Sunday 31 January 2016

ANOTHER SUCCESS !

This weekend was the Jay Brown Memorial Show and Cancer Agency Benefit, with over 1400 dollars being raised over two nights. As I've mentioned before, this is my favourite show of the year to play, and this year was no exception.
   The night started out with newcomers Riffheist,whose members are only new in this particular incarnation, having been around in many other bands previous to this. And they were fucking great ! Driving mid-tempo/fast songs with heaviness, and who knew that Gino ( formerly of AWT) could actually sing lead? But he can. See them when you get the chance!
  Next up were Total Shit, who were anything but that ! They are made up of Team Shitty members, and fucking rock out some angry short socially conscious hardcore songs. And yes, I bought the t-shirt. You should too.
   The Mags are no strangers to our wacky little scene, and pummeled us with their unrelenting rock and roll. Their energy was turned up to ten that night. Fuck yes.
   The Gnar Gnars are one of those bands who I have absolutely nothing in common with lyrically, but they will entertain you, mainly through the frenetic performance of the frontman, Brains. The guy cracks me up, and they were tight as hell.
   We also played, and enjoyed the crazy ass crowd. All in all, excellent times indeed.

And Scott Fraser took some great shots of all of the bands.
I will write about the second night tomorrow, as I have to head out to work.
      Thank you.

Tuesday 26 January 2016

FRIENDS AND MURDERERS

There are many people who do not want to see the hypocrisy of their own governments, foolishly believing that the authorities are working for everybody's best interests. The u.s. government is one of the biggest hypocrites in the world, judging every country as if it has the right to do so, and turning a blind eye to the crimes of their allies, while shrieking madly about "human rights" in whatever country does not bow down to them. This is an article about some academic who refuse to keep quiet about their own country's genocidal mission, and it is one of the u.s.a.'s most important allies in the region.

From A World To Win News Service

Turkey: As state attacks Kurds, academics declare, “We will not be a party to this crime”

