‘Jailhouse Lawyers’ by Mumia Abu-Jamal

July 18, 2009

“Jailhouse Lawyers, we are learning, are often people of extraordinary firmness who fight for a law that rarely fights for them.” “Unity is feared … isolation is favored.” – from “Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A.” by politically condemned death row prisoner, journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal

“This landmark legislation (Prison Litigation Reform Act) will help bring relief to a civil justice system overburdened by frivolous prisoner lawsuits. Jailhouse lawyers with nothing else to do are tying our courts in knots with an endless flood of frivolous litigation.” – Sen. Orrin Hatch, former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee

Moving off the lie of the budget cut into community reparations

July 18, 2009

Where do we go now? Yes, keep up the struggle for budget justice, but let’s look at another frame based in our own gifts, our thrival, not just survival – a plan of action to move off of the grid of philanthropy pimps, globalization pimps, non-profit pimps, to reject the lie of budget cuts, to reclaim our land and resources stolen from us so long ago!

A spiritual African American man vs. Darth Vader

May 7, 2009

If you’re a Black man working security for Lucasfilm at the Presidio, Darth Vader will get you for cheerfully greeting employees in the morning with a friendly “God bless you.”

Newsom ignores voters: $2.7 million poverty court opens on Polk Street

April 8, 2009

Notwithstanding a blistering defeat at the polls and strong opposition from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Mayor Gavin Newsom has opened his Community Justice Center, diverting several million dollars from essential City services to incarcerate poor people for the sole act of being poor.

POOR’s poetry battle

March 15, 2009

The 2009 Poetry Luchador/Wrestling Battle of ALL of the Sexes was a multi-generational, multi-lingual, multi-cultural mash-up of art, gender, poetry, wrestling, language and theatre brought to you by your favorite revolutionary poets, media-makers, poverty scholars and cultural workers at POOR Magazine.

Bringing democracy to Amerikkka

November 3, 2008

With Black youth on the front lines this election season, along with all youth plus older Blacks and other people of color, the struggle for real democracy can finally claim victory in the U.S. Masses of new voters have registered and are already lining up to vote wherever early voting is available, as it is here in the Bay Area.

From Amy Goodman to Nadra Foster: Implementing alternatives to police terror

September 30, 2008

The officers were waiting, loaded firearms dangling from their waists, steel filled chests puffed out, glassy stares behind helmets. She was one woman alone. She was a reporter doing her job. She was attacked by the police for no reason at all. Her only crime was being a media producer in a hostile location.