IV504 - January 2017

On December 9 2016 , Parliament voted in favor of a presidential impeachment by 234 votes to 56, with 7 invalid votes and 2 abstentions. Over 30,000 protesters were present to celebrate the impeachment. The votes in favor of impeachment exceeded what was expected, though it was slightly lower than the 81% support for impeachment among public opinion.

A mere week into his presidential term Donald Trump has created an enormous protest movement. Across the US protestors invaded airports on Sunday in protest at his Executive Order banning travelers from seven premoninantly-Muslim countries. The protest have apread elsewhere and over a million people in Bortin have signed a petition calling for the invitation to Trump to pay an official state visit be withdraw. David Finkel, editor of Against the Current and Joanna Misnik leading member of Solidarity gave us their opinion on the current situation.

IV540 January 2017 PDF magazine

The widespread jubilation over Oscar López Rivera’s release shows that anticolonial struggle still resonates in Puerto Rico. The campaign to free Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar López Rivera, a political prisoner confined in a US federal penitentiary since 1981, has dominated various sectors of Puerto Rican activism for the last decade. The 34 Mujeres Por Oscar has been a fixture at Union Squre Park and other locations around New York for years, and when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015, posters of Oscar festooned with a rainbow-pride flag around San Juan were ubiquitous.

Patrice Lumumba was prime minister of a newly independent Congo for only seven months between 1960 and 1961 before he was murdered, fifty-six years ago [1]. He was thirty-six.

I came back from the Women’s March in D.C. exhausted but thrilled, convinced that we are seeing the birth of a new women’s movement. The size, the inclusiveness, the defiant but good-humored spirit, and the progressive politics all make me very optimistic, though there will be challenges.

“Over the next months and years we will be called upon to intensify our demands for social justice, to become more militant in our defense of vulnerable populations. Those who still defend the supremacy of white male hetero-patriarchy had better watch out.

“The next 1,459 days of the Trump administration will be 1,459 days of resistance: Resistance on the ground, resistance in the classrooms, resistance on the job, resistance in our art and in our music.

“This is just the beginning and in the words of the inimitable Ella Baker, ‘We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.’ Thank you.” This was Angela Davis concluding her remarks at the Women’s March on Washington on 21 January 2017. (For the full transcript see below the article.)

This interview with anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski was conducted by Alain Pojolat and Alain Krivine and published in L’Anticapitaliste, weekly newspaper of the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) on January 12 2017.

In the first two weeks of 2017, five activists have reportedly gone missing in Pakistan. Others have taken to social media to share what they referred to as failed abduction attempts. Chat groups, email lists, and social media are abuzz with multiple reports of as many as nine activists and citizen journalists who have reportedly gone "missing". There is one common thread that haunts the families and the larger civil rights community in Pakistan: uncertainty.

Since the agreement on its nuclear programme, the obsession of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been to make the labour market attractive for the multinationals. So it is a “social” policy of the most violent kind that is being implemented.