Human Rights

Hunger Strike At Guantanamo Builds Movement

August 12, 2013 Staff, www.afp.com Resist! Guantanamo Bay, Human Rights

Guantanamo detainees are marking six months of an unprecedented hunger strike that has trained attention on the more than 150 men held at the US military prison without charge or trial. The strike began on February 6 as a spontaneous reaction to a cell sweep in which guards allegedly mishandled copies of the Koran, but soon grew into a mass protest against the legal limbo within the walls of the War on Terror prison. The strike helped push US President Barack Obama in May to renew his four-year-old vow to shut down the controversial facility in Cuba. "The hunger strike is unprecedented in its length and its magnitude," said Captain Robert Durand, a prison spokesman. "What they want is not to be detained... That is different from previous hunger strikes. In 2005 and 2006, they were talking about the conditions of detention."

Imagine: March Against The Wall

August 12, 2013 Norman Finkelstein, www.normanfinkelstein.com Organize! Human Rights, Israel, Palestine

Imagine this scenario: It’s July 2014, ten years after the International Court of Justice advisory opinion declared that The Wall is illegal and must be dismantled. One million Palestinians march on the Wall. They hold in one hand a copy of the International Court of Justice opinion, and in the other hand they carry a hammer or pick. They make their intentions very clear to the World. “All we are doing, is what the International Court of Justice said was supposed to be done. We are dismantling the Wall.”

The Business of Mass Incarceration

August 4, 2013 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Educate! Corporatism, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Government, Human Rights

Prisoners often work inside jails and prisons for nothing or at most earn a dollar an hour. The court system has been gutted to deny the poor adequate legal representation. Draconian drug laws send nonviolent offenders to jail for staggering periods of time. Our prisons routinely use solitary confinement, forms of humiliation and physical abuse to keep prisoners broken and compliant, methods that international human rights organizations have long defined as torture. Individuals and corporations that profit from prisons in the United States perpetuate a form of neoslavery.

Living In America Will Drive You Insane — Literally

August 4, 2013 Bruce E. Levine, www.alternet.org Educate! Corporatism, Finance and the Economy, Human Rights

A June 2013 Gallup poll revealed that 70% of Americans hate their jobs or have “checked out” of them. Life may or may not suck any more than it did a generation ago, but our belief in “progress” has increased expectations that life should be more satisfying, resulting in mass disappointment. For many of us, society has become increasingly alienating, isolating and insane, and earning a buck means more degrees, compliance, ass-kissing, shit-eating, and inauthenticity. So, we want to rebel. However, many of us feel hopeless about the possibility of either our own escape from societal oppression or that political activism can create societal change. So, many of us, especially young Americans, rebel by what is commonly called mental illness.

Chicago Hunger Strike For Health Care

August 3, 2013 Staff, www.moratoriumondeportations.org Resist! Health Care, Human Rights, Immigration

On June 29, a group of 14 people began a hunger strike at Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission, 3442 W 26th St Chicago. The strikers are protesting discriminatory health care practices that deny undocumented people in need of transplants a place on the transplant waiting list. Hospitals routinely deny life-saving patient care based on immigration status and inability to pay: in a profit-driven medical system, only certain lives are deemed to be worth saving. Hunger strikers include patients and loved ones who demand that hospitals place people on transplant lists based on need and not on immigration or insurance status. The Hunger strikers are calling for solidarity to help escalate the campaign and increase the pressure on hospitals and legislators.

Migrant Workers: America’s Harvest of Shame

August 3, 2013 Ralph Nader, www.nader.org/‎ Educate! Human Rights, Immigration, Worker Rights and Jobs

It probably won’t surprise you that the grapes, peaches, watermelons, strawberries, apricots and lettuce that you’re eating this week are brought to you from the fields by the descendants of the early migrant workers. Their plight is not that much better, except for the very few working under a real union contract. Start with the exclusion of farmworkers from the Fair Labor Standards Act. Then go to the EPA’s Worker Protection Standard (WPS), which is aimed at protecting farmworkers and their families from pesticides but is outdated, weak and poorly enforced. Continue on to the unyielding local power of growers and their campaign-cash indentured local, state and Congressional lawmakers.

Open Letter To Gov. Jerry Brown: Stop Torture In California Prisons

August 3, 2013 Staff, www.stoptortureca.org Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Human Rights, Solitary Confinement, Torture

Well over ten thousand adult prisoners are currently being held in some form of solitary confinement in California prisons – 80,000 in total across the United States. Among the worst form of solitary confinement is the indefinite and long‐term, extreme isolation of the Security Housing Units (the SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison, California’s “supermax”. Locked in a 11’7” x 7’7” windowless concrete box/cell for at least 22 ½ hours a day, day in day out, year after year, prisoners endure without sunlight, fresh air or human touch. In contrast to every other system in the United States, prisoners can’t even receive a phone call unless a family member has died. Over 500 prisoners have been locked down in the Pelican Bay SHU for over 10 years. About 80 of them have been in solitary for over 20 years and at least two prisoners have been isolated for over 40 years. This is a policy that condemns to permanent life long isolation.

