Category Archives: Anarchist

A conversation with Keep Hoods Yours and on the July 25th International Day of Solidarity with Antifascist Prisoners

KHY and Intl Antifascist Prisoners Solidarity

nycantifa.wordpress.com
Download This Episode

The first segment is a short conversation with members of NYC Antifa, an antifascist group in New York City. In this conversation we talk a bit about the history of this day of solidarity plus the state of fascism in the US and abroad. This conversation was transcribed and re-recorded to protect the folks’ identities. To learn more about this, you can visit https://nycantifa.wordpress.com/, and to donate to the international defense fund you can visit https://intlantifadefence.wordpress.com/about-2/

A large portion of this episode is a conversation with a member of Keep Hoods Yours. Keep Hoods Yours, or KHY, is a radical graffiti crew based in the SF Bay Area that organizes against gentrification, against sexual predators in the scene, against racism and more. During the conversation, we’ll hear about the rebel cultural car events called Sideshows, the police killing of Richard
Perkins during one of these Sideshows, KHY participation in uprisings against the Ferguson verdict, resistance to Fast Agent and poning of Kenny Truong and the shutdown of racist, gentrifying business “Locals Corner” in the Mission District. You can find KHY on Instagram or in the
streets. This interview was formatted into a zine by 1312 Distro and is available for printing thanks to IGD.

Announcements

Luke O’Donovan Solidarity

On July 25th at 9 am Luke O’Donovan will walk out of Washington State Prison after serving two years there. We are thrilled to see our friend free from behind prison walls. He is in high spirits and very excited to be released. As many of you who have been in touch with him know, he has occupied his time with a rigorous workout routine, lots of reading, and correspondence with all those who took the time to communicate with him.

Unfortunately he will not be allowed to return to his home and life in Atlanta. Due to the judge adding a banishment condition to his probation, Luke will have to move all the way to the West Coast for the next eight years, or until the conditions of his probation are changed. Moving forward, here are some ways to continue to support Luke as he starts life on strict probation.

Money– Luke will need money in order to cover his living expenses while he gets on his feet and moves his belongings and life to the West Coast. He will also need money to cover the probation and drug testing fees that he will be subject too. You can donate or set up recurring donations by visiting their paypal site.

Care Packages– Luke will need lots of little things, like clothes to rebuild his wardrobe, delicious vegan food, and other items that you are not allowed to have in prison. If you would like to send a care package please email letlukego@gmail.com to work out details on where and what to send.

Solidarity and Support- Throughout Luke’s case and subsequent imprisonment the support and solidarity he has gotten has been overwhelming. From the solidarity marches and actions to the mountain of mail and the hundreds of postcards sent to the judge we have been thrilled by all those who have taken action for him. Once things are more clear we will begin trying to get his banishment condition appealed, check back for updates. For now any and all actions are appreciated. As Luke’s new living situation isn’t worked out yet we can’t provide contact info at this time, but email us at letlukego@gmail.com if you want to get in touch.

Luke is set to be free from prison, but there is still a lot to do. Thanks everyone for your past and future support.

. … . ..

Playlist

. … . ..

 

Transcription

What follows is the transcript from an interview with Keep Hoods Yours (KHY) that appeared on The Final Straw Radio (TFSR). KHY is an anti-authoritarian, anti-gentrification, anti-sexist, anti-racist and so forth, graffiti crew based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This interview talks about organizing in youth culture, radical potentials in graffiti, some of the struggles that KHY has been involved in and more. The Final Straw is a radical radio program out of Asheville, N.C. and their episodes can be found here: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/. This interview was transcribed in an effort to broaden conversations around radical organizing and antagonism within vibrant subcultures that anarchists and other radicals find themselves involved in. Ultimately, it also serves as a proposal and a challenge to punks, graffiti writers, skateboarders, dancers, musicians and artists of many forms to never pass up on an opportunity to strategically target our enemies and fire at will, and to explore the creative cultures we find ourselves enmeshed with for spaces to attack from. Or, in the words of the KHY interviewee, to “develop an antagonistic, decentralized, popular culture of resistance that can hopefully develop our capacity to identify and attack the various forces which exploit poor and working class spaces, including gentrifi cation, police violence, rape culture and local white supremacist and fascist efforts.”

TFSR: Well first off let’s talk about, what is a graffiti crew? For those people listening who may know nothing about graffiti culture, what is it and how does it operate?

KHY: Well they vary from crew to crew, but for the most part a graffiti crew is a semi-formal grouping of graffiti writers that have similar styles, aesthetic choices and a philosophy towards the craft. They group up and collaborate in order to do graffiti, to exchange styles, knowledge, strategies, and supplies and generally have each other’s backs. Since it’s a culture that’s rooted in the streets, anything can happen. And it being illegal, we can’t really rely on mainstream institutions to solve conflicts. But it varies. For some crews, they’re just drinking buddies. For others, they are very serious, formal, tight-knit and organized. It definitely varies.

TFSR: I guess the first thing people would think of when they think graffiti-crew; they think it’s automatically connected with a gang.

KHY: It’s actually not, it’s often the other way around actually. Especially in working-class neighborhoods, some youth do graffiti instead of falling in the gang trap. In some cities, gangs and graffiti crews get along or just don’t beef, while in other cities it’s much different. In some crews there’s overlap in gang affiliations and graffiti crews. But for the most part they’re two very separate worlds that sometimes conflict.

TFSR: So sense of place seems pretty central to the idea of KHY. Could you tell some of our listeners about, generally speaking, the upbringing of many of the people involved? What do you think drew them to become involved in KHY? And, what kind of drives people to be engaged in this activity that could potentially be legally dangerous for them?

KHY: All of the people involved in this project at this time were born and raised in the Bay Area. Part of what’s driven folks to become involved in KHY is just been seeing the blatant gentrification, police violence and other problems in our neighborhoods. And also seeing how liberal non-profit efforts at changing things fail completely. These efforts usually end up alienating folks in the hoods that are probably attracted to things like KHY, because they see it as a way to engage with the oppressive things happening in their neighborhoods without committing themselves to reformist or legal means. It’s potentially dangerous, but the reality for folks is that the problems they’re dealing with are already dangerous. They face a larger danger from losing people in their community to police violence, to gentrification, to having families split apart, to the erasure of their culture and the loss of dignity that comes with it, that kind of thing. So really, the risk of catching a misdemeanor case for writing on a wall, it doesn’t feel all that dangerous compared to our daily reality.

TFSR: And let’s talk specifically now about KHY and how, when did it form, and overall what are it’s goals? And also, as both a radical project and a graffiti crew, how did it evolve over time since it first started?

KHY: KHY formed at about 2008-2009 with just a couple of us, and it’s grown over time. It’s grown at a much faster rate in the last three years or so. It’s really just a graffiti crew that’s rooted in radical ideas, including anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial thought. KHY aims to highlight the anti-property values of graffiti culture by exploring how targeted graffiti application could be used as a form of direct action. Also using culture, like active youth culture and radical organizing, to help develop an antagonistic, decentralized, popular culture of resistance that can hopefully develop our capacity to identify and attack the various forces which exploit poor and working class spaces, including gentrification, police violence, rape culture and local white supremacist and fascist efforts.

TFSR: Great, thanks for sharing that. And let’s talk about what kind of campaigns you all have been involved in. To me, the first thing that pops up in my mind is Local’s Corner, which obviously wasn’t something that was started by you guys but is something you were involved in. If you could talk about that, and just what happened (Local’s Corner is closed now, it was a restaurant in the Mission District). Also, you’re involved in a campaign around Fast Agent, so if you could just talk to us about what both of those were, and why you chose those as targets.

KHY: The Local’s Corner campaign, it was a very obvious example of the blatant colonial white supremacist mentality behind some of the gentrifiers in the mission district. For folks who don’t really know the story behind it, it involves the owner refusing to seat people of color. There’s one specific incident where they denied a Latina mother and her kids a table, claiming that there weren’t enough seats, and then sat down a group of customers of the same size right after. There’s another incident where some local students carried out a test, where they had a group of white students come in, and they were given seating, and then they had a group of students of color come in, and they weren’t given seating. There was already a lot of local anger at that business, but the mainstream liberal attempts to hold them accountable were failing. Folks had a petition floating around, they had some protests, but none of that really put enough pressure alone on Local’s Corner to really do anything. KHY targeting Local’s Corner was the tipping point for their business. The bad publicity along with the mainstream legal pressure, then on top of that the repeated vandalism, which became popularized as other folks not involved with KHY in any way began replicating the strategy themselves, it was just the final straw. And they closed, they called it. We did that to show that direct action can be accessible to folks who don’t feel as familiar with it, ya know? It doesn’t necessarily need to involve a high-risk action, like burning something down. It can be creative, accessible, less of a risk than folks assume. And it can be effective, it can shut things down. You can make a gentrifying business get the fuck out of your town.

TFSR: I would assume for younger people that would be like a big tipping point, like “Oh we actually shut this thing down.”

KHY: Yeah, and I think that a lot of people saw that, even some of the liberal people gave us credit, they said that KHY had a lot to do with it, that they wouldn’t have closed without our efforts. And I think that legitimized direct action and more militant, illegal tactics n the eyes of the community, because it was effective. It was a small victory, but people were glad to see them leave. It also engaged a lot of folks who had never been involved in direct action before. Once other graffiti writers began vandalizing it, writing messages, their names, just scribbling over it, whatever, they became engaged in that process. They were able to build their confidence in attacking what essentially attacks them.

TFSR: Yeah, and I also think that’s interesting with the Fast Agent thing, which basically are a bunch of ads that are on bus stop benches, I see it as you are targeting things that are in the social landscape, like “Hey, get this!”

KHY: Definitely. It’s essentially what graffiti’s always been about. It’s been a battle for the public visual landscape. There’s something inherently very antagonistic, anti-property, and anti-capitalist about graffiti. So Fast Agent is an advertising campaign for the real estate agent who has the highest record for flipping properties in the neighborhoods being targeted by gentrification, the number one real estate agent in the East Bay. His name is Kenny Trong, and he, like Local’s Corner, already faced a lot of resentment from the locals. He wasn’t very strategic about it either. He did a lot of talking shit to people online and instigating and being condescending to folks. And part of that entitlement was blasting West Oakland and parts of East Oakland with these Fast Agent ads to take up space and show his presence, to assert his economic power.

