Cops call anti-Mumia protest

New York, NY, Apr. 13-- Police groups in New York and Philadelphia have announced a counter-demonstration at the May 7 rally for Mumia Abu-Jamal at Madison Square Garden. The May 7 Mobilization for Mumia condemned the plan. "Threats from these fascist-type elements won't stop us," asserted Monica Moorehead, a coordinator of the May 7 Mobilization. "Police threats will only cause us to redouble our efforts to fill Madison Square Garden to overflowing" to demand a new trial for Abu-Jamal, an award-winning African American journalist on death row in Pennsylvania.

One sponsor of the counter-protest is a web site called "41shots.com" that backs the four New York cops who gunned down Amadou Diallo. The site features racist diatribes against anti-police-brutality activist the Rev. Al Sharpton. On another site, misnamed "Mumia.com," Philadelphia cops are invited to ride free to the counter-protest "thanks to the generous donation of the charter bus by Yellowbird Bus Company Inc."

A statement issued by two cop-groups says, "There are a number of reasons why Mumia.com and NYFinest.com are teaming up for this event. Mumia.com will be there to protest a concert [sic] to benefit a convicted cop killer. NYFinest.com will be there to show support for the NYPD. This is also a much better way for us to show our support for the NYPD then [sic] just getting together at City Hall or 1 Police Plaza."

Monica Moorehead commented, "After all the trauma this city has suffered because of police brutality under Giuliani, it's amazing that the police would have the nerve to organize what is, in effect, a 'pro-police-brutality' demonstration."

Moorehead called it "a futile effort to discourage and intimidate Mumia's long-time supporters, and especially new supporters and ordinary people who want to know the truth about Mumia's case.

"Whenever the cops go ballistic over a Mumia-friendly event, it always ends up helping Mumia's cause," Moorehead said. "It's an especially foolish move for them here in New York, where the whole city is enraged over the brutal police killing of Patrick Dorismond and the acquittal of the racist cops who killed Amadou Diallo."

The pro-Mumia rally is scheduled for Sunday, May 7, at 2 p.m., in the Theater at Madison Square Garden, 7th Avenue and 32nd Street, Manhattan. Its demands include "A new trial for Mumia," "End the racist death penalty," and "Fight back against police terror."

Those sponsoring the counter-demonstration deny affiliation with the Fraternal Order of Police or New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. May 7 organizers explained that this is a lie.

"It is the official policy of the Fraternal Order of Police to harass and threaten anyone who speaks out for a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal," Moorehead said. She pointed to the FOP's web site, which includes a "hit list" of celebrities, organizations and public officials targeted for harassment.

"The FOP is behind the nationwide smear campaign against students at Antioch College in Ohio. The graduating class there has courageously invited Mumia Abu-Jamal to be a commencement speaker, along with lesbian trans activist and Rainbow Flags for Mumia co-founder Leslie Feinberg.

"The FOP and PBA know Mumia is innocent," Moorehead charged. "They don't want him to have a new trial because all the suppressed evidence and police coercion would come to light. That's why they always use sordid phrases like 'cop-killer' to describe Mumia. It's all for public consumption. They want to continue to try and isolate Mumia from the public.

"We're trying to break out Mumia's case to a broader audience. That's what he needs now," Moorehead explained. The May 7 Invitations Committee includes Ossie Davis, Susan Sarandon, former Mayor David Dinkins, Rage Against the Machine, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Edward Asner, Gloria Steinem, Dick Gregory, Mike Farrell, State Senator Tom Duane, the Indigo Girls, Monica Moorehead, Johnnie Cochran, Pam Africa, the Rev. Al Sharpton, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Leslie Feinberg, Leonard Weinglass and Bishop Thomas Gumbleton. Tickets for the May 7 event are selling out quickly. Organizers in many cities are filling buses and vans to join the New York event. General admission tickets are still available for $15. Groups of 10 or more can purchase tickets at $10 each. Tickets may be purchased on the Internet at www.leftbooks.com, by visiting the May 7 Mobilization office, or by sending a check or money order to the May 7 Mobilization for Mumia, 39 West 14th Street, Suite 206, New York, NY 10011.

