End These Wars!

“The Amerikan way of life is simply not sustainable, because it doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond Amerika.” ~Arundhati Roy

The wars that Amerika has been engaged in have lasted so long that they no longer even make the front pages of newspapers. Media uses these wars and occupations as political rhetoric and analyze (as if they were qualified) and discuss where presidential hopefuls should align themselves in order to obtain popular votes and argue about how they can get the muhfuckin’ “super”delegates on their side. Simultaneously thousands of troops have died, tens of thousands more have suffered injury, thousands of Iraqi civilians have died and been injured, families on both sides destroyed, and our militaries mere presence in Iraq and Afghanistan provide Al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups with ever-increasing recruitment numbers. Young Iraqis have grown up and are growing up in an occupied country and live under martial law. They have suffered through bombings, firing squads, air strikes, missile launchings, and a whole lot of other terrible shit that I don’t know enough to speak on.

What War Brings

They grow up on that while our youth grow up playing the video game versions of these wars as if they are not framed within the context of some of the most unjust and unfounded wars in history, and we all are becoming increasingly desensitized to death and dying and killing as we are fed numbers and statistics and lies.

I stayed up until 2 watching C-Span last night because there was a panel of 5 veterans of the war in Iraq reading their testimonials as to why they now actively oppose the war and work to end it and bring the rest of the troops back home. They were all part of the organization Iraq Veterans Against the War. The panel was put together by the Congressional Progressive Caucus to hear the experience of members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Congresswomyn Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey are the co-chairs of the caucus which aims to “give voice to the needs and aspirations of all Americans and to build a more just and humane society.” Watching this panel I could just see how fucked up one of the speakers was with post traumatic stress syndrome, you could see him flashing back while he was reading about what the military was doing when he was in Iraq. It was powerful to see 5 marines who served tours of duty speaking on why they have since become some of the biggest anti-war activists.

At this point the war in Iraq, which so many of us knew was an unjust war to begin with- solely based upon power and control of the worlds oil supply- is nothing more than a farce and disgrace to the global community. Thousands have been killed and Amerikan media has been ordered not to show the people what this war actually looks like: These pictures are INCREDIBLY HORRIFIC, some of the worst I’ve ever seen, but this is what “our” country is doing right now.

End all Amerikan invasions and occupations now!

Peace,

G-Mitch

Police State Status.

Gescard Isnora, Marc Cooper, and Michael Oliver at a press conference last week, some time after hearing their “not guilty” verdict.

So it’s been about a week since the not-guilty verdict came down from the judge in the case of Sean Bell’s murder.

3 police go free for killing an African- American male and seriously wounding two others. Wednesday hundreds of people in New York blocked rush-hour traffic in protest of the police aquittals. There were at least 216 arrests.

Even Al got arrested.

Meanwhile, here is footage of what’s happening in Philly right now. (No wonder these Philly rappers are so heated right now). I’m sure this ain’t the only reason of course. Fuck.

These men have already been characterized as “murderers” by the Philadelphia police Commissioner. So they are made to be guilty already. No proof. Stereotypes, racism, criminalizing the victim(s), this is always how it happens. Police departments and the media have been doing this for centuries now. It’s a science. Making the victim the perpetrator and the perpetrator the victim and you have a spun story…

Not to mention the wrongful police killings of Gary King Jr. and Anita Gay by Oakland and Berkeley Police officers in the past 8 months. Nor does it include the beating of Michael Fykes by Cleveland police. No matter where you look it’s happening. Police beating, detaining, killing, unjustifiably justified. Sometimes they have video which makes people appalled so they gasp and say that shouldn’t happen, but it does. And it never stops really. Whether it’s 1 shot or 51 shots. Whether it’s 1 cop or 14 beating three people.

We also currently have over 2 million people incarcerated in the US right now, that figure does not include those under house arrest, on papers, etc. ICE is going crazy arresting, detaining, and deporting (peep the post right before this one). Amerika is a POLICE STATE, don’t get it twisted.

Fed the fuck up.

Signing out From the land of the free to be killed by the Police State and State Institutions,

Slavename.

ICE ICE BABY.