So we started targeting him, and encouraging other folks to do so. At this point it’s been our campaign that’s had the widest participation than any other. I mean there’s been hundreds of other people from all walks of life who’ve tagged on them, vandalized them, ripped them out, far more than we ever did. It’s normalized, decentralized, has a life of it’s own, has little to do with us. And again, it goes to show that you don’t necessarily have to be a part of a group or organization. You don’t have to go through legal means or follow the law. You don’t have to ask for anything, you can just take resistance into your own hands, at your own pace, even if you’re isolated and even if you don’t want to be a part of anything formal. And at this point it’s been going on for over a year.

TFSR: Let’s talk a little bit about; if people are going to look at KHY stuff, primarily they do that through instagram. So how do you find, through engaging in social media, have you been able to build relationships with other projects through this? And also, what is it like using social media as a means to show people what the crew has been doing, but at the same time obviously the police use that as a means for surveillance?

KHY: So far, social media has been a means to highlight some of our ideas of resistance to folks who aren’t already involved in radical circles. Folks that are already radicalized, that are already involved in radical movements, don’t need social media to get informed. So the social media thing was really meant as a way to engage folks in the hood who were on social media anyways. So far, it has helped build some solidarity. We’ve reached out to folks in other cities across the west coast, the U.S., even in other countries. Just as far as exchanging some inspiration, news, strategy, ideas, just making those connections between similar struggles in different cities. There’s been a lot of sharing too, folks will send us photos of them doing politicized graffiti in their cities, things that are going on in other places. We’ve had folks use politically targeted graffiti in application and send us reports about it, stuff like that. Now that we’ve got a strong social media presence, we focus more on highlighting other struggles that might be isolated. It’s also helped to build some relationships that have materialized from real life, outside of social media. There’s definitely limitations to using a medium like social media that’s always surveilled. But, in reality, only very specific things are communicated through instagram. The photos that we post about Fast Agent for example, 90% of them come from folks that have absolutely nothing to do with KHY. At this point it’s more about documenting recent and ongoing struggles. At most, there’s just pictures of KHY graffiti, unfortunately social media became part of graffiti culture. There’s hella accounts documenting graffiti, and it’s just not as hot as other forms of direct action.

TFS: ‘Cause you hear all the time these horror stories of how someone goes and steals a bunch of paint, and then their next picture is of their job, and then police go to their job and arrest them.

KHY: Yeah but, in the Bay Area graffiti is just so widespread and so ingrained out here that it’s so easy to get away with it, that they’re not really prosecuting graffiti in the same way that they would in some small town. And if you’re not prepared to deal with the potential consequences, you shouldn’t even be doing it.

TFSR: Is that something you all think about too? ‘Cause it’s not just some instances, but it’s everywhere, it’s integrated into the landscape, like it’s murals, it’s advertisement, graffiti is part of not only working class communities but also capitalism itself. I guess, what does it mean to be a graffiti artist but also to make that radical connection?

KHY: Well most of the time, graffiti isn’t even that radical or political, but it is inherently, and that’s what we’re trying to highlight. We’re trying to highlight that this culture that a lot of youth from all walks of life participate in, is already inherently radical. It already has revolutionary potential, and folks that participate in this culture already have the tools necessary to carry out resistance. People do graffiti every day, and people do graffiti on everything, anything, all it takes is strategic placement, and if desired some messaging, and then it becomes a form of direct action.

TFSR: Well that kinda brings us to my next question, but has the politics of KHY affected other street organizations or graffiti crews that are in this general area? And has the stance that you all have taken pushed people that are in the graffiti scene in a more political direction? Or has it already just been going that way because of the gentrification and police violence in San Francisco and Bay Area?

KHY: As far as other street organizations and other crews, there’s been a lot of mutual respect. Our goals have kept us out of the usual and petty conflicts that exist in graffiti, and that’s given us a lot of room to focus on what we’re doing. We’re not engaged in the usual beef dynamics in graffiti politics, even though some of us might have been involved in before. We’re more interested in exploring potentials for unity, collaboration, and focusing on common enemies. And for the most part, other writers see this and respect it, or just leave it alone. We’re also not pushovers, and have our own histories out here that some people aren’t aware of. Graffiti was beginning to take a slightly more political direction in the Bay Area, but it was very minor. Graffiti is full of problematic people and oppressive behaviors, and so we’ve helped to push local graffiti in a more political direction as far as people becoming more involved, as far as people becoming strategic with what they do graffiti on, about what they paint, and also about bringing up dynamics in the culture, of how to carry themselves, solidarity, things like that. Calling out rape culture and misogyny, highlighting different issues that affect writers. There’s a drug addiction epidemic in graffiti that’s hard to talk about that has cost a lot of heavy hitters and good people. We’re definitely trying to radicalize graffiti writers, while using graffiti to radicalize folks that don’t do graffiti.

TFSR: When you are all engaged in that, do you feel like there’s some push-back? Because I would imagine that that kind of political stance almost seems like a cliché, to bring that stuff up in any sort of youth culture. I imagine people would just respond with “Oh I don’t care about that. For me it’s just about destroying shit and that’s what it is.”

KHY: The only push-back we’ve really felt is a few misogynistic individuals feel threatened by us highlighting a lot of predators in the Bay Area, calling out rape culture and being really explicit about that. It’s almost unheard of for a graffiti crew, for a project that mostly consists of males in a culture that’s male dominated, to explicitly call for fighting patriarchy and pushing rapists out of their scenes and spaces in a militant way.

TFSR: That it is pretty crazy, because historically graffiti has been so male dominated.

KHY: Yeah, so really that’s been most of the push-back. So far as our broader politics in this project, there hasn’t been much push-back because we’re actually graffiti writers in the first place. We’re not people who aren’t a part of graffiti and aren’t just using graffiti to try to reach out to youth or whatever. We’re already graffiti vandals, we have styles, we have history, we have legitimacy, we have these relationships already. And now we’re choosing to use our momentum to try to radicalize the culture and folks that have access to it. All of our campaigns have been about things that are blatantly a problem locally and that most people relate to regardless. People are already mad about them, we don’t really deal with abstract political concepts. We’re not out here putting out academic rants and things like that. We’re acknowledging what people are already well aware of; police murdering people, gentrification, and the recent rise in white supremacy organizing in the Bay Area. These are problems that people are already pissed about.

TFSR: We’re gonna talk a little bit about of the rebellion in the Bay Area against police violence in late 2014 in a second, but I just wanted to ask, you know we’re talking about social media, do you see any interest to create a KHY magazine, or something basically that’s off the internet? Obviously there’s this presence that’s online, I don’t know what you think about this, but how do you feel about graffi ti zines, magazines, publications, basically anything else that’s outside social media?

KHY: Even though social media has helped reach a broader audience, we understand that it’s pretty limited and temporary. We’re working on a zine project which should hopefully be coming out soon.

TFSR: Well that’s awesome to hear. I know there’s a lot of graffiti nerds out there that are rubbing their ears. So let’s talk a little bit about, in fall of 2014 and in the wake of Darren Wilson basically being let off for the killing of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, M.O. There were a series of riots that erupted in the Bay Area, and graffiti writers in my opinion played a huge role in that rebellion. Can you talk about the experience you thought of overall of the members of KHY in that revolt? How did it affect the crew in general? And how do you feel like the revolt changed people, especially those that were kind of like new to either “political action” or anything like that?

KHY: There were some folks involved in this project that were out in the streets. These demonstrations had a positive, energizing affect on most of the youth that came out. The revolt was very empowering for most people, for a lot of newly radicalized folks to feel that power, and to be able to hold space in the streets, to be able to push back cops, to be able to target things that they disagree with or don’t want in their neighborhoods, within the protection of a larger crowd. I think it also helped to establish radical politics within local youth cultures. You saw a lot of cultures being represented, you saw a lot of graffiti writers painting while there were riots in the background, you saw musicians, skateboarders, dancers, etc. A lot of the revolt was very youth-led, very youth involved. I think it was successful in bringing a lot of people out into the streets, being radical and having fun.

TFSR: I was telling people from out of town, I said that I felt that the graffiti writers were kind of like the Bay Area version of the soccer hooligans in Egypt, they kind of played a central role. It seems like a lot of the media, even radical media, overlooked that. It was really interesting to see people writing everywhere, a lot of different things.

KHY: Yeah, graffiti writers were definitely out during the revolt. And so many people do graffiti now; it’s just so widespread. A lot of graffiti crews were out during that. Your comparison of graffiti writers to soccer hooligans as an antagonistic cultural force is a good one, it’s interesting that that dynamic isn’t highlighted much.

TFSR: To our next question, could you talk about the recent sideshows that have taken part in East Oakland, and you might want to talk about “What is a sideshow?” for people listening who have no idea what that is. And KHY’s reaction to the police killing of Richard Perkins, who was killed outside of the sideshow in East Oakland, C.A., and more over what is your view of sideshows in general?

KHY: Well sideshows are a long-standing tradition in Oakland, and they’re essentially car-shows in the street where folks who space in the street and perform stunts with their cars. They do donuts, things like that. It’s like an outdoor, moving car-sport-party. They are a rebellious, self-organized activity of the working class and have a lot of valuable dynamics. In East Oakland, there’s not a lot for the youth to do, and we all know that there’s violence, all that, and these shows alleviate some of the anxiety, depression, and alienation that come with living through all that shit. Sideshows are empowering because they give the youth something to do in the streets collectively, and they give ownership over the streets that they live in while having fun and being rebellious. They’re unique because they’re decentralized, they’re organized without any permits or any formal hierarchy or leaders, and they easily and quickly gather a lot of people. They’re militant and very anti-police. When police come by, they don’t get taken seriously or they’re literally attacked. And often sideshows don’t end until the participants want them to; bottles get thrown at them (the cops). If they catch a lone cop; windows are getting smashed, hoods are getting stomped. Sideshows are usually so big that police can’t get to the center of the sideshow because of all the cars that are taking up the streets for a few blocks. I mean, some of them have hundreds and hundreds of participants, there’s a strong solidarity and a sense of unity when cops show up. Folks don’t snitch on each other and try to avoid internal violence. Sideshows have an insurrectionary potential. They’re often accompanied by graffiti, general public rebellion and sometimes riots. People are militant and often armed. These shows are very fluid and flexible at being able to move from hood to hood, from city to city, very efficiently. Some folks involved in this project are a part of sideshow and car culture in the Bay. Some of us were around, just keepin’ it lit, kickin’ it, when Richard Perkins was murdered. Everyone saw the murder of Richard Perkins as police retaliation for a nonstop weekend of huge sideshows that the police could not control, and for attacks on a couple of police cars also. Everyone saw that as a way for them to try to assert their dominance over Oakland and to scare folks into going back home. The police lied as always, they always do, they claim that he randomly drove up to them and pulled out a gun on them, a fake gun at that. Everyone knows that’s not true. He was at a sideshow having fun, he was not gonna randomly run up to cops and pull out a fake gun on them. This is not the first time this has happened in Oakland, where the pigs say that somebody pulled out a fake gun on them so they had to shoot them. Some are thinking that it may be easier for the State to frame people in Oakland with fake guns that you can’t trace. People were at the scene where the cops show him, they said that he wasn’t doing anything and that once he was shot down, they saw the cops kicking him, moving his body around carelessly. It’s just blatant white supremacist state violence. It was in response to the lawlessness of the sideshows and how they made the police look like they didn’t have any control. Especially with an increasingly gentrified Oakland, the police are really trying to kill that culture and oppress it. It’s really just repression.