January 25, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Silopi, in southeastern Turkey near the border with Iraq, January 19, after the 24-hour curfew was lifted. AP photo
Silopi, in southeastern Turkey near the border with Iraq, January 19. AP photo
19 January 2016. A World to Win News Service. A political crisis has been revealed and deepened by a petition initially signed by well over a thousand academics condemning the Turkish government’s offensive against city neighbourhoods and towns in the Kurdish provinces of eastern Turkey.
Entitled “We will not be a party to this crime,” the petition signed by “Academics for Peace” from almost 90 universities accuses the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan of seeking to use hunger to punish people in Sur (a neighbourhood in the city of Diyarbakir), Silvan, Nusayno, Cizre, Silopi and other towns kept under curfew since mid-December. “It has attacked these settlements with heavy weapons that should only be used in wartime,” it says, calling this a “deliberate and planned massacre.”
Rather than denying the accusation, the government’s reaction was to escalate. “Pseudo intellectuals” with a PhD should not expect to be treated any differently than the “terrorists” under attack by the army in Turkish Kurdistan, Erdogan warned. He declared that signing the 10 January petition was an act of treason and anyone who did not retract their signature would be charged and put on trial. Twenty-seven scholars, mostly from Kocaeli University in north-western Turkey, were arrested in early morning raids and briefly detained for “terrorist propaganda”. The signers were put under formal investigation.
Professors and researchers were denounced as supporters of “terrorism” by their academic bodies and some were suspended from their posts. Many received death threats. In some cases a red cross was painted on their office door. This symbol was used to indicate targets for slaughter during the genocide of the Armenians in 1915. A prominent gangster, Sedat Peker, an Islamist and Turkish nationalist believed to be close to Erdogan, posted the following on his Web site: “We will spill your blood and we will take a shower in your blood.”
The polarization spread throughout society, with forces loudly lining up on both sides. The number of petition signers more than doubled. Turkish writers (including Novel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk), publishers, film makers, associations of lawyers and journalists, and many other groups and individuals publicly voiced support for the threatened academics. So did many scholar activists abroad such as Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Etienne Balibar and David Harvey. The petition was read aloud in front of the Palace of Justice, where people came to “turn themselves in” for signing it. Even some political actors who have not been regime opponents expressed concern about Erdogan’s handling of this affair, if not his agenda.
Erdogan’s deliberate baring of his teeth at intellectuals is more than a power grab by an ambitious strongman, although it is that as well. His represents the ambitions of a large part of the Turkish ruling class and the Turkish state. Now he is faced with a crisis his own policies have created, in conjunction with a regional and international situation that is making itself felt in a concentrated way in Turkey.
The country is becoming “Syrianized”, both in the urban warfare going on in the south-east and Daesh (also called ISIS) attacks in major cities, and in the way developments in Turkey are fuelled by those on the international level. This means particularly the clash between Islamism and Western imperialism and the intertwining of that contradiction with the aggressive moves of a whole swarm of reactionary states seeking to protect and advance their interests in this gathering maelstrom.
The oppression of the Kurds is one nodal point in all this, and a key one in terms of Erdogan’s ambitions and the dangers he must deal with, even though it is not the only one, or even the main factor driving the overall development of the situation.
Erdogan’s Turkey has been deeply involved in the Syrian civil war since the start, seeking to bring that country under its influence as part of grabbing regional predominance and promoting Islamism, the ideological glue to hold this project together. It is public knowledge that Turkey has been the main conduit for weapons and recruits into Syria for a variety of Islamist forces, from the Turkoman (ethnic Turkish Syrians) militia it created to Al-Nusra and beyond in the constantly shifting and recomposing Islamist nebula. It has done this with the acquiescence of the US, whose anxiousness to oust Russia and counter Iranian influence in Syria has been a big factor in prolonging and intensifying the civil war. At the same time, Turkey’s position has brought it into conflict with the US, which is threatened by the Islamist onrush, especially Daesh. And yet, given the US’s rivalry with Russia and need to weaken Iran, the US has made it very clear that it needs Erdogan, even though it also needs whatever help it can get from Kurdish forces.
Erdogan hoped to get a parliamentary super-majority in the June general elections. This was not because he intended to rely on parliamentary means to achieve his ends, such as changing the constitution to give more legitimacy and leverage to his Islamist project. He also wanted to use these elections as a club against other ruling class factions. He was foiled and instead his party lost seats in parliament. One reason was the defection of some of his own base to the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), an umbrella group of many stripes that stands for a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question in Turkey and tries to act as a go-between between the state and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) leadership in the Kandil mountains on the border with Iraqi Kurdistan.
