Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://sfbayview.com/2012/the-vortex-of-dementia/

The vortex of dementia
October 29, 2012

by Abdul Olugbala Shakur, s/n James Harvey


Drawing by an unidentified prisoner

Though I have been active in the struggle for practically all my life, from a Panther cub to an urban guerrilla in the service of the underground, I have never considered myself to be a writer or at least not a good writer, but I felt it was imperative for me to conjure up whatever hidden skills I may possess to find the words to articulate this man-made construct that many of you out there call the prison industrial complex. For many of us trapped within its catacomb of solitary madness, this man-made construct of nefarious intent possesses a more sinister title: the vortex of dementia.

For the vast majority of us, when we initially entered these gates of hell, the protection of our physical being was of paramount concern, not realizing the booty bandits were the least of our worries. This realization doesn’t become manifest in its fullness until we enter into its twisted, officially sanctioned vortex in the Security Housing Unit, or SHU, where our inherent stability becomes subjected to conditions specifically designed with both deliberate and malicious intent to disfigure our basic grasp on our sanity. Often times these conditions are subtle, but very effective nonetheless.

My first three years in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) were a blur. Any attempt to probe my sanity was undetected by my conscious awareness. But it was my fourth year in isolation that my captor’s motives revealed themselves. While in the Adjustment Center at San Quentin State Prison, I was arbitrarily placed in the “quiet cell” – no running water, no lights, no mattress or blankets, just my boxer shorts and T-shirt.

I didn’t sleep at all that first night; I was still trying to wrap my sensibility around my new reality. The cell had the stench of urine and fecal matter and on each side of my cell there were screams of torment and constant banging on my walls, obviously an attempt orchestrated by my captors to deprive me of sleep while I contemplated the now visible probes into my sanity.

For many of us trapped within its catacomb of solitary madness, this man-made construct of nefarious intent possesses a more sinister title: the vortex of dementia.

Many of you who are unaware of the overall objective of the prison industrial slave-complex may be quick to dismiss the above experience as an aberration, not an elaborate scheme designed to break the spirit and torment the minds of its captives – the New Afrikan revolutionary prisoners in particular. On the 10th day of being in the quiet cell, my neighbors were informed that if they did not kick on my wall late at night, they’d not be removed from the quiet cell, a clear incentive for their complicity to facilitate my captors’ endeavors to rob me of my sanity.

For an entire month my neighbors kicked on my walls, so losing myself in sleep to escape this psychological torture was not an option. I was forced to confront this deliberate assault on my sanity. This scheme would repeat itself two more times, each time longer than the next. The second time was approximately 45 days and the third time was 90 days.

Then I was emergency transferred to old Folsom in 1985. San Quentin State Prison had told the Folsom administration that I was involved in a conspiracy to murder staff, which was a blatant lie. I was not even in the unit where the guard was killed. But this lie was designed to evoke hostility and violence upon my arrival to Folsom.

Their plan worked. When I got to Folsom, I was placed in four-point restraints on a table butt naked. This went on for three days. I was then placed in the quiet cell in 4-A for an additional six months. Then in 1987 I was placed in the first ever bedrock unit – I along with 24 white prisoners. I was the only New Afrikan (Black) prisoner assigned to this unit and spent approximately eight months in an environment designed to encourage a physical attack on me.

I was eventually released from Bedrock (i.e. Behavioral Control Unit) once my captors realized their plan didn’t work. About four months later, I was placed back into Bedrock where I spent over a year. Both Corcoran and Pelican Bay State Prison were modeled after the Bedrock units. My second return to Bedrock was under the false allegation that I was involved in a conspiracy to assault prison staff. In response to this fabricated charge, I was physically assaulted and Tasers were placed on my testicles while I was handcuffed behind my back.

The above experiences represented the traditional methods of both psychological and physical torture, each challenging the resilience of my mental health, which I admit was beginning to succumb to the seduction of dementia.

Then in 1989, I entered the gladiator yards of Corcoran State Prison, where fights were staged daily for the pleasure of sadistic pigs. Though I received only two disciplinary reports, I was involved in at least 14 staged fights – another experience that took a toll on my already exhausted sanity.

Then 22 years ago, I entered the cold corridors of Pelican Bay State Prison that have exposed me to a new form of mental torture, a more subtle but sophisticated and systematic assault on one’s senses, a deprivation so complete that it leaves one drowning within the depths of one’s own emptiness. This was (and is) a sanctioned assault of attrition being waged upon our mental health, a constant probing of our undiagnosed psychoses. Dementia was beginning to look more enticing, as I watched hundreds of prisoners around me surrender to the temptation of insanity, an escape from the harsh reality of sensory deprivation.

Many have asked how I’ve survived 30 years of solitary confinement isolation under constant assault on my mental state? I tell them, first of all, my ordeal is far from being over, so I have yet to survive my isolation, but I’m surviving in spite of my (our) situation.

For me, I believe identifying the symptoms is essential in resisting the attraction of dementia. Many convicts, because of the stigma attached to dementia, deny any symptoms. I don’t care who you are; anybody who has spent 20 years or more in solitary such as the Security Housing Unit is going to have some symptoms. Though they may be subtle, they have the potential to mature into a full blown psychosis, if ignored. This is why I believe that embracing the symptoms helps us to subdue them. I recognized my symptoms 20 years ago and I refused to give into them, but it is a constant battle. Dementia is forever present, waiting to claim our sanity.

I entered the cold corridors of Pelican Bay State Prison that have exposed me to a new form of mental torture, a more subtle but sophisticated and systematic assault on one’s senses, a deprivation so complete that it leaves one drowning within the depths of one’s own emptiness.

Before I close, I would like to briefly touch on a hypothesis that I’ve yet to hear anyone speak on, which I believe is worthy of further examination, and that is the Stockholm Syndrome. Many people became aware of this syndrome during the Patty Hearst trial, when she was witnessed on camera robbing a bank with her alleged captors. Simply put, the Stockholm Syndrome is when a captive begins to emulate the characteristics and/or belief system of his/her captor(s).

