Tuesday, March 16 2010 - Infoshop News

On Tuesday March 2nd [when]...an international graduate student, Kofi Adu-Brempong, was having a "nervous breakdown" in his apartment...[t]he University of Florida Police Department responded not by bringing in mental health workers to stabilize the situation, but by breaking down his door, shooting him twice with a taser, three times with bean-bag shotgun shells, and once in the face with an M-4...Kofi Adu-Brempong is now in the hospital in critical condition, and...is facing criminal charges for possessing a weapon (his cane that he uses to walk due to his polio).

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.

March 12, 2010

Independent Jewish Voices (IJV)...welcomes yesterday's defeat of MP Tim Uppal's House of Commons motion condemning Israeli Apartheid Week..."This shows courage to stand up to the Orwellian attempts by Israel's supporters to bully Israel's critics into silence..."

By Michelle Alexander - March 12, 2010

There's an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in [Obama's] appearance on the world stage...If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land...Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

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.

By Carlito Pablo - March 8, 2010

The activist group No One Is Illegal-Vancouver is preparing to confront what it says is a neo-Nazi rally being planned for March 21, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination...“It seems like the voices that may have been quieter before are now feeling like...they can come out and really publicly say things that we would consider completely atrocious and despicable...”

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.

Jamie Scott, 38, is suffering from kidney failure. She has received no indication that a kidney transplant is being considered as an option, though her sister is a willing donor. At the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (CMCF) in Pearl, where Jamie and her sister Gladys are incarcerated, medical services are provided by a private contractor called Wexford, which has been the subject of lawsuits and legislative investigations in several states over inadequate treatment of the inmates in its care.

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.

By Julianne Hing - February 28, 2010

People of color, especially young Black and Latino men, get shot at and killed by the police at disproportionately high rates...And the white cops who've shot them [are] all typically acquitted...But...what happens when not all of the officers involved are white?

SchNEWS - Friday 19th February 2010 | Issue 710

The state has begun handing down vicious sentences to men accused of participation in the rioting in London that occurred during the weeks of protest against the Israeli attacks on Gaza...Ten young men have been jailed for their role in protests demanding an end to Israel’s invasion of Gaza early last year...In total, 91 were arrested, the vast majority young Muslim men...The protesters were all...for the most part...[of] working class immigrant origin.

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.”