Police, prison and abolition

[blindpig]

Conditions So Bad That Prisoners Set Themselves on Fire: Crisis and Cover-Up at Red Onion Super-Max Prison
November 26, 2024


Artwork depicting prison leaders. Photo: Kevin Rashid Johnson.

By Phil Wilayto – Nov 20, 2024

Can you recognize these faces? All these leaders made profound sacrifices for their people, and the artist who created this powerful drawing must be considered one of them. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, who is extensively quoted in this shocking article, is one of them, one of the men being tortured 24/7 at Red Onion State Prison. Next to Mumia Abu Jamal, Rashid is the most read and respected prisoner in the US. Red Onion is a super-maximum security prison designed and built to be torturous in every way, just like Pelican Bay State Prison in California, where prisoners surmounted impossible odds in 2011-2013 to stage a series of three mass hunger strikes joined by 30,000 prisoners at their peak. To offer your help and support to the prisoners at Red Onion, use the contact information at the end of this article. Photo: Kevin “Rashid” Johnson.
Can you recognize these faces? All these leaders made profound sacrifices for their people, and the artist who created this powerful drawing must be considered one of them. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, who is extensively quoted in this shocking article, is one of them, one of the men being tortured 24/7 at Red Onion State Prison. Next to Mumia Abu Jamal, Rashid is the most read and respected prisoner in the US. Red Onion is a super-maximum security prison designed and built to be torturous in every way, just like Pelican Bay State Prison in California, where prisoners surmounted impossible odds in 2011-2013 to stage a series of three mass hunger strikes joined by 30,000 prisoners at their peak. To offer your help and support to the prisoners at Red Onion, use the contact information at the end of this article. Photo: Kevin “Rashid” Johnson.

Just how bad are things at Virginia’s Red Onion supermax prison?

On May 24, 2023, DeAndre Gordon deliberately started a fire in his cell that caused a third-degree burn on his leg. Gordon, who is Black, said he had been badly beaten by guards at the prison and feared for his life.

“I didn’t know any other way that I could get out of their custody besides to set myself on fire,” Gordon told a reporter with Radio IQ. “Because they don’t have a burn center in Southwest Virginia, I knew that I would be going to Richmond.”

According to the American Burn Association, Virginia has just three facilities capable of dealing with severe burns. Two are in Richmond: the Evans-Haynes Burn Center at VCU Health, a state institution, and the Wound Healing Center at Doctors Hospital, a private hospital. The third is at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk.

Red Onion, in Wise County, is about 375 miles west of Richmond.

On Aug 23 of this year, Demetrius Wallace, 27, also Black, says he set fire to his leg to force a transfer out of Red Onion.

The Defender spoke with Wallace on Nov 1.

“I did actually set my foot on fire,” Wallace said. “I got the charge that shows it. They came to my cell door and saw the flames on the side of my leg. They took me to medical, they assessed me right there that night, told me they don’t deal with burns, they would have to talk with the nurse practitioner, and that I would have to be taken off the mountain.”

“That was Friday, Aug 23… so Monday, around 2 in the afternoon, they drove me seven hours away to the VCU burn unit. As soon as the doctor sees me, he said, ‘When did this happen?’ I said, ‘Friday.’ He said, ‘Why haven’t you been here?’ I said, ‘I’m not trying to be funny, but I can’t drive myself from the prison.’

“He said to the COs [correction officers], ‘You see this foot? You tell your major I can’t treat him immediately, I have to put him on antibiotics to treat the infection.

“I stayed in the hospital for 14 days. They had to do an allograft [a temporary graft, using skin from a skin bank] and a skin graft. After 14 days, I was sent back to Red Onion State Prison. Harassed me, everything is still the same, stuck me in the hole, still being denied access to my JPay [a commercial email service for prisoners] or my actual phone.”

Asked why he had set himself on fire, Wallace said, “I got a lawsuit in because I was assaulted and sprayed by the COs twice while I was handcuffed. So as soon as I filed the lawsuit, they started retaliation. They denied my fiancé access to the prison, for no reason; you had COs and a lieutenant looking at her Facebook; they messaged her… she has screenshots.”

Wallace also said he wasn’t the only prisoner who has recently set himself on fire.

“I was in medical, and I witnessed five other offenders who came back there. They had burned their legs or arms. There are still two or three there now.”

On or about Sept 15, Ekong Eshiet, a 28-year-old African-born prisoner at Red Onion, says he also set fire to his leg.

On Oct 25, he gave an interview to Prison Riot Radio, a Philadelphia-based online program that provides a platform for prisoners to speak out about prison conditions and other issues.

In the interview, Eshiet said that, two days before, on Oct 23, he had begun a hunger strike.

“I’m trying to get off of here. I’m doing my best, I’m going about this the right way, I guess, with the hunger strike way. But if I have to, I don’t mind setting myself on fire again, and this time I’ll set my whole body on fire.

“Before I have to stay up here and do the rest of my time up here, I would rather die before I stay up here, because every day I’m dealing with discrimination, whether it’s behind my race, my last name or my religion.”

The Defender has been in touch with Kevin Rashid Johnson, a longtime prisoner activist and author who, last December, went on a 71-day hunger strike, demanding to be transferred from Red Onion because he said there were no medical facilities in that area equipped to deal with his several severe medical issues. He eventually was sent to VCU Health, then transferred to Greensville Correctional Center, and is now back at Red Onion.

Rashid wrote the Defender that he was in the medical unit at the prison when Eshiet was brought in for treatment, and Rashid said he saw for himself the severe burns on the man’s leg.

“He had been placed in a cell next to me in the prison’s medical department, where I overheard him talking with others about a series of prisoners, including himself, setting fire to themselves. I could not help asking him what was going on.

“He told me simply that the racism, the horrid and inhumane conditions at the prison, were so intolerable that he and others were setting themselves on fire in desperate attempts to get transferred. These were not protests, he made clear, but acts of desperation hoping to get out of an insufferable situation.”

Rashid, at great risk to himself, wrote a report that he sent to outside news media and support groups. The report was picked up by Prison Riot Radio, the Arlington-based Interfaith Action for Human Rights and The Virginia Defender, among others.

On Oct 25, this reporter called Red Onion and spoke with the warden, David Anderson. I explained that we had received a report that as many as a dozen prisoners at Red Onion had recently set themselves on fire, and asked if the report was correct.

“No, it’s not true,” Anderson said.

After a pause, he added, “I really shouldn’t be commenting on this.”

“So you’re saying that no one has set themselves on fire?” I asked.

“I can’t speak any further about that,” Anderson answered.

I told Anderson I would send him an email, with further questions. He said he would forward the email to the proper department for a response.

These are the questions sent on Oct 25:

* Over the last two months, did one or more prisoners at Red Onion set themselves on fire, as claimed by the letter writer?

* If so, what are the names and prison ID numbers of the men?

* What is now the location of each of the men?

* What is the medical condition of each of the men?

* Have any of the men been charged with institutional or criminal offenses as a result of these alleged actions?

As of this writing, on Nov 4, there has been no response.

Meanwhile, we have been trying to find corroboration on the reports.

In addition to speaking directly with Demetrius Wallace, the Defender called Marsha Prichett, Eshiet’s mother, on Oct 25. She said her son has had a very hard time since being sent to Red Onion in June.

“There’s been name calling, they call him Eat-Shit, they spit in his food. After he hurt himself, they treated him for minor burn wounds. “Then the hospital called us to let us know Ekong was in the hospital, but they said we couldn’t visit with him or talk to him because the warden said he was a danger to himself or others. So we couldn’t visit because of what the warden said.”

On Nov 1, a Friday, the Defender reached out to VCU Health to ask if any Red Onion prisoners had been treated there recently for severe burns. At first we were told the hospital was not allowed to give us that information because of the issue of patient privacy. We hadn’t asked about any particular patient.

On Nov 4, a Monday, we received a call from Danielle Pierce with VCU Public Relations. We asked if, from Aug 1 until the present, any Red Onion prisoners had been brought to VCU Health for treatment for severe burns.

“I’m happy to look into it for you,” Pierce said.

Since the Defender’s press deadline was the next morning, no answer was expected in time for this story, but any response will be posted here. [Post-publishing update: As of Monday, Nov 25, there has been no response.]

On Nov 1, the Defender also called and left messages at the offices of Virginia General Assembly Delegate Don Scott, a former prisoner who is now Speaker of the House. The Defender will report any response on the website.

The Defender has also have been trying to get various Virginia media to cover this story.

What is Red Onion?


This Google Earth map gives some idea of how isolated the Red Onion super-max prison is, situated on top of Red Onion Mountain in rural Wise County, far from the famiies of most of the men confined there.

The Justice Policy Center of the Urban Institute describes a supermaximum prison, or “super-max,” as “designed to hold the putatively most violent and disruptive inmates in single cell confinement for 23 hours per day, often for an indefinite period of time.”

Red Onion is a super-max prison. It opened in 1998 in the midst of a big right-wing and media scare about a new crime wave that supposedly was coming, but somehow never did.

Red Onion was supposed to house around 800 of “the worst of the worst” Virginia prisoners. As it turned out, there weren’t enough “worst” prisoners to fill the cells, so Virginia began taking in prisoners from other states—for a price. Further, many of the Virginia prisoners who wound up there were transferred from lower-level security prisons simply for breaking rules, not for committing violent crimes.

Red Onion quickly gained a reputation for extreme repression, cruelty and racism.

A 1999 report by Human Rights Watch stated that the “Virginia Department of Corrections has failed to embrace basic tenets of sound correctional practice and laws protecting inmates from abusive, degrading or cruel treatment” and claimed that “racism, excessive violence, and inhumane conditions reign inside.”

In 2001, Amnesty International released a report citing human rights violations at the prison.

The 2016 HBO documentary film “Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison” focused on the use and effects of solitary confinement.

In one particularly notorious case, Nicolas Reyes, a Salvadoran immigrant, was kept in solitary confinement for 13 years because he couldn’t complete the mostly English-language Step-Down Program required to be released.

Reyes only spoke Spanish and couldn’t read or write in any language.

With support from the ACLU and other organizations, Reyes was finally released and received a monetary award of $115,000 – which works out to about a dollar for every day he suffered in extreme physical, social, cultural and linguistic isolation.

This is what Rashid has recently written about the prison:

“Red Onion and its sister supermax Wallens Ridge State Prison, are both located in the mountains of the far southwestern corner of Virginia in rural, segregated white communities, while their prisoner populations are near totally Brown and Black.

“Since opening in 1998 and 1999, respectively, both prisons have operated without oversight in regions where the local populations are culturally conditioned to secrecy and hostility to outside scrutiny. Which makes for prisons shielded by a curtain of secrecy, inhumane abuse and racism.

“And while Virginia has been closing down many of its predominantly Black staffed prisons across the state, it has shifted resources and focused new prison construction projects in favor of opening and operating prisons in remote, racially segregated regions of the state like where Red Onion and Wallens Ridge are located.

“The strongest public exposure and protest needs to be directed at these expensive, inhumane and unneeded human warehouses. They must be opened up to broad public scrutiny and accountability, and closed down.

“This exposure and protest should be continually directed against the Virginia governor, Virginia Department of Corrections Director Chadwick Dotson and the state’s general assembly.

“Every effort must be made to share this information and increase public awareness about these places, their inhumane conditions and the desperate extremes they are driving fellow humans to in their pleas for relief.

“Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

“All Power to the People!”

Interfaith Action for Human Rights has started an online petition urging change at Red Onion. To sign, follow this change.org link.

As this goes to press, Kevin Rashid Johnson, Ekong Eshiet and Demetrius Wallace are all being held in solitary confinement—what the prison calls “restrictive housing.” All three men have reason to fear for their lives.

Rashid, who has been targeted because of his outspoken condemnation of the whole Virginia prison system, has outside attorneys working to try to get him transferred out of Red Onion.

Note: Both Rashid and Demetrius Wallace have given the Defender permission to quote them for this story. The Defender hasn’t spoken directly with Ekong Eshiet.

Conclusion
At this point, the Defender is confident in reporting that at least two men held at the Red Onion State Prison—Demetrius Wallace and Ekong Eshiet, and possibly others, have taken the desperate step of setting themselves on fire to try to force the prison officials to transfer them out of that notorious hellhole.

And the prison system is not only denying that these events ever happened, but have taken steps to isolate the men involved in order to keep the public from knowing about it.

The Virginia Defenders are calling for an immediate, independent, impartial, outside investigation of the conditions of these three men, as well as the general conditions at Red Onion. Copies of this story will be sent to Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, all members of the Virginia General Assembly, U.S. Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, Virginia Department of Corrections Director Chadwick Dotson and all the Defender’s contacts in the Virginia media.

And to the readers: if you want to get involved in the struggle for Prison Justice, email the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality at DefendersFJE@hotmail.com; call or text 804-644-5834 or write to: Defenders, PO Box 23202, Richmond, VA 23223.

https://orinocotribune.com/conditions-s ... ax-prison/

[blindpig]

The US Embrace of Incarceration for the Homeless Is a Win-Win for the Plutocrats
Posted on December 22, 2024 by Conor Gallagher

In the 1970s, the US began loosening restrictions on prison labor while simultaneously starting to attribute homelessness to mental illness and addiction (and ignoring economic factors). Forty-plus years later and those two parallel tracks of neoliberalism are merging and resurrecting the 19th century Victorian workhouse.

With the number of homeless continuing to rise in the US, municipalities, states, and the national government are faced with the task of doing something about a problem that’s apparently just too hard to solve. As with most any response to the fallout from neoliberalism here in the land of the free, the US comes equipped with a hammer in search of a nail that will profit the powerful and well-connected. And so it is with the “homeless problem” as we see the outlines of consensus beginning to form around solutions that involve incarceration — and therefore forced labor.

Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” drew inspiration from England’s Poor Law Act of 1834, which established the workhouse system that rather than provide refuge for the elderly, sick and poor or food and shelter in exchange for work in times of high unemployment, established a labor prison system.

And so it goes in America 190 years later.

US prisons that for decades have used forced labor will increasingly include the homeless among their ranks as the US Supreme Court-sanctioned criminalization of homelessness gathers momentum, and states like California return to “tough on crime” policies with the stated goal of ridding the streets of the unhoused.

The criminalization of homelessness is an easy solution that means the fact we have turned a basic human necessity over to market forces goes unchallenged. That means doing nothing about:

Poverty wages (between 40-60 percent of the homeless are employed).
Housing cartels jacking up rent.
Homebuilder cartels constraining supply.
Private equity buying up single-family and multi-family housing, which means a lack of affordable housing.
Central bank monetary policies that make the rich richer while mostly hurting everyone else.
A healthcare system that frequently bankrupts people.
A lack of a social safety net.

By deflecting attention away from these issues while simultaneously expanding the reach of the carceral state — which weakens “free” labor — the criminalization of homelessness is a win-win for American plutocrats.

No Effort to Stop the Causes of Homelessness

Trump is the latest to come along with a plan that does nothing to address the underlying causes.

“For a small fraction of what we spend upon Ukraine, we could take care of every homeless veteran in America,” he says in a 2023 video. He’s partially right. The US could take care of every homeless individual for a fraction of the money that’s been spent on the Ukraine racket. Here’s more:

…[Trump] will open large parcels of inexpensive land, bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists, and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified.

In addition, President Trump will bring back mental institutions to house and rehabilitate those who are severely mentally ill or dangerously deranged with the goal of reintegrating them back into society.

We’ll see if he follows through. Plans to deal with the homelessness crisis are often unveiled and quickly forgotten, and Trump has a short attention span. Nevertheless, it’s hard to argue this is worse than the whole lot of nothing currently being done; it’s also easy to see it going horribly wrong (e.g., an understaffed site that’s inexpensive because it’s on toxic land which quickly devolves into chaos and mass arrests).

Also, “relocated” to where? Trump is light on details, but If there’s no public housing and no affordable housing, where are people to go?

“Problems identified.” What if the problem is lack of money as many of the homeless are working.

Rather than answer these basic questions, he swings for the deportation pinata. Trump also says any failure to comply will result in imprisonment, which is now a bipartisan solution.

The Criminalization of Homelessness

Let’s take a look at California. That great bastion of liberalism contains one-third of the nation’s 650,000-plus homeless, and its champion, Gov. Gavin Newsom, is largely in agreement with Trump. He signed an executive order in July calling for cities to “humanely remove encampments from public spaces.” The order of course does nothing to address the systemic problems behind homelessness, including a lack of affordable housing and Social Security benefits not coming close to covering rent leading to skyrocketing numbers of homeless senior citizens. How “humane” can Newsom’s policy be?

As Deyanira Nevárez Martínez, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University writes, Newsom’s approach effectively turns the issue over to the criminal justice system and “leads to forced displacement that makes people without housing more likely to be arrested and experience increased instability and trauma.”

And it won’t just be displacement. California localities, like so many across the country, are increasingly passing laws that make it a crime to be unhoused.

The Supreme Court ruled this year in Grants Pass v. Johnson that cities can penalize individuals for sleeping in public spaces even when no shelter is available. That decision overturned the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling that anti-camping ordinances violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

California voters are once again getting “tough on crime.”

On election day California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36, which increases penalties for theft and drug possession, including reclassifying some misdemeanors as felonies. The measure was sold as a way to put an end to homelessness and included pro-business PACs and the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association as its major backers. Property crimes did indeed increase during the initial years of the pandemic, but have since begun to decline again across California, which continues a decades-long trend, according to the Department of Justice. Nonetheless, California police, prosecutors, and Silicon Valley “bros” have for years pushed the asinine argument that the state’s supposedly soft-on-crime approach is the cause behind the increase in homelessness.

When homelessness is framed as a choice that takes advantage of too-lenient laws, the solution is easy: lock them up. And that’s what California’s new laws will do. From Cal Matters:

The Legislative Analyst’s Office forecasts that the measure will cost tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Those costs are chiefly from placing a few thousand more people in prison and putting them in for longer terms.

A few notes on drug addiction and untreated mental health issues, which are often blamed for the modern day Hoovervilles across the country.

A study from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative last year was one of the deepest dives into California’s crisis in decades. It found that drug use and mental health problems are not the driver behind people losing housing; the primary reason is the increasing precariousness of the working poor.

Even if you believe that the issue can be boiled down to mental health and drugs, that is even more of a reason to attack the underlying economic culprits behind homelessness and poverty in the US. That’s because mental health and/or addiction problems can result from the loss of housing and it can severely worsen existing issues.

The UCSF study found that many succumb to drugs as a way to numb the pain of being chewed up and discarded by American society. It is also well-established that poverty and homelessness can lead to or worsen physical and mental health. For example, studies have shown PTSD is common after losing one’s home. It goes beyond just homelessness. For example, a recent study published in the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing finds that food insecurity is linked to severe mental illness. About 1 in 5 children in the US face food insecurity, as do 44 million Americans overall.

Back to California. While Proposition 36 also creates a new category of crime — a “treatment-mandated felony” — which allows for the completion of drug treatment instead of going to prison, the accused still face up to three years behind bars if they don’t finish treatment, and there are major questions about funding. Newsom says the measure is likely to “impact some existing drug treatment and mental health services.” It will also shift more of those services under the umbrella of the criminal justice system, which frequently makes the problem worse as we’ve seen from the decades-long “war on drugs.” As the Prison Policy Initiative explains:

Jails and prisons are often described as de facto mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, and corrections officials increasingly frame their missions around offering healthcare. But the reality is quite the opposite: people with serious health needs are warehoused with severely inadequate healthcare and limited treatment options. Instead, jails and prisons rely heavily on punishment, while the most effective and evidence-based forms of healthcare are often the least available.

This unsurprisingly results in an endless cycle of arrest for people who use drugs and for those who are homeless. The UCSF study found that roughly 20 percent of the state’s unhoused population entered homelessness from an institutional setting, such as jail and prison stays. And criminalization only makes the problem worse. From Governing:

The collateral consequences of even short-term jailing — such as loss of employment, separation from families, and fines and fees — increase the likelihood of future arrest while exposing arrested individuals to health risks and unsanitary conditions associated with jails.

Again, this measure and other California efforts blame drug use and crime for homelessness and do nothing to address the primary causes, i.e., unchecked American capitalism.

Time and again those experienced in the field say the most effective method to combat the crisis is to stop people from becoming homeless in the first place. California is not only ignoring that plea, but is making the problem even worse.

Slave Labor and American Productivity

What else did citizens on the “Left Coast” vote for? They rejected a rent control ballot measure that would have given cities more freedom to limit how much landlords can raise rent. Opponents of the measure included landlords, realtors, and Newsom who argued that rent control would reduce incentives to build new housing. He didn’t comment on any incentives to not build more housing.

Voters also rejected a prison reform measure that would have ended forced labor in prisons and jails. From Cal Matters:

California mandates tens of thousands of incarcerated people to work at jobs – many of which they do not choose — ranging from packaging nuts to doing dishes, to making license plates, sanitizer and furniture for less than 74 cents an hour, according to legislative summaries of prison work.

This is common practice across the country where imprisoned laborers have no minimum wage, no overtime, no unemployment, no workers’ compensation, no social security, no occupational health and safety protections, and no right to form unions and collectively bargain.

For decades the US has been moving towards removing restrictions on prisoner work and expanding the system — even if it puts forced labor in competition with “free” labor.

Back in 1929 the Supreme Court upheld a law that restricted the interstate sales of prisoner-produced goods, explaining that “free labor, properly compensated, cannot compete successfully with the enforced and unpaid or underpaid convict labor of the prison.”

That began to change in the 1970s, however, as neoliberalism took hold, Congress started to ease restrictions on private companies using prison labor. They were allowed to use it, but required to pay prevailing wages, most of which can be diverted to fund prisoners own imprisonment or otherwise stolen.

Similar neoliberal trends were happening on the homelessness front:

In my upcoming book, I show that, beginning in the 1980s, attributing homelessness to mental illness and addiction was politically engineered to obscure the socioeconomic roots of the crisis and to justify the removal of homeless people from public space.https://t.co/K8FH27HUET pic.twitter.com/nLJoExurH6

— Brian Goldstone (@brian_goldstone) December 11, 2024

Here’s Erin Hatton, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo with some numbers showing where the situation is today:

In the United States today, more than 2 million people are incarcerated in prisons and jails, another 4.5 million people are under supervision via probation or parole, and 70 million people have some type of criminal record. The carceral state has thus exerted its grip on nearly half of the U.S. workforce. In fact, the combined prison and jail population of the United States roughly equals the number of employees that Walmart, the world’s largest employer, employs across the globe.

Hatton breaks the types of jobs in US prisons and their effects on “free” labor:

The first category is facility maintenance, also known as “regular” or “non-industry” jobs. In these roles, incarcerated people work to keep the prison running; they sustain its operations. The vast majority of incarcerated workers perform this type of labor…Because wages for this work are invariably minimal—ranging from no pay at all in many southern states to $2 per hour in Minnesota and New Jersey—this form of labor saves prison operators untold sums of money by supplanting free-world, full-wage workers.

The second category is “industry” jobs, which are positions in the government-run prison factories that were launched in the 1930s. These account for just under five percent of state and federal prisoner employment. People who labor in these factories produce a wide range of goods and services for sale to government agencies: office furniture and filing cabinets; road signs and license plates; uniforms, linens, and mattresses for prisons and hospitals; wooden benches and metal grills for public parks; even body armor for military and police. In Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas state prisons, incarcerated workers receive no wages for this labor. On average, state and federal prisoners earn $0.33–$1.41 per hour for this work (as compared to an average of $0.14–$0.63 per hour for the facility maintenance jobs described above).

The third category of incarcerated labor is for private-sector companies that set up shop inside U.S. prisons. Such jobs employ just 0.3 percent of the U.S. prison population. These are the highest paid prison jobs, because private-sector companies are legally obligated to pay “prevailing wages” in order to avoid undercutting non-prison labor. However, incarcerated workers do not actually receive these “prevailing wages.” Private employers often pay only the minimum wage, not the prevailing wage, and legal loopholes allow them to pay even less. Moreover, incarcerated workers’ wages are subject to many deductions and fees, which are capped at a whopping 80 percent of gross earnings. In other words, U.S. prisons seize most of the workers’ wages in these jobs. Further, some states have mandatory savings programs that take away an additional portion of the pay. Thus, even though regulations mandate free-world compensation for private-sector jobs in prison, prison rates prevail.

The final category is work that occurs outside of the prison, through various labor arrangements such as work-release programs, outside work crews, and work camps. While no concrete data are available, reports suggest that such jobs are more common than both public and private industry jobs, though not as common as facility maintenance jobs. This category is highly heterogeneous, including work for public works, nonprofit agencies, and private companies. In work-release programs, prisoners typically maintain free-world jobs—at free-world wages, though subject to prison-world deductions—and then return to the prison after work hours. In prison work crews, incarcerated workers leave the prison or jail facility during work hours to perform public works, or “community service” jobs, such as fighting fires and cleaning highways, park grounds, and abandoned lots. Such workers typically return to prison at the end of the workday, unless their labor—as in the case of wildfires—is far from the prison; in those cases, they are typically housed in prison-like facilities, such as fire camps. In one instance, incarcerated women who labored for a multi-million dollar egg farm in Arizona were relocated to company housing so that the farm could retain its low-wage and reportedly “more compliant” incarcerated labor force despite the COVID-19 lockdowns that would halt the prison’s work-release program.

Prison labor is a nice little gift for American corporations. According to a 2022 report from the ACLU, “labor tied specifically to goods and services produced through state prison industries brought in more than $2 billion in 2021.”

Details are less readily available about American jails and other forms of “supervision” and their benefits for capital. The ACLU report did not account for work-release and other programs run through local jails, detention and immigration centers and even drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities. But we can gather some anecdotal data. According to the AP:

Some people arrested in Alabama are put to work even before they’ve been convicted. An unusual work-release program accepts pre-trial defendants, allowing them to avoid jail while earning bond money. But with multiple fees deducted from their salaries, that can take time.

And in Louisiana:

Jack Strain, a former longtime sheriff in the state’s St. Tammany Parish, pleaded guilty in 2021 in a scheme involving the privatization of a work-release program in which nearly $1.4 million was taken in and steered to Strain, close associates and family members. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, which came on top of four consecutive life sentences for a broader sex scandal linked to that same program.

The Capitalist Dream of Incarcerated Laborers

Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner’s comments last year calling for a 40-50 percent rise in unemployment and “pain” in the economy to remind laborers that “they work for the employer, not the other way around” were refreshing for their honesty.

Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become “arrogant” since COVID and “We’ve got to kill that attitude.” https://t.co/lcX3CCxGuj pic.twitter.com/f9HK2YZRRE

— Financial Review (@FinancialReview) September 12, 2023


Gurner might be an Australian “apartment wunderkind,” but such beliefs aren’t confined to the Lucky Country. Indeed, such forms of coercion are precisely what capital likes about imprisoned workers. From Hatton’s Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment:

….the defining feature across all these forms of prison labor is the infliction of punishment, or the threat of punishment, to secure compliance. When incarcerated workers do not obey a command from the corrections officers who oversee their labor, they can be fined a week’s wages, put on “keeplock” (confined to one’s own cell), and put in solitary confinement. Because of these punishments, moreover, incarcerated people can lose opportunities for parole. The risks of noncompliance for incarcerated workers thus include losing crucial connections with friends and family, losing access to essential food, amenities, recreation, and freedom of movement (however constrained), and, for some, losing the possibility of future freedom.

