Sudden Opening to Win Mumia Abu-Jamal's Freedom. Please Act NOW!

Below is an appeal from Bob Mandel of the Adult School Teachers United (ASTU) Bargaining Team in Richmond California. Learn more below.

Greetings

Unexpectedly, Mumia Abu-Jamal has a shot at freedom.  Judge Lucretia Clemons of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas has ordered the District Attorney’s office to turn over its entire file, up to 200 boxes, to the defense.  

 

Mumia’s lawyers expect to find even further evidence that he was framed, that the police coerced and bribed witnesses, and that conscious racism and judicial bias have permeated all the proceedings against him.  The judge has stated that she will issue a ruling within 60-90 days, roughly Feb.16-Mar. 16.   

 

This is the hour to fight for Mumia’s freedom.  On Feb. 16, longshore workers in ILWU #10 will shut down the Ports of Oakland and San Francisco, holding a stop-work meeting to demand his immediate release.  Teachers in the SF Bay Area are organizing to teach on his case around that same date, Feb. 16, the middle of Black History Month.

 

In less than a week, a delegation from ILWU #10 will travel to a labor conference in South Africa and ask that unions there act again in his defense.   NUMSA, the largest union in South Africa, played a critical role in getting Mumia life-saving medicine when he nearly died from hepatitis. In a letter to Pennsylvania’s then-governor Wolf, it compared Mumia’s medical neglect to the treatment prisoners received under the apartheid regime.

 

We urge you to fight for Mumia’s freedom now.  As a first step, write to Judge Clemons demanding that he be released immediately.  Then take whatever action you can—rallies, workplace meetings, political strikes—to give power to the demand.

Judge Clemons address:

Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County
1220 Criminal Justice Center
1301 Filbert Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
215-683-7020

The judge’s order opening the files came after the filing of an Amicus Brief by the U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent; a public statement by then-sitting Judge Wendell Griffen of the 6^th Circuit Court of Appeals, Arkansas, that the law requires Judge Clemons to release Mumia immediately;  an outpouring of international labor support; and a letter writing campaign to the judge herself based on the contradiction between her preliminary ruling against Mumia and her statement to the Philadelphia Catholic Archdiocese Racial Healing Commission:  http://bitly.ws/z9Yt

Attached you will find a resolution from adult education teachers, (Download this resolution here) a statement by thePresident of the Vermont AFL-CIO, and a letter from the largest union in the UK, Unite. (screenshot below)

After 41 years in prison, 29 of those on death row, Mumia has a real chance now to win his freedom.  Mobilizing our unions can truly make a difference.  We’re hoping you and your union will join us! 

Please keep us posted on your actions,

In solidarity,  
Bob Mandel,
member, Adult School Teachers United (ASTU) Bargaining Team

 

 

The Brutal US Prison System. Prisoners Must Have the Right To Organize

Source: ACLU (Screenshot)

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

6-17-22

 

It is widely known that the US imprisons more of its population than any other country in the world. Two thirds of these prisoners almost 800,000 people according to a new report from the U.S. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), also function as workers. This has been a contentious issue within organized labor although, like every other important issue in society, the labor hierarchy does next to nothing to combat it.

 

Workers in prisons are denied basic rights afforded the rest of the population.  The brutal US prison industrial complex is as secretive as the US military where workers in uniform are also denied many rights the rest of us have. The 13^th Amendment to the US Constitution protects against slavery and involuntary servitude but, as the report points out, “….explicitly excludes from its reach those held in confinement due to a criminal conviction. The roots of modern prison labor can be found in the ratification of this exception clause at the end of the Civil War, which disproportionately encouraged the criminalization and effective re-enslavement of Black people during the Jim Crow era, with impacts that persist to this day.”

 

The ACLU report points out that these, “…..incarcerated workers, produce more than $2 billion per year in goods and more than $9 billion per year in services for the maintenance of the prisons. Once incarcerated, workers are excluded from minimum wage, safety and other labor laws, they are denied the right to unionize. Here in California, we have seen how important incarcerated workers’ are during fire season as many of those that fight the increasing number of wildfires that are a product of climate change, are prisoners. A total of 14 states use prisoners in this capacity, the report says.

 

Prisoners are forced to work for next to nothing----13 to 52 cents an hour and it comes as no surprise that seven southern states, renowned for the brutal exploitation of prison labor, historically, in particular when it comes to the black population, pay no wages at all.

 

The pandemic has also had a devastating effect on the incarcerated with more than 3000 dying, “…..due to overcrowding, lack of access to virus mitigating tools like masks and vaccines, and inadequate access to health care.” Some 16 US states denied them early access to vaccines the report says.

