I N T E R N E T ' S  M A O I S T  BI-M O N T H L Y

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         THE MAOIST INTERNATIONALIST MOVEMENT

     MIM Notes 137              MAY 1, 1997



MIM Notes speaks to and from the viewpoint of the 
world's oppressed majority, and against the 
imperialist-patriarchy. Pick it up and wield it in 
the service of the people. support it, struggle 
with it and write for it.

IN THIS ISSUE:

1.  TAPES EXPOSE WHITE PIGS PUNTING OPPRESSED
    NATION HEADS
2.  GULAGS TO HOLD 10 MILLION BY 2020 IF TREND
    CONTINUES
3.  LETTERS
4.  SORRY CLINTON, APOLOGY NOT ENOUGH FOR BLACK
    NATION
5.  CAPITALISM MEANS WORSE HEALTH CARE
6.  NORTH DAKOTA SIDESTEPS HEALTH CARE AND ADVANCES
    REPRESSION
7.  MEXICAN PUPPET RULE MURDERS ZAPATISTAS
8.  ACTIVISTS STRUGGLE TO CLOSE THE SCHOOL OF THE
    ASSASSINS
9.  CHILEAN YOUTH PROTEST MILITARY BRUTALITY
10. HAITIANS BOYCOTT BOGUS ELECTIONS
11. "CAPITALISM RESTS ON RESERVE ARMY OF THE
    UNEMPLOYED," SAY BIG WIG AMERIKAN FINANCE
    CAPITALISTS
12. FEDERAL COURT STRIKES BLOW TO CHIPPEWA FISHING
    RIGHTS
13. ORGANIZE AGAINST IMPERIALISM
    OPPOSE MORE CAMPUS COPS
14. FORMER DEALER OF CIA CRACK SAYS:
    "I DO NOT EVER WANT TO BE A PIG AGAIN."
15. TRIP THROUGH AMERIKKKA
16. REMEMBRANCE OF STALIN'S RED ARMY
17. MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM ONLINE
18. PRO-LESBIGAYTRANS LOBBYISTS: CORRECT ON PROP
    209, OPPORTUNIST ON STRATEGY
19. UNDER LOCK AND KEY: NEWS FROM PRISONERS AND
    PRISONS


* * *


WHAT IS MIM?

The Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM) is a 
revolutionary communist party that upholds Marxism-
Leninism-Maoism, comprising the collection of 
existing or emerging Maoist internationalist 
parties in the English-speaking imperialist 
countries and their English-speaking internal semi-
colonies, as well as the existing or emerging 
Spanish-speaking Maoist internationalist parties of 
Aztlan, Puerto Rico and other territories of the 
U.S. Empire. MIM Notes is the newspaper of MIM. 
Notas Rojas is the newspaper of the Spanish-
speaking parties or emerging parties of MIM.

MIM is an internationalist organization that works 
from the vantage point of the Third World 
proletariat; thus, its members are not Amerikans, 
but world citizens.

MIM struggles to end the oppression of all groups 
over other groups: classes, genders, nations.  MIM 
knows this is only possible by building public 
opinion to seize power through armed struggle.

Revolution is a reality for North America as the 
military becomes over-extended in the government's 
attempts to maintain world hegemony.

MIM differs from other communist parties on three 
main questions: (1) MIM holds that after the 
proletariat seizes power in socialist revolution, 
the potential exists for capitalist restoration 
under the leadership of a new bourgeoisie within 
the communist party itself. In the case of the 
USSR, the bourgeoisie seized power after the death 
of Stalin in 1953; in China, it was after Mao's 
death and the overthrow of the "Gang of Four" in 
1976. (2) MIM upholds the Chinese Cultural 
Revolution as the farthest advance of communism in 
human history. (3) MIM believes the North American 
white-working-class is primarily a non-
revolutionary worker-elite at this time; thus, it 
is not the principal vehicle to advance Maoism in 
this country.

MIM accepts people as members who agree on these 
basic principles and accept democratic centralism, 
the system of majority rule, on other questions of 
party line.

"The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is 
universally applicable. We should regard it not as 
dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is not 
merely a matter of learning terms and phrases, but 
of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of 
revolution."
-- Mao Zedong, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 208



* * *



TAPES EXPOSE WHITE PIGS PUNTING OPPRESSED NATION 
HEADS

In Denver on March 26, a cameraman from Channel 2 
caught the police and paramedics manhandling and 
kicking in the head Gil Webb, 17. Webb had just 
rammed a police cruiser in a stolen car, critically 
wounding one officer. By the time Webb arrived at 
the hospital, his neck was broken.

In Springfield, Mass on March 20, a tourist's video 
camera caught Officer Jeffrey Asher kicking Roy 
Parker in the head, while two other pigs held the 
47-year-old Black man down.