Source: Grassroots Media Network:
rootmedia@mail.com

Sixteen years for a Snickers bar
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Last week, a Texas jury recommended that Kenneth Payne, 29, spend 16 years in jail. Payne's crime? Stealing a Snickers bar from a Tyler, Texas grocery store on December 17, 1999.

When Smith county Assistant District Attorney Jodi Brown was asked by the Associated Press how she could justify 16 years for the theft of a Snickers bar, Brown replied "It was a king size."

A king size Snickers bar it was. Retail price: $1.

In Texas, if you steal property worth less than $500, it's a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of $500 with no jail time. The case was brought as a felony because Payne was a habitual offender. He had ten previous convictions -- including one for stealing a bag of Oreo cookies -- and had spent seven years in Texas prisons. When he shoved the king sized Snickers bar down his pants he was on parole for felony theft. Still, the guy was a petty thief -- he stole cookies and candy bars.

Compare Kenneth Payne's plight to those of a group of white-collar and corporate criminals who also were sentenced this month.

Hoffman-LaRoche Ltd. pled guilty for their roles in an international conspiracy to suppress and eliminate competition in the vitamin industry -- what the Justice Department calls perhaps the largest criminal antitrust conspiracy in history. The prison terms: four months, three and one-half months, three months and three months. (The four executives were also fined anywhere from $75,000 to $350,000).

Also this month, three cruise line employees were sentenced for their role in dumping pollution into the Alaskan Inland Passage from a Holland America cruise ship. The three employees were each sentenced to two years unsupervised probation and fined $10,000.

These are not unusual sentences for white-collar criminals. In fact, it is unusual to see a white-collar criminal do time.

So, how can it be that Kenneth Payne is doing 16 years for stealing a one dollar Snickers bar while the former executives of some of the world's largest corporations get off with a few months in prison -- after being convicted of a crime that cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars?

It's like Richard Pryor said -- in our country -- justice means "just us" -- regular folks -- and not them -- the people who call the shots --who end up in the slammer.

This double standard permeates every aspect of our criminal justice system.

The other day, for example, we were listening to National Public Radio, and up popped a debate about whether felons should be allowed to participate in a democracy.

On one side of the debate was Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project. Mauer pointed out that in 46 states, you can't vote if you are in prison. In 16 states, if you were convicted of a felony -- even if you get out of prison -- you are disenfranchised for life. Mauer estimated that 13 percent of adult black men cannot vote as a result of a felony conviction right now.

On the NPR show, Roger Clegg, an attorney with the right-leaning and the slightly misnamed Center for Equal Opportunity (Linda Chavez' think tank), made the argument that felons shouldn't be allowed to vote. "If you aren't willing to play by the rules, then you shouldn't have a say in making the rules," Clegg said.
"And people who have been convicted of felonies, which are by definition serious crimes, shouldn't be given a role in deciding how the government should be run," Clegg said.

After hearing this, we called up Clegg to ask what he thought about banning corporate criminals -- like BASF and Hoffman LaRoche, who had engaged in perhaps the most egregious criminal antitrust conspiracy in history -- from "deciding how the government should be run." (Corporations of course don't vote, but they do give money to elect candidates, they lobby legislators and law enforcement officials, and they mold public opinion through their public relations efforts.) Gone was Clegg's unwavering absolutism.

After much hemming and hawing, Clegg admitted that "it makes sense to limit the political role of corporations when they have shown that they are not worthy of trust." But he quickly added that "because individuals and corporations are fundamentally different, you can't just apply the rules equally." Clegg questioned whether the First Amendment would allow prosecutors to strip corporations of their "rights" to influence how the government should be run. Clegg, of course, raised no such question when it came to stripping individual felons of such "rights."

