Global Week of Solidarity: Pittsburgh 09/19-26 [Archive]

Communist

8th August 2009, 02:20

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A Global Week of Solidarity with the Unemployed

September 19 - 26 (During the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, PA)

Yes to Jobs & Human Needs; No to War & Wall Street Greed

Sunday, September 20 - Rally & March for a Real Jobs Program
Building a Tent City in Pittsburgh for the Unemployed & Supporters the weekend before the G-20 Summit
Organizing Caravans of Unemployed People and Supporters to Converge on Pittsburgh during the week of September 19-26
Marches, Protests and Events Before and During the G20 Summit addressing demands such as: Bring the Troops Home from Iraq & Afghanistan Now! & Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, World-Renown Political Prisoner, Journalist, Activists and 'Voice of the Voiceless!"

In September the eyes of the world will be on Pittsburgh, where the G20 countries will meet to consider what to do about the biggest global economic crisis since the 1930s. The heads of governments, finance ministers and central bankers that will be in Pittsburgh for the summit hear the concerns of bankers and corporate executives all the time. They need to listen to the voices of the millions of people who have lost their jobs and their homes because of the crisis. The20Bail out the People Movement, a coalition of community, labor, religious, and grassroots activists, wants to help dramatize the crisis of joblessness, and the need for action both in the U.S. and worldwide to the G20 summit. It is now clear that the stimulus legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in March has done little to stop the loss of jobs. There is no recovery for the unemployed, the underemployed and the poor; and things are only getting worse. This is why we’re asking you to help make the idea of a Global Week of Solidarity with the Unemployed from September 19 through September 26, the week of the G20 Summit, a reality.

A TENT CITY AND MARCH FOR JOBS On Sunday, Sept. 20, the tent city will open with a rally and march for jobs. The main site for the tent city will be next to the Monumental Baptist Church in an historic section of the African-American community of Pittsburgh called “The Hill.” This location is just a short walk or march from the convention center where the G20 summit will be held, and from the rest of downtown Pittsburgh. Unemployed people and their supporters will inhabit the tent city from Sept 20 through Sept. 25. Additional locations for other encampments in Pittsburgh are being considered as well. This is why we’re asking you to help make the idea of a Global Week of Solidarity with the Unemployed from September 19 through September 26, the week of the G20 Summit, a reality.

IF YOU ARE STRUGGLING T O SURVIVE – THIS IS A WEEK OF SOLIDARITY WITH YOU The Week of Solidarity with the Unemployed is also a week of solidarity with those who have lost their homes to foreclosures and evictions; those who have been forced to take part-time or temporary jobs because there are no full-time jobs; workers who have seen their wages and hours cut; autoworkers whose plants have been closed; immigrant workers who are fighting for their rights; communities that are fighting gentrification and budget cuts to social programs; students who are being forced out of school because of the debt burden and rising tuition cost; the survivors and displaced victims of the Katrina/Rita hurricanes and the government's criminally negligent response; poor and working people everywhere, especially in poor countries who are bearing the cruel brunt of the economic crisis; workers everywhere fighting for the right to organize and in the U.S. for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act in the U.S.; All who need single payer health care; retirees who need their healthcare & pensions safeguarded; and young people, especially Black and Latina/o youths whom the system has condemned to a jobless future.

IT’S TIME TO BAILOUT THE UNEMPLOYED WITH A REAL JOBS PROGRAM In the days before and during the G20 summit, events and marches will take place to emphasize this central point: More than just another stimulus package is needed. It’s time for a serious, direct and massive jobs program on par with the Works Pr ogress Administration of the 1930s. We must fight for a real jobs program for the unemployed and underemployed that pays a living wage performing socially meaningful work; and an income for those unable to work. Any claim that the resources for a serious jobs program are not available must be rejected. If governments, particularly the U.S. government, can make available trillions of dollars for bailing out banks and corporations as well as funding the Pentagon’s endless wars, & Occupations, they can find the resources to bail out the unemployed and underemployed.

THIS IS A GLOBAL CALL BECAUSE JOBLESSNESS IS A GLOBAL CRISIS Mass unemployment is a global phenomenon. The right to a job at a living wage must be a global demand. Instead of being pitted against each other, unemployed and working people across the world can only improve their conditions by working and fighting together for their common interests. Activists and organizations everywhere are encouraged to support the Global Week of Solidarity with the Unemployed and organize events in conjunction with it.

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING'S FINAL CAUSE: THE RIGHT OF ALL TO A JOB OR AN INCOME The need and the right of everyone to either a job or a guaranteed income is the cause that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dedicated the last year of his life to. The present global economic depression has made King’s last cause even more urgent today than it was when he was alive. Dr. King also knew that: no matter the magnitude of suffering, governments do not respond if those who are suffering remain invisible and silent. Even a history-making president like Obama is still not a substitute for the mass movement for social justice. During the depression of the 1930’s, President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt once told labor leaders who were asking him to do more to help workers and the poor “I agree with you, know make me do it”. FDR’s advice applies to Pres. Obama to. The purpose of the Global Week of Solidarity with the Unemployed is to make sure that people who are usually ignored are seen and heard.

ORGANIZING CARAVANS OF UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE AND SUPPORTERS TO PITTSBURGH Over the next 10 weeks, organizing will be going on in every region of the country to bring caravans of unemployed people and supporters to Pittsburgh in Sept.

THINGS THAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP:

Have your Union/Community/Religious or Student Organization.endorse - http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20endorse.shtml
Donate to help with organizing expenses - http://bailoutpeople.org/donate.shtml
Organize car/s vans/ trucks & buses from your locality to participate in the caravans to Pittsburgh - http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20volorgcents.shtml
Have an Organizer address a meeting of your organizat ion - http://bailoutpeople.org/cmnt.shtml
Volunteer your time to work on this project - http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20volorgcents.shtml

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Europe: Millions of Unemployed Youth

Brussels, Jul 23 (Prensa Latina) A total of 5 million young people
between 15 and 24 years of age were unemployed in the European Union
in the first quarter of 2009, reported the statistics office EUROSTAT
Thursday.

According to this study, 18.3 percent of the European population in
that age segment was unemployed, an amount greater than that of the
general European population, which is 8.2 percent of active people.
The report said that more than 50 percent are living within the 16
eurozone countries, with Spain at the head of the list, a country
contributing with two out of every three new unemployed people this
year.

The economic recession ends three consecutive years of reduction in
unemployment.

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Communist

11th August 2009, 22:37

http://bailoutpeople.org/images/g20leaflet.jpg (http://bailoutpeople.org/)

BEFORE THE G-20 SUMMIT
A CALL TO JOIN A NATIONAL

The Unemployed, the Homeless, the Hungry & the Poor
must no longer be INVISIBLE & SILENT

MARCH FOR JOBS

IN PITTSBURGH SUNDAY, SEPT. 20

Tent City on the Hill - Sept. 20-25

Revive Dr. King's dream of a movement for a right to a job.

If you don't have a job, fight to get one - if you have one - fight to keep it.

DEMAND:
• A Jobs Program for ALL Now!
• A Moratorium on Layoffs, Foreclosures & Evictions.
• No Cuts in Social Services.
• Fund Peoples Needs, Not War & Greed.

Join the "Jobs or Income Now" caravans
(cars, vans, buses) from across the country.

Volunteers & funds needed

CONTACT: BAIL OUT THE PEOPLE MOVEMENT
BailOutPeople.org (http://bailoutpeople.org/)

March4Jobs(AT)gmail.com (http://mail01.mail.com/scripts/mail/compose.mail?compose=1&.ob=3af2900a9fa0151231d1697dd5f0a2296db8b03e&[email protected]&composecc=&subject=&body=)

PITTSBURGH: 412-780-3813
NYC: 212-633-6646

Big Red

15th August 2009, 04:29

September 23-25: Resist the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh

Join Thousands at a Three Day Convergence of Action, Resistance and Hope
Pittsburghers didn’t ask the G20 to come here, but it is our intention that the worldview the summit represents will die here.
This September 24-25 Pittsburgh will host the next summit of the G20, a group of finance ministers and central bank governors from the world’s largest economies who meet twice yearly to discuss and coordinate the international financial system. Around 1,500 delegates, including heads of state, will be here along with more than 2,000 members of the media, and thousands of police and security agents tasked with squelching dissent.
This summit, and the predecessor meetings this past April in London, occurs on the heels of the worldwide financial meltdown that has been severely impacting hundreds of millions around the world. Since its inception, the G20 has been a tool used to promote a world vision based on the ability of capital to move as it pleases, at the expense of labor, human rights and the environment.
Now that the system these leaders have forced on the world is in crisis they continue to operate as if they have the answer. We know that they do not. To save countries, they propose we turn to institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an entity that has historically imposed murderous structural adjustment programs on the world’s poor.
G20 summits, alongside other meetings of institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization, have rightfully been targeted by hundreds of thousands of people around the world because they represent a global vision based on war-making, social and economic injustice, and corporate greed. Pittsburgh will take its place alongside people around the world who have protested and resisted such gatherings in their hometowns.
Pittsburgh was chosen as the host city because of its history, and because the President is looking to buttress his working class credentials. It is true that our city has much to offer the world in terms of progress, we just happen to disagree with the politicians on what these words mean or what others should take from our experience. Pittsburgh has experienced 50 years of population loss and industrial decline as well as more than 150 years of industrial class conflict. We have gained an instinctual knowledge that you get what you are willing to fight for. We celebrate that worker and community self-organization has often succeeded where government, bosses and the supposedly enlightened have failed.
What has carried us through the tough times has been our relationships, the tight knit nature of our mostly non-corporate dominated neighborhoods, a do-it-yourself ethic, the unpretentious manner in which people treat each other, and a sense of local pride that isn’t based on salary or one’s place in some hierarchy. Pittsburgh never died, and the currently-in-vogue talk of "rebirth" measures success, growth, and progress in terms of the number of corporations based here, the multi-national profits, or the success of our politicians at going from Mayors to County Executives to Governors.
For our measuring stick, we look to whether or not all have the resources needed to lead and pursue rewarding lives, and if we are meeting community needs without the involvement of the state. We look to the health of our environment and the treatment of other living things, the equality of educational opportunities, the degree to which we lessen our participation in the exploitation of others, and how successful we are in moving towards a new kind of society in which your success and ability to survive is not at the expense of others.
And in these respects, our city is making progress. We find inspiration and common cause in the efforts of the multitude of other projects and initiatives that are transforming Pittsburgh into a more just and sustainable place to live, efforts that are in a conflictual relationship with state power, and will be joining resistance to the G20. And truly, if the G20 were about anything besides state power and money it would be these efforts that other countries would be coming here to discuss and look at, because there is much that we have to offer in creating a better world.
Pittsburgh is not without its problems, and there is much that needs to be addressed. During the summit and its lead-up little will be said about the troubling grip the UPMC medical industrial complex and others hold over the region, the chronic illnesses caused by the extremely high levels of particulate matter in our air, the troubling ethical questions posed by the warfare robotics that are being pioneered here, the police violence and acts of unaccountable brutality against the public, a stacked deck against labor organizing, a depressingly inadequate public transit system, and a political process marked by a lack of ethical accountability and transparency.
We should be clear then, we love our city, and in so far as we see the G20 as a threat to our collective health and well-being we intend to be an obstacle to its ability to function. This is an unavoidable decision given what the summit is, and what it represents. The presence of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh will be a major - if short-lived - disruption to the city and the people who work and live here, with or without protests. Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has acknowledged as much, stating the summit will result in "chaos" due to security cordons, increased traffic, etc.
The government has already staked out its position: the needs of 20 politicians justify whatever disruption and cost to our city, and the responsibility felt by thousands to participate in resistance to the G20 and to articulate an alternate vision for society is more than unimportant, it’s a threat.
Based on past summits the media will play the state game by focusing on whether protesters will be able to disrupt the ability of the summit to meet, using ominous and sensationalist stories with unsubstantiated claims of evil outsiders come to wreck havoc on the good people, because these stories, even if refuted and later disproved, serve to justify attacks on the public’s liberties and dignity. This must not, and will not, deter resistance. The stakes are too high.
The real value of this summit, to its participants and those resisting it, is not in the substance of the "leaders’" discussions. Our power is not in whether or not we have the ability to prevent a bunch of finance ministers and heads of state from talking. The real importance is in the way an undisrupted ceremony reinforces the dominant worldview. If that view is flawed, it must be rejected, and the spotlight such a gathering creates must be one in which people will manifest liberating social conflict.
We therefore believe that the necessary attempts of thousands to interfere with the summit are not an ends in and of themselves, they are a critical part of the means we can use to achieve the victory we are collectively organizing for in September: to heighten existing social resistance, and to present an alternative narrative of why our world is the way it is. We must make it clear that the world need not be this way, and talk about our vision for a movement towards a new society based not on profit and coercion but rooted in meeting collective needs for both material comfort and the freedom to pursue fulfilling lives of opportunity and dignity.
In this effort we invite and encourage your participation!
In Struggle,
Pittsburgh Organizing Group
www.organizepittsburgh.org (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.organizepittsburgh.org/)
If your group would like to endorse this call, let us know at [email protected] (http://www.anonym.to/?mailto:[email protected])
Endorsed by:
Students for Justice in Palestine (Pittsburgh)
Harrisburg Area Anarchist Collective (Harrisburg, PA)
Workers Solidarity Alliance (North America)
Friendly Fire Collective (SF)
Ricanstruction Netwerk (NYC)
Unconventional Action (Frederick, MD)
Dirty Hands Collective (Durango, CO)
Silent City Distro (Ithaca, NY)
Unconventional Action In The Bay (Oakland/San Fran, CA)
Armchair Revolutionaries (West Chester, PA)
Wooden Shoe Books (Philadelphia, PA)

www.resistg20.org (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.resistg20.org)

