Image Credit: Reuters

Here at Malcolm-Che.com, we understand our readers have a special interest in policy brutality. We tend to focus on instances of domestic police brutality, but we never forget that this is a worldwide problem.  We’ve already said that inside the prison system, the prison guards are the biggest gang; in the outside world, the police are the biggest gang.  Along with the military, they are the biggest agents of state-sponsored violence.

Given the political turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East, there are countless examples of police brutality that rightfully inspire indignation in all human rights activists.  Here we are highlighting the police brutality in Morocco.  Yesterday, according to official figures, which we know are often grossly underestimated, approximately 20 protesters in Rabat and Casablanca Morocco were beaten by police.  This was for allegedly defying a ban on public protests.  Since the uprising began in Tunisia, several Arab governments have passed various laws which have sought to stem the revolutionary tide that is now sweeping across the region.  Morocco is no different; they recently passed a constitutional amendment that would allow for “greater democracy and more independence for the judiciary.”

However, we know that these reforms are too little, too late.  The people of Morocco live under the extreme oppression of a monarchy, where a class struggle has been developing for centuries.  Common to all monarchical states,  Morocco has a very rigid class structure.  Although poverty is most concentrated in the rural areas (Morocco Poverty), Casablanca is home to one of the largest slums in the Arab world.  It’s class structure is dominated on the one hand by a tiny elite that holds the majority of the political, economic and religious power.  The other end is dominated by the  impoverished and illiterate masses, which live in the countryside or the slum.  While these represent the majority, there is also a layer of  urban youth, which are primarily under- or unemployed.  As in many of the uprisings in the Middle East, they seem to be an important protagonist in the struggle for political, social and economic freedom.

This article highlights two different demonstrations which are very telling in their location and content.  One demonstration was dispersed when graduate students were demanding jobs from the current Monarch.  The other demonstration was in front of a secret prison, where the protesters alleged prisoners were tortured.  It is worth mentioning that these are common themes which run throughout the so-called “Arab Spring,” but which we rightfully recognize as the Arab Uprising.  Protesters are demanding jobs and an end to the repressive tactics of authoritarian regimes.

Predictably, these protests are being blamed on “leftist and religious elements,” which are seeking to destabilize the country.  We realize that the political powers are scapegoating these two groups, and these demonstrations capture the true will of the populations.  We fully support the people of Morocco in their quest for revolutionizing their social and political institutions!

See article for more info:

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/181244.html

A lot of people don’t realize the role that police brutality has played in sparking these uprisings.  By no means the only or even the main issue at hand, it is nonetheless a very important element of what sparked the initial periods of uprising.  Check for yourself:

TUNISIA

Uprisings in Sidi Bouazid erupts end of December 2010 because a youth – Mohamed Bouazizi – has attempted to kill himself (by setting himself on fire).  What caused Bouazizi to do this?  The corrupt police force had trashed his vegetable stand and roughed him up; ruining his livelihood and attempting to take any dignity Bouazizi had.

Mohamed Bouazizi

The dictator Ben Ali had the nerve to visit Mohamed Bouazizi in his dying moments.

Protestors hold up a poster of the martyr Mohamed Bouazizi.

The police officers in Tunisia may have thought they had the last laugh when they attempted to destroy Bouazizi’s life; but instead history will note that it was this young martyr who sparked regional uprisings and ended dictatorships which had reigned for decades.

EGYPT

The events that have transpired – and continue to transpire – in Egypt were certainly affected by the uprising in Tunisia (which overthrew the dictator Ben Ali).  But the original protest that began it all in Egypt (recently that is) was already scheduled before the Tunisians had rose up.  And it was scheduled because a youth in Alexandria – Khalel Said – had been beaten to death by police (in June of 2010).  When the protest came around it took on a much greater life due to events going on in Tunisia , among other factors, but we can still see the huge role played by the martyr Khalel Said.

Khaled Said RIP Murdered by Egyptian police in Alexandria June 2010

Protesters hold up portraits of Egyptian victim of torture Khaled Said during a demonstration outside the journalists syndicate in Cairo on June 19, 2010.

Although Mubarak is not out of power as of the publishing of this article, most analysts agree that his days are numbered.  We will say the number is 3 or less.

Police brutality continues to be a rampant problem across the globe (can’t forget about riots in Greece in ‘08 due to the police murder of a youth).  We don’t want to reduce the reasons for the recent uprisings to police brutality, only to point out that this issue played a part here as well that shouldn’t be glossed over.  The leaders of the world should probably be on notice at this point that the youth is getting fed up with police-oriented solutions for economic problems.

Hands off the Middle East!!  Power to the People of Tunisia!!  Power to the People of Egypt!!

http://voiceofdetroit.net/?p=3134

Read BAR article on 1st day of strike HERE.

Offices of the wardens at Hay’s, Macon State, Telfair, and Augusta state all referred our inquiries to the Department of Corrections public affairs officer, who so far has declined to return our repeated calls.

