AGAIN AND AGAIN

 Whether or not it makes national headlines, the kkkiller kkkops persist in killing poor people in the united states, predominantly Black and Hispanic . How many of these killers actually get charged with anything, let alone convicted ? Almost none of them , and you can bet that those motherfuckers who do get put in jail are treated with respect and get protection from this killer system.

Fuck them and their fucked up murderous capitalist system.

AmeriKKKa: Three decisions and an Anniversary

February 24, 2021 | revcom.us

 

Make a list of the people killed by cops. Then make a list of pigs who have been charged with murder (let alone convicted).

One list is very, very long. The other so short you could probably write it on a matchbook.

*****

August 24, 2019, Aurora, Colorado cops stopped 23-year-old Elijah McClain after getting a report of a “sketchy” man walking in the neighborhood. Translation: a Black man walking home from the store. The pigs claim McClain was suffering from “excited delirium.” In a video you hear McClain saying, “I have my ID right here…. That’s my house. I was just going home,” then weeping, saying, “I can’t breathe. Please stop.” The cops administered an overdose of the powerful sedative Ketamine, causing McClain to vomit continuously, go into cardiac arrest and later die.

February 24, 2021, a grand jury decision: The pigs who murdered Elijah McClain will NOT face any charges.

March 23, 2020, 42-year-old Daniel Prude was having a serious mental health crisis and ran into the streets naked. He needed help. He needed compassion. But the Rochester, NY pigs grabbed him, pushed his face into the ground, and put a “spit sock” over his head, holding him down until he stopped breathing. Prude later died at the hospital.

February 23, 2021, a grand jury decision: The pigs who murdered Daniel Prude will NOT face any charges.

April 9, 2020, Cleveland cop Jose Garcia was on his way to work when he claims he saw two young men stealing a box of soda from a truck. Garcia pursued the men in his car, drove up beside their car and shot 22-year-old Desmond Franklin five times in the head, killing him. 

February 12, 2021, a grand jury decision: The pig who murdered Desmond Franklin will NOT face any charges.

February 23, 2021: The one-year anniversary of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia. A white father and son armed themselves and pursued Arbery in a pickup truck after seeing him jogging in their neighborhood. Arbery died from three close-range shotgun blasts. The murderers were let go by the police and only charged two months later when a video of the murder surfaced. The family of Arbery is still waiting for justice.

Now Say these other names: Randall Lockaby, in Erlanger, KY; Carl Dorsey III, in Newark, NJ; Ryan Shirey, in Lehigh, PA; Derek Hayden, in Seattle, WA; Andrew Hogan, in Trotwood, OH; Trey Bartholomew, in Pennsburg, PA; Keenan Sailer, in Mesa, AZ; Christopher Hagans, in Stratford, CT; Kevin Costlow, in Laytonsville, MD; Richard Fenton Thomas, in Caroline County, VA… February isn’t even over, and at least 10 people have already been murdered by cops this month.

Murder after murder after murder by the pigs who “serve and protect” this system—a system that needs to be overthrown.

“How Long?! How Many More Times Do the Tears Have to Flow?” A clip from BA Speaks: REVOLUTION— Nothing Less!

Elijah McClain (Family photo)

Daniel Prude
(Courtesy Roth and Roth LLP via AP)

Desmond Franklin

Ahmaud Arbery
(Credit: runwithmaud.com)

 

IF THERE'S A WAY

 Capitalism creates homelessness and then finds a way to profit from it. This system finds a way to profit from gluttony and starvation, "freedom" and incarceration, war and "peace", living in mansions and living and dying on the streets. Nothing matters to them but their profits, and this shit has to go.

