IAC petition demands Justice Department investigation of racial profiling in U.S.

From the International Action Center:

Stand in Solidarity with Prof. Gates! Say NO to Racism!

Stop Racial Profiling and Police Brutality!

Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Was Right!

The Cambridge Cops Must Apologize!

Youth Need Jobs & Schools – Not Jails!

Demand a Justice Department Investigation
of Racial Profiling Across the US

Sign the Online Petition here. Let President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Massachusetts Governor Patrick, Cambridge Mayor Simmons, the Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Police Commissioner Haas, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders and members of the media know you stand against racism with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and you want the Obama administration to launch a national investigation into racial profiling and police brutality NOW!
http://www.bailoutpeople.org/gatespetition.shtml (text of online petition)

[continued here]

Filed under: Fighting oppression, Justice, justice

Comments on the Sotomayor confirmation hearings and what is not being said

Thank you to Zachary Wolfe at the People’s Law Blog for his analysis of the Sotomayor confirmation hearings and the elephant in the room: ideology.  I have argued strongly in favor of Sotomayor’s confirmation because breaking down the racial, ethnic and gender barriers in institutions such as the Supreme Court is an important task.  But that is a very different thing than the liberal supposition that Sotomayor will decide things “the right way” because of her gender and ethnicity (or even her working class background).  Zach points out that while notions of “neutrality” and “following the law” are illusions, so are superficial assumptions about the way in which a person’s background will affect their worldview.

So as important as it is to challenge the glass ceiling that keeps significant numbers of people of color off of the highest courts in the U.S. (both state and federal), much more is needed to truly change the direction of the court system to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed.  Mumia Abu-Jamal commented on this in an article in which he cited the use of “lay judges” – ordinary working people who participate in judicial panels alongside professional judges – in Cuba.

But we might also ask the question no one dares ask: Why do we have a Supreme Court made up of people appointed for life by millionaire presidents and “confirmed” by the infamous millionaires’ club that is the U.S. senate? Why aren’t judges democratically elected by the people whose lives their rulings will affect?

Filed under: Justice, justice

Alternate realities

It’s a theme worthy of a science fiction novel.  Two cities from two different worlds co-exist in the same physical space.  Residents of both cities are aware of and see the other, but long custom and tradition require that they do not acknowledge – do not even look directly at – each other.  Interactions between the two occur only through the mediation of law enforcement authorities, as from time to time these cities intersect and residents interact in ways that cause injury and mayhem.

A good writer could have a field day with this premise.  I am satisfied to present it to you as a crude analogy for the two worlds occupied by rich and poor – and typically by white and non-white – in the U.S.

Case in point: today, the federal court threw out a lawsuit by a Hartford family against the Hartford Police Department arising from the execution of a search warrant aimed at an alleged drug dealer.  The family – Rosa Pina, Moses Torres and their three children – live on the second floor of a three story apartment on Belden Street in the North End of Hartford.  In May 2005, city police broke down the door of their apartment with a battering ram, handcuffed the two parents, and held the whole family at gun point while they ransacked the apartment looking for evidence of narcotics.  The parents allege that one of their children awoke with a police detective pointing a gun in her face, and that the police screamed obscenities at family members, threatening to shoot anyone who moved, while ripping open their personal belongings.  Seems the detectives had carefully investigated and determined that people were entering the building and going up the stairs to buy drugs from someone named Moses.

There were no drugs.  No evidence of drugs.  No evidence of drug-dealing.  The police reportedly now admit that the person they were looking for was a different Moses who lived on the third floor of the building.  It was all a mistake.

Front page news?  Multi-million dollar settlement?  Public apology?  Maybe if it were in the city that I see when I look out the window: a city of laws enforced by public servants for the common good, where I can usually safely assume that my interactions with the police will include being addressed as “Sir” and being addressed in polite, official tones.  Where  someone who pointed a gun at a child would be in jail.  Where a private home is a sanctuary.

But not in the other city.  Not in the one where Rosa Pina, Moses Torres and their kids live.  In that city, the police are not public servants but an army of occupation.  Every resident is a presumed criminal and every child is a potential criminal.  There is no such thing as sanctuary.  From my city I can see theirs, if I make it a point to look.  But the rules are that I’m not supposed to look.  They can see my city, but the laws of race and class – seemingly as permanent and unchangeable as the laws of physics – ensure that they cannot enter it.

