Author of “I Am Not a Tractor” pens thoughtful op/ed on lessons from Fair Food movement for #MeToo, “#MarchForOurLives” movements…
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Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Author of “I Am Not a Tractor” pens thoughtful op/ed on lessons from Fair Food movement for #MeToo, “#MarchForOurLives” movements… Coalition of Immokalee Workers
A View From The Left -LAPD Targets Grieving Aunt, BLM Activist Hands Off Sheila Hines-Brim and Melina Abdullah!
Workers Vanguard No. 1136
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29 June 2018
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LAPD Targets Grieving Aunt, BLM Activist
Hands Off Sheila Hines-Brim and Melina Abdullah!
LOS ANGELES—“That’s Wakiesha!” With these words, Sheila Hines-Brim threw the ashes of her niece, Wakiesha Wilson, who died in police custody, at LAPD chief Charlie Beck at a Police Commission meeting on May 8. In response to Hines-Brim’s defiant act, Beck ordered her forcibly removed from the meeting and arrested. As she was being hauled out by police, Melina Abdullah, professor and chair of Pan-African Studies at Cal State University L.A. and a well-known organizer of Black Lives Matter (BLM) Los Angeles, arrived at the meeting. Abdullah asked other attendees to film the police’s brutal manhandling of Wakiesha’s aunt, after which a cop yelled out “Arrest Melina!”
Both Hines-Brim and Abdullah were charged with suspicion of misdemeanor battery on a police officer and ordered to post $20,000 bail each. Outrageously, Beck obtained a temporary restraining order against Hines-Brim on May 17, branding her a dangerous criminal. Although the charges were not pursued against the two women at their June 1 court hearing, the prosecutor’s office can still do so anytime within a year. We demand: Drop the charges now!
Wakiesha Wilson, a 36-year-old black mother, was arrested in the early morning hours of 26 March 2016 on suspicion of felony battery and booked into the Metropolitan Correction Center. Some 24 hours later, she was dead. Demonstrating the cops’ contempt for black lives, Wilson’s family was not even informed. When they arrived in court for Wilson’s arraignment on March 29, all they learned was that she would not be appearing. It was only the next day that an LAPD supervisor told Wilson’s mother, Lisa Hines, to contact the coroner, who stated that Wilson had hanged herself three days before.
Although the cops claim that Wakiesha committed suicide, the family has been adamant that she was upbeat when they talked to her only 90 minutes before her death and that they had made plans to call again later that day during the family Easter celebration. Wilson was moved to an isolation cell, itself a violation of jail policy. An LAPD report states that 21 crucial minutes were missing from the jail surveillance videotape. In addition, several minutes elapsed between the time Wilson was observed by two guards slumped on the floor of her cell and when CPR was administered. Late last year, LAPD jailer Reaunna Bratton was fired for failing to render immediate medical aid to Wilson—a fact that the cops tried to cover up. Wilson’s mother filed a $35 million suit against the city, which eventually agreed to pay $298,000 to make the claim go away.
Whatever the exact circumstances of Wilson’s death, one thing is clear: the LAPD’s story stinks. State officials in Texas similarly claimed that black activist Sandra Bland, who in 2015 was found hanging in a county jail cell after being assaulted and arrested by a state trooper, had committed suicide. These are far from the only examples.
According to a 2014 article in Mother Jones, based on a rough calculation of Justice Department statistics, “black people were four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.” More recently, a study of “Fatal Interactions with Police” conducted at Washington University in St. Louis found that 60 percent of black women killed by the cops were unarmed. As we wrote in “The Police Are Guilty” (WV No. 1072, 7 August 2015) following Sandra Bland’s death, cop terror against black people “is not an ‘excess’; it’s a calculated program. It is the way U.S. capitalism, which is built on the bedrock of black oppression, resolves the contradiction between the assertion of some formal equal rights and the forcible segregation of the bulk of the black population at the bottom of society.”