CRUSH RACIST PARASITES THAT LIVE OFF OF HOMELESS WORKERS

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2021 AT 4:32PM

NEW YORK CITY, February 12— Capitalism makes sure that exploitation and profiteering are ever present even as homelessness becomes just another business.
“Man, I feel like there’s some exploitation going on here. I feel it!”
That is what one of the more than 250 homeless men, almost all Black, told a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrade last July, after New York City (NYC) officials  moved them into the Lucerne Hotel for emergency lodging during the Covid-19 pandemic (see CHALLENGE, 12/4/2020 and 10/22/2020).
New York City spends in excess of $2 billion yearly to shelter providers to serve the more than 80,000 homeless New Yorkers. Much of this money is doled out to so-called nonprofits, no matter which political party is in power. While there are at least 20,000 homeless children and 97 percent of those in shelters are Black and Latin, the “do-gooder” leaders of many of these “nonprofits” make salaries of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The murderous inequality on every level, alongside the wealth of Wall St. and Billionaire’s Row, enforced by racist police terror, cries out for an end to the profit system with communist revolution. Communism would eliminate all homelessness immediately.
Gov’t enables nonprofit corruption
Recent events have shed some light on NYC’s $2 billion “homeless industry,” where business is booming! The Doe Fund is a nonprofit that works with formerly incarcerated and homeless people. While providing shelter, it also supplies local business improvement districts (BIDs) with an army of minimum-wage sanitation workers that sweep the streets, clean the parks and deliver meals to hotels during the pandemic. This work used to be done by City workers with union contracts. The BIDs pay $12/hr., less than the $15 minimum wage. They would have to pay over three times as much for private sanitation. The Doe Fund makes up the $3/hr. difference in workers’ checks but gets back twice as much by charging the workers $249/week to cover coronavirus expenses (PPE), food, clothing and vocational training.
“It’s feudalism, pure exploitation,” one DoE Fund worker in the program said. “They receive money from the city and private donors, and they take money from us. A thousand dollars a month. Where is it going?” (The Appeal, 7/29/20)
Let’s take a look where it goes. The “non-profit” Doe Fund took in $54 million more in revenue than it spent in 2019. Founders George McDonald (who died on January 26) and his wife (Harriet-Karr McDonald) collect salaries of $400,000 each. His son draws $308,000 and his stepdaughter more than $100,000 (Dana Rubinstein, Politico, 11/7/19).  McDonald is also the Doe Fund’s landlord, collecting $17,000/month in office rent (Politico). The Doe Fund owns a number of apartment buildings across the City, but they are not available to the workers in the program.
Another profiteering, corrupt “nonprofit” is the Bronx Parent Housing Network (BPHN). On February 7, Victor Rivera, its CEO was fired and is now facing a criminal investigation after The New York Times reported that 10 women, both staff and women living in the shelter system, accused him of sexual assault. One woman had formally filed a complaint with the City, only to have it referred back to the BPHN, who dismissed it. Rivera is also accused of nepotism (unlike McDonald), directing contracts to friends and mixing his non-profit with his for-profit businesses (NYT, 2/7/21).  The complaints of sexual assault by 10 women and financial corruption did not stop NYC officials  from paying him about $275 million since 2017.
The working class needs communism
NYC is a showcase for a capitalist system that doesn’t work and needs to be replaced. Thousands of available hotels and office buildings remain empty, yet the number of homeless is rising along with tens of thousands of workers trying to survive the pandemic on poverty wages. Not so ironically, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio wanted to send the homeless workers in the Lucerne Hotel to a homeless shelter in the Wall St. area, the home of the bankers and businessmen who have gotten richer during the pandemic while increasing poverty. Now Citibank billionaire Ray McGuire is running for Mayor to try to save NYC for the rich. We need communist revolution to take back the whole world for the working class.
The real-estate developers and the financiers that invest in luxury housing, the bankers and their politicians; it’s this capitalist class who are responsible for homelessness and mass incarceration.We can end homelessness as soon as we overthrow capitalism. Communist revolution will mean a society run by and for the working class.

KKKANADIAN KKKORRUPTION

 Again, kkkanada shows itself to be more than  willing to help corporations in the name of profits instead of human rights. Haiti seems to get the bulk of the corruption against it's national interests , especially where kkkanadian exploitation of that country is concerned.

Read please.

Haitian official stashes wealth in Montréal

Senator Rony Célestin & new $4,25 million Montreal mansion

Recent media reports of a Haitian official stashing wealth in Montréal property ignore a key element of the story: Canada’s contribution to enabling Haitian corruption.

As a neo-Duvalierist regime becomes ever more dictatorial it’s also worth revisiting Canada’s history in facilitating fraud and money laundering in the hemisphere’s most impoverished nation.

Recently La Presse reported that the wife of a governing party senator, who works at the Haitian consulate in Montréal purchased a mansion in Laval. The story reported, “as the political crisis bogs down in Haiti, the wife of a senator belonging to the party of the contested president, Jovenel Moïse, has just bought a sumptuous $ 4.25 million villa in Laval, attracting a flood of criticism from Montreal to Port-au-Prince. The new property was paid off in full in one fell swoop, without a mortgage, and without their other house being sold, according to the Land Registry.” Two follow-up Journal de Montréal stories found that Senator Rony Célestin and his spouse, Marie-Louisa Célestin, spent $2 million more recently on property and businesses in the Montréal area.

La Presse’s Vincent Larouche should be praised for covering a story that had been circulating in Montréal’s Haitian community for days. But, a lot of important context is missing from the story, as Larouche must know. (15 years ago, Larouche wrote a nice review of my co-authored book on Canada’s role in the 2004 coup when he was with left-wing L’autre Journal). Senator Célestin was implicated in the 2019 killing of journalist Néhémie Joseph and threats targeting the Director General of the Anti-Corruption Unit. More broadly, Célestin’s political party was founded by corrupt and violent Duvalierist Michel Martelly.