 

Faced with the increased efforts by the mostly young unorganized workers at places like Starbucks and Amazon, the labor hierarchy has been forced to pay lip service to this movement. We have seen some of the leaders of this movement being photographed with established union bureaucrats and some have made comments here and there. On twitter, a “like” here and there from established union officials, Sara Nelson of the flight attendants’ union for example, has accompanied tweets from Amazon and Starbucks activists, but there has been no serious effort on the part of the labor hierarchy to mobilize the potential power of organized labor’s 14 million members and link the organized with the unorganized in a serious offensive against capital.

 

The organized working class must demand that the incarcerated and workers in the military have rights afforded the rest of us, rights workers fought hard for over a couple of centuries. In particular, the right to unionize. The ACLU report explains that prisoners that refuse to work are subject to punishments that include loss of family visits, denial of sentence reductions and even solitary confinement. Every worker should be conscious of this brutality and if in a union, take the issue up with your co-workers and get your local to take a position. We need to make this an issue. Incarcerated workers are among the most vulnerable of our class with the least rights. Not surprisingly, the bosses will not be averse to using them against us when we go on strike, just as they do with workers in the military. Fighting to expand rights we have to those of us in prison and in the military will strengthen us in our day to day battles against the capitalist offensive and the destruction of our wages, benefits and standard of living in general.

 

I am not naïve enough to expect the trade union hierarchy to take action on this disgraceful situation as even going on the offensive on behalf of their own members is avoided. The union officialdom, is fully aware of the tremendous potential power of their own members and are terrified of it and the idea that the Democratic Party will step to the plate is sheer fantasy.  But labor’s rank and file and all activists fighting on any fronts, must take these issues up. It is in our best interests to do so.

 

The ACLU report can be read here.

12 Important Points from Jacobin’s Latest Issue: “Reduce the Crime Rate”

I am not alone on the left in being critical of the Jacobin Magazine as the author of this review points out. But like him I have also read a few, not too many, very good articles in the past and this is one of them. I recall two in particular that I posted to this blog and this is another one. I think I will republish them. Excellent material here. We share this commentary from The Multiracial Unity Blog. The author is Joseph G Ramsey.

Capitalism can't live without racism. We can't live with it.

Don’t Judge an Issue Just by Its Cover – 12 Important Points from Jacobin’s Latest Issue: “Reduce the Crime Rate”

by Joseph G. Ramsey

November 27, 2021

It’s not enough to judge a left journal by its cover. A recent case in point: people in left social media circles of late have been taking shots at the democratic socialist magazine Jacobin’s latest issue (https://jacobinmag.com/issue/lower-the-crime-rate), with its provocative (and maybe confusing) cover bearing the slogan “Lower the Crime Rate.” A range of radical voices online have reacted to this cover as if it amounts to a kind of endorsement of police repression in liberal guise. But actually the lead articles inside the issue are, in this comrade’s view, quite good. From the Opening Statement by Benjamin Fogel to the interview with Marie Gottschalk, the contents here are valuable for the way they highlight major blindspots structuring liberal and much “left” common sense and activism around policing, prisons, and the carceral state these days. The issue deserves wide engagement, as it can help us to see more clearly some of the real challenges that lie before us in terms of radically changing the system of “criminal justice” in the USA. One need not share Jacobin‘s emphasis on electoral politics (or the specific organizational vehicle of the Democratic Socialists of America) to find value in the magazine’s pages.

Among the main takeaways:

1) That last year alone 21,570 people in the USA were murdered, a significant surge from the years prior. It follows that the widespread left talking point that the rise in crime is all an imaginary product of right-wing hysteria and sensationalist mass media is false. The USA is between 3 and 30 times more violent than its wealthy “peer nations”; violent crime remains a reality structuring US working-class life. It follows that would-be working-class organizers need to take it seriously.

2) That a black person in the US is 35 times more likely to be killed by another civilian than by a police officer. The US Black population’s murder rate exceed that of all countries on earth, excepting Jamaica and El Salvador. The 1000 or so people killed by police each year in the USA remains a perpetual outrage, but we must not allow this outrageous police violence to lead us to neglect the real problem of violent crime in this country, a problem which disproportionately affects Black (and poor, and Latin@ and Native) people.

3) That polling shows that a vast super-majority of Americans at present (apparently 86%!?) want the police to spend as much or *more* time in their neighborhoods as they do now, even as strong majorities think that “policing requires major changes” (58%) and think that “police violence is a serious problem” (79%). Such (contradictory) numbers can certainly be read symptomatically–as reflecting dominant media, politicians’ framings and general social fears–but, even so, police abolitionists thus have, to put it mildly, a lot of *persuading* to do if they are going to build a majority that can make such a change viable in most parts of the country.

4) That while the Black incarceration rate in the USA is off the charts compared to other countries (as is now well-known), being around 5 times that of the white incarceration rate in the US, even the incarceration rate for white individuals alone is still 4-15 times the incarceration rate of Japan and Western European countries. Thus, to frame the expansion of imprisonment in the USA as simply a “New Jim Crow” or an expression of anti-Black “systemic racism” is clearly inadequate. Even if the US released every single Black prisoner tomorrow, this country would still be imprisoning more people than any other country on earth. Framing incarceration as primarily an anti-“Black” problem risks blinding us to half the problem, and half of the potential mass base for its transformation.

