Judge grants latest appeal for Mumia Abu-Jamal, in part
By Kristen Johanson, December 27, 2018
https://kywnewsradio.radio.com/articles/news/judge-grants-latest-appeal-mumia-abu-jamal-part
email: DA_Central@phila.govMail:Philadelphia District Attorney Larry KrasnerThree South Penn Square
Corner of Juniper and South Penn Square
Philadelphia, PA 19107-3499phone:
215-686-8000tweet:@philaDAO
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We refuse to pay to protest!
Women's March on the Pentagon, October 2018
For Immediate Release
Contact: CindySheehan@MarchonPentagon.com
What: The day before Thanksgiving, Cindy Sheehan, co-coordinator of the recent Women's March on the Pentagon (WMOP) was presented with a $540.00 gill for "police escort" by the Arlington County Virginia Police Department (ACPD).
Background: Beginning in July, leadership of WMOP began taking steps to secure permits from the two jurisdictions that the WMOP would take on October 21st (51st anniversary of the March on the Pentagon during the Vietnam War):
Arlington County (brief march) and the Pentagon. Although WMOP eventually obtained a permit from the Pentagon, WMOP was never able to obtain a permit from Arlington County and many phone messages left by DC area Co-ordinator Malachy Kilbride were never returned by the ACPD.
On the day of the March, about 1500 people gathered at the Pentagon City Metro station (for a 12pm March start) in front of the mall and at about 10:30am, to the surprise of March organizers, ACPD showed up and did stop traffic for the brief March through Arlington County.
The organizers of the WMOP are outraged and appalled by this obvious violation of our First Amendment rights to gather “peaceably” and demonstrate one of the sacrosanct rights to our Freedom of Speech.
The DC area co-ordinator for the WMOP Malachy Kilbride had this to say upon receipt of the bill: “As a former resident of Arlington County of over 20 years I am disturbed that the county is following in the footsteps of the Trump Administration which wants to charge people for First Amendment activity. Shame on Arlington County! The First Amendment is priceless and shouldn’t be monetized.”
The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF)* the D.C. based non-profit legal organization that works to protect and advance the constitutional rights of protestors has issued the following letter to the ACPD on behalf of the Women’s March on the Pentagon:
Chief Jay Farr
Lt. John Feden
Arlington County Police Department
1425 North Courthouse Rd
. Arlington, VA 22201
Dear Chief Farr and Lt. Feden:
We are writing on behalf of Cindy Sheehan in response to Lt. John Feden’s e-mail correspondence dated November 21, 2018.
The Arlington County Police Department (ACPD) has issued an invoice to Ms. Sheehan seeking to charge her for engaging in constitutionally protected First Amendment activities. Specifically, the invoice is stated to be “for the police services we provided October 21st during the March On the Pentagon,” and demands $540.00 for what is described as “police escort for The Women’s March on the Pentagon.”
This attempt to tax free speech is without lawful basis and violates Ms. Sheehan’s constitutional rights. We request that this invoice be immediately withdrawn.
Ms. Sheehan did not request police “services,” nor was she given prior notice that the ACPD intended to send police to the demonstration and charge her for their time. At no time did Ms. Sheehan agree to pay for any such charges.
Indeed, the ACPD actually refused to respond to Ms. Sheehan’s efforts to coordinate the First Amendment activities with them. An application for a permit was submitted for the March and thereafter, Arlington Country was nonresponsive to follow up efforts. After failing and refusing to return phone calls regarding the March, the ACDP appeared at the Pentagon City mall in front of the metro stop entrance at the starting point for the march, well before the march was scheduled to step off. At that time Ms. Sheehan expressed her surprise at their presence given their refusal to communicate with the March organizers.
The ACPD may not charge demonstrators for First Amendment activities at its own discretion. We are requesting that the ACPD provide all policy documents, guidelines, and criteria that the department relies upon in assessing charges on demonstration activities as well as any notice it believes was given to Ms. Sheehan of such policies and procedures.
We further request that the ACPD issue instructions to personnel consistent with constitutional obligations to ensure that organizers of demonstration activity are not improperly charged in the future.
Sincerely,
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard (PCJF)
The Women’s March on the Pentagon adamantly refuses to pay for this appalling violation of our constitutional rights.
*The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund is a free speech and civil rights organization that has defended First Amendment rights for over 20 years in Washington, D.C. and around the country. It is currently challenging the Trump Administration’s proposed anti-protest rules that would levy potentially bankrupting fees and costs on demonstrators who engage in constitutionally protected free speech on public parkland in the nation’s capital. More information here.
*(Women’s) March on the Pentagon is a women-led coalition of activists, professionals, military veterans, and everyday citizens of the world with one thing in common: we are anti-imperialist. More info can be found here.
This press release can also be found on our website:
https://marchonpentagon.com/we-refuse-pay-protest/
Join the Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/183987719112273/
We refuse to pay to protest!
Women's March on the Pentagon, October 2018
For Immediate Release
Contact: CindySheehan@MarchonPentagon.com
What: The day before Thanksgiving, Cindy Sheehan, co-coordinator of the recent Women's March on the Pentagon (WMOP) was presented with a $540.00 gill for "police escort" by the Arlington County Virginia Police Department (ACPD).
Background: Beginning in July, leadership of WMOP began taking steps to secure permits from the two jurisdictions that the WMOP would take on October 21st (51st anniversary of the March on the Pentagon during the Vietnam War):
Arlington County (brief march) and the Pentagon. Although WMOP eventually obtained a permit from the Pentagon, WMOP was never able to obtain a permit from Arlington County and many phone messages left by DC area Co-ordinator Malachy Kilbride were never returned by the ACPD.
On the day of the March, about 1500 people gathered at the Pentagon City Metro station (for a 12pm March start) in front of the mall and at about 10:30am, to the surprise of March organizers, ACPD showed up and did stop traffic for the brief March through Arlington County.
The organizers of the WMOP are outraged and appalled by this obvious violation of our First Amendment rights to gather “peaceably” and demonstrate one of the sacrosanct rights to our Freedom of Speech.
The DC area co-ordinator for the WMOP Malachy Kilbride had this to say upon receipt of the bill: “As a former resident of Arlington County of over 20 years I am disturbed that the county is following in the footsteps of the Trump Administration which wants to charge people for First Amendment activity. Shame on Arlington County! The First Amendment is priceless and shouldn’t be monetized.”
The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF)* the D.C. based non-profit legal organization that works to protect and advance the constitutional rights of protestors has issued the following letter to the ACPD on behalf of the Women’s March on the Pentagon:
Chief Jay Farr
Lt. John Feden
Arlington County Police Department
1425 North Courthouse Rd
. Arlington, VA 22201
Dear Chief Farr and Lt. Feden:
We are writing on behalf of Cindy Sheehan in response to Lt. John Feden’s e-mail correspondence dated November 21, 2018.
The Arlington County Police Department (ACPD) has issued an invoice to Ms. Sheehan seeking to charge her for engaging in constitutionally protected First Amendment activities. Specifically, the invoice is stated to be “for the police services we provided October 21st during the March On the Pentagon,” and demands $540.00 for what is described as “police escort for The Women’s March on the Pentagon.”
This attempt to tax free speech is without lawful basis and violates Ms. Sheehan’s constitutional rights. We request that this invoice be immediately withdrawn.
Ms. Sheehan did not request police “services,” nor was she given prior notice that the ACPD intended to send police to the demonstration and charge her for their time. At no time did Ms. Sheehan agree to pay for any such charges.
Indeed, the ACPD actually refused to respond to Ms. Sheehan’s efforts to coordinate the First Amendment activities with them. An application for a permit was submitted for the March and thereafter, Arlington Country was nonresponsive to follow up efforts. After failing and refusing to return phone calls regarding the March, the ACDP appeared at the Pentagon City mall in front of the metro stop entrance at the starting point for the march, well before the march was scheduled to step off. At that time Ms. Sheehan expressed her surprise at their presence given their refusal to communicate with the March organizers.
The ACPD may not charge demonstrators for First Amendment activities at its own discretion. We are requesting that the ACPD provide all policy documents, guidelines, and criteria that the department relies upon in assessing charges on demonstration activities as well as any notice it believes was given to Ms. Sheehan of such policies and procedures.
We further request that the ACPD issue instructions to personnel consistent with constitutional obligations to ensure that organizers of demonstration activity are not improperly charged in the future.
Sincerely,
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard (PCJF)
The Women’s March on the Pentagon adamantly refuses to pay for this appalling violation of our constitutional rights.
*The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund is a free speech and civil rights organization that has defended First Amendment rights for over 20 years in Washington, D.C. and around the country. It is currently challenging the Trump Administration’s proposed anti-protest rules that would levy potentially bankrupting fees and costs on demonstrators who engage in constitutionally protected free speech on public parkland in the nation’s capital. More information here.
*(Women’s) March on the Pentagon is a women-led coalition of activists, professionals, military veterans, and everyday citizens of the world with one thing in common: we are anti-imperialist. More info can be found here.
This press release can also be found on our website:
https://marchonpentagon.com/we-refuse-pay-protest/
Join the Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/183987719112273/
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America has spent $5.9 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001, a new study says
- The U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers $5.9 trillion since they began in 2001.
- The figure reflects the cost across the U.S. federal government since the price of war is not borne by the Defense Department alone.
- The report also finds that more than 480,000 people have died from the wars and more than 244,000 civilians have been killed as a result of fighting. Additionally, another 10 million people have been displaced due to violence.
- https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/14/us-has-spent-5point9-trillion-on-middle-east-asia-wars-since-2001-study.html
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- The U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers $5.9 trillion since they began in 2001.
- The figure reflects the cost across the U.S. federal government since the price of war is not borne by the Defense Department alone.
- The report also finds that more than 480,000 people have died from the wars and more than 244,000 civilians have been killed as a result of fighting. Additionally, another 10 million people have been displaced due to violence.
- https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/14/us-has-spent-5point9-trillion-on-middle-east-asia-wars-since-2001-study.html
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Open letter to active duty soldiers on the border
DON'T TURN THEM AWAY
THE MIGRANTS IN THE CENTRAL AMERICAN CARAVAN ARE NOT OUR ENEMIES
Your Commander-in-chief is lying to you. You should refuse his orders to deploy to the southern U.S. border should you be called to do so. Despite what Trump and his administration are saying, the migrants moving North towards the U.S. are not a threat. These small numbers of people are escaping intense violence. In fact, much of the reason these men and women—with families just like yours and ours—are fleeing their homes is because of the US meddling in their country's elections. Look no further than Honduras, where the Obama administration supported the overthrow of a democratically elected president who was then replaced by a repressive dictator.
Courage to Resist has been running a strategic outreach campaign to challenge troops to refuse illegal orders while on the border, such as their Commander-in-Chief's suggestion that they murder migrants who might be throwing rocks, or that they build and help run concentration camps. In addition to social media ads, About Face, Veterans For Peace, and Courage to Resist, are also printing tens of thousands of these leaflets for distribution near the border. Please consider donating towards these expenses.
Open letter to active duty soldiers on the border
DON'T TURN THEM AWAY
THE MIGRANTS IN THE CENTRAL AMERICAN CARAVAN ARE NOT OUR ENEMIES
THE MIGRANTS IN THE CENTRAL AMERICAN CARAVAN ARE NOT OUR ENEMIES
Your Commander-in-chief is lying to you. You should refuse his orders to deploy to the southern U.S. border should you be called to do so. Despite what Trump and his administration are saying, the migrants moving North towards the U.S. are not a threat. These small numbers of people are escaping intense violence. In fact, much of the reason these men and women—with families just like yours and ours—are fleeing their homes is because of the US meddling in their country's elections. Look no further than Honduras, where the Obama administration supported the overthrow of a democratically elected president who was then replaced by a repressive dictator.
Courage to Resist has been running a strategic outreach campaign to challenge troops to refuse illegal orders while on the border, such as their Commander-in-Chief's suggestion that they murder migrants who might be throwing rocks, or that they build and help run concentration camps. In addition to social media ads, About Face, Veterans For Peace, and Courage to Resist, are also printing tens of thousands of these leaflets for distribution near the border. Please consider donating towards these expenses.
Don't turn them away
The migrants in the Central American caravan are not our enemies
Open letter to active duty soldiers
Your Commander-in-chief is lying to you. You should refuse his orders to deploy to the southern U.S. border should you be called to do so. Despite what Trump and his administration are saying, the migrants moving North towards the U.S. are not a threat. These small numbers of people are escaping intense violence. In fact, much of the reason these men and women—with families just like yours and ours—are fleeing their homes is because of the US meddling in their country's elections. Look no further than Honduras, where the Obama administration supported the overthrow of a democratically elected president who was then replaced by a repressive dictator.
"There are tens of thousands of us who will support your decision to lay your weapons down. You are better than your Commander-in-chief. Our only advice is to resist in groups. Organize with your fellow soldiers. Do not go this alone."
These extremely poor and vulnerable people are desperate for peace. Who among us would walk a thousand miles with only the clothes on our back without great cause? The odds are good that your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. lived similar experiences to these migrants. Your family members came to the U.S. to seek a better life—some fled violence. Consider this as you are asked to confront these unarmed men, women and children from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. To do so would be the ultimate hypocrisy.
The U.S. is the richest country in the world, in part because it has exploited countries in Latin America for decades. If you treat people from these countries like criminals, as Trump hopes you will, you only contribute to the legacy of pillage and plunder beneath our southern border. We need to confront this history together, we need to confront the reality of America's wealth and both share and give it back with these people. Above all else, we cannot turn them away at our door. They will die if we do.
By every moral or ethical standard it is your duty to refuse orders to "defend" the U.S. from these migrants. History will look kindly upon you if you do. There are tens of thousands of us who will support your decision to lay your weapons down. You are better than your Commander-in-chief. Our only advice is to resist in groups. Organize with your fellow soldiers. Do not go this alone. It is much harder to punish the many than the few.
In solidarity,
Rory Fanning
Former U.S. Army Ranger, War-Resister
Spenser Rapone
Former U.S. Army Ranger and Infantry Officer, War-Resister
Leaflet distributed by:
-
About Face: Veterans Against the War
-
Courage to Resist
-
Veterans For Peace
Courage to Resist has been running a strategic outreach campaign to challenge troops to refuse illegal orders while on the border, such as their Commander-in-Chief's suggestion that they murder migrants who might be throwing rocks, or that they build and help run concentration camps. In addition to social media ads, About Face, Veterans For Peace, and Courage to Resist, are also printing tens of thousands of these leaflets for distribution near the border. Please consider donating towards these expenses.
COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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COURAGE TO RESIST
New "Refuse War" Shirts
We've launched a new shirt store to raise funds to support war resisters.
In addition to the Courage to Resist logo shirts we've offered in the past, we now have a few fun designs, including a grim reaper, a "Refuse War, Go AWOL" travel theme, and a sporty "AWOL: Support Military War Resisters" shirt.
Shirts are $25 each for small through XL, and bit more for larger sizes. Please allow 9-12 days for delivery within the United States.
50% of each shirt may qualify as a tax-deductible contribution.
Courage to Resist -- Support the Troops who Refuse to Fight!
484 Lake Park Ave. #41, Oakland, CA 94610, 510-488-3559
couragetoresis.org -- facebook.com/couragetoresist
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Open letter to active duty soldiers
Your Commander-in-chief is lying to you. You should refuse his orders to deploy to the southern U.S. border should you be called to do so. Despite what Trump and his administration are saying, the migrants moving North towards the U.S. are not a threat. These small numbers of people are escaping intense violence. In fact, much of the reason these men and women—with families just like yours and ours—are fleeing their homes is because of the US meddling in their country's elections. Look no further than Honduras, where the Obama administration supported the overthrow of a democratically elected president who was then replaced by a repressive dictator.
"There are tens of thousands of us who will support your decision to lay your weapons down. You are better than your Commander-in-chief. Our only advice is to resist in groups. Organize with your fellow soldiers. Do not go this alone."
These extremely poor and vulnerable people are desperate for peace. Who among us would walk a thousand miles with only the clothes on our back without great cause? The odds are good that your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. lived similar experiences to these migrants. Your family members came to the U.S. to seek a better life—some fled violence. Consider this as you are asked to confront these unarmed men, women and children from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. To do so would be the ultimate hypocrisy.
The U.S. is the richest country in the world, in part because it has exploited countries in Latin America for decades. If you treat people from these countries like criminals, as Trump hopes you will, you only contribute to the legacy of pillage and plunder beneath our southern border. We need to confront this history together, we need to confront the reality of America's wealth and both share and give it back with these people. Above all else, we cannot turn them away at our door. They will die if we do.
By every moral or ethical standard it is your duty to refuse orders to "defend" the U.S. from these migrants. History will look kindly upon you if you do. There are tens of thousands of us who will support your decision to lay your weapons down. You are better than your Commander-in-chief. Our only advice is to resist in groups. Organize with your fellow soldiers. Do not go this alone. It is much harder to punish the many than the few.
In solidarity,
Rory Fanning
Former U.S. Army Ranger, War-Resister Spenser Rapone Former U.S. Army Ranger and Infantry Officer, War-Resister
Leaflet distributed by:
Courage to Resist has been running a strategic outreach campaign to challenge troops to refuse illegal orders while on the border, such as their Commander-in-Chief's suggestion that they murder migrants who might be throwing rocks, or that they build and help run concentration camps. In addition to social media ads, About Face, Veterans For Peace, and Courage to Resist, are also printing tens of thousands of these leaflets for distribution near the border. Please consider donating towards these expenses.
|
COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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COURAGE TO RESIST
New "Refuse War" Shirts
We've launched a new shirt store to raise funds to support war resisters.
In addition to the Courage to Resist logo shirts we've offered in the past, we now have a few fun designs, including a grim reaper, a "Refuse War, Go AWOL" travel theme, and a sporty "AWOL: Support Military War Resisters" shirt.
Shirts are $25 each for small through XL, and bit more for larger sizes. Please allow 9-12 days for delivery within the United States.
50% of each shirt may qualify as a tax-deductible contribution.
In addition to the Courage to Resist logo shirts we've offered in the past, we now have a few fun designs, including a grim reaper, a "Refuse War, Go AWOL" travel theme, and a sporty "AWOL: Support Military War Resisters" shirt.
Shirts are $25 each for small through XL, and bit more for larger sizes. Please allow 9-12 days for delivery within the United States.
50% of each shirt may qualify as a tax-deductible contribution.
Courage to Resist -- Support the Troops who Refuse to Fight!
484 Lake Park Ave. #41, Oakland, CA 94610, 510-488-3559
couragetoresis.org -- facebook.com/couragetoresist
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Judge to Soon Rule on Mumia’s Appeal Bid
By Kyle Fraser, December 4, 2018
Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Leon Tucker promised a decision on whether a former prosecutor unlawfully took part as a judge in rejecting Mumia Abu Jamal’s appeal of his 1981 conviction in the killing of a police officer. “We’re not going to stop fighting until we see Mumia walk out of these prison walls,” said Johanna Fernandez, of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home. Pam Africa, of the MOVE organization, said Abu Jamal’s supporters have sustained his defense for decades “no matter what kind of devious tricks this government has used to try to break this movement.”
Listen to a radio report at Black Agenda Report:
https://www.blackagendareport.com/judge-soon-rule-mumias-appeal-bid
Free Mumia Now!
Mumia's freedom is at stake in a court hearing on August 30th.
With your help, we just might free him!
Check out this video:
This video includes photo of 1996 news report refuting Judge Castille's present assertion that he had not been requested at that time to recuse himself from this case, on which he had previously worked as a Prosecutor:
A Philadelphia court now has before it the evidence which could lead to Mumia's freedom. The evidence shows that Ronald Castille, of the District Attorney's office in 1982, intervened in the prosecution of Mumia for a crime he did not commit. Years later, Castille was a judge on the PA Supreme Court, where he sat in judgement over Mumia's case, and ruled against Mumia in every appeal!
According to the US Supreme Court in the Williams ruling, this corrupt behavior was illegal!
But will the court rule to overturn all of Mumia's negative appeals rulings by the PA Supreme Court? If it does, Mumia would be free to appeal once again against his unfair conviction. If it does not, Mumia could remain imprisoned for life, without the possibility for parole, for a crime he did not commit.
• Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent and framed!
• Mumia Abu-Jamal is a journalist censored off the airwaves!
• Mumia Abu-Jamal is victimized by cops, courts and politicians!
• Mumia Abu-Jamal stands for all prisoners treated unjustly!
• Courts have never treated Mumia fairly!
Will You Help Free Mumia?
Call DA Larry Krasner at (215) 686-8000
Tell him former DA Ron Castille violated Mumia's constitutional rights and
Krasner should cease opposing Mumia's legal petition.
Tell the DA to release Mumia because he's factually innocent.
Write to Mumia at:
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A Call for a Mass Mobilization to Oppose NATO, War and Racism
Protest NATO, Washington, DC, Lafayette Park (across from the White House)
1 PM Saturday, March 30, 2019.
Additional actions will take place on Thursday April 4 at the opening of the NATO meeting
April 4, 2019, will mark the 51st anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the internationally revered leader in struggles against racism, poverty and war.
And yet, in a grotesque desecration of Rev. King's lifelong dedication to peace, this is the date that the military leaders of the North American Treaty Organization have chosen to celebrate NATO's 70th anniversary by holding its annual summit meeting in Washington, D.C. This is a deliberate insult to Rev. King and a clear message that Black lives and the lives of non-European humanity really do not matter.
It was exactly one year before he was murdered that Rev. King gave his famous speech opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam, calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and declaring that he could not be silent.
We cannot be silent either. Since its founding, the U.S.-led NATO has been the world's deadliest military alliance, causing untold suffering and devastation throughout Northern Africa, the Middle East and beyond.
Hundreds of thousands have died in U.S./NATO wars in Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Yugoslavia. Millions of refugees are now risking their lives trying to escape the carnage that these wars have brought to their homelands, while workers in the 29 NATO member-countries are told they must abandon hard-won social programs in order to meet U.S. demands for even more military spending.
Every year when NATO holds its summits, there have been massive protests: in Chicago, Wales, Warsaw, Brussels. 2019 will be no exception.
The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) is calling for a mass mobilization in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, March 30. Additional actions will take place on April 4 at the opening of the NATO meeting.
We invite you to join with us in this effort. As Rev. King taught us, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
No to NATO!
End All U.S. Wars at Home and Abroad!
Bring the Troops Home Now!
No to Racism!
The Administrative Committee of UNAC,
To add your endorsement to this call, please go here: http://www.no2nato2019.org/endorse-the-action.html
Please donate to keep UNAC strong: https://www.unacpeace.org/donate.html
If your organization would like to join the UNAC coalition, please click here: https://www.unacpeace.org/join.html
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In Defense of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson
Update on Rashid in Indiana
By Dustin McDaniel
November 9, 2018—Had a call with Rashid yesterday. He's been seen by medical, psych, and
dental. He's getting his meds and his blood pressure is being monitored,
though it is uncontrolled. The RN made recommendations for treatment
that included medication changes and further monitoring, but there's
been no follow up.
He's at the diagnostic center and he (along with everyone else I've
talked to about it) expect that he'll be sent to the solitary
confinement unit at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, though it could
be 30 days from now.
He's in a cell with no property. He has no extra underwear to change
into. The cell is, of course, dirty. He's in solitary confinement. He
didn't say they were denying him yard time. He didn't say there were any
problems with his meals.
They are refusing him his stationary and stamps, so he can't write out.
He gets a very limited number of phone calls per month (1 or 2), and
otherwise can only talk on the phone if a legal call is set up.
They are refusing to give him his property, or to allow him to look
through it to find records relevant to ongoing or planned litigation.
He's already past the statute of limitations on a law suit he planned to
file re abuses in Texas and other deadlines are about to pass over the
next month.
He has 35 banker boxes of property, or 2 pallets, that arrived in IDOC.
He needs to be allowed to look through these records in order to find
relevant legal documents. Moving forward, I think we need to find a
place/person for him to send these records to or they are going to be
destroyed. It would be good if we could find someone who would also take
on the task of organizing the records, getting rid of duplicates or
unnecessary paperwork, digitizing records, and making things easier to
search and access.
Although he does not appear in the inmate locator for IDOC, he does
appears in the JPay system as an Indiana prisoner (#264847). At his
request, I sent him some of his money so hopefully he can get stamps and
stationary.
Hold off on sending him more money via JPay - I've been told that some
of the IDOC facilities are phasing out JPay and moving to GTL and
wouldn't want to have a bunch of money stuck and inaccessible due to
those changes. If you want to send him more money immediately, send it
to Abolitionist Law Center. You can send it via Paypal to
info@abolitionistlawcenter.org, or mail it to PO Box 8654, Pittsburgh,
PA 15221. We will hold on to it and distribute it according to Rashid's
instructions.
