Hold the New York Post accountable

Go to the Colorofchange action site to email the editor and view the cartoon

The New York Post recently published the political cartoon shown here, depicting two white police officers standing over the carcass of a bullet-riddled chimpanzee, with the animal representing the author of the stimulus package.

The decision to run this cartoon was irresponsible at best, and hurtful and malicious at worst. It seems unthinkable that an editor of a newspaper would not understand the history of Black folks being depicted as monkeys and apes or the recent spate of death threats against President Obama. Worse, when confronted, Post editor Col Allan dismissed people's concerns as baseless.

Join us in demanding that The Post issue an apology for the decision and their callousness, and fire the editor who allowed this cartoon to go to print.

Obama's War on Terror

Obama's War on Terror may not be so different from Bush's it turns out. The NYT reported that in recent confirmation testimonies, Obama nominees supported:

*continuing the CIA program that transfers prisoners to other countries without legal rights and also detains terrorist suspects indefinitely without trials even if they were arrested far away from a war zone
*possibly resumming military commision trials
*pressuring allies to release information about alleged US torture practices

For the full article click here

Of course this shouldn't really be that surprising - Obama (and his administration) is (ful)filling a symbolic role and therefore needs to (re)present the hegemonic order as natural and worthy of protection. But it still hurts.

TAKE ACTION NOW!!!

On January 20, 2009 guards in the Special Management Unit (SMU) at the State Correctional [sic] Institution (SCI) in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania assaulted six prisoners, reportedly citing as reasons that these men file grievances against guard misconduct and are engaged in civil litigation against DOC officials.

We are asking that you read the alert, become angry, and act accordingly to help protect the men in the SMU and by extension all others subjected to the normalized white supremacist torture occurring on a daily basis inside prisons in the state of Pennsylvania and throughout the U.S.

FOR THE MEMO AND INFORMATION ABOUT HOW TO TAKE ACTION click here

Undocumented Immigration 101

So here's the basic situation as I understand it
The U.S. government has historically:
- manipulated governments and trade in the region,
- exploited opportunities to use land and bodies from south of the border
- criminalized the bodies that cross the border because of the incentives that big business (supported by the same government) provides for crossing
- accepted taxes from these individuals (for more click here) and
- allowed the U.S. economy to benefit from these workers while simultaneously
- incarcerating, detaining, and deporting any undocumented workers they find

The NYT reported today that undocumented immigrants are actually rebuilding New Orleans for us.. and then being mugged and attacked in the streets. For the full article click here

As Tom Barry writes in Dollars and Sense,

"The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 drastically altered the traditional political economy of immigration. The millions of undocumented immigrants—those who crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas—who were living and working in the United States were no longer simply regarded as a shadow population or as surplus cheap labor. In the public and policy debate, immigrants were increasingly defined as threats to the nation’s security. Categorizing immigrants as national security threats gave the government’s flailing immigration law-enforcement and border- control operations a new unifying logic that has propelled the immigrant crackdown forward.

Responsibility for immigration law-enforcement and border control passed from the Justice Department to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In Congress Democrats and Republicans alike readily supported a vast expansion of the country’s immigration control apparatus—doubling the number of Border Patrol agents and authorizing a tripling of immigrant prison beds.

Today, after the shift in the immigration debate, the $15 billion-plus DHS budget for immigration affairs has fueled an immigrant-crackdown economy that has greatly boosted the already-bloated prison industry. Even now, with the economy imploding, immigrants are currently behind one of the country’s most profitable industries: they are the nation’s fastest growing sector of the U.S. prison population.

Across the country new prisons are hurriedly being constructed to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught each year. State and local governments are vying with each other to attract new immigrant prisons as the foundation of their rural “economic development” plans.

While DHS is driving immigrants from their jobs and homes, U.S. firms in the business of providing prison beds are raking in record profits from the immigrant crackdown. Although only one piece of the broader story of immigration, it’s all a part of the new political economy of immigration."

Click here for the full article The New Political Economy of Immigration

HOW INCARCERATION AFFECTS THE JOB MARKET

From Racewire:

Millions of people leave jails and prisons every year and that number is about to grow. Citing unconstitutional health conditions, a panel of federal judges on Monday told the state of California to reduce prison overcrowding by 55,000 people, about a third of the total state prison population, over the next three years.