National Call For Action And Endorsements
at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, PA
Sept. 19 – 25

Endorsers: Iraq Veterans Against the War Chapter 61, Pittsburgh; PA State Senator Jim Ferlo; Veterans for Peace Chapter 047 – Pittsburgh, Chapter 140 – Meadville, PA; National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations; Thomas Merton Center Pittsburgh; Codepink Pgh Women for Peace; Bail Out The People; Green Party of Allegheny County; World Can’t Wait; ISO (International Socialist Organization); WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) Pgh; Socialist Action; Ohio Valley Peace; Bay Area United Against War; Coloradans For Peace; Radio Free Maine; Code Pink National; Voters For Peace; Community Organizing Center (Columbus, Ohio); Columbus Campaign for Arms Control; Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Social Justice Committee; After Downing Street; Charlotte Action Center For Justice; Connecticut Students Against the War; Students For Peace, Duluth, Minnesota; Democratic Socialists of Central Ohio; Columbus Progressive Peace Coalition; Pgh Palestine Solidarity Committee; Pitt Students for Justice in Palestine; Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace; Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, U.S. Section; Rhode Island Mobilization Committee to Stop War and Occupation (RIMC); Socialist Party USA; National Radical Women; New England United; North Star Republic – ML; Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) – Ohio; AFSC PA Program; Peace and Freedom Party of California; Socialist Party of Connecticut; Wasatch Coalition for Peace and Justice of Salt Lake City; Global Justice Ecology Project; Socialist Organizer; Green Party of Ohio; Interfaith Council for Peace in the Middle East
Activists from Pittsburgh, the U.S., and across the globe will converge to protest the destructive policies of the G-20 – meeting in Pittsburgh this September 24-25.
We believe a better world is possible. We anticipate involvement and support from like-minded people and organizations across the country for projected actions from September 19-25:

People’s Summit – Sept. 19, 21-22 (Saturday, Monday, Tuesday)
A partnership of educators and social justice groups is organizing a People’s Summit to discuss global problems and seek solutions informed by genuine democracy and human dignity, also providing interactive workshop discussions.

Mass March on the G-20 – Friday, Sept. 25:
Money for human needs, not for war!

Gather at 12 noon, march to the City County Building downtown

A peaceful, legal march is being sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, an umbrella organization that supports a wide variety of peace and justice member projects in Pittsburgh. We will hold a mass march to demand “Money for human needs, not for war!”.

WE SEEK THE BROADEST RANGE OF SUPPORT, PARTICIPATION, AND ENDORSEMENTS FOR THE MASS MARCH AND PEOPLE’S SUMMIT

To endorse, E-mail:[email protected] (http://www.anonym.to/?mailto:[email protected])
Or contact: Thomas Merton Center AWC, 5125 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15224

A number of other events are being planned by a wide variety of community and social justice groups in Pittsburgh.
For more information and updates please visit http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/g20action.htm (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/g20action.htm)
The Group of Twenty (G-20) Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors represents the world’s economic leaders, intimately connected to the most powerful multi-national corporations that dominate the global economy. Their neo-liberal policies have squandered billions on war, plunged economies into deep recessions, worsened social, economic and political inequality, and polluted the earth.

Big Red

15th August 2009, 04:29

More information can be found in the following places...

http://g20media.org/sites/g20media.o...organizing.pdf (http://www.anonym.to/?http://g20media.org/sites/g20media.org/files/g20_organizing.pdf)
(list of events/protests)

http://www.g20media.org/sectors (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.g20media.org/sectors) (media clearinghouse)

http://resistg20.org/ (http://www.anonym.to/?http://resistg20.org/) (organizing resistance)

http://www.organizepittsburgh.org/ (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.organizepittsburgh.org/) (more info)

http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/ (http://www.anonym.to/?http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/) (information, and live coverage of the protests)

there you have it, active g20 resistance in Pittsburgh. See you at the Barricades!

ps. sorry for posting this twice, but didn't notice their was already a thread for g20.

Communist

15th August 2009, 17:14

http://www.bailoutpeople.org/images/march4jobs.jpg (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/)

Youth jobless stats “beyond scary; they’re catastrophic,” says NY Times Columnist Bob Herbert
Sept. 20 Pittsburgh march for jobs right on time

On Sunday, Sept. 20 a National March for Jobs will step off from the historic Hill District in Pittsburgh, PA just prior to the G20 summit declaring that the unemployed, the homeless, the hungry and the poor must no longer be invisible and silent. This is particularly urgent for young workers as highlighted by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert this week. (www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/opinion/11herbert.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/opinion/11herbert.html))

Herbert wrote, “Two issues that absolutely undermine any rosy assessment of last week’s employment report are the swelling ranks of the long-term unemployed and the crushing levels of joblessness among young” workers. … The plight of young workers, especially young men, is particularly frightening. The percentage of young … men who are actually working is the lowest it has been in the 61 years of record-keeping, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

“Only 65 of every 100 men aged 20 through 24 years old were working on any given day in the first six months of this year. … For male teenagers, the numbers were disastrous: only 28 of every 100 males were employed in the 16 through 19-year-old age group. For minority teenagers, forget about it. The numbers are beyond scary; they’re catastrophic.”

Herbert called the 0.1 percent unemployment drop in July “wildly deceptive,” because the decline was “not because more people found jobs, but because 450,000 people withdrew from the labor market. They stopped looking, so they weren’t counted as unemployed.”

Herbert noted that "The country has lost a crippling 6.7 million jobs since the Great Recession began in December 2007. No one is predicting a recovery in the foreseeable future powerful enough to replace the millions of jobs that have vanished in this historic downturn."

The magnitude of the jobs crisis is giving momentum to the September 20 National March for Jobs. On Monday, August 10, the San Francisco Labor Council unanimously passed a resolution endorsing the march, which reads in part:

"Whereas, there is no recovery in sight from the current economic crisis. Although government measures have enabled Wall Street to pocket hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, still unemployment, foreclosures and poverty continue to soar; and

Whereas, in September the eyes of the world will be on Pittsburgh, where the G20 countries will meet on what to do about the global crisis, and this will be an excellent opportunity for labor and its allies to present OUR workers’ recovery agenda; and...

Resolved, that the San Francisco Labor Council endorse the March for Jobs in Pittsburgh on September 20, 2009, and the Global Week in Solidarity with the Unemployed, on the occasion of the G20 summit in that city." (read the full resolution at : http://www.bailoutpeople.org/sflc.shtml)
The ILWU (International Longshore Workers Union) Local 10 and the Letter Carriers Union Local 214 have also passed similar resolutions in support of the March for Jobs.

There is much work to be done in the next few weeks. Here's how you can help:

Become a local organizer - help organize a "Jobs or Income Now" caravan (cars, vans, bus, etc) to Pittsburgh for the G20. http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20volorgcents.shtml
Volunteer - http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20volorgcents.shtml
Download leaflets at http://www.bailoutpeople.org/pdfs/g20leaflecolor.pdf

Big Red

16th August 2009, 00:30

Northeast Pre-G20 Meet Up

Start: 09/05/2009 - 12:00am

End: 09/06/2009 - 11:59pm

We all know the G20 needs smashed, it's just a matter of doing it responsibly and informedly and making good connections with our comrades beforehand. Fear not! The anarchists of Boston and Pittsburgh, enmeshed in a torrid, revolutionary love affair as they are, are combining their inimitable powers to bring you a weekend of learning, strategizing and schmoozing [without the boozing, if you please].
So for this year's state-sponsored erasure of working people's history, aka 'Labor Day Weekend,' we invite you to Rendezvous! Present yourselves at The Community Church of Boston 565 Boylston in Copley Square [accessible space!]
Saturday September 5
11AM - food
12PM - welcoming, intros, meeting principles
1:30PM - folx from the G20 Resistance Project in Pittsburgh present on their work and answer questions
3PM - food
4-6PM - open space [opportunity for breakouts among medic folk, legal folk, whatever other breakouts folks want] Get your own dinner [we'll tell you the best places to go]
8PM - fashion show fundraiser for G20 legal
Sunday September 6
10AM - food
11AM - Know Your Rights, both generally and with added Pittsburgh-specificity
12:30PM - food
1:30PM - Surviving on the Streets workshop
3PM - Emotional Wellness for Activists workshop
4:30PM - check out
For all food thoughts, questions and concerns, email Dave at pjleaf (at) googlemail (dot) com
We'll have vegan food, gluten-free food, soy-free food, raw food. Please let us know if you have allergies.
For housing, contact Clara at lil (underscore) red (at) riseup (dot) net
For general event inquiries, contact Adrienne at cyd (dot) grayson (at) gmail (dot) com
And for heavensake, do let Clara know if you're coming and how many of you so that we may adequately feed and house you.

Big Red

16th August 2009, 00:32

see you there comrade.:thumbup1:

Big Red

16th August 2009, 00:33

Pittsburgh Principles

Our solidarity will be based on respect for a political diversity within the struggle for social justice. As individuals and groups, we may choose to engage in a diversity of tactics and plans of action but are committed to treating each other with respect.
We realize that debates and honest criticisms are necessary for political clarification and growth in our movements. But we also realize that our detractors will work to divide by inflaming and magnifying our tactical, strategic, personal, and political disagreements. For the purposes of political clarity, and mutual respect we will speak to our own political motivations and tactical choices and allow other groups and individuals to speak on their own behalf. We reject all forms of red-baiting, violence-baiting, and fear-mongering; and efforts to foster unnecessary divisions among our movements.
As we plan our actions and tactics, we will take care to maintain appropriate separations of time and space between divergent tactics. We will commit to respecting each other’s organizing space and the tone and tactics they wish to utilize in that space.
We oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. We agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others. We oppose proposals designed to cage protests into high-restricted "free speech zones."
We will work to promote a sense of respect for our shared community, our neighbors, and particularly poor and working class people in our community and their personal property.

In solidarity, the undersigned:
Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project (http://resistg20.org/)
Thomas Merton Center Anti-War Committee (http://pittsburghendthewar.org/)
Students for a Democratic Society (http://www.studentsforademocraticsociety.org/)
Self-Described Anarchist Collective (http://selfdescribed.org/)
Three Rivers Climate Convergence: United for Environmental Justice (http://www.actforclimatejustice.org/g20)
Raging Grannies - Pittsburgh (http://pittsburghraginggrannies.homestead.com/)
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom - Pittsburgh
Iraq Vets Against the War - Pittsburgh (http://ivaw.org/pittsburgh)
Pittsburgh Organizing Group (http://www.organizepittsburgh.org/)
Ask your group sign on to the Principles, and let us know (http://resistg20.org/contact) if they do.