5) That the main driver of mass incarceration in the US has not been non-violent drug offenses–and certainly not non-violent offenses linked only to petty drugs like marijuana. (Such marijuana only offenses amount to only around 1% of those in prison.) Even if ALL prisoners whose primary charge is a drug offense were released tomorrow, that would reduce the prison population by only 20%, still leaving the US by far the main jailer in the world. Drug decriminalization then, however correct (and this author mostly supports it), does not yet speak to the heart of the problem: a growing punitiveness in US society and government that is at once increasing the violence of this society, while responding (and often compounding) high levels of real violence in the society more generally. (The place of property crimes here deserves more attention than the Jacobin issue provides.)

6) That there are more than 200,000 people in the US serving “life sentences,” many of them without even the prospect of parole. This is more than many countries incarcerate at any one time, for any amount of time, and around the *total* number of prisoners held in the USA before the prison boom and the “war on crime” launched in the late 70s. It represents a startlingly state-sanctioned condemnation of our fellow human beings, a mass policy of flushing people away without even the hope of rehabilitation or redemption.

7) That in the USA today, more $$$ value is stolen by employers via “wage theft” each year than the total $$$ of property stolen as a result of “robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts.” Thus, even without going deeper to the Marxist point that all wage-labor involves a kind of theft through exploitation, the employer class is a massive source of criminality, host to a massive amount of robbery.

8)That the hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of dollars of private and corporate wealth that is held (often “legally”) in tax havens like the Caiman Islands or Panama is not only a massive social theft of tax resources from the people, but also creates a swamp of shadow banking and underground finance that attracts, feeds, and enables organized crime the world over.

9) That crime among the masses can and should be viewed not as right-wing (or liberal) invention to justify militarized policing, but as a genuine “index of oppression,” “born out of poverty and the miseries of capitalism.” As such, it requires action not just (and not primarily) at the level of policing or public safety (though the reality of these levels cannot be bypassed), but a deeper social transformation of the entire economic system. The goal of bringing down the crime rate, and thus the widely felt need for expansive policing, requires a broader kind of *abolitionism*, one aimed at abolishing poverty, abolishing homelessness, making quality health care (including mental healthcare) as well as quality education available to all, providing sustaining and meaningful employment to those who currently lack it, and generally redistributing wealth and power downward to reduce the vast inequalities in our midst.

10) That, within the current system, the kind of radical reforms above are going to *cost much more* than the current state strategy of intensive policing and punishment. Shifting the resources from existing police institutions to social programs, public health, or prevention, however well intended or symbolically powerful, will *not* be anywhere near enough (by a factor of more than 10). Indeed, to the extent that a focus on “defunding the police” takes our focus off of fighting to expand the total federal and state revenues for things like universal healthcare, public housing, jobs programs, as well as redistributive progressive taxation, it risks becoming a self-defeating endeavor. (Furthermore, some studies show that underfunded police departments may in fact become *more* abusive, not less.) We need to keep our eyes on the real prize.

11) That the current system response to the economic stagnation since the 1970s has in many ways been a response based on not only social control priorities of the elite, but controlling things on the *cheap,* keeping taxes on the rich and corporations low, maintaining profitability, etc. We should be honest about the massive social investments–and the need to expropriate the social wealth controlled by capital and the rich–that will be necessary for this kind of program of radical reform. You can’t squeeze public health and social safety from the bloody budget of a SWAT team or a Bearcat.

12) Reducing the glut of guns in the USA, shifting drug offenses from the frame of “crime” to “public health” would all be good things, and transferring the deadly militarized budget surpluses of US police to social programs and community based crime prevention initiatives would also (aka “Defund the Police” or even better “Demilitarize the Police”). So would ending the CIA, whose criminal anti-communist crusades have seeded the terrain for organized crime and drug trafficking for generations. But without deeper transformations in Americans political consciousness and society, reforms (radical or moderate) at the level of policing are not only unlikely to accomplish the ends of harm reduction, but may in fact play into the hands of far-right politicians who love nothing more than to run on “law and order,” as if their policies of increasing punishment, surveillance, militarization, and racist profiling are the only way to keep communities “safe.” The left cedes the ground of serious public safety to the right at its peril.

Joseph G. Ramsey teaches English and American Studies at UMass Boston, where he is active in the Faculty Staff Union (FSU/MTA) and in struggles to defend public higher education.  He is presently working on a book recuperating the critical communism of Richard Wright: <

https://newpol.org/recovering-the-dialectic-of-race-and-class-struggle-in-the-usa/&gt;

 

Black Lives Matter: Jim Crow by stealth

Police detain Ieshia Evans during a protest against police brutality in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 9, 2016, days after police shot and killed Alton Sterling. (Reuters/Jonathan Bachman.) Source

by Mark Bygrave - UK trade unionist and Labour party member.