The following is from the Urban Institute in 2003, but as Gurner’s comments demonstrate, there’s little reason to suspect such opinions have changed:

Employers strongly spoke of the quality of the inmate workforce in responses to the question of what they liked best about employing inmates. Responses of workforce “quality and productivity” far outweighed “lower costs” 53% to 7%. Additionally, employers rated inmates as somewhat more productive than a domestic workforce might be, and 92% said they “recommend” the inmate workforce to business associates. As one employer explains: “Inmates learn that the success of our company depends on the satisfaction of our customers with our product. Quality, service and price have to meet expectations. Our futures are intertwined…”

This data provides supporting evidence that in today’s environment, employers consider inmate workers to be productive workers—“more productive” than the domestic workforce— in a variety of manufacturing, assembly and services production settings.

Yes it would make sense they’re more productive. Less distractions.

Perhaps the ever-expanding US carceral plays an underappreciated role in America’s “productivity boom”:



Just how much does the US rely on prison labor?

The American economy pic.twitter.com/CHHOHDBFq7

— inhumans of capitalism (Ojibwa ) (@Inhumansoflate1) October 27, 2024


He might be slightly overstating the case out of self interest but not by much. Imprisoned Arizonans, like most people on the outside, are forced to sell their labor for at least 40 hours a week. Many of the ones in official captivity earn just 10 cents an hour for their work, however.

Arizona, like many states, contracts with The GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies. If that name sounds familiar, that’s because it was in the news recently due to its stock soaring following Trump’s victory and his promise to crack down on crime and illegal immigration.

The details of the contracts a state like Arizona signs with The GEO Group are telling. At Florence West prison, for example, Arizona guarantees GEO a 90% occupancy rate. The state must pay a per diem rate for 675 prisoners, regardless of how many people are actually incarcerated there, although the state is incentivized to make sure it’s at or near capacity. That’s because, as Arizona Department of Corrections Director David Shinn explains, prisoners are forced to provide labor “to city, county, local jurisdictions, that simply can’t be quantified at a rate that most jurisdictions could ever afford. If you were to remove these folks from that equation, things would collapse in many of your counties, for your constituents.”

So what amounts to slave labor helps keep taxes low on one end. And then there’s the profit motive on the other, as explained by Arizona Rep. John Kavanagh:

“You have to guarantee that they’re going to have people there, and they’re going to have a profit that they make, they’re going to have income,” Kavanagh said. “No one’s going to enter into a contract when you can’t guarantee the income that they expect. That’s kind of based on basic business.”

“Basic business” also includes the widespread availability of low-wage and easily exploitable immigrants for American capital, which brings us back to Team Trump and The GEO Group.

Will Trump deal with illegal immigration by making it difficult for these migrants to get paid work or will he provide more of an “innovative” testing ground for Israeli-style surveillance and detention tech while continuing to ensure the supply of cheap labor? It increasingly looks like the latter.

According to incoming vice president JD Vance, the Trump administration is going to ensure its immigration and deportation plans are not bad for business. “Generally I agree, okay, we’re going to let some immigrants in,” he says. “We want them to be high-talent, high quality people. You don’t want to let a large number of illegal aliens in.”

The Trump plan is starting to sound like policy as usual, which highlights the connection between the police state, immigration detention, deportation, and labor. From Noah Zatz, a law professor at UCLA:

This continuity is particularly important because labor advocates and the labor movement have come to understand—through a long and still-contested process—how employers gain power to intimidate, retaliate against, and divide workers when the state’s deportation threat hangs over them and can be invoked by employers.

Better Solutions to Homelessness

The US is actually finding success cutting the number of homeless veterans. The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced in November that veteran homelessness rates dropped to a record low since detailed counting began in 2009. Officials counted 32,882 homeless veterans, down significantly from recent years and a 55.6 percent decrease from 2010.

While the overall number is still soberingly high, and the program is imperfect since it doesn’t address underlying economic causes that will continue to see vets cast onto the streets, it is progress. How did they do it?

Using a Housing First approach, which prioritizes getting a homeless individual into housing and then assists with access to health care and other support. Notably, the VA program does not try to determine who is “housing ready” or demand mental health or addiction treatment prior to housing. The Housing First model says that housing is a fundamental right and that housing programs should identify and address the needs of the people it serves from the people’s perspective. The VA is doing that by providing immediate access to permanent, subsidized, independent housing without treatment participation or sobriety prerequisites.

For this fiscal year—Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025—the VA budget for Veteran homelessness programs is $3.2 billion. That’s less than what the US has been spending per month on Ukraine since Feb. 2022.

So why not scale up the VA program and apply to all homeless Americans, as well as help those in danger of becoming homeless. According to Fran Quigley who directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law, there are nine million U.S. households that are behind on their rent right now. There’s an easy way to help them: give them money.

If we consider capital’s incentives to discipline and control workers — including throwing the homeless into modern day workhouses — there is a strong argument to be made for fledgling American organized labor to more actively join the fight against both homelessness and mass imprisonment. As Zatz from the UCLA School of Law argues:

One intuitive answer focuses on characterizing incarcerated people as workers and the carceral state as a system of labor exploitation. This approach asserts a shared identity and a shared foe. The easiest way to make the argument highlights how employers may substitute hyper-vulnerable incarcerated workers for rights-bearing “free labor.” But the strategy has been known to backfire: Rather than engendering solidarity, it can instead amplify hostility by portraying incarcerated people as a threat to non-incarcerated people’s jobs.

A different path to solidarity highlights how the carceral state reaches into the heart of so-called “free” labor markets. What I call a “carceral labor continuum” stretches from the prison, through “work-release” programs, to parole work requirements, to “working off” criminal fines and fees, and more. As a result, carceral labor is not a problem confined to the prison, and it provides no neat divide between any “us” and “them.”

Or as the Hampton Institute puts it:

labor-based consumer income. There will be many contradictions that come with keeping capitalism alive for the sole purpose of feeding the soon-to-be trillionaire class. Of course, this is all contingent on the outcome of class struggle.

— Hampton Institute (@HamptonThink) September 20, 2024

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12 ... crats.html

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‘Cop City’ Leads US Buildup in Police-Training Bases
December 23, 2024

Elizabeth Vos reports on a vast law enforcement training facility in Atlanta that defies the defund-police movement and sets the stage for Israel-linked militarized policing across the U.S.


Georgia Air National Guard assist Atlanta Police Department SWAT team enforcing a curfew during demonstrations in Atlanta during Black Lives Matter protests, June 4, 2020. (U.S. Air National Guard, Roger Parsons, CC BY 2.0)

By Elizabeth Vos
Special to Consortium News

After years of intense opposition that left one protester riddled by police bullets, Atlanta’s so-called Cop City is set to begin operations in the next few weeks. The city’s police chief hosted a tour of the campus last week and training programs are expected to start during the first quarter of 2025.

The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, as it is officially known, is an 85-acre campus with a price tag of at least $110 million and another $1.7 million recently approved by Atlanta’s City Council for its security.

Most infamously, it includes a mock city, for which the site gained its Cop City nickname, for “real-world” training that includes a convenience store, two-story house, apartment and commercial-style building.

There is also a military vet training center, leadership institute, lab to develop and test technological innovations, training field, 12-acre emergency vehicle operations course.

It also comes with burn towers, a shooting range, horse stalls, police-dog kennels and training grounds, and 40 acres of horse pasture, according to a video published by the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Foundation’s website.

Backlash to Black Lives Matter


George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis, Aug. 17, 2020. (Fibonacci Blue, Flickr,CC BY 2.0)

Atlanta’s Cop City site was designated in 2021, the year after a white Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin asphyxiated a Black man named George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes.

Chauvin’s murder of Floyd, after a series of high-profile police killings of Black Americans, kicked the growing Black Lives Matter Movement into high gear, causing what has been described as one of the largest social movements in U.S. history, with some protests extending internationally.

The wave of demonstrations during the summer of 2020 shone a spotlight on the greater harm that police cause Black people, who are more than three times as likely to be killed by police, according to a study by Harvard University.

Protesters’ calls to defund and abolish the police yielded policing reforms efforts in several states.

At the federal level, however, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act has stalled.

And while the wave of protests in 2020 helped expose the threat that police pose to the overall population in the U.S., they did not succeed in protecting Americans from deadly police violence. In 2024, police killed civilians at the highest rate in a decade, according to the collaborative research group Mapping Police Violence.

In Atlanta, Jasmine Burnett, a political organizer, told Prism that demands of defunding the police and investing in community programs “really scared city council members, scared the executives and the elites in the city, and that’s when they really put their foot on the gas to get this ‘Cop City’ project moving forward.”

More Police Funding

That pro-policing backlash to Black Lives Matter in Georgia appears to be occurring in many other parts of the U.S. In 2022, two years after the Black Lives Matter wave of demonstrations, police budgets were increasing year over year, according to a news analysis of the budgets for more than 100 law enforcement agencies across the country. Next year in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, the city’s $230 million policing budget reportedly represents a 6 percent increase from this year.

Renee Johnston, co-host of Saturdays with Renee on Black Liberation Media, has been tracking steady interest and investment in police facilities across the country since 2020.

Johnston argues that although many of the sites she tallied were planned or otherwise in progress well before 2020, the uprisings in the wake of Floyd’s death accelerated their approval or development.

U.S. President Joe Biden was bullish about the police during his abortive re-election campaign earlier this year, when he published a White House fact sheet touting the administration’s crime-crackdown.

“More than 1,000 communities across the country have invested over $15 billion to keep their communities safe and prevent crime,” the fact sheet boasts. “The President’s budget also funds his Safer American Plan, including providing for hiring 100,000 additional police officers for effective, accountable community policing.”


On Jan. 27, 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden calls RowVaughn and Rodney Wells, the mother and stepfather of Tyre Nichols, killed by police brutality that month in Memphis, Tennessee. (White House, Erin Scott)

Johnston says she produced her pdf spreadsheet to inform activists concerned about an intensifying police presence in their local communities. “Nationally, groups are organizing in multiple cities and states, there were some national meetings this summer and a national coalition has formed in hopes of creating shared processes and resources,” Johnston told Consortium News via email.

Her spreadsheet includes 83 projects of various sizes and in various stages — from proposal to completion — in every U.S. state except Wyoming at the time of writing.

Some of the projects are as seemingly innocuous as a 23,000-square-foot public safety center in Chisholm, Minnesota, that makes no mention of police training and includes a fire hall to replace one built during the days of horses and buggies as well as housing emergency services and the police department on one site.

But a few of the projects on Johnston’s radar are even bigger than Cop City Atlanta.

The most expensive is a $415 million project underway on state property near a maximum security prison in Nashville, Tennessee, which has broken ground on a 600 acre site and will reportedly house offices of the State’s Department of Correction and State Department of Safety and Homeland Security along with training facilities for state troopers and officers, including dorms, a driving track, and police-dog kennels.

Another behemoth is envisioned for Baltimore. At a projected cost of at least $330 million, it could include an Atlanta Cop-City-style “tactical village,” according to news reports.

The modernization and expansion of a Police Academy in Hershey, Pennsylvania, now under construction, is estimated at $300 million and will include a “tactical village” and other elements similar to Atlanta’s training facilities.

In New York City, a $225 million police training facility was announced this year.


Motorcycle police alongside anti-police brutality march in New York City on Oct. 22, 2011, the 36th day of Occupy Wall Street. (Carwil Bjork-James, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Protest History

Coming a year after the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, the announcement of the Atlanta training center in 2021 sparked immediate protests, which became the “Stop Cop City” and “Defend The Atlanta Forest” movements.

Activists referring to themselves as forest defenders began occupying the South River Forest, part of the land designated to become Cop City in late 2021, with some living in tree houses full-time for months.

The occupation of the forest was meant to resist both the authoritarian implications of such a massive police training campus and the environmental damage the facility reportedly poses to an area that has been called one of the “lungs” of Atlanta.

The site’s firing range alone could be a potent source of heavy metal contamination. The looming spectre of environmental damage led to lawsuits by local environmental organizations.

The overall protest movement against the campus has been decentralized and leaderless, with some hopeful that the land might one day be returned to the Muscogee people.

The occupation of the forest saw an aggressive response from Georgia authorities that escalated over time and included heavy police surveillance verging on harassment. Eight protesters were arrested in May 2022 as police forces attempted to clear activists from the area. On Dec. 13 that year, five protesters were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. They would not be the last.

On Jan. 18, 2023, an early morning police action against the forest defenders brought the killing of Manuel Paez Terán, who went by “Torguguita,” and was shot 57 times. The 26-year-old was sitting down cross-legged with hands raised when shot, according to an autopsy.

The family of Terán recently filed a federal lawsuit against three of the officers involved in the killing, claiming that they breached Terán’s Fourth and First Amendment rights.


A shrine in Atlanta on Jan. 19, 2023, the day after the police killing of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, aka Tortuguita. (Tatsoi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

RICO Charges

State prosecutors have pursued a novel legal strategy that has been criticized for criminalizing political protest. In August 2023 they indicted 61 Cop City protesters for allegedly violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, in what has been described as the largest use of so-called RICO statutes against a protest movement in U.S. history.

RICO laws were designed for prosecuting organized crime. As an example of how incongruously those laws apply to activists, prosecutors hit people organizing a “solidarity fund” for some protesters with money laundering charges.

