Chinese Reforms Make Rich Even Richer

Socialist Kshama Sawant Elected to City Councel

Arrest of Hem Mishra and Prashant Rahi: Silencing voices questioning violation of fundamental rights

http://sanhati.com/tweet/7924/

September 5, 2013

COORDINATION OF DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS ORGANISATION (CDRO)

Press Statement
4th September 2013

Arrest of Hem Mishra and Prashant Rahi:
Silencing voices questioning violation of fundamental rights

The CDRO strongly condemns the arrest of Prashant Rahi and Hem Mishra, accusing them of Naxal links. Though the exact date of Hem Mishra’s arrest is yet to be ascertained, he was most probably picked up by the police around around 15th August. Prashant Rahi was on the other hand was arrested on the 2nd September. The allegation against both of them is that they were carrying some documents/ literature. Both have been charged under the notorious Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act [UAPA]. Both are serving a long period of police remand without being provided a lawyer.

Hem Mishra had been active with a student organization in Uttarakhand before coming to Delhi, when he obtained admission at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. In the year 2007/08, a number of activists involved in organizing youth and the rural poor in Uttarakhand were arrested on the allegation of Maoist links. So potent was the terror unleashed, that few would dare to question the allegations or meet the arrested persons for fear of being implicated. Hem Mishra, handicapped in one hand, was the person who visited all the arrested in jail and helped them get legal support. One of the arrested at that time was Prashant
Rahi.

Prashant Rahi (52 years) worked as a journalist in Uttarakhand. He was also passionately involved with a host of protest movements ranging from issues of forest-dwellers, and of rural labour, to the displacement by the Tehri dam. Arrested in December 2007, alleged to be a most-senior Maoist leader, Prashant was kept in solitary confinement through most his 3 year 8 month stay in the jail. Once
released on bail, Prashant took upon himself to visit those imprisoned as Naxalites all over the country and to help them obtain access to a lawyer. To this end, he was regularly travelling to across the country collecting details of cases and reaching the same to lawyers.

That there is no real allegation of any crime against both Hem Mishra and Prashant Rahi, it is evident from the fact that both have been charged solely on the basis of the UAPA. For, it is this law that makes normal social and political activity into a crime solely on the whims and fancies of the police. Banning of political organisations and converting any association with such organizations and their opinions into a crime is what opens the gates to the law becoming an instrument of injustice.

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EXCLUSIVE: Syrians In Ghouta Claim Saudi-Supplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack

http://www.mintpressnews.com

Rebels and local residents in Ghouta accuse Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan of providing

chemical weapons to an al-Qaida linked rebel group.

By Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh | August 29, 2013

This image provided by by Shaam News Network on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2013, purports to show several bodies being buried in a suburb of Damascus, Syria during a funeral on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2013, following allegations of a chemical weapons attack that reportedly killed 355 people. (AP Photo/Shaam News Network)

This article is a collaboration between Dale Gavlak reporting for Mint Press News and Yahya Ababneh. 

Ghouta, Syria — As the machinery for a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria gathers pace following last week’s chemical weapons attack, the U.S. and its allies may be targeting the wrong culprit.

Interviews with people in Damascus and Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, where the humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders said at least 355 people had died last week from what it believed to be a neurotoxic agent, appear to indicate as much.

The U.S., Britain, and France as well as the Arab League have accused the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for carrying out the chemical weapons attack, which mainly targeted civilians. U.S. warships are stationed in the Mediterranean Sea to launch military strikes against Syria in punishment for carrying out a massive chemical weapons attack. The U.S. and others are not interested in examining any contrary evidence, with U.S Secretary of State John Kerry saying Monday that Assad’s guilt was “a judgment … already clear to the world.”

However, from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack.

“My son came to me two weeks ago asking what I thought the weapons were that he had been asked to carry,” said Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of a rebel fighting to unseat Assad, who lives in Ghouta.

Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant, known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion. The father described the weapons as having a “tube-like structure” while others were like a “huge gas bottle.”

Ghouta townspeople said the rebels were using mosques and private houses to sleep while storing their weapons in tunnels.

Abdel-Moneim said his son and the others died during the chemical weapons attack. That same day, the militant group Jabhat al-Nusra, which is linked to al-Qaida, announced that it would similarly attack civilians in the Assad regime’s heartland of Latakia on Syria’s western coast, in purported retaliation.

“They didn’t tell us what these arms were or how to use them,” complained a female fighter named ‘K.’ “We didn’t know they were chemical weapons. We never imagined they were chemical weapons.”

“When Saudi Prince Bandar gives such weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle and use them,” she warned. She, like other Syrians, do not want to use their full names for fear of retribution.

A well-known rebel leader in Ghouta named ‘J’ agreed. “Jabhat al-Nusra militants do not cooperate with other rebels, except with fighting on the ground. They do not share secret information. They merely used some ordinary rebels to carry and operate this material,” he said.

“We were very curious about these arms. And unfortunately, some of the fighters handled the weapons improperly and set off the explosions,” ‘J’ said.

