Wednesday, August 4, 2021

5 myths about Cuba, debunked

+ emperor penguins may be nearly extinct by 2100 ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌
 

Cuba has been in global headlines recently after rare anti-government protests erupted in July and led to at least 700 arrests, according to human rights organizations.

Struggle, dissent, crackdown – it's a seemingly familiar cycle in Cuba. But what do you really know about this Caribbean island about 100 miles (161 km) from Florida?

"Cuba remains largely an enigma to outsiders, and especially to Americans," writes Caroline McCulloch, a Cuba specialist at Florida International University. "Myths prevail because of Cuban government censorship and the United States' historic tendency – born of the Cold War – to stereotype and simplify the communist island."

McCulloch explains five common misconceptions about Cuba and U.S.-Cuba relations.

Also today:

Catesby Holmes

International Editor | Politics Editor

Street view of Havana, Cuba, July 26, 2021, several weeks after mass protests broke out. Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images

5 ways Americans often misunderstand Cuba, from Fidel Castro's rise to the Cuban American vote

Caroline McCulloch, Florida International University

Cuba: It's complicated.

Ethics + Religion

Environment + Energy

Politics + Society

Education

Science + Technology

Trending on Site

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Saturday, August 11, 2012

From Cynthia McKinney: One Small Step for the Republic, A Giant Leap for Voter Choice in Georgia?

Hello!  Some good news to report on the voter choice front!

The State of Georgia is technically in default in its own case on voter choice, having no answer to the precedent-setting Tennessee decision just ordering that the Green Party and the Constitution Party Presidential candidates be placed on the ballot.  That Tennessee decision was affirmed by the Appellate Court yesterday in its refusal to issue a stay which would have, in effect, disallowed the placement of the Green and Constitution Parties on the November 2012 Tennessee ballot.  In Georgia, the state Green and Constitution Parties teamed up again, represented by Roseanne Barr's campaign legal advisor, Mike Raffauf.  I call this "one small step for the Republic and a possible giant leap for voter choice in Georgia!"

Here's the Ballot Access News write-up with the pdf of the actual order embedded and below that is the Knox.com write-up:

Sixth Circuit Preserves Ballot Spot in Tennessee for Green Party and Constitution Party

August 9th, 2012
On August 9, the Sixth Circuit issued a 7-page order, denying the request of Tennessee election officials to remove the Green Party and the Constitution Party from the November 2012 ballot. However, the Sixth Circuit did grant the state's request for a stay of the U.S. District Court order that said there must be a random procedure to give each party an equal chance to get the top line on the ballot.
In February 2012, a U.S. District Court in Tennessee had struck down the state's ballot access law for newly-qualifying parties, and had also ordered the state to print the two plaintiff parties on the 2012 ballot. The U.S. District Court had also struck down the law, giving the two largest parties the best spots on the ballot.
The Sixth Circuit has not decided any of these issues at this time. Instead, the Court simply set forth what rules should be in place, pending a decision. The order says, "The state has not shown why the plaintiffs' past support – which, as noted by the district court, consists of nearly 20,000 votes for the Green Party and almost 10,000 signatures for the Constitution Party – is so insubstantial as to create a real possibility of frustrating the State's democratic process." The reference to the 10,000 signatures for the Constitution Party, and the 20,000 votes for the Green Party, is to past elections, not anything related to this year's election.
From knoxnews.com:

Green, Constitution parties allowed to be on November ballot in Tenn.

