Black Agenda Radio

Rand Paul is Ally in Fight to Repeal Patriot Act Congress will consider a bill to completely repeal the Patriot Act, which is up for renewal, this spring. President Obama campaigned on a platform to rein in U.S. intelligence agencies, but “will soon leave Washington in even worse shape than he found it” in terms of civil liberties, said Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Buttar said GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul and elements of the Tea Party are more willing than most Democrats to stand up to the CIA and NSA. A Multi-Generational Movement “We need to create an intergenerational dialogue between those who represent the older movement and those who are representing the newer movement,” said Nyle Fort, a young minister from Newark, New Jersey, and contributor to the latest issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy. The journal is sponsor of a public forum on “Mass Incarceration, Police Violence and Political Imprisonment” at the Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz Center in New York City, March 20. Mumia: What Was “Unsaid In Selma” “Selma is a vivid example of an evil that still lives with us: that of police immunity for their violence,” said Mumia Abu Jamal. President Obama’s speech at the 50th anniversary ceremonies in Selma was a “masterwork” of oratory, said the nation’s best known political prisoner. The president “could have addressed police immunity, but that would have shattered his ‘we’re all better’” off than we used to be speech. A 20-Year Cap on Prison Terms No one should serve more than 20 years in prison, no matter what the crime, said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project. About 3,000 people sit on death rows in the U.S., while 160,000 are serving life sentences – comprising one out of every nine inmates, said Mauer. Sentences are a lot shorter in Europe, where “some countries have found life sentences to be unconstitutional, and those that still maintain it generally have only a few dozen people serving those kind of terms,” he said. Obama goes Reagan on Venezuela President Obama last week invoked the same language against Venezuela that President Ronald Reagan deployed against Nicaragua, in the Eighties, when the U.S. waged a proxy war against that country. In imposing economic sanctions against seven Venezuelan officials, Obama declared the country an “extraordinary threat” to the national security of the United States. Obama is attempting, like President George Bush, “to inoculate Latin America from the contagion that Venezuela represents in terms of social and political change,” said Miguel Tinker Sala, professor of history and Latin American Studies at Pomona College, in Claremont, California. However, all of Latin America has denounced U.S. sanctions against Venezuela. Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the U.S. foreign policy establishment doesn’t under “that the hemisphere has changed drastically in the last 15 years, and is truly independent of the United States for the first time in 150 years.”

Ferguson Activist: Holder Should “Go Quietly Into the Dark” A U.S. Justice Department report accepts the St. Louis County prosecutor’s conclusion that Michael Brown didn’t put his hands up before officer Darren Wilson put a bullet in Brown’s brain – and, therefore, Wilson cannot be indicted on civil rights charges. Only a “perfect murder” would convince Holder to act, said Taurean Russell, a leader of Hands Up United, in Ferguson, Missouri. “They want a perfect victim. His hands have to be all the way up – a perfect death, a perfect killing, and you’re never gonna get that,” said Russell. What about outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder’s legacy? “He should go quietly off into the dark.” New Yorkers Need Less Law Enforcement Bill Bratton, New York City’s police commissioner, wants to hire 1,000 more officers. But there are already too many cops busying themselves arresting Black and brown people for minor offenses, said Josmar Trujillo, of New Yorkers Against Bratton, which favors redirecting resources to improving conditions in poor neighborhoods. Police are “harassing and ticketing us, they’re criminalizing us en masse,” said Trujillo, “We don’t want more copse, we want to move away from law enforcement” under the slogan, “Strong Communities Make Police Obsolete.” Robert Gangi, of New York’s Police Reform Organizing Project, called Bratton’s “Broken Windows” policing philosophy “a brazenly racist practice.” Individual rogue cops are not the problem, he said: “It’s the system.” Voices from the Gulag Lawyers for Mumia Abu Jamal and other Pennsylvania prison inmates won the right to pursue their challenge to the state’s so-called Revictimization Relief Act, which would effectively silence the voices of those who make crime victims feel “mental anguish.” If allowed to prevail, the law could shut down Prison Radio and its roster of inmate correspondents. “We cannot cover the prison story, which is one of the biggest stories in America, without those first-person, on-the-ground voices,” said Prison Radio director Noelle Hanrahan. Mumia: Americans “Feed on Fear” Since 9/ll, “a kind of madness erupted in the country,” said political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, in a commentary for Prison Radio. “Newscasts have become fearcasts, as government and media converge to sow dragons’ teeth of fear into the minds of millions. It grows, eating us, as we eat it – and we are still not full.” Dubois Blacklisted at Temple African American Studies The model for liberatory Black Studies was created by W.E.B. Dubois at the turn of the 20th century, said Duboisian scholar and activist Dr. Tony Monteiro. However, under chairman Molefi Asante, Temple University’s African American Studies Department no longer teaches Dubois’ works, on the grounds that “he was not Afro-centric, he was a Marxist,” said Monteiro. Asante fired Monteiro last year, and wants to change the program’s name to Department of Africology.

