This guy just came out and said what a lot of them think anyway; that poor people should be in prison. He once again demonstrated that the only time they think it’s appropriate to give us any aid is when we’re locked up. This man said, “We’ll teach them personal hygiene ..” This is so insulting!!! Yo, Paladino, we don’t need hygiene lessons, we need food, clothing and shelter!!!!
NY candidate: Prison dorms for welfare recipients
"We'll teach them personal hygeine..." - Carl Paladino, candidate for Republican nomination in New York governor's race.
NEW YORK — Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they could work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in “personal hygiene.”
Paladino, a wealthy Buffalo real estate developer popular with many tea party activists, isn’t saying the state should jail poor people: The program would be voluntary.
But the suggestion that poor families would be better off in remote institutions, rather than among friends and family in their own neighborhoods, struck some anti-poverty activists as insulting.
Paladino is competing for the Republican nomination with former U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio. The primary is Sept. 14.
Paladino first described the idea in June at a meeting of The Journal News of White Plains and spoke about it again this week with The Associated Press.
Throughout his campaign, Paladino has criticized New York’s rich menu of social service benefits, which he says encourages illegal immigrants and needy people to live in the state. He has promised a 20 percent reduction in the state budget and a 10 percent income tax cut if elected.
Asked at the meeting how he would achieve those savings, Paladino laid out several plans that included converting underused state prisons into centers that would house welfare recipients. There, they would do work for the state — “military service, in some cases park service, in other cases public works service,” he said — while prison guards would be retrained to work as counselors.
“Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we’ll teach people how to earn their check. We’ll teach them personal hygiene … the personal things they don’t get when they come from dysfunctional homes,” Paladino said.
New York, like other states, receives a federal block grant to provide cash and other forms of welfare to very low-income residents. Federal law already requires welfare recipients to do some form of work to receive benefits.
New York’s welfare rolls have grown slightly during the recession, while food stamp eligibility has almost doubled, according to the state.
Paladino told The Associated Press the dormitory living would be voluntary, not mandatory, and would give welfare recipients an opportunity to take public, state-sponsored jobs far from home.
“These are beautiful properties with basketball courts, bathroom facilities, toilet facilities. Many young people would love to get the hell out of cities,” Paladino he said.
He also defended his hygiene remarks, saying he had trained inner-city troops in the Army and knows their needs.
“You have to teach them basic things — taking care of themselves, physical fitness. In their dysfunctional environment, they never learned these things,” he said.
Ketny Jean-Francois, a former welfare recipient and a New York City advocate for low-income people, said Paladino’s idea shocked her.
“Being poor is not a crime,” she said. “People are on welfare for many reasons … Is he saying people are poor because they don’t have any hygiene or any skills?”
A Lazio spokesman didn’t immediately return a message.
Paladino said he based his ideas on the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal program that paid young unemployed men during the Great Depression to plant trees, build roads and develop parks.
Paladino said he would open the program both to long-term welfare recipients and to people who had lost their jobs during the recession. He said that he didn’t know how he would pay for it but that prisons could be consolidated to make room.
As the recession bites many South African workers are questioning the logic of a system that forces the vast majority of the population to live in poverty, while multinational companies make profits and take their wealth out of the country.
In South Africa the idea that workers won’t fight during a recession is being challenged.
And with these strikes workers are looking for answers on how to root out the inequality that capitalism has entrenched.
South African police clashed with state workers who protested outside government buildings on the third day of a wage strike that has shut schools and clinics.
Police used water cannons to disperse protesters at Johannesburg’s Helen Joseph Hospital today, video shown by Cape Town-based e News Channel showed. Officers broke up a group of strikers who blocked roads to a hospital and a courthouse in the town of Chatsworth in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, police said.
The government “has noted with concern the violent acts of intimidation and public violence” associated with the strike,’’ it said in an e-mailed statement today. “Steps will be taken against strikers or sympathizers who intimidate staff or members of the public, or commit acts of hooliganism, destruction of property or violence.”
While state employees are demanding an 8.6 percent pay increase and a housing allowance of 1,000 rand ($136) a month, the government says it can’t afford to raise its offer of a 7 percent increase and a 700 rand allowance. South Africa’s annual inflation rate is currently 4.2 percent.
Public Service and Administration Minister Richard Baloyi met with union officials today “to try and persuade them to understand the government offer,” Dumisani Nkwamba, Baloyi’s spokesman, said by telephone from Pretoria. Asked if the wage offer may be increased, he replied, “absolutely not.”