Many prisoners don’t have a clue that they are emulating the same cowardly and immoral practices of their captors. I provide you with two brief examples:

1. First of all, the prison guard is an active participant within the CDCR-sanctioned torture scheme. Guards will identify a number of noises that they believe will serve to agitate and/or irritate prisoners. For example: loud whistling, slamming our food port, stomping up and down the stairs while we sleep, talking loud over the PA system, just to name a few. Once identified, staff would begin to incorporate these cowardly tactics in their daily routine.

But so-called convicts have also adopted these methods. I have witnessed a number of times so-called convicts direct the pig scheme towards other convicts, thus collaborating with the pigs to wage psychological torture on their fellow convicts. As New Afrikan revolutionaries, we call these so-called convicts collaborators. I believe these so-called convicts are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. I personally tell them about it every time I witness it, but for the most part to no avail. They are so far gone into the syndrome they have become captors (guards) by proxy.

2. The Security Housing Unit (SHU) is a deliberate construct, and sensory deprivation is the product of a sick mind. Anyone who manages and profits from such a destructive scheme is void of any sense of humanity, especially when she/he can work in this environment and completely ignore the impact it is having on its captives.

You often become a product of your environment. If it’s devoid of any sense of humanity and moral redemption, it is going to produce a product of like values. Many prisoners upon release are emulating the lack of humanity and redemption displayed daily by their captors; unfortunately, society suffers as a result via reoffending. That’s a deliberate ploy designed to guarantee their return and the survival of the prison industrial slave-complex.

Many have asked how I’ve survived 30 years of solitary confinement isolation under constant assault on my mental state? I tell them, first of all, my ordeal is far from being over, so I have yet to survive my isolation, but I’m surviving in spite of my (our) situation.

I ask, what can you produce from a depraved environment? I believe recidivism has a mental component that is directly linked to our captors.

Being in prison alone has an impact on our mental state. But within the control unit prisons, there exists a deliberate and systematic assault on our sanity with a clear purpose. If state departments of corrections and the federal Bureau of Prisons can weaken our mental stability, we then become more vulnerable to the trappings of recidivism.

A disciplined mind allows us to resist any temptations that can bring us back to prison, such as drugs and alcohol or even negative friends. The key to resolving this matter lies with us as prisoners.

The prison system and the SHU is not going to shut down anytime soon. So we will have to be more realistic and pragmatic in our approach to addressing the mental health of prisoners. We can start off as prisoners by pledging we’ll not become collaborators with the CDCR in their endeavor to assault our sanity!



Send our brother some love and light: Abdul Olugbala Shakur, s/n James Harvey, C-48884, PBSP SHU D1-119, P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City, CA 95532. This story was mailed to and transcribed by Kendra Castaneda.

[American Dream]

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... money.html

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2012

HSBC Caught in New Drug Money Laundering Scandal



While HSBC's Canary Wharf masters are back-peddling furiously over charges that they gave a leg up to terrorist financiers and drug traffickers as a recent U.S. Senate reportcharged, new evidence emerged that its business as usual for the multinational banking giant founded by Hong Kong-based British opium merchants.

Earlier this month, The Independent reported that French police had "intercepted one of the dozens of 'go-fast' cars which transport cannabis at high speed from Spain to Paris. The seizure--banal in itself--unravelled an extraordinary network of drug-trafficking, money-laundering, fraud and tax evasion which sprawled over the invisible barrier which separates Paris from the city's poor, multiracial suburbs."

The bank embroiled in this latest scandal? Why HSBC, of course!

According to reporter John Lichfield, "bank notes handed by clients to street drug dealers in the suburbs were ending up, French and Swiss investigators discovered, in the safes of seemingly law-abiding, well-heeled citizens in the French capital."

But that's not the only place where crisp bundles of cash were turning up.

"A trio of Moroccan brothers, including a prominent fund manager in Geneva, are alleged to have concocted an elaborate scheme to launder money by balancing two illegal flows of cash," The Independent averred.

At the center of this multimillion euro money laundering spider's web were: Meyer El-Maleh, the managing director of the fund management firm GPF SA, and brothers Mardoché El-Maleh, the alleged bagman of the cannabis-for-cash scheme and Nessim El-Maleh, a fund management specialist with the Swiss private banking arm of HSBC, HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) S.A.

The Independent reported that the trio "are suspected of handling up to €12m (£9.6m) in cash in the past seven months (and far more over the past four years). Assets seized by the police include €2m in cash, gold ingots, art treasures and guns."

"The HSBC bank has confirmed that its employee was involved in the affair," Swiss Info disclosed, "but says that it has been 'cooperating actively with the authorities about this over the past few months'. The Swiss newspaper Le Temps reports that GPF SA is about to dismiss the other brother."

Talk about closing the barn door after the horses have escaped!

Among the well-heeled perps arrested by authorities on charges of "conspiracy to launder money and association with criminals" was Florence Lamblin, a prominent Green Party politician and deputy mayor of the 13th arrondissement in Paris.

Her arrest was all the more ironic considering that fake "left" Greens are currently in coalition with François Hollande's pro-austerity "Socialist" government. Lamblin and her coalition partners had run on a platform demanding tougher action against (wait for it) international money laundering!

When Lamblin's home was raided "police discovered €400,000 (SFr484,000) in low-value notes" in safes belonging to the "progressive" politician, Swiss Info averred.

In the wake of her arrest, Lamblin was forced to resign although she denied "any involvement" in the drug smuggling scheme.

Her lawyer, Jérôme Boursican told AFP "she had held 350,000 euros from a family legacy in a Swiss account."

"If anything, my client may be guilty of tax fraud, over the transfer back to France of a sum of €350,000 from a family inheritance which was placed in a Swiss bank account in 1920," Boursican explained.

The attorney told France 24 that he would ask a judge "to dismiss the case against his client 'as soon as possible' and blamed her involvement on a 'judicial error'."

The "error" of getting caught perhaps?

