incarceration

No court in Canada will ever hear a case against the Crown or the fucking churches about their genocide.
— Samuel Wedge1

The Human Rights Committee questioned Canada in twenty different areas concerning the human rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Each year, throughout the Muslim world, believers participate in the month-long Ramadan fast. Here in Kabul, where I’m a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, our household awakens at 2:15 a.m. to prepare a simple meal before the fast begins at about 3:00 a.m.  I like the easy companionship we feel, seated on the floor, sharing our food.

On Monday, June 8, 2015, US District Court Judge James Brady ruled that the Angola 3’s Albert Woodfox be both immediately released and barred from a retrial. The next day, at the request of the Louisiana Attorney General, the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay of release set to expire on Friday, June 12.

As with everything to do with “The New Iraq”, the death, on June 5th, 2015, of the country’s former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, 79, was announced with a lie.
The Deputy Governor of Nasiriya, Adel Aldikhaly, stated that he had died of a heart attack after “a long term incurable disease.”

Julian Assange, founder and editor of WikiLeaks, has now been a refugee in the Ecuadoream embassy in London for three years. The key issue in his extraordinary incarceration is justice. He has been charged with no crime. The first Swedish prosecutor dismissed the misconduct allegations regarding two women in Stockholm in 2010. The second Swedish prosecutor’s actions were and are demonstrably political. Until recently, she refused to come to London to interview Assange. Finally, when the British government almost pleaded with her to come, she agreed. She has now cancelled her trip.

Kalief Browder committed suicide when he hanged himself with an air conditioner power cord on June 6. Actually Kalief Browder’s death at age 22 is a state killing with uncounted accomplices among police officers, prosecutors, judges, prison guards, prison officials, legislators, mayors, governors, and all the rest of the state justice apparatus that was utterly incapable of providing anything close to decent, just procedures in dealing with a wrongly-accused, innocent, 16-year-old black man.

Our nation has a penchant for creating unnecessary complexity and obstacles for its people in areas such as the tax, health insurance and student debt miasmas. The prison industry adds to this with what it euphemistically calls “collateral consequences.” In simple language, this means a series of state-based statutory punishments – rooted in the medieval English practice of “civil death” – that greet ex-felons who have served their time and paid their debt to society.

The candidate I’m voting for acknowledges that forgiving and forgetting U.S. war crimes has not worked. They continue to haunt and hamper us. Former administration officials who lied us into war in Afghanistan and Iraq must be brought to justice. We need to know who falsified the intelligence and why. Remember their catchy slogan: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”?
Hundreds of thousands have died and many innocents continue to suffer for this cynical deception.

It’s tempting to look at Baltimore and think that this is an urban event, impacting the lives and futures of relatively few who are relatively insignificant. It’s convenient to think of a ‘riot’ as breakdown of civil society, but civil society broke down long ago. The streets of Baltimore are the parallel to Reagan’s fantasy view of America. They reflect a reality that in spite of the effort to hide and marginalize it won’t go away. It proves that no matter how much we try to argue otherwise, our collective fate must honor all those who are part of it, not just the few.