[See: Georgia Frames Cop-City Protest as Criminal Conspiracy]

With documented encouragement from the federal Department of Homeland Security, prosecutors in a state that had broadened its definition of domestic terrorism in 2017, brought separate domestic terrorism charges against dozens of the same defendants for allegedly using fireworks and molotov cocktails against police, though no one was reported injured.

At one point in March 2023, police went so far as to arrest a legal observer for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Lawyers Guild.

All of the money laundering charges were later dropped, with prosecutors criticized for “blatantly violating” protester’s rights. The rest of the charges remain, however, with some trials in progress and others set to start next year.

Who Is Behind Cop City?

The Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), a nonprofit organization formed in 2003 is the principal funder of the Cop City project. As an NGO, it is not accountable to public oversight.

The APF is instead legally accountable to a board of directors who include powerful corporate players — CEOs of Waffle House and the Atlanta Hawks, VPs from the Home Depot and Delta Air Lines — and members of Atlanta’s ruling class, as a 2022 report by The New Yorker details. Cox Enterprises, a media conglomerate based in Atlanta that owns the city’s largest newspaper, The Journal-Constitution, which has run editorials in favor of the project, is among Cop City’s corporate donors. Cox’s CEO, Alex Taylor, is the chair of fund-raising for the training facility, according to the same New Yorker article.


Cox Enterprises headquarters in Atlanta. (Taylor2646, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Links With Israel

The Atlanta Police Foundation is also a central point of connection between Cop City and pro-Israel interests. As Derek Seidman reported for Truthout in July, the project is expected to “deepen a policing ecosphere in Atlanta with close ties to Israeli forces that oppress Palestinians.”

That Israeli-linked “ecosphere” has a lot to do with the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program. Based at Georgia State University, GILEE has long facilitated trips for law enforcement to Israel and other countries. As 11Alive reports:

“for more than three decades, law enforcement leaders from around the metro have traveled to Israel to train officers there on best practices in community policing and homeland security.”

Similar programs outside Georgia facilitate training in Israel or with Israeli personnel, including exchanges run by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).


An Israeli Border Police armored car, August 2004. (Justin McIntosh, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

These programs were largely created after 9/11 for U.S. law enforcement to receive counter-terrorism training from Israeli authorities thanks to the latter’s experience in brutally suppressing Palestinians. Organizations such as Jewish Voices for Peace and others contend that such exchanges have helped militarize U.S. police forces.

When training with Israel, U.S. police delegates witness “live demonstrations of repressive violence in real-time, in protests across the West Bank, patrols in East Jerusalem, and visits to the Gaza border,” Eran Efrati, executive director of Researching the American-Israeli Alliance (RAIA), told Al Jazeera in 2020.

In 2020, hacktivists further documented strong ties between U.S. law enforcement and Israel, as well as policing links with U.S.-based organizations like the ADL.

Those who support the police training center in Atlanta argue that it will include de-escalation techniques.

“In addition to the focus on tactical training, the PSTC will emphasize cultural awareness, community knowledge, and the variety of citizen concerns that modern policing in a diverse city requires of an effective and trusted law enforcement agency,” says The Atlanta Police Foundation’s website.

But given the size and scope of the Atlanta facility, along with its connection to Israeli training methods, such reassurances are not likely to assuage alarm at the prospect of a corporate-backed, militarized police force with tentacles beyond Georgia. Over 40 percent of the trainees at the Atlanta facility would come from outside the state, according to documents obtained by the Atlanta Community Press Collective.

The center’s mock city is reminiscent of urban warfare training performed by the military. The site’s design, the extreme prosecutions and apparently coercive surveillance of protesters speaks to the treatment of the public as a potentially terroristic enemy.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/12/23/c ... ing-bases/

[blindpig]

From Bernhard Getz to George Zimmerman to Daniel Penny: Using Vigilantes to Police a Racist Social Order
Jon Jeter 18 Dec 2024


Gov. David A. Paterson commuted the prison sentence of John H. White who fatally shot an unarmed white teenager in Long Island, NY, after an altercation with his son, sparking a debate about racism and the law. [Photo: New York Times]

The state and vigilante lynchings of Black men and boys in the U.S. are not merely an aberration or a momentary relapse on the nation’s path to racial equality. They are part of the toolbox of violent and psychological warfare tactics used on Black people to maintain the system of racial oppression.

Shortly before midnight on August 9, 2006, a Wednesday, 56-year-old John H. White was awakened by his terrified teenage son, Aaron, who shouted:

“Dad, these guys are coming here to kill me!”

White sprang into action, quickly grabbing a pre-Second World War Beretta pistol and emerging from the garage of his Long Island home to confront what he would later describe as a “lynch mob” of five, white teenagers armed with a baseball bat. Words were exchanged and the most belligerent of the youths, 17-year-old Daniel Cicciaro, Jr.—known as “Dano”— lunged at the pistol; White fatally shot him in the cheek at point blank range.

At trial, White’s attorneys would seize upon the 911 recording as the boys raced Dano to the hospital in their black Mustang Cobra. Wrote Calvin Trillin in the New Yorker:

“The 911 operator can be heard saying, “Sir . . . hello . . . hello . . . sir, pick up the phone.” The boys, their muffled voices almost hysterical, can be heard shouting directions to one another and giving assurances that Dano is still breathing. The operator keeps saying, ‘Hello . . . sir.’ Then the voice of Joseph Serrano, sitting in the back seat with his bleeding friend and his baseball bat, comes through clearly: ‘Fucking niggers! Dano, I’ll get ’em for you, Dano.’

White’s conviction on a single count of manslaughter serves as a stark counterpoint to the acquittal last week of Daniel Penny, a white, Marine veteran who strangled an African American panhandler, Jordan Neely, aboard a New York city subway car. Unlike Cicciaro, Neely was alone, unarmed, and in mental distress; witnesses described him as belligerent and aggressive, but he did not at any point assault or attack anyone.

Cicciaro and his friends were enraged by a message posted in an Internet chat room threatening to rape a female friend; they believed, mistakenly, that Aaron White was the author. Former New York Governor David A. Paterson commuted the elder White’s 20-month prison sentence but in barber shops, beauty salons and online platforms, African Americans juxtaposed his 2009 conviction against Penny’s acquittal and that of other vigilantes—Bernhard Getz who in 1984 shot four Black youths he alleged were trying to rob him, and George Zimmerman, who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American youth in a Florida subdivision.

"It was foolish of us to think that a Black man would get justice in a system that is designed to keep him oppressed," said Chivona Newsome, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Greater New York.

There is, in fact, considerable evidence to support Newsome’s claim that Penny’s acquittal is part of a larger institutional effort that not only condones white vigilantes’ violent attacks against African Americans but encourages it as a means of policing Black dispossession.

Consider that at least 33 states have passed Stand Your Ground laws since the height of the subprime real estate market in 2006, by which time economists had been warning of a housing bubble for at least four years. Well before the downturn, it had become abundantly clear that the real estate market was propped up by fraudulent loans—targeting African Americans and Latinos—that far outstripped borrowers’ ability to repay.

Florida was the first of 33 states in the U.S. to extend, rather preposterously, the Castle Doctrine—the legal principle that states that a man’s home is his castle—dating back to a 17th-century British common law exempting a homeowner from assuming a defensive posture against a burglar or intruder. As a result of Florida’s Stand Your Ground legislation authorizing the use of lethal force outside the home, the legal consequence for killing an unarmed African American in the state is less than that for killing a beaver in Maine.

In fact, a 2010 study by Texas A&M University economics professor Mark Hoekstra and research assistant C. Cheng found that Stand Your Ground laws actually increased the homicide rate by an average of 8 percent.

The authors wrote:

“It is clear that the primary impact of these laws, beyond giving potential victims additional scope to protect themselves, is to increase the loss of human life.”

A statistical analysis of 204 Stand Your Ground cases between 2005 and 2013 by a St. Louis University researcher found “disturbing” proof that “there indeed is a quantifiable racial component in the impact of the law in Florida; namely, a suspect is twice as likely to be convicted of a crime if the victim is white, compared to when that victim is not white.” The article compares its findings to a civil rights-era study that similarly found “strict enforcement for crimes when the victim is white and less rigorous enforcement when the victim is non-white.”

In her 2017 book Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair With Lethal Defense , author Caroline Light wrote:

“(A)s the Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName movements are teaching us now, our current insecurities will not be mitigated by endowing more citizens with the right to shoot first and ask questions later. Indeed, eliminating gun restrictions and the duty to retreat has only intensified the violence against our nation’s most vulnerable citizens. It should not surprise us that (Stand Your Ground) laws and more liberal gun-carry laws—in spite of their ostensibly race-neutral framing—continue to place people of color outside of our nation’s protective boundaries. The deliberate misidentification of criminality and vulnerability is embedded in our very ideals of citizenship.”

The correlation between the proliferation of Stand Your Ground legislation and the simultaneous dispossession of Black wealth through fraudulent home loans is clear. By 2019, the median white family owned almost eight times more in net assets than the median Black household, according to Ann F. Thomas, a law professor at New York University.

Stand Your Ground is not the only means of legalizing white settler terrorism, however. In 2021 state legislative sessions following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Republican lawmakers in 34 states introduced 81 bills that toughen penalties on protesters who block roads, more than twice as many proposals as in any other year, Elly Page, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, told the New York Times. These include, incredibly, bills passed by lawmakers in Oklahoma and Iowa immunizing motorists whose vehicles plow into protesters. Other proposals include an Indiana bill to bar anyone convicted of unlawful assembly from holding state employment, including elected office, and a bill in Minnesota to prohibit anyone convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving student loans, unemployment benefits, or housing assistance.

In this context, it seems clear that the surge in violent attacks by both vigilantes and police is intended to intimidate Blacks to comply with a pyramid scheme in which whites, especially, are allowed to continue to extract wealth from African Americans in the form of gentrification, rents, consumer and municipal debt, discrimination in the job market and a criminal justice system that advantages capital and police officers, attorneys, judges and bail bondsmen.

The escalation is sparked by the emergence of a post-industrial economy, and the precarity that accrues from it. Whites are, both consciously and subconsciously, trying to retain their racial privileges through violence. Their efforts today are virtually indistinguishable from a century ago when the migration of southern Blacks to Northern factories, warehouses and docks sparked white anxiety about competition for jobs, housing and social status.

In addition to racist pogroms such as those that occurred in Red Summer of 1919, Tin Pan Alley songwriters attempted to console anxious whites with lyrics intended to disabuse African Americans of any fanciful notions they may have entertained. Ditties such as “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” were par for the course:

“Someone had to pick the cotton,

Someone had to plant the corn,

Someone had to slave and be able to sing,

That’s why darkies were born.

Though the balance is wrong,

Still your faith must be strong,

Accept your destiny brothers, listen to me.”

Nearly a century later, in the spring of 2015, Darren Seals, an African American activist in St. Louis lamented the ineffectiveness of the public response to Michael Brown’s slaying, concluding in a social media post:

BLACK DEATH IS BIG BUSINESS.

Sixteen months later, the 29-year-old Seals was fatally shot and the car he was sitting in set on fire. His murder remains unsolved.

https://blackagendareport.com/bernhard- ... cial-order

[blindpig]

Despite His Law and Order Rhetoric, Trump May Surprise in his Second Term
By John Kiriakou - December 26, 2024 2


Flanked by police officials, Donald Trump announces his support for a proposal by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to substantially rewrite sentencing and prison laws in November 2018. [Source: nytimes.com]

Donald Trump has a lot of faults. God knows that we have discussed them at length here at CovertAction Magazine and in other venues.

But if there is one thing that Trump is right on, it is prison reform. It was Trump, after all, who issued a flurry of pardons and commutations at the end of his first term and who signed into law the First Step Act, which ended thousands of sentencing disparities, shortened drug-related sentences, and gave thousands of former prisoners a second chance at a productive life.


President Donald Trump speaks before signing the First Step Act in the Oval Office of the White House on December 21, 2018. [Source: heritage.org]

That’s great. And it is certainly more than Joe Biden did in his four years as president (keeping in mind that his vice president is a former prosecutor who dedicated much of her adult life to incarcerating people).

But with that said, at the federal, state and local levels, prison conditions, draconian sentences and corruption are very serious problems all around the country.

Donald Trump is going to have his hands full. (One proviso: No president has jurisdiction over state corrections departments or local jails. But every president sets the tone for state and local corrections departments. And when those corrections departments ignore human rights, civil rights and civil liberties, every president can use the Justice Department to sue states, to prosecute wardens and crooked guards, and to force positive changes.)

Here is what those of us who care about these issues are up against:

*Seven prisoners who tested positive for drugs at the Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex earlier this year were given a choice of punishments, according to a recently filed federal lawsuit. Warden David Green and six guards offered them the choices of either being tased or being forced to drink their own urine. The Kentucky State Department of Corrections responded that, well, at least they fired the guards.


Former Clark County, Indiana, Sheriff Jamey Noel. [Source: courier-journal.com]

*Clark County, Indiana, had to pay $325,000 to 25 former county jail prisoners, both male and female, after Sheriff Jamey Noel—who has been linked to the Oath Keeper militia group—admitted that he allowed guards to carry out something that they called a “Night of Terror,” where, for $1,000 paid to the warden, they were allowed to take prisoners to isolated parts of the jail to rape them. Noel was fired, but for an unrelated embezzlement case. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison last month.

*Three former Santa Clara County, California, jail guards pleaded guilty in August for beating a mentally-ill prisoner to death. The three were convicted by a jury after claiming that the prisoner, Michael Tyree, had simply fallen. But they were ordered to spend only nine years in prison. With time served awaiting trial, all will be released later this year.