Many activists and those in the Denver media have 
been comparing the Denver incident to the 
videotaped police beating of Rodney King. Denver 
Mayor Wellington Webb (no relation to the beaten 
youth) opposed this analogy:

"Don't push the issue in the context of inciting 
communities.... The constant references (to Rodney 
King) to inflame passions in the community, without 
giving us the opportunity to investigate, are 
irresponsible."(1)

MIM believes the Rodney King analogy is correct, 
and one which allows the people to make the correct 
analysis of the political situation. The issue is 
not a small number of bad apples in the police 
forces, but a systemic problem of the police 
occupying the territory of the oppressed nations 
like a foreign troop. What makes the Rodney King 
and similar incidents notable is not the brutality, 
but the videotape itself.

The quality of the Webb videotape is very poor, 
leaving some doubt about what happened. The 
videotape is poor because a cop forced the 
cameraman to retreat a block under threat of 
arrest. Since the initial airing of the Channel 2 
videotape, Channel 9 "enhanced" the quality of the 
tape, and it now apparently shows the cop kicking 
Webb below the waist.

No one is disputing the fact the paramedics and 
police twice dropped Webb onto the gurney (the 
first time he slid off and hit the ground). A 
wooden gurney and neck brace, typically used when 
neck injuries are suspected, were not used.

MIM hasn't seen the "enhanced" videotape, and isn't 
familiar with the methods used to so-called 
"enhance" it. But unlike the mainstream papers and 
the police spokespeople, it doesn't matter to MIM 
whether Webb was kicked above or below the waist, 
as a kick is clearly unnecessary. More importantly, 
we work to oppose the power of the police, not just 
attempt to make it "kinder and gentler." MIM also 
believes that the accused should be treated with 
respect, regardless of their crime. This will be 
true under socialism.

The mainstream media, Gil Webb's supporters, and 
the police dispute whether his neck was broken in 
the car crash or during his beating. Either way, 
this doesn't make the police look good. If his neck 
was broken in the accident, the alleged resistance 
couldn't have happened as the pigs describe it, and 
the manhandling and kick was inappropriate even by 
police standards. If Gil Webb's neck was fine from 
the accident but the paramedics and pigs broke it, 
then it's a clear case of excessive force.

Arguing about when Webb's neck was broken serves 
the police as it allows the pigs to distract 
attention away from the question of the correct way 
to treat someone accused of a crime. In the U.S. 
konstitution, it is stated that people are to be 
treated innocent until proven guilty. But where the 
oppressed nations are concerned, the konstitution 
is exposed as a farce every day. It is not a matter 
of struggling to get the konstitution to apply to 
the oppressed nations as the konstitution was never 
intended to apply to them anyway.

In Springfield, MA, the pig who kicked Roy Parker 
was placed on suspension after the videotape 
surfaced. A criminal investigation has been 
started. Initially the NAACP was predicting that 
the officer would not be punished, but apparently 
the Springfield Police Department is continuing its 
symbolic hunt for bad apples, as covered in 
previous MIM Notes.

Starting from the very beginning of the Springfield 
exposure, the criticism of Asher, the pig who did 
the beating, was muted. The Police Commission 
Chairperson said "I understand [Asher] was 
assaulted and slashed on the neck. Not that that 
justifies his action. This is just a bad incident 
and it certainly doesn't help the police 
department's image."

Below the picture of the beating, the Springfield 
Union-News ran a file photo of Asher holding an 
infant he had rescued. The obvious message: Asher's 
saving a white infant balances out getting caught 
beating up a Black man.

Our struggle is to build up our own independent 
institutions of the oppressed, including a force to 
deal with crime as defined in the interests of the 
oppressed. In the medium to long term, we need to 
wrest control of our communities away from the 
pigs.


NOTES:
The Denver Post 11 April 1997, p. A1.
Also: Springfield Union-News 5 April 1997, p. A1.



* * * 



GULAGS TO HOLD 10 MILLION BY 2020 IF TREND 
CONTINUES

MIM'S PRISON PROJECTIONS

MIM offers these projections of where the U.$. 
prison system is going, not because we expect to 
get to 2020 and find that this has happened, but 
instead to show people what would happen if things 
keep going as they are. We don't expect these to 
come true; this is to help people understand the 
trends currently in progress, and to motivate 
people to get involved and overthrow this system 
before this or something worse actually happens.

If current trends continue, MIM estimates, by 2020 
there will be almost 10 million prisoners in the 
U.$., 4.3 million of them Black and 3.6 million 
white. In terms of incarceration rates, these 
projections show that there would be 9,517 Blacks 
in prison per 100,000 in the population (9.5%), 
compared to 1,400 per 100,000 whites, and 3,035 per 
100,000 overall. That is, the Black incarceration 
rate would increase almost 5 times, and the white 
rate would increase almost five times, but with the 
Black rate starting out more than 6 times higher 
means they would spread further and further apart 
over the years. The projected trends are shown in 
the graphs.


