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Protests Grow in Solidarity with California Prisoners as Hunger Strikes Enter Third Week

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Thousands of inmates in at least 13 prisons across California’s troubled prison system have been on hunger strike for almost two weeks. Many are protesting in solidarity with inmates held in Pelican Bay State Prison, California’s first super-maximum security prison, over what prisoners say are cruel and unusual conditions in "Secure Housing Units." We play an audio statement from one of the Pelican Bay prisoners and speak to three guests: Dorsey Nunn, co-founder of "All of Us or None" and executive director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, and one of the mediators between the prisoners on hunger strike and the California Department of Corrections; Molly Porzig, a member of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition and a spokesperson for Critical Resistance; and Desiree Lozoya, the niece of an inmate participating in the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike, who visited him last weekend. [includes rush transcript]

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/15/protests_grow_in_solidarity_with_california

LAPD gives itself ‘get out of jail free’ cards

‘Conditional official reprimands’ reveal contradictions of class society

By Doug Kauffman

July 15, 2011

This 2006 LAPD brutality incident might only rate a 'conditional official reprimand.'

Question: In the United States, who can commit heinous crimes and never go to jail?

Answer: Wall Street bankers and their system’s storm troopers, the police.
The Los Angeles Police Department is getting justified heat lately for its officer “discipline” policy. The policy has allowed police officers to receive nothing more than a warning for driving drunk, domestic violence, excessive force, false imprisonment and hate speech, among other crimes.
The policy is centered on giving cops “conditional official reprimands” for criminal behavior. These can be more accurately termed “get out of jail free” cards. Here’s how they work: a cop brutalizes or tazes someone without cause; that cop will then have an “extensive discussion” with the police brass, where the cop is supposed to explain the ways that their criminal behavior has affected their “mission” to protect the city. That is it.
Essentially, under this policy, police commit crimes and then get a warning that another offense of the same type could lead to more serious consequences in the future.
The old LAPD policy focused on punishment and would usually mean multiple successive suspensions without pay. So, the LAPD has moved to a policy that ensures even less accountability for police crimes against people. To justify the policy, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and the inventor of the policy, Deputy Chief Mark Perez, have declared that punishment is not a deterrent to misconduct.
Deputy Perez even told the Los Angeles Police Commission: “We have to lead as if we're going to progress past just punishing people and expecting that to get anything done.”
If this is really how the city’s top cops feel, should they not employ equally lenient policies when it comes to working-class people who they deem to be “criminals?”
Not under this system.
Instead, cops commit crimes and have a discussion about them, while they arrest working people for doing some of the same things—or nothing at all. Then, those arrested get sentenced to months or years in overcrowded jails.
It seems that the theory of punishment not deterring misconduct is only good enough for the protectors of capitalism, not their victims. Workers get zero tolerance, while cops get a slap on the wrist.
Consider these statistics: In 2009, the most recent year that statistics were published, the LAPD made 140,212 adult arrests and 26,294 juvenile arrests. Of the adults arrested, 92,878 were charged with misdemeanor offenses and 23,873 were charged with felonies—all of these workers being forced into the court system in one way or another, facing exorbitant fines and prison time. Those arrested have one thing in common—none received a “conditional official reprimand” or anything remotely like it.
No punishment at all
The LAPD began using “conditional official reprimands” in 2008. That year, it issued 14 reprimands. In 2010, the LAPD issued 109 reprimands to officers for everything ranging from drunk driving to domestic violence and use of excessive force. This is more than a 700 percent increase in the use of reprimands.
The spike in usage of the “get out of jail free” cards has even elicited a response from the usually toothless and compliant Los Angeles Police Commission, a supposed oversight body. The Police Commission has overlooked LAPD brutality time and time again, including last year’s police killing of Manuel Jamines, a Guatemalan day laborer.
The Police Commission, however, expressed concern over the reprimands given to 22 officers for DUI, six for domestic violence, two for unauthorized use of force and four for false imprisonment. In one case, Chief Beck himself reprimanded a supervising sergeant who shouted racist slurs at a crime scene. The reprimand included vague language about “real punishment” if the sergeant was caught being overtly racist again. In any other workplace, racist slurs and hate speech would justifiably be met with immediate termination.
As if LAPD leniency wasn’t enough, the new policy has no guidelines. That is just how they want it. Responding to criticisms about the lack of guidelines, Chief Beck stated: “We don’t want to tie our hands. We need to be able to be flexible.” Beck also made it clear that decisions regarding discipline lie solely with him and that any attempt to create rules or oversight surrounding the use of reprimands would be resisted by the LAPD.
In other words, the cops are determined to prevent any form of accountability for their criminal behavior.
Mass movement needed
The new LAPD officer reprimand policy is an outrage. It sets no standards for the cops, puts them in charge of ensuring accountability and is hypocritical in all ways. This policy, along with all reactionary police policies, can be pushed back by the people.
A mass movement to hold police accountable is needed now more than ever before. The people must respond to every criminal act perpetrated by the police against workers and the poor.
Our main demand should be for community control over the police. From Los Angeles to New York City, we need local elected, all-civilian control boards with the power to discipline officers for breaches of department policy or violations of law. The police must answer to the people, not the other way around.
But to realize community control, building working-class consciousness is necessary. To do away with police misconduct once and for all, the role of police under capitalism must be laid bare.
Capitalism positions police as the enforcers for the rich. They are the protectors of the Wall Street bankers, the oil tycoons and the monopoly capitalists, who own everything in our society. The police work for them. They are well paid to stand firmly between the “haves” and “have-nots”—and have their batons on the necks of the “have-nots” at all times.
Police are used to oppress Black and Latino youth, immigrant workers, LGBT people and the poor. They are hired by the capitalists to beat strikers on the picket lines and utilized to disrupt the activities of social justice organizations and revolutionary political parties. But these crimes are considered legal—none would even elicit a “conditional official reprimand” because, for the cops, they are just part of the job.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation is working to build a movement for police accountability and against police violence and terror. Around the country, the PSL has mobilized to defend the Jena 6, the Palmdale 4, the Irvine 11, Jeremy Marks and many others from racist police frame-ups. The PSL has fought to demand justice for Kenny Lazo, Chuniece Patterson, Raul Pinet, Doug Zerby, Jordan Miles, Manuel Jamines, Oscar Grant, and all victims of police violence.
Wherever the police attack the working class, the people must fight back. The PSL will continue to be at the forefront of these struggles.

