“The main portion of the episode features an interview with Alvaro Luna Hernandez, a Chicano political prisoner serving a 50 year sentence in Texas for disarming a Sheriff who pulled a gun on him, and then fleeing. Mr. Hernandez speaks about his case, his legal history, his political development, and his imprisonment. Special thanks to the Central Texas Anarchist Black Cross for this material. More info on Alvaro can be found at”: https://denverabc.wordpress.com/prisoners-dabc-supports/political-prisoners-database/alvaro-luna-hernandez/
After that, we hear recent metal releases by Mar and Soror.
Prior to the main portion of this week’s episode, we hear a Sean Swain segment and also Ben Turk comes on to talk about difficulties Sean’s currently facing (for instance beginning a hunger strike on Monday due to shenanigans by officials at OSP, where Sean is being held, and possibly JPAY (the company that contracts communication with Ohio’s DRC) that have limited his communications again.
The majority of this week’s episode is a conversation with incarcerated members of the Free Alabama & Mississippi Movements. The FAMMC (now including inmates in California as well) is an inmate-drive non-violent, civil disobedience movement with the goal of bettering the situations of prisoners, challenging the profits of prison corporations and departments of correction, ending the impunity of wardens and guards and abolishing the “new slavery” of mass incarceration in the U.S.
Due to the poor connection with the guests, some of the audio is difficult to hear, so a transcript should be posted in a few days at ashevillefm.org/the-final-straw where this post can be found and later at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org (oh yeah? where is that, now?)
Melvin Ray (aka Bennu Hannibal Ra(y)-Sun) at St. Clair Correctional Facility/SCCF and R.EARL (aka Kinetic Justice Amun) at Holman/HCF near Atmore, AL, two founders of the Free Alabama Movement along with a member of the Free Mississippi Movement break down mass incarceration, the forms of struggle they’re taking, the economic underpinning to prison labor and prison privatization, issue of sanitation, diet, cost to inmates and family of incarceration, assault and rape in Women facilities, networking across state borders… M & Kinetic also talk about the recent lock-downs at their facilities.
An upcoming way for folks around the country to get involved in this movement is to share the information of the FAMMC with folks on the inside and try to help them to get involved in the movement. Keep up on the upcoming pushes to protest at and outside of prisons around Alabama, Mississippi and more by checking out their facebook and twitter pages. These groups are planning to focus demonstrations and campaigns against McDonalds Restaurants (which use prison labor to make it’s burger patties, uniforms and more) and other businesses that are all around us that contract prisoner labor to make a profit.
These folks run a weekly (often up to 3 times a week) podcast-radio show called The People’s Platform that can be listened to and called into when live or found as archives. More on this show can be found at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/freealabamamovement
A recent report about the violence (sexual and otherwise) perpetrated by officials against the prisoners at the Juliet Tutwiler Women’s Facility in Alabama (at which the current warden of St. Clair, Curtis Davenport, who’s overseen this rise of violence was once an official), check out this US DOJ report from January of last year: http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/spl/documents/tutwiler_findings_1-17-14.pdf
“This week features a conversation with attorney, educator and trans activist, Dean Spade about his new book, “Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the limits of law”, just out from South End Press. Normal Life is a finalist for the 2012 Lambda Literary Awards. Follow Mr. Spade’s writing at http://www.deanspade.net/”
In the conversation, we discuss “mainstreaming” efforts by liberal LGBTQI organizations towards pressing for same-sex marriage, removal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, hate crimes legislation and other reformist measures in the U.S. Dean contrasts these efforts and visions with abolitionism. We also discuss calls for justice in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin, attempts to reform aspects of the Prison Industrial Complex and discuss Foucaultian models of power in society.
Following the interview, we featured tracks from Skaphe, Youth Avoiders, Oblivionation and more for the last half of an hour.
This week William speaks with V, who is an anarchist living in Bloomington IN about current and former instances of racist and institutional violence against inmates at the Pendleton Correctional Institution in Madison County, Indiana. Folks are organizing a call in day from 11am-1pm EST on Monday, September 8th. People are asked to flood the central office and the mail room to protest repression against radical and New Afrikan organizing in the form of severe restrictions to mail and communication, among many other things.
(317) 233-6984 for the DOC central office.
The Pendleton mail room supervisor can be reached at (765) 778-2107 extn.1264
To learn more about this issue, and for updates you can visit
indianaqps.noblogs.org
This week we get to speak with Amélie Trudeau and Fallon Rouiller. Amelie and Fallon, alongside Carlos Lopez Marin, make up the 5E3, who are being charged by the mexican state for an arson of a Nissan dealership and the neighboring ministry of communication and transportation in January of this year. We talk about prison, freedom, dignity, solidarity and more. For more info on the case of the 5E3, check out our episode of August 10th, 2014, where you can find links to sources of their writings and updates.
This episode features two conversations. The first is with Ben Turk, anarchist, playwrite and prison abolitionist. We chat briefly about the upcoming North American Anarchist Black Cross conference in Colorado, about what folks can expect if they go and how to support the event.
After that, a conversation with Alexander Abbasi. Alex is a Palestinian-American from Los Angeles, an activist in the BDS (that’s boycott, divest and sanctions movement against the Israeli occupation of Palestine) and a student at Harvard’s divinity school. We talk about decolonization, the uprisings in Ferguson, the struggle to liberate Palestine from the occupation by Israel and what solidarity and liberation might look like.