*The warden of Alabama’s Limestone Correctional Facility and his wife were arrested earlier this year on three felony charges of producing and trafficking psilocybin, also known as “magic mushrooms.” The warden, Chad Ray Crabtree, already had been in the news after three prisoners under his care died and their bodies were returned to their families with their internal organs missing.

*A guard at South Carolina’s Marlboro County Detention Center was sued earlier this year after being accused of brutalizing a homeless mentally-ill prisoner by stomping on his head. Prisoner Eldred Joe received no treatment in the jail for his bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and he was allegedly brutally beaten by guard Morgan Ridges after other guards had left the area.

*The Ohio Court of Claims approved in July a settlement whereby the state’s Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections had to pay the estates of former prisoners Dewey McVay, Jr., and Michael McDaniel $725,000 after guards at the Correctional Reception Center in Columbus beat them to death. McVay was allegedly killed because he was an accused rapist. McDaniel was beaten to death for no apparent reason just six months before he was due to be released. County and state prosecutors elected not to file charges against the guards.


Jada McDaniel holds a portrait of her brother, Michael McDaniel, who died Feb. 6, 2021 after a violent clash with guards at the Correctional Reception Center.
Michael McDaniel was one of many victims of out-of-control prison violence across the U.S. [Source: dispatch.com]
South Carolina prison captain Christine Livingston, was arrested earlier this year and charged with accepting $219,000 in bribes for smuggling cell phones into the prison in which she worked. She was also charged with maintaining an inappropriate sexual relationship with a murderer in the prison.
Georgia Department of Corrections guard Daniel Farmer was sentenced to 15 years in prison earlier this year for allowing one prisoner to attack and murder another with a home-made shank. The victim was stabbed seven times and killed after Farmer unlocked the victim’s cell remotely so that the other prisoner could stab him.
The deputy warden in Oklahoma’s Lexington Assessment and Reception Center prison, Tasha Parker, was arrested in May for smuggling drugs into the prison, as well as for conspiring with four other guards to assault a prisoner. She is awaiting trial. The four guards were charged with misdemeanors and have kept their jobs.


Tasha Parker—one of many corrupt prison wardens across the U.S. [Source: kfor.com]

Three guards and three staff members at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex were arrested in May and charged with smuggling cell phones, ceramic blades, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, oxycodone, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids into the jail for sale to prisoners. The five each face 20 years in prison.
These bullet points are but a small sampling of what is happening in the country’s jails and prisons at the local, state and federal levels.

The Biden administration did nothing to address the problem. Frankly, no president has done anything of note to address our utterly broken penal system.

Now it is Donald Trump’s turn. Again. I won’t hold my breath. But even though business school teaches that “hope is not a strategy,” I will remain hopeful that something—anything—good will happen.



https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... cond-term/

While it is true that you can't hold Trump to anything he says betting on him showing mercy to Black and Hispanic folks given his ingrained racism is a poor bet indeed. What is this guy smoking?

[blindpig]

Luigi Mangione & the Dangers of Terrorism Charges
December 28, 2024

The indictment of the alleged assassin comes as some states expand terror laws to ensnare protesters who block “critical infrastructure,” Schuyler Mitchell reports.


Luigi by RCF-urlan. (Deviant Art, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives Works 3.0 License)

By Schuyler Mitchell
Truthout

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg unveiled new charges on Dec. 17 against Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspected of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

While Mangione already faced second-degree murder and weapons charges, the unsealed indictment reveals an escalation: New York prosecutors have charged Mangione with first-degree murder “in furtherance of terrorism.”

Bragg’s choice to invoke the big “T” word came as a surprise; it’s not often associated with a single, targeted killing. In fact, prosecutors are charging Mangione using a state law hatched after the 9/11 attacks “to combat the evils of terrorism.”

Tacking terrorism onto the indictment allows the district attorney to upgrade the murder charges from the second to the first degree; under New York law, first-degree murder charges are normally reserved for crimes like serial or mass killings or the murder of police officers.

In previous cases, Manhattan prosecutors have used the state domestic terror law to convict people accused of plotting to bomb synagogues or recruiting support for ISIS.

In 2019, a white supremacist pled guilty to New York terrorism charges after he killed a Black man with a sword with the intent of starting a “worldwide race war.”

Bragg said he levied the charge against Mangione because his alleged killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO was intended “to sow terror.”

Folk Hero Status

It’s hard not to see the bloated charges in the context of Mangione’s recent ascent to quasi-folk hero status.

At the scene of Thompson’s murder, police reportedly found shell casings with the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” — an apparent reference to a book about why health insurance companies deny claims. The suspect was also said to have left a backpack full of Monopoly money in Central Park.

This assemblage of facts meant that broad swaths of the internet across the political spectrum erupted in praise for Mangione, who many saw as a crusader against the for-profit health care system. People shared harrowing stories about their own struggles to obtain coverage for life-saving care.

As the public face of the largest health insurance company in the U.S., Thompson was flattened to a symbol of corporate greed. His total compensation in 2023 exceeded $10 million.

This outpouring of public resentment has unnerved health care executives. Corporations scrambled to scrub information about their C-suites from the internet and called up private security details. Bragg made a broad reference to this fear in a press conference.

“This was a killing that was intended to evoke terror and we’ve seen that reaction,” he told reporters on Dec. 17. “This was not an ordinary killing.”


Bragg in June 2023. (CmdrDan, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The word terrorist has never been a neutral descriptor in the U.S., applied equally across populations. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, terrorism was recast by U.S. politicians and media as predominantly an issue of transnational, Islamist fundamentalism.

This imbued the term with a political charge that often obfuscated sources of mass violence at home — like white supremacy.

‘Legitimate’ State Violence

Labor journalist Hamilton Nolan has critiqued the terrorist label on his Substack, writing that, for years, it has been “embedded into the average American’s psyche as a synonym for ‘evil.’”

“It defines its subject from the outset as a villain,” Nolan wrote. “It connotes violence that is illegitimate, in contrast to the legitimate violence delivered by the state.”

Legitimate violence delivered by the state could, for instance, include systematic torture at Guantánamo Bay, the bankrolling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza or allowing a profit-driven health care system to kill thousands of U.S. citizens each year.

I should emphasize here that I’m not, of course, condoning any form of violence, but rather thinking critically through the instances in which state actors do or do not choose to call upon the terrorist label.

And in recent years, there have been several high-profile cases in which we’ve seen the police state’s definition of domestic terrorism expanding, even when no physical harm is involved.

In Georgia, more than 40 activists have been charged under the state’s domestic terrorism law for their alleged involvement in the decentralized Defend the Atlanta Forest movement. Police warrants cited probable cause for the protesters’ arrest on grounds as weak as having muddy shoes.

Since late 2021, demonstrators have been pushing to stop the construction of a massive police training facility, dubbed Cop City, on Atlanta forest land.

[See: ‘Cop City’ Leads US Buildup in Police-Training Bases]

“If I am arrested with domestic terrorism charges for camping in a forest, that’s something I’m willing to go to court for,” Sam Law, an anthropology doctoral student from Texas, told the Associated Press in March of last year.

Georgia broadened its domestic terrorism statute in 2017, two years after white supremacist Dylann Roof perpetrated a mass shooting at a Black church in South Carolina. Lawmakers framed the revised law as a response to white supremacist violence, but the new language also included attacks on critical infrastructure and government facilities under the domestic terror umbrella.

The expanded definition has since been used to charge the Cop City protesters. According to prosecutors, blocking the construction of a police training facility now amounts to terrorism.


January 2023 protest in Atlanta against the construction of “Cop City,” a large police training center. (Tatsoi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Several other states have proposed or enacted laws expanding their domestic terrorism definitions. When Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill in Oregon last year, civil liberties groups sounded the alarm.

Democrats said the expanded statute was a response to recent attacks on the power grid linked to neo-Nazi groups, but legal experts noted that the law was broad enough to sweep up anti-racist and climate activists for peaceful protests.

In February, New York Democrats introduced their own bill that would criminalize blocking public roads and bridges as an act of domestic terror — a further expansion of the already broad domestic terror law under which Mangione is being charged.

The move appeared to be in direct response to the influx of protesters swarming New York streets to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Disparate Acts

A brazen assassination, a mass shooting and a peaceful protest are obviously wholly disparate acts — and so their conflation under the banner of terrorism, a charge that already has a tradition of being wielded politically, should raise additional red flags.

On the day of Mangione’s arrest, another 26-year-old in New York was acquitted. A jury found Daniel Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the case over the death of Jordan Neely, a Black unhoused man experiencing a mental health crisis on the city subway. Video captured Penny maintaining a chokehold on Neely for nearly a minute after he had gone limp.

The shocking and sudden nature of the killing sparked protests calling for justice for Neely, including one group of demonstrators that jumped on subway tracks on the Upper East Side. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested and charged those protesters with domestic terrorism last May.

Bragg’s office later dropped the NYPD’s charges. But as local reporting pointed out, the activists faced the same domestic terrorism charges as Frank James, the shooter who opened fire on a New York subway in 2022, injuring 10 people — simply for jumping on subway tracks.

On Dec. 19 federal prosecutors unsealed their own indictment against Mangione, including federal charges of murder, stalking and weapons offenses. New York ruled capital punishment unconstitutional in 2004. But if Mangione is convicted in federal court, he could face the death penalty.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/12/28/l ... m-charges/

[blindpig]

Malcolm X’s Family Lawsuit Accuses the CIA, FBI and NYPD in Icon’s Assassination
By John Potash - February 21, 2025 0


[Source: venturejolts.com]

[Today marks the 59th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. See CovertAction Magazine’s in-depth exploration of the crime as an addendum to this piece.—Editors]

In mid-November, three daughters of Malcolm X (aka el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) accused the CIA, FBI, the New York Police Department and the Department of Justice with involvement in the 1965 assassination of the activist leader.

The daughters, spearheaded by Ilyasah Shabazz and represented by Attorney Ben Crump, filed a $100 million lawsuit in conjunction with the Malcolm X estate, claiming these agencies were aware of and involved in the assassination, and failed to stop it.


Attorney Ray Hamlin speaks during a press conference at the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center on February 21, 2023. [Source: complex.com]

Their lawsuit claims that the New York Police Department (NYPD), working with federal law enforcement agencies, arrested Malcom X’s own security guards days before the assassination, while also removing their own police security detail that was present at all of Malcolm’s events in the previous year or more. These agencies also had undercover agents at the scene of the assassination who failed to protect Malcolm X.[1]

U.S. Intelligence Documents and Actions Support Daughters’ Claims About the FBI
An FBI memorandum of March 4, 1968, discussed the “long range goals” including: “Prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.” Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah.” This and other documents presented how Malcolm X had clearly emerged as U.S. Intelligence’s top threat.[2]

Malcolm’s influence over large numbers of American Blacks first came through his Nation of Islam (NOI) leadership as its national spokesman. The FBI began their surveillance file on him early in the 1950s.[3]


Malcolm X. in his heyday. The FBI began its surveillance file on him in the 1950s. [Source: reddit.com]


John X Ali [Source: visupview.blogspot.com]

As early as 1958, New York detectives shot up Malcolm X’s office, for which the city settled with Malcolm in a $24 million lawsuit. FBI undercover agent John X Ali, who infiltrated the NOI, could provide the floor plan since he was living with Malcolm at the time. [4]

By the start of the 1960s, FBI documents revealed that U.S. intelligence wrote up to several reports a week on Malcolm due to his radical influence over Blacks.

Agent John X Ali also reportedly played a part in orchestrating the firebombing of Malcolm’s house in 1965. Ali had risen to a national secretary assignment, one of the highest leadership positions in the NOI. NOI leader Elijah Muhammad’s son, Wallace Muhammad, said several FBI undercover agents in the NOI national staff helped Ali make that rise, as also attested to by FBI documents.[5]

Evidence of the New York Police and CIA’s Involvement in the Assassination of Malcolm X
High-level CIA whistleblower Victor Marchetti explained in a 1974 expose that the CIA director was “the titular chief of the entire intelligence community.”[6]

This would include the FBI and the Bureau of Special Services and Investigation (BOSS), the NYPD’s special intelligence unit working against leftist political groups.

In the 1960s, BOSS carried out investigations and operations against political activists and was spearheaded by Lieutenant Angelo Galante who had previously worked for the CIA, specializing in fighting against revolutionary guerrilla forces behind enemy lines.[7]

From the late 1950s on, Malcolm X’s leadership of the New York NOI mosque also helped him meet with Third World revolutionaries and African leaders at the New York-based United Nations. The CIA grew concerned about Malcolm’s influence amongst these leaders. African leaders soon hosted Malcolm X and had him take part in their political decisions.