But the broader Canadian angle is the most important omission. On Facebook, activist Jean “Jafrikayiti” Saint-Vil explained: “The PHTK regime headed by Michel Martelly and his self-described ‘bandi legal’ (legal bandits), came to power thanks to fraudulent elections organized, financed and controlled by the foreign occupation force established in Haiti since the coup d’état of February 2004. The planning meeting for the coup d’etat and putting Haiti under trusteeship was organized by Canadian Minister for La Francophonie Denis Paradis. The Ottawa Initiative on Haiti [January 31-February 1, 2003] succeeded in overthrowing the legitimate President as well as 7,000 elected officials from the region’s most impoverished country. The elected officials were replaced by bandits such as ‘Senator’ Rony Célestin of whom this article speaks.”

In a follow-up post Saint-Vil offers an alternative way of understanding Canada’s relationship to political corruption in Haiti. He asks, “Can you imagine [Hells Angels leader] Maurice ‘Mom’ Boucher and [serial killer] Carla Homolka installed as Senators in Canada by fraudulent elections led by a coalition of Haitian, Jamaican, Ethiopian diplomats in Ottawa?”

Few Canadians would be happy with such an outcome. But it’s a troublingly apt description of US, Canadian and French policy in Haiti.

This is not the first time Canada has been implicated in Duvalierist corruption. Before fleeing to the French Riviera, Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier emptied government bank accounts. The Royal Bank of Canada and other Canadian financial institutions assisted the young dictator’s theft. A US auditing firm hired to investigate and track down public funds concluded that Duvalier’s financial advisors “had set up an intricately concealed flow of money through a bevy of banks and accounts, most of them Canadian.”

The Royal Bank of Canada branch in Haiti assisted Duvalier. So did a Toronto branch of the bank. In Money on the Run: Canada and How the World’s Dirty Profits Are Laundered, Mario Possamai details Duvalier’s turn to Canadian institutions when Swiss banks froze Baby Doc’s accounts. At a Royal Bank branch in Toronto his attorneys converted $41.8 million in Canadian treasury bills, a highly secretive and respected form of money. Once converted, the Duvaliers’ assets could no longer be scrutinized.

In Canada: A New Tax Haven: How the Country That Shaped Caribbean Tax Havens Is Becoming One Itself Alain Deneault summarizes: “The dictator’s money was moved from Canada to Jersey [tax haven] where it was received by the Royal Trust Bank, a subsidiary of Canada’s Royal Trust Company. The deposit was made to an account that was part of a larger account held by the Manufacturers Hanover Bank of Canada, a financial institution with its headquarters in Toronto a few steps away from the Royal Bank of Canada where the whole operation had been set in motion. The operation became more complex with securities being split from their ownership records and further movements between the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in Jersey, the Royal Bank of Canada in London, the Banque Nationale de Paris, and sundry Swiss institutions.”

Despite guidelines requiring banks to determine customers’ identity, RBC admitted it simply trusted Duvalier’s lawyers. Bank officials later claimed they would have refused the transaction had they known who the beneficiaries were.

This explanation is hard to believe. The only foreign bank in the country for a number of years, the Royal Bank financed projects by the Duvalier regime. Amidst the uprising against Jean-Claude Duvalier, Royal’s senior account manager in Port au Prince, Yves Bourjolly, joined a long list of prominent businessmen who signed a statement expressing “confidence in the desire of the government for peace, dialogue and democratization … at a time when order and security appear to be threatened.”

Over the years Canada has empowered many other corrupt and violent politicians in Haiti. In response to the Célestin story, intrepid tweeter “Madame Boukman — Justice 4 Haiti” noted, “Justin ‘Blackface’ Trudeau, like those before him, knowingly supports drug traffickers, money-launderers and assassins in Haiti. That is the only way Canadian mining vultures can loot Haiti’s massive gold reserves.”

This about sums it up.

 

On February 28 the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute is hosting a discussion of Haiti Betrayed, a powerful indictment of Canada’s role in the 2004 coup and subsequent policy in the country. In the week leading up to the event the film will be available to watch for free for those who register in advance.

 

STRINGS ATTACHED

 Most people think that more aid to "developing countries" is a cure for their economic and social ills, while not realizing that the aid given to these places and people is always tied to submitting the control of their economies to the ones giving this aid. It is not a gift .......

The trouble with Canadian aid

Global Affairs Canada, international development studies departments and many NGOs are celebrating International Development Week. Lost amidst the salute to Canadian aid is the self-serving dark side of international assistance.