So in their city, what happened to this family is not front page news but a small article in a local legal newspaper.  It’s not a huge jury verdict or a big settlement but a case dismissed because it was “reasonable” for the police to think that the Moses they were looking for lived in the second floor apartment – although he bore no physical resemblance to the Moses who lived on the third floor.  Sort of the way that it would be reasonable for police to break into your home, if your name happens to be John, and the neighbor’s name also happens to be John, and they are looking for him and not you.  Whoops.

It is particularly frightening to me that the custom and tradition that keeps the occupants of my city from acknowledging those in that other city is so strong.  So strong, in fact, that even those who try to shake it off are still bound and blindered by it.  So in one city, many of my friends and colleagues are appalled that U.S. troops use stormtrooper tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan, but seem to be oblivious to this same reality in that other city.  It is comforting to hear voices of outrage at shameful abuses of human rights . . . and almost heartbreaking to realize that the outrage is directed at images on a television screen transmitted from across the globe and not at tragedies unfolding in that other world that exists only an arm’s length and an infinite distance from where we live.

Filed under: Fighting oppression, Justice, justice, Police brutality

The Angola 3: Torture in Our Own Backyard

About Angola Penitentiary, Louisiana:

“a hundred black men are in the field, bent over picking tomatoes. A single white officer on a horse sits above them, a shotgun in his lap … It’s the same as it looked 40 years ago, and 100 years ago.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Filed under: Fighting oppression, Justice, justice, Prison Industrial Complex

Solidarity, forever!

It would be in the spirit of May Day for me to comment on the working class demonstrations around the globe, especially those that are challenging the attacks on working people being brought on as a result of the global economic crisis.

But my favorite news story today is about a 15 year old Korean immigrant in Keswick, Ontario.  Seems that when a white bully punched him in the mouth and called him a “***ing chinese,” the youth responded by breaking the bully’s nose.  Repeating the story that we have all heard a hundred times before, local police arrested the youth and charged him with assault for defending himself from a racist attack.

But that wasn’t the end. “[P]olice reopened the case as a possible hate-crime after 400 mostly white students walked out of the high school Monday in protest of how the Korean youth was treated.”

That’s the spirit of May Day.  Solidarity, forever!

Filed under: Fighting oppression, Justice, justice

To start Obama’s dialogue on immigration, stop the ICE raids!

Today’s New York Times says that President Obama has announced that he intends to begin a national discussion on immigration that would end with the passage of legislation aimed at comprehensive immigration reform by the Fall of this year.  The Times also says that Obama’s plans for this discussion including some avenue by which undocumented immigrants can attain legal status in the U.S.

Flyer for Great American Boycott, May 1, 2006

A national dialogue on immigration is long overdue.  So far the exchanges have been one-sided.  In 2006, tens of millions of immigrants and their supporters came out into the streets in May Day demonstrations across the U.S. to demand an end to an immigration policy that keeps them hiding in the shadows and that punishes them for merely wanting to work to support their families.  The national boycott, in which many industries with large concentrations of immigrant workers virtually came to a halt for 24 hours, was the first great political strike by workers in U.S. history.  In its wake, many civic organizations, community groups, churches and labor unions saw the justice in the immigrants’ demands and began to find ways of opening doors for them at the community level.

The response from the government, however, has been three years of repression, with Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) agents leading the charge, often with the support of local police departments, terrorizing immigrant communities through the use of gestapo-like tactics to round up, imprison and deport thousands of people.  Right behind them were racist public officials raising and often passing laws and ordinances that target immigrants, Spanish-speaking people, Muslims, and people of color generally.  And cheerleading for these thugs have been a parade of right wing radio, television and print “commentators” as well as hate groups like the Minutemen.

For that reason, one of the first conditions for a national dialogue has to be an end to ICE raids and the release of thousands of people who are currently in detention camps and prisons awaiting immigration court proceedings. This cannot be a discussion about immigration in which immigrants are not allowed to participate freely and openly, or a national dialogue about what “those people” do or do not deserve.

Sadly, Obama’s political allies seem to envision something very much like that.  The Times says that:

. . . Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, a Democrat from Mr. Obama’s hometown, Chicago, has been on the road most weekends since last December, traveling far outside his district to meetings in Hispanic churches, hoping to generate something like a civil rights movement in favor of broad immigration legislation.

However, it goes on to observe that in these church meetings “Illegal immigrants have not been invited to speak.”

