Every year the Greyhound Board of Great Britain hold an awards ceremony to congratulate themselves and the greyhound trainers for exploiting greyhounds over the year. Whilst this is happening most of the greyhounds that earned the greed driven industry money will be kept in cold outside kennels in the middle of winter. The GBGB usually has its fancy do in London but this year they are coming to Manchester. We will be working with the guys from the Shut Down Belle Vue group,Greytexploitations, Pet Levrieri & Pro Greyhound to make sure the whole of Manchester will be made aware of the monsters they are allowing into their city. 

Everyone who is against the racing industry, everyone who has rescued a greyhound, everyone who thinks exploiting these beautiful animals is wrong UNITE make this protest and show the industry how hated this industry really is. 

The Hilton Manchester are hosting this farce of an awards gala.

It is estimated that between Ireland and the UK around 10,000 greyhounds are euthanized or disappear each year, either ‘culled’ as pups because deemed unsuitable for racing, eliminated due to being too slow or because of injury, or simply because of having reached the end of their racing careers. Only a small percentage is given up for adoption.

These dogs spend their lives caged and often muzzled, deprived of human contact and the opportunity to play. For these reasons, racing is an inherently cruel ‘sport’, which must be banned. 

Thousands of healthy greyhound puppies are disappearing, presumed killed, every year, but their deaths are not reported or investigated by the $144 million greyhound racing industry.

Shocking details about puppy farming and the mass killing of the pups have emerged as a record number of people and organizations told a NSW parliamentary inquiry about the dark practices of the greyhound industry.

In one submission, a former industry participant, who did not want to be identified because he said he feared for his safety, said: “I actually found a brown sack one day, when washing my hands in the river that ran through the property, full of dead newborn pups.”

In 2011, up to 3440 puppies were born in registered litters but disappeared before they were named. Naming is a prerequisite for the dogs to race.

Rescue and adoption group Amazing Greys says the industry is one of the largest puppy mills in Australia and relies on breeding a huge excess to find a few champions. ”The industry is characterized by routine killings of puppies and dogs, greed and profits,” its submission said.

SAY NO! TO GREYHOUND RACING. NO EXCUSE FOR ANIMAL ABUSE

• By Elisa Lambri
 

WHAT FOX NEWS AND HANNITY BLOCKED ME

 FROM SAYING: MUMIA AS FUEL FOR RIGHT-WING AGENDA

by Johanna Fernandez

Mumia Abu Jamal in a photo taken last year. He was forced to cut his hair when he left death row.

On Wednesday afternoon, Jan. 8, I received an email from Fox News’ show, Hannity, about the possibility of an interview with me on the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The heat was turned up at Fox in response to the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing that day where Debo Adegbile was being confirmed as President Barack Obama’s nominee for assistant attorney general of civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Before long I was on the phone with one of the producers, who grilled me on my take on Adegbile’s appointment and his connection to Mumia Abu-Jamal.

I said that I am part of Mumia’s legal team, that Adegbile was never part of the small group of lawyers and staff working on the Mumia case at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, that Adegbile did not lobby for the Legal Defense Fund to take on the case, and that he simply happened to be working with the organization that had decided to take it on. I added that Fox should, however, explore why one of the most respected legal civil rights organizations in the nation, of Brown vs. Board of Education fame, would deem the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal important enough to take on.

Moreover, I added, the issue around which Adegbile is being attacked surrounds a federal appeal that challenged Mumia’s death sentence, not his conviction, which was pursued rabidly and illegally by prosecutor Joe McGill in a manner that desecrated the Constitution of the United States. The federal judges agreed with the brief, and the death sentence of this world-renowned journalist was commuted to life without parole.

On Mumia’s birthday, April 24, 2012, supporters marched and rallied to “Occupy the Justice Department” and demand an investigation into his case.

On this basis alone – that for over 28 years Mumia was unconstitutionally subjected to inhumane and torturous conditions on death row – Mumia should immediately be released. But in addition to being railroaded in a trial that, according to anAmnesty International Report on the case, “failed to meet minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings,” the evidence in Mumia’s case suggests that an innocent man has now been imprisoned for 32 years.

As the long history of Black criminalization in the U.S. demonstrates, just because a Black person is convicted doesn’t mean he/she is guilty. Ask The Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

Back to Fox News. In classic Fox form, the interview with me would not be about the case or about the appointment of Adegbile. Hannity gave ample time to Katie Pavlich, who was representing the views of the prosecution and who was clearly committed to simply echoing its conclusions.

“Fry Mumia” is the response of Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police supporters to the sea of “Free Mumia” signs that regularly fill the city’s streets.

In the end, the point of the segment was for Fox to call Mumia “a thrice-convicted cop killer” as many times as possible, and to associate that with Debo Adegbile so as to strategically energize a right-wing agenda against the gains of the civil rights movement – following the same pattern as in their successful campaign to decommission Van Jones.

At the end of the segment, I wanted out of the studio immediately, got up to walk off the set and was stopped by producers because I was about to walk through the camera as Hannity introduced the next segment. Then, while I was standing there, I decided to stay a while longer to let Hannity have it when the cameras went down.

I told him that his crafty staging of inflammatory propaganda parading as political debate was cheapening a desperately needed public discussion in the U.S. and destroying the project of democracy on which it depends. Hannity’s is a false front for news, journalism and debate, in which the opposing viewpoint is rudely cut off and is then pummeled to the ground with a battery of lies.

True to its form, Fox News manipulated the facts of the case to depict Mumia as an unrepentant cop-killer. For example, Ms. Pavlich claimed that Mumia did not enter a not-guilty plea in court during the trial. In fact, Mumia’s attorney entered a not-guilty plea and later in the trial Mumia himself twice upheld his innocence.

But as the trial began, Mumia took a vow of silence in protest of prosecutorial misconduct – the failure of the prosecution to honor its pre-trial agreement to release to the defendant important photographs and records before the start of the trial. Mumia also took a vow of silence because he wished to be his own attorney and to make an opening statement to the court – all requirements of fair trial proceeding under the Constitution, but denied to Mumia Abu-Jamal.

On the 30th anniversary of Mumia’s imprisonment, supporters packed Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center on Dec. 9, 2011. – Photo: Joseph Piette, Workers World

After the Hannity interview, Fox’s The Kelley Files interviewed Officer Daniel Faulkner’s widow, Maureen Faulkner. Mrs. Faulkner said on air that Obama’s appointment is tantamount to “spitting on all of our officers.”

As I watched, I was reminded of a heart-wrenching interview I conducted a few years ago with Mumia’s sister, Lydia Barashango, who was dying of cancer. She told the film crew of “Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal” that “justice for Maureen Faulkner is tied to finding out who killed Officer Daniel Faulkner. Mumia is not that person.”

Justice for Daniel Faulkner and justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal depend on an uncompromising commitment to facts, due process and truth; to date, that commitment has not been realized. As with so many other defendants, the courts failed Mumia. He was not tried by a jury of his peers, police officers tampered with evidence and the prosecution suppressed exculpatory evidence.

The most important and least known fact of the Abu-Jamal case is that a fourth person was present at the crime scene, and the prosecutor and the presiding judge repressed his presence at trial. Former TV Guide reporter and independent crimes-investigation journalist Patrick O’Connor argues convincingly in his book about the case, that that fourth person, Kenneth Freeman, killed Officer Faulkner.

In 1970, Deputy Minister of Information Mumia Abu Jamal, 15, was featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Also alarming is that 15 of the 35 officers involved in collecting evidence in the case went to jail for corruption and evidence tampering within weeks of the end of Mumia’s trial. In fact, the photos taken by Pedro Polakoff, an independent photojournalist who took the first photographs of the crime scene, show evidence tampering on the part of the police and disprove the prosecution’s entire theory of the case.

Sadly, despite the overwhelming evidence of innocence in this case, Mrs. Faulkner is denouncing Obama’s appointment of Adegbile and trying Mumia before the court of public opinion on the basis of his political affiliation with the Black Panther Party, which he joined when he was a 14-year-old. Incidentally, this was the same illegal strategy used at trial by prosecutor Joe McGill to secure the death penalty in Mumia’s case.

Deploying the language that has historically been used to silence those who fight against injustice – the language of McCarthyism – Mrs. Faulkner denounces Mumia as “a radical and a Black Panther.” But the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States protects freedom of speech and association and also protects against the use of political affiliation as proof of a defendant’s guilt if it is not germane to the case.

Mrs. Faulkner’s life-long campaign against Mumia Abu-Jamal is fueled, yes, by pain, but also by a blind anger that has been nurtured, misdirected and manipulated by the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). Her statements are, in part, a response to the new petition, launched by The Campaign to Bring Mumia Home that calls on the Department of Justice to support the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Our aim is to get a million signatures. Please help us reach that goal by forwarding the link to your networks.

Mumia’s supporters are all over the world. Here they march to free Mumia in London on Dec. 9, 2011.

Those whose careers would be destroyed if the truth surfaced in this case argue that the failure of the appellate process to grant Abu-Jamal relief on his conviction is proof of his guilt. However, as was recently demonstrated in the case of Herman Wallace of the Angola 3, the appellate system in the United States very often fails the defendants.

The problem with the appellate process is that following a series of regressive, states’ rights laws passed in the 1990s, such as the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, appellate judges are forced to accept the “factual” rulings of lower courts, without regard for the tampered and falsified evidence often manufactured by the police and relied upon by the lower courts.

Because the appellate process is stacked against Mumia Abu-Jamal and hundreds of thousands of other defendants, the only available route to justice amidst the crisis of mass incarceration and political imprisonment in the U.S. is open debate and discussion – precisely what Hannity and his friends at Fox are intent on crushing.

The new petition, launched by The Campaign to Bring Mumia Home that calls on the Department of Justice to support the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Our aim is to get a million signatures. Please help us reach that goal by forwarding the link to your networks.

Mumia is a present-day Scottsboro Boy, and we must demand that Pennsylvania reveal his innocence now, not 80 years later the way Alabama did with the Scottsboro Boys.

On May 8, 2011, supporters in Saint Denis, France, a Paris suburb, celebrate the fifth anniversary of the renaming of a street Rue Mumia Abu Jamal.

In the 1990s, the Movement to Free Mumia brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets and deployed the political pressure that stopped Mumia’s execution – twice! After Mumia’s death sentence was ruled unconstitutional, Philadelphia DA Seth Williams decided not to pursue the death penalty once again.

He feared that doing so might galvanize an international movement that would descend on his city and expose the manner in which the courts, politicians and the police conspired to silence and imprison this radical journalist who is arguably the Nelson Mandela of our time.

Victories like these are rare during downturns in struggle, but our victory in winning Mumia’s release from death row coincided with a shift in consciousness in the U.S. occasioned by the economic crisis that began in 2008, the execution of Troy Davis, the emergence of the Occupy Movement, the murder of Trayvon Martin, the struggle against Stop and Frisk and the emergence of a new, embryonic but growing movement against mass incarceration.

In Mexico City, a Mumia Solidarity Week is held every December. Here, Jorge Salinas, a former political prisoner, sings for Mumia’s freedom on Dec. 9, 2008.

Given this shift, The Campaign to Bring Mumia Home believes that it makes more sense than ever to begin to imagine a world in which Mumia Abu-Jamal walks among us. For this reason we are hard at work building a strategic grassroots movement that takes the streets and shifts the current media representation of this case, nationally and especially in Philadelphia.

Like the struggle that freed Mandela, the fight to free Mumia is bound up in the struggle to build a better world.

For those who watched my interview with Fox News, this is what I would have said on Hannity if I hadn’t been interrupted. These are the talking points that will bring Mumia home:

1. Mumia is innocent.

2. On the night that Officer Faulkner was shot, there were four persons at the crime scene. But the prosecutor, Joe McGill, and the trial judge, Albert Sabo, concealed the presence at the crime scene of that fourth person at trial. In fact, the presence of that fourth person, the passenger in the Volkswagen which Officer Faulkner had stopped, was acknowledged by prosecutor Joe McGill in another trial that was happening concurrently, surrounding the same crime scene. This key, exculpatory evidence – that there was another person at the crime scene who was the passenger – was hidden from the defense and the jury. Why?

