About 250 people attended a Black Lives Matter rally in Putney, Vermont on July 22. Putney is about 10 minutes from Brattleboro by car. Vermont has the nation's most racist prison system, which may help explain why it is one of the whitest states. Vermont sends prisoners to a private prison in Mississippi.
***********
About 70 people attended a Black Lives Matter rally in Keene on July 4. It was organized by Conor Hill and two other people. Hill did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The Valley Post has interviewed him in the past and will post his comment in the “comments” section at the bottom of this article.
*********
Until now, no news outlet has covered a July 1 Code Pink rally in Northampton. Dozens of people attended the rally. The rally was to protest Trump's support of Israel’s annexation of the West Bank in Palestine. More information is at www.CodePink.org.
Democracy and the kind of extreme economic inequality that now exists in the USA are incompatible. Unions reduce inequality. In Brattleboro on June 15 there was a well-attended union rally, seen in the below photo. A follow up rally is set for June 22. Details are available from Sy Creamer, the union president. Her email address is at:
www.unap.org/unap-locals/brattleboro-retreat
A phone number is at:
www.unap.org/about/contact-us-2
To enlarge the photo, click on it, then scroll down and click “view full size image.” Then you can click on the photo to zoom in more.
On May 1 there will be car rallies in Brattleboro at 12:30 p.m., in Holyoke at 2 p.m., and in Springfield at 4 p.m. The rallies are for workers' rights. All three are caravans. A similar rally in Greenfield on April 24 drew more than 100 people. The Brattleboro rally starts at the high school parking lot and will pass grocery stores and hospitals. It's being organized by the Vermont Workers' Center and other groups.
There will be a car rally in Northampton on April 17 at 2:15 p.m. The main goal is to get politicians to listen to workers who are calling for face masks and other safety gear. The car rally will be a caravan that will stop outside the hospital, a supermarket, and another location to-be-announced. It starts at the lower parking lot at the high school, 380 Elm Street. Organizers are asking people to bring signs saying things like, “Masks for staff and customers.” More information is at:
On April 9, a land trust in Keene announced it had permanently protected 37 acres of farmland in Chesterfield, New Hampshire from development. Chesterfield borders Brattleboro. The land trust is the Monadnock Conservancy. The below photo shows the land with Lucky Evans and his daughter Ingrid. photo by Monadnock Conservancy
Unless activists stop the plan, thousands of acres of Green Mountain National Forest will be logged soon. The forest is about 10 miles from Brattleboro. “They are coming hard with the chainsaws to Green Mountain National Forest,” Chris Matera told the Valley Post. “What a sorry sight it will be to look down from the top of Mount Snow and see clear-cuts instead of that beautiful intact forest we see now.”
No nation keeps such a high percentage of its people in prison as the USA. Europe's rate is a third of ours. Due to the coronavirus, the prosecutors in the counties that are home to Northampton and Brattleboro are releasing some prisoners. “I have released some due to coronavirus,” Tracy Shriver told the Valley Post in a phone interview on March 26. She is the prosecutor for Windham county, which includes Brattleboro. Shriver said she has freed “more than one and fewer than 100” people due to the epidemic.
Unless it's postponed due to coronavirus, there be a peace rally in Brattleboro on April 15. The rally will be outside 2 Main Street from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. With 4 percent of the world's population, the USA spends as much money on war as the rest of the world combined. This year the USA will spend $1.6 trillion on war. That's 47 percent of the federal budget, meaning about half your income taxes go to war. This data is from:
www.warresisters.org/sites/default/files/fy2021piechart.pdf
More information on the Brattleboro rally will be posted soon at:
In Holyoke on February 21 at 4 p.m. there will be a rally in solidarity with Native Americans in Canada who are fighting construction of a fracked gas pipeline. The rally will be at 12-6 Mt. Park Road. More information about the rally is available by calling Gia at (413) 512-1192. More information about the pipeline is on the web site of the tribe that's leading the fight to stop it:
www.wetsuweten.com/territory/pipelines
*********