LAPD: Deadly Enemy
of Black People, Latinos
For decades the LAPD was synonymous with an all-out police war against black people, Latinos and the poor. Today, police chief Charlie Beck is lionized in the media and by local politicians as having ushered in a new era of enlightened policing. In fact, Beck won his spurs in the 1980s and ’90s under LAPD chief Daryl “Choke Hold” Gates as part of the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) unit. This “war on gangs” (read: black and Latino youth) unleashed the notoriously brutal and corrupt Ramparts division. Scores of cops from Beck’s own unit were implicated in shootings, beatings, frame-ups and more.
Now Beck, who was appointed in 2009 by Democratic Party mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to “clean up” the LAPD, is heralded for building “trusting relationships” with communities. That’s not the story out on the streets, where the LAPD has killed more people than any other police department for several years running. To name but a few: Manuel Jamines, a 37-year-old Mayan day laborer from Guatemala, executed by a cop in 2010, his killing saluted by Villaraigosa as an act of bravery; Ezell Ford, a 25-year-old black man with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, shot down in 2014; a few months later Charly “Africa” Keunang, an unarmed homeless black immigrant, savagely beaten and then fatally shot on a crowded Skid Row sidewalk. In 2017, police snipers killed a man in Sunland from a helicopter, a first for this gang of violent marauders.
For the last two years, BLM activists in Los Angeles have protested at weekly Police Commission meetings together with Wakiesha Wilson’s family. Across the country hundreds of BLM protesters have been arrested and targeted for police surveillance and repression for their opposition to cop terror. Yet for all their courage and dedication, the demands of BLM do not challenge the system of racist American capitalism, which is the root cause of cop terror. Instead, their demands are based on the liberal strategy of pressuring the capitalist rulers to either reform or abolish their police thugs.
In L.A., where BLM had been demanding that Beck be fired as top cop, Melina Abdullah cheered his announcement of early retirement (scheduled for June 27) by tweeting, “Thank you to our partners who stood with us to make this happen.” The whole history of the LAPD demonstrates that it doesn’t matter who’s the police chief, nor if the cops are black, white or Latino. The police are accountable only to their capitalist masters. Nor is the bourgeoisie going to divert funds from the LAPD to “things that actually make communities safe,” such as housing for the homeless, mental health resources and after-school programs, as Abdullah called for on May 9 on Good Day LA. The very conditions of destitution faced by millions in America—homelessness, poverty, starvation, disease—are the product of a system based on production for profit and maintained by the police as well as the military, courts and prisons.
In the U.S., these armed shock troops defend a capitalist system rooted in the oppression of black people stemming from the days of chattel slavery. Los Angeles has always been a viciously segregated city. According to the 2010 census, 60 percent of black Angelenos lived in areas with few whites, the legacy of segregationist covenants and racist housing policy from the local to the federal level. At the same time, black people, roughly 10 percent of the city’s population, made up 35 percent of the homeless. Next to black people—in terms of per capita and household income, education and unemployment—is the vast Latino populations in Southern California. In 2017, nearly 20 percent of all Latino families in L.A. County lived in poverty.
To reap the trillions they amass through the exploitation of labor, the capitalist rulers set workers against each other—white against black and Latino, native-born against foreign-born. That they get away with it is in large part thanks to the trade-union misleaders, who preach the lie that the interests of the workers are tied to the profitability of U.S. capitalism. To this end, they chain the workers to their class enemy, centrally through the Democratic Party, and embrace the killer cops as union brothers and sisters. The LAPD jailer implicated in Wakiesha Wilson’s death was a member of the Service Employees International Union Local 721, whose leadership defended her against being fired. All cops, prison and security guards—the sworn enemies of workers and the oppressed—should be kicked out of the unions!
The working class, whose labor keeps the wheels of profit turning, is the only force with the social power and objective interest to wage a struggle against the exploitation, racial oppression and all-sided misery of capitalist class rule. Black and Latino workers are a crucial part of the L.A. union movement and represent a bridge between labor and the ghettos and barrios. Many of these unionists, their families, friends and co-workers have had their own experience with the LAPD and can help inculcate into the working class the understanding that the cops are not allies but enemies of labor.