Please write to him, if you haven't already. He's got nothing to do in
solitary with nothing to read and nothing to write with.
FOR UPDATES CHECK OUT RASHID'S WEBSITE AT RASHIDMOD.COM
you can also hear a recent interview with Rashid on Final Straw podcast here: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/tag/kevin-rashid-johnson/
Write to Rashid:
Kevin Rashid Johnson's writings and artwork have been widely circulated. He is the author of a book,Panther Vision: Essential Party Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson, Minister of Defense, New Afrikan Black Panther Party, (Kersplebedeb, 2010).
Kevin Johnson D.O.C. No. 264847
G-20-2C Pendleton Correctional Facility
4490 W. Reformatory Rd.
Pendleton, IN 46064-9001
www.rashidmod.com
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Judge to Soon Rule on Mumia’s Appeal Bid
By Kyle Fraser, December 4, 2018
Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Leon Tucker promised a decision on whether a former prosecutor unlawfully took part as a judge in rejecting Mumia Abu Jamal’s appeal of his 1981 conviction in the killing of a police officer. “We’re not going to stop fighting until we see Mumia walk out of these prison walls,” said Johanna Fernandez, of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home. Pam Africa, of the MOVE organization, said Abu Jamal’s supporters have sustained his defense for decades “no matter what kind of devious tricks this government has used to try to break this movement.”
Listen to a radio report at Black Agenda Report:
https://www.blackagendareport.com/judge-soon-rule-mumias-appeal-bid
Free Mumia Now!
Mumia's freedom is at stake in a court hearing on August 30th.
With your help, we just might free him!
Check out this video:
This video includes photo of 1996 news report refuting Judge Castille's present assertion that he had not been requested at that time to recuse himself from this case, on which he had previously worked as a Prosecutor:
A Philadelphia court now has before it the evidence which could lead to Mumia's freedom. The evidence shows that Ronald Castille, of the District Attorney's office in 1982, intervened in the prosecution of Mumia for a crime he did not commit. Years later, Castille was a judge on the PA Supreme Court, where he sat in judgement over Mumia's case, and ruled against Mumia in every appeal!
According to the US Supreme Court in the Williams ruling, this corrupt behavior was illegal!
But will the court rule to overturn all of Mumia's negative appeals rulings by the PA Supreme Court? If it does, Mumia would be free to appeal once again against his unfair conviction. If it does not, Mumia could remain imprisoned for life, without the possibility for parole, for a crime he did not commit.
• Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent and framed!
• Mumia Abu-Jamal is a journalist censored off the airwaves!
• Mumia Abu-Jamal is victimized by cops, courts and politicians!
• Mumia Abu-Jamal stands for all prisoners treated unjustly!
• Courts have never treated Mumia fairly!
Will You Help Free Mumia?
Call DA Larry Krasner at (215) 686-8000
Tell him former DA Ron Castille violated Mumia's constitutional rights and
Krasner should cease opposing Mumia's legal petition.
Tell the DA to release Mumia because he's factually innocent.
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PA DOC
SCI Mahanoy
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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A Call for a Mass Mobilization to Oppose NATO, War and Racism
Protest NATO, Washington, DC, Lafayette Park (across from the White House)
1 PM Saturday, March 30, 2019.
Additional actions will take place on Thursday April 4 at the opening of the NATO meeting
April 4, 2019, will mark the 51st anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the internationally revered leader in struggles against racism, poverty and war.
And yet, in a grotesque desecration of Rev. King's lifelong dedication to peace, this is the date that the military leaders of the North American Treaty Organization have chosen to celebrate NATO's 70th anniversary by holding its annual summit meeting in Washington, D.C. This is a deliberate insult to Rev. King and a clear message that Black lives and the lives of non-European humanity really do not matter.
It was exactly one year before he was murdered that Rev. King gave his famous speech opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam, calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and declaring that he could not be silent.
We cannot be silent either. Since its founding, the U.S.-led NATO has been the world's deadliest military alliance, causing untold suffering and devastation throughout Northern Africa, the Middle East and beyond.
Hundreds of thousands have died in U.S./NATO wars in Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Yugoslavia. Millions of refugees are now risking their lives trying to escape the carnage that these wars have brought to their homelands, while workers in the 29 NATO member-countries are told they must abandon hard-won social programs in order to meet U.S. demands for even more military spending.
Every year when NATO holds its summits, there have been massive protests: in Chicago, Wales, Warsaw, Brussels. 2019 will be no exception.
The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) is calling for a mass mobilization in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, March 30. Additional actions will take place on April 4 at the opening of the NATO meeting.
We invite you to join with us in this effort. As Rev. King taught us, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
No to NATO!
End All U.S. Wars at Home and Abroad!
Bring the Troops Home Now!
No to Racism!
The Administrative Committee of UNAC,
To add your endorsement to this call, please go here: http://www.no2nato2019.org/endorse-the-action.html
Please donate to keep UNAC strong: https://www.unacpeace.org/donate.html
If your organization would like to join the UNAC coalition, please click here: https://www.unacpeace.org/join.html
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In Defense of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson
Update on Rashid in Indiana
By Dustin McDaniel
November 9, 2018—Had a call with Rashid yesterday. He's been seen by medical, psych, and
dental. He's getting his meds and his blood pressure is being monitored,
though it is uncontrolled. The RN made recommendations for treatment
that included medication changes and further monitoring, but there's
been no follow up.
He's at the diagnostic center and he (along with everyone else I've
talked to about it) expect that he'll be sent to the solitary
confinement unit at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, though it could
be 30 days from now.
He's in a cell with no property. He has no extra underwear to change
into. The cell is, of course, dirty. He's in solitary confinement. He
didn't say they were denying him yard time. He didn't say there were any
problems with his meals.
They are refusing him his stationary and stamps, so he can't write out.
He gets a very limited number of phone calls per month (1 or 2), and
otherwise can only talk on the phone if a legal call is set up.
They are refusing to give him his property, or to allow him to look
through it to find records relevant to ongoing or planned litigation.
He's already past the statute of limitations on a law suit he planned to
file re abuses in Texas and other deadlines are about to pass over the
next month.
He has 35 banker boxes of property, or 2 pallets, that arrived in IDOC.
He needs to be allowed to look through these records in order to find
relevant legal documents. Moving forward, I think we need to find a
place/person for him to send these records to or they are going to be
destroyed. It would be good if we could find someone who would also take
on the task of organizing the records, getting rid of duplicates or
unnecessary paperwork, digitizing records, and making things easier to
search and access.
Although he does not appear in the inmate locator for IDOC, he does
appears in the JPay system as an Indiana prisoner (#264847). At his
request, I sent him some of his money so hopefully he can get stamps and
stationary.
Hold off on sending him more money via JPay - I've been told that some
of the IDOC facilities are phasing out JPay and moving to GTL and
wouldn't want to have a bunch of money stuck and inaccessible due to
those changes. If you want to send him more money immediately, send it
to Abolitionist Law Center. You can send it via Paypal to
info@abolitionistlawcenter.org, or mail it to PO Box 8654, Pittsburgh,
PA 15221. We will hold on to it and distribute it according to Rashid's
instructions.
Please write to him, if you haven't already. He's got nothing to do in
solitary with nothing to read and nothing to write with.
By Dustin McDaniel
November 9, 2018—Had a call with Rashid yesterday. He's been seen by medical, psych, and
dental. He's getting his meds and his blood pressure is being monitored,
though it is uncontrolled. The RN made recommendations for treatment
that included medication changes and further monitoring, but there's
been no follow up.
He's at the diagnostic center and he (along with everyone else I've
talked to about it) expect that he'll be sent to the solitary
confinement unit at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, though it could
be 30 days from now.
He's in a cell with no property. He has no extra underwear to change
into. The cell is, of course, dirty. He's in solitary confinement. He
didn't say they were denying him yard time. He didn't say there were any
problems with his meals.
They are refusing him his stationary and stamps, so he can't write out.
He gets a very limited number of phone calls per month (1 or 2), and
otherwise can only talk on the phone if a legal call is set up.
They are refusing to give him his property, or to allow him to look
through it to find records relevant to ongoing or planned litigation.
He's already past the statute of limitations on a law suit he planned to
file re abuses in Texas and other deadlines are about to pass over the
next month.
He has 35 banker boxes of property, or 2 pallets, that arrived in IDOC.
He needs to be allowed to look through these records in order to find
relevant legal documents. Moving forward, I think we need to find a
place/person for him to send these records to or they are going to be
destroyed. It would be good if we could find someone who would also take
on the task of organizing the records, getting rid of duplicates or
unnecessary paperwork, digitizing records, and making things easier to
search and access.
Although he does not appear in the inmate locator for IDOC, he does
appears in the JPay system as an Indiana prisoner (#264847). At his
request, I sent him some of his money so hopefully he can get stamps and
stationary.
Hold off on sending him more money via JPay - I've been told that some
of the IDOC facilities are phasing out JPay and moving to GTL and
wouldn't want to have a bunch of money stuck and inaccessible due to
those changes. If you want to send him more money immediately, send it
to Abolitionist Law Center. You can send it via Paypal to
info@abolitionistlawcenter.org, or mail it to PO Box 8654, Pittsburgh,
PA 15221. We will hold on to it and distribute it according to Rashid's
instructions.
Please write to him, if you haven't already. He's got nothing to do in
solitary with nothing to read and nothing to write with.
FOR UPDATES CHECK OUT RASHID'S WEBSITE AT RASHIDMOD.COM
you can also hear a recent interview with Rashid on Final Straw podcast here: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/tag/kevin-rashid-johnson/
Write to Rashid:
Kevin Rashid Johnson's writings and artwork have been widely circulated. He is the author of a book,Panther Vision: Essential Party Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson, Minister of Defense, New Afrikan Black Panther Party, (Kersplebedeb, 2010).
Kevin Johnson D.O.C. No. 264847
G-20-2C Pendleton Correctional Facility
4490 W. Reformatory Rd.
Pendleton, IN 46064-9001
www.rashidmod.com
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Prisoners at Lieber Correctional Institution in South Carolina are demanding recognition of their human rights by the South Carolina Department of Corrections and warden Randall Williams. Prisoners are also demanding an end to the horrific conditions they are forced to exist under at Lieber, which are exascerbating already rising tensions to a tipping point and people are dying.
Since the tragedy that occured at Lee Correctional earlier this year, prisoners at all level 3 security prisons in SC have been on complete lockdown, forced to stay in their two-man 9x11 cells 24 hours a day (supposed to be 23 hrs/day but guards rarely let prisoners go to their one hour of rec in a slightly larger cage because it requires too much work, especially when you keep an entire prison on lockdown) without any programming whatsoever and filthy air rushing in all day, no chairs, tables, no radios, no television, no access to legal work, no access to showers, and no light! Administration decided to cover all the tiny windows in the cells with metal plates on the outside so that no light can come in. Thousands of people are existing in this manner, enclosed in a tiny space with another person and no materials or communication or anything to pass the time.
Because of these horific conditions tensions are rising and people are dying. Another violent death took place at Lieber Correctional; Derrick Furtick, 31, died at approximately 9pm Monday, according to state Department of Corrections officials:
Prisoners assert that this death is a result of the kind of conditions that are being imposed and inflicted upon the incarcerated population there and the undue trauma, anxiety, and tensions these conditions create.
We demand:
- to be let off solitary confinement
- to have our windows uncovered
- access to books, magazines, phone calls, showers and recreation
- access to the law library and our legal cases
- single person cells for any person serving over 20 years
Lieber is known for its horrendous treatment of the people it cages including its failure to evacuate prisoners during Hurricane Florence earlier this year:
Please flood the phone lines of both the governor's and warden's offices to help amplify these demands from behind bars at Lieber Correctional.
Warden Randall Williams: (843) 875-3332 or (803) 896-3700
Governor Henry McMaster's office: (803) 734-2100
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Get Malik Out of Ad-Seg
Keith "Malik" Washington is an incarcerated activist who has spoken out on conditions of confinement in Texas prison and beyond: from issues of toxic water and extreme heat, to physical and sexual abuse of imprisoned people, to religious discrimination and more. Malik has also been a tireless leader in the movement to #EndPrisonSlavery which gained visibility during nationwide prison strikes in 2016 and 2018. View his work at comrademalik.com or write him at:
Keith H. Washington
TDC# 1487958
McConnell Unit
3001 S. Emily Drive
Beeville, TX 78102
Friends, it's time to get Malik out of solitary confinement.
Malik has experienced intense, targeted harassment ever since he dared to start speaking against brutal conditions faced by incarcerated people in Texas and nationwide--but over the past few months, prison officials have stepped up their retaliation even more.
In Administrative Segregation (solitary confinement) at McConnell Unit, Malik has experienced frequent humiliating strip searches, medical neglect, mail tampering and censorship, confinement 23 hours a day to a cell that often reached 100+ degrees in the summer, and other daily abuses too numerous to name. It could not be more clear that they are trying to make an example of him because he is a committed freedom fighter. So we have to step up.
Phone zap on Tuesday, November 13
**Mark your calendars for the 11/13 call in, be on the look out for a call script, and spread the word!!**
Demands:
- Convene special review of Malik's placement in Ad-Seg and immediately release him back to general population
- Explain why the State Classification Committee's decision to release Malik from Ad-Seg back in June was overturned (specifically, demand to know the nature of the "information" supposedly collected by the Fusion Center, and demand to know how this information was investigated and verified).
- Immediately cease all harassment and retaliation against Malik, especially strip searches and mail censorship!
Who to contact:
TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier
Phone: (936)295-6371
Email: exec.director@tdcj.texas.gov
Senior Warden Philip Sinfuentes (McConnell Unit)
Phone: (361) 362-2300
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Background on Malik's Situation
Malik's continued assignment to Ad-Seg (solitary confinement) in is an overt example of political repression, plain and simple. Prison officials placed Malik in Ad-Seg two years ago for writing about and endorsing the 2016 nationwide prison strike. They were able to do this because Texas and U.S. law permits non-violent work refusal to be classified as incitement to riot.
It gets worse. Malik was cleared for release from Ad-Seg by the State Classification Committee in June--and then, in an unprecedented reversal, immediately re-assigned him back to Ad-Seg. The reason? Prison Officials site "information" collected by a shadowy intelligence gathering operation called a Fusion Center, which are known for lack of transparency and accountability, and for being blatant tools of political repression.
Malik remains in horrible conditions, vulnerable to every possible abuse, on the basis of "information" that has NEVER been disclosed or verified. No court or other independent entity has ever confirmed the existence, let alone authenticity, of this alleged information. In fact, as recently as October 25, a representative of the State Classification Committee told Malik that he has no clue why Malik was re-assigned to Ad-Seg. This "information" is pure fiction.
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Listen to 'The Daily': Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?
By Michael Barbaro, May 30, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/podcasts/the-daily/kevin-cooper-death-row.html?emc=edit_ca_20180530&nl=california-today&nlid=2181592020180530&te=1
Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via RadioPublic | Via Stitcher
The sole survivor of an attack in which four people were murdered identified the perpetrators as three white men. The police ignored suspects who fit the description and arrested a young black man instead. He is now awaiting execution.
On today's episode:
• Kevin Cooper, who has been on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California for three decades.
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Last week I met with fellow organizers and members of Mijente to take joint action at the Tornillo Port of Entry, where detention camps have been built and where children and adults are currently being imprisoned.
I oppose the hyper-criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers. Migration is a human right and every person is worthy of dignity and respect irrespective of whether they have "papers" or not. You shouldn't have to prove "extreme and unusual hardship" to avoid being separated from your family. We, as a country, have a moral responsibility to support and uplift those adversely affected by the US's decades-long role in the economic and military destabilization of the home countries these migrants and asylum seekers have been forced to leave.
While we expected to face resistance and potential trouble from the multiple law enforcement agencies represented at the border, we didn't expect to have a local farm hand pull a pistol on us to demand we deflate our giant balloon banner. Its message to those in detention:
NO ESTÁN SOLOS (You are not alone).
Despite the slight disruption to our plan we were able to support Mijente and United We Dream in blocking the main entrance to the detention camp and letting those locked inside know that there are people here who care for them and want to see them free and reunited with their families.
We are continuing to stand in solidarity with Mijente as they fight back against unjust immigration practices.Yesterday they took action in San Diego, continuing to lead and escalate resistance to unjust detention, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and to ICE.
While we were honored to offer on-the-ground support we see the potential to focus the energy of our Drop the MIC campaign into fighting against this injustice, to have an even greater impact. Here's how:
- Call out General Dynamics for profiteering of War, Militarization of the Border and Child and Family Detention (look for our social media toolkit this week);
- Create speaking forums and produce media that challenges the narrative of ICE and Jeff Sessions, encouraging troops who have served in the borderlands to speak out about that experience;
- Continue to show up and demand we demilitarize the border and abolish ICE.
Thank you for your vision and understanding of how militarism, racism, and capitalism are coming together in the most destructive ways. Help keep us in this fight by continuing to support our work.
In Solidarity,
Ramon Mejia
Field Organizer, About Face: Veterans Against the War
P.O. Box 3565, New York, NY 10008. All Right Reserved. | Unsubscribe
To ensure delivery of About Face emails please add webmaster@ivaw.org to your address book.
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Major George Tillery
MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION
SEX FOR LIES AND
MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY
April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony.
These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors.
Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony
For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault. Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence. The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes. Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters.
Homicide detectives and prosecutors threatened Claitt with a false unrelated murder charge, and induced him to lie with promises of little or no jail time on over twenty pending felonies, and being released from jail despite a parole violation. In addition, homicide detectives arranged for Claitt, while in custody, to have private sexual liaisons with his girlfriends in police interview rooms.
In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies". In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery.org.
Without the coerced and false testimony of Claitt there was no evidence against Major Tillery. There were no ballistics or any other physical evidence linking him to the shootings. The surviving victim's statement naming others as the shooters was not allowed into evidence.
The trial took place in May 1985 during the last days of the siege and firebombing of the MOVE family Osage Avenue home in Philadelphia that killed 13 Black people, including 5 children. The prosecution claimed that Major Tillery was part of an organized crime group, and falsely described it as run by the Nation of Islam. This prejudiced and inflamed the majority white jury against Tillery, to make up for the absence of any evidence that Tillery was involved in the shootings.
This was a frame-up conviction from top to bottom. Claitt was the sole or primary witness in five other murder cases in the early 1980s. Coercing and inducing jailhouse informants to falsely testify is a standard routine in criminal prosecutions. It goes hand in hand with prosecutors suppressing favorable evidence from the defense.
Major Tillery has filed a petition based on his actual innocence to the Philadelphia District Attorney's Larry Krasner's Conviction Review Unit. A full review and investigation should lead to reversal of Major Tillery's conviction. He also asks that the DA's office to release the full police and prosecution files on his case under the new "open files" policy. In the meantime, Major Tillery continues his own investigation. He needs your support.
Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years
The Pennsylvania courts have rejected three rounds of appeals challenging Major Tillery's conviction based on his innocence, the prosecution's intentional presentation of false evidence against him and his trial attorney's conflict of interest. On June 15, 2016 Major Tillery filed a new post-conviction petition based on the same evidence now in the petition to the District Attorney's Conviction Review Unit. Despite the written and video-taped statements from Emanuel Claitt that that his testimony against Major Tillery was a lie and the result of police and prosecutorial misconduct, Judge Leon Tucker dismissed Major Tillery's petition as "untimely" without even holding a hearing. Major Tillery appealed that dismissal and the appeal is pending in the Superior Court.
During the decades of imprisonment Tillery has advocated for other prisoners challenging solitary confinement, lack of medical and mental health care and the inhumane conditions of imprisonment. In 1990, he won the lawsuit, Tillery v. Owens, that forced the PA Department of Corrections (DOC) to end double celling (4 men to a small cell) at SCI Pittsburgh, which later resulted in the closing and then "renovation" of that prison.
Three years ago Major Tillery stood up for political prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanded prison Superintendent John Kerestes get Mumia to a hospital because "Mumia is dying." For defending Mumia and advocating for medical treatment for himself and others, prison officials retaliated. Tillery was shipped out of SCI Mahanoy, where Mumia was also held, to maximum security SCI Frackville and then set-up for a prison violation and a disciplinary penalty of months in solitary confinement. See, Messing with Major by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Major Tillery's federal lawsuit against the DOC for that retaliation is being litigated. Major Tillery continues as an advocate for all prisoners. He is fighting to get the DOC to establish a program for elderly prisoners.
Major Tillery Needs Your Help:
Well-known criminal defense attorney Stephen Patrizio represents Major pro bonoin challenging his conviction. More investigation is underway. We can't count on the district attorney's office to make the findings of misconduct against the police detectives and prosecutors who framed Major without continuing to dig up the evidence.
Major Tillery is now 67 years old. He's done hard time, imprisoned for almost 35 years, some 20 years in solitary confinement in max prisons for a crime he did not commit. He recently won hepatitis C treatment, denied to him for a decade by the DOC. He has severe liver problems as well as arthritis and rheumatism, back problems, and a continuing itchy skin rash. Within the past couple of weeks he was diagnosed with an extremely high heartbeat and is getting treatment.
Major Tillery does not want to die in prison. He and his family, daughters, sons and grandchildren are fighting to get him home. The newly filed petition for Conviction Review to the Philadelphia District Attorney's office lays out the evidence Major Tillery has uncovered, evidence suppressed by the prosecution through all these years he has been imprisoned and brought legal challenges into court. It is time for the District Attorney's to act on the fact that Major Tillery is innocent and was framed by police detectives and prosecutors who manufactured the evidence to convict him. Major Tillery's conviction should be vacated and he should be freed.
Major Tillery and family
HOW YOU CAN HELP
Financial Support—Tillery's investigation is ongoing. He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom.
Go to JPay.com;
code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC
Tell Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner:
The Conviction Review Unit should investigate Major Tillery's case. He is innocent. The only evidence at trial was from lying jail house informants who now admit it was false.
Call: 215-686-8000 or
Email: justice@phila.gov
Write to:
Security Processing Center
Major Tillery AM 9786
268 Bricker Road
Bellefonte, PA 16823
For More Information, Go To: JusticeForMajorTillery.org
Call/Write:
Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009, Kamilah29@yahoo.com
Rachel Wolkenstein (917) 689-4009, RachelWolkenstein@gmail.com
Obtain Updates: www.justice4majortillery.info
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Free Leonard Peltier!
Art by Leonard Peltier
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1, P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
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Working people are helping to feed the poor hungry corporations!
Charity for the Wealthy!
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|
Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via RadioPublic | Via Stitcher
The sole survivor of an attack in which four people were murdered identified the perpetrators as three white men. The police ignored suspects who fit the description and arrested a young black man instead. He is now awaiting execution.
On today's episode:
• Kevin Cooper, who has been on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California for three decades.
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Last week I met with fellow organizers and members of Mijente to take joint action at the Tornillo Port of Entry, where detention camps have been built and where children and adults are currently being imprisoned.
I oppose the hyper-criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers. Migration is a human right and every person is worthy of dignity and respect irrespective of whether they have "papers" or not. You shouldn't have to prove "extreme and unusual hardship" to avoid being separated from your family. We, as a country, have a moral responsibility to support and uplift those adversely affected by the US's decades-long role in the economic and military destabilization of the home countries these migrants and asylum seekers have been forced to leave.
While we expected to face resistance and potential trouble from the multiple law enforcement agencies represented at the border, we didn't expect to have a local farm hand pull a pistol on us to demand we deflate our giant balloon banner. Its message to those in detention:
NO ESTÁN SOLOS (You are not alone).
Despite the slight disruption to our plan we were able to support Mijente and United We Dream in blocking the main entrance to the detention camp and letting those locked inside know that there are people here who care for them and want to see them free and reunited with their families.
We are continuing to stand in solidarity with Mijente as they fight back against unjust immigration practices.Yesterday they took action in San Diego, continuing to lead and escalate resistance to unjust detention, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and to ICE.
While we were honored to offer on-the-ground support we see the potential to focus the energy of our Drop the MIC campaign into fighting against this injustice, to have an even greater impact. Here's how:
- Call out General Dynamics for profiteering of War, Militarization of the Border and Child and Family Detention (look for our social media toolkit this week);
- Create speaking forums and produce media that challenges the narrative of ICE and Jeff Sessions, encouraging troops who have served in the borderlands to speak out about that experience;
- Continue to show up and demand we demilitarize the border and abolish ICE.
Thank you for your vision and understanding of how militarism, racism, and capitalism are coming together in the most destructive ways. Help keep us in this fight by continuing to support our work.