TFSR: Let’s switch gears a little bit. Can you talk about the kind of support that KHY’s gotten? Specifically from the Mission District, but also the Bay Area in general. I’ve seen a lot of different articles and stuff being written, kids handing out KHY stickers and stuff like that. Cause it is kind of impressive that KHY has gotten sort of the notoriety within the Bay Area and the Mission District specifically for kind of a taboo activity so to speak. And can you talk about this positive feedback, but also the negative receptions as well?

KHY: I think the support really comes from the fact that again, our campaign and the issues that we’ve been addressing have been things that a lot of people in our hoods already care about. And this moment is kind of a downtime for radical struggles in the Bay Area, so a lot of responses to police murders, gentrification, etc. have mostly been dominated by liberal ideology and pacified nonsense, which folks are alienated from and can see that it usually brings no kind of results. It feels like a slap in the face when the only response to someone in your hood being executed by a racist pig is a so-called “peaceful protest” in which every detail is so micro-managed that the lame ass protest security in yellow vest is staring at you because the message on the sign you’re holding is “too-militant.” The fact that we’ve been engaged in struggles that people are feeling hopeless about in a refreshing, creative way while bringing a militant radical ideology to the forefront definitely has to do with the support we have, despite using a taboo activity. We haven’t really had any negative reactions aside from folks who obviously wouldn’t be down with our project, like yuppies and cop apologists and occasional whining, delusional liberals but who cares about them. At first we thought that we’d be accused of being a gang, but that hasn’t happened much. Most folks are just actually excited to see graffiti writers use creative application to inspire the community and educate folks by discussing revolutionary ideas. They usually are highlighted by the existing liberal left, while also creatively targeting things in the community that everyone hates, whether it be banks, gentrifier businesses, corporations, cop cars, crossing out white supremacist graffiti, the sort of things within the public landscape for all to see, showing that they aren’t untouchable.

TFSR: You mentioned that a couple times, could you just touch on that? White power graffiti in the Bay Area…

KHY: Historically there hasn’t been, aside from the obviously established white supremacy that it’s inherent in a settler state, an open-public-white-supremacist movement in the Bay Area for various reasons. Possibly in relation to gentrification and all these new-comers from new places , there’s been an obvious rise in white-supremacist graffiti. Whether it be swastikas, “white power,” anti-Black messages, anti-Mexican messages, etc. So we decided that was a very easy thing to gather support for targeting, and it’s something that can bring folks together around a common enemy. Despite differences in the community in conflict and divisions, everyone can agree that we don’t want Nazis, we don’t want white supremacists, and by us taking the initiative to start crossing out those messages, we’ve inspired other folks to do so. So now all kinds of people, even those that don’t do graffiti, are buying markers and crossing out these markers where they see ‘em. It’s empowering people to take matters into their own hands, instead of waiting on the liberals or police to do something. They’re engaging with that on their own, because they should, because these are their streets and their struggles.

TFSR: Well let’s talk a little bit about, you mentioned the Bay Area’s kind of been in a down-tide, you’ve all really continued to push since the revolt of late 2014, can you talk a little bit about the kind of different organizing things you guys have done, different community outreach events, and just talk a little more about as you were saying the need to build in these down moments?

KHY: That’s another main focus of this project, to use culture and community organizing to help those ideas actually materialize in our neighborhoods. We can’t just wait for the next uprising or the next series of riots, we can’t just wait for the next police murder and hope this will be the one that will trigger an uprising. In the meantime, between these peak points in struggle, we need to be doing a culture of resistance and building collective capacity. We need to be establishing and normalizing radical thinking within the cultures that make up our communities. We need to be educating and learning from each other. We need to be building relationships, meeting each other, strengthening those relationships, building trust so that when there are peak points in the struggle again, when folks are in the streets, they’ll already have stronger relationships, they’ll trust and recognize each other. And do this cultural work, this grassroots work; we’re also able to bring in new folks and branch out of these closed circles of radicals. We don’t need to wait for peak points in struggles; oppression is always there, exploitation is always there, alienation is always there. So even if there’s nothing going on, or if you’re isolated, or if the city you live in doesn’t have a very established radical movement of any kind, anyone can grab a marker or a spray can and go target and challenge things in their neighborhood that are problematic, spread ideas and creatively take back public space.

TFS: Well I’m really curious, what do you think the possibilities for bringing radical politics into, as you said cultural things. I’m thinking specifically youth culture, from hip-hop to graffiti, to punk, to motorcycle crews, to sports, to anything. What kind of advice would you give to anybody that’s looking to do this style of activity? It doesn’t even have to be graffi ti, but something culturally oriented that doesn’t really kind of have the auspices of political activity.

KHY: I think it’s very possible to bring radical politics into more traditional forms of youth culture. Most of these cultures already have inherently antagonistic aspects, but it needs to be done in a way that carries legitimacy. It needs to be done by folks that are already participants in these cultures. It’s hella see-through when folks who aren’t apart of the culture haven’t put in the work, time, risk, energy, etc. pop their heads up in said culture and try to use it to make politics cool or something. It comes off as corny, opportunistic and insincere. I think it’s really up to those who are already a part of these cultures to bring radical perspectives into them. We’re actually graffi ti writers in the fi rst place, and we’re able to maneuver in a way that allows us to reach a lot of people while remaining authentic and rooted in real graffiti.

TFSR: So for anybody that’s listening to this that is involved in graffiti specifically, and they are like ‘Wow this is great, I have these political ideas and am into graffi ti…’ Is there any advice you’d give them to form something like KHY in their own towns or cities?

KHY: Just do it. Do it. You already have the tools, skills and desires to do graffi ti, and you’re already pulling it off. Just think about placement, strategy, what’s important to you, and see if anyone else is down. That’s our point, that it’s really that easy.

TFSR: ‘Cause I think that’s a really key point that you hinted on, fi nding targets that people already know are like this huge bone of contention, that kind of thinking and strategy is something that’s often missing. Do you wanna just tell people how they can get a hold of KHY stuff, online? Or they can go on instagram and other places?

KHY: Yeah, folks can check us out at keephoodsyours on instagram, or just run into us in the streets. Shout out to all of our Bay Area people in the struggle and all the vandals putting paint where it ain’t, keepin’ it rooted in the streets.

Intl Solidarity with Russian Anarchist and Antifa Prisoners

Moscow ABC on Solidarity w Russian Anarchists & Antifa

Download This Episode

This week’s episode features a conversation with Antii, a member of Moscow Anarchist Black Cross about the call-out for solidarity with Russian anarchists and anti-fascists. This starts off with a description of the cases of: Dmitry Buchenkov (accused of participating in anti-Putin protests in Bolotnaya square on May 6th, 2012); Alexei Gaskarov (accused of anti-police violence and riotting in anti-Putin protests in Bolotnaya square in 2012); Alexei Sutuga (a Siberian street-level antifascist accused of brawling with neo-nazis); Ilya Romanov (anarchist former prisoner accused of attempted terrorism to stop the development of Kulibinsky park in Nizhny Novgorod); Alexander Kolchenko (Crimean antifascist accused of attempting to resist the Russian takeover of the region formerly of Ukraine); & Elizaveta Tsvetkova (accused of hate-crimes against police for posting up anti-police leaflets). Each of these prisoners are inside because of their activism and are considered political prisoners locked in the Putinist prison system.

During the hour Antii, who was exiled from Russia, talks about the cases of these 6, a more general context of anarchist and antifa action in Russia these days and about the prison system Russia.

The original callout can be found up at the Autonomous Action in English, Spanish and other languages here: http://avtonom.org/en/news/anarchist-black-cross-moscow-1st-10th-july-2016-join-international-days-solidarity-russian

Announcements

Kara Solidarity

Kara Wild is an artist, comrade and resilient force of nature, currently being detained in France for her alleged participation in a protest against draconian labor reforms and police repression. She is a trans woman and is currently being held in a mens jail without access to hormones. She is also a U.S. citizen and has been denied bond because French authorities consider her a flight risk.

On May 18th, thousands of people converged in Paris to defy an ongoing siege of police violence and to oppose a new neoliberal labor reform. During one of these marches a police car was attacked and set on fire. Kara was brutally arrested in connection to this incident more than a full week later, at a separate event. She is currently being accused of attempted voluntary manslaughter of a person holding public office, destruction of property, group violence and participating in a masked armed group.

Kara is among 6 people currently facing charges in connection to this incident. To make matters worse, Frances Prime Minister, Manuel Valls is vowing to execute unrelenting punishment, in order to set an example and de-mobilize protests.

You can learn more about this situation and donate to Kara Wild’s support effort by visiting the website https://freekarawild.org/

Eric King Sentenced to 10 Years

Eric King was sentenced to 10 years in prison this last week. His sentencing statement and updates can be found here: https://supportericking.org/2016/06/28/statement-from-the-eric-king-support-crew-regarding-his-sentencing/

An interview with members of DAF, an anarchist collective in Istanbul, plus words from Sean Swain

Turkish Anarchists of DAF, pt 1

anarsistfaaliyet.org/
Download Pt 1

Here, we present both parts one and two of an interview with Merve Arkun, Hüseyin & Özgür, members of Devrimci Anarşist Faaliyet, or DAF. DAF translates to Revolutionist Anarchist Action and is a network of overlapping collectives in Turkey. They are based out of Istanbul and run an office and two cafe’s, both called 26A, which is a meeting space and employer for collective members. This conversation was conducted on March 19, 2016, a few short hours after a DAESH (ISIS) bombing occurred in the Beyoğlu neighborhood of Istanbul, on the touristy street called İstiklal Avenue, just a few blocks from one of the collective’s cafe’s and their newspaper office.

The bomb killed 5 people (4 tourists plus the bomber), and injured some 36 more. The tension in the city in the days before the bombing was palpable as trucks of riot police roved around the neighborhood, and embassies and foreign schools closed for security reasons. The approaching Newroz celebrations, or Kurdish New Years, were slated to take place a mere 2 days after this attack in the contentious Taksim Gezi Park so recently after the resumption of military and legal hostilities between Kurdish groups and aligned leftists and the Turkish government headed by the AK Party of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This decision most certainly would promise demonstrations and conflict
between security forces and civil society around the right to the contentious park, and against the war on the Kurds both in Syria and Turkey by Erdoğan’s government.