Marxists seek to advance this consciousness as part of the fight to educate the working class that it needs its own party organized independently of the capitalists, their state and their political parties. We struggle to break the working class from all political representatives of the capitalist class—Democratic, Republican and Green—as a vital component of the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party. Such a party will fight to lead a proletarian revolution that will smash the capitalist state and rip the productive forces away from the bourgeoisie, a step toward establishing a centrally planned economy that serves the interests of the working class and oppressed.
On 1943 Anti-Mexican “Zoot Suit” Riots (Quote of the Week) This June marks the 75th anniversary of anti-Mexican (and anti-black) riots in Los Angeles, dubbed the “Zoot Suit” riots by the bourgeois press.
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From The Partisan Defense Committee-Nina Droz Sentenced—Free Her Now! (Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
Workers Vanguard No. 1136
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29 June 2018
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The following article appeared under the Partisan Defense Committee's Class-Struggle Defense Notes masthead in the print version of this issue of Workers Vanguard. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.
Nina Droz Sentenced—Free Her Now!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
On June 12, Puerto Rican activist Nina Alejandra Droz Franco was hit with 37 months in prison on trumped-up federal charges of conspiracy to start a fire near the Banco Popular building in San Juan during the May Day national work stoppage and mass protests that rocked Puerto Rico in 2017. Having already served more than a year in prison as she awaited sentencing, Droz now faces another two years behind bars.
Droz initially faced charges of “malicious use of fire” and “conspiracy.” She took a plea deal on the lesser charge of conspiracy and gave up her right to appeal to avoid a sentence that could carry up to 30 years in prison. According to the U.S. rulers, since the Banco Popular building is used for “interstate commerce,” Droz had committed a federal crime. Nina is innocent. She was targeted for her political activism against the management board imposed by the Obama administration in 2016—known as the “junta”—which has enforced savage austerity on the population.
In Puerto Rico, Droz has become a symbol of the crackdown on protesters by the U.S. government and its Puerto Rican lackeys. Her frame-up and cruel treatment are meant to send a chilling message to all those engaging in struggle against job and pension cuts, school closures, lack of infrastructure and overall starvation measures. These struggles have continued in the wake of the destruction of last year’s Hurricane MarÃa and the criminal neglect of the U.S. colonial overlords, which, according to a recent Harvard study, left some 4,600 dead.
During her sentencing hearing, Droz bravely spoke about the conditions of the women in the prison where she had been locked up. After the hurricane, the cells were overheated and had no ventilation; women could not shower for days and were told to drink toilet water if they were thirsty.
Since her arrest, Droz has been the victim of abuse by prison authorities, including being denied medication and put in solitary confinement twice, including for 13 days in the Federal Detention Center, in Tallahassee, Florida, where she endured separation from her family and supporters. Droz was sent to solitary confinement in Florida because of her advocacy on behalf of prisoners with hepatitis C, HIV, diabetes and cancer who were being denied medical care.
Notably, the FMPR teachers union has taken up the case of Nina Droz. During this year’s May Day national work stoppage, they and others demanded her freedom. FMPR teachers and University of Puerto Rico students have themselves been victims of violent police repression (see “Puerto Rico May Day: Cops Attack Demonstrators,” WV No. 1134, 18 May). Protesters arrested that day still face charges. Hands off May Day protesters!
The real criminals are the U.S. imperialists who have bloodily repressed independence fighters for decades and kept Puerto Rico subjugated as their colony. We oppose the starvation measures imposed by the colonial masters and enforced by the capitalist government of Puerto Rico. The case of Nina Droz captures well their desire to suppress all dissent. It is in the interest of the multiracial U.S. working class to demand freedom for Nina Droz, call to cancel Puerto Rico’s debt and stand for Puerto Rico’s right to independence.