Communist

16th August 2009, 15:00

Dear Friends,

Through the March for Jobs on Sept. 20 the unemployed, homeless, hungry and poor won't be invisible or silent when the G20 Summit disrupts every-day life in Pittsburgh publicity hype that isn't what people live daily.

From Sept. 20 when we march down from the Hill toward the Convention Center demanding jobs or a decent income, until the G20 leave town on Sept. 25, the unemployed and their supporters will erect and live at a Tent City at Monumental Baptist Church on Wylie St. in the Hill District of Pittsburgh featuring community speak outs, discussions, films, music, spoken word and more.
The unemployed need your help to revive Dr. King's last project and dream -
a movement for a right to a job. If you are unemployed, underemployed or know someone who is jobless, this is your march
The March on Sunday Sept. 20 and the tent city that follows are a step on that road.

If you do not wish to receive further updates, please respond to this email and you will be promptly removed from the list.

If you want to find out more, come to a Block Party at Monumental on Sat. Aug 22, 2 pm (that is 2228 Wylie St. between Kirkpatrick and Soho).
If you already want to help, we will be doing daily outreach to the community by going door to door, passing out flyers at bus stops and the T. We are meeting up during the week at our organizing center at 727 Bryn Mawr on Upper Hill at 10 am daily. We are in need of volunteers to help with outreach. For more information or if you have question about the March4Jobs call 412-780-3813. FUNDS and material assistance for sanitation and food.

Revive Dr. King's dream of a movement for a right to a job.

If you don't have a job, fight to keep to get one - if you have one, fight to keep it.

DEMAND:

A Jobs Program for All Now!
A Moratorium on Layoffs, Foreclosures & Evictions
No Cuts in Social Services.
Fund Peoples Needs, Not War and Greed
Atty. General Eric Holder, investigate civil rights violations against Mumia Abu-Jamal

For a national update on organizing for the March4Jobs go to www.bailoutpeople.org (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/).

http://www.leehansen.com/clipart/Holidays/FathersDay/thumbs/king-of-grill-th.gif (http://www.leehansen.com/clipart/Holidays/FathersDay/pages/dads-bbq.htm) http://www.leehansen.com/clipart/Parties/Picnic/thumbs/picnic-th.gif (http://www.leehansen.com/clipart/Parties/Picnic/pages/picnic-poster.htm)

Saturday, August 22, 2pm there will be a Block Party On the Hill, everyone is welcome. There will be a cookout, food, BBQ, refreshments, music, games, speakers and info.
The Block Party will be at Monumental Baptist Church Parking Lot,
between 2228 and 2240 Wylie Avenue.
Find out more. You can be a part of this history.

Jobs - meaningful and real living wage jobs - are tied to every need and aspect in the lives of working class women and men. Unemployment and the high cost of education drives young people into the economic draft to the military. Many people are losing the very roofs over their head because they were swindled by bankers (later bailed out) or lost their job, lost hours or suffered a pay cut. Youth unemployment condemns a new generation to a hopeless future or jails and the prison industrial complex that profits off incarceration of young working class men and women - disproporationately from communties of color and immigrants. Hundreds of thousands are denied health care - a human right to life.

Together we can change it.
We are the change we have been waiting for but how can it happen without organizing and acting together.

Call: 412-780-3813 or email: March4Jobs(AT)gmail.com (http://mail01.mail.com/scripts/mail/compose.mail?compose=1&.ob=4739707b682cfba1539481458a390a10b2948e53&[email protected]&composecc=&subject=&body=)
www.BailOutPeople.org (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/)

Big Red

16th August 2009, 23:08

Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project

Below is the latest update on the strategy from the Action Framework Working Group. (http://resistg20.org/framework)
Sept 22-25: Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Strategy Update

The Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project (PG20RP) exists as a space to aid coordination and actualize resistance to the G20 summit happening this September 24-25 in Pittsburgh, PA. The group has coalesced around a shared desire to deepen ongoing social resistance locally, to demonstrate and build new and existing alternatives to the worldview represented by the G20 and the direct policies it promotes, and to disrupt the summit and undermine its attempts to gain legitimacy.
Towards these collective goals, the PG20RP is creating a strategy that recognizes the unique opportunity created by an influx of outside supporters during the four-day period around the summit and the challenges presented by the incredible amount of state resources that will be directed against us. We are steadily addressing how to effectively focus on and integrate these four days into the bigger picture of ongoing local social resistance.
On Tuesday, September 22, the PG20RP and allies will host an Anti-G20 Community Gathering in the East End of Pittsburgh and are encouraging other groups to hold similar gatherings in neighborhoods throughout the city. These events will work to bring together community members already active against the G20 with their neighbors, and locals with out-of-towners who care enough to come to Pittsburgh to resist the G20. This is a chance to create webs of solidarity between the people of Pittsburgh and the world. This is not a protest; this is a chance to directly tell our story of the world for which we’re fighting. The gathering will involve the sharing of food, music and stories.
On Wednesday, September 23, other Pittsburgh organizations are tentatively holding a major march, followed by an evening concert. We are calling for a Red and Black contingent within this march. In accordance with the Pittsburgh Principles, this anti-authoritarian presence will not be a black bloc and will not be masked. Later that night there will be a spokescouncil (a meeting of representatives from groups participating in street actions) to discuss the following day’s schedule.
On Thursday, September 24, we will meet at 2:30pm in a location TBA in the East End to “March on the G20” summit at David Lawrence Convention Center downtown. This event is a space for the active expression of diverse forms of resistance by all those wishing to oppose the G20. This is not a state-sanctioned event. We hope to also create a way to coordinate the participation of those with varying risk levels, and those who may not want to participate in more direct actions themselves but would like to stand in solidarity with those do.
On Friday, September 25, events will begin at high noon with dozens of simultaneous actions that connect the struggle against the G20 to a broader arena of local and international social resistance. The aim is an event that puts dozens of groups in motion, drawing on the strengths of coordination, decentralization, diversity of tactics and differing risk levels. Individual groups will choose what they do and while we’ll be unaware of what is planned, we have faith that people will act creatively and effectively in ways based on respect for the principles driving the overall mobilization and the Pittsburgh Principles. We’ll soon put out a list of a hundred or so places already being resisted in Pittsburgh and some generic ideas, and we’ll come up with a way for groups to avoid going to the same places. Afterwards, groups will converge at Fifth and Craft avenues in Oakland to participate in the march and rally being organized by our allies, the Thomas Merton Center Anti-War Committee. Although we would like to march as a PG20RP contingent, we would ask people to avoid police provocations and ensure their actions during the march stay consistent with the Pittsburgh Principles. After the conclusion of the march, we will move as a group to begin a jail solidarity encampment outside the local jail and wherever they hold folks arrested during the summit.
In general, we are calling on individuals and groups to participate in, and self-initiate, efforts consistent with the following goals:

Defend our communities and contest state control of space in our neighborhoods.
Occupy to reclaim space from the clutches of neo-liberalism, before, during and after the summit.
Confront and disrupt the G20 and its political, corporate, and institutional enablers throughout the city.
Connect the G20 to local and global struggles.

The PG20RP is actively working to:

Provide a mobilization infrastructure and an information clearinghouse
Create and distribute publicity and educational materials
Create space for folks interested in resisting the G20 through articulation of a broad action framework
Ensure that some of this space is utilized through actions organized and carried out by the PG20RP and supportive individuals and groups
Build hype and momentum through a series of lead-up actions directed at local supporters of the G20 and its agenda (such as the Allegheny Conference), and state-organized propaganda events designed to present the illusion of community support that lay the groundwork for repression of dissent.

More details will be released as the Action Working Group and General Assembly flesh out more specifics.
http://www.resistg20.org

Big Red

16th August 2009, 23:10

Communist

24th August 2009, 13:01

Labor support for unemployed march in Pittsburgh grows (http://www.workers.org/2009/us/labor_0827/)

Published Aug 23, 2009 8:57 PM

The following resolution was adopted by delegates of the San Francisco Labor Council on Aug. 10. Similar resolutions were also adopted by the International Longshore Warehouse Union Local 10 executive board on Aug. 11 and by the Golden Gate Branch #214, National Association of Letter Carriers on Aug. 5 in support of the March for Jobs and Global Week in Solidarity with the Unemployed–Pittsburgh, Sept 20-26:

Whereas, there is no recovery in sight from the current economic crisis, although government measures have enabled Wall Street to pocket hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, still unemployment, foreclosures and poverty continue to soar; and

Whereas, in September the eyes of the world will be on Pittsburgh, where the G-20 countries will meet on what to do about the global crisis, and this will be an excellent opportunity for labor and its allies to present OUR workers’ recovery agenda; and

Whereas, while the G-20 meets in Pittsburgh, a Global Week in Solidarity with the Unemployed will highlight the suffering, desperation and anger of the millions whose lives are being devastated by this crisis, and demand that the U.S. and other governments address their needs; and

Whereas, a March for Jobs will take place in Pittsburgh on Sunday, Sept. 20, calling for a real jobs program to provide full-time, living wage jobs. Instead of bailing out banks and funding wars, there must be money to create jobs, provide healthcare, stop foreclosures and bail out the unemployed; and

Whereas, from Sept. 19-26 a tent city dedicated to the unemployed, poor and underemployed will be erected next to Monumental Baptist Church, located in an historic part of the African-American community in Pittsburgh called The Hill, not far from the G20 summit; and

Whereas, “March for Jobs” caravans of unemployed people and supporters from across the country will converge on Pittsburgh to join the march and tent city, similar to the marches for jobs that took place in the 1930s; and

Whereas, Martin Luther King Jr. once called “the second civil rights movement” the fight for the right to a job or a guaranteed income. King dedicated the last year of his life to planning a mass movement for jobs, and his dream has to be revived; and

Whereas, the San Francisco Labor Council in January 2009 called for a National Recovery Plan, stating, “To end this recession and prevent a depression, there needs to be gainful productive employment for all” and “any bailout needs to be for workers, their families, children, students, seniors, small farmers, small business–the everyday folks,” and calling for a massive, publicly supported jobs program as existed in the 1930s; therefore be it

Resolved, that the San Francisco Labor Council endorse the March for Jobs in Pittsburgh on Sept. 20, 2009, and the Global Week in Solidarity with the Unemployed, on the occasion of the G-20 summit in that city.
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Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Communist

25th August 2009, 01:26

Sept. 20 Pittsburgh
March for jobs right on time (http://www.workers.org/2009/us/march_for_jobs_0827/)

By Steven Ceci
Pittsburgh

Published Aug 23, 2009 9:07 PM

On Sunday, Sept. 20, a National March for Jobs will step off from the historic Hill District in Pittsburgh, declaring that the unemployed, the homeless, the hungry and the poor must no longer be invisible and silent.

The march is set for just prior to a summit of the G-20, the Group of Twenty finance ministers and central bank governors, being held in Pittsburgh Sept. 24-25.

This is particularly urgent for young workers, as highlighted by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert on Aug. 10. Herbert wrote: “Two issues that absolutely undermine any rosy assessment of last week’s employment report are the swelling ranks of the long-term unemployed and the crushing levels of joblessness among young Americans. ... The plight of young workers, especially young men, is particularly frightening. The percentage of young American men who are actually working is the lowest it has been in the 61 years of record-keeping, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
“Only 65 of every 100 men aged 20 through 24 years old were working on any given day in the first six months of this year. ... For male teenagers, the numbers were disastrous: only 28 of every 100 males were employed in the 16- through 19-year-old age group. For minority teenagers, forget about it. The numbers are beyond scary; they’re catastrophic.”

John Smith, a 21-year-old unemployed Black resident of the Hill District, is typical of many young people. Smith told an organizer for the Sept. 20 March for Jobs: “It’s hard out here. People can’t take care of their responsibilities. There are no jobs; we need a march for jobs because it could bring change.”

Another unemployed Black youth from the Hill District, 17-year-old Shardaya Brown, said: “The job situation is poor and I don’t see things getting better. I think we need to demand jobs, but I don’t know what’s going to happen. Because people can’t find work there is more crime and I don’t feel safe.”