HDP planned to oblige Erdogan to concede some rights and limited regional autonomy in the new constitution, integrating Kurdish and erstwhile “left” forces into the framework of the Turkish state. But instead of being cowed by the electoral reversal and accepting HDP’s extended hand, Erdogan stepped up his game. If an election doesn’t come out right, hold another one. Breaking the ceasefire with PKK was part of his campaign. In the November elections the governing AKP (Justice and Development Party) got back its majority. Some prominent Kurdish political bigshots who had stepped outside the AKP came back in. The US, while pretending to remain aloof, played a major role in this developing situation by making an agreement with Erdogan, more or less openly spelled out: Erdogan would help the US (supposedly against Daesh, but so far mainly against Russia). The State Department gave him a go-ahead to attack PKK in Turkish Kurdistan and Iraq, but not to attack the PYD, the PKK’s sister organization in Syria, which has become the US’s only armed forces in Syria.
Map Mid-east Turkey focus
In the past few months, Erdogan has tried to assert full Turkish state dominance in south-eastern Turkey. Tanks and artillery have destroyed areas suspected of PKK sympathy and held the population hostage under around-the-clock curfews, trying to turn people against PKK. (Not everyone in the Kurdish region is in agreement with Kurdish nationalism—many are more in tune with Islamic fundamentalism.)
With this scorched earth policy, like the Israeli army in Palestine, the Turkish army’s aim is not to win hearts and minds but to set the terms of the situation. With these terms being set, the AKP has also made moves to recognize Kurdish identity and language—measures that should have been taken a very long time ago and which now can’t assuage the anger of a new generation of Kurdish youth that sees no future for itself under this set-up. The army has used special units and vicious military tactics designed cut down as many youth and very young teenagers as possible in order to turn their families against PKK. The widespread outrage—“The government is deliberately killing our kids and destroying our homes”—was a major factor spurring the academics’ petition.
The lack of any basic positive change in south-eastern Turkey through decades of war and negotiations has stoked an explosive frustration among young women and men in the region. PKK has been able to mobile these youth to bring the war down from the mountains and lead armed resistance in the cities. Trenches have been dug to keep the Turkish authorities out of neighbourhoods and towns, while local governments have taken up local autonomy in policing, services, etc. The demand is for the Turkish government to recognize some degree of local administration in the new constitution to be debated in parliament, although HDP is being excluded from preliminary discussions with the pretext that they have not yet sufficiently distanced themselves from “terrorism”. Many people in Western Turkey and internationally hope that the youthful spirit of rebellion in Kurdistan will crack open an unbearable situation.
Illusions about parliamentary democracy and the possibility of a “realpolitik” alignment between Kurds and the US have been helpful to Erdogan and the US but deadly to the people. The concept of “self-administration” as a form of coexistence with one or more reactionary states, as modelled in Kobani, where US air power allowed the PYD to beat back a siege by Daesh, brings all these illusions together. What happened was not that the US threw in with the Kurds but that Kurds threw in with the US—so much for “local administration” and “no state”. Such a model is not a viable and still less emancipating solution to the oppression imposed by the Turkish state.
As for the US, it can only be detrimental to the people. When the US ambassador tweeted a mild admonition to the Turkish government, it distanced itself from the petition at the same time. (“It is imperative that citizens have the opportunity to express their views, even controversial or unpopular ones.”) The US State Department has not budged from its position that the Turkish state has a right to “defend itself” against PKK “terrorists”. There is no division of opinion about this within the Obama administration, just a division of labour.
This is the ninth anniversary of the assassination of journalist and democratic activist Hrat Dink—which the state incited and is still covering up. In November, Dyarbakir bar association president Tahir Elci was shot down while holding a press conference in front of a mosque. Even before Erdogan’s recent declaration of war against petitioners and Kurdish youth—“Anyone who rebels, we will crush them”—there was more evidence than anyone needs to understand the deadly futility of imagining that the Turkish state can be fundamentally reformed and that the imperialist powers will help or even allow that to happen.
The petition and upwell of courageous protest are extremely welcome developments. The Turkish state cannot be allowed to crush this opposition, which could gather even more momentum. But the hope for “a lasting peace that includes the political demands of the Kurdish movement” is doomed, and the sooner people realize that the better. The antagonistic contradictions at work in Turkey and the region will continue to tear people apart, and most likely on a even more massively destructive level in the future, unless and until people recognize the nature of the social forces and reactionary dynamics at work and learn to use the conditions of political crises to bring about a revolutionary solution.
***
The following is the full text of the Academics for Peace 10 January petition:

