Upcoming events in August and September

Here are some upcoming meetings on social justice and impeachment events:

 

The next Durham Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) meeting will probably be September 8^th at 3pm, at a library if free space can be found.   At the August meeting people brought up Price's vote on the bill that would seem to legalize Bush's illegal domestic wiretapping, anti-torture organizing, impeachment efforts, easily tampered with American voting machines and those who support them (at least Durham has machines with paper ballots), the effort to get NC, along with other states, to award their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who gets the most votes nationally, the Durham library fee, etc.   There is lots going on and this was an unusually well-attended meeting, hopefully replicated in September. 

 

The next Durham Impeach Bush-Cheney meetup (online at impeachbush.meetup.com/349/ ) will be at the Parkwood Library on Thursday, August 16^th at 7pm.  There is going to be a viewing of Bill Moyers' recent program on impeachment and a work session to type petitions into Excel on Sunday, the 12th, at 2pm.   

 

GRIM (impeachbushcheney.net) is meeting with Rep. Price at I think 2pm on Monday August 20 ^th in Chapel Hill, possibly with a meeting at Cup A Joe beforehand.  We are trying to collect 5000 signatures for a new petition and it is going quickly (one person alone got 200 signatures in 200 minutes holding a sign at a civic event in downtown Raleigh recently), but we need more people to circulate the petition.   I was told 20 people attending a few events would be enough to reach the goal.  We have almost 1000 signatures now, and it is already at 1000 if the earlier petitions, such as www.petitiononline.com/dsmnc/petition.html and its paper version, are included.    

 

NC Stop Torture Now is having several events soon.  Saturday, August 11^th from 1-3pm there will be mobile freeway blogging protests at overpasses in Raleigh.  Signs and banners will be placed at overpasses and entrances/exits.   An anti-torture and anti-war rally or rallies are being organized for the weekend of October 27^th near Aero Contractor's hangar at the Johnston County Airport.  There might be an earlier event in Raleigh as well.   The next STN monthly meeting will be August 19^th, 2-4pm at the usual Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh location. 

 

The Duke Human Rights Center and several other groups are hosting a half-day conference on extraordinary rendition and Guantánamo at John Hope Franklin Center room 240 (see map.duk.edu for directions) on Wednesday, September 26^th, 12 to 5:30pm.  Stephen Grey, the author of a book on the rendition flights, Ghost Plane , Maher Arar, a Canadian who was sent to Syria by the US, where he was tortured, and Ariel Dorfman, author of the foreword to Poems from Guantánamo:  The Detainees Speak, will be at the conference (Arar will telecommute, because the Bush Administration still bars him from entering the country, without explanation).   Everything will also be streamed live on the Internet and at Duke's Bryan Center, and an audience at the University of Ottawa, in Canada, will also take part.

 

The Triangle Socialist Forum will discuss rights on the job and fair wages September 1^st at 2:30pm in the usual place at the Chapel Hill Public Library.   If there are readings, they will be posted soon, at Durham Spark, but Marx's Value, Price, and Profit, which we looked at last year, is a good work to review, summarizing the theory that monetary value comes from the cost of labor, which is the lowest cost of maintaining a worker and his family.   The UN International Labor Organization's standards are another document to look at, to see how many rights the US violates (which is one basis for Hear Our Public Employees' case against the State, for denying public employees the right to collectively bargain).  

 

I think a national anti-war demonstration is being organized in Washington, DC for September 29^th.