Doctors who treated the chemical weapons attack victims cautioned interviewers to be careful about asking questions regarding who, exactly, was responsible for the deadly assault.

The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders added that health workers aiding 3,600 patients also reported experiencing similar symptoms, including frothing at the mouth, respiratory distress, convulsions and blurry vision. The group has not been able to independently verify the information.

More than a dozen rebels interviewed reported that their salaries came from the Saudi government.

Saudi involvement

In a recent article for Business Insider, reporter Geoffrey Ingersoll highlighted Saudi Prince Bandar’s role in the two-and-a-half year Syrian civil war. Many observers believe Bandar, with his close ties to Washington, has been at the very heart of the push for war by the U.S. against Assad.

Ingersoll referred to an article in the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph about secret Russian-Saudi talks alleging that Bandar offered Russian President Vladimir Putin cheap oil in exchange for dumping Assad.

“Prince Bandar pledged to safeguard Russia’s naval base in Syria if the Assad regime is toppled, but he also hinted at Chechen terrorist attacks on Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi if there is no accord,” Ingersoll wrote.

“I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us,” Bandar allegedly told the Russians.

“Along with Saudi officials, the U.S. allegedly gave the Saudi intelligence chief the thumbs up to conduct these talks with Russia, which comes as no surprise,” Ingersoll wrote.

“Bandar is American-educated, both military and collegiate, served as a highly influential Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., and the CIA totally loves this guy,” he added.

According to U.K.’s Independent newspaper, it was Prince Bandar’s intelligence agency that first brought allegations of the use of sarin gas by the regime to the attention of Western allies in February.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the CIA realized Saudi Arabia was “serious” about toppling Assad when the Saudi king named Prince Bandar to lead the effort.

“They believed that Prince Bandar, a veteran of the diplomatic intrigues of Washington and the Arab world, could deliver what the CIA couldn’t: planeloads of money and arms, and, as one U.S. diplomat put it, wasta, Arabic for under-the-table clout,” it said.

Bandar has been advancing Saudi Arabia’s top foreign policy goal, WSJ reported, of defeating Assad and his Iranian and Hezbollah allies.

To that aim, Bandar worked Washington to back a program to arm and train rebels out of a planned military base in Jordan.

The newspaper reports that he met with the “uneasy Jordanians about such a base”:

His meetings in Amman with Jordan’s King Abdullah sometimes ran to eight hours in a single sitting. “The king would joke: ‘Oh, Bandar’s coming again? Let’s clear two days for the meeting,’ ” said a person familiar with the meetings.

Jordan’s financial dependence on Saudi Arabia may have given the Saudis strong leverage. An operations center in Jordan started going online in the summer of 2012, including an airstrip and warehouses for arms. Saudi-procured AK-47s and ammunition arrived, WSJ reported, citing Arab officials.

Although Saudi Arabia has officially maintained that it supported more moderate rebels, the newspaper reported that “funds and arms were being funneled to radicals on the side, simply to counter the influence of rival Islamists backed by Qatar.”

But rebels interviewed said Prince Bandar is referred to as “al-Habib” or ‘the lover’ by al-Qaida militants fighting in Syria.

Peter Oborne, writing in the Daily Telegraph on Thursday, has issued a word of caution about Washington’s rush to punish the Assad regime with so-called ‘limited’ strikes not meant to overthrow the Syrian leader but diminish his capacity to use chemical weapons:

Consider this: the only beneficiaries from the atrocity were the rebels, previously losing the war, who now have Britain and America ready to intervene on their side. While there seems to be little doubt that chemical weapons were used, there is doubt about who deployed them.

It is important to remember that Assad has been accused of using poison gas against civilians before. But on that occasion, Carla del Ponte, a U.N. commissioner on Syria, concluded that the rebels, not Assad, were probably responsible.

Some information in this article could not be independently verified. Mint Press News will continue to provide further information and updates . 

Dale Gavlak is a Middle East correspondent for Mint Press News and has reported from Amman, Jordan, writing for the Associated Press, NPR and BBC. An expert in Middle Eastern affairs, Gavlak covers the Levant region, writing on topics including politics, social issues and economic trends. Dale holds a M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago. Contact Dale at dgavlak@mintpressnews.com

Yahya Ababneh is a Jordanian freelance journalist and is currently working on a master’s degree in journalism,  He has covered events in Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Libya. His stories have appeared on Amman Net, Saraya News, Gerasa News and elsewhere.

Ignored Shocking Story by Dale Gavlak That Could Derail Attack on Syria :http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.in/

Brazil: Huge protests and illusions of capitalist development

From A World to Win News Service

 August 19, 2013. A World to Win News Service

by AWTWNS correspondents in Latin America.

Like a welcome fresh gust of wind, Brazilians took to the streets in large numbers during the month of June in a way that hadn't been seen in 20 years. The protests came to a peak on June 22, when in Rio alone 100,000 people joined the upsurge, while more than a million total were counted in about one hundred different cities and towns across the country.

