May 8, 20

original HERE.. PLEASE DONATE to IGD .. shared with thanks https://itsgoingdown.org/breakout-dispatches-on-resistance-to-the-pandemic-inside-prison-walls- 3,048 views

As we enter week 14 of the pandemic, attitudes are starting to shift; the shock is wearing off and many of us are hunkering down for the long-haul. Prisoner resistance to the pandemic has not slowed, nor has the commitment of those outside the walls – but the tone has shifted. While our first two updates heralded calls to #FreeThemAll before it was too late – for many, that time has passed. Our updates and timelines are filling with homages to fallen comrades; obituaries for the bodies contained and the spirits now free.

Some states have begun the process of “re-opening” their economies, with disastrous results as the US as a whole is careening towards a death toll of unimaginable numbers. The health care system is taxed, the unemployment system is a bloated mess; ready to burst at any moment, and the insurgent far-Right has begun clamoring for a return to a new normal that will ensure a continued wave of COVID-19 related deaths.

Entire units are put on quarantine isolation for weeks at a time while testing inside remains virtually non-existent. And many have been thrown into isolation as punishment for speaking to the media, or sending information out about conditions inside.

With this reality in mind, it’s no surprise that so many Department of Corrections bureaucrats have completely ignored the pleas from families and prisoners themselves – or even public policy recommendations. The level of depravity that the State has shown in an effort to keep those locked up behind bars has been shocking. Moreover, in the face of possible coronavirus outbreaks, isolation has become a main weapon in the DOC arsenal. Many people inside have been faced with the unthinkable reality of being thrown into prolonged isolation, without access to the outside world or their belongings, simply if they dare to report possible symptoms to DOC staff. In this way, entire units are put on quarantine isolation for weeks at a time while testing inside remains virtually non-existent. And many have been thrown into isolation as punishment for speaking to the media, or sending information out about conditions inside.

In California, the Bureau of Prisons went so far as to take away email and phone access to nearly 4,000 people in an effort to ‘stop the spread of COVID-19.’ This obviously sloppy measure was done at the expense of people having access to basic communication with their loved ones and supporters outside. These facility wide gag orders will become commonplace as both the resistance inside and outside ratchets up along with the infection rates.

“People Shouldn’t Have to Die Like This”

On April 1^st, Andrea Circle Bear gave birth via C-section while on a ventilator in a local hospital in Texas. On April 28^th she became the 29^th person in federal custody to die of COVID-19, her baby survived – but out of “respect for the family” the BOP refuses to release information on the baby’s condition or whereabouts. The news of her death shocked and saddened not only the US abolitionist movement, but the world. Even with documented pre-exisiting conditions and several months into her pregnancy, Circle Bear was not eligible for one of the few slots allocated by the BOP for “priority release.”

Continue reading “BreakOut: Dispatches on Resistance to Pandemic In Prison”

Turkey. May 7, 2020. Thousands pay tribute to Ibrahim Gökçek, a musician of the Grup Yorum band, who was on death fast for 323 days and has passed away earlier today.

Originally published by ANF News.

Ibrahim Gökçek, bassist of the socialist band Grup Yorum, led a death fast protest for 323 days in protest at the state repression against his group. With the protest, the 39-year-old musician demanded the lifting of the concert ban of Grup Yorum, an end to the police raids against the Idil cultural centre, the release of all imprisoned band members and the cessation of all legal proceedings.

https://twitter.com/Gipsi0/status/1258448987964813313

The musician ended his death fast on the 323rd day, on May 5, after Turkish officials agreed for a talk with the band for permission to make concerts.

After ending the fast, Gökçek was taken under treatment in the intensive care unit of Reyap Istanbul Hospital in the Esenyurt district. Gökçek was connected to respirator after a deterioration of his condition last night. His heart has stopped at around 1 pm today.

Cenazeye saygınız yok! pic.twitter.com/LeLL0elgEg

— Grup Yorum (@GrupYorum85) May 8, 2020

Continue reading “#Turkey: 3rd dead Hunger Striker of #GrupYorum, still banned by Erdogan. Gökçek is dead!!”

There is strong evidence to suggest that both Juan Guaidó and the U.S. government were intimately involved in a botched weekend insurrection.

Who else would pay millions to yet again attack this innocent country it has decimated with sanctions, killing tens of thousands another evil war crime and a blatantly criminal attempt to steal it’s resources.?

from Covert Action Magazine by Alan Macleod

Sunday, May 3, 2020. Interior Minister Nestor Reverol said on state televisionthat security forces overcame an armed maritime incursion with speedboats from neighboring Colombia. Eight attackers were killed and others detained. [Source: AP Photo/Matias Delacroix]

UPDATED: Trump Bodyguard Arrested By Venezuelan Authorities

UPDATE: One of the people arrested by Venezuelan authorities was Luke Denman, a mercenaries with American citizenship. Footage shows that Denman, along with his boss and former colleague Jordan Goodro ensured the safety of US President Donald Trump at a political event.