3. It is well documented, in declassified memos, that the Philadelphia police in consultation with COINTELPRO had for many years been trying to peg a crime on former Black Panther and muckraking radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose reporting on police brutality, corruption in City Hall and the MOVE organization had long been a thorn in the side of the establishment. Now the Philadelphia police had their man and they were going to do everything in their power to frame him.

This is the photo that blows the prosecution’s argument by showing guns in a police officer’s bare hand. – Photo: Pedro P. Polakoff III

4. The clearest sign that the Abu-Jamal trial was a miscarriage of justice came only two weeks after the end of the trial, when its lead investigator, police inspector Alfonzo Giordano, was tried and eventually convicted of rank corruption, extortion and tampering with evidence.

5. Because almost all the jurors that heard Mumia’s case were white, they believed the testimony of the police. A jury of Mumia’s peers would have known better. Shortly after Mumia’s trial, one third of the police officers involved in collecting evidence in his case were convicted of corruption and tampering with evidence to obtain a conviction.

Happening concurrently was also an investigation of the Philadelphia Police Department by the U.S. Department of Justice – the largest ever conducted of a police department in the United States. That investigation concluded that the level of corruption and tampering with evidence on the part of the Philadelphia police and its homicidal behavior against Black and Brown detainees “shocks the conscience.”

6. Upon arrival at the scene of the crime, the police who found Mumia on the ground with a bullet from Daniel Faulkner’s gun in his gut proceeded to beat Mumia to a pulp and throw him into a paddy wagon where they beat him up some more. Approximately an hour later, they drove him to the hospital and threw him on the ground at the entrance of the Emergency Room.

Lydia Barashango, Mumia’s sister, speaks at a rally on Oct. 21, 2006.

7. The prosecution pegged the murder of Officer Daniel Faulkner on Mumia based on the perjured testimony of three witnesses, who said, 60 days later, that Mumia confessed to the shooting while in the hospital. This was contradicted, however, by the testimony of Dr. Anthony Coletta, who was with him from the moment he entered the hospital.

Dr. Coletta said that Mumia was barely conscious and in a state of shock, and that the trauma produced by Mumia’s bullet wound and the beating he had endured at the hands of the cops meant that medically, Mumia was incapable of speaking. In addition, the police report written on the night of the incident by the officer assigned to Mumia at the hospital, Gary Wakshul, states, “The Negro male made no comment.”

8. The first photographs taken of the crime scene were taken by a regularly published freelance photographer, Pedro Polakoff. He repeatedly called the police to give them those photographs, but the cops never responded. Polakoff assumed that Mumia was guilty and forgot about the issue.

In 2006 these photographs were discovered and studied by Dr. Michael Schiffman of Heidelberg University in Germany. The photos disprove the prosecution’s entire case theory.

Attorney Johanna Fernandez speaks at a rally for Mumia in Philadelphia on Nov. 9, 2010. – Photo: Diane Bukowski

They also show that the police lied and tampered with evidence. Officer James Forbes, who testified in court that he had properly handled the guns allegedly retrieved at the crime scene, is photographed holding the guns with his bare hands, destroying all potentially significant fingerprints.

Most importantly, the Polakoff photos also point to the presence of a fourth person at the crime scene: Officer Faulkner’s hat is pictured resting on top of the Volkswagen on the side of the passenger seat, suggesting that he may have had a conversation with the passenger.

9. Exonerating evidence abounds in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Because Mumia is known the world over for his commentaries and writings on inequality and because he has spent so much of his time in prison offering a radical critique and analysis of mass incarceration, a victory in Mumia’s case would open up a much larger conversation in the mainstream about the crisis of mass and political imprisonment in the U.S.

Johanna Fernandez is a professor of history at Baruch College (CUNY). Follow her on Twitter:www.twitter.com/JohannaFernand. This story first appeared in the Huffington Post.

Johanna’s note: BRING MUMIA HOME! We need a media strategy and a campaign in the streets, fast! Please forward this link to your contacts: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/60-for-mumia-s-60th-birthday. Make the “60 for Mumia’s 60th Birthday” campaign a success. Join the campaign to Bring Mumia Home. We need your help to build the campaign that will free Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Fetuses are not babies. Women are not incubators. Abortion is not murder. 

Women are not objects. Women are not things to be used for the sexual pleasure of men NOR are they breeders of children. WOMEN ARE HUMAN BEINGS CAPABLE OF FULL EQUALITY IN EVERY REALM!

Women made the right to abortion a central demand of their movement because they understood that women could never be equal with men without control over their reproductive lives.

... Nothing inspired the birth of the women’s movement more than the anti-Vietnam War movement and especially the civil rights movement. African Americans’ determination to achieve equality through actions such as the famous sit-in at a Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter had a contagious effect. Women became radicalized as they participated in mass protests...

Young radical women formed women’s liberation groups in 1967, which spread to over 40 cities by 1969, organizing one of the most liberating activities of the new movement, consciousness-raising. The terms “liberation” and “consciousness-raising” were inspired by the black and colonial liberation movements as well as socialist ideas.

Consciousness-raising groups came together to question unequal gender roles and to talk frankly about sexual issues which had long been hidden causes for shame and embarrassment, turning depression into anger and building self-confidence and strength together. They also debated issues and strategies to focus their movement around and how to eradicate sexism and overthrow capitalism.

These younger radicals considered NOW’s emphasis on courtroom tactics too stodgy and conservative. Instead, they organized large demonstrations in the streets and took direct action to confront instances of sexism, making far-reaching demands for changing society with the intention of raising other women’s consciousness, confidence, and expectations. Anything that degraded women became a target for protest.

The victories of the women’s movement, such as Roe v. Wade, were not handed down by enlightened judges or politicians from either party, but were won in spite of them. Women had to fight hard for these gains by building their own independent mass movement and large-scale protests.

Women also multiplied the power of their movement by linking their struggles together with other social movements. The women’s movement would never have won the right to abortion if it had not been for the millions of others who protested against racism, the Vietnam War, and low wages and benefits...

The victories of the women’s movement prove that radical social change is completely possible. In spite of the politicians, courts, corporations, media, educational system, and FBI all being stacked against the women’s movement, a small minority of determined women were able to build a mass movement that won to their side the majority of ordinary Americans – the same working-class people who are so often dismissed as hopelessly conservative and consumeristic.

The explosive growth of the women’s liberation movement disproves the idea put forward by many liberals – then and now – that change only happens gradually, step-by-step...

 The liberal strategy of lobbying politicians for only gradual changes and the partial reform of abortion laws dominated the early years of the women’s movement. But as the movement grew and learned through experience, the radical and socialist wings of the movement rapidly gained support. The “realistic, practical” liberal strategy was quickly discarded as it became apparent that it was anything but practical, and the “extreme” socialist strategy of mass struggle and demanding the full legalization of abortion was adopted. 

We can learn from the younger, militant women’s insistence on calling for radical changes, such as free abortion on demand, free childcare and equal pay for equal work, as opposed to the pragmatic outlook of today’s women’s leaders who continually preach “moderation” and “realism.” The radicals’ bold, unapologetic case for abortion rights raised the confidence of millions of women and changed the terms of public debate. This stands in stark contract to the increasingly apologetic, timid defense of abortion by today’s leaders of NOW and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Although the movement did not succeed in achieving free abortion on demand, subsequent events have confirmed how correct the socialist feminists were to argue for it. The experience of the past 30 years since Roe has demonstrated beyond a doubt that the legal right to an abortion is not enough if abortion services are not also accessible and affordable.

The religious right has seized on this by focusing its strategy on rolling back access to abortion services in order to make them more and more difficult to obtain. The lesson is clear – as we re-build the women’s movement, we need to defend the right to an abortion but also explain that real choice means free and accessible abortion.

The experience of the past 30 years shows that reforms won under capitalism will always be temporary and partial. The ruling class can be forced to make certain concessions (such as legalizing abortion) under the pressure of mass movements, but as soon as these movements subside, the capitalists will move to claw back the reforms.

We must fight for every reform possible, but clearly reforms are not enough. To secure real reproductive freedom and put an end to sexism, we must overthrow the capitalist system itself.

(Jennifer) Nelson sets out to place women of color in the center of the movement to secure reproductive rights for women in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Nelson's thesis is that women of color were responsible for moving a discourse centered on access to legal abortion to one that more broadly defined reproductive rights to include an end to forced sterilization and the right for all women to bear as many children as they chose. She does a fine job of illustrating how Puerto Rican and African-American women advocating for reproductive rights addressed the controversial issues of population control and racial genocide within their own communities.

Nelson begins her study with an overview of The Redstockings, a New-York based radical feminist group formed in 1969, which she uses to represent "white" feminism. Because the Redstockings's analysis of patriarchy led them to conclude that the root of women's oppression lay in lack of control of their bodies, much of their early agenda focused on legalizing abortion. Freedom from unwanted pregnancies, the Redstockings reasoned, would free women from sexist roles and allow women to participate more fully in the sexual revolution. This exclusive focus on abortion would have profound implications for both the emerging reproductive rights movement and the increasingly popular women's liberation movement, as Nelson makes clear in subsequent chapters.

 Nelson's second and third chapters explore the controversial charge that birth control and abortion were tools of genocide against the black community. She argues that these debates must be understood within the larger discussion that occurred about the black family in the 1960s and 1970s. Nelson shows how African-American women attempted, with varying degrees of success, to push nationalist groups, such as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, towards a more feminist reproductive rights agenda. She details their critique of a black masculinity dependent on controlling women's fertility and limiting women's economic and political role. This analysis draws on both organized black feminists--the Black Women's Group of Mount Vernon, the Black Women's Liberation Committee of SNCC which became the more inclusive Third World Women's Alliance, the National Black Feminist Organization, and the Combahee River Collective--and prominent black feminist theorists such as Cellestine Ware and Toni Cade Bambara, and women within black nationalist groups, including Angela Davis.

It is women who must decide whether they wish to have children or not. Women must have the right to control their own bodies. And this means that we must also speak out against forced sterilization and against compelling welfare mothers to accept contraceptive methods against their will. There is now a women's liberation movement growing in the United States. By and large, Black women have not played a prominent role in this movement. This is due to the fact that many Black women have not yet developed a feminist consciousness. Black women see their problem mainly as one of national oppression. The middle class mentality of some white women's liberation seem to be irrelevant to Black women's needs. For instance, at the November 1969 Congress to Unite Women in New York, some of the participants did not want to take a stand against the school tracking system fearing that "good" students thrown in with "bad" ones would cause the "brilliant" students to leave school, thus lowering the standards. One white woman had the gall to mention to me that she felt women living in Scarsdale were more oppressed then Third World women trapped in the ghetto! There was also little attempt to deal with the problems of poor women, for example the fact that women in Scarsdale exploit Black women as domestics.

The movement must take a clearer stand against the horrendous conditions in which poor women are forced to work. Some women in the movement are in favor of eliminating the state protective laws for women. However, poor women who are forced to work in sweatshops, factories and laundries need those laws on the books. Not only must the State protective laws for women remain on the books, but we must see that they are enforced and made even stronger.

Women in the women's liberation movement assert that they are tired of being slaves to their husbands. confined to the household performing menial tasks. While the Black woman can sympathize with this view, she does not feel that breaking her ass every day from nine to five is any form of liberation. She has always had to work. Before the Emancipation Proclamation she worked in the fields of the plantation, as Malcolm X would say, "from can't see in the morning until can't see at night."

And what is liberation under this system? Never owning what you produce, you are forced to become a mere commodity on the labor market. Workers are never secure, and their length of employment is subject to the ups and downs in the economy. Women's liberation must relate to these problems. What is hampering it now is not the fact that it is still composed of mainly white middle class women, Rather it is the failure to engage in enough of the type of actions that would draw in and link up with the masses of women not yet in the movement., including working and Third World women. Issues such as daycare, support for the striking telephone workers, support for the laws which improve working conditions for women, and the campaign to free Joan Bird are a step in the right direction. I don't feel, however, that white women sitting around a room, browbeating one another for their "racism," saying, "I'm a racist, I'm a racist," as some women have done, is doing a damn thing for the Black woman. What is needed is action.