NASHVILLE — A 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling Thursday assures that Green Party candidates will have a place on Tennessee's November general election ballot in several races — including Martin Pleasant of Knoxville as the party's U.S. Senate nominee.
"That's wonderful," said Pleasant, 43, who now plans to take some time off his job with the Knox County Engineering and Public Works Department for campaigning.
State Election Coordinator Mark Goins said the court ruling came in requests for an expedited ruling on two issues in a lawsuit brought by the Green and Constitution parties challenging the state's ballot access.
Currently, Democrats and Republicans are listed by party affiliation but others are listed as independents. A U.S. District Court judge in Nashville ruled in February in the Green and Constitution parties' favor on some key issues, but the state attorney general appealed.
In Thursday's decision, the court declared Green and Constitution party candidates must be on the ballot and listed by party name, Goins said. But the court ruled for the state in another issue up for "expedited" decision — letting stand a present law requiring the "majority party," now Republicans, be listed first on the ballot, followed by the "minority party," the Democrats, with others following lower on the ballot.
The Nashville judge had ruled that the ballot order should be determined by a random drawing.
Further hearings and rulings are expected later.
The Green Party of Tennessee nominated a slate of candidates at a convention earlier this year, but their place on the ballot was not assured until Thursday's decision. The decision also means that Kermit Steck of Kingsport will be on the ballot as U.S. Senate nominee of the Constitution Party, which did not qualify candidates in any other races.
Five Green Party congressional candidates will be on the ballot under the ruling. They are Robert N. Smith of Greeneville in the 1st District, Norris Dryer of Knoxville in the 2nd District; John Miglietta of Nashville in the 5th District; Patrick John Riley of Lancaster in the 6th District; and Howard Switzer of Linden in the 7th District.
There are also five Green Party candidates for state House seats, including two in Knoxville. Calvin Cassady will oppose Rep. Joe Armstrong, D-Knoxville, in the 15th state House District, while Bryan Moneyhun will face Rep. Bill Dunn, R-Knoxville, in the 16th District. Both Armstrong and Dunn would have no opposition to re-election without the Green nominees.
Get Copyright Permissions © 2012, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.

--
 ----------------------------------------------------------+
|    __o     CONTINENTAL CRITICAL MASS   
|  _`\;,_               come ride with me
| (*)/ (*)
|                  Bike4Peace Across the USA                   
-----------------------------------------------------------+


http://www.enduswars.org
http://www.livestream.com/dignity
http://www.myspace.com/dignityaction
http://www.myspace.com/runcynthiarun
http://www.twitter.com/cynthiamckinney
http://www.facebook.com/CynthiaMcKinney
http://www.youtube.com/runcynthiarun

Silence is the deadliest weapon of mass destruction.

"The biggest weapon in the hands of the oppressors is the minds of the oppressed." Steve Biko

"Make your spirit flexible, and nothing will ever bend you out of shape."  Wisdom by Taro Gold









Corporate Roots of European Imperialism


From The Ramparts
Junious Ricardo Stanton


"A chartered company is an association formed by investors or shareholders for the purpose of trade, exploration and colonization. Companies enabled merchants to band together to undertake ventures requiring more capital than was available to any one merchant or family. Typically, these companies were formed from the sixteenth century onwards by groups of European investors to underwrite and profit from the exploration of Africa, India, the Caribbean and North America, usually under the patronage of one state, which issued the company's charter. But chartered companies go back into the medieval period. Chartered companies enabled states to use private resources for exploration and trade beyond the means of the limited resources of the treasury, which is a liberal form of indirect rule; some companies did themselves employ a form of indirect rule of territories through traditional leaders, such as princely states with whom they (not the European state) made treaties. Chartered companies were usually formed, incorporated and legitimised under a royal or, in republics, an equivalent government charter. This document set out the terms under which the company could trade; defined its boundaries of influence, and described its rights and responsibilities."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_company

