This day began as a commemoration of Chicago workers’ fight for the 8 hour work day and the right to organize.
In Haiti, workers are still battling for these essential rights.
Haitian garment workers receive the lowest wage in the western hemisphere – 350 Gourdes, or US $5.40.
Their wages are consumed just by the transportation costs of getting to and from work.
Most live in debt, and on the brink of hunger and homelessness.
Production quotas in factories are often set impossibly high. Factory owners and management do not respect the law, and often do not pay the minimum wage.
Union members and organizers are constantly harassed and arbitrarily fired for exercising their legal rights.
Batay Ouvriye (Workers Fight), is an independent workers’ movement in Haiti, with affiliated textile unions throughout Haiti – SOKOWA, SOVAGH & SOTA-BO.
For May Day, they are holding marches and activities across Haiti to bring attention to their fight.
They want a decent wage that allows them to feed, clothe, house and educate themselves and their families.
They want safe working conditions, free of harassment.
Featured image: Army personnel assigned to Bravo Company, 121st Combat Support Hospital, based out of Camp. When one cannot go to support an action directly, how can one still support that action?
Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s talk, which you can view on Deep Green Video.
Napoleon, or maybe it was Frederick the Great, famously commented that an army marches on its stomach. The quartermasters are just as important as the soldiers. In World War II battles, only about 10% of the soldiers ever fired the gun in battle. Most soldiers were clerks, truck drivers, people who delivered munitions, medics, or cooks. That is a pretty common figure: about 10%, often less. Only about 3% of the IRA ever picked up weapons.
Consider a professional basketball or baseball team. You not only have the players; you’ve got all the minor leaguers, coaches, trainers, dietitians, people who sell tickets, and groundskeepers.
A movie does not just consist of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. There are gaffers and best boys and stunt people and editors and caterers. There are very few accomplishments that people actually do solo.
Most of us require support in whatever we are doing, and that support work is just as important as the more glorious aspects. My friend Lierre Keith often says that an activist movement needs two things: loyalty and material support.
For example, right now there are indigenous people and some non-indigenous supporters opposing a pipeline going across their land (of course every pipeline goes across indigenous land, but we’ll leave that aside for a moment). For those who, for any number of reasons, cannot be there physically, there are a near-infinite number of things they can do. They can write letters to the editor locally, they can advocate in one way or another for them, they can send them supplies. The people on the front lines still need to eat and they are going to have shoes that fall apart; they’re going to tear a hole in their jeans or they’re going to get sick.
When we were attempting to stop timber sales, we would sometimes have to work very hard to meet a deadline. We would have until midnight to finish our appeal. We would oftentimes be working as hard as we could for hours and hours on this thing; we’d only have two hours left to go and we were really hungry, so somebody had to go get some food. That‘s just as important as the person who drives to the post office, just as important as the person who writes it. Physical, material support is very important. You need to develop support among the people in order to have a guerrilla army. That’s also true of activism. We need to raise public support for our positions.
In “Second Person Experiment” researchers had a bunch of people sitting in a room and then have a couple of people come in. One person would, for example, say something very racist. (They wouldn’t believe it, they would just say it as part of the experiment.) They found that the response of everybody else in the room was very heavily influenced by the response of the second person.
Let’s say the first person says something really racist and the second person says, “Hey yeah, it’s pretty funny, that’s great.” Everybody else in the room is much more likely to respond positively, than if the second person says, “That’s not really very cool.” That just came up in a very small way this past week.
I’m on a neighborhood watch email list where they announce when somebody gets their house burgled or something. That’s pretty handy. But another thing that the people running the list do, which kind of annoys me, is they will complain every time anybody in the neighborhood sees a mountain lion or a bear. They will say, “We need to call Fish and Game and get rid of the animals, because the mountain lion was seen carrying a gray kitty.” They’ve been doing this a lot and I kept silent, but finally I just couldn’t take it anymore and wrote a very nice note: “We need to remember that we’re in their homes, and if you have a cat and you let the cat outside, that’s the risk you’re taking. The mountain lion or the bear should not be harmed because of a risk that you took and that your cat took (never mind that cats kill birds, we’ll leave that aside).” This is a very nice note, but it had to be said.