May 1, 2009 will mark three years since those amazing and courageous demonstrations that swept the country.  The news that Obama will seek to begin a national dialogue on immigration should be seized upon by everyone concerned about social and economic justice.  May Day is the perfect time to begin that dialogue with large demonstrations by immigrants and non-immigrants together for the fundamental human right to live and work without fear.  Communities marking ths important holiday – International Workers Day, as it is celebrated around the world – should raise as a cental demand that Obama order an end to the ICE raids so that immigrants can participate in this discussion about their future in a meaningful way.

Filed under: Immigrant rights, Justice, justice

From the Bottom of the Heap

Robert Hillary King

What: From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King

When: April 21, 1pm-3pm

Where: Konover Auditorium, Dodd Center, UConn Storrs

In 1970, a jury convicted Robert Hillary King (formerly known as Robert King Wilkerson) of a crime he did not commit and sentenced him to 35 years in prison. He became a member of the Black Panther Party while in Angola State Penitentiary, successfully organizing prisoners to improve conditions. In return, prison authorities beat him, starved him, and gave him life without parole after framing him for a second crime. He was thrown into solitary confinement, where he remained in a six-by-nine foot cell for 29 years as one of “the Angola 3.” In 2001, the state grudgingly acknowledged his innocence and set him free.

In his recently published autobiography, From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King, King begins his story at the beginning: born black, born poor, born in Louisiana in 1942. At the age of 15, King journeyed to Chicago as a hobo. He came back to Louisiana, married and had a child, and briefly pursued a semi-pro boxing career to help provide for his family. Just a teenager when he entered the Louisiana penal system for the first time, King tells of his attempts to break out of this system, and his persistent pursuit of justice where there is none.

The conditions King endured in Angola almost defy description, yet King never gave up his humanity, nor his tireless work towards justice for all prisoners. That work continues to this day, now “from the outside” — as he speaks out against the failures and inequities of the criminal injustice system, and fights to free his Angola 3 comrades Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, who have been behind bars for 35 years, most of them in solitary confinement.

Robert King’s story is one of inspiration, courage, and the triumph of the human spirit. He will be touring the U.S. Northeast beginning in March of 2009, telling his powerful personal story and raising awareness about the campaign to clear the Angola 3 of all wrongful charges and release the two who remain locked inside Angola.

.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

“For a person to go through 29 years in one of the most brutal prisons in America and still maintain his sanity and humanity, that’s what makes people want to listen to Robert.” —Malik Rahim, Co-Founder of Common Ground Collective (New Orleans)

“Friendships are forged in strange places. My friendship with Robert King and the other two Angola 3 men, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, is based on respect. These men, as Robert reveals in this stunning account of his life, have fought tirelessly to redress injustice, not only for themselves, but for others. This is a battle Robert is determined to win and we are determined to help him.” —Gordon Roddick, Co-founder of The Body Shop and activist

“When there is a train wreck, there is a public inquiry, to try to avoid it recurring. Robert King’s conviction was a train wreck, and this book is perhaps the only way the world will get to understand why. There are more than 3,000 people serving life without the possibility of parole in Angola today, some as young as 14 when they were sent there, and many of them innocent but without the lawyer to prove it. We owe it to them, and others in a similar plight around the world, to read this book.” —Clive Stafford Smith, Director, Reprieve

Filed under: Fighting oppression, Justice, justice, Prison Industrial Complex

IAC and FIST Statement: Justice for Oscar Grant

Joint statement from the International Action Center &
F.I.S.T. (Fight Imperialism-Stand Together)

International Action Center
http://www.iacenter.org

FIST (Fight Imperialism-Stand Together)
http://www.fistyouth.wordpress.com

Justice for Oscar Grant!
Jail Johannes Mehserle and All Killer Cops!
Amnesty Now for those arrested during the Oakland
rebellion!
Rebellion of the Oppressed is not a Crime, Police
Brutality is the Crime!

The International Action Center and Fight
Imperialism-Stand Together (FIST) strongly condemn the
fatal shooting of 22 year-old African-American father,
Oscar Grant, by BART cop Johannes Mehserle, Jan. 1 at the
Fruitvale station in Oakland, Calif. Grant was forced off
the train at 2 a.m. with others and forced to lie face
down on the ground. While he was laying face down,
Mehserle pulled his gun from its holster and shot Grant in
the back.

The incident was caught on cell phone cameras and has
since been broadcast far and wide, exposing not only BART
police but the ineptitude of the authorities in Oakland in
dealing with the fatal killing of another unarmed person
of color by the police.

It was not until days had passed that BART officials or
anyone from the city made any public statements regarding
the killing, though many witnesses came forward.

Officials refused to officially give Mehserle’s name and
claimed that an official statement was being withheld
until he could be interviewed. Then, Mehserle resigned and
the public was told to wait further.