In Solidarity,
Ramon Mejia
Field Organizer, About Face: Veterans Against the War
P.O. Box 3565, New York, NY 10008. All Right Reserved. | Unsubscribe
To ensure delivery of About Face emails please add webmaster@ivaw.org to your address book.
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Major George Tillery
MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION
SEX FOR LIES AND
MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY
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April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony.
These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors.
Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony
For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault. Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence. The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes. Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters.
Homicide detectives and prosecutors threatened Claitt with a false unrelated murder charge, and induced him to lie with promises of little or no jail time on over twenty pending felonies, and being released from jail despite a parole violation. In addition, homicide detectives arranged for Claitt, while in custody, to have private sexual liaisons with his girlfriends in police interview rooms.
In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies". In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery.org.
Without the coerced and false testimony of Claitt there was no evidence against Major Tillery. There were no ballistics or any other physical evidence linking him to the shootings. The surviving victim's statement naming others as the shooters was not allowed into evidence.
The trial took place in May 1985 during the last days of the siege and firebombing of the MOVE family Osage Avenue home in Philadelphia that killed 13 Black people, including 5 children. The prosecution claimed that Major Tillery was part of an organized crime group, and falsely described it as run by the Nation of Islam. This prejudiced and inflamed the majority white jury against Tillery, to make up for the absence of any evidence that Tillery was involved in the shootings.
This was a frame-up conviction from top to bottom. Claitt was the sole or primary witness in five other murder cases in the early 1980s. Coercing and inducing jailhouse informants to falsely testify is a standard routine in criminal prosecutions. It goes hand in hand with prosecutors suppressing favorable evidence from the defense.
Major Tillery has filed a petition based on his actual innocence to the Philadelphia District Attorney's Larry Krasner's Conviction Review Unit. A full review and investigation should lead to reversal of Major Tillery's conviction. He also asks that the DA's office to release the full police and prosecution files on his case under the new "open files" policy. In the meantime, Major Tillery continues his own investigation. He needs your support.
Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years
The Pennsylvania courts have rejected three rounds of appeals challenging Major Tillery's conviction based on his innocence, the prosecution's intentional presentation of false evidence against him and his trial attorney's conflict of interest. On June 15, 2016 Major Tillery filed a new post-conviction petition based on the same evidence now in the petition to the District Attorney's Conviction Review Unit. Despite the written and video-taped statements from Emanuel Claitt that that his testimony against Major Tillery was a lie and the result of police and prosecutorial misconduct, Judge Leon Tucker dismissed Major Tillery's petition as "untimely" without even holding a hearing. Major Tillery appealed that dismissal and the appeal is pending in the Superior Court.
During the decades of imprisonment Tillery has advocated for other prisoners challenging solitary confinement, lack of medical and mental health care and the inhumane conditions of imprisonment. In 1990, he won the lawsuit, Tillery v. Owens, that forced the PA Department of Corrections (DOC) to end double celling (4 men to a small cell) at SCI Pittsburgh, which later resulted in the closing and then "renovation" of that prison.
Three years ago Major Tillery stood up for political prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanded prison Superintendent John Kerestes get Mumia to a hospital because "Mumia is dying." For defending Mumia and advocating for medical treatment for himself and others, prison officials retaliated. Tillery was shipped out of SCI Mahanoy, where Mumia was also held, to maximum security SCI Frackville and then set-up for a prison violation and a disciplinary penalty of months in solitary confinement. See, Messing with Major by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Major Tillery's federal lawsuit against the DOC for that retaliation is being litigated. Major Tillery continues as an advocate for all prisoners. He is fighting to get the DOC to establish a program for elderly prisoners.
Major Tillery Needs Your Help:
Well-known criminal defense attorney Stephen Patrizio represents Major pro bonoin challenging his conviction. More investigation is underway. We can't count on the district attorney's office to make the findings of misconduct against the police detectives and prosecutors who framed Major without continuing to dig up the evidence.
Major Tillery is now 67 years old. He's done hard time, imprisoned for almost 35 years, some 20 years in solitary confinement in max prisons for a crime he did not commit. He recently won hepatitis C treatment, denied to him for a decade by the DOC. He has severe liver problems as well as arthritis and rheumatism, back problems, and a continuing itchy skin rash. Within the past couple of weeks he was diagnosed with an extremely high heartbeat and is getting treatment.
Major Tillery does not want to die in prison. He and his family, daughters, sons and grandchildren are fighting to get him home. The newly filed petition for Conviction Review to the Philadelphia District Attorney's office lays out the evidence Major Tillery has uncovered, evidence suppressed by the prosecution through all these years he has been imprisoned and brought legal challenges into court. It is time for the District Attorney's to act on the fact that Major Tillery is innocent and was framed by police detectives and prosecutors who manufactured the evidence to convict him. Major Tillery's conviction should be vacated and he should be freed.
Obtain Updates: www.justice4majortillery.info
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Free Leonard Peltier!
Art by Leonard Peltier
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1, P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
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Working people are helping to feed the poor hungry corporations!
Charity for the Wealthy!
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1) Gov. Jerry Brown Commutes 131 Sentences and Orders DNA Testing in Death Row Case
By Thomas Fuller, December 24, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/us/kevin-cooper-commutation-jerry-brown.html
Kevin Cooper, shown in 1983, is on death row for his 1985 conviction in the killings of Douglas and Peggy Ryen and two of their children in Chino, Calif.
SAN FRANCISCO — Gov. Jerry Brown of California on Monday ordered a limited retesting of evidence in a highly contested murder conviction.
Lawyers for Kevin Cooper, who was convicted in 1985 of murdering Douglas and Peggy Ryen and two of their children in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, had petitioned the governor for clemency in 2016.
Mr. Brown said in July that he would consider additional testing in the case, and on Monday he ordered the retesting of a shirt, towel, hatchet handle and hatchet sheath.
In his order the governor said that the purpose of the testing, which will be carried out under the supervision of Daniel Pratt, a retired judge, was to see whether DNA from any another person in the F.B.I.’s database is present on the items.
Mr. Cooper, who has been sentenced to death, has exhausted all his appeals. His case had been championed by, among others, Senator Kamala Harris and the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
The request for retesting was fiercely contested by the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office, which in a 94-page filing urged the governor to “consider the overwhelming evidence of Cooper’s guilt” and to allow his “clearly deserved death sentence to remain in place.”
The filing quoted extensively from Josh Ryen, the only surviving family member, who was 8 years old at the time of the killings.
Mr. Brown granted Christmas Eve clemencies that included 143 pardons and 131 commutations. Among them was one for Sear Un, an immigrant from Cambodia who avoided deportation because of the governor’s pardon. Mr. Brown will leave office at the end of his term next month.
Given a commuted sentence was Richard Richardson, the editor in chief of San Quentin News. After serving more than 20 years for robbery, Mr. Richardson will be given the opportunity to appear before the Parole Board and make his case for earlier release.
The governor rejected a request by the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, to have the sentence of her brother commuted. The mayor’s brother, Napoleon Brown, has spent 18 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter and armed robbery.
1) Gov. Jerry Brown Commutes 131 Sentences and Orders DNA Testing in Death Row Case
By Thomas Fuller, December 24, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/us/kevin-cooper-commutation-jerry-brown.html
Kevin Cooper, shown in 1983, is on death row for his 1985 conviction in the killings of Douglas and Peggy Ryen and two of their children in Chino, Calif.
SAN FRANCISCO — Gov. Jerry Brown of California on Monday ordered a limited retesting of evidence in a highly contested murder conviction.
Lawyers for Kevin Cooper, who was convicted in 1985 of murdering Douglas and Peggy Ryen and two of their children in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, had petitioned the governor for clemency in 2016.
Mr. Brown said in July that he would consider additional testing in the case, and on Monday he ordered the retesting of a shirt, towel, hatchet handle and hatchet sheath.
In his order the governor said that the purpose of the testing, which will be carried out under the supervision of Daniel Pratt, a retired judge, was to see whether DNA from any another person in the F.B.I.’s database is present on the items.
Mr. Cooper, who has been sentenced to death, has exhausted all his appeals. His case had been championed by, among others, Senator Kamala Harris and the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
The request for retesting was fiercely contested by the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office, which in a 94-page filing urged the governor to “consider the overwhelming evidence of Cooper’s guilt” and to allow his “clearly deserved death sentence to remain in place.”
The filing quoted extensively from Josh Ryen, the only surviving family member, who was 8 years old at the time of the killings.
Mr. Brown granted Christmas Eve clemencies that included 143 pardons and 131 commutations. Among them was one for Sear Un, an immigrant from Cambodia who avoided deportation because of the governor’s pardon. Mr. Brown will leave office at the end of his term next month.
Given a commuted sentence was Richard Richardson, the editor in chief of San Quentin News. After serving more than 20 years for robbery, Mr. Richardson will be given the opportunity to appear before the Parole Board and make his case for earlier release.
The governor rejected a request by the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, to have the sentence of her brother commuted. The mayor’s brother, Napoleon Brown, has spent 18 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter and armed robbery.
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2) Investigation Finds at Least $800M in Taxpayer Money Went to Funding For-Profit Immigrant Prisons in 2018
By Jake Johnson, December 27, 2018
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/12/27/investigation-finds-least-800m-taxpayer-money-went-funding-profit-immigrant-prisons
Emily Ryo, an associate professor at the University of California's Gould School of Law, said the working conditions at these facilities are effectively indistinguishable from "slave labor." (Photo: Customs and Border Protection)
While President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant agenda has been disastrous and deadly for asylum-seekers fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries, a Daily Beast investigation published on Thursday found that the White House's xenophobic policies have been a major boon for the private prison industry—at the expense of American taxpayers.
According to the Daily Beast's Adam Rawnsley and Spencer Ackerman, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget records show that for-profit immigrant detention centers run by corporate giants like CoreCivic and GEO Group raked in over $800 million in taxpayer money in 2018 alone, thanks to generous government contracts that are largely kept secret from the public.
"For 19 privately owned or operated detention centers for which the Daily Beast could find recent pricing data, ICE paid an estimated $807 million in fiscal year 2018," Rawnsley and Ackerman reported. "Those 19 prisons hold 18,000 people—meaning that for-profit prisons currently lock up about 41 percent of the 44,000 people detained by ICE. But that's not a comprehensive total, and the true figures are likely significantly higher."
As Ackerman pointed out on Twitter, the estimated $807 million cost to taxpayers is also "certainly an undercount, because ICE's accounting of how many for-profit prisons it contracts to is opaque."
On top of documenting the big profits private prison corporations are making from Trump's immigration dragnet, the Daily Beast also highlighted the brutal and "exploitative" conditions of the for-profit detention facilities, where detained aslyum-seekers work for as little as $1 a day.
Yesica, a 23-year-old woman who fled El Salvador after MS-13 persecuted her for being a lesbian, described the Texas facility where she is currently detained as "like a torture chamber."
"This is a really terrible place," Yesica, who works the kitchen graveyard shift for $3 a day, said of the Joe Corley Detention Center. "It's inhumane."
Emily Ryo, an associate professor at the University of California's Gould School of Law, told the Daily Beast that the working conditions at these facilities are effectively indistinguishable from "slave labor."
"To the extent that the industry is in the business of expanding the system so they can make more money off holding more immigrants that can be confined, and doing everything possible to profit off of it by labor processes like getting detainees to work and paying them a dollar a day, there is very little distinction you can draw between slave labor and what they're doing," Ryo said.
Laura Lunn, an attorney with the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network in Colorado, agreed with this assessment, declaring, "The whole system is exploitative."
"It takes away the humanity of the people it detains and tells them, 'you can't be with your family, you can't go outside, you have very little agency, and while you're here, you've got to represent yourself in an immigration case without any tools, really, to succeed,'" Lunn concluded. "The labor piece of their detention is a small fragment of the ways their dignity is stripped from them. It's dehumanizing."
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2) Investigation Finds at Least $800M in Taxpayer Money Went to Funding For-Profit Immigrant Prisons in 2018
By Jake Johnson, December 27, 2018
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/12/27/investigation-finds-least-800m-taxpayer-money-went-funding-profit-immigrant-prisons
Emily Ryo, an associate professor at the University of California's Gould School of Law, said the working conditions at these facilities are effectively indistinguishable from "slave labor." (Photo: Customs and Border Protection)
While President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant agenda has been disastrous and deadly for asylum-seekers fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries, a Daily Beast investigation published on Thursday found that the White House's xenophobic policies have been a major boon for the private prison industry—at the expense of American taxpayers.
According to the Daily Beast's Adam Rawnsley and Spencer Ackerman, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget records show that for-profit immigrant detention centers run by corporate giants like CoreCivic and GEO Group raked in over $800 million in taxpayer money in 2018 alone, thanks to generous government contracts that are largely kept secret from the public.
"For 19 privately owned or operated detention centers for which the Daily Beast could find recent pricing data, ICE paid an estimated $807 million in fiscal year 2018," Rawnsley and Ackerman reported. "Those 19 prisons hold 18,000 people—meaning that for-profit prisons currently lock up about 41 percent of the 44,000 people detained by ICE. But that's not a comprehensive total, and the true figures are likely significantly higher."
As Ackerman pointed out on Twitter, the estimated $807 million cost to taxpayers is also "certainly an undercount, because ICE's accounting of how many for-profit prisons it contracts to is opaque."
On top of documenting the big profits private prison corporations are making from Trump's immigration dragnet, the Daily Beast also highlighted the brutal and "exploitative" conditions of the for-profit detention facilities, where detained aslyum-seekers work for as little as $1 a day.
Yesica, a 23-year-old woman who fled El Salvador after MS-13 persecuted her for being a lesbian, described the Texas facility where she is currently detained as "like a torture chamber."
"This is a really terrible place," Yesica, who works the kitchen graveyard shift for $3 a day, said of the Joe Corley Detention Center. "It's inhumane."
Emily Ryo, an associate professor at the University of California's Gould School of Law, told the Daily Beast that the working conditions at these facilities are effectively indistinguishable from "slave labor."
"To the extent that the industry is in the business of expanding the system so they can make more money off holding more immigrants that can be confined, and doing everything possible to profit off of it by labor processes like getting detainees to work and paying them a dollar a day, there is very little distinction you can draw between slave labor and what they're doing," Ryo said.
Laura Lunn, an attorney with the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network in Colorado, agreed with this assessment, declaring, "The whole system is exploitative."
"It takes away the humanity of the people it detains and tells them, 'you can't be with your family, you can't go outside, you have very little agency, and while you're here, you've got to represent yourself in an immigration case without any tools, really, to succeed,'" Lunn concluded. "The labor piece of their detention is a small fragment of the ways their dignity is stripped from them. It's dehumanizing."
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3) My Picks for Athlete of the Year Carried That Weight
By Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, Guardian UK, December 27, 2018
Colin Kaepernick, Maggie Nichols and Serena Williams left us better off because of their commitment to sport and society
https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/54140-my-picks-for-athlete-of-the-year-carried-that-weight
oday’s athletes have to carry a lot more baggage than a smelly gym bag and the giddy dreams of their parents. If they hope to achieve true greatness (or GOAT-ness) – and not just fleeting athletic notoriety – they also have to shoulder the leg-wobbling weight of responsibility to the community. This responsibility can come in different forms: charity work, as a role model and/or political activism. At the same time as they’re pushing the boundaries of their sport, they have to help define and promote the values of their community, even if that goes against some of the members of that community. That kind of athlete needs as much courage off the court as they do on it. Maybe more. With that in mind, in no particular order, here are my picks for athlete of the year, based on conduct most becoming a professional athlete.
Colin Kaepernick, football
Colin Kaepernick is still being punished by the NFL for exercising his right to peaceful free speech. Despite protestations of innocence from various teams, his continued absence from the league is a deliberate message meant to keep players in line and pander to football fans who aren’t also fans of the Bill of Rights. This is truly a case of a league misreading the room – and the decade. His influence has only spread more during his enforced absence from football. Nike’s use of his image in their ad campaign increased sales 31%. On 14 December, seven members of the Prince George County Board of Education sent a letter to Washington requesting they give Kaepernick an immediate tryout for the team after their two starting quarterbacks went down with injury: “We believe that giving Kaepernick an opportunity will send the right message to our students and community members, who see him as someone who cares about issues affecting our community.” Washington have instead chosen to start a quarterback who last threw a pass in the NFL in 2011. Kaepernick risked everything to quietly protest racial injustice while the NFL is unwilling to risk anything to do what’s right.
Maggie Nichols, gymnastics
University of Oklahoma gymnast Maggie Nichols will be honored in January with the 2018 NCAA Inspiration Award. This year she won an NCAA individual national championship as well as becoming the first gymnast with two perfect 10s on every event. She is the only gymnast to post back-to-back “Gym Slams” with a 10.0 on every event in consecutive seasons. What makes her achievements even more remarkable is that she accomplished this while undergoing the kind of personal stress that would have sidelined most of us. Right before the start of the 2018 season, Nichols revealed that she was the first of what would become hundreds of young girls to accuse Larry Nassar, the team doctor for USA Gymnastics, of sexual molestation.
Beyond exposing the exploitation of the athletes, her courage in coming forth also led to uncovering the negligence of the USA Gymnastics organization in stopping the abuse. The subsequent lawsuits have resulted in USA Gymnastics declaring bankruptcy and a complete reorganization. “Coming forward made me a stronger person,” Nichols said. “Going through such a traumatic event and growing the courage to come forward took a lot of strength for me. It was very hard. But after I did so, I felt that I was inspiring others which gave me so much strength and made me feel like an inspiration which is so motivating.” Because of her and the other gymnasts who have come forward, thousands of other young girls are safer to focus on the joys of the sport instead of worrying about predators.
Serena Williams, tennis
No one disputes Serena Williams’ place as one of the most successful athletes in the world. She has dominated tennis for most of her career, tying Steffi Graf’s record of being ranked number one by the Women’s Tennis Association for 186 consecutive weeks. Her achievements have not only encouraged young girls to take up tennis, but her prominence as a black woman in a mostly white sport has inspired more African-American girls to pursue the sport. That would be enough to make her one of the most influential athletes this year. But she has gone even further in redefining the sport by redefining the way females are perceived, not just as athletes, but as women.
For most of her career, she has faced body shaming for being a muscular woman. Watching her stride onto the court confident in her powerful body is a stark refutation of the harmful traditional view of beauty which praises skinny, physically weak women in need of a man’s strength. Fortunately, that grotesque and self-loathing image is being replaced by women like Williams who aren’t ashamed of their muscles.
Williams is also the embodiment of what NFL coach Vince Lombardi used to say: “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.” She returned to professional tennis just months after giving birth, a procedure that nearly killed her due to a pulmonary embolism that required multiple surgeries. Despite the trauma to her body, she is back playing as hard as ever, demonstrating that motherhood is not an impediment to ambition, but a bonus in providing a new perspective. “I think having a baby might help,” Williams said. “When I’m too anxious I lose matches, and I feel like a lot of that anxiety disappeared when Olympia was born. Knowing I’ve got this beautiful baby to go home to makes me feel like I don’t have to play another match. I don’t need the money or the titles or the prestige. I want them, but I don’t need them. That’s a different feeling for me.” That difference was demonstrated when she returned to play tennis, only to find that the WTA had changed her world ranking from number 1 to 451, a clear punishment, whether intended or not, for her taking time off to have a baby. After public outcry, the WTA this week changed their rules regarding women returning from giving birth. Williams continues to improve the sport through her athleticism and her social stances.
Coach John Wooden taught me that sports wasn’t just about making us better athletes, but about making us better people. Compassion, kindness, and morality were more important than a championship season. Fame wasn’t an accomplishment, it was an opportunity to show our gratitude to the community that we are a part of by changing it for the better. That’s what these three exceptional athletes have done this year: left us better off because of their commitment to a sport and to society.
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3) My Picks for Athlete of the Year Carried That Weight
By Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, Guardian UK, December 27, 2018
Colin Kaepernick, Maggie Nichols and Serena Williams left us better off because of their commitment to sport and society
https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/54140-my-picks-for-athlete-of-the-year-carried-that-weight
oday’s athletes have to carry a lot more baggage than a smelly gym bag and the giddy dreams of their parents. If they hope to achieve true greatness (or GOAT-ness) – and not just fleeting athletic notoriety – they also have to shoulder the leg-wobbling weight of responsibility to the community. This responsibility can come in different forms: charity work, as a role model and/or political activism. At the same time as they’re pushing the boundaries of their sport, they have to help define and promote the values of their community, even if that goes against some of the members of that community. That kind of athlete needs as much courage off the court as they do on it. Maybe more. With that in mind, in no particular order, here are my picks for athlete of the year, based on conduct most becoming a professional athlete.
Colin Kaepernick, football
Colin Kaepernick is still being punished by the NFL for exercising his right to peaceful free speech. Despite protestations of innocence from various teams, his continued absence from the league is a deliberate message meant to keep players in line and pander to football fans who aren’t also fans of the Bill of Rights. This is truly a case of a league misreading the room – and the decade. His influence has only spread more during his enforced absence from football. Nike’s use of his image in their ad campaign increased sales 31%. On 14 December, seven members of the Prince George County Board of Education sent a letter to Washington requesting they give Kaepernick an immediate tryout for the team after their two starting quarterbacks went down with injury: “We believe that giving Kaepernick an opportunity will send the right message to our students and community members, who see him as someone who cares about issues affecting our community.” Washington have instead chosen to start a quarterback who last threw a pass in the NFL in 2011. Kaepernick risked everything to quietly protest racial injustice while the NFL is unwilling to risk anything to do what’s right.
Maggie Nichols, gymnastics
University of Oklahoma gymnast Maggie Nichols will be honored in January with the 2018 NCAA Inspiration Award. This year she won an NCAA individual national championship as well as becoming the first gymnast with two perfect 10s on every event. She is the only gymnast to post back-to-back “Gym Slams” with a 10.0 on every event in consecutive seasons. What makes her achievements even more remarkable is that she accomplished this while undergoing the kind of personal stress that would have sidelined most of us. Right before the start of the 2018 season, Nichols revealed that she was the first of what would become hundreds of young girls to accuse Larry Nassar, the team doctor for USA Gymnastics, of sexual molestation.
Beyond exposing the exploitation of the athletes, her courage in coming forth also led to uncovering the negligence of the USA Gymnastics organization in stopping the abuse. The subsequent lawsuits have resulted in USA Gymnastics declaring bankruptcy and a complete reorganization. “Coming forward made me a stronger person,” Nichols said. “Going through such a traumatic event and growing the courage to come forward took a lot of strength for me. It was very hard. But after I did so, I felt that I was inspiring others which gave me so much strength and made me feel like an inspiration which is so motivating.” Because of her and the other gymnasts who have come forward, thousands of other young girls are safer to focus on the joys of the sport instead of worrying about predators.
Serena Williams, tennis
No one disputes Serena Williams’ place as one of the most successful athletes in the world. She has dominated tennis for most of her career, tying Steffi Graf’s record of being ranked number one by the Women’s Tennis Association for 186 consecutive weeks. Her achievements have not only encouraged young girls to take up tennis, but her prominence as a black woman in a mostly white sport has inspired more African-American girls to pursue the sport. That would be enough to make her one of the most influential athletes this year. But she has gone even further in redefining the sport by redefining the way females are perceived, not just as athletes, but as women.
For most of her career, she has faced body shaming for being a muscular woman. Watching her stride onto the court confident in her powerful body is a stark refutation of the harmful traditional view of beauty which praises skinny, physically weak women in need of a man’s strength. Fortunately, that grotesque and self-loathing image is being replaced by women like Williams who aren’t ashamed of their muscles.
Williams is also the embodiment of what NFL coach Vince Lombardi used to say: “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.” She returned to professional tennis just months after giving birth, a procedure that nearly killed her due to a pulmonary embolism that required multiple surgeries. Despite the trauma to her body, she is back playing as hard as ever, demonstrating that motherhood is not an impediment to ambition, but a bonus in providing a new perspective. “I think having a baby might help,” Williams said. “When I’m too anxious I lose matches, and I feel like a lot of that anxiety disappeared when Olympia was born. Knowing I’ve got this beautiful baby to go home to makes me feel like I don’t have to play another match. I don’t need the money or the titles or the prestige. I want them, but I don’t need them. That’s a different feeling for me.” That difference was demonstrated when she returned to play tennis, only to find that the WTA had changed her world ranking from number 1 to 451, a clear punishment, whether intended or not, for her taking time off to have a baby. After public outcry, the WTA this week changed their rules regarding women returning from giving birth. Williams continues to improve the sport through her athleticism and her social stances.
Coach John Wooden taught me that sports wasn’t just about making us better athletes, but about making us better people. Compassion, kindness, and morality were more important than a championship season. Fame wasn’t an accomplishment, it was an opportunity to show our gratitude to the community that we are a part of by changing it for the better. That’s what these three exceptional athletes have done this year: left us better off because of their commitment to a sport and to society.