Initially, when I (Bursts) contacted Alex for this conversation I was attempting to suss out what anarchists in Palestine had to say about the siege of Gaza by Israel, the national question, what Anarchism looked like to them and what how that might differ from the U.S. context. That’s a conversation I’m still looking to have. Alex was kind enough to have a conversation but it went in a different, albeit worthwhile direction as is clear when one listens to the questions that I ask. We hope that you enjoy it. The second half of it will be featured in an upcoming episode and will be linked here soon.
It’s been a week since the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. The images and sounds of the struggle in the streets have ripped open the mainstream media to dialogue around police use of force, discrepancies between how different races and classes in the U.S. experience that force and the lack of transparency and legitimacy on behalf of law enforcement. Solidarity has been expressed from communities around the world, even by folks in Gaza, with the people of Ferguson and the family of Mr. Brown who’ve suffered this loss and continually live under the gun of the state in Missouri.
This week we talk to Luka, a white anarchist from St. Louis who’s been going to Ferguson and meeting folks and being in the streets with them, building relationships. Ferguson is a majority black city whose police force is 94% white. Luka talks about their experience of conversation with and struggle alongside of folks from a personal more than political standpoint, across racial lines. Luka gives a narrative of the days between the shooting of Mike Mike through Friday evening (08/15/14), when we spoke. There’s discussion of police and protest tactics and how they’ve changed in the face of a week of gassing and rubber bullets met with molotovs and rocks.
This week’s episode is LITERALLY packed solid. We start off with an announcement about the case of Luke O’Donovan’s trial beginning on August 11th at 9AM at the Superior Court of Fulton County, 136 Pryor Street, S.W., Suite C-640, Atlanta, GA. Luke’s support is asking for folks who want to get his back to show up in court attire and be present for the court date. Luke is facing 5 attempted homicide charges stemming from injuring the 5 men attacking him as he was being queer bashed in Atlanta on New Years of 2013. More info and the callout can be found at http://LetLukeGo.wordpress.com
Next, a quick announcement about an upcoming benefit for and presentation about the 5E3, three anarchists (Amelie, Fallon and Carlos) accused of using molotov cocktails to damage a Nissan dealership and the Ministry of Communication and Transportation in Mexico City on the 5th of January. A supporter of the 5E3 will be speaking about their case on Sunday, August 10th at Rosetta’s Kitchen (Upstairs) at 8pm. August 10th is also known as Prisoner’s Justice Day and witnesses yearly hunger strikes across the convict race serving time across Canada in remembrance of all prisoners who’ve died of unnatural causes while incarcerated. More info at http://fuegoalascarceles.wordpress.com/in-english-information/
Our first segment (after Sean’s words of wisdom) is a conversation with D, an anarchist and prison abolitionist from West Virginia to update us about the Elk River chemical spill from January of this year. We talk about the West Virginia Clean Water Hub and the project it recently spawned, Voices From South Central WV. Voices from South Central is working to amplify the voices of prisoners at the main jail in Charleston, WV. The project began as a way of gauging and presenting (in prisoners own words) the effects of the water crisis on those incarcerated and how the administration dealt with health effects it caused and worked (or didn’t) to provide clean water to those they jailed. http://storiesfromsouthcentralwv.com/
For our past coverage of the spill, check out: http://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/?s=west+virginia
Finally, we air another great segment from Anarchistisches Radio Berlin. This time A-Radio speaks with members of the Greek political Hip Hop group Social Waste. The discussion ranges from chat about the development of Hip Hop in Greece, where it overlaps with politics, immigrant solidarity, anti-capitalism and anti-fascism as currently practiced in Greece.
This week’s episode features the rest of a conversation with Layla AbdelRahim about her recent book, Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education. We played the start of this conversation near the end of last week‘s show and continue it throughout this hour. Layla talks about education, domestication, patriarchy, capitalism, instrumentalism, empathy and much more. More of her writings can be found at http://layla.miltsov.org/
Sean Swain’s segment this week talks about ISIL/ISIS, the crisis in Iraq and revisits the stupidity and cruel ignorance of U.S. intervention into Iraq since the 1980’s.
2nd, “On March 21st, 2012 Higinio Ochoa III aka w0rmer, was arrested and charged with hacking law enforcement agency websites and posting the personal information of police officers online, as well as being accused of defacing a government website in Alabama. Hig was part of an Anonymous crew called the Cabincr3w.” (Anon-Sweden support page). w0rmer will be released into a halfway house after 2 years of incarceration this August, however he’ll be forced to live in Austin, TX, 4 hours from where his wife and now-1-year-old son live. Support folks are trying to raise $6,000 to help cover the move and some living expenses until both find gainful employment in Austin. More info at: http://www.youcaring.com/other/help-the-ochoa-family-to-reunite/190052
This week’s episode features a workshop by Mel Bazil, an indigenous Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en organizer, sovereigntist, and anarchist of the Unist’ot’en Action Camp. For folks in the listening audience, Unist’ot’en is located on unceded native lands in so-called British Colombia, Canada. More about the Unist’ot’en Action Camp can be found at unistotencamp.com
This audio is from an almost hour and a half presentation that Mel gave on Saturday the 24th of May at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfaire, entitled “Anarchy, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Decolonization.” Many thanks to CKUT Radio in Montreal for sharing this content with the Final Straw. More info on CKUT can be found at www.ckut.ca
This week we’ll be presenting the first of two parts of Mel’s presentation, the second will be aired in coming weeks and linked together on the Final Straw website soon.
Firstly though, an announcement about the health of longterm political prisoner, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson. The following text was found at http://rashidmod.com, where one can seek further updates on the situation.