PROJECTION METHOD AND STARTING POINTS


We started with two facts from the government, 
which reported that at midyear 1996 there were a 
total of 1,630,940 people incarcerated in all 
prisons and jails. They also said the average rate 
of growth in this number from 1985 to 1996 was 
7.8%.(1)
Then, we took the incarceration rates for whites 
and Blacks from the 1992-93 Sentencing Project 
report, which were 306 per 100,000 for whites and 
1,947 for Blacks.(2) From there we derived a 
starting point breakdown of 733,443 whites and 
723,537 Blacks in jail or prison in 1996.

So, we had starting points and a rate of growth. 
However, we know that the Black and white prison 
populations are not growing at the same rates. To 
take that into account, we used the latest numbers 
we could find of the breakdown of new prisoners. In 
1991, the government estimated that 34.295% of the 
new prisoners were Black, and 43.567% were 
white.(3) For our projections, we assumed this was 
the breakdown of future prison growth as well.

Finally, to figure out the rates, we used the 
government's middle-range estimates of future 
population growth, which predict population at 
five-year intervals, up to 255 million whites and 
45 million Blacks in the country in 2020.(4) 


STOP THIS GENOCIDAL OPPRESSION


MIM repeats: This is not inevitable! This is the 
course the government has set for incarcerating 
almost 10% of the entire Black population - meaning 
in practice closer to 20% of Black men in 
particular - by the year 2020.

Even if current rates did not increase, the 
government itself estimates that 28.5% of Black men 
born today will be incarcerated in a prison at some 
point in his life, compared to 16% of "Hispanics" 
and only 4.4.% of whites.(3)

Already, as of 1994 1 in 3 Black men ages 18-34 
were under "correctional supervision" on any given 
day.(5) So the total reach of the injustice system 
is much further than just those incarcerated. If 
they get to having 10% actually behind bars, the 
numbers on probation, parole, house arrest, 
electronic monitoring, chemical castration, and so 
on will be all that much higher.

Get involved with RAIL or MIM today to put a stop 
to the imperialist plan with the best tool the 
oppressed have at their disposal: a vanguard party 
leading a national liberation struggle toward 
proletarian and feminist revolution.


NOTES.
1. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice 
Statistics Bulletin, "Prison and Jail Inmates at 
Midyear 1996". Jan. 1997, NCJ 162843.
2. Seteven R. Danziger (ed.), The Real War on 
Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice 
Commission. Harper Perennial: New York, 1996.
3. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice 
Special Report, "Lifetime Likelihood of Going to 
State or Federal Prison". March, 1997, NCJ-160092.
4. 1994 Statistical Abstract of the United States.
5.  Danziger, op cit., p. 35.
6.  



* * * 



LETTERS

To MIM: The article by MC5 in MN134 "Amerikans: a 
People on Psychological Drugs Rotting Their Minds" 
sounds more like an indictment against people 
claiming child abuse then it does an article 
exposing the decadence of psychology. I agree that 
yes, the majority of the bought off Amerikan 
populace will lie in order to deny social 
responsibility, scapegoat social inequalities onto 
the oppressed and to be able to steal more 
superprofits from the Third World. But this article 
is making more excuses for a patriarchal society 
and child abuse then anything else. Wasn't Freud's 
initial reasons for psychology to prove that 
children, especially wimmin, were making up the 
sexual abuse from their fathers and families? I 
think that your point of trying to show that whites 
lie about Black "crime" gets lost in using the 
psychology industries own "studies" to prove that 
people make stuff up. The study itself could fall 
right in line with Freud initial reasoning.

I assume that the use of "arithmetic puzzles" in 
early childhood education is an example of 
objective learning- but how long does math stay 
objective and how far are we going to imitate the 
"scientific" intelligentsia of today who do this 
already? Puzzles and the objective learning early 
on ultimately have to be put into some sort of 
practice that can't just be justified by early 
"puzzle learning".

Also, why can't we be angry?? Yeah the culture 
raises selfish individuals, but they are still 
thinking breathing humyn beings who ultimately make 
a choice-collect a lot of stuff and oppress the 
majority of the world, or fight for a sustainable 
existence. Most here choose the first. To say that 
they don't know any better I think is a lame excuse 
for the White working class's actions and chosen 
ignorance. No country, government or oppressor can 
exist without their bought off followers.

--a RAIL Comrade

MIM RESPONDS: This RAIL comrade's criticisms raise 
the important issue of how difficult it is to 
navigate our way between contradictions in the 
world. For instance, Freud's reactionary claim that 
wimmin and children make up stories about abuse 
sounds like it falls right in line with the recent 
studies from the psychiatry industry that say 
people are making up these stories. But this alone 
is not enough reason to reject these studies and 
MIM tries not to shrink away from the truth, even 
when it is complex and requires some careful 
explanation.

