Demonstrations against the ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good are sweeping the country. The Indivisible website says there are over 1,000 planned for this weekend, and already this week there have been hundreds, including in many small towns. There was a rally in Detroit Friday night in Clark Park which, reportedly, was well attended. Today (Saturday) I attended another rally at Hart Plaza (center of downtown) which drew about 500 people, which is a fair amount given the weather (mid-30s with rain turning to snow). As usual at No Kings rallies, many people brought their own homemade signs. And many expressed the kind of sentiments we're used to at No Kings rallies: "Trump is illegal", etc. But PSL also had a bunch of printed signs, "Stop the bombing of Venezuela". I listened to a couple of the speakers. One was a memorial tribute to Renee Good. The other was a man with a petition drive to ban corporate PACs from making contributions to campaign funds. Then they went into chanting slogans, the usual "Money for health care, not for war" and "Stop ICE".
PSL had a lot of printed signs there, but no distributors of their paper. There were two distributors from Spark, one with their paper and one with a leaflet against the "U.S. war on Venezuela". BAMN had a couple distributors with a leaflet against the "U.S. invasion of Venezuela." A group called Detroit Committee to Stop ICE had a leaflet calling for "Jail the murderer of Renee Good" and "Trump must go!" They're trying to create a pressure campaign against Wayne County, to try and get the county to cancel its contract with ICE, which allows ICE to use Willow Run airport to deport immigrants.
Renee Good demos
Re: Renee Good demos
I went to the event advertised as being in Ballard, but really on the hill southeast of Green Lake. I drove right to it, but I assume numerous people had trouble finding the place because they were still arriving after the march started. Since only about 10 people were there when I arrived, I got to meet the older organizer and his forty-something son, talk with the anarcho-syndicalist guy who used to come to our weekly Northgate event (but now goes to a similar event at Green Lake), etc. Meanwhile, people kept coming and coming and the organizer gave a short speech. Then, about 500 of us started marching down the hill to Green Lake, with more people joining (usually from the rear) all the time. And I'm guessing the crowd had grown to 800 or more by the time we got to the lake.
The only chant I remember was “ICE has got to go!”
The tall RCP guy handed out a quite small flyer on slick paper. A younger SEP guy handed out a leaflet from WSWS. (In the first paragraph they get a fact wrong about the shooting of Renee Good, but I haven't read the rest.)
Given that there were 24 events in the Seattle area today, I think the turnout to this one was very good! And I expect that there will be quite a few thousand people at Cal Anderson Park tomorrow.
Frank
The only chant I remember was “ICE has got to go!”
The tall RCP guy handed out a quite small flyer on slick paper. A younger SEP guy handed out a leaflet from WSWS. (In the first paragraph they get a fact wrong about the shooting of Renee Good, but I haven't read the rest.)
Given that there were 24 events in the Seattle area today, I think the turnout to this one was very good! And I expect that there will be quite a few thousand people at Cal Anderson Park tomorrow.
Frank
Re: Renee Good demos
From Eric:
I went to the protest at Columbia City. The protest was jointly called by SA and SRS, for a park a couple of blocks off c. Rainier Ave, and so out of the way. I arrived a little before noon, and there were about 15-20 people at the rally in the park, but I heard honking from the direction of Rainier and headed over there: about a hundred people gathered on both sides of Rainier, holding signs and talking with each other. There was nearly constant honking from the drivers, and a lot of encouragement by the protestors. Signs were focused on humor, on denouncing Trump. I recognized no one in the crowd, and the only signs I saw from an organized group was FSP (I think). My sense is that there were fewer signs like the ones at the No Kings demos, calling for the Democrats to "do your jobs" etc. There were one or two "impeach" signs.
After about 30 minutes, people started to drift away and the numbers were way down by 1. I passed by the SA/SRS demo on the way to my car, and they were still 22 people vigorously shouting to themselves. I heard the speaker at that moment saying they were going to pack up their tables and go to the light rail station to collect signatures to get Sawant onto the ballot, and recruiting the handful of people to join them.
I would also note, there were new Sawant posters up with this slogan: "Elect the socialist who won the nation's highest minimum wage!" An annoying rewriting history, erasing the whole $15 Now movement.
I went to the protest at Columbia City. The protest was jointly called by SA and SRS, for a park a couple of blocks off c. Rainier Ave, and so out of the way. I arrived a little before noon, and there were about 15-20 people at the rally in the park, but I heard honking from the direction of Rainier and headed over there: about a hundred people gathered on both sides of Rainier, holding signs and talking with each other. There was nearly constant honking from the drivers, and a lot of encouragement by the protestors. Signs were focused on humor, on denouncing Trump. I recognized no one in the crowd, and the only signs I saw from an organized group was FSP (I think). My sense is that there were fewer signs like the ones at the No Kings demos, calling for the Democrats to "do your jobs" etc. There were one or two "impeach" signs.
