Prisoner hunger strikers to be force fed

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

There is nothing the ruling classes fear more than those who actively resist oppression, who take part and lead the struggle for freedom and human dignity.  Those who make the most sacrifice, many of them playing leading roles, are feared most of all, and especially in death.  The dead are the memory of the living, a reminder of the struggle against the oppressor.

The bones of the Irish revolutionaries that died at the hands of British occupation are scattered throughout the country in unmarked graves.  The British occupation made sure of that. They did the same in Kenya after they murdered or executed after show trials, the leaders of the Mao Mao that fought against British colonial rule.

The US ruling class is force feeding hunger strikers imprisoned in the concentration camp at Guantanamo Cuba.  Most of the people still there have never been convicted of anything and many of them have been scheduled for release but are are still incarcerated after 11 years.  Death by self imposed starvation is not something the US ruling class wants.

In California we also have a prisoner hunger strike that is in its 44th day with 70 participating.  Inmates want more humane treatment and an end to indeterminate solitary confinement that dehumanizes people and drives some insane. Some people have been confined to solitary confinement for as long as 30 years.

Inmates can sign legally binding "do not resuscitate requests" and it has been the policy of authorities in these situations to allow people to starve themselves to death.   But it seems the state can prevent us from dying now.  A San Francisco judge has given prison officials authority to force feed an inmate who may be in "failing health" even if they signed requests not to be revived.

If you aren't eating for 44 days, it seems that failing health is the required result but the all powerful and caring state will put you through the torture of force feeding caring as it does for the sanctity of human life.  If you can't afford medical care, housing, or food, the chances are you can die that way as the state recognizes that we are individuals and here in the USA individual rights trump all others.  If you choose not to work (unemployment) if you choose to sleep beneath underpasses, if you choose not to eat proper food and if you choose not to pay for medical coverage to a middle man in the form of an insurance company you can die.

Isn't freedom swell!

If you are in a union you should get letters of support sent to the governor on the hunger striker's behalf. Here is the latest update on the prison hunger strike form Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity.  You will find contact info there.

Day 44 – Statement from Mediation Team

Posted on August 20, 2013 by prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity

Hunger Strikers, Gavin Newsom’s Citizenville and the Frontline
Years ago a defense attorney, who was contemplating acceptance of her first death row client, talked to me about how hard it would be to keep this person from ending up in San Quentin’s Death Chamber. But she was anxious to take on the task. I asked her why? She simply and eloquently explained that in every society there must be people who are willing to stand in the way of those who abuse the power they have over individuals under their control. If there is no one there to point out that abuse, to push back against those powerful forces, the abuse will spread and deepen and will become unstoppable.

On Day 44 of the prisoner hunger strike, we are watching a real-life display of that lawyer’s philosophy—prisoners are starving themselves to disrupt the abuse of power displayed by the CDCR’s inhumane policies and practices involving indeterminate solitary confinement. They have put themselves on the frontline of protest to demand to be treated like human beings.
Meanwhile, not long ago some of the family members of the hunger strikers attempted to meet with Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom about these important matters. At the time, Newsom was temporarily serving as Acting Governor while Jerry Brown was traveling out of the country. The meeting never happened: Acting Governor Newsom said he would not have any more to say about the prisoner hunger strike than the Governor had to say about it, which, thus far, has been nothing helpful.  Well, pretty much nothing at all.

Ironically, the Lieutenant Governor recently released a book he authored called Citizenville. His promotional email states that “Citizenville shows how we can make government as useful and engaging as your iPhone.” He adds: “I talked to technology pioneers, entrepreneurs, and social media stars for Citizenville to come up with clear steps we can take to reshape our government and engage ordinary citizens.”

Perhaps the “usefulness” of government as depicted in Newsom’s marketing material for his book would be better measured by him and Governor Brown agreeing to talk to the hunger-striking prisoners themselves. The two elected officials could learn of some meaningful fixes to CDCR policies and practices that would do more than merely “engage ordinary citizens,” such talks could actually save lives—those of the protestors as well as those prisoners who are being made morose or insane or both by indeterminate solitary confinement for decades.

On behalf of the Mediation Team,
Barbara Becnel 510-325-6336 

Hunger Strike Mediation Team
Dr. Ronald Ahnen, California Prison Focus and St. Mary’s College of California
Barbara Becnel, Occupy4Prisoners.org
Dolores Canales, California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement
Irene Huerta, California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement
Laura Magnani, American Friends Service Committee
Marilyn McMahon, California Prison Focus
Carol Strickman, Legal Services for Prisoners With Children
Azadeh Zohrabi, Legal Services for Prisoners With Children

Read More

War is Hell

by Richard Mellor

I hadn’t seen old Pepto for a few days.  Working in the public sector kept me in the streets on a regular basis and I knew pretty much every homeless person in town.  Before my retirement I worked for the water department installing water mains.  I loved the job; it paid well, with good benefits, and I was outside in the sunshine most of the time.

Pepto got his name by accident.  None of us knew his real name. Very few people, take the time to ask homeless people their names, after all, it’s their fault they’re homeless isn’t it? 