I got a text message last night warning about how there have recently (like the past couple days at least) been Migra sweeps at public schools around the East Bay! “ICE sweeps, public schools, Berkeley High, East Oakland, West Oakland…” The message continued, but i just peeped the Oakland “conservative” Tribune today and there was an article in there today about a few homes in Berkeley and Oakland where ICE came and snatched up families so WATCH OUT for federal agents, cuz they are on a mission right now! So not just schools but errywhere!

This is damn damn troubling, i can only imagine the fear and confusion of the people trying to avoid these raids. ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement formerly known as Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)) is an incredibly destructive and problematic agency of the government. They perform raids all over the country tearing apart thousands of families and deporting and detaining (with an without charges) working people. Here’s just one example in Dallas. This problem is waaay too frequent and waaaay too silent in non-immigrant households and needs to be PUT ON BLAST as loud as possible.

Here’s a mini but potent article you NEED to know about:

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/05/06/18497395.php

Sfgate reporting:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/07/BA8B10HRUS.DTL&feed=rss.news

Know Your Rights! Go to immigrantrights.org:

http://immigrantrights.org/knowrights.asp#toolkit

Peace Duckin’ the Feds,

Slavename.

No Justice, No Peace, No Muthafuckin’ Chance

We’ve all heard about the murder of Sean Bell by 3 NYPD pigs, and if you haven’t, get the fuck up on it. You’re late!

I am damn near debilitated by all of the bullshit that these courts put my family through. And while Sean Bell is not my family I know that the same situation has been happening all around the Bay and could very well happen to me or someone I know.

The judge presiding over the trial aquitted all 3 undercover officers either yesterday or this morning of manslaughter and reckless endangerment charges.

Some context: My friend is being tried right now, and he’s been charged with murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and of being a felon in possession of a firearm. He is facing 40 years to Life for an accidental shooting.

From BBC News:

The defendants had opted to have a judge decide the case rather than a jury, arguing that pre-trial publicity could have prejudiced jurors.

Publicity has surrounded the trial and case of my friends as well, but these same decisions are not implemented when it comes to young working class men and women of color. This shit is far past any terrible adjective that I can think of. Not just this detail, but everything about our criminal (in)justice system that we fall victim to in Amerikkka.

All I can really say at this point is that my countdown to seeking refuge in another country (like James Baldwin) has already begun. If Barack ain’t elected I’m pretty much out this piece, and I ain’t sayin’ that Obama is this fuckin’ triumphant hero ass dude here to lift underprivileged people out of oppression, i’m just saying that at this point he is the last glimmer of hope (besides all of the crazy beautiful activists out there who don’t have the media attention given to a presidential hopeful) that realistically holds any type of real change that this country will see. Fuck Hillary, if she wins the primaries I probably ain’t voting, and I’m bouncing.

Peace to my people serving time in modern day plantations,

G-Mitch aka Slavename.

Mass Media Propaganda and Barack Obama

We live in times where propaganda streams through every one of our mediums of gathering information. The “news” channels are simply propaganda for dictating societal, cultural, and political norms. Our media function as info/tainment, and barraging us with large daily dosages of politically conservative jokes, non-chalant racism, and overtly divisive programming and words that take already existing societal fears, stereotypes and anxieties and manipulate them in ways that magnify our differences and serve to pit everyone in our society against one another instead of directing our anger at the true sources of our problems i.e. government, corporations, and media. 

This blog, for me, is my little way of combating the constant negativity, manipulation, and ideological conditioning that we live through everyday here in Amerika. It is a small, isolated, sporadically updated blog that not that many people see, and yet by posting i feel a sense of empowerment in believing that by putting out these words into the vastness of the Internet, it is giving my friends and whoever else sees this shit, a breath of fresh air and a break from all of the bullshit we breath in the rest of the day. 

We place varying degrees of our trust in that television and media will give us a non-biased portrayal of the world we live in, but even knowing that this is largely not the case, and in fact many of us who know that corporations and the government dictate what we watch, people still widely believe what the people on t.v. think about things from sports, to food, to politricks, and turn the televisions arguments into their own personal doctrines. This is why it is discouraging to see all of the effort to turn Barack Obama into an anti-Amerikan, anit-semetic, anti-white, muslim terrorist. They are comparing to HITLER for gods sake! What the Fuck?! This is the shit that i far too often passively receive as an open receptacle for the garbage thrown into my brain each day that honestly is killing me softly constantly. Barack Obama gave what probably was the best breakdowns of where we are as a society and because we live in a world of propaganda, colonialism, and smear artists, he is trivialized, dumbed down, and his words manipulated in ways that distort what he actually said- instead of bestowing him with praise for telling the truth and having the courage to speak that truth, especially when all we get from our current president is lies and an evil grins.Luckily we got people who fight back.

