Author: Linn Washington

Those intent on tormenting now ex-death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal have done it again, this time perhaps even exceeding their past efforts to painfully harass this man widely perceived as a political prisoner.

The latest punitive slap involves Pennsylvania prison authorities throwing Abu-Jamal into “Administrative Custody,” more commonly known as ‘The Hole.’

The draconian constraints of AC placement surpass the harsh restrictions of the death row isolation Abu-Jamal has endured for over a quarter century.

A jury sentenced Abu-Jamal to death following a controversial July 1982 conviction for killing a Philadelphia policeman.

No surprise that this latest punitive assault against Abu-Jamal has his worldwide support movement in an uproar. Supporters see AC placement as retaliation by those incensed that Abu-Jamal is no longer facing execution.

Energizing supporters is the opposite of what Philadelphia’s District Attorney Seth Williams said he desired when he announced last month that his office would not seek reinstitution of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence. At the time, DA Williams said he hoped avoiding a rehearing on the death sentence would consign Abu-Jamal to obscurity.

Free Mumia rally in London (photo by Linn Washington)

As the racist rhetoric oozes from Republican presidential candidates, why are comments contained in Ron Paul newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s being widely considered more offensive than current bigoted banter uttered by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum?

One answer to that question is a politics where partisan criticisms are directed at crippling certain candidates feared as rising stars.

Thus when Congressman Paul began percolating up in the Iowa Caucus polls late last year, news of his caustic comments in those decades-old newsletters became headline news coverage.

Curiously for a candidate tagged racist Paul has a public record of opposing the most racist governmental offensive in contemporary America – the War on Drugs – that societally destructive campaign other GOP presidential candidates ignore.

The Drug War’s documented race-tainted enforcement practices drives facts like blacks comprising 25% of Iowa’s state prison population despite blacks there representing just 2.9% of that state’s population.

Another answer to that question of why Ron not Rick or Newt lies embedded in America’s historic refusal to earnestly address racism especially pernicious institutional racism.
America incarcerates vastly more blacks, and latinos, than whites, and the Drug 'War' is the prime reason

London — Standing on a picket line in front of her work place at a world renowned heart-lung hospital in London wasn’t Jeanette Anderson’s first choice for how to spend her day.

However, Anderson said protesting was her “only choice.”

Protesting as part of a nationwide general strike in the UK, Anderson said, was necessary to combat austerity measures from Britain’s conservative led government that now targets the pensions of public sector workers like Anderson and her picket line colleagues at the Royal Brompton Hospital in this city’s up-scale Chelsea section.

“We do not get the fat-cat pensions like the rich,” Anderson said, noting that participating in the one-day strike action wasn’t something she took lightly.

“Public sector workers are already into a two-year pay freeze and now the government plans to extend that pay freeze for another two years.”

Anderson, her Brompton Hospital picket line colleagues and an estimated two million other public sector workers staged a one-day general strike across Britain Wednesday (11/30).
Public workers prepare to march through Central London in Wednesday's UK General Strike (photos by Washington)

London -– Neither overcast sky nor small crowd dampened the passion Duale Yusuf displayed as he denounced the destructive U.S. foreign policy in Somalia during a protest recently outside the American Embassy in this city’s posh Mayfair section.

“There is a Guantanamo Bay prison in Mogadishu where thousands of Somalis are being tortured. American drones are killing people in Somalia. We don’t need drones, we need peace, like in America and Britain,” said Yusuf, criticizing the latest upsurge in American military activity in his homeland in the Horn of Africa.

A few days before that London protest some American news outlets carried a report detailing increased U.S. military activities across the African continent supposedly designed to “fight militants” with measure that include supplying equipment, providing intelligence and expending “tens of millions of dollars.”

That report referenced $45-million in military equipment sent to Uganda and Burundi to support their forces in Somalia plus $24-million to Kenya, which invaded southern Somalia days before the protest.

Kenyan officials said their incursion into Somalia is to end murderous cross-border raids by the Al-Shabaab militia, an organization in Somalia that U.S. officials’ link to al Qaeda.

Yusuf, a member of the Somalia Youth Congress, expressed particular disappointment during his protest remarks with U.S. President Barack Obama for bringing more bombs than books to Africa, breaking promises to Africans that he would institute constructive rather than destructive policies.
The US-backed French military overturn of the recent Ivory Coast election has sparked weekly rallies by Africans in Paris (photo by Washington)

London — For a dozen years they had marched peacefully to the street containing the residence of Britain’s prime minister, asking the current occupant of #10 Downing Street to investigate the scourge ripping at the soul of this nation.

That scourge is the thousands of suspicious deaths occurring while in the custody of British police, in British prisons and in British mental health facilities.

Eight persons died in police custody just during the first nine months of 2011, according to official British government statistics. That’s more than double the custody deaths last year.

One of those deaths involved a 49-year-old reggae music singer who police claimed had committed suicide by plunging a butcher knife into his heart while making tea in his kitchen, allegedly for officers who were in his house conducting a drug investigation.

That knife contained no fingerprints of the dead singer.

This year, on their thirteenth march to Downing Street the demonstrators endured, for the first time — the very thing they were protesting against: abuse by police.

This year police responded to this annual march by the United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC) by roughing up some demonstrators, and by denying them their desire to simply pin their demands to the gate blocking entrance to Downing Street as they’ve done without incident in past years.