Ferguson Activist: Holder Should “Go Quietly Into the Dark” A U.S. Justice Department report accepts the St. Louis County prosecutor’s conclusion that Michael Brown didn’t put his hands up before officer Darren Wilson put a bullet in Brown’s brain – and, therefore, Wilson cannot be indicted on civil rights charges. Only a “perfect murder” would convince Holder to act, said Taurean Russell, a leader of Hands Up United, in Ferguson, Missouri. “They want a perfect victim. His hands have to be all the way up – a perfect death, a perfect killing, and you’re never gonna get that,” said Russell. What about outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder’s legacy? “He should go quietly off into the dark.” New Yorkers Need Less Law Enforcement Bill Bratton, New York City’s police commissioner, wants to hire 1,000 more officers. But there are already too many cops busying themselves arresting Black and brown people for minor offenses, said Josmar Trujillo, of New Yorkers Against Bratton, which favors redirecting resources to improving conditions in poor neighborhoods. Police are “harassing and ticketing us, they’re criminalizing us en masse,” said Trujillo, “We don’t want more copse, we want to move away from law enforcement” under the slogan, “Strong Communities Make Police Obsolete.” Robert Gangi, of New York’s Police Reform Organizing Project, called Bratton’s “Broken Windows” policing philosophy “a brazenly racist practice.” Individual rogue cops are not the problem, he said: “It’s the system.” Voices from the Gulag Lawyers for Mumia Abu Jamal and other Pennsylvania prison inmates won the right to pursue their challenge to the state’s so-called Revictimization Relief Act, which would effectively silence the voices of those who make crime victims feel “mental anguish.” If allowed to prevail, the law could shut down Prison Radio and its roster of inmate correspondents. “We cannot cover the prison story, which is one of the biggest stories in America, without those first-person, on-the-ground voices,” said Prison Radio director Noelle Hanrahan. Mumia: Americans “Feed on Fear” Since 9/ll, “a kind of madness erupted in the country,” said political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, in a commentary for Prison Radio. “Newscasts have become fearcasts, as government and media converge to sow dragons’ teeth of fear into the minds of millions. It grows, eating us, as we eat it – and we are still not full.” Dubois Blacklisted at Temple African American Studies The model for liberatory Black Studies was created by W.E.B. Dubois at the turn of the 20th century, said Duboisian scholar and activist Dr. Tony Monteiro. However, under chairman Molefi Asante, Temple University’s African American Studies Department no longer teaches Dubois’ works, on the grounds that “he was not Afro-centric, he was a Marxist,” said Monteiro. Asante fired Monteiro last year, and wants to change the program’s name to Department of Africology.