As academics and researchers of this country, we will not be a party to this crime!

The Turkish state has effectively condemned its citizens in Sur, Silvan, Nusaybin, Cizre, Silopi, and many other towns and neighbourhoods in the Kurdish provinces to hunger through its use of curfews that have been ongoing for weeks. It has attacked these settlements with heavy weapons and equipment that would only be mobilized in wartime. As a result, the right to life, liberty, and security, and in particular the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment protected by the constitution and international conventions have been violated.
This deliberate and planned massacre is in serious violation of Turkey’s own laws and international treaties to which Turkey is a party. These actions are in serious violation of international law.
We demand that the state abandon its deliberate massacre and deportation of Kurdish and other peoples in the region. We also demand that the state lift the curfew, punish those responsible for human rights violations, and compensate those citizens who have experienced material and psychological damage. For this purpose we demand that independent national and international observers to be given access to the region and that they be allowed to monitor and report on the incidents.
We demand that the government prepare the conditions for negotiations and create a road map that would lead to a lasting peace which includes the demands of the Kurdish political movement. We demand inclusion of independent observers from broad sections of society in these negotiations. We also declare our willingness to volunteer as observers. We oppose suppression of any kind of the opposition.
We, as academics and researchers working on and/or in Turkey, declare that we will not be a party to this massacre by remaining silent and demand an immediate end to the violence perpetrated by the state. We will continue advocacy with political parties, the parliament, and international public opinion until our demands are met.

