The state of Georgia and the Supreme Court are about to murder an innocent man. It will come as no surprise that this man is a working class African American. Democracy Now! has covered this story in great detail, which you can find here (http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2008925amy_goodmans_new_column_troy_davis_and_the_supreme_decision). Today, the European Parliament condemned it (see AP story below). Remember: A rich, white man has NEVER been executed by the state in America!
Rally For Troy Davis
Thursday, October 23 5:30 p.m. 33rd Street and 8th Avenue, (SE corner) New York City, NY
Stand Firm For Justice! Rally For Troy Davis In New York City
Join fellow activists in a rally to demand justice for Troy Davis
On Oct 14 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Troy Davis?s petition and the State of Georgia has set an execution date of October 27, ignoring overwhelming evidence of his innocence. People throughout the United States are seriously disturbed by the thought of a possibly innocent man being executed. Nothing can undermine public faith in a criminal justice system faster than an execution when there are still serious doubts about guilt.
Join fellow New Yorkers on Thursday Oct. 23 as we call for the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant justice to Troy Davis and stop his execution.
STRASBOURG, France (AP) — The European parliament is strongly protesting plans to execute a man in the United States who has been sentenced to death for killing a police officer.
Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed in Georgia on Oct. 27, despite calls from his supporters to reconsider because seven of nine key witnesses against him have recanted their testimony. [my bold]
EU parliament head Hans-Gert Poettering says all executions are violations of human rights. He says the condemned American symbolizes the fate of all death row inmates, and vows the EU legislature "will fight against the death penalty under any circumstances everywhere in the world."
The 40-year-old Davis was sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of 27-year-old Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail. His case has also attracted support from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and South Africa Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
I must introduce this by apologizing to David Swanson for limiting his excellent essay for this blog. Please follow up and read the entire thing by clicking on the link below:
Sweeping Astroturf
By David Swanson
Imagine for a second that it's November 5th, and the Democrats are set to control both houses of Congress and the White House. Perhaps they even control 60 Senate seats, making Republican filibusters impossible. Now what?
For the past two years, numerous activist groups have opposed the demands of their own members by arguing that the Democrats were helpless. They couldn't get past filibusters or vetoes, and were therefore as impotent as newborn babes.
[...]While you can't get any results from watering or fertilizing astroturf, you can sweep it. If the Democrats take both houses of Congress and the White House, and especially if they take 60 senate seats, their principal recent excuses for all variety of crimes of both omission and commission will vanish. Accomplishing this with margins of victory too large to plausibly steal remains an uphill fight requiring full attention. And fighting election fraud, which is already almost openly underway, will require working on the behalf of candidates who will not lift a finger to help themselves. We need all hands on deck for this one for the next two weeks and possibly far beyond.
But come November 5th, pseudo-grassroots groups, also known as astroturf organizations will have to begin thinking hard about how they will relate to both their members and to a government swept by the party whose wishes they habitually defer to. With that in mind, here are my recommendations:
First, begin to think and act more in terms of individual representatives, senators, and president, and less in terms of party. [my bold]The health care plan we all favor, H.R. 676, has 94 cosponsors, and we are about to elect more. No longer can our silence on such legislation be justified by the need to elect someone other than McCain. We've already elected Obama. He's in the White House.
Second, begin to think in terms of Congress as the first branch of our government. [my bold]If we allow all power to continue to remain in the White House, we will be represented less well during the next four years, and all power will still remain in the White House when the next Republican lives there. We need to restore the power of the purse, the power of subpoena, the power to ratify or reject treaties, the power to legislate free of editing by "signing statement," and the power to begin and end wars. If we cannot restore those powers to the branch of our government they were supposed to belong to now, while we have the supposed people's party cooperatively running the Congress and the presidency, then when can we?
Third, clearly and publicly lay out the policy demands that you, as a legitimate activist organization, are making of our government, and do so in November.[my bold][...]
We should demand an end to our imperial wars in the Middle East. This will have been the third consecutive election in which we voted for that change. If the will of the voters is matched by the official election outcomes, and if those outcomes remove the major recent excuses for inaction and regression, then it will be time for us to demand clearly what we, the people, the sovereigns of this nation, want. We don't want to reduce any occupations or move them anywhere else. We want our men and women brought home. Now.
We don't want to enlarge the world's largest military. We want to shrink it. We want to shift our resources to where they will do some good for people. We don't want to put our children into debt funding weapons, wars, or Wall Street. We want major investment in green energy, jobs, affordable housing, education, and foreign aid. And I mean major investment, with no excuses about the needs of poor struggling billionaires and arms dealers.
[...]Remove the cap on income taxed for Social Security. Remove the loopholes and tax corporations. Undo the Bush tax cuts for millionaires. Undo Paulson's Plunder. Tax financial transactions. End wars, and begin closing the 1,000 or so military bases we maintain to our great detriment in other people's nations around the world. [...]
We want the minimum wage made a living wage and indexed to the cost of living. We want the right to organize a labor union restored. We want corporate trade agreements shredded and new trade policies written to benefit people, not corporations. [...]
We also want money removed from politics. If a completely Democratic government does not create public financing and free air time for candidates, then they can drop all pretense that they want it. If they don't give the District of Columbia representation in Congress, then the people of DC should hear that message loud and clear. If the Democrats who constantly tell you they can't do things because they're afraid of the media are swept into power and refuse to break up the media cartel, we can henceforth assume they enjoy being afraid. And if they do not establish the right to vote and to have our votes openly counted, including universal registration, weekend elections, and on-site hand-counted paper ballots, we can henceforth assume winning didn't feel as good to them as it does to normal people.