Herbert called the 0.1 percent unemployment drop in July “wildly deceptive,” because the decline was “not because more people found jobs, but because 450,000 people withdrew from the labor market. They stopped looking, so they weren’t counted as unemployed.”

Larry Hales, youth organizer for the Bail Out the People Movement, said: “Young workers, in particular youth of color, are demanding meaningful jobs and education, not jail or the military. The ‘free marketers’ disrupting health-care town halls hide their anti-worker economic policies that increase poverty and unemployment.”

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Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Red Rebel

25th August 2009, 22:35

I'll see all my brothers and sisters there.

Communist

27th August 2009, 03:09

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http://www.bailoutpeople.org/images/march4jobs.jpg (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/)

Why are we demanding jobs or income at the G-20 Economic Crisis Meeting in Pittsburgh in September?

30 million people in the U.S. are unemployed or underemployed – We say NO!

What is the G-20?
It’s a group of Treasury officials and central bankers from 20 countries, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Its goal is to protect bank profits, whatever it costs the people of the world.
The U.S. delegation is led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve System (The Fed). They organized a bailout of the banks, insurance companies and stock brokerages that totals $12.6 trillion--or $42,105 for every adult and child in the U.S.

How much is a trillion dollars? It is 1,000 billion. And a billion is 1,000 million.

The Federal Reserve controls this money, yet most people have never heard of it. The Fed has seven governors, all bankers, appointed by the U.S. President for 14-year terms. George W. Bush appointed Bernanke Chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors and then head of the Fed. The Fed operates in secrecy, even from Congress, yet makes decisions affecting whether we work, have homes, or eat.
Geithner, the former chief of the NY Federal Reserve Bank, worked with the Fed under the Bush administration to devise the bank bailout. He invented the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and eight other programs to funnel taxpayer money into the banks. His top aide is from Goldman Sachs Bank. He changed bank regulations to prohibit congressional audits of the Federal Reserve.

Who is representing the people at the G20 conference? No one!
Profit recovery for banks –
Jobless ‘recovery’ for workers

The bailout for the banks:

$12.6 trillion in handouts, loans and guarantees.
Bonuses: Since the bailout, six banks that got our money are giving $74 billion in bonuses – double last year’s.
Even TARP chief Neel Kashkari says the bailout is “Rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayer’s credit card.”
The New York Times said the bailout of banks by taxpayers is a “Partnership in which one partner robs the other.”
Sen. Dick Durbin said, “We’re facing a banking crisis that many banks created – still they are the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill, and they frankly own the place.”
Representative Alan Grayson, House Financial Services Committee, said of the Fed: “We are seeing a transfer of trillions of dollars of wealth from the taxpayers to the bad banks…. We have become the saps for Wall Street.”
Who got bailed out: Citigroup, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo. Some have now merged into larger, more powerful monopolies.
Result: The banks are making huge profits again and concentration of wealth is in fewer hands. Instead of more regulation, they demanded and got less. The UN says just 500 rich people in the world earn more than the 416 million poorest people, and this is getting worse.
Instead of creating jobs they are demanding speedups. Corporate profits go up; wages go down and jobs or hours decrease.

Bailout money for us:

$8.2 billion

This is less than one-thousandth of the $12 trillion the banks have received.
Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, most of this went to state unemployment insurance programs or job training programs—for JOBS THAT ARE NOT THERE. Just $25 a week went to those receiving unemployment insurance.

Result for us: 30 million people in the U.S. are unemployed or working involuntary part-time.

Wall Street admits unemployment will be permanently high. Unlike other times when workers were called back, millions of jobs have been terminated. Others have had their hours cut. There are fewer jobs now than in 2001, although 12 million new workers have joined the labor force.

Fewest young men have jobs in 61 years of record keeping.
Teenagers age 16-19 suffer 78% unemployment.
For youth and people of color, this is worse than the Great Depression.
Foreclosures are continuing at record levels this year.
People are running out of unemployment benefits.
Personal bankruptcies are up again.
Retirees have lost 22% of their benefits, forcing seniors to work--but there are no jobs.

Will going to Pittsburgh make a difference for me or my family?
Yes!

We are demanding a public jobs program and forcing corporations to hire so everyone in need is guaranteed a livable income. Only a mass movement of the people on the march, holding protest meetings and organizing in our communities, schools, unions, and places of worship, can change our lives. We must represent ourselves. It’s not easy, but it can be done.
You can start by bringing friends together in your home. You can invite an organizer from the Bailout the People Movement. Then you can do your block, your neighborhood, your workplace, school or place of worship.
If you have a job now, you can only protect it and your wages and benefits by joining the movement for jobs. With millions out of work your boss will use the competition among workers to get cheaper labor to replace you, make working conditions harder, or lower your wages.

PITTSBURGH IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF THIS MOVEMENT
How can I get there?
We are working hard to raise funds for buses, cars, and vans to caravan to Pittsburgh. You can help. Donate, or have a yard sale, bake sale, raffle or dinner. Even one dollar will help.

WORKERS ARE CONNECTED ALL AROUND THE WORLD
The G-20 bankers come together to make profits off the backs of the world’s people. Our lives are all connected now. Unemployment anywhere in the world is unacceptable. At the time of the G-20 Pittsburgh conference there will be protests in cities worldwide. We can compete against each other and die, or unite and have a better life now and for our children. A job is a right!

Join the March for Jobs, Pittsburgh, September 20!

Become a local organizer - help organize a "Jobs or Income Now" caravan (cars, vans, bus, etc) to Pittsburgh for the G20. http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20volorgcents.shtml
Volunteer - http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20volorgcents.shtml
Download leaflets at http://www.bailoutpeople.org/pdfs/g20leaflecolor.pdf
Join the BOPM Facebook Group - http://www.facebook.com/business/dashboard/?ref=sb#/pages/Bail-Out-The-People-Movement/112781742929

(http://bailoutpeople.org/donate.shtml)

G20 Conveners
(partial list)

Rev. Thomas Smith, Pastor, Monumental Baptist Church, Pittsburgh; Pres., Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO);
Bill Robinson, Allegheny County Commissioner, Pittsburgh;
Rev. Graylan Hagler, Pres., Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice of the United Church of Christ;
Abayomi Azikiwe, Moratorium NOW! Coalition, Detroit;
Rob Robinson, Picture The Homeless, New York;
Cynthia McKinney, DIGNITY;
Donna DeWitt, Pres., South Carolina AFL-CIO Council;
Cindy Sheehan, Anti-war and Human Rights activist;
Ramsey Clark, Former U.S. Attorney General;
Charles Barron, New York City Council Member;
Brenda Walker, Operation POWER;
Chris Silvera, Sec-Treas., Teamsters Local 808, NYC;
Clarence Thomas, ILWU Local 10, San Francisco;
Brenda Stokely, NYC Katrina & Rita Hurricane Survivors Network;
Rev. Lucius Walker, Pastors For Peace;
Fr. Luis Barrios, Human Rights Activist;
Saladin Muhammed, Black Workers For Justice;
Rev. Bruce Wright, Refuge Ministries;
Lawrence Hamm, Chairperson, People's Organization For Progress;
Dave Welsh, Delegate, San Francisco Labor Council;
Barbara Vedder, County Board Supervisor, Dane, Madison, WI;
Bill Reuther, Trustee, Ohio Valley Trades & Labor Assembly,* Wheeling, WV;
Bill Perry, Executive Director, Delaware Valley Veterans for America, Levittown, PA;
Roxanne Pauline, Coord., Scranton- Wilkes Barre Citizens In Action, PA;
Nada Khader, Exec. Director, WESPAC Foundation, Pleasantville, NY;
Karen Hansen, State Director, Ohio Conference On Fair Trade*;
Darren Graves, Humanities Comm. Chair, Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen,* Cleveland;
Rev. Bruce Wright, Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign

*for identification only

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Communist

31st August 2009, 16:45

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HOPE YOU'VE BEEN FOLLOWING SOME OF THE EXCITING NEWS REGARDING
THE MARCH4JOBS, TENT CITY & G20 ACTIONS. THEY'VE HOSTED A SUCCESSFUL
BLOCK PARTY INVOLVING THE LOCAL COMMUNITY, GOTTEN GREAT PRESS
COVERAGE, BEEN ENDORSED BY THE USWA, SAN FRAN LABOR COUNCIL, AMONG
MANY OTHER DEVELOPMENTS. BELOW IS A LONGER REPLY WE ARE USING.
SOLIDARITY & GOOD LUCK. JIM FOR BOPM

WOW!
Momentum is really growing for the Sept 20 March for Jobs, and the Tent City &
actions at the G20. Many groups, individuals & coalitions are
collaborating in all these, so some logistics specifics is still be
developed. But please join us at the Tent City for however long you
can, & help publicize for the March for Jobs & G20 actions.

Literature is available from the website. If you need more concrete
information, or are able to help in any way possible call us in
Pittsburgh at 412-780-3813 or email directly to March4Jobs(AT)gmail.com. (http://mail01.mail.com/scripts/mail/compose.mail?compose=1&.ob=835c91139e04a85b496a51c81842886ff75a6825&composeto=March4Jobs%40gmail.com)

Things you can do:

-1) GET THE WORD OUT: Organize people to come from your city or town
for the JOBS MARCH or for the entire G-20 Summit and Tent City Week;
Distribute flyers and put up posters; Invite a representative from
the JOBS MARCH to speak at a house meeting or at your local
community, student, or union group; Spread the word via Facebook.
Youtube, Twitter or other medium.

-2) WE NEED HELP AT THE TENT CITY: Help with set up, security, and
clean up; Volunteers are needed to help coordinate food; Health care
providers are needed to help with medical needs and BP screening.
Register now and tell us if you can camp out for the week or part of
it &/or can bring a tent.

Solidarity and good luck. As Mumia says, “people working together
make movements.”

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Communist

1st September 2009, 03:51

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Go to Pittsburgh, and Defy Your Empire

Truthdig

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090831_hedges_pittsburgh_g20_defiance/

Posted on Aug 31, 2009

By Chris Hedges

Globalization and unfettered capitalism have been swept
into the history books along with the open-market
theory of the 1920s, the experiments of fascism,
communism and the New Deal. It is time for a new
economic and political paradigm. It is time for a new
language to address our reality. The voices of change,
those who speak in powerful and yet unfamiliar words,
will cry out Sept. 25 and 26 in Pittsburgh when
protesters from around the country gather to defy the
heads of state, bankers and finance ministers from the
world's 22 largest economies who are convening for a
meeting of the G-20. If we heed these dissident voices
we have a future. If we do not we will commit
collective suicide.

The international power elites will go to Pittsburgh to
preach the mantra that globalization is inevitable and
eternal. They will discuss a corpse as if it was
living. They will urge us to remain in suspended
animation and place our trust in the inept bankers and
politicians who orchestrated the crisis. This is the
usual tactic of bankrupt elites clinging to power. They
denigrate and push to the margins the realists--none of
whom will be inside their security perimeters--who give
words to our disintegration and demand a new,
unfamiliar course. The powerful discredit dissent and
protest. But human history, as Erich Fromm wrote,
always begins anew with disobedience. This disobedience
is the first step toward freedom. It makes possible the
recovery of reason.

The longer we speak in the language of global
capitalism, the longer we utter platitudes about the
free market--even as we funnel hundreds of billions of
taxpayer dollars into the accounts of large
corporations--the longer we live in a state of
collective self-delusion. Our power elite, who profess
to hate government and government involvement in the
free market, who claim they are the defenders of
competition and individualism, have been stealing
hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to
nationalize mismanaged corporations and save them from
bankruptcy. We hear angry and confused citizens, their
minds warped by hate talk radio and television, condemn
socialized medicine although we have become, at least
for corporations, the most socialized nation on Earth.
The schizophrenia between what we profess and what we
actually embrace has rendered us incapable of
confronting reality. The longer we speak in the old
language of markets, capitalism, free trade and
globalization the longer the entities that created this
collapse will cannibalize the nation.

