Grassroots Alliance Challenges Paris Climate Conference; Walmart Worker Surveillance - 28:58

It Takes Roots to Weather the Storm: the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance Challenges COP21 Climate Conference in Paris

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Kali Akuno, is a founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, an emerging network of worker cooperatives and supporting institutions in Jackson, Mississippi and the South. Kali also served as the Co-Director of the US Human Rights Network, and as the Executive Director of the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund based in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. Some of Kali s most noted works include, most recently Casting Shadows: Chokwe Lumumba and the Struggle for Racial Justice and Economic Democracy in Jackson, Mississippi ; Revolutionary Nationalism

for the 21st Century , and Until We Win: Black Labor and Liberation in the Disposable Era . Kali has authored many articles and pamphlets on international and working class politics, with a focus on how government counterinsurgency, state violence, the drug war, mass incarceration and neoliberalism impact Black communities, and issues of zero waste, food sovereignty, solidarity economies, and worker cooperatives. 

Kali, discusses "an agenda for power for working and poor people and communities of color," for climate justice advocated by the "It Takes Roots to Weather the Storm delegation of over 100 frontline leaders from climate-impacted communities across the U.S. and Canada, including the Arctic, united under the slogan: 'No War, No Warming -- Build an Economy for People and Planet.' ... Climate justice seeks to address much more than greenhouse gas emissions, but the root systemic causes of climate change itself. Climate justice is about social and economic justice, and how democratic, peaceful and equitable solutions, not military violence, best serve the interests of humanity. The fossil fuel economy is a driver of these multi-faceted crises facing the world: causing resource wars; polluting our air, water and land; creating illness and death to people and of ecosystems; privatization of nature ..."

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Walmart Engages FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and Lockheed Martin To Surveil Workers Calling for $15 an Hour and Full-Time Work

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Dan Schlademan, Co-Director, Our Walmart

OUR Walmart has uncovered testimony revealing Walmart’s surveillance of their workers fighting for $15 an hour and full-time work in the wake of Black Friday strikes in 2012 and the “Ride for Respect” in 2013. In addition to  closely monitoring the lawful labor rights activism of its associates on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as the company faced a wave of bad publicity and negative same store sales, Walmart enlisted military industrial giant Lockheed Martin to spy on its workers and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force to gather intelligence on protests.  “We are fighting for
all workers to be paid a fair wage and enough hours to put food on the table and provide for our families," said Mary Pat Tifft, a Walmart worker of 27 years in Wisconsin. "To think that Walmart found us such a threat that they had to hire a defense contractor and engage the FBI is a mind-blowing abuse of power. 

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