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San Jose, Calif. – This Thursday the Gulf Coast Civic Works Project will hold its second annual Post-Katrina Summit. The day-long event, which consists of multiple activities, is a symbol that the fight must continue for victims of Hurricane Katrina. CC Campbell Rock – a native of New Orleans, veteran journalist and Katrina evacuee – is set to speak about the ills of one of the nation’s worst national disasters, as well as how it has affected our society. There will also be a panel discussion with the students of the organization, a music performance and a showing of Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke.”
The Gulf Coast Civic Works Project (GCCWP) is the national effort to pass HR 4048: The Gulf Coast Civic Works Act, which would create 100,000 jobs for Gulf Coast residents and evacuees to rebuild their communities. HR 4048 will provide our citizens with living wage jobs, make housing available for themselves and their communities, restore a sense of personal empowerment and hope and restore faith among our citizenry of the government’s ability to respond to the needs of our people.
The GCCWP, which is made up of students and faculty from San Jose State University, is no stranger to hard work. The collective has held several creative events over its two-year lifespan in an attempt to get the country’s support. Just last November the group participated in a campus-wide sleep out, an event where students replicated the lives of homeless Gulf Coast residents and slept outside for a night. Students and faculty also orchestrated a Mardi Gras procession in February of this year, in which they recreated the family friendly events of the New Orleans staple.
The GCCWP has allied with regional partners – LA ACORN, All Congregations Together (ACT of New Orleans), Bayou Interfaith Shared Community Organizing (BISCO), Equity and Inclusion Campaign – as well as national partners ColorofChange.org, RFK Human Rights Center and Student Hurricane Network – to pass HR 4048.
Many of the SJSU students are well aware of their peers’ efforts and say they are pleased to be around conscious students. Senior communications major Jason Jong said, “I think it’s critical that events like this take place so that we’re constantly reminded of the tragedy – not the sad side of it but the side that tells you something needs to be done.” He continued, “People need to understand that even though the Gulf Coast isn’t on the news, it doesn’t mean that people’s lives have been restored.”
Contact Dr. Scott Myers-Lipton at
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Declaration Against the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) Summit in New Orleans
We, the participants of the Second Continental Conference Against Free Trade and Privatizations, stand opposed to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) Conference of the Americas being convened by U.S. President George W. Bush in New Orleans, Louisiana, April 21 and 22.
This meeting is a heinous crime against the peoples of North America, but particularly against the dispossessed and displaced peoples of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Calling this meeting in the city of New Orleans, which remains largely unoccupied more than 30 months after Hurricane Katrina and where more than half of its historic African American majority remains displaced, only highlights the true intentions of this undemocratic initiative and the neo-liberal agenda it seeks to propagate.
In the case of New Orleans, this neo-liberal agenda advances the ethnic cleansing of the city’s African American population as a means to eliminate a strategic base of “Black Power” resistant to the program of privatizations and retrenchments needed to maximize profits for transnational corporations.
In the case of North America as a whole, the SPP seeks to eliminate the national sovereignty of Mexico and Canada in the name of U.S. national security and plunder their natural resources (oil, gas, water etc.) for U.S. consumption and the profit maximization of transnational corporations.
We stand in active solidarity with the People’s Summit being organized by the democratic forces of resistance in New Orleans and throughout North America to counter the neo-liberal program of state privatization and working class dispossession being advanced by treaties like the SPP, NAFTA, CAFTA and other free trade agreements.
We support the conclusions of the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, held in New Orleans Aug. 29 through Sept. 2, 2007, and demand the right of return for all displaced people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the recognition of internally displaced person (IDP) status for the displaced people, reparations for all those displaced and a massive publicly funded reconstruction program, beginning with the restoration of all public housing for the residents of New Orleans.
We call for the unity of the peoples of the Americas for self-determination, national sovereignty and human rights against reactionary privatizations, free trade agreements and corporate driven dictatorships. The people united will never be defeated!
Adopted Sunday, April 6, 2008, in Mexico City, Mexico
This message was sent by Kali Akuno,
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For more information about the struggle against privatization in Mexico see “Mexico legislators storm Congress” (in Mexico), shouting, “The country is not for sale,” at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7341821.stm. For more information on the II Encuentro Continental, visit www.encuentrocontinental.org.
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