What are we now? What do we believe? What economic
model explains the irrationality of looting the U.S.
Treasury to permit speculators at Goldman Sachs to make
obscene profits? How can Barack Obama's chief economic
adviser, Lawrence Summers, tout a "jobless recovery"?
How much longer can we believe the fantasy that global
markets will replace nation states and that economics
will permit us to create a utopian world where we will
all share the same happy goals? When will we denounce
the lie that globalization fosters democracy,
enlightenment, worldwide prosperity and stability? When
we will we realize that unfettered global trade and
corporate profit are the bitter enemies of freedom and
the common good?

Corporations are pushing through legislation in the
United States that will force us to buy defective,
for-profit health insurance, a plan that will expand
corporate monopolies and profits at our expense and
leave tens of millions without adequate care.
Corporations are blocking all attempts to move to
renewable and sustainable energy to protect the
staggering profits of the oil, natural gas and coal
industries. Corporations are plunging us deeper and
deeper as a nation into debt to feed the permanent war
economy and swell the military budget, which consumes
half of all discretionary spending. Corporations use
lobbyists and campaign contributions to maintain arcane
tax codes that offer them tax havens and tax evasions.
Corporations are draining the treasury while the
working class sheds jobs, sees homes foreclosed and
struggles to survive in a new and terrifying global
serfdom. This has been the awful price of complacency.

Protests will begin several days before the summit.
Many of the activities are being coordinated by
Pittsburgh's Thomas Merton Center. There will be a
march Sept. 25 for anyone who, as Jessica Benner of the
center's Antiwar Committee stated, "has lost a job, a
home, a loved one to war, lost value to a retirement
plan, gotten sick from environmental pollution, or
lived without adequate healthcare, water, or food. ...
" There will be at least three tent cities, in addition
to a Music Camp beginning Sept. 18 that will be
situated at the South Side Riverfront Park near 18th
Street. Unemployed workers will set up one tent city at
the Monumental Baptist Church on Sept. 20 and five days
later will march on the Convention Center. The
encampment and the march are being organized by the
Bail Out the People Movement. The Institute for Policy
Studies, The Nation magazine, the United Electrical,
Radio and Machine Workers of America, Pittsburgh United
and other organizations will host events including a
panel on corporate globalization featuring former World
Bank President Joseph Stiglitz, along with a "People's
Tribunal." There will be a religious procession calling
for social justice and a concert organized by Students
for a Democratic Society.

But expect difficulties. The Secret Service has so far
denied protesters permits while it determines the size
of the "security perimeter" it will impose around the
world leaders. Pittsburgh has contracted to bring in an
extra 4,000 police officers at an estimated cost of
$9.5 million. Activist groups have reported incidents
of surveillance and harassment. The struggle to thwart
the voices of citizens will be as fierce as the
struggle to amplify the voices of the criminal class
that is trashing the world's economy. These elites will
appear from behind closed doors with their communiques
and resolutions to address us in their specialized
jargon of power and expertise. They will attempt to
convince us they have not lost control. They will make
recommitments to free-trade agreements from the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, the World
Trade Organization and NAFTA, which have all thrust a
knife into the backs of the working class. They will
insist that the world can be managed and understood
exclusively through their distorted lens of economics.
But their day is over. They are the apostles of a dead
system. They maintain power through fraud and force. Do
not expect them to go without a struggle. But they have
nothing left to say to us.

"Those who profess to favour freedom, yet deprecate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up
the ground," Frederick Douglass wrote. "They want rain
without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean
without the awful roar of its many waters. This
struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical
one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must
be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will."

If you can, go to Pittsburgh. This is an opportunity to
defy the titans of the corporate state and speak in
words that describe our reality. The power elite fear
these words. If these words seep into the population,
if they become part of our common vernacular, the elite
and the systems they defend will be unmasked. Our
collective self-delusion will be shattered. These words
of defiance expose the lies and crimes the elite use to
barrel us toward neofeudalism. And these words, when
they become real, propel men and women to resist.

"The end of something often resembles the beginning,"
the philosopher John Ralston Saul wrote in "Voltaire's
Bastards." "More often than not our nose-to-the-glass
view makes us believe that the end we are living is in
fact a new beginning. This confusion is typical of an
old civilization's self-confidence--limited by
circumstances and by an absence of memory--and in many
ways resembling the sort often produced by senility.
Our rational need to control understanding and
therefore memory has simply accentuated the confusion.
... Nothing seems more permanent than a
long-established government about to lose power,
nothing more invincible than a grand army on the
morning of its annihilation."

Chris Hedges' latest book is "Empire of Illusion: The
End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle."

_____________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest
to people on the left that will help them to
interpret the world and to change it.

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Communist

2nd September 2009, 00:55

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http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2661/3878570952_97c3e6228a.jpg (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/)

The March 4 Jobs before the G20 Summit is Growing!

Breaking News Bulletin:

United Steel Workers Union and United Electrical Workers have endorsed and are mobilizing.

These are two powerhouse unions with a long and rich history
with international headquarters in Pittsburgh Pa.

Join USW – UE and many, many others on Sunday, Sept 20th, 2 p.m.
In front of Monumental Baptist Church, Soho Street & Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh

If your community, union or student group is not already on board—there is still time to get involved.

Endorse (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20endorse.shtml) – Organize – and Mobilize!

Distribute flyers (http://bailoutpeople.org/pdfs/g20leaflecolor.pdf) and send out email notices.
Bring a bus, van or car from your city, town or neighborhood – tell us (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20volorgcents.shtml) so we can plan parking.
Donate (http://bailoutpeople.org/donate.shtml) $ so that those without funds can attend.

VERY IMPORTANT: Please REGISTER (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20register.shtml) for the Tent City.

If you are going to be participating at the ‘Solidarity with the Unemployed’ Tent City following the March 4 Jobs—it’s critical to register to make sure there are resources and space available. Space is limited. Pre-registration is required.

Register at http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20register.shtml

We need your help:

Funds are urgently needed to help subsidize buses and vans and to assist with organizing costs for the "March for Jobs." - http://bailoutpeople.org/donate.shtml
Volunteer - http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20volorgcents.shtml
Download leaflets at http://www.bailoutpeople.org/pdfs/g20leaflecolor.pdf
Join the BOPM Facebook Group - http://www.facebook.com/business/dashboard/?ref=sb#/pages/Bail-Out-The-People-Movement/112781742929
Follow BOPM on Twitter - http://twitter.com/bailoutpeoplem

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Communist

4th September 2009, 04:14

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==========================

Major labor unions back jobs march in Pittsburgh
(http://www.workers.org/2009/us/pittsburgh_0910/)
By LeiLani Dowell

Published Sep 2, 2009 7:27 PM

Momentum is building for the National March for Jobs and Tent City from Sept. 20-25 that will confront the leading finance ministers and bankers of the world’s wealthiest nations who will be meeting in Pittsburgh for the G-20 Summit.

In a major development, both the Steelworkers union and the United Electrical union—the only two international unions with national headquarters in Pittsburgh—have endorsed the Sept. 20 March for Jobs.
The Steelworkers union, which originally only represented those working in the steel industry, has diversified through a series of mergers and now represents workers in other industries as well, including those in other metals and manufacturing, paper and forestry products, the chemical industry, health care, pharmacies and pharmaceuticals, public employees, mining, and energy and utilities.

UE, one of most radical unions in the country, calls itself “the rank and file union.” The union represents “some 35,000 workers in a wide variety of manufacturing, public sector and private non-profit sector jobs.” (ueunion.org)

No to a jobless recovery

Bail Out the People Movement activists, along with others mobilizing for the Global Week in Solidarity with the Unemployed, note that G-20 summit participants will be meeting from Sept. 24-25 to discuss plans to protect their interests during the economic crisis—but not those of the working people throughout the world who are affected the most by this crisis.
While the March and Tent City will address multiple concerns—including U.S. imperialist wars, health care, foreclosures and evictions, political prisoners and more—the principal issue will be the need for a serious jobs program. Organizers wish to carry on the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose final struggle in the days before he was assassinated was the fight for jobs at a living wage.

The March for Jobs will assemble at 2 p.m. at Monument Baptist Church, located in the Hill, an historic African-American community adjacent to downtown Pittsburgh. Marchers will return to the Tent City, located in a lot next to the church and dedicated to the unemployed people of the world.
Both events will demand the rejection that a jobless recovery should be accepted or tolerable. BOPM organizer Larry Holmes told WW, “We must not accept a recovery only for Wall Street—a recovery for profits, but a jobless recovery.”

Building actions throughout country

Outside of Pittsburgh, activists are organizing to bring caravans of unemployed and their supporters to the week of action. A big push is being made at Labor Day events throughout the country to win the support of more unions.

Many activists vowed their support at a labor meeting in New York on Aug. 31, which featured workers from the Stella D’Oro factory in the Bronx; the president of the Vulcan Society, Black firefighters who just won a discrimination lawsuit against New York City; the vice president of Service Employees Local 1199; a co-chair of the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights; among others.

A speaking tour of Ohio is gathering momentum for the events, and an organizing meeting will take place in North Carolina involving Black Workers For Justice, the youth group FIST (Fight Imperialism, Stand Together), UE Local 150 and other community and labor forces.

Resolutions supporting the March for Jobs and Global Week in Solidarity with the Unemployed have been adopted by the San Francisco Labor Council, the International Longshore Warehouse Union Local 10 executive board and Golden Gate Branch 214 of the Letter Carriers union. (See WW, Aug. 23.)

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For information, visit:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2661/3878570952_97c3e6228a.jpg (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/)
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Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/picture.php?albumid=277&pictureid=3410 (http://www.workersworld.net/wwp/pmwiki.php/Main/Background)

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Communist

5th September 2009, 15:26

=============UPDATES==================

The Steelworkers (USW) and United Electrical workers (UE) support the March for Jobs @ the G20 on Sept. 20 at 2 pm in Pittsburgh.

Your help is needed.

Take leaflets to your church, work place, school or community. Ask the stores in your neighborhood to display a poster in the window.

Join us for door to door outreach -

Sunday, Sept. 6, 2 pm - at 727 Bryn Mawr 15219 in Pittsburgh

Monday - at the Labor Day March - meet us at the Monumental Mission Ministries 2228 Wylie - 8:30 am so we can go together

Saturday, Sept. 12 - 10 am 2228 Wylie

Email or call us to let us know you are coming so we can plan for lunch. Tell us your ideas for reaching out and mobilizing.

Call 412-780-3813 or
Email: march4jobs(AT)gmail.com (http://mail01.mail.com/scripts/mail/compose.mail?compose=1&.ob=c07e7515c740092cd4fc1fcdf5e0cea95676085c&[email protected]&composecc=&subject=&body=)

Register for the Solidarity Tent City and download leaflets at www.bailoutpeople.com (http://www.bailoutpeople.com/)

----------------------------------------------------

Pawn Power

5th September 2009, 17:05

http://www.defenestrator.org/userfiles/callout2.jpg

Communist

6th September 2009, 00:58

Labor's Stake In the Pittsburgh G-20 Protests

By Alan Hart
United Electrical Workers
Beaver County Blue
September 5, 2009

http://beavercountyblue.org (http://beavercountyblue.org/)

When G-20 government leaders met in London last April,
thousands of trade unionists marched in protest. Labor
organizations from over 100 countries - including the
AFL-CIO - issued a "London Declaration" that criticized
the G-20's policies for favoring multinational
corporations and banks, and demanded new economic
priorities that "put people first."

Unions are the strongest and most consistent voices for
working people. Pittsburgh union members need to take a
prominent place in the peaceful protests and
educational events planned when the G-20 Summit comes
to Pittsburgh.

The Group of 20 is an organization of the finance
ministers and central bankers from the 19 most
economically powerful countries, plus the European
Union. Their meetings coordinate global economic
policies known as neoliberalism or corporate
globalization. Neoliberalism aims to "liberate" capital
- corporations, bankers, big investors - from measures
that working people have won in the past, through union
struggles and legislation, that placed rules and limits
on what big business can do.

Neoliberal policies include deregulation of business,
which has allowed widespread abuses of workers,
consumers and the environment. Deregulation of the
banking industry led to a speculative bubble of
reckless gambling on mortgages. When it eventually
burst, it ruined the values of millions of homes and
dragged the world economy into deep crisis. They also
include privatization, which has wiped out thousands of
public service jobs and enabled rogue contractors like
Halliburton and Blackwater to rob the taxpayers and
commit crimes in our name.