The primary objective of Canadian overseas aid has long been to advance Western interests, particularly keeping the Global South tied to the US-led geopolitical order. Initially conceived as a way to blunt radical decolonization in India, Canadian aid is primarily about advancing Ottawa’s geopolitical objectives. The broad rationale for extending foreign aid was laid out at a 1968 seminar for the newly established Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). This day-long event was devoted to discussing a paper titled “Canada’s Purpose in Extending Foreign Assistance” written by University of Toronto Professor Steven Triantis. Foreign aid, Triantis argued, “may be used to induce the underdeveloped countries to accept the international status quo or change it in our favour.” Aid provided an opportunity “to lead them to rational political and economic developments and a better understanding of our interests and problems of mutual concern.” Triantis discussed the appeal of a “‘Sunday School mentality’ which ‘appears’ noble and unselfish and can serve in pushing into the background other motives … [that] might be difficult to discuss publicly.” A 1969 CIDA background paper, expanding on Triantis’ views, summarized the rationale for Canadian aid: “To establish within recipient countries those political attitudes or commitments, military alliances or military bases that would assist Canada or Canada’s western allies to maintain a reasonably stable and secure international political system. Through this objective, Canada’s aid programs would serve not only to help increase Canada’s influence within the developing world, but also within the western alliance.”

Historically, military intervention has elicited aid. Call it the ‘intervention-equals-aid’ principle or ‘wherever Canadian or US troops kill Ottawa provides aid’ principle.

Ottawa delivered $7.25 million to South Korea during the Korean War. Tens of millions of dollars in Canadian aid supported US policy in South Vietnam in the 1960s and during the 1990-91 Iraq war Canada provided $75 million in assistance to people in countries affected by the Gulf crisis. In 1999-2000 the former Yugoslavia was the top recipientof Canadian assistance.

Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into Haiti after Canadian troops helped overthrow the country’s elected government in 2004. In the years after the early 2000s invasions, Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti were the top recipients of Canadian ‘aid’.

Aid has also been designed to help Canadian companies expand abroad. With most aid “tied” to the purchase of Canadian products and services, the aid program was an outlet for surplus commodities and contracts for Canadian exporters.

The proportion of ‘tied’ aid has declined over the decades but Canadian aid still supports Canadian firms. After the earthquake in Haiti, for instance, CIDA and the Canadian Red Cross contracted Groupe Laprise and SNC-Lavalin to supply 7,500 temporary shelters. Almost all of the money was spent in Québec and the temporary shelters were of poor quality.

Indirectly Global Affairs also supports Canadian firms by channeling funds to sectors in which Canadian firms dominate. Canadian aid has helped liberalize mining legislation in numerous countries. In the best-documented example, Ottawa began an $11 million project to re-write Colombia’s mining code in 1997. CIDA worked on the project with a Colombian law firm, Martinez Córdoba and Associates, representing multinational companies, and the Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI), an industry think-tank based at the University of Calgary. The CIDA/CERI proposal was submitted to Colombia’s Department of Mines and Energy and became law in 2001. The new code also reduced the royalty rate companies pay the government to 0.4 per cent from 10 per cent for mineral exports above 3 million tonnes per year and from five per cent for exports below 3 million tonnes. In addition, the new code increased the length of mining concessions from 25 years to 30 years, with the possibility that concessions can be tripled to 90 years.

The Trudeau government has channeled large sums of aid to international mining. In 2016 the Liberals put up $100 million for international projects titled “Enhanced Oversight of the Extractive Industries in Francophone Africa”, “Enhancing Resource Management through Institutional Transformation in Mongolia”, “Support for the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development”, “Enhancing Extractive Sector Benefit Sharing”, “Supporting the Ministry of Mines to Strengthen Governance and Management of the Mining Sector” and “West Africa Governance and Economic Sustainability in Extractive Areas.” They ploughed another $20 millioninto the Canadian Extractive Sector Facility “to promote knowledge generation and improved governance in the extractive sector in Latin America and the Caribbean.” The “Skills for Employment in the Extractives Sector of the Pacific Alliance” channeled $16 million into “industry-responsive training systems” in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru where Canadian mining companies dominate mineral extraction.

In East Africa the government launched the $12.5 million “Strengthening Education in Natural Resource Management in Ethiopia”, which was designed “to improve the employability of people … in natural resource fields like geology, mining and engineering. It works through universities and technical institutes to improve the quality of programs, align them more closely with the needs of the private sector.”

While the corporate and geostrategic components of aid receive some criticism, another dimension has received little attention. Aid is designed to co-opt internationalist minded young people into aligning with Canadian foreign policy. Part of this process is simply offering internationalist minded youth opportunities to do international charity work, which draws some away from challenging domestic political structures that contribute to ‘underdevelopment’. Government funding gives NGOs the ability to maintain an institutional structure, which most activist groups don’t have, that draws internationalist minded youth into their orbit. While they open many young peoples’ eyes to global inequity, government-funded NGOs simultaneously take up political space that would often be filled by those more critical of Canadian foreign policy.

