Tag: War on Drugs

Another young, unarmed Black man, Kenneth Harding, has been gunned down in broad daylight. He was shot numerous times in the back as he fled, his empty hands held in the air. His crime had been a simple train fare evasion for which San Francisco police executed him in the street.

CURB is sending a strong message from different parts of the state to Gov. Brown and the state legislature, calling for the state to take active steps to end its participation in the 40-year-old “war on drugs” and to prioritize vital social services over prison spending.

On May 23, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision ordering California to release tens of thousands of inmates from its overcrowded prisons on the grounds that their living conditions – including lethally inadequate healthcare – were so intolerable as to be “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The racism of the American “war on drugs,” especially in the South, is notorious. So is the racism faced daily by Palestinians. In Atlanta, a university program allows these two manifestations of racism to feed off each other and community activists are organizing to shut the program down.

Inmate beatings by prison guards occur across Georgia following an eight-day peaceful protest to highlight inhumane conditions in the prisons. These protesting prisoners must be silenced because a whole range of corporate interests has found that they can profit from caging human beings.

“This system treats us like throw-away people,” says Carolyn Brown, a Seattle volunteer with prison reform group Justice Works! An African American with a record, her effort to find a job is deeply frustrating due to systemic racism.

If you want to do your part to help our young people, you will vote. You must vote yes on Proposition 19, the marijuana constitutional amendment. The war on drugs is a war on the little dope dealer. Those who profit the most are immune from arrest and prosecution.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who waged a more successful war on drugs than the entire U.S. government, was concerned with people like Ronald Reagan and George Bush, who made enormous profits from this trade by flooding urban America with poison. Her efforts to investigate were suppressed by Porter Goss, who then chaired the House Intelligence Committee. Now Goss heads the ethics office that charged Waters with ethics violations for her legitimate advocacy for Black banks and economic justice for Black and Brown people.

At a community town hall on May 8, the discussion is expected to generate ideas for building community responses against violence that don’t involve police. The town hall will take place from 8 a.m. to 12 noon at Oakland City Council chambers, 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. No gang injunctions!

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.

Among many startling findings by legal scholar Michelle Alexander, former director of the ACLU's Racial Justice Project here in the Bay Area, is this: There are more African Americans under correctional control today – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

The report that went around the world was that over 300 businesses were destroyed; the actual damage was 40-45 windows smashed and a couple of dozen garbage cans thrown into the streets.