I just got this email from moveon.org that read,

This week, Barack Obama gave one of the most honest and inspiring speeches on race in American history after weathering days of the media’s relentless, divisive, and racially charged attacks. But have you wondered where these attacks came from and why they dominated the news? Reporters like NBC’s Tim Russert focused on the “Reverend Wright controversy” only after FOX and other right-wing media did. It happens over and over: FOX airs a right-wing smear and the mass media repeat it. Film director Robert Greenwald just released a short video called FOX Attacks Obama: Part 2 which shows how it happens.

I’m posting that along with the “Part 1″ cuz that shit just summarized really quickly how this bullshit is going down.

Part 1

Part 2

Wow. Sometimes i feel helpless and hopeless, i’m glad i find my outlets, in mostly positive ways.

Peace and truth,

G.

Allen Jackson Takes Stand Against Berkeley Police!…and then is condemned for it.

Allen Jackson, the president of the Berkeley branch of  the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, took a stand and decided to make a statement condemning the BPD two days after Anita Gay was killed February 16 by Berkeley police officer Rashawn Cummings.  

Granted, even though it wasn’t until this morning that I even knew that Berkeley had a branch of the NAACP, this is still some bullshit to hear about how they, along with Henry Wellington, president of the Berkeley Police Association and Shira Warren, president of the Berkeley Black Police Officers Association are dumbing down Allen Jackson’s attempts to speak out against police brutality. 

In the paraphrased version of Allen Jackson’s said statement written in an article by Kristen Bender of the Oakland Tribune– (a destructive news reporter, as she is responsible for most of the Tribune’s coverage of Meleia Willis-Starbuck’s death and the subsequent cases, in one of the East Bay’s notoriously conservative newspapers)– Jackson is being criticized for criticizing the Berkeley police department for not using a “nonlethal method of apprehension” and also that it is “apparent that the only thing in the mind of a Berkeley police officer is to kill any African American that they can.”

Now, I cannot personally recall a time when I’ve ever been glad to hear what the NAACP has to say, but that is not to say that they do not or have not played an important role in the history of Civil Rights in Amerika. They unfortunately have been pretty conservative in their politics for decades now, and do not have anywhere close to the level of credibility within “the black community” –(i don’t like using this term, because i do not believe that their is a black community nor do i like to generalize and use blanket statements as if there is one all encompassing black consciousness and view of things, but for lack of a better term)– that they once had… decades ago.

Despite this, it was nice to hear these words from Allen Jackson particularly because while living through times when it seems like every police officer- white, black, brown, purple, whatever- has immunity when it comes to killing black people, and in times when people of color, especially black people, are continuously fucked over over by this criminal (in)justice system we have in Amerikkka, it is nice to hear words that re-affirm your right to EXIST and have a voice, especially a voice that emits words of truth and go against the mainstream media coverage and dominant power structures.

I’d like to say thank you to Allen Jackson for his courageous words, and I’d like to say fuck you to the Oakland Tribune, Berkeley Police Association, and the Berkeley Black Police Officers Association for defending police brutality (no surprises there) even when fatal. And I would also like to say “Come on now… get it together…” to the NAACP nationally and locally.

Signing off from the city that they love to call liberal, even with racist cops killing black folks out here- Berkeley, Ca.

G-Mitch.

Peace.

Gary King Jr., Anita Gay, Sean Bell Murdered By Oakland/Berkeley/New York Police

This post is dedicated to Anita Gay, Gary King Jr., all of their families and friends, and all of the countless other victims of police killings and brutality that go unnoticed, unannounced, and are given some form of justification by racist police departments across the country.

Gary King Jr. was wrongfully shot and killed by the notoriously corrupt Oakland Police Department on September 20, 2007. Immediately action was taken by his family, friends, and concerned community members to fight for justice in this case of fatal police brutality. 

Gary King Jr. was 20 years old when he was killed by Sgt. Pat Gonzalez of the Oakland Police Department. A myspace page with a brief profile has since been set up in his memory. Also the city of Oakland allowed family and friends to erect a mural on the pillars of the BART tracks at the place he was slain.