‘Intensifying’
Unions representing about 1.3 million state workers say their members struggle to get by on their current salaries and that the strike will continue until their demands are met.
“The strike will be intensifying all around the country,” Sizwe Pamla, a spokesman for the 250,000-member National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union, said today in an interview.
The rand fell for a second day against the dollar, declining as much as 1.1 percent, to 7,3731. The FTSE/JSE Africa All Share Index shed 0.6 percent to 26,989.63 for a third consecutive decline.
Government employees last struck in 2007, when schools, hospitals and immigration offices were disrupted for 29 days, the longest-ever walkout by state workers.
South African laws prevent strikes by certain categories of workers who provide essential services, accounting for about a third of state employees. Even so, many nurses have joined the labor action, said Fidel Hadebe, a Health Ministry spokesman.
‘Quite Severe’
“The impact of the strike has been quite severe in a number of facilities,” he said today by telephone from Pretoria. The provinces of “Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Kwazulu- Natal have been worst-affected.”
Police fired rubber bullets yesterday to disperse workers who entered the grounds of the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto township, south of Johannesburg, and tried to prevent patients and doctors from entering.
“We abhor the inhuman conduct of denying doctors and patients access to hospitals and teachers and pupils access to their schools,” the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference group said today in a statement issued to the South African Press Association. “Care is being denied to the weakest and most vulnerable.”
Members of the South African Defense Force were deployed to several hospitals to fill in for striking workers, while critically ill patients who were unable to access treatment at state facilities were transferred to private hospitals.
Reports of Deaths
A pregnant woman who was denied access to a state hospital in the eastern city of Durban gave birth in the parking lot of Netcare Ltd.’s St. Augustine hospital in the city, the company said in an e-mailed statement today.
Several newspapers said patients had died because they had not been treated or received medication. The health department was still investigating the reports, Hadebe said.
“As much as we offer our condolences to those families, we don’t want our members to be blackmailed when they have a legitimate right to strike,” Pamla said. “Hospitals by their nature are places that people go to get saved, but it doesn’t always happen that way” and it can’t be proven that strikers caused the deaths, he said.
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, representing 70,000 workers, said today that car and fuel retail-industry workers plan to strike from Sept. 1 after employers failed to meet their demands for a pay increase. Numsa members in the tire and rubber industries will begin a walkout on Aug. 30, the union said.
EAST POINT, GA — A huge crowd of people trying to meet a deadline to get an application for public housing help flooded a facility in East Point Wednesday.
The crowd began with just a few hundred people gathering around noon Monday at the Tri-Cities Plaza Shopping Center.
By Wednesday morning, it had swelled to tens of thousands.
Many in the crowd could be seen running toward police vehicles. Thousands were gathered around the front of the plaza. Many more were just waiting in long lines.
“We have a lot of homeless families, a lot of families who are unemployed and it creates a desperate situation, which is what our agency was created to assist with,” said Kim Lemish, the executive director of East Point Housing Authority.
Right now East Point’s nearly 200 public housing units are full, more than 400 Section 8 vouchers are being used for help with private housing rent, and the chance of getting immediate housing is slim.
All the people in line Wednesday just wanted to get on the waiting list, which last opened in 2002.
“At that time we took in 2,400 applications. Now based on that number and the way the economy is today, we prepared for 10,000 people,” Lemish said. “Unfortunately three times that number showed up.” She says many of them didn’t even need housing help but came along to support loved ones in line.
“We gave out over 13,000 applications in under three hours,” she said. “The number was just astronomical, and it ties exactly to the way the economy is today.”
“Hopefully in the very near future, we’ll be able to help these families that received applications,” she said. “The next step for the applicants is they’re going to have to return their applications to us. That process is going to be much smoother.”
She’s encouraging people to mail applications in instead of dropping them off in person at the East Point Housing Authority offices at 3056 Normanberry Drive Thursday.
Lemish says plans are in place to keep the process as smooth as possible, but there are no guarantees.
More than 60 people were treated, mostly for heat related illness, while waiting for applications. There were no serious injuries or arrests for criminal behavior.
Prison is modern-day slavery!! You are compelled to work if you ever want to get parole; and you will work at wages that might be laughable if the situation wasn’t so grim. Here is the best quote:
“[There is] a nationwide network of prison camps churning out products for contractors and federal agencies that might otherwise buy the same goods from private, unionized plants.”
Calif. judges reject suit seeking to raise inmate wages
On land previously occupied by a slave plantation, Louisiana prisoners pick cotton, earning 4 cents an hour. This is Angola prison, big shout out to the Angola 3!!! This isn't a metaphor for slavery, its modern-day slavery!!