A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine, a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world's Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.

Monday 25 January 2016

IMPERIALIST HERO

I have often heard ( sometimes from fairly intelligent people!? ) about how great a "statesman" winston churchill was, and how "we" should continue with his legacy. Even though his legacy is one of hate, racism, imperialism, and white supremacy. After all, this asshole wanted hitler's germany to defeat russia during world war 2. In short, he was a fucking prick.

Winston Churchill: Britain’s “Greatest Briton” Left a Legacy of Global Conflict and Crimes Against Humanity

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Sunday January 24th 2016 marks the anniversary of the death of one of the most lionized leaders in the Western world: Sir Winston Churchill.
The current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has called Churchill “the greatest ever Prime Minister”, and Britons have recently voted him as the greatest Briton to have ever lived.
The story that British schoolbooks tell children about Churchill is of a British Bulldog, with unprecedented moral bravery and patriotism. He, who defeated the Nazis during World War II and spread civilisation to indigenous people from all corners of the globe. Historically, nothing could be further from the truth.
To the vast majority of the world, where the sun once never set on the British empire, Winston Churchill remains a great symbol of racist Western imperialist tyranny, who stood on the wrong side of history.
The myth of Churchill is Britain’s greatest propaganda tool because it rewrites Churchill’s true history in order to whitewash Britain’s past imperialist crimes against humanity. The Churchill myth also perpetuates Britain’s ongoing neo-colonial and neo-liberal policies, that still, to the is day, hurt the very people around the world that Churchill was alleged to have helped civilise.
The same man whose image is polished and placed on British mantelpieces as a symbol of all that is Great about Britain was an unapologetic racist and white supremacist. “I hate Indians, they are a beastly people with a beastly religion”, he once bellowed. As Churchill put it, Palestinians were simply “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung.”
In 1937, he told the Palestine Royal Commission:
“I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
It is unsurprising that when Barack Obama became President, he returned to Britain a bust of Churchill which he found on his desk in the Oval office. According to historian Johann Hari, Mr. Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill’s watch, for daring to resist Churchill’s empire.
Apart from being an unrepentant racist, Churchill was also a staunch proponent of the use of terrorism as a weapon of war.
During the Kurdish rebellion against the British dictatorship in 1920, Churchill remarked that he simply did not understand the “squeamishness” surrounding the use of gas by civilized Great Britain as a weapon of terror. “I am strongly in favour of using gas against uncivilised tribes, it would spread a lively terror,” he remarked.
In the same year, as Secretary of State for War, Churchill sent the infamous Black and Tans to Ireland to fight the IRA. The group became known for vicious terrorist attacks on civilians which Churchill condoned and encouraged.
While today Britons celebrate Churchill’s legacy, much of the world outside the West mourns the legacy of a man who insisted that it was the solemn duty of Great Britain to invade and loot foreign lands because in Churchill’s own words Britain’s “Aryan stock is bound to triumph”.
Churchill’s legacy in the Far East, Middle East, South Asia and Africa is certainly not one of an affable British Lionheart, intent on spreading civilization amongst the natives of the world. To people of these regions the imperialism, racism, and fascism of a man like Winston Churchill can be blamed for much of the world’s ongoing conflicts and instability.
As Churchill himself boasted, he “created Jordan with a stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon,” thereby placing many Jordanians under the brutal thumb of a throneless Hashemite prince, Abdullah. Historian Michael R. Burch recalls how the huge zigzag in Jordan’s eastern border with Saudi Arabia has been called “Winston’s Hiccup” or “Churchill’s Sneeze” because Churchill carelessly drew the expansive boundary after a generous lunch.
Churchill also invented Iraq. After giving Jordan to Prince Abdullah, Churchill, the great believer in democracy that he was, gave Prince Abdullah’s brother Faisal an arbitrary patch of desert that became Iraq. Faisal and Abdullah were war buddies of Churchill’s friend T. E. Lawrence, the famous “Lawrence of Arabia”.
Much like the clumsy actions in Iraq of today’s great Empire, Churchill’s imperial foreign policy caused decades of instability in Iraq by arbitrarily locking together three warring ethnic groups that have been bleeding heavily ever since. In Iraq, Churchill bundled together the three Ottoman vilayets of Basra that was predominantly Shiite, Baghdad that was Sunni, and Mosul that was mainly Kurd.
Ask almost anyone outside of Iraq who is responsible for the unstable mess that Iraq is in today and they are likely to say one word, either “Bush” or “America”. However, if you asked anyone within Iraq who is mainly responsible for Iraq’s problems over the last half century and they are likely to simply say “Churchill”.
Winston Churchill convened the 1912 Conference in Cairo to determine the boundaries of the British Middle Eastern mandate and T.E. Lawrence was the most influential delegate. Churchill did not invite a single Arab to the conference, which is shocking but hardly surprising since in his memoirs Churchill said that he never consulted the Arabs about his plans for them.