The people of Oakland appeared to not be in a waiting mood
and instead calling for mass rallies and, at the first
one, openly rebelling, even to the point of almost
overturning a police cop squad car.

This was in response to cops in full riot gear charging
toward what had initially been a peaceful demonstration.

The response of the crowd, especially the young people is
reminiscent of what transpired in Greece a few months back
after the killing of 15 year-old Alexandros Andreas
Grigoropoulos by a cop in Exarchia, Greece. The killing
set off a rebellion that lasted for days and occurred at a
time of a general strike that gained momentum because of
the rebellion, which led to more job walkouts throughout
the country in many industries.

The mood of the oppressed and workers, especially African
Americans in Oakland, one of the poorest cities in
California, is one of being fed up. One woman in the crowd
of protesters summed it up, “We live a life of fear, and
we want them to be afraid tonight.”

From Gaza, where the Palestinian people are quartered in
the world’s largest prison and being slaughtered by
U.S.-backed Israeli bomb and tanks to Exarchia, to
Oakland, people have a right to express their indignation,
demand justice and their due as human beings.

The cop who killed Oscar Grant should not be allowed to
walk free and should be jailed, prosecuted and his fate
decided by the people of Oakland. The evidence is
irrefutable; it was a cold blooded killing.

The 150 protesters arrested and detained from righteously
rebelling at the protest after Oscar Grant was buried
should be released and given amnesty as soon as possible.

Demand that the District Attorney arrest and charge
Mehserle the murder of Oscar Grant:

Contact: Alameda County District Attorney, Tom Orloff at:
(510) 272-6222
(510) 271-5157 fax

End Oppression from Gaza to Exarchia to Oakland!
_______________________________________________

Anyone can subscribe.
Send an email request to
Action.News-subscribe@organizerweb.com

Filed under: Fighting oppression, Justice, justice, Police brutality

Junta Workers Center: Homemakers and companions recover over $16,000 in wages

[Our congratulations and solidarity go out to the New Haven homecare workers and to the folks at Junta Workers Center on this significant victory for workers' rights.]

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 8, 2009

CONTACT:

Laura Huizar, Program Coordinator for Economic Development

(203) 787.0191 or laura.huizar@juntainc.org

HOMEMAKERS AND COMPANIONS RECOVER OVER $16,000 IN WAGES

New Haven homecare provider failed to compensate employees for work performed

New Haven, CT – On December 29, 2008, the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut ruled in favor of fifteen homemakers and companions who filed suit in May 2008 against their former employer, New Haven-based By Your Side Homemaker and Companion Services, LLC, for failing to pay in full for work performed. The women alleged that their employer repeatedly failed to pay them in a timely manner, paid them with checks that did not have sufficient funds, or refused to pay them at all. The court has awarded a total of $16,155.32 to the group, which includes liquidated damages in the amount of double the wages lost for each plaintiff.

Many of the women involved in the case worked for weeks without pay in order to continue serving their homebound clients, but all were ultimately forced to leave the company after its owners repeatedly ignored their demands for payment. “The company played with us,” says Betzaida Rodriguez, one of the plaintiffs. “When a laborer performs his responsibilities in a good and efficient manner, employers must do the same and pay their workers.” Today, the women involved continue to suffer from the company’s failure to compensate them. “My credit has been ruined and I can’t open a bank account anywhere,” states Glenda Rodriguez, another plaintiff in the case.

The homemakers and companions were able to organize themselves with the assistance of the Worker Center at JUNTA. The Center offered a place where they could share their stories, build strength as a group, and connect with Yale Law School students who provided legal representation in the case. “We are proud of these women who refused to accept their employer’s abuse and we are hopeful that this victory will encourage more workers to assert their rights,” said Laura Huizar, a worker rights organizer with the Worker Center.

JUNTA is the oldest Latino non-profit organization in New Haven and offers a wide range of programs including Adult Education, Economic Development, Cultural Awareness, Legal Advocacy, Family Management and Youth Services. JUNTA’s Worker Center, which operates at JUNTA’s offices, is dedicated to education, leadership development, and organizing as strategies for addressing workplace injustice in the New Haven area.

###

–
Economic Development, Program Coordinator
JUNTA for Progressive Action, Inc.
169 Grand Avenue
New Haven, CT 06513
Tel: 203.787.0191, ext. 16
Fax: 203.787.4934
www.juntainc.org

Filed under: Immigrant rights, Justice, justice, Labor solidarity