Malcolm believed that U.S. Intelligence said CIA agents made their presence obvious to try to intimidate him as he traveled through Africa. They did not want him to present a planned United Nations appeal to African leaders that the U.S. was violating American Blacks’ human rights.[8]

In late July 1964 Malcolm X ate at a restaurant in Cairo, Egypt, where he said he felt poison in his food. He realized that he recognized the waiter as someone he had seen in New York. Rushed to the hospital, he was barely saved by a stomach pumping. The attending doctor said there was a toxic substance in his food. Malcolm had been concerned about death threats from the NOI he had left that year but he knew that they did not have a global spy capacity.[9]

Several other disclosures supporting CIA attempts on Malcolm X’s life include one from a high-level African diplomat. He said that the French Counter-Espionage Department reported that the CIA planned Malcolm’s murder, and France barred Malcolm for the first time in fear of getting scapegoated for the assassination.[10]

Furthermore, the FBI Director wrote a confidential memo on Malcolm’s travel plans through Britain and France. He sent it to the CIA Director, the Army Intelligence (Intel) chief, the Naval Intel Director, and the Air Force Counterintel chief, as well as Intel chiefs in London and Paris.[11] One such memorandum on Malcolm and African leaders went directly to the CIA director of covert action, Richard Helms, who had a key role in assassination plots.[12]


Richard Helms [Source: spyscape.com]

The FBI and Malcolm X’s Assassination in New York and Reversal of Convictions in 2021
Gunmen carried out Malcolm X’s assassination on February 21, 1965, in the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. An FBI document said (undercover agent) John Ali met with Talmadge Hayer (aka Thomas Hagan), one of the gunmen who shot Malcolm X, the night before the assassination.[13]


Talmadge Hayer [Source: imdb.com]

As the Shabazz daughters’ lawsuit states, at the Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X gave his last speech, uniformed police left the area despite usually filling the hall inside and outside where Malcolm gave speeches.[14]

Meanwhile, the New York Herald Tribune also said a “high police official” confirmed that several undercover BOSS agents were in the Ballroom audience at the assassination.[15]

In 1969, undercover BOSS police agent Gene Roberts testified that he was the first to arrive at Malcolm’s body and he “proceeded to give Malcolm X mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”[16]

Gene Roberts contradicted any good intentions in his later interviews and actions. For example, in interviews years later he described the actions of his wife Joan Roberts who was with him at the event. When Malcolm X was shot, Malcolm’s wife Betty Shabazz first tried to cover her daughters and screamed, “They’re killing my husband!”[17]

When the shooting stopped, Shabazz, a nurse, went to run to her husband, but Joan Roberts grabbed her. Shabazz struggled to get free, threw Roberts into a wall and ran to Malcolm. Gene Roberts said he was there checking Malcolm’s pulse. He turned to Shabazz and said Malcolm was dead.[18]


[Source: face2faceafrica.com]

The actions of Roberts parallel the actions of undercover infiltrator, military intelligence agent Marrell McCollough in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. McCollough disclosed how he raced to and knelt over MLK as he lay bleeding from the shooting.

An MLK friend, writer William Pepper, noted that McCollough was “apparently checking him for life signs,” making sure the assassination was successful and signaling to military intelligence that “the army snipers there as backup shooters” were not needed.[19]

Undercover agent Gene Roberts later infiltrated Malcolm X’s followers in the Harlem Black Panthers and unsuccessfully attempted to have them convicted of many charges.

And finally, the New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times reported that, just after the shooting of Malcolm, police detained two people whom the crowd had grabbed. Patrolman Thomas Hoy said that Malcolm’s supporters grabbed one suspect and he grabbed a second suspect being chased by some people. Hoy further said, “the crowd began beating me and the [second] suspect” in the Ballroom. In the following days, the Herald Tribune, the Times and a mass of media accounts never mentioned a second suspect.[20]

In 1966, New York authorities convicted three men of assassinating Malcolm: Talmadge Hayer (aka Thomas Hagan, later Mujahid Abdul Halim), Muhammad Abdul Aziz and Khalil Islam. The latter two had their convictions overturned in 2021, with a re-investigation by The Innocence Project finding FBI documents pointing to other suspects and police ignoring a warning given to New York’s Daily News that Malcolm X would be killed that day.



1.Larry Neumeister, “The daughters of Malcolm X sue the CIA, FBI and NYPD over the civil rights leader’s assassination,” Associated Press, November 15, 2024. ↑



2.On FBI document, FBI memorandum, March 4, 1968. In Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X: The FBI File (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991), p. 17. Also see, Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (New York: The Free Press, 1989), pp. 112, 217, cited in Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1991), p. 170. ↑



3.Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X: The FBI File, p. 18. ↑



4.Karl Evanzz, The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), p. 73; and Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon, 1999), pp. 187-88, 192, 317. Also see, Louis E. Lomax, To Kill a Black Man (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1987), pp. 82, 103. All cited in James W. Douglass, “The Murder and Martyrdom of Malcolm X”; and Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, eds., The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003), pp. 378-81. ↑



5.See interview of Nation of Islam Captain Joseph X in Spike Lee, By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X (New York: Halperion, 1992), p. 63, and Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X, a 1997 film directed by Jack Baxter. Author James Douglass’s interview with Wallace Muhammad, now W.D. Muhammad, February 2, 1999, and Evanzz, The Messenger, p. 317, both cited in Douglass, Assassinations, ed. Di Eugenio and Pease, 379. Wallace himself accepted FBI money for information after fearing his half-siblings’ actions for Wallace aiding Malcolm X. ↑



6.ictor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Dell Publishing, 1974), p. 96. ↑



7.Murray Kempton, The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York v. Lumumba Shakur et al. (New York: Dutton, 1973), p. 57. This book was a National Book Award winner. Also see Michael Newton, Bitter Grain: Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1991), p. 176. ↑



8.Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965). ↑



9.Jan Carew, Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1994), p. 39, cited in The Assassinations, ed. Di Eugenio and Pease, 396. ↑



10.African diplomat’s statement made to Eric Norden, “The Murder of Malcolm X,” The Realist, February 1967, p. 12, cited in The Assassinations, p. 404. ↑



11.FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, February 4, 1965, memorandum. Besides the intelligence agencies mentioned, Hoover also sent this memo to the Attorney General and the Foreign Liaison Unit, Baba Zak A. Condo, Conspiracies: Unraveling the Assassination of Malcolm X (Washington, D.C.: Nubia Press, 1993), pp. 271-72, endnote 491. ↑



12.August 11, 1964, CIA memorandum from Deputy Director of Plans, titled “ACTIVITIES OF MALCOLM POSSIBLE INVOLVEMENT OF AFRICAN NATIONS IN U.S. CIVIL DISTRUBANCES,” cited by Kondo, Conspiracies, pp. 49 and 242 (endnote 280), and Evanzz, The Judas Factor, p. 254, cited in The Assassinations, pp. 398-99 (endnote 118). ↑



13.Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X (2nd edition) (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 314. See also The New York Times, March 3, 1966, p. 24, cited in The Assassinations, pp. 410-11. ↑



14.See Patricia Russell’s eyewitness account in The Baltimore Afro-American, February 27, 1965, cited in George Breitman, Herman Porter and Baxter Smith, The Assassination of Malcolm X (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991), pp. 58-59. Then, after the assassination, police calmly filled the hall within 15 minutes, without drawing their guns. See also Earl Grant, “The Last Days of Malcolm X,” in John Henrik Clarke, ed., Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (New York: Macmillan, 1975), p. 96, and Lee, By Any Means Necessary, p. 42. ↑



15.New York Herald Tribune, February 23, 1965, cited in Breitman, Porter and Smith, The Assassination of Malcolm X, p. 54. ↑



16.Kempton, The Briar Patch, pp. 200-201. “‘What appeared to be twenty minutes later,’” Roberts finished, “police finally got there and took him over to the medical center.’” This disclosure contradicts police officer Henry’s attempt to call back-up officers and Police Inspector Taylor’s claim of 20 police officers at the Ballroom.



17.Malcolm X’s daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz, in Corey Kilgannon, “Remembering Malcolm X In the Place Where He Fell,” The New York Times, February 21, 2005, p. B1. ↑



18.On Joan Roberts grabbing Betty Shabazz, see Elaine Rivera, “Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Spied on Malcolm X,” Newsday, July 23, 1989. On Gene Roberts checking Malcolm X’s pulse, see author Douglass’s interview with Roberts, July 7, 2000, both cited in Douglass, “The Murder and Martyrdom of Malcolm X,” in The Assassinations, ed. Di Eugenio and Pease, 413. On turning to Betty Shabazz and saying Malcolm’s dead, see Kempton, The Briar Patch, p. 200.



19.William F. Pepper, Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Time Warner, 1998), pp. 128, 431, 481, 485. ↑



20.New York Herald Tribune, February 22, 1965, front-page (early edition) headline and description of two men being grabbed and beaten by the mob before police took custody of them. This was changed without explanation in the later edition. Also see The New York Times, February 22, 1965, all cited in Breitman, Porter and Smith, The Assassination of Malcolm X , pp. 52-54. U.S. Intelligence has stated in their internal documents having that kind of censorship control over media organizations. For one of many examples, see Joseph Crewden, “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.,” The New York Times, December 26, 1977, p. 1. ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... ssination/

******

Black prisoners organize for dignity in Angola, Louisiana’s modern-day plantation

Louisiana State Penitentiary is nicknamed after the former plantation site that it sits on. Those incarcerated at the prison say the practice of slavery is still alive and well

February 23, 2025 by Natalia Marques


Conditions of modern-day slavery at Angola prison in Louisiana (Photo via National Museum of African American History and Culture)

This Black History Month, Peoples Dispatch is exploring the history of the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary, the site of centuries of Black struggle—first against slavery, then convict leasing, and now the US prison system, which some label as slavery in the modern day.

At the helm of the US’s notorious system of mass incarceration sits Louisiana State Penitentiary. Apart from being the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, this prison, nicknamed “Angola” after the former plantation site that it sits on, is an example of the conditions of modern-day slavery that the US prison system inflicts upon its disproportionately Black incarcerated population.

The Angola Plantation
Before the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the land the prison currently sits on was known as the Angola Plantations, owned by slave trader Isaac Franklin. The name “Angola” comes from the southern African nation, with another one of Franklin’s plantations being named “Loango” after the pre-colonial African kingdom. Angola became one of the most productive plantations in the US South, churning out 3,100 bales of cotton per year via the labor of its slaves.


Black laborers pick cotton at Angola, circa 1900

Following the Civil War, in 1880, the plantation was sold to Samuel Lawrence James, a former Confederate Army Major, who took advantage of the return of slavery-like conditions through the emergence of the convict leasing system. Through convict leasing, private corporations colluded with the criminal justice system to entrap, convict, and lease mostly Black people as incarcerated laborers. This practice became highly lucrative throughout the former slave states of the US South, with the state of Alabama generating 73% of its annual state revenue from convict leasing in 1898.

Conditions at the former plantation, now known as the James Prison Camp, became so harsh that they prompted the formation of the Prison Reform Association in New Orleans, which vehemently opposed the convict leasing system. The group’s advocacy alongside other prison reform groups eventually resulted in the banning of convict leasing in Louisiana in 1898.


Quarters at Angola, circa 1901

James died in 1894. In 1901, the state of Louisiana purchased the 8,000-acre plantation, establishing the Louisiana State Penitentiary on the grounds. And although Angola had gone from plantation, to convict-leasing camp, to prison, the basic conditions persisted throughout history—the brutal, forced labor of mostly Black people in the fields.

Authors Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell would go on to label the “Angola” prison as “probably as close to slavery as any person could come in 1930.” Louisiana State Penitiary staff “ran the prison like it was a private fiefdom,” they wrote in the The Life and Legend of Leadbelly.

Prisoners struggle for better conditions
Prisoners, although effectively re-enslaved on the grounds of the Angola plantation, refused to remain slaves of their conditions. The history of Angola prison is as much a history of struggle of the most oppressed sectors of the working class as it is a history of brutality within the prison system.


Prisoners at Angola, including famous prisoner and singer Leadbelly, July 1934

As conditions at the prison continued to deteriorate, especially following staff and budget cuts after the Great Depression, current and former prisoners put themselves at the forefront of the struggle for reform. In 1943, former Angola prisoner William Sadler published “Hell on Angola,” as a series of articles in The Angolite, Angola’s prisoner-operated publication. Sadler, who was nicknamed “Wooden Ear” due to injuries sustained in an attack by a prison guard, dedicated himself to reforming conditions within his former prison.

By 1951, prison conditions had deteriorated to such a level that 31 prisoners sliced their own Achilles tendons in protest and to avoid overwork in the fields—a somewhat common form of self-mutilation and protest by prisoners throughout the US to avoid overwork and torture by guards. By May of that year, what became known as the “Heel String Gang,” or inmates of Angola that had undergone this painful form of protest, had grown to 55. The protest, though violent, was ultimately successful, and corporal punishment was formally abolished at the prison.

Angola has incarcerated some notable fighters for Black liberation, including Ruchell Magee, who was subject to what some dub a “legal lynching,” being sentenced at age 16 for “aggravated attempted rape” for his relationship with a 23-year-old, married white woman. After finally leaving the fields of Angola at age 23, Magee would go on to be reincarcerated in Los Angeles and later participate in the Marin County Courthouse Rebellion, dubbed a “slave rebellion” by some in the Black liberation movement.


Covers of the prisoner-run “Angolite” magazine, showing a prisoner picking cotton (Photo via JSTOR)

Some of the most high-profile incarcerated organizers and freedom fighters were known as the Angola 3—political prisoners Albert Woodfox, Herman Wallace, and Robert Hillary King. The Angola 3 were imprisoned at Angola from the 1970s to the early 2000s and 2010s. Woodfox and Wallace were placed in solitary confinement for over 40 years—the longest period of solitary confinement in US history.

Beyond being subject to the longest periods of solitary—international recognized as a form of torture—Woodfox, Wallace, and King formed what some label as the first official chapter of the Black Panther Party behind prison walls.

Prisoners keep up the fight today
In the past few years the struggles of Angola prisoners have revealed that conditions at the prison remain essentially as a modern day form of slavery.

In September of 2024, several prisoners filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the harsh conditions of forced farm labor at the prison. Angola’s mostly Black inmates are still forced to pick cotton in the same fields as they did before slavery was abolished, often in conditions of extreme heat.

