New website promotes local protests, including Amazon, Whole Foods boycott

Presenter: One of the groups helping to organize the nationwide No Kings rally Oct. 18 is named 50501: 50 protests, 50 states, one movement. Speaking for 50501 Eugene, here’s Huckleberry:

Huckleberry: I’m involved with 50501. It’s a decentralized organization that focuses primarily on protest and getting people out and getting people together, and we’re working with other local organizations to help make this happen and make it big and call people to action.

[00:00:41] Something that Eugene and Springfield benefit from that a lot of other places don’t is our activist community has become pretty well unified and we work together on these things.

[00:00:57] And so some of us in 50501, with some other members of activist groups, have a side project: A website, EugeneTogetherStrong.org, and that website directs people who come out to march, people who are interested in helping the cause, people who are really concerned about the rise of fascism and authoritarianism in the United States, and they want to know how they can fight back against it on a local level—this website directs them straight to what they can do on their local level to help fight back against this and to help protect our neighbors who are being unduly targeted by this administration.

[00:01:43] Presenter: One of the actions is a boycott of Amazon and Whole Foods. From 50501, Huckleberry:

[00:01:50] Huckleberry: The Whole Foods boycott is one of our action items that we are asking people to participate in. So that’s Whole Foods and Amazon. And the reason for that, the reasons for that are that Amazon is a prime driver of ICE’s deportations, by providing ICE with data storage services. They’re helping expand the growth of their surveillance data accumulation, arrest imprisonment, and deportation of immigrants.

[00:02:24] And Bezos donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. He is working very hard to gain favor with this regime and empower it. Bezos personally owns the Washington Post and there’s some criticism that he is made efforts to align the newspaper’s editorial stance with a more Trump-friendly view.

[00:02:47] And Amazon itself is a cartoonishly evil company. They’re union busters, they’ve engaged in illegal union-busting activity. Jeff Bezos makes $8 million per hour while paying his warehouse workers an average of about $20 an hour. And that’s a job where they get virtually no breaks, where delivery drivers, for example, end up famously/infamously urinating into bottles because they can’t even take bathroom breaks.

[00:03:19] So Amazon is pushing forward plans to build a warehouse in Eugene, and while we understand that those warehouses will provide jobs in the short term, Amazon is moving rapidly to automate all of its warehouses. So we might get jobs for 10 or 15 years. But eventually what’s going to happen is that warehouse is going to be roboticized and then we have to deal with the brunt of the environmental impacts, the impacts to our electricity and utilities costs.

[00:03:57] And by doing that, we’re also empowering the type of corrupt billionaire that has managed to buy out so much of our campaign system and our political process. So that’s one of the action items that we’re asking people to execute on.

[00:04:16] Presenter: Another call to action involves the Flock surveillance cameras.

[00:04:21] Huckleberry: Other immediate urgent action items are: One is getting Flock cameras out of Eugene and Springfield. The way that it connects to the No Kings movement is that these cameras are a tool of the overreaching federal government. So Flock is a startup that just came on the scene and their security protocols are not up to snuff, and they’ve found that this system is very easily usable.

[00:05:00] So for example, if Eugene Police Department is sharing Flock camera data with other police departments in the state of Oregon, all it takes is one single police officer, often another city in Oregon, to share that data with a federal agent. And then they have access to all of our camera data.

[00:05:24] And you may be thinking, ‘Oh, okay. We’ve had red light cameras for a long time.’ That may be true, but these cameras have AI technology. They’re capable of facial recognition, they’re capable of identifying vehicles, bicycles, people, and they store that data for 30 days, up to 30 days.

[00:05:48] And they’re storing data en masse on everybody, innocent and suspect alike, and we believe that that constitutes unreasonable search. It’s not targeted policing. It’s what we believe to be unconstitutional mass surveillance.

And the problem with that is with how easy it is to abuse this system and with how the federal government is currently demonizing protesters, activists, trans people and immigrants, and deeming large swaths of the population as terrorist groups.

[00:06:34] Even if they’re not organized groups, they’re just descriptors of people. We don’t trust this data to not be abused by any federal agent that may happen to get their hands on it.

[00:06:49] Maybe there is a world in which we can use and trust that technology, but right now we’re in the Wild West of the internet and data security, and we do not think that the safeguards are there or that we’re in the kind of environment where this kind of technology is safe.

[00:07:11] And once this technology is ubiquitous, that cat’s out of the bag. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, right? So we’re trying to keep that genie from coming out of the bottle and keeping this technology out of our cities, in an effort to keep our neighbors safer to keep our activists, our trans friends, our immigrant friends safer, because we are a sanctuary state.

[00:07:37] And that’s a case where we will not be able to enforce our sanctuary state laws effectively if we have that kind of hole in our security fabric.

[00:07:48] Presenter: Another call to action seeks to protect gender-affirming care.

