A free four-part video series has been created by the non-profit Turtle Island Project (TIP) in Munising, Michigan on the third annual "Cowboys and Angels" concert that benefited the White Buffalo Calf Woman Society (WBCWS) in Mission, South Dakota – the world's oldest Native American domestic violence shelter...WBCWS battles domestic violence, sexual assault and an alarming increase in teen suicides on the Lakota Rosebud Sioux Reservation...A wide variety of social problems are among the causes for the Rosebud suicides and family violence including poverty, depression, no jobs, and substance abuse Rev. Dr. Lynn Hubbard performed original songs and seasonal music during the free concert on Saturday, Dec. 13, 2008 at the Falling Rock Cafe and Bookstore in Munising, Michigan.

[Translated from GegenStandpunkt: Politische Vierteljahreszeitschrift 4-05, Gegenstandpunkt Verlag, Munich]

In his inaugural speech, the President of the United States communicates about the material situation of the working class in the United States. He promises his fellow citizens the following:

It is telling that the violent death of Tracey, a homeless woman in Vancouver, who burned to death after attempting to keep warm after constructing a small fire in a downtown street corner, has resulted in national headlines while the freezing death of another unidentified homeless man in Montreal the very next night has resulted in only a passing mention in Montreal newspapers. It is beyond cynical to point out that when a homeless person burns to death, it is a national tragedy, whereas when a homeless person freezes to death, it is scarcely even news.

By RICHARD RHAMES - December 26-28, 2008

As the holiday season slides past again, feel-good media stories of charitable giving subside. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the merciless lashing of consumers to buy-buy-buy is decorated with syrupy tales of donated time, money, presents, and food. For a few weeks each year, it’s fashionable to acknowledge a key issue in our atomized and structurally brutish society: Towering inequality. Jesse Jackson called it, more directly, “economic violence.”

In 1995, just before the Harris Government cut social assistance rates by 21.6%, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty marched from the low-income community of Regent Park into affluent Rosedale. The impending welfare cut and Provincial tax breaks would soon transfer about $1 million a month from one community to the other. Replicated across Ontario, this vast transfer of wealth to the already wealthy was at the very heart of the ‘Common Sense Revolution’. Initiatives around poverty that ignore this continuing injustice are of very limited value.

By Iason Athanasiadis - December 17, 2008

The riots and sit-ins continued for a second week across Greece yesterday as protesters kept up pressure on the government to step aside and commentators described the country as being on the verge of "societal collapse"...Universities and 400 high schools are occupied by student activists as a leaked police report revealed official fears that the current crisis will fuel a recruitment drive for Greece's anarchist movement.

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Radicals Getting Rad
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The APC is having a fundraising holiday/non-holiday get together.

Friday, December 20th
7:00 pm
524 Main Street

There will be music and food! There will also be beverages for purchase!

By Karen AbuZayd - December 14, 2008

With an estimated 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, including some 325 children, the declaration that "everyone has the right to liberty and security of person" and that no one shall be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment has a sad resonance today. Compounding these abuses are statistics that attest to the lack of protection of social and economic rights. An unprecedentedly high number of Gazans - more than half - now live below the deep poverty line.

SchNEWS - Friday 12th December 2008 | Issue 659

The Greek police are notorious for their brutality and racism, as well as their links to far right groups. They haven’t been reformed since the days of the fascist colonels came to an end in the '70s, and pretty much every Greek has got a story of brutality at the hands of the police.

By John Clarke - December 8, 2008

In poor communities, this crisis comes after a long process of pushing them down during the decades of neoliberalism. There is already anger and the realization that bad is going to get much worse – and it will make large numbers of people look for answers. The issue is to demonstrate in practical forms of organized resistance that these worsening conditions are not unstoppable and inevitable. That [they are] the starting point for a movement that can respond to this crisis and pose a bold anti-capitalist vision of what it is fighting for.

BBC NEWS - 2008/11/21

Ministers should rethink or delay plans to force lone parents, disabled people and the long-term jobless to seek work, a senior government adviser has said...Those on incapacity benefits will be expected to prepare themselves for finding work while non-working mothers with children as young as one will be encouraged to return to the workplace when feasible...Only severely disabled people and single mothers with babies under one are likely to avoid any benefits conditions.

OCAP

How Ontario's Poverty Reduction Strategy Will Fail

By Saul Landau - November 17, 2008

The...[P]residential campaign demonstrated the contemporary versions of institutionalized denial. For example, most members of the public and even Congress see desperately poor people every day, on their way to and from work, in streets, near their homes or from inside their cars. Yet, they accept an implicitly accepted dogma: do not, under any conditions, allow the use in political speech of the words "poor people."

Everyone's Downstream II: Stop Playing Games With Our Lives
To be held November 22nd, 23rd at

The Edmonton Native Friendship Centre
11205 101 Street NW

This event is co-presented by OilSandsTruth.org [OST] with the Indigenous Environmental Network [IEN]

And on Friday November 21, 2008 at the University of Alberta:

KITCHENER-WATERLOO — Today has been declared a day to raise awareness about the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), and to take action against the corporations and government ministries responsible for implementation of the continental integration agreement. Protests and demonstrations will be taking place in Toronto, Hamilton, Guelph, Kitchener-Waterloo, Stratford and London.