Here is the front page, above-the-fold story from the current issue of the Industrial Worker, on troubling news from Zimbabwe, a rich and fertile country immiserated and stripped by a century of kleptocratic armed factions — first the land-grabbing colonialists, and then an independent white apartheid government, and now a violent anti-colonial,
revolutionary
government, which has intoned populist slogans in order to justify government patronage to its political supporters, while assaulting all popular movements independent of the government — especially workers’ unions — on the grounds that any movement independent of, or opposed to, the anti-imperial
government must therefore be a tool of white imperialism. The government that claims the right to rule Zimbabwe has, through this and other means, made itself into one of the most violently anti-worker governments in the world today.
Zimbabwe [sic] arrests unionists, opposition
Zimbabwe’s ruling party and paramilitaries are conducting a terror campaign of arrests and captive meetings of opposition supporters before the presidential run-off election on June 27.
Police arrested the union president Lovemore Motombo and general secretary Wellington Chibebe of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) on May 8. Police charged them with
inciting people to rise against the government and reporting falsehoods about people being killedduring a May Day rally.The General Agriculture and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe has said that 40,000 farm workers are
affected by the current terror campaignthat has led to violence and eviction from their workplaces.Teachers in rural classrooms are among those being targetted as MDC supporters. Two have been killed to date, with a third abducted by Zanu-PF paramilitaries. The teachers’ union has received reports that the Zanu-PF are chasing teachers out of schools, beating them, and demanding
repentancefines in the form of cash, goats, and cattle, according to IRIN, a United Nations news service report.The situation in the schools resembles war zones, and there is no way teachers can report for work to face those death squads,Raymond Majongwe, president of the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe, told IRIN.
Our fear is that more could be under torture, or have been killed,said Majongwe.The MDC has placed the death toll since the March 29 election at 43 people, with hundreds beaten and more than 5,000 people fleeing to the mountains and elsewhere to escape Zanu-PF militias.
People who have tried to file complaints to the police are, in turn, detained and interrogated, said the MDC, which means few people are coming forward.
On April 25, armed police raided the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) headquarters in Harare and arrested more than 300 men, women and children who had taken refuge there from political violence.
National and international unions have condemned the Zanu-PF for the violence against union members and party activists.
Dockworkers affiliated with the Congress of South African Trade Unions in South Africa and dockworkers in Mozambique refused to unload a ship loaded with AK-47 machine gun bullets, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades sold by China to Zimbabwe. The ship returned to China without unloading its cargo.
In a speech to the Zanu-PF’s Central Committee on May 16, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said Zimbabwean democracy was stronger than ever and blamed the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) for inciting rural violence to benefit Western political and corporate interests.
Such violence is needless and must stop forthwith. Our fist is against white imperialism; it is a fist for the people of Zimbabwe, never a fist against them.The same day, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai delayed his return to Zimbabwe, saying that his party alleged that the military planned to kill him and at least 36 other opposition leaders.
Tsvangirai had been lobbying neighbouring countries and the United Nations to pressure Mugabe to release and accept the election results.
While the MDC refers to Tsvangirai as the
Presidenton its web site, it has agreed to contest the presidential run-off in a bid to avoid violence such as that seen in Kenya after its election.Despite the violence, MDC activists are gearing up for the presidential election campaign. The MDC said that 20,000 activists attended a rally in Harare.
The people are very clear on what they want. They want change. The dictatorship is dead and on 27 June we must attend its burial,said MDC parliamentarian Nelson Chamisa.—The Industrial Worker 105.04 (June 2008): Zimbabwe arrests unionists, opposition
It’s hard to know what to do in the face of this kind of violence, especially when it is so far away. There may not be much that American workers really can do other than bear witness and hope. But I do want to call special attention to the vital importance of actions like those of the dockworkers in South Africa and Mozambique — an inspiring example both of direct action on the shop floor, and also international labor solidarity. In the end, the actions of workers both in Zimbabwe and in international solidarity campaigns will matter far more than even the fairest, most transparent, most open elections ever will or ever could. What is needed is more — not just inspiring examples, but a coordinated campaign of industrial action against the entire coercive apparatus of Zanu-PF and the Zimbabwean state, to choke off their capacity to attack and terrorize workers.
