On the Fourth of July, 25 people rallied at the Federal Building against the rush of June Supreme Court decisions. I loved these talks for two reasons — they all mentioned that our struggle, our movements, are within a context of global imperialism and global capitalism. And that the movements have to cooperate and fight for everyone’s rights, or we’re all toast.
These two themes have been widely repeated at other rallies — for Palestinians, at the students encampment, at Eugene City Council, homeless protests and many other events this year. There were excellent talks for each different movement: LGBTQ, Gaza, economic injustice, homelessness, loss of democracy, etc.
I want to focus on the theme that we’re being ruled by a ruthless imperial system, and we have to have each other’s backs.
Why would people in the LGBTQ movement or the climate movement or Black people have common ground with Labor or Palestinians, for example? Or vice versa?
They’re not all leftist.They’re composed of a cross-section of society. They’re less conscious of other issues. But advancing any of their goals involves changing laws or changing the Constitution. And these can never be done until you confront global capitalism who control the media, legislation, the military and police.
Steve Dear, a community organizer and activist involved with Extinction Rebellion, Planet Versus Pentagon, Springfield Eugene Anti Imperialism Coalition, said on July 4: “We are here because the deeply corrupt U.S. Supreme Court has issued three new decisions that represent a tectonic shift away from basic legal protections of civil liberties, environmental health, worker safety and limitations on presidential power: the Chevron case, the Trump case — presidential immunity from criminal prosecution — and City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, effectively criminalizing sleeping in the only location available to homeless people in Grants Pass.”
Dear continues, “Let us understand the context of these recent decisions.The United States of America was never a democracy, only a nominal republic. The legal documents upon which the structures of our economy and legal and political system are based from the U.S. Constitution back to the Magna Carta were designed to protect the property and interests of a small elite. Wealth is now concentrated in fewer and fewer hands… Operating within the iron cage of capitalism, journalism is mostly dead.”
Back on June 26, John Monroe told the Eugene City Council that he’d “like to address the question of why this council and why this city should be concerned with the genocide happening in Gaza in Palestine or broadly because what we’re seeing there is the most extreme edge of a process that’s happening everywhere, including here in the U.S. The bombing that has destroyed every university in Gaza is an extreme form of the gutting of our libraries and of our 4J school system that is damaging the future of our residents and taking away basic education.”
Finally, Kamryn Stringfield, at the Pinkwashing Rally June 16 said, “On the working class, our liberation, as well as Palestinian liberation, Black liberation, women’s liberation, and all liberation is tied to the liberation of mankind from imperialism once and for all. With that, I want to leave you all off with a quote from Comrade Fidel Castro in an interview he did in 2010 with the La Jornada newspaper in Havana, where he apologized for his role in LGBT-plus oppression in Cuba early on. At the conclusion of his interview, he said, the world of the future has to be common and the rights of human beings have to be above individual rights. And it will be a rich world where our rights are equal for all. The interviewer asked, how are you going to achieve that, commander? He said, ‘Educating, educating, creating trust and love.’”
Todd Boyle is a 1978 University of Oregon graduate, an anticapitalist retired CPA and an antiwar veteran.
A Note From the Publisher
Dear Readers,
The last two years have been some of the hardest in Eugene Weekly’s 43 years. There were moments when keeping the paper alive felt uncertain. And yet, here we are — still publishing, still investigating, still showing up every week.
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Listening to readers has always been at the heart of Eugene Weekly. This year, that meant launching our popular weekly Activist Alert column, after many of you told us there was no single, reliable place to find information about rallies, meetings and ways to get involved. You asked. We responded.
We’ve also continued to deepen the coverage that sets Eugene Weekly apart, including our in-depth reporting on local real estate development through Bricks & Mortar — digging into what’s being built, who’s behind it and how those decisions shape our community.
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Thank you for standing with us!
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Eugene Weekly
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