Youth from the Movimento Passe Livre (movement for free public transport) accelerated protests back in March in various parts of the country to demand a reduction of public transport fares, at times with the slogan "Tarifa Zero" (Zero Fare). São Paulo, the country's economic hub of 11 million people, was the site of the first large protest on June 6, in the elegant central bank district of Avenida Paulista. Police tried to stop the demonstrations with repression, using rubber bullets, gas, and clubs, and detaining some of the participants. The frustration of many people over the 20 cent hike for both bus and metro transport quickly moved towards a questioning of the billions of dollars being spent on the upcoming soccer World Cup in 2014 while large numbers of people struggle just to survive. The movement grew rapidly and the thousands turned into hundreds of thousands, broadening to resentment over police violence and government corruption.

In the beginning mainly youth demonstrated, but as the protests grew in size, they drew in older people as well. The majority who participated in the marches and meetings were from the middle classes, but more oppressed sections of the people also joined in. This social mix of people from different classes made clear to the youth the connection between police brutality in the demonstrations and the systematic repression by the military police that has been intensified for years against the oppressed in the favelas (shantytowns in Brazilian cities). Although the fare increase kicked off the June protest movement—people earning minimum wage already had to pay a big chunk of their 700 RS$ salary (about $340) to get to and from work—other problems such as access to good health care and public services, as well as the violent response of the police who killed several demonstrators during the month, and the widening gap between rich and poor became part of their demands and some began to question on some level the whole system they had lost faith in.

Russia Begins Moving Ships to Mediterranean

Maoism Rising Among Chinese Students

Marx's Nightmare

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/
by Peter McLaren

He awoke
with the aftertaste of his nightmare
weighing heavily on his
fading recollection
of factory-fed vampires in striped pantaloons
red runnels of blood
flowing from their culled smiles
squeezing the tears of the night shift workers
into small vials assembled on conveyor belts
to be sealed, stamped and sold back
to the workers
for the price of something called
labor power
He sank back into sleep
and the next day
had an idea
for a book.

---

Peter McLaren is Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.

THEY MUST NOT—THEY WILL NOT—GET AWAY WITH THIS!!!

On the Murder of Trayvon Martin and the Outrageous Acquittal of His Killer:

http://revcom.us/

Updated July 20, 2013 8 am | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The whole country was rocked—and is rocking—over the outrageous acquittal of George Zimmerman.  This must be a watershed moment.  This must become the day that people look back on and say, “that’s when people began to see that you couldn’t reform this shit, and a whole different way—a revolution—was needed.”  But that will take STRUGGLE—struggle in the streets that must not be allowed to die down...and struggle against ways of thinking that will take us right back into the arms of the forces that have been carrying out crime after crime after crime... for hundreds of years. 

Right now download and print the materials from revcom.us and take them out. Go to the demonstrations that may be called in your city, whoever calls them, and bring this message. Go to where people gather and bring this message. If you can get a few people together to do this with you, all the better. And if a few people turn into 20 gathered round listening and speaking their own bitterness, take that 20 and march to where there are other people, bring this message, and keep this thing going.

Get copies of the film BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! Bob Avakian Live, copies of Revolution #144, "The Oppression of Black People, The Crimes of This System and the Revolution We Need," the new 3 Strikes poster, palm cards withBAsics quote 1:13. Grab bundles of the current issue of Revolution. This newspaper can be—and needs to be—all over the place. Popularize revcom.us. Agitate, speak out. Go to showings ofFruitvale Station, to laundromats, everywhere people gather. It is not time to go back to normal.

In thousands of ways, and from many different angles, people on the bottom and people of all strata and nationalities are being told to accept this verdict—or to rely on the very system of justice that rendered George Zimmerman not guilty to make fundamental changes.  People are being told that the only solution to a basic and foundational problem in this society is to once again turn for redress and justice to the very system that has produced and validated such atrocities. NO!  What needs to happen now is for the struggle to continue and advance. Society needs to roil with debate and anger. The new cracks in the cement that glues this society together need to be widened and deepened. The determined fury of people needs to bust through again and again. Thousands are rightly questioning what America is really all about. By standing up and challenging all the ways people have been taught to think about this, people can and must become ever more consciously part of the movement for revolution that is being built right now in this society.

Thousands protest in Los Angeles, July 14, 2013. Photo: AP

But first, let’s tell the truth about what this system has meant for Black people in this country...from its beginnings down to today. Let’s actually look squarely at what was revealed in the trial of George Zimmerman.

Put it this way—58 years ago a Black teenager named Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi by some white men who decided he had “acted wrong,” and those white men were acquitted.  Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till, said “NO MORE” and the uproar that she stoked was one big beginning factor that led millions of people to stand up and over the next two decades rock this country to its foundation.  People needed revolution, and many fought for revolution, and many of those heroically laid down their lives—but we got reforms.  Now, after all those reforms... after all the promises... after all the excuses... after all the Black faces in high places including even a Black president... a Black teenager named Trayvon Martin is murdered by a white man who decided he was “acting wrong,” and he too is acquitted. 