What Mugabe and his apparatchiks are doing to workers in Zimbabwe is abominable, but we must never forget that the workers have more power standing with our hands in our pockets than all the combined wealth and weapons of the bosses — whether economic, social, or political.
But wait, there’s more.
In Tulare County, California, the county sheriff’s office has formed a new, dedicated Gang Unit
to engage in saturation patrols
of the south end of town, to pull over suspicious cars
(any guess on what color suspicious
drivers are likely to be), get in the faces
of suspect
young men (any guess on what the color of those faces will be?), and generally to make sure that certain members of the public are afraid to use public spaces. By putting more heavily-armed police officers on the streets, they claim to be taking weapons off the streets.
Gang Unit mouthpiece Sergeant Harold Liles says that the purpose of all this letting them know we are here, and the streets belong to us.
In Wilmington, Delaware, a new charter school is in the planning stages. It will enroll as many as 600 inner-city high school students — or rather, Cadets
— for training in jobs for the front lines in the Nation’s [sic] homeland security.
The Academy
will require its teenaged cadets
to wear uniforms, give them extensive physical training during and after school, offer homeland security training
as an after-school activity, and offer a choice of vocational curricula ranging from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) through prison guard, water rescue, paramedic, fireman, professional demolition and emergency response operator.
Meanwhile, in the great northwest, Montana Highway Patrol used to carry M14 rifles in the trunks of their patrol cars in case of an emergency. Soon they will all be carrying AR-15 assault rifles strapped to the front seat of the car. Montana Highway Patrol mouthpiece Jerril Ren says that For the most part, they’re trying to make them [high-powered assault rifles] more readily available to the officer
and said that the higher-powered guns were necessary for now-common tactical situations.
Inner-city patrol cops in Miami have also been carrying assault rifles for the past few months, at the behest of city Police Chief John Timoney.
Johnson City, Tennessee patrol cops were already armed with handguns and shotguns. Now they have started a new weapons program to ensure that at least some patrol cops are carrying other, special weapons
on every patrol shift. They won’t say in public what those weapons are or how many they are putting onto the streets.
And if you’re wondering why all these stories have suddenly hit the news so close to each other, over just the last month, in so many different cities and counties, my suspicion is that you’ve got the answer right there: the United States federal government, which spent the past 30 years or so involving itself in state and local law enforcement agencies through the use of tax-funded training, grants, and equipment sales for paramilitary SWAT
teams and anti-terrorism
task forces, now seems to be making use of those same grants to more heavily arm and more thoroughly militarize ordinary patrol cops on the highway, in the inner city, and in rural sheriff’s offices.
Do you feel safer now?
According to the ruling elite and the rank-and-file of bellowing Know-Nothing busybodies, all the people of the world must be segregated according to their nationality. If they won’t stay in their
place voluntarily, then the government had better make them stay there through paramilitary lockdowns at national borders and rigid enforcement of a state-imposed passbook (visa,
passport
) system to control where people can live and work, which is to say a system of government permission slips for existing, which provides a mechanism for the state to track and control those who go through official channels, and a mechanism for detecting, arresting, jailing, and exiling peaceful residents from the communities that they now call home when they cannot meet some presumptuous government official’s demand for Ihre Papiere, bitte.
Those who stand up for this despicable system of coercion and control — some of whom embrace it whole-heartedly out of unapologetic race hatred or inquisitorial theo-nationalism, and some of whom do the same damage by making half-hearted Sensible Liberal excuses based on an illusory need for control or the chauvinistic ideal of assimilation
— are all promoting a government-imposed system of discrimination and rigid segregation in housing, employment, education, and civic life, supported by government surveillance, enforced through government violence, all in the name of an illusory national unity
or integrity
that depends, at the bottom, on having the government presumptively treat outsiders
(even those outsiders
who have been living and working inside
for years) as more dangerous, more likely to be criminal, more unsanitary, less deserving of security in their persons and effects, less worthy of a happy life, and less deserving of simply being left in peace than the native-born, solely on the basis of their nationality. That is to say, treating them as if their lives and homes and livelihoods were worth less than nothing—just so much foul-smelling garbage to be removed at the first opportunity.
