racism

Eddie Farnsworth Protects Rapists Again

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Content Warning: The following post includes a discussion of sexual assault and domestic violence. It has been quite an eventful legislative session already for everyone’s favorite misogynist grifter state legislator, Eddie Farnsworth. He made national news last week when a hearing he was chairing devolved into chaos because of his poor leadership. After activist Hugo … Read more

Joel Fineman, Pima County Public Defender

Joel Feinman’s Simple Solution to Ending Mass Incarceration

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Lynching in America continued from the 1920s up to 1980, according to Pima County Public Defender Joel Feinman.

Arizona incarcerates a higher percentage of the population than South Africa did during apartheid. “We are not the land of free and home of brave as long as that statistic is true,” said Pima County Public Defender Joel Feinman.

He spoke recently at a program on mass incarceration sponsored by the Arizona Ground Game (TAGG), a grass-roots Progressive organization that encourages active citizenship through neighborhood building.

“Mass incarceration is a long and ugly story, a bloody and racist tour of where we’ve been,” he said. “The good news is that mass incarceration is actually one of easiest political problems to solve.”

Plea bargains

Part of the problem is the universal use of plea agreements to end criminal cases. In 2013, 97% of criminal cases in the federal system were resolved by plea bargains.

“The average sentence for federal narcotics defendants with a plea agreement is  5 years,” Feinman said. “For defendants who went to trial, the average sentence was 16 years — more than 3 times the years in prison because they chose to exercise their constitutional right under the 6th amendment to have a trial by jury.”

Plea bargains are an unfair contract, where the prosecutor (the Pima County Attorney) has all the bargaining power and the defendant has none. “The criminal justice system is more interested in moving cases along than dispensing justice,” he said. “As a result, you get the highest incarceration rate and the highest number of people in prison. The judge is not the most powerful person, not the jury, not our state representatives or congress people — it is your local prosecutor. They are by far the most powerful person in the criminal justice system.”

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“X is for Xenophobia: I am America” art show

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Opening reception for this unique  art show is on  Saturday Feb. 4, from 6 to 9 pm. at Steinfeld Warehouse, 101 W. 6th St.  More than 25 artists are participating.

Artist’s statement: “What is XENOPHOBIA? It is defined as an irrational fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign. The rise of populism is accompanied by, and often explicitly espouses, xenophobia and racism. At the same time, there are signs that wide and heterogeneous alliances are being formed against these trends, both within traditional politics and out in the world, in communities.” (statement continued below)

Mediterannean music will be performed by Kyklo (Paul Amiel, Anton Shekerjiev, Kelsey Shea).  They describe their music as: “music of the mountain villages, ancient islands, hashish dens, cafés, harems, pubs, dance halls, cloisters, and prisons of the old world, on traditional acoustic instruments.”

Kyklo – L to R: Paul Amiel, Kelsey Shea, Anton Shekerjiev,)

Artist’s statement continued:

“The destruction caused by wars without end, driven by forces and actors far from the battlefields, has created not only the desperate flight of refugees but also decimated economies and destroyed countries to the extent that rebuilding does not even seem to be on the agenda. There are frequent deadly attacks on refugee shelters in Germany; the extreme Right is growing across Europe. In the US and elsewhere, populists are on the rise scapegoating the most vulnerable for socities’ problems.

What can the role of art be in this world we live in right now? We created an exhibition with a group of artists who use their aesthetic knowledge and craft skills to interrogate Xenophobia. These artists are interested in creating political art, activist art, interventionist art, socially engaged art, and/or social practice art addressing Xenophobia.

The xenophobic and racist propaganda is deeply rooted in the political landscape of today and it is coming both from “above” (powerful elites) and “below” (working-classes). How can we (as artists) contribute resources to combat it? We need to know the terrain to fight back and use the their tools and rules to our advantage. The tools of the game are signs, symbols, story and spectacle. We are artists. We have used these tools for years. We are well equipped but I believe we need to collaborate and create big, ground breaking exhibitions and use our networks in this struggle. If we, like minded artists, do not do it, who else will?

The aim of this exhibition is to CHANGE the way a society with growing xenophobic and racist tendencies perceive the world and act in this world, with the hope to furnish resources for those groups, alliances, networks and communities struggling to build a more just, equitable and inclusive future.

If this resonates with you, please come and join us for the opening reception. February 4th, 2017 at 6pm.

The exhibition will be up until March 30, 2017. The hope is to make it a traveling exhibition in the US and abroad. We need your support to make it a reality.
If you have any questions&concerns you can contact Ozlem at ozlemayseozgur@gmail.com”

RSVP via FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/255614104872267/

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Does Bernie Sanders Have ‘White People Problems’? (video)

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11,000 Sanders supporters filled the Phoenix Convention Center on Saturday, July 18,2015. (Photo by Dennis Gilman)
11,000 Sanders supporters filled the Phoenix Convention Center on Saturday, July 18,2015. (Photo by Dennis Gilman)

Saturday was a day of highs and lows for Senator Bernie Sanders.

In the morning at Netroots Nation, Sanders became visibly annoyed by Black Lives Matter protesters who wanted to hear more than stump speeches from Democratic presidential candidates Sanders and former Governor Martin O’Malley. They wanted to know what President Sanders or President O’Malley would do to end systemic racism in the US. They didn’t get an answer from either candidate.

In the evening– again at the Phoenix Convention Center– Sanders was greeted enthusiastically by a mostly white crowd of 11,000 progressives cheering his economic inequality stump speech. According to news accounts, this was Sanders’ largest crowd to date.

The whiteness of Sanders’ supporters has come up before, but Netroots Nation (NN15) really brought the issue home for me.

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Pretty much everything you need to know about modern Republican governance of states in one sentence

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In the aftermath of Wednesday evening in Charleston, SC, when a white supremacist terrorist murdered nine African-American people in cold blood after they welcomed him into their church, a lot of people are demanding that South Carolina take down the Confederate flag that festoons the State Capitol and questioning why the flag remains a popular symbol in that state and many other parts of the country despite its ugly, hateful history*. It turns out that the Stars and Bars (which was not even flown at half-mast the day after the shootings as the U.S flag was) is protected by state law and controlled solely by the state legislature.

I did a search to see if South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley had weighed in on that and found something astounding from last October. It seems the subject came up during Haley’s reelection campaign at a televised candidate forum.

haley video screenshot
Link with video because of course I can’t embed one here

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