May Day 2020

Remembering those who have died, Fighting For Our Lives, Our Families & Our Unions Facing COVID-19

Life Over Profits!

Join us on May 1 at 10:00 AM at the SSA terminal on 1717 Middle Harbor Road at

The Port Of Oakland at 10am and May Day Labor Community Caravan Through Oakland At 11:00 AM

Join ILWU, the Community, unionists and working people on May Day Friday May 1.

Our lives are being threatened every day as we and others have to fight for PPE and safe working conditions, in particular due to COVID-19. The Coronavirus pandemic is absolutely exposing how important it is for the Working Class everywhere to collectively demand Safe Working Condition and Fair wages.

On May 1 working people around the world are joining together to show workers power. Without workers there is no production and profits for the billionaires. This pandemic is particularly affecting the Black and Brown communities at a much higher rate. On going systematic discrimination and the lack of housing and healthcare for all that has plagued this country fear many years is the reason this is happening. Our unions and organizations need to stand as one to demand truth and cooperation from our Government and Employers to effectively combat this global pandemic. We must defend all the working people here in Oakland, the US and around the world.The billionaires from Bezos at Amazon, to Fisher who owns the A’s only care about profits and not the lives of workers nor the community.

Join us on May 1 at. 10:00 AM in front of the SSA terminal in Oakland. 1717 Middle Harbor Road at 10am where we will have a speak-out and a caravan at 11:00 AM through the streets of Oakland. Bring your banners and posters for your cars and bicycles. We will be practicing all Safety Social Distancing provisions meaning 6ft apart and wearing face coverings for everyone’s protection..

1) Fight For PPE For All Workers On the Front Lines-No Safety No Work.

2) National Healthcare For All/End Private Healthcare System.

3) Stop All Evictions and Foreclosures On Our Homes.

4) Full Funding For Cal/OSHA and Criminal Prosecution of Bosses Who Violate Labor Health Protections during this Pandemic.

5) Full Funding For All Working People & Our Families to Survive This Pandemic.

“An Injury To One Is An Injury To All”

May Day 2020 Oakland Action Facebook & Other May Day Actions

https://www.facebook..com/events/s/mayday-in-the-bay-worker-commu/600269507244447/

May Day in the Bay / People's Strike / May Day 2020 Action: Fighting for our lives, Forging our future

The COVID-19 pandemic has starkly revealed the inequalities and injustices that daily plague the world.

The triple crisis of viral plague, systemic economic breakdown, and the failure and/or unwillingness of Governments to provide necessary protections, especially for the poor and people subjected to white supremacy, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and mysogyny has thrown us into a fight for our lives.

In order to avoid the needless deaths of millions of people and keep corporations and authoritarian governments from stealing our collective future working and oppressed peoples need to stand together in solidarity, mutual aid, cooperation and joint action. Together we can build a new world, a better world, a world that puts people and the planet over profits.

Collective Action is the Key

Determined mass, non-violent direct action conducted in a coordinated campaign can transform the institutions of governance and upend the power of the banks and the multi-national corporations to address the immediate needs of workers and peoples throughout the world.

Join us in initiating this mass action on Friday, May 1st, 2020. We are encouraging everyone through the U.S. and the world to join us in engaging #NoWork #NoShopping #NoRent #NoMortgage #NoEviction #NoDebt #NoSchool #NoPrison #NoDetention actions. Let’s send Trump and Wall Street a clear message: #WeWontDieForWallSt #PeopleAndPlanetOverProfits  
Our Demands

#MayDay2020 #GeneralStrike2020 #CoronaStrike #StrikeForOurLives #PeopleOverProfit #NoWork #NoShopping #NoRent #NoMortgage #WeWontDieForWallSt

OAKLAND CARAVAN JUMP OFF @ 10AM

STOP #1
Support the ILWU at the Port of Oakland:
Remembering those who have died, Fighting For Our Lives, Our Families & Our Unions  Facing COVID-19. 

Join ILWU, the Community, unionists and working people for a May Day Rally @10:00AM at the SSA terminal on 1717 Middle Harbor Road.

Following the rally we will caravan from the Port Of Oakland at 11am and May Day Labor Community Caravan throughout the streets of Oakland At 11. 

—-
Our lives are being threatened every day as we and others have to fight for PPE and safe working conditions, in particular due to COVID-19.  The Coronavirus pandemic is absolutely exposing how important it is for the Working Class everywhere to collectively demand Safe Working Condition and Fair wages.

On May 1 working people around the world are joining together to show workers power. 

Without workers there is no production and profits for the billionaires. This pandemic is particularly affecting the Black and Brown communities at a much higher rate. 

On going systematic discrimination and the lack of housing and healthcare for all that has plagued this country fear many years is the reason this is happening. 

Our unions and organizations need to stand as one to demand truth and cooperation from our Government and Employers to effectively combat this global pandemic. 

We must defend all the working people here in Oakland, the US and around the world. The  billionaires from Bezos at Amazon, to Fisher who owns the A’s only care about profits and not the lives of workers nor the community.

Bring your banners and posters for your cars and bicycles. We will be practicing all Safety Social Distancing provisions meaning 6ft apart and wearing face coverings for everyone’s protection to Demand: 

1) Fight For PPE For All Workers On the Front Lines-No Safety No Work.

2) National Healthcare For All/End Private Healthcare System.

3) Stop All Evictions and Foreclosures On Our Homes.

4) Full Funding For Cal/OSHA and Criminal Prosecution of Bosses Who Violate Labor   Health Protections during this Pandemic.

5) Full Funding For All Working People & Our Families to Survive This Pandemic.

“An Injury To One Is An Injury To All”

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April 28, 2020 - Veterans Join Call for a Global Ceasefire, The Lasting Effects of War Book Discussion, Sir, No Sir Viewing, VFP's Online Convention, Workshop Proposals, Convention FAQ, No More COVID-19 Money For the Pentagon, Repeal the AUMF, Community Conversation on Hybrid Warfare, St Louis VFP Delivers VA Lunch, In the News and Calendar

Veterans Join Call for a Global Ceasefire

Veterans For Peace, as a United Nations Department of Global Communication affiliated NGO, is most gratified to see UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres make his plea for a worldwide ceasefire during this global pandemic.

The first line of the Preamble of the UN's Charter says that they originated to save “succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. But sadly, because the UN was created by the victors of WW2 who remain the powers of the world, and because the UN depends for funding on those same militarily and economically dominant nation-states, primarily the U.S., much more often than not the UN is very quiet on war.

Please join Veterans For Peace in appealing to U.S. Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft to support the Secretary General's call for a GLOBAL CEASEFIRE!

Sign now!

For more information about events go to:

https://www.veteransforpeace.org/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=fa5082af-9325-47a7-901c-710e85091ee1

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From Business Insider 2018

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The biggest block from having society in harmony with the universe is the belief in a lie that says it’s not realistic or humanly possible. —Johnny Gould (Follow @tandino415 on Instagram)

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When faced with the opportunity to do good, I really think it’s the instinct of humanity to do so. It’s in our genetic memory from our earliest ancestors. It’s the altered perception of the reality of what being human truly is that’s been indoctrinated in to every generation for the last 2000 years or more that makes us believe that we are born sinners. I can’t get behind that one. We all struggle with certain things, but I really think that all the “sinful” behavior is learned and wisdom and goodwill is innate at birth. —Johnny Gould (Follow @tandino415 on Instagram)

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COVID-19 Pandemic: Cuba Shows That International

Solidarity is the Answer!

Please join us for a special solidarity webinar to learn about the example Cuba is setting of putting human needs ahead of profits in the fight against COVID-19. Panelists will discuss Cuba’s history of medical internationalism; how Cuba is fighting COVID-19 on the Island based on providing health care as a right; learn how Cuba is developing effective new medications such as Interferon Alpha 2-B; and how Cuba is sending medical teams to Italy, the Caribbean and dozens of countries.

https://mailchi.mp/b103a4a00a4c/thank-you-for-endorsing-the-call-6437738?e=99431d0db8

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We Call for the Immediate Release of the Political Prisoner and Afrobolivian Leader, Irene Elena Flores Torrez

April 14, 2020

We call for all the de facto government's charges against Elena Flores to be dropped immediately and for Flores, Choque, Hermosa, and all political prisoners to be released.

Elena Flores, the elected union president of Adepcoca (the Departmental Association of Coca Producers) and the beloved eldest sibling in her family, has been harassed and jailed without cause by the racist, misogynist and anti-labor coup regime of Jeanine Añez.

She has been imprisoned for more than a month under deplorable conditions. The regime has subjected her to a smear campaign with continued threats of violence.

The de facto government is responsible for stealing a presidential election and ordering 36 deaths and at least 890 illegal detentions. They have carried out forced disappearances, rape by military and police, and three massacres in Sacaba, Senkata, and Ovejuyo. The Añez government censures media, attacks, and tortures journalists, and celebrates the violence of white supremacists who are granted immunity from prosecution.

In the Yungas where the majority of Afrobolivians live, US interventionism disguised as anti-narcotics, together with illegal gold mining operations, has sown paramilitary violence.

Who is Elena Flores?

Elena Flores is a highly respected Afrobolivian and union leader. She began union work in her youth, carrying out many leadership roles in the Association of 35,000 coca leaf farmers of the Yungas, 5,000 feet below the city of La Paz. Flores says she always dreamed of leading the Association, which since 1983 had been led only by men. When she was elected in August last year, she won on a platform of ousting paramilitaries and uniting the three regions of the Inquisivi and the North and South Yungas. She is a strong labor leader and profoundly dedicated to the wellbeing of women.

Flores is the eldest of four siblings. They care for her elderly mother who is unwell and a brother has a severe disability. She would, of course, want to be protecting her family during the dangerous times of the coup regime and the coronavirus pandemic.

She denounced the criminality of the former union leadership, who are trained in paramilitary tactics and bankrolled by the Bolivian right and the U.S. The former union leaders refused to leave office or hold elections. They created cocaine networks, and ran vast corruption schemes using the considerable income of the union.

More recently, Flores’ enemies have served as paramilitaries under the direction of the army and police of the Añez regime. They enter the city of La Paz as one contingent of the right-wing "shock groups" and "pititas", made up of mobs of conservative neighbors. Añez calls them heroes and has taken smiling photos with them.

Since the coup, Flores has been at the forefront of denouncing the Añez regime's militarisation, harsh repression and disregard for democracy. She vows to protect and unify her unionised, campesino, Indigenous and Afrobolivian region.

The current situation of women political prisoners

Since March 4th Elena Flores has been imprisoned at the Centro de Orientación Femenino de Obrajes or Centre for Women's Guidance.

María Eugenia Choque Quispe is also detained there, the 60-year-old president of the Supreme Electoral Board who was falsely accused by the coup regime of committing fraud (she is also a social worker and professor of Indigenous women's histories).

Another Indigenous woman in that prison is Patricia Hermosa, a lawyer, and notary for Evo Morales. Hermosa has been imprisoned ever since she tried to file the formal papers for Evo's candidacy for the Senate. His candidacy is entirely legal but has been blocked by the de facto government.

Numerous other political prisoners have been jailed since the November 10th coup that brought to power Jeanine Añez.

The so-called crimes of Elena Flores

Flores led a takeover of a Health Centre, el Centro de Especialidades de Atención Integral, which rightfully belongs to the union of which Elena Flores is the elected president.

The clinic had fallen under right-wing paramilitary control thanks to the previous union leader, Franklin Gutierrez. He installed corrupt networks and refused to hold elections, in complete contempt of Adepcoca's governing statutes.

Elena Flores has been targeted by the regime because she is a Black woman leader, a key union organizer, and an elected leader in the coca-growing region. She appeared at the side of Evo Morales repeatedly during the months leading up to October elections. The Yungas has always been a strong base of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS).

The coup government’s false charges

The regime’s court imprisoned Elena Flores for aggravated robbery, harming public property, forced entry, and preventing the State from exercising its services.

They charge her for an offense they allege took place in July, 2019. More than six months later, the coup regime filed against her. Strangely, the legal team presented photographs taken in November as evidence, and the coup judge accepted them. Flores' lawyer argues that she was not given adequate notice of these charges and has been denied due process.

The coup regime

The coup regime was launched by the United States, working with racist oligarchs and Luis Almagro's Organization of American States (OAS). They aim to protect multinational business interests and return the country to neoliberalism, racism and general misery.

The civilian shock groups who built a climate of chaos for years before the coup, in 2019 attacked Indigenous women and cut off their braids, likewise tearing at Afrobolivian women's afros.

In the months following the coup, the de facto government has institutionalized their hatred of women by dismantling social programs that were destined for young mothers. They have destroyed public health care that in the last 14 years had tremendously decreased infant and maternal mortality.

Within days of the coup, Añez made evident her misogynist goals through systematic rape of women and girls by the security forces, including after they had murdered them.

The Añez regime must release Elena Flores. She must return to her family, community, region and union work. Her people have been robbed of her leadership.

We call for all the de facto government's charges against Elena Flores to be dropped immediately and for Flores, Choque, Hermosa, and all political prisoners to be released.

View complete list of endorsers here:

https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/Call-For-Immediate-Release-of-Political-Prisoner-Irene-Flores--20200413-0016.html

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Mumia Abu-Jamal Update

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Mobilization4Mumia

215-724-1618

Mobilization4Mumia.com

mobilization4mumia@gmail.com

PRESS ALERT

Contact: Sophia Williams 917-806-0521, Pam Africa 267-760-7344 or Joe Piette 610-931-2615

PA DOC cruel hoax that Abu-Jamal was ill with COVID19

Breaking News: At 5:04pm on Wednesday, April 15th, a prison official inside the SCI Mahanoy Superintendents’ Office told a concerned advocate for Mumia on an official DOC phone that Mumia was being transported by ambulance for evaluation of COVID 19 symptoms and had trouble breathing. After hours of supporters repeatedly calling prison officials to demand an opportunity to speak with Mumia, they allowed him a call at almost 9PM. Mumia confirmed that the official report was false. “I am fine,” he said, “What I need is freedom.”

This is of grave concern because the COVID-19 pandemic imposes a death sentence on the incarcerated, including 66 year-old Mumia, who already suffers from cirrhosis of the liver. More striking is this whole incident points to how the Pennsylvania DOC response to the COVID 19 pandemic is doomed to failure. As of April 15th there have been a total of 53 tests out of 45,000 inmates with a 17% positivity rate and already we have seen one death. There simply are not enough tests to understand the full transmission of the virus. The prison reduction mitigation efforts are not at all commensurate with the epidemic. In the last month there has only been a reduction of 474 out of 45,000 prisoners.

It is time to release thousands of prisoners, especially the elderly and immunocompromised, like respected journalist and internationally recognized political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, that have homes, and caring families and are no risk to the community.

--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/

Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.org

To unsubscribe contact: http://freedomarchives.org/mailman/options/ppnews_freedomarchives.org

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Mumia Abu-Jamal: New Chance for Freedom

Police and State Frame-Up Must Be Fully Exposed!

Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent. Courts have ignored and suppressed evidence of his innocence for decades.... But now, one court has thrown out all the decisions of the PA Supreme Court that denied Mumia's appeals against his unjust conviction during the years of 1998 to 2012!

This ruling, by Judge Leon Tucker, was made because one judge on the PA Supreme Court during those years, Ronald Castille, was lacking the "appearance of impartiality." In plain English, he was clearly biased against Mumia. Before sitting on the PA Supreme Court, Castille had been District Attorney (or assistant DA) during the time of Mumia's frame-up and conviction, and had used his office to express a special interest in pursuing the death penalty for "cop-killers." Mumia was in the cross-hairs. Soon he was wrongly convicted and sent to death row for killing a police officer.....

