Monthly Archives: January 2019

Carolyn Saulson (Feb. 24, 1948 – Jan. 14, 2019) passed away after a long battle with cancer at the age of 70. A resident of Berkeley, California, she was the board president and a founder of Iconoclast Productions, a Bay Area media arts non-profit serving the Black community. Homegoing services will be held at the Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, CA 94611 – quiet reflection on Monday, Feb. 4, 3-5 p.m., and funeral service Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2-4 p.m.

Aramark serves pre-cooked, freeze-dried, dehydrated, processed and mechanized meals and uses the DOC offenders to operate its company with free labor. The offenders cook, serve and clean under DOC’s supervision and Aramark maintains a skeletal staff of less than five employees in total, and one at any given time. The prison recently had an audit, which it failed in its food service department.

Alterra Home Loans, one of the largest minority-owned mortgage companies in the U.S. and a national mortgage lender focused on serving underserved markets, announced today that its Legacy Division will be renamed Legacy Home Loans, and it will remain under the direction of President Ben Slayton. The new name is designed to focus more on the company’s mission, Slayton said.

A funny voice over from scenes of GTA5. I have been watching this guy for awhile. He also plays video games if...

  455 Fell Street 72 Affordable Rental Units available at 455 Fell Street. Rents range from studio $1,187, one-bedrooms $1,306-$1,351 two-bedrooms $1,502 and three-bedrooms $1,647 per month. Maximum...

Much of the argument surrounding the controversy is that R. Kelly’s victims have given themselves to him willingly. But I am here today to tell you that a 14-year-old cannot consent, does not understand the consequences of following powerful men into dark places. My abuser’s only power was the power he had over me. And yet, I was utterly powerless on that bitter day to fight back, to find a will of my own. Can you imagine how much power and control a man of R. Kelly’s status and wealth must have over his victims?

On New Year’s Eve, the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) went to the polls to choose their next president, parliament and provincial governments. I spoke to Maurice Carney, executive director of Washington, D.C.-based Friends of the Congo, about the results.

When Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s new purportedly progressive district attorney, took office last January, he vowed to unflinchingly make the office’s goal “seeking justice,” instead of just seeking convictions, as a string of DAs going back to at least Ed Rendell had done. Last week, faced with a decision calling for real courage, Krasner flinched.

Just weeks after it was revealed that six previously undisclosed boxes of files labeled “Mumia” were allegedly “discovered” in an abandoned furniture closet in Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office, hundreds of boxes of prisoner’s files have also been found. A Jan. 18 “supplementary verification” from the DA’s Post-Conviction Relief Act Unit (PCRA) revealed that files from imprisoned journalist and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case were among hundreds of other boxes hidden in a storage room. Supporters of Abu-Jamal say the contents could prove malfeasance and lead to dismissal of charges and the release of Abu-Jamal and other defendants.

 

Lording over the landscape like giant -- Insects sucking soul, blood, chocolate -- into multi-colored mushrooms -- Metastasizing citywide. -- Officers ordering vacant storefronts, -- lined up like soldiers, to make money, -- while brothers with cupped hands -- platoon on plastic crates at entrances to -- $4-a-cup coffee shops with belligerent baristas.

Late Friday, a federal judge found that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is systemically violating the due process rights of prisoners. The judge ruled that CDCR is violating the Constitution by repeatedly relying on unreliable and even fabricated confidential information to send California prisoners to solitary confinement. The court also found CDCR is using constitutionally flawed gang validations to deny people in prison a fair opportunity for parole.

At our council retreat in San Diego Jan. 18, during the presentation on how to correct the low 1 percent participation of African Americans in Caltrans contracting in the midst of a 17.9 percent DBE accomplishment, a council member made a comment that has made me feel compelled to clarify why this council is in existence. I know that most of us, particularly newer council members, may believe that we are here because we are qualified contractors, but in this country, with its inherent institutional discrimination where qualifications of certain ethnic groups don’t matter, we are here to pursue equality and equal opportunity, known as civil rights, for all classified minorities and women.

It is our intention to transform “prison slaves” into respected and productive members of the international proletariat movement. As a proletarian, YOU, the sister or brother sitting on your bunk, or in your cubicle, or in the day room reading this essay – YOU are a WORKER and not a SLAVE. Your lives matter, and you have great potential to be an extremely productive and successful member of the new society we are struggling to create.

On Oct. 27, 2018, a group of homeless people moved to a vacant city-owned lot in East Oakland. They named this encampment “Housing and Dignity Village”; it was a drug-free site for sober, unsheltered women and their families. But on Nov. 7, 2018, the city posted a 72-hour notice for them to leave. On Nov. 9, 2018, Housing and Dignity Village sued the city asking that they not be evicted from the site. Their case was called Miralle v. City of Oakland.

FDU-Inkingi, the United Democratic Forces of Rwanda, a coalition of groups opposed to the current Kagame regime, condemns the murder of five prisoners in Huye Prison in the night of Jan. 23, 2019, allegedly for their attempt to escape. It calls on the government to end this barbarism that has become common in detention at police stations and government prisons.

Venezuela and the Bolivarian Revolution that has empowered the country’s poor and working class is under assault by a U.S.-orchestrated coup effort. Join us for a forum on Tuesday, Jan. 29, at 7 p.m., to learn the facts about Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, the U.S. attempts at overthrowing the democratically elected government of Nicolás Maduro and what we can do to fight back. A video of the San Francisco March in Solidarity with Venezuela will be shown at this event.

Early Saturday, Jan. 12, activists and artists gathered in a theater at the historic Redstone Labor Temple to advocate for the preservation of one the largest community centers for justice organizing in San Francisco. The Mission Economic Development Agency placed a bid of $18 million in December to purchase the Redstone and allow the current nonprofits to operate in the area. If the current owner accepts the MEDA bid, the building could be preserved as a place for low-budget nonprofit organizations in the Mission for the foreseeable future.

History has shown that the individual, disunited voices of incarcerated people will always fall on the deaf ears of prison officials, which ensures that our misery and suffering behind the walls will continue unabated. So we, the incarcerated class here at Greensville Correctional Center have come together out of necessity to form this Human Rights Committee as a mechanism to unite prisoners from different racial groups, religious affiliations, organizational ties and geographical locations so that we can speak with ONE VOICE in communicating and articulating our demands to Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) officials for humane living conditions, greater access to rehabilitation, an end to slave labor etc.

“This (conservatorship law) sounds like slavery to me,” reported Memphis, houseless poverty skola reporter for POOR Magazine’s RoofLESS radio after a terrifying town hall on SB1045, the new anti-poor people conservatorship legislation that was just signed into law by then-Gov. Brown and will be enacted as a “demonstration” in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.