            The Occupy Movement has helped raise consciousness about the role giant Wall Street banks and major corporations play in shaping government policy; how these entities have assumed a major influence over the operation of governments and the lives of ordinary people. Contrary to what most people think, this is not a recent phenomenon. European merchants, money changers, nobles and monarchs melded together to form trading companies and grant virtual monopolies to themselves to explore and establish colonies designed to expropriate the resources of the indigenous people every where they went on planet Earth. These monopoly trading companies are the forefathers of the international banks and giant corporations of today.
            Western history books tell a far different story than what really happened when resource starved, war torn, disease ravaged Europeans first began to covet the riches of foreign lands in the fifteenth century.  Beginning in elementary school, we are forced to learn outright lies, memorize and regurgitate myths and fairy tales about the Pilgrims, and the other early colonists who ventured beyond the shores of Europe in search of "the new world". In school books the Europeans are depicted as noble, ambitious industrious beings searching for trade and commerce, freedom from persecution, they are the good guys seeking to spread civilization and Christianity to the "heathen" in far off lands.
How can you spread or give what you don't have? There is a saying "everywhere you go, there you are"; meaning the Europeans who ventured forth seeking riches brought with them their values, their cultural disposition towards selfishness, greed and love of war. It was only a matter of time before conflict, strife and war broke out between Europeans and the aboriginal people they encountered around the globe. This is well documented and we are seeing the vestiges and consequences of those conflicts played out in today's current events.
Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, merchants, financers and European blue bloods formed monopoly trading companies to facilitate and augment their ruthless dealings with indigenous people around the world. We've heard of them but we never told what they did and how they did it. Companies like: The Massachusetts Bay Company, The Hudson Bay Colony, Royal West Indian Company, Royal African Company (England) , Dutch East India Company, Dutch West India Company (Holland)  Brandenburg African Company (Germany), Compagnie du Mississippi (France)  and numerous others were the forces behind much of the early European colonization of the world.
These companies needed men to work the fields, mines and clear the land to extract its resources. The trading companies also needed canon fodder to lead the invasions and fight to expand their "settlements". So the merchants and financers colluded with the monarchs to empty the jails and press the dregs of European society into service of the monopoly trading companies. The Europeans tried to enslave the indigenous inhabitants and raped their women; was it any wonder genocidal wars broke out almost immediately between the whites and the aboriginal inhabitants everywhere the Europeans went? If you want to know the truth about European contacts with indigenous people read: Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World by E. Franklin Frazier Beacon Press 1957, Afrikan People and European Holidays A Mental Genocide (books one and two) by Rev. Ishakamusa Barashango IV Dynasty Publishing Co 1980 and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, Howard University Press 1982.
Now even whites are beginning to tell the truth about their history and their centuries' old legacy of genocide, pillage and plunder. "The first true war attributed to British colonists in North America was 'King Philip's War,' so called, of the 1670s, and was blamed entirely on the natives, who were depicted as brutal savages, who betrayed the colonists' trust. The Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Narragansett and other peoples of Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Connecticut had actually been exceedingly generous to the newcomers, effectively sharing land and teaching them how to cultivate it according to local climate and soil conditions. But English notions of land usage, particularly that of private enclosure, quickly brought the colonists and natives into conflict. Increasing European migration, coupled with competition over land, led to attacks by aboriginals on British settlements, then into all out war. Native populations had already been extremely diminished by contact with European diseases to which they had no immunity, and this coupled with the efforts of colonists to exacerbate conflict between tribes, and to thwart intertribal unity, made victory over the British impossible. When the colonists eventually prevailed they inflicted a horrible slaughter on men, women and children alike. For a quarter century the severed head of Metacomet, the son of the colonists' benefactor, Massasoit, remained impaled on a pike in Plymouth town square, a reminder of the implacability of those who intended to be masters of the land. English victory cleared the natives of southern New England and 'allowed the uninterrupted growth of England's northern colonies right up to the American Revolution,' and became as well 'the brutal model for how the United States would deal with its native population.' And, one could add, for all of America's non-white enemies yet to be. Doctrines of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, fostered to rationalize genocidal attitudes, and to justify the enslavement of Africans, quickly percolated into the culture, to be refined continually up to the present." War and Empire Are and Always Have Been the American Way of Life By Paul L. Atwood http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32124.htm