* * * * *

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning and intrepid journalist, a former Black Panther, MOVE supporter, and a critic of police brutality and murder. Mumia was framed by police, prosecutors, and leading elements of both Democratic and Republican parties, for the shooting of a police officer.. The US Justice Department targeted him as well... A racist judge helped convict him, and corrupt courts have kept him locked up despite much evidence that should have freed him. He continues his commentary and journalism from behind bars. As of 2019, he has been imprisoned for 37 years for a crime he did not commit.

Time is up! FREE MUMIA NOW!

* * * * *

DA's Hidden Files Show Frame-Up of Mumia

In the midst of Mumia's fight for his right to challenge the state Supreme Court's negative rulings, a new twist was revealed: six boxes of files on Mumia's case--with many more still hidden--were surreptitiously concealed for decades in a back room at the District Attorney's office in Philadelphia. The very fact that these files on Mumia's case were hidden away for decades is damning in the extreme, and their revelations confirm what we have known for decades: Mumia was framed for a crime he did not commit!

So far, the newly revealed evidence confirms that, at the time of Mumia's 1982 trial, chief prosecutor Joe McGill illegally removed black jurors from the jury, violating the Batson decision. Also revealed: The prosecution bribed witnesses into testifying that they saw Mumia shoot the slain police officer when they hadn't seen any such thing.... Taxi driver Robert Chobert, who was on probation for fire-bombing a school yard at the time, had sent a letter demanding his money for lying on the stand....... Very important, but the newly revealed evidence is just the tip of the iceberg!

All Evidence of Mumia's Innocence Must Be Brought Forward Now!

Mumia Abu-Jamal's trial for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner was rigged against him from beginning to end........ All of the evidence of Mumia's innocence--which was earlier suppressed or rejected--must now be heard:

• Mumia was framed - The judge at Mumia's trial, Albert Sabo, was overheard to say, "I'm gonna help 'em fry the n____r." And he proceeded to do just that.... Mumia was thrown out of his own trial for defending himself! Prosecution "witnesses" were coerced or bribed at trial to lie against Mumia.. In addition to Chobert, this included key witness Cynthia White, a prostitute who testified that she saw Mumia shoot Faulkner... White's statements had to be rewritten under intense pressure from the cops, because she was around the corner and out of sight of the shooting at the time! Police bribed her with promises of being allowed to work her corner, and not sent to state prison for her many prostitution charges.

**• Mumia only arrived on the scene after Officer Faulkner was shot** - William Singletary, a tow-truck business owner who had no reason to lie against the police, said he had been on the scene the whole time, that Mumia was not the shooter, and that Mumia had arrived only after the shooting of Faulkner. Singletary's statements were torn up, his business was wrecked, and he was threatened by police to be out of town for the trial (which, unfortunately, he was)...

• There is no evidence that Mumia fired a gun - Mumia was shot on the scene by an arriving police officer and arrested. But the cops did not test his hands for gun-powder residue--a standard procedure in shootings! They also did not test Faulkner's hands. The prosecution nevertheless claimed Mumia was the shooter, and that he was shot by Faulkner as the officer fell to the ground. Ballistics evidence was corrupted to falsely show that Mumia's gun was the murder weapon, when his gun was reportedly still in his taxi cab, which was in police custody days after the shooting!

• The real shooter fled the scene and was never charged - Veronica Jones was a witness who said that after hearing the shots from a block away, she had seen two people fleeing the scene of the shooting.... This could not have included Mumia, who had been shot and almost killed at the scene. Jones was threatened by the police with arrest and loss of custody of her children. She then lied on the stand at trial to say she had seen no one running away.

• Abu-Jamal never made a confession - Mumia has always maintained his innocence. But police twice concocted confessions that Mumia never made. Inspector Alfonso Giordano, the senior officer at the crime scene, made up a confession for Mumia. But Giordano was not allowed to testify at trial, because he was top on the FBI's list of corrupt cops in the Philadelphia police force... At the DA's request, another cop handily provided a second "confession," allegedly heard by a security guard in the hospital......... But at neither time was Mumia--almost fatally shot--able to speak.. And an earlier police report by cops in the hospital said that, referring to Mumia: "the negro male made no comment"!

• The crime scene was tampered with by police - Police officers at the scene rearranged some evidence, and handled what was alleged to be Mumia's gun with their bare hands... A journalist's photos revealed this misconduct. The cops then left the scene unattended for hours.. All of this indicates a frame-up in progress....

• The real shooter confessed, and revealed the reason for the crime - Arnold Beverly came forward in the 1990s. He said in a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury, that he, not Mumia, had been the actual shooter. He said that he, along with "another guy," had been hired to do the hit, because Faulkner was "a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area"! (affidavit of Arnold Beverly).

• The corruption of Philadelphia police is documented and well known - This includes that of Giordano, who was the first cop to manufacture a "confession" by Mumia... Meanwhile, Faulkner's cooperation with the federal anti-corruption investigations of Philadelphia police is strongly suggested by his lengthy and heavily redacted FBI file......

• Do cops kill other cops? There are other cases in Philadelphia that look that way. Frank Serpico, an NYC cop who investigated and reported on police corruption, was abandoned by fellow cops after being shot in a drug bust. Mumia was clearly made a scape-goat for the crimes of corrupt Philadelphia cops who were protecting their ill-gotten gains.

• Politicians and US DOJ helped the frame-up - Ed Rendell, former DA, PA governor, and head of the Democratic National Committee--and now a senior advisor to crime-bill author Joe Biden--is complicit in the frame-up of Mumia. The US Justice Department targeted Mumia for his anti-racist activities when he was a teenager, and later secretly warned then-prosecutor Rendell not to use Giordano as a witness against Mumia because he was an FBI target for corruption..

* * * * *

All this should lead to an immediate freeing of Mumia! But we are still a ways away from that, and we have no confidence in the capitalist courts to finish the job. We must act! This victory in local court allowing new appeals must now lead to a full-court press on all the rejected and suppressed evidence of Mumia's innocence!

Mass Movement Needed To Free Mumia!

Mumia's persecution by local, state and federal authorities of both political parties has been on-going, and has generated a world-wide movement in his defense... This movement has seen that Mumia, as a radio journalist who exposed the brutal attacks on the black community by the police in Philadelphia, has spoken out as a defender of working people of all colors and all nationalities in his ongoing commentaries (now on KPFA/Pacifica radio), despite being on death row, and now while serving life without the possibility of parole (LWOP)...

In 1999, Oakland Teachers for Mumia held unauthorized teach-ins in Oakland schools on Mumia and the death penalty, despite the rabid hysteria in the bourgeois media. Teachers in Rio de Janeiro held similar actions. Letters of support came in from maritime workers and trade unions around the world.. Later in 1999, longshore workers shut down all the ports on the West Coast to free Mumia, and led a mass march of 25,000 Mumia supporters in San Francisco................

A year later, a federal court lifted Mumia's death sentence, based on improper instructions to the jury by trial judge Albert Sabo.. The federal court ordered the local court to hold a new sentencing hearing... Fearing their frame-up of Mumia could be revealed in any new hearing, even if only on sentencing, state officials passed. Much to the chagrin of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)--which still seeks Mumia's death--this left Mumia with LWOP, death by life in prison..

Mumia supporters waged a struggle to get him the cure for the deadly Hepatitis-C virus, which he had likely contracted through a blood transfusion in hospital after he was shot by a cop at the 1981 crime scene. The Labor Action Committee conducted demonstrations against Gilead Sciences, the Foster City CA corporation that owns the cure, and charged $1,000 per pill! The Metalworkers Union of South Africa wrote a letter excoriating Governor Wolf for allowing untreated sick freedom fighters to die in prison as the apartheid government had done. Finally, Mumia did get the cure.. Now, more than ever, struggle is needed to free Mumia!

Now is the Time: Mobilize Again for Mumia's Freedom!

Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

www.laboractionmumia...........org

Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal | Mumia Abu-Jamal is an I.....

November 2019

"There is no time for despair, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language.. This is how civilizations heal." -Toni Morrison

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TEEN VOGUE OP-ED: ON MAY 1, ORGANIZERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY WILL CARRY OUT RENT AND WORKPLACE STRIKES

In this op-ed, Socialist Alternative and Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant calls for a national day of action in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more...

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Message to the People

A voice from inside Pennsylvania’s gulag

By Kerry “Shakaboona” Marshall

I trust everyone is well, healthy, and safe. I just got news that the federal judge denied my appeal to modify my federal sentence. I don’t classify the news of denial as either good or bad; it simply is what it is, a denial. It neither sets me back or pushes me forward. I am at the same spot that I’ve been at before that federal appeal, and that is, very close to being released from prison. Remember, we were simply trying to “expedite” release from prison. And that hasn’t change not one bit. The judge’s denial of my appeal is just a reminder of how most of the status quo view us—as less than—less than human, less than citizens, less than themselves, less than...you can fill in the rest.

People may be wondering how I’m feeling, so let me tell you all how I pretty much always feel and view situations like this one. I always have momentary mixed feelings of disappointment, anger, and sadness, but as quick as it comes it goes. Because my view in life is 1) they can’t keep a good person down for long, 2) be thankful for what you have, 3) always look at the positive in things that appear bad and take that positive position, and 4) have faith in the universal laws at play in the world. So, the way I see this situation is that I’m a good brother; I’m thankful for being near release from prison and for even getting the opportunity to have my federal appeal heard before a court because that rarely happens. I see the positives as being heard, meeting new friends, bringing family closer to me, and new paths revealing themselves to me; and I have unwavering faith in the law of cause and effect—that what we put into the world is what we get out of the world. Well I put in good works.

So, keep your eyes on the prize and fight like hell to get it! I know I will. And know of a surety, that in the end, we will win freedom, justice, equality, peace, happiness, family, good homes, health, and heaven on earth while we live. Stay safe.

Write to Shakaboona:

Smart Communications/PA DOC

Kerry Shakaboona Marshall #BE7826

SCI Rockview

P.O. Box 33028

St. Petersburg, FL 33733

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You can watch the film here:

iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/gb/movie/we-are-many/id1118498978

Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/We-Are-Many-Damon-Albarn/dp/B01IFW0WX4

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https://gem.godaddy.com/p/8813801?pact=1217503-157698117-7790601629-9b91dd92b638c231143896a170db2b4ac53d507c

URGENT ACTION ALERT COVID

LETTERS NEEDED FOR

LEONARD PELTIER

Dear Friends, Supporters, and Family,

In light of the provisions of the CARES Act meant to decrease the risk to prisoner heath, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Attorney General has delegated to the Director of the Bureau of Prisons the authority to release certain vulnerable prisoners to home confinement. Currently, the process for identifying appropriate candidates for home confinement have not been solidified but we believe it may help to write to the BOP Director and Southeast Regional Director and ask that Leonard be immediately considered and transitioned to his home on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.

Your letters should be addressed to:

Michael Carvajal

Director

320 First Street NW

Washington, DC 20534

J.A. Keller

Southeast Regional Director

Federal Bureau of

3800 Camp Crk Prk SW, Building 2000

Atlanta, GA 30331

We have not drafted a form letter or correspondence. Your pleas should come from your heart as an individual who has supported Leonard for so many years. Say what you would like but we have put together some talking points that will assist you in your letter writing. Below are some helpful guidelines so your letter touches on the requirements of the Attorney General’s criteria for releasing inmates like Leonard to home confinement

OPENING:

• Point out that Leonard is an elder and is at risk for example.” Mr. Peltier is 75 years old and in very poor health; his only desire is to go home to the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation and live out the remainder of his years surrounded by his family.”

MEDICAL:

The AG and CDC guidelines for releasing inmates requires the health concerns cause greater risk of getting the virus. Leonard has the following conditions you can list in your letter

• Diabetes

• Spots on lung

• Heart Condition (has had triple by-pass surgery)

• Leonard Peltier suffers from a kidney disease that cannot be treated at the Coleman1facility and impacts as an underlying condition if contracting the virus.

RISK TO COMMUNITY:

To qualify for release to home confinement we must show that Leonard poses no risk to the community.

COMMUNITY SUPPORT/RENTRY PLAN:

To qualify for release to home confinement we must show that Leonard has a reentry plan. Leonard has support from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Band and has family land on the reservation where he can live.

RISK OF COVID 19:

To qualify for the release to home confinement must show that Leonard is at reduced risk to exposure of COVID 19 by release than he is at Coleman 1. Currently Rolette County, ND has no cases of COVID 19, Sumter County has at least 33 cases.

Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.org

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Dear Readers, this is a very important list of demands crafted by the group, Socialist Resurgence, that appears at the end of their statement on the COVID-19 pandemic. The article itself is quite long but the most comprehensive statement I've seen and well worth reading at the URL below. Please circulate widely.

—Bonnie Weinstein

STATEMENT BY SOCIALIST RESURGENCE

ON COVID-19

https://socialistresurgence.org/2020/03/24/statement-by-socialist-resurgence-on-covid-19/

A program of action and solidarity

Capitalism stands totally disgraced. Even amidst a global pandemic and the coming ecological collapse, the ruling class in every country is trying to save its own profits at the expense of humanity. Workers have nothing at all to gain from supporting the capitalists, their programs, or their parties. Instead, working people must put forward our own solutions to the crisis and struggle with every weapon we have to achieve them. We call for:

Centralized, international commissions of doctors and engineers to coordinate a global response to the pandemic!

Retool all non-essential production to provide medical and safety equipment and begin a massive build-out of green infrastructure!

No bans, no walls, amnesty for all immigrants and refugees, with full citizenship rights now!

Democratic decision-making carried out through public discussion on all restrictions of movement!

Free housing, food, and medical care throughout the crisis! Pay for it through the military budgets, with 100% tax on all income over $250,000!

Hazard pay of at least 200% for all workers and full implementation of workplace safety measures! Completely free child care now! Stop all foreclosures, freeze all rents and mortgages, and stop all evictions for the duration of this crisis!

Evacuate the prisons! Free all non-violent, immuno-compromised, and elderly prisoners, and provide quality housing!

Drastically increase funding for domestic violence resources and education! No one stuck in quarantine with an abuser!

Decrease hours without a decrease in pay for all who must work! All the necessities for those who are not working!

Abortion is an essential service! Free and safe access for all who need it!

Aid, not sanctions! Reparations for colonized countries now! Cancel all imperialist debt!

Removal of all imperialist troops from the neo-colonial world; re-assign them for immediate use in aid efforts!

No bailouts for big business or the banks! Nationalize production and finance under democratic workers’ control!

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View in browser >

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COVID Newsletter #2020-2 March 25, 2020

Migrants on Hunger Strike at the Laval Immigration Detention Centre: Act Now in Solidarity

Solidarity Across Borders, March 25, 2020

– Stay in touch! Look here for updates and renewed calls for support

Migrants detained at the Laval Immigration Detention Centre have launched an indefinite hunger strike to demand their release in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Around 30 men are currently being held on the men’s side of the detention centre. The ten hunger-strikers are refusing all meals, despite pressure from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to desist. Like other prisoners across Canada and around the world, they are demanding to be released for their own safety. Read their statement here.

We are joining the detainees to demand the immediate release of everyone currently detained, safe and decent housing for everyone released, and an end to new detentions!

Free them all!

Support the prisoners (see details and more background info below)

In Canada, call Ministers of Health and Public Safety (contacts and script below)
Everywhere, echo their demands on social media, alternative media and mainstream media by passing this message on, or by posting or writing articles demanding their release (background on migrant detention in Canada).

Background

The 34 detainees are inmates of the Laval Immigration Prevention Centre, a prison where migrants are held if they don’t have identity documents, or if Canada wants to deport them and does not think they will comply. Detention is an important tool that Canada uses to keep its borders closed to colonized and racialized people from the global south, while continuing to exploit their labour and natural resources.

Afraid for their health, the prisoners in the migrant prison in Laval point out in their petition the high risks of being kept in a confined space. They are exposed to hundreds of guards, food workers, and health staff entering and leaving the facility every day.

Their demand comes as urgent calls for the release of prisoners multiply – in Quebec, across Canada and elsewhere – as a public health imperative. The pandemic has exposed how interrelated we all are in society, within and across borders, within and outside prison. It calls for solidarity with those who will be hit hardest – those already in the most precarious situations, such as detention.