Triumph for Internet Neutrality The Federal Communications Commission last week ruled that the Internet should be regulated like a public utility, with no fast or slow traffic lanes. “The Verizons and Comcasts of the world wanted to create a class system on the Internet,” said Kevin Zeese, of Popular Resistance. Far from opening the way for a government “takeover” of the Internet, “this is more like the First Amendment for the Internet, where people have freedom of speech and equal access.” Black Self-Determination Requires Control of Police The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations has issued a call for Black community control of police. “We need to have the ability to hire, fire, train, set standards of behavior, fund, defund and establish the role of this force, so that it becomes a part of the fabric of the community, itself,” said chairman Omali Yeshitela. Control of police is a right of self-determination, he said. Trayvon Martin Case Closed Three years after George Zimmerman killed Black teenager Trayvon Martin, the U.S. Justice Department has leaked that it will not bring federal charges against the vigilante. “The feds are held out as that dangling thing that will give you justice after you’ve just been punched in the gut by the local cops,” said Carl Dix, of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. “But, Malcolm told us that “the federal foxes cannot be relied on to deal with the injustice that the local wolves are bringing down on you.” The whole system needs to be dismantled. No Quick Fix in Movement-Building Kevin Alexander Gray, the Columbia, South Carolina activist and author who edited Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, cautions that it takes time to build a movement. “The police are about introducing people into the criminal justice system, where they are tracked all their lives,” said Gray. “It’s about making people cower to power.” Building a sustainable movement to ensure that Black lives really matter, is a process. “It’s going to take a little bit longer than just two or three years,” said Gray. No Justice in Benton Harbor Rev. Edward Pinkney, the Benton Harbor, Michigan, activist who was sentenced to 2 ½ to 10 years in prison for allegedly tampering with an elections petition, said judges and prosecutors must be made to answer for their crimes against Black people. “In Berrien County, they have one job: to send every single Black person to prison,” said Pinkney, now housed at the state prison in Marquette. “In the Sixties, it was called Negro Removal. In Bosnia, it was called ethnic cleansing.” Pinkney incurred the wrath of police and prosecutors when he resisted the Whirlpool Corporation’s gentrification efforts in mostly Black Benton Harbor. Denver Cops Kill Transgender Latino Youth  

Triumph for Internet Neutrality The Federal Communications Commission last week ruled that the Internet should be regulated like a public utility, with no fast or slow traffic lanes. “The Verizons and Comcasts of the world wanted to create a class system on the Internet,” said Kevin Zeese, of Popular Resistance. Far from opening the way for a government “takeover” of the Internet, “this is more like the First Amendment for the Internet, where people have freedom of speech and equal access.” Black Self-Determination Requires Control of Police The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations has issued a call for Black community control of police. “We need to have the ability to hire, fire, train, set standards of behavior, fund, defund and establish the role of this force, so that it becomes a part of the fabric of the community, itself,” said chairman Omali Yeshitela. Control of police is a right of self-determination, he said. Trayvon Martin Case Closed Three years after George Zimmerman killed Black teenager Trayvon Martin, the U.S. Justice Department has leaked that it will not bring federal charges against the vigilante. “The feds are held out as that dangling thing that will give you justice after you’ve just been punched in the gut by the local cops,” said Carl Dix, of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. “But, Malcolm told us that “the federal foxes cannot be relied on to deal with the injustice that the local wolves are bringing down on you.” The whole system needs to be dismantled. No Quick Fix in Movement-Building Kevin Alexander Gray, the Columbia, South Carolina activist and author who edited Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, cautions that it takes time to build a movement. “The police are about introducing people into the criminal justice system, where they are tracked all their lives,” said Gray. “It’s about making people cower to power.” Building a sustainable movement to ensure that Black lives really matter, is a process. “It’s going to take a little bit longer than just two or three years,” said Gray. No Justice in Benton Harbor Rev. Edward Pinkney, the Benton Harbor, Michigan, activist who was sentenced to 2 ½ to 10 years in prison for allegedly tampering with an elections petition, said judges and prosecutors must be made to answer for their crimes against Black people. “In Berrien County, they have one job: to send every single Black person to prison,” said Pinkney, now housed at the state prison in Marquette. “In the Sixties, it was called Negro Removal. In Bosnia, it was called ethnic cleansing.” Pinkney incurred the wrath of police and prosecutors when he resisted the Whirlpool Corporation’s gentrification efforts in mostly Black Benton Harbor. Denver Cops Kill Transgender Latino Youth  

