This is a presentation of some of the Q and A session which took place after the IDOC Watch panel in Chicago last year. If you are hearing this and don’t know what I’m talking about, head on over to the previous episode to catch up!
In this segment, we’ll hear Kwame Shakur, Lorenzo Stone-Bey, Sheila, and Zolo Azania speak on supporting incarcerated people, the tactic of the prison strike, and ways that attitudes in society about and toward prison and incarceration have changed over time.
Before we get into it tho I would like to say a big hearty FUCK THE POLICE to the murdering cowards we call cops everywhere and especially Minneapolis. I would also like to say big ups and strength to those who are fighting this white supremacist enemy in the streets this week. I hope y’all are staying safe from tear gas, having each other’s backs in whatever ways make sense, and enjoying all that liberated shit. We’re thinking of y’all and sending love!
Relatedly, our friends at the United Panther Movement are seeking funds to send some delegates up there to help in the fight.
From their fundraising ask:
“They want us divided, fighting each other, so they can continue terrorizing our communities ! The United Panther Movement and the New Afrikan Black Panther Party will be there boots on the ground for the people whenever and wherever we can ! And now the people our crying out for justice in the wake of George Floyd’s public lynching. We want to get out there yesterday ! We are asking the people to support our travels and lodging.
“Indigenous prisoners at USP Victorville are being denied access to essential supplies for their sweat ceremonies. This has been a routine occurrence even before COVID-19 response protocols were in place. Most recently, after further attempts to raise their legitimate grievances, newly arrived chaplain Sadiq ordered corrections officers to take the sacred pipe from its elected pipe carrier, Oso Blanco/Yona Unega (also known as Byron Shane Chubbuck). Oso Blanco is urgently requesting letters and emails to bring attention to these grievances and demand action. NOTE: Oso wants the tone to stay polite and non-confrontational for the time being.Send both letters and emails to the addresses below:
This week we are presenting audio from a panel conducted last year in Indiana with members of IDOC Watch, which is the Indiana Department of Correction watch. From their website:
“The Indiana Department of Correction Watch (IDOC Watch) exists to be in solidarity with prisoners. This means we correspond with and and foster camaraderie with people who are incarcerated in Indiana, expose abusive conditions and treatment, and fight policies and initiatives that further isolate, marginalize, and harm prisoners. We seek to uplift prisoners’ voices and struggles (check out our blog!), and educate the masses about prisons, generally, as well as specific issues we are fighting.”
This panel features (in order of appearance): Kwame Shakur of the Stolen Lives Movement, Sheila, who is a mother, grandmother, and advocate of incarcerated people, Lorenzo Stone-Bey of IDOC Watch, and Zolo Agona Azania who is formerly of the Black Liberation Army, and is a three time survivor of death row. He is currently a prolific writer, artist, and advocate for incarcerated people. To hear our past interview with Zolo about his life, check this out!
While editing this panel, which took place well before the current pandemic, I was very struck by the panelists words and how applicable they are to today’s situation. Many thanks to all the buddies who got this audio out, with a special shout out to Casey!
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*** As a general content warning for this episode, since folks are talking from their direct experiences of the violences of racism and incarceration, this show makes mention of police and prison guard brutality, extreme isolation, and suicide.
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Stay tuned mid week to our podcast feed for the extended Q&A session which occurred after this panel! It will also be up at our website https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org
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We are excited to announce that The Final Straw will be airing at 4pm every Sunday on KMSW, the Martinez Street Women’s Center at 101.5FM in San Antonio, TX!
If you have a local radio station that you wanna hear us playing on, get in touch with us or follow the radio broadcasting link on our website for ideas on how to propose us 🙂
We’re happy to share the second half of this conversation with Graham Clumpner, anarchist, U.S. military veteran and eco-defender. If you missed the first half of this chat, check out our May 17th episode up at our website. For this hour Graham talks about the responsibility of U.S. society as a whole for the devastation of the Global War On Terror and to the victims in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. He also talks about the need for a movement against militarism and war, the need for active inclusion of veterans into our movements and intersection of militarism and ecological devastation and climate catastrophe. You can find Graham on twitter by the handle @turncoatveteran
The anti-militarist organizations he mentions include:
This week we’re sharing a chat with Graham Clumpner, an anarchist veteran of the U.S. military from the early days of the so-called Global War on Terror. During his time in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Graham worked his way up to being an Army Ranger and left the military in 2007. After struggling with the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Graham resisted being recalled into the military, for a short time going underground before finding a path with the help of Common Courage and the G.I. Rights Hotline. Graham became involved in anti-war organizing with Iraq Veterans Against The War (IVAW), which later developed into the group, About Face. Currently Graham organizes on-water direct action against fossil fueled climate change in the Salish Sea with the Mosquito Fleet as a part of the Environmental movement against climate change and is also on the advisory board of the CLDC.