So-called "free trade" really means unlimited mobility
for capital. Companies and entire industries now move
from country to country seeking the lowest wages and
weakest environmental rules. It has meant the loss of
millions of U.S. jobs and pushed down our wages, and
has been a disaster for workers in countries around the
world.

Free trade also turns workers into economic refugees.
In the case of NAFTA, countless working-class families
in the U.S., Canada and Mexico had to leave their
hometowns when local industries closed, and farming
communities in Mexico were wiped out by the flood of
free trade corn and other agricultural imports, forcing
people to migrate. When "Pittsburgh welcomes the
world," Pittsburgh labor needs to speak to the world.
We must make our voices heard as we demand that the
G-20 place human need above corporate greed. G-20
Protests

By Alan Hart United Electrical Workers

When G-20 government leaders met in London last April,
thousands of trade unionists marched in protest. Labor
organizations from over 100 countries - including the
AFL-CIO - issued a "London Declaration" that criticized
the G-20's policies for favoring multinational
corporations and banks, and demanded new economic
priorities that "put people first."

Unions are the strongest and most consistent voices for
working people. Pittsburgh union members need to take a
prominent place in the peaceful protests and
educational events planned when the G-20 Summit comes
to Pittsburgh.

The Group of 20 is an organization of the finance
ministers and central bankers from the 19 most
economically powerful countries, plus the European
Union. Their meetings coordinate global economic
policies known as neoliberalism or corporate
globalization. Neoliberalism aims to "liberate" capital
- corporations, bankers, big investors - from measures
that working people have won in the past, through union
struggles and legislation, that placed rules and limits
on what big business can do.

Neoliberal policies include deregulation of business,
which has allowed widespread abuses of workers,
consumers and the environment. Deregulation of the
banking industry led to a speculative bubble of
reckless gambling on mortgages. When it eventually
burst, it ruined the values of millions of homes and
dragged the world economy into deep crisis. They also
include privatization, which has wiped out thousands of
public service jobs and enabled rogue contractors like
Halliburton and Blackwater to rob the taxpayers and
commit crimes in our name.

So-called "free trade" really means unlimited mobility
for capital. Companies and entire industries now move
from country to country seeking the lowest wages and
weakest environmental rules. It has meant the loss of
millions of U.S. jobs and pushed down our wages, and
has been a disaster for workers in countries around the
world.

Free trade also turns workers into economic refugees.
In the case of NAFTA, countless working-class families
in the U.S., Canada and Mexico had to leave their
hometowns when local industries closed, and farming
communities in Mexico were wiped out by the flood of
free trade corn and other agricultural imports, forcing
people to migrate. When "Pittsburgh welcomes the
world," Pittsburgh labor needs to speak to the world.
We must make our voices heard as we demand that the
G-20 place human need above corporate greed.
________________________________________________
_____________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest
to people on the left that will help them to
interpret the world and to change it.

---------------------------------> (end)
----------------------------->

http://www.bailoutpeople.org/images/g20-march4jobs-4c.jpg (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/)

Communist

6th September 2009, 02:34

-------------

---------------

Jobless recovery: Only remedy is workers’ struggle (http://www.workers.org/2009/us/jobless_recovery_0910/)

By Fred Goldstein

Published Sep 3, 2009 11:07 PM

Guess what? There is a slight rise in some corporate profits. The corporations and biggest banks are doing a bit better. So the experts see a “recovery.”

No big surprise, however.

The government gave the banks and the auto industry trillions of dollars in bailout money. No wonder they are doing somewhat better.
If Washington gave $1.2 trillion in cash to a genuine workers’ jobs program, instead of giving it to AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and the rest of the robber barons, the 30 million workers now unemployed or underemployed would be doing a whole lot better too.

If the government spent $10 or $12 trillion to buy up the workers’ unpayable debts and guaranteed their loans, the way they have done for Wall Street, workers would still be exploited and underpaid, but things would not be quite so bad.

Instead there are 30 million workers either unemployed or underemployed, with depression-level rates of joblessness in the African-American and Latino/a communities, and things are getting worse for them and their families, not better.

1,000 apply for 30 jobs

A taste of how hard it is for workers to find jobs, especially African-American workers, was revealed in a story about unemployment in Uniontown, Ala., whose surrounding Perry County is very poor and almost 70 percent Black. Uniontown had been paid $3 million to dump thousands of tons of ash that spilled at a site in eastern Tennessee last December.
An announcement said the deal would create 30 jobs in a county whose unemployment rate was 17 percent. Arrowhead Landfill stopped taking applications after 1,000 were submitted (New York Times, Aug. 29).

The situation in Perry County is much like the situation in Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island, California, North Carolina, Nevada and counties and cities throughout the U.S. One conservative estimate is that for the country as a whole there are six unemployed workers for every job opening, and things are getting worse.

Boosting profits by cutting jobs

It is the mass shedding of workers by the capitalists that is behind the slight and temporary upturn in business profits, not renewed business activity.

“The market barreled ahead this summer and is hovering near its high for the year,” wrote the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 31, “fueled in large part by stronger-than-expected second-quarter earnings. But the significant driver of the good news was cost cutting. Many companies had disappointing sales.”

The bosses are staring a contradiction in the face: “You cannot simply cut costs forever to have sustainable earnings,” said a strategist at Zack Investment Research. “You need revenues to grow [profits] over time.”

The bosses rely on sales to make their profits. They make their money from workers’ sweat and blood by selling what the workers produce. But to boost profits, bosses have cut wages, trimmed the labor force, cut hours and reduced benefits. As each company tries to maximize its profits by cutting labor, this trend inevitably deepens and widens poverty and hardship.

“Cost cutting” is a code word for layoffs, pay freezes, pay cuts and forced furloughs or cuts in hours. Fearing low sales, bosses also shrink inventories, which results in lower orders. In turn, lower orders mean more unemployment or underemployment.

Foreclosures up, tent cities spread

Despite talk of recovery and revival of the housing market, foreclosures are on the rise and getting worse as the unemployment crisis deepens. There were 360,000 foreclosures in July, a 7 percent increase over June and 32 percent above the year before. A record 13.6 percent of households are either in foreclosure or behind in their mortgage payments. More and more foreclosures are on prime mortgages of workers who have lost their jobs.

As workers lose their jobs, homelessness and tent cities are sprouting up around the country. Fearing mass rebellion, many municipalities are moving to legalize tent cities around the country. Examples are Nashville, Tenn.; Ontario (near Los Angeles), Ventura and Sacramento in California; Lacy, Wash.; and Champaign, Ill. These are among the many localities either providing services to the homeless or allowing charitable institutions to do so.

New York City and Seattle, on the other hand, have moved sharply to repress the growing homeless movement.

In Nashville, on any given night there are 4,000 homeless people, according to city authorities, and 785 shelter beds. There are now at least 30 known tent encampments in Nashville.

David Olson, 47 years old, is typical of the new homeless population. He and his spouse wound up living under a Nashville overpass after he lost his job making cement pipes in Iowa. They came to Nashville for a construction job that did not exist. “I’ve got five years experience in carpentry and 10 years roofing and I can’t find a job.” (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 11) The city and nonprofit organizations found housing for 25 people. David Olson was not one of them.

This is the answer of the richest capitalist country in the world to homelessness. It lets the evicted masses live in tents instead of providing housing, which should be a fundamental right of all people.

Unemployment leads to failed mortgages. It is a measure of the remaining real estate crisis and the excessive debt of all types that 84 banks have already failed this year. Furthermore, there are 416 banks, with assets of $299 billion, on the list of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in danger of failing. The FDIC has only $10 billion left in its fund to deal with insolvent banks.

Instead of coming to the aid of the foreclosed, enabling them to pay their mortgages, which would keep the banks solvent, the FDIC has spent $40 billion taking over insolvent banks and merging many of them with other banks.

The FDIC has created “loss shares” in which they let stronger banks take over the weak ones and guarantee from 80 percent to up to 95 percent of potential losses on bad real estate loans. It would be the most direct and efficient measure to use the tens of billions of dollars to guarantee homeowners’ mortgage payments, keep them in their homes, keep home prices from falling and keep neighborhoods from deteriorating. But the FDIC is manipulating the process to let banking sharks get stronger by devouring the weaker banks.

‘The mother of all jobless recoveries’

As far as the working class is concerned, underlying the entire economic crisis is the crisis of unemployment. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the capitalist system, in its present state of development, cannot solve the growing crisis of mass, long-term unemployment.

An Associated Press story on Aug. 24 reported: “So many jobs have been lost—nearly seven million since the recession began in December 2007—that the unemployment rate will remain high long after the economy begins to rebound.

“Many out-of-work Americans have lost unemployment insurance and severance benefits and are depleting their savings. Others are saving more and spending less, still shaken from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.”

The dispatch cited Alan Sinai, a highly respected bourgeois economic analyst: “This is going to be the mother of all jobless recoveries,” he said.
The vast majority of layoffs during the present crisis have been permanent layoffs. This means that of the seven million jobs destroyed so far, most will not return. The average household debt is near $10,000. Unemployment rises steadily. Wages and benefits are going down. Personal bankruptcies are going up.

Profit-hungry health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and for-profit hospitals are eroding the health care benefits of the 250 million people who are covered. The number of people without health insurance is rising steadily with the growth of unemployment and is now approaching 50 million.

All in all there are no prospects for any real capitalist revival—the kind where workers go back to work; where the stress and insecurity imposed by fear of layoffs and plant closings and the endless demands for concessions ceases; where wages are brought up to a level to support a decent living; and where jobs are secure.

The average annual wage of 80 percent of the working class is now down to $33,000 a year—about one-and-a-half times the official poverty level (Business Week, Aug. 27). If there is no resistance as workers are forced to compete with each other more and more for jobs, wages decrease, unions are weakened, and the collective strength of the working class is eroded.

Independent united class struggle the only way

The only way to overcome this crisis is for the working class and all the oppressed to unite (http://www.workersworld.net/wwp/pmwiki.php/Main/AboutThisSite) in struggle. The time of waiting for the Democratic Party leadership to reverse the fortunes of the workers must be ended. The time of waiting for capitalism to revive itself and bring back boom times is over.
The labor movement must unite with the communities; the organized must unite with the unorganized; the employed must unite with the unemployed. U.S.-born workers must unite with immigrants, including the undocumented.

White workers must reject racism and division. This is the only way to build the kind of mighty movement to turn things around.

This is precisely the goal of the Bail Out the People Movement and dozens of sponsoring organizations that are building a mass March for Jobs in Pittsburgh on Sept. 20 to protest the gathering of the G-20—the twenty rich governments that are coming together to try to bolster the profit system that bleeds the workers of the world.

There will be a fighting Tent City in solidarity with the unemployed starting on the weekend of Sept. 19-20 and culminating in a March for Jobs on Sept. 20.

The good news is that as August ended the Steelworkers union and the United Electrical union, both of which have their national headquarters in Pittsburgh, have formally endorsed the March for Jobs, which is also already gathering support in Pittsburgh’s African-American community.

Be there. Declare that a job or income is a right. If you have a job, fight to keep it. If you don’t have a job, fight to get one!
___________________________________
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Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Communist

6th September 2009, 15:42

Protests planned to oppose G-20 summit in Pittsburgh (http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=12820&news_iv_ctrl=1261)
Saturday, September 5, 2009
By: Walter Smolarek
People Over Profits! Jobs Not War!

On Sept. 24 and 25, the Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors (G-20), which encompasses some of the world’s 20 largest economies, will hold a summit in Pittsburgh to discuss ways to implement their agenda of plunder and exploitation. Their policies, while aimed at containing the current deep crisis of the capitalist system, continue to emphasize the unrestricted mobility and dominance of capital over people’s needs.