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — After renowned attorney J. Tony Serra spent nine months in a federal prison camp for not paying his taxes, he calculated how much he was paid for watering the camp gardens – 19 cents an hour – and thought it might violate a U.N. standard that says inmates should get fair wages.
But the lawsuit that followed in 2007, which sought higher pay for all federal prisoners in California, faced even longer odds than many of the cases in Serra’s career, celebrated in the 1989 film “True Believer.” On Friday, a federal appeals court delivered a thumbs-down verdict, saying the government can set prison wages at any level, including zero.
“Prisoners do not have a legal entitlement to payment for their work,” said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in a 3-0 ruling.
Federal law, the court said, allows the attorney general to arrange payments to inmates or their dependents “as he may deem proper.” Even the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, made an exception for convicted criminals, the court noted.
As for the standard adopted by the United Nations at a 1955 conference on the treatment of prisoners, it declared only that nations should establish a system of “equitable remuneration” for prison work, without specifying any particular wage level, said Judge Richard Clifton in Friday’s ruling. What’s more, he said, the standard isn’t a treaty, isn’t binding on the United States and can’t be enforced in court.
Serra’s lawsuit sought at least the federal minimum wage, now $7.25 an hour. When he filed the suit two years ago, he said he wasn’t complaining about personal mistreatment at the federal prison camp in Lompoc Santa Barbara County but about systemic unfairness.
His job watering the gardens for five hours a day, Serra said, was part of a nationwide network of prison camps churning out products for contractors and federal agencies that might otherwise buy the same goods from private, unionized plants.
Serra, 74, has represented scores of controversial clients in a nearly 50-year legal career while living a Spartan life and driving a rundown car. He successfully defended Black Panther leader Huey Newton on murder charges and was part of the defense team that won an acquittal in a 1973 Chinatown murder. James Woods played a lawyer modeled on Serra in “True Believer,” loosely based on the Chinatown case.
Serra pleaded guilty in 2005 to willfully failing to pay $44,000 in federal income taxes in the late 1990s, his third tax conviction. A self-described lifelong tax boycotter who had spent four months at Lompoc in 1974 for a tax protest related to the Vietnam War, he agreed to pay $100,000 in back taxes after his last conviction.
He said he’d try to follow the law in the future, observing that it’s harder to fight the system when you’re locked up in it.
Eugene Terreblanche, a notorious white supremacist and founder of a white supremacist paramilitary organization, was murdered by two of his farm laborers because he had allegedly not paid them since December.
Terreblanche was notoriously brutal to the workers on his farm, even being convicted of attempting to murder one of them on his farm; he was given a light sentence (he served 2/3 of a 5 year sentence!!) while his victim – Paul Motshabi – suffered brain damage, and was left paralyzed and unable to speak for months after the attack. He still walks with a limp. Let’s hear some testimony from Motshabi :
“He shot me in the head with a firearm. I don’t have the capacity to remember what kind of bullet went through my head,” Motshabi told AP Television News, speaking in the Tswana language.
Terreblanche was also convicted of setting an attack dog on a black man in an earlier incident. Recently Terreblanche had announced a new organizing campaign in which he and his group (the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging AKAthe AWB) would push for their own nation, one controlled entirely by whites.
Across all the capitalist press organizations much airplay is being given to an apartheid-era song that was sung by the ANC youth leader, Julius Malema, that advocates violence against white plantation owners. Despite the attention the capitalist media is giving to this song, the issues at stake here are MUCH BIGGER. The following quote from the article we’ve chosen perfectly sums it all up:
The crux of the matter is that even though black Africans gained considerable political clout with the end of apartheid, they have yet to experience economic emancipation.
Exactly! The whites still weild vast economic power in South Africa (there are reportedly 50,000 large scale white farmers to this day while the vast majority of black South Africans still live in dire poverty), and the real reason Malema is being villified is that he is in favour of nationalising the mining industry and is among those pushing for a controversial new policy to hasten the redistribution of white-owned land.
”We hear you are going straight for the mines, that is what we are going to do in South Africa,” he told a rally in Zimbabwe recently. In fact, Malema was in Zimbabwe as part of a multi-country tour (through Zimbabwe, China, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil and Cuba) to study nationalization programs.
