Some sights are so strange that you can’t stop to look: that corpse with rigor mortis on the roadside; the monkey butcher’s stand; the mummy-wrapped form balanced crosswise on that slow bicycle’s cargo rack. You just blink and proceed. We all have doubtful memories like that.
Transfield Services is a diversified corporation with fingers in many a pie. This month, it was announced that Australia’s Abbott government had awarded a $1.22 billion government contract to the company to run detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island. The ethicists moaned as the shareholders cheered: shares rose by 20.81 per cent on the announcement.
President Kennedy never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon…
— Malcolm X, December 1, 1963
[Note: Again, real national-level news from a small town, Spokane, in a small state, Washington. This is published now at Spokane Living Magazine. Great photos by my daughter, Makenna. A community college student in Spokane. What more does the world want than a radical revolutionary who write kick-ass better-than-that-Hunter/freak/Thompson AND also does straight ahead journalism?]
More Bang for the Public Safety Buck: Criminal Justice Commission Pushes a No New Jail Thesis
May 1, 2006 seems a long time ago. In one of the most hopeful manifestations of this century so far, on that day millions of US residents stayed home from work and school, and took to the streets to rally in favor of legalizing all undocumented workers and democratizing Washington’s immigration policy. Since, that day, over two million undocumented US workers have been deported; thousands more languish in detention centers where they are denied access to relatives and subject to brutality at the hands of guards and other detainees, and millions of others live in constant fear of La Migra.
This past Fall, Herman Wallace of the Angola 3 made news headlines around the world when his conviction was overturned and he was dramatically released from prison after 41 years in solitary confinement. At the time of his release on October 1, 2013 he had been fighting terminal liver cancer for several months. Three days later, on Oct. 4, Herman was surrounded by loved ones as he passed on at a friend’s house in New Orleans, Louisiana.
This week:
1. Aldeia resiste the world cock
2. The War on Christmas Trees
3. NYE Noise Demos
4. Rote Flora Defense
5. 20 years of Zapatistas
6. RATM – People of the Sun
7. Anarchists come out of the closet
https://ia600801.us.archive.org/10/items/WarOnChristmasTreesHD/ITE_JAN_2014_HD.mp4
To start, click on the above video box.
The Solution Is Not Working
Personal visit after breakfast by The Man himself. Dr. Creed, eyebrows a-flutter, glum.
“When can I get out of here?” I asked.
“When your blood-count stabilizes, you’ll be able to go home and rest.”
“When can I lose this albatross,” I pointed to the machine, my ball-and-chain.
“Give it a couple of days.”
“You asked me about transfusions. Are you going to give me a transfusion?”
Eye brows in overdrive, he paused, sighed.
“The Solution is not working. I’m sorry.”
“What? Then what?”
Early nurse’s aide collected blood. The patient to the right of me moaned all night begged mercy. Still dark. The usually pleasant semi-noise of pre-dawn amplified to unpleasant by the wheeling of stretchers and machines; insistent patients buzzing the nurses’ station. I was not clear enough to know exactly where I was in terms of life’s journey as I waited for the sun, but it sure as hell wasn’t Egypt.