While MIM does recognize that wimmin and children 
are raped and abused in very large numbers, we 
can't allow this to stop us from fighting against 
the criminal injustice system when it pretends to 
get on the bandwagon in order to put more people in 
prison. And when the psychology industry gets on 
the same bandwagon to expand its parasitic 
influence by "helping" people remember things that 
happened to them so that they can pay the 
psychologists more money to "help" them deal with 
it, we can not ignore our duty to protest. 
Discussion of studies such as the one reviewed in 
MIM Notes must be put in careful context: in this 
case the point was to attack the criminal injustice 
industry and the psychology industry for attempting 
to produce a society of complacent supporters of 
national oppression. In fact, most of the article 
is devoted to attacking the psychology industry for 
attempting to help people feel good about 
patriarchal imperialism.

We agree with the letter writer that we must put 
our "objective learning" into some practice which 
serves the people. But this does not change the 
fact that 2+2=4, whether a decadent, imperialist 
mathematician says it or a proletarian 
revolutionary says it. People need to differentiate 
between truth and opinion or status. In a situation 
where several people give different answers to 
arithmetic problems, students will have to decide 
which answer is right. Is it the one the teacher 
gives, the one the popular kid gives, or the answer 
4? Such exercises help youth grasp the importance 
of objective truth.

Finally, we agree with the letter writer that we 
should get angry, that was the point of the article 
attacking feel-goodist culture. MIM believes we 
need to re-educate people about when to be angry 
and when to be happy because what we have learned 
in this parasitical imperialist culture is all 
wrong. We should be angry that the majority of the 
people in this country choose complacency and 
parasitism on the backs of the majority of the 
world's people who suffer and die so that Amerikans 
can live a comfy life. The article merely intended 
to point out that this parasitic Amerikan culture 
has created such a maize of justifications and 
feel-good fictions to hide the reality of 
imperialist life that many Amerikans have 
successfully achieved oblivion to the world around 
them. This was only possible because of their 
wealth and position of privilege and it is this 
which we fight to dismantle. 


* * *


DEAR MIM, A late October 1996 edition of the San 
Francisco Chronicle published a special report. 
This report charged the recalcitrant California 
State Department of Corrections with collusion in a 
conspiratorial attempt to suppress internal reports 
of racist prison guards staging deadly fights among 
inmates at the Corcoran Correctional Facility. They 
participated in this cover-up in order to justify 
the department demands for billions of the 
taxpayers' dollars to construct more death camps.

The shocking report of the escalating prison 
violence and mass human rights violations 
perpetrated against inmates at Corcoran is a 
microcosm of the vulturistic multi-billion dollar 
U.S. Prison-Industrial Complex. This complex uses 
politicians, the courts, the so-called law 
enforcement agencies and the mass media to deceive 
the public as legal cover to abuse, oppress and 
perform genocide on prisoners with impunity.

Consequently, to effectively fight and reduce the 
proliferation of state-sponsored violence on 
prisoners in the current pro-capitalistic political 
pretext, demand a much broader public scrutiny of 
the national prison system that must include as a 
minimum: 1. Free and complete access of the 
bourgeois Black and mass media to the prisons. This 
could help expose and prevent abuse. 2. Independent 
Prison Oversight Commission empowered to 
investigate inter-related issues of penal policies 
that promote racial violence among inmates.

And continue to work along with MIM, the Nation of 
Islam and other grass-roots revolutionary 
individuals, groups and organizations, who work 
inside and outside the system in order to 
politicize the mass atrocities committed against 
Blacks, Latinos and other victims of domestic and 
foreign Amerikan imperialism.

Respectfully submitted,
--Brother for Change, 4 February 1997

P.S. Your Prison Program is one of the most 
organized, effective and far-reaching. Therefore, 
please accept my very humble $1.00 contribution 
toward those efforts. Please keep up the 
revolutionary activities.


MIM REPLIES: Thank you for writing, brother, and 
for your donation to MIM's prison work. MIM's 
Prison Program can always use such donations to 
help cover postage costs.

Protracted legal struggle like building independent 
media is our central task at this time, since the 
current balance of forces rules out armed struggle. 
So prison reform does have its place. However, the 
reforms which should be prioritized are those which 
help to build the independent power of the 
oppressed, as opposed to those which merely build 
the power of the bourgeois media, bourgeois courts, 
bourgeois legislatures, or bourgeois-controlled 
oversight committees. So rather than trying to use 
the bourgeois media against the bourgeois prisons, 
why not:
 
#Distribute MIM Notes and Notas Rojas?