            The chartered monopoly trading companies spawned banks and insurance companies in Europe to hoard the profits, safeguard the investments of the partners, their ships and cargos. They also prompted mercenaries and expeditionary armies/navies owned by the trading companies to carry out their greedy agendas and ruthless policies in the name of profit. Sound familiar? The policies of the original trading companies are not all that different from their latter day descendants. "In order to carry out their many tasks, which in many cases included functions - such as security and defence - usually reserved for a sovereign state, some companies achieved relative autonomy. A few chartered companies such as the British Honourable East India Company (HEIC) and Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) had military and naval forces of their own that dwarfed even the average European state's armed forces, and adequate funds to buy the best men and equipment, in effect making them a state within a state. More chartered companies were formed during the late nineteenth century's 'Scramble for Africa' with the purpose of seizing, colonising and administering the last 'virgin' African territories, but these proved generally less profitable than earlier trading companies. In time, most of their colonies were either lost (often to other European powers) or transformed into crown colonies. The last chartered company to administer territory directly in Africa was the Companhia de Moçambique in Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique), which handed over rule of the colonies of Manica and Sofala to the Portuguese republic's colonial government in 1942." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_company
            Do you see their pattern? The economic interests of the elites drive public policy, even war. While the fifteenth century trading companies depended on the various monarchs' and Papal cooperation to grant them monopolies to discover and expropriate raw materials, minerals and labor, their twenty-first century heirs now own the governments and use their treasuries, military and covert ops to invade and control new markets, resources, financial systems and labor to fuel their global vampire economy.  Anyone who stands in their way gets demonized and neutralized or is used as a pretext to invade, install quislings and puppets, rob and steal other people's lands and resources and control their markets. (Think US CIA British MI6 and NATO)
"Throughout the former European empires the real problem for Washington was de-colonization. Sometimes the movements were communist but often not. Nationalism and the movement toward 'non-alignment' were equal threats, though anti-communism provided the ideological cover for Washington's global military response to any and all emerging movements that might frustrate the overall goal of a unitary, integrated American-managed world-system. Thus in the name of anti-communism the newly minted Central Intelligence Agency, violating the congressional mandate that had created it, and domestic and international law as well, overthrew the parliamentary government in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. In that year Vietnam was divided, supposedly temporarily, in order to allow nationwide elections but, since the CIA knew that Ho Chi Minh would easily win, the division was really to buy time to prevent Ho from achieving his movement's goal of independence and national unity. In fact Washington moved to prevent national elections agreed to by all great powers, except the U.S., in the Geneva Accords of 1954, and in contravention of them 'invented' a new state, South Vietnam, and then pretended that it was the choice of a majority of Vietnamese. Throughout the 1950s the U.S. also intervened covertly to thwart the rise of Arab and Muslim secular nationalism, particularly Nasserism, whom the CIA tried to assassinate because he nationalized the Suez Canal, as well as Qassim in Iraq for doing the same to that nation's oil industry. The strategy of attempting to overthrow governments that stood in the way of American corporate dominance of key national industries in the Muslim world backfired by creating a vacuum into which Islamic fundamentalism flowed, in what the CIA today calls 'blowback.'"  War and Empire Are and Always Have Been the American Way of Life
Globalization is nothing more than monopoly imperialism, it's colonialism and neocolonialism on steroids. Instead of several monarchs and trading companies fighting and vying for resources and labor, the power behind the scenes is a small cabal working in collusion and cooperation to control the global financial system, national governments and the whole world. They've come a long way since the 1400's.