For the hour Graham will share about his time before, during and immediately after, his resistance to redeployment, ideas on de-enlistment and his politicization as an anarchist a little on the inspiration of the revolution in Rojava. You can find Graham on Twitter by the handle @turncoatveteran
Stay tuned for the second half of this conversation, out May 20th at our website, in our podcast stream, blah blah blah. You’ll hear Graham talking about the responsibility of veterans and members of imperialist societies for the harms done in their name and with their money abroad, what it might mean to build a movement with teeth, pushing back on environmental devastation by militarism and capitalism and some tips on integrating veterans into our movements.
Announcements
Indigenous Mutual Aid
So far, the coronavirus pandemic is making more apparent all the violences that the so called US is predicated upon: capitalism, xenophobia, racism, prison/slavery, genocide, and disposability, all of which – when they collide – create situations that are escalating degrees of deadly for the people and communities who are most affected by systemic violence.
We here have seen staggering statistics in so called US, which already account for almost a third of all covid deaths worldwide. The widest spread rates of infection and death are coming out of communities which are the hardest impacted by racism, poverty, and genocide. To that end we would like to uplift the platform Indigenous Mutual Aid! From their website:
“Indigenous Mutual Aid is an information and support network with an anti-colonial and anti-capitalist framework. We exist to inspire and empower autonomous Indigenous relief organizing in response to COVID-19.
We seek to grow the organizing of this effort into a collective hub of
organizers from throughout what we recognize as Turtle Island.
As our communities have a deep history with organizing to support each other in times of crisis, we already have many existing Mutual Aid models to draw from. This looks like a small crew coordinating their relatives or friends to chop wood and distribute to elders. It looks like traditional medicine herbal clinics or sexual health supply distribution. It looks like community water hauling efforts or large scale supply runs to ensure elders have enough to make it through harsh winters. Basically any time individuals and groups in our communities have taken direct action (not through politicians or indirect means) and supported others, not for their own self-interests but out of love for their people, this is what we call ‘mutual aid.’”
If you have suggestions for further mutual aid networks we can help uplift and amplify, or if you yourself would like to be interviewed or know someone who might, you can always email us at thefinalstrawradio@riseup.net with the subject line “Mutual Aid Info”!
Prison-Related
Prisoners across the country and around the world are resisting their captivity and the dangers of the pandemic in a constellation of ways, from sharing rations to caring for the sick, from filing grievances and getting word out about conditions to daring escapes, uprisings and hunger strikes. A few great places to find news are the Perilous Chronicle site and the Breakout columns on itsgoingdown.org and to hear prisoners struggles in their own voices, check out our fellow CZN podcast, KiteLine.
Leonard Peltier
Leonard Peltier is an elder indigenous rights activist, member of the American Indian Movement (or AIM) and prisoner held since the 70’s for the killing of a federal agent during the Wounded Knee standoff when the U.S. government besieged native people at Pine Ridge reservation. This week two congress people, citing the release from prison of convicted fraudster and ally of Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, due to fears of covid-19 and his age and health problems. Published a letter to the president requesting similar release for Mr. Peltier. His main support website, WhoIsLeonardPeltier.Info, has more info on his case. At our website you can hear a conversation we had with his supporter Paulette D’Auteuil.
Imam Jamil Al-Amin
Jamil Al-Amin, formerly known as H Rap Brown, is a civil rights leader and elder in prison accused of shooting two sheriff’s deputies in Georgia in the year 2000. He is currently fighting for a retrial of his case and there is a petition on change.org where you can see a video of the Imam’s son and attorney, Kairi Al-Amin talk about the possibility and learn more about the case and see an adjoined video of the man who has confessed to the shooting of the deputies.
Marius Mason
Marius Mason is an imprisoned Earth Liberation Front activist who is 10 years into an almost 22 year sentence for acts of sabotage against ecocide and capitalism. He has tested positive for covid-19 while being held at Danbury Correctional in Connecticut and is being held in quarantine with other corona-positive inmates. His support folks are posting updates on the blog at SupportMariusMason.org and they are asking folks to send him letters. Note that he is limited in who he can write back to, so you may not get a response, but he could sure use some inspiring words right now. Check out a conversation with Marius’ daughter we published a few years back.