The arbitrary lines drawn in Middle Eastern sand by Churchillian imperialism were never going to withstand the test of time. To this day, Churchill’s actions have denied Jordanians, Iraqis, Kurds and Palestinians anything resembling true democracy and national stability.
The intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict can also be traced directly back to Churchill’s door at number 10 Downing Street and his decision to hand over the “Promised Land” to both Arabs and Jews. Churchill gave practical effect to the Balfour declaration of 1917, which expressed Britain’s support for the creation of a Jewish homeland, resulting in the biggest single error of British foreign policy in the Middle East.
Churchill’s legacy in Sub-Saharan Africa and Kenya in particular is also one of deep physical and physiological scars that endure to this day.
Of greater consequence to truth and history should be a man’s actions, not merely his words. Whilst Churchill has become one of the most extensively quoted men in the English speaking world, particularly on issues of democracy and freedom, true history speaks of a man whose actions revolved around, in Churchill’s own words, “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”.
One such war was when Kikuyu Kenyans rebelled for their freedom only to have Churchill call them “brutish savage children” and force 150,000 of them into “Britain’s Gulag”.
Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Professor Caroline Elkins, highlights Churchill’s many crimes in Kenya in her book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Professor Elkins explains how Churchill’s soldiers “whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects”, all in the name of British “civilization”. It is said that President Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured from Churchill’s men.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved how in Bengal in 1943 Churchill engineered one of the worst famines in human history for profit.
Over three million civilians starved to death whilst Churchill refused to send food aid to India. Instead, Churchill trumpeted that “the famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” Churchill intentionally hoarded grain to sell for profit on the open market after the Second World War instead of diverting it to starving inhabitants of a nation controlled by Britain. Churchill’s actions in India unquestionably constituted a crime against humanity.
Churchill was also one of the greatest advocates of Britain’s disastrous divide-and-rule foreign policy.
Churchill’s administration deliberately created and exacerbated sectarian fissures within India’s independence movement, between Indian Hindus and Muslims that have had devastating effects on the region ever since.
Prior to India’s independence from Britain, Churchill was eager to see bloodshed erupt in India, so as to prove that Britain was the benevolent “glue holding the nation together”. For Churchill, bloodshed also had the added strategic advantage that it would also lead to the partition of India and Pakistan. Churchill’s hope was this partition would result in Pakistan remaining within Britain’s sphere of influence. This, in turn, would enable the Great Game against the Soviet empire to continue, no matter the cost to innocent Indian and Pakistanis. The partition of India with Pakistan caused the death of about 2.5 million people and displaced some 12.5 million others.
According to writer, Ishaan Tharoor, Churchill’s own Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery,  compared his boss’s understanding of India’s problems to King George III’s apathy for the Americas. In his private diaries Amery vented that “on the subject of India, Churchill is not quite sane” and that he didn’t “see much difference between Churchill’s outlook and Hitler’s.”
Churchill shared far more ideologically in common with Hitler than most British historians care to admit. For instance, Churchill was a keen supporter of eugenics, something he shared in common with Germany’s Nazi leadership, who were estimated estimated to have killed 200,000 disabled people and forcibly sterilised twice that number. Churchill drafted a highly controversial piece of legislation, which mandated that the mentally ill be forcibly sterilized. In a memo to the Prime Minister in 1910, Winston Churchill cautioned, “the multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race”. He also helped organise the International Eugenics Conference of 1912, which was the largest meeting of proponents of eugenics in history.
Churchill had a long standing belief in racial hierarchies and eugenics. In Churchill’s view, white protestant Christians were at the very top of the pyramid, above white Catholics, while Jews and Indians were only slightly higher than Africans.
Historian, Mr. Hari, rightfully points out, “the fact that we now live in a world where a free and independent India is a superpower eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the Kikuyu ‘savages’ is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest – and a sweet, ironic victory for Churchill at his best.”
Amid today’s Churchillian parades and celebratory speeches, British media and schoolbooks may choose to only remember Churchill’s opposition to dictatorship in Europe, but the rest of the world cannot choose to forget Churchill’s imposition of dictatorship on darker skinned people outside of Europe. Far from being the Lionheart of Britain, who stood on the ramparts of civilisation, Winston Churchill, all too often, simply stood on the wrong side of history.
Churchill is indeed the Greatest Briton to have ever lived, because for decades, the myth of Churchill has served as Britain’s greatest propaganda tool to bolster national white pride and glorify British imperial culture.
Garikai Chengu is a scholar at Harvard University. Contact him on garikai.chengu@gmail.com

