By Kelly Pflug-Back

Editor's Note: On July 19, Kelly Pflug-Back was sentenced to 11 months, plus time served, for her participation in the Toronto G20 counter-summit demonstrations. Kelly is an amazing organizer, writer, ]poet, musician and comrade.

Please write to Kelly at:

Kelly Pflug-Back
Vanier Centre for Women
P.O. Box 1040
655 Martin Street
Milton, Ontario
L9T 5E6 Canada

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June 27, 2010, was uncharacteristically overcast for mid-summer Toronto. My head pounded from the humidity as I walked alone down Queen Street, through a cityscape teeming with riot police, and still dusted with shards of broken glass from the day before. Construction crews had already set to work repairing the trail of wreckage, attempting to get everything back to normal before anyone noticed.

When I reached Jimmie Simpson Park, where people were meeting for the day’s scheduled prison solidarity rally, I saw only a small crowd of friends standing under the drooping honey locust trees: some debriefing or consoling one another, others speaking with the reporters who swarmed like gnats around the gathering. This sparse group of about thirty was all that remained after the preemptive kidnappings and mass arrests. I can’t remember if I felt any particular sense of foreboding—any eerie apprehension of why I too hadn’t been taken away.

As our diminished group walked from the park to the detention center where our friends were being held, I hoped to be able to find some news of what had happened to my partner, or to anyone for that matter.

By Kat Parlor

[url=http://www.unmaskingchoice.ca/]The Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform[/url] stopped by Vincent de Paul church on June 28 for the Toronto stop of its cross-country New Abortion Caravan [url=http://www.unmaskingchoice.ca/about/schedule]speaking tour[/url]. A new spin on the original Abortion Caravan-which promoted reproductive freedom in the 1970's—the tour began in Vancouver on May 29 and will wrap up on July 1 on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa. Utilizing graphic images of aborted fetuses in an attempt to shock Canadians into opposing abortion, the CCBR's stated goal is “to end abortion in their lifetime.”

It's no coincidence that the campaign closely follows the February introduction of [url=http://www.stephenwoodworth.ca/canadas-400-year-old-definition-of-human-... 312[/url] by Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth. This private members bill requests a special Parliamentary Committee be struck to investigate whether or not the Criminal Code's definition of “human being” should be expanded to grant personhood to fetuses. The House of Commons will vote on the matter on September 19; the New Abortion Caravan intends to garner public support for a motion that could ultimately lead to the re-criminalization of abortions in Canada.

In Toronto the CCBR met with resistance, however, when a number of pro-choice activists, joined by members of the Ontario Coalition of Abortion Clinics, showed up to protest their event.

For nearly three hours dozens of protesters picketed and petitioned on the sidewalk in front of the church. Their pro-choice presence dwarfed the abysmal attendance of the CCBR event, at several points swelling to at least four times its attendance.

Disability Politics and Theory
By AJ Withers
Fernwood Publishing

Review by Karine Wehlm

"(D)isability falls somewhere in a constellation. Like the constellation in the sky, disability is in constant flux and appears different depending on the positioning of the onlooker."(p.99)

Disability Politics and Theory is an excellent new book that critically examines the key models of disability that have shaped how disability and disabled people have been viewed in North America throughout the capitalist era and to this current day. The book's author, AJ Withers applies an intersectional and anti-capitalist analysis on these models and suggests an alternative model, the radical model of disability, as a analytical tool to move the disabled people’s movement forward. Withers' arguments stem from an understanding that multiple oppressions are intertwined with one another and cannot be dealt with separately. The author also argues that capitalism is inherently problematic since, among other things, it assigns individual self-worth and value based on whether one can work for a wage (and so produce profits for someone else). Withers ends with a call for both non-disabled people’s movements and the disabled people’s movement to organize inclusively for social justice and radical access.

Republished from Ideas and Action

Julio Rodriguez, a stalwart comrade of ours from Los Angeles, has been held in prison since Saturday under threat of immediate deportation. We will not let another one of our brothers be kidnapped from us by the racist state!

Julio is an anarchist youth organizer with the Youth Justice Coalition and RiseUp LA, radical groups that run out of Chuco’s Justice Center in Inglewood, CA. He is a student at Free LA High School at Chuco’s where he is studying to get his GED. Julio is prominent in the LA punk scene, organizing and promoting DIY shows, and encouraging the politicization and education of kids in the scene.

This past Saturday, Julio was hosting a Cinco de Mayo party at his house. When he noticed that someone had stolen his laptop, he shut down the party and told everyone they needed to leave, but a group of them refused. Julio knocked on the side of their car to get them to leave, but rather than drive away, the group called 911. The Sherriff’s deputies arrived and arrested Julio for vandalism. He was taken to Men’s Central Jail where he is currently detained. Julio’s family posted bail for him on Sunday, but ICE put an immigration hold on him and will not allow him to be released until the hold is resolved. If the immigration hold is not dropped, Julio will be transferred to an ICE detention facility and then be deported to Mexico, where he has not lived since his infancy.

[i]It’s a Student Strike, a People’s Struggle[/i]

Statement by CLASSE
Translated by [url=http://lifeonleft.blogspot.ca/]Richard Fidler
[/url]
Hike in tuition fees is part of “the cultural revolution”

For several weeks now a student revolt has shaken the neoliberal consensus imposed for many years by the Quebec and Canadian governments. It was sparked by the announcement of a new, 75 per cent increase in university tuition fees.

Since its announcement in the 2010 Quebec budget, the media lackeys of the Liberal government have attempted to present this measure as inevitable. But behind this claimed inevitability we find an eminently political decision expressed in what the finance minister terms a “cultural revolution,” and the international economic authorities refer to as an “austerity budget.” Whatever the name given to it by governments, it clearly and definitively involves the dismantling of public services aimed at privatizing what remains of the commons.

The student movement has focused on the issue of tuition fees and the commodification of the universities. However, it is not unaware that this measure is integrally linked to a larger project affecting elementary and secondary education, the healthcare sector and the unfettered development of natural resources. Our resistance to the Quebec government's neoliberal measures has to take into account all of these sectors, establishing a social link that enables us to speak of a community.