Jennifer Rose
Just a bump that Jennifer Rose, whose words we featured on the show a few weeks back, is still in need of support letters for an upcoming parole hearing she has. You can check out her support site at https://babygirlgann.noblogs.org
Wayne Price is longtime anarchist, author and currently a member of Bronx Climate Justice North and the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council, or MACC, in New York City. After reading his book, The Value Of Radical Theory: An Anarchist Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (AK Press, 2013), I got excited to speak to him about his views on anarchists engaging Marxist economic concepts and some of the historical conflicts and engagements between Marxism and Anarchism.
We talk about his political trajectory from a pacifist Anarchist in high school, through Trotskyism and back to anarchy. Wayne talks about common visions of what an anarchist economy might look like, how we might get there, class and intersection of other oppressions, critique of State Capitalism. Wayne sees the oppressed of the world having a chance during this economic freeze to fight against re-imposition of wide-scale capitalist ecocide by building libertarian, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and heterogenous future societies in the shell of the old.
We’re happy to share the rest of our conversation with Michele Gretes, director of the Digital Security project at the Civil Liberties Defense Center, and Cora Borradaile, who is on the board of the CLDC. For this podcast special, you’ll hear the two discuss different tools for more secure, encrypted communication that is available on various platforms to folks organizing. They publish guides on CLDC.org/Security. We discuss the end-to-end encrypted alternative to Slack (Keybase) **, pgp email encryption (particularly the enigmail tool), Signal Messenger, problems with Whatsapp, Cryptpad, Jitsi, Wire, VPNs and The Onion Router,the TorBrowser, OnionShare, Zoom, Protonmail and some of the challenges of running longstanding movement infrastructure such as the RiseUp collective does (plus their file sharing and pad services). Check our show notes for links to some of these projects.
** Keybase was just purchased by Zoom. See the CLDC article.
This week, we feature two conversations. Cora Borradaile and Michele Gretes, folks involved in the Digital Security Project of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, speak about contact tracing apps and surveillance. Then, Se speaks about Tucson Food Share’s grocery distribution program.
Contact Tracing Apps
First up, we hear Michele Gretes and Cora Borradaile. Michele is the Digital Security Coordinator of the Civil Liberties Defense Center and also does digital security for an environmental non-profit. Cora is a co-founder of the CLDC Digital Security Program and is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University with a focus on the security state and the adoption of more-secure apps. They talk about surveillance and the use of apps for tracing folks contact with people infected with covid-19 to slow the pandemic spread. This is a segment of a larger conversation we’ll be releasing in the middle of this week as a podcast in which Cora and Michele talk about and compare tools for online organizing that engage encryption and offer alternatives to the google and other “free” products that often surveil their users. We speak about Jitsi, Wire, Zoom, RiseUp, Signal, vpns, The Onion Router, TAILS, KeyBase, Riot.IM, pgp and other mentionables. More at CLDC.org/Security/
Apple & Google announced this approach toward contact tracing we didn’t really cover in detail / by name in this conversation. Here’s an article from Wired about it.
The White Paper referenced by Cora references from the EU with cryptographers is here.
After that, we’ll hear from Se of Tucson Food Share, based in Arizona. We talk about their project, how it scaled up from Tucson Food Not Bombs to deliver groceries and hand out burritos publicly, multi-lingual engagement, resisting burnout and finding joy in feeding people. More at TucsonFoodShare.Org . You should get in touch if you’re thinking of setting up a food distribution project and have any questions.
Announcements
New Station: KODX Seattle
We’d like to mention that we’re now airing on Monday mornings at 2am on KODX in Seattle. You can check out that station’s schedule up at kodxseattle.org or hear them in north eastern Seattle on 96.9 on the FM dial.
Recent Release: Bomani Shakur and Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin
Just a headsup, if you’re looking for more content for your ears, we released a small segment of Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin talking about prisoner organizing in the 1970’s and today. This was paired with a longer chat with Lucasville Uprising survivor and death row prisoner Bomani Shakur aka Keith Lamar. For a little over an hour, Bomani talks about his youth, the uprising in 1993, his case and being railroaded. He has an execution date set by the state of Ohio for November 16, 2023.
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Naughty By Nature – Hip Hop Hooray (instrumental) – Hip Hop Hooray
Leslie Fish – Bella Ciao – Smoked Fish and Friends