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4) A Second Chance for Prisoners, and Their Warden
As a school board member in Wolf Point, Mont., Ron Jackson couldn’t help struggling Native American students as much as he hoped. Now some of them are his inmates.
By Erica L. Green and Annie Waldman, December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/us/warden-native-americans-education.html
Wallace Archdale, 23, in a segregation unit at the Fort Peck Indian Reservation adult correctional facility in Poplar, Mont.
This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization.
WOLF POINT, Mont. — Every day Ron Jackson walks into work and is reminded of his failures.
As Mr. Jackson, the warden of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation adult correctional facility, patrols the cells, he sees Native American inmates who might be leading productive lives on the outside if they had graduated from high school. And Mr. Jackson, a member of the Assiniboine tribe, says he feels partly responsible.
Before becoming warden, he served on the Wolf Point school board for 15 years, 10 as its chairman. He pushed to curb discrimination in the town’s schools against Native Americans, who make up more than half of students but less than one-fifth of the staff. He fought for more reading instruction and other support for Native children and challenged decisions to expel them. But his efforts mostly fell flat as the white majority on the board outvoted or ignored him.
Now he has been meeting some of those dropouts as adults on the other end of the school-to-prison pipeline.
“I still see the effects of our schools,” he said. “We got grandparents 70, 80 years old, can’t read and write because they went to these schools. Their kids are doing the same thing; they don’t care if they go to school.”
At 64, Mr. Jackson hasn’t given up. More than a century ago, the federal government opened up unused land on the reservation to white settlers, whose descendants have long dominated Wolf Point’s politics, business and school system. But corrections and policing of tribal members has been under Native control for decades, and Mr. Jackson is trying to make the most of it.
Built in 2014, the two-story correctional facility in Poplar, 20 miles from Wolf Point, has about 70 inmates at a time. It serves as both a jail and a prison; some inmates are awaiting trial, while others have been convicted of violent crimes. Mr. Jackson has shifted its focus from punishment to rehabilitation and education.
One of his first acts as warden after being appointed by the tribal executive board in 2016 was to gather the inmates in a circle and lead them in a prayer for redemption. He also allowed prisoners to travel overnight to powwows and other Native ceremonies. Although many of them struggle with substance abuse, they all passed drug tests on their return. This year, Mr. Jackson introduced a G.E.D. program to help inmates earn diplomas.
Inmates point to the failures of Wolf Point’s schools at key moments in their youths. Elton Lambert, 19, who was serving four months for criminal mischief, sat in gray sweatpants and an orange sweatshirt in a circular meeting room with a skylight and murals of feathers and eagles etched on the walls, as he recounted getting kicked out of a Wolf Point school in second grade.
“I would get mad and walk out of the classroom and throw stuff around,” he said. “I acted out because I had a hard time reading, and I didn’t want to read out loud.”
Beginning at age 6, Mr. Lambert was sent off the reservation to residential treatment centers for troubled children. When he returned to Wolf Point at age 12, the school wouldn’t take him back, citing his earlier outbursts and saying that he had fallen so far behind that he would be teased, he said.
“I wanted to go back to school because I wanted my education,” he said. “They denied me, so I just kept getting back in trouble.”
Wallace Archdale Jr., 23, who is serving 16 months for domestic abuse, said he was held back two years in middle school, then told he couldn’t graduate because he would be too old. He dropped out, he said.
“They just watch you until you mess up, so they can kick you out,” he said.
Unlike the schools, Mr. Archdale and Mr. Lambert said, the prison offers a sense of tribal community. Family lineage is celebrated and traditional religious ceremonies are woven into inmates’ schedules. Mr. Jackson built a sweat lodge where inmates perform a purifying and healing ceremony. The facility offers alcohol and drug counseling, and mental health evaluations, and a women’s center conducts parenting groups and domestic violence counseling for male and female inmates.
“It helps the people on the inside to know that the warden cares for them and also tries to walk his talk as much as possible,” said Christine Holler-Dinsmore, the pastor of Spirit of Life Ministries, who provides spiritual guidance to inmates. “The depths of the pain of what people have experienced here is tragic, and that’s one thing that Ron understands. Nobody here is a stranger to the struggles.”
Mr. Jackson was born on the reservation but grew up in Gary, Ind., where his family moved with help from the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, a federal law that provided job training to Native Americans and encouraged them to leave the reservations for urban areas. He returned to Wolf Point in the late 1960s. As a high school athlete, he said, his Native peers nicknamed him “apple,” mocking his popularity with white students — red on the outside, white on the inside. Of more than 100 Native students in his freshman class, only he and nine others graduated.
Mr. Jackson was born on the reservation but grew up in Gary, Ind., where his family moved with help from the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, a federal law that provided job training to Native Americans and encouraged them to leave the reservations for urban areas. He returned to Wolf Point in the late 1960s. As a high school athlete, he said, his Native peers nicknamed him “apple,” mocking his popularity with white students — red on the outside, white on the inside. Of more than 100 Native students in his freshman class, only he and nine others graduated.
Mr. Jackson climbed the ranks on the reservation, holding jobs in law enforcement and at the local community college. He joined the school board in 1991, thinking that with more Native voices at the table, he could change the system.
“Just about every time you brought up an issue on your agenda, you’d talk about that, that it wasn’t fair,” Mr. Jackson said. “Every time we had to go into executive session for a child, they expelled them.”
A tribal elder named him Pte Mnonga Nadambi, “Charging Bull,” but his efforts were largely in vain. Even when he toured the schools, he was treated differently from white board members.
“I walk down the hall and one of my teachers walks by and acts like I’m not even there,” he said. “I told them I am really getting tired of walking down the hall and having my own people, the guys that I sign their checks, ignoring me.”
After he lost election in 2012, the board was all white. Mr. Jackson and six other Native residents sued the school district, contending that the boundaries of Wolf Point’s school board districts discriminated against Native Americans by giving greater voting power to whites. Less than a year after the suit was filed, the district entered into a consent decreeto draw more equitable district lines. Today, half the school board members are Native American or of Native descent.
Still, mistreatment of Native students persists, he said. “Nothing works here.”
Erica L. Green is a correspondent in Washington covering education and education policy. Before joining The Times, she wrote about education for The Baltimore Sun.
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4) A Second Chance for Prisoners, and Their Warden
As a school board member in Wolf Point, Mont., Ron Jackson couldn’t help struggling Native American students as much as he hoped. Now some of them are his inmates.
By Erica L. Green and Annie Waldman, December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/us/warden-native-americans-education.html
Wallace Archdale, 23, in a segregation unit at the Fort Peck Indian Reservation adult correctional facility in Poplar, Mont.
This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization.
WOLF POINT, Mont. — Every day Ron Jackson walks into work and is reminded of his failures.
As Mr. Jackson, the warden of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation adult correctional facility, patrols the cells, he sees Native American inmates who might be leading productive lives on the outside if they had graduated from high school. And Mr. Jackson, a member of the Assiniboine tribe, says he feels partly responsible.
Before becoming warden, he served on the Wolf Point school board for 15 years, 10 as its chairman. He pushed to curb discrimination in the town’s schools against Native Americans, who make up more than half of students but less than one-fifth of the staff. He fought for more reading instruction and other support for Native children and challenged decisions to expel them. But his efforts mostly fell flat as the white majority on the board outvoted or ignored him.
Now he has been meeting some of those dropouts as adults on the other end of the school-to-prison pipeline.
“I still see the effects of our schools,” he said. “We got grandparents 70, 80 years old, can’t read and write because they went to these schools. Their kids are doing the same thing; they don’t care if they go to school.”
At 64, Mr. Jackson hasn’t given up. More than a century ago, the federal government opened up unused land on the reservation to white settlers, whose descendants have long dominated Wolf Point’s politics, business and school system. But corrections and policing of tribal members has been under Native control for decades, and Mr. Jackson is trying to make the most of it.
Built in 2014, the two-story correctional facility in Poplar, 20 miles from Wolf Point, has about 70 inmates at a time. It serves as both a jail and a prison; some inmates are awaiting trial, while others have been convicted of violent crimes. Mr. Jackson has shifted its focus from punishment to rehabilitation and education.
One of his first acts as warden after being appointed by the tribal executive board in 2016 was to gather the inmates in a circle and lead them in a prayer for redemption. He also allowed prisoners to travel overnight to powwows and other Native ceremonies. Although many of them struggle with substance abuse, they all passed drug tests on their return. This year, Mr. Jackson introduced a G.E.D. program to help inmates earn diplomas.
Inmates point to the failures of Wolf Point’s schools at key moments in their youths. Elton Lambert, 19, who was serving four months for criminal mischief, sat in gray sweatpants and an orange sweatshirt in a circular meeting room with a skylight and murals of feathers and eagles etched on the walls, as he recounted getting kicked out of a Wolf Point school in second grade.
“I would get mad and walk out of the classroom and throw stuff around,” he said. “I acted out because I had a hard time reading, and I didn’t want to read out loud.”
Beginning at age 6, Mr. Lambert was sent off the reservation to residential treatment centers for troubled children. When he returned to Wolf Point at age 12, the school wouldn’t take him back, citing his earlier outbursts and saying that he had fallen so far behind that he would be teased, he said.
“I wanted to go back to school because I wanted my education,” he said. “They denied me, so I just kept getting back in trouble.”
Wallace Archdale Jr., 23, who is serving 16 months for domestic abuse, said he was held back two years in middle school, then told he couldn’t graduate because he would be too old. He dropped out, he said.
“They just watch you until you mess up, so they can kick you out,” he said.
Unlike the schools, Mr. Archdale and Mr. Lambert said, the prison offers a sense of tribal community. Family lineage is celebrated and traditional religious ceremonies are woven into inmates’ schedules. Mr. Jackson built a sweat lodge where inmates perform a purifying and healing ceremony. The facility offers alcohol and drug counseling, and mental health evaluations, and a women’s center conducts parenting groups and domestic violence counseling for male and female inmates.
“It helps the people on the inside to know that the warden cares for them and also tries to walk his talk as much as possible,” said Christine Holler-Dinsmore, the pastor of Spirit of Life Ministries, who provides spiritual guidance to inmates. “The depths of the pain of what people have experienced here is tragic, and that’s one thing that Ron understands. Nobody here is a stranger to the struggles.”
Mr. Jackson was born on the reservation but grew up in Gary, Ind., where his family moved with help from the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, a federal law that provided job training to Native Americans and encouraged them to leave the reservations for urban areas. He returned to Wolf Point in the late 1960s. As a high school athlete, he said, his Native peers nicknamed him “apple,” mocking his popularity with white students — red on the outside, white on the inside. Of more than 100 Native students in his freshman class, only he and nine others graduated.
Mr. Jackson was born on the reservation but grew up in Gary, Ind., where his family moved with help from the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, a federal law that provided job training to Native Americans and encouraged them to leave the reservations for urban areas. He returned to Wolf Point in the late 1960s. As a high school athlete, he said, his Native peers nicknamed him “apple,” mocking his popularity with white students — red on the outside, white on the inside. Of more than 100 Native students in his freshman class, only he and nine others graduated.
Mr. Jackson climbed the ranks on the reservation, holding jobs in law enforcement and at the local community college. He joined the school board in 1991, thinking that with more Native voices at the table, he could change the system.
“Just about every time you brought up an issue on your agenda, you’d talk about that, that it wasn’t fair,” Mr. Jackson said. “Every time we had to go into executive session for a child, they expelled them.”
A tribal elder named him Pte Mnonga Nadambi, “Charging Bull,” but his efforts were largely in vain. Even when he toured the schools, he was treated differently from white board members.
“I walk down the hall and one of my teachers walks by and acts like I’m not even there,” he said. “I told them I am really getting tired of walking down the hall and having my own people, the guys that I sign their checks, ignoring me.”
After he lost election in 2012, the board was all white. Mr. Jackson and six other Native residents sued the school district, contending that the boundaries of Wolf Point’s school board districts discriminated against Native Americans by giving greater voting power to whites. Less than a year after the suit was filed, the district entered into a consent decreeto draw more equitable district lines. Today, half the school board members are Native American or of Native descent.
Still, mistreatment of Native students persists, he said. “Nothing works here.”
Erica L. Green is a correspondent in Washington covering education and education policy. Before joining The Times, she wrote about education for The Baltimore Sun.
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5) The First Step Act Is a Small Step for Incarcerated Women
By Anjana Samant, December 28, 2018
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/12/28/first-step-act-small-step-incarcerated-women?cd-
To achieve meaningful gender justice, we need to apply a gender lens in analyzing both problems and solutions. (Photo: Flickr/cc)
The enactment of the First Step Act earlier this month will bring some much-needed change to our criminal justice system. But the First Step Act remains just that, a first step — particularly with respect to the impact that mass incarceration has had on cisgender women and trans people.
The legislation ends two gender-specific indignities of federal incarceration: the shackling of pregnant women and restrictions on access to menstrual hygiene products.
Shackling pregnant women during delivery has zero safety or health purposes, and serves only to demean and endanger the individual and her infant. The First Step Act moves toward permanently banning this practice by prohibiting federal correctional authorities from shackling incarcerated women during pregnancy and for a period thereafter, with some exceptions. The act also requires the federal Bureau of Prisons to provide sanitary napkins and tampons at no charge. As with the shackling of pregnant women, unnecessary restrictions on access to menstrual health products have turned a normal bodily function into a nightmare for people in prison.
These changes, in addition to the act’s other reforms, are welcome improvements, but they only begin to scratch the surface for incarcerated women. Even in the areas of pregnancy and menstrual health, many problems in federal prisons will go unaddressed. For instance, the often indiscriminate and arbitrary use of solitary confinement against pregnant women and the inadequate provision of OB-GYN care will not change. Furthermore, though cost will no longer be an issue, access to sanitary napkins and tampons is not guaranteed since institutions can continue to set arbitrary monthly quotas on such supplies. The act also will not end policies that deny or delay laundry privileges or a change of clothes to someone who has bled through their clothing. And if you are in federal immigration detention or are one of the unknown number of transgender prisoners in federal men’s facilities, you are not covered by the legislation at all.
Moreover, most women behind bars will not benefit from the act simply because the vast majority of imprisoned women are in state and local facilities.
In recent decades, women have been the fastest growing incarcerated population in the country. That growth has been concentrated in state and local facilities due to several factors. The increased criminalization of poverty at the local level means that jurisdictions across the country are throwing women in jail because they cannot afford to pay government fines and fees, and because they cannot afford bail. As a recent ACLU and Human Rights Watch report found, “While most women admitted to jails are accused of minor crimes, the consequences of pretrial incarceration can be devastating.” Whether in jail for a day or for months, women face the prospect of losing their jobs, apartments, children, and — as the deaths of Sandra Bland and Natasha McKenna remind us — even their lives.
The rising women’s population in state prisons is partially the result of the overcriminalization of drug-related offenses, the spread of “broken windows”-style policing and sentencing, and the criminalization of behavioral responses to gender-based and sexual violence. Additionally, girls and trans youth — particularly youth of color — are being pulled into the criminal justice system earlier and more often through the increased criminal prosecution of in-school behavior and the school-to-prison pipeline.
Most cisgender women and trans people who come into contact with the criminal justice system either have some history of substance abuse, or are survivors of or witnesses to violence. Yet state and local facilities often fail to provide appropriate trauma counseling, mental health services, or other supports that would reduce retraumatization and improve odds of successful reintegration upon release.
The First Step Act’s requirement that incarcerated people in federal prisons be placed within 500 driving miles of their families signals an acknowledgment that family separation harms both people in prison and their loved ones. However, this rule will not apply to the roughly 60 percent of women in state prisons and 80 percent of women in local jails who are mothers with minor children. Even though these women also are more likely to be single parents or primary care providers than jailed fathers, odds are that they will be imprisoned far from home, regardless of the impact on their personal or their families’ well-being.
The reforms of the First Step Act should be implemented and expanded at the state and local levels. More steps should be taken to permanently ban the shackling and solitary confinement of all prisoners and ensure free and unimpaired access to menstrual health supplies and OB-GYN medical services. Additionally, we must end money bail and close debtors’ prisons, adopt incarceration and prosecution alternatives, and institute trauma-informed practices in all detention and prison facilities. These are just a few examples of more gender-inclusive reform efforts.
To achieve meaningful gender justice, we need to apply a gender lens in analyzing both problems and solutions. Otherwise, and despite important efforts like the First Step Act, sexist inequities in institutions throughout society, including the criminal justice system, will persist.
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5) The First Step Act Is a Small Step for Incarcerated Women
By Anjana Samant, December 28, 2018
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/12/28/first-step-act-small-step-incarcerated-women?cd-
To achieve meaningful gender justice, we need to apply a gender lens in analyzing both problems and solutions. (Photo: Flickr/cc)
The enactment of the First Step Act earlier this month will bring some much-needed change to our criminal justice system. But the First Step Act remains just that, a first step — particularly with respect to the impact that mass incarceration has had on cisgender women and trans people.
The legislation ends two gender-specific indignities of federal incarceration: the shackling of pregnant women and restrictions on access to menstrual hygiene products.
Shackling pregnant women during delivery has zero safety or health purposes, and serves only to demean and endanger the individual and her infant. The First Step Act moves toward permanently banning this practice by prohibiting federal correctional authorities from shackling incarcerated women during pregnancy and for a period thereafter, with some exceptions. The act also requires the federal Bureau of Prisons to provide sanitary napkins and tampons at no charge. As with the shackling of pregnant women, unnecessary restrictions on access to menstrual health products have turned a normal bodily function into a nightmare for people in prison.
These changes, in addition to the act’s other reforms, are welcome improvements, but they only begin to scratch the surface for incarcerated women. Even in the areas of pregnancy and menstrual health, many problems in federal prisons will go unaddressed. For instance, the often indiscriminate and arbitrary use of solitary confinement against pregnant women and the inadequate provision of OB-GYN care will not change. Furthermore, though cost will no longer be an issue, access to sanitary napkins and tampons is not guaranteed since institutions can continue to set arbitrary monthly quotas on such supplies. The act also will not end policies that deny or delay laundry privileges or a change of clothes to someone who has bled through their clothing. And if you are in federal immigration detention or are one of the unknown number of transgender prisoners in federal men’s facilities, you are not covered by the legislation at all.
Moreover, most women behind bars will not benefit from the act simply because the vast majority of imprisoned women are in state and local facilities.
In recent decades, women have been the fastest growing incarcerated population in the country. That growth has been concentrated in state and local facilities due to several factors. The increased criminalization of poverty at the local level means that jurisdictions across the country are throwing women in jail because they cannot afford to pay government fines and fees, and because they cannot afford bail. As a recent ACLU and Human Rights Watch report found, “While most women admitted to jails are accused of minor crimes, the consequences of pretrial incarceration can be devastating.” Whether in jail for a day or for months, women face the prospect of losing their jobs, apartments, children, and — as the deaths of Sandra Bland and Natasha McKenna remind us — even their lives.
The rising women’s population in state prisons is partially the result of the overcriminalization of drug-related offenses, the spread of “broken windows”-style policing and sentencing, and the criminalization of behavioral responses to gender-based and sexual violence. Additionally, girls and trans youth — particularly youth of color — are being pulled into the criminal justice system earlier and more often through the increased criminal prosecution of in-school behavior and the school-to-prison pipeline.
Most cisgender women and trans people who come into contact with the criminal justice system either have some history of substance abuse, or are survivors of or witnesses to violence. Yet state and local facilities often fail to provide appropriate trauma counseling, mental health services, or other supports that would reduce retraumatization and improve odds of successful reintegration upon release.
The First Step Act’s requirement that incarcerated people in federal prisons be placed within 500 driving miles of their families signals an acknowledgment that family separation harms both people in prison and their loved ones. However, this rule will not apply to the roughly 60 percent of women in state prisons and 80 percent of women in local jails who are mothers with minor children. Even though these women also are more likely to be single parents or primary care providers than jailed fathers, odds are that they will be imprisoned far from home, regardless of the impact on their personal or their families’ well-being.
The reforms of the First Step Act should be implemented and expanded at the state and local levels. More steps should be taken to permanently ban the shackling and solitary confinement of all prisoners and ensure free and unimpaired access to menstrual health supplies and OB-GYN medical services. Additionally, we must end money bail and close debtors’ prisons, adopt incarceration and prosecution alternatives, and institute trauma-informed practices in all detention and prison facilities. These are just a few examples of more gender-inclusive reform efforts.
To achieve meaningful gender justice, we need to apply a gender lens in analyzing both problems and solutions. Otherwise, and despite important efforts like the First Step Act, sexist inequities in institutions throughout society, including the criminal justice system, will persist.
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6) Young Inmates Say They Were Shipped Upstate, Held in Isolation and Beaten
By Jan Ransom, December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/nyregion/solitary-confinement-lawsuit-young-inmates.html
Davon Washington, 22, was transferred in March from Rikers Island to an Albany County jail, where he says he was abused and sentenced to 360 days in isolation.
The young inmates were taken by van from a jail on Rikers Island in New York City to an airfield hours north of the city. There, the abuse started almost immediately, according to a federal lawsuit filed on Friday.
A dozen correction officers from a county jail led them inside a building and into metal cages. They would issue deliberately confusing commands and when the inmates failed to comply, the guards would pummel and kick them, use their Taser guns, and shove their fingers and batons into their rectums.
“This is not Rikers,” the guards shouted before sending the inmates to solitary confinement at the jail, the Albany County Correctional Facility.
The abuse was designed for inmates from Rikers who had been accused of assaulting correction officers, according to the suit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan by three inmates and another young man who had been held in the Albany jail.
The lawsuit comes five months after a New York Times investigationfound that New York City had increased the number of young inmates transferred to correctional facilities elsewhere in the state since 2015, when the city banned solitary for inmates younger than 22 and limited it for others.
While New York has long had the power to transfer inmates, defense lawyers and inmate advocates criticized the increase as an end-run around the city’s own rules, adding that it undermined Mayor Bill de Blasio’s promise to reform the criminal justice system.
In many cases, inmates sent away from New York City have been accused of assaulting guards and are transferred in part because their safety cannot be ensured.
But the lawsuit, filed against the city, Albany County officials and individual correction officers, said that the inmates’ constitutional rights were violated when they were sent upstate without any regard for their welfare, and that the men were systematically targeted for brutal treatment carried out by high-ranking correction staff.
“The lawsuit will reveal that the city knows what’s going on and condones it,” said Katherine Rosenfeld, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, who are represented by two private law firms. “They keep putting people in the van and sending them up there.”
A spokesman for the mayor, Eric Phillips, did not respond directly to the accusations of abuse. In a statement, Mr. Phillips said, “For an extremely small number of young detainees facing credible safety threats in our jails, the safest option is a transfer to another facility.”
The Albany County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The inmates’ situation was exacerbated when they were sent to solitary confinement, the suit claimed. Isolation increases the risk of depression or suicide, especially among younger inmates.
The city’s jail reforms were inspired, in part, Mr. de Blasio said, by Kalief Browder, a teenager who committed suicide after spending much of his three years at Rikers in solitary confinement before robbery charges against him were dropped.
Hundreds of inmates have been kept out of isolation since the city implemented its ban on solitary confinement for young people and reduced its use for other inmates. Still, the transfer of inmates to outside jails seems to highlight the limitations of the ban.
Two of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit were 19 and 21 when they were transferred to Albany. The other two were older than 22. One of the plaintiffs is identified only as John Doe because he fears retaliation by correction workers.
One of the plaintiffs, Davon Washington, who is now 22, said in an interview at his home in the Bronx that he wrote the mayor and provided a detailed account of the abuse, and asked to be transferred elsewhere. He said he never received a response.
Mr. Washington was transferred from Rikers Island to the Albany facility in March, two weeks after he said he got into an altercation with a city deputy warden. He was there until November and released from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in Albany on Monday. He had been convicted of attempted robbery.
“I’ve been trying to forget about Albany,” he said.
Like each of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Mr. Washington said during the interview and in the lawsuit that in Albany, he was forced to follow a series of commands. The moment he made a mistake, he was repeatedly punched in the face and then stomped by multiple correction officers.
He said there was a lieutenant who led the attacks and directed the officers while a superintendent watched. The officers accused him of hiding contraband in his body, but he said he did not have anything on him. He said a correction officer inserted two fingers into his rectum. He said he was taken to a body scanner designed to detect contraband stored in a person’s body.
At one point, a nurse asked if he had any injuries. When he said he did, he was punched in the face.
Mr. Washington, who was handcuffed and shackled, was eventually placed in isolation. While inside the small cell, he said, the officers attacked him again. After the beating, he was bleeding, his tooth was chipped, his lip was split, and he had bruises all over his body. During the attacks, he said, he thought he was going to die.