Besides the 26A cafes, DAF includes an Anarchist Women’s collective, a publishing project in the form of the Meydan Gazette (published monthly in paper form), and a youth collective, the Lycee (or High School) Anarchist Federation called LAF. In addition it organizes arts events and projects, and participates in labor organizing and solidarity with Kurdish resistance and the Rojava Revolution. DAF also organizes in tandem though autonomously with anti-militarist and anti-conscription activists in Turkey.

Merve is an active member of the Meydan Gazette publishing crew, the Anarchist Women’s collective and also in a seperate but related anti-militarist group. Hüseyin is a main editor of the Meydan Gazette and involved in the 26A cafes. Özgür is involved in Meydan & the self-defense program and the PATIKA ecological collective.

Throughout this first hour: Merve, Hüseyin & Özgür talk about the collectivized economic and living structures of DAF and how that pans out to support collective members and build collectivized models for survival within and against capitalism.

In the second podcast episode, the interviewees discuss: PATIKA Ecological Collective and their publication, organizing with communities in the Black Sea region against a hydro-electric dam, and more; Merve’s work with the Conscientious Objector Association against militarism and conscription; Meydan Gazette and their other publication projects; the modern anarchist movement in Turkey since 1989; solidarity with Kurdish populations in Turkey; organizing material support for the Rojava Revolution and aiding in helping anarchists join the struggle there; and more. Download Pt 2

To see an article (in Turkish) about Esra Ankan, you can visit the Meydan Gazette’s article here:
http://meydangazetesi.org/gundem/2016/02/trans-tutsak-esrayla-dayanismaya/

. … . ..

Announcements

Vigil for The Pulse Shooting

******A quick announcement: There will be a vigil tonight at 9pm at Firestorm Books and Coffee at 601 Haywood Rd in West Asheville for the victims and community affected by the shooting that occurred last night in Orlando, Florida. The shooting occurred at the Gay dance club called The Pulse and media outlets are announcing that there were 50 people killed in what appears to have been a targeted attack by someone from outside of the area wielding an assault rifle and a handgun. The hostage situation that developed was ended by a SWAT invasion at 5AM this morning (6-12-1016). Come out tonight and support this community.******

Notes From Sean’s Segment

Sean Swain speaks about a comrade of his in his facility, a trans woman who was put away for defending herself against an assaulter. Her government name is Adam Bockerstette, and while she can receive mail

under her chosen name (which is Kara), we were unsure about how to spell that. So if you do choose to write to her, your letters can be addressed to Kara Bockerstette, but note that your envelopes should be addressed to:

Adam Bockerstette
#606000
PO Box 120
Lebanon, OH 45036

Also keep an eye peeled at http://seanswain.org/ for more updates about Kara and her situation.

. … . ..

Oso Blanco

Good news for our comrade on the inside, Oso Blanco, who was sentenced to 80 years in maximum security prison for a series of bank robberies and a firearms violation. Oso Blanco is someone of Cherokee descent, and has been politicized during his time in prison and before. Recently there has been a massive fundraising effort on the part of his support team to get him transferred out of his former facility, and for legal fees to get his sentenced reduced. Both of these efforts have been
successful!

Thanks to fundraising efforts and donations, they have reached their fundraising goal at this time. Of course, money will always be needed until Oso Blanco is completely free – donations are always welcome. The support in donations and spreading the word was fast and amazing! Oso Blanco has been assigned a lawyer who he feels comfortable with and he is moving quickly to make sure the motion is filed by June 25th, 2016. Communication with Oso Blanco has been iffy at best. Please write him to
show support. If you donated, write and let him know as it will help immensely to raise his spirits. If you would like to donate further, and for guidelines on what mail will and won’t get into his facility, you can visit his support website at: http://freeosoblanco.blogspot.com/

To write Oso Blanco at his new location, you can address letters to:

Byron Chubbuck
#07909051
USP Lewisburg
PO BOX 1000
Lewisburg, PA 17837

Firehawk on Female incarceration, ‘rehabilitation’, and promising radical strategies

http://unstoppable.noblogs.org/

Download This Episode

This week we spoke with Firehawk, who is an anarchist and anti prison/anti carceral state organizer based out of Colarado. In this interview we talk about her zine “Governing Bodies, Governing Souls: Female incarceration, ‘rehabilitation’, and promising radical strategies”, which came out of her experiences conducting research into increasing rates of incarceration in women’s prisons in the US. We talk about those experiences, about the zine in general, and about possible ways to be a support to incarcerated people and to anti-carceral struggles. We also talk about the various ways in which incarceration of transgender people are represented or thought about, a topic not necessarily included in the zine.

If you have any opinions about how we discussed this topic, we would love to hear them. Additionally, if you have a take on this issue that we did not touch on, or more information that we didn’t consider, please don’t hesitate to drop us an email at thefinalstrawradio@riseup.net, or you can email William Goodenuff at stormwater(a t)riseup.net, *or* you can email Firehawk at firehawk666(aat)riseup.net.

You can go check out and download a printable version of the zine, “Governing Bodies // Governing Souls” at http://insurgenttheatre.org/hackett.pdf.
If you are interested in interfacing with the WEBS class, visit the facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/websofsupport/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel. And for the Unstoppable Publication, again you can visit http://unstoppable.noblogs.org to order a copy and to learn more about this project.

. … . ..

Announcements

TRANZMISSION

There will be a volunteer interest meeting for the Asheville based group the Tranzmission Prison Project, Wed June 29th at 7pm sharp in the upstairs room of the west asheville Izzy’s at 373 Haywood Road. The Tranzmission Prison Project is a volunteer run group which sends books and zines to LGBTQI prisoners, all free of charge. To get in touch with them, you can email them at tranzmissionprisonproject@gmail.com or search for them on facebook.

. … . ..

ANTIFENIX

This was communicated to The Final Straw from our comrades in the so called Czech Republic, who have been facing government and police oppression in the form of an initiative called “Operation Fenix”, which specifically targets anarchists.

“As “Czech” Anarchist Black Cross and the AntiFenix Collective, we call for international solidarity actions against the repression of anarchists in the so-called Czech Republic. This repressive wave is labeled Operation Fenix – 8 people are accused or charged, some with possible life sentences, and with many more harassed by police, interrogated, raided, devices confiscated.

Our call for international solidarity is to support all of charged and affected, but also in particular to support Martin, an anarchist who was entrapped and accused of preparation of a terrorist attack, all planned by two state infiltrators. He has been locked away already almost 14 months in terrible conditions, and in response, he has just gone on hunger strike. Especially in places where you have Czech embassies or consulates, you can show that borders can’t stop anarchist solidarity.”

To learn more about this you can visit antifenix.noblogs.org

. … . ..

Eric King

The sentencing date for vegan anarchist prisoner, Eric King has been set for Tuesday, June 28th at 11:30am at the US District Court House in Kansas City, Missouri. Eric accepted a non-cooperating plea to federal arson charges. He was convicted of attempting to set fire to a congress-member’s office. If you’d like to attend his sentencing, it’s suggested that you arrive by 11am to Courtroom 8A at 400 East 9th St in Kansas City with a valid, state-issued ID and plan to go through a metal detetctor. There is a request for fund-raising for his expected 8-year sentence, support t-shirts, his current mailing address, details on his case and more that can be found at http://supportericking.org

. … . ..

Call in to Waupun CI in Wisconsin

The Industrial Workers of the World Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee is requesting folks to email and call Waupun Correctional Institute in Wisconsin on today and Monday, June 20th. The hunger strike involving at least 5 prisoners is focused on an end to the practice of long term solitary confinement in the state of Wisconsin. As of Sunday, today, people have been on hunger strike in Waupun for 13 days. One of the hunger strikers, Cesar De Leon, announced 6/15/16 that he is now also refusing water because Waupun’s water supply is contaminated by lead, he vomits up their water and experiences stomach pain and heart-burn when he drinks it.

Email brain.foster@wisconsin.gov
Phone 920-324-5571

If you wish to write to participating prisoners to make message of support to hunger strikers, please write to: Cesar Deleon #322800, Lamar Larry #293906, Rayshun Woods #390831, LaRon McKinley #42642, at:
Waupon Correctional Institute
P.O. Box 351
Waupon, WI 53963

Norman Green #228971 has recently been transferred to Columbia, and can be written at
Columbia Correctional Institute
P.O. Box 900
Portage, WI 53901

More details can be found on the facebook page entitled phone and email zap: support wisconsin prisoners’ hunger strike day 13 & 14: https://www.facebook.com/events/1900430210184456/

Or at https://solitarytorture.blogspot.com/

. … . ..

Playlist

An interview with a member of Koko Lepo – an autonomous youth collective in Belgrade -, an update on AntiFenix, and words from Sean Swain

Koko Lepo – Belgrade, Serbia

Download This Episode

This week we feature an interview with Freddy, who is a member of the autonomous youth collective in Belgrade, Serbia known as Koko Lepo. We speak about the origins of the collective as growing out of a self organized kindergarten primarily for Roma children, about solidarity between anarchists and Roma people in Belgrade, about some history of the region, and about the complex nature of solidarity itself.

 

It should be mentioned though, that due to a very unfortunate technical error, we lost the final 13 or so minutes of this interview, many apologies both to you – dear listeners – and to our guest. Just to give you a broad picture of what we talked about, we touched a bit more on the complex nature of actual solidarity, and made the point that sometimes so called “real” solidarity can look somewhat ordinary or boring. We also spoke more about the tour that Freddy just concluded with a stop in Asheville, and about challenges that the various audiences brought to the talks he did, in particular the question of race, racism, and ally complexes. Our guest brought up the point that there have been various conversations about this topic in the US that have not happened – or have not happened in the same way – as they have in Belgrade. He was particularly excited to engage with American audiences about this issue, and said a lot of really cool and poignant things which we are unfortunately unable to share with you. Though if you would like to write to this project you can email them at kokolepo(aat)riseup.net and get in touch with them on facebook by searching kokolepoav

However, all of this perhaps gives us the opportunity to share more in depth than we may originally have been able some of the musical projects that our guest recommended. It also bears mentioning that mutual aid in the form of money donations most often happen for this project in the form of music shows, punk, metal, hardcore, or other varieties. If you feel so moved to, please feel free to make a solidarity show in your town!

