Ann Garrison - search results

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is ... a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Under the false premise that I was organizing prisoners for purposes of carrying forth a physical assault in the spirit of Black August, 18 years later, I remain confined in their “mad-scientist” like torture chambers as an alleged prison gang member solely because I refuse to become an informant for the state!

When the Occupy San Quentin rally ended, San Rafael police followed us to the Richmond Bridge. I don’t know if it was Jabari Shaw’s orange CDCR jumpsuit that kept them wondering – Is he an escapee, one of ours? – or if it was the sheer magnitude of fearlessness represented by women like Kelly, a former prisoner who would not let her traumatic experience silence her. One brother got so full looking at the guards on the other side of the gate watching that he looked like he was going to leap the gate and hurt someone as he recalled the violations of his person over and over again. Members of All of Us or None dropped everything to embrace him when he left the stage.

Universities and school officials that partner closely with major criminals, especially those who kill, rape and molest children, would do well to heed LaVar Arrington’s advice. Let today be a start to protect the victims, instead of the perpetrators.

For the past four years all aid agencies, including the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and U.N. relief agencies, have been blocked by the Ethiopian military from feeding starving people in Ogadenia. There are millions of starving people, maybe as many as 6 million, though no one can say for sure because no one is allowed into the region.

Your community needs you at the Police Commission hearing on Tasers: this Wednesday, Feb. 23, 5:30 p.m., in Room 400, City Hall. A study found that in the first year of Taser usage, sudden deaths in custody go up 550 percent and officer shootings more than double. The United Nations and Amnesty International consider Tasers to be torture devices, and the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild, and the NAACP oppose their use. It is certain that Taser usage does not lead to fewer shootings.

This month the U.S. and the U.N. Security Council must choose: Will they hold accountable major perpetrators of continued atrocities in the Congo or collaborate with them to put the blame on a few guilty but minor scapegoats and some innocent people who are guilty only of challenging the major offenders?

Paul Robeson was an extraordinary and versatile individual, world famous during his lifetime, who has been deliberately erased from the dominant myth of U.S. history for speaking the truth about conditions both domestic and abroad – his opposition to racism, fascism and colonialism and his support for civil and human rights, democracy, national liberation, socialism and the day-to-day resistance of working people of all lands to oppression, knowing that his fame would allow these messages to be more widely heard.

Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney sent an email around on Sunday in which she wrote: “[I]t has just now come to my attention that a ‘journalist’ who suggested that I be lynched was actually being paid by our own government to say that. Now, when I reported it to the FBI, how in the world was I to know that he was at that time on the FBI’s payroll?”