As a result of the civil rights movement from the 1960s onwards, and the shifting cultural outlook of white Americans who had generally moved to the view that overt acts of racism were unacceptable, reforms were introduced which, for a period of time allowed for some increases in living standards for some black US citizens.

A programme of “affirmative action” was also introduced by white liberal politicians, desperate to find a solution to the anger coming out of black communities and to contain it within the capitalist system itself. Although this did bring some material benefits to a minority of black people through education, media, business and other workplaces, where positions were “reserved” for them, it also played into the hands of the right-wing, who weaponized affirmative action amongst white workers, to further sow division. They used the line that “he only got the job because he’s black”, showing that there will never be an end to the bosses trying to divide our class along race lines whilst they wield social and economic power, however much tinkering is attempted.

The ruling class thought they could socially engineer a section of their class to open it up to black and brown people who would then act as apologists and advocates of capitalism and keep the mass of blacks in check. Nowhere is this more exemplified than by people like Candace Owens who are part of the Trump media offensive to give black cover to the white ruling class and try split US blacks along class lines. Owens effectively blames African-Americans for their own predicament, and “bad choices”, all the while refusing to acknowledge the objective conditions that the vast majority of blacks are born into. In the UK we see comments along a similar vein from the likes of Labour MP David Lammy and former head of the commission for racial equality  who never once raises the issue of class and only ever talk about tinkering and reforms of a system that has racism hardwired into its DNA that will ultimately do nothing for the mass of people, but may advance the careers of a select few.

What is systemic racism?

In the US it is the system of mass incarceration that underpins racism in US capitalism. Mass incarceration effectively replaced the Jim Crow segregation laws and was begun by Nixon, using the “southern strategy” and then put into full effect by Reagan in his now infamous “war on drugs”. Billions of federal dollars were offered to state and local law enforcement, on the condition it was used in the “drug war”, which became a euphemism for terrorising and criminalising black communities.

The stealth of this system is that its supposed to be “colourblind” and only goes after “criminals” but everyone knows the colour of the person a politician is talking about when they refer to a “criminal” is the USA 

In fact, when Reagan started his drug campaign, the majority of white Americans did not even view drugs as a major issue. It was jobs and health that were the main issues for white Americans, but US capitalism was not able to address these, given the world economic situation at the time. So neo-liberal policies were introduced to transfer public money into private hands, to increase profitability for capital together with huge tax cuts for the rich to kick start a boom paid for by the poorest sections of US society mainly black and brown people. 

Supported by media depictions of black men as pimps, dealers and rapists, the ruling class set about de-humanising black people with negative stereotypes prevalent throughout white American TV, newspapers, movies and news reports.

All studies show that drug use was and remains pretty near equal amongst whites as it is blacks, but white kids had nothing to fear in the suburbs if they happened to be found in possession of small amounts of cannabis after Reagan’s declaration of war.

Moralizing and hand-wringing

In contrast, in black communities we saw young black males arrested, charged, convicted or imprisoned at alarmingly high rates and then being ripped from their families, devastating community ties and foundations.

We then had to listen to the moralising hand-wringing of white commentators in mainstream media, talking about absent fathers and the lack of moral guidance denied to black children, and suggesting that black fathers were ‘feckless’, whilst all the time ignoring the destruction of families through racist law enforcement, poverty and underfunded education.

Police were given powers to stop and search, even though the 4th Amendment was specifically written to prevent unlawful search and seizure. Various challenges were made even all the way to the Supreme Court, but a “drugs exception” is now implicit, even though it is not specifically written anywhere in the 4th Amendment. The supreme court judges have effectively given the green light to racist stop-and-search and allowed a branch of law enforcement to define the constitutional rights of citizens.

The threat of death is inherent in every police stop

Once stopped by the police, the nightmare for any black person really begins. If they question the stop, protest or resist in any way, the police will use brute force, then pile on trumped-up charges, like assaulting an officer or resisting arrest, and the pretext to be taken to jail is achieved. If this is not bad enough, the threat of death by cops is inherent in every situation when a black person is stopped. A cop only has to say he felt his life was threatened to use deadly force.

The nightmare of a criminal justice system that is so weighted against poor people is then shown in full glare. Too poor to have a lawyer and with a token public defender system so underfunded and overworked that it means anyone arrested is faced with staying in jail or trying to get bail.

The bail system is then the next hurdle where you are expected to raise surety for thousands of dollars through family or friends, which is a near impossibility. Contrast that with the case of Epstein, who was in jail arrested on suspicion of sex with minors and who was released on bail within four hours.

