After an animal rights protest with graphic images of force fed ducks calling for the boycott of 'SALT'-an upscale Baltimore restaurant serving 'foie gras', Baltimore cops handcuff a protester, and arrest a reporter filming the scene and an eye witness who protested their action…

On Tuesday, November 18th, four to five hundred union members and supporters rallied at Baltimore's City Hall. The crowd was peppered with bright red signs reading "Hotel Workers Rising - Lifting one another above the poverty line!" and union staff were collecting cans of food from dozens of people who had brought them to show solidarity with struggling workers at the Sheraton Baltimore City Center hotel.


Full article with more photos: | Video (Youtube) from William Hughes
Coverage from the Indyreader: Unite Here! Marches on the Sheraton Hotel – Ron Kipling Williams

BALTIMORE RISING TIDE:
Coal finance day of action
Join us as we mobilize to STOP foreclosure on the climate!!!

IT'S TIME WE STAND UP AND SAY DON'T FORECLOSE ON THE CLIMATE!!!
Please join us in Baltimore Rising Tide's first action where we will demand that the banks stop investing in coal and mountain top removal, destroying Appalachia and threatening the health of our communities.

WHERE: Bank of America and Citi Bank on the corner of East Baltimore St. and Calvert St. (Near the Charles Center Metro Station)

WHEN: November 14th, 11am to 1pm

In an unprecedented move in Baltimore labor union history, the United Workers declared the Downtown Inner Harbor a “Human Rights Zone.”

The organization that last year won a living wage for its workers at Camden Yards announced on Saturday, October 25th at the Light Street Presbyterian Church they were in solidarity with the workers at the largest tourist venue in the city.

“After securing the living wage at Camden Yards, we decided to extend and expand the victory to include more low-wage workers in the city,” said Bennie Witherspoon, a leader in the United Workers and cleaner at Camden Yards. “We learned that through talking with workers at the Inner Harbor that they were experiencing many of the same human rights violations that we experienced at the stadium.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland is filing additional Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA) requests on behalf of 32 advocacy groups and more than 250 individuals in Maryland who may have been spied on by Maryland State police under the rubric of "homeland" and "national" security.

“History shows us that our democracy works best when the voices of people are heard. The chilling of free speech puts our nation at risk,” said Rev. Andrew Foster Connors with Christian Peace Witness for Iraq.

McCain classmate and Maryland activists display anti-torture messages to his and McCain's Naval Academy 50th class reunion.

Although it's unclear to what extent the mass media (or as I, turning their own equivocations against them, have now taken to calling them, the ' self-described journalists' embedded in the national newspapers and networks) accurately relayed the events, anyone paying attention to the alternative press during the Republican National Convention knows the extent to which the city of St. Paul did everything in its power to violently and preemptively squash any manifestations of dissent. Most spectacular, perhaps, was the arrest of Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman along with her producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, and most troubling are the arrests of the RNC 8, members of the RNC Welcoming Committee, a group which did not plan a single protest itself, but who, due in part to the tales told by paid informants, are facing charges of 'Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism.'

Of course one could (and should) argue that this repression is the predictable extensions of the illegal and inhumane policies perpetrated as central components of the War on Terror, the new 'standards' for the use of torture and extrajudicial detainment from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo coming home to roost. And, on the other hand, as anyone who's been involved in direct action activism for a while should recognize, the police in St. Paul were dishing out the latest variation on an old theme —- the practice of how to shut down a counter-summit protest in the United States having become something of a cottage industry for consultants like John Timoney, who cut his police state teeth during the 2000 protests against the RNC in Philadelphia, and went on to formulate what's been called 'The Miami Model' during the anti-FTAA protests in 2003.

Nevertheless, the recent events in St. Paul have brought to light a new element in this distressing constellation of surveillance, midnight raids at gunpoint, preemptive detention, and an ever expanding political expediency of the charge of 'terrorism'. While it's one thing for activists to suspect that the suppression of dissent is becoming a standard operating procedure, it's another thing entirely to see cities and police departments themselves recognizing this explicitly. The city of St. Paul was proud to announce that taxpayers would not bear the brunt of any lawsuits leveled against the city and its police response —- for it had had the foresight to compel the Republican Party itself (in other words, it's corporate sponsors) to take out an insurance policy which would indemnify the city against whatever claims the rabble might bring against it, to the tune of $10 million in coverage. Apparently, at least since the 2004 RNC protests in NYC, where settlements so far have run to at least $2 million, this kind of 'forward thinking' has become de rigeur for the host city of a convention wanting to make sure that the temporary elimination of civil liberties doesn't come at too high a cost.

Wednesday September 3, 2008, along with attorney Thomas Ruffin, we paid a visit to the Jessup Correctional Facility where we interviewed former member of the Black Panther Party and current political prisoner Marshall "Eddie" Conway. We heard his story, history of the BPP, the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and discussed the continuing struggle for human rights.

MP3 Download:
Part 1
Part 2