Notes from the US: July
Louis Further rounds up the news from the US you may have missed in the month of July.
Violence
Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan, on whose imprisonment Freedom has reported recently, was freed from Rikers Island jail in New York City in July. A short time afterwards a report by the ‘New York Times’ exposed the extent of brutal attacks by prison officers there. New York city’s health department carried out a secret study and found that abuse was widespread and routine. Over an 11-month period in 2013, ‘serious injuries’ were inflicted by staff on as many as 129 prisoners. In 77% of cases, the prisoner had a mental illness. (Rikers now houses approximately the same number of mentally ill people as all 24 psychiatric hospitals in New York state combined.) Typical seems to be one instance when jailers intervened to stop a prisoner from hanging himself. But he was forced to lie face down on the floor and punched so hard that he suffered a perforated bowel and needed emergency surgery. Another prisoner was beaten so badly that he nearly died. Continue reading
Notes from the US: Economics, Violence and Environment
Louis Further rounds up the news from the USA you may have missed.
Environment
A review published in mid-June by the Associated Press found that the Obama administration does not inspect four out of every ten new high-risk oil and gas wells. It seems that The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been so overwhelmed by the current increase in fracking that it has not been able to keep up with the numbers of ‘regular’ oil wells still needing oversight; these include those near national forests and fragile watersheds. Even a former BLM field officer called the situation “a disaster waiting to happen”.
In mid July over a million gallons of saltwater from oil drilling operations in North Dakota leaked from a pipeline on a Native American reservation; the area covered is almost two miles. The leak by Crestwood Midstream Services has killed vegetation and may have reached a bay connected to a drinking water source for the Fort Berthold reservation. Continue reading
Notes from the US: Racism, Politics, Violence and Economy
Monthly roundup on the state of the USA by Louis Further Continue reading
Notes from the US
Crime
Ex vice-president Cheney’s former oil company, Halliburton, pleaded guilty in late September to destroying evidence after the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. A former Halliburton manager also faces a new charge of destroying computer simulations after… Continue reading
Notes from the US
Occupy The Occupy movement continues to gain momentum; though its focus and – perhaps – its lack of the kinds of analysis which anarchists favour are similar in the United States to those shortcomings in the UK. Evictions and violence… Continue reading
“Bring the fire here!”
No Borders activists work in solidarity with migrants who struggle against the border regime. We want to strengthen links between this resistance and the wider discontent seen on Britain’s streets against commodification and police harassment.
Here, we make the argument… Continue reading
Notes from the US
Economics
What some even inside the United States are seeing as a global movement was first manifested in New York from mid September as ‘Occupy Wall Street’. Within a few days, similar protests (at the greed and corruption of the… Continue reading
Brixton Riots, April 1981
To mark the 30th anniversary of the Brixton riots we reproduce an eye witness account by the ‘We Want to Riot, Not To Work Collective’
By now the social and economic background to the Brixton riots will be familiar to… Continue reading
Big Fat Gypsy Racism
The Theft of the Commons is one of those times in history when many of us think, “wish we could’ve stopped that”. It was an episode marking out capitalism as an emerging force. Along with the many other side effects,… Continue reading
Who’ll defend the League?