The incidents around King’s murder remain extremely suspect. Police claimed he was reaching for a weapon as he ran away, but witnesses (even “neutral” witnesses) say that he was pulling his pants up as he ran. He was suspected of being a suspect, and ultimately killed for being a young black male in the vicinity of a police officer who was willing to shoot and kill King in the back as he ran away from being accused of a murder that he did not commit and was not even a suspect in! According to an article written by George Ciccariello-Maher:

…Gary King and a group of friends were walking out of East Bay Liquors. A patrol officer, Sgt. Pat Gonzales, was headed southbound on the other side of MLK, near the 55th Street light. The officer claims to have identified King as a potential suspect in a murder that had occurred nearby a month prior – note here the words “potential” and “suspect.”

For anyone who knows the geography of the incident, this “identification” was quite a feat: A full block away, looking diagonally across six lanes and between the thick pillars supporting the BART tracks, Gonzales was allegedly capable of identifying King.

The officer crossed under the tracks, tires squealing, to confront the group of teens in front of the liquor store. According to witnesses, Gonzales grabbed King by his dreads, while it remains unclear if the officer was attempting to carry out an arrest. After King pulled away from Gonzales, the officer used his Taser to try to incapacitate this “potential suspect.”

You should read this article (again, if you’ve already read it).

Anita Gay –(I could not find a picture of her)– was killed 11 days ago by officer Rashawn Cummings of the Berkeley Police Department. Gay, a 51-year old mother and grandmother. Witnesses to this shooting were not allowed to get help for Gay after she was shot by police and lay bleeding on her porch. Witnesses also dispute the police’s report of her being a danger to her daughters.

http://www.nbc11.com/news/15332459/detail.html

It is terribly disturbing that in damn near every case where police officers murder people, the media is quick to justify it through somehow placing a weapon on the victim. It is just as disturbing that so many people are quick to believe these stories that are often so far fabricated and one-sided (MOST OFTEN THE POLICE DEPARTMENT’S SIDE) that they choose not to even interview witnesses with disputing accounts of what happened. Even when they do they tell the public the story from the perspective of the police who OF COURSE are going to say that it was justified. Why would they do the right thing and claim that they have officers who patrol our streets and murder people for no good reasons.

I hope that we all recall Sean Bell, and his story of being murdered by undercover police November 25, 2006 in Queens New York at the age of 23, hours before he was to be married. He was shot and killed as 50 bullets were fired in he and his friends direction. Two of his friends were seriously wounded. Luckily for them the shots were not fatal. Sean Bell was not this lucky.

Sean Bell’s father testified this morning about the final night he spent with his son.

These murders committed by police of black people across the country have all somehow been justified. But all of these cases, plus all of the cases that do not receive national or even local attention continue to represent unprovoked violence to the point of being fatal upon black bodies across the nation. These racist, ignorant, and rash tactics take lives that could have been spared, and continue to remind us as black people that we are ALWAYS under the constant threat of fatal violence especially by those who they try to convince us are here to “protect and serve.” That’s all bullshit to me. I don’t trust police, and I never will trust police.

These killings also demonstrate something that far too many people do not understand and that is that the race of the officer who shoots and kills these victims is irrelevant in terms of the racism involved. Let me make that make sense. A black or latino officer that kills another black person is committing a racist crime. While the officer may not be outwardly racist or even believe himself to have made an incredibly rash decision based on race, we live in a country that teaches us to fear black and brown bodies, and this teaching is embedded into ALL OF US despite the color of our skin. These killings illuminate how our fears of dark bodies and our subconscious racism becomes externalized in the most disturbing and fatalistic ways. 

These murders HAVE NOT remain unnoticed. Much activism and progressive media has gone into fighting for the rights of Sean Bell and Gary King Jr., and others.

March for Justice in the Murder of Gary King Jr. and in solidarity with the Jena 6.

Michael Moore on police brutality, racism, and the murder of Amadou Diallo. (Moore turns it into satirical humor, which none of what i just wrote is like, but he makes some good points in it. It seems like white folks need to be spoonfed shit in a humorous way or else they ain’t tryin to hear it, ex. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert).

Democracy Now! on the Murder of Sean Bell.

Peace,

G-Mitch