He stopped by our job one day looking for a few cents for some coffee as he often did.

“Any you guys spare a dollar?” he asked with this sad look on his face.

Pepto had visited our job sights a few times and always asked questions about the job.  We didn’t always give money as it tended to get around and half the homeless in town spent their day trying to find out where we were working. But a couple of us reached in our pockets and handed him a dollar or two, enough for him to get breakfast.

“What’s up, man?” I asked him.  “You seem a bit down today.” I immediately reminded myself that he’s a homeless man, not exactly an uplifting situation to be in.

“Man this shit is fucked up,” he answered. 

“What shit’s that?” I replied, kicking myself again for asking such a stupid question.

“Damn Vietnam.  I keep thinking about that Vietnam shit.”

One of the guys on the crew made some sarcastic remark about every guy begging for money by the side of the freeway claims they are a Vietnam Vet and that some of them earn $500 a week. He was the only guy on the crew I didn’t like.  He always blamed the poor for their condition and his criticisms were always tainted with a bit of racism. Like most people with that mentally he was also lazy.

Pepto ignored him. “I had to kill a man once. But he woulda killed me if he could.  That damn Nam was bismal.”  We understood he meant abysmal.  The foreman told him with a chuckle that Pepto Bismol was a medicine for upset stomach. 

“Well this shit gives me an upset stomach alright.  I could sure do with that Pepto stuff.”

Our homeless friend finally had a name. But as I reflect on those days, I should have asked him what his name was.

A few more days passed and Pepto still hadn’t come around.  Knowing him made me think more about the homeless.  Where do they sleep?  There’s way more animal shelters in this country than homeless shelters or shelters for battered women.  Many of them are mentally ill. People thrown out of institutions and on to the streets during the Reagan era.  Many of them are women who also suffered the added horror of sexual abuse once out of the care of the state.  I discovered that a third of the homeless were Vietnam Vets. 

“I think I would go nuts if I were homeless for an extended period” I told some of my co-workers.

It must have been three weeks before I found out Pepto’s whereabouts. I was reading my local small town paper one morning and there was a little piece in it about a homeless man being found dead in an office building under construction.  He had died form an overdose, the paper said.

I felt real sad as the report revealed his real name.  He was called Fred McHenry.  He was described as a local homeless man with drug and alcohol problems.  He was also a Vietnam Vet and had a Purple Heart.

The next day I went to the Veteran’s building and asked about him.  They suggested I call the VA and I could find out more information from them.  The VA was very helpful as was the author of the piece in the paper.  I eventually got a hold of his mother’s phone number and got in contact with her.

She was clearly saddened by her son’s death but she was not really interested in talking with me.  I wanted to find out more about him and how he ended up where he did.  She obviously had a hard time with him due to his drug abuse.  But drug abuse was rampant among the troops in Vietnam.  I thought of all the flag waving and talk from politicians about the bravery of “our boys” when they want to send young men, other people’s sons and daughters in to some fruitless war.  How they always tell the public that “our boys” are making the greatest sacrifice.  

           
Killing a human being in real life is not like Hollywood.  Unless you’re a psychopath it’s going to have a devastating effect on you as a human being; it could drive you to homelessness and drugs, just like it did to Fred McHenry.

Read More

OCAP Wins small victory for homeless in Toronto

Update on Toronto Shelters Campaign: City Council Votes to Open Beds for Homeless!

Submitted by ocap on Fri, 04/05/2013 - 04:41.

Thursday, April 4, 2013
It took months of community action, two occupations and some fifty arrests, but the City's claim that the overcrowded shelter system is 'meeting the needs of the homeless' has now collapsed.

On April 4th, City Council voted in favour of a return to the policy of opening new space when shelter occupancy reaches 90% (it is presently running at an official 96% average with some spaces, including women's shelters, at 99 and 100%). Staff are now instructed to take the measures necessary to achieve this goal including the opening of new facilities. Our efforts will now be devoted to ensuring that they do just that.

When the final vote was taken on the amended motion, one member of Council cast a vote against- Mayor Rob Ford. Ford had earlier told the media that he would return to the Council Chambers to explicitly vote against opening more beds for the homeless and he did just that. He had already delayed consideration of the shelter issue by placing on the agenda a proposal to open a Hero Burger outlet in Nathan Phillip's Square. He was able to win the burger joint, but his efforts to deny safety and dignity to homeless people were in vain.

This vote is a victory for community action. We said all along that
letting people die on the streets could be viewed as the ultimate result of the austerity agenda and we have shown we can fight back against that agenda and win. However, we are also clear that it will take ongoing action to ensure this Council vote translates into more beds and new spaces for the homeless.

Finally, pleased as we are with this victory, let's remember that we have won shelter beds for the homeless, not housing. We don't accept that people should sleep in hostels or that upscale development continues to push people and services out of the downtown core. We now have to build a powerful and united movement that can win housing for everyone in this city, and to push back against the gentrification of our communities. We know this will be a long and hard fight. The people who we've lost - members, friends, and the 'nameless' - they are not forgotten and we fight for a city where 'No More Homeless Deaths' is truly a reality.