While its funding crowds out oppositional forces indirectly, sometimes CIDA directly co-opts NGOs. After leaving her position as head of CIDA in Afghanistan, Nipa Banerjee explained that Canadian aid was used to gain NGO support for the war there. “Our government thinks they are getting public support and [NGO support] for their mission if they fund NGO programs,” she told the Globe and Mail.

International Development Week itself is a prime example of the co-optation of NGOs and development studies by the government. Each year they are given funds to organize events focused on promoting Canada’s good works. Seldom is heard a discouraging word. Criticism is not part of the program.

It is up to those who no longer believe in the myth that Canada is a force for good in the world to point out the truth.The primary purpose of aid is, and always has been, to advance the US-led geopolitical order and Canadian corporate interests.

 

On February 18 the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute is sponsoring a talk on “The Trouble with Canadian Aid: Reflecting on Canada’s International Development Week”

IMPERIALIST KKKANADA

 Most kkkanadians are quite smug about their country being "the best country there is" , or "at least we're not as bad as the amerikkkans, eh", but there is a dark bullying imperialist underside to this myth. 

trudeau might be a smarmy little fuck , but he's not that far off from trump, at least with his foreign policies.

Trudeau faces series of setbacks to corporate, imperial policies

As much as some Canadians would like to believe their country is a force for good in the world, the truth is more sobering. Extreme inequality is rampant and the Canadian government is an important supporter of corporate power and imperialism in global affairs. The good news is that the pushers of the unfair, unjust and immoral existing world order do not always get their way.

It is uplifting to tally some of the Trudeau government’s setbacks:

• Last Friday the International Criminal Court ruled that it has jurisdiction over Israeli war crimes committed in the Palestinian territories, which should pave the way for a possible criminal investigation. A year ago the Trudeau government sent a letter to the ICC saying it didn’t believe the court had jurisdiction over Palestine. Its letter implied it could sever funding to the ICC if the court pursued an investigation of Israeli crimes. After the recent decision new Foreign Minister Marc Garneau released a statement criticizing the ICC decision.
• On January 26 former Liberal finance minister Bill Morneau withdrew his bid to lead the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries after it was determined he had no chance of winning.
• On January 22 the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force, making weapons that have always been immoral also illegal under international law. Canada voted against holding the 2017 UN Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards their Total Elimination and boycotted the TPNW negotiating meeting, which two-thirds of the world’s countries attended.
• On January 20 new US President Joe Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The Trudeau government pressed the president-elect to break a direct promise and maintain a climate-destroying pipeline okayed by Donald Trump.
• Since Venezuela’s new National Assembly began sitting on January 6 numerous countries have withdrawn from the US–Canada led campaign to anoint Juan Guaidó President. The European Union dropped its de facto recognition of Guaidó. As did the Dominican Republic. Even the Ottawa-led Lima Group has softened its stance. Last week Panama withdrew the credentials of Guaidó’s ambassador.
• In October Chileans voted overwhelming to rewrite the country’s Pinochet-era constitution. The referendum was a blow to Canadian corporations operating in Chile and the Trudeau government’s alliance with right-wing governments in the hemisphere.
• A week earlier Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo won a decisive election victory that was a rejection of the Canadian-backed coup against Evo Morales a year earlier. The overwhelming results were also a blow to Ottawa’s bid to wipe out the remnants of the leftist pink tide in Latin America. (On Sunday an ally of leftist former President Rafael Correa, Andrés Arauz, gained the most votes in the first round of Ecuador’s presidential election.)
• In June the international community decisively rejected Trudeau’s foreign policy. They voted against Canada’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council by a larger margin than a decade earlier under Stephen Harper.

People who support a fairer, more just and equal world should take comfort from these defeats for the Trudeau government’s pro-corporate and imperial policies. Proof that the bad guys are not invincible should offer hope for bigger victories to come.

JUST MEANINGLESS RHETORIC

 The killers who run the u.s. government have all of the nice sounding words to make you believe they're the "good guys". I mean, who doesn't want "freedom and democracy" , and "freedom of speech"? What they don't tell you is that if people start to listen to you while you're trying to organize against racism and exploitation, you will end having your freedom of speech silenced forever. The Black Panthers found this out in the most brutal way......

The FBI-Chicago Police Assassination of Fred Hampton

October 31, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

 

Bob Avakian recently wrote that one of three things that has “to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better: People have to fully confront the actual history of this country and its role in the world up to today, and the terrible consequences of this.” (See “3 Things that have to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better.”)

In that light, and in that spirit, “American Crime” is a regular feature of revcom.us. Each installment will focus on one of the 100 worst crimes committed by the U.S. rulers—out of countless bloody crimes they have carried out against people around the world, from the founding of the U.S. to the present day.

See all the articles in this series.