#Work with MIM on a project aimed at funding MIM's 
work?

#Fight prison censorship of MIM materials?

#Work more closely with MIM to build public opinion 
against the criminal injustice system and for anti-
imperialist revolution?

As for your other demand, our protracted legal work 
should indeed have as a goal the formation of a 
prison oversight commission which is truly 
independent of the imperialist bourgeoisie. This 
can only come as a result of protracted public-
opinion and institution-building.

Ultimately, the best the best way to support 
prisoners is to struggle with, work with, and 
finance MIM and MIM-led organizations, like RAIL. 
History has shown that the overthrow of the system 
under which capitalists profit from the 
exploitation of prisoners requires the leadership 
of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party.

Regarding the Black bourgeoisie in general and the 
Nation of Islam (NOI) in particular: We see the 
national bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations as a 
progressive if vacillating ally at this time. 
Included in this category are the Black press 
(particularly the more independent Black press) and 
the NOI. But while the NOI is principally an ally 
at this time, we do not consider it to be a 
revolutionary organization. The NOI portrays itself 
as a militant Black nationalist organization, but 
instead of calling for the masses to make 
revolution, it calls for the masses to passively 
await the wrath of "God". We can ally with the NOI 
and with the Black press, but it would be a mistake 
to put one's efforts into building up these 
institutions of the national bourgeoisie when 
proletarian institutions exist and need your 
support.



* * *



SORRY CLINTON, APOLOGY NOT ENOUGH FOR BLACK NATION

by a comrade

In a cowardice cover-up and gloss-over, President 
Clinton announced that he would formally apologize 
to the Black men used as human guinea pigs for 
forty years in Tuskeegee Alabama. The government 
knowingly left 400 Black men untreated for syphilis 
to study them without their consent. Now if you 
have but one cynical bone in your body or 
materially understand the history of settler 
colonialism, you should understand that an apology 
is not sufficient and that the Amerikan settler 
colonialist should not be forgiven or absolved of 
the responsibility for slowly torturing and 
murdering these men as they withheld the necessary 
treatment.

On April 13th, the National Black United Front in 
St. Louis showed "The Deadly Deception" which 
details the government's experimentation on Black 
men in a small rural town in Macon county Alabama. 
The government promised free treatment for Bad 
Blood, the euphemism for syphilis and other 
diseases. In the 1920s and 1930s the rates of 
syphilis increased drastically and the government 
allegedly set out to end the disease. The numbers 
infected reached an epidemic rate among Black males 
in Macon county. 35% were infected. The government 
stated that it wanted to cure 10,000. To start 
with, it only treated 1,400 and did not even treat 
these people completely with the necessary dosages 
and follow-ups. In 1931, the government abandoned 
the program it had only started in 1930 allegedly 
because it did not have enough funding, but of 
course funding decisions are political and poor 
Black sharecroppers were expendable so funding for 
these programs was a low priority.

Soon after, doctors interested in studying syphilis 
looked at Macon County as a "natural laboratory." 
The white doctors needed the Tuskeegee Institute to 
carry out research, so the Department of Public 
Health asked the institute founded by Booker T. 
Washington to recruit Black men for study in order 
to continue receiving its public funding. The 
institute recruited 400 men in the later stages of 
syphilis through the local churches and schools.

The movie points out that historically the burden 
of human experimentation has rested on the 
oppressed. In the case of the men in Macon county, 
it was without their "consent" or knowledge. The 
men were forced to participate by employers who 
threatened them with lose of their jobs if they did 
not return for follow-up visits. The men were told 
that having a spinal tap was part of the treatment 
and following the initial "treatment" doctors said 
that the men had to return annually for further 
treatment at which time they were studied further 
and given placebo pills.

Despite the fact that syphilis attacks the brain, 
internal organs and joints and causes neurological 
damage, heart disease, blindness and early death, 
the government continued to withhold treatment for 
the men for forty years. Even after the development 
of penicillin and FDR's public heath programs after 
the depression, the men were denied treatment. 

This study was not confusing or completely hidden 
from the public eye. In fact, reports of the study 
were printed in the Journal of the American Medical 
Association (JAMA) and given to Congress. The 
medical profession and the politicians banded 
together in order to retain the ability to 
experiment, counting the Black men as expendable. 
During FDR's programs to eradicate syphilis across 
the united snakes, men in the experiment were 
specifically excluded and were refused treatment 
even outside of Macon county. Later in San 
Francisco, one of the doctors who tried to treat 
one of the men was severely reprimanded by the 
government.

For men not treated between the ages of 25 through 
50, life expectancy is reduced by 20%, yet in 1969 
the Center for Disease Control convened a panel to 
review the study and decided to carry it on 
justifying this by saying that the treatment would 
not help so late anyway and that they did not want 
to make the Black men angry.