Women's Liberation must not isolate itself from the masses of women or the Third World community. At the same time, white women cannot speak for Black women. Black women must speak for themselves. The Black Women's Alliance has been formed in New York to begin to do this. We felt there was a need for a revolutionary Black women's movement that spoke to the oppression of Black women as Blacks, as workers, as women. We are involved in reading, discussion, consciousness raising and taking action. We feel that Black women will have a difficult time relating to the more bitter anti male sentiment in the women's liberation movement, fearing that it will be a device to keep Black men and women fighting among themselves and diverting their energies from the real enemy.

Many Black women realize it will take both men and women to wage an effective struggle. However, this does not negate the necessity of women building our own movement because we must build our struggle now and continue it after the revolution if we are to achieve real emancipation.

When the Third World woman begins to recognize the depth of her oppression, she will move to form alliances with all revolutionary forces available and settle for nothing less than complete destruction of this racist, capitalist, male-dominated system.

Measuring how a change in direction by one bird affects those around it, the team discovered that one bird's movement only affects its seven closest neighbors. So one bird affects its seven closest neighbors, and each of those neighbors' movements affect their closest seven neighbors and on through the flock.

The Startling Science of a Starling Murmuration

Video of a massive starling flock turning and twisting over a river in Ireland has gone viral, and with good reason. Flocking starlings are one of nature’s most extraordinary sights: Just a few hundred birds moving as one is enough to convey a sense of suspended reality, and the flock filmed above the River Shannon contained thousands.

What makes possible the uncanny coordination of these murmurations, as starling flocks are so beautifully known? Until recently, it was hard to say. Scientists had to wait for the tools of high-powered video analysis and computational modeling. And when these were finally applied to starlings, they revealed patterns known less from biology than cutting-edge physics.

Starling flocks, it turns out, are best described with equations of “critical transitions” — systems that are poised to tip, to be almost instantly and completely transformed, like metals becoming magnetized or liquid turning to gas. Each starling in a flock is connected to every other. When a flock turns in unison, it’s a phase transition.

At the individual level, the rules guiding this are relatively simple. When a neighbor moves, so do you. Depending on the flock’s size and speed and its members’ flight physiologies, the large-scale pattern changes. What’s complicated, or at least unknown, is how criticality is created and maintained.

It’s easy for a starling to turn when its neighbor turns — but what physiological mechanisms allow it to happen almost simultaneously in two birds separated by hundreds of feet and hundreds of other birds? That remains to be discovered, and the implications extend beyond birds. Starlings may simply be the most visible and beautiful example of a biological criticality that also seems to operate in proteins and neurons, hinting at universal principles yet to be understood.

The “Right Sector”... is guided in these events by the sincere feeling of insult. Yanukovych “stole their culture” and started implementing the fascist program without their participation. If they came to power, they would pass the same bills as those passed by the Party of Regions and the “Communist” Party, only with a racist agenda.

We, the members of leftist, trade union and human rights organizations in Ukraine, as well as individual activists, would like to draw your attention to the recent events in our country.

On Thursday, 16th of January 2014 without the discussion and contrary to its own regulations and to the Constitution of Ukraine, the Ukrainian parliament, passed a series of laws directed at limiting freedom of speech and citizens’ right to peaceful protest. One of the approved items is the infamous amendment to the Criminal Code which bans so-called “extremism”. In this amendment “inciting social discord” is defined as “extremism”. It is clear that any kind of drawing attention to social problems, to the blatant inequality that exists in Ukrainian society, can be qualified as “inciting social discord”, therefore the activities of left, trade union and social activists in Ukraine can be criminalized to a large extent.

The Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) plays a particularly shameful part in these events. Not only did the Communist Party’s faction unanimously voted for the repressive bills, but the CPU official website also features materials that condemn the recent protests as being inspired by foreign actors with the aim of destabilizing Ukraine. Spreading such opinion, the CPU in fact fulfills the task of the whitewashing of Yanukovych’s regime.

It is true that open anti-communists do play a significant role on Maidan, but this anti-communism is caused mostly by the arrogant position of the Communist Party itself. It is not the first time the CPU has tried to de-legitimize civil protests and adopted a conservative position. In addition to this, in the country that suffered the catastrophic losses caused by hunger and repressions during the Stalinist regime, the CPU refuses to condemn the actions of the USSR’s leaders or at least apologize for them, which makes socialist ideas less popular in Ukrainian society.

Yanukovych’s regime has demonstrated its readiness for repressions. It is evident today that the CPU will use its international connections in order to justify this regime’s actions. That is why we believe that the left all around the world and especially in the European Union must terminate any relations with the Communist Party of Ukraine and condemn its actions.

We believe that the party that treats popular uprisings with open hatred, the party that speaks out against “inciting social discord”, is not fit to be called communist or leftist and is “communist” in  name only.

We ask you to bring this letter to the attention of the leadership of the parties which are members of your Union.

Russian & Ukrainian Antifa Rallies Held, Nazis Riot in Kyiv

Neo-nazis attacked about 30 antifascists in Kharkov, Ukraine who were commemorating the lives of comrades assassinated in Moscow 5 years ago. Those remembered were Anastasia Baburova – an anarchist and journalist, who was a member of the Autonomous Action, and relentlessly investigated the Neo-nazis – and Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer. Nazis retreated behind police lines for protection, after being beaten back by the antifascist group. Shortly after, police forced two antifascists to write accounts of them beating back the fascists, clearly in favor of the nazis who attacked.

Kharkov: a nazi runs to his police allies for protection from antifascists

Kyiv: Neo nazis clash with Berkut police forces at parliament

Meanwhile, in Kyiv, cops clashed with Neo-nazis as they tried to take over the Parliament during a protest against recent legislation. Mainstream media widely reported these clashes, victimizing the Neo-nazis who were holding crusader shields bearing the white pride cross and “Heil Hitler” nazi symbols, as well as the symbol for white supremacist David Lane’s 14 words (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.”) Writers for Nihilist.li have referred to these riots as an “involuntary ejaculation of fire,” explaining that ”This is the natural act of desperate people who are sick of all politicians and who are not ready to accept the state of emergency. This is not a revolutionary act of the people, this is not parliamentary masturbation – simply an involuntary ejaculation due to long lasting abstinence from sensible and purposeful actions.” Images emerged of nazis beating cops, as can be seen in this video.

Anastasia and Stanislav were investigating the crimes committed by Yuri Budanov, a Russian officer convicted of war crimes in Chechnya. Two members of a neo-Nazi group, who confessed to their murders, were convicted later, though the entire circumstances of the double assasination remain murky. ”Stanislav Markelov was shot dead after attending a press conference at which he had discussed plans to appeal against the early release of a Russian former colonel who was imprisoned for the murder of a Chechen girl. Anastasia Baburova, a journalist from the newspaper Novaya Gazeta who was accompanying Stanislav Markelov, was seriously injured when she tried to stop the killer. She died later that day in hospital, without regaining consciousness.“ 

The International Federation of Journalists documented that over the past 20 years, 300 journalists were killed or have disappeared in Russia.

“To remember means to fight. If you remember, you know what to do” – this was written on a bannerwhich was hanged by activists in Moscow, near Putin’s Krelmlin. Earlier, hundreds of antifascists marched through the streets of Moscow, guarded by riot cops, in remembrance of Anastasia Baburova and Stanislav Markelov.

On Sunday in Kyiv, 200 anarchists and antifascists remembered the double assassination, holding portraits of their fallen comrades, candles, and banners reading: “No political terror,” “We are all antifascists,” “Remembering means fighting.” These messages have a tragic echo in Ukraine these days, as the current ruling power of Ukraine, against the country’s Constitution, passed laws banning “extremism,” which is defined against its own meaning, as “inciting social discord.” This means that any dissent has became a crime. As the Autonomous Workers Union in Kyiv points out, “It is clear that any kind of drawing attention to social problems, to the blatant inequality that exists in Ukrainian society, can be qualified as “inciting social discord,” therefore the activities of left, trade union and social activists in Ukraine can be criminalized to a large extent.”

They also spoke out against the strengthening of the police state, which western media is ironically referring to as a “dictatorship” and as “totalitarian.” While this is true, it is also true of western countries who have enforced similar measures criminalizing protests. The difference is that when protests are criminalized in the West, mainstream media don’t call that tyranny, but “democracy.”

Later in the evening supporters of the opposition coalition of Merkel-created UADR, nationalist Fatherland, and neo-nazi Svoboda clashed with the riot police, who responded with tear gas and water cannons.

The UADR leader called for early elections in a desperate attempt to fully exploit the fact that the West has made them credible, and directly helped them make use of the protests as a powerful electoral tool.

Fatherland leader Yulia Tymoshenko called for a new constitution, and Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok claimed that they are forced to give protesters a leader, since the crowds demand it. In other words – the opposition claim they are being invited to take power by the crowds they manipulate. While the opposition figures have taken the stage of their manufactured Euromaidan protests, they have done an awful job maintaining support and trust between each others respective parties.

Vitali Klitschko sprayed with a fire extinguisher by nazi protestors while trying to stop clashes with police

Tyahnybok also made some awkward claims – he said the government would rob a gun shop and take guns on the streets so they can blame them of being armed. There is no proof to sustain this and it did not happen, but the fact that he mentioned guns should perhaps be kept in mind. Some 100 people were injured during the street clashes, a fifth of them cops.

 The prison industrial complex both reflects and exacerbates many of our social ills. There is much work to be done, and we all must play a role.

*Pretty Sparkly Things: A Black Girl’s Encounter with the Prison Industrial Complex

I love clothes. I always have. As a black girl coming of age in the early 1990s, I was up on all the adornment trends: from asymmetrical haircuts and Cross Colours jeans to neckties and button down shirts (a la Boyz II Men). As any person who went to a predominantly black school knows, you had to come to school CLEAN! Even as twelve-year-old kids, style was our form of self-expression. It was our way of envisioning possibilities for our futures that could propel us beyond the de facto boundaries of our hyper-segregated neighborhoods. Dressing stylishly enabled us toimagine what it would be like to be doctors, ball players, lawyers, millionaire businesspersons, or entertainers. Because of our self-fashioned “fly code,” I was always looking for the next dope outfit to wear to school.

One day, my stylish Mother came home with a white denim short set that she’d bought for me. The shorts and matching top had these multicolored, beaded tassels—“pretty sparkly things”—dangling from them. I paired the outfit with a hot pink hat (like the ones Mayum Bialik used to wear on the T.V. show “Blossom”). I borrowed my mother’s hot glue gun (this was pre-Bedazzlers), and I glued rhinestones on a pair of my ballet flats. That next week, I strutted through my junior high school’s halls in my new fashion ensemble. I was the Hip Hop Coco Chanel, and this outfit was my masterpiece! It quickly became my signature look that I reserved for special occasions.

So naturally, when my Father told me we were going to visit my older brother who was serving time in prison, I knew exactly what I was going to wear: my outfit with the pretty sparkly things! I wanted my big brother, who was eight years my senior, to be proud of the young woman I was becoming while he was away. And, to me, this outfit symbolized not only my sartorial innovation but also my maturity and professional promise.

I had never been to a prison before. I was terrified. But, I put aside my fears so I could visit my hero. After riding in the car for what seemed like forever, we pulled into the prison’s visitor parking area. My heart began to pound; I could feel moisture forming on my palms. I wondered: “Would my brother recognize me? What was his life like in prison? Was it like the film South Central? Was my Brother like O.G. Bobby Johnson? If I go in, will they force me to stay…forever?!” All of these thoughts whizzed through my twelve-year-old brain as we approached the facility. The one thought that did not occur to me was that I might not be able to get into the prison because of what I chose to wear that day.

Another visitor informed my Father that the guards might not let me in because my pretty sparkly things violated the visitors’ dress code. I was crushed. The very outfit that I’d picked out to impress my big Brother with might be the very thing that kept me from even seeing him. My outfit was an affront to the prison industrial complex. And, the prison system responded by attempting to stifle and confine my creativity—reflected in the pretty sparkly things on my garment—the same way it had those of the millions of men and women held captive behind its bars. Tears welled in my eyes. I felt guilty that after driving nearly two hours to the prison, my Dad would not even get to see his son. I felt like I had wasted his gas and his time simply because I had to wear this outfit.