The first project we’ll share is a Roma language hip hop project called Lord Kastro with Djelem Djelem. The next is a track from a hardcore project called Katma, the singer of which is one of the co-founders of the original kindergarten. The third is another track from Gipsy Mafia (an antifa Roma hip hop group, a track from which opened up the show as well) with “Ava Kari”.

. … . ..

Announcements

Operation Fénix

Here is an update from comrades in Czech Republic:

On Friday 5-27-2016 in Pankrác remand prison anarchist Martin Ignacák accused of terrorism went on hunger strike. He did this because on 4-29-2016 the City court in Prague ruled in favour of his release from remand and the state’s attorney appealed this decision to the High court in Prague. On friday 5-27-2016 the High court in Prague extended the remand. Therefore the anarchist has decided to protest by going on hunger strike and has stopped taking in nutrition and liquids. This type of hunger strike threatens the life of the hunger striker after a week.

During the year long investigation of the preparation of a supposed terrorist attack the imprisoned anarchist has exhausted all legal options, to achieve objective procedure of the respective organs active in the criminal proceedings. None of them were taken into account. This is why he now chose this radical form of expression, to draw attention to this manipulated police case. “I consider the approach of the investigators and the police to be very problematic, it is a threat to the freedom of every human being, a threat to freedom of speech, a threat to activism that tries to lead to a better world , and this doesn’t just involve anarchists.”

Martin has been prosecuted in the so called Fénix case since April 2015, in which 5 people altogether were accused of the preparation and the failure to notify of a terrorist attack on a train. Martin is the only one who has been in remand prison this whole time and his detention has now been extended after the intervention of the state’s attorney. As a reason for the extension of remand the state’s attorney used the testimony of a police agent who infiltrated the anarchist movement in 2014. From his testimony the state’s attorney drew the conclusion that Martin might attempt to escape to Spain. Another reason, according to him, was that Martin “is connected to the so called Sít revolucních bunek/ The Network of Revolutionary Cells (SRB) and therefore also to similar organizations abroad.” The police spoke about SRB when they began Fénix and provided information to the media.” Any connections between the 5 attacks ascribed to SRB and all the detained and accused have been refuted. The investigators themselves have ruled it out” says Martin.

At the moment Martin is the second longest detained prisoner in the Pankrác remand prison. For 13 months he has been living there under conditions that negatively affect his psychological and physical state. For example he has been refused food free of animal products, which means he practically doesn’t have access to hot food. Friends, who have come to visit him have been mentioned by name in the indictment. Police from the Department for combating organized crime have started to collect information on Martin’s sister, only because she tries to support her brother in whichever way she can.

For Martin parole would mean that after 13 long months he would again see his friends, family, nature, that he wouldn’t be exposed to emotional deprivation and physical hardship.

Update Sunday, May 29th: Martin’s sister Pavla B. joined her brother in the protest and this morning she has started hunger strike herself as well.

For more information follow https://antifenix.noblogs.org/

Our past interviews on AntiFenix can be found here: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/?s=antifenix

. … . ..

playlist

Hasan on prison organizing + Free Ohio Movement; Istanbul ABC on Turkey + vegan anarchist prisoner Evcan Osman

Hasan on Free Ohio Movement + Istanbul ABC on Osman Evcan

abcistanbul.blogspot.fr/
Download this Episode

This week Bursts spoke with Imam Siddique Abdullah Hasan, one of five defendants in the Lucasville Uprising case from 1993 facing the death penalty known collectively as the Lucasville 5. Hasan, calling from Ohio State Prison supermax in Youngstown, Ohio, took the time to talk about the newly formed Free Ohio Movement, a prison organizing movement based on the Free Alabama Movement which centers on the claim that prisons in the U.S. are the current site of a continuation of slavery supposedly abolished but really upheld by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Hasan talks about prisoner labor & recidivism, claims of rehabilitation by the state and the organizing towards the September 9th nationwide prisoner strike on the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971. More on Hasan’s case can be found at http://lucasvilleamnesty.org and you can hear our previous interviews with Hasan here.

After that you’ll hear a conversation with a member of Istanbul Anarchist Black Cross, in Turkey, that Bursts conducted. The conversation talks about the political prisoner situation in Turkey, the work of IABC, and the case of vegan anarchist prisoner Osman Evcan, who
recently succeeded to win rights from the state after a 45 day hunger strike. More on IABC, in Turkish, at http://abcistanbul.blogspot.fr/

Announcements

Stanley Corbett at Alexander CI, NC

At the request of prison organizers in North Carolina, we’d like to share the following information:

Politically active prisoner Stanley Corbett (0716025) has been repeatedly harassed by COs at Alexander CI, in Taylorsville, NC, and is being denied full food portions. Upon Corbett complaining, one CO said, “Y’all n-words always complaining about something.” Then later, after filing a grievance, a different CO yelled, “Suck my (BLEEP) n-word, write that up!” Please call in to the prison at (828) 632-1331 and request the administration to feed Corbett and stop this harassment.

Again, that number is 828 632 1331 and Stanley Corbett’s number is 0716025, held at Alexander CI in Taylorsville, NC.

Save Our Roots

Here is a brief announcement from Save Our Roots: An Indigenous People’s Campaign to Protect the Sacred Biodiversity of our Natural Forests:

“[Genetically Engineered] trees pose a very real and significant threat to our natural forests and all Life on … Earth. It violates Indigenous peoples’ fundamental rights to live in harmony with nature and to practice our cultural and spiritual beliefs … The propagation and use of GE trees as a natural resource and commodity for increased pulp and energy production will compromise and destroy the delicate regenerative biodiversity and life-cycles of [the] Earth . The growing of GE trees is a risk towards: the Rights of the Earth; land tenure and subsistence rights of Indigenous Peoples; depletion of precious ground water reserves; increases the use of deadly herbicides and pesticides; continues the release of greenhouse gas emissions and microscopic pollutants; and are a false solution towards mitigating climate change.”

To learn much more about this topic, for updates on current situations and campaigns, and for interview opportunities for your media project, you can visit http://saveourroots.org/

Koko Lepo Solidarity Tour

On Thursday, May 26, 7-9pm Firestorm Books & Coffee (610 Haywood Road) will host the Anarchy & Anti-Fascism in the Balkans: Koko Lepo Solidarity Tour!
Suggested Donation (no one turned away) to help presenter with travel costs. During this time, a member of Koko Lepo autonomous youth solidarity program in Belgrade, Serbia, attendees can hear from a Koko Lepo member who is visiting the U.S. on a tour to spread awareness of autonomous, anarchist and anti-fascist/anti-racist projects and organizing going on in Belgrade and beyond!

The presenter will narrate the evolution of Koko Lepo from a free kindergarten in the defunct InexFilm squat to a broader youth program. The discussion will focus on issues of anti-ziganism (a term for prejudice against Roma/gypsies), autonomous solidarity efforts in Belgrade, the difference between charity and mutual aid, and the struggle against hierarchy; the presenter welcomes challenges and suggestions for continued solidarity and new connections.​

Koko Lepo youth solidarity collective is a mutual aid program working with the residents of “the Dump”, a ‘favela-type slum’ in Belgrade inhabited by people usually referred to as “Roma” or “Gypsies”. The collective is founded on the principles of equality and mutual aid. It is closely tied to the anarchist and antifascist scene in the Balkans and beyond.

Koko Lepo began in 2013 as a free kindergarten program in the InexFilm squat in the Karaburma neighborhood of Belgrade. Its students were picked up three to five days a week from their homes in the settlement and walked to the kindergarten where we had a three to four hour program with them before walking them back home. The program was focused on autonomy, respect for others, and making a safe space for the young children to explore their identities. We placed a strong emphasis on undermining ‘traditional’ gender dynamics and breaking down other divisions in the settlement. Over time, we developed very strong ties with our families in the settlement which allowed us to start a broader program for older children. This was called Školica and began as a weekend study program. This quickly expanded however and started to host film nights, excursions, and other activities.

When the squat was taken from us in October last year, we lost our ability to do the kindergarten so we redoubled our efforts with Školica. Now Koko Lepo occurs at least once a week all over the city with either our younger group (aged 7-10) or our older group (11-14) totaling around 50 kids (the kindergarten had another 20 or so). All of our funding comes from anarchist and antifascist groups in Europe as well as some odd individual donations here and there.

Check it out

Wild Roots Feral Futures

From http://feralfutures.wordpress.com:

We are very happy to announce that, for the 8th year running, the Wild Roots Feral Futures (WRFF) eco-defense, direct action, and rewilding encampment will take place in the forests of Southwest Colorado this coming June 18-26, 2016 (exact location to be announced). WRFF is an informal, completely free and non-commercial, and loosely organized camp-out operating on (less than a) shoe-string budget, formed entirely off of donated, scavenged, or liberated supplies and sustained through 100% volunteer effort. Though we foster a collective communality and pool resources, we also encourage general self-sufficiency, which lightens the burden on communal supplies, and which we find to be the very source and foundation of true mutual sharing and abundance.

We would like to begin by acknowledging that Wild Roots Feral Futures takes place on occupied/stolen indigenous territory, primarily of the Nuutsiu (occasionally spelled Nuciu or Nuchu, aka “Ute”) people, as well as Diné [“Navajo”], Apache, and others. In recognition of this reality and as a first step in confronting it, we seek to establish proactive working relationships with those whose stolen land we gather upon, and open the space we temporarily gather in to the centering and amplification of indigenous voices and struggles. Our understanding is that any community of resistance that doesn’t center the voices of indigenous people and put their leadership in the forefront is a movement that is part of the problem. [Read more here…]

We would like to invite groups and individuals engaged in struggles against the destruction of the Earth (and indeed all interconnected forms of oppression) to join us and share your stories, lessons, skills, and whatever else you may have to offer. In this spirit we would like to reach out to frontline community members, local environmental groups, coalitions, and alliances everywhere, as well as more readily recognizable groups like Earth First!, Rising Tide North America, and others to come collaborate on the future of radical environmentalism and eco-defense in our bio-regions and beyond.

We would also like to reach out to groups like EF!, RTNA, and the Ruckus Society (as well as other groups and individuals) in search of trainers and workshop facilitators who are willing to dedicate themselves to attending Wild Roots Feral Futures and sharing their skills and knowledge (in a setting that lacks the financial infrastructure to compensate them as they may have come to expect from other, more well-funded groups and events). We are specifically seeking direct action, blockade, tri-pod, and tree climbing/sitting trainers (as well as gear/supplies).

Regarding the rewilding and ancestral earth skills component of WRFF, we would like to extend a similar invitation to folks with skills, knowledge, talent, or specialization in these areas to join us in the facilitation of workshops and skill shares such as fire making, shelter building, edible and medicinal plants, stalking awareness, tool & implement making, etc. We are also seeking folks with less “ancestral” outdoor survival skills such as orienteering and navigation, etc.