From The Partisan Defense Committee Free All the MOVE Prisoners! Debbie Africa Paroled (Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
Workers Vanguard No. 1136
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29 June 2018
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The following article appeared under the Partisan Defense Committee's Class-Struggle Defense Notes masthead in the print version of this issue of Workers Vanguard. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.
Free All the MOVE Prisoners!
Debbie Africa Paroled
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
On June 16, MOVE member Debbie Sims Africa was released on parole from Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution Cambridge Springs. She is the first of the MOVE 9 to be released after they were incarcerated in 1978, sentenced to terms of 30 to 100 years for the killing of a Philadelphia police officer during the 1978 cop siege of MOVE’s Powelton Village home. Two other MOVE prisoners, Janine and Janet Africa, were up for parole with Debbie, but were denied. “I am happy to finally be home with my family,” said Debbie, “but Janet, Janine and the rest of the MOVE 9 are still in prison, in the same situation that I was in and they deserve parole too.” For the immediate, unconditional release of all the MOVE prisoners!
From its appearance in the early 1970s proclaiming the right of armed self-defense, the predominantly black, radical back-to-nature MOVE commune was met with vicious cop terror. Debbie’s release comes just two months before the 40th anniversary of the 8 August 1978 police attack on MOVE. After a months-long siege, an army of nearly 600 cops surrounded the MOVE house to evict its defenseless residents. The police unleashed a fusillade of gunfire and then stormed the home. One police officer, James Ramp, was killed in the cops’ own cross fire. At least eight witnesses testified that no gunshots came from the MOVE house, and no fingerprints of any MOVE member were found on the weapons supposedly recovered from their home. Despite this evidence of their innocence, six MOVE members remain in Pennsylvania’s dungeons nearly 40 years later. Merle and Phil Africa have already died in prison hellholes.
On 13 May 1985, the MOVE prisoners watched in horror from their cells as the Philadelphia police under black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, in league with the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, dropped a high-powered explosive bomb on MOVE’s Osage Avenue home. Eleven people, including five children, were burned to death and an entire black neighborhood was left in smoldering ruins. For the “crime” of being the sole adult survivor of the bombing, Ramona Africa was sentenced to 7 years and served every day. This coordinated act of racist state murder must never be forgotten.
Until Debbie’s release, the MOVE prisoners had been denied their freedom time and again since becoming eligible for parole in 2008. But despite persistent persecution and harassment, the surviving MOVE members remain strong and outspoken, steadfast fighters not only for their own freedom but also for the freedom of others, not least political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a longtime MOVE supporter.
In once again denying parole to Janet and Janine Africa, the parole board cited their “lack of remorse.” This is a common basis for denying parole to those who have been falsely convicted. Having committed no crime, the imprisoned MOVE members have nothing to show “remorse” for. Although the office of Philadelphia’s new district attorney reportedly sent letters saying that Janet and Janine “will not pose a threat to the Philadelphia community,” the parole board cited the “negative recommendation” of a prior prosecuting attorney as another basis for denying their release.
At the time of the 1978 cop attack, Debbie was just 22, the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, Michelle, and eight months pregnant. Her son, Michael Jr., was born in prison and taken from her after just three days. “After being born in jail and never being with my mom or dad, I’m happy to be with my mom at home for the first time ever in almost forty years. But my family is still incomplete because my dad is still in prison,” said Mike Africa Jr. His father, Michael Africa Sr., is a MOVE prisoner who is up for parole in September.
The MOVE 9 were among the first activists supported by the class-war prisoner stipend program of the Partisan Defense Committee. The sinister web of police terror and frame-ups unleashed against them and Mumia Abu-Jamal is no aberration. Suppressing political dissent as well as terrorizing the besieged black and Latino populations is precisely the job the cops are paid to do as enforcers of the racist capitalist order. As Workers Vanguard underlined in “Free Ramona Africa and All MOVE Prisoners!” (WV No. 396, 31 Jan. 1986), “Defense of all the MOVE prisoners is an elementary duty for every working-class organization.” It will take a workers revolution to put the capitalist state’s machinery of torture and death out of business once and for all.
