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

On the fourth Armenian Remembrance Day of his presidency, President Obama has for the fourth time in a row broken his promise to the Armenian community to use the word “genocide” in describing what happened at the hands of the Turks roughly a century ago.

As a senator, and then as a presidential candidate,  Barack Obama often talked about how bold he was to call the slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire just what it was: a genocide.

“America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides,” he said. “I intend to be that president.” In a January 2008 letter to the Armenian Reporter, Mr. Obama said he shared “with Armenian Americans — so many of whom are descended from genocide survivors — a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide. That starts with acknowledging the tragic instances of genocide in world history.”

In a statement, Ken Hachikian, the chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America said, “President Obama today completed his surrender to Turkey, shamefully outsourcing U.S. human rights policy to a foreign state, and tightening Ankara’s gag on American recognition of the Armenian Genocide. The President’s capitulation to Turkey – on this, the last April 24th of his term – represents the very opposite of the principled and honest change he promised to Armenian Americans and to all the citizens of our nation. President Obama’s pledge to recognize the Armenian Genocide stands today as a stark lie, a painful promise etched on the hearts of all who had hoped and worked for change, but who, today, have been betrayed by a politician who failed to live up to his own words.”

In 2006, Mr. Obama noted, “I criticized the secretary of state [Condoleezza Rice] for the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia John Evans, after he properly used the term ‘genocide’ to describe Turkey’s slaughter of thousands of Armenians starting in 1915. I shared with Secretary Rice my firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.”

Asserted Mr. Obama, back then: “The facts are undeniable. An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is an untenable policy.”

That was then, this is now. As previous presidents have concluded, Mr. Obama has decided that distorting the historical facts is better than alienating ally Turkey, which disputes that term. And that policy has been, at least in the short term, quite tenable.

The president in his statement today said “I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915. My view of that history has not changed. A full, frank, and just acknowledgement of the facts is in all of our interests. Moving forward with the future cannot be done without reckoning with the facts of the past. …Some individuals have already taken this courageous step forward. We applaud those Armenians and Turks who have taken this path, and we hope that many more will choose it, with the support of their governments, as well as mine.”

-Jake Tapper

For decades the UC has thwarted attempts by community members to transform the site for urban sustainable agriculture and hands-on education. With deliberate disregard for public interest, the University administrators plan to pave over this prime agricultural soil for commercial retail space, a Whole Foods, and a parking lot.

“For ten years people in Albany have tried to turn the Gill Tract into an Urban Farm and a more open space for the community. The people in the Bay Area deserve to use this treasure of land for an urban farm to help secure the future of our children,” explains Jackie Hermes-Fletcher, an Albany resident and public school teacher for 38 years.

Occupy the Farm seeks to address structural problems with health and inequalities in the Bay Area that stem from communities’ lack of access to food and land. Today’s action reclaims the Gill Tract to demonstrate and exercise the peoples’ right to use public space for the public good. This farm will serve as a hub for urban agriculture, a healthy and affordable food source for Bay Area residents and an educational center.

“Every piece of uncontaminated urban land needs to be farmed if we are to reclaim control over how food is grown, where it comes from, and who it goes to,” says Anya Kamenskaya, UC Berkeley alum and educator of urban agriculture. “We can farm underutilized spaces such as these to create alternatives to the corporate control of our food system.”

UC Berkeley has decided to privatize this unique public asset for commercial retail space, and, ironically, a high-end grocery store. This is only the latest in a string of privatization schemes. Over the last several decades, the university has increasingly shifted use of the Gill Tract away from sustainable agriculture and towards biotechnology with funding from corporations such as Novartis and BP.

Frustrated that traditional dialogue has fallen on deaf ears, many of these same local residents, students, and professors have united as Occupy the Farm to Take Back the Gill Tract. This group is working to empower communities to control their own resilient food systems for a stable and just future – a concept and practice known as food sovereignty.

Occupy the Farm is in solidarity with Via Campesina and the Movimiento Sin Tierra (Landless Workers Movement).