Despite Lamblin's professed innocence, Swiss Info reported that "the sums involved are huge." French police have charged that "the sum involved in the money laundering is about €40 million, while French Interior Minister Manuel Valls says that the drug smuggling must have brought in about €100 million."

As preliminary reports suggest it appears that Lamblin was keen on keeping more than the environment "green."

A typical money laundering "placement" scheme, "cannabis profits leaving France were 'swapped' for assets hidden in Switzerland which tax cheats or business fraudsters wished to repatriate," The Independent reported.

"The risky job of smuggling drug-trafficking proceeds over the Franco-Swiss border was avoided," Lichfield wrote. "Instead, the drugs cash was handed over in plastic bags to Parisians who had hidden Swiss accounts."

"The same sums were debited from their banks in Geneva and sent on a complex route through shell companies in London and offshore tax havens to purchase assets for the drug barons in Morocco, Dubai or Spain. A commission was allegedly paid on both transactions," The Independent averred.

Referred to as "layering," the transfer of funds took place through a series of opaque financial transactions that camouflaged their illegal origins. In the case of our well-heeled Parisians, drug profits were swapped through bank-to-bank and bulk cash transfers via private banks in Geneva, one of which was owned by HSBC.

As Senate investigators disclosed, "Bulk cash shipments typically use common carriers ... to ship U.S. dollars by air, land, or sea. Shipments have gone via airplanes, armored trucks, ships, and railroads."

"Shippers," Senate staff averred, "may be 'currency originators,' such as businesses that generate cash from sales of goods or services; or 'intermediaries' that gather currency from originators or other intermediaries to form large shipments. Intermediaries are typically central banks, commercial banks, money service businesses, or their agents."

Eschewing armored cars, airplanes or ships, the "originators" of these illegal cash flows preferred ubiquitous black plastic trash bags and "go-fast" limousines as the method of choice for bulk cash transfers. It would certainly cut down on shipping costs as the loot moved "offshore" and entered the shadow world of private banking!

As financial researcher James S. Henry pointed out in The Price of Offshore Revisited: "The term 'offshore' refers not so much to the actual physical location of private assets or liabilities, but to nominal, hyper-portable, multi-jurisdictional, often quite temporary locations of networks of legal and quasi-legal entities and arrangements that manage and control private wealth--always in the interests of those who manage it, supposedly in the interests of its beneficial owners, and often in indifference or outright defiance of the interests and laws of multiple nation states."

"A painting or a bank account may be located inside Switzerland's borders," Henry wrote, "but the all-important legal structure that owns it--typically that asset would be owned by an anonymous offshore company in one jurisdiction, which is in turn owned by a trust in another jurisdiction, whose trustees are in yet another jurisdiction (and that is one of the simplest offshore structures)--is likely to be fragmented in many pieces around the globe."

Given Switzerland's strict bank secrecy laws, we do not know, and Senate investigators did not disclose, how many billions of dollars were hidden for HSBC's private banking clients in Geneva, where it originated or whether or not occult wealth shielded from scrutiny was derived from organized criminal activities.

In July however, when the Senate pointed a finger directly at HSBC over anti-money laundering "lapses," The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that "British clients of an HSBC-owned private Swiss bank that is the focus of a major HM Revenue & Customs investigation are alleged to have evaded tax by an amount likely to exceed £200m."

Lord Stephen Green, Baron of Hurstpierpoint and current Minister of Trade and Investment in David Cameron's Conservative government, was previously HSBC's chief executive and the chairman and director of HSBC Private Banking Holdings (Suisse) N.A. for ten years.

During Green's tenure, journalist Nick Mathiason disclosed that "the sums allegedly evaded by Britons using HSBC's Swiss bank are massive. HMRC told the Bureau 'the early indications are that the amounts are significant'."

According to Mathiason, in 2010 the HMRC "received data smuggled out of HSBC by a former bank IT worker, now under arrest in Spain and facing possible extradition to Switzerland, that contained details of 6,000 UK-linked individuals, companies and trusts. Two senior tax investigators who both worked at HMRC told the Bureau the average amount evaded in the 6,000 accounts is likely to range between £33,000 and £50,000."

While the sums involved in the Parisian money laundering and drugs scandal may be chump change in comparison to thetrillions of dollars in illicit drug money that enters the system each year as a result of "normal business relations" between global drug cartels and the international financial system as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) revealed last year, it does demonstrate the utterly corrupt nature of the system as a whole.

Indeed, seeming ideological foes are joined at the hip when it comes to fleecing the working class and imposing austerity and privatization schemes that profit their real constituents--the global class of financial parasites who "win" regardless of which party of hucksters gain power.

As Henry observed, "private elites ... had accumulated $7.3 to $9.3 trillion of unrecorded offshore wealth in 2010, conservatively estimated, even while many of their public sectors were borrowing themselves into bankruptcy, enduring agonizing 'structural adjustment' and low growth, and holding fire sales of public assets."

Public sector thefts that enrich the shareholders and officers of corrupt institutions like HSBC.

Although settlement talks between U.S. regulatory agencies and HSBC has forced the bank to set aside at least $700m (£441m) to meet the cost of any fines, it is highly unlikely that officials at the bank will be criminally charged.

Currently negotiating with the Justice Department, the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency over serious allegations that the bank conducted a multiyear, multibillion dollar business with terrorist financiers and global drug cartels, the price tag may balloon even higher.

"HSBC's $700 million set-aside, if paid, would constitute the largest U.S. settlement reached over such allegations, topping the $619 million in penalties and forfeitures paid in June by ING Groep NV, the biggest Dutch financial-services company,"Bloomberg News reported.

According to The New York Times, "federal authorities think HSBC could end up paying at least $1 billion. The bank itself said 'it is possible that the amounts when finally determined could be higher, possibly significantly higher'."

A spokesperson for HSBC however, told the Times this "case is not about HSBC complicity in money laundering. Rather, it's about lax compliance standards that fell short of regulators' expectations and our expectations, and we are absolutely committed to remedying what went wrong and learning from it'."