Daily camp life, along with workshops, skill shares, great food, friends, and music, will also include the volunteer labor necessary to camp maintenance. Please come prepared to pitch in and contribute to the workload, according to your abilities. We encourage folks who would like to plug in further to show up a few days before the official start of the event to begin set-up and stay a few days after the official end to help clean up.

Site scouting will continue until early June, at which point scouts and other organizers will rendezvous, report-back their scouting recon, and come to a consensus regarding a site location. We are also planning on choosing a secondary, back-up site location as a contingency plan for various potential scenarios. Email us for more info on getting involved with scouting and site selection processes.

WRFF is timed to take place before the Earth First! Round River Rendezvous, allowing eco-defenders to travel from one to the other. Thus we encourage the formation of a caravan from WRFF to the EF! RRR (caravans and ride shares can be coordinated through our message board at feralfutures.proboards.com.

We are currently accepting donations in the form of supplies and/or monetary contributions. Please email us for details.

Please forward this call widely, spread the word, and stay tuned for more updates!

For The Wild,

~The Wild Roots Feral Futures organizers’ collective

Email: feralfutures(at)riseup(dot)net

June 11th Day of Solidarity

And now the call-out for this year’s June 11th: International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners

The podcast version of this episode includes a reading of the June 11th Statement for 2016, a rather lengthy one at about 20 minutes, prior to us playing the interview with Hasan. The text from that announcement can be found here.

For a zine version, check out this link.

May Day with Peter Linebaugh

Peter Linebaugh

Happy May Day
Download This Episode

To friends we’ve met, and to those we have yet to meet, I’d like to wish everyone a happy May Day. As we’ll hear in the following hour, this day has a long celebrated history. From its many European pagan roots as a celebration of fertility as the fruits of the spring planting season began to… uh, spring forth. Then on to the repressive winter that fell early on May 3rd and 4th of 1886 in Illinois with, first, the killing of workers striking for an 8 hour work day at the McCormick Works and then the repression of anarchist and socialist workers and organizers following the bombing at Haymarket Square in Chicago of that same year. From there to the taking up of May 1st as International Workers Day by struggling groups around the world and the U.S. adoption of a sanctioned Labor Day in September of the year.

To divide an international working class, The U.S. government, oppressors of that May Day 1886 sanctioned a Labor Day to be celebrated in September, declared the first of May both Law Day (an obvious testament to Irony in respect to the Haymarket 8, all jailed and 4 executed) and, for some, it’s celebration as Americanism Day. Whatever that means. In 2006 & 2007, immigrants rights marches were seen on and around May Days that, for many, re-sparked the importance of this day. The protests and festivals swelled to numbers nearly unmatched in the history of protest on Turtle Island, and were accompanied by school and work walkouts and boycott days.

This hour we’ll be hearing Peter Linebaugh, author of the recently printed book “The Incomplete, True, Authentic & Wonderful History of May Day” to present some of his meditations from the last 30 years but covering ancient times, through the first May Pole on Turtle Island, through to today.

The rest of the hour will feature songs that made myself and William, cohost of The Final Straw, feel a bit in the spirit of the day. Whether you’re out there today taking direct action, in repose from the horrors of wage slavery, resisting the carceral state, gardening, dancing around a May Pole or otherwise celebrating the possibilities of this year to come when, hell, we might as well end this system of exclusion and extraction: We wish you a fire on your tongue, love in your heart and free land beneath you.

May Day Across North America

Bloc Party: Fire of Beltane

. … . ..

Playlist

. … . ..

Transcription

TFSR: I’m speaking with Peter Linebaugh. Mr. Linebaugh is a Marxist, a historian, and an author. His most recent book is a compilation of essays called The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, out from PM Press. Peter, thanks for taking the time for this chat.

Peter Linebaugh: You’re welcome.

TFSR: So May Day is this coming Sunday, when we’ll be airing this episode of the show. For listeners that are out there who may not know can you sketch some of the history of this great and widely celebrated day?

PL: Yes! I like the way you say that it’s great and widely celebrated because for so many American years, it was never celebrated. The ruling class just hated that day. Because it was a day of no work. It was a day to enjoy the springtime. It was a day to go outside. Hooray, hooray! The first of May! Outdoor loving begins today. That’s the spirit of the day. It goes back to the first agricultural civilizations around the great rivers, the Neolithic Revolution. It’s springtime. It’s a time for fertility. I’m speaking from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the whole world is budding and flowering right now. I imagine that’s somewhat past in North Carolina.

TFSR: It’s a very sexy place here in North Carolina. There’s there’s pollen in the air and a lot of people are suffering from it, but…

PL: So anyways, it was a major pagan festival and survived through years of dominant religions. The State of England, under the Tudors, they forbade it. They made it criminal to hoist a maypole because people would dance around the maypole as part of community celebration and fertility, as you say.

For us in North America, the date to remember is 1627 when Thomas Morton set up a maypole in Quincy, MA, and Native American people and runaway servants and former slaves and antinomians from England, they danced around that maypole. The first poem ever made in the USA was there. I’ll quote it “with the proclamation that the first of May, at Marymount shall be kept a holy day.”

So that’s 1627. The Puritans from Boston came down and shut it down with force of arms. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a wonderful story about it, thinking it was the crossroads of American history. We could have gone one way and been happy with the maypole and the spirit that it represented among different kinds of people. Multicultural we’d say today. Or it could have gone the other way, the way of domination, hierarchy, endless war, and endless work.

That brings us to the second major aspect of the day, which we need to celebrate with a different kind of seriousness, and that’s the struggle for the eight-hour day and the massacre of socialists, anarchists, white, indigenous and African Americans in Chicago, back in 1886 at the famous scene at Haymarket. That came as a direct result of a police shooting of workers at the McCormick works. McCormick made the mechanical reaper that brought industry and machines to the earth, to the plains, to cutting grass, cutting grain. Those workers had gone on strike for an eight-hour day, and the police shot them and killed one. In response, the people of Chicago called for a meeting to discuss the issue at Haymarket, where farmers brought in hay for the horses. At that meeting, just a few days after May Day, 1886, a stick of dynamite was thrown. To this day, no one knows whether it was a police provocateur or a misguided anarchist or what. But anyway, there was casualties, including demonstrators, as well as the policemen.

As a result, tremendous repression came down all across the US, not just in Chicago. Seven people were found guilty after a kangaroo trial, and four of them were actually hanged on the 11th of November 1887. We should remember their names: Albert Parsons, we know him especially because of his wife, Lucy, who went on living and carrying the message of the eight-hour day and a workers struggle right into the 1930s. August Spies, before he hanged, he said, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangled today.” That’s been the case. Their silence is powerful, and all of us around the world celebrate and remember those workers, those martyrs, as they’re called in Mexico.

The ruling class of the United States tried to put an end to the celebration right away. They made made an into Law Day. Eisenhower did that. Then they made the workers’ holiday, Labor Day, in September to get it far away from May Day, when workers all over the world celebrated. They wanted to divide US workers from world workers.

I have to admit that they succeeded. People forgot May Day except for a few anarchists in the 1920s. Then in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the Communist Party kept up the tradition of May Day. But the Communist Party, worldwide anyway, associated the day with militarism, and it became something in the Cold War. This gives another reason why, in the United States, we’ve tended to forget that day. Until 2006, when tens of thousands of undocumented workers, most Spanish speaking, flooded the streets of Chicago again, and of Los Angeles and other towns, calling for justice for this new underclass of people denied basic rights as workers or citizens.

While I should also say, my book is called incomplete, because the hope of May Day has not been realized. We still are fighting not only for the eight hour day, but for equality, not equality of opportunity, but equality of economic conditions. I think we should fight this year to own the whole economy, not leave it just to the 1%. It should belong to us all, and we need to reconstitutionalize ourselves, reconstitute ourselves. But now I’m going off on my own views. I hope that gives your listeners some idea of the importance of May Day in the past, especially as it concerns North America.

TFSR: That was a really lovely outline that you just offered. I love the way that in the book you connect themes such as the displacement of indigenous people prior to the period, the Gilded Age of the Haymarket, when the Haymarket affair occurred, the clearing of the pastures, the killing off of buffalo and other residents of the great grasslands of the Midwest, then the connection to the McCormick works creating the reaper that just decimated the grasslands themselves.

PL: Yeah, just produced a buzz cut, didn’t it? Then as a result, we had the Dust Bowl because it was so bad for the soil: monoculture.

TFSR: The essays in the book range from 100 years after the Haymarket, basically 1986 to 2015. From the oldest to the newest, you make the claim a few times that May Day has both a green and a red side. What do you mean by this, and why do you think it’s important to remind people of that?

PL: Well, the green side now, as we’re talking in 2016, with the melting of the ice caps, the pollution of the Pacific Ocean, the destruction of species has a greater meaning, I think, than it did when I first conceived of the idea in the ‘80s. The notion of the green is the notion of photosynthesis, now that I think about it, the relationship of the sun to vegetation. Of course, vegetation is the basis of animal life, so really, all of life depends on… Well, I’m not a biologist, but a great deal of life depends on the green, depends on photosynthesis and chlorophyll. So there’s a literal meaning of green, but there’s also a symbolic meaning of green, which is the joy of living, the joy of life. In contrast to the red. Red I used signify blood and to signify struggle, especially class struggle, and thinking of the red flag of battle.

May Day is a holiday that spans both these notions. It can be both a family day of picnicking, outdoors preferably, and of dancing, and it can be a day of marching and a day of militants, a day of taking back the world that has been dis-commoned and dis-greened (if I can use that phrase), turned into asphalt, turned into concrete. So it’s had both the green and the red. I mean, the green has led to the Anthropocene. It’s led to geological changes of the planet. I think we can restore it, not to the way it was, but to the way it could be, only by a red struggle, only by a mass struggle. I believe people are are interested in that and see the necessity of it all over the world.

Anyway, so that’s kind of the red and the green, but I think it’s up to your readers and listeners to give to these symbols their own meanings from their own experience.

TFSR: Yeah, definitely you leave it with a lot of space for interpretation but draw out some lovely conclusions of your own.

How have you seen the celebration of the day change throughout your lifetime? You mentioned that the through the ‘20s it was remembered by a number of anarchists activists, and through the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s communists in the United States… Just to interject right here, my first May Day that I celebrated was in San Francisco in 2000 during the anti-globalization era, as people call it. There was a giant maypole that was raised and a number of speaker and at the same time a big open-ended pagan celebration and picnic that led to a march eventually. It was really beautiful tying together what you seem to describe as the green and the red. And the marches of 2005 and 2006, as you mentioned.

Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve seen May Day in the popular imagination during your life?

PL: Yeah, I just know my own part of it. I love to hear about that San Francisco May Day. That sounds grand and beautiful. And I love to hear about the immigrant ones, the undocumented worker ones in 2005 and 2006. For me, May Day, an important day is always May 2nd because then I tune into the radio or read the newspaper, or now I guess we have the internet, to see who else in the world has turned out. May Day was so important in bringing down apartheid in South Africa and is still a major day of struggle in South Africa. It’s that way in so many parts of the world. On May 2nd it’s just a good time to check in and see what’s going on.

But for me, it began as a historian in Rochester. We thought let’s try to have a picnic and make it a family day and have some speeches and then sing songs. That’s the way it worked there. Then later, I moved to Boston, and we had different forms of May Day. I remember in Jamaica Plain on May Day we joined a festival called Wake Up The Earth. So on all these occasions I would meet people, old timers who had participated in Union Square in New York, for instance, and in May Day celebrations of the ‘40s. Then here in Washtenaw County, in Southeast Michigan, ever since I’ve lived here, we try to have a picnic, or we have a commons, or we teach children how to dance around the maypole. This year, I think, folks for Black Lives Matter and folks from other social change outfits will probably go to Detroit to join a picnic and march in so called Motor City, which now I guess is known, not as a rust belt, but as a place of urban gardening.

It’s important to do that because the powers that be have been poisoning the waters, as you perhaps have heard of, up in Flint, MI. It’s just a crime what the rulers of our country are doing. We need to bring them to justice to pay for their crimes. Not by long prison sentences. I’m certainly not in favor of that because we need to open the prisons, if anything. But we need to find other ways of making them pay. That is, we need reparations. The main reparations that must come must restore equality. So the riches, the ill gotten gains of the 1%, either they must voluntarily turn them over, or they must be made to do it. That can only be done I think with justice and mass mobilization.

At the moment our mobilizations can’t be that great, but it’s growing. It’s growing bursts. People are wondering, “What is anarchism? What is socialism? What is the political revolution?” These are questions raised by Bernie Sanders, and not to support him, but the questions are important. The discussion that results from them is important, and May Day should be a day to have those discussions. May Day is a day when we need to think deeply about this and to do it with our neighbors. To do it with all kinds of folks, everybody, all workers, all working people who belong to our class of the precariat, students, servers need to be involved in this discussion, as well as farmworkers and undocumented workers. Undocumented workers are so important because they bring the experience of other countries, and they bring also revolutionary experience from other countries. So we have a lot to learn from them.

Anyway, so I’m hoping to learn something myself by meeting some new friends this coming Sunday in Detroit. By the way, I was asking you about the lunch counter sit-ins in North Carolina. I asked you that for a purpose because I think there was an earlier lunch counter sit-in for the same goal of integrated lunch counters here in Ann Arbor, MI, in the 1920s led by Lenore Smith from Mississippi. We learned this by studying May Day in our own locality. I urge all your listeners to study May Day in your locality, to talk to old timers, to search out the old records, even to consult the occasional historian and see what they know and what they remember to bring this back to life.

One way of doing this is a wonderful book by Dave Roediger called the Haymarket Scrapbook, which I recommend. James Green wrote a very good book too called Death in the Haymarket. These are essential readings for those who want to go back to that, those crimes at Haymarket, when the police and the state came down so heavily on the workers, their press, their leaders, and their families, and jailed and hanged so many. In some ways, it’s a sad day.

TFSR: In the Ann Arbor experience that you’re talking about, in the second to last essay you wrote between 1923 and 1928, the Negro Caucasian Club was involved in some of these strikes, right? If listeners want to pursue further.

PL: Right, just get a friendly competition going between your state and Michigan.

TFSR: Competing for who gets the title of first lunch counter sit-ins?

PL: Yes, against segregation. Because of course, the North is so full of Jim Crow, even worse in many ways.

TFSR: Yeah, just kind of a different accent…

PL: They’re not poisoning the waters down in North Carolina, as far as I can see.

TFSR: Well, I don’t know, when you get coal ash ponds that are overflowing into the rivers, or the leaking of chemicals from coal production. Or in Louisiana with cancer alley. I mean, they’re doing it to us everywhere.

PL: Yes, thank you.

TFSR: As a historian, much of your written work has focused on the idea and the history of the commons, or at least that’s an idea that you seem to have played with a lot and documented, from which we draw May Day is a pagan holiday in the European context. Can you talk a bit about what the commons were and the enclosure of that and what you think May Day opens up in terms of the opportunity of the commons?

PL: Yeah, the basic thing about what May Day opens up is that the earth belongs to all. I talked about skipping and dancing on May Day, but the Earth as our sacred habitat, the Earth as Turtle Island, the earth as a place of abundance and joy to share with all kinds of creatures. The way to celebrate that is to climb over the fence, or to go under it or around it or through it, because the enclosures, the privatization of the earth, to produce the incredibly weird fiction that a person can own the earth, or part of it, this needs to change. It’s only in the United States, really, that private property is like this and is enforced with weapons. “Keep Off” and “No Trespassing” signs. Anyone who’s flown, you look down from the air, you see that the whole land is turned into squares or rectangular grids. This is what the founding fathers did. They privatized the common, they privatized the free land where people had lived, hunted, farmed, and gathered for for centuries.

That is the commons in terms of North America, in terms of Europe, and especially England, which which I studied carefully because, well, I grew up in England, and thats what I studied and taught. The enclosure of the village commons, the enclosure of common field agriculture, became the basis of the capitalist mode of production, as we say. It began under Henry the Eighth, who everybody knows because he killed his wives. But he’s the one who took a fifth of English land and sold it off, privatize it, just the way George Washington and them did several hundred years later in the 1790s to North America. They surveyed it with a theodolite and the tools of the surveyor, laid down their lines, and said, “This is mine,” and threw off everyone else who had lived on it. Thus creating the proletariat, as well as agribusiness.

But the commons are a basis of community. People long for community, they long for useful work, so they long for the commons, to share the earth and to share the means of subsistence, the means of production. This is what I meant earlier, when I said, “We demand the whole economy.” Because we really need to rest, to stop being quite so busy, to stop driving for profit, stop driving for “development,” to stop driving for “progress.” Progress for whom? Progress for the 1%. The rest of us need to rest. This is why Sunday and May Day is so important. There used to be hundreds of holidays every year, but the capitalist enterprise and puritanical beliefs shut down those holidays. We’re lucky to have… I was gonna say one a weeK——Sunday, but that’s not even true anymore.

So, community, time of work, is all tied to the commons. It’s not an accident that Henry the Eighth was a wife beater, wife killer. According to documents of his own age, he killed 78,000 people on the gallows. This isn’t the demonize him particularly, but it’s to show at the birth of the modern British state, its project was misogynist, it was enclosing, and then it became slaving. These are the basis of capitalism as we know it. Misogyny, or patriarchy, enclosure, or destruction of the commons, and privatization and slavery. I hope everyone has a great May Day.

TFSR: I really hope so too. Well, thanks for the inspiring conversation. I guess we should maybe get out there and start commoning, right?

PL: Well, people are doing it all over. We have to do it just to survive. Whether we like it or not, whether it’s ideological or not. Poverty requires us to. Either that or suicide. On that happy note… [laughs]

TFSR: Well, Peter, thanks a lot for talking. I enjoyed the book and look forward to reading more of your stuff. Have a great time up in Michigan.

Announcement from Asheville Anti-Racism and an interview on LGBT+ anarchist struggle in Berlin

LGBT and Anarchist Struggle in Berlin

Asheville AntiRacism
Download this Episode

We open with an announcement from Asheville Anti-Racism, which is a far-right-watch group here in Asheville. There is a benefit show tonight (4/17/2016) at the Odditorium in Asheville, NC to raise funds for an anti-fascist, anti-KKK march just outside of Atlanta, GA next Saturday the 23rd. Every year, fascists march on Stone Mountain in Georgia, and every year there is anti-fascist presence. Let’s make this a year to remember!

Announcements

A few prison updates from the U.S.:

Since April 4th, prisoners in at least 4 Texas prisons have been on strike for better conditions and an end to slavery and human rights abuses. This strike is but the latest in a nationwide mass movement inside prisons for dignity and freedom. Minimum wage in Texas prisons is 00/hr. Access to medical care requires a $100 medical copay.

Striking prisons have been put on lockdown in an attempt to “conceal the strike” and the battle of wills is being daily tested by the inhumanity of the administration. No lights, two peanut butter sandwiches a day, no phone, mail or visitation from the outside world. And likely far worse.

Since the strike’s inception, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice TDCJ) has been trying to contain the strike and paint the strikers as causing harm to inmates and families. Threatening additional lockdowns, forced transfers, violence. Even a statewide lockdown.

The Incarcerated Workers Organzing Committee, IWOC, believes TDCJ’s actions to be an intentional, routine tactic. “They are trying to change who the enemy is,” said Nick Onwukwe, Co-Chair of IWOC and a former prisoner. “Trying to get you believe the enemy isn’t the slave master, it’s the slave who sits down and says – enough.”

Increasingly lockdowns are becoming reality. Already there are additional lockdowns at Jester III, Dalhart, and Beto, partial lockdowns at Coffield and Allred, and a confirmed order for lockdown at Michael for this morning, April 16th. Is the strike spreading? Will TCDJ’s tactics backfire? We may be at a tipping point.

IWOC and prisoners, family & supporters are requesting shows of solidarity from the outside. If you hate slavery in the U.S. under the guise of the Prison Industrial Complex there are a few suggestions on getting involved: contact family and friends in prison and clue them in to the strikes; organize a local group to engage folks in jail and prison and hear their concerns; talk to your neighbors, church-mates, schoolmates, coworkers who may have folks on the inside and talk about what’s going on; join the call in campaigns or demonstrate outside a facility.

More info from the IWW Incarcerated Workers’ Organizing Committee (IWOC) can be found at their webpage, iwoc.noblogs.org, and they can be reached at : 816-866-3808 or iwoc@riseup.net Visit the site to find phone numbers and addresses to direct grievances about the treatment of Texas prisoners and continued conditions of enslavement in the U.S. prison complex

In related news, on April 9, 2016 3 prisoners at David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, Louisiana went on hunger strike. The three were also on what is called “extreme suicide,” which is where they place you in FULL RESTRAINTS (chains) – that is, shackles and handcuffs attached to a waist chain. This is done for days at a time. They are also on “strip” –dressed only in a paper gown.