So the pressure to get out of a stinking jail is applied by the prosecutor's office, where the DA has so much power to intimidate and extract a confession or plea deal it becomes clear that the pursuit of ‘justice’ is non-existent. If you try to plead ‘not guilty’ and want to go to court, the DA can effectively threaten to escalate and add more charges, without any evidence. So you can enter the system on a charge that carries, say, 3 months prison and end up being faced with more serious charges that carry 20 years, if found guilty. Is it any surprise that most people cave in and take a plea deal, especially if faced with legal fees they cannot afford and continued incarceration?

Vast majority of charges never go to court

In around 97% of convictions, the person charged never sees the inside of a courtroom, except to agree to the deal with a judge. It is openly acknowledged by both defence and prosecutors in the US that if every person arrested actually demanded a court appearance to fight their charges, then the system would collapse, such is the number of people charged at any one time.

It is clear that the legal system, in terms of the experiences of poor people and especially black and brown caught up in it, is not the ‘pursuit of justice’. The aim is to get a conviction and for the arrestee to be criminalised for life and then to be excluded from mainstream society. What is this, if not segregation or Jim Crow by the back door?

Another step taken by Republicans and Democrats was to introduce mandatory sentencing, effectively removing the discretion of judges to look at the individual circumstances of the perpetrator and the crime itself and decide on sentencing. Now it became possible to receive a sentence for minor drug offences that was longer than for violent crimes. It was not unheard-of to be sentenced to life for a first-time offence.

In 1982, a Supreme Court ruling upheld forty years of imprisonment for possession in a case involving an attempt to sell 9 ounces of cannabis, and several years later the same Supreme Court upheld a sentence of life for defendant with no prior convictions who attempted to sell 23 ounces of cocaine. The 8th Amendment is supposed to protect citizens from “cruel and unusual” punishments, but once again ,there appears to be an exception for black people.

Is it any wonder that the vast majority of black people feel alienated, disconnected and unwelcome in the country of their birth? The constitution and the American dream are entirely meaningless to them.

Weapons, vehicles and surveillance equipment

The “war on drugs” allowed federal money to be showered on police  to purchase weapons, vehicles, surveillance equipment and anything else the police wanted. Within a few years police became completely dependent upon this funding which was only renewed if convictions and arrests continued to rise, so a perpetual cycle of mass arrests whilst cuts to social programmes were continued causing immense pain to families who were nearly all just trying to get by in some of the toughest neighbourhoods in the world. And so began the school to prison pipeline - a deliberate and constructed system to criminalise as many black youth as possible creating a cycle of deprivation and self fulfilling crime stats justifying further budget increases for the police.

New laws were also introduced, whereby police could seize assets and property, even if they only suspected it was from the proceeds of the drug trade. It wasn't long before law enforcement had a perpetual motivation to keep the war on drugs going to provide an ever-expanding flow of money into their departments.

In most US cities, the police budgets are more than all of those provided for social services put together, only emphasising the priorities of the capitalist class towards the black population.

This means that simultaneously there were police round-ups mass arrests alongside the defunding of schools, cuts to social services and other welfare programmes. A harsh collateral punishment was introduced where tenants could be evicted from public housing if a family member was convicted, so the damage and terror was not confined to just the arrestee and widened out to catch even more innocent poor people.

Prison system a multi-billion dollar business

The USA has 5% of the world's population, yet holds 25% of the world's prison population. Black males make up 4% of the US population but are around 40% of that prison population.  The prison system itself is now a multi-billion dollar business, where private companies have monetised every aspect of incarceration to profit off the backs of inmates, including forced labour for many well-known product brands, meals and phone calls for inmates, along with ancillary services and other profitable revenue streams.

Mass incarceration is making billions for the largest corporations in America whilst impoverishing black people.

Let us also not forget that once convicted of a felony in the USA and prison time is served, this is not, as one would expect, the end of the sentence. A convicted felon enters a parallel universe in which discrimination and stigma are legal. This also applies to people who accepted a plea deal and a felony conviction in return for not going to prison. In fact, the majority of convicted felons have not served prison time.

A 2008 study showed there were a shocking 2.3 million people in prisons and jails but a staggering 5.1 million under some form of “community correctional supervision”. Every single job application in the US requires the applicant to tick a box if they are a convicted felon. This all but excludes most people from obtaining even a basic minimum wage job and ever returning to society; it also prevents rehabilitation, so the cycle of petty crime – just to survive – is repeated, ultimately resulting, in many cases, in a return to prison.

In the 80s and 90s, both the Republican and to their shame, that ‘friend of the workers’ the Democratic Party, in efforts to outdo each other on being “tough on crime” agreed ever-more draconian post-felony release sanctions.

In almost all states a convicted felon cannot even get food stamps, cannot get public housing and with parole officers who provide no support and are just used as a force for social control. A convicted felon will be discriminated against quite legally by private landlords and forever denied licences for a wide range of professional bodies, resulting forever being locked out of mainstream society.