Food Not Bombs Thrives Despite Repression

August 1, 2013 Keith McHenry, www.blog.foodnotbombs.net Create! Food and Agriculture, Human Rights

After spending most of the night in a holding cell at police headquarters they were released to discover that the Chronicle had published a huge photo of riot police guarding the food from the hungry with a headline proclaiming "Nine Volunteers Arrested For Feeding the Homeless at Golden Gate Park." The Food Not Bombs answering service on Polk Street was swamped with calls from people wanting to help. Offers of food, legal support, help with cooking and even commitments to risk arrest if necessary flooded in. The August 15, 1988 arrests marked a change in American societies view of the homeless and sparked a global movement. The San Francisco Police made over 1,000 arrests for the "crime" of "making a political statement" by sharing food with the hungry in public.

Mediators, Medical Professionals On Behalf Of Hunger Striking Prisoners

July 31, 2013 Staff, www.prisonerhungerstrikesoildarity.wordpress.com Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Human Rights

Leading expert on prison health issues, Dr. Terry Kupers, signed on to the statement, adding, “The prisoners on hunger strike are making a courageous effort to speak up for their humanity and their rights. It is extraordinarily callous of the CDCR and Governor Brown to ignore their plea for reasonable relief, and then to fail even in providing them adequate medical care.” Ahnen reiterated the demands coming from many community members across the state: “The time has come for Governor Brown to end this strike now by ordering negotiations between prisoners and CDCR officials to begin immediately. There is only one question I have for Governor Brown: how many more prisoners will you allow to die before you begin negotiations?” A complete copy of the health providers’ letter is attached and pasted below.

9 Dreamers In Detention, 6 In Isolation, On Hunger Strike

July 29, 2013 Staff, www.dreamactivist.org Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Human Rights, NSA

ICE officials are probably taking these atrocious actions because they are petrified at the prospect of the undocumented youth leaders organizing inside the detention facility. Before they were placed in confinement, the DREAM 9 were able to interview and collect stories from at least 7 people who were also detained at Eloy, even though they had committed no crimes. Thus far, we have heard nothing but silence from those who are part of the non-profit immigration reform complex. Even if you disagree with the tactics of our friends who risked their lives to effect change in a brutal immigration system, silence at this point is not just complacency. Silence is support for President Obama’s 1.7 million deportations and broken families. Silence is support for the detention of Dreamers trying to come home.

Third Week Hunger Strike By Colombian Prisoners, Solidarity Needed

July 29, 2013 Staff, www.afgj.org Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Human Rights

Prisoners in the Doña Juana Penitentiary in Colombia are halfway through the third week of a hunger strike to demand better conditions. Located in La Dorada, Caldas, the prison is one of the new jails built with US funding and advice as part the “New Penitentiary Culture” (link). Typical of such prisons are overcrowding, lack of medical treatment, a concentration of political prisoners, and beatings and forms of torture by prison guards. The US government is exporting the “New Penitentiary Culture” around the world, not only to Colombia, where it was pioneered, but to Mexico, Honduras, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere. It is no coincidence that prisoners at Doña Juana and prisoners in the California prison system began hunger strikes on the same day. Strikes are or have been also underway in Guantanamo and Afghanistan.

Economic Crisis Worsens, More Reasons To Create New Economy

July 28, 2013 Hope Yen, www.ap.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, Housing, Human Rights, Poverty

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream. Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend. Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor." "I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

Video: Revolution, An Instruction Manual

July 28, 2013 Staff, www.stormcloudsgathering.com Strategize! Finance and the Economy, Government, Human Rights, Media, Solidarity, Video

The causes of revolution are numerous in form, but there is one common root, and that's discontent. Discontent is the emotion that builds and builds under the surface, it is a storm which brews in the mind of the people, just waiting to be unleashed. Discontent is a not sufficient driving force for a revolution, that is if your goal is actually to leave a better world for your children and grandchildren. In order for an upheaval to have positive results it must be driven by a clear and realistic vision, a vision that accounts for the world and humans the way they actually are right now, not the way we wish they would be or hope that they might be, and it must differentiate between that which can and cannot be changed in the short term.

Families Decry Cruelty Of Indefinite Detention, Senate Holds Gitmo Hearing

July 26, 2013 Lauren McCauley, www.commondreams.org Educate! Guantanamo Bay, Human Rights, Wars and Militarism

While reportedly called to examine proposals to enable the detention center's closure, the hearing—the first of its kind since 2009—spelled more indecision and procrastination on the part of both lawmakers and President Obama—who recently professed renewed interest in closing the facility but blamed Congress for the inaction. However, as Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), noted during the hearing, "the administration could be doing more to close Guantanamo." In addition to the families who sent letters describing the impact of their loved ones' imprisonment, the five attending senators took in testimony from human rights groups, think tanks and military leaders on the long-ignored issue of how best to proceed with the facility and the 86 individuals who have been cleared for transfer yet remain in indefinite detention.

‘Walk For Dignity’ To Sanford Begins In Jacksonville

July 25, 2013 Staff, www.fightbacknews.org Organize! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Human Rights, Organizing

Even the summer afternoon rain couldn’t stop more than 25 activists from meeting in downtown Jacksonville’s Hemming Plaza, July 22, to begin a five-day walk to Sanford, Florida. Activists took the first steps in the “Walk for Dignity – Enough is Enough” event, demanding justice for Trayvon Martin and the resignation of State Attorney Angela Corey, who prosecuted the George Zimmerman case. Called by the Southern Movement Assembly, a network of activist groups around the South that met in Jacksonville last April, the walk will end with a large rally in Sanford. Activists from the Jacksonville-based New Jim Crow Movement, Project South, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Coalition for Justice for Trayvon, Southerners on New Ground and other organizations are participating in the walk.

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