“I saw guys collapse,” said Angola prisoner Lamont Gross of his time working Angola’s notorious “farm line”. “There were dudes that got heat stroke. There were dudes with underlying conditions, older or had some sort of disability, but they had to go out there, too.” Harkening to conditions of slavery, plaintiffs in the class action suit claimed that they fainted due to their working conditions and were punished for it.

Across the US, prisoners are struggling against the behemoth of mass incarceration, much of which involved similar conditions of modern-day slavery. In Alabama, for example, prisoners have organized several rounds of state-wide shut downs of prison labor. These Alabama incarcerated organizers, led by a group called the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), want more than just better conditions—they have called for an end to prison slavery.


Activists stand in solidarity with incarcerated organizers outside of St. Clair prison in Alabama (Photo: Birmingham DSA)

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/02/23/ ... lantation/

[blindpig]

Racist policing in Maryland: 41 deaths in police custody reclassified as homicides
May 30, 2025 Lev Koufax



Nearly two weeks ago, Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Attorney General Anthony Brown announced that a Towson University audit reclassified 41 deaths in police custody as homicides. The audit focused on the years 2003-2019, a period that aligns with the tenure of notorious racist medical examiner, David Fowler, who was trained in apartheid South Africa.

All 41 cases were initially classified by Fowler as “undetermined, accidental, or natural” during his tenure as Maryland’s Chief Medical Examiner. The murders, finally being called murders, include high-profile cases such as Anton Black and Tyrone West. In both cases, the police brutally assaulted and killed a young Black man, and in both cases, David Fowler found the deaths to be accidental. Racism as a system could not function without a whole system of bureaucrats like Fowler who silence the community and rubber stamp racist murder.

Fowler’s heinous testimony in the trial of Derek Chauvin stirred public outrage when he testified under oath that George Floyd died from a heart attack. According to Fowler, the police officer’s knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly 10 minutes was merely coincidental. Due to public pressure, the State of Maryland ordered the audit after 450 medical experts published a letter demanding a full review of Fowler’s tenure.

Even as Governor Moore and AG Brown reflected on the audit results as “concerning,” there was no announcement of charges against the perpetrators of the recently converted murders. All of these killings are documented in nauseating detail. The sad fact is that – Fowler, Chauvin, the Maryland State Attorney – are all cogs in a larger racist machine. They work to uphold and enforce modern Jim Crow.

Frankly, the working class is tired of hearing about audits, investigations and reviews. All this report did was confirm a fraction of what the entire city of Baltimore has known for years: The police and the medical examiner have coordinated to protect brutal, racist cops.

Justice for Marlyn Barnes

Many people died at the hands of the racist justice system who weren’t on that list. For example, Marlyn Barnes was one of the 1,300 initial cases that Towson investigated but was not included in the cases officially reopened. Marlyn Barnes died under suspicious circumstances in the Harford County jail in Bel Air, Maryland, in 2019. It was Fowler’s Medical Examiner administration that scuttled Barnes’ mother’s efforts to gain information about his death. Even to this day, Marlyn’s mother Marilyn doesn’t know the whole story. This is the sort of racist injustice enacted upon the Black community in Maryland and across the United States every day tenfold.

There is no better argument for the need for a socialist revolution than the horrendous police terror regime known as the U.S. criminal justice system. While Fowler’s fall from grace and the reclassification of some of the murders is a positive step – they are also indicative of the limits of justice under capitalism. Ultimately, capitalist bureaucracy isn’t designed to genuinely assist working people, but to frustrate their efforts while maintaining a veneer of progress.

Anton Black, Marlyn Barnes, Tyrone West, Korynne Gaines, all prisoners, and all those who have suffered from racist police brutality deserve legitimate justice. What is really needed is not just a full people’s prosecution of racist killer cops, but also complete community control of the police.

Please see Struggle-La Lucha’s previous coverage of David Fowler, Marlyn Barnes, and the prisoner and police terror struggle more broadly:

Protest Demands Justice for Marlyn Barnes, Oct. 16, 2019
Bel Air, Md., Nov. 9: Truth and Justice for Marlyn Barnes and all Prisoners!, Oct. 30, 2019
Justice for Marlyn Barnes & Prisoners Solidarity Car Caravan, May 10, 2020
#FreeThemAll caravan honors Marlyn Barnes, May 23, 2020
Chauvin witness David Fowler: medical expert or racist liar?, Apr. 17, 2020
Baltimore: Reopen Marlyn Barnes’ case, June 8, June 2, 2021
Cases reopened: Maryland’s former chief medical examiner covered up police killings, Jan. 7, 2023
Baltimore demands justice for Tyre Nichols and end to police terror, Feb. 2, 2023
Nazi Billionaires: Fascism in the Elon Musk family tree, Jan. 26, 2025

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... homicides/

I've been on a couple "rough rides" in the back of a Baltimore City paddy wagon back in the 70s when I was a wild boy. Good thing for me that I was white...

[blindpig]

Minneapolis Police Officers, May 2020.

A retreat from justice: Shielding cops from accountability
Originally published: The Progressive Magazine on June 3, 2025 by Terrance Sullivan (more by The Progressive Magazine) | (Posted Jun 05, 2025)

While turning a corner onto Central Avenue in Louisville, Kentucky. I saw the police lights flashing behind me and felt my heart drop. There, in the shadow of world-famous Churchill Downs racecourse, I waited in fear as the two officers approached my car. What happened next that day in 2011 was completely uncalled for, and terrifying.

The officers’ guns were drawn and pointed in my direction as I tried to breathe and regulate my emotions.

Luckily, or unluckily, I’d been here before. Five years prior, when I was pulled over by Kentucky State Police, there were six officers with guns pointed at me. Having only two in this instance was no less frightening.

My license and registration wasn’t their first demand. Instead, the officers asked where I was coming from and what brought me to the area. As it happened, I had just washed and detailed my eighteen-year-old Lexus which had 300,000 miles on it. It looked good, maybe too good. Maybe good enough to make the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) feel the need to check in on the young Black man in the Lexus.

When I finally had a chance to speak, aside from the obligatory “yes sir, no sir,” I asked the officers why they had pulled me over. One of the officers said there had been an issue at a bank a few miles away and, of course, I fit the description. The officer slightly shifted his tone after I told him I was a second-year law student, and while he didn’t stop pointing his gun toward my face, he did move his finger a little further away from the trigger.

After a few more barked orders, the officers’ radio informed them that I was not their guy, and they left without offering any semblance of an apology. But I was lucky. I was able to leave. Others in this city, like Breonna Taylor, were not so fortunate.

On March 13, 2020, Louisville police shot and killed Taylor in her apartment. The incident received national attention a few weeks later, after the world watched George Floyd take his final breath under the knee of a Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer—an event that recently had its five-year anniversary.

These killings were not isolated tragedies: They were seismic events that led to an outpouring of protest, grief, and a rare moment of bipartisan recognition that the enduring reality of police violence and structural racism in the United States had to change. And for a brief time, it seemed as though that might happen. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) launched long-overdue civil rights investigations into the police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, eventually producing harsh reports that documented unconstitutional abuses and deeply entrenched racial bias.

These findings led to federal consent decrees—court-enforced reform agreements aimed at curbing police brutality, ensuring accountability, and rebuilding public trust. They were not perfect solutions, but they were a good start. Now, the Trump Administration is ending even that modest progress.

In an alarming but not surprising move, the current administration announced just days before the anniversary of Floyd’s murder that it was seeking to dismiss pending police reform agreements in Louisville and Minneapolis, as well as shutting down active federal police reform efforts in Phoenix, Arizona; Trenton, New Jersey; and Memphis, Tennessee. This amounts to a sweeping declaration that federal oversight of racist, abusive policing is no longer a priority, or even a concern.

These decisions are not simply bureaucratic shifts by a new administration, as commonly occur when there is a change in the presidency. Rather, it is a profound move towards erasure, one that ignores the evidence, disrespects the dead, and undermines the hard-fought demands of millions of people in the United States and throughout the world who took to the streets for racial justice in 2020.

The DOJ’s investigative report on LMPD, released in March 2023, painted a damning picture. Officers routinely used excessive force, conducted illegal searches, and discriminated against Black residents. Later that same year it came to light that LMPD officers had engaged in behavior dubbed “Slushygate,” in which officers laughed as they threw drinks at pedestrians in predominantly Black neighborhoods, recording and sharing the videos for their amusement. These officers were not simply proverbial “bad apples”; they were symptomatic of a system corrupted by dehumanizing racialized contempt and the absence of accountability.

The Minneapolis report, released in June 2023, was no less disturbing. It evidenced years of racially biased policing, reckless force, and leadership failures that allowed abuses to endure. These reports confirmed what communities have long been saying: that modern policing, especially in Black and brown neighborhoods, too often operates as a mechanism of control rather than protection.

While the Trump Administration is seeking to dismiss federal consent decrees across the country, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights has maintained that the city of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department will remain under an existing state-level consent decree, which limits officers’ use of force, requires offices to de-escalate, prohibits certain pretextual stops, and requires independent oversight. The state court is the only entity that can terminate this agreement.

By walking away from these federal decrees, as well as the issuing of a recent Executive Order that professes to “unleash law enforcement,” the Trump Administration is saying to police departments everywhere:

We’ve got your back. Go ahead and abuse Black people. We don’t mind.

This is not just a policy shift. It is a manifestation of a white supremacist logic—that state violence against Black people is acceptable, even necessary, to maintain “order.” It reflects an authoritarian impulse to consolidate state power, silence dissent, and shield law enforcement from scrutiny.

It is not coincidental that this comes amid broader attacks on racial justice—from efforts to ban the teaching of Black history to the criminalizing protest and the leadership of movements. The government’s pulling back from police reform is part of a much larger project to reassert dominance through fear and force.

Historically, the United States has been quick to condemn authoritarianism or strong-armed state violence and tactics abroad. But now we are seeing the outright dismantling of mechanisms that are designed to uphold constitutional rights and dignity.

When the federal government abandons its responsibility to investigate systemic abuses—particularly when those abuses disproportionately harm marginalized communities. It signals the normalization of a police state where law enforcement can act with impunity, and those harmed are left with no path to justice.

This is not democracy. This is the weaponization of state power against the very people it is meant to serve.

We should instead seek to honor the lives of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others by continuing to demand real accountability—not with symbolic gestures or rhetorical commitments, but meaningful structural change.

Congress must act to reinstate and strengthen the authority of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to investigate and enforce reforms. State and local governments must fill the void by enacting their own accountability mechanisms, including independent oversight, bans on qualified immunity, and divestment from militarized policing.

A larger conversation must be had about the root problem of white supremacy and the lasting legacy of this racist ideology across the board. All efforts must be made to address a system that is designed to uphold racial hierarchies through violence and surveillance.

As we think of the thousands of people like me who are regularly unjustly targeted by police, or the ones who succumb to the violence, we must be vigilant in seeking protections and accountability. The retreat from consent decrees is not only a policy failure—it is a moral collapse. We must respond not with resignation, but with renewed resistance.

https://mronline.org/2025/06/05/a-retre ... ntability/

******

"Crimigration" and immigration apartheid are intensifying in the US.
June 5, 2025 , 11:23 am .


The Trump administration has refined its methods of immigration repression and criminalization by using social media as tools of mass surveillance and censorship (Photo: The Washington Post)

One of the Trump administration's latest decisions was the temporary freeze on visa appointments for foreign students, a measure announced on May 27, 2025, by the State Department and immediately implemented by order of Secretary Marco Rubio.

This pause seeks to review applicants' social media accounts, without specifying what type of activity will be considered "suspicious." The measure appears to be directly related to the political climate generated by the international protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Student movements at universities such as Harvard, Columbia, and UCLA have been violently repressed, while the Trump administration seeks to silence them under the pretext of "national security." Trump has labeled them "anti-Semitic" and progressive, accusations that are part of a broader campaign of institutional harassment against academic spaces that do not align with the American conservative narrative.

Vance: "Teachers are the enemy"
Trump has gone even further, threatening to withdraw federal contracts from the university, specifically because of its alleged affirmative action toward minority groups and its tolerance of demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine. Before taking office, his vice president, J.D. Vance, warned that "faculty are the enemy" and threatened to "honestly and aggressively attack America's universities."

This persecution is not new: in 2023, three law students were rescinded from leadership positions in Harvard and Columbia groups that expressed support for the Palestinian people and held Israel responsible for the Hamas attack on October 7 of that year.

The offensive not only affects students in Latin America, Africa, and West Asia, but also attacks the right to higher education in general, turning universities into ideological battlegrounds where an agenda of control and repression is imposed.


In 2023, Harvard University students faced workplace retaliation for demonstrating in support of Palestinians in Gaza in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Photo: Getty Images)

The context reflects a logic of symbolic apartheid: those who do not share certain ideological or cultural values ​​are "preemptively" excluded, under the pretext of national security. Social media becomes a tool of mass surveillance, allowing any critical comment, shared image, or digital interaction to be used as a pretext for denying a visa.

In this sense, what is being implemented is not an immigration policy, but rather a form of globalized censorship, a de facto erasure.

" Crimigration": Legal and social apartheid
The above adds to the wave of immigration measures aimed at constructing a system of racialized and selective exclusion that primarily affects communities from the Global South and reveals a certain nostalgia for the order that Washington has attempted to impose.

The Trump administration has taken so-called " crimmigration "—the fusion of criminal and immigration policies—to extreme levels. This approach, intensified during his second term, turns every migrant—even those with legal status—into a potential suspect. Thousands of international students have had their immigration permits revoked based on minor police records, with no real verification of their guilt or guarantee of due process.

This policy, known as the " Student Criminal Alien Initiative ," has led to mass deportations and exclusions from universities without the opportunity for defense. The use of algorithms and automated searches in criminal databases has generated blatant errors, including cases of individuals who were never formally charged with any crime. Federal judges like Ana Reyes have harshly criticized this practice, demanding that the government provide answers as to whether certain students are in the country legally.