Media Contacts:

Lesley - (707) 293-3253

Gopal - (510) 847-3592

Anya - (415) 892-4793

“Below was written by George Lynch, the great guitarist of Dokken, a friend, and one of my guitar heroes growing up. Check it out:

JIM CROW CONTINUES TO DRAW THE THIN BLUE LINE

The murdering of trayvon martin by Zimmerman is indicative of the larger problem that exists both in human nature and in the artifice of a society enslaved by an economic system that is designed to be exclusionary. This inequality is maintained through the institutionalized use of 4 basic tools:
1.)the demonization of ” the other”, i.e; those who worship the wrong ( or no) god, are economically disenfranchised or under educated, accidentally being born any color but white
2.)economic and educational constraints,
3.)the obiquise selling of the ” American dream/ nightmare” that we should all be aspiring To
4). The subjugation of all of the above to coercive increasingly militarized police tactics.
Trayvon’s murder serves as a litmus test and reflection of who were try are as a society,collectively and we should be prepared to own thses sort of events as direct consequences of our true belief systems and ideals… And ideology of fear, hatred ,extreme short sighted  selfishness and lack of compassion .

George Lynch

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

May 18 -21, 2012

Occupt This/Occupy That! - An Open Invitation

Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers

The tiny fraternity of concentrated wealth and power that calls itself the Group of Eight (G8) is meeting in Chicago in mid-May, overlapping with representatives of history’s largest global military cohort, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the gently self-named military behemoth dominated by the US.

Heads of state, spooks, foreign ministers and generals, cabinet members and secret operatives, advisors and bureaucrats— the 1% of the 1%—plan to gather in barricaded opulent surroundings while coordinating and conspiring to extend and defend their obscene wealth, to exploit the remaining fossil fuels, natural resources, human labor and the living planet to the last drop, and to dominate the people of the global majority.

A 1984-style national security dragnet is descending on the city to attempt to lock Chicago down. Chicago’s Mayor is concocting a culture of fear, suggesting that it is the human resistance to NATO/G8 that represents danger, outside agitators, violence and invasion. Universities and schools are being urged to close early in May; communities of color are told that this is not their concern; merchants are preparing for assault. In reality, NATO/G8 represents the masters of war; it is they who are the greatest purveyors of violence on this earth.

NATO/G8 will not be alone in Chicago: Occupy’s 99% will gather in a festival of life and peace, joy and justice. Two permitted, family-friendly rallies at the Daley Center and marches for justice, jobs and peace are scheduled on May 18 and 19 (and perhaps another on May 21). Music, dance, teach-ins and peoples’ tribunals will overflow the parks and theatres. We will all be there to open Chicago back up. In the spirit of the Arab Spring and Occupy, the Madison labor struggle, the Pelican Bay hunger strikers, teachers and nurses, the Dream youth, returning veterans against the wars, women insisting on reproductive dignity, foreclosure resistance, LGBTQ equality and,many more, Adbusters, CanG8, Code Pink, Portoluz and others have called for people to come from near and far, armed with their spirit and their creativity, pitching their tents and staking their claims.

We’re excited and you’re invited: Come to Chicago, May 18-May 21. Bring a sleeping bag, and if we have room, you can stay with us on the Southside.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made it entirely clear that he alone will happily host NATO/G8, but that the 99% are decidedly not welcome. He has funding to further arm and mobilize the police and militarize the city; he has announced plans to contain and suppress demonstrators; he has pushed through legislation that restricts and criminalizes free speech and assembly, and requires insurance for public demonstrations; he is issuing a steady stream of pronouncements about Chicago-under-siege from ominous and dangerous outside forces.

But Chicago is big enough for all—it is after all a nuclear-free and cease-fire city, cradle of the Haymarket martyrs and the 8-hour day, labor and peace actions, vast civil rights and immigration rights manifestations, home of Ida B. Wells Barnett, Jane Addams, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel. The rich and the powerful do gather here, but Chicago is a public space with historic parks, monuments, neighborhoods and streets for popular mobilizations as well—Chicago belongs to all of us. We underline the right—the moral duty—to dissent and demonstrate, to resist and to be heard, to participatory (not billionaire paid for) democracy. Mayor Emanuel can still change course, and he should; so far he has obstinately and foolishly chosen to frame mid-May solely in military and security terms.

The mayor, not the popular resistance, is creating conditions—once again—for a police riot in Chicago against people who have every intention and every right to assemble peacefully deploying humor and music, art and play, civil disobedience and imagination to forcefully express rejection of imperial and permanent wars, to challenge racial/ethnic/gender discrimination and hate, to demand justice, education, health care and peace, women and gender dignity, the opportunity for meaningful work and reversing epic income disparities, an end to mass incarceration, and the urgent need to shift course and live differently for the sake of the planet and future generations.

Join us in Chicago in May (or, if you can’t come, act in solidarity—Occupy the suburbs, cities, and communities across the land): stand up for civil and human rights, exercise your voice and be a witness, act up and speak out. Be part of a wave of people power, creative direct non-violent action, and the most vast, determined resistance in memory.

History calls!

Occupy the future!

Another world is possible!

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.