Meanwhile, visits to the prison for migrants have been cancelled, leaving prisoners even more isolated. Detention is already a major source of psychological distress, especially for trauma survivors, in addition to poor nutrition and sleep, and limited access to healthcare. The lack of visits also poses a significant barrier to legal advice. Mandatory detention review hearings now take place by phone. Last week, CBSA announced that it was halting deportations for at least three weeks, but failed to address detention.

On Thursday, March 19th, the detainees issued a call in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their hand-written petition was sent to the Federal Minister of Public Safety, Federal Minister of Immigration, Prime Minister of Canada, the Federal and Quebec Ministers of Health, and international bodies such as the UNHCR. After a week of inaction on the part of government officials, detainees launched an indefinite hunger strike to demand their release.

Contacts

Federal Minister of Public Safety Bill Blair

Bill.Blair@parl.gc.ca

Telephone: 613-995-0284

Fax: 613-996-6309

Federal Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Marco Mendocino

Minister@cic.gc.ca

Telephone: 613-954-1064

Fax: 613-952-5533

What to say

– Ten migrant detainees at the Laval Immigration Detention Centre are on hunger strike to demand their release. The situation is urgent and demands immediate action to ensure their safety.

– Locking people inside this facility and taking away their freedom is unjustifiable to begin with, but to force people to remain inside in the midst of a pandemic is beyond unjust, it’s dangerous for everyone

– I am asking for the immediate release of everyone currently detained and decent and safe housing for all of the people who are released.

– I am also asking for an end to new detentions

Communiqué From Prisoners In The Laval Immigration Holding Centre: Hunger-Strike Until We Are Free (Laval, 24 March 2020)

Following the petition we wrote , which had little impact on our situation of detention, we have decided to move to the second phase of our plan. This is to go on an indefinite hunger strike, starting today. This will be done in the most peaceful way and we are not breaking any detention centre rules. Thank you for your support and all help is welcome.

*Petition to free the detainees, sent to Ministers of Immigration and Public Safety on 19 March 2020: We are currently detained at the Laval Immigration Holding Centre. Given the urgent situation of the propagation of the coronavirus, we believe that we are at high risk of contamination. Here in the detention centre we are in a confined space, every day we see the arrival of people, of immigrants, from everywhere, who have had no medical appointment nor any test to determine whether they are potential carriers of the virus. There is also the presence of security staff who are in contact with the external world every day and also have not had any testing. For these reasons we are writing this petition, to ask to be released."

#HungerStrikeLaval #FreeThemAll

Dear Folks,

This is the Kersplebedeb email list, normally devoted to telling you where and when you can buy books i distribute (and sometimes publish); only, all my tabling plans are obviously postponed indefinitely now.

I’m trying something new.

This list will be used proactively to share information about the current unfolding COVID-19 catastrophe, and the resulting political and economic turmoil. These won’t all be articles i agree with, but they will all be articles that i think are worth reading.

Good luck everyone, and stay safe

p.s. You can also see previous newsletters or other documents on COVID-19 on the Kersplebedeb website

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Great photograph. All you need is the caption from Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar's great verse, "We Wear the Mask."

We Wear the Mask

By Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

(Paul Laurence Dunbar [1872–1906] was one of the first influential African-American poets in American literature. Obviously, his invocation of the metaphor of the mask reflects a far different experience from our own. No cultural misappropriation is intended.)

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We Sit Inside

by Caitlin Johnstone

We sit inside and wonder
what the hell is going on
and what the hell is going to happen.
How we're going to pay the bills
and how the store can still be out of fucking toilet paper.
What the government is hiding from us
and how they'll screw us over this time.
If we'll be okay when we get sick
or if we'll be one of those weird anomalies you read about online.
If those we live with will get bored of us
or if they already are.
If we're going to be okay.
If the world is going to be okay.
If maybe, just maybe,
out of all this chaos and confusion,
in some secret, safe, and sacred space,
something truly good might be birthed.
We sit inside and wonder.

We sit inside and wait
for the lockdown to end
and for the uncertainty to end.
For the latest disturbing news story
and the latest round of disturbing statistics.
For the delivery person
and the video chat ringtone.
For a family member to awaken from sleep
so we don't feel so alone and afraid.
To again hug our elderly loved ones
and to have block parties with our neighbors.
To again meet a set of eyes and smile warmly
at a stranger across the room in a public space.
For the earth to heal itself.
For humanity to heal itself.
For that primal sanity
which lies dormant in our cells
to finally awaken.
We sit inside and wait.

We sit inside and change
our old habits
and our old assumptions.
Our fear of stillness
and our fear of ourselves.
Our hearts
and our minds.
From restless
to rested.
From doing
to being.
From a posture of sprinting
to a posture of meditating.
From frenzied momentum
to the fan blades fully stopping.
From guardedness with our loved ones
to vulnerability and intimacy.
From war with the world
to peace with ourselves.
From an insane species in an awkward adolescence
to who knows what the hell comes next.
Our eyes crack open.
Our hearts crack open.
Our cells sprout leaves.
We sit inside and change.

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CAPTAIN NARCISSUS

Filling sails with warm breeze

The ship Capitali set to sea,

The crowd was cheering

The vessel was glistening,

Golden nails its timbers fastening.

At the helm stood Captain Narcissus

The Realm’s one stable genius,

Waving he steered west,

On a voyage of conquest.

The moonlight lay over the sea,

By sunrise land was seen.

After Capitali dropped anchor,

Narcissus went to reconnoiter.

The Captain stepped onto the beach

And spied a diamond at his feet,

To the natives then he spoke:

“I am a civilized folk,

From a Great Realm come I to negotiate,

This diamond must be mine I so state

Golden glitter from my ship you may take.”

The natives agreed, then with great speed

Returned to his cabin and down on his knees,

A golden nail did he pry,

From floor boards inside.

The exchange then he did make

“I’m incredible” did Narcissus state.

With diamond the size of a fist,

He rowed to his ship through the mist.

From under his bed pulled a treasure chest

Tying rope from leg to chest he lay down to rest.

Many lands did they encounter

So many gems did he pilfer,

And many golden nails he did offer.

Admiring his gem filled chest on the floor

Narcissus said “this has never been done before!”

“”My success” said he, “you wouldn’t believe.”

Tying rope from leg to chest he lay down to sleep.

Returning to the Realm,

The Capitali hit a storm.

A mighty wave did strike the ship,

And timbers shuddered from tip to tip.

Narcissus awoke as the cabin floor split

The Treasure Chest then did fall fast,

Dragging the Captain down into the dark,

Smashing through the hull he shot down like a dart.

The ship drew on water,

The crew did scamper,

Over the side

They all did dive

Into the darkness-- to survive.

Nayvin Gordon 3/30/20

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To the initiators of the “Letter of

Dissent”: Antiwar Commemoration of the

Kent State Massacre, May 4, 2020

To the initiators of the “Letter of Dissent”

Dear Friends,

Much has happened since last September when we initiated the Open Letter Calling for an ANTI-WAR COMMEMORATION of the KENT MASSACRE, May 4, 2020. It’s an entirely new world - and not the most copacetic of times.

Yet even in the midst of the unfolding social and economic crisis, it’s heartening to see an organic, working-class solidarity begin to emerge. People are pitching in to help one another and are beginning to organize - demanding that human needs come before corporate profits.

Ultimately, overcoming the ongoing disasters will require all of society’s means – and for that we must dismantle the insatiable war machine and use those vast resources to heal the planet. We must continue the fight to end US wars, occupations and sanctions.

This letter goes out to the 59 original signers of the Letter of Dissent. Over 1000 additional antiwar activists have signed, making our initiative an authoritative statement from the antiwar community.

The KSU administration refused to respond to our concerns, proceeding instead with a corporate, celebrity-filled program designed to cover up the truth of the massacres and the war. The university has now cancelled the official planned program. An online event is being developed, but it will undoubtedly have the same sanitized character.

As antiwar activists under quarantine, we cannot use traditional marches, pickets and rallies - we will need to create new forms of struggle. That has already begun, with protests of empty shoes, spaced out picket lines, car caravans and internet actions.

I’m writing to ask you to help form an online commemoration of the massacres at Kent, Augusta and Jackson.

We can encourage groups and individuals to initiate memorial events or include May ‘70 in other planned actions. Some sites already exist, notably the Kent State Truth Tribunal, which has carried on activities for years and created a large video collection of personal narratives about May 4. They are here: https://www.truthtribunal.org/about

For my part, using a previously established blog, there is now a temporary site for individuals to contribute written experiences from May 1970, the national student strike, the GI antiwar movement and similar antiwar experiences.

This is an open venue for anyone and everyone to help write our rich history. You can share your stories on the Kent Massacre Wall (Click on Share Your Stories): https://kentmassacre.wordpress.com/author/mikealewitz/

Most importantly, this letter is also an invitation to help begin a new Facebook group, KENT MASSACRE ONLINE ANTIWAR COMMEMORATION – a place to post news of events, photos, articles, videos, comments and discussion related to the 50-year commemoration. Please join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2850853628362946/

Today’s social media discussions are focused on issues of staggering importance, such as the elections, pandemics and mass extinctions. But the civil rights, labor, antiwar and other great movements of the past contain valuable lessons of how to fight and win. We need to spread the collective consciousness and history of the massacres, the national student strike and the antiwar movement.

Humanity faces unprecedented challenges in the times ahead - but we know that the creative power of the working class is a mighty force when it is unleashed.

In Solidarity,

Mike Alewitz

- - - - - - - - - -

A slightly altered version of this letter will go out to the 1000+ signers on the Change.org site: http://chng.it/QTLkTvX6

____________________________________

MIKE ALEWITZ

Professor Emeritus

__________________________________

Art Department / Mural ProgramCentral CT State University
1615 Stanley Street/ New Britain, CT 06050
___________________________________

Red Square

116 Federal Street
New London, CT 06320
___________________________________

Mobile: 860.518.4046

___________________________________

alewitz@gmail.com

___________________________________

https://www.facebook.com/alewitz

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Coronavirus, Epidemics and Capitalism:

The Bugs Are in the System

Radical Women supports and recommends this thoughtful analysis of the novel coronavirus by our sister organization, the Freedom Socialist Party. The statement raises excellent demands to protect workers, women, the poor, and people of color being scapegoated for the crisis.

Governments around the globe have had since December to prepare for the novel coronavirus. And while some countries have done better than others with their response, here in the U.S. the for-profit medical industry is practically ensuring that more people catch the virus and more die from it. As with other disasters and emergencies, capitalism makes things worse.

Billionaire White House occupant Donald Trump shot us all in the foot when he fired his pandemic response team in 2018. A year later, his administration scaled back the Centers for Disease Control’s pandemic prevention teams in several countries, including China. His 2021 budget proposal includes a 16% cut in the CDC’s budget, this after the department endured over a decade of budget cuts going back to the Obama administration. Now in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., Trump visited the CDC and asked, “Who would have thought?” (New York Times, 3/8/20).

Coronavirus has so far claimed more than 4,600 lives worldwide. Cases of people with COVID-19 have been confirmed in 114 countries, including the United States, with the disease reported in 42 states so far. Washington state is the initial epicenter with over 330 cases confirmed and possibly 1,000 or more undetected.

On one hand, there is a constant drumbeat from corporate media outlets that invites panic. On the other, elected leaders are too concerned with the economic disruption to take this threat seriously enough. Testing for the virus is a good example of this. Initial kits from the CDC were faulty and the agency was slow to remove senseless restrictions on who could be tested. In Washington state, the insurance commissioner directed insurance companies not to charge any co-pays for the tests — but those without insurance still have to pay. This guarantees greater suffering for homeless people and the lowest-paid and most marginalized workers, meaning women, immigrants and people of color.

And there are still shortages of test kits, letting the virus continue to spread. Congress passed an $8.3 billion anti-coronavirus spending package on March 4, which should buy more testing kits. But if a tenth of that money had been spent years ago developing a coordinated, international strategy of prevention we might not be in this fix. Not to mention Trump’s ridiculous revolving-door Cabinet that has included four different Secretaries of Health and Human Services and his appointment of Vice President Mike Pence as his coronavirus czar. Pence is famous for his slow response to an outbreak of the AIDS virus as governor of Indiana, a delay that caused it to spread far and wide.

Trump and his fellow far-right world leaders are using the virus as an excuse to double down on xenophobic nationalism, upping the rhetoric and shutting down borders. Racist bigots everywhere are following their example. Violence against Asian people has escalated, as witnessed in London and on a New York City subway last month. Asian-owned businesses across the U.S. have been shunned and hotels have turned away customers because of their race.

It doesn’t help matters that 24% of all U.S. workers and 58% of those in the service industry receive no paid sick leave. That leaves them to choose between being getting fired or potentially causing their co-workers and customers to fall ill. The Healthy Families Act would give everyone at least a week’s sick leave, but even if it becomes law it won’t be enough. Many serious illnesses are contagious for more than a week and many workers, especially women, need to care for sick family members.

Like other epidemics before it, coronavirus is a threat compounded by capitalist greed and callousness. As disease ecologist Peter Daszak recently put it, “Unprecedented road-building, deforestation, land clearing and agricultural development, as well as globalized travel and trade” make pandemics likelier than ever, especially when “between outbreaks, the will to spend money on prevention wanes.” Global warming and nuclear proliferation have shown that capitalists will always trade tomorrow’s welfare for today’s dollar if we let them.

Now is the time to mobilize our unions and community organizations, along with small businesses to insist on immediate and effective action to protect public health.

To address this crisis, the Freedom Socialist Party raises these demands:

A universal, free, nonprofit, nationalized medical industry, including pharmaceuticals, managed by healthcare workers and patients
Free testing, treatment and vaccines
International cooperation on the virus treatment and vaccine research; outlaw profit-making from the crisis
Unlimited paid sick leave for all workers, with government assistance as necessary plus full compensation for lost wages due to closures or quarantines
Free laptops and Wi-Fi at home and free lunch programs for all students when schools close; free childcare for parents who have to work
Emergency financial assistance for small businesses hurt by the epidemic, including subsidies for paid sick leave
Increase public and private staffing levels to perform the intensified cleaning required
Train all at-risk workers and provide proper protective equipment
Stop the racist scapegoating of Chinese and all Asian and immigrant communities
No abridgement of civil liberties
Redirect military spending and border wall funding to coronavirus response, prevention and cure

You can find fiery Radical Women writings on the RW webpage. Learn more about RW through The Radical Women Manifesto, an exhilarating exploration of Marxist feminist theory and organizing methods. Buy a copy or read it on Google Books.
Donations are appreciated! As a grassroots group, Radical Women is sustained by support from people like you. Please contribute online or mail a check, payable to Radical Women, National Office 5018 Rainier Ave S Seattle, WA 98118 USA.

Check out the Freedom Socialist newspaper, a bi-monthly socialist feminist newspaper with news and analysis from around the globe. It also features book reviews, irreverent political cartoons, movement news and letters-to-the-editor. You can read or listen to articles online. Subscribe online or send $10 for one year or $17 for two to Freedom Socialist, 5018 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle WA 98118. (Students $8 for one year, strikers and unemployed $5.)


Mailing Address: Radical Women, National Office 5018 Rainier Ave. S. Seattle, WA 98118 Add us to your address book For more information Phone: 206-722-6057 RadicalWomenus@gmail.com www.RadicalWomen.org
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Friday post

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The American way of life was designed by white supremacists in favor patriarchal white supremacy, who have had at least a 400 year head start accumulating wealth, out of generations filled with blood sweat and tears of oppressed people. The same people who are still on the front lines and in the crosshairs of patriarchal white-supremacist capitalism today. There's no such thing as equality without a united revolutionary front to dismantle capitalism and design a worldwide socialist society.