It‘s the same on the larger scale. The line by Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” is awfully simplified, but it is really true that somebody has to go out and say something. And then somebody else has to repeat it again and again until it starts gaining a cultural currency.
In terms of the attempts to support the indigenous people opposing the pipeline, if they had 50,000 people show up, that would be great—but if that 50,000 people showed up and they had nobody show up with food, this 50,000-people-thing would last about six hours and leave a mess. You need the support in order to have a long-term campaign. That’s just as crucial as anything else.
I have a friend who is an accountant. As part of her activist work, she does accounting for various organizations. That’s something you have to do too, especially if you’re having a non-profit. You have to have somebody who can navigate that territory. I don’t care what your skills are. If you’re a good writer, they need writers; if you’re a good cook, they need good cooks; if you’re a good accountant, they need good accountants. I get so tired of being called the“violence guy” because I talk about resistance, but the truth is: We need everything. We need school teachers, we need accountants, we need cooks. We need everything.
I want to challenge everybody who’s reading this to take at least one hour every week and do some form of activism or support for somebody else’s activism. This is how I got started as an activist. When I was about 24, 25 or 26, I realized I wasn’t paying enough for gasoline. I wasn’t covering the social and economic costs. So every time I would buy gas, I was going to donate a dollar for every dollar I spent on gas to a local environmental organization. But I didn’t have any money because I was unemployed. So what I would do instead is give myself a choice: either pay a dollar for every dollar of gas, or pay myself five bucks an hour to do activism. If I spent ten bucks on gas, I would either give ten bucks to a local organization, or I would do two hours of activism.
I challenge everybody to do that: take some amount and either tithe $10 a week to some local organization, or do two hours of work for a local organization. I don’t care how busy you are, everybody can take one hour away from their life. Write a letter, go to a protest, help start assembling a package. You can do just that much to start. It’s a wonderful start.
The unholy and hated corporate leviathan known as Dominion Energy has begun felling trees for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a project poised to cross hundreds of rivers and streams and bore underneath the Appalachian Trail. Dominion’s ACP (along with EQT’s Mountain Valley Pipeline) disproportionately target communities of color and working class families in Appalachia. These projects have been rammed through via Dominion’s political and economic monopoly over every aspect of Virginia’s energy economy.
Dominion has already commenced with clearing and surveying using crews from Utah and Texas, despite their ear numbing promises of jobs for Virginians. We send out cheerful greetings to comrades everywhere.
Water Is Life! Death to the Black Snake!
– Three Sisters Camp
Derrick Jensen will be speaking at the Eugene Public Library on Sunday, March 4, from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm. The talk is about the destruction of the planet, men’s violence against women, and the male violation imperative at the core of patriarchy.
Originally, Derrick was supposed to be the featured speaker at a reception hosted by the Western Environmental Law Center (WELC) during PIELC (Public Interest Environmental Law Conference). WELC received a single complaint from someone who threatened to gather a group of people to disrupt the event and the organization. In response to this single complaint, WELC deplatformed Derrick.
Some of us do not give in to threats and bullying. Some of us believe it is more important than ever to talk about what we are going to do to stop the destruction of the planet. Some of us believe it is more important than ever to talk about the patriarchal male violation imperative that is leading to this destruction. Thus this event.
To be clear, Derrick was deplatformed because he stands in solidarity with women. He refuses to believe that females, including those who have been sexually assaulted by males, should be forced–as in against their will–to share their most vulnerable spaces with males. He believes that females have the right to bathe, sleep, gather, and organize free from the presence of males.
For that he was deplatformed.
So if you believe we need to stop the destruction of the planet; if you believe that women have a right to discuss their oppression, their bodies, their reality, and their very existence; if you believe that free and open discourse is foundational to a functioning democracy; if you recognize that the Left has embraced McCarthyite tactics to its profound detriment; and if you refuse to give in to bullies, come to Eugene.
HUAJIMIC, Nayarit, Mexico — A century-old land conflict has flared up again in the Western Sierra Madre, deepening already raw tensions in the wake of the May 2017 assassination of two Huichol (Wixárika) leaders who fought to reclaim that land.
On Friday, the anniversary of last year’s equally contentious reclamation action, 1,200 indigenous Huichols hiked for three hours down a mountain into the contested valley of Huajimic to meet the court officials scheduled to sign over to them a bitterly contested piece of farmland.