But as Rowan Bosworth-Davies, a former financial crimes specialist with London's Metropolitan Police observed: "You don't launder this volume of money by accident, because somewhere along the line, your systems and controls for preventing money laundering just 'broke down'! You do it because you work in a bank which is willing to flout every rule in the book and engage in layer upon layer of criminal conduct if the money is right! You do it because your management structure is defined by a criminogenic determination to amplify the anomic environment within which you operate and in which you expect your staff to co-operate."

For their part, Swiss bankers are scrambling to put as much daylight as possible between themselves, the Paris money laundering scandal and HSBC.

Bernard Droux, the chairman of the Geneva Financial Center foundation, an umbrella group of independent banks and wealth managers told Swiss Info: "We were surprised that it should still be possible to do this today. This is a practice that has been forbidden by law for more than 20 years."

But as with other recent examples of financial skullduggery, Droux reverted to form and claimed "You can never rule out the possibility of black sheep in any profession. No international centre is totally protected from this kind of thing."

He hastened to add that Switzerland was at the "forefront" of the international fight against drug money.

However, Droux's "black sheep" brush-off was undercut by a recent Bloomberg Businessweek report. We were informed that "Swiss private banks are looking for footholds in Latin America as the lower fees and higher interest rates offered by local wealth managers deter the region's super-rich from traveling to Geneva and Zurich."

This "changing relationship," Bloomberg reported, began "in the 19th century when Swiss banks guarded the fortunes of plantation owners and mining magnates. UBS AG (UBSN), Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) and other Swiss banks are being forced to seek acquisitions as Latin America’s $3.5 trillion wealth management market is set to grow by more than half by 2016, according to Boston Consulting Group."

"'People are becoming richer and richer,' said Gustavo Raitzin, head of Latin America for Julius Baer Group Ltd. (BAER). 'An emerging consumer class wants to make liquid investments and they need private banks and wealth managers'."

It is worth recalling in this context that Julius Baer's Cayman Islands division, as the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaksrevealed, was instrumental in squirreling away "several million dollars" of funds controlled by late Mexican Army General Mario Acosta Chaparro and his wife, Silvia, through a shell company known as Symac Investments.

Acosta, who served time in prison for his ties to the late drug trafficking kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the self-styled "Lord of the Heavens" who ran the Juárez Cartel, was killed in May when an assassin fired three rounds from a a 9mm revolver into his head.

The secret-spilling web site averred: "With the assistance of Julius Baer, Mr Chaparro was able to invest several millions of USD in Symac with all the secrecy which the Caymans allowed and to draw out some $12,000 a month."

Who else might be in need of "private banks and wealth managers" employed by the likes of HSBC and Julius Baer to make such "liquid investments" possible with no questions asked?

Paging Chapo Guzmán, white courtesy telephone!

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Experimentation, we were saying, is an ideal mode of engagement for marginalized people, and we couldn’t understand, we continued to say, why so many people still believe that the “transparency” of conventional storytelling somehow allows one to capture what it is to exist in the world more authentically. Of course, this question has been debated within the arts for decades now, but it is no less pertinent and divisive today. As a “black lesbian poet” you enter language from a place of disorientation. Your grasp of the authority of the subject is slippery. You feel deviant. You feel the need to fuck with things. As you gaze into words, into their relation, you see things that are not there to people who have never had to prove that they should be counted among the living. You see jungle spaces, geometric spaces inside which it is possible to point, to unfold something about the silences, the loneliness of being in the world. Really though, this opportunity exists for anyone who looks deeply into language and the moment of utterance with his mouth or body all open.

—Renee Gladman

[American Dream]

Audre Lorde on poetry, activism, and other orally translated jewels:

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

“Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.

Poetry is an absolute necessity of our living because it delineates … it the beginning of that process by which we insure the future because we know so much more than we understand. We must first examine our feelings for questions, because all the rest has been programmed. We have been taught how to understand, and in terms that will insure not creativity, but the status quo.

If we are looking for something which is new and something which is vital, we must look first into the chaos within ourselves. That will help us in the directions that we need to go—that’s why our poetry is so essential, is so vital. Now whether poetry has the responsibility to effect social change … it doesn’t really matter. As we get in touch with the things that we feel are intolerable, in our lives, they become more and more intolerable. If we just once dealt with how much we hate most of what we do, there would be no holding us back from changing it. This is true with any kind of movement. This is the way in which the philosopher/Queen, the poet-warrior leads.

“An Interview with Audre Lorde.” American Poetry Review

I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, “Why don’t they?” And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably toward change.

So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.

“Black Women Writers at Work.”

I am a black feminist lesbian poet, and I identify myself as such because if there is one other black feminist lesbian poet in isolation somewhere within the reach of my voice, I want her to know she is not alone. I have been teaching the poems of Angelina Weld Grimke recently, another black lesbian poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Thanks to the work of women like Gloria Hull, Barbara Smith, Pat Bell-Scott, Erlene Stenson, and others, her work is once more becoming available to us. But it has been lost for many years to me. And I often think of her, dying alone in an apartment in New York City in 1958, while I was a young black lesbian, in isolation not too far away, and I think of what it could have meant in terms of sisterhood and survival for each one of us to have known of the other’s existence, for me to have had her words, and for her to have known I needed them. That we are not alone.

“Sisterhood and Survival.” The Black Scholar

Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don’t want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly. What I write is important, and I insist that you feel out what you have to say on the subject, and then maybe you can say it better. But it must be heard. I refuse to be silenced, that’s right. And I will not allow my work to be trivialized because what I am writing is not only about me, it is about the lives of many voiceless people, and the life of the planet that we share. You can’t get rid of me just by saying I’m strident, or I’m too intense, or I’m silly, or I’m crazy, or morbid, or melodramatic: hey, listen, I can be all of those things, and you still must open yourself to what I am talking about, in the interests of our common future… .

http://femmequeerandvisibleohmy.tumblr. ... udre-oh-my

[American Dream]

Woven Survival by Khushboo Kataria Gulati
October 2012

struggles overlap, intersect & parallel
we will not be divided and conquered
we need each other

recover the love buried under layers of trauma & hate
love’s possibilities travel beyond borders,
thrives beyond binaries & past paradigms that seek to stagnate us
break down viciousness in our communities
strength comes from our unity
plant them solidarity seeds

[American Dream]

"A History of Violence: 1981 - 2011"
by NomDeGuerre200

1981

"Operation Red Dog"

No discussion of Canadian racist violence can be complete without reference to "Operation Red Dog."



