Some events

PROTEST TO COMMEMORATE THE 17 INNOCENT IRAQI CITIZENS MURDERED BY BLACKWATER IN NISOUR SQUARE

One Year Anniversary Protest and Rally Against Blackwater

Sponsored by Blackwater Watch (http://blackwaterwatch.net) and NC Stop Torture Now (http://www.ncstoptorturenow.org)

For more information email admin at  blackwaterwatch.net or telephone 919-801-0734

Saturday, Sept. 13, 2008 4-6 p.m.

at Blackwater's Lobbyist Firm Headquarters:

 

Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice
One West Fourth Street, Winston-Salem, NC 27101
Headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice is the third lobbying firm hired by Blackwater since October 2007. Womble Carlyle lobbyists representing Blackwater are: John Mashburn, former general counsel and policy director for Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., who is the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee; and Mark Harkins, who was chief of staff to Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., chairman of the Investigations and Oversight subcommittee of the House Science and Technology

Committee.

FIVE KEY REASONS TO GET BLACKWATER OFF OUR BORDER AND OUT OF GOVERNMENT CONTRACTING:

Blackwater Worldwide, a mercenary group, has a history of killing innocent civilians. In Nisour Square, Iraq, on September 16, 2007, Blackwater "security personnel" shot and killed without provocation seventeen Iraqis civilians, including a nine year old boy.

Blackwater has taken no responsibility for any of the killings. Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, told Congress one month after the Nisour Square Massacre that he had no knowledge of his men hurting innocent civilians.

Blackwater is not part of the military! It is a business that profits from bloodshed and killing. Its personnel are not accountable to military, civil, or criminal law. One year after the killings, no one at Blackwater has been charged for any of the killings of innocent civilians.

Blackwater used subsidiary business names to apply for its building permits in San Diego to avoid the normal permit process and avoid public scrutiny. Blackwater has done everything in their power to stop the right of the San Diego City Council, the City Attorney, and San Diego residents to say "no" to having Blackwater there, including suing the City of San Diego.

Blackwater is a company that profits from conflict. NO CONFLICT = NO PROFIT! Blackwater mercenaries along the US-Mexico border will seek to profit from border instability. Any minor difference among ethnic groups can easily be exploited by Blackwater mercenaries to intervene and make money. 

9/10:  Discussion of NC immigration law enforcement
Join the Triangle Socialist Forum in discussing the immigration struggle - what is going on, what economic forces drive each side, and what are some progressive responses?  The meeting is at 7pm in the Chapel Hill Public Library's conference room.  Email your blogger for more information.

9/11:   6:30pm  Dinner & a Documentary: "9-11 Ripple Effect: Lies, Propaganda and A Call For Justice"
Fuquay-Varina United Methodist Church,  100 S. Judd Pky SW, Fuquay-Varina
At 6:30 we will have a Pizza dinner available for a $5 donation.  Movie to start at 7pm.  Childcare is available. Please contact Denise Frie before hand at: niesee at embarqmail dot com to discuss your needs.  We meet the 2nd & 4th Thursday of every month.  This week we will be viewing 9-11 Ripple Effect: Lies, Propaganda and A Call For Justice, takes the audience on a behind-the-scenes tour of the largest attack in US history while at the same time exposing the falsehoods of the official account using live video feed & photographs shot the morning of 9-11-2001. Pilots, military personal & 9-11 researchers examine some of the most talked about footage ever uncovered.

9/10:  BAJ - Dignity or Serfdom? 7:30 Wednesday September 10 at the Community Church of Chapel Hill 106 Purefoy Road [see directions below] Balance & Accuracy in Journalism, with co-sponsors Carolina Interfaith Taskforce Connecting the Americas and the Charles Jones Peace and Justice committee present: DIGNITY OR SERFDOM? 60 hr mandatory work week and shrinking benefits provoke strike in the Chatham County town of Moncure by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, local 369.  [I also read that there is a racial divide and conquer aspect, Latino immigrant workers being told they will be deported if they join the union and the majority black workers being told that no more blacks will be hired now]. Management proposals demanding a 60 hour mandatory work week with reduced health and pension benefits at the Moncure Plywood plant provoke a strike now in its 8th week.   Hear from longtime workers, new management, and media. Details to follow. Community involvement can support the struggle for fair wages, benefits and working conditions.

DIRECTIONS to

Community Church of Chapel Hill:

106 Purefoy Road, in Chapel Hill

FROM EITHER DIRECTION ON THE CHAPEL HILL BY-PASS:  take 15-501 [or 54] to the 15-501 Pittsboro exit

As you exit, TURN at the traffic light toward Chapel Hill.

In half a block, TURN RIGHT just short of the convenience store.  That's PUREFOY ROAD, and you take it almost a half mile, passing side streets and curving left up the hill past speed bumps and an extra stop sign, until you can just see the stop sign at the end of the street.  Watch for a driveway on the left with a white-painted curb and a tan colored sign for the church. That driveway takes you to the parking lot and the Community Church.

 

9/20:  Durham Bill of Rights Defense Committee 

The meeting will be at 3pm in the Auditorium at the Main Library, with continuing focus on immigrant rights in Durham.

9/23:  September Meeting of Orange County BORDC

7 PM, Tuesday, September 23, Orange Water and Sewer Authority meeting room, 400 Jones Ferry Road, Carrboro. Theme continues on immigrant rights, with speakers NC State Senator Ellie Kinnaird and Marty Rosenbluth of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice [http://www.southerncoalition.org ].
9/12:  The Ukrainian Famine-Genocide:  Reflections after 75 Years

 

I'm not recommending this event, but I want to mention it, like I mentioned the anti-communist academic conference at Duke in the spring, and again they want to indoctrinate teachers in anti-communism. 

 

UNC is sponsoring a conference at the appropriately named FedEx Global Education Center on the "Holodormor."  This is one of the pillars of Ukraine's bourgeois nationalists, puppets of the US and EU, and their predecessors, the collaborators who fought for Nazi Germany, claiming that the USSR, and Stalin specifically, wanted to and did cause mass starvation in Ukraine in the 30's.  There are articles refuting this charge at the pro-Stalin sites list on the right.   

 

The three panels and art exhibit have relatively innocuous sounding titles, except for the panel at 7:30pm, "The Ukrainian Famine-Genocide and Confronting Stalinism in Ukraine and Russia."  The capitalists and their supporters know they have to confront "Stalinism," or real revolutionary Marxist-Leninist communism, because it is the ideology the oppressed workers and nations need to defeat the capitalist system, as they did in many places when Stalin headed the revolutionary Communist Party of the Soviet Union.  Maybe there wouldn't be so much starvation and malnourishment around the world and mass killings and ethnic cleansing, perhaps even genocide, in Iraq and Afghanistan now, if not for the Soviet revisionists, led first by Khrushchev, who joined with the capitalist world to destroy socialism and revolutions wherever they occurred. 

 

Does Ukraine want to be a puppet like Georgia and a possible ground zero for the next world war, or will Ukraine's working people fight US, EU, and Russian imperialism and their local capitalists and build a better future for themselves and the world?    

 

The FedEx Center is that big new building at the corner of McCauley and Pittsboro streets, just west of the main campus.  I thought it was further away - maybe I will stop by Friday.  For more information about the events: global.unc.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=691&Itemid=94