                                              


The Okey-Doke

 From The Ramparts
Junious Ricardo Stanton
 The Okey-Doke

"Ever since the work of French sociologist Gustave Le Bon in the late nineteenth century, we know that adults behave like children when they are in the throes of collective emotion. They become susceptible, even if for just a critical fleeting moment, to the suggestions of a leader-of-men who for them embodies a father figure. In 1990, Sharp got close to Colonel Reuven Gal, then chief psychologist of the Israeli Army (he later became deputy national security adviser to Ariel Sharon and now runs operations designed to manipulate young Israeli non-Jews). Combining the discoveries of Le Bon and Sigmund Freud, Gal reached the conclusion that it was also possible to exploit the 'Oedipus complex' in adolescents and steer a crowd of young people to oppose a head of state, as a symbolic father figure. On this basis, Sharp and Gal set up training programs for young activists with the objective of organizing coups. After a few successes in Russia and the Baltics, it was in 1998 that Gene Sharp perfected the method of 'color revolutions' with the overthrow of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic."  - Perfecting The Method of "Color Revolutions Western leaders slip back into childhood By Thierry Meyssan  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32110.htm

The good news is corporate media news consumption is way down in fact CNN is so far down in the ratings, its CEO recently resigned. http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120727-712098.html Now if we can only get the yahoos to stop watching Fox News. The reason the mass media news is down is because more and more people are getting their information from alternative sources: Short Wave radio, the Internet and Satellite TV. Most sane people realize the corporate media lies and promotes an elitist plutocratic global agenda favoring what they themselves call a New World Order.  The corporate media reflects the values, class biases and world view of the handful of conglomerates that own most of the radio, television, and print media in existence. So naturally they create the lenses and filters they want us to see the world through to manipulate our minds to acquiesce to their foul agendas whether it be: perpetual wars, Frankenfoods, debt peonage, eugenics or population control.
The corporate media wants us to believe the masses in places like Libya, Tunisia and Syria thirst for change and "revolution" but somehow places like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar are bastions of human rights, freedom and democracy. The so called Arab Spring "color revolutions" of last year were a total fraud. Despite what the Western media told us they were really coupe d'états, the result of well laid plans and immense financing to target and topple regimes the West wanted ousted for their own nefarious reasons. What we are seeing and being told by the corporate media about Syria and Iran are total lies akin to the earlier lies about 9-11, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.  The US media at the behest of Western global warmongers created demons and devils like Osama bin-Laden to justify their global plunder and naked imperialism. These make believe enemies have long been on the US CIA, British MI6, Saudi secret police/security and Pakistani ISI payrolls.
Why has no one in the corporate media asked why the Obama administration is paying its supposed sworn enemy "Al-Qaeda" to kill civilians in places like Libya and now Syria?  "The Obama administration is focusing on increasing aid to the Free Syrian Army and other oppositional factions to facilitate a forced regime change in Syria. Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, admits that the US government '[is] looking at the controlled demolition [of the Syrian government]. But like any controlled demolition, anything can go wrong.' The Pentagon have been plotting and overseeing terrorist activities in Syria as the campaign for regime change marches on. Along with NATO and French Special Forces, the US government has been placing strategic measures to make sure terrorism is carried out in Syria. The globalists at the RAND Corporation admit that 'al-Qaeda has conducted roughly two dozen attacks, primarily against Syrian security service targets. Virtually all have been suicide attacks and car bombings, and they have resulted in more than 200 deaths and 1,000 injuries.'"  Al-Qaeda Directs Free Syrian Army in Controlled Demolition of Syria by Susanne Posel http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32177
Under cover of lies, deceit and disinformation the international blood suckers, their minions in government, the think tanks and NGOs are financing/waging a not so covert war on Syria with plans to move on Iran and Lebanon in the very near future. These psychopaths are attempting to undermine and eliminate the Syria-Iran mutual defense pact so that when they take on Iran, Syria and Hezbollah will already have been "neutralized". The Western imperialists using their NATO enforcement arm is moving in for the kill. But they have to make it look like they are the good guys so they've created this disinformation and psy-op bull crap about a grass roots uprising to topple the "evil" Assad regime. Who could be more corrupt than the NATO axis of evil?
It's all lies! "The 'protests' did not emanate from internal political cleavages as described by the mainstream media. From the very outset, they were the result of a covert US-NATO intelligence operation geared towards triggering social chaos, with a view to eventually discrediting the Syrian government of Bashar Al Assad and destabilizing Syria as a Nation State. Since the middle of March 2011, Islamist armed groups --covertly supported by Western and Israeli intelligence-- have conducted terrorist attacks directed against government buildings including acts of arson. Amply documented, trained gunmen and snipers including mercenaries have targeted the police, armed forces as well as innocent civilians. There is ample evidence, as outlined in the Arab League Observer Mission report, that these armed groups of mercenaries are responsible for killing civilians. While the Syrian government and military bear a heavy burden of responsibility, it is important to underscore the fact that these terrorist acts --including the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children-- are part of a US-NATO-Israeli initiative, which consists is supporting, training and financing  'an armed entity' operating inside Syria.
The role of the US-NATO-Israel military alliance in triggering an armed insurrection is not addressed by the Western media. Moreover, several 'progressive voices' have accepted the 'NATO consensus' at face value. The role of CIA-MI6 covert intelligence operations in support of armed groups is simply not mentioned. Salafist paramilitary groups involved in terrorist acts are, according to reports, supported covertly by Israeli intelligence (Mossad). The Muslim Brotherhood has been supported by Turkey, as well as by MI6, Britain's Secret Service (SIS) since the 1950s. More generally, the Western media has misled public opinion on the nature of the Arab protest movement by failing to address the support provided by the US State Department as well as US foundations (including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)) to selected pro-US opposition groups. Known and documented, the U.S. State Department 'has been been funding opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad, since 2006.' (U.S. admits funding Syrian opposition - World - CBC News April 18, 2011). The protest movement in Syria was upheld by the media as part of the "Arab Spring", presented to public opinion as a pro-democracy protest movement which spread spontaneously from Egypt and the Maghreb to the Mashriq. There is reason to believe, however, that events in Syria, however, were planned well in advance in coordination with the process of regime change in other Arab countries including Egypt and Tunisia." SYRIA: NATO's Next "Humanitarian" War? Michel Chossudovsky (Editor)
The same rabid colonization game plan is in the works for the rest of the world namely Africa and Latin America. The Western imperialist vampires covet the water, mineral resources and land there as well. They are psychopaths and megalomaniacs who should be seen and recognized as such. Don't fall for their okey-doke, get your information for reliable sources not the lying mainstream media.