The bottom line is that while apartheid and the racial oppression that comes with it is gone, black South Africans are still suffering from capitalism. Economically, they are not far away from where they were during apartheid, and only bold, revolutionary action will change that. Freedom and equality awaits South Africans, but only at socialism’s doorstep. To many black South Africans, the killers of Terreblanche are heroes… check out the videos below, especially when a black South African woman is asked if she fears retaliation by white paramilitaries. She says, “I am worried, but we are ready… we are ready for them.” Right on!
Check out this great article as well by Gamal Nkrumah:
Returning ghosts haunt South Africa. Last week, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) Youth League President Julius Malema was banned from singing the anti-apartheid battle cry liberation song Ayesaba Amagwala (The Cowards are Scared) which a regional high court ruled incited violence against whites. The ruling outraged blacks, many of whom see Malema as the “voice of the voiceless” and as articulating the anger of the underdog, the poor, disfranchised and black masses of South Africa.
Almost to prove the judge’s point, this week, while Malema was being feted in neighbouring Zimbabwe, South Africa’s most vociferous white supremacist Eugene Terre Blanche was killed by his farm hands in his own homestead. Born in 1941, Terre Blanche founded the Afrikaner Resistance Movement or Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) in 1970, proudly proclaiming the banner of hatred and segregation. His mutilated body was found symbolically with the traditional African farm tools and weapons — knobkerrie and panga machetes — next to it. Two black African suspects were detained. They were workers on Terre Blanche’s farm who had recently had an argument with the racist leader over unpaid wages.
Sometimes sordid details tell us salubrious things. People are questioning whether the white racist leader’s gory ruin was politically motivated. It comes at an inopportune moment for South Africa. The country is preparing to host the football World Cup, the first to be held on African territory. South African President Jacob Zuma urged restraint and calm.
“We are prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma,” the controversial Malema threatened recently, much to the consternation of the country’s white minority who constitute 10 per cent of the population. Zuma is widely viewed as being at best too lenient and at worst secretly sympathetic to Malema’s sentiments. Many whites are indignant that a firebrand such as Malema could hold such high profile public office.
During his fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe Malema was greeted with thunderous applause and hailed as a “true revolutionary” and “freedom fighter”. He professed interest in Zimbabwe’s indigenisation programme and the “land grab” policy of confiscation of white-owned agricultural property. Malema expressed the wish that South Africa would emulate Zimbabwe. “We want the mines. They have been exploiting our minerals for a long time. Now it is our turn to also enjoy these minerals,” Malema, in reference to the white-owned farms and mines in South Africa, addressed cheering Zimbabwean crowds. Malema’s critics at home are systematically dismissed as “counter-revolutionaries”, “racists” and “white settler colonialists”. There are growing calls in South Africa for the ANC to emulate the “land grab” policy of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. More than 3,000 white farmers have been killed in South Africa since the end of apartheid in the country in 1994.
Terre Blanche, the descendant of French Huguenots, had prophetically warned of his own death. “It is clear that the South African police cannot stop the rape, murder and robbery of our people,” he said recently. His optimism in championing the white cause was, however, misplaced. “We fought the British Commonwealth, we can survive the ANC,” he was quoted as saying.
“Our country is being run by criminals who murder and rob,” Terre Blanche lamented. It is perhaps not so ironic that he met his end at the hands of his own black employees, those he derisively derided as “criminals, murderers and robbers”.
Alan Paton’s classic Cry The Beloved Country was a novel that graphically depicted life in South Africa under apartheid and few could have foreseen how things would have unfolded in the post-apartheid period. The crux of the matter is that even though black Africans gained considerable political clout with the end of apartheid, they have yet to experience economic emancipation. The sad reality is that income differentials between blacks and whites in South Africa have not narrowed significantly in the post-apartheid period. This disparity of incomes between blacks and whites has led to widespread resentment among blacks and might lead to a political backlash similar to the land grab policy adopted in neighbouring Zimbabwe. In short, Terre Blanche’s assassination has a forceful topicality. So what made him so emblematic?
Dhubula Ibhunu (Shoot the White Farmer) is the rallying cry of the farm labourers and landless peasants in South Africa and Terre Blanche’s killing has brought into sharp focus the increasingly polarised perspectives regarding the country’s future. South Africans are bitterly divided as to whether Terre Blanche’s death was a farm murder, an act of political assassination or a case of class struggle. The debate has opened a Pandora’s Box in the run-up to the World Cup. This is the significant South Africa moment. It is a tortuous trial for the Rainbow nation.
