As Trump returned, the world’s richest and most powerful met in Davos, for their World Economic Forum. A movement resisting Billionaire greed is coming together and YOU can be part of it
As Donald Trump came back, many of the world’s richest and most powerful arrived in Davos, Switzerland for the hugely influential World Economic Forum meeting. At the same time, a movement resisting billionaire greed is coming together and you can be part of it…
This week we are joining other groups across the world to draw a bold #RedLineToBillionaires.
Many of the people and businesses gathering in Davos have made enormous profits off fossil fuels, war, conflict and exploiting workers. They are now flirting with far-right forces and tightening their grip on our economies and democracies.
JOIN THE ACTION:
Thousands of people have been creating huge, symbolic red lines on the streets in Global South cities and we can all join in with an online action to be part of this global movement.
The global elites continue to fail, again and again, to adopt the solutions we need to tackle the climate crisis and inequality is skyrocketing across the globe. Billionaires like Elon Musk are richer than ever before, as the rest of us struggle with economic crises and climate breakdown.
About a month ago, I had an nasty encounter at work with the Department of Homeland Security (ICE). Today I had one with the Israeli authorities–while sitting at a desk in Iselin, New Jersey.
A friend of mine, along with his wife and several small children, is literally going hungry in the West Bank, has had nothing to eat for days.
They’ve been fully locked down since 2023: no work, no money, nowhere to go. The army is in their village every day, smashes into their house every now and then.
The world a mile outside of their village is a shooting gallery where violent death lurks around every corner. The IDF told them flat out to leave now or die later. They’ve opted for “die later.”
I offered (insanely) to come and take my friends’ kids off his hands at least, but he said no. I’m not even sure how I would have “taken” them, or where. Not that it matters.
Dad won’t have it. I’ve basically kept the family (and to some extent the tribe) alive by sending them regular cuts of my paycheck via Western Union since 2023. I guess I’ll just keep doing this until I hear that they’re all dead.
Every time I send money, the regulations tighten. This time, the Israelis forced me to write a groveling letter in which I accept their version of why I’m sending the money, and then accept “full legal responsibility” for any untoward use made of the money once it’s disbursed.
I guess my reasons for sending my own money abroad aren’t good enough for these people. They rejected a typed version of the letter they demanded of me, then made me re-write several drafts of a handwritten version until I got it exactly right.
Then they demanded my passport information, along with a photo of my passport. Evidently, we’re still not done.
The money is sitting there in a Western Union in the West Bank–has been for twelve hours–but my friend still hasn’t been given access to it. All told, we’ve been at this for 24 hours. What next? Show up in person at COGAT headquarters and apologize for my bad penmanship?
What does “full legal responsibility” mean, anyway? Full legal responsibility for what? For “terrorism,” obviously.
Put it this way: if my friend buys groceries, and the grocer makes change with one of the bills he gets, and one of those bills finds its way into the hands of someone who stabs a border guard at Checkpoint 300, I guess I’ll becomea “material supporter” of the “terrorism” involved, and liable to arrest either upon setting foot within Israeli jurisdiction or through extradition. There’s nothing else for it to mean.
As I write this, I see a message on my phone of an announcement making its way through a bunch of Jersey neighborhoods:
“Report Illegal Aliens!” it says.
“In your neighborhood, at schools, at work, at church, at restaurants. There is Nowhere to Hide!”
Home sweet home in SF
……………………………….
Comment– protect our friends and neighbors!
– Every day the above is truer in the West Bank, and US America is fast becoming a Police State. But a fascist takeover isn’t so simple.In reality the US heavily depends on honest hard working immigrants to do essential but dirty work and keep the economy going.
No way the newly elected far right thugs of the billionaire deep state will be allowed to crash the economy by deporting up to 10 million wage slaves! (But yes maybe up to 100,000 of us?! )–
In realitythere are tens of thousands of us happy to defend and hide our friends and neighbors. They’ll just have to settle for another cruel media show, just to further cement their power and their Empire of Lies with more inhuman racist militarized campaigns.–
15 years ago, antifascist lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova was murdered in Moscow. Their legacy tells us why anti-fascism remains vitally important in Russia today.
