My apologies for not being as active on this here thing, but these days my work days start at 4 am , and sometimes go all day. Be that as it may, I will do my best to keep up a presence, and we are excited to be playing on June 3rd at Logan's with The Old Derelicts ! Fuck yes! In the meantime, this is true, motherfuckers.
Victoria continues it's fine tradition of police chief shittery with this asshole....and you know that whatever they are telling us, it's much worse than this.
Victoria's police chief Frank Elsner has been suspended, effective immediately, following allegations of misconduct, including attempting to influence witnesses and delete information from Victoria Police computers.
The new accusations surfaced in connection with the ongoing investigation into claims Elsner sent inappropriate social media messages to the wife of a subordinate officer.
The co-chairs of the Victoria and Esquimalt Police Board were told of the suspension this afternoon.
The Victoria Police Board says it will meet next week to determine whether the suspension will be with or without pay.
Chief Elsner has been on administrative leave since December.
A statement from police complaints commissioner Stan Lowe earlier today said new information suggests Elsner "attempted to inappropriately influence potential witnesses" and "may have deleted or attempted to delete information relevant to the internal investigation."
Deceit and discreditable conduct
According to the statement Elsner is now facing three separate disciplinary breaches of public trust; an allegation of deceit and two allegations of discreditable conduct.
Elsner's lawyer Janet Winteringham says he cannot comment on the allegations.
Elsner was sworn in a Victoria Police Chief in December 2013 (@ChiefElsner)
"Even in the face of a detailed media release that has been delivered from the police complaints commissioner's office, neither the chief nor council should be commenting on an outstanding police act investigation." Winteringham told CBC News.
The RCMP has been designated to investigate the new allegations which represent another twist in the ongoing drama around Elsner which began last August when the co-chairs of the Victoria and Esquimalt Police Board received a tip that Elsner had exchanged inappropriate Twitter messages with a female officer on another force.
The woman's husband is an officer serving under Elsner.
Elsner has been on paid leave since December when the initial investigation was launched.
Investigations under the Police Act must be completed within six months.
Unless, of course, they are torturing their own children.....
OTTAWA - A Mountie accused of torturing and starving his 11-year-old son told an Ottawa court he was in a constant battle to control the boy's bad behaviour — a battle that ultimately resulted in him physically restraining and hurting the boy.
But in a second day of testimony in his own defence, the man, whose name cannot be published in order to protect the boy's identity, said his wife was never present when he "hit, burned or slapped" his son.
"It was a war between me and (my son)," the man said Tuesday as he detailed behavioural problems he said he experienced with his son, suggesting the boy was often out of control.
"I am living with the devil at home."
But the officer, who once worked for the RCMP's national security unit, said his wife was never present when he assaulted his son.
And he never told his wife to hit the boy with a wooden spoon, the man said.
In September, the boy, who was then 13, told the court that his father forced his stepmother to hit him for not doing his homework.
The court heard the boy had been beaten by his father with a wooden stick and burned with a barbecue lighter while chained in the basement of his west-end Ottawa suburban home.
The man and his wife each face a charge of aggravated assault, forcible confinement and failing to provide the necessaries of life.
The woman is also charged with assaulting the boy with a weapon, while the man faces other charges of sexual assault causing bodily harm and assault with a weapon.
In earlier testimony Tuesday, the father told court the boy frequently made up outlandish stories.
He described in detail a Florida family vacation taken in 2012, a trip he said he thought his son enjoyed.
Last fall, the boy testified that during the vacation he was left tied up in a hotel room, where he was forced to urinate on himself.
"That never happened," the officer said under questioning from his lawyer Robert Carew. He showed the court pictures from two vacations where he, his wife and three children appeared happy together.
The Mountie, now 44 and suspended from the force without pay, and the boy's stepmother were charged in February 2013 after the emaciated boy, then 11 years old, was found wandering in search of water.
The court earlier heard testimony that the boy was fed two peanut butter pitas a day before escaping his chains and weighed only 50 pounds when taken to hospital.
The man said his son consistently made up stories and that it always frustrated him.
His frustrations with the boy's behaviour, combined with problems at work, led him to go on anti-depressants, said the officer. He also testified that he attempted suicide three times, the first time at age 19 and twice later when he felt helpless against his son's problems.
The boy finished the 2012 school year in June, but never returned after his parents decided to home-school him the following September.
That seemed to be a good decision, for about a month and a half, until the boy "suddenly decided he didn't want to do homework anymore," the father testified.
