USA: outrage and protests against Zimmerman's acquittal, many arrested arbirtrarily

As you probably know, a Cuban-American self-appointed vigilante, George Zimmerman, shot and killed an African-American teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida with everything pointing to racist murder, as the boy was unarmed, had not done anything at all and Zimmerman was almost twice his age. The "fault" of Martin was to be black, young and proud, not feeling intimidated by the self-appointed racist paranoid and criminal arrogance of Zimmerman. 

As Trayvon is dead, we only have Zimmerman's account but who can believe a paranoid racist self-appointed street vigilante who had been advised by police to mind his business and go home? Apparently a Florida popular court. 

This evidences that Zimmerman's madness is not only his own but is a social pandemic: Florida and probably much of US society seems to believe that Black people can be murdered "preventively" or just because. More or less what Nazis felt about Jews. 

It is in many aspects a Klu Klux Klan society, where the privileged segments of society: WASPs and assimilated (including fascist-mafioso Cuban-Americans but surely not most other Hispanics) can go on murderous rampage against the marginated ethnicities, such as African-Americans or Mexican immigrants. 

But society is reacting. Thousands have demonstrated in many North American cities against the deeply rooted racist criminal impunity that this sentence consecrates.

While protests were initially peaceful, police has been aggressive and arrested at least 19 people in Los Angeles and New York for "failure to disperse" or "disorderly conduct", in other words: for exerting their right to protest.

A result is that some protests are going slightly violent. In Oakland protesters burned US flags, broke windows, painted graffiti and thrashed a police car.

A 200-strong protest in Miami carried a banner reading: "Don't worry about more riots, worry about more Zimmermans". 

Protests have been reported across the whole federation, although the numbers are still relatively low (hundreds, a few thousands at best). 

Sources: Reuters, USA Today, CBC.

USA: 151 arrested in protests against social cuts in North Carolina

151 citizens, mostly members of NAACP, were arrested in the last few days in Raleigh, North Carolina, when taking part in demonstrations against social cuts. The protests, called by NAACP, denounced the embargo of federal social expenditure and attempted to occupy a government building.

The social cuts decreed by Obama in the current budget directly affect to some 40% of US citizens, the poorest ones of course. 

Source: Webguerrillero[es].

USA: Chicago teachers protest against Emmanuel's cuts

From Black Agenda Report (excerpt):

Chicago teachers see themselves as engaged in a movement to defend the public sphere from corporate acquisition. “Wall Street hedge funders and other speculators are betting heavily on school privatization as the next great investment frontier.”

Thousands of Chicago teachers and their community allies marched and rallied for three days in opposition to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his handpicked school board’s plans to close 54 public schools, almost all of them in Black neighborhoods – the biggest round of closings anywhere in the country, to date. Parents and teachers say the plan puts children at greater risk as they cross the boundaries of different gangs’ turf; destabilizes neighborhoods that will lose their schools; and is part of a larger scheme to further decimate the teaching ranks and convert more schools to charters. Teachers Union president Karen Lewis says “study after study” has shown that shuffling children around from school to school accomplishes nothing unless the new schools are significantly better – yet, most of the cross-city movement in the mayor’s plan is from one poor neighborhood to another.

Elderly US exile in Cuba officially "targetted for assassination" by Obama

Assata Shakur, 65, exiled in Cuba since 1979 and, in a case similar to that of Mumia Abu Jamal, charged with a dubious police murder, which took place in 1973 in a confusing shooting between Black Panthers and Ohio police. This old case has now been intriguingly revived with the placement of Shakur in the most wanted terrorist list of the White House, which formally allows the imperialist forces to kill her without any further reason. 

Yes, US law today allows for targeted assassination of US citizens at home or abroad, at the whim of the federal authorities who fill that list of "terrorists". 

But why now? Why such a cold, old and nearly forgotten case would be upgraded to "terrorist" category? Glen Ford at argues at BAR that the aim is to target overall the Black Liberation Movement, further criminalizing the most oppressed ethnicity of North America. However I suspect that there is another reason: to create a pretext, a casus belli for military or otherwise forceful intervention against Cuba, whose successful socialist example, where every single citizen has a home, food and free quality healthcare, is felt as a growing threat to the oligarchic rule of the increasingly class-polarized US and European societies, and also for its growing influence in general in the American continent.

USA: 100,000 people in solitary confinement every single day - new prisoner hunger strike in California

The USA is not only the state with more people in prison but also the one with more people submitted to cruel and unusual punishments like solitary confinement. Don't tell me about gulags anymore please...

From Black Agenda Report:

The total U.S. prison inmate population held in solitary confinement on any given day exceeds 100,000 – “the equivalent of locking up every man, woman and child in Charleston, South Carolina, in their own little 8 by 12 foot box – for an eternity.” Prisoners in solitary at California’s Pelican Bay may once again go on hunger strike, July 8. They need support from the outside.

Another prison hunger strike is looming in California, where more than 200 inmates at the Pelican Bay supermax have been in solitary confinement for between five and ten years and nearly 100 have been shut off from most human contact for 20 years or more. Across the nation, on any given day, more than 100,000 inmates suffer in solitary – about 25,000 in the federal system and another 80,000 or so in state facilities. That’s the equivalent of locking up every man, woman and child in Charleston, South Carolina, in their own little 8 by 12 foot box – for an eternity. Nothing like this American form of mass human torment has ever existed on the face of the earth: systematic, industrial strength torture, multiplied 100,000 times per day. Solitary confinement as a form of routine, mass punishment is beyond barbarity. Nowhere in human history do we find barbarians who tortured hundreds of thousands of people every day for decades at a time. Only in America.

Solitary confinement, by its very nature, is designed to ensure that no one but the torturers hears the cries of the tormented. However, knowledge of such monstrous evil compels decent men and women to action, in solidarity with those who have been wronged. The prisoners of Pelican Bay, who went on hunger strike in 2011, have sent word that they will do so again, on July 8, if the state of California does not meet their core demands. One demand is fundamental: that inmates not be confined to solitary unless they have been charged, “and found guilty of, committing a serious offense… a felony!”

... continue reading at BAR.