Open Letter to Arne Duncan

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/assault-detroit-open-letter-arne-duncan

 Venezuela Celebrates Five Years Free of Illiteracy

By EDWARD ELLIS – CORREO DEL ORINOCO INTERNATIONAL

Over the past 7 years, Mission Robinson has focused much of its attention on reaching out to geographically isolated and historically excluded members of the population including indigenous groups and Afro-descendents. (YVKE)

In 2005, UNESCO affirmed that more than 95 percent of the Venezuelan population is literate, qualifying the country for the title of “Territory Free of Illiteracy”.
The free government program, Mission Robinson, is largely responsible for the success, teaching more than 1.5 million people to read and write in the first two years of its existence.
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5770

Subprime Mortgage Crisis: Nightmare of the “American Dream” for Black and Latino People

Ozell and J.W. McBee, a retired Black couple, had lived with their three grandchildren in their South Side Chicago home since 1999. In 2006, they received a call from a “mortgage consulting” company offering to re-finance them into a mortgage with a monthly payment $100 lower than the $700 a month they were paying. But to get that lower rate, the McBees were told, they would first have to be refinanced into a mortgage with payments of $1,400 for two months. Ozell and J.W. signed up, and they borrowed money on their credit cards to make the two $1,400 payments.
But then the mortgage company refused to refinance them into the lower monthly payments. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “Ozell, 86, a retired nurse’s assistant, and J.W., 67, a retired janitor, couldn’t meet the increased payments, fell behind, the house was foreclosed and they were evicted.” They, along with two of the grandkids and a 21-month-old great-grandchild, had to move into an apartment, paying $975 a month in rent that they can hardly afford. “I can’t sleep at night,” Ozell said. “I’ve just been so worried it’s making me sick.”

Heartbreaking stories like this are being repeated across the U.S. because of the subprime mortgage crisis that could lead to an estimated 2.2 million homeowners in the U.S. losing their homes to foreclosures in the next couple of years. In 2007 alone, “almost 1.3 million properties, or one for every 97 households in the U.S….had some type of foreclosure action taken against them.^”1 And this crisis is hitting Black and Latino people with particularly devastating force.

