Open Threads

Today the Obama administration's FBI added black liberation fighter Assata Shakur to its list of "Most Wanted Terrorists." They doubled the million-dollar price on her head; and she becomes the first woman on the list. Fortunately Assata Shakur is living free in Cuba after being liberated from a federal penitentiary in 1979, but it's clear her life is in mortal danger. Labeling Shakur a "terrorist" is a declaration of war against all dissenters and revolutionaries, and sets her up for murder at the hands of the state with complete impunity. It's also evidence of the continued bullying relationship between the United States and its anti-imperialist Caribbean neighbor, Cuba.

If Assata Shakur can be labelled a terrorist, so can anyone who has raised their fist against the empire.

Assata Shakur is a survivor of the vicious COINTELPRO campaign that attempted to smash the Black Panther Party and its offshoots in the 1960s and 1970s. Dozens of heroic black liberation fighters were murdered outright or sent away to prison for long sentences: the U.S. government was determined at any cost to smash a movement that refused to play by liberal rules. She was repeatedly framed with apolitical crimes she had nothing to do with; she went underground but was arrested in 1973 when the car she was a passenger in was attacked by New Jersey State police; and was very seriously wounded while trying to surrender.

We've talked before about how elements in the LGBT community have responded to the winning of certain rights by the full-on embrace of corporatism and even militarism. A recent episode adds new context. Somewhat surprisingly, the San Francisco Pride Committee announced that imprisoned whistleblower Bradley Manning was to be made one of the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Trans Pride Parade's grand marshalls, albeit symbolically, probably to be represented in the actual parade by the heroic whistleblower of the Vietnam era Daniel Ellsberg. Immediately right-wing elements in the gay community objected. (Read some of the heated commentary over the issue at one gay blog here and here.) The announcement was then promptly withdrawn.

Boots Riley has summed it up like this: "SF Pride leaders fight for equal opportunity to be Imperialist bootlickers." But columnist Glenn Greenwald, writing about the affair in the Guardian UK, has really nailed it. His column appears below.

--ISH

by ISH

As everyone knows now, the entire Boston metro area was locked down Friday so law enforcement authorities could pursue a manhunt against suspected terror bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev, a young U.S. citizen of Chechen ethnicity. The streets of the Boston suburb of Watertown saw parades of black-uniformed paramilitary SWaT teams and armored military vehicles parked at intersections. In unprecedented fashion, mass transit was shut down, businesses were closed, even travel in the northeast corridor was halted.

Just five days before, Tsarnaev, with his brother Tamerlan — killed in a shootout with cops on Thursday night — allegedly dropped off two pressure-cooker bombs filled with BBs and nails at the finish line of the Boston marathon. When the bombs exploded, they killed three people — including an 8-year-old boy who had previously been photographed protesting the racist murder of Trayvon Martin — and maimed dozens more. Witnesses described limbs ripped from bodies flying through the air. While the days between the bombing and Tsarnaev's capture witnessed an orgy of clueless and racist media speculation, false leads and accusations, racial profiling, and even a handful of violent incidents against random, innocent “Muslim-looking” people, there's reasonably strong evidence against the Tsarnaev brothers. The evidence, combined with the circumstances of their final confrontations with police suggest the veracity of police claims against them. As of this writing, the motives of the Tsarnaevs remain unknown to anyone but themselves. Of course all sorts of further details are yet to be exposed, including some alleged history of contact between the elder Tsarnaev brother and an FBI antiterrorism task force.

— by ISH

Brooklyn, March 16:

If it was a little closer to Manhattan, or a little better served by public transportation, Brooklyn's East Flatbush is the kind of neighborhood that would be prime turf for the wave of white gentrification sweeping over the borough. But for now, it's part of the wide swath of central Brooklyn that remains majority African-American. It's a solidly working-class neighborhood, the buses crowded at rush hour with women heading home from day jobs, or others heading out to late shifts. It's home to thousands of immigrants from Jamaica and the English-speaking Caribbean, and it's where the life of young Kimani Gray, called KiKi by his legion of friends, ended in a hail of police bullets.

