A ray of hope from American struggles

The following is an excerpt from"Making Waves: Part 1" by Viewpoint. It highlights the intensity of struggle in America and highlights possibilities for future struggles against fascists in Europe who might get into power in the coming years. It's a ray of hope. Read it:

• The block­ade of air­ports around the coun­try by tens of thou­sands, whose imme­di­ate respon­se and pres­sure man­aged what fed­er­al court orders could not, free­ing those detained by the sud­den impo­si­tion of the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly ille­git­i­mate exec­u­tive order
• a taxi strike in New York City (by the New York Taxi Work­ers Alliance, who rep­re­sents rough­ly 18,000 dri­vers) to sup­port those block­ades and demon­stra­tions
• a wide­spread boy­cott of Uber in the wake of their attempt­ed strike-break­ing, which, com­bined with protests at their head­quar­ters, led first to the ner­vous cre­ation of a $3-mil­lion fund in case their own dri­vers faced detain­ment and then to their CEO step­ping down from Trump’s eco­nom­ic advi­so­ry coun­cil (and, more recent­ly, from his posi­tion at the com­pa­ny itself)
• the Vaughn pris­on upris­ing, where inmates of Delaware’s largest pris­on seized hostages and con­trol of one of the jail’s build­ings, call­ing reporters to “explain the rea­sons for doing what we’re doing. Don­ald Trump. Every­thing that he did. We know that the insti­tu­tion is going to change for the worse.”
• the ongo­ing for­ma­tion of local self-defense groups ready to con­front not only racial­ized, Islam­o­pho­bic, and gen­dered vio­lence and harass­ment but also ICE raids, espe­cial­ly as the ongo­ing depor­ta­tions that gath­ered speed in the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion has tak­en a new­ly vis­i­ble and more explic­it­ly mar­tial char­ac­ter aimed to ter­ror­ize com­mu­ni­ties on the streets, at their jobs, and in their homes
• mil­i­tant antifas­cist resis­tance in the days before the inau­gu­ra­tion and every day since, includ­ing suc­cess­ful­ly halt­ing Milo Yiannopoulos’s cam­pus talks at Davis and Berke­ley (dur­ing which undoc­u­ment­ed stu­dents would have been “outed”/doxxed to the cheers of the crowd)
• fed­er­al work­ers qui­et­ly push­ing back, both through a steady stream of leaks¹ and through strate­gies such as that of work­ers in the Jus­tice Depart­ment, who plan to essen­tial­ly sab­o­tage their new direc­tives by work­ing slow and lodg­ing com­plaints with the inspec­tor general’s office
• the New York bode­ga strike, where­in rough­ly 1,000 Yemeni-owned bode­gas closed for 8 hours in protest of the immi­gra­tion ban and pro­duced one of the most dis­tinct­ly pro-Amer­i­can chal­lenges to Trump’s attempt­ed autoc­ra­cy. (In the words of Nabil Nash­er, a deli own­er: “Trump, he wants to be like some dic­ta­tor in the Mid­dle East. It’s not right, it’s the Unit­ed States! What I hear from him is like what I hear from the pres­i­dent of Yemen for 33 years!”)
• enough pub­lic pres­sure through phone calls and online furor to force the with­drawal of a GOP-backed bill (pushed by none oth­er than Jason Chaf­fetz) to sell off 3.3 mil­lion acres of nation­al land
• echoes of the 2006 “day with­out an immi­grant” gen­er­al strike in Mil­wau­kee and twelve oth­er Wis­con­sin cities, where Voces de la Fron­tera Work­ers’ Cen­ter led protests across the state. Three days lat­er, immi­grant “com­mu­ni­ty gen­er­al strikes” erupt­ed in dozens of cities across the Unit­ed States, includ­ing the unlike­ly can­di­dates of Char­lot­te, Detroit, New Orleans, Philadel­phia, and Wash­ing­ton, D.C., while the more estab­lished seats of migrant orga­niz­ing in Chicago, New York, and the South­west have seen stu­dent walk­outs, dis­rupt­ed ICE raids, and the con­sti­tu­tion of com­mu­ni­ty defense or rapid respon­se net­works
• mil­i­tant con­tin­gents of the inter­na­tion­al women’s strike (or gen­der strike, as it was called in Oak­land) across the Unit­ed States, which, in addi­tion to clog­ging the arter­ies of major cities and forc­ing the clo­sure of at least two school dis­tricts, main­lined a rad­i­cal fem­i­nism and launched groups ded­i­cat­ed to orga­niz­ing fem­i­nized labor
• glob­al sol­i­dar­i­ty demon­stra­tions; numer­ous dai­ly march­es, meet­ings, self-defense and cryp­tog­ra­phy work­shops, let­ter-writ­ing cam­paigns, van­dal­ism, packed town halls, and call­ing of Sen­a­tors through­out the coun­try
• last but cer­tain­ly not least, punch­ing the words right out of a Nazi’s mouth, result­ing in our moment’s great­est work of unplanned pro­pa­gan­da, a meme that can nev­er be seen enough

Autonom

Länk: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/03/23/making-waves-part-1/