After about 30 minutes, people started to drift away and the numbers were way down by 1. I passed by the SA/SRS demo on the way to my car, and they were still 22 people vigorously shouting to themselves. I heard the speaker at that moment saying they were going to pack up their tables and go to the light rail station to collect signatures to get Sawant onto the ballot, and recruiting the handful of people to join them.
I would also note, there were new Sawant posters up with this slogan: "Elect the socialist who won the nation's highest minimum wage!" An annoying rewriting history, erasing the whole $15 Now movement.
Re: Renee Good demos
Cover-Up, a movie now streaming on Netflix. Review by Pete Brown. I am posting this with the Renee Good demos because I think this movie has an important lesson -- an obvious one, perhaps, but one that might be helpful to drive home to activists. This movie is a biopic of Seymour Hersh, an investigative reporter famous for his work exposing the My Lai massacre, the Nixonites' attempt to cover up their hand in the Watergate break-in, the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, and other atrocities. The most interesting parts are on My Lai and Abu Ghraib -- how Hersh heard about them, how he doggedly pursued leads, and how he finagled media outlets and government people to finally force the truth to be exposed. And the truth he exposed in each case was horrible, about people being tortured, raped, murdered, etc. Hersh could barely stand to hear about it, much less write descriptions of it. But the main lesson he drew from these experiences was: Don't believe it's just a few bad apples. It's (also) the higher-ups and the organization they devised. Hersh is disappointed that Lt. Calley was the only one convicted of a serious crime after My Lai. Higher-ups were only given a mark in their career book saying they were derelict in reporting certain things, and the general in charge, Westmoreland, was promoted. Pentagon spokesmen criticized Hersh for "undermining the army," and the president, LBJ, went on lying about the great progress the U.S. was making in Vietnam. Calley himself was released from jail after serving just a few months. Hersh is disappointed that he could not push things farther, but he recognizes that, as you go higher up, the wagons circle more closely, and it becomes more and more difficult to penetrate the blockade.
Anyway, this lesson I think is important: Don't believe that the killer of Renee Good is just one bad apple in a barrel of conscientious public servants. Regardless of how ICE behaved in the past, it has been revamped by Trump and his minions to be a gang of racist thugs operating without warrants, without badges, and without faces. They have shot 12 people in the last year and killed three I know of. The response of Trump, Vance, Noem, and Homan to the Minneapolis shooting was typical; without even getting their facts straight, right away they started denouncing Good as a fanatic, a terrorist, etc., and lying about how ICE operates.
What's happening now is that the atrocities U.S. imperialism used to visit upon the people of Vietnam, Iraq, Chile, etc., is now being visited upon the people of the United States. The people in Minneapolis and other cities are coming face to face with the kind of thugs people faced at My Lai and Abu Ghraib. And the government leaders are just as soulless and two-faced as the ones who led U.S. imperialism into those atrocities.
Anyway, this lesson I think is important: Don't believe that the killer of Renee Good is just one bad apple in a barrel of conscientious public servants. Regardless of how ICE behaved in the past, it has been revamped by Trump and his minions to be a gang of racist thugs operating without warrants, without badges, and without faces. They have shot 12 people in the last year and killed three I know of. The response of Trump, Vance, Noem, and Homan to the Minneapolis shooting was typical; without even getting their facts straight, right away they started denouncing Good as a fanatic, a terrorist, etc., and lying about how ICE operates.
What's happening now is that the atrocities U.S. imperialism used to visit upon the people of Vietnam, Iraq, Chile, etc., is now being visited upon the people of the United States. The people in Minneapolis and other cities are coming face to face with the kind of thugs people faced at My Lai and Abu Ghraib. And the government leaders are just as soulless and two-faced as the ones who led U.S. imperialism into those atrocities.
Re: Renee Good demos
Roughly 1,500 good people with homemade signs turned out for today's Cal Anderson Park event in Seattle. That's many less than I expected, and perhaps the reason is that the event was only going to be two hours of speeches, with no march: something I was unaware of. The speakers I heard all decried what ICE is doing in the country, decried the ICE murder of Renee Good, and so on. They were repetitive, and I'm sure this is why numerous people left early, including myself. Also, I think every speaker I heard save one emphasized non-violence and peacefulness.