U.S. and Europeans Seek Control of Nigeria Boko Haram’s jihadist rebellion in northern Nigeria has caused “the fracturing of the Nigerian body politic,” making the country more vulnerable to manipulation by the United States and European powers, said Eric Draitser, a political analyst and publisher of the web site StopImperialism.com. “Nigeria is by far the most dynamic economy in Africa.” Therefore, “it is a major prize for the United States and the European powers,” said Draitser. Rwandan Dictator Fears Loss of Immunity Paul Kagame’s government allows “no freedom of movement, no freedom of association,” and “has massacred Rwandan Hutu refugees” in Congo, said Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero played by actor Don Cheadle in the movie Hotel Rwanda. The movie portrayed Kagame’s forces as the good guys, but Rusesabagina, now in exile, tells a different story. Kagame is trying to remain in power past constitutional limits because he fears indictment by foreign courts as soon as he loses presidential immunity, said Rusesabagina, in an interview on the Taylor Report, CIUT Radio, Toronto, Canada. U.S. Helped Create ISIS “Monster” What we see in the Middle East, today, “is the product of two and a half centuries of European and American intrusion” into the Arab and Muslim world, said Jennifer Lowenstein, who teaches Middle East Studies at the University of Wisconsin, at Madison. ISIS is “a Frankenstein’s monster that the U.S. helped create.” Lowenstein, who has lived and worked for many years in the region, said the U.S. is “becoming a pariah nation, despised by almost every other country in the world.” Proposed Limits on Solitary Confinement in New Jersey Atty. Jean Ross, a member of the Newark-based People’s Organization for Progress, testified recently in favor of legislation that would bar solitary confinement for prisoners under 21, people with mental illness, and pregnant women. The bill would “require that anyone in solitary confinement be reviewed every day by a clinician,” to monitor their mental and physical condition. The Worst “Crap Hole” Among Pennsylvania’s Prisons Prisoners rate Frackville State Prison as “a crap hole” and “perhaps the worst” facility in the state’s prison system, said inmate Bryant Arroyo, in a report to Prison Radio. Arroyo calls Frackville an “anonymous fiefdom” where “the guards seem to find great pride, even honor, in perpetrating their anti-prisoner culture” of “unrestrained authority, separate from the state correctional system.” Frackville is also home to Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner.

NYPD Creates Machine Gun-Toting Anti-Protest/Terror Unit New York City police commissioner William Bratton announced formation of a 350-officer, machine gun-equipped Strategic Response Group unit to deal with Black Lives Matter protests as well as terror attacks. “That’s outrageous.” said Carl Messineo, legal director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a DC-based outfit that has won millions of dollars in damages against police departments that abuse protesters’ civil rights. “The police always conflate terrorism and protest.” The mayor needs to “disband this unit before it is put into place,” said Messineo. “This is a mission that is doomed to disaster.” Ferguson Protest Leader Speaks on Holder’s Tricks and Oprah’s Insults Taurean Russell, one of the leaders of Hands Up United, has been a key protest organizer since the day Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown on a street in Ferguson, Missouri. Asked how Blacks in Ferguson reacted to word that Attorney General Eric Holder will not indict Wilson on civil rights charges, Russell said: “We really don’t care if the system brings charges or indicts him. The community has indicted him.” The protests “woke up a lot of people to the hypocrisy that is the system.” On media Tycoon Oprah Winfrey’s criticism, that young leaders of the new movement don’t know what they want, Russell said protesters’ demands have been widely circulated since August. “I assume that she has a billion distractions – literally,” he said. Black Judas at the Justice Department For months, the U.S. Justice Department has been telling selected media that there will be no federal civil rights indictment of former cop Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown. The latest leak prompted whistleblower and BAR editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo to author an article titled, “Eric Holder’s Final Betraying Kiss to the People of Ferguson.” “The symbolism is obviously the kiss between Judas and Christ,” said Coleman-Adebayo. In a sense, the leak liberates the Brown family from an eternity of waiting. “Trayvon Martin’s family has been waiting for three years,” she said. All the martyrs’ families “should know they’ll get the same response” from Holder’s Justice Department as Michael Brown’s family. Marissa Alexander Out of Prison on House Arrest After spending three years and 65 days in a Florida prison, Marissa Alexander has been placed under house arrest. The Black mother had faced as much as 60 years in