The prisoner strike in Georgia is unique, sources among inmates and their families say, because it includes not just black prisoners, but Latinos and whites too, a departure from the usual sharp racial divisions that exist behind prison walls. Inmate families and other sources claim that when thousands of prisoners remained in their cells Thursday, authorities responded with violence and intimidation. Tactical officers rampaged through Telfair State Prison destroying inmate personal effects and severely beating at least six prisoners. Inmates in Macon State Prison say authorities cut the prisoners’ hot water, and at Telfair the administration shut off heat Thursday when daytime temperatures were in the 30s. Prisoners responded by screening their cells with blankets, keeping prison authorities from performing an accurate count, a crucial aspect of prison operations.

As of Friday, inmates at several prisons say they are committed to continuing the strike. “We are going to ride it,” the inmate press release quotes one, “till the wheels fall off. We want our human rights.”

The peaceful inmate strike is being led from within the prison. Some of those thought to be its leaders have been placed under close confinement.

The nine specific demands made by Georgia’s striking prisoners in two press releases pointedly reflect many of the systemic failures of the U.S. regime of mass incarceration, and the utter disconnection of U.S. prisons from any notions of protecting or serving the public interest. Prisoners are demanding, in their own words, decent living conditions, adequate medical care and nutrition, educational and self-improvement opportunities, just parole decisions, just parole decisions, an end to cruel and unusual punishments, and better access to their families.

It’s a fact that Georgia prisons skimp on medical care and nutrition behind the walls, and that in Georgia’s prisons recreational facilities are non-existent, and there are no educational programs available beyond GED, with the exception of a single program that trains inmates to be Baptist ministers. Inmates know that upon their release they will have no more education than they did when they went in, and will be legally excluded from Pell Grants and most kinds of educational assistance, they and their families potentially locked into a disadvantaged economic status for life.

Despite the single biggest predictor of successful reintegration into society being sustained contact with family and community, Georgia’s prison

authorities make visits and family contact needlessly difficult and expensive. Georgia no longer allows families to send funds via US postal money orders to inmates. It requires families to send money through J-Pay, a private company that rakes off nearly ten percent of all transfers. Telephone conversations between Georgia prisoners and their families are also a profit centers for another prison contractor, Global Tel-Link which extracts about $55 a month for a weekly 15 minute phone call from cash-strapped families. It’s hard to imagine why the state cannot operate reliable payment and phone systems for inmates and their families with public employees at lower cost, except that this would put contractors, who probably make hefty contributions to local politicians out of business.

Besides being big business, prisons are public policy. The U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, but accounts for almost a quarter of its prisoners. African Americans are one eighth this nation’s population, but make up almost half the locked down. The nation’s prison population increased more than 450% in a generation beginning about 1981. It wasn’t about crime rates, because those went up, and then back down. It wasn’t about rates of drug use, since African Americans have the same rates of drug use as whites and Latinos. Since the 1980s, the nation has undertaken a well-documented policy of mass incarceration, focused primarily though not exclusively on African Americans. The good news is that public policies are ultimately the responsibility of the public to alter, to change or do do away with. America’s policy of mass incarceration is overdue for real and sustained public scrutiny. A movement has to be built on both sides of the walls that will demand an end to the prison industry and to the American policy of mass incarceration. That movement will have to be outside the Republican and Democratic parties. Both are responsible for building this system, and both rely on it to sustain their careers. The best Democrats could do on the 100 to 1 crack to powder cocaine disparity this year, with a black president in the White House and thumping majorities in the House and Senate was to reduce it to 18 to 1, and then only by lengthening the sentences for powder cocaine. On this issue, Democrats and Republicans are part of the problem, not the solution.

As this article goes to print Saturday morning, it’s not known whether the strike will continue a third day. With prison officials not talking, and corporate media ignoring prisoners not just this week but every day, outlets like Black Agenda Report and the web site upon which you’re reading this are among the chief means inmates and their families have of communicating with the public. The prisoners are asking the public to continue to call the Georgia Department of Corrections, and the individual prisons listed below to express concern for the welfare of the prisoners.

Prison is about corruption, power and isolation. You can help break the isolation by calling the wardens’ offices at the following prisons. Prisons, naturally , are open Saturdays and Sundays too.

Macon State Prison is 478-472-3900.

Hays State Prison is at (706) 857-0400

Telfair State prison is 229-868-7721

Baldwin State Prison is at (478) 445- 5218

Valdosta State Prison is 229-333-7900

Smith State Prison is at (912) 654-5000

The Georgia Department of Corrections is at http://www.dcor.state.ga.us and their phone number is 478-992-5246

A Sunday update to this story will be posted at Black Agenda Report, about 9AM EST.

Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and based in Marietta GA. Dixon is a member of the state committee of the GA Green party.

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.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gMerqzo-GmOgn5-ch4wz-J0DJ7nAD9HO45H00

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.

South African state workers are striking over a demand for higher wages. (Reuters: Siphiwe Sibeko)

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=22162

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.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-20/south-africa-s-police-out-in-full-force-to-monitor-state-workers-strike.html

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.