No, Let’s NOT “Move On”—Let’s Draw the Lessons Of This Outrage

It’s important that we keep fully getting into what actually happened here.  It’s important that we learn everything we can about what kind of society this really is and how it operates.  It’s important that we not “move on,” and talk about “reforms” and “conversations” and blah blah before we actually deeply get into this and learn what we need to learn.

George Zimmerman decided that Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager walking home at 7:15 at night, looked “suspicious.”  He called 911 and without ever meeting or talking to Trayvon Martin, cursed him out as “a punk” and a “fucking asshole.”  He said “they always get away”—and everybody knows, unless they consciously don’t want to know, that George Zimmerman was using “they” to mean “Black people.”  He got out of his car to stalk Trayvon Martin, despite orders from 911 not to.  And then, a few minutes later, George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin with a bullet to the heart. 

Stop right there.  What does this tell you?  It tells you that George Zimmerman had been taught by America to think that every Black person is guilty until proven innocent, a threat, a “problem”... and that every white person has the right to question, judge and hunt down any Black person who rubs him the wrong way.  Ask yourself: how did George Zimmerman learn this?  Ask yourself: how many times a day do these same vicious assumptions poison social interactions in schools, stores, the streets, workplaces, and—most deadly of all—with the police or wannabe pigs like Zimmerman?  Ask yourself: does this have anything to do with how America was built and how it achieved and maintained its vaunted wealth, and the traditions it passed on to justify all that and to reinforce the new forms in which it goes on?

Then there’s the police.  When the police arrived they tested the victim for drugs and let the killer—George Zimmerman—go home, that very night.  Ask yourself: is this somehow unusual for the police to do?  No, this is so accepted—and so integral to this system—that this didn’t even get brought up at the trial!  This is how the police are trained, in every city of the country—in any conflict between a Black person and someone who is white, the white person is assumed to be in the right, even if the white person had murdered someone in their own neighborhood with only the flimsiest of stories to justify it.   All a white person has to do is to say that the Black person “looked suspicious” and the pigs are right there with him.

What if the roles had been reversed?  What if somehow Trayvon Martin fearing for his life had wrestled Zimmerman's gun away and in defending himself had shot Zimmerman?  What do you think would have happened?  If Trayvon Martin had not been immediately gunned down by the police, which is by far the most likely thing, he would have been sent to prison for a long long time.  And in prison he would have joined hundreds of thousands of other Black and Latino youth who have been shipped off to America’s prison system—the biggest, and most discriminatory, in the whole world by far.  Ask yourself: if this is the greatest country in the world... if America used to “discriminate” (a word which itself cleans up and covers over a history of kidnapping, rape, enslavement, lynching, humiliation and violence at every turn) but now is supposedly “post-racial” or at least “improving”—how do you account for the explosive growth of America’s prison system (ten times as many prisoners today as 50 years ago), with over half of those prisoners either Black or Latino in a country that is majority white?

It took a massive national movement to even force a trial of Zimmerman.  Then what happened?  First the media began to work to plant doubts and uncertainty—maybe Trayvon Martin had been doing something wrong, maybe he was a “bad kid,” and on and on and on.  How many times did anyone in the mass media bring out the basic points made above about the history and present-day reality of this country?  Ask yourself: WHY does the media work so hard to shape people’s thinking and WHY is it always in the direction of justifying what this system does or is planning to do?

Then it came to trial.  First the judge made a number of outrageous rulings.  First, Zimmerman’s lawyers invoked the Batson rule—which was originally designed to prevent prosecutors from engaging in a strategy dismissing almost all Black jurors without cause and was a rule that people had to fight tooth and nail for. The judge ruled in the defense’s favor—and ruled against the prosecution’s dismissing WHITE people who they felt were prejudiced in favor of Zimmerman.   So a rule designed to prevent all-white juries was used to justify... an almost all-white jury!  Then the judge said that the prosecution could use the word “profiling” but not RACIAL profiling.  In other words you could say Zimmerman was profiling—but you could NOT say that it was because of race.  These rulings meant two things: that the jury would be mainly white; and that they would not be challenged in their assumptions and thinking about race.  This meant that even if some of the jurors said, “hey, this is clearly a case of murder”—which apparently some did—the other jurors would be sitting there with all the power of hundreds of years of white supremacist, racist thinking that every white person is taught, and they would use that and hammer down those who somehow saw the truth of the matter.  This rigged things right from the beginning.  What does that tell you about “equal justice before the law”?  What does that tell you about how not just George Zimmerman, but the vast majority of whites are trained to view Black people?  Here is an example of how “color-blindness” in a society riven by the pervasive, all-round oppression of people due to their skin color works to perpetuate that oppression.