Terre Blanche’s life and death, like the protagonist in Too Late The Phalarope, Paton’s contemporary Greek tragedy set in South Africa, unravels the predicament of white moral bankruptcy masquerading as moral superiority. Like Pieter van Vlaanderen, the villain of the piece, Terre Blanche failed to reconcile his fundamental character flaws with the charade of his moral uprightness in the hearts and minds of his people. In the end both fictitious hero and the slain Afrikaner martyr brought about their own destruction and that of their people whom the portended to defend.
At this point we inevitably reflect on the current controversy surrounding the demise of Terre Blanche in South Africa. He was a man incapable of deep retrospection. White racists hanged on his every eccentric pronouncement. For those white South Africans who have kept an ever hopeful eye on the revival of white supremacy and racial segregation, his cries for help had an added, poignant resonance.
Where, I wondered on first hearing it, did the years go? Terre Blanche represented the naked wickedness of white South Africa, the cruel and callous survival instinct that thrives on the obliteration of the indigene.
He looked gaunt and decrepit long before his time. He was an anachronistic political animal in every sense of the word. His political trajectory has, in many ways, run diametrically counter to that of the black Africans who now run the country. In spite of his incessant protestations, he has seen “Black Power” spiral out of control into parliament in Pretoria, into the corridors of power in Cape Town.
From the halcyon days of the 1960s and 1970s to the uncertainties of the 1980s and the New South Africa of the 1990s, Terre Blanche was systematically losing ground to those who ultimately destroyed him and who he despised when still alive and kicking.
Then all of a sudden his political career was over. He was rudely awakened, so to speak, from his dream of white supremacy.
There is an allegory lurking here. Terre Blanche’s sorry end sounds the death knell for his ilk. Again the resilience, the bluff optimism and dogged determination disguised the true extent of his failure. His life was in shreds. The irony conceals a great deal of heartbreak for him and for his people, or at least for those whom he professed to represent. He had no conception of changing times, no regard for the contemporary. His politics epitomised the turbulence, uncertainty and the increasing pessimism of white supremacists of the times. His pronouncements sounded by turn choleric, defiant and uncompromising.
Terre Blanche tried in vain to synthesise the cataclysmic social trends challenging South Africa into a coherent political platform that exclusively serves the interests of whites. His bloody death re-opens old wounds even though it is, by the same token, a very symptom of the apartheid legacy.
How much could he get away with and still triumph? It was the madness in his method and message, the man revered by millions of racists in southern Africa and around the world, whose very name epitomises the notion of European settler colonialism.
The omens were not good. There is a moral to the grisly story of the life and death of Terre Blanche. The old cliché, who lives by the sword dies by the sword, springs to mind. Southern Africa will continue to spout the Malemas and Mugabes until the injustices of the past are redressed, and the question of social justice is seriously addressed. That is what I call a history lesson.
You think we’re gonna shed a tear for this racist white supremacist here at Malcolm-Che?!?! This is the man that once beat a worker within an inch of his life, and now it came back around and two workers beat him to death. Most of these white farm owners have wealth that dates from apartheid; their farms should have been expropriated and given to the blacks that labor on them. More on this later.
One of the most notorious racists in South Africa, Terreblanche was murdered in his sleep following a wage dispute with two black laborers on his plantation.
VENTERSDORP, South Africa — A 15-year-old who minded cattle for South Africa’s most notorious white supremacist told his mother that he and an older laborer bludgeoned him to death because he hadn’t paid them in months.
The confession detailed in an exclusive interview with AP Television News Monday undermines claims the killing was inspired by an apartheid-era song urging people to kill white farmers.
It was a brutal end for Eugene Terreblanche, 69, a man once convicted of beating a farm worker so badly the man was left brain damaged.
According to the 15-year-old now accused of his murder, some of Terreblanche’s last words were threatening: “I will kill you and throw you to hell.”
Terreblanche’s slaying has heightened racial tensions as South Africa prepares to host soccer’s World Cup in June and July. And it draws unwelcome attention to crime in the country with one of the world’s highest murder rates, some 50 a day in a country of 50 million people.
It also comes amid controversy over a fiery black leader’s insistence on singing the song “kill the boer.” Boer means farmer in the Afrikaans language but also is a derogatory term for whites.
Members of Terreblanche’s Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging movement, better known as the AWB, have blamed African National Congress Youth League leader Julius Malema, saying he spread hate speech that led to Terreblanche’s killing.
Malema led college students in the song last month, sparking a legal battle in which his governing ANC party is challenging a high court ruling that the lyrics are unconstitutional. The ANC insists the song is part of its cultural heritage and that the lyrics — which also refer to the farmers as thieves and rapists — are not intended literally.