A View From The Left-Ruthless Trump, Hypocritical Democrats No Detentions! Full Citizenship Rights for Immigrants!
Workers Vanguard No. 1136
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29 June 2018
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Ruthless Trump, Hypocritical Democrats
No Detentions! Full Citizenship Rights for Immigrants!
The sight and sound of terrified children thrown into wire cages and separated from their parents by heavily militarized border police and I.C.E. agents have evoked such widespread horror and outrage that even the Tweeter-in-Chief feigned retreat. Trump signed an executive order on June 20 that allows families to be jailed together—indefinitely. Immigrants and asylum-seekers, mainly from Central America, are being disappeared in the vast archipelago of concentration camps called “immigrant detention centers,” which mushroomed under Barack Obama.
Democrats cynically rail that Trump’s executive order overturns the 1997 Flores settlement, which prohibits the federal government from detaining immigrant children for more than 20 days. While a June 24 Trump tweet called for “immediate” deportation “with no Judges or Court Cases,” Obama—after being prevented from using indefinite detention—used Flores to carry out fast-track expulsions of immigrants without due process. He deported a record 2.5 million people. This is the immediate precedent for the Trump administration’s kidnapping of over 2,000 children since May and criminalizing parents as “smugglers” for bringing their kids with them across the border.
The extreme poverty of life under the jackboot of U.S. neocolonial subjugation compels Latin American families to risk everything in the dangerous trek to the U.S. border. Marco Antonio Muñoz, a 39-year-old Honduran man who requested asylum at the border and was then separated from his family, committed suicide in a Texas jail last month, exemplifying the desperation faced by immigrants.
In solidarity, some activists have organized “Occupy I.C.E” protests, attempting to stop deportations by blocking I.C.E. buses transporting immigrants as well as access to I.C.E. facilities. What is necessary is that the American labor movement mobilize in opposition to the capitalist ruling class, which exploits workers at home, to stop the deportations and fight for full citizenship rights for all those who have made it here. While a number of heavily minority union locals have rightly mobilized to defend their immigrant members and their families from deportation, the bitter truth is that the union movement is crippled by a flag-waving leadership committed to upholding the American capitalist order. The protectionist cry of “American jobs for American workers” pushed by the AFL-CIO tops encourages anti-immigrant bigotry. The bureaucrats’ support for the Democratic Party serves to tie working people, including union activists fighting for immigrant rights, to the other party of racist U.S. capitalism.
Immigrants have been rounded up and disappeared in the biggest workplace raids in years. I.C.E. agents blocked exits and aimed guns at 97 workers in a Tennessee meatpacking plant; another 114 were rounded up at an Ohio landscaping company. To their credit, American Airlines flight attendants broke the story about terrified children, separated from their parents, being loaded onto their planes and posted on Facebook that they refuse to be complicit in such actions again. As a result, several airline bosses (who have lucrative contracts with the government for precisely this kind of dirty work) announced that their companies would no longer fly separated children. Meanwhile the misleaders of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA told these workers with guts and compassion to hush up, stay off social media and file “incident reports” with the union.
Driven by visceral anger against Trump’s anti-immigrant barbarism, many working people, young activists and others are planning to attend nationwide protests on June 30. But the aim of the protest organizers and union tops is to contain growing outrage and deflect it back to the dead end of supporting the Democratic Party, which is cynically manipulating sympathy for immigrant children to boost its own fortunes in the upcoming midterm elections. Trump’s Republican Party revels in overtly whipping up white-supremacist anti-immigrant fear, loathing and violence, just as George W. Bush did against Muslims after 9/11. Continuing that tradition, the Supreme Court on June 26 upheld Trump’s racist anti-Muslim ban.