Those decisions alone were probably enough to determine the verdict.  But they still weren’t done.  Rachel Jeantel—a young Black woman whom Trayvon had reached out to befriend—came on the stand to talk about the trauma of being on the phone as her friend Trayvon told her how he was being followed... and how his voice was suddenly cut off after hearing him shout “Get off, get off.”  Rachel Jeantel was then hounded by Zimmerman’s attorney and, almost worse, was made into a target of media scorn and venom.  The chorus—which again used all the “polite” but utterly racist code words—was as deafening as it was dehumanizing and disgusting.  The level of personal attack focused on how she dressed, how she spoke, and all the rest... the snide sneering of the racist was broadcast from every television in the country.  Zimmerman’s lawyers and the media snake-mouths tried to destroy her and when she maintained her certitude and her dignity and then showed defiance of this baiting—and to her great credit, she did—they went after her even more viciously.  Make no mistake—this was done both to hammer the jury into the “right verdict” and to prepare public opinion for it AND TO REINFORCE ALL THE RACIST SHIT IN WHITE PEOPLE’S THINKING AND ALL THE DEFENSIVE OBSESSION WITH RESPECTABILITY IN SOME BLACK PEOPLE’S THINKING... while setting up this teenager to take the blame. 

But then came the pigs!  See how smoothly they backed up George Zimmerman.  See how they skimmed over the blatant inconsistencies from one version of his story to another.  See how the prosecutors refused to ask them about their egregious bias and intentional “incompetence” and then pandered to the white entitlement ways of thinking and being in this society in the whole way they presented their case and argued it to the jury. See how the jury—conditioned by ten million hours of TV and a lifetime of breathing the air, such as it is, of America—lapped it up.  WHY do you think that is?  WHAT does that tell you about how America works?

Yet still it wasn’t enough.  A parade of witnesses came on to testify about how wonderful George Zimmerman was.  And then, as a final blow, the defense was allowed to put on a witness who said that two young Black men had burglarized her house.  What the FUCK did that have to do with the death of Trayvon Martin?  How in the HELL was that in any way relevant?  It wasn’t!  All it was meant to do—in this trial in which we are being told “race was not an issue”—was to evoke the irrational, racial conditioning in the jury, instilled by decades of living in America. 

In this light, here we have to quote an article we ran right after the verdict, talking about how the defense claimed that Trayvon Martin was armed with a deadly weapon—a chunk of sidewalk, which they waved around in front of the jury.  In fact, Trayvon Martin didn’t have a chunk of anything.  This demagogue was referring to the fact that Zimmerman claimed Trayvon hit Zimmerman’s head on the sidewalk.  As our article pointed out, this means that any Black youth walking on a sidewalk can now be considered armed and dangerous. 

So, no, Zimmerman was not acquitted because the case was hard to prove, as some educated idiots who very well know better proclaim from their perches on television.  And no he was not mainly acquitted due to the prosecution’s “mistakes” (though their mistakes were plentiful and serious).  And no he was not acquitted because the “system didn’t work this time.”  He was acquitted because THE SYSTEM DID WORK—to draw on, to use, to reinforce and to in fact deepen the racism of this society.

Why?

The Revolutionary Communist Party has in many other places  gone into  WHY the system works like this (search revcom.us).  How the mother’s milk of America was the blood of Native American Indians, driven from their land and made the victims of genocide, and the blood of Africans kidnapped from their lands and enslaved for generations.  Why and how this was driven by the needs of capitalism and then capitalism-imperialism, with its profit-over-all mentality and its expand-or-die “logic of the game.”  How the so-called founding fathers were slave owners and defenders of slave owners, and how they brought forward a perverted social order in which white people were endowed with a privileged status in relation to Black people and Native American Indians, and then Mexicans, and how this perverted sense of privilege was backed up by law and violence and permeated every social interaction in the whole society. 

We have shown how these ideas and institutions flowed first from the economic relations that hinged on the enslavement and bitter exploitation of generations of Africans and their descendants...

then from share-cropping, with its lynch-mob rule and dehumanizing and violently humiliating codes of “Jim Crow”...

then “the great migration” to the cities and industrial jobs, always last hired and first fired, in the worst and dirtiest jobs when there were jobs...

and today the desolation of “post-industrial” America where millions of Black and Latino youth have no future other than, as Bob Avakian has said, “a boot up the ass or a bullet in the brain.”  We have gone deeply into how these were woven into the fabric of the entire system—and then adjusted and re-woven with each succeeding generation, no matter how hard people fought against it.

The only answer is Revolution…Nothing Less! And bringing a whole different world into being.  And we have also gone deeply, in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, how all this could be DISMANTLED, UPROOTED AND FINALLY ELIMINATED through revolution, and how a whole new society could be built. (See alsoCommunism and Jeffersonian Democracy and other works by Bob Avakian; specialRevolution issue "The Oppression of Black People, The Crimes of This System and theRevolution We Need"; and other material on revcom.us.) These are all things to get into, deeply into, now—AS we are fighting the power.  In particular, if you at all hunger to understand more deeply what the problem is and what the solution is, you need to get Bob Avakian’s speech BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! and watch it all the way through, and you need to start reading BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian.