And soon, the boy was acting out again, even defecating on his books, the man said.
In a police interview after his arrest in 2013, the officer admitted he tied his son to a wall or a pole in the basement of his home, where the boy developed cuts on his wrists from the chains or plastic zip ties used to bind him.
The current portion of the trial is scheduled to run until May 6.
Many people in north amerikkka think that bernie sanders is the answer to u.s. aggression, and the answer to idiots like trump. No, he is not. He merely believes that workers in the u.s. should get a greater share of the spoils of imperialism than they are getting now. He does not seem to acknowledge where the wealth of his fucking fascist country comes from, and what it is built upon. Fuck their system.
The people this system makes homeless mean less than nothing to those in power, and the enforcers of this same system make sure you know this. This is just one more reason........
“They just shot him” San Francisco Pigs Murder Homeless Immigrant
Memorial for Luis Gongora. Special to www.revcom.us
Welcome to San Francisco, the so-called progressive city of tolerance and respect for diversity, the “beautiful city by the Bay,” seen by people around the country and the world as a trendsetter in liberal causes, social justice, and high-minded efforts—something that’s an exception to America. But San Francisco IS in America. Look beyond the cute tourist areas and past the well-endowed museums, urban parks, and designer bridges; search behind the calculated gestures or cynical lies of its city officials—and you’ll see a city of ethnic cleansing. A city where a large majority of Black people and thousands of Latinos have been driven out in recent years. A city where Black people make up less than six percent of the population and 56 percent of those in county jail. A city of thousands of homeless treated like an eyesore to be hidden away—or shot down in the street. Welcome to San Francisco, a city that’s part of the same America built on the foundation of slavery, genocide, conquest, and oppression.
And in San Francisco, the police have murdered yet again.
At about 10 am, Thursday, April 7, Luis Gongora, a 45-year-old immigrant from Yucatan, Mexico, and resident of a homeless encampment in the Mission District, was coldly killed by two SFPD cops. According to news reports, earlier that morning a city homeless outreach team working at the encampment called police to report someone waving a large kitchen knife.A security camera recorded the arrival of three squad cars to the encampment. Police exited their patrol cars and rushed towards an area off camera. Within seconds police can be heard shouting, “Stay on the ground, stay on the ground” and “Drop it, drop it”—followed by the sound of cops firing four beanbag gun rounds and seven gunshots from 40-caliber police pistols. Luis Gongora was hit and declared dead shortly after at SF General Hospital.
Luis was fatally wounded in less than 30 seconds from the time the police exited their cars. The executive director of the city’s Coalition on Homelessness, Jennifer Friedenbach, said, “From the video, it appears that the officer came at the situation with guns blazing.”
Shortly after the shooting, SF police chief Greg Suhr told reporters that after the initial volley of beanbag rounds, Gongora “charged” at the officers with a knife, forcing cops to open fire with live rounds. But a witness who was at the encampment, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, said that Luis “didn’t charge the officers. He was going round in circles. He didn’t understand what they were saying. They just shot him. They just shot him.” (Luis did not know English and could not have understood the police commands.) Another witness told the UK Guardian that she ran to her apartment window when she heard someone shout, “Get on the ground!” She said about Luis, “He was on the ground, crouched with his head between his knees. He didn’t get up until they were shooting. I would by no stretch of the imagination say that he was charging them. His body was recoiling from bullets. It’s like they came out shooting. It’s complete bullshit what’s happening. There’s no way that somebody deserved to lose their life.”
In a press conference after the murder, a police spokesperson displayed a photo of an approximately 13-inch kitchen knife Luis allegedly had. But numerous witnesses have said that Luis was not brandishing a knife and not threatening anyone, and folks in the encampment pointed out that carrying a knife for self-defense is common among homeless people who live and sleep outside and have few ways to protect themselves and their possessions.
Gongora was regarded as a friendly man who collected bottles and cans and loved to kick a soccer ball around. A resident of an apartment in the area described how her son practiced Spanish by talking with Luis. A friend who lived in a tent near Luis’s, and who was with him shortly before he was killed, tearfully related how Luis always called him “hermano” [brother] and how he and Luis would help each other out and share whatever food or money they managed to come by. “It was half down the middle with everything.”
Why are we still fighting for justice in 2015?