A recent report titled “State of the Dream 2008: FORECLOSED” by United for a Fair Economy² situates the subprime crisis within “a long tradition of economic, and more specifically, housing discrimination in the U.S.” The report documents how mortgage companies and banks targeted people of oppressed nationalities with predatory subprime loans, and how foreclosures have severely affected Black and Latino communities in the last ten years. The report summarizes that “the subprime lending debacle has caused the greatest loss of wealth to people of color in modern U.S. history…between $164 billion and $213 billion for loans taken during the past eight years.”

Subprime mortgages are a relatively recent development that began in the early 1990s and then expanded greatly during the past few years. These loans have much higher interest rates as well as higher fees and penalties than conventional mortgages. Because people who don’t qualify for traditional mortgages (due to their income or credit history) could get subprime loans, these loans were billed as enabling many more people to buy into the “American Dream” of homeownership. But the higher interest rates and other costs have driven many families who got subprime mortgages into situations where they were forced to give up their houses.

By 2006 more than one-fifth of all mortgages in the U.S. were subprime. The banks and mortgage companies went after middle-class families who had accumulated too much debt to qualify for a conventional mortgage, as well as low-income families who wanted to buy a home in the inflated housing market. In 2007, 11 percent of all subprime loans went to first-time buyers. The rest of subprime loans, 89 percent, went to borrowers who were talked into refinancing their homes, for anything from paying off credit card debt, to dealing with devastating health care costs, to surviving a period of unemployment.

The mortgage industry developed a number of methods to make these subprime loans squeeze the most out of the families who were the most vulnerable economically. These include:
•  Prepayment penalties against paying the loan off early, so borrowers were stuck with high-interest loans once they were lured into them (70 percent of subprime loans have prepayment penalties).

•  “Exploding” adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs), which come with a relatively low “teaser” rate for the first two or three years. After that initial period, the interest rate increases substantially, by a third or more. Through mid-2006, such ARMs made up 81 percent of subprime loans. Between now and 2009, when 1.8 million ARMs are due to be reset at a higher interest rate, many more people will be unable to make the payments and be forced to give up their houses.

While the subprime crisis affects people of all nationalities, the predatory loans were deliberately targeted at Black and Latino people in particular. More than half of all loans made to Black people in 2005-2007 were subprime.³ The figure for Latino people is two out of five.⁴ This has to do with the fact that because of the history of systematic national oppression in this country, Black and Latino people on average are poorer than white people. In 2005, the per capita income for whites in the U.S. was $28,946 compared to $16,874 for Blacks. The United for a Fair Economy report points out, “Thus, if subprime loans were meant to target households whose income was not high enough to qualify for conventional loans, this meant a majority of households of color.”

The current crisis also highlights a related aspect of the tremendous economic gap that exists between whites and Black people in the U.S.—the fact that the net worth of an average white family is 14 times greater than that of an average Black family.⁵ When you consider that homeownership and home equity is the primary, even sole, asset of many Black and Latino families, this focuses up even more sharply the devastating effect of the subprime crisis on Black and Latino communities.

It is not just low-income Blacks and Latinos who have been victimized. In a practice known as “steering,” mortgage brokers push higher-cost subprime loans on middle-income families that qualify for conventional loans. In 2005, Black homeowners earning more than $100,000 a year were more likely to get high-cost loans than white homeowners earning less than $35,000.

The subprime crisis is hitting Black and Latino communities that were already hard-hit by the recession of 2000-2001, when Blacks and Latinos lost 27% of their net worth.⁶ And there is a “spillover effect” from the increasing number of foreclosures: whole communities where houses stand vacant, stores and businesses close, the value of the remaining houses goes down, and the tax base that pays for schools and city services shrinks. The mayor of Cleveland recently said that the city can’t afford to board up all the houses that have been foreclosed. Baltimore is suing Wells Fargo Bank, “contending that the bank’s lending practices discriminated against black borrowers and led to a wave of foreclosures that has reduced city tax revenues and increased its costs.” The mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, called the subprime crisis “an economic tsunami that is hitting our cities.”⁷
****
For decades, the financial institutions of U.S. capitalism carried out “redlining”—systematically denying mortgages, business loans, and other services to people living in minority neighborhoods. This was a conscious discriminatory policy as well as part of the deindustrialization and other aspects of the profit-driven workings of capitalism that have devastated the inner-city communities of oppressed people.

The exponential growth of subprime mortgages in recent years has been a perverse sort of redlining in reverse. Instead of being denied loans, certain sections of Black and Latino people have been flooded with predatory loans and promises of a piece of the “American Dream”—even as the poorest strata of those communities have been hit hard with the gutting of public housing and other government social programs. Now, as the subprime crisis hits, a nightmarish “economic tsunami” is further devastating the oppressed communities of America.