In 1981, a number of Canadians were arrested in a bizarre plot by Canadian and American white supremacists (led by Don Black who now runs Stormfront), with Mafia funding, to overthrow the government of the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica. The plan, called "Operation Red Dog," was to have netted the supremacists a base of operations and lucrative illegal businesses. It was foiled by the FBI, and the participants were arrested. Those Canadians who were involved in the plot included Wolfgang Droege, Larry Lloyd Jacklin, Marion McGuire, James McQuirter, Charles Yanover, and Harold Woods.

Toronto, ON - Grand Wizard of Canadian KKK charged with weapons offences

On a routine traffic stop, police found two ounces of cocaine and 5000 pills in James Alexander McQuirter's car. When they went to search his home, they were threatened by another KKK member who waved a loaded shotgun at them.

1982

Toronto, ON - James Alexander McQuirter arrested for hiring hitman to kill KKK roommate

James Alexander McQuirter was an outspoken Canadian racist who helped start the Ku Klux Klan in Toronto in 1976. He soon became the group's "grand wizard" and opened a public office in Toronto's Riverdale neighbourhood in 1980. At its peak, McQuirter claimed, the Ku Klux Klan had over 2,000 Canadian members; police estimated the number at about 70. McQuirter's imprisonment was largely responsible for the group's decline in Canada. While in prison for the Dominica plot, McQuirter (then 24) was sentenced to serve eight more years in prison after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder. He had paid an undercover policeman posing as a hitman $2,000 to murder former Klansman Gary MacFarlane, who he believe was interfering with Klan activities (see 3:41 of video link). McQuirter also received a concurrent sentence of five years in prison for forging cheques, passports and other documents.

1985

Huntsville, AL, USA – Wolfgang Droege arrested on weapons and drug charges

After disembarking from a flight in Huntsville, AL, federal agent search Wolfgang Droege and his luggage. They find a Teflon dagger on his person and 4 ounces of cocaine (he claims the dagger had been a gift and the cocaine was for the purpose of financing “the movement”). Droege was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison, but he was released and deported back to Canada in 1989. (Kinsella, 261)

1987

Ottawa, ON – Members of the Aryan Resistance Movement (ARM) shoot immigrant


Neo-Nazis Mark Bauer, Brian McQuaid and a 16 year-old young offender fired a weapon at the home of Jaajpe Ladan. Ladan was hit in her face but survived. In May 1988, after a Crime Stoppers segment on the crime was aired, the three men were arrested. All three would plead guilty to criminal negligence causing bodily harm, and were given two-year suspended sentences and ordered to stay away from one another. Bauer was the leader of the Ottawa chapter of ARM, one of the publishers of the racist magazine Canada Awake! and played in the white power band Cross. No mention was made of the perpetrator’s white supremacist views during the trial or the sentencing. (Kinsella, 311)

1988

Calgary, AB - Tearlach Mac a' Phearsoin charged with gross indecency

Imperial Wizard of Alberta’s Invisible Empire, “was charged with gross indecency, following a complaint by a mentally disabled teenager…” Mac a' Phearsoin was fined $1000.00. (Kinsella, 33)



Calgary, AB – Robert Hamilton and Tim Heggen arrested in bombing and murder plot

Two members of Mac a' Phearsoin’s Invisible Empire Association’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan are arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit property damage and serious injury by use of explosives. The targets were a Jewish businessman and the Calgary Jewish Centre. The two men would be convicted and sentenced to 5 years in prison. (Kinsella, 33)

Ottawa, ON – Carleton student beaten

ARM member Richard Arbic brutally assaulted a Carleton University student Michael Jeffries in an unprovoked attack. He was later convicted and sentenced to 90 days. “Evidence given in court established that Arbic had joined two other Nazi skineheads in kicking and beating Michael Jeffries at a local bar. Jeffries was left with serious head and chest injuries; when he was arrested by police, Arbic gave a false name and was concealing a knife. A weapons charge was dropped when he agreed to plead guilty to assault.” (Kinsella, 318)

1989


Toronto, ON – Chris Newhook attacks a Vietnamese man


Chris Newhook, a Heritage Front member originally from Nova Scotia, attacked a Vietnamese shopkeeper in Toronto, leaving him blind in one eye.



1990

Toronto, ON – Kevin Dyer Lake is found guilty in the murder of Tony Le

21-year old Kevin Dyer Lake, an ARM (Aryan Resistance Movement) bonehead, was found guilty of murdering 15-year old Tony Le and sentenced to 12 years. Le, who had come to Canada as a Vietnamese refugee, was fatally stabbed in the heart after he intervened in a New Years Eve confrontation between his friends, Dyer Lake and another neo-Nazi. Le’s friend, 18 year old Mukesh Narayan, also tried to intervene and was stabbed five times by Dyer Lake.

Toronto, ON –Hammerskin Jeffrey Jusczel is sought on assault and robbery charges

Two men including 25-year old Jeffrey Paul Jusczel, a Hammerskin, attacked a fellow Toronto neo-Nazi. Juczel beat and choked the victim, stole his money and credit cards, and dragged him naked through the streets while continuing to beat him. The victim, who was left crippled by the attack, was found lying near railroad tracks with a gash in his neck. Jusczel was charged with robbery, aggravated assault, endangering a life and choking. He fled, ending up in Colorado where he would be charged in the killing of a friend who was a fellow Hammerskin.