"Why are we still fighting for justice in 2015?" is a clip from the film REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion; A Dialogue Between CORNEL WEST & BOB AVAKIAN. The film is of the November 2014 historic Dialogue on a question of great importance in today's world between the Revolutionary Christian Cornel West and the Revolutionary Communist Bob Avakian. Watch the entire film here.
Luis Gongora was one of the tens of millions driven from homelands ransacked and ruined by the workings of this system of capitalism-imperialism and seeking a way to survive in the U.S. Behind the glitter of the SF Bay Area is cutthroat, expand-or-die competition for big profits within the global networks of capitalist exploitation, especially among high-tech firms and big real estate and financial investors. Huge profits have enriched some—and caused havoc and hardship on many more. Housing prices and rents have spiraled into the stratosphere, along with evictions of those who can’t afford a roof over their heads. Shiny new skyscrapers with multimillion-dollar condos rise while the streets below and areas under freeway overpasses or embankments are lined with tents of the homeless—filled with people discarded by the system and forced to fend for themselves.
According to a 2015 report, 71 percent of San Francisco homeless people formerly had housing in the city. Luis Gongora was one of them. The contrast here could hardly be more stark: The tent community where Luis lived sits within a shrinking Latino immigrant neighborhood, the Mission District—where more than 8,000 Latinos have been forced out in the last 10 years and rents have soared to among the highest in the world. The rising population of the homeless on the streets has caused numerous West Coast cities to declare homeless shelter crises or homeless states of emergency—acts normally reserved for natural disasters.
The powers that be in San Francisco see the rising population of homeless encampments on many city streets as a stain that mars the value of the SF “brand”—as a financial and high-tech center, as a trendy place to live, as a tourist attraction. When San Francisco hosted the Super Bowl 50 spectacle this February, city officials took great pains to force the homeless out of sight of visitors and media. Within days after Luis Gongora’s murder, SF mayor Ed Lee announced that all homeless encampments in the city were going to be taken down! The supposed reason given by the mayor? To make the city “safe.” SAFE?! If this heartless move was about safety of humanbeings like Luis Gongora, the city officials should have set out to disband the SF police, with their vicious record of murder and mayhem, and Luis’s blood fresh on their hands. But taking down the homeless encampments is not about protecting the safety of people—it’s about protecting the interests of this people-crushing system.
On April 10, the SFPD sent three or four officers to the homeless encampment where Luis had been killed. An activist reported that the police “arrived with long sticks with which they hit the tents. Residents of the tents, including three eyewitnesses to the shooting, were told to leave or risk arrest.” Cops smashed candles that had been lit for Luis by his friends. Some people fled while others started packing their belongings. Cops slashed tents with knives, and a city worker loaded some belongings in a truck. The activist said, “This was an act of harassment plain and simple, because after tearing down three tent homes, the cops just left. They left a mess and they left several homeless people without shelter on a rainy night.”
The taking of Luis Gongora’s life and the cruel and violent attacks on the homeless come amidst a murderous onslaught by SF police over the past several years—as well as important beginning resistance and a scramble among local authorities to try to contain the outrage.
Just hours after Luis Gongora’s murder, the Justice for Mario Woods Coalition held a town hall meeting just a few blocks away. Hundreds of people marched from the meeting to the encampment where Luis was gunned down and on to the Mission District pig sty. Mario Woods was a 26-year-old Black man executed by police early last December in the city’s largely African-American Bayview district. A cell phone video caught the brutal murder of Mario, shot at 40 times by five SFPD thugs in front of a city bus filled with middle school children. The video went viral and set off torrents of angry protests, including disruption of Mayor Lee’s inauguration.
The city has ignored the demands that Police Chief Suhr be fired and murder indictments be brought against the killers of Mario Woods. Instead, the mayor and police chief have trotted out threadbare and pathetic promises to “re-engineer the SFPD’s Use of Force policies” so as to “de-escalate” conflicts.
We now see the results of such promises in the brutal police murder of Luis Gongora! His name has been added to the growing list of those unjustly and outrageously murdered by San Francisco police. Along with Mario Woods, recent victims include Alejandro “Alex” Nieto, Amilcar Perez-Lopez, O’Shaine Evans, Kenneth Harding, Herbert Benitez, Alice Brown, and many more. And they are among the thousands upon thousands of other stolen lives, murdered by police across the country.
Again and again, SF cops murder someone in cold blood, in front of all kinds of witnesses, often captured on video. There is outrage, protests, sometimes powerful protests. Then Chief Suhr gets up in front of everyone and justifies it once more—“the officers feared for their safety,” blah blah blah. And the cops get off, again and again and again. This must be brought to a stop!