It’s precisely this sort of immorality — the elevation of state control or belligerent nationalism over common decency towards peaceful people — that has been put on display recently in Roswell, New Mexico, with the arrest, jailing, expulsion and exile of Karina Acosta, a pregnant high schooler who was ready to graduate in the spring, because the immigration law, which is nothing but Jim Crow imposed at the level of nationality, forbids her from attending an Estadounidense school, and Student Resource Officer
Charlie Corn, the pig-in-residence at Roswell High School, decided to take the opportunity of a minor traffic violation pull her out of class, arrest her, and then snitch on her to La Migra, so that they could jail her and force her out of her home, away from her family, and back into her place.
U.S. immigration officials deported a pregnant Roswell High School senior after she was pulled from class Wednesday by a local police officer regarding a traffic ticket issued days before.
According to Roswell Police Chief John Balderston, Karina Acosta, 18, was given several days to provide proper identification after being cited for a parking violation and driving without a license on Nov. 29 but failed to do so.
RHS Student Resource Officer Charlie Corn, a 10-year RPD veteran, removed Acosta from class Dec. 5 regarding the traffic violation and detained her at the school before notifying U.S. immigration officials of her illegal status, according to Balderston.
Acosta, who is five months pregnant, was transported to the Chaves County Detention Center, put on hold by the INS and later deported to Mexico, according to Balderston.
In the course of an investigation, if we determine that someone is not here legally, we will contact INS and tell them what their status is,he said.Worried about the deportation of the girl and the future security of other illegal immigrant students at RHS, Acosta’s mother and nearly 50 members of the Hispanic community gathered at the RHS Little Theater, and later the Roswell Police Department, to voice their concerns.
The kids are scared now because this thing happened, so we need your help,said Maria Rodriguez to Balderston during a meeting in an RPD conference room Friday afternoon.At the meeting, Balderston listened to complaints about Corn, including allegations he targets Hispanics. Balderston agreed to meet further with representatives from the Hispanic community and Corn in an effort to ease relations and eliminate any problems or misconceptions that might exist.
If you don’t trust us then we need to do some more work here,said Balderston, who will retire Jan. 4.Roswell Independent School District Assistant Superintendent Mike Kakuska said the RISD has officially protested Acosta’s arrest with the INS and the Mexican Consulate.
We are very, very concerned as a public school as to what happened the other day,said Kakuska, addressing a group of about 50 parents who gathered at RHS Friday morning.The police officer, without our knowledge, had this young lady brought into his office here at school and the detain orders were issued through him, not the Roswell schools.—Richard Jacques, Roswell Daily Record (2007-12-08): RHS senior deported; parents concerned
The good news is that Charlie Corn and all the other pigs-in-residence have been removed from Roswell city schools. The bad news is that Karina Acosta is still stuck in Mexico, away from her family, her home, and her school. And the Roswell cops will do it again, by God, just as soon as they get the chance:
In the lengthy open meeting that lasted more than one hour, Kakuska and other school officials, including RHS Principal Brian Shea, answered questions and notified those in attendance that Corn has been removed as an SRO.
The Roswell Independent School system did not support the decision of this officer to have this young lady arrested,said Kakuska.In a joint decision by the RPD and RISD, all SROs have been removed from RISD schools. Both Balderston and Kakuska maintain that despite the incident, no contention exists between the RISD and the RPD.
We’re going to work through this and I wish I can say that it’s not going to happen again, but I can’t. The officers are going to enforce the law,said Balderston.School officials said Acosta was on course to graduate in the spring.
