The People's Forum: Freedom Isn't Free
Issue #1: Portland protests, CARES Act protections, Houston's Chinese Consulate shut down, an intro to abolition, and more. Read it here first!
Welcome to The People’s Forum, a weekly newsletter aiming to streamline your access to local news, upcoming actions, GoFundMe’s, and current events you should be paying attention to.
News Around Town
Renters will lose CARES Act rent protections on Saturday, 7/25. Houston-area residents don’t have the same protections as Austin/Travis and Dallas do, since Mayor Turner and Harris County’s justices of the peace haven’t issued an eviction moratorium of any kind. Houston and Harris County’s relief funds are out of money, and Mayor Turner opposes an ordinance for a grace period even though Houston’s layoffs and COVID-19 positivity rates keep climbing. Representative Gene Wu was joined by dozens of other state officials in calling on the Texas’s Supreme Court to suspend eviction proceedings. Many undocumented folks are forced to self-evict to avoid legal proceedings.
Following in the footsteps of Austin and Houston, Fort Worth voted on July 14 to continue using a sales tax to fund its police department for another ten years. FWPD takes over $250 million from the city budget, and the sales tax adds about $85 million per year. Despite incredible calls for defunding of the police and reallocating budgets to support education and community rehabilitation, we see little change across police departments all over Texas.
The Chinese consulate in Houston was ordered to close by the State Department on July 22. The consulate covers eight U.S. states in the South, along with Puerto Rico. The Chinese Foreign Ministry denounced the move as a provocation. Language coming out of Congress is dramatically suggesting that the closure was a response to cyberattacks and infiltration by a “vast network of spies.” As tensions between the U.S. and China rise, we’ll see the steady unraveling of an already rocky relationship.
News Around The World
Congressmember John Lewis passed away last Friday, July 17. He organized with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and worked and advocated for de jure and de facto voting rights over the course of decades in public service. This week, Democracy Now rebroadcasted a 2012 interview segment where you can watch Lewis discuss his motivation for revolutionary work, along with his experience on Bloody Sunday in 1965. Rest in power John Lewis.
Violent arrests taking place in Portland right now are lawless yet legal. A special task force was created by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to President Trump’s Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence. This task-force “has been tasked not only to assess civil unrest but also to “surge” resources to protect against it.” These ‘secret police’ may be deployed in Chicago and could potentially be headed to major cities across the U.S.
US Officials Re-Occupy the Chinese Consulate in Houston. Amidst escalating tensions between the two countries resulting in consulate re-seizures by both sides, additional attention has been raised to China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. We see a complicated picture being painted about the relocation programs in this region. Opposition groups and CIA-backed sources suggest that it is a modern-day ethnic cleansing and religious repression performed in concentration camps while the reality is one of ethnic separatism being remedied by economic reforms with an eye on minimizing separatist violence.*
*Most U.S. reporting on the Uyghur crisis remains skewed, lacks credibility, and is inevitably US government-influenced. Read here for more information on why.
Community Updates
Data to Dream: What happens if community organizers have access to the same tools and knowledge that data analysts and technologists have? BLMHTX and Datajams are hosting a virtual series of abolition data workshops, starting this Saturday, July 25 at 11 a.m. Practice working with public information in an abolitionist movement! Sign up here.
TPLF Book Club: This weeks is on Thursday, 7/30, at 4 p.m., and will cover chapters 6 and 7 of Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis. You can find links to the text and the Zoom call on our Linktree.
Stand for Human Rights in the Philippines by getting involved with Malaya TX: Sign this Unity Statement (as an individual or on behalf of your org) to pressure lawmakers to condemn the Anti-Terror Law that was recently passed by Duterte, and join the Global Day of Action against the Philippine Terror Law at the People’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) caravan protest in Houston on July 27 from 2-5 p.m. To join the caravan, please sign up here. To volunteer, please sign up here.
The United Student Front, a grass-roots and Houston-based organization has launched their nationwide tuition strike campaign. Their calls for action include striking tuition, not showing up and not logging in when the school year begins. You can read their launch presentation here.
Donate! Donate! Donate!
The UH chapter of Deeds Not Words is fundraising for the Okra Project, which employs Black trans chefs to meet the food needs of other Black trans folks. Donate via their Venmo (@deedsatuh)!
Portland protestors need bail funds now. The Portland General Defense Committee has set up a GoFundMe you can donate to here. Protestors are on the ground and fighting every day, donate so you can help them continue! They’re so close to their goal.
Community Healthcare Boxes by The People’s Liberation Front are kits that provide preventative, immunity-building supplies for unhoused Houstonians. You can give via our GoFundMe or donate items such as tents, umbrellas, first aid kits, backpacks, and reusable water waterbottles. You can schedule a drop-off for donations with a TPLF member by messaging @TPLFofficial on Instagram or emailing us!
Help out your community by donating here. Mutual Aid Houston has collected community members Venmo’s and Cashapps, separated based on need and urgency. Follow the twitter thread and donate! Get your friends to match! And reshare!
Revolutionary Recs
Chicano Batman’s album Freedom Is Free bridges funk and tropicalia, and speaks on revolutionary love (“Angel Child”), extractive economics (“The Taker Story”), police violence (“La Jura”), and earth spirituality (“Flecha Al Sol”).
The Combahee River Collective’s statement, which can be found here, lays the groundwork for intersectional marxism and recognizes that race, sex, and class oppression are interacting forces that have created the conditions for our lives.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore makes the case for abolition on The Intercept. This podcast is great for those who are not yet convinced that a police-free future is possible or reasonable. Listen to the podcast here, and part two here for an introduction to abolition.
Minju Bae and Mark Tseng-Putterman analyze the radical history of Black-Asian solidarity in Amerika and globally, and highlight how we can use an internationalist framework to inform and strengthen our organizing. Vijay Prashad expands this idea in calling for a resurrection of the project of the Third World.
Keleketla! is a collaborative project by Johannesberg's Keleketla Library and London's Coldcut, bringing together a multicultural cast of instrumentalists and vocalists to bring electronic music and afrobeat together. Activism is deeply interwoven with the album, by virtue of the artists' revolutionary roots. The track 'International Love Affair' is the perfect song, authentically expressing the cultures and struggles into this inspiring work of art.
In the meantime, there's a lot of work to do. Tell your friends and join us! If you're about the cause and want to get more involved, our membership application is on our linktree.