A felony sentence means permanent exclusion

Once on parole, you are subject to regular surveillance and monitoring and you may be stopped and searched, without consent, at any time. Is it any wonder that once somebody enters this world where the normal rules of citizenship do not apply there is a high rate of return to prison?

The US bureau of statistics shows that 30% of released prisoners were re-arrested within six months of release. Within three years, nearly 68% were rearrested for at least one offence.

This is the aim of mass incarceration and the criminalisation of the black community and is Jim Crow by stealth, reinvented and rebranded to hide its nature from white America because it is acknowledged that in 21st century even amongst whites, the idea of living in a racist society is abhorrent. So the ruling class have had to develop, evolve and rebrand their system of control of the black population and made it “colourblind” and pretend its only aim is to go after “criminals” to fool middle class white America.

More African-Americans adults are under correctional control today – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

In contemporary USA, it is not an exaggeration to describe the vast majority of black neighbourhoods as similar to the ‘Bantustans’ of Apartheid South Africa. The murder of the jogger Ahmaud Abery by white men who planned a lynching because a black man dared to run through “their” neighbourhood, gives an insight into how African Americans are forced to stay only where whites decide they should belong.

It's generally viewed that one of the roles of the police is to act as border guards, keeping black people in their zones and enforcing an unofficial travel ban to white neighbourhoods.

Systemic racism highlights that as important as it is to draw attention to the appalling bias in jobs, income and financial standing, it extends beyond the basic economic indices. African Americans live with the knowledge that there are some white citizens, especially the police, who would have no hesitation in killing them, because they know the justice system will almost always find a way to get them off.

This is clearly an attempt to divide workers in a “culture war” where if you are white you are expected to take the side of one ‘your own’ tribe. This must be resisted by all activists and by the Labour and trade union leaders. Quite rightly, the vast majority of our class are appalled by racism, but at the same time, very few are aware of what institutional or systemic racism actually consists of.

Heroism of youth on the streets

Important discussions about the role of the police have begun amongst the radicalised youth taking part in the uprisings in the US and as socialists we must intervene in these discussions. The role of the police in society has been exposed as a force for social control, not fighting crime.

In the US, even the police themselves acknowledge that they have been used as the “go to” organisation for the consequences of social issues, deprivation, underfunding of services and poverty that are not policing matters; from stray dogs and minor disagreements, through to far more serious social and health issues like drugs, unemployment, overcrowded housing. For too long, the stock answer has been “call the cops” and white America has been happy to go along with it.

The funding of the police must be subject to far more scrutiny where the workload of police could actually be reduced significantly if money was spent on services like mental health and drug rehabilitation programmes. Investment could be diverted to youth training and education programmes, but most of all, the so called “war on drugs” must end and be replaced with policing by consent with full democratic accountability at state, city and local level by means of elected democratic organs, where citizens can determine policy, operational guidelines and fully direct the work of the police.

We must listen to the youth and workers and encourage establishment of socialist education groups where the gap between unorganised workers and trade unions can be bridged.

The workers in the mighty US trade union movement must take inspiration from the heroism of those youth on the streets and be at the forefront of some bridge-building, by making links at grassroots level, inviting speakers to their local meetings for example. 

We have already seen examples of how unionised workers can support the struggle e.g. bus drivers in NYC refusing to assist transporting arrested demonstrators.

Union members must look at their own leaderships, who have continually sought conciliation and collaboration with the same people who support mass incarceration and they must break with any illusions that the Democrat Party or the capitalist system can provide social peace, economic prosperity or stability for any worker black or white.

We will fight for and will welcome any minor reforms this uprising may bring the workers of the US. But the capitalist will try to take any concessions back again sometime in the future. In the U.S, we are seeing a movement of the working class developing that is confronting racism and the murder of the black population by the police. It is inevitable that the capitalist system itself will come under fire as well. In this ongoing struggle a major goal must be the creation of a political alternative to the two capitalist parties, a workers’ party based on the unions and working class communities. This will give us a place to fight for our own class interests and strengthen the struggle for permanent change which will allow African Americans, Latinos and all POC to determine their own destiny. 

The ruling class are now relying on the Democratic Party to absorb this new wave of anger, with Obama and Pelosi both exploiting the situation to get Biden into power. The ‘lesser of two evils’ raises its head again in US politics, so we must agitate for a workers’ party, which, if established and armed with a socialist programme, would be unstoppable in a challenge for power and become a beacon to the world working class.

The US in 2020 has entered the world stage as one the opening episodes of the unfolding world revolution inspiring outpourings of solidarity in Paris, Berlin London and other cities around the globe. The internationalism of workers to the plight of our black brothers and sister is real and concrete and should fill us with optimism for the struggle that is about to unfold in the coming period

No Justice No peace!

For a Socialist USA, a socialist American continent and a Socialist World!