Finally in 1972, the government stopped the study. 
A lawsuit filed was settled out of court for a 
measly $38,000 for each of the handful of the 
survivors. In addition to the 400 men who went 
untreated, any of the 200 men who served as the 
control for the experiment and contracted syphilis 
were also refused treatment. The torture and 
complicity in murder is not compensated by a mere 
pittance and is certainly not forgotten because of 
an apology by the current commando in chief. The 
Black nation and all oppressed nations have MIM's 
support in the struggle for real reparations and 
for true national liberation. Not only will the 
settler white nation pay for the men of Macon 
county, it will also pay for the years of slavery, 
destruction of history and culture, murder of 
revolutionary nationalists, imprisonment of 51% of 
the Black nation in the gulags and continued 
exploitation and oppression.

After the showing of the movie, the organizer said 
that the Black nation needs to look at its history. 
Another person said that they needed to use what 
Mao did in China as an example for liberation for 
the Black nation. The organizer criticized the 
audience for not fighting hard enough to stop the 
closure of the Homer G Philips hospital which was 
the last public hospital in St. Louis. People said 
that the apology is bullshit and that "Power is not 
given it is taken!" Finally the organizers said 
that "Power is the People!" and that the liberation 
and justice for the Black nation is not up to the 
Amerikan government, but up to the people in the 
communities.

***For more on medical experimentation on the 
oppressed see MN130.***



* * *



CAPITALISM MEANS WORSE HEALTH CARE

by MC17

In yet another example of why capitalism does not 
work, a pharmaceutical company sponsored study 
which demonstrated that the company's drug was no 
better than less expensive generic versions, is 
finally being published in the Journal of the 
American Medical Association after the company 
spent years blocking the publication and 
campaigning to discredit the work of the 
researchers. Capitalism is supposedly based on the 
principal of free competition. But this system of 
competition makes it profitable to suppress 
research which could save lives and money. This 
case is not unusual, in fact there is much useful 
health research that never gets out to the public: 
for many years the tobacco industry was a prime 
example of capitalism's failure to serve the 
people's health needs.

In this case, the pharmaceutical company, Knoll, 
realized that publishing a study that showed their 
drug was no more effective than cheaper brands 
would lead to a big loss in profits. So naturally 
they did not want it published. And since the 
researcher, Dr. Dong of the University of 
California at San Francisco, had signed standard 
agreement with Knoll that said she would not 
publish anything without the company's permission, 
the company was in a good position to keep these 
findings quiet. After several years of fighting 
with Knoll, the researcher finally got a paper 
accepted to the JAMA in 1995.

But it was not only the pharmaceutical company that 
blocked the publication of these results which 
could mean tremendous savings for patients with 
thyroid problems whose doctors prescribe the more 
expensive drug. The night before this paper was to 
be published, the University of California called 
Dr. Dong and ordered her to withdraw the paper. The 
University was worried about how much money might 
be lost if they went against the pharmaceutical 
company.

The Public Citizen's Health Research Group 
estimates that almost $800 million has been spent 
on the more expensive thyroid drug as a result of 
the suppression of this research which shows that 
the generic brand is just as effective.

A researcher employed by Knoll took Dr. Dong's data 
and reanalyzed it in a different way to reach the 
opposite conclusion and these findings were 
published in mid-1995. If capitalism really worked, 
different interpretations of data collected in such 
studies would be published together for the public 
to review. Instead, profits take precedence over 
the health of the people and even in this wealthy 
country where the majority of the people are 
benefiting from imperialism, capitalism proves 
itself a failure.


NOTE: New York Times, 16 April 1997. p.A1.



* * *



NORTH DAKOTA SIDESTEPS HEALTH CARE AND ADVANCES 
REPRESSION

by MC45

As of April 10, it is now legal for any "police 
officer, firefighter, emergency medical technician, 
health care worker, or medical patient, who 
believes another person has 'significantly' exposed 
them to blood to obtain a state court order to 
detain that person -- without criminal charges or a 
hearing -- for up to five days, during which a 
judge can force the detainee to have a blood test 
for HIV." The new law, which promises to randomly 
expose individuals' HIV+ status, says nothing about 
care for individuals tested and found positive, or 
about maintaining their privacy after their status 
is discovered. The law is designed to deprive HIV+ 
people of their privacy without doing anything for 
them in return.

The national director of the ACLU AIDS Project 
pointed out that while testing people under arrest 
and medical patients, this law has nothing to say 
about the HIV status of the individual who demands 
the test. It's one thing to know if you've been 
potentially exposed, but closing the book on one 
instance of exposure doesn't confirm a person's 
status.