Last Saturday night Kimani was in the neighborhood hanging out with friends. At 16, he was learning to navigate some tough turf. There's not an African-American kid his age in Brooklyn who doesn't understand the way things are: staying in school seems pointless, finding work will be hard, being pushed around or thrown up against a wall by cops is the price of leaving your house, and sticking with your friends or even a gang is the way to keep it together.

That night two plainclothes cops decided Kimani looked suspicious. They claim he pulled a gun on them from his waistband as they approached him. Two menacing strangers walking toward a kid who was just out on the street with his friends.

I've reblogged this from the BLACK GIRL DANGEROUS blog, by Mia McKenzie out of San Francisco. It's occurred to me this week in East Flatbush that revolutions don't start when somebody announces "this is the revolution. please turn to page 45 of State and Revolution to see what we do next." Something about this blogpost is inspirational, is hopeful, and revolutionary, and says something about a moment I think is coming back.
 --ISH

Dear Humanity,

by Roland Denis • translated by George Ciccariello-Maher • from venezuelanalysis.com

Note from the translator: Here is a recent statement by Roland Denis, an anarchist-communist with a long and critical history in the armed struggle and barrio assemblies, who has walked the fine line between supporting and pushing Chávez (I have talked to many who consider him "anti-" chavez for the sharpness of his critiques, but he embodies the necessary tension: he was vice minister of planning who pushed the development of popular councils, and for example during the oil lockout his official position as vice minister was to support looting by the people.

I'm crossposting this from my personal blog. It's not a worked-out balance sheet on Hugo Chávez, just some scattered thoughts on the moment of his passing. Tonight I joined a line of people paying last respects to Chávez at the Venezuelan consulate, along with comrades from our struggles here in NYC. It was beautiful to see an outpouring of love and respect. --ISH

---

Via a friend on facebook:

POEM FOR HUGO CHAVEZ

Because you know
That pain is not
Our motherland

That suffering
Is not our
Divine right
That heaven is
What we make
On earth

Like houses
Love
And bread

Because you come
From the heart
Of the soil

And do not sprinkle us
With holy water
Pie-in-the-sky lies and
Ashes to ashes dust to dust

Because you know
That your big mouth
And your curly hair

Is African
And your brown skin
And dark eyes is Indian

Because you don’t point
To Europe for
Beauty or salvation

Because you know
As Che and Fidel and
Maurice Bishop and Roque Dalton
And Walter Rodney
And Neruda and Allende
And Patrice Lamumba

That life is what
We make with our
Hands

Because you know as Jesus
That it is not difficult to
Multiply bread and fish

That oil is not
The lifeblood
Of the earth

That it should not
Run through our veins
Like fear

Because you are David
In the shadow
Of Goliath

And know that
The price of freedom
Is love

—Tony Medina::

This interview appears on the radical queer website "HOMO." (Caution: very graphic NSFW content). Without endorsing all of its arguments, I thought it introduced a lot of concepts relevant to the discussions on how queer revolutionaries relate to civil rights successes and rightward community drift that we've been having here on Kasama. --ISH

INTERVIEW / Sociologist Gary Kinsman on the emergence of the neoliberal queer

On Monday, January 21, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park hosted its second annual celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday. Attended by over a hundred people in the working class community of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the event was held at St. Jacobi Church, the original home of Occupy Sandy.

This year’s event was smaller than our first Unity Day last year, but we managed to meet two important goals for this year’s event. Last year the overwhelming majority of the 300 participants were from the city-wide Occupy movement. This year we wanted to reach more people in the neighborhood, and by working with a number of co-sponsors, we managed to attract a more sizable percentage of neighborhood folks. We also wanted to present a “Spanish-language first” atmosphere in our event, since so many people we want to reach in the neighborhood are from colonized Puerto Rico or immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and in this we were successful: everything but some of the cultural performances was bilingual. I wound up MCing the event, testing the limits of my own Spanish, but it was really a rewarding experience.

We were a little ambitious in planning the event; and wound up having to jettison a series of small-group discussions and the candle light march we had planned for afterwards due to time, but we got great feedback in general for the program.