Repeated scandals over racist, sexist, and homophobic text messages sent among at least 18 SFPD officers have also deepened the rage against the police. The first revelations came in court filings from a 2015 federal corruption case involving at least 14 officers, including veterans with more than 10 years on the force. The texts carried vile genocidal rants like “All n*****s must fucking hang” and “Cross burning lowers blood pressure.” In early 2016, a new batch of texts was discovered by prosecutors during an investigation of an alleged sexual assault by an SFPD officer. Again the texts were racist and homophobic, used the “n” word and even mocked the investigation of the original text scandal. The cops in this second round of texts felt completely free with their racist texts even at the time that there was a public scandal over the first round of racist texts. Why? These cops were trained by the system in the outlook of white supremacy, male supremacy, homophobia, and loathing for the masses of poor and oppressed. They knew there is backing for their ugly views from the highest authorities and that this is in line with what they are called on by the system to do every day in the streets.
The powers that be are maneuvering to contain the widening outrage and limit how much more about police murder and brutality comes out, to quell questioning of the legitimacy of the police’s use of force against oppressed communities, and to channel the anger into dead ends of puny reforms and empty promises of “change.” They want this moment of heightened outrage to be a big go-nowhere moment.
But we—those most directly hit by police terror as well everyone who refuses to be silent in the face of these outrages—have to stay in the streets, raising hell, demanding justice, and building the movement for revolution. As part of that, the call for nationwide student protests on April 21 tostop police terror!, issued by students at San Francisco State University and taken up by the Stop Mass Incarceration Network and students at different campuses, is timely and urgent right now.
Luis Gongora came from Yucatan to the U.S., responding to a world in which capitalism-imperialism dominates the globe and reaches into and warps and exploits countries like Mexico. He found himself in the shadows of the SF capitalist “success story,” living in the streets with others forced into a similar situation. Treated like a criminal by the enforcers of this unjust system, he was shot down in cold blood—and the encampment he was part of was ripped to pieces by the cops who forced Luis’s fellow homeless out into the rainy night. This is the capitalist-imperialist system, once again showing everyone it is utterly cold-hearted and vicious, ravaging and destroying lives.
We need a revolution and a whole new system. Nothing less will do.
Get Organized for an Actual Revolution Get Ready to Bring This System DOWN... And Bring Something Much Better into Being
Prepare the ground, prepare the people, and prepare the vanguard—get ready for the time when millions can be led to go for revolution, all-out, with a real chance to win.
Are there any moronic liberals left who are still glossy eyed over obama and his management over a murderous empire, or is everyone playing the " at least he's not trump" thing? Fuck obama, trump, cruz, clinton, and all of those lying hypocrite assholes.
Chicago Eight Years Later: If You Think Voting Solves a Single Goddamn Thing, Look at Obama’s Home Base and Tell Us Why...
April 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Pierre Loury
May 6, 2015, victims of police torture under the command of retired Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, at the Chicago City Council. Some victims spent decades in prison after confessing to crimes they did not commit. (AP photo)
January 28, 2016, Chicago State students and supporters shut down the Dan Ryan Expressway to protest the closing of their school. Photo: YouTube
If you think voting can change a single goddamn thing, look at what went down last week in Obama’s home base, Chicago. Then tell us why voting for anyone else is going to change anything.
Monday April 10, Pierre Loury, a 16-year-old Black high school junior ran from police, in a country where police murder Black youth with impunity. Chicago police shot and killed him as he fled. Leroy Collins, Pierre’s uncle, said, “We know what happened, they shot an innocent kid and are now covering it up. It’s the same thing—just a different day and neighborhood.” Barack Obama never said shit about police and white racists killing Black people until thousands were in the streets. But he has done nothing—not a damn thing—while the epidemic of police murder rolls on.
Two days after the murder of Pierre Loury, a report from Chicago’s Police Accountability Task Force came out saying data from the Chicago Police Department “gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.” [emphasis ours] This system has nevertreated people of color as human beings. If a Black man in the White House didn’t change that, how are you going to tell yourself that voting for anyone else will?
The same day the task force report came out, theGuardian newspaper published an exposure of Homan Square—a warehouse in Chicago where at least 7,351 people, more than 6,000 of them Black—have been detained without access to attorneys, tortured, and in at least one case, killed. Remember when Obama ran for president as the anti-torture candidate? Prisons and police were torturing people then and the CIA was torturing people around the world... and they still are—from Chicago to Guantánamo.