March participants Rigg and Bennett whose brothers died in police custody, at protest march (photo by Washington)

London–Sam Berkson, widely known in England as “Angry Sam,” the competition-winning performance poet, stood on the steps of London’s historic St. Paul’s Cathedral recently reciting one his latest works to an assembled throng gathered at the Occupy London site – a parallel protest to the Occupy Wall Street in New York City.

“Moral messages with twisted policies…Liberty costs money, forget equality…No fraternity, it’s been like this for an eternity,” Berkson said in rhythmic voice.

Occupy London participants set up their encampment in the square outside the famous landmark – one of London’s top ten tourist attractions – after a court injunction barred them from occupying the square in front of the London Stock Exchange less than two blocks away.

Like similar demonstrations around the world, organizers for Occupy London say they are highlighting social and economic injustice, which is as severe in Britain as in the US.

Britain is currently being run by a conservative government in coalition with the Liberals, another conservative party, and this government has been instituting harsh austerity measures which are hammering the most vulnerable members of society. For example disabled persons are being compelled to find jobs or risk losing their already meager government benefits.

The “current examinations to assess fitness to work [approves] two-thirds of claimants as fit, including those with terminal illness,” wrote Claire Glasman of the disability rights group Winvisible in a comment posted on the website of the Crossroads Women’s Centre located in North London.

Blasting government budget priorities, Glasman wrote, “Bankers and politicians have come off relatively unscathed. Why should the most vulnerable pay to clear up their mess?”
Diane Richards experienced police abuse first hand when 30 London cops raided a hair salon she was a client at

They worked many late night hours since this past spring creating a unique vehicle – part grassroots initiative and part cutting-edge technology – for countering the most corrupting force in American politics today: corporate dominance now controlling too many elected leaders on Capitol Hill.

Months before the Occupy Wall Street movement captured attention, inspiring millions across America while alarming this nation’s political/corporate class, they began fashioning plans to enable honest people to run for elected office.

Liz Abzug

A problem was how to get those honest, regular people to run for Congressional office without the need for those candidates to seek or accept money from lobbyists just so as to be able to afford the purchase of the TV ads traditionally presumed as essential for effective campaigning.

Their solution: new open source software that affords candidates opportunities to get their messages to voters with full transparency, in tandem with social media, thereby circumventing another scourge of campaigning, the staged manipulation of traditional televised political debates.

On October 17th – the one month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street – they launched OccupyGovernment.org during an informational activity at ground zero of the Occupy Wall Street effort: the former Liberty Plaza Park now known as Zuccotti Park in New York City.

The immediate goal of the non-partisan OccupyGovernment.org is to elect a majority of new corporate-money-free representatives in Congress next year, thus flushing-out those congresspersons on both sides of the political isle that are beholden to the interests of corporations and private wealth, including the Tea Party- aligned representatives awash in Koch Brothers cash.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams possesses a rare opportunity to make a legacy mark by cleaning up a toxic mess polluting Philly’s justice system for nearly thirty years.

Williams can utilize an obscure yet occasionally utilized legal procedure to end the injustice involving the world’s most identifiable death row inmate, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who worked as a journalist in Philadelphia before his controversial 1982 murder conviction for killing a policeman.

This legal procedure, known as an Alford Plea, is a win-win situation for Williams and Abu-Jamal.

This procedure requires the inmate to concede that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict while requiring prosecutors to permit the inmate to maintain their innocence.

Williams the prosecutor gets his pound-of-flesh satisfaction of having kept Abu-Jamal in prison since his December 1981 arrest.

Abu-Jamal gains release from a conviction riddled with constitutional rights sabotaging misconduct by police, prosecutors and judges as amply documented by numerous investigators including Amnesty International.

Defendants and inmates in criminal cases from political corruption to murder, including murders of police officers, have utilized Alford Pleas.
Abu-Jamal supporters at a London event. The Mumia case has damaged the US reputation worldwide (photo by Linn Washington)

London – The many criticisms of capitalism leveled over a century ago by Karl Marx, the co-author of the Communist Manifesto, may prove to be more right than wrong.

Evidence both anecdotal and empirical of many of Marx’s observations abounds across London, the city where the German-born Marx, who held a doctorate in philosophy, lived for three decades before his death in 1883.

Income inequity – an element of the capitalism Marx criticized – is at historic high in Britain as in the US.

The richest ten percent in Britain live 100 times better off than the poorest, according to a report published last year in the Guardian newspaper.

In London, the richest capital city in Europe, 41 percent of children live in poverty, according to statistics listed in a Museum of London exhibit.

That Guardian report placed average household wealth for Britain’s top ten percent at the equivalent of $1.3-million-U.S. dollars compared to the equivalent of $13,531 for Britain’s poorest.
Marx spoke of the immiseration of the workers, and today's capitalists are proving him right (Washington photo)

The controversial execution of Troy Davis last week in Georgia ignited outrage around the world while injecting renewed attention across America into the propriety of the death penalty, particularly in Davis-like cases where there is evidence of innocence or serious reason for doubt about guilt.

Despite the outrage over the execution of Davis though, an overarching reality is that most people don’t give a rusty-darn about debates over the death penalty.

Most folks don’t give a flick about conceptions of justice because they are just trying to make it, often barely, day-to-day.

But there is a reality about the death penalty that too few people properly appreciate: it ain’t an out-of-sight/out-of-mind circumstance impacting only families of murder victims, the death-sentenced inmate and narrow interests on either side of the pro-con execution divide.

The death penalty, besides that constantly raised “morality” thing, is a money thing that picks the pockets of all Americans, regardless of their support for or opposition to execution.
Execution of witches in 17th Century England: A long history of official killing