 

 

THE CRIME

Fred Hampton. (Photo: Paul Sequeira)

 

From Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA:

• The Oppression of Black People & the Revolutionary Struggle to End All Oppression

Read more

• Rereading George Jackson

an excerpt from “Getting Over the Two Great Humps: Further Thoughts on Conquering the World”

Read more

 

The Panthers conducted “people’s tours” of Fred Hampton’s apartment. Thousands came from the ghettos and beyond; film crews and reporters were brought in.

At 4:45 am on December 4, 1969, a special operations team of 14 Chicago police stormed into the apartment of Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. They were being directed by Cook County Prosecutor Edward Hanrahan and acting in close coordination with the FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Armed with shotguns, handguns, and a .45-caliber machine gun, and guided by a floor plan of the apartment provided by an informant, the police shot anyone they saw and sprayed the apartment with machine-gun fire.

Moving to the back of the apartment, they entered Fred Hampton’s bedroom. Hampton, already wounded, was still in bed, having been drugged earlier by the FBI’s informant. Alongside him was Deborah Johnson, his girlfriend who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with their child. As they lay there, the cops stood over Hampton and put two bullets in his brain. One cop reportedly said, “He’s good and dead now.”

The shooting continued—by the time they were done, they had also killed 22-year-old Mark Clark and critically injured four other Panthers, most of whom were asleep when police entered the apartment. After carrying out this massacre, the cops proceeded to abuse the seven surviving occupants and arrest them on major felony charges.

THE CRIMINALS

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: The FBI played the main role in targeting the Chicago Panthers, and Fred Hampton in particular. It assigned one of its agents to work closely with the Chicago state’s attorney’s office on this. (Initially the authorities hid the role of the FBI, but later the FBI’s own documents revealed not only their key role, but a conscious effort to cover up that role.) An FBI informant (William O’Neal) infiltrated the Chicago Panthers and became Hampton’s bodyguard. O’Neal provided the cops with a floor plan of the apartment. And on the night of the raid, he slipped barbiturates into Fred Hampton’s drink, causing him to fall asleep in the middle of a phone call with his mom and to sleep through the whole raid. After the assassinations, O’Neal received a $300 bonus from the FBI Headquarters in Washington for his work.

Cook County Prosecutor Edward Hanrahan: Hanrahan organized the actual raid—and the outrageous arrests of the survivors—and he was the front man and mouthpiece for the assassinations. He loudly proclaimed that his officers had been under heavy fire from the Panthers and that what went down was a “shoot-out.” He even displayed a revolver that he said Hampton had fired at police. All of these claims were soon exposed as complete lies. The police fired nearly 100 shots and suffered no injuries; only one shot was fired by the Panthers. (Mark Clark’s gun went off accidentally as he fell to the floor, fatally wounded by police.) As the truth was revealed, all charges against the surviving Panthers were dropped, and Hanrahan himself was ultimately indicted for obstructing justice and tried in connection with the raid. (The trial judge directed an acquittal.)

Chicago Tribune: The system’s mass media played a key role in preparing public opinion for murderous attacks on the Panthers by painting them as thugs, racists, and animals. A Tribune editorial, “No Quarter for Wild Beasts,” 20 days before the raid, urged cops to approach the Panthers ready to shoot to kill. When the police story of the raid started falling apart, Hanrahan asked the Tribune to run an interview with the killer cops, promoting their lies. The Tribune also ran an article with pictures showing holes in the apartment walls, purportedly caused by bullets fired by the Panthers. They were actually nail holes. A Tribune reporter later admitted that the police and state’s attorney were his “sole source” for this article, even though the Panthers were conducting tours of the apartment for hundreds of people to show the world what really happened.

THE ALIBI

Hanrahan claimed that the purpose of the raid was to seize “illegal weapons” that were in Hampton’s apartment. He also claimed that police were met with heavy gunfire and were forced to fire back in response.

THE ACTUAL MOTIVE

The claim that this was a search for weapons was a lie. For one thing, the FBI knew from their informant that most or all of the occupants of the apartment were at a political education meeting the night before the raid. So they could have executed their search warrant without a confrontation. For another, after the raid, they didn’t even bother to properly tag and catalogue the weapons they allegedly found at the apartment. And no weapons charges were pursued.

         

Editor's note: Here Bob Avakian talks about the 1960s.
Between the anti-war protesters and the war planners in the Pentagon; between the Black Panthers and J. Edgar Hoover; between Black, Latino, Asian, and Native peoples on the one side and the government on the other; between the women who rebelled against their "traditional" roles and the rich old men who ruled the country; between the youth who brought forward new music, in the broadest sense, and the preachers who denounced them as disciples of the devil and despoilers of civilization: the battle lines were sharply drawn. And through the course of those tumultuous times, those who were rebelling against the established order and the dominating relations and traditions increasingly found common cause and powerful unity; they increasingly gained—and deserved—the moral as well as political initiative, while the ruling class dug in and lashed out to defend its rule, but increasingly, and very deservedly, lost moral and political authority.