April 14, an op-ed in the New York Times by Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, author of the book Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court, exposed how “the rottenness [of] the Police Department” is enabled by “racist practices [that] extend far into the criminal courts, indeed they are the very foundation of the cases that enter into the court system. The hands of many judges and prosecutors are just as dirty as the bigots in blue.” Obama’s Department of Justice defended the police in every single case of police brutality that came before the Supreme Court. But when heroic youth rose up in Baltimore in April 2015 demanding justice for Freddie Gray, he called them “thugs.”
As of April 15, there were 166 murders in Chicago alone. It is a horror that our Latino and Black youth are killing each other off—deprived of hope and a chance for a future, in a system where crime becomes, in the words of a conservative economist, “a rational choice”—and indoctrinated with the dog-eat-dog survival ethic of capitalism. Remember—they told you that just having a Black president would give “hope” to the ground-down youth in the ghettos and barrios? That was a sick lie that has done great harm to people.
At the end of this month, the government is set to shut down Chicago State University on the South Side—a school whose students are overwhelmingly poor and Black, and mostly women. If you voted for Obama, you endorsed a war on public education with a devastating impact on the most oppressed—in his home base Chicago and around the country.
Obama has done little or nothing about any of this. Angela Davis told you that Obama’s election was a “victory, not of an individual, but of ... people who refused to believe that it was impossible to elect a person, a Black person, who identified with the Black radical tradition.” All that did was set you up for another eight years of horrors.
Some of those who promised you “change” say: Well, see, Obama, or whoever, can’t do it all alone, we have to pressure “the system”—as if you can make this system work in the interests of the very people it eats up. That’s a lie too—as we insisted, pretty much alone, eight years ago: the fact is, "pressure from below” or not—Obama couldn’t bring about any real change even if he tried, and he wasn’t intending to in any case. Why? Because it IS a system—the system of capitalism-imperialism—and that has real meaning. You can’t get justice out of this system by voting. And it’s not just a waste of time, it’s harmful to try. If you play that game, it makes you complicit of the crimes of the system. Wake the fuck up, admit it, and act accordingly.
Eight years ago, when almost everyone else was drinking the Obama-lade—the Revolutionary Communist Party fought with you to confront the reality that this system’s elections wouldn’t and couldn’t change things. And what WE were saying about elections eight years ago is just as true today, and in some ways even more apparent.
Humanity can get beyond all this. None of these outrages are necessary. But NOTHING is going to change under this system.
Revolution CAN bring about a whole new, and much better, way of organizing society. Here’s the reality:
This system of capitalism-imperialism cannot bring any justice and must be overthrown and replaced with something far better—a socialist society on the way to communism.
This IS possible, but it will require us to be very scientific to identify and take advantage of the weaknesses of this system and to develop the potential strengths of the people.
We have a leader, Bob Avakian, who has developed the new synthesis of communism that has taken the science of revolution and emancipation to another level, and following THIS leadership—and REJECTING the Obamas, Sanderses, and Clintons of the world—is what is needed.
The following quote not only applies to the u.s., it also applies here, where the lame-brained media love to focus on what the prime minister's wife is fucking wearing. I'm sure there are many morons out there who eat this shit up, but don't give Attawapiskat a second thought.
So long as human society is divided into different classes of people, there is, and there can be, no such thing as a "free election," in the sense that no group in society has a greater influence than others on elections and in general on political decision-making. In a world of this kind, one group in society—fundamentally representing a ruling class of one kind or another—will always have greater influence than the rest of the people. Only when we get to a communist world—without class divisions, and without oppressive social relations and social antagonisms—will this no longer be the case; and then elections will not have the same character and the same role as they do now.
All this is very much bound up with the following "three sentences" on democracy and class rule:
In a world marked by profound class divisions and social inequality, to talk about "democracy"—without talking about the class nature of that democracy and which class it serves—is meaningless, and worse. So long as society is divided into classes, there can be no "democracy for all": one class or another will rule, and it will uphold and promote that kind of democracy which serves its interests and goals. The question is: which class will rule and whether its rule, and its system of democracy, will serve thecontinuation, or the eventual abolition, of class divisions and the corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality.
Bob Avakian Chairman, Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
May 6, 2015, victims of police torture under the command of retired Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, at the Chicago City Council. Some victims spent decades in prison after confessing to crimes they did not commit. (AP photo)
