By Anna Macchi - 03 March 2010

"South Africa is the historical place where...the word comes from, from the Afrikaans language, but now...'apartheid' is a crime that any state can commit...It has an international definition that we can find in the international convention for the suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid...[W]hen we look at the history of the Zionist movement and the process of establishing and maintaining the Israeli state, it's clear that Israel committed the crime of apartheid."

-- Hazem Jamjoum of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights discussing the Israeli Apartheid system.

As a U.S. soldier in 1969, Mike Wong refused orders to Viet Nam and deserted to Canada. Mike is featured in the film Sir! No Sir! In today's wars, Eddie Falcon served as a U.S. Airman in Guantanamo Bay and various places in the Middle East including Iraq and Afghanistan. Mike Wong is a member of Veterans for Peace and Eddie Falcon is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

The prison industrial complex is the current manifestation of the legal legacy of the racialized transformations of plantations into prisons, of Slave Codes into Black Codes, of lynching into state-sponsored executions.

Guests, Ray Boudreaux and Richard Brown, former Panthers and defendants in the case of the San Francisco 8. Three days after the airing of this episode, on July 6, the case was dismissed against Ray, Richard, Harold, and Hank. Charges still remain against Cisco Torres.

New book chronicles inner workings of Saipan's garment factories from first ever first-hand perspective of a former garment factory worker.

Guest, Pierre Labossiere, a Haitian national, co-founder of the Haiti Action Committee, has been a long-time social-justice activist and advocate for the Lavalas Party of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, currently exiled in South Africa. Pierre has also been active in the campaigns to free political prisoners in Haiti and the U.S. Guest, Emiliano Echeverria, Central American Scholar, radio DJ, and former Coordinator of "Freedom Is A Constant Struggle" on KPFA Pacifica Radio. Emiliano is also a long-time activist who has traveled often to Cuba where he received excellent medical care and appeared in the film Sicko.

Guest, Bob Offer-Westort, Coordinating Editor of the Street Sheet, San Francisco homeless people's newspaper, and the Civil Rights Organizer for the Coalition on Homelessness. Guest, Tiny (daughter of dee, single mama of tiburcio) is a poverty scholar, co-editor and founder of POOR Magazine/PoorNewsNetwork, member of the Poetas POBRE- Po' Poets Project and the welfareQUEENs, and author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing up Homeless in America.

I met Safiya in the visiting room of the Federal Correctional Institution (for women) in Dublin, California, in 1997—but when we embraced, it felt as if I’d known her all my life. At the time, Safiya was traveling to various prisons, visiting political prisoners to talk with us about Jericho ’98, the national campaign, beginning with a march rally to the White House, that she was organizing (with Herman and Iyaluua Ferguson, political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim, and others). I was in Dublin, along with six other women political prisoners.

Elbert “Big Man” Howard, author, lecturer and activist, is one of the six founding members of the BPP who was Deputy Minister of Information and Editor of the Black Panther Newspaper. Billy X Jennings, Black Panther Party Historian, is one of the original Oakland Panthers who joined the Party in 1968 at age 17.

My interest in Angola is as both a paradigm of the Southern transformation of plantations into prisons and as a prototype for what we now call the prison industrial complex. Many old plantations in the South became prisons after the Civil War. Angela Y. Davis traces the initial rise of the penitentiary system to the abolition of slavery, writing: “in the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for the newly released slaves.”

This week, Rustbelt Radio interviewed Philadelphia journalist Linn Washington Jr. about the January 19 ruling by the US Supreme Court that vacated previous 2001/2008 federal court rulings that overturned the death penalty for death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal. The sixteen minute segment of the Rustbelt Radio is included here. Also featured here is Washington's new article examining a possible silver lining in the January 19 ruling.

Willie Sundiata Tate (Sundi), was a member of All of Us or None, a group of ex-prisoners actively fighting discrimination against people who have done time in prison, and was a member of TIMERS, another group of former Black Panthers and activist ex-prisoners who organized an annual Black Family Reunion Day in West Oakland with food, speakers and a bicycle give-away for many years.

Pierre Labossiere, a Haitian national, co-founder of the Haiti Action Committee, has been a long-time social-justice activist and supporter of the Lavalas Party of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, currently exiled in South Africa.

This is the third part of an interview conducted with Robert King and Terry Kupers in October 2009. In part 3, Robert King and Dr. Terry Kupers argue that slavery persists today in Angola and other U.S. prisons, citing the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which legalizes slavery in prisons as "a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." As King says: "You can be legally incarcerated but morally innocent."

Baba Jahahara Amen-RA Alkebulan-Ma'at is a proud Baba (father), son, veteran justice, community, labor, international and environmental rights organizer, author, journalist and musician. He has helped lead successful campaigns on a variety of important issues while residing and working in Chicago, New York, Kansas City and the Oakland/San Francisco Bay Area. He is the past elected National Co-Chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA) and was editor/publisher of REPARATIONS NOW! for nearly a decade.