—Johnny Gould

(Follow @tandino415 on Instagram)

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Want to learn more about sanctions? Visit sanctionskill.org/resources-2 for fact sheets, articles, books, videos, chant sheets, press releases, placards, banners, union resolutions, social media campaigns, translations and more!

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147 W 24th St.
2nd Floor
New York City, NY 10011

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

National Solidarity Events to Amplify Prisoners Human Rights

AUGUST 21 - SEPTEMBER 9th

To all in solidarity with the Prisoners Human Rights Movement:

We are reaching out to those that have been amplifying our voices in these state, federal, or immigration jails and prisons, and to allies that uplifted the national prison strike demands in 2018. We call on you again to organize the communities from August 21st - September 9th, 2020, by hosting actions, events, and demonstrations that call for prisoner human rights and the end to prison slavery.

We must remind the people and legal powers in this nation that prisoners' human rights are a priority. If we aren't moving forward, we're moving backward. For those of us in chains, backward is not an option. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Some people claim that prisoners' human rights have advanced since the last national prison strike in 2018. We strongly disagree. But due to prisoners organizing inside and allies organizing beyond the walls, solidarity with our movement has increased. The only reason we hear conversations referencing prison reforms in every political campaign today is because of the work of prison organizers and our allies! But as organizers in prisons, we understand this is not enough. Just as quickly as we've gained ground, others are already funding projects and talking points to set back those advances. Our only way to hold our ground while moving forward is to remind people where we are and where we are headed.

On August 21 - September 9, we call on everyone in solidarity with us to organize an action, a panel discussion, a rally, an art event, a film screening, or another kind of demonstration to promote prisoners' human rights. Whatever is within your ability, we ask that you shake the nation out of any fog they may be in about prisoners' human rights and the criminal legal system (legalized enslavement).

During these solidarity events, we request that organizers amplify immediate issues prisoners in your state face, the demands from the National Prison Strike of 2018, and uplift Jailhouse Lawyers Speak new International Law Project.

We've started the International Law Project to engage the international community with a formal complaint about human rights abuses in U.S. prisons. This project will seek prisoners' testimonials from across the country to establish a case against the United States Prison Industrial Slave Complex on international human rights grounds.

Presently working on this legally is the National Lawyers Guild's Prisoners Rights Committee, and another attorney, Anne Labarbera. Members of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP), and I am We Prisoners Advocacy Network/Millions For Prisoners are also working to support these efforts. The National Lawyers Guild Prisoners' Rights Committee (Jenipher R. Jones, Esq. and Audrey Bomse) will be taking the lead on this project.

The National Prison Strike Demands of 2018 have not changed.. As reflected publicly by the recent deaths of Mississippi prisoners, the crisis in this nation's prisons persist. Mississippi prisons are on national display at the moment of this writing, and we know shortly afterward there will be another Parchman in another state with the same issues. The U.S. has demonstrated a reckless disregard for human lives in cages.

The prison strike demands were drafted as a path to alleviate the dehumanizing process and conditions people are subjected to while going through this nation's judicial system. Following up on these demands communicates to the world that prisoners are heard and that prisoners' human rights are a priority.

In the spirit of Attica, will you be in the fight to dismantle the prison industrial slave complex by pushing agendas that will shut down jails and prisons like Rikers Island or Attica? Read the Attica Rebellion demands and read the National Prison Strike 2018 demands. Ask yourself what can you do to see the 2018 National Prison Strike demands through.

SHARE THIS RELEASE FAR AND WIDE WITH ALL YOUR CONTACTS!

We rage with George Jackson's "Blood in my eyes" and move in the spirit of the Attica Rebellion!

August 21st - September 9th, 2020

AGITATE, EDUCATE, ORGANIZE

Dare to struggle, Dare to win!

We are--

"Jailhouse Lawyers Speak"

NLG EMAIL CONTACT FOR LAWYERS AND LAW STUDENTS INTERESTED IN JOINING THE INTERNATIONAL LAW PROJECT: micjlsnlg@gmail.com

PRISON STRIKE DEMANDS: https://jailhouselawyerspeak.wordpress.com/2020/02/11/prisoners-national-demands-for-human-rights/

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COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist

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Meet the Candidates

Endorse

Presidential candidate Gloria La Riva denounces Trump's new Iran sanctions

Campaign tweet of La Riva at anti-war protest speaking on the human impact of U..S. sanctions

"Sanctions are a silent killer that have already had devastating effects in Iraq and Iran. I denounce Mike Pompeo's and Steven Mnuchin's announcement of more sanctions on Iran, which are solely intended to create suffering on the Iranian people," said Gloria La Riva, 2020 presidential candidate and longtime anti-war activist. "It is clear that the Trump administration is not backing down from its belligerence. In fact, Trump is forcefully pursuing further confrontation, and is all the more reason for us to remain mobilized against a new war on Iran." Join the Sat. Jan. 25 – Global Day of Protest – No War On Iran! "Sanctions are an act of war," she continued, "I traveled three times to Iraq during the 1990's when the United States government imposed a total blockade of the country for more than 12 years. I witnessed the human toll, thousands of people dying every month from the blocking of food, medicine, and infrastructure materials after the 78-day U.S... military bombing of 1991." La Riva produced the 1998 award-winning documentary, Genocide by Sanctions: The Case of Iraq, based on her investigative work there... "And now President Trump, via executive order, is virtually tightening a noose on Iran." In the Friday address Treasury Secretary Mnuchin announced that Trump's sanctions included penalties that would be applied to any individual or governments trading with or involved with Iranian construction, manufacturing, textiles or mining industries. "Sanctions are designed to destabilize a country's society, they are part of a larger war drive," La Riva said. "They hit the most vulnerable people first, the sick, young children, elderly and the poor because they lose access to necessary items. In Iran the prices of potatoes have already increased over 300% from previous sanctions. The costs of rice and chicken and many other goods have gone up.......... The point of sanctions is to create suffering—with these kinds of acts it is no wonder Iran and the Iraqi Parliament have called for the expulsion of the U..S. military from the region. "There is no justification for these sanctions. In fact United Nations resolutions state that there is no justification for policies that target a whole population.... Such an act of aggression is recognized as genocide." Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that Iranian general Qassem Soleimani was behind imminent threats to Americans but when asked for specifics, he only cited the death of a U.S.. contractor killed in Iraq. However, that was weeks prior to the killing of Soleimani. La Riva said, "by logic and definition a past occurrence does not constitute not an imminent threat. What we know instead is that with Trump's abrogation of the JCPOA, he embarked a while ago on an offensive that the people of the United States and worldwide are extremely worried about.." La Riva has been in the streets of San Francisco with thousands of other people demanding No New War on Iran.... She is running nationally for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and in California she is seeking the Peace and Freedom Party nomination. Her vice-presidential candidate is Leonard Peltier, Native political prisoner unjustly held in federal prison now for 43 years. Point five of La Riva's Presidential 10 Point Program reads, "Shut down all U.S. military bases around the world—bring all the troops, planes & ships home... U...S. foreign policy uses the pretext of national security to enforce the imperialist interests of the biggest banks and corporations... That is what is behind the endless wars and occupations. Use the $1 trillion military budget instead to provide for people's needs here and worldwide. Abolish nuclear weapons... Stop U.S. aid to Israel. Self-determination for the Palestinian people, including the right of return. End the U.S.. blockade of Cuba and sanctions against Venezuela, Iran and all countries...... Independence for Puerto Rico and cancel its debt!"

Questions? Comments? Contact us. This email was sent to caroleseligman@sbcglobal.net. To stop receiving emails, click here. Created with NationBuilder, the essential toolkit for leaders.

Meet the Candidates

Endorse

La Riva / Peltier 2020 Campaign
10-Point Program

The 10-Point Program of the La Riva/Peltier 2020 Campaign is a fighting program that represents the interests and needs of the vast majority of people of the United States and extends international solidarity to the peoples of the world. Our campaign will reach to every corner of the U.S. with the message that only socialism can solve the crises of climate change, racism, poverty and war. It will take a people's movement for real, lasting and sustainable change. We hope you will join us! Donate to our campaign today!
★ 1 | Make the essentials of life constitutional rights The U.....S. has more than enough so that all the essentials of life — food, housing, water, education, health care and a job or basic income can be guaranteed rights — rather than distributed only for profit. Create a completely free and public healthcare system.. Make education free—cancel all student debt. Fully fund rebuilding of the infrastructure in transport, water and utility systems... Stop all foreclosures and evictions. End all discrimination based on ability/disability.
★ 2 | For the Earth to live, capitalism must be replaced by a socialist system Global warming, pollution, acidified and depleted oceans, fracking, critical drought, plastics choking the seas, nuclear weapons and waste — it is clear that capitalism and production for profit are destroying the planet and threatening all life.. The crisis is already here, with the most vulnerable and oppressed areas of the U.S.. and Global South bearing the brunt. Using truly sustainable energy and seizing the oil and coal companies to stop fossil fuel pollution, are urgent steps needed to reverse climate change.. Ultimately, only the socialist reorganization of society can assure the future of the people and the planet.
★ 3 | End racism, police brutality, mass incarceration. Pay reparations to the African American community Mass incarceration and racist policing are symptomatic of the 400 years of brutal repression meted out to African-descended peoples in the U.S. Reparations must be paid! More than 2....2 million people are behind bars in the largest prison complex in the world. End mass incarceration of all oppressed and working-class people. Fully prosecute all acts of police brutality and violence. Free Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners!
★ 4 | Full rights for all immigrants Abolish all anti-immigrant laws. Stop the raids and deportations and demonization of immigrants......... Shut down ICE and the concentration camps and reunite families.. The government's war on immigrants must end. The border wall must be dismantled. Amnesty and citizenship for those without documents... Full rights for all!
★ 5 | Shut down all U.S.. military bases around the world—bring all the troops, planes & ships home U.S. foreign policy uses the pretext of national security to enforce the imperialist interests of the biggest banks and corporations... That is what is behind the endless wars and occupations. Use the $1 trillion military budget instead to provide for people's needs here and worldwide. Abolish nuclear weapons... Stop U....S... aid to Israel.. Self-determination for the Palestinian people, including the right of return. End the U.S. blockade of Cuba and sanctions against Venezuela, Iran and all countries.. Independence for Puerto Rico and cancel its debt!
★ 6 | Honor Native treaties... Free Leonard Peltier now Both major parties have continued to allow the destruction and theft of Native lands by mining and corporate agricultural interests in blatant disregard of indigenous sovereign rights.. 33% of Native children live in poverty and many of the poorest U..S... counties are reservations..... The crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and the over-incarceration of Native peoples shows the bankruptcy of capitalism from its earliest inception in the Americas until today..
★ 7 | Full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people Fight back against anti-LGBTQ discrimination and violence.... Defend marriage equality. Full equality in all matters governed by civil law, including employment, housing, healthcare and education.. No to "religious exemption" laws that allow discrimination against LGBTQ people!
★ 8 | Equality for women and free, safe, legal abortion on demand Stop the attack on women's reproductive rights and defend Roe v. Wade... Women must have the fundamental right to choose and to control their own bodies. Women still earn 22 percent less than men, and the gap is even more severe for Black and Latina women.. Close the wage gap and end the gender division of labor......
★ 9 | Defend and expand our unions Support the right of all workers to have a union. Fight back against the attacks on collective bargaining...... Require employers to recognize card check union votes. Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. Focusing on low-wage worker organizing, rebuild a fighting labor movement.
★ 10 | Take over the stolen wealth of the giant banks and corporations – Jail Wall St.. criminals The vast wealth of the giant banks and corporations is created by workers labor and the exploitation of the world's diminishing natural resources. The billionaires looted and destroyed the economy. It is time to seize their assets and use those resources in the interests of the vast majority. Power must be taken out of the hands of the super rich, and Wall Street criminals must be jailed.

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Stop Kevin Cooper's Abuse by San Quentin Prison Guards!

https://www.change.org/p/san-quentin-warden-ronald-davis-stop-kevin-cooper-s-abuse-by-san-quentin-prison-guards-2ace89a7-a13e-44ab-b70c-c18acbbfeb59?recruiter=747387046&recruited_by_id=3ea6ecd0-69ba-11e7-b7ef-51d8e2da53ef&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=petition_dashboard&use_react=false

On Wednesday, September 25, Kevin Cooper's cell at San Quentin Prison was thrown into disarray and his personal food dumped into the toilet by a prison guard, A. Young. The cells on East Block Bayside, where Kevin's cell is, were all searched on September 25 during Mandatory Yard. Kevin spent the day out in the yard with other inmates.. In a letter, Kevin described what he found when he returned: "This cage was hit hard, like a hurricane was in here .. .... . little by little I started to clean up and put my personal items back inside the boxes that were not taken .... .. .. I go over to the toilet, lift up the seatcover and to my surprise and shock the toilet was completely filled up with my refried beans, and my brown rice. Both were in two separate cereal bags and both cereal bags were full. The raisin bran cereal bags were gone, and my food was in the toilet!" A bucket was eventually brought over and: "I had to get down on my knees and dig my food out of the toilet with my hands so that I could flush the toilet. The food, which was dried refried beans and dried brown rice had absorbed the water in the toilet and had become cement hard. It took me about 45 minutes to get enough of my food out of the toilet before it would flush." Even the guard working the tier at the time told Kevin, "K.C.., that is f_cked up!" A receipt was left in Kevin's cell identifying the guard who did this as A... Young. Kevin has never met Officer A...... Young, and has had no contact with him besides Officer Young's unprovoked act of harassment and psychological abuse... Kevin Cooper has served over 34 years at San Quentin, fighting for exoneration from the conviction for murders he did not commit. It is unconscionable for him to be treated so disrespectfully by prison staff on top of the years of his incarceration. No guard should work at San Quentin if they cannot treat prisoners and their personal belongings with basic courtesy and respect................. Kevin has filed a grievance against A. Young.. Please: 1) Sign this petition calling on San Quentin Warden Ronald Davis to grant Kevin's grievance and discipline "Officer" A. Young.. 2) Call Warden Ronald Davis at: (415) 454-1460 Ext. 5000. Tell him that Officer Young's behaviour was inexcusable, and should not be tolerated........ 3) Call Yasir Samar, Associate Warden of Specialized Housing, at (415) 455-5037 4) Write Warden Davis and Lt. Sam Robinson (separately) at: Main Street San Quentin, CA 94964 5) Email Lt. Sam Robinson at: samuel.robinson2@cdcr.......................ca.gov

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Eddie Conway's Update on Forgotten Political Prisoners

November 19, 2019

https://therealnews........com/stories/eddie-conway-update-forgotten-political-prisoners

EDDIE CONWAY: I'm Eddie Conway, host of Rattling the Bars. As many well-known political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal continue to suffer in prison…

MUMIA ABU JAMAL: In an area where there is corporate downsizing and there are no jobs and there is only a service economy and education is being cut, which is the only rung by which people can climb, the only growth industry in this part of Pennsylvania, in the Eastern United States, in the Southern United States, in the Western United States is "corrections," for want of a better word. The corrections industry is booming. I mean, this joint here ain't five years old.

EDDIE CONWAY: …The media brings their stories to the masses.. But there are many lesser-known activists that have dropped out of the spotlight, grown old in prison, or just been forgotten.............. For Rattling the Bars, we are spotlighting a few of their stories........ There was a thriving Black Panther party in Omaha, Nebraska, headed by David Rice and Ed Poindexter...... By 1968, the FBI had began plans to eliminate the Omaha Black Panthers by making an example of Rice and Poindexter. It would take a couple of years, but the FBI would frame them for murder..

KIETRYN ZYCHAL: In the 90s, Ed and Mondo both applied to the parole board. There are two different things you do in Nebraska, the parole board would grant you parole, but because they have life sentences, they were told that they have to apply to the pardons board, which is the governor, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, and ask that their life sentences be commuted to a specific number of years before they would be eligible for parole.

And so there was a movement in the 90s to try to get them out on parole...... The parole board would recommend them for parole because they were exemplary prisoners, and then the pardons board would not give them a hearing. They wouldn't even meet to determine whether they would commute their sentence..