Postscript: This is an excerpt from the book, The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness by Michelle Alexander 

“Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.”

June 6, 2020

ICE Pepper Sprays Refugees Protesting Internment

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

I see the US House of Representatives just passed a law putting targeted sanctions on Chinese officials for "arbitrary detention, torture, and harassment" of the Uighur Muslims in China. How uncivilized.

Meanwhile here in the USA, US Immigration and Custom Enforcement officers (ICE) pepper sprayed economic refugees being held in a jail in rural Louisiana who were protesting their imprisonment, or what the US media calls, “prolonged detention”. A spokesperson for the company that owns these centers reassures us though that only, “a brief, calculated use of pepper spray was employed” affecting only 50 refugees, and they,“subsequently became compliant”. Don’t you just love the terminology representatives of the state security forces use? The protestors were refusing to go back to their cells, sleeping outside of them and some folks had written “libertad” on “bedsheets and towels” according to reports. The imprisoned are seeking asylum and being forced to spend months in holding cells with no effort to process them.

The jail is operated by a private company that owns several similar centers and jails throughout Louisiana and the number of imprisoned economic refugees in the state has grown over the past period and as many as 8000 were held earlier this year.

Do people not realize the hypocrisy of the US Congress, the most prolific purveyor of state violence on the planet, censoring any individual or administration for detention or torture?  Are we to think that this hypocrisy goes unnoticed by most people in the world? The US has two million people incarcerated, more than 50% people of color. We execute children, the mentally ill and have locked up the children of economic refugees in cages. We supply the arms and money for the Zionist regime’s theft of Palestinian land and murder of their children. The US embraces the murderer of Kashogi the Saudi dissident and US citizen. And what was/is Guantanamo but a torture chamber. Have you ever wondered how the US got a base in Cuba? And to top it off, we tolerate a rapist and racist in the White House. The US ruling class is thoroughly degenerate.

I do not raise this comparison out of any love for the Stalinist regime in Beijing, simply to point out the inconsistencies here.

I refer to the influx of people from our southern border as “economic refugees”, because that’s what they are. If we familiarize ourselves with the history of US imperialism in the region; its savage plunder of the resources as well as its indirect and at times violent direct meddling in the politics there, the correctness of that definition becomes clear. The US predator in chief and his right wing fascist supporters are fond of pointing to Latino gangs that originate in the region like MS 13, Barrio 18 or numerous US based gangs as one of the reasons for his ant-immigrant stand and the need for his stupid wall. I am not sure at this point but I think he cannot yet take the title of Deporter in Chief that his predecessor Barack Obama held.

The main point we have to grasp though is that the many Latino gangs in the US and particularly Los Angeles are a direct result of US policy in Central America. Some one million people fled north to escape US armed and financed death squads in Central America in the 1980’s, many of these people were urban or rural poor and many settled in Los Angeles with little opportunity or real assistance at integration. This history has to be understood if we are to talk at all about immigration.

In 1953 the US orchestrated the coup that overthrew the Guatemalan government that was introducing polices that would have laid the foundation for a healthier and more stable environment for the majority of the people there. Instead the new US backed regime slaughtered thousands of indigenous Guatemalans and many came to the US to survive. People don’t flee their homeland because they don’t like where they live generally. The US overthrew the Guatemalan government on behalf of the United Fruit Company. I wrote previously about this here. And I suggest reading The Brothers about the Dulles brothers and their role in the Guatemalan Coup. There is a review of that book here.  The US also orchestrated the coup that overthrew the democratically elected secular regime of Mossadegh in Iran the same year. The gift the US gave to Iran for that venture was the murderous Shah. This history was suppressed but became more widely known after Stephen Kinzers book,  All the Shah’s Men was published.

Street gangs, Latino or otherwise can’t match the biggest gang of all when it comes to violence and mayhem and that is the US ruling class and its organizations.  That the present gang occupying the US Congress can get away with the laws it passes, including the recent censure of China for human rights violations that would be perfectly legitimate if the source had any credibility on the world stage, is because the US working class has no concept of the murderous role it’s government plays on the world stage or turns a blind eye to it. 

That this will change I have no doubt.

US Prison Strike Begins Today

The US incarcerates more people, overwhelmingly working class people, than any other nation and in the most inhumane conditions.  This US Gulag disenfranchises millions of American citizens and disproportionally affects people of color who collectively comprise over 50% of the prison population.  The US also executes the mentally ill and children. We reprint this article about the strike from the Guardian.

 

US inmates stage nationwide prison labor strike over 'modern slavery'

Organisers say prisoners across the country are expected to refuse to work, hold sit-ins and even stage hunger strikes.

