By Neve Gordon - March 18, 2010

When social justice activists like Rachel Corrie are branded terrorists and international human rights law becomes the enemy of the state...then it becomes absolutely clear that something is terribly wrong.

Phavia Kujichagulia, a Griot/Djialli (Oral Historian), musician, writer, poet, dancer who utilizes music, poetry and dance to heal and reveal history -- was a professor of Ethnomusicology and African Civilizations at World College West and Stanford University's Workshop on Political and Social Issues.

Our guest will be the legendary human rights activist, Yuri Kochiyama, who lived in Harlem for 40 years and worked with Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik el Shabazz). Although no official holiday honors Malcolm's birthday, May 19 has become a traditional day of celebration in the Black and progressive communities.

By Alexander Billet - March 12, 2010

Since Cash's death in 2003, there have been no shortage of forces who have sought to manipulate and reclaim his legacy for themselves...[T]he conservative right have been notably smug in morphing this most rebellious of country legends into one of their own...It's easy to imagine the likes of Glenn Beck squirming at this batch of songs, though...And in their own way, they reveal a stunning answer to any confusion on whose side this artist stood.

At Angola, eighty per cent of the prisoners are African-Americans and, under the watchful eye of armed guards on horseback, they still work fields of sugar cane, cotton and corn, for up to 16 hours a day. "You've got to keep the inmates working all day so they're tired at night," says Warden Burl Cain, a committed evangelist who believes that the rehabilitation of convicts is only possible through Christian redemption.

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.

Saturday, February 20 2010 - Infoshop News

As part of the No 2010 Olympics Convergence, members of Katzie First Nation and supporters took part in blocking the Golden Ears Bridge spanning the Fraser River between Pitt Meadows and Langley ["British Columbia"] - Coast Salish Territories.

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.

Since solitary confinement has been shown to cause severe psychological trauma in prisoners without underlying psychiatric conditions, it would be difficult to imagine a more damaging place to incarcerate the mentally ill.

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.

Guest, LBD (William Hammons) is a DJ and co-host of KPOO's Saturday morning show (7 a.m. - Noon), Wake Up Everybody! with Donald E. Lacy, as well as co-founder with Lacy of the Love Life Foundation. The program is a mix of music, news and public affairs, liberally sprinkled with comedy. KPOO is a community-based nonprofit, noncommercial radio station that caters to the needs of populations traditionally underrepresented in the mainstream media.

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.”