From the open publishing newswire: The fourth Annual Law and Disorder Conference will take place May 10th-12th, at Portland State University and will feature a panel discussion on the recent grand jury raids in the northwest.

We are excited to announce the Fourth Annual Law and Disorder Conference, May 10-12th 2013, at Portland State University. This year's conference features a special panel about grand jury resistance with members of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression and the Committee Against Political Repression. A special keynote will be given by former political prisoner Jihad Abdulmumit, co-chair for the Jericho Movement, as well as his highly acclaimed theatrical performance "Political Incarcerations". Other special presentations will be given by Sacramento Prisoner Support, David Hill (American Indian Movement), Portland Rising Tide, Portland Central America Solidarity Committee, Right 2 Survive and Portland Industrial Workers of the World, as well as many other local organizations.

L&D was founded in 2010 by members of the NW Student Coalition, a consortium of radical student groups in the Pacific Northwest from PSU, Mt. Hood Community College, Reed College and Washington State University-Vancouver in the aftermath of the police murders of Aaron Campbell and Keaton Otis in Portland and Oscar Grant in the Bay Area. The general theme of the conference has been to bridge the gap between different traditions of radical politics. The first and foremost goal has been to raise the issues of U.S.-held political prisoners, their existence contrary to denial on the part of the state, and practical discussions regarding their support and amnesty. Secondly, we engage in a critical dialogue about political repression, from the historical targeting and incarceration of activists in the FBI's counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) in the second half of the 20th century to the most recent manifestations such as the PATRIOT ACT and Homeland Security. The third theme is the abolition of the Prison- Industrial Complex and finding community alternatives to the police.

This conference calls for people, movements, organizations and collectives to present alternative accounts to the political dimensions of civic engagement, mutual aid and revolution as they relate to economics, politics, invention, technology, work, artistic and cultural production, the body, pedagogy and social change. [...]

Website:  http://lawandisorder.wordpress.com
Facebook: Law and Disorder Conference

From the open publishing newswire: Please join us for The Portland Women's Movement, Part I: Origins, History of Social Justice Organizing's first program for 2013. The panel will feature Maureen Gray Hudson, Kathleen Saadat and Susan Stoner. Sandy Polishuk will moderate.

Find us in room 328 Smith Center at Portland State University, 1825 SW Broadway on Thursday, January 24 at 7pm. The program will be free as usual.

History of Social Justice Organizing is an ongoing series of presentations by activists and scholars on a wide variety of social justice organizing both in Portland and elsewhere. A program of Occupy History

Find upcoming programs at historyofsocialjustice.wordpress.com and
www.facebook.com/historyofsocialjustice

From the open publishing newswire: In recent weeks, a showdown has loomed on U.S. docks between the shipping bosses and port workers that has rattled the capitalist ruling class. On the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, the International Longshoreman's Association prepared to strike container shipping while the employers threatened to lock out 14,500 ILA members. On the West Coast, the grain shippers been demanding a giveback contract from the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU), which would effectively bypass the union hiring hall, slash workers' vital safety protections and gut union power. Yet in the midst of the Northwest grain battle, an Occupy activist, Peter Little, publishes an article vociferously arguing against the call to defend the ILWU. While posing as ultra-left, this policy if actually carried out would aid the employers who are hell-bent on destroying ILWU union power on the waterfront. Blaming sellouts on the nature of unions lets the bureaucrats off the hook. We in the Internationalist Group say: All those who stand with the exploited and oppressed must come to the defense of the ILWU in this fight. And that defense includes forthrightly opposing the capitulations and betrayals by the labor bureaucracy which sells out vital union gains in the vain hope of an impossible "cooperation" with capital, endangering the workers organizations they preside over.

Read the article at the Internationalist Group website:  http://www.internationalist.org/whywedefendilwu1301.html.