1. “Paying More for the Dream: The Subprime Shakeout and Its Impact on Lower-Income and Minority Communities.” Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, March 2008. (nedap.org)[back]

2. “State of the Dream 2008: Foreclosed.” United for a Fair Economy, January 15, 2008. (faireconomy.org/dream)[back]

3.“NAACP Fights Loan Discrimination,”
BlackEnterprise.com, July 13, 2007.[back]

4. “Hemorrhaging Housing Market Threatens Latino Wealth.” Houston Chronicle, March 8, 2008.[back]

5. According to The Black Commentator, “The median net worth of an African American household is about $6,000, while white households wield 14 times as much wealth: more than $88,000.” One-third of Black families have no assets or have a negative net worth. “Wealth of a White Nation; Blacks Sink Deeper in Hole.” The Black Commentator, October 21, 2004. (blackcommentator.com/110/110_cover_white_wealth_pf.html)[back]

6. According to The Black Commentator, Black people’s losses from the 2000-2001 recession “appear near-permanent, the result of the deindustrialization of the United States.” Latinos, more heavily concentrated in the service sector, were slightly less affected by the recession, and the national homeownership rate among Latinos increased to 50% by 2007. But 88% of the net worth of Latino families is in equity in their homes, so they are being very hard-hit by foreclosures. The housing crisis also directly affects Latino employment because one in three construction workers is Latino.[back]

7.“Foreclosures Prompt Cities to Make Plea for Aid,” New York Times, January 24, 2008. (nytimes.com/2008/01/24/us/24mayors.html)[back]

Benefits of Venezuela's Revolution

Chavez: Pensioners and Children Benefit from Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

By Steven Mather - Venezuelanalysis.com

Tags

• Communal Councils
• Social Missions
• Social spending

   Caracas, July 20^th 2010 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez revealed figures on Sunday that he said show the great strides the Bolivarian Revolution is making in improving and protecting the health and well-being of children and older people.

   Chavez said that in the last 10 years the government has given out a million pensions to retired workers worth in total Bs. 67.8 billion, around Bs. 678 million per year.
   According to the president, this is a sharp increase in performance compared alongside the governments of the previous 22 years, a time period before the country’s more progressive Constitution was created in 1999, known as the Fourth Republic.
   He said: “In the last 22 years of the Fourth Republic only Bs. 582 million were invested, something less than Bs. 30 million per year. Notice the difference. The Bolivarian government, in only one year paid more than the Fourth Republic managed in its last four terms of government [22 years].”
Chavez blamed capitalism and the former state of the Fourth Republic for prioritizing the rich over the poor in its politics.
“The bourgeois state is an irresponsible and selfish state towards the people. In contrast, it gives the bourgeoisie everything. What the previous governments did was to close the doors to the people, deny them social security, a fair salary, pensions and in that way lower costs so as to give more money to the bourgeoisie. Now, with socialism, we are making things more equal. We give fewer resources to those that have enough and we give more to the people, according to their needs,” he said.
   He also pointed to the lowering of levels of infant mortality for the under-fives and to those under a year of age.
   According to Chavez, the average number of deaths of children less than a year old was 23.07 per 1,000, where as it has now lowered to 16.64 per 1,000 after 10 years of revolution.
“If we take into account that each year in Venezuela half a million children are born, it means that in these 10 years, 5 million have been born... that means that if the infant mortality index hadn’t reduced, 1.3 million kids probably wouldn’t be alive today,” he said.
   He also showed that there had been a real lowering of children living on the streets, from 9,000 in 1998 to only 900 in 2007.
   He said: “This must continue reducing until we reach zero.” If the old government had remained in power, “be sure, as has happened in many countries in the world, there wouldn’t be 5,000, there would be up to 20,000 abandoned children in the streets, because that is how savage capitalism is.”
Also, in the last two years, the social programme “Children of the Neighbourhood” has reintroduced 965 children who had become separated from their parents back into the family home.
   Some 635 have also been adopted and 332 are in the process of being put into homes.
   Chavez said that children who find themselves without a family and homeless are the responsibility of everyone not just the government. He called on communal councils to take action to help children in need in their communities.
   “This is very important. It is a fundamental value of socialism - social, collective, communal responsibility,” he said.
   The Children of the Neighbourhood programme was initiated in June 2008 to come to the aid of street children and those with social problems such as drug abuse and alcoholism.
   The communal councils were put in place in 2006 as participatory institutions in local communities in order that citizens themselves could manage the social programmes operating where they lived.
   The Chavez government says it hopes that these participatory democratic forms will over time grow in power, influence and importance, eventually replacing the capitalist state itself.