It’s like this: people have been brutalized and enslaved by this system since its founding, and if you ever begin to think that “maybe this time it’s different” the people who sit atop this system and enforce it will be forced both by the workings of their system (its rules, its laws, its logic) and their very nature to show you that the melody may be different, but the bloody fucking song is the same.  Poison is poison, no matter how pretty the label.   It is time now to face facts, and to set about seriously getting rid of this horror, this hell, that destroys people all over the planet (and the planet itself), day in day out, by the hour and by the minute.

After the Verdict: Anger, Defiance and Outraged Questioning From Some... And Misleading Bullshit From Others

Millions of people described their reaction to the verdict like this: “I’m not surprised... but I’m shocked.”  “Shocked” in the sense that Carl Dix described it—like you’d been punched in the gut.  “Shocked” in the sense of outraged.  “Shocked” in the sense of “can’t take this no more, goddamnit!”

But this time was different.  Different than any time since the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992 forced the retrial of the police who had been acquitted of brutally beating Rodney King—despite having the beating recorded on video tape and broadcast the world over!  This time the shock began to go somewhere other than right back inside you, festering and tearing at you.  After the Zimmerman acquittal, the outrage poured out in the social media, from celebrities and athletes and writers and artists, and—in the streets—from those most victimized by this system and those moved to stand with them.,. and against the system.  Righteous acts of defiance rippled from LA to New York and in between.  Among millions questions were raised—what kind of a society IS this, anyway?  Why does this happen?  What can we do about it?  And how do I, how do WE, act... NOW?

Other places on this website and in this paper detail the intensity and scope of this resistance, and some of the character of this questioning, this much much needed interrogation and re-thinking of how hundreds of millions and yes, billions, live every day.  In terms of what to do now, the answer is to find the ways to intensify and spread this resistance, and to broaden and deepen the questioning and criticism—while bringing the message of revolution, and drawing people into this revolution on many different levels and in many different ways.  Where resistance and defiance have manifested strongly, join with those people and fight against the attempts to suppress it, while spreading the message of revolution.  Where people have just started to stir, find the ways to build on that.  Don’t let it die down.  And where people are in turmoil over this, but have not yet acted, reach out to them.  Reach out, right now, with this paper, promote revcom.us, and reach out with flyers, posters, stickers and with spoken agitation—right on the street, on buses, at basketball tournaments and movie lines and farmers’ markets... in public spaces of all kinds.

But here it's important to carefully note and understand that a number of forces also got out—and were given platforms—to redirect and misdirect this needed struggle and needed questioning.  As for Obama’s disgusting statement right after the verdict, which would be pitiful if it weren’t so poisonous... well, just see our reply. ("Obama Sanctifies Cold-Blooded Murder")

But there are others as well, out and about.  Some work for the powers-that-be and make no bones about it—they brag about their connections to Obama and the other gangsters on top.  Others come at it from the viewpoint of people who want things to change but can’t see beyond the current system and its dog-eat-dog relations and the values that gives rise to, and can only imagine either slightly changing the system around the edges or changing the faces of those on top without getting at the roots of the problem.

There are those who say we need a “conversation.”  What they really mean is “get out of the streets and pretend as if it’s all a matter of ‘listening better ’”—instead of getting to the truth of the matter.  As one person said on Twitter, “we don’t need a conversation—America already spoke.”  YES—and in the same basic bloody language it’s used for 400 years. No, we don’t need polite and muted conversation... we need REVOLUTION.

There are those who say we must demand an investigation from the Department of Justice.  The same Department of Justice that presides over 2.24 million people in prison, that tortures 80,000 of them in solitary confinement, and that runs a school-to-prison pipeline from the ghettos, barrios and reservations straight to the pentitentiaries.  The same of Department ofInjustice that invents legal justifications for drone attacks on innocent people in the Middle East and for utterly unconstitutional spying on people, all over the world and in this country as well?!?  Investigation?!?  Are you fucking kidding?  For what—so we can have more months and years of delay and distraction until things die down?  HELL NO!!  We don’t need investigation... we need REVOLUTION.

There are those who say we need prayer vigils.  To pray for WHAT?  And more than that, to pray to WHOM?  The sooner we put aside fairy tales about how some non-existent god is going to take care of this... any day now... or how the victims of this system have gone to a heaven that doesn’t exist... the sooner we confront the reality that when this system kills people there is no afterworld that somehow redeems them... the sooner, in other words, that we actually confront the real problem—then the sooner we will get to the real solution.  Anyway, who decided that African slaves and the descendants of African slaves have to kneel down to Jesus?  We don’t need consolation... we need REVOLUTION!

Right now people from all walks of life—from those who face brutality and systematic abuse in their lives on a day-to-day basis, to those who are now recognizing the basic and fundamental injustice perpetrated in this society and questioning if this is the kind of world they want to uphold and live in—all need to be led to keep going up against all the ways that their righteous anger and outrage is being quieted down and derailed.  For the revolutionaries this not only means being the in the midst of these struggles, but transforming how people are thinking.  It means making real and concrete: Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution. 