EDDIE CONWAY: They served 45 years before Rice died in the Nebraska State Penitentiary. After several appeals, earning a master's degree, writing several books and helping other inmates, Poindexter is still serving time at the age of 75.

KEITRYN ZYCHAL: Ed Poindexter has been in jail or prison since August of 1970. He was accused of making a suitcase bomb and giving it to a 16-year-old boy named Duane Peak, and Duane Peak was supposed to take the bomb to a vacant house and call 911, and report that a woman was dragged screaming into a vacant house, and when police officers showed up, one of those police officers was killed when the suitcase bomb exploded............

Ed and his late co-defendant, Mondo we Langa, who was David Rice at the time of the trial, they have always insisted that they had absolutely nothing to do with this murderous plot, and they tried to get back into court for 50 years, and they have never been able to get back into court to prove their innocence. Mondo died in March of 2016 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Ed is going to turn 75 this year, I think............. And he has spent the majority of his life in prison... It will be 50 years in 2020 that he will be in prison..

EDDIE CONWAY: There are at least 20 Black Panthers still in prison across the United States.. One is one of the most revered is H. Rap Brown, known by his Islamic name, Jamil Al-Amin.

KAIRI AL-AMIN: My father has been a target for many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years of the federal government, and I think him being housed these last 10 years in federal penitentiaries without federal charges show that the vendetta is still strong. The federal government has not forgotten who he was as H.. Rap Brown, or who he is as Imam Jamil Al-Amin...

JAMIL AL-AMIN: See, it's no in between.. You are either free or you're a slave. There's no such thing as second-class citizenship.

EDDIE CONWAY: Most people don't realize he's still in prison. He's serving a life sentence at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson...

KAIRI AL-AMIN: Our campaign is twofold.. One, how can egregious constitutional rights violations not warrant a new trial, especially when they were done by the prosecution........ And two, my father is innocent. The facts point to him being innocent, which is why we're pushing for a new trial.. We know that they can't win this trial twice... The reason they won the first time was because of the gag order that was placed on my father which didn't allow us to fight in the court of public opinion as well as the court of law... And so when you don't have anyone watching, anything can be done without any repercussion..

EDDIE CONWAY: Another well-known political prisoner that has been forgotten in the media and in the public arena is Leonard Peltier. Leonard Peltier was a member of the American Indian Movement and has been in prison for over 40 years and is now 75 years old..

SPEAKER: Leonard Peltier represents, in a very real sense, the effort, the struggle by indigenous peoples within the United States to exercise their rights as sovereign nations, recognized as such in treaties with the United States.. For the government of the United States, which has colonized all indigenous peoples to claim boundaries, keeping Leonard in prison demonstrates the costs and consequences of asserting those rights.

EDDIE CONWAY: Leonard Peltier suffers from a host of medical issues including suffering from a stroke... And if he is not released, he will die in prison...

LEONARD PELTIER: I'll be an old man when I get out, if I get out.

PAULETTE D'AUTEUIL: His wellbeing is that he rarely gets a family visit. His children live in California and North Dakota. Both places are a good 2000 miles from where he's at in Florida, so it makes it time consuming as well as expensive to come and see him. He is, health-wise, we are still working on trying to get some help for his prostate, and there has been some development of some spots on his lungs, which we are trying to get resolved....... There's an incredible mold issue in the prison, especially because in Florida it's so humid and it builds up. So we're also dealing with that...

EDDIE CONWAY: These are just a few of the almost 20 political prisoners that has remained in American prisons for 30 and 40 years, some even longer. Mutulu Shakur has been in jail for long, long decades.... Assata Shakur has been hiding and forced into exile in Cuba......... Sundiata has been in prison for decades; Veronza Bower, The Move Nine........... And there's just a number of political prisoners that's done 30 or 40 years.

They need to be released and they need to have an opportunity to be back with their family, their children, their grandchildren, whoever is still alive. Any other prisoners in the United States that have the same sort of charges as those people that are being held has been released up to 15 or 20 years ago. That same justice system should work for the political prisoners also.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Rattling the Bars. I'm Eddie Conway.....

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Letters of support for clemency needed for Reality Winner

Reality Winner, a whistleblower who helped expose foreign hacking of US election systems leading up to the 2016 presidential election, has been behind bars since June 2017. Supporters are preparing to file a petition of clemency in hopes of an early release... Reality's five year prison sentence is by far the longest ever given for leaking information to the media about a matter of public interest..............

Stand with Reality shirts, stickers, and more available. Please take a moment to sign the letter SIGN THE LETTER

Support Reality Podcast: "Veterans need to tell their stories" – Dan Shea Vietnam War combat veteran Daniel Shea on his time in Vietnam and the impact that Agent Orange and post traumatic stress had on him and his family since...

Listen now This Courage to Resist podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace — "Towards an honest commemoration of the American war in Vietnam." This year marks 50 years of GI resistance, in and out of uniform, for many of the courageous individuals featured.. If you believe this history is important, please ... DONATE NOW
to support these podcasts

COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT! 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559 www.....................couragetoresist..org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist

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Board Game

https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/race-for-solidarity

Solidarity against racism has existed from the 1600's and continues until today

An exciting board game of chance, empathy and wisdom, that entertains and educates as it builds solidarity through learning about the destructive history of American racism and those who always fought back. Appreciate the anti-racist solidarity of working people, who built and are still building, the great progressive movements of history.. There are over 200 questions, with answers and references.

Spread the word!!

By Dr.... Nayvin Gordon

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50 years in prison: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!! FREE Chip Fitzgerald Grandfather, Father, Elder, Friend former Black Panther

Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald has been in prison since he was locked up 50 years ago...... A former member of the Black Panther Party, Chip is now 70 years old, and suffering the consequences of a serious stroke. He depends on a wheelchair for his mobility. He has appeared before the parole board 17 times, but they refuse to release him.. NOW is the time for Chip to come home! In September 1969, Chip and two other Panthers were stopped by a highway patrolman..... During the traffic stop, a shooting broke out, leaving Chip and a police officer both wounded. Chip was arrested a month later and charged with attempted murder of the police and an unrelated murder of a security guard. Though the evidence against him was weak and Chip denied any involvement, he was convicted and sentenced to death. In 1972, the California Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty.......... Chip and others on Death Row had their sentences commuted to Life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. All of them became eligible for parole after serving 7 more years...... But Chip was rejected for parole, as he has been ever since. Parole for Lifers basically stopped under Governors Deukmajian, Wilson, and Davis (1983-2003), resulting in increasing numbers of people in prison and 23 new prisons. People in prison filed lawsuits in federal courts: people were dying as a result of the overcrowding.. To rapidly reduce the number of people in prison, the court mandated new parole hearings: · for anyone 60 years or older who had served 25 years or more; · for anyone convicted before they were 23 years old; · for anyone with disabilities Chip qualified for a new parole hearing by meeting all three criteria. But the California Board of Parole Hearings has used other methods to keep Chip locked up. Although the courts ordered that prison rule infractions should not be used in parole considerations, Chip has been denied parole because he had a cellphone.......... Throughout his 50 years in prison, Chip has been denied his right to due process – a new parole hearing as ordered by Federal courts. He is now 70, and addressing the challenges of a stroke victim. His recent rules violation of cellphone possession were non-violent and posed no threat to anyone. He has never been found likely to commit any crimes if released to the community – a community of his children, grandchildren, friends and colleagues who are ready to support him and welcome him home. The California Board of Parole Hearings is holding Chip hostage..... We call on Governor Newsom to release Chip immediately. What YOU can do to support this campaign to FREE CHIP: 1) Sign and circulate the petition to FREE Chip. Download it at https://www.change.org/p/california-free-chip-fitzgerald Print out the petition and get signatures at your workplace, community meeting, or next social gathering. 2) Write an email to Governor Newsom's office (sample message at:https://docs..google.com/document/d/1iwbP_eQEg2J1T2h-tLKE-Dn2ZfpuLx9MuNv2z605DMc/edit?usp=sharing 3) Write to Chip: Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald #B27527, CSP-LAC P.O. Box 4490 B-4-150 Lancaster, CA 93539 -- Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863...................9977 https://freedomarchives.org/

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On Abortion: From Facebook

Best explanation I've heard so far......., Copied from a friend who copied from a friend who copied..................., "Last night, I was in a debate about these new abortion laws being passed in red states. My son stepped in with this comment which was a show stopper. One of the best explanations I have read:, , 'Reasonable people can disagree about when a zygote becomes a "human life" - that's a philosophical question.... However, regardless of whether or not one believes a fetus is ethically equivalent to an adult, it doesn't obligate a mother to sacrifice her body autonomy for another, innocent or not..., , Body autonomy is a critical component of the right to privacy protected by the Constitution, as decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), McFall v.. Shimp (1978), and of course Roe v. Wade (1973).. Consider a scenario where you are a perfect bone marrow match for a child with severe aplastic anemia; no other person on earth is a close enough match to save the child's life, and the child will certainly die without a bone marrow transplant from you.. If you decided that you did not want to donate your marrow to save the child, for whatever reason, the state cannot demand the use of any part of your body for something to which you do not consent..... It doesn't matter if the procedure required to complete the donation is trivial, or if the rationale for refusing is flimsy and arbitrary, or if the procedure is the only hope the child has to survive, or if the child is a genius or a saint or anything else - the decision to donate must be voluntary to be constitutional.... This right is even extended to a person's body after they die; if they did not voluntarily commit to donate their organs while alive, their organs cannot be harvested after death, regardless of how useless those organs are to the deceased or how many lives they would save...., , That's the law.., , Use of a woman's uterus to save a life is no different from use of her bone marrow to save a life - it must be offered voluntarily.............. By all means, profess your belief that providing one's uterus to save the child is morally just, and refusing is morally wrong............ That is a defensible philosophical position, regardless of who agrees and who disagrees....... But legally, it must be the woman's choice to carry out the pregnancy..., , She may choose to carry the baby to term..... She may choose not to. Either decision could be made for all the right reasons, all the wrong reasons, or anything in between... But it must be her choice, and protecting the right of body autonomy means the law is on her side... Supporting that precedent is what being pro-choice means....", , Feel free to copy/paste and re-post., y Sent from my iPhone

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Celebrating the release of Janet and Janine Africa

Take action now to support Jalil A. Muntaqim's release

Jalil A...... Muntaqim was a member of the Black Panther Party and has been a political prisoner for 48 years since he was arrested at the age of 19 in 1971. He has been denied parole 11 times since he was first eligible in 2002, and is now scheduled for his 12th parole hearing... Additionally, Jalil has filed to have his sentence commuted to time served by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Visit Jalil's support page, check out his writing and poetry, and Join Critical Resistance in supporting a vibrant intergenerational movement of freedom fighters in demanding his release. 48 years is enough. Write, email, call, and tweet at Governor Cuomo in support of Jalil's commutation and sign this petition demanding his release.
http://freedomarchives.org/Support...Jalil/Campaign.html

Write: The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo Governor of the State of New York Executive Chamber State Capital Building Albany, New York 12224 Michelle Alexander – Author, The New Jim Crow; Ed Asner - Actor and Activist; Charles Barron - New York Assemblyman, 60th District; Inez Barron - Counci member, 42nd District, New York City Council; Rosa Clemente - Scholar Activist and 2008 Green Party Vice-Presidential candidate; Patrisse Cullors – Co-Founder Black Lives Matter, Author, Activist; Elena Cohen - President, National Lawyers Guild; "Davey D" Cook - KPFA Hard Knock Radio; Angela Davis - Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Native American historian, writer and feminist; Mike Farrell - Actor and activist; Danny Glover – Actor and activist; Linda Gordon - New York University; Marc Lamont Hill - Temple University; Jamal Joseph - Columbia University; Robin D.G. Kelley - University of California, Los Angeles; Tom Morello - Rage Against the Machine; Imani Perry - Princeton University; Barbara Ransby - University of Illinois, Chicago; Boots Riley - Musician, Filmmaker; Walter Riley - Civil rights attorney; Dylan Rodriguez - University of California, Riverside, President American Studies Association; Maggie Siff, Actor; Heather Ann Thompson - University of Michigan; Cornel West - Harvard University; Institutional affiliations listed for identification purposes only.

Call: 1-518-474-8390 Email Gov.Cuomo with this form Tweet at @NYGovCuomo

Any advocacy or communications to Gov. Cuomo must refer to Jalil as: ANTHONY JALIL BOTTOM, 77A4283, Sullivan Correctional Facility, P.O. Box 116, Fallsburg, New York 12733-0116

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Funds for Kevin Cooper

https://www.gofundme.....com/funds-for-kevin-cooper?member=1994108 For 34 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.. Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here ..... In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov..... Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.. The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings ......... Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, paper, toiletries, supplementary food, and/or phone calls........ Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!

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Don't extradite Assange!

To the government of the UK Julian Assange, through Wikileaks, has done the world a great service in documenting American war crimes, its spying on allies and other dirty secrets of the world's most powerful regimes, organisations and corporations. This has not endeared him to the American deep state.......... Both Obama, Clinton and Trump have declared that arresting Julian Assange should be a priority... We have recently received confirmation [1] that he has been charged in secret so as to have him extradited to the USA as soon as he can be arrested. Assange's persecution, the persecution of a publisher for publishing information [2] that was truthful and clearly in the interest of the public - and which has been republished in major newspapers around the world - is a danger to freedom of the press everywhere, especially as the USA is asserting a right to arrest and try a non-American who neither is nor was then on American soil. The sentence is already clear: if not the death penalty then life in a supermax prison and ill treatment like Chelsea Manning... The very extradition of Julian Assange to the United States would at the same time mean the final death of freedom of the press in the West..... Sign now! The courageous nation of Ecuador has offered Assange political asylum within its London embassy for several years until now. However, under pressure by the USA, the new government has made it clear that they want to drive Assange out of the embassy and into the arms of the waiting police as soon as possible... They have already curtailed his internet and his visitors and turned the heating off, leaving him freezing in a desolate state for the past few months and leading to the rapid decline of his health, breaching UK obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights. Therefore, our demand both to the government of Ecuador and the government of the UK is: don't extradite Assange to the US! Guarantee his human rights, make his stay at the embassy as bearable as possible and enable him to leave the embassy towards a secure country as soon as there are guarantees not to arrest and extradite him........... Furthermore, we, as EU voters, encourage European nations to take proactive steps to protect a journalist in danger... The world is still watching. Sign now! [1] https://www..nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/politics/julian-assange-indictment-wikileaks.....html [2] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-concluded-prosecution-of-julian-assange-for-publishing-documents-poses-grave-threats-to-press-freedom/ Sign this petition: https://internal.diem25.....org/en/petitions/1

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Words of Wisdom

Louis Robinson Jr., 77 Recording secretary for Local 1714 of the United Auto Workers from 1999 to 2018, with the minutes from a meeting of his union's retirees' chapter.