Edmonton, AB – Daniel Sims and Mark Swanson assault Keith Rutherford

Daniel Sims and Mark Swanson, 19-year old members of the Final Solution Skinheads and followers of Terry Long of the Aryan Nations, attacked Keith Rutherford in his Edmonton home. Rutherford was a retired radio journalist who had 30 years prior broadcasted an expose on an alleged Nazi war criminal. He was kicked in the groin and left blind in his right eye as a result of being struck in the face with a club. Sims received an 18 month sentence and Swanson received 8 months. Rutherford filed and won a civil suit against Terry Long, alleging that one month before the beating, the attackers and several other neo-Nazis (including Cpl. Matt McKay) had been at Long’s home when it was suggested that he be hurt.

More at: http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2 ... -2011.html

[American Dream]

http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2009/0 ... a-reprise/

The White Racial Frame: A Reprise

By Joe R. Feagin

Since several folks have asked lately about the systemic racism and white racial frame concepts, let me repeat a revised version of what I have posted a year or more ago. The North American system of racial oppression grew out of extensive European and European American exploitation of indigenous peoples and African Americans. It has long encompassed these dimensions: (1) a white racial framing of society with its racist ideology and other key elements; (2) whites’ discriminatory actions and an enduring racial hierarchy grounded in material exploitation; and (3) pervasively racist institutions maintained by discriminatory whites over centuries. White-generated oppression is far more than individual bigotry, for it has from the beginning been a material, social, and ideological reality. For four centuries North American racism has been systemic–that is, it has been manifested in all major societal institutions.

In the books Systemic Racism and The White Racial Frame I develop the concept of a white racial frame holistically and comprehensively. Since its development in the 17th century, this racial frame has been a “master frame,” a dominant framing that provides a generic meaning system for the racialized society that became the United States. The white racial frame provides the vantage point from which European American oppressors have long viewed North American society. In this racial framing, whites have combined racial stereotypes (the verbal-cognitive aspect), metaphors and interpretive concepts (the deeper cognitive aspect), images (the strong visual aspect), emotions (feelings), and narratives (historical myths like “manifest destiny of whites to spread across the country”), and routine inclinations to discriminatory action. This frame buttresses, and grows out of the material reality of racial oppression. The complex of racial hierarchy, material oppression, and the rationalizing white racial frame constitute what I term systemic racism. This white racial frame includes much more than the usual somewhat weak concepts most scholars and popular analysts use in the study of US racial matters, such as stereotyping, prejudice, and bigoted discrimination.

The white racial frame has long been propagated and held by most white Americans–and even, in part, accepted by many people of color. For most whites, the racial frame is deeply held, with many stored “bits,” including stereotyped knowledge, racial images and understandings, racial emotions, and racial interpretations. Not all whites use the dominant frame to the same extent, and in everyday practice there are multiple variations. By constantly using selected bits of the dominant racial frame to interpret society, by integrating new items into it, and by applying its stereotypes, images, and interpretations in many discriminatory actions, whites imbed their racialized frame deeply in their minds.

Take this key example from the early development of the dominant white racial frame. Among the self-named “whites,” who also named “black” and “Indian” Americans, were US founders Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. They had conceptions of black Americans as very inferior to white Americans, who were seen as greatly superior in civilization. In Jefferson’s only major book, Notes on the State of Virginia, the white framing of African Americans is fiercely racist: enslaved black Americans smell funny, are natural slaves, are less intelligent, are uglier in skin color, are lazy, are oversexed, not as sophisticated in serious music, cannot learn advanced knowledge, and can never be well-integrated into white America.

This dominant racial frame was, and still is, designed by whites to rationalize an extensive system of racial oppression, with its central racial hierarchy, one with whites on top. The old racial hierarchy is rooted in coercive exploitation and resource inequality and is rationalized by the deeply held white racial frame. First centered on African Americans, and to some extent Native Americans, the white racial framing placed later groups of color–such as Chinese Americans after the 1850s and Mexican Americans after the 1840s–well down the already dominant racial hierarchy. Whites were central from the beginning to creating the North American system of racial oppression and its dominant racist frame, including all key words (“white,” “black,” and almost all racist epithets) and interpretations in that frame. Today, as in the past, the white racial frame is not just in the United States, but is fundamentally constitutive of it.

In our book, Two Faced Racism Leslie Picca and I give many examples of the contemporary white racial frame in daily operation. We collected journals from 626 white students at 28 colleges and universities in various regions. They were asked to record (for, on average, about 6-9 weeks) observations of everyday events in their lives that revealed racial issues, images, and understandings. In these relatively brief diaries these white students gave us got more than 7,500 accounts of blatantly or obviously racist commentary and actions by white friends, acquaintances, relatives, and strangers, much of it in backstage areas. In addition, about 300 students of color at these same colleges gave us another 4000 accounts of clearly racist events that happened to them and their friends or relatives.

Their everyday accounts offer many insights into how the white racial frame works today. Here, for example, is one of thousands of extended racial events from the diaries, this one about an evening party of six white students at a midwestern college. Trevor, a white student, reports on a typical evening gathering:

When any two of us are together, no racial comments or jokes are ever made. However, with the full group membership present, anti-Semitic jokes abound, as do racial slurs and vastly derogatory statements. . . . Various jokes concerning stereotypes . . . were also swapped around the gaming table, everything from “How many Hebes fit in a VW beetle?” to “Why did the Jews wander the desert for forty years?” In each case, the punch lines were offensive, even though I’m not Jewish. The answers were “One million (in the ashtray) and four (in the seats)” and “because someone dropped a quarter,” respectively. These jokes degraded into a rendition of the song “Yellow,” which was re-done to represent the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It contained lines about the shadows of the people being flash burned into the walls (“and it was all yellow” as the chorus goes in the song).

There is nothing subtle about these racist performances. Trevor continues with yet more performances:

A member of the group also decided that he has the perfect idea for a Hallmark card. On the cover it would have a few kittens in a basket with ribbons and lace. On the inside it would simply say “You’re a nigger.” I found that incredibly offensive. Supposedly, when questioned about it, the idea of the card was to make it as offensive as humanly possible in order to make the maximal juxtaposition between warm- and ice- hearted. After a brief conversation about the cards which dealt with just how wrong they were, a small kitten was drawn on a piece of paper and handed to me with a simple, three-word message on the back. . . . Of course, no group is particularly safe from the group’s scathing wit, and the people of Mexico were next to bear the brunt of the jokes. A comment was made about Mexicans driving low-riding cars so they can drive and pick lettuce at the same time. Comments were made about the influx of illegal aliens from Mexico and how fast they produce offspring.