From the open publishing newswire: Well, by now everyone in the Occupy movement is hotly debating "nonviolence" vs. "diversity of tactics", as recently so in, "Chris Hedges and Kristof Lopaur of Occupy Oakland debate black bloc, militancy and tactics," February 8, 2012, on KPFA in Berkeley, California.

Both Lopaur and Hedges made some critically weak, flawed, at times somewhat disingenuous or self-contradictory and, in Lopaur's case, often specious arguments in their radio debate. This so, even though I politically agree with Hedges, and although Hedges' recent commentary, "The Cancer in Occupy," seemed poorly supported journalistically. But, Hedges is dead on about, 'Go do violence under your own name, not the Occupy movement's.'

Read more: daveyd.com | hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com

[ Related: | How violence protects the State | On The Nature of Violence and Nonviolence | Organized Non-violent Civil Disobedience vs. OWS ]

From the open publishing newswire: The 'Occupy' movement is one of several in American history to be based on anarchist principles.
London, UK - Almost every time I'm interviewed by a mainstream journalist about Occupy Wall Street I get some variation of the same lecture:

"How are you going to get anywhere if you refuse to create a leadership structure or make a practical list of demands? And what's with all this anarchist nonsense - the consensus, the sparkly fingers? Don't you realise all this radical language is going to alienate people? You're never going to be able to reach regular, mainstream Americans with this sort of thing!"

If one were compiling a scrapbook of worst advice ever given, this sort of thing might well merit an honourable place. After all, since the financial crash of 2007, there have been dozens of attempts to kick-off a national movement against the depredations of the United States' financial elites taking the approach such journalists recommended. All failed. It was only on August 2, when a small group of anarchists and other anti-authoritarians showed up at a meeting called by one such group and effectively wooed everyone away from the planned march and rally to create a genuine democratic assembly, on basically anarchist principles, that the stage was set for a movement that Americans from Portland to Tuscaloosa were willing to embrace. [...]

From the open publishing newswire: The Occupy Movement couldn't have come along at a worse time, from the viewpoint of the Democrats. Election season is just getting started and Occupy has thrown a giant wrench into the political machinery. Some labor leaders too are sensing "politics as usual" shifting under their feet; the "get out the vote" for the Democrats may elicit blank stares from the rank and file.

Occupy has the potential to create earthquakes within the labor movement and labor's relationship to the Democrats, if it approaches the subject intelligently. This seismic shift could permanently change politics in the United States, much for the better. Many commentators have noted that the Occupy Movement can be only poison for the Democrats. Unlike the Republicans, who benefited from the corporate sponsored far-right Tea Party, the Democrats have no intention of moving - or even flirting - with an independent movement to its left. Long before the corporate Presidency of Bill Clinton, the Democrats have moved only to the right, with the leftist talk reserved strictly for election campaigns. This evolution is now to the point where President Obama stands to the right of President and arch-Conservative Richard Nixon on most economic and social issues. Times have certainly changed.

 http://www.workerscompass.org

From the open publishing newswire: As anarchists, we often say that the freedoms in bourgeois society are a sham. Most of the time, non-anarchists can easily just laugh this off as the delusions of nutty radicals. Not so much right now. Not when "democracy" after "democracy" is chasing their site out of their borders, for doing nothing more than non-violently refusing to stay silent while the worlds' elites conspire to kill, torture, and oppress.

Not when Julian Assange is being dragged into what is a quite obviously dragged into a politically-motivated trial. Not when Assange will probably end up being killed in the next year. Not when both "left" and "right" governments are cooperating in the effort to muzzle Wikileaks. It's the bourgeois concept of freedom: we'll let you have freedoms only so long as you agree not to use them for anything truly meaningful. Then we'll revoke them from you. Are these the hallmarks of the sort of system that can be changed peacefully and non-disruptively from within? It is, I think, an ideal time to make these points to our friends who are not currently radicals.