He received an infraction ticket for trying to assault an officer, which he said was a bogus claim. At a disciplinary hearing, he was sentenced to 360 days in isolation and denied phone privileges for a month.
“I was losing my mind doing the same thing over and over again,” Mr. Washington said.
He said he was beaten again in October, after correction officers learned he had met with lawyers about his allegations of abuse.
“The city failed to investigate or remediate these conditions and has continued sending detainees, including many aged 21 and younger, to the Albany County Jail without notice or hearing, to be beaten and put in solitary confinement,” the lawsuit said.
The other plaintiffs include Pariis Tillery, 25, and Steven Espinal, 19. Mr. Espinal was one of four inmates charged with gang assault for the attack on Rikers Island correction officer Jean Souffrant, which was captured on video. The attack left the officer’s spine fractured.
Mr. Espinal said he was beaten in Albany, lost hearing in his left ear, and passed blood in his urine after the attacks. He was hospitalized and sentenced to 600 days in solitary confinement.
“They would say these are violent kids. These kids have done — some of them — very violent things. They’re human,” said Steven Goldman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, adding that correction staff “attach blame and now it’s open season.”
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6) Young Inmates Say They Were Shipped Upstate, Held in Isolation and Beaten
By Jan Ransom, December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/nyregion/solitary-confinement-lawsuit-young-inmates.html
Davon Washington, 22, was transferred in March from Rikers Island to an Albany County jail, where he says he was abused and sentenced to 360 days in isolation.
The young inmates were taken by van from a jail on Rikers Island in New York City to an airfield hours north of the city. There, the abuse started almost immediately, according to a federal lawsuit filed on Friday.
A dozen correction officers from a county jail led them inside a building and into metal cages. They would issue deliberately confusing commands and when the inmates failed to comply, the guards would pummel and kick them, use their Taser guns, and shove their fingers and batons into their rectums.
“This is not Rikers,” the guards shouted before sending the inmates to solitary confinement at the jail, the Albany County Correctional Facility.
The abuse was designed for inmates from Rikers who had been accused of assaulting correction officers, according to the suit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan by three inmates and another young man who had been held in the Albany jail.
The lawsuit comes five months after a New York Times investigationfound that New York City had increased the number of young inmates transferred to correctional facilities elsewhere in the state since 2015, when the city banned solitary for inmates younger than 22 and limited it for others.
While New York has long had the power to transfer inmates, defense lawyers and inmate advocates criticized the increase as an end-run around the city’s own rules, adding that it undermined Mayor Bill de Blasio’s promise to reform the criminal justice system.
In many cases, inmates sent away from New York City have been accused of assaulting guards and are transferred in part because their safety cannot be ensured.
But the lawsuit, filed against the city, Albany County officials and individual correction officers, said that the inmates’ constitutional rights were violated when they were sent upstate without any regard for their welfare, and that the men were systematically targeted for brutal treatment carried out by high-ranking correction staff.
“The lawsuit will reveal that the city knows what’s going on and condones it,” said Katherine Rosenfeld, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, who are represented by two private law firms. “They keep putting people in the van and sending them up there.”
A spokesman for the mayor, Eric Phillips, did not respond directly to the accusations of abuse. In a statement, Mr. Phillips said, “For an extremely small number of young detainees facing credible safety threats in our jails, the safest option is a transfer to another facility.”
The Albany County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The inmates’ situation was exacerbated when they were sent to solitary confinement, the suit claimed. Isolation increases the risk of depression or suicide, especially among younger inmates.
The city’s jail reforms were inspired, in part, Mr. de Blasio said, by Kalief Browder, a teenager who committed suicide after spending much of his three years at Rikers in solitary confinement before robbery charges against him were dropped.
Hundreds of inmates have been kept out of isolation since the city implemented its ban on solitary confinement for young people and reduced its use for other inmates. Still, the transfer of inmates to outside jails seems to highlight the limitations of the ban.
Two of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit were 19 and 21 when they were transferred to Albany. The other two were older than 22. One of the plaintiffs is identified only as John Doe because he fears retaliation by correction workers.
One of the plaintiffs, Davon Washington, who is now 22, said in an interview at his home in the Bronx that he wrote the mayor and provided a detailed account of the abuse, and asked to be transferred elsewhere. He said he never received a response.
Mr. Washington was transferred from Rikers Island to the Albany facility in March, two weeks after he said he got into an altercation with a city deputy warden. He was there until November and released from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in Albany on Monday. He had been convicted of attempted robbery.
“I’ve been trying to forget about Albany,” he said.
Like each of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Mr. Washington said during the interview and in the lawsuit that in Albany, he was forced to follow a series of commands. The moment he made a mistake, he was repeatedly punched in the face and then stomped by multiple correction officers.
He said there was a lieutenant who led the attacks and directed the officers while a superintendent watched. The officers accused him of hiding contraband in his body, but he said he did not have anything on him. He said a correction officer inserted two fingers into his rectum. He said he was taken to a body scanner designed to detect contraband stored in a person’s body.
At one point, a nurse asked if he had any injuries. When he said he did, he was punched in the face.
Mr. Washington, who was handcuffed and shackled, was eventually placed in isolation. While inside the small cell, he said, the officers attacked him again. After the beating, he was bleeding, his tooth was chipped, his lip was split, and he had bruises all over his body. During the attacks, he said, he thought he was going to die.
He received an infraction ticket for trying to assault an officer, which he said was a bogus claim. At a disciplinary hearing, he was sentenced to 360 days in isolation and denied phone privileges for a month.
“I was losing my mind doing the same thing over and over again,” Mr. Washington said.
He said he was beaten again in October, after correction officers learned he had met with lawyers about his allegations of abuse.
“The city failed to investigate or remediate these conditions and has continued sending detainees, including many aged 21 and younger, to the Albany County Jail without notice or hearing, to be beaten and put in solitary confinement,” the lawsuit said.
The other plaintiffs include Pariis Tillery, 25, and Steven Espinal, 19. Mr. Espinal was one of four inmates charged with gang assault for the attack on Rikers Island correction officer Jean Souffrant, which was captured on video. The attack left the officer’s spine fractured.
Mr. Espinal said he was beaten in Albany, lost hearing in his left ear, and passed blood in his urine after the attacks. He was hospitalized and sentenced to 600 days in solitary confinement.
“They would say these are violent kids. These kids have done — some of them — very violent things. They’re human,” said Steven Goldman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, adding that correction staff “attach blame and now it’s open season.”
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7) A Black Man Called His Mom From a Hotel Lobby. Then He Was Kicked Out.
By Mihir Zaveri, December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/us/black-man-kicked-out-hotel-portland.html
Jermaine Massey, 34, was escorted out of a hotel in Portland, Ore., after a security guard confronted him as he talked to his mother on the phone in the lobby.
When a black man staying in a Doubletree hotel in Portland, Ore., called his mother from the lobby, he was told by a white security guard that he was trespassing and was escorted out of the building by the police.
The Dec. 22 encounter was captured on cellphone video by the man, Jermaine Massey, who posted it that night on Instagram, where it was shared widely. In other videos, Mr. Massey, 34, acknowledges that he has become part of the continuing documentation, through cellphone videos and social media, of black people being confronted by white authority figures or bystanders while going about their everyday lives.
“I’m afraid to just do normal things now,” Mr. Massey said in an interview Friday, calling the encounter racial profiling. “I’m cautious about what I’m doing, and how people are perceiving that, and I shouldn’t have to think twice about where I take a phone call, or what part of the hotel I can visit.”
Paul Peralta, the general manager of the Portland Doubletree, said in a statement on Saturday that, after an internal review, the hotel had fired the security guard and a hotel manager who was also involved in the encounter.
“Our hotel is a place of hospitality, and their actions were inconsistent with our standards and values,” Mr. Peralta said.
He said he reiterated the “sincere apology” to Mr. Massey that the hotel had previously issued.
Mr. Peralta said on Friday that the hotel would ask a third party to “conduct a full investigation into the incident — reviewing our internal processes, protocols and trainings to ensure we are creating and maintaining a safe space for everyone.”
Doubletree is part of Hilton Worldwide. The Portland Doubletree is independently owned and operated, a Hilton spokeswoman said. She said Hilton had “zero tolerance” for racism and was working with the Portland hotel’s management.
The incident was one of numerous widely publicized confrontations this year in which people have called the police on black people for innocuous activities. In October, the police were called on a black manwho was babysitting two white children. A white apartment complex manager in Memphis was fired after she called the police on a black man wearing socks in the pool on the Fourth of July.
On the afternoon of Dec. 22, Mr. Massey, who lives in Kent, Wash., said he checked into the Doubletree hotel, then went out to dinner and to a Travis Scott concert before returning around 11 p.m.
He saw that he had missed a call from his mother and called her back from his cellphone in a secluded spot in the lobby. After a few minutes of discussing what he described as a private “family matter” with her, a security guard, who is white and has not been publicly identified beyond his name plate, which read “Earl,” walked up to Mr. Massey and asked what room he was in, Mr. Massey said.
“I said: ‘I don’t know, I’m having a conversation right now. Can you leave me alone right now?’” Mr. Massey recalls in the Instagram videos.
The guard then said that Mr. Massey was trespassing and that he was going to call the police, according to Mr. Massey.
At this point, the videos that Mr. Massey recorded of the encounter begin, showing the security guard standing over him and telling him that the police will arrive soon to escort him off the property. Mr. Massey points out that he is a guest at the hotel.
“Not anymore,” the security guard responds.
Another hotel employee — whose position is not clear in the video — walks over, and says the guard “wouldn’t ask me to call 911 without any cause.”
The second employee tells Mr. Massey to calm down and asks him what the problem is.
Mr. Massey then shows the guard and the other employee the envelope containing his room key.
The videos of the encounter end with a Portland Police Bureau officer telling Mr. Massey that the security guard is “in control of the property.”
Mr. Massey said that he left the hotel after collecting his things from his room so as “not to make a bad situation worse.” The encounter with the police was not hostile, said Greg Kafoury, a lawyer for Mr. Massey.
Sgt. Chris Burley, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau, said in a statement on Friday that the hotel had the authority to ask Mr. Massey to leave, and that the police officer had offered to help him get to a new hotel, which Mr. Massey declined.
Mr. Massey drove himself to a nearby Sheraton.
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7) A Black Man Called His Mom From a Hotel Lobby. Then He Was Kicked Out.
By Mihir Zaveri, December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/us/black-man-kicked-out-hotel-portland.html
Jermaine Massey, 34, was escorted out of a hotel in Portland, Ore., after a security guard confronted him as he talked to his mother on the phone in the lobby.
When a black man staying in a Doubletree hotel in Portland, Ore., called his mother from the lobby, he was told by a white security guard that he was trespassing and was escorted out of the building by the police.
The Dec. 22 encounter was captured on cellphone video by the man, Jermaine Massey, who posted it that night on Instagram, where it was shared widely. In other videos, Mr. Massey, 34, acknowledges that he has become part of the continuing documentation, through cellphone videos and social media, of black people being confronted by white authority figures or bystanders while going about their everyday lives.
“I’m afraid to just do normal things now,” Mr. Massey said in an interview Friday, calling the encounter racial profiling. “I’m cautious about what I’m doing, and how people are perceiving that, and I shouldn’t have to think twice about where I take a phone call, or what part of the hotel I can visit.”
Paul Peralta, the general manager of the Portland Doubletree, said in a statement on Saturday that, after an internal review, the hotel had fired the security guard and a hotel manager who was also involved in the encounter.
“Our hotel is a place of hospitality, and their actions were inconsistent with our standards and values,” Mr. Peralta said.
He said he reiterated the “sincere apology” to Mr. Massey that the hotel had previously issued.
Mr. Peralta said on Friday that the hotel would ask a third party to “conduct a full investigation into the incident — reviewing our internal processes, protocols and trainings to ensure we are creating and maintaining a safe space for everyone.”
Doubletree is part of Hilton Worldwide. The Portland Doubletree is independently owned and operated, a Hilton spokeswoman said. She said Hilton had “zero tolerance” for racism and was working with the Portland hotel’s management.
The incident was one of numerous widely publicized confrontations this year in which people have called the police on black people for innocuous activities. In October, the police were called on a black manwho was babysitting two white children. A white apartment complex manager in Memphis was fired after she called the police on a black man wearing socks in the pool on the Fourth of July.
On the afternoon of Dec. 22, Mr. Massey, who lives in Kent, Wash., said he checked into the Doubletree hotel, then went out to dinner and to a Travis Scott concert before returning around 11 p.m.
He saw that he had missed a call from his mother and called her back from his cellphone in a secluded spot in the lobby. After a few minutes of discussing what he described as a private “family matter” with her, a security guard, who is white and has not been publicly identified beyond his name plate, which read “Earl,” walked up to Mr. Massey and asked what room he was in, Mr. Massey said.
“I said: ‘I don’t know, I’m having a conversation right now. Can you leave me alone right now?’” Mr. Massey recalls in the Instagram videos.
The guard then said that Mr. Massey was trespassing and that he was going to call the police, according to Mr. Massey.
At this point, the videos that Mr. Massey recorded of the encounter begin, showing the security guard standing over him and telling him that the police will arrive soon to escort him off the property. Mr. Massey points out that he is a guest at the hotel.
“Not anymore,” the security guard responds.
Another hotel employee — whose position is not clear in the video — walks over, and says the guard “wouldn’t ask me to call 911 without any cause.”
The second employee tells Mr. Massey to calm down and asks him what the problem is.
Mr. Massey then shows the guard and the other employee the envelope containing his room key.
The videos of the encounter end with a Portland Police Bureau officer telling Mr. Massey that the security guard is “in control of the property.”
Mr. Massey said that he left the hotel after collecting his things from his room so as “not to make a bad situation worse.” The encounter with the police was not hostile, said Greg Kafoury, a lawyer for Mr. Massey.
Sgt. Chris Burley, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau, said in a statement on Friday that the hotel had the authority to ask Mr. Massey to leave, and that the police officer had offered to help him get to a new hotel, which Mr. Massey declined.
Mr. Massey drove himself to a nearby Sheraton.
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8) Students Defiant as Chinese University Cracks Down on Young Communists
By Javier C. Hernandez, December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/world/asia/chinese-university-crackdown-students.html
Students demonstrated Friday in Beijing against a change in leadership of a Marxist group at Peking University.
BEIJING — Students at one of China’s most prestigious universities on Friday denounced the government’s efforts to crush a student-led campaign for workers’ rights that has embarrassed the ruling Communist Party.
More than a dozen students from Peking University in Beijing, in a rare rebuke of authority, protested Friday on campus to draw attention to the university’s attempts to punish students for taking part in the campaign.
The students are part of a small but tenacious group of young communists using leftist ideology to shine a light on labor abuses across China and to call for better protections for the working class.
The students have put the government in an awkward position because they are invoking the teachings of Mao, Marx and Lenin, which President Xi Jinping has championed, to point to problems in Chinese society including inequality, corruption and greed.
Peking University officials moved swiftly to contain Friday’s protest, holding the students in classrooms and keeping them through the night for questioning, activists said. They were released on Saturday morning.
Videos posted online by students showed security guards shoving protesters and teachers grabbing students so they could not leave.
In one video posted on Twitter, an activist with cuts on his fingers asserted that the police had injured him. “They are trying to stop us from spreading the truth,” he said.
The stern reaction by the authorities reflects the party’s deep anxieties about the young communists and their unusual campaign.
The party has long feared student-led protests, especially since the 1989 pro-democracy movement, which had deep student involvement and was crushed in a bloody crackdown around Tiananmen Square. Party leaders may be concerned that the 30th anniversary of the massacre, coming up in June, could inspire new protests.
“They don’t want to take any chances about students organizing politically,” said Eli Friedman, a labor scholar at Cornell who in October suspended an exchange program with Renmin University in Beijing because of the recent crackdown.
The protest on Friday came after Peking University officials tried to block a Marxist student group from organizing a celebration for Mao’s 125th birthday. On Wednesday, the president of the group, Qiu Zhanxuan, was taken in for questioning by security officials, students said, and he was later removed from his post. On Friday, students held signs demanding that the university reinstate Mr. Qiu and several other members.
The university did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.
The young communists began organizing in the summer, when dozens converged on the factories of southern China to stand with workers who were seeking to form a labor union without the Communist Party’s official backing.
Throughout their campaign, the activists have steadfastly voiced support for Mr. Xi and the tenets of communism. In celebrating Mao’s birthday this week, for example, they sang socialist anthems and chanted slogans like “Long live Chairman Mao! Long live the working class!”
While the students’ leftist critique of society has gained traction among a small number of students on university campuses, their numbers have dwindled in recent weeks as the government has intensified efforts to detain leaders of the campaign.
More than two dozen activists have been detained, gone missing or placed under house arrest over the past few months. In November, a recent graduate of Peking University who took part in the campaign, Zhang Shengye, was beaten and dragged into a car on campus and driven away, according to witnesses.
Since rising to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has sought to rein in dissent, especially on university campuses. Advocates said that the crackdown on the young communists showed that the government was becoming even less tolerant of criticism.
“The message is clear,” said Patrick Poon, a researcher at Amnesty International in Hong Kong. “No one can avoid control, even the Marxists.”
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8) Students Defiant as Chinese University Cracks Down on Young Communists
By Javier C. Hernandez, December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/world/asia/chinese-university-crackdown-students.html
Students demonstrated Friday in Beijing against a change in leadership of a Marxist group at Peking University.
BEIJING — Students at one of China’s most prestigious universities on Friday denounced the government’s efforts to crush a student-led campaign for workers’ rights that has embarrassed the ruling Communist Party.
More than a dozen students from Peking University in Beijing, in a rare rebuke of authority, protested Friday on campus to draw attention to the university’s attempts to punish students for taking part in the campaign.
The students are part of a small but tenacious group of young communists using leftist ideology to shine a light on labor abuses across China and to call for better protections for the working class.
The students have put the government in an awkward position because they are invoking the teachings of Mao, Marx and Lenin, which President Xi Jinping has championed, to point to problems in Chinese society including inequality, corruption and greed.
Peking University officials moved swiftly to contain Friday’s protest, holding the students in classrooms and keeping them through the night for questioning, activists said. They were released on Saturday morning.
Videos posted online by students showed security guards shoving protesters and teachers grabbing students so they could not leave.
In one video posted on Twitter, an activist with cuts on his fingers asserted that the police had injured him. “They are trying to stop us from spreading the truth,” he said.
The stern reaction by the authorities reflects the party’s deep anxieties about the young communists and their unusual campaign.
The party has long feared student-led protests, especially since the 1989 pro-democracy movement, which had deep student involvement and was crushed in a bloody crackdown around Tiananmen Square. Party leaders may be concerned that the 30th anniversary of the massacre, coming up in June, could inspire new protests.
“They don’t want to take any chances about students organizing politically,” said Eli Friedman, a labor scholar at Cornell who in October suspended an exchange program with Renmin University in Beijing because of the recent crackdown.
The protest on Friday came after Peking University officials tried to block a Marxist student group from organizing a celebration for Mao’s 125th birthday. On Wednesday, the president of the group, Qiu Zhanxuan, was taken in for questioning by security officials, students said, and he was later removed from his post. On Friday, students held signs demanding that the university reinstate Mr. Qiu and several other members.
The university did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.
The young communists began organizing in the summer, when dozens converged on the factories of southern China to stand with workers who were seeking to form a labor union without the Communist Party’s official backing.
Throughout their campaign, the activists have steadfastly voiced support for Mr. Xi and the tenets of communism. In celebrating Mao’s birthday this week, for example, they sang socialist anthems and chanted slogans like “Long live Chairman Mao! Long live the working class!”
While the students’ leftist critique of society has gained traction among a small number of students on university campuses, their numbers have dwindled in recent weeks as the government has intensified efforts to detain leaders of the campaign.
More than two dozen activists have been detained, gone missing or placed under house arrest over the past few months. In November, a recent graduate of Peking University who took part in the campaign, Zhang Shengye, was beaten and dragged into a car on campus and driven away, according to witnesses.
Since rising to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has sought to rein in dissent, especially on university campuses. Advocates said that the crackdown on the young communists showed that the government was becoming even less tolerant of criticism.
“The message is clear,” said Patrick Poon, a researcher at Amnesty International in Hong Kong. “No one can avoid control, even the Marxists.”
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9) Seasons Greetings from France’s Yellow Vests: “We are not tired”
"This indiscriminate use of gas was typical of the government’s tactic of preventing mass peaceful demonstrations by provoking violence and spreading fear. For example, “black block” casseurs and rock throwers have been identified as under-cover policemen by eyewitness and on videos. This was apparently the case last Saturday at the Montpellier Préfecture. (See video[4])"
By Richard Freeman, December 30, 2018
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/seasons-greetings-from-frances-yellow-vests-we-are-not-tired/
Is the Yellow Vest rebellion, now in its seventh week, “petering out?” Such was the near-unanimous pronouncement of the mainstream media, when I returned home to Montpellier, France, eager to participate and to observe first-hand this popular insurrection which I had been afraid of missing.
I needn’t have worried. By nine o’clock last Saturday morning (Dec. 22), hundreds of Yellow Vest demonstrators were gathering for a peaceful march to the Préfecture (local seat of government) chanting “We’re not tired” and carrying placards reading “We are not casseurs (vandals) or pyromaniacs. Peaceful” (see video[2]) The mood was bon enfant(“jolly”) with demonstrators en famille including the children and old folks in wheelchairs. Marching ten abreast, they filled the rue de la Loge, but when they arrived at the Préfecture, the police, apparently taunted by some radicals in the crowd, let loose with teargas, injuring children (see video[3]). Then all hell broke loose and continued all day, with marches, countermarches and gas in the air.
This indiscriminate use of gas was typical of the government’s tactic of preventing mass peaceful demonstrations by provoking violence and spreading fear. For example, “black block” casseurs and rock throwers have been identified as under-cover policemen by eyewitness and on videos. This was apparently the case last Saturday at the Montpellier Préfecture. (See video[4])
Meanwhile, my wife and I were out with the Yellow Vests at the main roundabout into Montpellier, where two thirds of the passing drivers were displaying yellow vests, giving the high-sign, or honking their approval. So much for the Yellow Vests decline in popularity. The sign we were handed shows the word “Republic” crossed out and replaced by “Direct Democracy. The Divorce is Consummated.” Then: “Inform yourselves by Internet. 99% media owned by billionaires.” (see attached photo). At the same time, we were getting regular cellphone reports from downtown of tear-gassing continuing all day, capped by the triumphal arrival of more than 80 Yellow Vest motorcyclists who took over the main square as evening fell[R1] .
Similar actions, on a larger scale, were taking place in Paris, where, in a successful ruse, the Yellow Vest Facebook page convinced the police that they were going to attack the royal chateau out at Versailles, where hundreds CRS riot police were moved. In fact, the Yellow Vests organized a last-minuet, fast-moving wildcat march that began in Montmartre, snaked through the capital ahead of the police, and was only stopped at Macron’s Elysée Palace, heavily invested by the “forces of order.” At the very same time, the National Assembly in Paris was hastily approving a “Yellow Vest Law” designed to recognize their protesters’ grievances and embarrass President Macron, a number of whose party members voted with the majority. A measure of the President’s popularity.
Smaller Numbers
To be sure, the Yellow Vest demonstrations in Paris and the provinces yesterday and last Saturday (Dec. 15) were smaller than the previous four Saturdays. The reasons for this decline are obvious: 1. Massive police violence 2. The concessions already won from President Macron (who had vowed never to make any), 3.The shocking Dec. 11 terrorist killings in Strasbourg, 4. The pro-government bias of the media, and 5. Winter vacation (sacred in France). So I’m not sure this decline in numbers means the movement is “petering out” – as the talking heads in mainstream media keep proclaiming with undisguised relief.
In any case, one thing is certain. The French establishment, non-plussed by an incomprehensible leaderless movement which refuses to be coopted back into the system, has reacted crudely with an onslaught of violence and lies. Although partly successful, these repressive tactics have also backfired in a serious way, depriving the French political class, already weak and divided, of its legitimacy and threatening its hegemony. Let’s take a closer look at this campaign of state repression and establishment propaganda.
- Violence
The unprecedented violence unleashed by the “forces of order” over the previous five Saturday gatherings, invisible in the mainstream media, has been taking its toll on activists, as videos of police brutality and hideous injuries circulate on YouTube, on alternative new sites like Médiapart, and through the Yellow Vest Facebook pages.