My father and the other adults began brainstorming as to what could be done about my clothes: perhaps they could give me someone else’s t-shirt to wear so that only the pretty sparkly things on my shorts would show. Maybe someone could wait in the car with me while my Father went inside…“So much fuss over a few pretty. sparkly. things.” I thought. Finally, the prison authorities decided I could go in. I could keep on my outfit, and I could go into the prison. We got to see my Brother, who put on a happy face for us despite the fact that he was likely ashamed that we had to visit him under such circumstances. I hugged him, and beamed with pride (though a little less brightly) as I showed off my outfit. I left the prison knowing that something in me had changed; I had lost a bit of my innocence that day. I had been exposed to a type of cruelty that I could not articulate at the time. I never visited my brother again. And, once he was released, we never discussed his stint in prison.

I recently shared my story with activist Lois Ahrens, who runs the Real Cost of Prisons Project, based in Northampton, Massachusetts, and she helped me put my personal experience into a broader context. I asked her, “Why did this happen? Why are guards so worried about what people wear?” Ahrens said:

Guards have power and prisoners and visitors have none. Everything a guard does reminds a prisoner or visitor of that dynamic… We are all presumed guilty because we are visiting someone who has been found guilty… Every visitor is suspect therefore whatever a visitor does or wears is suspect.

She then gave me a list of clothing and adornment items that have been banned from Massachusetts’ prisons:


Tassels                                           Cargo pants

 Open-toed shoes                          Bobby pins
Barrettes                                        Earrings
Sleeveless shirts                           Underwire bras
Zip-front shirts                              Shorts
Baggy or tight clothing                 Clothing w/ many pockets
Hoodies                                         Revealing or sheer clothing
Bodysuits of any type                    Wrap around shirts


This list represents the literal policing of people’s dressed bodies. The guards have the sole discretion to enforce these dress codes, and the list of banned garments varies from state to state. If you challenge a guard’s decision about your clothing, you could lose your visitation privileges for a year or more. These adornment regulations are part of a larger, problematic set of visitor body politics. Loved ones are subject to intrusive body searches, which can include: scanning; wanding; removing shoes, outer shirts, and belts; looking under your collar; examining your hair and mouth; and having search dogs sniff you. This process is only slightly less invasive than the full-body searches the prisoners are subjected to before they enter the visiting area.

The reality is that most people, like my family, do not know the rules regarding “proper” attire while visiting prisons. Nor are most people trying to sneak contraband to prisoners in their garments. Ironically, it is often the guards who operate smuggling rings (see here and here). Most people are simply trying to visit their loved ones, trying to make their family members feel their love through the prison’s Plexiglass windows. During our conversation, Ahrens noted the paradox between prisons’ treatment of loved ones and their stated views about the importance of family visits. She told me, “Every state claims it values ‘family reunification,’ yet every state makes visiting as degrading as can be imagined.” Ahrens is currently engaged in a battle with the Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC), pushing the DOC to change its policy regarding using search dogs during the visitor screening process.

Families often have to visit with their incarcerated loved ones through a Plexiglass window

But, what the fight for the humane treatment of prison visitors needs most is people willing to share their stories. Ahrens states, “Visiting a prison or a jail is traumatizing for everyone, which is why it is so important to do it and good to talk about it since there is so much stigma and shame with having a loved one in prison…which helps keep [the structure of power] in place.”

I’d pushed my traumatic visit to the prison into the recesses of my memory, until I started organizing this mass incarceration forum. At twelve years old, I did not have the language with which to articulate my trauma or to push back against the system. But, now I understand the power in speaking out about these issues. Incarcerated folks—regardless of whether they are innocent or guilty of the charges for which they have been convicted—belong to someone. They are loved. And, their loved ones deserve to be treated humanely when they visit. This essay was very difficult to write because this experience was so personal, and family dynamics can be hard to discuss in an open forum. But, it is important to illuminate how mass incarceration affects families. We are invisible victims of the prison system. I hope my story compels others to share their experiences and join in the fight against the prison industrial complex.

*This piece is written in loving memory of my big Brother who died tragically on December 16, 2012.

                                                                              ****

Get involved with the Free Mumia Movement

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Tags: adornment, African American girls, body politics, clothing, Family, Gender,Mass Incarceration, prison industrial complex, Race

1. Regina N. Bradley on January 23, 2014 at 10:33 am

   Phenomenal per your usual, Tanisha.
   This piece invoked a pain in me I haven’t thought about for some years. I used to visit my father in prison. It was a traumatic experience. I think I’m most horrified by the light that would come on that let people know someone was coming to the visitation area. It was white and cold. It sanitized my excitement to see my father.
   One particular visit I remember fussing with my grandparents about why I couldn’t leave a picture I drew and painted for my daddy with him. My folks had to argue with the guards just to let me bring it in so he could see it. I worked hard on that piece. And it broke my heart – probably not as much as my daddy’s – that I couldn’t leave it with him.
   Thanks for this piece and bringing a sense of humanity to not only the prisoners but the family that has to jump through hoops to see them.

   REPLY
2. susanofthenorth on January 23, 2014 at 10:36 am

   Thank you for sharing your experience-it opened my eyes.

   REPLY
3. Juanita Crider on January 23, 2014 at 10:48 am

   This reminds me of when my cousin’s mother in law, who had loss her hair during chemotherapy, had to remove her head scarf when she went to visit her grandson in
   prison. She felt humiliated because they would not let her wear it during the visit even after she removed it for inspection.

   REPLY
4. *Pretty Sparkly Things: A Black Girl’s Encounter with the Prison Industrial Complex – The Feminist Wire | up2xxi on January 23, 2014 at 12:21 pm

   […] See on thefeministwire.com […]

   REPLY
5. Kimberly George on January 23, 2014 at 12:50 pm

   Heartbreaking. Thank you, thank you, for your courage and energy to write this piece.

   REPLY
6. A on January 23, 2014 at 8:34 pm

   Thank you for this.

   REPLY
7. Rachel on January 24, 2014 at 12:23 pm

   What an honest story, and beutiful too. This series has been very helpful for me- and has inspired my desire to-reenage in advocacy…
   I was a volunteer chaplain at a prison (my goal was to just be with people not to convert or be with “offenders” or to have any religious agenda—but to be with them) for 2 years and I would routinely show up and the guards at the desk would pretend they couldn’t find the paperwork to sign in. Despite the fact that I could see it- in plain sight behind the guards.
   I was being policed, reminded who was in charge and controlled and recall being aware that this was the encounter with the system that inmates had all the time. I didn’t know how I would control my rage if I were to encounter that all the time….
   Thank you again for your wise words, profound work and inspiration.
   -R

   REPLY

In Conversation with Antonio Negri

_{Some coordinators of the landless worker’s movement meet to discuss plans for the encampment, Pará, Brazil, 1999.}

_{Anti-riot police, Caracas.}

_{Women Zapatistas.}

Strip us naked, and we shall all be found alike. Dress us in their clothing, and they in ours, we shall appear noble, they ignoble—for poverty and riches make all the difference.

Small crimes are chastised, but great and serious ones rewarded … We have no business to think about conscience; for when, like us, men have to fear hunger, and imprisonment, or death, the fear of hell neither can nor ought to have any influence upon them. If you only notice human proceedings, you may observe that all who attain great power and riches, make use of either force or fraud; and what they have acquired either by deceit or violence, in order to conceal the disgraceful methods of attainment, they endeavor to sanctify with the false title of honest gains. Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent.¹

_{Bust of Machiavelli, Pallazo Vecchio, Florence.}

_{Phillippe Halsman, Jump Book, 1959. Portrait of Walter Gropius.}

_{Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo, designed by Kisho Kurokawa, 1972.}

ORSON SCOTT CARD WANTS YOU TO KNOW

Where will he get his "national police"? The NaPo will be recruited from "young out-of-work urban men" and it will be hailed as a cure for the economic malaise of the inner cities.

In other words, Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama's enemies.

Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people "trying to escape" -- people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama.

"Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books," and that while not every gay person should be incarcerated, the law must "be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society."

"The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly..."

Card’s status as a board member of the National Organization for Marriage, one of the largest and most well funded anti-gay activist groups in America, which works to prevent not only marriage equality but also civil union legislation and to legally prevent LGBTQ couples from adopting, is for many, including this writer, a different beast than mere personally held conservative views that might enter the subtext of a story or be voiced, when asked, by a writer or artist. Card has publicly expressed his views on gay marriage as worth overthrowing the government for, linked homosexuality with pedophilia, argued that marriage equality will lead to a world where parents who encourage their kids to date members of the opposite sex will be accused of hate speech, and has stated that he would prefer laws that criminalize consensual homosexual sex to stand and be enforced as a “message.” His presence on the board of NOM gives him more power to actually effect his opinions on others than your average celebrity with socially conservative political leanings.

Orson Scott Card’s sexist, victim-blaming “Ender’s Game” sequel

"Speaker for the Dead" sets Ender up as a white male savior, and implies a female character deserves abuse

(Credit: Wikimedia)

The problem is expanding mining operations is easier said than done. You see if you layered maps of mineral resources, tribal populations, and endangered wildlife on top of each other you’d see a scary picture. That's because what's left of India's cheapest coal reserves lies in the exact same places as the country's remaining forests which also happen to be home to the country's remaining tiger populations and large numbers of tribal populations. It's this combustible mix that has fueled 'naxal' insurgencies in many parts of the country's coal belt. 

What that means is that India's drive to expand coal supplies (as well as build new power plants) runs face first into fierce local resistance. These local communities have held back the goliath of coal expansion with little more than a slingshot and a rock.  That heroism, aided by the beauracratic inefficiency of Coal India and a decrepit transportation infrastructure, has caused stagnating production, and heightened project delay.

"The ongoing coal expansion is irrational and dangerous. Coal mining is destroying India's forests, tribal communities and endangered species, and now we know the pollution it emits when burned is killing thousands. Coal has failed to deliver energy security. We need a moratorium on new coal plants and ambitious policy incentives to unlock the huge potential India has in efficiency measures, wind and solar."

An oft repeated statement in recent years is that the continued reliance on coal power is essential to lift the poor people in India from the clutches of poverty. The government and many people in the position of influence have been repeating this statement so often that it seems to be attaining the status of “Goebbels’s Truth”...

When the harsh realities of coal power in the true context of global warming and the overall welfare of our communities are objectively reviewed, the hypocrisy behind such statements/reports will become obvious.... 

Whereas the successive governments continue to say that coal capacity addition is necessary to provide electricity to all, and through it to eliminate poverty in our country the reality as seen since independence is vastly different. Whereas the total installed power capacity in the country has increased from about 1,000 MW in 1947 to about 212,000 MW in 2013, and the national per capita electricity has increased from less than 100 kWh in 1947to about 800 kWh in 2013, about 300 Million people in the country have no access to electricity. Despite such massive growth in coal dominated electricity grid about 75 Million families have no electricity at all in 2013 as against the Planning Commission’s target of 30 kWh of electricity per family per month as life line energy by 2012.

The reasons given by the official agencies for not being able supply electricity supply to all is that it is not economical to extend the grid power to all villages. Since coal power is economical only in large size grid connected mode, the hollowness of the claim that coal power is needed to electrify all houses becomes clear. A large number of people are living without electricity even in the close vicinity of coal power plants.

A conveniently hidden fact about coal power is the inherent gross inefficiency associated with the coal power. The losses involved in coal burning, steam making, generating, transmitting and distributing electricity is so high that only about 20% of the coal energy reaches the end consumer in the form of electricity even with the best technologies....

India is endowed with a vast potential in renewable energy sources.... 

We, in India, need to take a much more holistic view of the energy needs of the people vis-à-vis all-round welfare of communities. We should build new clean energy sources regardless of what the West does because it’s the cheapest, cleanest, and best solution for our people. It’s time our ‘leaders’ focused on India’s clean energy future and dropped support for a corrupt dirty coal sector.

The Australian government, under Prime Minister Tony Abbott, seems committed to exacerbating its nation’s climate woes. Even as his Environmental Minister approved a vast coal mine that will produce 40 million tons of CO2-emitting coal per year, Abbott is calling Australia’s strong renewable energy sector into question.