On January 20, we remember the Antifascists Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova, murdered in 2009 by Russian neo-Nazis in the center of Moscow. Today, St. Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, Riga and Izhevsk, among many others, have woken up with improvised altars in their memory. To remember is to fight! No forgetting, no forgiveness!
19 de January del 2025 De parte de Sare Antifaxista 10 puntos de vista Los 19 de enero se recuerda a lxs Antifascistas Stanislav Markélov y Anastasia Babúrova asesinados en 2009 por neonazis rusos en el centro de Moscú. Hoy San Petersburgo, Krasnoyarsk, Riga o Ízhevsk entre otros muchos, han amanecido con improvisados altares en su memoria.¡ Recordar es luchar ! ¡ Ni olvido ni perdón !
Anastasia Baburova
Baburova was active in the anarchist in environmentalist movement until her murder by nazis . She participated in the activities of ecological camps, in social fora, including the Fifth European Social Forum in Malmö 2008, organised the ‘Anti-capitalism 2008’ festival, demonstrated widely, and was involved in anti-fascist activities more generally.
Russian opposition protestors march in central Moscow on January 19, 2020, carrying portraits of lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova. – More than a thousand opposition activists of various stripes marched in central Moscow after President Vladimir Putin proposed re-drafting the constitution and unleashed a political upheaval. Protesters — mostly young anti-fascist activists — chanted “Revolution” and “No to dictatorship” and some carried copies of the constitution. The annual march was called to commemorate the memory of lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova were gunned down in Moscow in 2009 by ultranationalists. (Photo by Alexander NEMENOV / AFP) (Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)
In 2003, she married a fellow journalism student, Alexander Frolov, whom she met in 2000 during her studies in Sevastopol, they divorced in 2007.
In July 2008, Baburova participated in a demonstration against the felling of the Khimki Forest. Besides Russian and Ukrainian, which she considered her native languages, she also spoke English and French.[12]
The day before her murder, Anastasia appeared at the anarcho-communist unity event ‘Autonomous Action’.
Throughout 2008, Anastasia Baburova worked on the editorial team of the Russian newspaper, Izvestia, and had had dozens of articles published by both Izvestia and Financial News, particularly on finance.
Beginning in October 2008, she investigated (as a freelance-journalist) Russian neo-Nazi groups for Novaya Gazeta.[16][17] In December 2008, she resigned from this post over the political course of the newspaper.
At first it was reported that Baburova had been wounded in an attempt to detain Markelov’s killer, but later Russian law enforcement authorities declared that Baburova was shot in the back of the head. Baburova died a few hours after the attack at a Moscow hospital.[18
The Living Front of Stanislav Markelov
Ten years ago, activist lawyer Stanislav Markelov was murdered in Moscow. His legacy tells us why anti-fascism remains vitally important in Russia today.
On 19 January 2009, Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova were murdered. Every year since, Russian anti-fascists hold a march in their memory. Source: anatrrra / Livejournal.
Ten years ago, Stanislav Markelov was murdered in Moscow. He defended anti-fascists and ecologists, mothers trying to defend their sons serving in the army and citizens of Blagoveshchensk brutalised at the hands of the riot police, the relatives of Elza Kungayeva (murdered by a Russian soldier in Chechnya) and journalist Mikhail Beketov, who was brutally assaulted for covering the construction of a new highway near Moscow.
That day in January, the Neo-Nazis also killed his companion Anastasia Baburova, a like-minded journalist. The killers were eventually sentenced to long prison terms. Some of their friends and sympathisers are now working for government bodies or pro-regime mass media, whereas others have fought and still fight on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine. As a figure, Markelov feels so necessary in Russia today, yet so hard to imagine.
Starting in the hippie subculture of the perestroika era, Markelov went on to join the Student Defence trade union and Defenders of the Rainbow eco-movement. Later, he was a legal representative in some of the country’s most dangerous and high-profile cases — and a proponent of Russia’s new anti-fascism.
In the 1990s, Markelov was among those who appealed to the non-Bolshevik traditions of the Left, caught between aggressive free marketeers and Soviet revanchists. During the Constitutional Crisis in October 1993, he joined the Voloshin Medical Brigade, who helped everyone in need of medical assistance, no matter what side they took amidst the bloody conflict.