Bob Avakian, BAsics 5:6

In reality, Hampton’s assassination was part of a broad campaign by the FBI to smash the Black Panther Party and the rapidly growing revolutionary movement that burst onto the scene in the 1960s.

In September 1968, Hoover called the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” According to PBS, Hoover claimed that “1969 would be the last year of the Party’s existence.”

The Panthers were the number one target of COINTELPRO, which carried out 233 documented operations against them. These ranged from assassinations like those of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark to attempts to turn street gangs against the Panthers, efforts to create divisions within the BPP and between the BPP and white radicals, and setting up Panthers on false criminal charges. Dozens of Panthers were murdered and hundreds jailed on trumped-up charges in a coordinated national effort to crush this revolutionary force.

Hoover specifically aimed to prevent the rise of what he called “a Black messiah”—leaders and potential leaders of the people, like George Jackson or Malcolm X. Many of them were killed by the authorities. Fred Hampton was targeted because he was a bold leader, famous for his chant "I am a revolutionary," who inspired many others to take up revolution. Hampton was influenced by studying the revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong, and was known for working with the hardest youth in the hood, as well as reaching out to other segments of society. Hampton's influence and that of the Black Panther Party were growing in Chicago and nationally.

All of the things that inspired many to love "Chairman Fred" aroused the hatred of the FBI and other defenders of this system, who feared the potential for a revolutionary force that could seriously challenge their rule during this period of tremendous social upheaval in the U.S. and revolutionary struggles around the world.

So Hampton was placed on the FBI’s “Agitators Index” as a “key militant leader.” His mother’s phone was tapped. Many FBI informants were planted in the Chicago Panther chapter, one to become his bodyguard. The FBI even wrote an “anonymous” letter to the leader of the Blackstone Rangers street organization saying the Panthers were planning to kill him, hoping to incite them to attack Hampton. All of this culminated in the savage assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

SOURCES:

“December 1969: The FBI Assassination of Fred Hampton—'I AM... A REVOLUTIONARY,” Revolution #184, November 29, 2009 (updated December 4, 2015)

Decision in: Iberia HAMPTON et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Edward V. HANRAHAN et al., Defendants-Appellees. UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Honorable Joseph Sam PERRY, Appellee, v. Jeffrey H. HAAS, Attorney at Law, Contemnor-Appellant. UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Honorable Joseph Sam PERRY, Appellee, v. G. Flint TAYLOR, Attorney at Law, Contemnor-Appellant. United States Court of Appeals, Seventh District, 1979. See especially, paragraphs 41-86.

Haas, Jeffrey (2010).The Assassination of Fred Hampton. Lawrence Hill

Wikipedia entry on Fred Hampton

PBS documentary, Eyes on the Prize, America at the Racial Crossroads 1965-1985, Part 12 (“A Nation of Law 1968-1971”) begins with the murder of Fred Hampton and follows with a segment on the 1971 prisoners uprising at Attica State Prison.

 

AN ENTIRE FUCKING YEAR

 It's hard to believe that it was an entire year ago that we played with DOA and Class Of 1984 at Logan's Pub.

Now live shows and Logan's are a thing of the past. It's sad really . So many people will miss that place , not just for the music, but for the community . It was a great time, and I just want to say thank you to Esther for putting it on .

Maybe one day soon we'll get to do it again.....

DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH

 What changes will actually come from the new u.s. government ?

Does anyone remember the disappointment with obama when he became the biggest deporter of immigrants in amerikkkan history ?  Many were surprised, but some weren't.

This murderous racist system has to go, and will behave in many of the same ways no matter who is in charge.....

Home » Im/migrants and Refugees » Immigrant/refugee rights: It’s now or never, Joe

Immigrant/refugee rights: It’s now or never, Joe

WW commentary

By Teresa Gutierrez posted on February 3, 2021

Since the beginning of the most recent war on immigrants — which took shape starting in 2006 with the hypercriminalization of undocumented workers — the U.S. Congress has repeatedly talked of passing legislation labeled “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” to right some of those wrongs.

We are long past “reforms,” however.

Conditions during the past 15 years for documented, undocumented and refugee workers, not only in the U.S. but around the globe, have been dismal — which is an understatement. The time is now to bring workers out of the shadows, out of the detention centers and out of the countless deplorable migrant tent cities around the world and grant workers immediate full, legal, human and workers’ rights.

The condition of migrant workers is a crime against humanity. Relief and aid must happen now, not tomorrow.

Global working-class issue

According to the U.N., “more people than ever live in a country other than the one in which they were born. In 2019, the number of migrants globally reached an estimated 272 million. … The number of globally forcibly displaced people topped 70 million for the first time … [this] includes 26 million refugees, 3.5 million asylum seekers and over 41 million internally displaced persons.” (tinyurl.com/hbxsqafc)

It was not just in the U.S. that a white supremacist right-wing xenophobe used immigration to whip up a nativist base. Both Trump and right-wing leaders in Europe used the age-old tactic of divide and conquer the global working class.