These new tactics, officially named PROJECT FEAR, were explicitly designed to intimidate. So are the harsh sentences imposed on Yellow Vest demonstrators arrested as casseurs (vandals) for as little as possessing bike helmets, gas masks, and ski goggles considered “evidence” of “conspiracy” and “intention to attack the forces of order.” These items are now so common, that the local Bricorama (“Home Depot”) strategically displays ski goggles right next to yellow emergency vests, yet such demonstrators are routinely herded straight from the street into Room 24, a 24-hour emergency courtroom where they are sent to jail after summary trials.
From the very beginning of the movement on Nov. 27, Yellow Vests have been systematically repressed by the government through massive use of tear gas, flash bombs, pepper spray, water canons and police truncheons. In a report published on Friday, Human Rights Watch said that France’s “crowd-control methods maim people,” pointing to cases where protesters were wounded by rubber projectiles and tear gas grenades. At the same time, the mainstream media systematically played up vandalism against property (windows broken, cars burned) during demonstrations – while failing to expose indiscriminate police brutality and the many serious injuries including the murder of an 80 year old Arab woman hit in the head with a flashball while attempting to shutter her balcony windows. Here are some gruesome videos which you may not want to look at showing what happens when police are licensed to deliberately aim their flashball and gas grenades at people’s faces.[5]
Given the demographics of the more than 3,000 people arrested thus far, few fit the stereotype of young, black-clad casseurs (vandals) and fascists, whom the government and media blame for the violence. Many of them, provincials, had in fact come out to protest (and gone to Paris) for the first time in their lives. The Yellow Vests I have seen here in Montpellier appeared mostly middle-aged. They, and their Parisian counterparts, don’t look a bit like the typical black block “anarchists” who are visible on countless videos and who somehow never seem to get arrested – although some have been filmed climbing aboard police vehicles.
This contradiction might be one explanation for why, despite all attempts to castigate them as “perpetrators of unacceptable violence,” the government’s and media’s ongoing rhetoric about security has been quite ineffective.[6] Indeed, it has mainly succeeded in de-legitimizing their authors.[7] The contrast between official reports and those of eyewitnesses and videos on Facebook is too glaring. The narrative is always about demonstrators violently “attacking police,” however not a single injured policeman has been seen on T.V.
Having seen French CRS riot squad Robocops from close up, it seems to me demonstrators fighting with them (like we did with their ill-equipped predecessor in ’68) would be like ragged peasants with clubs going up against knights in full armor.
Macron’s militarized state over-reaction to a mass political demonstration breaks with a long tradition of tolerance for muscled demonstrations by rowdy angry farmers and militant labor unions. A tolerance Macron, in speeches, has blamed for the failure of previous governments to pass needed pro-business counter-reforms.
- Lies: the Monarch Addresses his People
On Monday evening Dec. 10, after a month of silence in the face of massive rejection of his neo-liberal policies and arrogant, condescending personality, Macron finally went on TV with a lame pre-recorded speech combining threats and concessions. The “Jupiterian” President began by blaming all the violence on the protesters (“we have all seen them attacking the police”) and threatening them with severe punishment (“no indulgence”) if they persist. For the Yellow Vests, this was throwing gasoline on the fire, as everyone who had participated in the protests or had seen the horrendous videos of the systematic police mayhem deliberately unleashed by Macron knew he was lying.
“The President of the rich” then went on to admit that the protesters may have had a legitimate point. “We” (the royal “we”?) “may have forgotten the single mother struggling to make ends meet” and the other little people. Macron then condescended to propose “a national conversation, which I will coordinate,” including even local mayors, about the social/economic crisis. He also made few economic concessions.
These included rescinding his new taxes on social security retirement for some retirees with very low incomes, elimination of taxes on paid overtime, a call on businesses to voluntarily give a year-end bonus to their employees, and a year-end 100€ ( $115) raise in the minimum wage.
On closer examination by the Yellow Vests, this “raise” turned out to be “smoke and mirrors.” First, it applied to only some low-wage workers. Second, it was not really a raise in the hourly wage, but in fact a government bonus to encourage “active” workers, which did not include benefits and was to be paid for out of the workers’ taxes, essential moving money from one pocket to another. “Don’t give us words, give us figures” one Yellow Vest told me, infuriated at being taken for a fool (con).
In his address, the monarchical President pointedly refused to pronounce the words “Yellow Vests” and “ecology” or to re-establish the Tax on Great Fortunes to pay for these concessions. Macron’s offer of crumbs from the table of the rich was immediately rejected as “too little, too late’ by the Yellow Vests, who continued calling for Macron’s resignation and a bottom-up reorganization of French democracy.
- The Strasbourg Killings
Concerning Macron’s speech to the nation, Susan Ram suggests that “two elements merit particular concern. Firstly, his inclusion of the phrase “laïcité bousculée” (‘secularism buffeted or overturned’) in his analysis of the ills of current French society. Secondly, his reference to the ‘profound identity’ of the nation and the need, in this context, to ‘tackle’ the question of immigration. Both comments seem suggestive of an effort to inject racist and xenophobic themes into the Yellow Vest movement, the better to divide it while simultaneously making it appear that the state is listening to right-wing grievances. Indeed, from the beginning the Yellow Vests, given their origins in la France Profonde (middle France) have been smeared by the media (and rejected by much of the Left) as right-wing and racist, despite videos showing them forcefully ejecting members of LePen’s National Front from their march.
Events in Strasbourg just a day after Macron’s opened up further opportunities for divisive propaganda. As Ram continues: “The killing of four people, and injuring of a dozen or so others, by a lone radicalized Islamist gunman at the city’s popular Christmas market predictably became grist to state efforts to undermine and divide the Yellow Vest uprising. A sequence of senior government ministers and regional officials called on protestors to call a halt, optimistically invoking the ‘exhaustion’ of the security forces as an argument likely to melt the hearts of Yellow Vestssubjected to baton charges, tear gas, rubber bullets and more. The education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, expressed his horror at “vile” social media posts suggesting the government had exaggerated (or worse) the Strasbourg attack in order to deflect attention away from the protest movement. On cue, the mainstream media plunged into a smear-the-protestors feeding frenzy.”[8]
- The Winter Holidays
Workaholic U.S. readers may have difficulty taking in the seriousness of holidays in this country, which mandates five full weeks of vacation per year, where family ties remain strong enough so that children are routinely sent to their grandparents for the Winter holiday, where train reservations are all booked up months in advance and where no place is farther than four hours from Paris.
The first paid vacations were won by the French workers at the end of the 1936 national wave of sit-in strikes, and newsreels of the departures that August of Parisian worker families who had never seen the sea are part of the national narrative.[9] Impending summer vacations were also partly responsible for the eventual collapse of the inspiring May-June 1968 student-worker rebellion. The French police have taken advantage of this factor forcibly remove the makeshift shelters and barbeques that had been a convivial feature of the Yellow Vest presence at roundabouts and toll-booths. Yet there were still a few Yellow Vests at the main roundabout here in Montpellier on Christmas eve, and a downtown rally announced for this Saturday, Dec. 29, came off peacefully, although there was gas elsewhere.[10] Meanwhile, Yellow Vests descended onto the tracks at the Montpellier railroad station and blocked trains. (See video.[11])
Why France’s ‘Silent Majority’ Is Mad as Hell
Like all the spontaneous mass uprisings that dot French history going back to Feudal times, the Yellow Vest revolt was initially provoked by unfair taxes. Spurning all established political parties, and unions, the Yellow Vests got organized on social media and acted locally. The broadcast media, although highly critical, spread the news nationally, and the movement spread across France, blocking intersections, filtering motorists, allowing free passage at highway tollbooths, and gathering to demonstrate, more and more numerous and militant, on successive Saturdays.
Why Saturdays? “I can’t go on strike,” explains one woman. “I’m raising three kids alone. My job, that’s all I have left. Coming on Saturdays is the only way for me to show my anger.” Women – receptionists, hostesses, nurses-aids, teachers – are present in unusually large numbers in these crowds, and they are angry about a lot more than the tax on Diesel. Like Trump, Macron has showered corporations and millionaires with huge tax cuts, creating a hole in the budget which he has compensated by cuts in public services (hospitals, schools, transit, police) and by tax increases for ordinary people (up to 40% of their income), large numbers of whom are struggling hard to make ends meet and going into debt.
This anger has been building since last Spring, the 50thanniversary of the 1968 worker-student uprising, but was frustrated when Macron won the stand-off with labor over his neo-liberal, pro-business counter-reforms. This labor defeat was facilitated by the leadership of the CGT and other unions, who played the same negative role in the 1968 sell-out to de Gaulle.[12] Although workers have been active in the Although workers have been active in the Yellow Vest movement, which fights for traditional labor goals like higher minimum wage, public services, etc. the French labor leaders have shunned them as petty-bourgeois potential fascists. These union bureaucrats see the Yellow Vests, accurately, as competitors and a threat to their own hegemonic status as official representatives of the workers, especially after Macron’s “concessions.”
On Dec. 6, in direct response to an appeal for calm from Macron, the leaders of the CGT and all the other labor federations except for Solidarité signed a Déclaration of solidarity – not with the injured and arrested demonstrators, but with the Macron government as the representative of the peaceful republican order![13] In return for what many have described as a “betrayal,” these professional negotiators accepted Macron’s invitation to “resume the social dialogue” – that is to sit at the table with him and negotiate more “give backs” of workers’ rights. The next day, contradicting themselves, the CGT’s Martinez and the other union leaders called for a national labor demonstration on Fri. Dec 14 covering the same basic economic demands as the Yellow Vests but not on the same day, Saturday Dec 15.
Needless to say, only a few stalwarts came out for Martinez’ much touted demonstration. Yet clearly, only with the active participation of France’s organized workers can this broad popular movement succeed – for example through a general strike – in bringing the capitalist class to its knees and founding a new social order.
What Next?
So apparently the Yellow Vest movement is not exactly “petering out.” After six weeks of daily roadblocks and disruptions in every corner of France, and after six (now seven) successive mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands in Paris and the provinces, violently repressed, this spontaneous, self-organized rebellion, coordinated via social media, is still seriously challenging the political and economic order in France.
Not only has this rebellion persisted despite unprecedented police brutality, media misrepresentation, and rejection by labor union officials, it has retained its grass-roots popularity and deepened its goals – from an initial rejection of a tax increase on Diesel fuel to explicit rejection of the established political/economic system and to near-unanimous call for the resignation of Macron and the creation of a new kind of democracy via referendum or constitutional convention.
Moreover, the French students have joined the uprising, protesting Macron’s introduction of anti-democratic selection in college admissions, with 170 high schools disrupted in answer to the “Black Tuesday” appeal by their union. There has also been a revival of strikes and protests among civil servants, nurses and educators, all inspired by the Yellow Vests’ success in wringing concessions from Macron, whose onslaught of pro-business, neo-liberal counter-reforms organized labor, hamstrung by its collaborationist leaders, failed to stop last Spring. The apparent rift with the ecological movement has been breached as demonstrations from the two movements combined in action under the slogan “End of the Month/End of the World: Same Cause/Same Enemy.” Likewise, marchers from the feminist “End Violence Against Women” have been honored and welcome by the Yellow Vests.
Meanwhile, the epidemic of Yellow Vest inspired revolts has spread to Belgium, Great Britain, Portugal, Holland, Hungary, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and beyond,[14] recalling the Internet-propagated contagion of the 2011 Arab Spring and “Occupy” movements and even provoking the Egyptian military government to ban the sale of yellow emergency vests. But the numbers are smaller. See video of German Amazon workers wearing yellow vests during their annual Christmas attempt to strike and disrupt the company’s profits during the busiest time of the year in an international effort that includes Polish Amazon workers.[15]
Clearly, to achieve ultimate success this spontaneous, self-organized, uprising of the 99% against the 1% will have to unite internationally as well as to continue to deepen itself, to grow and to mutate – like similar popular movements in the history of France from the Jacqueries of the Middle Age through the Sans-culottes of 1789, the social-republicans of 1848, the Communards of 1871. Armed with social media on which to coordinate mass actions and to debate goals and methods from the local to the national and international levels, there is no technical reason why this self-organized insurrection cannot surpass the uncoordinated movements of 2011 and take root everywhere. So far, as far as France is concerned, the missing political elements are the full participation of the industrial working class and of the North African and African immigrant population, which have not yet showed up en masse.
Only the future will tell how far this movement will go, but already its achievements are impressive and permanent. 1. The Yellow Vests have succeeded in unmasking and discrediting Macron, the neo-liberal wunderkind who was supposed to Thatcherize France and is now so hated that the remaining years of his mandate are in question.
- The Yellow Vests have also unmasked and discredited the mass media, particularly television networks, which had supposedly hypnotized the ignorant masses who now see them as corrupt, overpaid propagandists for the billionaire class. 3. The Yellow Vests have also succeeded – wonder of wonders! – in unmasking and discrediting the hegemonic myth of representative “democracy” with its unrepresentative “political class” of professional politicians of right left and center. These genies can never again be put back in the bottle.
Amazing achievements for a movement that is only seven weeks old and still growing. The hegemony of the French ruling classes is hanging by slender threads of increasingly counter-productive violence and lies. The French popular masses, already famous for their anger and cynicism, are furious at being taken for fools by their betters and joyful at feeling their own strength and solidarity. No one knows where all this will end.
A Joyful 2019 to all!
Richard Greeman was a activist in Paris in the late ‘fifties and a member of the legendary revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie, with Castoriadis and Lyotard. He is based in Montpellier, and is best known for his translations of the Franco-Russian novelist and revolutionary, Victor Serge.
[3] https://www.lengadoc-info.com/7644/social/gilets-jaunes-des-enfants-gazes-par-les-forces-de-lordre-a-montpellier-video/?fbclid=IwAR1JFYXCtZM3tcgVtye7ez0of94u_X8z_x1RkgNdnY0UWrqg3MfMySM0q8U Credit: lengedoc-info
[5] https://lundi.am/Violences-policieres Warning. Gruesome.
[7] This unacknowledged “invisible” violence reminds me of the Nixon’s “secret bombing” of Cambodia, which was of course no secret to the Cambodians, and when finally revealed, provoked the nation-wide student strike of 1971 After U.S. troops killed protesters on the campuses of Kent State and Jackson State universities..
[9] Unfortunately, while the workers were at the beach that memorable Summer, the Popular Front government took away many of the advantages they had won, acquiesed in Franco’s right-wing coup in Spain and Stalin’s blood-purge of Lenin’s closest comrades. As Victor Serge, disparing at any possibility of policial action, lamented at the time: “Vacation is sacred.”
[10] https://www.facebook.com/lagazettedemontpellier/videos/2314803012073979/ There was no teargas. On the other hand, two Saturdays ago in Toulouse, where the Yellow Vest movement is small, the CRS riot police invaded the main square, where the annual Christmas Market was being held and most Yellow Vests were sitting outside at cafés when a few hundred peaceful marches with signs. The cops, under orders, innundated the whole square with tear gas, thus spoiling the businesses of the restaurants and the Christmas Markets on one of the must lucrative days of the year – all so as to blame it on the Yellow Vests. That kind of bullshit doesn’t fly in France, where people resent being taken for fools (cons). What will happen in Montpellier on the last Saturday of the Christmas Market?
[12] Please see my « French Labor’s Historical Defeat » https://www.laprogressive.com/teacher-strikes/
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9) Seasons Greetings from France’s Yellow Vests: “We are not tired”
"This indiscriminate use of gas was typical of the government’s tactic of preventing mass peaceful demonstrations by provoking violence and spreading fear. For example, “black block” casseurs and rock throwers have been identified as under-cover policemen by eyewitness and on videos. This was apparently the case last Saturday at the Montpellier Préfecture. (See video[4])"
By Richard Freeman, December 30, 2018
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/seasons-greetings-from-frances-yellow-vests-we-are-not-tired/
Is the Yellow Vest rebellion, now in its seventh week, “petering out?” Such was the near-unanimous pronouncement of the mainstream media, when I returned home to Montpellier, France, eager to participate and to observe first-hand this popular insurrection which I had been afraid of missing.
I needn’t have worried. By nine o’clock last Saturday morning (Dec. 22), hundreds of Yellow Vest demonstrators were gathering for a peaceful march to the Préfecture (local seat of government) chanting “We’re not tired” and carrying placards reading “We are not casseurs (vandals) or pyromaniacs. Peaceful” (see video[2]) The mood was bon enfant(“jolly”) with demonstrators en famille including the children and old folks in wheelchairs. Marching ten abreast, they filled the rue de la Loge, but when they arrived at the Préfecture, the police, apparently taunted by some radicals in the crowd, let loose with teargas, injuring children (see video[3]). Then all hell broke loose and continued all day, with marches, countermarches and gas in the air.
This indiscriminate use of gas was typical of the government’s tactic of preventing mass peaceful demonstrations by provoking violence and spreading fear. For example, “black block” casseurs and rock throwers have been identified as under-cover policemen by eyewitness and on videos. This was apparently the case last Saturday at the Montpellier Préfecture. (See video[4])
Meanwhile, my wife and I were out with the Yellow Vests at the main roundabout into Montpellier, where two thirds of the passing drivers were displaying yellow vests, giving the high-sign, or honking their approval. So much for the Yellow Vests decline in popularity. The sign we were handed shows the word “Republic” crossed out and replaced by “Direct Democracy. The Divorce is Consummated.” Then: “Inform yourselves by Internet. 99% media owned by billionaires.” (see attached photo). At the same time, we were getting regular cellphone reports from downtown of tear-gassing continuing all day, capped by the triumphal arrival of more than 80 Yellow Vest motorcyclists who took over the main square as evening fell[R1] .
Similar actions, on a larger scale, were taking place in Paris, where, in a successful ruse, the Yellow Vest Facebook page convinced the police that they were going to attack the royal chateau out at Versailles, where hundreds CRS riot police were moved. In fact, the Yellow Vests organized a last-minuet, fast-moving wildcat march that began in Montmartre, snaked through the capital ahead of the police, and was only stopped at Macron’s Elysée Palace, heavily invested by the “forces of order.” At the very same time, the National Assembly in Paris was hastily approving a “Yellow Vest Law” designed to recognize their protesters’ grievances and embarrass President Macron, a number of whose party members voted with the majority. A measure of the President’s popularity.
Smaller Numbers
To be sure, the Yellow Vest demonstrations in Paris and the provinces yesterday and last Saturday (Dec. 15) were smaller than the previous four Saturdays. The reasons for this decline are obvious: 1. Massive police violence 2. The concessions already won from President Macron (who had vowed never to make any), 3.The shocking Dec. 11 terrorist killings in Strasbourg, 4. The pro-government bias of the media, and 5. Winter vacation (sacred in France). So I’m not sure this decline in numbers means the movement is “petering out” – as the talking heads in mainstream media keep proclaiming with undisguised relief.
In any case, one thing is certain. The French establishment, non-plussed by an incomprehensible leaderless movement which refuses to be coopted back into the system, has reacted crudely with an onslaught of violence and lies. Although partly successful, these repressive tactics have also backfired in a serious way, depriving the French political class, already weak and divided, of its legitimacy and threatening its hegemony. Let’s take a closer look at this campaign of state repression and establishment propaganda.
- Violence
The unprecedented violence unleashed by the “forces of order” over the previous five Saturday gatherings, invisible in the mainstream media, has been taking its toll on activists, as videos of police brutality and hideous injuries circulate on YouTube, on alternative new sites like Médiapart, and through the Yellow Vest Facebook pages.
These new tactics, officially named PROJECT FEAR, were explicitly designed to intimidate. So are the harsh sentences imposed on Yellow Vest demonstrators arrested as casseurs (vandals) for as little as possessing bike helmets, gas masks, and ski goggles considered “evidence” of “conspiracy” and “intention to attack the forces of order.” These items are now so common, that the local Bricorama (“Home Depot”) strategically displays ski goggles right next to yellow emergency vests, yet such demonstrators are routinely herded straight from the street into Room 24, a 24-hour emergency courtroom where they are sent to jail after summary trials.
From the very beginning of the movement on Nov. 27, Yellow Vests have been systematically repressed by the government through massive use of tear gas, flash bombs, pepper spray, water canons and police truncheons. In a report published on Friday, Human Rights Watch said that France’s “crowd-control methods maim people,” pointing to cases where protesters were wounded by rubber projectiles and tear gas grenades. At the same time, the mainstream media systematically played up vandalism against property (windows broken, cars burned) during demonstrations – while failing to expose indiscriminate police brutality and the many serious injuries including the murder of an 80 year old Arab woman hit in the head with a flashball while attempting to shutter her balcony windows. Here are some gruesome videos which you may not want to look at showing what happens when police are licensed to deliberately aim their flashball and gas grenades at people’s faces.[5]
Given the demographics of the more than 3,000 people arrested thus far, few fit the stereotype of young, black-clad casseurs (vandals) and fascists, whom the government and media blame for the violence. Many of them, provincials, had in fact come out to protest (and gone to Paris) for the first time in their lives. The Yellow Vests I have seen here in Montpellier appeared mostly middle-aged. They, and their Parisian counterparts, don’t look a bit like the typical black block “anarchists” who are visible on countless videos and who somehow never seem to get arrested – although some have been filmed climbing aboard police vehicles.
This contradiction might be one explanation for why, despite all attempts to castigate them as “perpetrators of unacceptable violence,” the government’s and media’s ongoing rhetoric about security has been quite ineffective.[6] Indeed, it has mainly succeeded in de-legitimizing their authors.[7] The contrast between official reports and those of eyewitnesses and videos on Facebook is too glaring. The narrative is always about demonstrators violently “attacking police,” however not a single injured policeman has been seen on T.V.
Having seen French CRS riot squad Robocops from close up, it seems to me demonstrators fighting with them (like we did with their ill-equipped predecessor in ’68) would be like ragged peasants with clubs going up against knights in full armor.
Macron’s militarized state over-reaction to a mass political demonstration breaks with a long tradition of tolerance for muscled demonstrations by rowdy angry farmers and militant labor unions. A tolerance Macron, in speeches, has blamed for the failure of previous governments to pass needed pro-business counter-reforms.
- Lies: the Monarch Addresses his People
On Monday evening Dec. 10, after a month of silence in the face of massive rejection of his neo-liberal policies and arrogant, condescending personality, Macron finally went on TV with a lame pre-recorded speech combining threats and concessions. The “Jupiterian” President began by blaming all the violence on the protesters (“we have all seen them attacking the police”) and threatening them with severe punishment (“no indulgence”) if they persist. For the Yellow Vests, this was throwing gasoline on the fire, as everyone who had participated in the protests or had seen the horrendous videos of the systematic police mayhem deliberately unleashed by Macron knew he was lying.
“The President of the rich” then went on to admit that the protesters may have had a legitimate point. “We” (the royal “we”?) “may have forgotten the single mother struggling to make ends meet” and the other little people. Macron then condescended to propose “a national conversation, which I will coordinate,” including even local mayors, about the social/economic crisis. He also made few economic concessions.
These included rescinding his new taxes on social security retirement for some retirees with very low incomes, elimination of taxes on paid overtime, a call on businesses to voluntarily give a year-end bonus to their employees, and a year-end 100€ ( $115) raise in the minimum wage.
On closer examination by the Yellow Vests, this “raise” turned out to be “smoke and mirrors.” First, it applied to only some low-wage workers. Second, it was not really a raise in the hourly wage, but in fact a government bonus to encourage “active” workers, which did not include benefits and was to be paid for out of the workers’ taxes, essential moving money from one pocket to another. “Don’t give us words, give us figures” one Yellow Vest told me, infuriated at being taken for a fool (con).
In his address, the monarchical President pointedly refused to pronounce the words “Yellow Vests” and “ecology” or to re-establish the Tax on Great Fortunes to pay for these concessions. Macron’s offer of crumbs from the table of the rich was immediately rejected as “too little, too late’ by the Yellow Vests, who continued calling for Macron’s resignation and a bottom-up reorganization of French democracy.
- The Strasbourg Killings
Concerning Macron’s speech to the nation, Susan Ram suggests that “two elements merit particular concern. Firstly, his inclusion of the phrase “laïcité bousculée” (‘secularism buffeted or overturned’) in his analysis of the ills of current French society. Secondly, his reference to the ‘profound identity’ of the nation and the need, in this context, to ‘tackle’ the question of immigration. Both comments seem suggestive of an effort to inject racist and xenophobic themes into the Yellow Vest movement, the better to divide it while simultaneously making it appear that the state is listening to right-wing grievances. Indeed, from the beginning the Yellow Vests, given their origins in la France Profonde (middle France) have been smeared by the media (and rejected by much of the Left) as right-wing and racist, despite videos showing them forcefully ejecting members of LePen’s National Front from their march.
