Black Mesa Indigenous Support

Keep fighting.

 

Local resistance news round-up

The Quad-City Times has a pretty decent article on Minneapolis resident Carrie Feldman and her refusal to testify before a Davenport, Iowa grand jury. The focus on the raid itself, rather than the undemocratic nature of grand juries (to put it mildly), is sort of unfortunate, but actually not that unfair, in my opinion.

 

A quick note on “property crime”

So I was briefly in court the other day. I am not going to comment much on the reason for my presence, though you can get an idea here.

What an amazing thing it is to be in court, though. The system stands naked before you and gets all awkward about the shit.

The last time I was in court, a few months ago, we (me and my co-defendants) were preceded by three different cases. One was a public urination offense and the other two were trespassing charges lodged against rather sad-looking dudes who had apparently slept in an abandoned house and a trainyard, respectively.

This time, since we had acquired counsel, we weren’t really even on the agenda. We mostly hung out in the hall, reading the formal complaints we’d demanded a month ago and received directly prior to the hearing. The state offered us the same basic offer we got last time, which we refused. One of us got our charges dismissed for some reason. Hell yeah for that.

Anyways, sitting in the courtroom, here are the two other charges I heard against others on Friday:

Public indecency: A woman was arrested passed out in the passenger seat of a car with no pants on. The representative of the state asked her very serious questions about this. She was compelled to answer very seriously. The prosecutor was a young white woman and the defendant was an African-American woman in her mid-30s, I’d guess. Everyone found it awkward and distasteful and stupid. Still, that’s how the system rolls.

Trespassing: An old man — grizzled, looking pretty beat-up but mostly from the travails of street-life, I’d guess — stood in shackles in that little booth Hennepin County mandates for inmates. Turns out, he slept in a bus stop enclosure and got picked up. It was readily apparent that he probably had nowhere else to go. Still, here he was, jumpsuited, shackled, looking like someone who’d hurt someone. Fuck if I know if he ever had. He mostly looked dejected and sad. He answered questions like, “Did you know, on the evening of October xx, that it was illegal to seek shelter in a bus-stop?” And he was like, “Yes, m’aam.” And looked down.

We, me and my co-defendants, are charged with allegedly impeding — in various ways — the eviction of a 25-year resident from her house. Later, it seems, they will arrest those who sleep in the house they just emptied. Later still, they will arrest those who “seek shelter in bus-stops.”

This is madness.

 

The Revolting Queers have a blog

It’s here.

 

Push-back against MN Neo-Nazis continues

This time in Austin, MN.

Revealingly, the cops maced anti-racist opposition, arrested three folks, and then escorted the Nazis (one of whom had earlier destroyed a protester’s cell phone) safely to their cars.

In a surprise to no one, the local corporate media’s coverage was abysmal, failing to specify that the NSM are Nazis and preferring to cast this description as a matter of dispute (while corporate print media reported that the NSM speaker ended his tirade with “White Power!” and images of NSM swastika decals abounded), and uncritically quoting an Austin cop saying,

“Our role here is to keep the peace, not take sides but to keep the peace so nobody get’s hurt [sic].”

In the meantime, we are of course routinely treated to the neologism “self-described anarchists” in virtually every RNC or RNC8-related story to be found.

If shouting “White Power!” and wearing swastikas doesn’t make you a “self-described neo-Nazi,” I have hard time understanding what would.

 

Neo-Nazi scum claim they’re coming to Minneapolis

To protest an anti-racism workshop.

Mobilizations are underway to combat this hate-mongering. As others have written,

This provocation also has a wider goal: The NSM has been holding racist anti-immigrant rallies in southern Minnesota, and now they are seeking to establish a presence inside the City of Minneapolis. For years Minneapolis has been a virtual “no-go” area for organized racist activity, due to the efforts of young anti-racist organizers.It is vital, especially in the wake of the racist attacks in Brooklyn Park last week, that the nazis not go unopposed. They plan to bring their racist, homophobic, anti-immigrant, antisemitic message of division and hate right into the heart of the city. They must not go unopposed!

Indeed.

Midtown YWCA, Saturday morning. Be there.

 

Re:Activism Twin Cities

Come out & play!

We’re excited about bringing it here, and think it’s a good fit for the Twin Cities, for several reasons:

1. As we approach the one-year anniversary of the RNC, it offers an interesting – and hopefully fun and empowering – way to commemorate the events of last September before they’re shunted down the collective memory hole;
2. The focus on text-messaging and, perhaps, other emerging technologies that played such a primary role during the RNC can be metaphorically invoked in the way the game is played;
3. By placing the RNC and its attendant repression within the context of historical – and ongoing – local struggles, we can create for ourselves an opportunity to draw important parallels and bring these to the front of public discourse. We’d argue that for many, if not most, RNC activists, the point has always been that state oppression is the norm, that police brutality is systemic, that the sanctioned violence experienced by activists on the streets last September was simply a microcosm of the daily violence experienced by diverse communities every single day, and so on: Re:Activism, in whatever form we collectively shape it, contains within it a way to make these connections between struggles explicit, a way for us to learn about each other and further strengthen our solidarity; and
4. It’s probably a good excuse to bike around town, make noise, and generally disrupt business-as-usual, in a particularly theatrical fashion.

So, if you’re interested in playing, keep yr eyes on this page for details over the next week.

And we still need all kinds of help getting it off the ground, so if you’re one of those organiz-y types, hit us up: reactivismtwincities@gmail.com

We want a bunch of voices, a bunch of perspectives, and anyone interested in the history of radical struggle in Minnesota to be involved!

Facebook group here. Join us!

 

CRASS op-ed

For the record, I’m a co-author. But I still find it worth checking out:

New RNC charges highlight vindictive prosecutorial tactics.

 

Leonard Peltier up again for parole

It’s been 33 years. I can’t think of a better way to spend a few minutes of your Independence Day^TM then trying to help out. You can write the parole board at:

United States Parole Commission
5550 Friendship Blvd., Ste. 420
Chevy Chase, MD 20815-7286
(Insert Date)
Re: LEONARD PELTIER #89637-132

 

Corporate PRIDE v. insurgent activism

I wish I had something substantial to link to. Aside from the mainstream Googleable accounts, I don’t. Here’s my post-Pride^tm account, anyways …

The TC Pride^tm festival was its usual and utterly predictable corporatist, assimilationist self this past weekend. You couldn’t swing a leather something-or-other without hitting a Target, ING, or “non-denominational church” booth, assuming you were naive enough to wade through the throngs of $5 corndogs, bought with duplicitous tickets, or the booths where they sold said tickets. It was some gross, yuppie shit.