MIM does not worship the right to privacy as it is 
supposedly guaranteed under Amerikan law and 
ideology. In the long-term, under socialism and 
then communism, we support the state's and 
society's right to intervene in the individual's 
life for the benefit either of that individual or 
for society. In revolutionary China landlords were 
deprived of their so-called private property 
because even though this property was protected by 
law and ideology, it had been gained at the expense 
of the peasants and was maintained as part of a 
system of continuing to oppress the peasants.

Under socialism and then communism we will see 
interventions in individuals' private lives for the 
good of the society. Part of the intervention under 
the dictatorship of the proletariat enables the 
people's institutions to treat, cure and eradicate 
deadly disease. This new North Dakota law is not 
framed in terms of social benefits, instead it pits 
individuals against each other and decides that 
individuals in the custody of the state are less 
deserving of privacy than the individuals who put 
them there.


NOTE: 
http://www.qrd.org/incoming/.Copyright/970413.q407



* * *



MEXICAN PUPPET RULE MURDERS ZAPATISTAS

by Otis

On Friday, March 14th, the small community of San 
Pedro Nichtalucum, Mexico, was the site of 
escalated violence involving members of the PRI 
(the ruling political party) and the PRD (a 
political party opposed to the PRI), as well as 
members of the Zapatistas. As with all interactions 
between the imperialists and the indigenous, 
everything went against the oppressed; they were 
blamed for everything, arrested, beaten and killed 
for their "crimes." Of course, there are two 
stories about the state murder, but MIM will use 
only the expressions of the Zapatistas, as the 
Mexican government has a material interest in 
upholding lies. 

"[O]n Thursday, March 13th, members of the Union of 
Indigenous Communities of the North of Chiapas 
(Uncizon)--an organization whose members support 
the PRD and are allied with the EZLN [the 
Zapatistas] in the zone--took over the offices of a 
municipal agency in San Pedro, demanding to know 
where the government resources allocated to the 
community were actually going. They held four local 
PRI authorities as prisoners inside." Later that 
night, a group of drunk PRI's started a fight with 
Uncizon. The next morning, a group of PRIstas 
[members of PRI] kidnapped, tied and beat six 
Zapatistas who were not aware of the conflict.

In order to have their comrades returned freely, 
the Zapatistas kidnapped four members of the PRI 
and offered a 'prisoner exchange.' "The response 
was clear: 'No, we aren't in agreement, what we're 
in agreement with is killing your Zapatista 
friends. We'll take care of all of them right 
here.'" 

"Then came the public security forces and the 
judicial police. First, they went to where the six 
Zapatistas were being held and beaten, and promptly 
arrested them, supposedly for the kidnapping of the 
PRI's militants." What's that? The state arrested 
who? Why, of course they arrested the beaten 
Zapatistas. When capitalists control the state, 
"justice" is merely a sorry joke. 

The Zapatistas set up a roadblock to prevent the 
police from leaving with their comrades. The 
Zapatistas approached the police unarmed, seeking 
to negotiate the liberation of the prisoners. The 
police opened fire "and in a matter of minutes, the 
Mexican Army arrived with a convoy of troops." 

"When it was all over, according to women from the 
community who gave their testimony to La Jornada 
journalist Hermann Bellinghausen, the army had 
entered every house in the community signalled out 
as 'Zapatista', and destroyed it. All the civilian 
supporters of the EZLN, the PRD, or the Uncizon who 
didn't manage to escape into the surrounding hills 
or fields, were either killed or taken prisoner." 

MIM recognizes that such brutality is nothing new. 
U.$. imperialism has controlled Mexico for years 
and funds the lackey Mexican government in its 
unending war against the people who refuse to 
accept imperialist exploitation and oppression. 
Since 1994, Amerika has aided the Mexican 
government's attempts to destroy the just uprising 
of the indigenous people of Chiapas. Under amerikan 
hegemony, terror will reign down on the majority of 
the world's people. It is only through 
revolutionary national liberation struggles that we 
will successfully bring about the overthrow of 
imperialism. 

NOTE: 
http://kafka.uvic.ca/~vipirg/SISIS/emerg/chiapas.ht
ml



* * *


ACTIVISTS STRUGGLE TO CLOSE THE SCHOOL OF THE 
ASSASSINS

by a comrade

As MIM Notes goes to press, activists are waging a 
ten-day fast on the steps of the Amerikan "Capitol" 
to protest the School of the Americas in Fort 
Benning, Georgia. The School of the Assassins (SOA) 
got its more appropriate name as activists 
supporting human rights and justice in Latin 
American countries started to uncover the 
voluminous evidence that this military base has 
trained close to 60,000 of the individuals 
responsible for murder, rape, massacres and 
military domination in the Latin American 
dictatorships propped-up by the Amerikan 
government.

