NLG Convention 2008

The NLG 2008 Conference is right around the corner, starting 10/15 and ending 10/19. If you are interested in attending, visit nlg.org to reserve a place (and to receive a better rate, first become a member). If you'll need housing in Detroit, let post on the GoogleGroup as soon as possible, as housing is limited and there are deadlines. There are some terrific workshops and there are a number of excellent major panels this year, featuring many amazing speakers.

Labor Renewal: Fighting for the Future of Work
The panel will examine developing strategies within the labor movement that are generating opportunities for labor renewal, explore initiatives within AFL-CIO and Change To Win unions and discuss opportunities for building broader worker solidarity in the United States in the face of ongoing national and global attacks against organized labor. Invited speakers include Bill Fletcher, Cindy Estrada, and Sandy Pope.

Alternatives to Prison Proliferation
The development of the prison-industrial complex and the racism, classism, and other problems associated with it have been a major issue for the National Lawyers Guild and other progressive organizations. What are the alternatives to putting people in prison? This panel will feature three speakers on the following subjects: drug courts as an alternative, harm reduction, and strategies to shift spending to public services.

Legal and Political Strategies to Support the Liberation of Palestine
The nature of support for Palestine, and the movement to condemn Zionism as a form of racism, has been at the center of many NLG discussions. This panel seeks to build on that work, particularly in light of the 60 year anniversary of the Nakba, and propose concrete legal strategies for dismantling the Zionist occupation and ending the genocide. In addition, many NLG members are looking for concrete ways to support Palestine solidarity work. This panel helps provide strategies, such as legal support for a comprehensive boycott of Israel, expelling Israel from the United Nations and other measures in the international arena, litigating against Israel and Israeli officials for genocide, use of Israel’s human rights violations to aid asylum seekers in the U.S., addressing movement building in the U.S., dealing with internalized Zionism and prioritizing the voices of Palestinians, litigation in Israel’s courts by Palestinian organizations.

Transgender Constituency Panel
This panel will focus on the different legal and non-legal tactics that are being used around the country to help ensure that all people are able to have their legal documents reflect their gender identity. Depending on what state a person resides in or is born in, this can be accomplished through a court order, a legal change on a birth certificate or other measures. Most of these measures require some form of a surgical standard to allow for a legal change in gender. Lawyers, legal workers and organizers have been working in different ways to try and change standards that often create barriers for people to legally change their gender. From campaigns to change surgical standards required for gender changes on birth certificate to court room battles to obtain court orders changing a person’s gender, different strategies are being utilized all over the country to accomplish common goals. This panel will explore the successes and setbacks that have occurred as well as the pros and cons of the different tactics that lawyers, organizers and legal workers have used when assisting people and working to change policies around the legalization of gender.

Displacement and Occupation of Our Inner Cities: Understanding Post-Fascist Amerikkka
People living in inner-cities areas are being squeezed out. With “white flight” in reverse, poor people and people of color are forced out of desirable downtown city-areas. This panel will explore the ways that city and county governments are working with private developers, business interests, and the police to achieve these ends. The panel will also explore the legal tools attorneys and activists are using to combat these forces.

Hearing from the Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern Communities of Metro Detroit
Metro Detroit has the largest Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern population in the U.S. The 2008 NLG convention in Detroit provides a unique opportunity for Guild members to learn about the issues of concern to these communities and how we can support activists working to address those problems. Since 9/11 Middle Easterners have been heavily targeted by law enforcement agencies at all levels. These largely ineffective efforts have had devastating effects on these communities including secret detentions, disrupted families, frustration of religious obligations (e.g. annual contribution to Islamic charity) and weakening of social bonds. Speakers include activist lawyer Nabih Ayad, ADC National Board Member and the MI Advisory Board Chairman, Shahid Buttar of Muslim Advocates and the Pakistan Justice Coalition and others.

Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer, feminist and activist best known for 'The Vagina Monologues', wrote the following about Sarah Palin

Drill, Drill, Drill
I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, 'It was a task from God.'

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, 'Drill Drill Drill.' I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008