Tag: Georgia Green Party

Nearly six weeks since shelter-in-place and quarantine orders in the United States and worldwide because of the COVID-19 outbreak, countries all over the world have been pummeled with more than 3.3 million confirmed cases and 235,000 deaths worldwide.

“It has been 33 days since these men have eaten. We must move swiftly or people are going to start dying,” writes Delma Jackson, wife of Miguel Jackson, the prisoner who was beaten with a hammer in retaliation for his role in the December 2010 mass sit-down strike protesting slave labor and other atrocities.

I am honored to be the wife of a man who stands against injustice and oppression. The Georgia Department of Corrections is terrified of their injustices being exposed to the taxpaying public citizens. Hence, my husband is locked down, no outside contact, and labeled “a white Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”, to discourage him, silence him and keep him from awakening others – both staff and inmates. Truth will always prevail over falsehood.

Since June 10 an undetermined number of Georgia prisoners have been on a hunger strike. Some of these men are the Jackson State prison strikers. After two weeks, according to the families of Miguel Jackson and Preston Whiting, they are weak from hunger and subject to fainting spells. But they seem to believe they have little to lose. They are, a letter from one of them asserts, “starving for change.” We must demand justice for Miguel Jackson and other Georgia state prisoners who are being targeted and brutalized for exposing their inhumane conditions and standing up for their most basic human rights.

A year ago this month, Black, White and Brown inmates in a dozen Georgia prisons staged a brief strike. They put forward a set of simple and basic demands – wages for work, decent food and medical care, access to educational and self-improvement programs, fairness and more.

There is a popular myth which explains President Barack Obama’s reluctance to stand up to Pentagon militarists, Wall Street banksters and corporate greedheads. The myth is that he really does want to do all these things, but we the people have abandoned our responsibility to “make him do it.”

On or about Dec. 16, Terrance Bryant Dean was severely beaten by guards at Macon State Prison. The Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoners' Rights asserts this brutal beating was in retaliation against the multiracial group of prisoners who staged a peaceful protest demanding their human rights.

"Since the start of the Dec. 9 peaceful work stoppage and appeal for reform and respect for human rights, some inmates have been targeted and others have simply disappeared. We are urging the Department of Corrections and Governor-Elect Nathan Deal to act now to halt these unjust practices and treat these men like human beings,” said Ed Dubose, President of the NAACP of Georgia.

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?”