News and Views from the People's Struggle
Minneapolis, MN – About 40 protesters held signs reading “No war for the holidays” and “Stop endless wars” to engage with holiday shoppers at the busy intersection of Hennepin and Lagoon Avenues in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis, December 21.
St. Paul, MN – Hundreds of Somali American families gathered on the State Capitol grounds, Jan. 6, to protest shutdown of hawalas. Hawalas are the only way that Somalis in the U.S. can send money to relatives in their homeland. 3 million people in Somalia depended on these remittances for survival. Because of U.S. government restrictions stemming from the ‘war on terror,’ Sunrise Community Bank, the one bank that used to process funds for all of the hawalas in Minnesota, stopped working with hawalas in late December. This is a cause of great anguish for people fearful for their families in Somalia. One demand is for the U.S. to grant a waiver so the bank will resume processing wire transfers via hawalas.
#SaintPaulMN #SaintPaul #warOnTerror #SomaliImmigrants #Somalia #Hawalas #Africa
Now that ten years are passed since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, we would do well to look back and take note of some of the causes and consequences. We need to sum up and draw lessons. Immediately following the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, the Bush administration began cynically manipulating events to launch an expansive and ongoing war on the peoples of the world and an escalating campaign of repression here at home under the guise of a ‘war on terror.’ This two-pronged approach to reasserting the power of the U.S. empire at the expense of working and oppressed people is continuing, and in some ways accelerating under the Obama administration.
Call-in campaign to Office of Foreign Assets Control announced
Chicago, IL – More information trickled out to the Committee to Stop FBI Repression (CSFR) and Chicago’s Coalition for People’s Rights (CPR), May 9, about the previous week’s freezing of the Abudayyeh family’s bank accounts. The family and supporters learned that entity behind the freeze is the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
Fight Back News Service is circulating the following greeting from Freedom Road Socialist Organization to demonstrators at the Republican National Convention.
Comunidades pobres y de clase trabajadora, ya azotadas por los cesos y reducciones dehoras de trabajo que resultan de la recesión económica, están a punto de sufrir aun mas como los gobiernos estatales y municipales empiezan a cortar los servicios de salud, escuelas y gobierno local, cosas necesarias para nuestras familias.
With the help of bombs and mercenaries from the Northern Alliance, U.S. and British forces have occupied the main cities of Afghanistan. Washington convened a meeting in Europe where a strange collection of Afghan warlords, monarchists, and political has-beens were anointed as the new government. They were put in airplanes and sent to Kabul where they had to explain how the “careful” American pilots bombed a convoy of their supporters who on the way to their inauguration.
Poor and working class communities, already hit hard by layoffs and shorter work hours from the recession, are about feel more pain as state and local governments cut health care, education, and other social services that our families need.