Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine

Food AND Medicine and the Eastern Maine Labor Council invites you to attend our Ninth Annual …

FOURTH OF JULY SOLIDARITY CELEBRATION
Featuring Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion with Slaid Cleaves

PLACE: at the Solidarity Center, 20 Ivers St. Brewer, 04412.

TIME: 6 p.m. – 8:30 p.m Rain or Shine

This year’s Fourth of July promises to be a blast with amazing food, music and program to celebrate both Independence Day and the proud tradition of democracy in the work place, and the continuing struggle for workers’ rights and laid-off workers.

Food AND Medicine will also celebrate its affiliation with Jobs with Justice, a national network of coalition groups dedicated to fighting for social and economic justice.

Here’s a look at what’s in store for this Fourth of July:

We continue our own tradition of providing great music on the Fourth by bringing you

• Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, and
• Slaid Cleaves

Delicious locally-raised pig roast, roasted by Judi Funaioli as well as locally-raised organic lamb roasted by Happytown Farm’s Paul Volckhausen. Not to mention the tons of food we’ll have for our potluck, including vegetarian options!

Speaker: Congressman Mike Michaud.

Working folks do it best: Union-made chili cook-off.

Kids area with games for the little ones.

Bangor/Brewer’s best kept secret — We have the best location to view the fireworks, right on the banks of the Penobscot River. A great view!

Tickets are $15 for adults, $2 for kids under five and $25 for the whole family, and are available at Bull Moose and at the door.
Proceeds go to benefit laid-off workers.

This event co-sponsored by UMaine Student Labor Action Project, Maine People’s Alliance, Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine, Peace through Interamerican Community Action, UMaine Bureau of Labor Education and Food for Maine’s Future.

Contact Mario Moretto for more info: riocarmine@gmail.com or 989-5860.

Events
Vigils
Voices for Peace
HOPE Festival

The U.S. House of Representative has voted 226-202 in favor of the conference report, spending $106 billion to extend and expand war in south Asia and to guarantee troubled foreign bank loans.

Both Mike Michaud and Chelli Pingree voted “nay.” Thank you for holding fast under tremendous pressure from the Obama administration and Democratic leadership.

See the previous (June 15) update and video thank-you from Robert Greenwald HERE.

Veterans For Peace, Jim Harney Chapter 003, would like to invite you to join us to march in the 2009 Bangor-Brewer July 4th Parade. More details will follow, but we will begin at the Hannaford parking lot in Brewer, Saturday 7/4, 10-11 in the morning and end in downtown Bangor, after which we will gather at the Peace and Justice Center for pizza and discussion about how to continue to keep peace in the forefront in the post-Bush era. Would you please respond at your earliest convenience to let us know if you can join us. We have a “Supporters of Veterans For Peace” banner that we would very much like to have be a part of this parade, but we need as many of you as possible to help us with it!

Video clip from the HOPE Festival, click below to play

Note: You must have Flash installed in order to play.

Excellent local media

Video from pre-festival presser on Ch. 7 (Friday 4/24) and day-of-festival coverage on Ch. 5 (Saturday 4/25)

The HOPE Festival is over for 2009 and it was a great success. The archive for HOPE Festival postings is HERE. You can let us know if you enjoyed this year’s event by posting a comment below this message. Planning for next year starts early, so also let us know if you’d like to help! All of you who came and especially those who participated in myriad ways with this massive community effort, THANK YOU!! We’ll see you again next year!

Find ‘em at peacecast.us

Cheri Honkala: Economic Human Rights
Cheri Honkala of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign spoke in Orono, Maine on the University of Maine campus on Thursday April 2. At the link is the podcast of her 61-minute program and extensive question and answer session. Honkala just left Maine after an extensive tour.

March 21 Teach-In on WERU
This is the podcast for the WERU Weekend Voices/peacecast.us Special featuring our Active Community Teach-in on New Strategies for Organizing in the Obama Era that broadcast on Saturday April 4, 2009 at 3 pm. The event was held Saturday March 21, 2009 in Bangor at the Unitarian Universalist Church. See also, below.

David Roediger: Writing Socialist History
Professor Roediger’s main focus is the life and work of his late friend and colleague, the labor activist and historian for the Industrial Workers of the World, Fred Thompson. Thompson died in 1987. I found the discussion of Thompson’s years as a professor at Work People’s College in Duluth, Minnesota personally quite interesting. This was a labor school founded by radical Finns and operated for about fifty years from the 1920s to 1970. The talk was given on the University of Maine campus in Orono on Thursday April 9.

Click below to listen to AUDIO ONLY from March 21 event keynote (introductions and full talk, 68 minutes), go HERE for download link.