                                               









Wednesday, August 8, 2012

BLOW THE WHISTLE ON ‘STOP & FRISK’!


To those who are tired of seeing police step to our youth with harassment, brutality and even worse; to those outraged because the NYPD stopped and frisked 684,000 people last year alone; to Black and Latino youth tired of knowing that every time you leave your house you might be descended on by cops;  to parents who fear that no matter what you tell your kids about surviving an encounter with cops it won't be enough to keep them safe; to people who know this will never happen to them but also know it's wrong — join us on September 13th to "Blow the Whistle on Stop & Frisk!"

Stop & Frisk is racist, and it's no damned good.  People have begun to stand up and fight it.  In the face of the massive public outcry, the NYPD is doubling down.  They are on pace to stop and frisk even more people this year.  Now is the time to unleash resistance that can sweep Stop & Frisk away.  The racial profiling Stop & Frisk concentrates is a pipeline to mass incarceration and the warehousing of our youth in prison.  We don't have to suffer all this anymore, and we won't.  There is no good reason for Stop & Frisk to remain in effect. It's illegal and illegitimate.  It must be stopped!  We are going to stop it, and you must join us in doing that!

Join us in Blowing the Whistle on Stop and Frisk!  On September 13th, thousands of people all across NYC will politically confront the cops who are violating people's rights.  We will be blowing whistles to call out these injustices and using cameras to document the criminal actions of the cops.  At 6 PM, we will all blow our whistles at once to signal to all those who have been targeted by Stop & Frisk, to all those who have stood up against it and to the cops and officials who enforce it that there are people all over who will no longer be silent.  And in cities across the country, people have to act in solidarity: Blowing the Whistle on the way cops target Black and Latino youth, whether they call it Stop & Frisk or not.

On September 13th we will say in a strong, united voice: WE WILL NO LONGER STAND BY SILENTLY WHILE PEOPLE ARE DENIED THEIR RIGHTS.  Our actions on that day will drive a nail into the coffin of Stop & Frisk.

Be a part of making this day happen.  Get your whistles and get them out to others in your neighborhood, at your school, in your workplace or in your place of worship.  Spread the word and organize people you know to be a part of this day.  Take to the streets on September 13th and with us declare that the days when the cops can violate people's rights however they want, when people aren't inspired and organized to politically resist this kind of injustice are no more.

This Call Is Issued By: 
  • Carl Dix, Revolutionary Communist Party
  • Cornel West, professor, author and public intellectual
  • Debra Sweet, World Can't Wait
  • Efia Nwangaza, Malcolm X Center, Greenville, SC
  • Gbenga Akinnagbe, actor
  • Herb Boyd, author, activist; Harlem, NY
  • James Vrettos, professor, John Jay College, City University of New York
  • Luke "Aidge" Patterson, artist and activist
  • Randy Credico, political satirist-activist 
What You Can Do
  •  Get whistles and flyers and organize people in your neighborhood, your work place or your place of worship for Thursday, September 13th;
  • Organize crews to go into your school, and other schools, in September and take united action—Blow the Whistle on Stop & Frisk;
  • Contact the Stop Mass Incarceration Network and get an organizing kit;
  • Contribute money to help make all this happen as powerfully as possible.
Stop Mass Incarceration Network
stopmassincarceration@gmail.com * P.O. Box 941 Knickerbocker Station NYC NY 10002