He’s cutting funding for renewables, threatening to remove the 20 percent renewable energy standard and even falling back on the old and largely debunked criticism that wind power has negative impacts on human health.  Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council looked into the issue in 2010 and again in 2012. And now Abbott is calling for another review. Because, why not?

And just for good measure, he’s also dismantling Australia’s well-regarded plans for curbing carbon emissions and jettisoning the nation’s goals for carbon reductions.

India's coal inferno

India's planned power expansion depends overwhelmingly on coal, with over a hundred huge new generation units planned by 2030. Sarah Stirk reports on the nightmare the dash for coal is bringing to once peaceful rural communities.

Serena Williams is a "ghetto thug" for arguing with an umpire—John McEnroe was presumably less ghetto and thuggish when he regularly berated refs throughout his career; LeBron James is a thug just because this sports fan says so, because "I just don't like LeBron James or the way the NBA forces himself upon us, the fans and the media."

(One would be remiss to not also note that murdered black teenager Trayvon Martin's body had barely been in the ground before people were slandering him as a thug who got what was coming to him.)

There are other ways people try and deride black athletes—and teachers and lawyers and presidents and students buying skittles—and their various behaviors, of course, including adjectives like "tacky" and appeals to class. Many said Richard Sherman is "classless," for instance, because he raised his voice and showed too much pride and too little sportsmanship.

America loves its black athletes. It loves to watch them jump high and run fast. It loves to watch them punch each other in rings and tackle each other on fields, occasionally so violently that they tear each other's ligaments and break each other's bones and concuss each other. America loves to do all of this so much that it's willing to devote innumerable hours and billions of dollars to the practice. But all that love can be abusive and fleeting, and woe be unto the black athletes who step out of line in America.

White supremacist culture dictates who and who does not get to be human. In order for people of color to receive a Human Card, they must assimilate: they must not use slang. They must be quiet. They must not wear hoodies. They must not curse. They must be gracious at all times. They must enunciate. They must not talk about racism. They must not listen to rap music. They must not sag. They must not brag. They must not laugh in public. They must not take up more than one seat on the bus. They must not ever ask for more. In short, you must be perfect. Robotic. Even if you are a professional athlete who performs for millions of Americans, playing a game in which aggression, testosterone, and energy are rewarded (demanded)… you must be quiet, gracious, calm, unassuming. Unscary. To be black and also be regarded as human, you must never make a mistake in your entire life, ever—ever—or you are a thug. Ghetto. Other. Your Human Card is denied.

Richard Sherman’s Latest and his Refusal to Be a Brand

The presence of U.S. military and intelligence forces in Africa is designed to bolster the strategic mineral and territorial interests of Wall Street. Africa is now supplying greater amounts of oil, natural gas and other essential minerals to economic interests of the ruling class.

With the growing role of the People’s Republic of China on the continent, Washington and Wall Street are concerned that they will lose their post-World War II advantage in Africa. Hence due to the declining economic influence of the U.S., the capitalist are relying more on aggressive military and intelligence operations to undermine Africa’s long term interests which are more in line with other continental states as well as other geo-political regions of the world including Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

....Africa is a paradox that underscores the ongoing power of financial imperialism. She is spectacularly rich, yet the natural capital that is extracted from above and below her children’s feet continues to enrich, not Africans, but the people who facilitate Africa’s impoverishment: Western capitalists.

...Neo-liberalism is unquestionably the greatest cancer spreading across the African continent. Neo-liberalism is the promotion of a combination of counter-developmental economic policies, such as privatisation, austerity and structural adjustment that put the interests of foreign capital over local labour.

The BRICS agenda of relegitimising neoliberalism not only reinforces North American power, of course. In each case, the BRICS countries’ control of their hinterlands for the sake of regional capitalist hegemony was another impressive feature of sub-imperialism, especially in South Africa’s case....

...South African, US, European, Australian and Canadian firms have been joined by major firms from China, India and Brazil in the region. Their work has mainly built upon colonial infrastructural foundations – road, rail, pipeline and port expansion – for the sake of minerals, petroleum and gas extraction. BRICS appears entirely consistent with facilitating this activity, especially through the proposed BRICS Bank...

...The eco-destructive, consumerist-centric, over-financialised, climate-frying maldevelopment model throughout the BRICS works very well for corporate and parastatal profits, especially for Western capital, but is generating repeated crises for the majority of its people and for the planet.

...it is the West that is reliant on African handouts. These handouts come in many and varied forms. They include illicit flows of resources, the profits of which invariably find their way into the West’s banking sector via strings of tax havens (as thoroughly documented in Nicholas Shaxson’s Poisoned Wells). Another is the mechanism of debt-extortion whereby banks lend money to military rulers (often helped to power by Western governments, such as the Congo’s former President Mobutu), who then keep the money for themselves (often in a private account with the lending bank), leaving the country paying exorbitant interest on an exponentially growing debt.

...Recent research by Leonce Ndikumana and James K Boyce found that up to 80 cents in every borrowed dollar fled the borrower nation in ‘capital flight’ within a year, never having been invested in the country at all; whilst meanwhile $20billion per year is drained from Africa in ‘debt servicing’ on these, essentially fraudulent, ‘loans’.

Africlimate | The DRC: Beyond the atrocities, an emerging environmental crisis

DRC rainforest deforestation rates since 1990 have been in the lowest of any major forest region in the world. However there are still a number of threats to the health of the Congo rainforest and its residents. The biggest drivers of deforestation in the Congo rainforest over the past 20 years have been small-scale subsistence agriculture, clearing for charcoal and fuel wood to domestically generate energy for cooking and lighting, urban expansion and mining.

Pickets on Krasnopresnenskaya in support of the Bolotnaya case defendants

Thirty people in total have been charged in the Bolotnaya case. Maksim Luzyanjn and Konstantin Lebedev pleaded guilty and were sentenced to jail. Another defendant in the case, Mikhail Kosenko, was found to be not mentally competent and sentenced to compulsory psychiatric treatment. In separate proceedings, Leonid Razvozzhaev and Sergei Udaltsov have been investigated for allegedly organizing the mass riots. 

After Khodorkovsky’s release, 8 of the Bolotnaya prisoners were amnestied at the end of last year - Nikolai Kavkazsky, Maria Baranova, Leonid Kovyazin, Vladimir Akimenkov, Anastasia Rybachenko, Dmitry Altaichinov and Fedor Bakhov. Eight other people were not included in the amnesty. 

"...I think that the authorities were fearful of the protest moving leftwards. On the March of Millions there were large columns of the Left Front, the Russian Socialist Movement, anarchists and a strong column from the universities and educational spheres [protesting against the growing privatization of education – trans. note]. On the whole social slogans were dominant. I believe that the Bolotnaya Case was to a significant extent directed towards defeating the left opposition. But the crackdown was unsuccessful. We have overcome this stage and come out of it stronger, the struggle continues. At the same time I would like to remark that amongst the people involved in the Bolotnaya case there were people who were at a demonstration for the first time. Ending up in jail has politicised them."

Interview with two anarchist prisoners charged with participating in the May 6, 2012 clashes with police during an opposition rally in Moscow's Bolotnaya Square.

Former sailor Alexei Polikhovich, 22 (pictured), and historian Stepan Zimin, 21 are among the many people charged with clashing with police during an opposition rally. Both face a sentence of five-and-a-half year in penal colony, having spent over a year in pre-trial detention.

Q: You have unwillingly became a defendant in a political trial. Did you have pronounced political views before? Have they changed after you were imprisoned?

Polikhovich: I am a libertarian socialist. This is rather a social philosophy, a worldview rather than political view. A libertarian wants to build a new society on the principles of free union, equality, self-administration, federalism, respect for an individual, co-operation rather than rivalry. A libertarian would not be making electoral pledges, or fight for a position in the parliament or in a government. A libertarian's fight is for the people of the whole world - in the streets of Athens and Barcelona, Mexico City and Lima, and not in the corridors and lobbies of power. A libertarian is the most consistent opponent of a Nazi and an authoritarian communist, of a religious fundamentalist and of an exporter of ultra-liberal democracy, an enemy of hierarchies, verticals, dogmas, institutions of oppression, prisons. A libertarian is, without a doubt, an opponent of our main prison, which was described by Max Stirner: "Every state is a tyranny, be that a tyranny of one person or a tyranny of the many... The state seeks to hinder every free activity by its censorship, its supervision, its police, and holds this hindering to be its duty, because it is in truth a duty of self-preservation." The latter is particularly true in today's Russia.

Zimin: I am an adherent of anarcho-communist, anti-fascist views. Although for me they are life's principles rather than rigid frames of ideology. The best expression of the main point and essence of anarchism was made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his tiny essay ["Discourse on Inequality"]: "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

It is a huge mistake to think that anarchism is general chaos, lawlessness, the final result of which is Hobbes' war "of every man, against every man". In fact, it pursues the aim of building a society based on mutual aid and solidarity of all of its members, regardless of gender, race and religious creed.

Q: Why do you think the trial's most important part was hidden away to the Zamoskvoretsky Court, away from the large hall of the Moscow City Court and then from the large hall of the Nikulinsky Court?

Polikhovich: After the charges against four out of twelve defendants were dropped [in the December 2013 amnesty] ourselves and our lawyers can physically fit into the small hall of the Zamoskvoretsky Court. In her own domain [judge] Natalya Viktorovna [Nikishina] can find it easier to control the events, the final game will be played in her field.

Zimin: I do not think it is directly connected to the sentencing. It's just that the number of defendant has noticeably dropped, a small courthouse in central Moscow is much more convenient than Nikulinsky, the journey to which takes up a long time. Seeing that the trial lasts for eight months already, and we leave at six in the morning and return in a prison van after midnight, it is now easier to reach the trial courthouse, simply on everyday level.

Q: Do you have a sense of moral victory?

Polikhovich: I don't feel anything of the sort.

Zimin: I feel moral victory not so much due to transfer of the trial from one courthouse to another (after all, it only changed the surroundings), but rather because the court investigation has finished, and after hearing all the arguments of the prosecution, I am once again convinced of our innocence. In all the time that I was listening to the compositions by the so-called "victims" and their colleagues who served as witnesses, watching video recordings, I had the same thought: so who really has to sit in this aquarium?

Q: Some of the "Bolotnaya Case" folks were amnestied; when they were released in the courthouse, you celebrated that as though they were your relatives. Now some time has passed. What do you feel for the amnestied people?

Polikhovich: We had a laugh over this question. Does it assume that now, after some time has passed, we are supposed to have changed our attitude? I am sincerely happy for Masha [Baronova], Kolya [Kavkazsky], Lyonya [Kovyazin] and Vova [Akimenkov], especially for the latter. This trial has made us close, and I think we would never lose touch.

Zimin: On the day that they were released in the courthouse, there was a feeling as though you are getting released yourself. The sense of pride in them cannot be honestly put into words! And how could I not be happy for the people who were in handcuffs next to me in the morning, and were free by the evening. You know, back in the day, Leon Trotsky wrote: "Prison united all of us." I think that these words can be well applied to our situation. You can't say it in a better way.

Q: Do you think of what the sentence might be, what do you expect, do you believe that it can at least partly depend on the lawyers' work and on your position?

Polikhovich: I try not to hope and not to expect anything. I am prepared for any outcome. I think that the main conceptual decision on us will be made by the top officials but within that conception of the sentence there can be some variations, some individual approach. The lawyers have done a lot to dispel illusions concerning fairness of our prosecution, and for seven months they have been proving the invalidity, absurdity and biased nature of the charges, I am very grateful to them. We will find out very shortly whether their work has made any difference to the final outcome.

Zimin: The main thing that depends on my position in court is my attitude towards myself. We made the entire journey from arrest to the sentencing, and I think that each one of us has come to the conclusion that Russia's law-enforcement system (like all other similar systems) is far from perfection, to say the least. Half of all norms in the Criminal Code and in the Criminal Procedure Code are violated or not fulfilled.

Under such conditions, our lawyers have to be greatly thanked for expertly and consistently defending us under the conditions of abuse we are subjected to. As for the sentence, whatever happens, in the end it will all be good, we will keep on fighting. No pasaran!

Addresses of Stepan and Alexei. Note that these 2 prisons do not admit letters in English, so translate your text (f.e. with google translate or other similar program) before sending, or pass postcards and photos). 