Ed Pilkington in New York

@edpilkington

Tue 21 Aug 2018 01.00 EDT Last modified on Tue 21 Aug 2018 01.02 EDT

Prisoners at San Quentin in California. The strike is being largely organized by prisoners themselves. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

The first part of the prisons likely to be hit will be the kitchens, where stoves will remain unlit, ready-meals unheated and thousands of breakfasts uncooked.

From there the impact will fan out. The laundry will be left unwashed, prison corridors un-mopped, and the lawns on the external grounds ring-fenced with barbed wire will go uncut

On Tuesday, America’s vast army of incarcerated men and women – at 2.3m of them they form by far the largest imprisoned population in the world – will brace itself for what has the potential to be the largest prison strike in US history.

Nineteen days of peaceful protest are planned across the nation, organised largely by prisoners themselves.

The strike is being spearheaded by incarcerated members of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a group of prisoners providing mutual help and legal training to other inmates. A few days ago they released an anonymous statement setting out their reasons for calling a protest that carries the risk of substantial penal retaliation.

“Fundamentally, it’s a human rights issue,” the statement said. “Prisoners understand they are being treated as animals. Prisons in America are a warzone. Every day prisoners are harmed due to conditions of confinement. For some of us it’s as if we are already dead, so what do we have to lose?”

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Organizers have put together a list of 10 national demands. They include improved prison conditions, an end to life without parole sentences or “death by incarceration” as the authors call them, increased funding for rehabilitation services and an end to the disenfranchisement of some 6 million Americans with felony convictions who are barred from voting.

One of the most passionately held demands is an immediate end to imposed labor in return for paltry wages, a widespread practice in US prisons that the strike organisers call a modern form of slavery. More than 800,000 prisoners are daily put to work, in some states compulsorily, in roles such as cleaning, cooking and lawn mowing.

The remuneration can be as woeful in states such as Louisiana as 4 cents an hour.

The idea that such lowly-paid work in a $2bn industry is equivalent to slavery is leant weight by the 13th amendment of the US constitution. It banned slavery and involuntary servitude, with one vital exception: “as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”.

Prisoners, in other words, have no constitutional rights and can be blatantly exploited.

Prisoners understand they are being treated as animals. Prisons in America are a warzone

In addition to a refusal to work, inmates engaging with the strike plan to go on hunger strikes, hold sit-in protests and stage a boycott of commissaries, collect phone calls and other payment streams where private and state-owned companies make money out of them. The boycott was the brainchild of Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun of the Free Alabama Movement under the rubric Redistribute the Pain.

He called on fellow prisoners to stop channeling either their own or their relatives’ money to what he called the “prison industrialized complex”. He urged participants to spend 25% of what they saved from the boycott on books such as Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration.

Inmates who join the action know that they face potentially serious consequences. Participants face being placed individually into isolation cells, while past prison strikes have been met with lockdowns of entire institutions.

Communications too are certain to be blocked, leading potentially to a blackout of news on the protest.

According to prison reform activists engaged in planning the strike, retaliatory measures have already started. Karen Smith, who runs the Gainesville, Florida chapter of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee that is backing the strike, said that prison authorities have moved most of the local strike organisers into solitary confinement wings where they will be unable to communicate with others.

“Other inmates have been warned that if they continue to contact advocacy groups they will be moved to the most brutal camps.”

The strike comes two years after the last major nationwide prison strike in September 2016 that saw more than 20,000 inmates refuse to show up for work across 12 states. That strike was co-ordinated out of Holman prison in Alabama, a state notorious for its overcrowded and dilapidated penal institutions, by a group of inmates styling themselves the “Free Alabama Movement”.

The Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina, was the scene of a deadly prison riot earlier this year. Photograph: Sean Rayford/AP

 This year’s strike was triggered by the riot at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina in April in which seven inmates died in what was the most deadly prison unrest in a quarter of a century. The bloody melee, fueled by gang rivalry over contraband, lasted for seven hours while prison guards did next to nothing to stop it.

Within days of the South Carolina carnage, and the renewed spotlight it put on the gross overcrowding, understaffing and inhumane living conditions in American prisons, the idea of a nationwide strike began to form.

As inspiration for what promises to be a tough 20 days ahead, strike organizers are leaning on history. The nationwide action begins on Tuesday on the 47th anniversary of the death of the prominent Black Panther member, George Jackson, who was shot as he tried to escape in the prison yard of San Quentin in California.

The strike is then scheduled to close on 9 September, the 47th anniversary of the Attica prison rebellion in upstate New York. In an echo of today’s protest, the 1971 Attica riot was also framed by inmates as a push for humane conditions and basic political rights.

But after four days of negotiations it ended in a bloodbath when New York’s then governor, Nelson Rockefeller, sent in state police armed with shotguns and tear gas. Twenty nine inmates and 10 of their hostages were killed.

Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971, said that it was symbolically important that Attica was being invoked. “Attica drew a line in the sand – it was a recognition that people have a right to rebel, and will rebel, when they forced into unbelievably horrific conditions.”