“The death of Terreblanche has got nothing to do with the song. We know who Terreblanche was, his character and how he related with his workers,” Malema said Monday.
He again sang the song while on a weekend visit to neighboring Zimbabwe, defying a high court injunction temporarily ordering him to stop it.
In Ventersdorp, AWB member Rean Olivier said Malema needs to be killed to prevent a race war.
“I personally think Malema has to be taken out to clear the playing field,” Olivier was quoted as saying by the South African Press Association.
But leaders of the AWB, whose members wear khaki uniforms and swagger around with pistols on their hips, sounded a more conciliatory note Monday.
Provincial leader Pieter Steyn said the movement is withdrawing threats made Sunday to avenge Terreblanche’s death. He said the AWB renounces violence in any form, speaking after ANC leaders came to Ventersdorp to pay their respects to the Terreblanche family.
There has been an increasing number of attacks on farms in recent weeks, according to Johannes Moller, president of the commercial farmers’ union AgriSA.
He said there were many motives but “simply irresponsible actions, such as the singing of struggle songs (like Malema’s), may have contributed to this increase.”
Moller’s union says more than 1,700 white farmers and 1,600 black farm workers and dwellers have been killed since 1994, when elections ended racist white rule and installed a democratic government.
Black workers’ unions say many farm workers are brutalized and even killed by farmers, but they could provide no figures.
“When farm workers are brutalized, even to the point of murder, it is only sheer luck that the matter would be reported to police,” said Katishi Masemola, general secretary of the Food and Allied Workers Union.
Terreblanche was sentenced to six years in jail in 2001 for the attempted murder of former security guard Paul Motshabi in March 1996. Terreblanche was released in 2004. Motshabi suffered brain damage, and was left paralyzed and unable to speak for months after the attack. He still walks with a limp.
“He shot me in the head with a firearm. I don’t have the capacity to remember what kind of bullet went through my head,” Motshabi told AP Television News, speaking in the Tswana language.
The mother of the 15-year-old suspect so feared Terreblanche, even in death apparently, that she never once used his name in Monday’s interview, referring to him only as “the elder.”
She said her son told her that he and his co-workers had not been paid since he started working for Terreblanche in December.
When they asked for their money, Terreblanche told them to first make sure that all his cattle had been brought in from pasture and counted. When they did that, Terreblanche still refused to pay them.
“He (Terreblanche) said ‘I will kill you and throw you to hell,’” the mother said, speaking in Tswana, repeating what she was told by her son.
At that point the older laborer went away and came back armed.
“He came with an iron rod, the older one hit the elder four blows and the young one hit him three blows and they left the farm house to hand themselves in at the police station and they told the police that they have killed the elder,” the mother said.
She is not being named in line with South African law, under which a minor charged with a crime cannot be identified without permission from a judge.
“My son was a person who doesn’t like to be in trouble,” the mother said softly, appearing a bit bewildered and scared.
At Terreblanche’s farm Monday, a big grader was being used to dig a hole in the family graveyard, where he is to be buried after a church service in Ventersdorp on Friday.
“This was such an unnecessary thing,” Terreblanche’s brother, Andries, told the AP, as he sat on a gray marble grave. “We are not racists, we just believe in purity of race.”
Reeves Detention Center is a 2,400 inmate PRIVATIZED prison in Texas that houses a large population of undocumented immigrants. This for-profit prison (like all of them) is administered for the greatest profit possible, of course any corner that can be cut will be! An inmate needs healthcare attention? Sorry, costs too much! Leave him to die! They may has well have said “let him eat cake.”
We at Malcolm-Che give our full solidarity to the rightous prisoners who rose up against these horrible conditions when one of their friends died at the hands of these capitalists!! It was the death of Manuel Galindo that sparked the uprising, but it was the poor food, poor healthcare and anger generated from the indefinate detention of these immigrants that made the uprising possible.
They took hostages (which they later released), demanded to speak to the Mexican consulate; tried anything they could do to try to get the word out about what was going on inside. We salute you! 25 of them are up on charges right now resulting from the uprisings, we demand they be given clemency!
From immigration to healthcare to privatized prisons this article touches on so many issues that are important to us. This is MUST READ!!
Attorney says inmate’s death led to Pecos prison riots
Here is a pic of the uprising at Reeves County Detention Center in Texas.
PECOS — The death of a 32-year-old epileptic inmate in solitary confinement at Reeves County Detention Center last Dec. 12 touched off the first of two riots that saw fires set and hostages taken, said an attorney for the dead inmate’s family.