Alexey Polikhovich Alexey Alexeevich Polikhovich, 1990 g.r. FKU SIZO-2 UFSIN Rossii po g. Moskve ul. Novoslobodskaya d. 45 127055 Moskva Russia 

Stepan Zimin Stepan Yurevich Zimin 1992 g.r., FKU SIZO-5 (Vodnik) UFSIN Rossii po g. Moskve, Vyborskaya 20, 125130 Moskva Russia 

Excert from an article by Yulia Polukhina, Novaya Gazeta newspaper, Januray 24, 2014. The questions, same for all interviewees, were passed to the detainees via their lawyers.

From the Perspective of Resistance: An Interview with Michael Hardt

THIS IS NOT OKAY

The radicalism of fools: the rise of the new anti-Semitism

No self-respecting person on the left should endorse anti-establishment positions that are in reality just cloaked anti-Semitism.

Mixed signals: fans do the quenelle outside a Nantes venue where Dieudonné was due to give a show on 9 January that was banned by the supreme court Arnaud Journois/photoshot.

... On word that a single camera crew had arrived at Maghaberry to cover the release, Corey was whisked off in a prison van for a secret assignation with his solicitor at nearby Moira railway station. The thwarted BBC news team must have been particularly aggrieved, for these machinations received higher billing on the evening news than almost any other aspect of the four-year saga.

... a general injunction in talking to any media outlet appears plainly disproportionate to any justification for this restriction on his rights. Access to the media by those subject to criminal sanctions, and seeking to expose potential miscarriages of justice, has long been carefully guarded by the UK’s courts.

In 1973, at the age of 19 he was sentenced to life in prison for his part in the killing of two Royal Ulster Constabulary (R.U.C.) officers near Lurgan. Mr Corey spent 19 years of his life in prison; he was released in June 1992, six years prior to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA). Therefore he has served his full sentence and was not released under the provisions of the early release scheme as provided in the GFA.

Former Northern Ireland Secretary of State Shaun Woodward had ordered his prison recall on the basis of "closed material" and unspecified allegations of involvement with dissident republicans.

 Justice Watch Ireland (JWI) welcomes Mr Corey’s eventual release, however, we do so with continuing concern as to the process and manner in which he was detained including that of his release conditions.

The fact that Mr Corey has been incarcerated since April 1, 2010 without trial or charge in Her Majesty’s Prison (HMP) Maghaberry – the fact that he has never been given any lawful or legitimate reason for his dentition nor has there ever been any sufficient disclosure documentation been made available, regardless of the countless requests by his legal team and Human Rights groups, all would infer that he has no case to answer.

JWI call for the immediate removal of all conditions imposed upon the released ‘internee’ Martin Corey and reiterate our position; arraign Martin Corey in an open court and allow due process to take its place; if the authorities are unable or unwilling to do this, let him go unconditionally.

In the absence of afore mentioned process it shall result in making a mockery of the judicial system with evidence dictating that the state has imprisoned 63 year old Mr Corey unlawfully now for almost four years.

If any state can detain an Individual on so called ‘secret evidence’, hold them indefinitely without producing a shred of real evidence, release them years later without the accused ever being able to face their accuser – then have the state judicial apparatus gag them, give no recourse through it’s judiciary system so they may clear their name and be compensated for wrongful detention and abuse, we are facing a future not dissimilar to a Stalinist dictatorship.

The fact that Mr Corey is a political opponent to the current political process would cause one to extrapolate that the entire episode may be of a sinister and politically motivated action.

JWI have great concern as to how this degree of civil rights abuse has been allowed to go unchecked by those statuary bodies deemed to be in place in order to prevent such abuses occurring, particularly when conducted in such an open and notorious way.

All these issues require prompt and full investigation.

Mr Corey has been denied many rights, most importantly this 63 year old man; has been denied and continues to be denied his right to family and personal life as set out in the provisions of Article 8 of the ECHR.

That all said, it should be further noted that a breach of fundamental human rights of one is in fact, a breach of fundamental human rights for all.

Release Martin Corey Campaign spokesperson Cait Trainor said: “It is clear the continued imprisonment of Martin Corey was a political embarrassment to the Northern Ireland Office and he was released in a way that would ensure minimum publicity.

“The British government, secretary of state and all those involved in the internment of Martin Corey showed contempt for human rights and were involved in a despotic policy of ruling by decree.”

The following is from News Junkie Post. 

REPRESSION IN NORTHERN IRELAND: MARTIN COREY'S 

DETENTION WAS ON SECRET EVIDENCE

By Eugene Egan

After almost four years of detention without trial, Irish Republican Martin Corey, 62, was finally released on January 15, 2014. Corey is a member of Republican Sinn Fein, who broke away from Sinn Fein under the leadership of Gerry Adams in 1986. Republic Sinn Fein are linked to the republican dissident group the Continuity Irish Republican Army, who have continued to carry out attacks against British forces based in Northern Ireland.

Corey, from Lurgan in County Armagh, was previously jailed for life in 1973 for the killing of two police officers but released in June 1992 after serving 19 years. On April 16, 2010, however, he was arrested, on the orders of Shaun Woodward, the then British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and detained in Maghaberry Prison without charge or trial.

The Good Friday Agreement

Republican Sinn Fein oppose the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement because they see it as a sell-out that copper-fastens British rule in Northern Ireland. This agreement was reached by republican and unionist politicians on Friday April 10, 1998 following peace talks between Irish republicans and the British Government that led to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provisional IRA) and loyalist paramilitaries decommissioning their weapons. The agreement allowed for a Power-Sharing Assembly in Stormont, Northern Ireland and “parity of esteem” for Irish nationalists and British unionists. It followed years of a protracted armed campaign by the IRA to force a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.

Ireland had been under British rule since the 12th century when it was invaded on the orders of the English king Henry 11 in 1169. Over the centuries, there were many uprisings and rebellions against British rule. The British responded with brute force, including a campaign of genocide in the 17th century by Oliver Cromwell’s army which wiped out a third of the Irish population. In addition, the British planted settlers from Scotland and England mostly in the North-East of Ireland: the forerunners of the unionist/loyalist communities in Northern Ireland today. The settlers were Protestants who enjoyed privileges over the native Catholic Irish, which served the interests of Britain’s policy of “divide and rule.”

In 1916, an uprising by Irish nationalists in Dublin known as the Easter Rising was defeated. Although it was unsuccessful and their leaders executed, the brutal manner of the executions led to the reawakening of the Irish national consciousness and the formation of the IRA. In the 1918 election, over 73 percent of the Irish people voted for Sinn Fein’s mandate calling for Irish independence, but this was ignored by the British Government. Nevertheless the IRA’s campaign of guerrilla warfare was very effective and led to peace talks between the IRA and the British Government. The talks culminated in the partition of Ireland and the establishment of the Irish Free State, but Northern Ireland would remain under British rule under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.

Many Irish republicans were unhappy about this, who insisted on a complete British withdrawal and the establishment of an independent Irish Republic. A civil war ensued between pro-treaty and anti-treaty republicans. The newly-formed Irish government pro-treaty forces were as ruthless, if not more, than the British and were eventually successful in suppressing those republicans who wanted to continue the struggle against partition and for a united Ireland completely free from British rule.

With partition and the suppression of the IRA, Ireland was divided into two reactionary states. The newly-formed state of Northern Ireland was created in such a way as to ensure a Protestant/unionist majority over the Catholic/nationalist community. Laws were introduced that discriminated against Catholics who were denied civil rights and found it hard to get employment and housing.

In 1968, a campaign for civil rights was formed but this was met with baton-charging and other such violence by the protestant-dominated sectarian police force, known as the B-specials, who encouraged loyalist pogroms against the Catholic community. The situation was running out of control with riots and killings and the British army had to be brought in ostensibly to keep the peace, but in reality it was to maintain British rule and prop up the sectarian state. At the same time the Provisional IRA was born to help defend the nationalist community from state violence and force a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Water cannons, rubber bullets, curfews and other such like was the order of the day. Internment was introduced in 1971 to deal with the IRA, but this only increased their support and alienated nationalists from the British state.

Following almost 30 years of a long protracted military conflict between the Provisional IRA and the British state, a compromise solution was established. This compromise was the Good Friday Agreement. Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, under the leadership of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness brokered a peace deal that led to the Provisional IRA decommissioning its weapons in return for power sharing in the Northern Ireland Assembly of Stormont.

The Case of Martin Corey

The British authorities detained Martin Corey for nearly four years on the basis of “closed information”: in other words, “secret evidence.” Neither Corey nor his legal representatives were shown the evidence against him or told why the authorities believed he was a threat.

In a Judicial Review in July 2012, Corey challenged his detention, leading  Judge Colman Treacy to order his release on bail on the grounds that “closed material” was insufficient evidence to detain him. On the same day, however, the judge’s order was blocked by the Secretary of State, citing grounds of national security, as the evidence against him was secret and could not be disclosed even to the judge.

The fact that a man can be taken away from his home and detained on the basis of “secret evidence,” without charge or trial, is a form of selective internment and a blatant disregard for human rights and the due process of law. Supporters of Martin Corey say his detention is part of a vindictive campaign of repression against political activists who speak out against the Good Friday Agreement.

Part of the conditions of his release is that he cannot talk to the media. The Martin Corey Release Campaign welcomed his release but issued a statement saying: “Martin was interned on secret evidence gathered by secret police and held without a charge or trial since April 2010…. The British Government, secretary of state and all those involved in the internment of Martin Corey showed contempt for human rights and were involved in a despotic policy of ruling by decree.”

The British-controlled state has a long history of using repressive laws and tactics against Irish republicans and nationalists who oppose British rule. Such tactics have included internment, curfews, non-jury courts, paid informers, undercover assassinations, and agent provocateurs. On January 30, 1972, British soldiers shot dead 13 civil-rights marchers in Derry in what became known as Bloody Sunday. In 1978, the European Court of Human Rights found the British government guilty of inhuman and degrading treatment when 14 former internees took legal action after being hooded, beaten, deprived of sleep and food, forced to stand for long periods and subjected to continuous loud noise. More recently, there has been evidence of many British soldiers and policemen colluding with pro-British loyalist death squads.

More and more Irish Republicans, socialists and political activists are pointing out that, like the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, the Good Friday Agreement is a ruse by the British Government to maintain British rule in Ireland. They argue that it fails to address the root cause of the conflict: the British presence and the Unionist veto on a united Ireland. Republican Sinn Fein broke away from Sinn Fein over its decision to take seats in the British parliament, arguing that having two separate referendums on a united Ireland (as happened with the agreement’s ratification) was undemocratic, as Northern Ireland is an artificially created state established to ensure a British unionist majority and that the whole of the people, north and south, should be given the right to vote in one all-Ireland referendum. An increase in bombing, shootings and riots in recent years illustrates the growing popular tensions and disillusionment with the peace accord.

Editor’s notes: Eugene Egan is a political  activist and writer based in the United Kingdom who campaigns on Palestine and Ireland. His work has been published in various British and Irish publications including Palestine News and Ceasefire Magazine. Photographs one, five, six and thirteen by Iker Merodio. Photographs four, nine, eleven, twelve  and  fifteen by PPC Antifa. Photograph ten by The Urban Guerrilla . Photograph three, seven, eight and fourteen  from the Burns Library.

- See more at: http://newsjunkiepost.com/2014/01/17/repression-in-northern-ireland-martin-coreys-detention-was-on-secret-evidence/#sthash.wW2uUgSi.dpuf

Refusing to conform, she “hid out” until her delegation had passed, then surged into the group of white women – some hostile, some not – and took her rightful place in the Illinois group. She also had to be protected from the other women in the delegation who were, ah, slightly peeved that a Negro woman dared  march among their ranks, after she had been explicitly told not to.

It’s true, white women lacked the agency of their husbands, fathers and brothers, so their hand in slavery did not extend to the buying and selling of human chattel, the laws being made that called black people only a fraction of a human being. But white women whipped black bodies. They burned them. They posed next to the murdered bodies of black people who were lynched. They called people niggers. They scratched faces. They separated families. While wearing their pretty dresses, they ruined lives.

The enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained, for upon unquestioned authority it is stated that in every southern State but one there are more educated women than all the illiterate voters, white and black, native and foreign, combined. As you probably know, of all the women in the South who can read and write, ten out of every eleven are white. When it comes to the proportion of property between the races, that of the white outweighs that of the black immeasurably. The South is slow to grasp the great fact that the enfranchisement of women would settle the race question in politics. The civilization of the North is threatened by the influx of foreigners with their imported customs; by the greed of monopolistic wealth and the unrest among the working classes; by the strength of the liquor traffic and encroachments upon religious belief. Some day the North will be compelled to look to the South for redemption from those evils on account of the purity of its Anglo-Saxon blood, the simplicity of its social and economic structure, the great advance in prohibitory law and the maintenance of the sanctity of its faith, which has been kept inviolate. Just as surely as the North will be forced to turn to the South for the nation's salvation, just so surely will the South be compelled to look to its Anglo-Saxon women as the medium through which to retain the supremacy of the white race over the African.

On March 3, 1913, as 5,000 women prepared to parade through President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, demanding the right to vote, Ida B. Wells was standing to the side. A black journalist and civil-rights activist, she had taken time out from her anti-lynching campaign to lobby for woman suffrage in Chicago. But a few days earlier, leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) had insisted she not march with the Illinois delegation. Certain Southern women, they said, had threatened to pull out if a black woman marched alongside whites.

 By 1900, most suffragists had lost their enthusiasm for civil rights, and actually used racism to push for the vote. Anna Howard Shaw, head of NAWSA, said it was "humiliating" that black men could vote while well-bred white women could not. Other suffragists scrambled to reassure white Southerners that white women outnumbered male blacks in the South. If women got the vote, they argued, they would help preserve "white supremacy."

...Wells was never really embraced by the white suffrage movement. And though both white and black women won the vote in 1920, they did not do it by marching together.

WE ARE ALL WOMEN FIRST and every one of these women who call themselves feminists seems to have forgotten that infighting doesn’t further the feminist cause.

This kind of divisiveness hurts us. And it drives away young women of all races and classes who feel that such discussions, with nothing more, serve little useful purpose.

This may sound reasonable on the surface, especially with comments like “women of all races and classes” giving a nod to the idea of inclusion, but what it really amounts to is, “When you complain about racism in the feminist community, you cause divisions. So shut up and don’t complain.” We wrap ourselves up in all these cries for unity as if the division itself were the root of the problem. As if the problem is women of color having a problem with racism, and *not* the racism itself. It’s a way to sideline the issue of racism and shift the blame to the WoC who point it out. That way we never have to address it and actually fix it.

I know I am bouncing all over the place here, just sort of throwing darts out there, so let me try to bring this a little more together.

Too many just assume that white women are natural allies of Black people in the struggle against white supremacy.  If only it were so, but it isn't.  As Chauncey DeVega has pointed out eloquently:

White women were members of the KKK. White women owned black people as slaves. White women raped, tortured, and abused their African-American human property. White American women struggling for the right to vote in the early 20th century leveraged their status as “white” citizens, and the “offense” to the white racial order that was (ostensible) black male voting-citizenship, in order to win the franchise.

 But the fights against the White inferiority complex masquerading as White supremacy and white privilege are not perfectly congruent with the struggles by White women against the sexism faced by their group. Here, Third World Feminism, Womanism, and “White Feminism” are not always the same struggles.

The nomenclature and broader language attempts to capture that reality. The language of “allies” and “natural” must also be deconstructed and challenged. Would White women see their struggle as more aligned with Black women than with White men? And would they make that choice–again emphasizing the word “natural”–as a given and a default against the collective and group self-interest of Whiteness as a political and social force?

Among anti-racists, progressives, liberals, as well as those who are invested in “social justice” in the United States and elsewhere, one of the standing rules is that we are not allowed to “rank oppressions.” Sexism, racism, homophobia, able-ism, classism, and other types of inequalities and discrimination are all considered equal.

Such a rubric is a practical concession; in many ways it is also rooted in lazy thinking.

Based on empirical data, we can most certainly rank oppressions. Race and gender are social constructs that do not necessarily reveal with any precision or truth a great deal about how individual people fully locate themselves in society, approach politics, or go about their daily lives. Of course, race and gender remain real. Yet, this is true in relative, local, and absolute terms.

Ani DiFranco is a White woman who enjoys the benefits of both racial and class privilege in the United States. What does her plantation misstep tell us about sexism and racism? And as I signaled to above, are White women as a group any more (or less) committed to anti-racism, and fighting White privilege, than are White men?

The answer is no. There are exceptional White women who have fought, and continue to fight, the White inferiority complex masquerading as White supremacy in the United States and the West. There are White men who have done the same. Whiteness remains a powerful social drug which promises unearned material, psychological, and economic privileges for its signatories and beneficiaries.

White women have signed that contract in much the same way as White men.

An allegiance to White privilege and White racism (more often than not) unites White men and White women together This is one of the ugly, dirty, little secrets that those on the anti-racist Left are afraid to confront.

White conservatives are deeply invested in White supremacy. They are honest about it. By comparison, there is an ugly strain of White Liberal Racism, that while in comparison to the Right, is very different in how it is expressed. But Liberal Racism shares many of the latter’s racist assumptions about Black people…as well as an investment in maintaining and protecting White privilege.

Liberal and Conservative racism both do the work of White supremacy in the United States during the post civil rights era. Unfortunately, the public discourse in the United States has not matured enough to confront such a troubling and challenging social fact.

Why write all this?  Why go here?  

If white people are ever going to collectively and with real strength confront the legacy of and the power of white supremacy all whites, regardless of gender, have to  face up to reality.  White people have to become race traitors. Further, if we are ever going to confront in a real way Capital, white people, white workers, white activists, white leftists, have to do exactly the same thing.  We can't do that if we deny our (I say "we" and  "our" since I am white, too) history and complicity in all this.  A divided multitude or a divided working class will never successfully replace capital, global or otherwise, until whites deal with white supremacy and white privilege.  It just can't happen.  You can't unite a class that is in fact divided, and you can't overcome division by pretending all you have to do is shout "Black and white, unite and fight." You must deal with the very real material conditions and privileges that are the cause of the divide and that are the basis of white supremacy.  

In my book, that is a fact.

That's why this is here.  This is just one piece of the puzzle that really isn't all that puzzling.

The following is from Racism Review.

White Women and U.S. Slavery: Then and Now

It’s Tuesday and that means it’s Trouble with White Women and White Feminism, our ongoing series meant to offer a broader context and deeper analysis of the latest outrages by the melanin-challenged.

White women were active participants in, proponents of and key beneficiaries of the system of slavery in the U.S., both historically and now.

While some historians, such as  C. Vann Woodward and Catherine Clinton, have argued that white women were secretly opposed to the system of slavery, scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese demolished this notion with her work, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 1988).  Fox-Genovese draws on white slaveholding women’s diaries, letters, and postbellum memoirs, along with the Works Progress Administration’s narratives of enslaved black women as her source material to make a convincing argument that even though they worked in the same households there was no “shared sense of sisterhood” among black and white women in the plantation household.  Fox-Genovese makes a distinction between white women in the North, whose urban, bourgeois culture valued individualism and the redeeming power of domestic work, and white Southern women, whose hierarchical, dependency-based culture judged women’s worth on their success in conforming to the ideal of the “lady,” rather than on their thrift, industry, and devotion to all-sacrificing motherhood. By arguing that white, Southern women’s history “does not constitute a regional variation on the main story; it constitutes another story,” Fox-Genovese joined women of color and labor historians who were offering critiques of both the white, middle-class feminist movement and the histories it produced. (See this for a much longer and more thorough summary of Fox-Genovese’s work.)

It is a mistake to believe that slaveowning was an entirely Southern U.S. phenomenon. In fact, it was the Northeast where slavery began in the U.S. and where some of its enduring legacy remains. “Human slavery was the precondition for the rise of higher education in the Americas,” writes historian Craig Steven Wilder in his, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of American Universities.  Wilder writes:

“In the decades before the American Revolution, merchants and planters became not just the benefactors of colonial society but its new masters. Slaveholders became college presidents. The wealth of the traders determined the locations and decided the fates of colonial schools. Profits from the sale and purchase of human beings paid for campuses and swelled college trusts. And the politics of the campus conformed to the presence and demands of slave-holding students as colleges aggressively cultivated a social environment attractive to …wealthy families.”

Wilder paints a compelling portrait of the ways that slavery was not merely part of the “context” present at the same time as the rise of higher education in the U.S., but in fact, was a crucial element that universities relied on to build facilities, endowments and legacies of elite social environments for cultivating subsequent generations of the nation’s leaders. While it’s true that these institutions were established for the benefit of white men, white women eventually demanded and won access.

White women in the academy, and I’m one of them, continue to benefit from the system of higher education built by enslaved human beings. According to the Almanac of Higher Education, women accounted for only 31% of all tenured faculty in US colleges and universities,but of these 78% are white women, compared to just 0.6% American Indian, 4% Latina, 6.7% Asian American, and 7% African American.  Wilder’s research is focused on Ivy League (elite) educational institutions, but it has implications for those of us outside those institutions as well. I work at CUNY (not, to my knowledge, built by enslaved people) but CUNY operates within an eco-system of other institutions of higher education from which we all benefit.

“But, my family didn’t own slaves!” also, “Slavery was a long time ago, isn’t it time to forget all that?

These refrains about a distant, non-slaveholding past are a commonplace among white people. The first is meant to suggest a lack of connection to the institution of slavery, and therefore, a lack of responsibility for understanding it; and the second is meant to suggest that historical amnesia is a salve for social ills. My family didn’t own slaves either (that I know of). This wasn’t an ethical stance, they just couldn’t afford to own any human beings.

The rush to forget, to distance from the legacy of slavery in the U.S. strikes me as peculiar.  Recently, this resistance to facing history has come out in the ways that white people talk about (and don’t talk about) the film ’12 Years a Slave.’    Most often, what I hear from white women friends, is this: ”I’m not sure I can go see 12 Years a Slave. It just sounds too painful to watch, and I wonder, why would I want to pay a babysitter so I can be in agony for two hours?”

Perhaps part of this resistance is a reluctance to come to terms with the way that, as Olivia Cole writes, white women ruined lives while wearing their pretty dresses.  While scholarly works like those by Fox-Genovese or Wilder may not reach a wide public audience, this film could if people are willing to go see it. Part of what the film reveals is the cruel treatment meted out by white women situated as the plantation mistress to the enslaved women they controlled.

Plantations: Topographies of Terror or Theme Parks?

Slavery does not exist solely in the mists of some distant past, but remains with us in the here and now of the U.S.  Plantations are increasingly popular locations for weddings for white women who are convinced they can “work around the racism” of such a setting.

(Image source)

People who doubt the fascination we have as a society with the “plantation” theme, should watch “Gone with the Wind” (1939), which serves as a kind of cultural template for the aesthetics of this phenomenon. While some may see this as irrelevant to the contemporary milieu, the recent micro-controversies involving Paula Deen and Ani DiFranco suggest otherwise.

Paula Deen is a celebrity who built a small empire on her southern cooking and down-home style.  Deen recently became embroiled in controversy when in June 2013, she became the target of a lawsuit alleging racial and sexual discrimination.  In her deposition, when asked if she’d used the N-word to describe African American people, she said “Yes, of course.”   Among the other revelations about Deen that emerged were the details of her “dream southern plantation wedding.”   Deen offered a tearful apology for her use of the N-word, the lawsuit was dismissed, but it may have been too late because there was already a Twitter hashtag #PaulaDeenRecipes with some truly hilarious, creative entries (e.g., Back of the Bus Biscuits #PaulaDeenRecipes). Deen had her television show cancelled by Food Network, and endorsement contracts cancelled by Smithfield Foods, Walmart, Target, QVC, Caesars Entertainment, Home Depot, diabetes drug company Novo Nordisk, J.C. Penney, Sears, KMart and her then-publisher Ballantine Books. However, several companies have expressed their intent to continue their endorsement deals with Deen, and fans flocked to her restaurants in a show of support.