Events in Strasbourg just a day after Macron’s opened up further opportunities for divisive propaganda. As Ram continues: “The killing of four people, and injuring of a dozen or so others, by a lone radicalized Islamist gunman at the city’s popular Christmas market predictably became grist to state efforts to undermine and divide the Yellow Vest uprising. A sequence of senior government ministers and regional officials called on protestors to call a halt, optimistically invoking the ‘exhaustion’ of the security forces as an argument likely to melt the hearts of Yellow Vestssubjected to baton charges, tear gas, rubber bullets and more. The education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, expressed his horror at “vile” social media posts suggesting the government had exaggerated (or worse) the Strasbourg attack in order to deflect attention away from the protest movement. On cue, the mainstream media plunged into a smear-the-protestors feeding frenzy.”[8]
- The Winter Holidays
Workaholic U.S. readers may have difficulty taking in the seriousness of holidays in this country, which mandates five full weeks of vacation per year, where family ties remain strong enough so that children are routinely sent to their grandparents for the Winter holiday, where train reservations are all booked up months in advance and where no place is farther than four hours from Paris.
The first paid vacations were won by the French workers at the end of the 1936 national wave of sit-in strikes, and newsreels of the departures that August of Parisian worker families who had never seen the sea are part of the national narrative.[9] Impending summer vacations were also partly responsible for the eventual collapse of the inspiring May-June 1968 student-worker rebellion. The French police have taken advantage of this factor forcibly remove the makeshift shelters and barbeques that had been a convivial feature of the Yellow Vest presence at roundabouts and toll-booths. Yet there were still a few Yellow Vests at the main roundabout here in Montpellier on Christmas eve, and a downtown rally announced for this Saturday, Dec. 29, came off peacefully, although there was gas elsewhere.[10] Meanwhile, Yellow Vests descended onto the tracks at the Montpellier railroad station and blocked trains. (See video.[11])
Why France’s ‘Silent Majority’ Is Mad as Hell
Like all the spontaneous mass uprisings that dot French history going back to Feudal times, the Yellow Vest revolt was initially provoked by unfair taxes. Spurning all established political parties, and unions, the Yellow Vests got organized on social media and acted locally. The broadcast media, although highly critical, spread the news nationally, and the movement spread across France, blocking intersections, filtering motorists, allowing free passage at highway tollbooths, and gathering to demonstrate, more and more numerous and militant, on successive Saturdays.
Why Saturdays? “I can’t go on strike,” explains one woman. “I’m raising three kids alone. My job, that’s all I have left. Coming on Saturdays is the only way for me to show my anger.” Women – receptionists, hostesses, nurses-aids, teachers – are present in unusually large numbers in these crowds, and they are angry about a lot more than the tax on Diesel. Like Trump, Macron has showered corporations and millionaires with huge tax cuts, creating a hole in the budget which he has compensated by cuts in public services (hospitals, schools, transit, police) and by tax increases for ordinary people (up to 40% of their income), large numbers of whom are struggling hard to make ends meet and going into debt.
This anger has been building since last Spring, the 50thanniversary of the 1968 worker-student uprising, but was frustrated when Macron won the stand-off with labor over his neo-liberal, pro-business counter-reforms. This labor defeat was facilitated by the leadership of the CGT and other unions, who played the same negative role in the 1968 sell-out to de Gaulle.[12] Although workers have been active in the Although workers have been active in the Yellow Vest movement, which fights for traditional labor goals like higher minimum wage, public services, etc. the French labor leaders have shunned them as petty-bourgeois potential fascists. These union bureaucrats see the Yellow Vests, accurately, as competitors and a threat to their own hegemonic status as official representatives of the workers, especially after Macron’s “concessions.”
On Dec. 6, in direct response to an appeal for calm from Macron, the leaders of the CGT and all the other labor federations except for Solidarité signed a Déclaration of solidarity – not with the injured and arrested demonstrators, but with the Macron government as the representative of the peaceful republican order![13] In return for what many have described as a “betrayal,” these professional negotiators accepted Macron’s invitation to “resume the social dialogue” – that is to sit at the table with him and negotiate more “give backs” of workers’ rights. The next day, contradicting themselves, the CGT’s Martinez and the other union leaders called for a national labor demonstration on Fri. Dec 14 covering the same basic economic demands as the Yellow Vests but not on the same day, Saturday Dec 15.
Needless to say, only a few stalwarts came out for Martinez’ much touted demonstration. Yet clearly, only with the active participation of France’s organized workers can this broad popular movement succeed – for example through a general strike – in bringing the capitalist class to its knees and founding a new social order.
What Next?
So apparently the Yellow Vest movement is not exactly “petering out.” After six weeks of daily roadblocks and disruptions in every corner of France, and after six (now seven) successive mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands in Paris and the provinces, violently repressed, this spontaneous, self-organized rebellion, coordinated via social media, is still seriously challenging the political and economic order in France.
Not only has this rebellion persisted despite unprecedented police brutality, media misrepresentation, and rejection by labor union officials, it has retained its grass-roots popularity and deepened its goals – from an initial rejection of a tax increase on Diesel fuel to explicit rejection of the established political/economic system and to near-unanimous call for the resignation of Macron and the creation of a new kind of democracy via referendum or constitutional convention.
Moreover, the French students have joined the uprising, protesting Macron’s introduction of anti-democratic selection in college admissions, with 170 high schools disrupted in answer to the “Black Tuesday” appeal by their union. There has also been a revival of strikes and protests among civil servants, nurses and educators, all inspired by the Yellow Vests’ success in wringing concessions from Macron, whose onslaught of pro-business, neo-liberal counter-reforms organized labor, hamstrung by its collaborationist leaders, failed to stop last Spring. The apparent rift with the ecological movement has been breached as demonstrations from the two movements combined in action under the slogan “End of the Month/End of the World: Same Cause/Same Enemy.” Likewise, marchers from the feminist “End Violence Against Women” have been honored and welcome by the Yellow Vests.
Meanwhile, the epidemic of Yellow Vest inspired revolts has spread to Belgium, Great Britain, Portugal, Holland, Hungary, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and beyond,[14] recalling the Internet-propagated contagion of the 2011 Arab Spring and “Occupy” movements and even provoking the Egyptian military government to ban the sale of yellow emergency vests. But the numbers are smaller. See video of German Amazon workers wearing yellow vests during their annual Christmas attempt to strike and disrupt the company’s profits during the busiest time of the year in an international effort that includes Polish Amazon workers.[15]
Clearly, to achieve ultimate success this spontaneous, self-organized, uprising of the 99% against the 1% will have to unite internationally as well as to continue to deepen itself, to grow and to mutate – like similar popular movements in the history of France from the Jacqueries of the Middle Age through the Sans-culottes of 1789, the social-republicans of 1848, the Communards of 1871. Armed with social media on which to coordinate mass actions and to debate goals and methods from the local to the national and international levels, there is no technical reason why this self-organized insurrection cannot surpass the uncoordinated movements of 2011 and take root everywhere. So far, as far as France is concerned, the missing political elements are the full participation of the industrial working class and of the North African and African immigrant population, which have not yet showed up en masse.
Only the future will tell how far this movement will go, but already its achievements are impressive and permanent. 1. The Yellow Vests have succeeded in unmasking and discrediting Macron, the neo-liberal wunderkind who was supposed to Thatcherize France and is now so hated that the remaining years of his mandate are in question.
- The Yellow Vests have also unmasked and discredited the mass media, particularly television networks, which had supposedly hypnotized the ignorant masses who now see them as corrupt, overpaid propagandists for the billionaire class. 3. The Yellow Vests have also succeeded – wonder of wonders! – in unmasking and discrediting the hegemonic myth of representative “democracy” with its unrepresentative “political class” of professional politicians of right left and center. These genies can never again be put back in the bottle.
Amazing achievements for a movement that is only seven weeks old and still growing. The hegemony of the French ruling classes is hanging by slender threads of increasingly counter-productive violence and lies. The French popular masses, already famous for their anger and cynicism, are furious at being taken for fools by their betters and joyful at feeling their own strength and solidarity. No one knows where all this will end.
A Joyful 2019 to all!
Richard Greeman was a activist in Paris in the late ‘fifties and a member of the legendary revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie, with Castoriadis and Lyotard. He is based in Montpellier, and is best known for his translations of the Franco-Russian novelist and revolutionary, Victor Serge.
[3] https://www.lengadoc-info.com/7644/social/gilets-jaunes-des-enfants-gazes-par-les-forces-de-lordre-a-montpellier-video/?fbclid=IwAR1JFYXCtZM3tcgVtye7ez0of94u_X8z_x1RkgNdnY0UWrqg3MfMySM0q8U Credit: lengedoc-info
[5] https://lundi.am/Violences-policieres Warning. Gruesome.
[7] This unacknowledged “invisible” violence reminds me of the Nixon’s “secret bombing” of Cambodia, which was of course no secret to the Cambodians, and when finally revealed, provoked the nation-wide student strike of 1971 After U.S. troops killed protesters on the campuses of Kent State and Jackson State universities..
[9] Unfortunately, while the workers were at the beach that memorable Summer, the Popular Front government took away many of the advantages they had won, acquiesed in Franco’s right-wing coup in Spain and Stalin’s blood-purge of Lenin’s closest comrades. As Victor Serge, disparing at any possibility of policial action, lamented at the time: “Vacation is sacred.”
[10] https://www.facebook.com/lagazettedemontpellier/videos/2314803012073979/ There was no teargas. On the other hand, two Saturdays ago in Toulouse, where the Yellow Vest movement is small, the CRS riot police invaded the main square, where the annual Christmas Market was being held and most Yellow Vests were sitting outside at cafés when a few hundred peaceful marches with signs. The cops, under orders, innundated the whole square with tear gas, thus spoiling the businesses of the restaurants and the Christmas Markets on one of the must lucrative days of the year – all so as to blame it on the Yellow Vests. That kind of bullshit doesn’t fly in France, where people resent being taken for fools (cons). What will happen in Montpellier on the last Saturday of the Christmas Market?
[12] Please see my « French Labor’s Historical Defeat » https://www.laprogressive.com/teacher-strikes/
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10) MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN MUMIA'S CASE. TIME SENSITIVE. SHARE WIDELY. WE WANT KRASNER TO BE DELUGED.
INTERNATIONAL CONCERNED FAMILY AND FRIENDS OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
December 29, 2018
Dear Comrades and Friends Across the Globe:
On December 27, 2018, in a historic action, Court of Common Pleas Judge Leon Tucker granted Mumia’s petition for new appeal rights, over the opposition of “progressive DA” Larry Krasner.
This is the first Pennsylvania state court decision in Mumia’s favor since he was arrested on December 9, 1981. The new appeals ordered by Judge Tucker open the door to Mumia Abu-Jamal’s freedom. The legal claims and supporting evidence, previously denied in the PA Supreme Court with Justice Ronald Castille’s participation, warrant a dismissal of the frame-up charges that have kept Mumia imprisoned for 37 years, or, at the very least, a new trial.
It is critical that Mumia can go forward immediately with these appeals. However, DA Larry Krasner has the authority to appeal Judge Tucker’s decision. Krasner’s position, to the surprise of many who had described him as the “new kind” of district attorney, more bent toward justice than mere conviction, with a history of defending dissident activists, been adamant in his opposition to Mumia’ petition. His legal filings, court arguments, and his statements on public radio have all argued that there is no evidence of Justice Castille’s bias or the appearance of impropriety when he refused to recuse himself in Mumia’s PA Supreme Court appeals from 1998-2012 (!).
If the prosecution appeals, there will follow years of legal proceedings on the validity of Judge Tucker’s order before Mumia can begin the new appeal process challenging his conviction. .Mumia is now 64 years old. He has cirrhosis of the liver from the years of untreated hepatitis C. He still suffers from continuing itching from the skin ailment which is a secondary symptom of the hep-C. Mumia now has glaucoma and is receiving treatment. He has been imprisoned for almost four decades. An extended appeals process coming at the age of 64 to a person whose health had already been seriously compromised is the equivalent of a death sentence by continued incarceration.
We are asking you to join us in demanding that Larry Krasner stop acting in league with the Fraternal Order of Police. Mumia should be freed from prison, now! We are asking you to call, email or tweet DA Larry Krasner TODAY and tell him: DO NOT Appeal Judge Tucker’s Decision Granting New Rights of Appeal to Mumia Abu-Jamal.
In his decision, Judge Tucker ruled that former PA Supreme Court Justice Ronald Castille, who was the District Attorney during Mumia’s first appeal of his frame-up conviction and death sentence, had “created the appearance of bias and impropriety” in the appeal process when he didn’t recuse himself from participating in Mumia’s appeals. Judge Tucker relied heavily on Ronald Castille’s public statements bragging that he would be a “law and order” judge, that he was responsible for putting 45 men on death row, that he had the political and financial support of the Fraternal Order of Police, and in recently discovered new evidence that Castille had particularly campaigned for immediate death warrants of convicted “police killers”. Judge Tucker states unequivocally that the appearance of bias and lack of “judicial neutrality” exhibited by Castille warranted his recusal.
Judge Tucker’s order throws out the PA Supreme Court decisions from 1998-2012 that rubber-stamped Mumia’s racially-biased, politically-motivated murder conviction on frame-up charges of the shooting death of police officer Daniel Faulkner.
Judge Tucker’s decision means that Mumia Abu-Jamal’s post-conviction appeals of his 1982 conviction must be reheard in the PA appeals court. In those appeals Mumia’s lawyers proved that Mumia was framed by police and prosecution who manufactured evidence of guilt and suppressed the proof of his innocence. And, he was tried by a racist, pro-prosecution trial judge, Albert Sabo, who declared to another judge, “I’m gonna help them fry the n----r” and denied Mumia his due process trial rights.
We can win Mumia’s freedom! We have a legal opening. It is our opportunity to push forward to see Mumia walk out of prison! The international campaign for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s freedom has launched a new offensive. At the top of its actions is this call for letters and phone calls to DA Larry Krasner demanding he not appeal Judge Tucker’s order granting new appeal rights to Mumia Abu-Jamal. Please take this action today. Please send us back your name so we can compile a list of international signers. Also, no matter how many letters for Mumia you have signed in the past year or two, please sign this one as well. The moment is different, and the demand of Krasner is different. We want all possible supporters included.
CONTACT: Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.
Phone: (215) 686-8000; Email: DA_Central@phila.gov; Tweet: @philaDAO
Mail: Phila. DA Larry Krasner, Three South Penn Square, Phila, PA 19107
Tell DA Krasner: Do Not Appeal Judge Tucker’s Decision Reinstating Appeal Rights
for Mumia Abu-Jamal!
In solidarity and toward Mumia’s freedom,
(Initiated by all the US based Mumia support organizations)
International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal; The MOVE Organization; Educators for Mumia; International Action Center; Mobilization for Mumia; Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC); Campaign to Bring Mumia Home; Committee to Save Mumia; Prison Radio, Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Oakland; Oakland Teachers for Mumia; Workers World/Mundo Obrero
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11) How Times Reporters Froze a Fatal Moment on a Protest Field in Gaza
By Malachy Browne, December 30, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/reader-center/gaza-medic-israel-shooting-video-investigation.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Times reporters synchronized more than 1,000 videos and photos taken by witnesses to create a minute-by-minute tick-tock of the protest in Khuzaa on June 1.
Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.
On June 1, 2018, a 20-year-old medic named Rouzan al-Najjar was killed by Israeli gunfire while she was volunteering on a protest field less than a mile from her home in Khuzaa, Gaza Strip. She was the latest casualty in a wave of protests this year in Gaza that often culminated in violence near the boundary fence with Israel.
My colleagues Yousur Al-Hlou and Neil Collier had met Rouzan during a reporting trip three weeks earlier and were struck by her charisma and her determination to help the injured. We felt duty bound to investigate her death — and, along with The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, David M. Halbfinger, spent five months doing so. We interviewed more than 60 people (witnesses, family members, friends, teachers, acquaintances, members of the Israeli army, and medical, legal and ballistics experts).
On the day Rouzan was killed, David went to Khuzaa to talk with her family and medics on her team, and Yousur and I began to gather video evidence, to piece together what happened. Our goal was to freeze that fatal moment in time and find out why that shot was taken.
We discovered that most of the day was documented in pictures by journalists, protesters, medics and bystanders taking selfies. Over months of reporting from New York and Gaza, we collected more than 1,000 videos and photographs directly from the cellphones and cameras of more than 30 key witnesses. Getting the original pictures gave us file metadata — information that allowed us to verify the authenticity of the footage and to arrange clips in the order in which they were taken.
Later, we realized that some pictures were out of sequence because the time was incorrectly set on several cameras. So we compared each device against an accurate clock to recalibrate the metadata and create a precise tick-tock of events.
We laid out hours of footage minute by minute, and were able to triangulate moments from multiple angles, including the fatal shot: Six cameras captured that moment.
We made several trips to Gaza. Complicating matters on the ground was the Israeli closure policy, which makes crossing in and out impossible from Thursday at 3:30 p.m. to Sunday at 7:30 a.m. On a hunch, David raced to meet a couple of Rouzan’s former high school teachers at noon on a Thursday, one eye on the clock. He learned from them, for the first time, of how Rouzan had testified against her own grandmother in a homicide case in which members of her family had sought to keep quiet.
Our next step was to map out the protest field. We circled it using high-definition drone cameras and partnered with the British research agency Forensic Architecture to create a 3D model using photogrammetry software. Nicholas Masterson, a researcher at the agency, used every frame of the photos and videos we collected to precisely sketch out where people and objects were on June 1. He positioned the Israel Defense Forces soldiers, their jeeps, a sniper’s bunker and sand berms used by soldiers on the Israeli side of the fence. Mr. Masterson and our colleague in Times Video, Tim Chaffee, painstakingly plotted the positions of cameras filming on the Gaza side into the model; inserted the medics, protesters and bystanders at key moments; and reconstructed that deadly scene.
The bullet hit two medics and sprayed a third with shrapnel and debris. Having accurately calculated their positions, we drew a line through them and retraced the bullet to sand berms where Israeli snipers had taken up position minutes before the fatal shot. One of the medics, Mohammed Shafee, was sprayed in the chest and pelvic area by debris and shrapnel from the bullet. Videos confirmed that at the moment of the shot he was facing the fence. So the bullet had to have come from the Israeli side, not from behind Mr. Shafee.
The positions of medics and protesters plotted in a 3D model of the protest area. Top: Medics tending to an injured protester lying on the ground. Bottom: Rouzan al-Najjar, highlighted in orange, standing in the crowd one second after she was shot.
A senior Israeli commander told David that soldiers shot four protesters in Khuzaa on June 1. He gave specific details: the minute each protester was shot, what they were wearing and that they were acting violently. We had uninterrupted footage extending over this period, and confirmed that four shots were fired at the times the commander said they were. We also identified the first, third and fourth targets. But we determined that the Israel Defense Forces’ account of the second shot — fired at 6:31 p.m. — is inaccurate. Critically, this is the shot that killed Rouzan.
The Israel Defense Forces’ rules of engagement are secret, but Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a military spokesman, told us that its soldiers only target protesters who are posing a violent threat, like “cutting the fence, throwing grenades.”
The Israeli military maintains that the 6:31 p.m. shot targeted and hit a protester wearing a yellow shirt who was throwing stones and pulling at the coils of barbed wire laid out 40 yards from the security fence. We identified several men and boys wearing yellow shirts that day. Only one was near the direction of fire. From several videos, we could determine that he was standing around 120 yards from the fence and that he did not appear to be protesting violently in the minutes leading up to the shot. Indeed, we didn’t see any violent protesting in that area in the minutes before the fatal gunshot, suggesting that the shot contravened the Israeli military’s own rules about targeting protesters. What’s more, behind the target was a group of bystanders and medics in white coats. Former snipers in the United States Army and the Israel Defense Forces told us that, without a backstop, it was a reckless shot to take.
The bullet missed and hit the ground a few yards in front of the medics. Michael Knox, a forensic ballistics investigator, told us that the type of bullet used by the Israeli sniper could skim like a stone off the rocky soil. When it hits soil at a low angle, it pushes the soil ahead of it into a miniature ramp and projects itself up and out of the ground. Mohammed Shafee was hit in the torso with shrapnel. The bullet grazed Rami Abo Jazar’s thigh and continued its upward trajectory to pierce Rouzan just above her chest, severing her aorta.
Working with the research agency Forensic Architecture, The Times retraced the path of the bullet that killed Rouzan al-Najjar, from an Israeli sand berm through a group of protesters and medics.
Traditional reporting in Gaza was critical to bolstering the forensic analysis. We reviewed the video with the witnesses whom we and our Gazan colleague, Iyad Abuheweila, identified in the footage. We studied autopsy reports and interviewed the doctors who tried to save Rouzan. We read Supreme Court petitions and judgments, and talked with international legal experts about the rules governing the use of live fire.
Though Israel claims Rouzan’s killing was unintentional, our investigation shows that her shooting appears to have been reckless at best, and possibly a war crime, for which no one has yet been punished. During our reporting we learned that by August, 60 to 70 Gaza protesters had been killed “unintentionally.” Yet the Israeli army’s rules of engagement remain unchanged, the military says. What’s certain is that Rouzan’s was an innocent life needlessly taken.
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10) MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN MUMIA'S CASE. TIME SENSITIVE. SHARE WIDELY. WE WANT KRASNER TO BE DELUGED.
INTERNATIONAL CONCERNED FAMILY AND FRIENDS OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
December 29, 2018
Dear Comrades and Friends Across the Globe:
On December 27, 2018, in a historic action, Court of Common Pleas Judge Leon Tucker granted Mumia’s petition for new appeal rights, over the opposition of “progressive DA” Larry Krasner.
This is the first Pennsylvania state court decision in Mumia’s favor since he was arrested on December 9, 1981. The new appeals ordered by Judge Tucker open the door to Mumia Abu-Jamal’s freedom. The legal claims and supporting evidence, previously denied in the PA Supreme Court with Justice Ronald Castille’s participation, warrant a dismissal of the frame-up charges that have kept Mumia imprisoned for 37 years, or, at the very least, a new trial.
It is critical that Mumia can go forward immediately with these appeals. However, DA Larry Krasner has the authority to appeal Judge Tucker’s decision. Krasner’s position, to the surprise of many who had described him as the “new kind” of district attorney, more bent toward justice than mere conviction, with a history of defending dissident activists, been adamant in his opposition to Mumia’ petition. His legal filings, court arguments, and his statements on public radio have all argued that there is no evidence of Justice Castille’s bias or the appearance of impropriety when he refused to recuse himself in Mumia’s PA Supreme Court appeals from 1998-2012 (!).
If the prosecution appeals, there will follow years of legal proceedings on the validity of Judge Tucker’s order before Mumia can begin the new appeal process challenging his conviction. .Mumia is now 64 years old. He has cirrhosis of the liver from the years of untreated hepatitis C. He still suffers from continuing itching from the skin ailment which is a secondary symptom of the hep-C. Mumia now has glaucoma and is receiving treatment. He has been imprisoned for almost four decades. An extended appeals process coming at the age of 64 to a person whose health had already been seriously compromised is the equivalent of a death sentence by continued incarceration.
We are asking you to join us in demanding that Larry Krasner stop acting in league with the Fraternal Order of Police. Mumia should be freed from prison, now! We are asking you to call, email or tweet DA Larry Krasner TODAY and tell him: DO NOT Appeal Judge Tucker’s Decision Granting New Rights of Appeal to Mumia Abu-Jamal.
In his decision, Judge Tucker ruled that former PA Supreme Court Justice Ronald Castille, who was the District Attorney during Mumia’s first appeal of his frame-up conviction and death sentence, had “created the appearance of bias and impropriety” in the appeal process when he didn’t recuse himself from participating in Mumia’s appeals. Judge Tucker relied heavily on Ronald Castille’s public statements bragging that he would be a “law and order” judge, that he was responsible for putting 45 men on death row, that he had the political and financial support of the Fraternal Order of Police, and in recently discovered new evidence that Castille had particularly campaigned for immediate death warrants of convicted “police killers”. Judge Tucker states unequivocally that the appearance of bias and lack of “judicial neutrality” exhibited by Castille warranted his recusal.
Judge Tucker’s order throws out the PA Supreme Court decisions from 1998-2012 that rubber-stamped Mumia’s racially-biased, politically-motivated murder conviction on frame-up charges of the shooting death of police officer Daniel Faulkner.
Judge Tucker’s decision means that Mumia Abu-Jamal’s post-conviction appeals of his 1982 conviction must be reheard in the PA appeals court. In those appeals Mumia’s lawyers proved that Mumia was framed by police and prosecution who manufactured evidence of guilt and suppressed the proof of his innocence. And, he was tried by a racist, pro-prosecution trial judge, Albert Sabo, who declared to another judge, “I’m gonna help them fry the n----r” and denied Mumia his due process trial rights.