prison for firing a shot to ward off her abusive husband. Her supporters convened a People’s Movement Assembly to welcome Alexander back to Jacksonville. “When we got rid of capitalism and the prison system, we also have to dismantle patriarchy,” said Aleta Alston-Toure, co-leader of the Free Marissa Now Mobilization Campaign. “The National Rifle Association supports people having guns in their homes to protect themselves. But, why wasn’t Marissa in that equation? Because she’s a Black woman,” said Alston-Toure. February 20 Event for Lynne Stewart and All Political Prisoners On New Year’s Eve, 2013, people’s lawyer Lynne Stewart was released from federal prison on compassionate grounds, suffering from Stage Four cancer. “We are celebrating the year that Lynne has had out. The life expectancy was six months,” said her husband and lifelong comrade in struggle, Ralph Poynter. The celebration, at 6:pm on Friday, February 20, at St. Peter’s Church, 54th Street and Lexington Avenue, in Manhattan, will call for freedom for all political prisoners. “These are the people who gave their all, and we have to recognize them,” said Poynter. A new movement is afoot. But, how can young people be expected to put their liberty at risk, when the prisoners of two generations ago are still behind bars? “We cannot expect them to join in under those circumstances,” said Poynter. “So, let us do something about it, if we truly are a movement people.” Thre

The $10 billion pledged by international donors for Haiti earthquake relief, five years ago, was “enough money to give every Haitian a check for $1,000,” said Jake Johnston, principal author of the Center for Economic and Policy Research report, “Haiti by the Numbers, Five Years Later.” Yet, 300,000 people are living on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince in appalling conditions, while “only 9,000 homes have been built by the international response.” Cholera, brought into the country by United Nations soldiers, is unchecked, and a U.S.-backed president rules largely by decree. Most American aid money was spent on U.S. firms, said Johnston. “Less than one percent of it went to Haitian organizations or Haitian government institutions.  ” Newark to Get Cop Review Board  Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka unveiled a draft plan for the city’s first Citizens Complaint Review Board, last week. The proposed board would have the power to subpoena witnesses and recommend punishment of abusive officers. However, the police director could, under some circumstances, veto the board’s recommendations – a serious point of contention, according to Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress. “We’re going to need the most effective review board possible, in order to change p  olice behavior,” said Hamm. “They see themselves as special, above the law, and above reproach. They don’t think citizens have the right to judge them.” Charges Dropped Against Crusading Black Educator Three years ago, Professor Jahi Issa was arrested while observing a student protest against the rapid “whitening” of Delaware State University, a nominally Black institution. A judge this month overrode prosecution objections and dismissed the misdemeanor resisting arrest charge. “My attorney wrote that the president of Delaware State and his chief of police need to go see Selma, the movie, because they neither understand nor respect history,” said Dr. Issa, who lost his job teaching history and Africana Studies. “If this is the new crop of HBCU leadership, then we are seriously in trouble.” Mumia on MLK’s Ordeal Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was “hounded and tormented” by the United States government “until his dying day,” said Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, in a report for Prison Radio. The pressure increased after King’s 1967 Riverside Church speech in which he denounced the Vietnam War “and criticized capitalism.” U.S. Constitution Legalizes Slavery Another correspondent for Prison Radio, Kerry Shakaboona Marshall, who has served more than 25 years of a life sentence imposed when he was a juvenile, said the U.S. government has “perpetrated a fraud” on the public for the pat 150 years, with the claim that the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery. “While the 13th Amendment abolished the chattel labor form of slavery, it simultaneously legalized slavery as a punishment for a criminal offense conviction,” said Marshall. The result was “penal slavery, the prison slave labor system.” Rev. Edward Pinkney Awaits Hearing in Prison Benton Harbor, Michigan’s imprisoned community leader, Rev. Edward Pinkney, is “doing very well, they have not broken his spirit,” said his wife, Dorothy. Rev. Pinkney was sentenced to 2 ½ to 10 years in prison for an elections petition offense stemming from a campaign to recall the local mayor, an ally of the giant Whirlpool corporation, which dominates the mostly Black town. A hearing is scheduled for February 24 on two defense motions, including that one of the jurors was a close associate of the prosecution. Veteran activist Larry Pinkney – no family relation – is media contact for Rev. Pinkney. “He’s not getting his mail, they’ve moved him way up to Marquette, Michigan,” said Larry Pinkney. “But the brother is a warrior, he’s a fighter, he’s standing tall.”

