Monthly Archives: May 2010

The state of Arizona has just exploded any pretense of civil rights. It has begun the exposure of the American labor hypocrisy. We need our labor cost to be lower than that for which Blacks are willing to work. The reality is Americans will do any job if the pay is right. We should remind ourselves that this argument is about pay.

Join unemployed people, youth, labor and community activists on Saturday, May 8, the 75th anniversary of the WPA, 12 noon at the new Federal Building, 7th and Mission, San Francisco, to tell the government that today’s jobless crisis is as bad as it was 75 years ago — when the unemployed demanded and won a public jobs program. Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff is one of the speakers.

Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” (published by The New Press, 2010) looks at the invisible people and the invisible birdcage that keeps the masses of Black people locked in and alienated from society – the targets of the War on Drugs.

The Los Angeles Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant will hold a press conference Friday, May 7, at 8 a.m. and rally from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. during the final hearing before the murder trial of former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle, who fatally shot Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day 2009. Be there if you can!

The champagne bottles were popping at the U.N. for the pledging session’s success – $5 billion, $10 billion pledged for the future. Whose future? What Haitians in Haiti need is a hoe, a tractor, some lifting equipment, so they might not have to use their bare hands to dig out the corpses still under the rubble over three months after the earthquake. Just a hoe, a tractor – we’ll do the work.

The Coast Guard estimates 5,000 barrels of crude oil a day, 210,000 gallons a day, are pouring out of a damaged British Petroleum well in the Gulf of Mexico. Plans to set parts of the Gulf on fire have been pushed back by bad weather. In 1975, the New Orleans group, The Meters, released their album, “Fire on the Bayou.” In 2010 the idea of a fire on the bayou may well be coming true.

On April 30, in Edmond, Oklahoma, a team of lawyers and process servers attempted to personally serve Rwandan President Paul Kagame with an eight count lawsuit, which includes racketeering to acquire and control the resources of eastern D.R. Congo.