We can win Mumia’s freedom! We have a legal opening. It is our opportunity to push forward to see Mumia walk out of prison! The international campaign for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s freedom has launched a new offensive. At the top of its actions is this call for letters and phone calls to DA Larry Krasner demanding he not appeal Judge Tucker’s order granting new appeal rights to Mumia Abu-Jamal. Please take this action today. Please send us back your name so we can compile a list of international signers. Also, no matter how many letters for Mumia you have signed in the past year or two, please sign this one as well. The moment is different, and the demand of Krasner is different. We want all possible supporters included.
CONTACT: Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.
Phone: (215) 686-8000; Email: DA_Central@phila.gov; Tweet: @philaDAO
Mail: Phila. DA Larry Krasner, Three South Penn Square, Phila, PA 19107
Tell DA Krasner: Do Not Appeal Judge Tucker’s Decision Reinstating Appeal Rights
for Mumia Abu-Jamal!
In solidarity and toward Mumia’s freedom,
(Initiated by all the US based Mumia support organizations)
International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal; The MOVE Organization; Educators for Mumia; International Action Center; Mobilization for Mumia; Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC); Campaign to Bring Mumia Home; Committee to Save Mumia; Prison Radio, Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Oakland; Oakland Teachers for Mumia; Workers World/Mundo Obrero
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11) How Times Reporters Froze a Fatal Moment on a Protest Field in Gaza
By Malachy Browne, December 30, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/reader-center/gaza-medic-israel-shooting-video-investigation.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Times reporters synchronized more than 1,000 videos and photos taken by witnesses to create a minute-by-minute tick-tock of the protest in Khuzaa on June 1.
Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.
On June 1, 2018, a 20-year-old medic named Rouzan al-Najjar was killed by Israeli gunfire while she was volunteering on a protest field less than a mile from her home in Khuzaa, Gaza Strip. She was the latest casualty in a wave of protests this year in Gaza that often culminated in violence near the boundary fence with Israel.
My colleagues Yousur Al-Hlou and Neil Collier had met Rouzan during a reporting trip three weeks earlier and were struck by her charisma and her determination to help the injured. We felt duty bound to investigate her death — and, along with The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, David M. Halbfinger, spent five months doing so. We interviewed more than 60 people (witnesses, family members, friends, teachers, acquaintances, members of the Israeli army, and medical, legal and ballistics experts).
On the day Rouzan was killed, David went to Khuzaa to talk with her family and medics on her team, and Yousur and I began to gather video evidence, to piece together what happened. Our goal was to freeze that fatal moment in time and find out why that shot was taken.
We discovered that most of the day was documented in pictures by journalists, protesters, medics and bystanders taking selfies. Over months of reporting from New York and Gaza, we collected more than 1,000 videos and photographs directly from the cellphones and cameras of more than 30 key witnesses. Getting the original pictures gave us file metadata — information that allowed us to verify the authenticity of the footage and to arrange clips in the order in which they were taken.
Later, we realized that some pictures were out of sequence because the time was incorrectly set on several cameras. So we compared each device against an accurate clock to recalibrate the metadata and create a precise tick-tock of events.
We laid out hours of footage minute by minute, and were able to triangulate moments from multiple angles, including the fatal shot: Six cameras captured that moment.
We made several trips to Gaza. Complicating matters on the ground was the Israeli closure policy, which makes crossing in and out impossible from Thursday at 3:30 p.m. to Sunday at 7:30 a.m. On a hunch, David raced to meet a couple of Rouzan’s former high school teachers at noon on a Thursday, one eye on the clock. He learned from them, for the first time, of how Rouzan had testified against her own grandmother in a homicide case in which members of her family had sought to keep quiet.
Our next step was to map out the protest field. We circled it using high-definition drone cameras and partnered with the British research agency Forensic Architecture to create a 3D model using photogrammetry software. Nicholas Masterson, a researcher at the agency, used every frame of the photos and videos we collected to precisely sketch out where people and objects were on June 1. He positioned the Israel Defense Forces soldiers, their jeeps, a sniper’s bunker and sand berms used by soldiers on the Israeli side of the fence. Mr. Masterson and our colleague in Times Video, Tim Chaffee, painstakingly plotted the positions of cameras filming on the Gaza side into the model; inserted the medics, protesters and bystanders at key moments; and reconstructed that deadly scene.
The bullet hit two medics and sprayed a third with shrapnel and debris. Having accurately calculated their positions, we drew a line through them and retraced the bullet to sand berms where Israeli snipers had taken up position minutes before the fatal shot. One of the medics, Mohammed Shafee, was sprayed in the chest and pelvic area by debris and shrapnel from the bullet. Videos confirmed that at the moment of the shot he was facing the fence. So the bullet had to have come from the Israeli side, not from behind Mr. Shafee.
The positions of medics and protesters plotted in a 3D model of the protest area. Top: Medics tending to an injured protester lying on the ground. Bottom: Rouzan al-Najjar, highlighted in orange, standing in the crowd one second after she was shot.
A senior Israeli commander told David that soldiers shot four protesters in Khuzaa on June 1. He gave specific details: the minute each protester was shot, what they were wearing and that they were acting violently. We had uninterrupted footage extending over this period, and confirmed that four shots were fired at the times the commander said they were. We also identified the first, third and fourth targets. But we determined that the Israel Defense Forces’ account of the second shot — fired at 6:31 p.m. — is inaccurate. Critically, this is the shot that killed Rouzan.
The Israel Defense Forces’ rules of engagement are secret, but Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a military spokesman, told us that its soldiers only target protesters who are posing a violent threat, like “cutting the fence, throwing grenades.”
The Israeli military maintains that the 6:31 p.m. shot targeted and hit a protester wearing a yellow shirt who was throwing stones and pulling at the coils of barbed wire laid out 40 yards from the security fence. We identified several men and boys wearing yellow shirts that day. Only one was near the direction of fire. From several videos, we could determine that he was standing around 120 yards from the fence and that he did not appear to be protesting violently in the minutes leading up to the shot. Indeed, we didn’t see any violent protesting in that area in the minutes before the fatal gunshot, suggesting that the shot contravened the Israeli military’s own rules about targeting protesters. What’s more, behind the target was a group of bystanders and medics in white coats. Former snipers in the United States Army and the Israel Defense Forces told us that, without a backstop, it was a reckless shot to take.
The bullet missed and hit the ground a few yards in front of the medics. Michael Knox, a forensic ballistics investigator, told us that the type of bullet used by the Israeli sniper could skim like a stone off the rocky soil. When it hits soil at a low angle, it pushes the soil ahead of it into a miniature ramp and projects itself up and out of the ground. Mohammed Shafee was hit in the torso with shrapnel. The bullet grazed Rami Abo Jazar’s thigh and continued its upward trajectory to pierce Rouzan just above her chest, severing her aorta.
Working with the research agency Forensic Architecture, The Times retraced the path of the bullet that killed Rouzan al-Najjar, from an Israeli sand berm through a group of protesters and medics.
Traditional reporting in Gaza was critical to bolstering the forensic analysis. We reviewed the video with the witnesses whom we and our Gazan colleague, Iyad Abuheweila, identified in the footage. We studied autopsy reports and interviewed the doctors who tried to save Rouzan. We read Supreme Court petitions and judgments, and talked with international legal experts about the rules governing the use of live fire.
Though Israel claims Rouzan’s killing was unintentional, our investigation shows that her shooting appears to have been reckless at best, and possibly a war crime, for which no one has yet been punished. During our reporting we learned that by August, 60 to 70 Gaza protesters had been killed “unintentionally.” Yet the Israeli army’s rules of engagement remain unchanged, the military says. What’s certain is that Rouzan’s was an innocent life needlessly taken.
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12) The Exhilaration of Revolt
By Sarah Jaffe, December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/opinion/teachers-strike-yellow-vests-extinction-rebellion-.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
As the organizer Mariame Kaba says, “Hope is a discipline.” That discipline is what sustains organizers who often grind away unseen for years. This is, most of the time, what unions and working people’s organizations do: make connections, and hope the sparks they light will catch and burn.
On Dec. 15, an estimated 50,000 people marched in the streets of Los Angeles alongside the nation’s second-largest local teachers’ union,United Teachers Los Angeles. These teachers are fighting not just for higher wages (though as for all the teachers recently on strike, theirs are unacceptably low) but also, and unapologetically, for racial and economic justice.
They serve, according to the union’s president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, a public school district whose student body is 95 percent minority and over 85 percent low-income. They’re fighting, they say, for the schools those students deserve — with nurses and counselors, arts funding, smaller classes and ethnic studies programs. They drew parents and students beside them into the streets, and onto the stage days later when they announced they would strike on Jan. 10 if those demands were not met.
Teachers who have taken their fights to the streets have drawn the biggest share of our attention in the past years, but it has not just been them. The words “Green New Deal,” a demand that its proponents say can combine the needs of working people for decent jobs and a livable planet, are on the lips of many people — even in countries where the New Deal has little cultural resonance. But it was a sit-in in Congress, joined by a couple of insurgent new members, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who thrust the demand onto the public stage even as the Democratic Party’s establishment continues to try to water it down.
In Britain, the new climate protesters call themselves Extinction Rebellion and clog streets through civil disobedience. The real extinction rebellion may have to look a lot more like the one going on in France, where the “Yellow Vests” have refused to accept the costs of climate adaptation being thrust onto the backs of a working class that has been hit again and again since 2008’s economic collapse. They are a potent reminder of what happens when working people see the wealthy cushioned from the results of their actions, while the resources they need are sliced away and they are exhorted to just work harder.
The strikes and sit-ins are often carefully planned, but the exhilaration of revolt can take many forms, and once learned, it’s hard to forget.
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12) The Exhilaration of Revolt
By Sarah Jaffe, December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/opinion/teachers-strike-yellow-vests-extinction-rebellion-.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
As the organizer Mariame Kaba says, “Hope is a discipline.” That discipline is what sustains organizers who often grind away unseen for years. This is, most of the time, what unions and working people’s organizations do: make connections, and hope the sparks they light will catch and burn.
On Dec. 15, an estimated 50,000 people marched in the streets of Los Angeles alongside the nation’s second-largest local teachers’ union,United Teachers Los Angeles. These teachers are fighting not just for higher wages (though as for all the teachers recently on strike, theirs are unacceptably low) but also, and unapologetically, for racial and economic justice.
They serve, according to the union’s president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, a public school district whose student body is 95 percent minority and over 85 percent low-income. They’re fighting, they say, for the schools those students deserve — with nurses and counselors, arts funding, smaller classes and ethnic studies programs. They drew parents and students beside them into the streets, and onto the stage days later when they announced they would strike on Jan. 10 if those demands were not met.
Teachers who have taken their fights to the streets have drawn the biggest share of our attention in the past years, but it has not just been them. The words “Green New Deal,” a demand that its proponents say can combine the needs of working people for decent jobs and a livable planet, are on the lips of many people — even in countries where the New Deal has little cultural resonance. But it was a sit-in in Congress, joined by a couple of insurgent new members, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who thrust the demand onto the public stage even as the Democratic Party’s establishment continues to try to water it down.
In Britain, the new climate protesters call themselves Extinction Rebellion and clog streets through civil disobedience. The real extinction rebellion may have to look a lot more like the one going on in France, where the “Yellow Vests” have refused to accept the costs of climate adaptation being thrust onto the backs of a working class that has been hit again and again since 2008’s economic collapse. They are a potent reminder of what happens when working people see the wealthy cushioned from the results of their actions, while the resources they need are sliced away and they are exhorted to just work harder.
The strikes and sit-ins are often carefully planned, but the exhilaration of revolt can take many forms, and once learned, it’s hard to forget.
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13) Son of Yemeni Mother Dies Soon After She Won Visa Battle With U.S. to See Him
By Christine Caron, December 29, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/world/abdullah-hassan-yemeni-toddler-dies.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront
Shaima Swileh holding her 2-year-old son, Abdullah Hassan, at the U.C.S.F. Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, Calif.
A Yemeni mother who fought to obtain a visa waiver to travel to California to see her terminally ill 2-year-old son was finally reunitedwith her only child just over a week ago.
On Friday night her son, Abdullah, died at the U.C.S.F. Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, where he was being treated for hypomyelination, a genetic degenerative brain condition, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group known as CAIR, said on Saturday.
“We are heartbroken. We had to say goodbye to our baby, the light of our lives,” Abdullah’s father, Ali Hassan, said in a statement. “We want to thank everyone for your love and support at this difficult time.”
The family’s plight received widespread attention in the news media and drew support from three members of Congress who wrote a letterto the State Department asking for an expedited decision on the visa waiver.
In October, the boy and his father journeyed from Cairo to Stockton, Calif., in search of better care. Mr. Hassan is an American citizen and a resident of Stockton.
Abdullah’s mother, Shaima Swileh, a Yemeni citizen, could not go to California because people from Yemen were barred from entering the United States under President Trump’s travel ban. Seven countries are included in the ban, most of them predominantly Muslim.
Obtaining a visa to visit the United States can be a long and arduous process.
The couple were married in Yemen in February 2016, and the next year they traveled to Cairo to apply for an I-130 visa, or a visa for a relative who is not American. Ms. Swileh had her first interview at the United States Embassy in Cairo in November 2017.
Ms. Swileh went to the embassy for her second interview in January, and was told that because of the travel ban, her application could not proceed unless she qualified for a waiver, according to Mr. Hassan’s lawyer. In August, she had a third interview and was told that the State Department was reviewing her eligibility.
During this time Abdullah’s condition worsened, so Mr. Hassan brought his son to the United States without his wife.
In December, the Sacramento Valley office of CAIR and a law firm specializing in immigration filed a lawsuit in federal court stating that the embassy in Cairo had purposely delayed a decision on Ms. Swileh’s application before the travel ban went into effect.
“This case is a perfect example of how the waiver process is a sham,” Jennifer Nimer, one of the family’s lawyers, said in a statement this month, adding that the embassy had “callously ignored over 28 desperate pleas for help from the family over the past year and even the expedite requests filed by the prior attorney, which contained medical documentation showing that the child was on the verge of death.”
The State Department granted her a visa waiver on Dec. 18.
On Dec. 19, Ms. Swileh arrived in California and traveled to the hospital to visit her dying son, who was on life support.
“Dearest Abdullah, you will never be forgotten,” CAIR Sacramento Valley wrote on Friday on Facebook. “We belong to God and to Him we shall return.”
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13) Son of Yemeni Mother Dies Soon After She Won Visa Battle With U.S. to See Him
By Christine Caron, December 29, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/world/abdullah-hassan-yemeni-toddler-dies.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront
Shaima Swileh holding her 2-year-old son, Abdullah Hassan, at the U.C.S.F. Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, Calif.
A Yemeni mother who fought to obtain a visa waiver to travel to California to see her terminally ill 2-year-old son was finally reunitedwith her only child just over a week ago.
On Friday night her son, Abdullah, died at the U.C.S.F. Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, where he was being treated for hypomyelination, a genetic degenerative brain condition, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group known as CAIR, said on Saturday.
“We are heartbroken. We had to say goodbye to our baby, the light of our lives,” Abdullah’s father, Ali Hassan, said in a statement. “We want to thank everyone for your love and support at this difficult time.”
The family’s plight received widespread attention in the news media and drew support from three members of Congress who wrote a letterto the State Department asking for an expedited decision on the visa waiver.
In October, the boy and his father journeyed from Cairo to Stockton, Calif., in search of better care. Mr. Hassan is an American citizen and a resident of Stockton.
Abdullah’s mother, Shaima Swileh, a Yemeni citizen, could not go to California because people from Yemen were barred from entering the United States under President Trump’s travel ban. Seven countries are included in the ban, most of them predominantly Muslim.
Obtaining a visa to visit the United States can be a long and arduous process.
The couple were married in Yemen in February 2016, and the next year they traveled to Cairo to apply for an I-130 visa, or a visa for a relative who is not American. Ms. Swileh had her first interview at the United States Embassy in Cairo in November 2017.
Ms. Swileh went to the embassy for her second interview in January, and was told that because of the travel ban, her application could not proceed unless she qualified for a waiver, according to Mr. Hassan’s lawyer. In August, she had a third interview and was told that the State Department was reviewing her eligibility.
During this time Abdullah’s condition worsened, so Mr. Hassan brought his son to the United States without his wife.
In December, the Sacramento Valley office of CAIR and a law firm specializing in immigration filed a lawsuit in federal court stating that the embassy in Cairo had purposely delayed a decision on Ms. Swileh’s application before the travel ban went into effect.
“This case is a perfect example of how the waiver process is a sham,” Jennifer Nimer, one of the family’s lawyers, said in a statement this month, adding that the embassy had “callously ignored over 28 desperate pleas for help from the family over the past year and even the expedite requests filed by the prior attorney, which contained medical documentation showing that the child was on the verge of death.”
The State Department granted her a visa waiver on Dec. 18.
On Dec. 19, Ms. Swileh arrived in California and traveled to the hospital to visit her dying son, who was on life support.
“Dearest Abdullah, you will never be forgotten,” CAIR Sacramento Valley wrote on Friday on Facebook. “We belong to God and to Him we shall return.”
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14) Doubletree in Portland Fires 2 Employees After Kicking Out Black Man Who Made Call From Lobby
By Mihir Zavero. December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/us/black-man-kicked-out-hotel-portland.html
Jermaine Massey, 34, was escorted out of a hotel in Portland, Ore., after a security guard confronted him as he talked to his mother on the phone in the lobby.
When a black man staying in a Doubletree hotel in Portland, Ore., called his mother from the lobby, he was told by a white security guard that he was trespassing and was escorted out of the building by the police.
The Dec. 22 encounter was captured on cellphone video by the man, Jermaine Massey, who posted it that night on Instagram, where it was shared widely. In other videos, Mr. Massey, 34, acknowledges that he has become part of the continuing documentation, through cellphone videos and social media, of black people being confronted by white authority figures or bystanders while going about their everyday lives.
“I’m afraid to just do normal things now,” Mr. Massey said in an interview Friday, calling the encounter racial profiling. “I’m cautious about what I’m doing, and how people are perceiving that, and I shouldn’t have to think twice about where I take a phone call, or what part of the hotel I can visit.”
Paul Peralta, the general manager of the Portland Doubletree, said in a statement on Saturday that, after an internal review, the hotel had fired the security guard and a hotel manager who was also involved in the encounter.
“Our hotel is a place of hospitality, and their actions were inconsistent with our standards and values,” Mr. Peralta said.
He said he reiterated the “sincere apology” to Mr. Massey that the hotel had previously issued.
Mr. Peralta said on Friday that the hotel would ask a third party to “conduct a full investigation into the incident — reviewing our internal processes, protocols and trainings to ensure we are creating and maintaining a safe space for everyone.”
Doubletree is part of Hilton Worldwide. The Portland Doubletree is independently owned and operated, a Hilton spokeswoman said. She said Hilton had “zero tolerance” for racism and was working with the Portland hotel’s management.
The incident was one of numerous widely publicized confrontations this year in which people have called the police on black people for innocuous activities. In October, the police were called on a black manwho was babysitting two white children. A white apartment complex manager in Memphis was fired after she called the police on a black man wearing socks in the pool on the Fourth of July.
On the afternoon of Dec. 22, Mr. Massey, who lives in Kent, Wash., said he checked into the Doubletree hotel, then went out to dinner and to a Travis Scott concert before returning around 11 p.m.
He saw that he had missed a call from his mother and called her back from his cellphone in a secluded spot in the lobby. After a few minutes of discussing what he described as a private “family matter” with her, a security guard, who is white and has not been publicly identified beyond his name plate, which read “Earl,” walked up to Mr. Massey and asked what room he was in, Mr. Massey said.
“I said: ‘I don’t know, I’m having a conversation right now. Can you leave me alone right now?’” Mr. Massey recalls in the Instagram videos.
The guard then said that Mr. Massey was trespassing and that he was going to call the police, according to Mr. Massey.
At this point, the videos that Mr. Massey recorded of the encounter begin, showing the security guard standing over him and telling him that the police will arrive soon to escort him off the property. Mr. Massey points out that he is a guest at the hotel.
“Not anymore,” the security guard responds.
Another hotel employee — whose position is not clear in the video — walks over, and says the guard “wouldn’t ask me to call 911 without any cause.”
The second employee tells Mr. Massey to calm down and asks him what the problem is.
Mr. Massey then shows the guard and the other employee the envelope containing his room key.
The videos of the encounter end with a Portland Police Bureau officer telling Mr. Massey that the security guard is “in control of the property.”
Mr. Massey said that he left the hotel after collecting his things from his room so as “not to make a bad situation worse.” The encounter with the police was not hostile, said Greg Kafoury, a lawyer for Mr. Massey.
Sgt. Chris Burley, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau, said in a statement on Friday that the hotel had the authority to ask Mr. Massey to leave, and that the police officer had offered to help him get to a new hotel, which Mr. Massey declined.
Mr. Massey drove himself to a nearby Sheraton.
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14) Doubletree in Portland Fires 2 Employees After Kicking Out Black Man Who Made Call From Lobby
By Mihir Zavero. December 28, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/us/black-man-kicked-out-hotel-portland.html
Jermaine Massey, 34, was escorted out of a hotel in Portland, Ore., after a security guard confronted him as he talked to his mother on the phone in the lobby.
When a black man staying in a Doubletree hotel in Portland, Ore., called his mother from the lobby, he was told by a white security guard that he was trespassing and was escorted out of the building by the police.
The Dec. 22 encounter was captured on cellphone video by the man, Jermaine Massey, who posted it that night on Instagram, where it was shared widely. In other videos, Mr. Massey, 34, acknowledges that he has become part of the continuing documentation, through cellphone videos and social media, of black people being confronted by white authority figures or bystanders while going about their everyday lives.
“I’m afraid to just do normal things now,” Mr. Massey said in an interview Friday, calling the encounter racial profiling. “I’m cautious about what I’m doing, and how people are perceiving that, and I shouldn’t have to think twice about where I take a phone call, or what part of the hotel I can visit.”
Paul Peralta, the general manager of the Portland Doubletree, said in a statement on Saturday that, after an internal review, the hotel had fired the security guard and a hotel manager who was also involved in the encounter.
“Our hotel is a place of hospitality, and their actions were inconsistent with our standards and values,” Mr. Peralta said.
He said he reiterated the “sincere apology” to Mr. Massey that the hotel had previously issued.
Mr. Peralta said on Friday that the hotel would ask a third party to “conduct a full investigation into the incident — reviewing our internal processes, protocols and trainings to ensure we are creating and maintaining a safe space for everyone.”
Doubletree is part of Hilton Worldwide. The Portland Doubletree is independently owned and operated, a Hilton spokeswoman said. She said Hilton had “zero tolerance” for racism and was working with the Portland hotel’s management.
The incident was one of numerous widely publicized confrontations this year in which people have called the police on black people for innocuous activities. In October, the police were called on a black manwho was babysitting two white children. A white apartment complex manager in Memphis was fired after she called the police on a black man wearing socks in the pool on the Fourth of July.
On the afternoon of Dec. 22, Mr. Massey, who lives in Kent, Wash., said he checked into the Doubletree hotel, then went out to dinner and to a Travis Scott concert before returning around 11 p.m.
He saw that he had missed a call from his mother and called her back from his cellphone in a secluded spot in the lobby. After a few minutes of discussing what he described as a private “family matter” with her, a security guard, who is white and has not been publicly identified beyond his name plate, which read “Earl,” walked up to Mr. Massey and asked what room he was in, Mr. Massey said.
“I said: ‘I don’t know, I’m having a conversation right now. Can you leave me alone right now?’” Mr. Massey recalls in the Instagram videos.
The guard then said that Mr. Massey was trespassing and that he was going to call the police, according to Mr. Massey.
At this point, the videos that Mr. Massey recorded of the encounter begin, showing the security guard standing over him and telling him that the police will arrive soon to escort him off the property. Mr. Massey points out that he is a guest at the hotel.
“Not anymore,” the security guard responds.
Another hotel employee — whose position is not clear in the video — walks over, and says the guard “wouldn’t ask me to call 911 without any cause.”
The second employee tells Mr. Massey to calm down and asks him what the problem is.
Mr. Massey then shows the guard and the other employee the envelope containing his room key.
The videos of the encounter end with a Portland Police Bureau officer telling Mr. Massey that the security guard is “in control of the property.”
Mr. Massey said that he left the hotel after collecting his things from his room so as “not to make a bad situation worse.” The encounter with the police was not hostile, said Greg Kafoury, a lawyer for Mr. Massey.
Sgt. Chris Burley, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau, said in a statement on Friday that the hotel had the authority to ask Mr. Massey to leave, and that the police officer had offered to help him get to a new hotel, which Mr. Massey declined.
Mr. Massey drove himself to a nearby Sheraton.
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