Some of the privately run federal lockup’s 2,400 inmates, many of them illegal immigrants, had complained of woeful health care after the riots on Dec. 12-13 and Jan. 31-Feb. 1.
But the story now centers on 32-year-old Jesus Manuel Galindo of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, who El Paso lawyer Miguel “Mike” Torres claims was improperly treated.
Representing Galindo’s widow, three children and parents with co-counsel Leon Schydlower, Torres said last week that a member of a Lubbock physicians’ group that contracts with the prison had examined Galindo just before his death.
“The doctor said Jesus had an attitude problem because he was complaining about the lack of medical treatment that killed him three days later,” said Torres.
Galindo “had no business” being in the Security Housing Unit, Torres said, “because he was only in for minor infractions, not fighting or worse.”
The inmate’s mother had been calling almost daily to say he was not feeling well and was having seizures, said Galindo’s attorney.
“She mailed the prison his medical records, but they sent them back with a curt note that said, ‘Don’t send these again.,’ ” Torres said.
“When they found him at 7 a.m. Dec. 12, rigor mortis had set in, which meant he had been dead for three to five hours,” the attorney said. “I attended his funeral, and the small neighborhood funeral home in south El Paso was filled to overflowing. It was tragic because he was a young man.”
Cellmates rioted
Torres, who said he is taking steps toward a civil lawsuit against the company operating the prison, said Galindo’s former cellmates touched off the riot because they had feared that result. “Everything we learned is that they were worried sick about this guy,” he said.
“They tried to contact the administration and say, ‘Bring him back and we will watch him.’ You have to take this type of medication (Dilantin) at precise times at well-monitored therapeutic levels.”
Judy Madewell, a federal public defender in San Antonio who was handling Galindo’s appeal of a 30-month term for illegal re-entry into the United States, said she has “had concerns for a long time because RCDC has had a number of problems with inmates getting proper medical attention.
“My secretary translated a letter in which Jesus said, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to die and no one will find me!’ ” Madewell said.
“We feel horrible about what happened and feel like there is a lot of responsibility on the facility’s part.”
She reported sending Octavio Vasquez, an investigator with the federal defender’s office in Alpine, to spend three hours with Galindo on Dec. 4.
“He was in the SHU for minor disciplinary infractions,” Madewell said of Galindo.
“Octavio went to the authorities and said, ‘He needs removing from solitary,’ and they said, ‘Yes, we will move him out by this weekend.’ He was still there when he died eight days later.
“Jesus told Octavio the prison was not giving him his meds often enough and lowered the dosage. He was a gentle person — not a problem client, and as far as I know not a problem inmate.”
Assistant Federal Defender Charlotte Harris of Alpine, whose office represented Galindo after his arrest, said the Geo Group of Boca Raton, Fla., operates the detention center with support from Reeves County.
“It’s better for the government to run prisons, rather than private companies, because corners can be cut if you have a profit motive,” said Harris.
No response from prison
A call to the prison last week was referred to Geo Group’s Florida headquarters, where a spokesman asked that questions be submitted by e-mail. Geo did not respond to e-mailed questions.
Two prison recreation specialists were released unharmed after the first riot. The rec center was torched during that melee, and smoke poured from a housing unit during the second, broadcast by cable news, after which three inmates were hospitalized, one missing a finger.
Charged with assault and other crimes, 25 inmates face trial, a court official said.
Lima: President Alan Garcia laboured on Saturday to contain Peru’s worst political violence in years, as nine more police officers were killed in a bloody standoff with Amazon Indians fighting his efforts to exploit oil and gas on their native lands.
The new deaths brought to 22 the number of police killed – seven with spears – since security forces moved early Friday to break up a roadblock manned by 5,000 protesters.
Protest leaders said at least 30 Indians, including three children, died in the clashes. Authorities said they could confirm only nine civilian deaths, but cabinet chief Yehude Simon told reporters that 155 people had been injured, about a third of them with bullet wounds.
He announced a 3pm-6am curfew in the affected region and said authorities had made 72 arrests.
“The government was required to take these measures, not only for the president of the republic but for all 28 million Peruvians,” Simon said of breaking up the protests, which blocked the flow of oil and gas out of the Amazon and prevented food and supplies from coming in.
“We’ve all been affected one way or another by the protest& when they take over highways and strategic points that can affect the national economy,” Simon said.
The political violence is the Andean country’s worst since the Shining Path insurgency was quelled more than a decade ago, and it bodes ill for Garcia’s ambitious plans to boost Peru’s oil and gas output.