—Richard Jacques, Roswell Daily Record (2007-12-08): RHS senior deported; parents concerned
Just remember: it doesn’t matter to these people how good a student you are, or how hard you’ve worked, or what a decent and productive member of your community you are, let alone — ha, ha — the mere fact that you are an individual, irreplaceable human being who has the right to expect a certain level of dignity, decent treatment, and basic humanity from your neighbors and from your brothers and sisters in other communities. What matters is The Law, and the coerced integrity
of a segregated nation, and the power of the world’s governments to each keep their own herd properly corralled and branded. To hell with that idiot notion. Smash international apartheid, now and forever.
(Story thanks to brownfemipower 2007-12-11.)
One of the worst things about so-called public education,
i.e. government-controlled schooling, is that students are forced into an institution that they consistently find unpleasant and boring, whether or not the individual student thinks that it’s worth the trouble. That fact, combined with the fact that the victims are all young and many of them are poor or black or otherwise marked as at-risk youth
in need of special surveillance and control, naturally and systematically corrupts the way that the school relates to its students. It leads administrators and political decision-makers to focus on restraining the unruly behavior of the coerced students, by making authority, control, security,
and discipline
top priorities. In practice this means monitoring, intimidation, and coercion. These facts in turn result in attitudes and institutional practices throughout State schools that are often hard to distinguish from those prevailing in a prison camp.
Here are three stories that have come out, just over the course of the past week, about the practices of administrators and uniformed thugs in American public schools. In particular, they are about three separate cases in which one or the other set out to maintain control over their school by physically brutalizing or sexually humiliating young women.
The first case, from Arizona, happened four years ago in Airzona. It’s in the news today because the famously liberal Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of appeals recently ruled that Safford Middle School officials were within the bounds of their legitimate authority when they forced a strip-search on a 13 year old girl — because a couple of student snitches claimed that she had some unauthorized ibuprofen on her, and the Authorities had to know for sure:
Safford Middle School officials did not violate the civil rights of a 13-year-old Safford girl when they forced her to disrobe and expose her breasts and pubic area four years ago while looking for a drug, according to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling.
The justices voted 2-1 in favor of the Safford School District on Sept. 21. The decision upheld a federal district court’s summary judgement that Safford Middle School Vice Principal Kerry Wilson, school nurse Peggy Schwallier and administrative assistant Helen Romero did not violate the girl’s Fourth Amendment rights on Oct. 8, 2003, when they subjected her to a strip search in an effort to find Ibuprofen, an anti-inflammatory drug sold over the counter and in prescription strengths.
…
The girl’s mother filed a federal law suit against the district and Middle School officials because they forced her daughter to strip down to her underwear then move her bra and panties in such a way that her breasts and pubic area were exposed. The mother also asserts that she was not notified of the impending search.
In the opinion written by Judge Richard Clifton,
Based on the information available to them, defendants (Safford School District, Wilson, Schwallier and Romero) hadreasonable groundsfor suspecting that the search of (the girl’s) person would turn up evidence that (the girl) had violated or was violating either the law or the rules of the school.Clifton wrote that Wilson and the others had reasonable grounds for believing the girl had Ibuprofen based on conversations with two other students.
The other students said the girl possessed Ibuprofen and had distributed the drug to others, according to the court report.
The second case is from New York, where — in order to enforce a blanket no-bags policy putatively adopted for the students own health and safety — a member of the school goon squad decided that it was O.K. for him, an adult male ex-cop, to pull 14 year old girls carrying purses out of class and interrogate them about their menstrual cycles:
Grahamsville — Several television news crews from New York City are camped outside the Tri-Valley Central School following the story in today’s Times Herald-Record about what question a school security guard asked a 14-year-old female student.
The girl was called out of class by a security guard during a school sweep last week to make sure no kids had backpacks or other banned bags.
Samantha Martin had a small purse with her that day.
That’s why the security guard, ex-Monticello cop Mike Bunce, asked her The Question.
She says he told her she couldn’t have a purse unless she had her period. Then he asked,
Do you have your period?Samantha was mortified.
She says she thought,
Oh, my God. Get away from me.But instead of answering, she just walked back into class.At home, she cried, and told her mother what happened.
It appears that at least a few other girls were also asked the same question.