What about the death penalty? In a new book, Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted (Doubleday, 2000), Jim Dwyer, Peter Neufeld, Barry Scheck, report that in the 24 years since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court, about 620 individuals have been put to death -- but 87 condemned persons had their convictions vacated by exonerating evidence.

Most likely, innocent lives have been taken. All this while really big recidivist corporate criminals like Exxon, Royal Caribbean, Rockwell International, Warner Lambert, Teledyne, and United Technologies -- criminals truly deserving of the corporate death penalty, get away with slap on the wrist fines.

Bottom line: big corporations and white-collar criminals are getting away with it, while the political and media elites pull the wool over our eyes.

Think of that next time you pick up a Snickers bar.

Source: Focus on the Corporation
corp-focus-admin@lists.essential.org

SNCC vets remember Al-Amin differently

Statement from friends and associates of Iman Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) at the 40th Anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee:

April 16, 2000 Raleigh, North Carolina-- We are distressed by the recent arrest of our former chairman and co-worker, Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, whom we knew as H. Rap Brown. Amin has been charged with the murder of one Atlanta policeman and the wounding of another on Thursday March 16th of this year.

The officers say they were attempting to serve what authorities described as a "relatively inconsequential" arrest warrant on Al Amin. But we wonder why the Atlanta police would send heavily armed men, wearing flak jackets, into Al Amin¹s neighborhood at 10 at night to serve such a warrant. Additionally, why were 16 bounty hunters involved in the "search" for a man whose whereabouts and regular routines were well known?

We are also concerned by a number of glaring discrepancies in the police version of events and what appears to be a precipitous and uncritical rush to judgment by the media. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the Atlanta police released, in rapid succession, constantly changing and differing accounts of the incident. The only constant in these changing official versions was that the assailant had been so severely wounded as to have left "a trail of blood" at the scene. Yet, four days later, when Al-Amin was arrested in Alabama, he was found to be completely free of physical injury!

What most distresses us is that the facts as alleged are so completely out of character for the man we knew. For twenty years our brother has been a serious student of religion, a devout spiritual teacher, and a public-spirited community leader. Nationally, he is highly regarded by the Council on American-Islamic Relations which in 1995 described him as "one of the Muslim community¹s leading figures."

We ourselves know him as a principled, compassionate man committed to justice for his people and devoted to the moral welfare of his constituency. Consequently, these allegations are totally contrary to the character of the man we know and greatly respect.

In the Sixties, Rap Brown was hounded by the authorities for his brilliant defense of all forms of Black protest. Moreover, five years ago police pressured an Atlanta resident, who later recanted, into identifying Al-Amin as the culprit in a shooting incident. Agents of the FBI, its Domestic Terrorism Task Force, as well as agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms converged in Atlanta to arrest Al-Amin. In the absence of any evidence, the charges were dropped. There has never been any satisfactory explanation given for the presence and interest of this array of federal forces in a "routine" local incident.

In the light of this past incident, the inconsistencies in the accounts of the current case, and our knowledge of his character, we urge a suspension of judgment pending a thorough and complete investigation of the events of March 16th.

This statement was adopted at the 40th Anniversary of the Founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; for more information and related stories:
http://crmvet.org/

BLACK BLOCK TAKES TO DC STREETS
by August Spies

Masked and clad in black, the Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc or "Black Bloc" took to the streets of DC in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday morning, and began a two day pitched battle against a combined force of DC police, suburban police from Virginia and Maryland, US marshals, US Secret Service, and National Guard troops, in an attempting to shut down the meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. In a show of solidarity with the broader anti-globalization movement, the predominately anarchist bloc, often in several groups of hundreds of demonstrators, acted as large "flying squads", roving from hot spot to hot spot along the Direct Action Network blockade lines, coming to the aid of locked down activist threatened by police. Yelling "Whose Streets, Our Streets!", and setting out to prove it, the bloc spent the morning hours confronting and at times over running police positions in order to prevent the arrest of locked down blockade activists, and keep some delegates from reaching the meetings on time.

