I was invited to join a delegation in Venezuela with the International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism: Sanctions, Blockades, Coercive Economic Measures, which together with the National Lawyers Guild (U.S.) and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, is conducting the last in a series of hearings and a fact-finding mission in Venezuela on the impact of U.S. sanctions and coercive economic measures targeting this nation.
Jaribu Hill is also part of the delegation. She is a civil and human rights attorney and the Founder and Executive Director of the Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights. She is the author of Knowledge is Power - A Know Your Rights Manual and co-author of The Black College Guide. She is a juror in the International People’s Tribunal on sanctions. We spoke in Caracas, Venezuela and made connections between international and domestic issues.
(For Ferguson, Baltimore, Million Workers March, Arab Spring, Standing Rock, Occupy, Jackson Rising, Fight for Fifteen, Extinction Rebellion, #Me Too…)
When the dust settles, as in all U.S. disasters, there will be a tale to tell of who mattered and who was sacrificed.
Colonized people, with a horrific historical connection to both science and medicine in this country, must examine science in service of the state.
The penal system remains a source of diseases that spread among prisoners at rates far exceeding those in the communities from which they came.
The necessary political demand is not that we make better, more humane prisons and jails, but that we abolish prisons and jails altogether.