Ani DiFranco is a singer, songwriter and is often regarded as a feminist icon.  DiFranco faced a controversy in 2013 when after the announcement that she was hosting a three-day artists’ workshop billed as the “Righteous Retreat” at Iberville Parish‘s Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana.  Now operated as a luxury resort, Nottoway Plantation was one of the largest plantations in the South, and features the largest antebellum mansion. Its operator and founder John Randolph owned over 155 slaves in the year 1860. DiFranco’s choice of venue for the retreat was called “a blatant display of racism” on a petition at change.org that collected more than 2,600 signatures. On December 29, 2013 DiFranco cancelled the retreat and offered what many saw as a tepid, non-apology-apology. Chastened by the criticism that followed that first statement, DiFranco issued a second apology on January 2, 2014 in which she wrote, “..i would like to say i am sincerely sorry. it is obvious to me now that you were right – all those who said we can’t in good conscience go to that place and support it or look past for one moment what it deeply represents. i needed a wake up call and you gave it to me.” 

The public oppobrium that Deen and DiFranco faced are tied up in what Priscilla Ocen, writing at For Harriet, calls the subservience fantasy in the U.S.  The persistent cultural fascination with plantations as settings of an idyllic past positions them as locations that can be “reclaimed” as luxury resorts, wedding venues, and “righteous retreat” destinations. And, I would argue, it is not coincidental that it is white women who are fueling this fantasy.

There are other ways to approach our history. At the same time that the controversy with Ani DiFranco was roiling the interwebs, I was visiting Berlin. While I was there, I went to a museum called “Topographies of Terror,” a museum that marks the site of the former Secret State Police, the SS and the Security Main Office of the Third Reich.  The story of how the museum was created fascinated me as much as the collection itself. After the war the grounds were leveled and initially used for commercial purposes, and eventually became a vacant lot. Public interest in this site emerged gradually in the 1970s and 1980s. It was during this time that groups of citizens, historians, and activists began the work of commemorating the site and using it as a mechanism for confronting the difficult past of the Nazi regime.

In the U.S., we have very few (if any) of these kinds of monuments.  Imagine, if you will, a wedding held at a former concentration camp with a “Third Reich” theme, with the bride urging guests to “work around” the blatant anti-semitism. Offensive, right? Of course it is.  Then why is it that here in the U.S., we turn plantations – our own topographies of terror – into theme parks and luxury resorts?

As I said, I find the American rush to forget, to distance ourselves from the legacy of slavery strikes me as peculiar.  I suspect that part of this reluctance has to do with the affective, particularly for white women, who wish above all else, not to be made uncomfortable about race.  More about that in another post in this ongoing series, Trouble with White Women#tww.

Whether pro or anti-death penalty, Circuit Judge Bye's dissent from the Eighth Circuit's denial of rehearing en banc is an opinion worth reading. He notes, first, that "Missouri put Nicklasson to death before the federal courts had a final say on whether doing so violated the federal constitution."

And this isn't the first time. Judge Bye cites nine instances in four years in the mid-1980s where Missouri set execution dates before federal review was exhausted. In most of the cases, Supreme Court Justice Blackmun stepped in and scolded the state courts. They apparently haven't learned their lesson.

"In my near fourteen years on the bench, this is the first time I can recall this happening," he wrote. "By proceeding with Nicklasson's execution before our court had completed voting on his petition for rehearing en banc, Missouri violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the long litany of cases warning Missouri to stay executions while federal review of an inmate's constitutional challenge is still pending."

Herbert Smulls was in the middle of a phone call discussing his attorneys’ final efforts to save his life when he was reportedly seized by prison guards, hauled into an execution chamber, and injected with a toxic cocktail of drugs. At the time of his death, an appeal was pending before the United States Supreme Court asking the justices to halt his execution. 

Missouri Executed This Man While His Appeal Was Pending in Court

It is 2014, not 1964 or 1914, and yet on Wednesday night a black man in Missouri, a black man convicted by an all-white jury, was executed before his federal appeals had been exhausted. He was executed just moments after reportedly being hauled away by prison guards while he was in the middle of a telephone call discussing his appeals with one of his attorneys. He was executed even though state officials knew that the justices of the United States Supreme Court still were considering his request for relief.
Asked repeatedly not to execute Smulls while appeals were pending, state officials failed even to respond to emails from defense attorneys that night while corrections officials went ahead with the execution. Smulls thus was pronounced dead four minutes before the Supreme Court denied his final stay request. This was not an accident or some bureaucratic misunderstanding and did not come as a surprise to Smulls’ lawyers. They say it was the third straight execution in Missouri in which corrections officials went ahead with lethal injection before the courts were through with the condemned man's appeals.*
Just last month, for example, Missouri officials similarly executed a man named Allen Nicklasson before his appeals were concluded. That timing of that execution prompted a federal appeals court judge, 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kermit Bye, to declare that he was “alarmed” that Missouri proceeded with its execution “before this court had even finished voting on Nicklasson's request for a stay. In my near fourteen years on the bench, this is the first time I can recall this happening.”
Below are some of the emails sent Wednesday night from Smulls’ attorneys to state lawyers as the deadline drew near for the expiration of the death warrant authorizing their client’s execution. Over and over again, the defense tried to impress upon state officials the need to wait for the judicial process to play out before executing Smulls:


Such frantic communication from defense attorneys to state officials is not uncommon in the hours leading up to an execution-- the state, after all, has the body of the man it seeks to execute (literally, habeas corpus). What is striking here, though, is not just that state lawyers failed or refused even to respond to Smulls’ attorneys but that these officers of the court, and corrections officials, essentially divested the Supreme Court of jurisdiction by killing the litigant.
The timeline is everything here. Before 10:00 that night, Smulls’s attorney notified state officials that there were active pending appeals at the both the Supreme Court and the 8th Circuit. “Do not execute Mr. Smulls while claims for legal relief and stay are pending,” the defense attorneys pleaded with opposing counsel. There was no email response from Missouri’s lawyers, Smulls' attorney Cheryl Pilate told me Friday. There was instead a single telephone call, much earlier in the evening, in which a state attorney acknowledge the existence of a stay (before filing to have that stay removed).
At 10:11, the final lethal injection protocols were initiated. By this time, the 8th Circuit had rejected all of the claims before it—over another pointed dissent from Judge Bye—leaving only an active appeal before the Supreme Court. At 10:20 Smulls was pronounced dead. Ten minutes later, at 10:30, the Supreme Court notified the lawyers that Smulls’ final stay request had been denied at 10:24. This means that Missouri began to execute a man 13 minutes before it was entirely sure it could do so. Smulls was pronounced dead four minutesbefore the Supreme Court finally authorized Missouri to kill him.
Via email Friday, I asked state attorneys to comment upon the emails they received from defense attorneys and Missouri’s evident lack of response to them. I asked them to explain their rationale in proceeding with the execution knowing the justices still had the case. Through a spokeswoman, late Friday, they responded:

The law is clear: the pendency of litigation is insufficient to stop an execution.  Barefoot v. Estelle, 463 U.S. 880, 895-96 (1983). The legal mechanism for a federal court to stop an execution is a court-ordered stay.  On January 29, 2014, the State of Missouri directly asked the United States Supreme Court if the execution of Mr. Smulls should be stopped.  The Court said no three times that day prior to execution, lifting all stays.

Attorneys for the State were in contact with the clerks of both the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court throughout the evening of the execution.  Both courts were aware that the execution would proceed once all stays had been lifted. No stay of execution was in effect at time of the execution.

Counsel for the State spoke to Ms. Pilate after the United States Supreme Court vacated the first two stays on the evening of January 29. Her subsequent emails, sent after the United States Supreme Court vacated the final stay, simply reiterated her demand that the State halt the lawful execution of her client but contained no legal authority for her demand (emphasis in original).

Some legal experts agree with that view. They contend that, at some point, the appellate process is over and that a man set for execution ought to be executed. This view posits that any other approach would give defense attorneys the power to pile appeal upon appeal in an effort to postpone the implementation of a death warrant. But this is not a universal view. Some death penalty advocates I spoke with on Friday say that state officials have an affirmative duty not to proceed with an execution if they know a Supreme Court appeal is pending. Clearly, Judge Bye, a veteran jurist, agrees with the latter approach.
In my view, if there were a breach here it was as much one of ethics as it was one of law. State lawyers acting as prosecutors (which is what Missouri’s attorneys were doing on the night of the execution) have special obligations to act as “a minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate,” according to the comment for Rule 4-3.8 of the Missouri Rules of Professional Conduct. “This responsibility carries with it specific obligations to see that the defendant is accorded procedural justice.” They should have been considering not just their obligation to execute Smulls, in other words, but their obligations to ensure it was done fairly and justly.
There is more relevant language in Missouri's ethics rules. The Preamble, for example, states that a "lawyer should demonstrate respect for the legal system and for those who serve it, including judges, other lawyers and public officials. While it is a lawyer's duty, when necessary, to challenge the rectitude of official action, it is also a lawyer's duty to uphold legal process." But because I am no expert in legal ethics, I asked some legal ethicists to weigh in on what happened here. One, Michael Downey, an ethics specialist at the St. Louis law firm Armstrong Teasdale, shared this view:

The lawyers at issue were representing the state were acting in a prosecutorial capacity. Moreover, this was a capital case, and Smulls was facing execution on the very night the communications occurred. When acting in a prosecutorial capacity, lawyers have special obligations to make sure that justice is done. Not to ensure that a criminal receives maximum punishment, but to make sure that justiceis done…

Perhaps the lawyers prosecuting the case have a very good explanation for why they did not respond. But it better have been a very, very good reason for not responding to defense counsel, and for allowing an execution – which may or may not have been proper – to occur.

I get that state authorities felt that they had their own legal obligations to enforce the death warrant before it expired and they had to jump through hoops to obtain a new one. What I don't get is the mindset of a lawyer telling the executioners to go ahead and kill a man knowing that at that very moment the justices are considering his case. What law school professor would teach a young student to make such a choice? What Attorney General would recommend that maneuver as official state policy?
“We strive toward excellence,” is the motto of the Missouri Department of Corrections. But let me offer a theory that undercuts that noble promise. State officials pressed ahead Wednesday night, knowing an appeal was outstanding, because they didn't want another delay in Smulls' execution-- didn't want to answer more questions about lethal injection.  But, stay or no stay in place, the knowledge that the justices were considering the case should have been enough to cause those officials to pause. Just imagine what we'd be talking about today if the justices had granted Smulls' stay request four minutes after he was pronounced dead. It was not open-and-shut against him. Judge Bye's dissent was not frivolous.
Indeed, it was Judge Bye on Wednesday night who best summed up the balance of factors involved. "Smulls faces the ultimate, irrevocable penalty in the absence of a stay," the judge wrote. "Missouri, on the other hand, merely faces the administrative work involved in obtaining a new date on which to execute Smulls." Judge Bye offered this blunt formula after explaining why Smulls' challenge to the injection protocols to be used against him were worthy of more substantial consideration by the federal courts that only a stay of execution would have provided.
What happened in Missouri this week is unacceptable in a nation that purports to worship its rule of law. It ought to be unacceptable even to the most ardent supporters of capital punishment. And the worst news of all is that there is no reason to think the problem is going to get better anytime soon. Missouri wasn't punished for its zealotry. And that surely signals officials in other death penalty states, like Louisiana, that they won't likely be punished, either, if they execute someone while his appeals still are pending. Herbert Smulls may have deserved to die. But surely not before the Supreme Court was through looking at his case.
________
*Last November, for example, Missouri executed Joseph Paul Franklin in circumstances almost identical to those that occurred in the Smulls case. Franklin’s lawyers, in a federal complaint filed after his execution, contend that Missouri in these last three executions is violating the terms of its own written policy.
The Missouri Department of Corrections, the complaint alleges, precludes a prisoner from being escorted from his holding cell to the execution chamber while there is pending legal activity—not necessarily a stay—to halt the execution process. The Director of the Department of Corrections is supposed to ask the Attorney General: “Are there any legal impediments or reasons why the lawful execution of (Inmate Name) should not proceed?"
It’s hard to fathom how state lawyers could have answered that question in the negative Wednesday night knowing that the Supreme Court was at that very moment evaluating Smulls’ stay request.