Prevention of Social Security Privatisation
   Chavez was at an event yesterday to give out Venezuela Institute of Social Security (IVSS) pension books to a group of citizens where he revealed that one of the first things his government did when it came into government in 1998 was to stop the plans of the previous governments to privatise the IVSS.
   He said there were also plans to privatise the petrochemical industry, the steel industry, and the oil industry.
   “They were going to privatise all that at very low prices. And that is not even mentioning that they had already privatized the airline Viasa and the Venezuelan National Telephone Company (Cantv),” he said.
   He ended by saying that mass privatizations would again become a reality if the current opposition came to power.

Analysis > Militant action needed to solve youth unemployment

Militant action needed to solve youth unemployment

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by: Joe Sims

April 12 2010

tags: economy, jobs, youth

Youth unemployment is currently at its highest level since the Great Depression, topping even the cyclical downturn of the early 1980s. Back then, fueled by an industrial crisis, close to 20 percent of all young people under 25 were jobless.
There were huge consequences. The jobs crisis, combined with lack of education and influx of drugs, particularly crack, precipitated what Marx called "social death" where millions live on the margins without the experience of ever working.
Today in the post-industrial towns of the U.S., three generations have come of age without the experience of gainful employment. For Blacks and Latinos particularly, but for white working class youth also, this has been a slow walk through hell until death.
In the early 1980s, led by the National Coalition for Economic Justice, important efforts were undertaken to bring attention to the jobs crisis. A national youth lobby for jobs was held in 1982 that brought 2,000 black, white and brown young people to D.C. to push Congress to pass jobs measures. While gaining some labor support, lauds from progressive legislators and nods here and there from the press, this movement failed to take firm hold. A few years later the cyclical economic upturn made it seem less pressing.
With the coming of the Great Recession these same issues have returned with a vengeance. From almost every standpoint, youth unemployment has grown far worse than before and shows no signs of abating. According to the Economic Policy Institute, "Since the start of the recession in December 2007, young adults have attained the highest unemployment rate on record (since 1948). The unemployment rate for 16-24-year-old workers peaked in September 2009 at 19.2% - passing the peak rate of 19.0% from November 1982 - and started 2010 at 18.9%."
According to their study, young workers account for 70 percent of all job losses.
Needless to say, there is a racial dynamic to the crisis. "Black 16-24 year-old workers had the highest rate, starting 2010 at 32.5%, followed by Hispanics (24.2%), and then whites (15.2%). However, it is 16-24 year-old Hispanics workers who saw the largest increase in unemployment (13.2 percentage points), compared to their black (10.7 percentage points) or white (8.2 percentage points) counterparts."
Thankfully the trade union movement is uniquely aware of these problems and is undertaking serious efforts to address them, a key factor not present in the 1980s. The AFL-CIO in June is holding a youth jobs conference. The Steelworkers president, Leo Gerard, in February called for a youth-led, labor-supported civil rights revolution around the fight for jobs.
Significantly, stress is being placed on the need for public works jobs, on the WPA model which celebrated its 75th anniversary last week. In this regard, citing the problems of workers over 20, a commentator recently wrote the following on the Firedoglake blog: "Unskilled workers between the ages of 20-24 are also have trouble finding work; their unemployment rate has climbed to nearly 15%. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dealt with this problem through the WPA's National Youth Administration work-study program, in which 2.7 million young people were able to either stay in school while working, or receive job training."
Great pressure will have to be placed on Congress to move in this direction. The Local Jobs for America Act, which has 100 sponsors, needs 100 more to have a chance of passing. It will provide one million new jobs.
Conservatives in both parties are loath to use leftover money from TARP to fund such programs, citing deficit.
Even President Obama's $250 Social Security payment failed to gain congressional support last month over alleged fears of adding to the deficit.
Only a massive militant movement demanding federal action will push Congress in the right direction. It's time to put on our marching shoes.
Photo: A young person walks in an alley in Detroit, where 16- to 19-year-olds face an official unemployment rate of 57.4 percent. (AP/Carlos Osorio)