Download and print the materials from revcom.us and take them out.   Go to the demonstrations that may be called in your city, whoever calls them, and bring this message.  Go to where people gather and bring this message.  If you can get a few people together to do this with you, all the better.  And if a few people turn into 20 gathered round listening and speaking their own bitterness, take that 20 and march to where there are other people, bring this message, and keep this thing going.

This must NOT die down.  They must NOT get away with this.  We must make this into the first day of the beginning of the end of... this system.

The Resident: Americans too good for drones

"Justice for Trayvon" Rallies in 100 Cities Across USA

Ford: Zimmerman's Acquittal Exposes the American Psyches' Racism

This system gave its verdict. Now we will give ours.

http://kasamaproject.org/

Posted by Mike Ely on Friday, 12 July 2013 in Race & Liberation

• 
  

 by Mike Ely

The story is not complicated, and most of the court details were raw diversion. 

This racist asshole wanted to confront a black teenager walking through the neighborhood. He went with a loaded gun, without a safety, with a bullet in the chamber. He drove around stalking Trayvon and then got out of the car.

 It doesn't matter what happened in the fight. Trayvon had every right to smack that asshole to protect himself. And Zimmerman had no right to shoot this young man through the heart after stalking and terrifying him.

Almost all the babble and micro-details in this trial are irrelevant. 

If I pick a fight with someone, and they whup me, I don't get a right to shoot them.

And more: No one has a right to hunt a young man (like an animal) just because he fears and loathes black people. And then force a confrontation, and then shoot that young man.

The right and wrong here are not complicated all. This was murder. Racist murder.

* * * * * * * * *

At some basic, psychic level, it has been believed by white people (especially in the Deep South) that they have a right, a need and a responsibility to control the movement of Black people.

It goes back to slavery, and then the Jim Crow-era Black codes. No one else has to "explain themselves" when they go somewhere. But all through the history of the U.S., "What are you doing here, boy?" are the opening words of the authorities.

Zimmerman thought he had a right to pursue that young Black man, with his gun loaded -- as if Trayvon was an animal, an inherent threat, an automatic suspect.

It is not just "racist assumuptions" it is also murderous intentions. This mindset, in America, has always been associated with with lynching, with castration, with brutal remorseless killing.

There is no crime in this country more intolerable, more embedded, more prettified than racist murder.

Time's up. It's been up. Let's end it, together. Power to the people.

* * * * * * * * *

Some questions need to be posed sharply:

* Can a racist vigilante stalk, confront and execute a young black man without punishment?

* Can anyone with a heart tolerate a legal system that cannot provide the most simple justice?

* Can the political channels of this system even pretend to offer us a solution to all that abuses   people every day?

* Is it impractical to want to shift real power into the hands of the powerless, or is it exactly what is needed by any means necessary?

In a few days, we will know the answer to the first question.

Then we will discuss those other three questions.

- See more at: http://kasamaproject.org/en/threads/entry/this-system-will-give-its-verdict-then-we-will-give-ours#sthash.xbhSVZYj.dpuf

The Zimmerman Trial: Lies, Slanders...and the Cold-Blooded Lynching of Trayvon Martin

http://revcom.us/

July 14, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The eyes of a nation are on the trial of the killer of Trayvon Martin, and in many ways, the whole world is watching. Trayvon Martin was a Black teenager gunned down by a vigilante killer just after 7 pm on the evening of February 26, 2012. He was walking to his father’s house with a can of ice tea and a bag of candy.

Trayvon Martin

George Zimmerman knew nothing about Trayvon Martin, never even heard of him. But he thought he knew him. All Zimmerman had to see was a young Black man in a hoodie walking home with a snack, and he “knew” that Trayvon Martin was a “suspect.” He “knew” Trayvon Martin was a “fucking punk.” He “knew” Trayvon was “a fucking asshole” who “always gets away with it.”

And based on that, Zimmerman got out of his car, stalked Trayvon Martin, pressed a 9mm pistol into Trayvon Martin’s sweatshirt right at his heart. He fired a hollow-point bullet into Trayvon’s heart, killing him nearly instantly.

Zimmerman never showed any remorse for killing Trayvon Martin. Not when he pulled the trigger. Not when he told police over and over again—without any basis—that Trayvon was “the suspect.” Not when directly asked if he would change anything if he could, in a TV interview that was played in court. In that TV interview, Zimmerman claimed—obscenely—that it was “god’s will” for him to kill Trayvon Martin.

And through this all, Zimmerman has acted as if he has a whole system behind him. For good reason. The Trayvon Martins of this country (and this world) have been branded suspects by a system that has no future for them. From endless depictions of them as thugs on TV and in the movies, to the institutionalized criminalization of them through “stop-and-frisk,” to the schools-to-prison pipeline to mass incarceration, they are a generation for whom this system has no future.

But Trayvon Martin was a human being! He had a right to live, to have a future, and so do millions like him. And so the stakes of this trial are truly decisive to the kind of world people will live in.