If the ruling holds up to appeal, tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, could return to their communities. {…}

The White House has appropriately put creating and saving jobs at the center of the stimulus plan. But for people with criminal records, the prospects of inclusion in the national recovery are dismal. It’s not enough to create a job when a quick criminal background check will result in so many people losing it or not getting it at all. Those with prior convictions will be excluded from the game before the starting whistle sounds.

Communities of color experience higher rates of joblessness. This is due in part to the damning mix of the stigma of having a criminal record, the assumption that ex-prisoners can never redeem themselves, the ensuing ban on public employment for people with felony convictions and the practice of employers doing background checks.

According to Princeton sociologist Devah Pager, joblessness among former prisoners after a year is somewhere around 75 percent -- three times the level among the same population before incarceration. The trend toward never-ending punishment, even after people have served their time, infects communities of color, especially Black people, with particular venom.

Consider, for example, the subprime mortgage crisis. It could not have occurred without a whole population of people of color whose economic and political vulnerability made them easy targets for exploitative loan products, which eventually spread out to other homeowners and took down the entire mortgage industry. And that kind of inequity is growing. In January Black and Latino unemployment was 12.6 and 9.7 percent respectively, compared to 6.9 percent for whites. Black and Latino poverty is close to 3 times that of whites. To get this economy moving again, we need people working, spending and paying taxes.

Fixing inequity is a prerequisite for constructing a healthy and just economy. As historians tell us, massive inequity preceded and contributed to the Great Depression. Removing concrete barriers to employment is one step in that direction. As we are implementing this stimulus plan, we should at the very least expunge the records of people with non-violent convictions, as the state of Illinois did in 2005. We should also severely limit employers’ rights to conduct criminal background checks, especially in situations like Vincent’s, whose employer routinely used them to keep the workforce temporary and insecure.

Vincent’s story:


For more about just jobs and private- versus public-sector impacts on poverty wages, read here

Where are your Valentine's Day flowers grown?

V-Day is also a very important day for Israeli exports because many of the flowers sold in (British) supermarkets and corner shops come from Israel and the Occupied Territories. Maybe it's the same where you live?

If you care about Israeli war crimes in Gaza, if you disagree with Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories, if you wish to live in a world without Apartheid... refuse to buy Israeli flowers on St. Valentine's Day.

When it comes to flowers, it isn't enough just to check for a Produce of Israel label or a barcode starting '7 29'. Israel sends many of its flowers to Holland for repackaging and relabelling. Support your local producers... buy locally-grown flowers.

The demonstration shown in this video took place last Saturday outside the premises of Carmel Agrexco. Carmel Agrexco is a 50%-state owned Israeli company at the heart of Israel's colonisation and exploitation of Palestinian land. It exports fresh fruit, vegetables and herbs from Israel and the Occupied Territories and accounts for 70% of exports of fresh produce from occupied Palestine. Britain takes 60% of its exports to Europe and Agrexco is the largest importer of illegal settlement goods into the UK, where it trades under the Carmel, Coral and Jaffa brand names.

Flowers exported by Agrexco are grown in illegal settlements on Palestinian land and so constitute illegally traded goods. Many Palestinians refuse to work with Agrexco. Thousands of others, though, are compelled by the complete strangulation of Palestinian agriculture resulting from the Israeli occupation to work packing goods for export in packing houses on land forcibly taken from their communities by Israeli settlers. They are paid as little as 30 shekels (£4) a day and have no sickpay, holiday pay, rights to unionise or contracts. Children are often employed on these settlements. Many of these Palestinian workers have called on the international community to boycott and campaign against Carmel Agrexco.

A regular picket is to be found outside Agrexco's premises in the UK. The aim of the picket is to expose its complicity in murder, theft and damage of occupied land, collective punishment, Apartheid, ethnic cleansing and other breaches of International Law to public scrutiny. A group of 15 women locked themselves to the gates of Carmel Agrexco to stop a delivery of Valentine's roses.

For the video:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ectomorfo/3274316685/

Judges Plead Guilty to Jailing Youths for Profit

You can't make this shit up. And just when I was feeling optimistic...

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

My thoughts exactly on the entire scandal that is the PIC. The entire system needs to be abolished. Prison abolition, please. Now.