UNAC Advocates “Independent Path” to Peace
It is “ridiculous” to believe that the Russians somehow tipped the November election to Donald Trump. “What was Hillary Clinton offering,” asked Sara Flounders, of UNAC, the United National Anti-War Coalition. “She was promising, ‘You’re going to have more of the same for the next eight years,’ plus all kinds of military threats. And, they also moved farther to the Right. That was rejected.” UNAC is gearing up for its yearly conference, June 16 to 18, in Richmond, Virginia, under the theme: The Need for an Independent Path. “We don’t place a bit of confidence in the Republicans or Democrats,” said Flounders. “They both represent Wall Street and corporate power.”
NYPD Wields “Precision Policing” Like a Mass Incarceration Bomb
Community organizations are demanding a halt to massive police sweeps of New York City public housing projects, which have resulted in the arrest of hundreds of residents on RICO conspiracy charges. The cops call it “precision policing.” “They are charging people with laws that were designed to take on the Mafia in the 70s,” said Josmar Trujillo, of the Coalition to End Broken Windows. “That’s where the department has stared to focus in the ‘post-stop and frisk era,’ and that’s the scenario where we’re preparing to meet them head on.” The term “precision policing” is “very much an echo of the kind of overseas counter-insurgency the military” conducts, he said.
Mumia: “Lynne Stewart, Freedom Fighter, Presente”
Funeral services were held this weekend for the revered and indomitable attorney Lynne Stewart, who succumbed to breast cancer at age 77. “For decades, she and husband Ralph fought for New York’s political activists and revolutionaries, but mostly they fought for the freedom of the poor and dispossessed,” said Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner. Stewart served four years of a ten-year federal prison sentence for vigorously defended her client. “Lynne Stewart was a people’s lawyer, beloved and respected,” said Abu Jamal. “May she ever be so.”
Mumia and Other Inmates Endangered by Tainted Prison Water
The State of Pennsylvania is intent on appealing a court ruling favorable to Mumia Abu Jamal’s demand that he and 5,000 other inmates be treated for hepatitis-C, a life-threatening, but entirely curable infection. Mumia’s condition is exacerbated by a water crisis that appears to afflict much of the prison system, as well as public schools in Philadelphia, said Sophia Williams, of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home, in an interview with BAR producer Kyle Fraser. Abu Jamal nearly died last year from complication related to hepatitis-C. By exposing him to foul, tainted water, the authorities are “continuing their project of slowly killing him.”
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One of the poorest towns in the nation, nearly all-Black Centreville, Illinois, floods with raw sewage every time it rains.
The recent prison reform rallies at the Mississippi Capitol were more akin to being for a Middle Passage with more efficient plumbing.
This week you discussed Venezuela, racism in healthcare, and regime change in Libya.
Late stage capitalism and its wars have imposed a permanent state of dislocation and disorientation on much of humanity, the “drift” of an unstable system.
Simmons explores ways we can hold harm-doers accountable without getting involved with the very state that brutalizes Black and other communities of color.