Sunday 24 January 2016

THIS IS WHY

This is why their laws are bullshit, and why they are really in place. It is a clear demonstration as to why staying inside the guidelines the bourgeoisie have set for us lead nowhere, and how staying within their legal limits will not lead to any meaningful change.

From Chicago Stop Mass Incarceration Network

Police Who Murder People Walk Free—
While Iggy & Alfredo Face Felony Charges for Protesting Police Murder & Demanding Justice!

Drop All the Charges Now on Iggy & Alfredo and on All Those Arrested Protesting Police Murder!

December 24, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Police nationwide continue to murder unarmed people, disproportionately Black and Latino. And while the police almost never face charges, people all over the country who protest to stop police murder are arrested, charged, and threatened with years in prison.The murder of Laquan McDonald has unleashed a torrent of almost daily protests in Chicago. In response the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the powers behind them continue to arrest protesters who are standing up for justice, just as they have done since the protests over Mike Brown and Eric Garner broke out over a year ago. And the police have been singling out, threatening, and arresting key activists from different perspectives who are playing major roles in the protests. THIS MUST STOP!
Now is the time, in the midst of these roiling protests, for everyone to come together and demand that all charges against all protesters be dropped and that CPD stop targeting key activists! A political and legal battle needs to be waged to make this happen and all people of conscience need to get involved in this.

IGGY & ALFREDO – FACE FELONY CHARGES

Last year, after grand juries refused to indict cops for the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, Chicago police arrested more than two dozen people at a downtown protest that was part of a national day against police murder on December 13, 2014.  Most of those arrested had their charges dropped or were allowed to opt for “community service”.  A misdemeanor case was defeated in court.
But two protesters, David “Iggy Flow” Rucker and Alfredo Reyes, were beaten by police, and then charged with aggravated battery to a police officer and slapped with $75,000 bail each. One year later, they still face felony charges and 7 years in prison.

WE DEMAND – DROP THE CHARGES NOW!  HANDS OFF IGGY & ALFREDO!