[00:07:53] Huckleberry: The government shut down because the federal budget bill has provisions in it that a lot of our elected representatives don’t agree with and don’t want to allow to pass. You’ve probably heard that this budget bill includes provisions to cut the Affordable Care Act benefits for a lot of people, and that there will be millions of people losing their healthcare or seeing their premiums double or triple if this bill goes through.

[00:08:23] But another provision that is not really being talked about, that we’re also very concerned about these civil rights and human rights implications of, is that this budget bill includes a ban on any federal funds supporting gender-affirming care for transgender people, at any age, right? Not just children, but also adults. That includes hormone therapy, for example.

[00:08:49] Another thing that this budget bill would do if it’s passed in its current state would be to gut protections for LGBTQ+ foster children. It would impose a nationwide ban on transgender participation in sports. There’s a number of reasons why we don’t think the federal government should be able to blanket ban that.

[00:09:09] And another is prohibiting pride flags in public buildings. So it’s a very targeted attack against a very vulnerable group of people. And it has very little to do with budget.

[00:09:24] You could say that gender-affirming care for transgender people does incur a cost, but that gender-affirming care is lifesaving therapy. It has well-established psychological benefits for transgender people. You can’t just deny health care to people based on personal views of whether or not you agree ideologically with their health care. So it’s blatant discrimination. It’s being carried out to deny the humanity of transgender people under the excuse of slashing the federal budget.

[00:10:04] And we don’t think that denying basic lifesaving health care for a marginalized group of citizens is an acceptable way to decrease federal spending. Civil rights should not be on the chopping block here.

[00:10:16] So what we’re asking people to do is call and email their elected officials. Tell them that they must demand that these provisions get removed from the spending bill that ultimately gets passed. And we include specific instructions on who to call and what that contact information is.

[00:10:37] Presenter: 50501 is also calling for protesters to monitor ICE.

[00:10:41] Huckleberry: A big part of the problem that people have with ICE is that the way that they are going about targeting immigrants is beyond what the law allows for. So people are being abducted by ICE often while lawfully attending their immigration court hearings. They’re often being abducted without warrants. They are being denied their constitutional right to due process.

[00:11:12] And in many cases, like the case with Alligator Alcatraz, the institutions are making it very difficult for them to access legal help, or even speak to their lawyers, right? So they are obstructing these people. The people who are being detained and deported are having their constitutional rights to due process infringed. They’re being sent to prisons with inhumane conditions being sent to countries far, sometimes far away from their countries of origin.

[00:11:48] I think we all know about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia who got sent to a Salvadorian superprison, CECOT, without any due process. He was just shipped off before he could communicate with a lawyer before he could appeal the process or deal with it legally in any meaningful way.

[00:12:17] He was sent to this superprison for high-profile terrorists. And this is happening with other people who are not Garcia. Migrants from Central America are being sent to South Sudan, all the way across the world—a place where they don’t know the language or the local customs, they’re completely unfamiliar with the legal landscape.

[00:12:44] These are violations of basic human rights. And just because someone, regardless of whether or not someone is a legal citizen or legal resident, many of these people who are getting picked up are legal residents, and in some cases are even having their resident status or their student visas revoked or under threat of revocation. And even people who may not be legal citizens or residents, they still have, they’re still entitled to the rights, the same basic rights that we are, that the Bill of Rights guarantees to everybody. And the right to due process is one of those things.

[00:13:36] So you can’t just scoop people up and abuse them and make them sit in inhumane conditions or send them off to who knows where, and lose track of them in the system, disappear them essentially. Even if they are not a lawful citizen or resident, they’re still entitled to the same basic rights that you and I are.

[00:13:59] And if we allow our government to abuse those people, we’re signing off on that abuse for everyone. Those people are entitled to those rights. If they can’t maintain and secure those rights, then that invalidates those rights for all of us.

[00:14:22] Previous administrations, including Democratic ones, have been deporting people at very high rates. The truth is that we’ve been deporting people pretty intensely for a long time. Trump’s strategy seems to be to treat them inhumanely and that will scare people away and keep them from crossing the border. But that kind of inhumane treatment is a violation of our rights. Full stop.

[00:14:51] There’s massive violations of human and civil rights happening right now, and ICE is just being given carte blanche by an administration and a party that are willing to turn a blind eye to the rights abuses that are happening, that are systemically happening within it.

[00:15:12] We are asking people to come out to protest ICE, lawfully stay on the sidewalk. This is nonviolent civil resistance that we’re asking people to do. We’re also asking people to monitor them because when you monitor something like this, when you record it, and you let them know that they’re being watched, it helps prevent human rights and civil rights abuses going forward.

[00:15:37] So, that’s not every part of the puzzle here, but those are the core of what we’re asking people to do, but they can learn more together at EugeneTogetherStrong.org. So if they want to see all of the suggestions that they have for how they can act and how they can help, they can see all of it at EugeneTogetherStrong.org.

[00:15:58] Presenter: Huckleberry from the group 50501 announces a new website, EugeneTogetherStrong.org, where you can learn about local actions and how to get involved.