"One mistake the international unions in the United States made was when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. When he did that, the unions could have brought this country to a standstill...... All they had to do was shut down the truck drivers for a month, because then people would not have been able to get the goods they needed. So that was one of the mistakes they made. They didn't come together as organized labor and say: "No.... We aren't going for this......... Shut the country down." That's what made them weak. They let Reagan get away with what he did. A little while after that, I read an article that said labor is losing its clout, and I noticed over the years that it did.. It happened... It doesn't feel good..." [On the occasion of the shut-down of the Lordstown, Ohio GM plant March 6, 2019.........] https://www.......nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/lordstown-general-motors-plant...html

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Get Malik Out of Ad-Seg

Keith "Malik" Washington is an incarcerated activist who has spoken out on conditions of confinement in Texas prison and beyond: from issues of toxic water and extreme heat, to physical and sexual abuse of imprisoned people, to religious discrimination and more... Malik has also been a tireless leader in the movement to #EndPrisonSlavery which gained visibility during nationwide prison strikes in 2016 and 2018.. View his work at comrademalik.com or write him at:

Keith H. Washington

TDC# 1487958

McConnell Unit

3001 S............ Emily Drive

Beeville, TX 78102 Friends, it's time to get Malik out of solitary confinement. Malik has experienced intense, targeted harassment ever since he dared to start speaking against brutal conditions faced by incarcerated people in Texas and nationwide--but over the past few months, prison officials have stepped up their retaliation even more. In Administrative Segregation (solitary confinement) at McConnell Unit, Malik has experienced frequent humiliating strip searches, medical neglect, mail tampering and censorship, confinement 23 hours a day to a cell that often reached 100+ degrees in the summer, and other daily abuses too numerous to name.. It could not be more clear that they are trying to make an example of him because he is a committed freedom fighter. So we have to step up.
Who to contact: TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier Phone: (936)295-6371 Email: exec.director@tdcj.texas.....gov Senior Warden Philip Sinfuentes (McConnell Unit) Phone: (361) 362-2300

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Articles:

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1) As Coronavirus Threatens, Teenage Migrants ‘Age Out’ Into ICE Jails

Those initially detained by the government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement are being held until their 18th birthday, then transferred to ICE custody.

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, April 23, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/us/politics/coronavirus-teenage-migrants-ice.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Credit...Adrees Latif/Reuters

As Coronavirus Threatens, Teenage Migrants ‘Age Out’ Into ICE Jails

Those initially detained by the government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement are being held until their 18th birthday, then transferred to ICE custody.

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, April 23, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/us/politics/coronavirus-teenage-migrants-ice.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

WASHINGTON — Isaac, a 17-year-old Guatemalan, crossed the U.S. border nearly eight months ago and was detained as a minor by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, long before the novel coronavirus existed.

As his 18th birthday approached last month, it appeared he would be released to a Texas shelter where the director promised that the teenager would be “provided counseling and referred for any medical assistance he may require” for high blood pressure, severe anxiety and, if necessary, Covid-19, should the virus reach the shelter.

Instead, on the day he became an adult in the eyes of the U.S. government, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement swooped in and shipped him to the Otero County Processing Center in El Paso, where he says he sleeps arm’s distance away from dozens of other immigrants.

“I have no doctor. I have medication but it is one given to me in the previous shelter, when I was a minor,” said Isaac, who asked to be identified only by his middle name for fear of retaliation.

Around 32,000 migrants remain in custody on civil charges as ICE faces growing pressure to address the health concerns posed by the spreading coronavirus, including scores like Isaac who were initially taken into custody as minors, then held long enough to age into the adult detention center. As of Wednesday night, ICE had confirmed 287 cases of the virus among detainees and 35 cases among staff members.

Earlier this year, lawyers representing two migrants argued in a class-action suit that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE had violated a statute that mandates how migrant children should be protected by relying on dubious technology and the discretion of individual local field offices. As a result, instead of minors going to a group home, they are ending up in ICE jails.

The administration’s system of deciding where to place such “age outs” exemplifies the extent of President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. Those moves include an executive order signed on Wednesday that restricts legal immigration into the United States and obscure procedural maneuvers like age-out detentions that not only limit opportunities to claim refuge in the country but also could expose a vulnerable population to the pandemic. The Education Department this week even prohibited higher education institutions from offering emergency assistance to undocumented students who were brought to the United States as children and are currently protected from deportation.

The coronavirus has re-energized the president’s immigration efforts, even as it brings new scrutiny. A federal judge in California this week ordered ICE to review the cases of detainees at high risk of catching the virus, including those over the age of 55.

But the coronavirus has also amplified concerns over the already contentious — and possibly illegal — practice of moving young migrants like Isaac on their 18th birthday from relatively benign shelters managed by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement into the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE detention centers.

While the safest option for the teenagers would be to be released to a sponsor, immigration lawyers say the shelters and group homes would provide more space and care than the detention facilities, where they say the young migrants would be mixed with another contingent population and be exposed to the virus, as well as psychological harm.

“Our clients are terrified of the prospect of being transferred to a secured detention facility with large numbers of people in close, confined settings, which is in direct contravention with C.D.C.’s advice on how to save oneself from this pandemic,” said Anthony Enriquez, the director of the unaccompanied minors program at Catholic Charities, who is representing another teenager in New York who in recent weeks was handcuffed by ICE agents on his 18th birthday and moved to a detention center.

“This is a real recipe for a humanitarian disaster,” Mr. Enriquez said.

Beyond the health risks are legal questions: A federal judge in the District of Columbia will soon rule on whether the Trump administration’s age-out effort violates the law.

By choosing to detain teenagers instead of releasing them to group homes or sponsors, lawyers argue, the administration has violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which requires the government to consider “the least restrictive setting available” to the migrants.

In Houston, ICE agents placed 97 percent of teenagers transferred from the resettlement office’s custody into detention centers as opposed to group homes, according to an analysis of government data from October 2018 to May 2019 submitted during trial. In Miami it was 96 percent and in El Paso 80 percent.

Lawyers for young detainees said the government had proved it did not have to happen that way. An ICE agent from the San Antonio field office, where placement statistics are considerably better, testified during the trial that if the resettlement office had not matched a teenager with a sponsor, he would find a group home that would take the migrant in. ICE agents in San Antonio placed just 2.6 percent of young migrants into detention facilities as opposed to releasing them to group homes or sponsors between October 2018 and May 2019.

“We don’t detain our age-outs,” the ICE officer, Jose Munguia, testified.

April Grant, a spokeswoman for ICE, declined to comment on the details of the continuing litigation. Ms. Grant said that when deciding whether to detain migrants who were aging out, the agency considered whether they were flight risks or dangers to themselves or the community, as well as whether an alternative space was available.

While such transfers occurred in previous administrations, the Trump administration is using a rigged system that ensures immigrants in certain parts of the country will be detained when they turn 18, according to Stephen Patton, one of the lead lawyers in the trial litigated by the National Immigrant Justice Center and Kirkland & Ellis in the District of Columbia. ICE’s computerized “risk classification assessment” system allows agents to enter a migrant’s information, then recommends detention or release.

But according to court documents, the agency tweaked the tool in August 2017 to eliminate the option of release, leaving only the recommendations of “detain” or “supervisor to determine.”

A worksheet requiring ICE agents to document their considerations for alternatives to detention did not include a space to detail the potential shelters available. Agents are left with two options: “detain” or “not detain.”

“There was not a shred of evidence that releasing these kids caused any problems or finding sponsors for them was an undue burden,” Mr. Patton said. “They could comply if they wanted to, and if they do comply almost everyone gets released.”

Another issue with resettling minors has been the Trump administration’s efforts to require sponsors to provide fingerprints to the government. That has discouraged immigrant relatives from coming forward to claim minors in custody, immigration advocates say.

In the 2019 fiscal year, 2,055 migrants were transferred to ICE custody, nearly double the 1,091 in the 2017 fiscal year, according to the Health and Human Services Department. Mark Weber, a department spokesman, said more than 140 young migrants had been handed over to ICE in 2020, but that is a small percentage of the children who cross the border each year and most are eventually matched with sponsors.

Mr. Weber said the department grappled with the most border crossings in more than a decade last year and was still able to place 72,593 children with sponsors. He said “a special effort” was made to release the children before they turn 18.

Ms. Grant, the ICE spokeswoman, declined to say how many of the migrants who turned 18 and were transferred to ICE custody were placed into a group home by the deportation agency.

The agency has also resisted calls for the widespread releases of migrants as the coronavirus approached, though nearly 700 have been released during the pandemic. Matthew T. Albence, the acting director of ICE, told the House Oversight Committee last week that such a move would be a “huge pull factor” and create a “rush at the borders,” according to a statement from the committee. The agency said in a statement that it was continuing to consider releasing immigrants to “alternatives to detention options.”

Those who have aged into the ICE detention centers say the virus has only added to concerns that include threats from fellow detainees, poor treatment by the staff and a lack of medical resources.

Sulma Hernandez Alfaro, who fled to the border to escape abusive relatives in Honduras, said she was confused when ICE agents showed up at the government shelter where she was staying in San Benito, Texas, in 2017. She had already been told by the staff that she would be released to a nearby group home, La Posada Providencia, when she turned 18.

Her lawyers’ pleas to ICE to release her to the group home went unanswered, according to court filings.

She said she was threatened by other detainees and treated poorly by the detention center’s staff. On one occasion, a guard yelled at her when she asked for a tampon. When she asked for a spare change of clothes, she was scolded.

“She just yelled at me and said I should just wash it in the sink because that’s why I have hands,” Ms. Alfaro said.

A court ordered Ms. Alfaro’s release in May 2018, six days before she was granted asylum.

Those are the same protections Jose Hernandez Velasquez hoped to obtain when he crossed the border in 2017.

Mr. Velasquez was erroneously moved from the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement as a 17-year-old after he was given a dental exam that mistakenly determined he was an adult, according to his lawyers, who later obtained a birth certificate proving he was a minor. By then he had already spent 10 months in a maximum-security detention center. Such dental assessments are supposed to be used to determine ages only in conjunction with other evidence.

“They told me that I was over the age and I wasn’t a minor even though I pleaded with them that I was. They just took me away,” Mr. Velasquez said in a February telephone interview from the Adelanto detention center in California.

He was placed back into a detention facility when he turned 18. In addition to facing threats from other detainees, he said he developed depression and hypertension while detained.

A federal judge this month ordered Mr. Velasquez to be released after his lawyers said in court filings that he was “vulnerable to serious disease” and that there was danger of the coronavirus spreading “uncontrollably with devastating results” in the detention center.

Mr. Velasquez is now quarantining himself as a precaution. But before he went to self-isolate in Los Angeles, he asked his lawyer to stop by the beach. He had not seen the ocean in nearly three years.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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2) Clean Air, Wandering Goats. It’s Getting Wild in the City.

The pandemic is allowing us to see how ready the natural world stands to reclaim the planet we have trashed.

By Margaret Renkl, April 27, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/opinion/coronavirus-shutdown-environment.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Credit...Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

NASHVILLE — “Sam is being too day-dreamy in class,” began the note that came home in our oldest child’s grammar-school backpack. Sam understood the lessons, it turns out, but he wasn’t completing his worksheets on time because he kept staring out the classroom windows.

I sent a note back to school explaining that the urge to sit quietly and study the world was one of Sam’s most admirable qualities. No more notes came home in his backpack.

“The world is too much with us,” the poet William Wordsworth wrote in 1802. And so it is with us these many years later. But there is another world, too — the one outside our windows, the world that enfolds our world — and it is far too little with us in the getting and the spending and the worksheets of ordinary life.

Now a pandemic has turned us all into window gazers. We have been given an unexpected space for wondering. In cities the world over, songbirds seem louder now that they aren’t competing with the sounds of traffic.

“I think the birds are enjoying this,” wrote a New York City bookseller in response to an online order I’d placed for a new field guide to songbirds. “In NYC we can hear them better than ever.”

But it’s not just that our ears are tuned, in the new silence, to the sounds of birds that have always shared our world. Coyotes now wander the sidewalks of San Francisco and the streets of Chicago; Great Orme Kashmiri goats forage in the town of Llandudno, Wales; a groundhog snarfs pizza right outside a window in Philadelphia; a mountain lion jaywalks in San Mateo; wild boars root in the medians of Barcelona; a red fox saunters across a driveway in Nashville.

This pandemic has overlapped with the annual spring songbird migration, so it’s possible that people are seeing birds that truly weren’t there before we all went into lockdown. But in general it’s not true that the wild animals we’re seeing from our windows have become more plentiful in our absence. They are simply making themselves more visible to us now that we have become less visible to them.

And like a little boy trapped in school during the tender green springtime, we are peering at them through windows we have hitherto hardly bothered to wipe. We are paying attention.

The coronavirus will not reverse the ravages of climate change, and it will not interrupt our progression toward an even more desperate future. But it is allowing us to see with our own eyes how ready the natural world stands to reclaim the planet we have trashed, how eagerly and how swiftly it will rebound if we give it a chance. We are seeing how clear the waters of Venice can become in the absence of motorboats, how clear the air of New Delhi can become in the absence of cars.

The pandemic is teaching us that all is not yet lost.

None of these changes will last — the human race cannot stay cooped up indoors forever — but while we have both the time to observe and the window perch to watch from, we can use this cultural moment to rethink our relationship to wildness. We can ponder what it truly means to share the planet. We can resolve to change our lives.

I am a lifelong window gazer myself, and I work from a home full of windows even in normal times, but I have been surprised by how much more I see these days, even though very little about my own workday life, or the dead-end street where I live, has been changed by the shutdown.

Delivery trucks are still coming and going; the sounds of construction — nail guns and masonry saws, cement mixers and backhoes — still fill the air as Nashville’s relentless gentrification continues apace. But my own comings and goings have ceased, and in that stillness I see more now than I have ever seen before.

One Sunday afternoon at the very beginning of the lockdown I was working in the yard when I heard the wicka calls of two Northern flickers competing for a mate’s attention. Wicka, wicka, wicka, kikikikikikiki, the bird in my yard would call. Wicka, wicka, wicka, kikikikikikiki, a bird across the street would call back. I peered up into the trees, hoping I could see at least one of them before they took their competition to more hospitable territory.

Flickers are not endangered, but their population dropped 49 percent between 1966 and 2012, and Audubon projects that climate change will cost them much of their range in Middle Tennessee. Already I rarely see them here, and I’ve never once seen the flicker’s “fencing duel” during mating season. Here was my chance.

While I was walking around the yard, looking for the nearest bird, the two birds were looking for each other, flying from tree to tree, moving closer and closer. And then, like a tiny pandemic miracle, they both lighted on a power pole at the corner of my yard, in plain view of anyone walking down the street, and began a flicker’s version of the universal boasting match between two male creatures vying for the attention of a fertile female.

But it wasn’t a duel so much as a dance. Facing one another, each bird pointed his bill toward the sky. One would spread his tail feathers and bob his head. Then the other would spread his tail feathers and bob his head. They alternated bobbing left and right, dipping and swinging their heads in an undulating arc, drawing invisible circles and figure eights in the bright spring air.

Some neighbors, passing on the street below, also paused to look up, to shade their eyes and watch.

We all watched. We watched because to witness that mysterious dance was both a privilege and a gift, a thing not meant for human eyes now become a vision and, with any luck, a spur.

And so our first task when we emerge from this isolation will be to remember. To sear into our memories that pure pageantry of wildness, of life in its most insistent persisting. And then to try in every possible way to save it.

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3) Dr. Fauci warned in advance that someone needed to tell Trump you can't drink bleach

By Mark Sumner, April 25, 2020

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/25/1940257/-The-search-goes-on-for-someone-to-blame-over-Trump-s-idea-for-injecting-bleach-to-cure-COVID-19?detail=emaildkre

On Saturday, there is no scheduled White House briefing on the COVID-19 crisis. This follows an abbreviated Friday session in which Donald Trump made only brief remarks and left without taking question. And that follows a Thursday session in which Trump suggested drinking or injecting disinfectant as a possible treatment. As well as finding a way to put a bright UV light “inside the body.” All of which makes it seem that, after allowing Trump to spew unchecked for hour after hour, he may finally have said something so obviously awful that even Trump may feel … what is that feeling … that strange, strange feeling … is it … embarrassment?

Maybe. But it’s certainly anger. Because the hunt for someone else to blame goes on.

Trump’s first go-to in the search for someone to take the fall went to his standard fall guys, with the current kinda-sorta press secretary Kayleigh McEnany calling out the press for taking Trump “out of context” while claiming that Trump never tried to give medical advice. The only problem with that is that there was no “context,” other than the context of how the networks have been broadcasting Trump’s increasingly off the rails press events in full. Actually, that’s not the only problem, because McEnany’s statement also requires ignoring the dozens of other times Trump tried to dispense advice.

