Tuesday, 20 Jul 2004
For Immediate Release:
The Student Labor Action Coalition (SLAC) of the University of Wisconsin Madison is organizing buses to protest the Republican National Convention in New York City. SLAC has reserved three buses to take 165 people to protest the event. One bus will leave Friday August 27th at 6pm from the Memorial Union in Madison in order to attend a Books Not Bombs Youth Convergence, a Planned Parenthood March for Womenís Lives and several different protests of Republican fundraisers. Housing will be provided for people leaving Friday. Two buses will leave Saturday at 2pm from the Memorial Union and Arrive in New York at 8 am to attend the biggest protest of the convention sponsored by United for Peace and Justice.
At this point in history it is hard to imagine an event that could generate more popular opposition. The convention celebrates an administration that was put into office on very illegitimate grounds, has aggressively sought to defund and privatize every social program it could get its hands on, used lies, manipulation, and intelligence that didnít exist to playing on insecurity and jingoism to wage a pre-emptive, illegal and immoral war costing billions of dollars and thousands of innocent lives, and has facilitated the massive redistribution and concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a smaller and smaller fraction of our population.
The convention will bring together a broad progressive force that has been attacked by the Bush Administration and the neoliberal Republican agenda for the past four years, including workers, students, women, people of color, members of the LGBT community, small farmers and environmentalists. There will be anarchists and other anti-capitalists, Greens, John Kerry supporters, and disaffected Republicans and Libertarians. The common message will be for an end to the oppressive and anti-democratic extremism of the Bush Administration and Republican agenda. It will be a call for an investment to the socially empowering tools of democracy not the violently constraining tools of fear and militarism. It is for books not bombs, schools not jails, and people over profit.
New Yorkís strongest unions: the teachers, firefighters, and police have announced plans to picket the event, and there is expected to be more than one million people in attendance making it possibly the largest demonstration in United States history. Despite this, the cityís mayor is making a mockery out of the peopleís constitutionally protected right to protest by refusing to issue a permit for a Sunday rally in Central Park. SLAC urges everyone to call Mayor Bloomberg at 212-788-3000 and demand he issue the permit that United for Peace and Justice has requested.
For more information on the buses and the protest go to these websites: The Student Labor Action Coalition: www.sit.wisc.edu/~slac The New York Collective Against the RNC: www.rncnotwelcome.org United for peace and Justice: www.jfpj.org
Contact Tony Schultz at aeschultz (at) wisc.edu 608 259 9326
Protest of the Republican National Convention in New York Citypage