It began early on Friday when security forces moved to break up a roadblock protesters mounted in early April. About 1,000 protesters seized police during the melee, taking more than three dozen hostage, officials said.
Twenty-two officers were rescued in Saturday’s storming of Station No 6 at state-owned Petroperu in Imacita, in the jungle state of Amazonas, Defence Minister Antero Florez told the Radioprogramas radio network. He said seven officers were missing.
When prisoners have a labor issue they are truly at the mercy of the corrections officers and the state. Workers that are ‘free’ can certainly relate to many of the tactics used against inmates but there things that bosses on the outside can’t do. In this instance the inmates don’t want to have to work more hours and not get anything in return… and their punishment for this insolence is to go on 23-hr lockdown.
“We say this is instigating cruel, unusual, degrading and inhumane treatment.” Damn right it is!!!
Prisoners at the Matsqui Institution in the Fraser Valley are going to court in an attempt to overturn a lockdown their lawyer says has forced some to use waste baskets and plastic bags in their cells as toilets because of a lack of timely access to washroom facilities.
Lawyer John Conroy, retained by the inmate committee at the medium-security facility about 70 kilometres east of Vancouver, said he has secured a hearing in B.C. Supreme Court next Monday to end a lockdown that was imposed on May 11.
The lockdown means the prisoners are in their cells 23 hours a day.
It was imposed after about 220 inmates at the 43-year-old institution stopped performing such duties as kitchen work to protest against changes that would have required more labour without more visits and yard time, he said.
But prisoners in three of the four wings do not have toilets in their cells, so, during the lockdown, must request access to communal washrooms from prison staff, Mr. Conroy said.
As a result, they are not being able to get to toilets as needed, he said.
“What they have been doing is going to the bathroom in their cells,” he said, noting that some are holding onto the raw sewage until they have their daily release, while others are throwing it out through open windows.
“We say this is instigating cruel, unusual, degrading and inhumane treatment,” he said, noting that it violates sections of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act on cruel and unusual punishment.
“We say there are remedies available to the institution and administration in the event of a work stoppage that don’t include locking people down and trying to coerce them to go back to work by using their toilet access as a way to coerce them,” he said.
Mr. Conroy said that he expects some members of the public will have little sympathy for his clients, but that standards for the treatment of inmates have to be respected.
“They’re not asking for a five-star hotel accommodations. They’re locked in cells without toilets,” he said, noting that they also lack washing options.
He said his clients are concerned, but not inclined to violence.
“It’s a popular myth that prisoners like to riot. It’s just nonsense,” he said. “They know what can happen during riots; how the lunatic fringe can take advantage of the cover of a riot. It’s not in their interests to riot. They want to try and resolve the whole thing peacefully and it’s the administration that’s escalating the situation by locking people down and trying to put them in a situation where some people might lose it.”
A spokesman for Correctional Service Canada, speaking on background, declined to give detailed comment on the situation because, he said, the matter is before the courts.
He would not talk about any aspect of the toilet-access issue, but acknowledged that inmates stopped working and so prison officials enacted what he called a “modified routine” that curbs privileges.
“Having less freedom has resulted in a number of things. That’s what is [being] brought in court,” he said.
MAPUTO (AFP) — A construction strike at Mozambique’s unfinished national stadium erupted in violence when a police officer shot and wounded two striking workers, a police spokesman said Thursday.
The two men, part of a group of about 700 working on the Chinese-run project, were shot Wednesday and were still in hospital as of Thursday morning, said Arnaldo Chefo, Maputo police spokesman.
Chefo promised a police investigation into the incident.
“We consider the use of firearms an exception, an extreme measure,” Chefo said.
“If it’s determined that there was excessive haste on the part of the officer that used the firearm, then in addition to the disciplinary process he will undergo, he could also be subjected to criminal prosecution.”
The strike is the construction workers’ second in less than three months.
According to independent newspaper O Pais, the workers are upset over low wages, no overtime pay and perceived mistreatment by the project’s Chinese management.
The workers say they were promised 105 dollars per month but in fact receive just 71 dollars, according to O Pais.
The 60 million dollar national stadium is part of Mozambique’s plans to cash in when neighbouring South Africa hosts the World Cup in 2010.
The Mozambican government is working to persuade fellow Portuguese-speaking teams, including five-time champions Brazil, to train in the new stadium.
But with the World Cup scheduled to begin in June 2010, authorities face a race against the clock, with strikes threatening to derail the 24-hour-a-day construction project.
help flooded a facility in East Point Wednesday.
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