But this criminalization is not limited to students. Through the Supreme Court, the Trump administration successfully overturned the humanitarian parole program that protected more than 500,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti. Thousands of them now face the risk of deportation after being granted entry to the United States for reasons more propagandistic than humanitarian.

In addition, Trump signed a proclamation on June 4 suspending visa issuance to citizens of other countries seeking to study at Harvard University. The decision was made "to safeguard the national security" of the United States.

"The proclamation suspends the entry into the U.S. of any new Harvard students as nonimmigrants under F (academic students), M (vocational students), or J (exchange visitor) visas," the text states. The document also orders Secretary of State Marco Rubio to revoke existing visas.

"Harvard has not provided sufficient information to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about known illegal or dangerous activities of foreign students, and has only reported deficient data on three students."

Another emblematic case is that of Dylan López Contreras, a young Venezuelan migrant who was arrested in Texas after participating in a peaceful protest against Trump's immigration policies. His case generated some media and political attention, including support from New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who issued public statements supporting his release and criticizing the criminalization of migrant activists.

In this scenario, a legal and social apartheid is established —as Amarela Varela, a researcher and professor specializing in migration at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), would say—where immigration rights are distributed according to criteria of race, class, and nationality. While the entry of white South African citizens is facilitated , millions of Latin Americans, Haitians, and Africans are labeled as "threats" without concrete evidence. The US immigration system thus becomes a machine of selective exclusion, where ethnicity determines access to legal protection, even turning the issue into a matter of national security.

Trump has attempted to turn an internal dispute in South Africa over land rights into an international issue, siding with the racial supremacist regime that prevailed in that country and controlled both labor and raw materials. As in the case of South African apartheid , the current regime has been able to count on the support of various political and ideological apparatuses.

Neither democracy nor freedom: the fear machine
Trump's approach to migration not only violates basic human rights principles but also contradicts the United States' traditional rhetoric as a defender of democracy and freedom. Various organizations have denounced these actions as a violation of multiple international treaties, especially regarding the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits deporting someone to a place where they could be persecuted or tortured.

Beyond the legal framework, there is a clear ideological double standard. While Washington finances opposition movements in countries like Venezuela, using the rhetoric of "freedom" and "democracy," it simultaneously criminalizes Venezuelan migrants seeking to escape conditions created or exacerbated by the same US foreign policies. It is clear that Trump uses immigration racism as a tool of internal control, while exporting his interventionist agenda.


Latin American migrants criminalized and deported by the United States at the Guatemalan Air Force base last January (Photo: EFE)

This is complemented by the creation of a prison infrastructure dedicated exclusively to migrants, which the United States is developing in collaboration with regional allies. Countries like El Salvador, under Nayib Bukele, received deported migrants and imprisoned them in high-risk detention centers, such as the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), where human rights are systematically violated.

Domestically, Trump has signed executive orders seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship , a constitutional mechanism in place since 1868. While it would not be retroactive, this change would represent a radical shift in the very conception of who qualifies as a citizen in the United States and who should remain outside the social contract.

The fear machine, oiled by Trump, operates under a logic: The important thing is that fewer people cross borders and that they return to their countries of origin despite the impoverishment caused by neoliberal adjustments, the precariousness produced by its sanctions, or the violence provoked in other countries by the drug market that mobilizes American society. In short, two classes of people are consolidating in the United States: citizens, who for now can speak out, and foreigners, who must remain silent in order to remain.

The geopolitics of extortion and double standards vs. Latin America
In Latin America, reactions to new migration policies have been mixed. While some progressive governments have expressed public concern, many others have remained silent or even acted as active accomplices in the implementation of these measures. This is particularly evident in the case of El Salvador, where Bukele has agreed to receive deported migrants without guaranteeing their safety.

President Nicolás Maduro has publicly denounced the decision to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 300,000 Venezuelans and has accelerated the Return to the Homeland Plan to guarantee the safety of those returning to Venezuela.

On the other hand, sectors of the extremist opposition, led by María Corina Machado, have maintained a deafening silence regarding the deportations, a demonstration of their disconnection with the reality of Venezuelan migrants and their ideological and political subservience to Washington.

Civil organizations and human rights groups have attempted to fill this gap, denouncing the illegality of these policies in international forums. However, the real impact remains limited, given the lack of political unity, in the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, and the instrumentalization of migration by extremist actors. Even within CELAC, the collective response has been weak, failing to strongly condemn Trump's actions or coordinate regional protection strategies.

Trump's immigration policies should not be understood solely as a domestic phenomenon, even considering that "US national security" is directly linked to international issues. They are part of a geopolitical strategy that seeks to consolidate a hierarchical international order, where countries of the Global South are relegated to providers of cheap labor and natural resources, and convenient victims of repressive policies.

Governments like those of Javier Milei in Argentina, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador have responded submissively to these designs, prioritizing diplomatic relations with Washington over defending the rights of Latin American and Caribbean people abroad. Instead of denouncing mass deportations or demanding safeguards for migrants, these leaders have opted for subservience, legitimizing a system that harms their own populations and neighboring countries.

This collaboration is not accidental. It is part of a tacit pact in which the United States offers economic and military support in exchange for supposed cooperation on migration and security issues. But this cooperation comes at an incalculable human cost: separated families, cut short lives, and a perpetuation of Latin America's structural dependence on the North.


Protest in support of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian man who had his U.S. citizenship and permanent residency revoked last April for leading protests against the war in Gaza at Columbia University (Photo: AP)

What is happening in the United States under Donald Trump's second term is not just a migration crisis. It is an authoritarian experiment that fuses technology, racism, and xenophobia to create an unprecedented apparatus of social control. Student visas, temporary protection programs, and even the right to be born in a territory are being redefined along ideological and ethnic lines. What is being built is not just a physical border, but a moral and existential barrier.

It seems that reality demands more than symbolic declarations and a common migration policy, international defenders of migrants, and a break with the dynamics of submission. Meanwhile, the world helplessly watches the resurgence of a postmodern apartheid , disguised as patriotism and national security.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/la ... an-en-eeuu

Google Translator

[blindpig]

False Promises of Protection Embedded in U.S. Militarism and Carcerality
Aiyana Porter-Cash 11 Jun 2025



"Protection" is a lie—a pretext for state violence, militarism, and control, targeting the marginalized while masking harm as care. True safety comes not from oppressive systems, but from resistance and collective liberation.

The language of “protection” saturates political rhetoric, from policing and incarceration to war and surveillance. But what and who is being protected? For communities long targeted by State violence, it is clear that protection propaganda often cloaks the machinery of harm. When State institutions claim to protect, they often mean to exploit, punish, and control. A people-centered human rights framework demands that we expose this deception.

Protection is the pretext, the marketing strategy, the moral cover. Within the U.S. and internationally, politicians deploy protectionist language to justify violence, often against the very groups they claim to shield. The language of safety has long been a smokescreen for militarism and carceral expansion. Propaganda is nothing new, but today’s protection rhetoric is uniquely sinister in how it weaponizes care to excuse cruelty.

Take Trump’s recent executive orders to “militarize police and punish sanctuary cities and refugees.” Packaged as national security measures, these policies deepen the alignment between policing and militarism, and further criminalize Black, brown, and migrant communities. This is not protection, it’s the State’s carceral arm capitalizing on the relationship between economic insecurity and xenophobia.

Yet, protectionist propaganda works. Trump has made significant gains in majority-Black and Hispanic counties, signaling how compelling these narratives can be when communities are disillusioned, systematically abandoned, and distracted by the Black Misleadership Class.

The UN Security Council established the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) as a guiding principle in 2006. Framed as protection for civilians under governments incapable or unwilling to interrupt or prevent grave harm (genocide, ethnic cleaning, and crimes against humanity), R2P was invoked to legitimize NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011. This imposition was used to enact regime change that aligned with the liberal imperialist agenda. In this way, R2P is as deceptive as U.S. law enforcement’s ubiquitous motto: “to protect and serve.” Both military and carceral arms of the State deploy protection propaganda, sewing confusion and complacency in the general public while generating discursive shields for their war crimes.

A hybrid of military and carceral forces, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is yet another entity that carries out state violence in the name of security. One example is the guise of conducting “welfare checks,” ICE targets children – not only for detainment and deportation, but also as bait for their undocumented loved ones. While the recent raids and deportation efforts have not yet reached the numbers achieved under former U.S. President Barack Obama, they are nonetheless terrorizing migrant and mixed-status communities all over the country. When the people stand up and fight back – as protestors recently did in Los Angeles – they are met with domestic warfare: local law enforcement, followed by thousands of National Guard troops, followed by hundreds of Marines. While California Governor Gavin Newsome and President Donald Trump argue over state sovereignty and federal overreach , civilians in the U.S. remain under attack by armed forces, even those ostensibly aimed abroad. We are endangered, not protected by this effort to mix policing with the military.

The State’s protectionist propaganda often features this inversion of the predator and dispossessed. Focusing on the intersection of carcerality and militarism elucidates this perversion of protection. In “Black, Brown, and Invisible ,” Rafia Zakaria makes it plain: “just as the imprisonment of every black man convicted is imagined just, all those killed by drones are terrorists.”

In the UK, policies like the Prevent policy are allegedly meant to stop “radicalization,” but target Muslim youth for surveillance under similar allegedly protective rationales. The Prevent policy was introduced in 2003 as part of the State’s counter-terrorism strategy, linking local policing with national security forces. As of 2015, all employees of public institutions are legally mandated to participate in the effort to “prevent terrorism.” Notably, critics argue that Prevent is rooted in Islamophobia and yet it was claimed that, “a partnership approach with Muslim communities has been at the heart of delivering these Prevent objectives.” Surveillance is not a form of protection, especially when it’s disguised as community outreach.

In Gaza, the myth of protection is used to justify genocide. Zionist ideology presents the ongoing genocide and displacement of Palestinians as necessary for Jewish people’s safety and for the security of the U.S.. Protecting their financial and political investments in the Zionist project, the U.S. ruling class funnels billions in military funds and weapons to “Israel” while dangling morsels of aid over Gaza. We must remember how Israel made a martyr of five-year-old Hind Rajab, and continues to kill a child every 45 minutes. The State’s expressions of concern for protecting children – or anyone besides the ruling class – are deception.

Meanwhile, Black and brown children in the U.S. are groomed for war under the pretense of protection from poverty. Project 2025 includes proposals to expand Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) programs, increase military recruiter access to young people, and require all students in federally funded schools to take the military entrance exam. Already, over 500,000 students are enrolled in JROTC (often involuntarily), especially in schools that are under-resourced and majority Black or Brown. Who does this protect?

The same manipulation exists within carceral logics. We see Stop Cop City (also known as Defend the Atlanta Forest) activists fighting back against militarized policing and paying the price with their lives and freedom . It’s worth noting that this Cop City is “officially” known as “Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.” Consider some other insidious carceral examples such as solitary confinement, especially for Black youth; another carceral perversion of protection frameworks, as the inhumane practice is often justified as “protective” custody. Trans people in prisons often face even more extreme isolation with the excuse that it is for their safety. But these acts of purported protection are dehumanizing and dangerous. The state uses the language of protection to rationalize torture and abandonment.

Cash bail is another iteration of the protection lie buoying the punishment bureaucracy. Framed as a way to ensure public safety and prevent flight risk, bail actually functions as a poverty tax. It disproportionately traps Black, brown, and other working class people in jails for days, weeks, and even months without trial. There’s nothing protective about it; it is punitive by design.

Internationally, we now see the exportation of this logic through “prison imperialism” and specifically, the practice of outsourcing incarceration to countries like El Salvador. The current administration has proposed similar deals with Liberia and Rwanda too. These schemes reveal the underlying function of carceral and imperialist structures is to sustain the capitalist status quo and moreover, the war on African people globally.

Food (another basic right) is also subjected to protection propaganda. The Trump administration proposes deep cuts to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) while demanding detailed personal information from applicants. These moves target immigrants and feed mass surveillance, all while pretending to fight fraud (and thus, protect the taxpayers). Meanwhile, Israel starves Gaza in plain sight and those who distribute food in war zones are labeled threats. This is the age-old “divide and conquer” tactic masquerading as protection.

Recent refugee policies further expose the hypocrisy of protection provided by the State. Trump welcomes white South Africans into the U.S. to “protect” them from accountability for apartheid, while rejecting and caging Black and brown asylum seekers. This double standard only amounts to protection for global white supremacy.

As scholars have noted elsewhere, child protection is the “ultimate trump card.” (Mintz, 2016) Politicians invoke children to justify surveillance, war, and censorship. But if protecting children was the mission, one in six wouldn’t live in poverty in the U.S. We wouldn’t see millions impacted by parental incarceration. And we wouldn’t see the State surveilling, detaining, recruiting, and massacring kids under the guise of protection.

Children are a stark and urgent example, but this same logic applies to migrants, prisoners, trans people, people with disabilities, people facing housing insecurity — all of humanity. The language of protection both exacerbates irrational fears and offers a (superficial) sense of resolution. But we must not allow ourselves to be fooled. The enemy killing babies in Gaza is the same war machine building another Cop City to target Black and brown youth in Baltimore, and poisoning older Black residents in Florida.

Protectionist propaganda is the bridge between manufactured consent for carceral violence and militarized control. It’s time we stop asking to be protected by systems built to harm us.

Protection from State violence can be arranged through political will, community investment, and organization. We can start by recognizing and resisting false (com)promises of protection.

https://blackagendareport.com/false-pro ... arcerality