It is no surprise that immigrant allies and organizations in the U.S. organized in record numbers to remove Donald Trump from office. Their work helped to oust one of the worst racist and misogynist presidents ever. This can be considered a win for them. Allies report that some migrants in camps in Matamoras, Mexico, actually cried with relief when they heard Trump had lost the election.

This should not come as a surprise when you consider the following news.

On Jan. 30, the Associated Press reported that at least 19 migrants were found shot and burned to death in Mexico near the U.S. border. The migrants appeared to be mainly Guatemalan and Mexican. “The bodies were found Jan. 22 piled in a burned-out truck on a dirt road in the northern border state of Tamaulipas. The truck had 113 bullet impacts.”

This kind of atrocity is the tip of the iceberg of crimes that occur against migrants and refugees as they try to make their way into developed countries.

In a camp in Lesbos, Greece, hundreds of refugees stand close to one another as they wait in line for food, as “less than one in five are wearing a face mask” despite the deadly pandemic sweeping the globe. Said one Cameroonian woman refugee: “We are like inside an overcrowded chicken farm. We are lumped together during food distribution; it’s impossible to have one meter of distance between us.” (InfoMigrants, Sept. 16, 2020)

Were it not for heroic African American health care worker, Dawn Wooten, it would not be known that migrant women were being forcibly sterilized in an ICE detention center in Irwin County, Ga. One woman reported that she had not even been properly anesthetized. (Workers World, Sept. 23, 2020)

End of an era?

Will the administration of Democrat Joe Biden usher in a wave of victories and gains for migrants and the undocumented in the U.S.?

The hard-working, greatly committed and superbly organized movement for immigrant rights is hopeful. But they are not unwise. They have been here before. They will not be duped again. They know they must keep up the fight.

When the first Black U.S. president was elected in 2008, not only immigrants but many people of color and progressives were ecstatic. Tens of thousands were hopeful. This writer will not forget scenes of people in Kenya out in the streets in celebration or meeting a woman in Harlem who had traveled from Jamaica just to see the historic inauguration.

It was a privilege to be in Harlem the night Barack Obama was elected. Black and Latinx people and many others poured into the streets in jubilation. The police could not contain the spontaneous takeover of the streets and did not try. The people controlled the streets that night.

But for those who know this voracious, despicable capitalist system, we KNOW WE must fight ON. No matter the election history being made or the glass ceiling being broken, THE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE SYSTEM MUST GO ON.

Indeed, Obama tragically earned the title of Deporter-in-Chief as he — with then-Vice President Biden — came to deport more people than any other U.S. president in history.

“Biden’s decision to use part of his political capital on immigration may seem bold to some, but to many who have watched years of immigration inaction, the move generates skepticism,” wrote Julio Ricardo Varela, founder of Latino Rebels. (tinyurl.com/y3zzg328)

A key leader of the Dreamers movement, Korina Iribe, a DACA recipient in Arizona, wrote in the New York Times, “The first version of the Dream Act, which would have given young people like me a path to citizenship, was introduced in 2001. But nearly 20 years on, our futures still hang in the balance. Comprehensive immigration reform … has failed to pass under both Republican and Democratic administrations.” (tinyurl.com/yy2lc4xs)

Since Biden’s election, she continued, he “has taken various actions on immigration, including fortifying DACA. He also sent Congress the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which would offer a pathway to citizenship to the millions of undocumented immigrants living . . . [here]. The plan has been hailed as bold, but undocumented people have been here before. We can’t go on like this.”

In fact, the legislation Biden sent Congress DOES offer a pathway to “citizenship” — BUT would take almost 8 years and has many requirements and fees!

Haven’t the undocumented and their families faced enough? Haven’t they been terrorized by vigilantes at the border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and police agents around every corner, a vile Trump, malicious court and law officials, and factory owners who super-exploit at the workplace?

Haven’t immigrant workers shown in this horrid pandemic that they are essential to this country?

Eight years is too damn long.

Immediate legalization can be granted if Joe Biden wanted it. What is lacking is the political will to stand up to the Republicans and big business.

The time is now for all immigrants and refugees to be granted their full human and workers rights.

Open up the borders. Close the detention centers and the camps. Abolish ICE and the police or — in the words of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network “Abajo con la POLI-MIGRA! (Down with Pol-ICE).”

There is a reckoning taking place. Immigrants and allies are not just hopeful. They are mobilizing and stepping up their tactics in each phase of the struggle for their rights.

If justice does not happen now, what will this movement do next to demand what has already been earned a hundred times over?

It’s now or never, Joe