Right-wing media, both on Fox News and radio, tried to help out by coming up with the pretense that Trump was talking about some new and radical treatment—something too cool to be known by plain old medical doctors like Deborah Birx or Anthony Fauci. Are they supergenius messiahs? No! Then how can they be aware of the brilliance of ideas like a Clorox vape? There doesn’t yet seem to be a body count attached to this particular effort to own the libs … but it’s early.

Meanwhile, the White House seems to have pinned down a new scapegoat for Bleachgate. As The Washington Post reports, the whirling finger of blame has landed on Department of Homeland Security undersecretary William Bryan. And what did Bryan do? He had a briefing for Trump in which he discussed how UV light and disinfectants were effective in removing coronavirus from surfaces. Apparently, when giving this information to Trump, Bryan neglected to say that surfaces doesn’t include the interior of lungs or veins.

Apparently, a number of White House officials had deep concerns about this demonstration of cleaning something being taken in front of Donald Trump. Several people seemed to believe that Bryan had a lot of information in his presentation, and that the whole thing “was not ready” to go in front of Trump. Dr. Fauci seems to have predicted where Trump would take it, with worries the presentation might be taken as “the cure for humans.”

Of course, it’s understandable that Trump had to be given a briefing on how things are cleaned. For Trump, a can of Lysol or a jug of Clorox are arcane objects he has never handled in his life. He may have glimpsed such things being wielded by invisible people who scurried in to clear away the remains of his latest donuts and taco salad conquest. Or he made demand that those people only come out at night. Anyway, it’s an easy bet that he’s never used any such product in his entire life.

Really, people should understand that Trump has never used a disinfectant, never swiped a cleaning cloth, and never even contemplated whether a load of laundry needs a shot of bleach. These things are all new to him. Exotic. It shouldn’t be surprising that Donald Trump had to be given a briefing on how to clean a counter top, or that he had no understanding of the chemicals involved. After all, he’s not a plain old fool. He’s a rich fool.

If you’ve ever wondered why there were warning levels on the side of consumer products, the answer appears to be: Donald Trump.

Warning: Not to be taken internally. Keep refrigerated after opening. Do not place toaster in the oven.

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4) Detroit Students Have a Constitutional Right to Literacy, Court Rules

A major ruling in a lawsuit involving the Detroit public schools comes at a time when school shutdowns are expected to affect poor children most adversely.

By Dana Goldstein, April 27, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/us/detroit-literacy-lawsuit-schools.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=US%20News

For the first time in decades, a federal court has declared that American public school students have a constitutional right to an adequate education.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled last week that the state of Michigan had been so negligent toward the educational needs of Detroit students that children had been “deprived of access to literacy” — the foundational skill that allows Americans to function as citizens — in violation of the 14th Amendment.

The ruling came in response to a class-action lawsuit filed by a group of Detroit public school students that cited a litany of severe deficiencies: Rodent-infested schools. Unqualified and absentee teachers. Physics classes given only biology textbooks. “Advanced” high school reading groups working at the fourth-grade level.

When “a group of children is relegated to a school system that does not provide even a plausible chance to attain literacy, we hold that the Constitution provides them with a remedy,” Judge Eric L. Clay wrote for a 2-1 majority.

The overwhelming majority of students in the Detroit public schools are black or Hispanic and come from low-income families. Judge Clay noted that through the nation’s history, white people have repeatedly withheld education to deny political power to African-Americans and others, most notably under slavery and segregation.

Detroit, a center of coronavirus transmission, has closed its schools because of the pandemic and may not be able to reopen them for months, a situation that is expected to worsen inequities and have a negative impact on students’ learning for years to come.

Jamarria Hall, 20, one of the plaintiffs, said the ruling confirmed what he had always suspected about his Detroit public high school — that it did not provide students with a good education. Although he graduated at the top of his high school class, Mr. Hall struggled at the community college he attended and was put on academic probation. He is now working with a tutor to improve his skills.

He wants the next generation of Detroit children “to have a chance,” he said. “This is our future. These are our voters.”

The case, known as Gary B. v. Whitmer, is one of a group of lawsuits arguing that conditions such as segregation and unequal per-pupil funding violate children’s rights. Some of the cases, including the Detroit lawsuit, challenge a 47-year-old Supreme Court ruling that equality in education is not constitutionally guaranteed.

It is not yet clear what remedies will be considered in the Detroit case. In February, another lawsuit over the right to literacy, brought in California state court, led to a relatively modest settlement of $53 million, which the state will distribute to 75 low-performing elementary schools. And now, with the devastating economic impact of the pandemic, it may be hard to find much new money for public education.

Like the California settlement, the Detroit ruling did not wade into a major debate within the education world about which methods are most effective in teaching children to read.

The complaint in the case calls for “evidence-based literacy instruction” with a foundation of early-childhood phonics — explicit lessons on the relationship between letters and sounds. But the ruling did not mention the research on how children learn to read. The Sixth Circuit sent the case back to a district court to address the students’ claims.

Tacy F. Flint, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers and a partner at the firm Sidley Austin, suggested in an interview that Detroit schools had more basic problems to solve before turning to debates over literacy strategies.

“If that was a debate that we were having in these schools, that would be fantastic,” she said. “But we’re not remotely there. Getting a teacher in the classroom is the first step, having books and having adequate physical facilities.”

Though the evidence of inadequacies amassed in the four-year-old lawsuit is damning, students in the Detroit Public Schools Community District have shown some recent improvements in reading. The district has adopted a new curriculum and more rigorous phonics coaching for students who struggle to read.

There has also been an emphasis on assigning students more difficult texts. Previously, pressure to raise standardized test scores resulted in too much focus on helping children answer multiple-choice questions about short, simple passages, Nikolai Vitti, the district superintendent, said in an interview late last year.

After the changes, “students are actually reading books and novels again,” Dr. Vitti said.

The ruling in Gary B. v. Whitmer was announced the same day that the school system said it would work with local philanthropists to distribute free tablet computers and provide six months of internet service at no cost to 50,000 students who are attending classes remotely because the schools are closed.

When the lawsuit was originally filed in 2016, Rick Snyder, a Republican, was governor of Michigan, and he was the named defendant. His successor, Gretchen Whitmer, is a Democrat, and she has not said whether she will appeal the ruling.

A spokesman for Ms. Whitmer said on Sunday that her office was reviewing the court’s decision. “The governor has a strong record on education and has always believed we have a responsibility to teach every child to read,” he said.

The ruling was issued by a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit, with one judge, Eric E. Murphy, dissenting. It could still be taken up and reversed by the entire Sixth Circuit, if the court’s other judges find the dissent compelling.

“If I sat in the state legislature or on the local school board, I would work diligently to investigate and remedy the serious problems that the plaintiffs assert,” Judge Murphy wrote. “But I do not serve in those roles. And I see nothing in the complaint that gives federal judges the power to oversee Detroit’s schools in the name of the United States Constitution.”

The case could be appealed to the Supreme Court, whose conservatives have not been friendly to educational equality claims.

In recent years, though, concern about Americans’ lack of preparation for citizenship — a key part of the Sixth Circuit’s ruling — has widened across the ideological spectrum.

In his 2019 year-end report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts lamented that “civic education has fallen by the wayside,” and added, “In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.”

Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on education and the Supreme Court, said it was “not at all obvious” that judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats should disagree on “whether American children have a basic right to literacy.”

Credit...Brittany Greeson for The New York Times

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5) Fired in a Pandemic ‘Because We Tried to Start a Union,’ Workers Say

Employees who were in unions or were pushing to join them have been laid off and replaced by non-unionized labor. It’s part of a pattern stretching back decades, experts say.

By Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Rachel Abrams, April 28, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/business/coronavirus-unions-layoffs.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Business

The Cort Furniture Rental warehouse on in North Bergen, N.J., where employees were let go shortly before a unionization vote was to take place. Credit...Ben Solomon for The New York Times

The Cort Furniture Rental warehouse on in North Bergen, N.J., where employees were let go shortly before a unionization vote was to take place. Credit...Ben Solomon for The New York Times

The Cort Furniture Rental warehouse on in North Bergen, N.J., where employees were let go shortly before a unionization vote was to take place. Credit...Ben Solomon for The New York Times

Truck drivers and warehouse workers at Cort Furniture Rental in New Jersey had spent months trying to unionize in the hopes of securing higher wages and better benefits. By early this year, they thought they were on the cusp of success.

But when the coronavirus arrived, Cort, which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, laid off its truck drivers and replaced them with contractors, workers said. The union-organizing plans were dashed.

“They fired us because we tried to start a union,” said Julio Perez, who worked in Cort’s warehouse in North Bergen, N.J.

As American companies lay off millions of workers, some appear to be taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis to target workers who are in or hope to join unions, according to interviews with more than two dozen workers, labor activists and employment lawyers.

Nurses in North Carolina accused Mission Hospital, which is owned by the for-profit hospital chain HCA Healthcare, of using the pandemic to delay a union election. At Uovo Fine Arts, a company that packages and transports art for wealthy individuals and galleries, workers said that they were laid off as punishment for trying to unionize last year. Everlane, the online clothing company, laid off much of its customer-service team four days after a small number of its members informed the company’s chief executive that they had enough support to form a union. The company that owns The Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland this month laid off journalists who were in a guild and increased its reliance on non-unionized workers.

Companies say the layoffs are legitimate responses to an extraordinary economic crisis that has left many businesses on the cusp of collapse, not punishment for unionizing. Unionized employees tend to be more expensive, and getting rid of them can be an especially potent cost-cutting move.

Some big companies have accused workers of trying to exploit the crisis to glean public sympathy and gain momentum for unionization. A spokeswoman at Mission Hospital, for example, said that National Nurses United, the union behind the drive, “is trying to use this crisis to advance its own interest — organizing more members.”

There already have been some well-publicized cases of employees at major companies agitating for change — and then feeling that they are being punished for it.

Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, N.Y., recently accused the company of firing employees who complained about working shoulder to shoulder in the midst of the pandemic. In a letter sent last week, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, said the company may have violated federal worker safety laws and the state’s whistle-blower protections when it fired one worker.

n Louisville, a worker at Trader Joe’s supermarkets said he was fired after he created a Facebook page to discuss working conditions. On March 31, Trader Joe’s chief executive circulated a letter opposing labor unions and calling any attempts to recruit workers “a distraction.” A spokeswoman for Trader Joe’s denied that the worker had been fired because of his Facebook post. Amazon said that it respected its employees’ rights to protest, but that those rights “do not provide blanket immunity against bad actions.”

The pattern is playing out across the American business landscape.

“This is a continuation of behavior that has become all too common, of employers being willing to use increasingly aggressive tactics to stop unionizing,” said Sharon Block, a former National Labor Relations Board member appointed by former President Barack Obama. “The pandemic has given them another tool in their toolbox.”

Companies have seized on crises before to target union organizers, said Joseph A. McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, just as organizers were making inroads at steel plants and big industrial companies like General Electric, local officials, at the behest of big companies, began banning meetings. Their stated rationale, Mr. McCartin said, was public health and the risk of workers infecting one another at large gatherings. G.E. managed to stall union-organizing drives, he said.

During the Great Depression, Mr. McCartin said, companies targeted union members for layoffs.

What makes this time even tougher for union organizing, Mr. McCartin said, is that it combines a pandemic with a period of mass layoffs. “I suspect that just like the pandemic itself, a lot more of this is happening than we even realize,” he said.

In some cases, the actions are subtle. Some companies have hired consultants to warn employees about the risks of unionizing. “They imply that with this coming recession, there are hundreds of workers who would be more than happy to come in and take your jobs if you unionize,” said John Logan, a labor expert at San Francisco State University.

Workers at Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant in Glen Rose, Texas, had been trying to organize a union. The plant is operated by a subsidiary of Vista Energy, but a firm called Day & Zimmermann provides the labor. At a meeting with a handful of workers last month, a consultant hired by Day & Zimmermann warned about the perils of organizing during periods of extremely high unemployment. He said that huge numbers of skilled workers had recently lost their jobs in the oil and gas industry and “would absolutely be willing to come to a place like ours and work,” according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by The New York Times.

In New Jersey, truck drivers and warehouse workers at Cort Furniture Rental, which supplies desks, chairs and other furniture to homes and businesses in New York and New Jersey, began meeting in January to discuss joining the local chapter of the Teamsters union. Most people were in favor of joining, organizers said, and nearly everyone signed a union authorization card supporting a vote.

But before a vote could take place, Cort hired outside truckers to deliver furniture for the company, drivers told The Times. By the end of March, Cort had laid off most employees at the North Bergen location.

“Now we don’t have insurance, we have nothing,” said Walter Infante, a driver who helped to lead the organizing efforts and who spoke to The Times through an interpreter.

A spokeswoman for Cort declined to comment other than to say that the company “does not comment about possible, pending or ongoing litigation.”

In Cleveland, Advance Ohio owns both The Plain Dealer newspaper and the cleveland.com website. The newspaper’s journalists are unionized; the website’s are not.

The company announced last month that it would lay off 18 of its unionized newsroom employees, saying it would rely on the website’s journalists to fill some of the void. The Plain Dealer’s guild accused Advance Ohio of “union busting.”

Fourteen journalists remained in The Plain Dealer’s newsroom, down, the guild said, from more than 300 just a decade ago. Since the layoffs, most of them were reassigned to cover far-flung counties, which the guild characterized as “part of a broader move to eliminate The Plain Dealer and its staff altogether.”

Tim Warsinskey, The Plain Dealer’s editor, said in a statement that the reassignments were meant to complement cleveland.com’s coverage, not to sabotage the union.

This month, 10 of the remaining Plain Dealer journalists were laid off. The newspaper’s print edition is now filled largely by cleveland.com content.

It’s hard — sometimes impossible — to prove that a company is dumping workers in order to undermine a union as opposed to simple cost-cutting.

David Martinez and Peter Mackay have no doubt. They had worked for years at Uovo Fine Art in Queens, N.Y., storing, packaging and transporting artwork among the company’s warehouses. When the coronavirus started spreading, the men knew business would slow down, but they figured they would be fine, in part because of their seniority at Uovo.

But Mr. Martinez and Mr. Mackay had been leading a push to unionize the company’s workers. When Uovo furloughed most of its staff last month, informing them that they would keep receiving paychecks, Mr. Martinez and Mr. Mackay were among the few to permanently lose their jobs.

“This is obviously retaliation,” said Mr. Mackay, who had worked at Uovo as a driver and art handler for more than five years.

A Uovo spokeswoman said: “The claims subsequently asserted by two of the team members are entirely unfounded.”

Employees at Housing Works, a nonprofit counseling center in New York City, planned to vote by mail on March 20 on whether to form a union. Two days before the ballots were set to go out, the law firm representing Housing Works, Seyfarth Shaw, urged the National Labor Relations Board to delay the vote.

The N.L.R.B. postponed union elections nationwide until April 3.

Less than two weeks later, Housing Works laid off 29 people and furloughed 167. “That was pretty cold,” said Adrian Downing-Espinal, 39, who worked as a substance abuse counselor there and had been leading the push to unionize. She was among those to lose their jobs.

“Never did we target — or ever would consider targeting — anyone based on union affiliation,” said Matthew Bernardo, Housing Works’ president. He said that at the time the ballots were set to go out, Housing Works was struggling to figure out what the coronavirus meant for its clients, services and stores.

“It just didn’t seem like the time to go out there and run an election that was fair,” Mr. Bernardo said.

Marc Tracy contributed reporting.

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6) Who’s Profiting From the Coronavirus Crisis?

Amid an economic catastrophe, a few billionaires are still winning.

By William D. Cohan, April 29, 2020

Mr. Cohan is a former investment banker and the author of four books about Wall Street.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/opinion/coronavirus-hedge-funds.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Bill Ackman, chief executive of the hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, made a $2.6 billion profit with an exquisitely timed bet on debt.

Credit...Richard Brian/Reuters

The invisible killer is testing global capitalism as never before.

