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DESCRIPTION:March through campus starts from Oakes College at 2 PM. 
 Rally/speak-out/teach-in begins at Quarry Amphitheater at 3:30 PM! For 
 information on the history and politics behind this event, please check 
 out: https://www.womenstrikeus.org/\n\nOn March 8, we will go on strike 
 against gender violence – against the men who commit violence and against 
 the system that protects them.\n\nLast year on March 8, we, women of every 
 kind, marched, stopped work and took over the streets in fifty countries 
 across the world. In the United States we rallied, marched, left the dishes 
 to the men, in all the major cities of this country and countless smaller 
 ones. We shut down three school districts to prove to the world, once 
 again, that while we sustain society we also have the power to shut it 
 down.\n\nMarch 8 is coming again and things have gotten worse for us as 
 women in this country.\n\nIn the one year of the Trump administration we 
 have not only been pelted with verbal abuse and misogynistic threats in the 
 guise of official statements, the Trump regime has put in place policies 
 that will continue such attacks on us in deeply institutional ways.\n\nThe 
 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act guts exemptions that benefit low-wage workers, the 
 vast majority of whom are women. It has plans to savage Medicaid and 
 Medicare, the only two programs left in this cruel neoliberal landscape 
 that support the elderly and the poor, the sick and the disabled, family 
 planning and children – and hence women, who do most of the care work. 
 And while the act denies health care to immigrant children, it introduces 
 college savings for “unborn children”, a chilling way to establish by 
 legal fiat the “rights” of the “unborn child” thereby assaulting 
 our fundamental right to make decisions about our own bodies.\n\nBut that 
 is not the whole story.\n\nWith these multiple warfronts opened against us, 
 we have not cowered. We too have fought back.\n\nWhen last fall women with 
 public visibility and access to international media decided to break the 
 silence about harassment and sexual violence, the floodgates were finally 
 opened and a stream of public denunciations inundated the web. The #Metoo, 
 #UsToo and #TimesUp campaigns made visible what most women already knew: 
 whether in the workplace or at home, in the streets or in the fields, in 
 prisons or in ICE detention centers, gender violence with its differential 
 racist impact haunts women’s everyday life.\n\nWhat has also become clear 
 is that public silence about something we have always known, endured and 
 fought back against, does not exist simply because we are afraid or ashamed 
 to speak up: the silence is enforced. It is imposed by Congressional laws 
 that make women go through nearly a year of mandatory counseling and 
 mediation, if they dare to make an official complaint. It is affected by 
 the criminal justice system that routinely dismisses women’s reports 
 using additional layers of intimidation and violence. On university 
 campuses, willing administrators find clever “legal” means to protect 
 the institution and the perpetrator while throwing women to the wolves. The 
 racist foundations of these legal procedures demand further 
 resolve.\n\n#Metoo, #UsToo and #TimesUp have not just exposed individual 
 rapists and misogynists, they have ripped apart the veil that hides the 
 institutions and structures that enable them.\n\nRacialized gender violence 
 is international as must be the campaign against it. US imperialism, 
 militarism and settler colonialism foster misogyny throughout the world. It 
 is no coincidence that Harvey Weinstein, in his long years of trying to 
 silence and terrorize women, used the security firm, Black Cube, which is 
 made up of former agents of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. 
 We know that the same state that sends money to Israel to brutalize the 
 Palestinian Ahed Tamimi and her family also funds the jails in which 
 African American women like Sandra Bland and others have died.\n\nSo, on 
 March 8 we will go on strike against gender violence – against the men 
 who commit violence and against the system that protects them.\n\nWe 
 believe that it was no accident that it was our sisters with social 
 standing that first made visible what we all knew. Their ability to do so 
 was stronger than our low wage sister, so often of color, who cleans rooms 
 in that fancy Chicago hotel or the sister who picks fruits in the 
 Californian fields.\n\nThe vast majority of us do not speak out because we 
 lack collective power in our workplace, and are denied social supports such 
 as free health care, outside of it. The job, with its low wage, with its 
 bullying manager and abusive boss, with its long hours, becomes the one 
 thing we fear losing, for it is the only means for providing food for our 
 families and providing care for our sick and infirm.\n\nWe do not keep our 
 mouths shut. We are forced to keep our mouths shut by capitalism.\n\nSo, on 
 March 8 we will speak out, personally, against the individual abusers who 
 tried to ruin our lives, and we will speak out, collectively, against the 
 economic insecurity that prevents us from speaking out.\n\nWe will strike 
 because we want to expose our personal abusers. And we will strike because 
 we need social welfare provisions and living wage jobs to feed our families 
 as well as the right to unionize, should we be fired for standing up 
 against their abuse.\n\nSo, on March 8 we will strike against mass 
 incarceration, police violence and border controls, against white supremacy 
 and the beating drums of US imperialist wars, against poverty and the 
 hidden structural violence that closes our schools and our hospitals, 
 poisons our water and food and denies us reproductive justice.\n\nAnd we 
 will strike for labor rights, equal rights for all immigrants, equal pay 
 and a living wage, because sexual violence in the workplace is allowed to 
 fester when we lack these means of collective defense.\n\nMarch 8, 2018 
 will be a day of feminism for the 99%: a day of mobilization of black and 
 brown women, cis and bi, lesbian and trans women workers, of the poor and 
 the low waged, of unpaid caregivers, of sex workers and migrants.\n\nOn 
 March 8 #WeStrike.\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2018/03/06/18807191.php
SUMMARY:International Women's Strike Speak-Out/Teach-in
LOCATION:Quarry Amphitheater at UCSC\n1156 High Street, Santa Cruz
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2018/03/06/18807191.php
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