The Democrats cry crocodile tears while carrying out fundamentally the same policies. They too targeted immigrants as terrorists and criminals, ripped up democratic rights and beefed up the machinery of state repression; rather than banning Muslims from entering the country, Democrats like Obama bomb them in the Near East, Africa and Asia. Before Trump’s predecessor served as Deporter-in-Chief, Bill Clinton launched “Operation Gatekeeper” to militarize the border and escalate deportations.
Manufacturing threats from abroad is a timeworn method to deflect domestic discontent and inculcate conformity through patriotic gore. This invention of a foreign threat is backed up briskly with policing at home. Nothing binds the oppressed within a nation to their rulers quite as effectively as a campaign for law and order against a criminal “other” who must be obliterated.
The granddaddy of Democratic Party liberals, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, interned Japanese Americans in concentration camps and refused U.S. entry to Jewish refugees (including children) fleeing Nazi Germany. FDR’s mythologized New Deal was a pact with racist Southern Dixiecrats that explicitly excluded the predominantly black and Latino agricultural labor force from the right to form unions or get Social Security benefits and exempted agribusiness from child labor laws. Today, nearly half a million migrant children, some as young as nine years old, still legally slave in the fields. The Democrats won’t even whisper “save these children” because, as a capitalist party, their business is maximizing the exploitation of labor for profit. As for Trump Republicans, apparently the only “children” with rights are unborn fertilized eggs.
Trump’s lying equation of Mexicans with criminals is rhetoric intended to mobilize his base and fan the flames of white supremacy. On June 22, Trump hosted a White House dinner for “Angel Families” and ghoulishly autographed photos of dead children supposedly killed by immigrants. Even naturalized U.S. citizens are in the government’s crosshairs. An ominous task force set up by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service is charged with identifying foreign-born Americans who will be stripped of their citizenship if any irregularity is found in their paperwork.
Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III quoted Romans 13:1 from the Bible in defense of child separation, asserting that the law must be obeyed “for there is no authority except that which God has established.” It was certainly not lost on this walking monument to the Confederacy that this was the same Bible verse cited by slaveowners against abolitionists in defense of black chattel slavery, the bedrock of American capitalism. Sessions also stated that the machinery of death in the Nazi camps was merely for “keeping the Jews from leaving the country,” equating the camps where twelve million Jews, Gypsies, communists, gays and others were exterminated with immigration policy.
Democrats and liberals denounce Trump’s child separation policy as “un-American.” In fact, it’s as American as apple pie. Black families have been ripped apart for hundreds of years, from slaves sold downriver from their spouses and children to the mass incarceration of black men today. This country was founded on the near obliteration of the indigenous population, their history, culture and very identity. The U.S. government systematically separated Native American children from their families, stripped them of their names and suppressed their right to speak their language.
U.S. imperialism extends its reach throughout the planet and, as its economic needs demand, brings new sources of cheap labor into the bottom of the proletariat. The capitalists use anti-immigrant chauvinism and anti-black racism to obscure who the workers’ enemies are. The aim is to drive down wages and benefits and degrade working conditions for all working people. This is how the capitalist system divides the working class into different strata while also creating its own gravedigger: the proletariat. Immigrants are not just victims. They form a key and vibrant component of the multiracial U.S. working class, and often bring with them an understanding of the depredations of U.S. imperialism in their homelands, as well as experience in hard-fought class battles. The struggle to mobilize the labor movement in defense of immigrants must be seen as part of the fight to forge a class-struggle leadership of the unions committed to the understanding that workers and capitalists share no common interests.
Today anti-immigrant bigotry defines racist and rightist politics not only in the U.S. but throughout Europe and elsewhere, and it is an acid test for the workers movement and left. The Spartacist League/U.S., section of the International Communist League, fights against deportations and for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Our revolutionary internationalist program and commitment to forge a revolutionary workers party—70 percent black, Latino and other minorities—that will fight for a socialist future is truly America’s last, best hope.
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