We have an opportunity to either do great things or expose great flaws. We want war profiteers in prison, not just off our payroll. We want predatory lenders in prison, not multi-million-dollar public housing. We want torturers, war criminals, Richard B. Cheney, and George W. Bush prosecuted, imprisoned, and impeached. We want every future government to know that we are a nation of laws. If an election alone could communicate that to future tyrants, then the election of Jimmy Carter would have prevented the presidency of George W. Bush. [my bold]
We can't expect to accomplish everything we want by next spring or even in the space of four years, but if we are afraid to even articulate what we want, we will never begin to accomplish it.
Carter meets Hamas political chief Jimmy Carter, a former US president, has met Khaled Meshaal, the exiled Hamas leader, in the Syrian capital, despite strong opposition from Tel Aviv and Washington. The controversial meeting was being held at a Hamas office in Damascus and attended by Musa Abu Marzuq and Mohmmed Nazzal, senior figures from the Palestinian movement. Carter arrived in Syria on Friday and held talks with Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, before meeting Meshaal. [...]On Thursday, Carter met a delegation of Hamas leaders from the Gaza Strip in Cairo and held talks with Husni Mubarak, the Egyptian president. Speaking to the media, Carter defended his meetings, calling them necessary in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The former US president also described Israel's siege of the Gaza Strip as a crime and an atrocity. He said Palestinians in Gaza were being "starved to death", receiving fewer calories a day than people in the poorest parts of Africa. "It's an atrocity what is being perpetrated as punishment on the people in Gaza," he said. "It's a crime... I think it is an abomination that this continues to go on." Carter said that US attempts to undermine Hamas have been counterproductive. His meeting with leaders of Hamas, a group he insists must be included in peace negotiations, has angered many in Washington and Israel, who call the Palestinian group a "terrorist" organisation. [...]Israel has meanwhile sealed off the West Bank and Gaza for 10 days as it prepares to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Passover. Tanks and soldiers moved into position at the crossings following the shutdown that took effect early on Friday, barring Palestinians from the occupied territories from entering Israel.[...] http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/AAE23DE4-60F5-4A05-B2B8-949E9E60FF67.htm
PRESS RELEASE, BY LUISA MORGANTINI (GUE/NGL) Vice President of the European Parliament Why is there no protest when a former US President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate is denied entry to Gaza? 20 Palestinians and three Israeli soldiers have been killed, and in the Gaza Strip people continue to die. The International Community and EU must work for a cease-fire and an end to the siege. Rome, 17th April 2008 "While the Israeli Government continues its policy of isolation and collective punishment towards the Palestinian civil population in Gaza, it has also prevented to a former Head of State to visit the Gaza Strip. This unprecedented decision was adopted in the case of Jimmy Carter, former US President and 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Carter has always declared himself a sincere supporter of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, based on the creation of two people and two states, and has denounced the policies of Apartheid. Moreover, Carter was a mediator in the 1978 Camp David negotiations; the first agreement signed by Israel and an Arab State, Egypt. If this decision had been made by any other country, it would have provoked a real protest in the international media. Meanwhile, the situation in the Gaza Strip becomes more desperate every day: the International Community and the European Union must work for an immediate cease-fire and toward an end of all acts of violence. Once again, the price is paid by the civilian population. Each military action that involves civilians, as was the case yesterday in the Gaza Strip, must be condemned in adherence to International Humanitarian Law. In addition, essential services are nearing collapse due to a lack of fuel supplies. This is the result of Israel's April 9th decision to cease the fuel distribution to Gaza, although today the fuel supply only for the Gaza's only electric power station was reopened. In a press release yesterday, 8 UN Agencies denounced the fuel restrictions because they endanger the basic needs of the civil population. PMRS, one of the major NGO's providing health services in Gaza and the West Bank, has also launched an appeal regarding the immediate "humanitarian disaster" and is at risk of having to suspend all its activities. A statement by the Popular Committee against the Siege of Gaza (PCAS, part of the ongoing campaign in Gaza, www.freegaza.ps) says that more than 85 % of private vehicles and more then 65% of sanitary transport vehicles are unusable because of the lack of fuel. Palestinians in Gaza are denied the most basic necessities and the possibility to lead a dignified life. Once again the Palestinian population is suffering from massive collective punishment, explicitly illegal under International law. Yesterday, Physicians for Human Rights, an Israeli NGO, and the Campaign for the end of the siege in Gaza (www.end-gaza-siege.ps) denounced the DCO's (Israeli Defence Coordination Office) umpteenth refusal to allow Palestinian medical patients to enter Israel or the West Bank for medical care and treatments. Since the siege started 133 Palestinians have died as a result of these kinds of refusals and today 1,562 patients are waiting to leave Gaza for urgent medical care. On April 13th for the forth time Islam Alassouli, a 4 years old child from Khan Younis was not allowed to pass the Eretz crossing into Israel for a bone marrow transplant. He received no explanation for the refusal. The kind of transplant needed by Islam is impossible in Gaza's hospitals: because of the total closures imposed by Israel, elaborate medical equipment is unavailable and even vital medicines are nowhere to be found. The International Community and the European Union have no more excuses: they must intervene immediately, in a stronger and more effective way, for the immediate opening of all of Gaza's border crossings (according to the obligations of an occupying army under International Law), and for an immediate cease-fire by both sides.
otests US death sentence