This program features Joseph Gerson, Director of Programs and Director of the Peace and Economic Security Program for the American Friends Service Committee in New England. Joseph Gerson was the keynote speaker for our Active Community Teach-in on New Strategies for Organizing in the Obama Era held Saturday March 21, 2009 in Bangor, Maine at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Park Street.

This post includes the full-length talk by Joseph Gerson, about 68 minutes. Please inquire at the Center if you would like to view DVD video of the talk.

Joseph Gerson is introduced first by Ilze Pertersons of the Peace and Justice Center, then by Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. (See also Bruce Gagnon’s blog)

Please visit peacecast.us for download, RSS, and itunes links.

Portrait of Jim Harney by Robert Shetterly

For WERU Weekend Voices on January 3, Amy Browne assembled the best of Jim’s recent talks and interviews into a one-hour program. I do not want any of us to forget this program, so I’m reminding everyone to listen. You go HERE to play or download the program, or go ahead and play it right here:

WERU Weekend Voices 1-3-2009

“[Jim] Harney was former Catholic priest, and one of the Milwaukee 14, a group of priests and faith-based peace activists who broke into draft boards and burned about 10,000 Selective Service records with homemade napalm in a protest against the Vietnam War in 1968. They read from the gospel while the records burned. He spent more than a year in jail for his part in that protest.

In recent years many of us knew Jim Harney through the faces and voices of others that he shared through his photographs and stories. The photographs of people he met in Iraq have adorned pins and posters, putting a real face on war. Jim traveled extensively in Latin America, interviewing and photographing people whose stories might not otherwise be told— the poor, survivors of systemic economic violence, those struggling for change. He accompanied them on their journeys– running with his friends in El Salvador as US bombs rained down on them, sleeping in the mud in the corn fields, crossing the desert with the undocumented.

After learning he had terminal cancer, Harney planned a walk from Boston to Washington DC last summer, to call attention to the plight of the undocumented. He was able to make it as far as Rhode Island.

In December 2008, Jim Harney was given the Sacco & Vanzetti Social Justice Award from Community Church of Boston— an award that over it’s more than 30 year history has also been presented to Howard Zinn, Scott and Helen Nearing, Cesar Chavez and Rachel Corie.”

See Jim’s writing and more of his remarkable photos at www.posibilidad.org.

Jim Harney’s photos from Iraq often have been used at anti-war demonstrations to illustrate who pays the worst costs of the war

Portrait of Jim Harney by Robert Shetterly

We received this notice from Kelly Bellis this morning, and wanted to pass it along to you.

Our beloved compañero Jim Harney died at 10:45 PM Friday, December 26, 2008.

For more info, click HERE.

For a recent WERU Voices program featuring a PICA event Jim led at the Center, click HERE.

Jim Harney, PRESENTE

Cross-posted at Maine Owl
Ben Cohen: a demonstration of bloat

U.S. military budget is the cookie-eating elephant in the room (from TrueMajority.org)

The podcast for the peacecast.us/WERU Weekend Voices election special featuring the University of Maine panel presentation, “What are the Key Issues in the Nov. 4th Election?”, is now up at peacecast.us.

This radio special/podcast was recorded at the University of Maine on Thursday October 30, 2008 and broadcast on WERU Weekend Voices for November 1. Panelists include U Maine faculty and Bangor/Orono area community organizers. They are

• Professor Amy Fried, Political Science
• Professor Michael Howard, Philosophy
• Ilze Petersons, Program Coordinator, Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine
• Professor Doug Allen, Philosophy

The event was part of the Fall 2008 Socialist & Marxist Studies Thursday Controversy series.

The program explores some big ideas that ought to be part of our national discussion–if we think we have a democratic society–even if they seem to be missing or distorted in major party campaigns.

Among the most distorted ideas now running wild in the campaign is that of socialism. While this term is almost universally batted around as a pejorative, our panelists make a powerful case in favor of democratic socialism–for the weakened forms we already have, for the stronger forms found in other developed countries, and for comprehensive democratic socialism that would be of great benefit to the American people.

Included too is discussion of militarism and the bloated U.S. military budget. Please visit peacecast.us to play/download and enjoy the program.

Cross-posted at Maine Owl
The U Maine – Iraq Business Conference

“Postponed” on November 11, 2003 but never actually canceled, the original agenda still is posted HERE! We’re still waiting for a new date for the Conference.

More than any other event around which we have organized against the Iraq invasion, conquest, and occupation, none hit home harder than the University of Maine School of Business / Iraq Business Alliance conference which was scheduled for Scarborough, Maine on November 13, 2003.

It’s agenda was extremely revealing of reasons for the invasion other than “weapons of mass destruction.” The keynote speaker was to have been the late Casper Weinberger Sr., the former Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration. Rumors flew that the Dark Lord himself, Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, would drop in for a secret slot on the agenda.

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