The torturous punitive conditions here at David Wade Correctional Center have gone on long enough. The sadistic practices by security and the administration are a violation of human rights and decency.

The administration has admitted to the infliction of corporal punishment against prisoners on lockdown. Just now as I write, they sprayed a prisoner while he was on his knees and struck him several times. They also sprayed and beat another prisoner who is mentally ill and has been on . for over a year. He has also been on food loaf for a long time.

A letter from a prisoner at DWCC in Homer suggested “Please call if you can – just a phone call will spook them. Thank you!:
Department of Corrections Secretary James M. LeBlanc, 225-342-6740
Deputy Secretary Eugene Powers, 225-342-6744
Undersecretary Thomas Bickham, 225-342-6739”

For more information on this, you can visit http://sfbayview.com/2016/04/urgent-call-to-support-tortured-hunger-stri…

Finally, notes from 2 prisoners in the North Carolina prison system requesting help:

Kevin Cox is a politically active prisoner struggling at the moment just to be able to receive mail and contact from the outside. He asked that this statement be shared with anyone who might care to help call in to the prison. Since he wrote this, he’s been transferring to Marion CI,
but is still facing the same issues.

Greetings, Shalom Aleyka, Salaam Alaykum, Amani,

My name is Kevin Cox #1217063. I’m a political prisoner who’s being housed in Bertie Correctional Institution, in Windsor, NC. Since my incarceration I’ve dedicated my life to the struggle by fighting for the rights of prisoners, human rights for all oppressed people and rights for LGBTQ. Also I’m a dedicated member of the Black liberation movement and a member of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party [distinct from the New Black Panther Party], which is a legal aboveground political organization. At Bertie Corrections, I’m being treated like a ‘slave’ because of my political beliefs, my continuous activism in educating prisoners and my refusal to be submissive to Bertie Correction’s oppressive rules and regulations, which correlates to division, miseducation, provoking Black on Black violence, and racism.

As a result of my resistance, they [officers and staff] have stopped the flow of mail that comes from outside support such as family, friends, and comrades, have prevented me from recieving books, pamphlets, and newspapers, and have even denied me my “due process right” to be notified of the censorship of my property. The SRG [Security Risk Group] intelligence officers read my mail, that is stamped “legal,” without my being present, when my legal mail usually refers to my criminal case, law suits, etc. And the SRG officers are trying to “SRG” me, after I adamantly disavowed and denied any affiliation with any SRG group.

I’m telling you this because I need your help. I want to start a telephone/fax campaign to the administration demanding that they quit these egregious tactics that violate my constitutional rights.

Marion CI (Ask for Lt. Daniel Merrill and Cpt. Michael Long)
(828) 659-7810

NC Director of Prisons
George Solomon, (919) 838-4000

Jimmy Milton is an active voice in prison struggle at Bertie Ci, and has faced repeated violation of religious rights as a Hebrew-Israelite. He has not been provided Kosher meals, was not allowed to participate in Passover, and has not been able to order relevant religious materials. According to Jimmy, “I’ve already filed my grievance here at the facility and my next step is my hunger strike. The people I need for you to call and speak to are as follows:

Bertie CI Superintendant Herring or Asst. Superintendant Clark (252) 794-8601

More info on prisoner resistance in the U.S. and how to engage it can be found at http://supportprisonerresistance.noblogs.org

Also, for a first hand account by anarchist prisoner Michael Kimble who’s warehoused in the Alabama prison system, on the recent riots and ongoing struggles of prisoners there as well as organizing by the Free Alabama Movement, check out http://anarchylive.noblogs.org

This week we air an interview which was recorded at the latest international anarchist radio conference in Berlin this year. This interview is with an anarchist who is very active in LGBTQI struggle in that city, and we speak about the history of feminism and trans activism in Berlin as well as the problem of trans-misogyny in feminist and queer scenes, plus many more topics. You can see more about what our guest is talking about at http://www.transinterqueer.org/

This audio was made at a long standing leftist and anarchist space called Friedel 54, which is gearing up to fight an impending eviction. You can see more about this at https://friedel54.noblogs.org/, which is in German but gets run through a translator pretty well.

UNControllables: UNC Chapel Hill anarchist student group on organizing, austerity & community

UNControllables

https://www.facebook.com/carolinaUNControllables
Download This Episode

This week, Bursts spoke with members of the University of Chapel Hill-based student group called The UNControllables. Created in 2012, the UNControllables regularly present anarchist, feminist, anti-racist and anti-authoritarian presenters from around the world to speak to the student body and members of the community, organize around student issues, incarceration, reproductive health, and much more. For the hour, members of the group talk about what they’ve done and upcoming events they’ll be hosting, in particular an upcoming event with CeCe McDonald, a Black Trans Woman & LGBTQ activist who went to prison for defending herself against a hate attack by a white man with a swastika tattoo on his chest and served about 19 months. She’ll be at UNC Chapel Hill at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture & History for free on Monday, March 21st at 7pm. Check the UNControllables’s fedbook page for details and updates.

A major focus of the discussion is the student and faculty opposition to the incoming president of the UNC systems, Margaret Spellings (#SpellCheck) this Tuesday at 11AM. The UNControllables knew of students at 7 of the 17 universities in the UNC system where student walkouts would lead to teach-ins and or protests around privatization of education and university services, threats to the continued cultures of Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCU) and Native Universities in the UNC system. Spellings past as former Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush and was a prime mover in the No Student Left Behind project, a former Senior Advisor at the Boston Consulting Group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a former Board member of the University of Phoenix (facing lawsuits by former students), advisor to Ceannate (a for-profit student loan collection agency)… wow. There’s also a discussion of current relations between UNC system and faculty, adjuncts and employees in these times of growing precarity. Aramark Industries, which provides “services” within the many prisons, detention centers and jails around the U.S. produces the food at UNC Chapel Hill, interestingly.

Some faculty and adjuncts in the UNC system have been organizing under the name of Faculty Forward – NC.

We also present a couple of announcements:

Anarchist prisoner Eric King has accepted a non-cooperating plea deal, which he;ll sign on March 3rd. If you’re in Kansas City, MO & want to attend his hearing on Thursday at 1:30pm (or for other updates on his case) check out http://supportericking.wordpress.com

A request for letters supporting parole for accused former Black Liberation Army militant and New Afrikan activist and accupuncturist, Dr. Mutulu Shakur (written by the doctor) is up on http://mutulushakur.com along with information of his recent denial of release after serving 30 years since his arrest on February 12th, 1986.

Thursday, March 3rd at 6pm at Firestorm , 610 Haywood Rd, Asheville, NC 28806, the Political Prisoners Letter Writing Night will be holding a do-over for the January 22nd Trans Prisoner Day of Solidarity letter-writing night that was cancelled due to snow storms. Envelopes, paper, pens & postage will be provided. Check out the facebook event put on by Tranzmission Prison Project for more details.

Finally, there is a request for folks to seign a petition to Attorney General Loretta Lynch on behalf of Eddie Africa of the Move 9 following his 2 year hit during his recent parole hearing. The petition demands a federal investigation into the injustice and endangerment faced by the Move 9 To check it out, go to http://causes.com/campaigns/92454-free-the-move-9

Playlist

Breaking Loose: a conversation with Ron Sakolsky

Ron Sakolsky on Surrealism & Anarchy

http://littleblackcart.com/books/anarchy/breaking-loose
Download This Episode

This week’s episode features a conversation with Ron Sakolsky. Ron is a poet, an anarchist, a surrealist, a pirate radio broadcaster and author and more. Recently, Little Black Cart published a small book by Ron Sakolsky entitled Breaking Loose: Mutual Acquiescence or Mutual Aid? The essay is an anarcho-surrealist critique in which Ron levels a challenge to readers to move past (or break free) from the limitations we internalize from engaging with and within (as well as with others within) the systems of domination. In the conversation, Ron revisits the essay, breaks down some terminology and eggs the listener on to exercise their imagination and act from places of inspiration to apply direct action against the status quo. The essay it’s built off of can be found in Modern Slavery #1.

During the hour, we discuss that book, we chat about radio and Ron’s 30 years of radio experience starting in college radio in IL, later involved in the pirate station called Black Liberation Radio, publishing and promoting the building of micro-broadcast transmitters, and currently with Radio Tree Frog in the forests of Coast Salish Territories AKA British Colombia. He contributed to and edited the titles Seizing The Airwaves: A Free Radio Handbook (AK Press, 1998) and Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada (New Star Books, 2010). A sample of featuring mostly content from the “Old Pal” show on Tree Frog radio is found here: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tree+frog+radio&t=ffsb&ia=videos&iai=CACQMFIi9Pk

But first this announcement:

From The International Coalition to Free The Angola 3 we have some breaking news on Albert Woodfox, aka Shaka Cinque. From Friday, April 19, 2016:

“Just moments ago, Albert Woodfox, the last remaining member of the Angola 3 still behind bars, was released from prison 43 years and 10 months after he was first put in a 6×9 foot solitary cell for a crime he did not commit. After decades of costly litigation, Louisiana State officials have at last acted in the interest of justice and reached an agreement that brings a long overdue end to this nightmare. Albert has maintained his innocence at every step, and today, on his 69th birthday, he will finally begin a new phase of his life as a free man.

In anticipation of his release this morning, Albert thanked his many supporters and added: “Although I was looking forward to proving my innocence at a new trial, concerns about my health and my age have caused me to resolve this case now and obtain my release with this no-contest plea to lesser charges. I hope the events of today will bring closure to many.”

Over the course of the past four decades, Albert’s conviction was overturned three separate times for a host of constitutional violations including prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate defense, racial discrimination in the selection of the grand jury foreperson, and suppression of exculpatory evidence. On June 8th, 2015, Federal Judge James Brady ordered Albert’s immediate release and barred the State from retrying Albert, an extraordinary ruling that he called “the only just remedy.” A divided panel of the 5th Circuit Court of appeals reversed that order in November with the dissenting Judge arguing that “If ever a case justifiably could be considered to present ‘exceptional circumstances’ barring re-prosecution, this is that case.” That ruling was on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court when news of his release broke.

On behalf of the Angola 3 – Albert Woodfox, Robert King, and in memory of Herman Wallace – we would like to sincerely thank all the organizations, activists, artists, legal experts, and other individuals who have so graciously given their time and talent to the Angola 3’s extraordinary struggle for justice. This victory belongs to all of us and should motivate us to stand up and demand even more fervently that long-term solitary confinement be abolished, and all the innocent and wrongfully incarcerated be freed.”

For our 2014 interview with Malik Rahim about the case of the Angola 3, check out our blog

Playlist