Iggy works with the Revolution Club of Chicago and has been very visible in the protests against police murder, from Michael Brown of Ferguson to the protests today against the murder of Laquan McDonald. He is still being singled out by police. At one recent protest for Laquan, a cop who recognized Iggy assaulted him with a night stick and at another, a cop got in his face, shouting, “Hey, Punk, wanna take a swing at me?” The Sun-Timesrecently revealed that the Revolution Club and others were the target of police spying during that period.
Alfredo joined in the protest against police brutality.
If you have been protesting against police murder and terror, if your heart is with the protestors, if you believe in the value of protests shining a light on grave injustices — then

STAND WITH IGGY & ALFREDO!

~~~~~~~~~~

DROP THE CHARGES AGAINST the SOUTH SHORE 2!

On September 26, the South Shore 2 were in South Shore with the Revolution Club and others from the neighborhood organizing for the national protest “Rise Up October —Stop Police Terror! Which Side Are You On?” in New York City on October 24, 2015.
The group was passing out palmcards, calling on people to stand up against police terror, and displaying a banner with the faces of 40 people murdered by the police.  They passed out whistles to “blow the whistle on police brutality.” 
As people from the neighborhood gathered, speaking their outrage about their treatment by the police and about the police murders of Alfontish “NuNu” Cockerham and JJ Kemp, (two men from the South Shore neighborhood), the police began harassing a man nearby for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. Many people gathered to “blow the whistle” on the police, and in the face of this resistance, the cops backed off and let the man go.  But a short time later, after most of the crowd left, the police returned and suddenly attacked the group, arresting a young Black woman and young Black man – the South Shore 2.  They did nothing to deserve this. For a political protest against police terror they were each charged with the serious felony of aggravated battery to a police officer, by the very police that they were protesting.

PACK THE COURTROOM FOR THE SOUTH SHORE 2! January 6, 2016, 9:30 am
Room 604, Cook Co. Court, 26th and California.

UPDATE: On January 6 the court proceedings were continued to a later date. Watch revcom.us for future information.

Stop Mass Incarceration Network - Chicago
stopmassincarcerationchicago@gmail.com • (312) 933-9586    Facebook.com/SMINChicago
@StopMassIncChi    stopmassincarceration.net
The Stop Mass Incarceration Network is a project of the Alliance for Global Justice, a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. For more info, see stopmassincarceration.net

Saturday 23 January 2016

KEEP IT FUCKING BURNING

This is the kind of outrageous shit that keeps my fire burning and writing the songs I do, love them or fucking hate them. And more than this, the people fighting back against this shit are heroes, and nothing less.
   Police Murder of Cedrick Chatman Approved by Chicago Powers

This Cannot Go Down! This Cannot Go On!

Updated January 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

In the midst of outrage over one horrendous police murder after another and exposures of the official cover-up from every institution, the video of the police shooting of 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman in January 2013 was forced into the light of day after a battle by the city to suppress it. The family wanted the public to see the video to counter the official lies and verdict that Cedrick’s shooting was justified. “You see him running away from the officers as fast as he possibly could--he never even begins to turn,” Brian Coffman, the family lawyer, said. “Fry [the cop] never says anything. He just gets out of the car, watches him run with his gun trained on him, and fires.” Not only did they gun down Cedrick in the middle of the day on a busy South Side street corner, but there is the sickening sight of the other cop standing with his boot on the mortally wounded, handcuffed teenager, as though Cedrick is some kind of animal in a trophy kill. This horror gives graphic illustration to the reality expressed by many that it is “open season” on Black people. THESE HORRORS MUST STOP NOW!
What has come out around this case is the fact that all the “institutional processes” involved knew about and officially approved the cop’s right to shoot this unarmed Black youth while he was fleeing for his life. In this case both the state’s attorney and the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) cleared Fry of any wrongdoing. Neither cop faced any discipline and they have been on the street to this day.
The official police story was that Cedrick and others had carjacked a car. The police said they saw a car that matched the description, stopped it and that they saw Chatman reach down for something in the car and then get out of his car and run with a black object in his hand that they thought might be a weapon and that he turned slightly toward the pursuing cops, so “fearing for his life” the cop, Fry, opened fire. But the investigation of the scene showed that the object was a black iPhone box, there was no gun. And video footage from three nearby buildings shows Cedrick was sprinting away from the cops. Coffman, who initially was hesitant to take the case, said, “The more I saw, the more I realized, ‘Oh my god, this is a giant scam.’ It was unbelievable. They were fighting tooth and nail to cover this up from the very beginning.”
The only thing that was not pig business-as-usual in this case is that the lead investigator for IPRA, Lorenzo Davis, found that the shooting was unjustified and recommended firing Fry, the cop who murdered Cedrick. Fry was not fired, but Lorenzo Davis was fired for refusing to change his decision. Davis examined the video and concluded that “Cedrick was just running as the shots were fired. You’re taught that deadly force is a last resort and that you should do everything in your power to apprehend the person before you use deadly force. I did not see where deadly force was called for at that time.” The head of IPRA (who is appointed by the mayor), a supposed independent and impartial investigative body, was determined to protect the police and intervened directly and ordered Davis to change his decision to “justified” on this case (and five others including the police murders of Laquan McDonald and Flint Farmer). Davis, who had been a Chicago cop for 23 years, refused and he was fired for “anti-police bias!” After his firing, the higher-ups at IPRA changed the decision on the shooting to “justified.” No charges were brought by the state’s attorney either. Case closed. Officially-approved murder—signed, sealed, delivered.
THERE IS MORE. The murdering cop has a long record of brutality and at least one other death. The wrongful death civil suit filed by Chatman’s family is the fifth civil rights lawsuit since 2006 in which Fry is named as a defendant. The other four allege violations of excessive force, false arrest and illegal searches. They all ended in settlements. At least one involved the shooting of another Black teen. Fry has been the target of 30 complaints throughout his career and ALL were marked as “unsubstantiated." In fact, Fry has faced no discipline whatsoever in his whole career.
AND THERE IS MORE. Instead of charging the killer cop, two alleged accomplices in the alleged carjacking who were 10 blocks away at the time the cops killed Cedrick, were charged with Cedrick’s murder! The prosecutors wrote that the men “set in motion a chain of events that caused the death of Cedrick Chatman.” This is a twisted logic—cops kill a man and get away with murder and two youth who weren’t even on the scene are charged for his murder. The murder charges were used as a club to force them to plead guilty to lesser charges. They are now in prison for 10 years while the cops are free and on duty on the street.
Yes there's a conspiracy, to get the cops off

"Yes there's a conspiracy... to get the cops off" is a clip from Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, a film of a talk by Bob Avakian given in 2003. Learn more about Bob Avakian here
What does this tell us? That the whole process and routine machinery of the police, the law, the supposed investigative and legal “checks and balances,” and the executive (mayor and city council) is set up to give the stamp of approval to police murder and terror and to hide what’s really going on so they can keep doing it. Who was punished? Not the cops, not the head of the IPRA. They fired the investigator who wouldn’t back off his finding. This is more than a code of silence, it is a system that is in place to allow the police to murder with impunity, and at the same time routinize it, cover it up, and make it look like the process is fair and equal by suppressing evidence and demonizing a whole section of people that they viciously repress.
Brian Coffman said, “the symmetry between our case and the McDonald case is pretty obvious...This is a bomb that’s about to drop in the city of Chicago, where everyone suddenly realizes the system is broken.”
What this actually reveals is how the whole system really works, and is meant to work, yes, in Chicago, but all over the country, as Bob Avakian sharply reveals in the video “Yes there is a conspiracy ... to get the cops off.”
Everyone who is sick of what they have seen on these videos, everyone who can’t sit silent while police murder more people like Bettie Jones and Quintonio Legrier, everyone who wanted 12-year-old Tamir Rice to have a chance to grow up, everyone who has been protesting and refusing to be quiet—you need to be in the streets and schools raising hell!
And you need to be at the Midwest Regional Conference of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN) to STOP POLICE TERROR on Saturday, January 23, 12-6 pm at Trinity Episcopal Church, 125 East 26th Street, Chicago. (Go here for SMIN regional conferences coming up in other areas of the country.)