Later Denman claimed on TV that the aim of the invasion was to kidnap President Maduro and take him to the US.

After the photos began to appear in the media of SilverCorp PMC’s Director Jordan Goodro and his activities to ensure the safety of US President Donald Trump, the ambiguous photos disappeared from the company’s accounts on social networks.

On May 4^th, the Venezuelan authorities foiled a second “terrorist infiltration” attempt, capturing 8 suspects.

Continue reading “Operation GEDEON: New U.S. War Crime a Fiasco as Venezuela Invasion Flops”

The Gulf coast 0f Louisiana and Texas has the world’s greatest concentration of fossil fuel plants, built and operated as National priority with scant attention to human or environmental health.

Now, even as grass roots victims are fighting back, the monstrous industries are doubling in size, with dozens of new fracking and liquid gas pipelines being laid, gigantic LNG export plants built, and a huge new plastics industry underway as the dirt cheap fuels from the West Texas field and elsewhere arrive.

As coronavirus ravages Louisiana, ‘cancer alley’ residents haven’t given up the fight against polluters

• from Grist, shared with thanks (illustrations added)
• by Rachel Ramire

Four years ago, Sharon Lavigne was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis. Blood tests revealed that she had aluminum inside her body.

Lavigne has lived all her life in St. James Parish, which sits on an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that connects New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Since the 1980s, it’s been known as “cancer alley.”

According to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, seven out of 10 U.S. census tracts with the nation’s highest cancer risks are located in this corridor, which is already home to more than 150 chemical plants and refineries. When she got her diagnosis, Lavigne didn’t think any of this might be related to her failing health, or that of so many of her friends and neighbors.

“That should’ve been my wake-up call,” Lavigne, 67, told Grist. “But I was teaching in school, uninterested with what’s going on. I was only interested in my job, going home, resting, and taking care of my children and grandchildren. That all changed when I found out that a new plant was coming.”

Continue reading “As virus ravages Louisiana, ‘Cancer Alley’ residents Fight Back”

Dr Lisa McKenzie ..via rt.com.. shared with thanks

Dr Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic. She grew up in a coal-mining town in Notts and became politicized through the 1984 miners’ strike with her family. Dr McKenzie lectures in sociology at the University of Durham and is the author of ‘Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain.’ She’s a political activist, writer and thinker. .on Twitter @redrumlisa.

The coronavirus is killing poor people at twice the rate of better-off people, and exposing the appalling inequalities and injustice of our broken system. We need a new revolt, to bring about real change.

“Things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all goods are held in common, and until there will be neither serfs nor gentlemen, and we shall be equal” said the Priest John Ball, during his speech before marching into London with Watt Tyler during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the first great popular rebellion in UK history. 

Continue reading “Black Death led to the Peasants’ Revolt. Time we modern peasants rebelled over Covid-19”

By SIGC-FAGC on May 2, 2020 translation @thefreeonline

Preamble

The coronavirus lockdown has stopped tourism in the Canaries, and left tens of thousands of famies with zero income and high rents overdue.(Canarias Semanal) Below is a Report by an anarchist union on ongoing rent strikes and survival struggles.

“The rent strike is a historic milestone, which has not been going on with this force for almost a century. It is the first time since then that a large group of people simultaneously questions a modern taboo’s: the capitalist institution of income”.

In Gran Canaria, we must start from the idea that a rent strike was not strange to us in certain militant spaces. Since the Anarchist Federation of Gran Canaria (FAGC) went into housing (2012), it did so looking for and nourishing itself on references from the past, and those references almost always spoke of tenant strikes: Baracaldo (1905), Buenos Aires (1907), Glasgow (1915), New York (1918), Seville (1919), Veracruz (1922), Santiago de Chile and Valparaíso (1925), Barcelona (1931) Santa Cruz de Tenerife (1933), and this to mention only the best known of the first half of the 20th century

In 2015 and 2016, the FAGC participated in two sets of rent strikes in the capital of Gran Canaria in two blocks of vertically owned houses, in order to obtain a reduction in rent. The first was won instantly when declaring itself and the second only the next day. We were thus shown, empirically, that the rent strike is a formidable weapon, requiring almost no resources and allowing strikers, if they wanted to win, to endow what they previously took for a “personal problem” with a collective meaning.

The rent strike also had another advantage: in a situation of involuntary non-payment, the strike could turn insolvency into an act of political demand and social struggle. The idea was also brought to us indirectly by the experience of a colleague who, without any recourse, decided to go on a hunger strike: since she was not going to eat anyway, she could at least give political content to her difficult situation.

The same logic articulated throughout history the aforementioned tenant strikes: when you cannot pay and there is little to lose, the possibility of organizing with others and coordinating non-payment becomes a reality even when there is not the slightest politicization previously.

Continue reading “Canary Isles : story and balance after 30 days of Rent Strike. English/Spanish”