MLK Would be “Shutting It Down” If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive, he would have joined in the 96-hour direct action and civil disobedience campaign coordinated by the ONYX Organizing Committee, in Oakland, California, this past weekend, according to activist Cat Brooks. “He’d be shutting it down” at federal buildings and taking over freeways,” said Brooks. “As in the later part of his life, he’d be connecting, loudly, the bloody dots of capitalism and gentrification with the systematic oppression and violence against Black and brown people in the cities.” Man Who Recorded Eric Garner’s Death Has Court Date Ramsey Orta, the Staten Island, New York, man who videotaped Eric Garner’s death by chokehold at the hands of a cop, appears in court January 25 on weapons charges. Orta maintains police set him up in retaliation. His lawyer, Alton Maddox, said “It’s time for a reawakening of the people in New York City as to how grand juries should be employed.” As it stands, prosecutors use grand juries as an excuse NOT to indict cops, said Maddox, whose license to practice law was revoked in 1990, in the wake of the Tawana Brawley case. French Celebrate White Supremacy and Racist Values “’Je Suis Charlie’ has become an arrogant rallying cry for white supremacy,” wrote Ajamu Baraka, editor and columnist for Black Agenda Report and co-founder of the U.S. Human Rights Network. The French “values” that are supposedly under attack are, in reality, “grounded in a colonial division between people who are recognized as humans, and those who have been consigned to the category of sub-humans and are eligible to be murdered, to have their lands taken, to be enslaved,” said Baraka. “Those are the values that many of those people who embraced ‘Je Suis Charle’ were, in fact, upholding.” Right On! to Franz Fanon on His 90th Birthday Dr. Lewis Gordon, professor of philosophy and African American Studies at the University of Connecticut, spoke at the Pan-African Bazara, in Nairobi, Kenya, on the 90th birthday of Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist from Martinique who fought alongside the Algerians against French colonialism and wrote The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon taught that “every group has to understand that it has the responsibility to set the conditions for its own freedom and emancipation,” said Dr. Gordon. “He argues that it is not enough to fight for material change; you need also to set the conditions for very new concepts” of human existence. Fanon died of leukemia in 1961. Black Colombian Women Defend Ancestral Land Rights Illegal gold mining operations are poisoning the environment and infringing on the land rights of African-descended people in Colombia, South America. Charo Mina-Rojas, an organizer of women’s resistance to the incursions, said local authorities are collaborating with the mechanized mining operators. “They are armed, but we have to expose ourselves to make sure that these people understand that these are our territories, we have rights there, and we are ready to protect them by all means necessary,” said Mina-Rojas.

Cop Body Cameras Threaten Civil Liberties President Obama wants to spend $75 million to equip cops with body cameras. However, Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee warned that “body cameras will ultimately be used to create a mountain of new evidence” against citizens, leading to even higher rates of mass incarceration. “These cameras monitor people without any individualized basis for suspicion” of committing a crime, said Buttar. “The best thing to do is prohibit those police from arresting residents who capture police activities on their phone cameras.” Mumia Abu Jamal’s Lawyers Challenge Silencing Act The Pittsburgh-based Abolitionist Law Center and two other legal outfits filed a motion to halt Pennsylvania from enforcing the so-called Silencing Act, designed to muzzle the voice of the nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal. The law gives victims of personal injury crimes the right to sue people convicted of such offenses for inflicting “mental anguish” by virtue of their subsequent, undefined “conduct,” including by speech, written word, or other communication or action. Abolitionist Law Center executive director Bret Grote said the law is irredeemably unconstitutional. “The whole purpose of it was to target Mumia Abu Jamal, whose conduct has been recognized by the courts as constitutionally protected.” Thousands of other Pennsylvania prison inmates and convicts that have served their sentences, as well as civilians who do business with such persons, could also be prosecuted under the Silencing Act. Mumia: Blowback in France “Wars have a way of returning home in the most unexpected of ways,” said Mumia Abu Jamal, in a report for Prison Radio. The Iraq War still generates new violence, ten years after the invasion. “We’re seeing that now, in France,” said Abu Jamal. “Perhaps we shall see it here, as well.” Racist Mythology Props Up U.S. Ruling Class The U.S. social order is largely built on the myth that cops, judges, jailers and prosecutors “are all that stand between us and rampant crime, anarchy and ruin,” said BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon. Rather than provide a decent standard of living for its people, America brands Black and poor folk as unworthy and irredeemable. For that reason, said Dixon, “the burgeoning movement against police immunity and impunity really is a threat to so-called national security, a menace to the privileges of banksters and employers, of privatizers and gentrifiers, and of the prerogatives of the 1%.” Lynne Stewart: Abolish Grand Juries In an article published in Socialist Action newspaper, people’s lawyer Lynne Stewart called the grand jury system an “anachronism” that “puts another roadblock in the way of the people. It’s a way in which the prosecution keeps the playing field for itself; it controls all the moves,” said Stewart, who spent five years in prison before she was released a year ago, suffering from Stage Four breast cancer. Only two or three times in her 30 years as an attorney has a grand jury refused to go along with the prosecutions wishes, said Stewart.