All white male participants here are well educated. Notice the many aspects of the white racial frame, with its subframes negatively targeting an array of groups of color, as well as Jewish Americans (apparently seen as not quite “white”). Notice the great “fun” these educated whites are having as part of this recurring social gathering. Note too the different roles played by whites in this one racialized evening. There are the protagonists performing assertively for an all-white audience. Some appear also as cheerleading assistants, with the recording student apparently acting as a passive bystander or perhaps a mild dissenter. No one, however, openly remonstrates with the active protagonists. Four types of white actions in one room.

The contemporary white racial frame as revealed in such everyday performances has great implications for most nooks and crannies of society.

Another key idea I suggest in the WRF book is that of resistance and counter-framing. Counter-frames are grounded in counter-system thinking and have been important for groups of color to survive and resist oppression over many generations. Certain leaders and thinkers in racially oppressed groups, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, have developed articulated counter-frames, but so do ordinary people, the “organic intellectuals” in these oppressed groups. In these resistance/anti-racism counter-frames whites are defined as problematical, and ideas and strategies on how to deal with whites and white institutions are developed. Among other things, a developed counter-frame includes understandings of how discrimination and racial hostility work, examples of dealing with discriminatory whites from family and friends, and teachings about safety and various passive and active strategies of resistance to a variety of white discriminators.

[American Dream]

“Celebrated social scientist Max Weber wrote famously of the “Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism” in assessing the fostering conditions before and around modern capitalism. However, in this European economic expansion one sees what might more accurately be termed the “predatory ethic” of Western capitalism. Central to European colonialism and capitalism was a predatory ethic that asserted the right of Europeans to take the land and labor of others by violence for their own individual and collective gain.”
— Joe Feagin

“Today, many scholars and popular analysts continue to describe contemporary Western societies with terms like “modern” and “modernity.” They emphasize as positive certain characteristics of these modern societies: industrialization and technology, market economies, national governments, and complex bureaucratization. Significantly, however, numerous supposedly positive features of this distinctive modernity have played a major and negative role in the genocide, land theft, and labor theft that accompanied the global expansion and colonialism of European countries beginning in the late 1400s.

Strikingly, colonialism, capitalism, modernity, and global exploitation all have a common genealogy. European colonialism and capitalism were in their early stages of development when they generated the cross-Atlantic slavery system. European colonialism took on its exploitative wealth-generating form in concert with the enslavement of Africans and other indigenous peoples across the growing north and south Atlantic economies. The bloody European theft of land and super-exploitation of enslaved labor were presided over by ever-growing and bureaucratized nation-states, the latter usually described by Western social scientists as signs of the modernization process. From its beginnings, European colonialism relied heavily not only on a growing entrepreneurial bourgeoisie but also on these nation-states, most especially upon their well-equipped military organizations.”
— Joe Feagin

The combination of white freedom and black enslavement seems radically contradictory. Historian William Wiecek notes that “the paradox dissolves when we recall that North American slavery was racial. White freedom was entirely compatible with Black enslavement.” Indeed, the work of those enslaved brought the wealth and leisure that whites, especially in the ruling elite, could use to pursue their own liberty.

Various U.S. analysts have argued that it is unfair to judge early white enslavers by contemporary standards. However, not only were there many outspoken Black opponents of slavery in this early era, there were numerous opponents of slavery among whites. For example, one of the most wealthy slaveowners in the colonies, Robert Carter III, freed all 500 of the African Americans he enslaved, for he had come to view slavery as “contrary to the principles of religion and justice.”

Robert Carter was well-known to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, the most prominent slaveholders among the founders. They just ignored the views and examples before them in their own time. In addition, the founders themselves sometimes exhibited guilt over slavery. James Madison himself argued that it would be wrong to state openly in the Constitution the “idea that there could be property in men.”
—Joe Feagin

Once fully instituted, the arrangements of slavery became much more than a machine for generating wealth. They constituted a well-developed system for the social and sexual control of men and women. During slavery, and later under legal segregation, many African and African American women were sexually coerced and raped by white men, including sailors, slave-masters, overseers, and employers. Such sexual violence symbolized white male power to everyone in local communities. Under the North American system, the children resulting from coerced sexual relations were automatically classified as black, even though they had European ancestry. Indeed, it is estimated today that at least three-quarters of “black” Americans have at least one “white” ancestor. No other U.S. racial group’s physical makeup has been so substantially determined by the sexual coercion and depredations of white men.”
— Joe Feagin

[American Dream]

http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2012/ ... in-greece/

Fighting the Fascist Phenomena in Greece
November 1st, 2012



The increasing threat of Greece’s Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is punctuated by their violent acts against political opponents, immigrants and others. The Greek government and Police have shown their sympathy with Golden Dawn by persecuting journalists who speak out against them and people who show public opposition to their fascism. This video aims to communicate the underlying tension of these forces by using images to contrast the way Greece appears on the surface with voiceover by an anonymous anti-fascist motorcycle patroller who, as reported by the Guardian UK, was one of 15 people arrested and tortured by police for participating in a motorcycle demonstration against Golden Dawn.

Produced, Filmed and Edited by Chris Spannos
Music by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, song: “Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable”
Length: 17:09

[American Dream]

http://ordoesitexplode.wordpress.com/20 ... -ring-out/

When Our Names Ring Out



What is the life of a young Black boy lost worth to the society? What is the social price of the Negro lived experience? How are we remembered?

The specter of the prison system and society ambivalence to my plight as a Black male has always followed me. I grew up watching my grandfather battle white gentrifiers over everything on our, formerly all Black, street. I grew up fatherless because he had 22 years of his life stolen from him by the State via the prison industrial complex. My cousin, as brown and as bold as he was, found himself facing the inside of a cell for fighting a police officer that spit on his face. These three men and their experiences with the White power structure of the State shaped my understanding and fear. We are demonized and oppressed on various levels.