Almost immediately after the city’s selection was announced, activists from Pittsburgh and throughout the country began to organize various actions to oppose the gathering. Protesters will be descending on Pittsburgh to demand money for jobs, health care and education, not for endless war and trillions in bank bailouts.
Among the events slated for the week of the conference is a March for Jobs, a People’s Tribunal, and a series of lectures and workshops called the People’s Summit. In addition, there will be a People’s March to the G-20 on September 25 that has attracted the support of over 60 organizations, including the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, the Thomas Merton Center Pittsburgh, Connecticut Students Against the War, Ohio Valley Peace, Pitt Students for Justice in Palestine, Philly Against War, and the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism).
The state, acting on behalf of the ruling class, has launched a multifaceted campaign to stifle dissent. According to the Aug. 22 New York Times, 900 local officers will be joined by an additional 4,000 law-enforcement personnel from departments throughout the country. Under the direction of the Secret Service, authorities will virtually close downtown Pittsburgh for the duration of the meeting.　
What’s more, the city is dragging its feet when it comes to issuing permits for the various free speech activities. Permits for various gathering areas and marches have been denied or "conditionally approved," but none have been issued. Several groups that wish to use Point State Park, located just a few blocks from the site of the summit, are encountering severe difficulties.
Even though the park is public space, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s office has insisted that protesters use it for only one day, not stay overnight, and share the Point with the police, who will be using the area immediately adjacent to the area proposed for protest as a staging area for their efforts to repress the protest and plans a "tent city" to house thousands of out-of-town police officers. Furthermore, the police are threatening to stop the People’s March well before it comes within sight or earshot of the delegates.
Finally, all of the organizing is being done under the shadow of the fear-mongering corporate media. Whipping up the usual hysteria about allegedly "violent out-of-towners," these news outlets parrot the talking points of the G-20, shut out alternative views and demonize those planning to protest.
The city is rolling out the red carpet for the corporate criminals participating in the G-20 and trampling on basic Constitutional rights while the economic crisis continues to ravage the working people of Pittsburgh, the United States and the world. These violations of basic rights to free speech and assembly and the widespread slander against protesters have not gone unanswered. Organizers and activists are demanding that their civil liberties be respected.
On Aug. 20, a press conference was held to bring attention to these issues. This has put important political pressure on the mayor and others.
On Sept. 2, the Pittsburgh City Council held a hearing for public comment on a slate of legislation that would govern protest activity during the G-20 summit. Activists packed the hearing to testify in defense of the right to free speech, assembly and expression. Activists are hard at work in the Pittsburgh area building grassroots support for actions opposing the G-20 in their communities, workplaces, schools and everywhere they can. Large numbers of people will be coming from all over the region, the East Coast and the Midwest to protest the G-20 starting on Sept. 19 and culminating with the People’s March on Sept. 25.
If you are interested in working with the PSL during the week of activities, call 202-543-4900.

Communist

7th September 2009, 03:26

http://mail01.mail.com/scripts/mail/getattch.mail?folder=INBOX&msg_uid=1252290134&partsno=1.2.2 (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/)

Endorse (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20endorse.shtml) | Register for the Tent City (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20register.shtml) | Donate (http://bailoutpeople.org/donate.shtml) | View List of Endorsers & Conveners (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/conveners.shtml)

A LABOR DAY APPEAL: A JOBLESS RECOVERY MEANS FIGHT BACK OR STARVE!
SEPT. 20 MARCH FOR JOBS IN PITTSBURGH BEFORE THE G20 SUMMIT

"Fight or Starve" read the headlines of a leaflet being distributed by the Unemployed Council members in 1933. Flash forwards 76 years and it’s Labor Day 2009. A year ago the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a worldwide melt down of the banking system and the biggest world economic crisis since the 1930s. One year later, after more than 13 trillion dollars of help from the government, they say Wall Street is okay. As finance ministers prepare for the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh this month, the spin is that the recovery is here or near and that U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke saved the country and the planet from a second great depression.

Saved who from a depression? The official unemployment rate in Detroit , Michigan is 29%. That’s depression-level unemployment. But it’s not just Detroit . While the official national unemployment rate just edged up to 9.7%, when the unemployed and underemployed who are not counted in the official rate are added, it’s really closer to 17%. For teenagers it’s a whopping 25% and for African-American young adults it’s closer to 50%.

We're talking about depression-level unemployment. The rate of home foreclosures continues to soar and it’s only going to get worse.

High unemployment affects every worker. Why? Because it drives down wages and benefits across the board and weakens or breaks union contracts. The real news is that things are never going to be the same unless we do something about it. The jobs that were lost are not coming back. The global economic crisis that hit the fan a year ago has ushered in a permanent and ever-escalating war on the working class and the poor. There will be no more respites of peace and prosperity for most of us.

The only question is what are the workers going to do about it? What are the labor unions going to do about it? What are organizations and activists who are dedicated to social and economic justice going to do about it? Will there be a massive fight back of the kind we haven’t seen since the workers said “we’re not taking anymore” in the early and mid-1930s and then proceeded to stop evictions, organize, strike, occupy factories and scare the hell out of the powers that be?

There’s no nice way of putting this. If poor and working people don’t start fighting back we are going to be destroyed by the greedy, profits before people, rich sociopaths from all the Wall Streets all over the globe.

The eyes of the world will be on Pittsburgh in a few days because the heads of governments and their head bankers will be meeting there to talk about how they can continue their jobless recovery on the backs of the working people of the world.

On Sunday, Sept. 20, the first day of the week of the G20 summit, there’s going to be a major march for jobs. Unemployed and homeless people and their supporters will be coming to Pittsburgh for the march for jobs. With the support of some labor including the United Steelworkers union--which is headquartered in Pittsburgh --and the support of the Black community in Pittsburgh , the march for jobs will assemble in the historic Black community of Pittsburgh known as “The Hill”. The goal of the march is to revive the dream that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. devoted the final days of his life to--a second civil rights movement for the right of all to a decent paying job. After the march and rally that day, many will return to a patch of land next to the Monumental Baptist Church on the Hill, where they will live in a tent city dedicated to the unemployed people of the world for the rest of the G20 summit week.

Everything has to start sometime and somewhere. Maybe we can help start the fight back in Pittsburgh this month. Will you be there? Find a bus, a car, a van or a train headed towards Pittsburgh and bring everyone you can with you. Go to BailOutPeople.org (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/).

March For Jobs and Tent City Conveners include:

Bail Out The People Movement
Picture The Homeless
The Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign
Peoples Organization For Progress
May 1st Coalition for Immigrant and Workers Rights
United Electrical Union
United Steelworkers union
San Francisco Central Labor Council
Million Worker March Movement
Local 10 ILWU
Peoples Fight Back Campaign
Moratorium Now! Coalition Against Foreclosures and Evictions
Pastors For Peace

If your community, union or student group is not already on board—there is still time to get involved.

Endorse (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20endorse.shtml) – Organize – and Mobilize!

Distribute flyers (http://bailoutpeople.org/pdfs/g20leaflecolor.pdf) and send out email notices.
Bring a bus, van or car from your city, town or neighborhood – tell us (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20volorgcents.shtml) so we can plan parking.
Donate (http://bailoutpeople.org/donate.shtml) $ so that those without funds can attend.

VERY IMPORTANT: Please REGISTER (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20register.shtml) for the Tent City.

If you are going to be participating at the ‘Solidarity with the Unemployed’ Tent City following the March 4 Jobs—it’s critical to register to make sure there are resources and space available. Space is limited. Pre-registration is required.

Register at http://www.bailoutpeople.org/septg20register.shtml

================================================== ====
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Communist

7th September 2009, 18:40

Saw some folks from the G-20 Resistance Project at the Pittsburgh Labor Day parade this morning handing out papers...We traded on several occasions.
Good work comrades! Awareness is key and it's great you are out there on the ground.

Communist

7th September 2009, 22:25

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Jobless recovery: Only remedy is workers’ struggle (http://www.workers.org/2009/us/jobless_recovery_0910/)

By Fred Goldstein

Published Sep 3, 2009 11:07 PM

Guess what? There is a slight rise in some corporate profits. The corporations and biggest banks are doing a bit better. So the experts see a “recovery.”

No big surprise, however.

The government gave the banks and the auto industry trillions of dollars in bailout money. No wonder they are doing somewhat better.

If Washington gave $1.2 trillion in cash to a genuine workers’ jobs program, instead of giving it to AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and the rest of the robber barons, the 30 million workers now unemployed or underemployed would be doing a whole lot better too.

If the government spent $10 or $12 trillion to buy up the workers’ unpayable debts and guaranteed their loans, the way they have done for Wall Street, workers would still be exploited and underpaid, but things would not be quite so bad.

Instead there are 30 million workers either unemployed or underemployed, with depression-level rates of joblessness in the African-American and Latino/a communities, and things are getting worse for them and their families, not better.

1,000 apply for 30 jobs

A taste of how hard it is for workers to find jobs, especially African-American workers, was revealed in a story about unemployment in Uniontown, Ala., whose surrounding Perry County is very poor and almost 70 percent Black. Uniontown had been paid $3 million to dump thousands of tons of ash that spilled at a site in eastern Tennessee last December.

An announcement said the deal would create 30 jobs in a county whose unemployment rate was 17 percent. Arrowhead Landfill stopped taking applications after 1,000 were submitted (New York Times, Aug. 29).

The situation in Perry County is much like the situation in Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island, California, North Carolina, Nevada and counties and cities throughout the U.S. One conservative estimate is that for the country as a whole there are six unemployed workers for every job opening, and things are getting worse.

Boosting profits by cutting jobs

It is the mass shedding of workers by the capitalists that is behind the slight and temporary upturn in business profits, not renewed business activity.

“The market barreled ahead this summer and is hovering near its high for the year,” wrote the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 31, “fueled in large part by stronger-than-expected second-quarter earnings. But the significant driver of the good news was cost cutting. Many companies had disappointing sales.”

The bosses are staring a contradiction in the face: “You cannot simply cut costs forever to have sustainable earnings,” said a strategist at Zack Investment Research. “You need revenues to grow [profits] over time.”

The bosses rely on sales to make their profits. They make their money from workers’ sweat and blood by selling what the workers produce. But to boost profits, bosses have cut wages, trimmed the labor force, cut hours and reduced benefits. As each company tries to maximize its profits by cutting labor, this trend inevitably deepens and widens poverty and hardship.

“Cost cutting” is a code word for layoffs, pay freezes, pay cuts and forced furloughs or cuts in hours. Fearing low sales, bosses also shrink inventories, which results in lower orders. In turn, lower orders mean more unemployment or underemployment.

Foreclosures up, tent cities spread

Despite talk of recovery and revival of the housing market, foreclosures are on the rise and getting worse as the unemployment crisis deepens. There were 360,000 foreclosures in July, a 7 percent increase over June and 32 percent above the year before. A record 13.6 percent of households are either in foreclosure or behind in their mortgage payments. More and more foreclosures are on prime mortgages of workers who have lost their jobs.

As workers lose their jobs, homelessness and tent cities are sprouting up around the country. Fearing mass rebellion, many municipalities are moving to legalize tent cities around the country. Examples are Nashville, Tenn.; Ontario (near Los Angeles), Ventura and Sacramento in California; Lacy, Wash.; and Champaign, Ill. These are among the many localities either providing services to the homeless or allowing charitable institutions to do so.

New York City and Seattle, on the other hand, have moved sharply to repress the growing homeless movement.

In Nashville, on any given night there are 4,000 homeless people, according to city authorities, and 785 shelter beds. There are now at least 30 known tent encampments in Nashville.

David Olson, 47 years old, is typical of the new homeless population. He and his spouse wound up living under a Nashville overpass after he lost his job making cement pipes in Iowa. They came to Nashville for a construction job that did not exist. “I’ve got five years experience in carpentry and 10 years roofing and I can’t find a job.” (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 11) The city and nonprofit organizations found housing for 25 people. David Olson was not one of them.

This is the answer of the richest capitalist country in the world to homelessness. It lets the evicted masses live in tents instead of providing housing, which should be a fundamental right of all people.

Unemployment leads to failed mortgages. It is a measure of the remaining real estate crisis and the excessive debt of all types that 84 banks have already failed this year. Furthermore, there are 416 banks, with assets of $299 billion, on the list of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in danger of failing. The FDIC has only $10 billion left in its fund to deal with insolvent banks.