Michael Brown’s Killer Indicted by Black People’s Grand Jury After two days of investigation and deliberations, a Black People’s Grand Jury handed down a first degree murder indictment against former Ferguson, Missouri, policeman Darren Wilson in the death of teenager Michael Brown. Four Black prosecutors presented evidence to the 12 St. Louis County residents, who also drew on the records of the mostly white official grand jury that failed to indict Wilson in November. “Darren Wilson is a killer, but he’s not out there by himself,” said lead people’s prosecutor Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement. “Somebody made the decision to leave the body there for 4 ½ hours” in the blazing August heat. Darren Wilson “has been rewarded with almost a million dollars by white people. The problem is institutional, and this grand jury is more capable of understanding that” than the one that was seated and manipulated by St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch. An Awakening People Dr. Anthony Monteiro, the lifelong activist and former professor of African American Studies at Temple University, said young Black people are “awakening. They’re getting a sense of their power and what they can do without any corporate-designated leaders. And, once they’ve seen that, they’re going to connect the killing of Black people by the police to the economic and social crisis that engulfs the country.” Dr. Monteiro was fired from his post at Temple for his political activism. Beyond Issues of Brutality: Social Transformation “What we’re seeing is the radicalization of a new generation,” said Ajamu Baraka, an editor and columnist for Black Agenda Report and fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Through struggle, Black youth will learn that “what is absolutely required is a fundamental transformation of social relationships, and of the entire structure of oppression in this country.” Baraka was a co-founder of the U.S. Human Rights Network. America’s “Unworthy Victims” Activist scholar Paul Street, author of the recent article, “Worthy and Unworthy Victims: From Vietnam and Iraq to Ferguson and New York,” said the United States lauds its soldiers and cops as saints. The message is: “They’re policing the world and keeping chaos at bay; they’re nobly sacrificing themselves for the common good.” Meanwhile, “the folks on the other end of our guns” die in far greater numbers: millions killed in Vietnam and Iraq and untold numbers murdered under color of law in the “homeland.”

“Baby Doc” is Dead, But Duvalierism Lives On in Haiti Regime Haiti’s elite flocked to the funeral of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier who, along with father “Papa Doc” killed probably 20,000 people, terrorized the entire population and stole half a billion dollars over a period of two generations. Duvalier died of a heart attack at age 63, “but there are many others who were involved in the actual torture and arrests and stealing who supported that brutal system,” said Brian Concannon, executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. “The Duvalierist system has in many ways comes back” with the current government of Michel “Sweet Mickey” Martelly, who was closing associated with “Baby Doc’s” terror network. BBC Film Implicates Rwanda’s Kagame in Assassination of Two Presidents A recently release BBC documentary shows that Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame’s rebel forces shot down the airplane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, in 1994, setting the stage for mass killings. “Kagame’s complicity has been known for many years by the U.S. and the UN,” said Peter Erlinder, an international lawyer who has defended Kagame’s opponents and was himself jailed by the regime for questioning the prevailing narrative, that Kagame halted the Rwandan genocide. Once in power, Kagame’s forces invaded neighboring Congo, igniting yet another genocide that has killed six million people. Mumia Addresses Goddard College Grads In 1996, while still on Pennsylvania’s death row, Mumia Abu Jamal earned his bachelor’s degree from Vermont’s Goddard College. “Goddard allowed me to really study what interested and moved me: revolutionary movements,” the nation’s best known political prisoner told the college’s graduating class. Police organizations across the country fought furiously to prevent Abu Jamal from making the commencement speech, in which he advised students to “take what you know and apply it in the real world. Help be the change you’re seeking to make.” New Film on 1898 Wilmington Massacre The last vestiges of post-Civil War Reconstruction died in the flames and carnage of Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, when white supremacists mounted a military assault on the city’s alliance of Black Republicans and white Populists. Hundreds of Blacks may have died, half the Black population left the city, and the last Black Reconstruction congressman fled the state. Christopher Everett hopes to complete Wilmington on Fire, his new film on these historical events, by December. He said racist Democrats carried out the massacre “to put out a signal to the rest of North Carolina that, if they can take over Wilmington, the whole state will follow.”