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2011 June

Monthly Archives: June 2011

Solidarity and commitment

The Black August Organizing Committee stands in full solidarity with those of our brothers and sisters persecuted and tormented daily within the confines of America’s concentration camps.

California SHU prisoners begin hunger strike July 1

Prisoners in the Security Housing Units, SHUs, at Pelican Bay and Corcoran state prisons in California are beginning an indefinite hunger strike on July 1, 2011, to protest the cruel and inhumane conditions of their imprisonment in what is being called “an unusual show of racial unity.” Breaking news: Prisoners at Centinela have joined the hunger strike. A prisoner there reports: “Only a few inmates are walking the yard. No Blacks or Hispanics have left their cells. No one has gone to work. He said all the races are united in this fight.”

Corcoran SHU prisoners join Pelican Bay hunger strike

Greetings to all who support freedom, justice and equality. We here of the NCTT SHU stand in solidarity with and in full support of the July 1 hunger strike and the five major action points and sub-points as laid out by the Pelican Bay Collective in the policy statements.

African Union threatens withdrawal from United Nations

Mathaba has learned that the African Union is intending to pull out of the United Nations Organization unless NATO stops bombing fellow AU member, Libya.

Alice Walker: Why I’m joining the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza

Why am I going on the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza? It seems to me that during this period of eldering it is good to reap the harvest of one’s understanding of what is important, and to share this, especially with the young. How are they to learn, otherwise?

Wanda’s Picks for July 2011

A number of trees have fallen in the forest this past month and we want to acknowledge the huge spaces their absence brings: Geronimo ji jaga Pratt, Black Panther, decorated veteran of multiple wars ...

Hunger strikers protest perpetual solitary confinement

On July 1, 2011, I and my fellow prisoners – on their own free will – will be commencing a hunger strike to protest the denial of our human rights and equality via the use of perpetual solitary confinement. The Supreme Court has referred to “solitary confinement” as one of the techniques of “physical and mental torture.”

New Orleans police violence trial begins

Opening arguments begin today in what observers have called the most important trial New Orleans has seen in a generation. It is a shocking case of police brutality that has already redefined this city’s relationship to its police department and radically rewritten the official narrative of what happened in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina.

Neo-neo-colonialism?

European and American exploiters, using U.N. resolutions – but ignoring others – and NATO as fig leaves, rain death and desolation in the name of “protecting civilians.” That these same forces were just months ago in bed with the very same dictators that they today denounce, shows us that something else is at work.

Keep AAMLO and all libraries open, Oakland!

A recent evening at the African American Museum and Library in Oakland was special. The line wrapped around the corner of 14th Street at Martin Luther King Jr. Way as people lined up to hear Isabel Wilkerson talk about her book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”

Black Man with sagging pants kicked off plane and arrested, but man in panties...

Just a few days ago, a college football player was booted off a US Airways flight for having sagging pants. As it turns out, sagging pants is considered to be worse than a man wearing nothing but a pair of panties. A US Airways spokesperson confessed as much on Tuesday as she had to try to explain the inexplicable double standard.

Barack Obama: Africa’s friend or enemy?

President Obama, who many expected to bring peace and civility, has become a warmonger. His predecessor, George Bush, created so much animosity in the world ... So naturally, the world expected Obama to be different. Sadly, this hasn’t been the case.

The People’s Press

One of the most interesting publishing ventures in the San Francisco Bay Area is the POOR Press project. This revolutionary bi-lingual enterprise grew out of POOR magazine, a journal of poetry, polemics and righteous articles created by the inimitable Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, the indomitable force and magnet of affirmationof the people on the street, the economically poorest section of this society and her late mama who is alwaysstill close to Tiny’s heart and always evoked by her in a continuous solidarity.

Massive land grabs in Africa by U.S. hedge funds and universities

“A new report claims farmers in Africa are being driven off their lands to make way for vast new industrial farming projects backed by hedge funds seeking profits and foreign countries looking for cheap food. "

Louisiana Legislature votes to parole some elderly prisoners

The American Civil Liberties Union hailed the passage of a bill in the Louisiana legislature making it easier for elderly prisoners to get a parole hearing as an important step towards reducing the state’s unnecessarily high prison population.

Who benefits from sexual violence in eastern Congo? Cui bono?

Are the so-called rebels furthering the aims of heads of state by shattering communities in eastern Congo, driving people into refugee camps and thus separating them from the vast resources that corporations and the major world powers are so determined to control?

Question marks, the elephant in the room and the refusal of nuclear power defenders...

Given the detection of “hot particles” in Japan and as far away as Seattle, there is reason for concern. When ingested or inhaled, “hot particles” give intense radiation to local tissue areas. We acknowledge that many factors can cause infant deaths, but the critics who ignore Japanese fallout as possible contributing factors are acting irresponsibly.

The story of the Omaha Two

Third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, was in Omaha in March 1968 to qualify his American party in Nebraska. Wallace had arrived in Omaha on Sunday, the day before, and held an angry news conference to provoke a large turnout at his rally.

Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign reclaims and repairs foreclosed, vacant property

Martha Biggs and her four children – displaced like so many others from Cabrini Green and currently homeless – will be moving into a house at King and 72nd Street near Meyering Park, two years vacant and foreclosed on by one of the top four banks responsible for home foreclosure in Chicago: Deutsche Bank.

Who speaks for you?

While many had questioned whether Barack Obama was Black enough, in the 2008 elections 96 percent of African Americans cast their vote for him. Today, the question has re-emerged.