Looking back, this healing of wounds and applying of stitches on the streets of Moscow in 1993 feels like an attempt to symbolically unite two parts of a broken society. On the one hand, the enthusiasts of 1991, the people who, in 1993, still believed in the imminent triumph of liberal democracy. On the other, the people who believed that the near future would bring nothing good, but had no counter-agenda except a fanatical anti-liberalism and their memories of the USSR.
This rupture is yet to close, and Markelov — who mixed liberal human rights work with left-wing values — was the living embodiment of the attempt to overcome it. This combination is something very unusual in Russia. Ever since Soviet times, the majority of Russian liberals who have believed in human rights have shown skepticism towards any discussion of social justice and equality.
Leftists, on the contrary, often interpret the rhetoric of human rights as a cover for the economic aggression of neoliberalism. However, the fact remains that liberals in Russia cannot survive without a serious shift to the left (a truth that Alexey Navalny has understood all too well), while leftists, who easily turn to liberal human rights organisation for free assistance, and then brand them as enemies of the working class, look simply ridiculous in this instance.
Riot police surround people during a demonstration against Vladimir Putin in Moscow, on 5 May 2018. Photo: NurPhoto / SIPA USA / PA Images. All rights reserved.
Laughing bitterly at this absurd situation, the unique nature of Markelov’s experience is clear. Markelov came to work as a lawyer through his political activism, and then, for the sake of defending the most vulnerable and powerless people in society, disdained both a steady professional career and every stereotype on why the personal, political and professional should not be mixed in legal work.
In a blizzard of speeches, insults and executive orders, Donald Trump set out to erase the gains won by civil rights defenders in recent generations, and set himself on a collision course with U.S. neighbours.
First things first: order mass deportations, escalate the repression of protesters, dismantle any judicial and legislative provisions that still protect ordinary people, and consolidate a propaganda system intended to stupefy us all into obedience.
Watch Trump’s nazis whip up fascist hysteria.. a few steps further to the gas chambers!. Yet in other places Latino immigrants are seen as a welcome bonus…SEE: InfoMigrants Spain will legalize about 300,000 undocumented migrants per year through 2027, aiming to employ migration as a development strategy to sustain its economic growth. … Propelled by a shared language and culture, a wave of skilled immigrants from Latin America has closed labor gaps in the technology and hospitality sectors. ….
Trump’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News that Chicago will be one of many places across the country where federal authorities plan to make arrests.
“We’re going to take the handcuffs off ICE and let them go arrest criminal aliens, that’s what’s going to happen,” Homan said Friday. “What we’re telling ICE, you’re going to go enforce the immigration law without apology. You’re going to concentrate on the worst first, public safety threats first, but no one is off the table. If they’re in the country illegally, they got a problem.”
In reality the US depends on honest hard working immigrants to do essential but dirty work and keep the economy going. No way they can or want to deport up to 10 million people! But yes maybe 100,000 of us?! – Just to cement their power and the Empire of Lies with a racist nazi militarized campaign.–
Meanwhile authoritarian leftist groups simply treat all this as a recruitment opportunity.
Rainbow Railroad newsletter, Jan. 21: Trump signed an executive order that suspended the U.S. Refugee Admission Program, halting the processing of LGBTQI+ refugees already approved for resettlement, and leaving vulnerable and displaced queer and trans individuals stranded in dangerous and precarious conditions.
Trump told NBC News on Saturday that mass deportations remain a top priority. He didn’t give an exact date or city where they’ll start, but he said they would begin soon.
“Mars would be more habitable than this place right now so it’s crazy. There’s absolutely nothing,” said Shaun, a resident of the Palisades Bowl community. In a world undergoing hydroclimate whiplash, the latest apocalyptic catastrophe has now befallen one of the richest cities in the world in the richest nation on Earth. Warm 100 mile […]
Se había generalizado la guerra en toda España, pero especialmente la represión y los asesinatos en la retaguardia. En Las Merindades resaltar los asesinatos en Loma, Espinosa y Villatomil por la cantidad de ciudadanos, pero se extendieron por todo el territorio. Son escasas las noticias de la zona, hay alguna de guerra, y resaltan las […]
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