Instead of coming to the aid of the foreclosed, enabling them to pay their mortgages, which would keep the banks solvent, the FDIC has spent $40 billion taking over insolvent banks and merging many of them with other banks.

The FDIC has created “loss shares” in which they let stronger banks take over the weak ones and guarantee from 80 percent to up to 95 percent of potential losses on bad real estate loans. It would be the most direct and efficient measure to use the tens of billions of dollars to guarantee homeowners’ mortgage payments, keep them in their homes, keep home prices from falling and keep neighborhoods from deteriorating. But the FDIC is manipulating the process to let banking sharks get stronger by devouring the weaker banks.

‘The mother of all jobless recoveries’

As far as the working class is concerned, underlying the entire economic crisis is the crisis of unemployment. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the capitalist system, in its present state of development, cannot solve the growing crisis of mass, long-term unemployment.

An Associated Press story on Aug. 24 reported: “So many jobs have been lost—nearly seven million since the recession began in December 2007—that the unemployment rate will remain high long after the economy begins to rebound.

“Many out-of-work Americans have lost unemployment insurance and severance benefits and are depleting their savings. Others are saving more and spending less, still shaken from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.”

The dispatch cited Alan Sinai, a highly respected bourgeois economic analyst: “This is going to be the mother of all jobless recoveries,” he said.
The vast majority of layoffs during the present crisis have been permanent layoffs. This means that of the seven million jobs destroyed so far, most will not return. The average household debt is near $10,000. Unemployment rises steadily. Wages and benefits are going down. Personal bankruptcies are going up.

Profit-hungry health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and for-profit hospitals are eroding the health care benefits of the 250 million people who are covered. The number of people without health insurance is rising steadily with the growth of unemployment and is now approaching 50 million.

All in all there are no prospects for any real capitalist revival—the kind where workers go back to work; where the stress and insecurity imposed by fear of layoffs and plant closings and the endless demands for concessions ceases; where wages are brought up to a level to support a decent living; and where jobs are secure.

The average annual wage of 80 percent of the working class is now down to $33,000 a year—about one-and-a-half times the official poverty level (Business Week, Aug. 27). If there is no resistance as workers are forced to compete with each other more and more for jobs, wages decrease, unions are weakened, and the collective strength of the working class is eroded.

Independent united class struggle the only way

The only way to overcome this crisis is for the working class and all the oppressed to unite in struggle. The time of waiting for the Democratic Party leadership to reverse the fortunes of the workers must be ended. The time of waiting for capitalism to revive itself and bring back boom times is over.

The labor movement must unite with the communities; the organized must unite with the unorganized; the employed must unite with the unemployed. U.S.-born workers must unite with immigrants, including the undocumented. White workers must reject racism and division. This is the only way to build the kind of mighty movement to turn things around.

This is precisely the goal of the Bail Out the People Movement (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/) and dozens of sponsoring organizations that are building a mass March for Jobs in Pittsburgh on Sept. 20 to protest the gathering of the G-20—the twenty rich governments that are coming together to try to bolster the profit system that bleeds the workers of the world.

There will be a fighting Tent City in solidarity with the unemployed starting on the weekend of Sept. 19-20 and culminating in a March for Jobs (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/invitation.shtml) on Sept. 20.

The good news is that as August ended the Steelworkers union and the United Electrical union, both of which have their national headquarters in Pittsburgh, have formally endorsed the March for Jobs, which is also already gathering support in Pittsburgh’s African-American community.

Be there. Declare that a job or income is a right. If you have a job, fight to keep it. If you don’t have a job, fight to get one!

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Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World (http://www.workersworld.net/wwp/pmwiki.php/Main/Background). Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Communist

8th September 2009, 02:55

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WORKERS EMERGENCY RECOVERY CAMPAIGN
P.O. Box 40009, San Francisco, CA 94140.
Tel. (415) 641-8616; fax: (415) 626-1217.
email: wercampaign(AT)gmail.com (http://mail01.mail.com/scripts/mail/compose.mail?compose=1&.ob=b4dcdc4656fdf464cbc501567baa6f031635f586&composeto=wercampaign%40gmail.com)
Web site: www.wercampaign.org (http://www.wercampaign.org)
Please Excuse Duplicate Postings
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Dear Sisters and Brothers:

While the media keep trumpeting signs of economic
recovery, the plight of working people has been
growing steadily worse. Official unemployment
continues to rise, but even the official
statistics mask the growing number of people who
have stopped looking for work or who are working
fewer hours than before and are therefore not included in the numbers.

As unemployment rises, so do home foreclosures.
In 2007, at the beginning of the economic crisis,
1 in 100 homeowners were delinquent in their
mortgage payments; that number has now
skyrocketed to 1 in 10 and continues to grow.
Most delinquent homeowners end up in foreclosure.
A disproportionate number are Blacks and Latinos.

Meanwhile, the banks have returned to the
perverse reward system that contributed to the
financial meltdown. Citigroup, which accepted a
huge government bailout and has yet to pay it
back, wants to reward one of its traders with
$100 million bonus, thereby spiking the
inequalities in wealth. Yet no economic system
can thrive when the vast majority of wealth is
concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of
the population while the remaining majority struggles to get by.

Given this context, we are asking you to endorse
a demonstration organized by the Bail Out People
Movement (http://www.bailoutpeople.org/)
(http://www.bailoutpeople.org/)
which is being organized in response to the world
economic crisis. It is scheduled for Sunday,
September 20 in Pittsburgh, PA to coincide with
the meeting of the G20 there. The demands of the Bail Out People Movement are:

- A Jobs Program for All
- A Moratorium on Layoffs, Foreclosures and Evictions
- No Cuts in Social Services
- Fund People's Needs, not War and Greed

This demonstration has already attracted the following endorsements:

- United Steel Workers of America (USWA)
- United Electrical Workers Union (UE)
- San Francisco Labor Council
- Donna Dewitt, President of South Carolina AFL-CIO
- Cynthia McKinney, DIGNITY
- Cindy Sheehan
- Chris Silvera, Sec. Treasurer of Teamsters 808 in N.Y. City
- ILWU Local 10
- Letter Carriers Union, Local 214

The Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign
encourages people to attend the demonstration and/or help build it.

We also call on our supporters to help us
distribute at this demonstration a WERC flier
with our 10-point program. If you can help,
please fill out the coupon below and return it
asap to our campaign address listed above.

Thanks, in advance, for your support.

In solidarity,

Signed/

Interim National Steering Committee of the
Workers Emergency Recovery Campaign (WERC):

- Kali Akuno, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Gulf Coast
Reconstruction activist
- Alan Benjamin,* Executive Committee member, San Francisco Labor Council
- Mike Carano, Progressive Democrats of America
- Colia Clark, Veteran, Civil Rights Movement
- Donna Dewitt*, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO
- Pat Gowens, National organizer, Welfare Warriors
- Bill Leumer,* International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 853 (ret.)
- Luis Maga?a, Coordinator, Organization of Farmworkers of California (OTAC)
- Cynthia McKinney, Former Member of Congress,
2009 Green Party presidential candidate
- Jack Rasmus, Economist, Professor at St. Mary's College
- Al Rojas, Coordinator, Frente de Mexicanos en el Exterior
- Marc Rich*, United Teachers of Los Angeles
- Cindy Sheehan, Gold Star mother, antiwar activist
- Clarence Thomas, Member, ILWU Local 10
- Mark Vorpahl*, SEIU Local 49, Portland, OR
- Nancy Wohlforth*, Co-Pres., Pride at
Work/AFL-CIO, Vice Pres.,California Federation of Labor

(* titles and organizations for id. purposes only)
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* * * * * * * * * *

Communist

8th September 2009, 18:14

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[Intro Note: Bill Leumer and Alan Benjamin,
national co-coordinators of the Workers Emergency
Recovery Campaign, sent in the WERC endorsement
to the call below for Jobs With Justice.]

JOBS WITH JUSTICE CALL FOR
Week of Action to Demand a Real
Economic Recovery for Working People
September 24-October 1, 2009
<http://www.unionvoice.org/ct/C7vLmrs1yBab/>

ONE YEAR AGO Congress & the Federal Reserve
bailed-out Wall Street and the insurers, claiming
they were "too big to fail." ONE YEAR LATER ...

- Workers are losing their jobs, homes, healthcare, & retirement security.
- The Bailed-Out Banks continue to award
executive bonuses while refusing to finance jobs
and evicting renters and homeowners through foreclosures.
- Corporations still "own" Congress & are
continuing with "business as usual" by blocking
measures like health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act
- The G-20, an international group of powerful
bankers and governments, is meeting in Pittsburgh
(9/24) to push for more of the same failed
policies that created the economic crisis.

Jobs & the Unemployment Crisis:
- Stop layoffs and develop a "jobs creation
program" to create millions of good jobs in our communities
- Pass the Employee Free Choice and other measures to ensure worker dignity
- Prioritize the unemployment crisis, extending
and expanding benefits, including access to health care
Homes:

- Keep people in their homes; stop the foreclosures & evictions
- Fund affordable housing and community reinvestment
Health Care:

Enact quality, public, affordable health care for all
A New Economy that Works for Everyone:

- Protect retirement security and pensions
- Fix our broken trade and immigration laws
- Support education and human needs
- Make corporations and the wealth pay a fair share of taxes.
- Break up the corporate giants & create a financial system that works for all
- Join our growing coalition of workers, students
& youth, people of faith, and community members.

On the anniversary of the bailouts, some will
send members to Pittsburgh for the G-20 (http://bailoutpeople.org/) meetings
while others will take on banks and other
corporate criminals in our own communities who
have continued to make money while the rest of us suffer.

We need to join together and build power and
momentum through bold action in order to
transform our economy into something that works for all of us.

* * *

Communist

9th September 2009, 03:15

G-20 activists want emphasis back on the economy (http://bailoutthepeoplemovement.blogspot.com/2009/08/g-20-activists-want-emphasis-back-on.html)

By Jerome L. Sherman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

City officials and local media have spent too much time focusing on disputes over protest permits and the possibility of violence during next month's G-20 summit, neglecting the serious economic concerns behind those protests, one group of activists said yesterday in the Hill District.

"We're not interested in all the talk about permits and troublemakers," said Larry Holmes, a spokesman for Bail Out the People and a community organizer from New York City. "People are suffering. They need jobs."

Mr. Holmes spoke with reporters on a grassy lot at the corner of Soho Street and Wylie Avenue in the Hill, where his group plans to launch a "national march for jobs" on Sept. 20, the Sunday before world leaders gather in Pittsburgh.

The site, owned by neighboring Monumental Baptist Church, will also host a tent city for unemployed and homeless people and their supporters from Sept. 20 through the end of the two-day summit, on Sept. 24 and 25.

"We feel that we need to stand up and be vocal," said the Rev. Thomas Smith, the church's pastor. "We need to make sure people have decent jobs to realize the American dream."

On Friday, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl said all five groups seeking protest permits around the summit will be given conditional approvals for events in Downtown, the South Side, North Side and the Strip District. The city will also create two protest zones near the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown.

Bail Out the People, a national group based in New York that grew from outrage over the billions of dollars in government money given to failing banks last year, has asked for approval for its Hill District march and the use of Allegheny Commons Park on the North Side Sept. 19-25 and Market Square on Sept. 24 and 25.

Organizers are planning to start the march at 2 p.m. on Sept. 20, and it will end at the Hill's Freedom Corner.

Mr. Holmes said he was hoping for an "enormous" gathering, with potentially thousands of marchers, including prominent civil rights and union leaders. There are tentative plans for buses to come from New York City, Detroit, Chicago and other cities.

"We need everybody to know this is going to be a peaceful event. This is going to be an orderly event," Mr. Holmes said.

He and other organizers are concerned that Pittsburgh's heavy emphasis on security -- officials hope to have as many as 4,000 police officers on city streets -- will dissuade some people from participating in protests.

The Wylie Avenue tent city will allow people who can't afford to stay at hotels to be near Downtown during the summit.

"We'll take as many as we can," the Rev. Smith said.

He said the site would have Porta-Johns and water, and the church is seeking volunteers who can donate food or time to help organize the march and the tent city.

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