Throughout the morning they lifted and moved parked cars, though garbage cans, new paper boxes, and anything else they could find into the streets to blockade delegate and police movement. In one incident on 15th and New York, black block activists rushed a police line with a chain link construction fence, pushing them several blocks back to the corner of 14th and K street; exchanging volleys of tear gas, pepper spray and debris along the way. In another incident on 21st street riot police charged clubs swinging into the crowd. The bloc quickly rallied, pushing the police line back to 22nd street, and using burning dumpsters to discourage another police charge.

By Sunday afternoon Black Bloc activists by now well over a thousand strong and chanting, "This what anarchy looks like, This is what democracy looks like!", lead a victory march downtown to the ellipse accompanied by roughly ten thousand direct action participants, joining the festivities of the over ten thousand protesters from mainstream labor and environmental groups already there.

Sunday evening, elements of the Bloc formed around the Mexican embassy in the northern part of the city to bring attention to the Zapatista movement and the dehumanizing conditions of Mexican sweatshops that have sprung up along the US Mexican boarder in the wake of NAFTA.

Who were these black dressed activists? Participants came mostly from cities in the US, and Canada, with some Mexican participation. Their decisions are made by quick consensus meetings, that stem from the belief that hierarchy leads to corruption and inequality. Not all of the block identified as anarchists, and not all of the anarchists identified with the bloc. They are laborers and union people, students and teachers, punks and pagans, who hold the common belief that global capitalism and the institutions that thrust it on the peoples of the world are the root cause of poverty and an erosion of democracy worldwide.

By Monday morning the police response to the protest had turn heavy handed. In several incidents police ran over demonstrators with squad cars, or motorcycles. Several demonstrators were injured when club wielding police blocked protesters from assisting a man run over by a police car up to his neck. Under cover officers also sprung into action, using impact batons to strike protesters before fleeing the seen. Activists were shot point blank with tear gas canisters, and dozens arrests were made. In one incident DC Police Chief Ramesy, who spent the weekend downplaying the importance and effectiveness of the protests, was forced to call for assistance when he and several officers were surrounded, and the four star bar on his shoulder torn off by demonstrators.

Unlike the property destruction that accompanied the Seattle protests, the black bloc focused there energy on engaging police repression of constitutional freedoms, and left downtown businesses largely undisturbed. In one incident protesters walked passed a branch of the Gap, a company renowned and despised for sweatshop exploitation. The shop remained undisturbed as several police cars in the area were destroyed.

Why all the outrage? The Black block activists, and many activist of the broader anti-globalization movement were in Washington because of the oppressive conditions the IMF, and World bank creates in third world countries, leading to poverty, starvation and hopelessness. They advocate for the dispandment of these institutions, not there reform. One activist in the bloc identifying himself as Zap said, "What we are trying to show is that anarchy is the essence of community. Communities are being destroyed all over the world, and we are showing them what an empowered community looks like: that it¹s strong, that it acts for the good of the people. There are people in the Third World who are moved to tears today because we are finally speaking out. We are building an interracial movement, a movement of the people, for all the people."

Though the IMF and World Bank meetings were relatively uninterrupted by the protest, the effects of the protest were clear. The police no first amendment zone encompassed 90 blocks of the capitol area, and protesters shut down dozens more. Several metro stations were shut down do to protest, and bus service was sporadic at best in the downtown area. In a costly move, federal employees in the Capitol District were told to stay home Monday, effectively shutting down the government. Many downtown offices and businesses remained closed. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on police overtime and tens of thousands of dollars of police equipment were destroyed. "We¹ve won,": said Mr. Shan, a anti IMF/World Bank protester, "they militarized this city to make their meetings go off."