“What are you doing for New Year’s?” The question, posed by friends and family members this past week, seemed innocent enough. When I cheerfully answered, “Protesting the prison industrial complex,” however, most people were taken aback. Read the full piece by Rachel Allshiny at Suicide Girls by clicking here.
This post originally appeared on Iiron.org. Iiron is a Chicago-based network of multi-issue grassroots power organizations. We are devoted to people power, not for a few people over the rest, but for broad, inclusive, democratic collective power and self-governance. By Natalie Solidarity “If she doesn’t have her immunization, she can’t attend school,” my daughter’s school [...]
Post by Natalie Solidarity In Chicago on October 29, 2012, dedicated Occupy activists and their allies, all NATO5 supporters, attended End the NATO5 Witch Hunt: Raising Funds from the Dead. I was lucky enough to be in town for the evening and even luckier still to read my compilation piece about the struggles of jail [...]
On October 15, 2011, hundreds of activists were arrested in Chicago’s Grant Park after attempting to set up an Occupy encampment. Last month, a judge dismissed charges against 90 activists who filed suit that the charges were unconstitutional. On October 15, 2012, members of Occupy Chicago and a coalition of other activist groups, joined by [...]
On Saturday, October 13, as part of the Global Noise demonstrations around the world, demonstrators in Chicago stopped by a Hyatt hotel during a march to highlight Hyatt’s unfair labor practices. Watch the video:
Article by Aaron Cynic Freedom of speech had a hat trick of victories last week, proving that despite the interest of law enforcement and other machinations of the state to put down protesters, ultimately, the law still sides with activists. On Wednesday, the University of California settled with 21 students who sued after campus police [...]
Post by Aaron Cynic American law enforcement agencies continue to increase their surveillance on an otherwise fairly complacent citizenry, logging an incredible amount of requests for information regarding cell phone and social media use. Last week, a judge in New York ruled that Twitter must give a court close to three months of information from [...]
Post by Natalie Solidarity The Fourth of July celebrates of the birth of the United States, its act of finally breaking free from tyrannical England, represented by a reenactment of bombs exploding in the sky. As a nation, we fetishize the loss of life on both sides while we devour factory-farmed meats, consume liquids bottled [...]
Originally posted at NATO5.occupychi.org‘s “An Open Letter“ Dear friend, Imagine being trapped in a cage twenty-four hours a day. You have to eat food better fit for a garbage can than a human. Surrounded by guards who hate you, push you around, call you a terrorist. This is happening right now to our friends who [...]
Post by Natalie Solidarity My gentle friend was returned to state custody even as I willed otherwise. Three days later, my Occupy Chicago brothers and I sat on cold stone benches, watching families visit their fathers for the hallmark holiday. We drove together to visit our comrade together because that’s what families do. It was [...]
Precisely as Occupy fights for systemic change by highlighting the interconnectedness of home foreclosure to the education debt crisis and the corporatization of financial structures, forging the correlations of a repressive state climate coupled with brutal police repression and political imprisonment to Occupy Chicago’s overarching society-rebuilding endeavors is an exercise in solidarity.
When de-arresting fails and our family is ripped from us by the state’s savage hands and those boots on the ground are transformed into prison slippers on a cold cement floor, how does our movement stand? What do we do, as revolutionaries, when our comrades, our family-in-arms, the people with whom we make social change, are locked away from us?