On Sept. 21, Martin and other girls were called to the office of Principal Robert Worden. Lisa Raymond, the assistant superintendent for business, was also there, Martin said.
They just asked me what he (Bunce) said. I told them, and they said thanks for coming,she said.The small Sullivan County school has been in an uproar for the last week. Girls have worn tampons on their clothes in protest, and purses made out of tampon boxes. Some boys wore maxi-pads stuck to their shirts in support.
After hearing that someone might have been suspended for the protest, freshman Hannah Lindquist, 14, went to talk to Worden. She wore her protest necklace, an OB tampon box on a piece of yarn. She said Worden confiscated it, talked to her about the code of conduct and the backpack rule — and told her she was now
part of the problem.Tri-Valley Superintendent Nancy George, who has refused to meet with any reporters today, yestedar said that when Worden, Bunce and another staffer did the bag check, they were telling students to put the bags in their lockers. The administration is investigating whether they said anything more to some girls.
I have had some parents talk to me personally, and they gave me the names of some studentswho were asked, she said.We’re certainly not going to make light of this. It’s a very sensitive issue, but it needs to be handled.Parents with more information should call her directly, she added.Raymond and Worden failed to return calls yesterday for comment. Bunce was not working yesterday, and his home phone number is unlisted.
Bunce was forced to retire from the Monticello Police Department in 2002 after he and the former chief were caught running their process-serving business on village time.
School board President Lori Mickelson declined comment.
The school banned backpacks in the halls this year for two reasons, George said: Student health, because heavy bags could hurt the kids’ backs or people could trip on them; and for security concerns, felt nationwide, about concealed weapons.
—Heather Yakin, Times Herald-Record (2007-09-28): The Question’ causes furor at local high school
Clearly the Authorities concerns about small purses and their contribution teenagers’ back problems outweigh minor considerations like the dignity and sexual privacy of 14 year old girls.
The third case comes from Palmdale, California, near Los Angeles, where a member of the school goon squad slammed Pleajhai Mervin, a young black woman at Knight High School, down on a table, twisted her arm behind her back, and broke her wrist — after she refused to follow his bellowed orders to make a fourth try at cleaning up the last bits of a slice of cake that she had accidentally spilled on the lunchroom floor. According to Mervin, the uniformed thug yelled hold still nappy head
at her during the course of the attack. The fifteen-year-old young woman was then ticketed for littering, expelled from school, and arrested for battery
against the beefy uniformed security thug who was breaking her wrist while other security goons hovered around. Two other black students — a 14 year old boy and his 16 year old sister — were tackled, held down, shoved around, handcuffed, and arrested for daring to film what was going on using their cell phone cameras.
School security guards in Palmdale, CA have been caught on camera assaulting a 16-year-old girl and breaking her arm after she spilled some cake during lunch and left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning it up.
… The girl, Pleajhai Mervin, told Fox News LA that she was bumped while queuing for lunch and dropped the cake. After being ordered to clean it up and then re-clean the spot three times, she attempted to leave the area out of embarrassment but was jumped on by security who forced her onto a table, breaking her wrist in the process.
Mervin says a security guard slammed her against a table at a lunchroom at the high school and twisted her arms behind her back so violently, he broke her wrist. Her wrist is in a cast.
He put my arm behind my back and he started raising it until it hurt, so I told him,said Mervin.Stop, it hurts.He had slammed me on the table and told me to hold still. He called me anappy-head,and that’s when I just started crying,Mervin claims she was roughed up simply because she failed to pick up every crumb of a birthday cake she accidentally dropped on the floor of the lunchroom during a lunch-hour birthday celebration for a friend. She says she thought she cleaned up the mess, but the security guard thought otherwise.
He said,said Mervin.You have to come pick the rest of this cake up.So I said,I picked it up.He gets on his walkie-talkie, he got a call, so I just started walking to class, and that’s when he grabbed me,Mervin says when the security guard realized he was being videotaped, he tackled the student shooting the video. She says another student captured photographs of that incident. She says the whole incident was unnecessary.