Zimmerman’s Self-Exposure

On the Coup in Egypt: Strengthening Imperialism, Not the People

http://revcom.us/

July 7, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Events are unfolding quickly in Egypt. On July 3, the Egyptian military ousted President Mohamed Morsi in a coup, placed him under house arrest, suspended the Constitution, installed a "caretaker" government, and vowed to crush any opposition. Since then, the military junta has rounded up leaders of the organizations Morsi is part of, the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice Party, which have condemned the coup and mounted protests against it.

Here are three points of orientation on these developments:

1. The coup that has taken place—by an army that for decades was built, trained, and funded by the U.S. government—is reactionary and in no way, shape, or form holds out anything good for the people. Between 1979 and 2001, the U.S. gave Egypt $35 billion in military aid, second globally after Israel. Many top Egyptian military officers were educated in the U.S. In return the Egyptian military was a key protector of U.S. strategic interests in the region: giving the U.S. priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace; backing Israel's savage assaults on the Palestinians; joining the U.S. in attacking Iraq in 1991; and collaborating with the U.S. "war on terror," including interrogating and torturing prisoners sent to Egypt by the U.S. When the coup took place, the U.S. was funding Egypt's military to the tune of some $1.6 billion a year.

The fact that a section of the people seems to have been misled into supporting this coup means nothing about the actual character of it. The intent of this coup is to more securely nail Egypt into the horrific system of capitalism-imperialism and, in particular, into the more direct domination of the U.S.-headed bloc of that system. The facts that most of the governments in the US-headed bloc have refused to even call the coup a "coup" and that U.S. lackey Mohamed ElBaradei has told of seeking American support speak volumes. Again, the fact that masses of people have shed blood in the course of this and even in some cases in support of it does not change the essence of the matter: the class forces and political program being advanced through the coup—and it's a tragedy that the masses are again being misled, not something to celebrate.

2. The Morsi government was no better. It too was seeking to "secure" and integrate Egypt into a subordinate position in the world imperialist system, under slightly different terms. Bob Avakian has analyzed this phenomenon in the world today as follows:

Rise!                   Resist!                Liberate!

REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRATIC FRONT (RDF)  –  PRESS RELEASE  -  4 July 2013

Comrade Ganti Prasadam, the All India Vice-President of Revolutionary Democratic Front was brutally and fatally attacked by some unidentified gunmen in Nellore town today in the afternoon. The attackers first slew him on his neck with hunting sickles and then shot at him with a pistol three rounds. Comrade Ganti Prasadam is critically injured in the assassination attempt and at present he is being operated in a hospital in Nellore. According to the doctors who are working on him, his condition is extremely critical.

Comrade Prasadam has been also serving on the Committee for the Relatives and Friends of Martyrs as an Executive Member. He arrived at Nellore today to attend a public meeting of the Martyrs’ Committee, which is being held every year on 4 July remembering the Martyrs of Nellore. After the meeting, accompanied by three other members of the Committee he went to visit a family member of a martyr, who was hospitalised in a local Government Hospital. An assassination team of three were in waiting to swoop on him when he came out of the Hospital. In flash of a second they attacked Comrade Ganti Prasadam, before the other comrades realised of what was happening. When they tried to catch hold of murderous gang, they ran away leaving the swords behind.

Two bullets have been removed from his body so far in hours-long operation. The doctors have been maintaining that they cannot give any assurance of his safety till they could remove the third bullet, which has entered in a critical position near spinal card.

RDF believes that the assassination attempt on our Vice-President is designed and carried out by none other than the state intelligence agencies in charge of anti-Maoist operations in Andhra Pradesh. The state has clearly involved in the murderous attack, as Comrade Prasadam could not be cowed down by a huge number of cases fabricated on him apart from incarcerating him in prisons from time to time. The state government banned our organisation soon after the first Conference of RDF in Hyderabad in April 2011, in which Comrade Prasadam was elected as all India Vice-President.

RDF condemns this assassination attempt in strongest terms and appeals all democratic organisations and individuals to join us in these moments of grief and sorrow, and condemn the attack and its conspirators in unequivocal terms.

The Government of Andhra Pradesh is directly responsible for the attack. In Andhra Pradesh, such attacks of assassination of people’s political, social and civil rights activists have been not uncommon in the past 40 years. Dr. Ramanadham, Purushottam, Azam Ali, Belli Lalita are a few dedicated people’s leaders and civil rights activists who were targetted by the state in Andhra Pradesh in the past.

History has proved that such attacks on people’s activists in the past never brought an end to the people’s movement. In fact the mass resistance movement of people in Andhra, Telanagan and in the entire subcontinent is on the rise in the recent months and is going to engulf the anti-people pro-imperialist comprador ruling classes along with their reactionary counterparts in rural regions.

Varavara Rao

President, 09676541715

Rajkishore

General Secretary, 09717583539

Contact: revolutionarydemocracy@gmail.com

————

Source:

http://www.icawpi.org/resistance/1153-on-the-attack-on-ganti-prasadam

General, Your Tank is a Powerful Vehicle

It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.

But it has one defect:

It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.

It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.

But it has one defect:

It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.

He can fly and he can kill.

But he has one defect:

He can think

-- Bertolt Brecht