Missing Wikileaks? [link] | WikiLeaks Mirrors =>leaks.be | wikileaks.at | wikileaks.de| 213.251.145.96| wikileaks.pl | wikileaks.eu| wikileaks.fi| wikileaks.2600.com | wikileaks.indymedia.org

From the open publishing newswire: FBI "thwarts" it's own so-called bomb plot at Pioneer Square on Friday Nov. 26th. All major & even some [apparently liberal] news outlets pass off this bullshit as an actual event. Predictably, the dopes (e.i. general public) all fall for it, hook/line/sinker. Get ready for MORE security, MORE police, MORE surveillance, & MORE lenses watching your every move.

All these "thwarted bomb plots" are starting to become a real cliché. Some harmless 19 year old no-body with a clean record, brown skin, & two Mohamuds in his name gets fingered by the FBI informant goons in 2009. Over the next year or so, federal goons pretend to be this guy's friend, leaning on him, spoon-feeding him all sorts of phony baloney about carrying out some attack that he NEVER originally had any intention of carrying out. They give him all this material that he never would've had access to, or even the slightest clue of where to get it. They spend a year setting up & totally ENTRAPPING this guy, who in the beginning never EVER had a great sceme to carry out anything, maybe other than attending college. At one point, Mohamud Osmond Mohamud was planning to head to Alaska for a seasonal fishery job (which seems really unusual for a "hardened terrorist"). However, the fed. goons stopped him from going because how could he have carried out some fake bombing here in Portland if he was slinging fish in Alaska, right?

The "plot" was eventually "uncovered" & predictably, all the thought-less dopes swallow the LIES. Typically, all media outlets including The Oregonian, NPR/OPB, & even most of so-called "progressive" talk radio (locally at least) has been hashing out this one-sided propaganda about how Mohamud Osmond Mohamud was some eeeeeeevil jihadist & how the FBI did it's "due diligence".

Which is all total bullshit, of course. But who cares, right?

From the open publishing newswire: The Anti-Racist Action (ARA) Network Conference is an annual event that seeks to bring together anti-racists and anti-fascists for a weekend of educational events and networking to learn about bigoted organizing in our communities, and how we can respond. Workshops are free of charge, and open to anti-racists whether part of an ARA chapter or not.

Presentations include: "Portland Anti-fascist History," "Anti-Racist Organizing in Rural Communities," "The Portland Police and White Supremacy," and several more.

Schedule of Events | Workshop details

rosecityantifa.org

From the open publishing newswire: I know death is a scary and upsetting subject for most people. Emotions run high and people get confused about things. Especially under such strange and disturbing circumstances as the recent self immolation.
But in your search for meaning in this please be careful with your allies and comrades feelings. We're receiving a high volume of complaints from people who've had their feelings hurt and are expressing frustration with open publishing. Even worse than that, people are complaining that they are feeling discouraged from being a part of the struggle for animal rights (on all sides of the opinion spectrum on this issue).

From the open publishing newswire: An interview with Andrew Flood about the impressions of the North American anarchist movement he formed during his 2007/2008 44 city tour of the US and Canada. The interviews ends with questions about the comparison of the movement in Ireland with that in Britian and the promotion of anarchism via the internet. This was submitted and published in Black Flag.

From the open publishing newswire: just returned from Venezulea with a global exchange delegation centered on community organizing. I am working on a larger documentary based on the Bolivarian revolution and will return to Venezulea later this year. In the meantime I completed a version that features the David Rovics song "Song for Hugo Chavez".

From the open publishing newswire: Is Andrej Grubacic speaking in Portland? It's up to you[?] I just wanted to let people know that Andrej Grubacic who co-wrote Wobblies and Zapatistas with Staughton Lynd is coming up to the northwest for a speaking tour May 10-15. He will talk about anarchism in the 21st century - a way forward and will share some of his personal experiences with organizing with the Belgrade Libertarian Group in Yugoslavia and in the US and elsewhere as an anarchist. Of course, he will also talk about his book a little. He told me that he would really, really like to speak in Portland and is interested in speaking there on Sunday May 10th.