Some highfliers are getting a long overdue comeuppance. Take, for instance, the Vision Fund, the $100 billion venture capital fund created by Masayoshi Son, a Japanese billionaire whose mantra is “We only live once, so I want to think big.” On April 13, Mr. Son’s conglomerate SoftBank announced it expects to lose $16.7 billion on its Vision Fund portfolio for the year ended March 31, after a string of bad bets on dubious Silicon Valley start-ups.

The Vision Fund invested not just in WeWork, which was a debacle even before the coronavirus outbreak, but also Opendoor, a real-estate start-up; Zume, a restaurant robotics company; Compass, an online real-estate brokerage; and Oyo, an Indian budget hotel chain, all of which have fired or furloughed huge numbers of employees in recent weeks. SoftBank has already written off its $300 million investment in Wag, a dog-walking start-up, and is likely to lose its $2 billion equity investment in OneWeb, a British satellite operator, which filed for bankruptcy protection.

The Vision Fund thrived for as long as it did in part because of a decade of super-low interest rates. Investors desperate for higher yields, like the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, flocked to the Vision Fund because Mr. Son promised them a 7 percent yield on most of what they invested, far higher than could be found investing in, say, Treasury securities. It was the same mentality that attracted other investors to the mountains of risky debt issued in recent years by companies with less-than-stellar credit ratings. (There were $9.6 trillion in U.S. corporate bonds outstanding at the end of 2019, nearly double the amount of a decade earlier.)

This corporate debt bubble has finally burst — another long-awaited reckoning. Companies with too much debt are in an existential struggle. On April 15, Neiman Marcus, the luxury retailer, skipped a $5.7 million interest payment on its outstanding bonds, setting the stage for its inevitable bankruptcy filing. Another large retailer, Macy’s, has hired restructuring advisers. Ford has seen its debt downgraded to junk status, as has Kraft Heinz.

The United States will soon be awash in corporate bankruptcies, which means a world of hurt for creditors, shareholders and employees of overleveraged companies or companies that have found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In fairness, no company could have anticipated the catastrophic effects of the pandemic. But the investors and employees of companies that for years gorged on cheap debt will pay the biggest price. There will be no soft landing for them.

And yet, things are not playing out exactly as one would expect. That’s in large part because of the Federal Reserve. It has intervened into the capital markets in a way that dwarfs what it did in 2008, an intervention that has been so big and so fast that it introduces another wild card into America’s deeply uncertain economic future.

It started on March 23, when the Fed put together an array of loans and other forms of credit, totaling around $4 trillion. It was a necessary move, intended to restore calm and liquidity to the financial markets, which had all but stopped providing much-needed capital to businesses and households. The Fed was acting, as it should, in its essential role as the lender of last resort, which happens when financial markets seize up and the usual sources of capital — such as banks and global investors — disappear. The Fed’s actions allowed capital to begin to flow again, saving some companies and some jobs.

On April 9, the Fed struck again, by providing an additional $2.3 trillion in loans to support the economy, bringing its intervention to more than $6 trillion. For the first time, the Fed said it would also consider buying the bonds of “fallen angels,” companies like Ford and Kraft Heinz that are considered so troubled that their debt is now rated by credit agencies as junk after decades of investment grade ratings.

It also said it would be willing to buy high-yield exchange-traded funds. The Fed had never before agreed to buy such risky securities, giving speculators hope it might be willing to buy anything, including equities. Last August, the Fed held around $3.7 trillion in credit assets on its balance sheet; it now holds more than $6 trillion.

Thanks to the Fed, the debt markets sprung back to life. They had been shut for a month, but then in one week at the end of March, 49 companies issued $107 billion of investment-grade bonds, the single-largest week of issuance on record. Then came a parade of junk bonds: Yum Brands, the parent company of KFC and Pizza Hut, raised $600 million of new debt on March 30. On April 1, the cruise ship company Carnival issued $4 billion of new debt.

The Fed’s actions may have saved some jobs at struggling fast-food chains and cruise ship operators, but they are also warping the financial markets, just as they did in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. By buying junk bonds, the Fed has created a proverbial “moral hazard” for those investors whose risk-taking had gotten out of control but now may not face the consequences for their profligacy.

This problem is revealed most clearly in a spat that has pitted one group of billionaire investors against another. On one side are private-equity firms including Apollo Global Management and the Carlyle Group, which want some of the Paycheck Protection Program bounty for their struggling, overleveraged portfolio companies. This is an outrage, of course. Private-equity firms have more than $1.5 trillion of their own capital that they could use to salvage their losers instead of hoovering up money meant for the less fortunate.

On the other side are people like Howard Marks. He is the co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, one of the largest investors in distressed securities in the world. He made his billions betting that markets will act rationally in challenging times. In recent years, he has been warning that overleveraged companies will fail and that overpriced bonds will return to earth.

In an April 14 letter to his investors, Mr. Marks expressed his ire about the Fed’s moves that rescued such companies. “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Catholicism without hell,” he wrote, recalling an old Wall Street truism. “Markets work best when participants have a healthy fear of loss. It shouldn’t be the role of the Fed or the government to eradicate it.”

Mr. Marks is correct, in theory. Companies and investors that make poor economic decisions should be penalized for their mistakes. The system won’t function properly if, every time there is a major crisis, the bad actors get rescued. The Fed could be inadvertently reinflating another asset bubble right now, although it is comforting that those lucky companies tapping the capital markets are paying investors much higher rates of interest than they have in years. Investors seem to have finally wised up to the meaning of risk.

The Fed’s moves, at least for a while, may have saved the pension funds of firefighters, teachers and police officers — which often buy the high-yield securities issued by risky companies — from far worse losses. If in order to rescue those retirement funds and jobs at some troubled companies, we have to live with the Fed’s moves, then that’s a trade-off worth making. The Fed was created for moments such as this one, and it’s a blessing that it has acted forcefully.

In such times, there are always a few who somehow see trouble coming and find a way to profit from it. Take, for instance, Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager. In mid-February, he started buying insurance on various bond indexes — a bet that the debt bubble would burst — based on his hunch that investors would abandon the riskier securities in those indexes as the pandemic spread from Asia to the West. His $27 million hedge was completed on March 3, and he sold his positions on March 23, the day the Fed announced its first major new intervention, for a profit of $2.6 billion.

Mr. Ackman played the Fed’s moral hazard, betting correctly that until the Fed and the Congress acted, the markets would tank. And that once they did, that the markets would start to recover. (He has since plowed his winnings back into stocks.) For speed and accuracy, Mr. Ackman’s bet may be the single best trade of all time.

For the rest of us, there is more painful uncertainty. Until Americans feel safe — really safe — there isn’t going to be much good news from this economy. And there isn’t a whole lot that Congress, or the Fed, can do about that.

William D. Cohan (@WilliamCohan), a former investment banker, is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of “Four Friends.”

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7) How French Workers Took on Amazon in the Middle of a Pandemic and Won

Yes, it’s possible.

“It was only through worker-led protest and a tough-handed response from courts that the tech behemoth began adjusting its behavior to better meet worker needs. As warehouse employees saw firsthand, Amazon often made improvements after it was pressured to do so.”

By Cole Stangler, April 29, 2020

Mr. Stangler writes about labor and politics in France.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/opinion/amazon-france-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

PARIS — Business is booming at Amazon. With a third of the global population now under stay-at-home orders, stir-crazy shoppers have flooded to the site of the world’s largest retailer, to stream, to download and to place orders for everything from coffee makers to toilet paper. The boost has sent Amazon’s share price soaring by more than 40 percent over the past month — and in the process, fattened the pockets of the company’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, now worth about $140 billion.

But from Staten Island to Piacenza, Italy, amid the constant churn at Amazon’s warehouses, employees have raised concerns over what that means for their health and safety. These questions tend to be the basic ones that one might expect for an employer asking workers to show up during a deadly pandemic: Is there proper protective equipment? Is the job site clean? And are there adequate social-distancing measures in place? Amazon insists the answer is yes to all of the above, though many employees and their unions still insist there’s more work to be done.

But while safety concerns may stretch through Amazon’s sprawling global network of fulfillment centers, arguably nowhere has the company faced more pushback than in France, a country with a long history of worker protest and relatively pro-employee laws. That showdown offers insights that extend well beyond French borders.

As early as March 17, the day France’s national lockdown took effect, Amazon warehouse workers held protests and strikes. The unions that represent them railed against a lack of hand sanitizer and risks of overcrowding, and more than 200 of the company’s roughly 10,000 warehouse employees gave formal notice that they were refusing to work in unsafe conditions. Amid the outcry, national labor inspectors ordered Amazon to address safety hazards found at several of the company’s warehouses.

Then two weeks ago, in response to a separate union complaint, a judge in a Parisian suburb found Amazon still hadn’t done enough to protect workplace safety and ordered the company to limit warehouse activity to certain essential items — food, and hygiene and medical products — until it developed improved health and safety measures with labor unions. Noncompliance would come with a stiff penalty: a 1 million euro (about $1.08 million) fine per day and per violation.

At first, Amazon screamed bloody murder. The ruling was too complex to obey, the company said, before filing an appeal and announcing it would suspend activity at all of its French warehouses until further notice. The head of Amazon in France embarked on a media blitz to defend company safety practices, saying that only a small number of salaried workers were actually participating in the strikes and suggesting that overzealous unions were harming consumers.

But behind the scenes, the company took a different tack, entering detailed discussions with employee representatives about how to improve safety — and in an appeal ruling last week, a judge acknowledged that the company had made changes at several of its warehouses. But she also ruled that Amazon still hadn’t created a companywide evaluation method that could be applied to all of its sites. While she rejected the appeal, the judge also lowered the fine for noncompliance to 100,000 euros (around $108,000) per violation and expanded the range of items the company can distribute until it completes more in-depth safety talks — adding tech, home-office and pet products to the list.

Amazon maintains that the risks of breaking the order’s limits on what it can sell are too high and has not yet said when it plans to reopen warehouses, but workers continue to receive full pay and the company says that it plans to follow the judge’s decision. (Julie Valette, an Amazon spokeswoman, told me that the company is “going to comply” with the court order to consult employee representatives, with talks set to begin in the “coming days.”)

In Amazon’s version of events, nit-picking labor activists conjured up a couple of misguided court rulings — a narrative that fits nicely with Anglo-American stereotypes about doing business in France. But more than anything, the episode shines a light on the benefits of aggressively confronting Amazon: It was only through worker-led protest and a tough-handed response from courts that the tech behemoth began adjusting its behavior to better meet worker needs. As warehouse employees saw firsthand, Amazon often made improvements after it was pressured to do so.

Those simple facts seem all the more important to consider as Amazon looks set to emerge from the pandemic stronger than ever — and perhaps nowhere more so than in the United States, the company’s largest market and employment base, and where labor rights are sorely lacking when compared with the rest of the world’s most advanced economies. Amazon, based in Seattle, has long resisted recognizing unions stateside, let alone discussing safety with them. That hostility to collective action has been put on grim display by a string of firings in recent weeks, from the organizer of a walkout in a New York City warehouse to two employees critical of the company’s climate policies. (Management says they violated internal policies and social-distancing rules.)

Of course, the American legal system differs greatly from those of continental Europe, and in the United States, the mild penalties that come with violating worker rights are often written off as a cost of doing business. But federal authorities do have the power to investigate and fine employers that fail to respect safety obligations, and that doesn’t mean politicians can’t step up to plug other holes. Approving paid-leave requirements could give a boost to those at Amazon and beyond who’d rather stay home from work but can’t afford to do so. In the long run, a system of mandatory nationwide collective bargaining could ensure that companies negotiate directly with workers and take shop-floor concerns into account. After all, the presence of such a framework in France today is ultimately what is forcing Amazon to the table with unions.

No amount of retaliation is likely to kill the mounting tide of activism at Amazon. But as workers continue to speak out about working conditions and a lack of power on the job, regulators and policymakers have important choices to make. Are they going to take employees’ concerns seriously and reflect on ways to embolden them? Or will they surrender workplace authority to an ever-expanding, hyper-ambitious multinational that has a pattern of abusing it?

As the battle in France shows, robust legal protections can complement employee activism to improve workers’ lives and safety. It’s also a reminder that it’s not such a bad thing when powerful corporations complain of mistreatment — that squealing, in fact, is often the sound of progress.

Cole Stangler (@ColeStangler) is a journalist based in Paris who writes about labor and politics.

Credit...Mourad Guichard/Reuters

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8) Chaos and Fear in Latin America’s Prisons as COVID-19 Spreads

By TeleSUR, April 28, 2020

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Terror-in-Latin-Americas-Prisons-as-COVID-19-Spreads--20200428-0020.html

1.5 million inmates are detained across Latin America's facilities/ Photo: EFE

As the coronavirus pandemic is starting to spread across Latin America’s massively overcrowded prisons, putting the lives of tens of thousands at risk, riots have been reported in almost all the region’s countries as inmates say their fundamental rights to safety and protection are being violated.

A riot was reported Monday in the Castro Castro prison in Peru’s capital, Lima, resulting in a fire and the death of three people inside the prison.

The number of people incarcerated in Peru is close to 91,000, according to figures last updated two years ago. Of the country’s 68 severely overcrowded prisons, 23 hold more than 1,200 people, although only eight have such a capacity.

Another disturbance was also reported at the Ancon II prison located on the outskirts of Lima. Inmates rioted to demand medicine and food. They said they are eating only twice a day and are no longer receiving food from their families since visits are restricted, according to local media.

In another prison, the Huamancaca Chico prison in the department of Junin, located in the center of the country, prisoners were asking for COVID-19 tests after two of their fellow inmates died. Police responded by shooting tear-gas canisters.

Peru's prision population is so far the worst-hit in the continent with 613 cases and at least 13 deaths.

In Chile, authorities have confirmed Monday more than 300 COVID-19 cases in the Puente Alto prison in downtown Santiago both among inmates and prison staff. The facility’s 1,100 prisoners are terrorized and have few means to protect themselves as social distancing is impossible in cell blocks.

In Colombia, where prison overcrowding amounts to 51 percent, 213 people contracted the deadly virus and three died so far.

Human rights groups have been warning of the disastrous effects that the COVID-19 pandemic would have on jailed people in that South American nation, which is regularly accused of violating its prisoner’s fundamental rights.

In addition, since the pandemic started, there were at least 23 deaths in prison riots in Colombia not directly due to the virus itself but out of fear of it.

Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez endorsed Monday the house detention solution for common law prisoners after tensions mounted over the past weeks in the country's prisons with several riots and confrontations. Prisoners outside of jails would be controlled with electronic devices, the president said.

“Prisons are a very risky place of human concentration. Contagion and contamination can occur very easily,” he stressed.

In El Salvador, authorities over the weekend crammed prisoners together in prison yards while searching their cells, throwing away distancing measures. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele ordered the security crackdown after more than 20 people were killed Friday and reports suggested the orders came from imprisoned gang leaders.

About 1.5 million inmates are detained in Latin America’s facilities. Because of corruption, intimidation, and inadequate guard staffing, the prisons are often quasi-ruled by prisoners themselves while low budgets also create perfect conditions for the virus to spread. There is often little soap and water.

Throughout the region, the prisoners' demands come down to simply be properly protected from the virus.

Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.org

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Posted by: Bonnie Weinstein <bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com>

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4/28/2020

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 2020

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Veterans Join Call for a Global Ceasefire

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The biggest block from having society in harmony with the universe is the belief in a lie that says it’s not realistic or ￼humanly possible. —Johnny Gould (Follow @tandino415 on Instagram)

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We Call for the Immediate Release of the Political Prisoner and Afrobolivian Leader, Irene Elena Flores Torrez

Who is Elena Flores?

The current situation of women political prisoners

The so-called crimes of Elena Flores

The coup government’s false charges

The coup regime

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The biggest block from having society in harmony with the universe is the belief in a lie that says it’s not realistic or humanly possible. —Johnny Gould (Follow @tandino415 on Instagram)

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