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Lakhdar Boumediene

The corpses pile up like sandbags along the planet’s geopolitical borders.

“Perhaps his condition deteriorated and the authorities decided it was better to release him in a coma than as a corpse.”

So said an expert on North Korea recently, quoted in the New York Times following the death of 22-year-old Otto Warmbier, six days after he had been released in a comatose state from a North Korean prison. He had been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor a year and a half ago because he had taken a propaganda poster off the wall in his hotel. He had been with a tour group.

A bird's eye view of a highway

Monday, June 26,  June 23-28th - times listed on Facebook
Gateway Film Center, 1550 N. High St., Columbus.  

This powerful new documentary highlights the struggle by Leaders for Equality and Action in Dayton (LEAD) with the help of their lawyers at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE) on behalf of Dayton residents to gain access to jobs and education by bus to the neighboring suburb of Beavercreek. This clash between neighbors and the issues it raised are reminiscent of resistance faced by advocates and developers of affordable housing in communities across the country and this important film imparts important lessons for all of us. 

            All Eyez On Me Spotlights Tupac’s Leftist Activism & Repression

 

            Leftist black activists don’t get represented in Hollywood productions much, unless they represent the more mainstream Civil Rights movement. All Eyez On Me gives the radical leftist angle on rap icon Tupac Shakur’s family, upbringing, and his little-known political activism. Despite some of the movie’s small departures from eyewitness accounts, it surprisingly creates a pretty close approximation of Tupac, and the U.S. intelligence apparatus that murderously targeted him and his Black Panther family.

            The movie opens with a filmed interview that Vibe magazine conducted with Tupac in prison. This interview frames the first two thirds of the film, until it reaches the point when Tupac is recalling the reason he ended up there.

Native director Valerie Red-Horse Mohl’s well-made Mankiller was my favorite film at LAFF this year. Standing Rock has propelled American Indian issues to the forefront - for instance, Paiute/Shoshone helmer Myron Dewey co-directed Awake, A Dream From Standing Rock with Oscar nominee Josh Fox. Mankiller is a new documentary about the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation (ironically, the liberal Democrat reached that pinnacle due to Pres. Reagan’s appointment of her running mate to the Interior Department).

 

The Oklahoma-born Wilma Mankiller cut her political teeth at the famous Alcatraz Occupation that began in 1969 and Jane Fonda participated in. As the Cherokees’ elected leader Mankiller achieved many reforms, including spurring tribally-owned businesses, various self-development projects and indigenous self-government initiatives. The doc also considers the highly contentious casino issue. In 1998 Pres. Clinton awarded Mankiller the Medal of Freedom and when she passed away in 2010 Pres. Obama issued a moving statement.

 

Fri-Sun, June 23-25
Goodale Park, 120 W. Goodale St.
A free, non-corporate, yearly celebration of Columbus, Ohio’s community organizations, performers, artists, and volunteers. comfest.com.
Check out the Free Press wine booth near the Buttles Street entrance.
And the Free Press Comfest salon on Sunday at 1pm on the Solar Stage!
Keynote speaker Dennis Kucinich will speak on the Bozo stage Sunday at 3:30pm.
 

 

Tombstone that says Democracy on it in a grassy field

The Jim Crow GOP has stolen yet another Congressional election, this time in Georgia.  As always, the media and Democrats are saying nothing about it.

And now the US Supreme Court will allow secretaries of state to completely trash the ballots of anyone they choose.

So the Trump/GOP domination of American elections is essentially secure for the foreseeable future. Anyone believing the 2018 or 2020 elections will provide realistic opportunities to overthrow Trump/GOP control of the government is living in a dream world.

That dream world fits an historic pattern we outline in our new STRIP & FLIP DISASTER OF AMERICA’S STOLEN ELECTIONS. Its latest incarnation has just surfaced in Jim Crow Georgia.

The much-hyped Congressional race between Democrat John Ossoff and former Georgia GOP secretary of state Karen Handel was the most expensive in US history, costing more than $50 million.

It has ended with yet another victory for Jim Crow election theft as surely as if the KKK had run rampant through the countryside, lynching potential voters.

The Doomsday Clock has been moved closer to midnight than it’s been since 1953. The U.S. has shot down a Syrian plane. Russia has threatened to shoot down U.S. planes. There is no way to overstate the importance of avoiding telling hostile lies about Russia right now.

Dan Kovalik’s book, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia, is a good place to start if you watch a lot of television, don’t read much about politics, and simply can’t imagine the CIA doing anything inappropriate. This is a great primer. Framed around the current Russiagate madness, the book is a catalog of U.S. government sins over the past many decades.

In the United States you can attend a local “peace and justice” group meeting in almost any city and find people generally open to any new way of thinking or evidence of success that could help advance the causes of peace or justice.

But if you go to too academic a “peace studies” event you are likely to find people very focused on aid and development in distant poor nations selected from the list of those the United States is not heavily bombing at the moment — that, and a general resistance to organizing activism to end U.S. wars.

If, on the other hand, you go to a peace event organized by a national coalition you will typically find people excited to do peace activism as long as it takes the side of and is not overly confrontational toward elected Democrats.

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