The officials never arrived, however, because ranchers opposing the restitution staged a roadblock, and police never showed up to enforce the action. Now the Huichols say they’ll stay put on the remote piece of farmland until the restitution is complete, setting the stage for a potentially violent standoff of uncertain duration.
Photo: Octaviano Díaz Chema
Friday’s restitution was to be the second in a series of legal procedures recognizing the wrongful possession of 10,500 hectares (nearly 26,000 acres) of Huichol land by the region’s mestizo ranchers more than 100 years ago.
The ranchers hold titles from the Mexican government dated around 1906, but the Huichol people hold land grants dating back to the 1700s from the Spanish crown.
Since last year’s hard-fought restitution, the leader of that effort, Miguel Vázquez Torres, was shot to death by a truck full of armed gunmen, as was his brother Agustin. Many suspect they were targeted because of their outspoken support of the land restitution.
On Sept. 22, 2016, after a series of lawsuits were decided in favor of the Huichol community of San Sebastián Teponohuaxtlán, they moved in to claim their first parcel, a 184-hectare (454-acre) hillside ranch about 5 miles from the ranching town of Huajimic. That action was followed with a roadblock and threats of violence. Since that time three Huichol families moved in to set up a homestead and begin farming, and faced repeated threats from residents of the nearby town of Huajimic.
This time, the contested tract is only 63.7 hectares (157 acres), but for the Huichol community, it represents the leading edge of their fight to reclaim their ancestral homelands. For the ranchers, it represents the line they must hold to prevent the dispossession of lands that have been in their families for generations.
The day before the scheduled restitution, local and state officials met in the Nayarit state capital of Tepic with Agrarian Tribunal Magistrate Aldo Saúl Muñoz López and assured him that public security forces would be present to prevent violence, said Cristián Chávez, a territorial expert representing the Huichol community of San Sebastian, who was present at the meeting and the subsequent roadblock.
The promised police forces never showed up, and a caravan including various court officials, a state human rights observer, attorneys and media representatives made their way through the hilly terrain, driving for more than an hour before confronting the roadblock. Several pickup trucks blocked the road and about 40 individuals were on the scene, said Chávez.
Magistrate Muñoz López got down from his truck and informed the ranchers that he was there to carry out an order from the court, and politely asked them to let the caravan pass, according to a report by Agustín del Castillo from Milenionewspaper. Ranchers flatly denied passage.
Given that there was no law enforcement present, Muñoz López drew up a document describing the circumstances that prevented the execution of justice, and expressed his intention to seek the means to follow through with the legal decision as soon as possible, said Chávez. He also reassured the ranchers that he would take their concerns to the authorities in the state and federal government.
Carlos González was visibly upset with the circumstances, according to del Castillo’s report. “We blame the governor of Nayarit, Antonio Echavarría, his secretary general of government and his attorney general, for the violence that could be caused by this situation, since 1,200 comuneros have come down to the property and taken possession of it, and given the traffic and food blockades on the part of the ranchers, the situation may become unsustainable,” he said with obvious annoyance.
The Mexican government has come under severe criticism for its lack of action in the case, rejecting repeated requests by Huichol leaders and ranchers alike to reimburse ranchers with federal funds designated to help prevent land conflicts.
The spokesman for Mexico’s Secretariat of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development, which is charged with resolving land disputes, said the agency lacks the resources to get involved and is already faced with more than 300 pending land conflicts.
Huichol representatives have taken their case directly to the public in videos posted on Facebook Saturday. They say they will continue to occupy the land until the court officials arrive and formalize the restitution. In one of them, a camera pans a massive crowd standing in a field, with mountains in the backdrop. Felipe Serio Chino, president of the community’s security council, steps forward.
“Today, Sept. 22, 2017, more than 1,000 comuneros (Huichol community members) gathered here in this place to demand of Magistrate Aldo Raul Muñoz López, who is in charge of Tribunal 56 in Tepic, Nayarit, that he deliver this land into our possession as it was programmed. All these comuneros are awaiting your presence. Without it, we will stay until we achieve the objective we came here for.
“We send a salute to Mr. Aldo but we also ask him not to be a coward, to not be afraid, to not allow anyone to prevent him from doing his duty… the law has recognized it; we are only demanding what is ours.”