Recently, a childhood friend of mine was found shot to death on a corner. When the bourgeois press gets there his pockets will be searched for drugs, his person for weapons and his life for any narrative deemed good enough to vilify him. When we leave this planet, it is often without sympathy for the hell that we suffered through here due to this poisonous system. This poem is for him. We are beautiful. We shine like coal pressed. Our lives are important and precious and worth honor. All of us.

I Hope You Had A Good Day

In remembrance of high top fades

and scratched up Jays

and crack mothers hollering at the top of their lungs

and Wednesdays filled with forced Bible study sessions.

In remembrance of you I speak this poem.

Being Black ain’t easy when life is like this.

We who been through hell and mud

sweat and exploitation.

steel shackles and watching the colored only discos burn down.

We who breathe life rhythm into music

bass

a cool blue in the fields of the Delta

and fish fries.

We stand here crafting our lives out of this given nothingness.

On corners flanked by able-bodied men.

In kitchens decorated with the help.

Picket signs and pigs

pin-stripes and pot handles

bus boycotts, crack and the failure of the Panthers all wrought a now like this.

I remember small specs of dirt covering the red in your hair.

And the way you smiled.

Some small laugh covered in congestion and a slight optimism.

Standing like the first fall of snow

or mama’s voice on good mornings. . .

both rarities in our lives.

Wrapped in shrouds made of dreams

and the mockery of freedom flags.

I remember a laying of hands guiding us to shore in Summer.

Forever fields and a life filled with wonder

Not corners, stalked by death, where we fight and fall

Where images of how our childhoods use to be dance about on gin bottles and coke cans.

Begging us to be reality

Got a text that said they found you dead

Bleeding out and alone.

No harder words were read.

No one deserves to die alone.

How now can I explain the current movings of Earth and thought?

How life was with you and the falling of grey

This poem closes with a something often sought.

Like shaping of the very clay

I hope you had a nice day.

[American Dream]

Golden Dawn MPs Are Taking The Nazi Comparisons To A Whole New Level In Greece
Matthew Boesler | Oct. 27, 2012, 9:11 AM |

Greek MP Ilias Kasidiaris, the extremist Golden Dawn party's spokesman – who in July physically attacked a female lawmaker on live TV – is really starting to live up to the party's reputation as a "neo-Nazi" group.

The group has taken to the streets, terrorizing immigrants, and the police are reportedly colluding with them.


Greek MP Ilias Kasidiaris

Meanwhile, Golden Dawn is surging in popularity among the Greek electorate – it now polls as the third-biggest political party.

In the latest disturbing episode to emerge from the chambers of the Greek parliament, Kasidiaris read aloud a passage from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic propaganda piece circulated and mandated in classrooms by the Nazis during that party's rise to power in 1930s Germany. It was also one of Hitler's key "justifications" for the Holocaust.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/golden-d ... ss-2012-10

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/history/orientation-toward-mass-work

An orientation toward mass work

Nate Hawthorne

Brief exploration of how anarchists should operate in mass movements.

It will take time for the working class as a whole to become able to liberate ourselves from capitalism. Our class has various internal problems which limit us and help keep us in our place collectively. It takes work to move us beyond these problems.

At a smaller scope – not the whole class, but smaller numbers of people within our class – and at a lower level – not the abolition of capitalism but smaller steps that move us somewhat closer to that – I think the process works similarly. We have internal problems and it takes time to move us forward.

I think it’s important for anarchists to do work that fights directly against the state, capitalists, landlords and so on. I call it mass work. I’m not attached to the term, we can call it whatever. Mass work, and particularly anarchist involvement in mass work, is important for the process of changing people, at the class level and at a smaller level.

In anarchist involvement in mass work, it’s important that we keep sight of both our need to be effective in the mass work, and of our political goals in the short term and the long term. In order to be effective in this work politically, anarchists have to be decent at doing the organizing work. If we’re not good at and experienced in organizing then we won’t be taken seriously by people involved in struggles. On the other hand, if all we do is build struggles and don’t build relationships and spread ideas then we are little different from non-radical supporters of working class struggles. We have to strike a balance between these two related but different priorities: we’re not just about working class victory in struggles in the short term. We’re about a long term and a bigger picture.

I think it’s crucial that anarchists be involved with mass work in ways that place us in relationship with people who are having specific experiences. When people collectively fight the powers over our lives, we do various things. For instance, in workplace struggles we discuss and make decisions about tactics and strategy, we march on the boss, we walk off the job, and so on. There are at least two elements of this – running our own affairs and standing up to people over us. These are related but not identical. There are various results that follow from these activities. Experiences of running our own lives can help people have more confidence, more skills, and more of a taste for running our own lives in a way that makes it more intolerable when we don’t run our own lives. Experiences of collective conflict with people in power over us can also help us get more confidence in ourselves and other members of our class, help us get more of a sense that collective action is the way to solve our problems, and it can deepen our sense of opposition to the power over us.

Among the things these two things have in common in the most general sense is that both of them have the potential to radicalize or further radicalize the people who experience them, particularly if they haven’t experienced them much before. It’s not guaranteed that these experiences will radicalize people, though, and it’s not guaranteed what conclusions people will draw. I think this is part of why it’s particularly important for anarchists to be involved in struggles in ways that place us in relation to people who are having these experiences, particularly if they haven’t had these experiences before or haven’t had them much. If we’re placed in ways that put us in relationship with people having these experiences we can shape the ways that these transformative experiences play out. We can potentially make them more transformative and try to make it more likely that they eventually become anarchists in response to these experiences.

Finally, if we are involved in experience that change people in the way that I suggest and we are successful, we will have more anarchist comrades to work with. These comrades will have skills and experiences from their experiences of mass work which will be useful in building anarchist organizations. What’s more, these comrades becoming anarchists through working class struggles, they will have relationships with other people involved in the struggles, making the process more effective.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

SLINGSHOT HIPHOP- STRAIGHT OUTTA PALESTINE!!