—Leo Stallworth, KABC Los Angeles (2007-09-26): High School Security Guards Accused of Excessive Force One security guard twisted the arm of 16-year-old Pleajhai Mervin behind her back and slammed her against a lunch table, fracturing her wrist, parents said.
I want justice,said Mervin’s mother, Latrisha Majors, who also was arrested.I want justice for my daughter. I want the guards to be held accountable for their actions.Majors and her daughter were arrested in the Sept. 18 lunchtime incident, along with Joshua Lockett, 14, who videotaped the fight, and his sister, Kenngela Lockett, 16, who also suffered a fractured wrist.
Both Mervin and Kenngela Lockett attended the protest with their arms in slings.
Joshua Lockett, who was on probation for robbery, remained in juvenile custody on suspicion of violating his probation, sheriff’s deputies said.
We come to get an education, not to be hurt by security guards,said Kenngela, who said she tried to pull guards off her brother and was hurt while being handcuffed.One guard, whose name has not been publicly released, has been placed on leave with pay pending an investigation by the Antelope Valley Union High School District. Attempts to reach the guard were not successful.
Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said the guard told them he felt threatened by Mervin.
There was resistance by her,Sgt. Darrel Brown said.He went to control her.—Karen Maeshiro, LA Daily News (2007-09-29): Rally protests security guard acts.
Mainstream media sources such as the Los Angeles Times, KABC in Los Angeles, KSN (a local NBC affiliate), and the LA Daily News have repeatedly described what happened as a tussle … between a security guard and three students,
as a scuffle with security guards,
a melee with security guards,
mayhem,
etc. This apparently is what passes for accurate description of a professional uniformed security goon battering two high school girls and a fourteen-year-old boy, while he’s backed up by another security goon hovering around the area and clearly outweighs all of his victims. You can watch part of Joshua Lockett’s video of the scuffle
at MyFox Los Angeles (2007-09-26) and MyFox Los Angeles (2007-09-28).
Oh No A WoC PhD (2007-09-30) has a YouTube montage of more photos and videos from this so-called melee
, and also the contact information for school and city officials.
(Stories thanks to feministing 2007-10-01, Women of Color Blog 2007-09-30, Oh No a WoC PhD 2007-09-30, The Superfluous Man 2007-09-28, Radley Balko 2007-09-28, feministing 2007-09-28, and Majikthise 2007-09-28.)
State schooling, institutional racism, blanket zero-tolerance
policies, and increasing police and security
presence in schools have ensured that many if not most American schools are no longer primarily places of learning. They are guarded institutions whose primary focus is on command and control.
It occurs to me while reviewing the endless electronic reflection on the VT incident that the gun control crowd and their sympathizers don’t offer any rational, realistic arguments against allowing students to carry on campus. I have yet to see one person actually volunteer a concrete reason why it should be disallowed. What we get instead are appeals to emotion based on perceived feelings of vulnerability.
From an otherwise decent article by Lila Rajiva:
However much we may support the second amendment, do we really want students packing heat in their book bags, as filled with alcohol, drugs and partying as most campuses are today?
From a VT administrator:
The writer would have us believe that a university campus, with tens of thousands of young people, is safer with everyone packing heat. Imagine the continual fear of students in that scenario. We’ve seen that fear here, and we don’t want to see it again.
From a journalist:
Moreover, guns on campuses could turn smaller confrontations into major incidents. As drinking is a large part of university social life, a common drunken brawl could escalate into a deadly duel if firearms were present.
Many students don’t get to hand-pick their roommates in residence; imagine the discomfort of sharing a small room with a stranger who keeps a gun under his or her pillow.
If there are guns in residence and around campus, violence could spread beyond the university confines and into bars and other nearby places.
What do all of these opinions have in common? Simple: they are examples of disarming people on the grounds of vague fears. We just don’t like the idea of students carrying firearms. Students are unpredictable and potentially irresponsible, and that scares us, so let’s take that idea off the table. Let’s ignore the fact that guns are just as deadly to the bad guys as the good guys, and that shooting a bad guy is one very straightforward and undeniable approach to solving the problem.