Ontario Coalition Against Povertywww.ocap.ca
416-925-6939

I'd say three things stand out in the victory that has just been won around the crisis of overcrowding in Toronto's homeless shelter system:-

1. The dominant power structure at City Hall, gathered around the Mayor's office and the most senior levels of the administration, were determined to cram people into the shelters regardless of the human cost but they have been forced to give ground. Austerity is not inevitable and we can win victories even in the face of major attacks.

2. This particular victory is fragile as most victories are likely to be in the present situation. It is a given that the administration will do as little as possible to actually implement the Council decision to reduce the overcrowding. The gain we made will be worth something only to the extent that we continue to mobilize to force them to take real and effective action.

3. We can take a moment to feel some satisfaction at this win but we should also admit that it is a sign of our present weakness that we are fighting to prevent them from letting people die on the streets. We did not challenge homelessness but only eased the situation the homeless face. By gaining some additional shelter space, we took a few baby steps but we need to build a movement in this City that seriously fights for the right to decent and affordable housing for everyone.

 John Clarke, OCAP

Read More

War on Iran, War on Terror: No war on homelessness

By Richard Mellor

The Wall Street Journal reports today that for the first time, more than 50,000 people slept in New York City’s homeless shelters each night in January this year.  This is the size of a small town and it doesn’t include those that sleep on the streets; the sick, the disoriented and mentally damaged victims of capitalism and the free market.

The Huffington Post pointed out that there was19 million vacant homes in the US in 2011. This recent figure on NYC homelessness points out that it is families that are swelling the ranks.  Homelss families have risen 7.8% in Boston, 18% in Washington DC (the seat of government in the US) while the number of children sleeping in shelters in NYC has risen 22% in the last year. A staggering 21,000 children, a figure the Wall Street Journal calls “unprecedented”and equal to 1% of NYC’s young people slept in a shelter each night in January.  In this world city whose mayor, Michael Bloomberg has a net worth of $27 billion and is home to the United Nations, Wall Street, millionaire film stars and corporate law offices, homeless families have increased 73% since 2001 and  21,000 children have no permanent housing. This is nothing less than criminal.

This is occurring as Obama and Biden are assuring US corporations and the Israeli Lobby that war with Iran is not off the table and the absurd War on Terror shifts its focus to uranium and natural resource rich Mali and Saharan Africa. What is off the table is a war against speculators, coupon clippers and slumlords.  What is off the table is the war against poverty and homelessness, by-products of their precious market.

Trillions of dollars are spent on predatory wars fought by US workers on behalf of Wall Street and the corporations and 22 veterans a day commit suicide as a result of it. The bankers that wrecked the economy were bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of trillions of dollars.  Rich individuals are known to have stashed more than $26 trillion, the equivalent of the combined GDP of the US and Japan in offshore accounts to avoid taxes and all this as public services are slashed, jobs eliminated and wages driven downward contributing to further homelessness; even the WSJ can’t ignore this reality but goes no further than that.

The voices of opposition are muted. The heads of organized Labor whose worldview mirrors the bankers, coupon clippers and other wasters whose actions decimate our social welfare and pollute the environment, plead with the bosses and their representatives in the Democratic Party to return to the good old days, “Please, please, just be a little nicer.”

At its peak, mighty US capitalism could not provide its own population with the basic necessities of life. In its decline it has become mired in debt, increases its plunder of the natural world and the former colonial countries and is forced to put its workers and middle classes on rations.  It is taking from the American workers all that we won through a century and half of struggle and is doing so with the help of the leaders of the Trade Union movement.  This will not continue unabated.

Nineteen million vacant homes amid mass homelessness. “As many as 3.5 million people experience homelessness in a given year,1% of the entire U.S. population or 10% of its poor), and about 842,000 people in any given week..) according to some data.  Yes, America the free.

Why can't they just go get a job?

The difference between the capitalist system and its predecessors is this: We starve amid plenty; we lack shelter as structures become dilapidated as they remain unoccupied; we are denied health care because we can’t pay for it. We become impoverished amid abundance.

US capitalism is more threatening in decline than in its ascendance.  It is armed to the teeth. It supplies more arms to humanity than the rest of the world combined. Its corporations dominate the world and own the rights to everything from corn seed to water. It is a truly dangerous animal in its demise.  As we used to say, even a match glows bright moments before it is extinguished and US capitalism will become more ruthless as its global influence wanes and its dominance threatened.

US workers are yet to see the worst, the likes of New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, Warren Buffet, Donald Trump, the gnomes of Wall Street and the owners of industry are not finished with us; they will defend their system and it will be done on our backs.

The US working class will not take this lightly forever, fill shelters, complain without action, withdraw form the struggle. This country will explode at some point and we will see what we have seen in Europe if not at a greater level; our history is a revolutionary one.

Workers will be forced to draw the conclusion that there is a far greater threat to our well being than al Qaeda, and its domestic. They will look forward for alternatives as they struggle to defend what we have. Capitalism will be challenged.

Read More