SOA exists as one of the tools that has enabled 
Amerikan imperialism to repress and exploit the 
masses of many Latin American countries for the 
last 50 years. This training ground equips the 
leaders and the soldiers of military dictatorships 
with military strategy needed to fight against 
guerrilla warfare; teaches tactics of torture, both 
physical and psychological; teaches commando 
operations and interrogation techniques.

The molding of puppets within the walls of the 
School of the Assassins allows the Amerikan 
imperialist beast to sit fat within North America 
reaping the super-profits and protecting the 
interests of multi-national corporations without 
sending numerous Amerikan troops to fight a direct 
war in the countryside of Latin America. Instead, 
the beast trains those from the Third World who 
will ride in the tail of imperialist profit to 
slaughter the toiling masses of the soil and the 
exploited Latin American workers.

Closing the School of the Assassins will in no way 
put an end to imperialism. Death to imperialism 
will only come through the victorious struggles for 
national liberation of the oppressed through armed 
struggle and the overthrow of imperialism. However, 
exposing the direct hand of Amerikan imperialism in 
the blood of the masses is a progressive result of 
the push to close SOA. And closing the SOA would be 
a progressive step in organizing the Amerikan 
masses to take up internationalism and close all 
institutions which perpetuate imperialism.

On April 6th, Fr. Roy Bourgeois spoke in Ann Arbor 
after showing "School of Assassins" which documents 
a touch of the atrocities committed by the Latin 
American criminals trained by the Amerikan criminal 
government. Bourgeois is the founder of the School 
of the Americas Watch which monitors and reports on 
SOA activity. 

Bourgeois pointed out that "This issue is a serious 
one, about suffering and death" and called for 
support for the protesters fasting between April 
19th and 29th. He also called for activists to 
promote HR611 which calls for the closing of the 
SOA. Rep. Kennedy has tried to pass similar bills 
twice. Both attempts were opposed with the 
patriotic rhetoric that the SOA is necessary to 
promote and extend democracy. The second bill 
failed by a smaller margin and the activists at the 
SOA Watch see the passing of 611 as a higher 
possibility. MIM supports this campaign as one of 
the more progressive reformist attempts to end 
oppression while we continue to fight against the 
extension of imperialism by building for revolution 
in this country and supporting revolutionary 
struggles around the world.

The Latin American Training Center-Ground Division 
was started in 1946 in the Panama Canal Zone. This 
became the School of the Americas in 1963. In 1984, 
the school suspended its operations in compliance 
with the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty. Three months 
later it reopened in Ft. Benning, Georgia. Since 
then, the trail of massacres, murders and torture 
of rebels continued to trace back to the SOA. Jack 
Nelson-Pallmeyer's book, School of the Assassins 
details the number of leaders and soldiers trained 
at the SOA and involved in specific murders and 
tortures. This book includes a number of stories 
which reached the mainstream in the 1980s telling 
of massacres in which the majority of the soldiers 
and leaders involved were trained in Amerika: The 
murder of the Jesuit priests, the assassination of 
Romero, the massacre at El Mozote, and over two-
thirds of the soldiers responsible for the worst 
atrocities in El Salvador. The list continues.

School of the Assassins does a good job at 
connecting the history of the need to extract 
super-profits to expand Amerikan imperialism to the 
legacy of torture and murder. Though there are some 
points of analysis and perspective that MIM 
disagrees with, the book explains well the strategy 
of Low Intensity Conflict and the use of the SOA in 
this plan to set up the current economic dependence 
of the Latin American countries through the 
comprador regimes.

"At the present moment dishonesty and deceit, 
secrecy and lies, deception and treachery flow like 
tainted blood from the diseased heart of U.S. 
foreign policy, through the hardened arteries of 
the School of the Americas, and into the veins of 
Latin America." Because the imperialist vampires 
suck on the masses of the Third World, the masses 
will rise up and stab the beast in its slowly 
decaying heart. In the imperialist countries, it is 
our responsibility to struggle against the 
bloodline and weaken the beast in support of the 
vast majority of the world's people.

NOTE: School of the Americas Watch is an 
organization exposing the SOA. For more information 
on SOA, on HR611, on their annual protest at Ft. 
Benning in November 1997, or to obtain one of their 
two informational videos on the subject write: P.O. 
Box 3330, Columbus, GA 31903.



* * *



CHILEAN YOUTH PROTEST MILITARY BRUTALITY

In April, a wave of protests by youth exposed the 
torture that goes on in the military where service 
is mandatory for all young men at age 18. College 
students are granted a study exemption and so most 
of the men drafted come from poor families. At the 
rallies youth told of the brutal beatings by 
officers, pointing out that it was often safer to 
desert than serve the mandatory term.

On December 15 one young man, Pedro Soto, 
disappeared from his regiment after complaining to 
his mother about the abuse he was enduring in 
military training. The military declared him a 
deserter but on March 15 his body was discovered. 
It had been dismembered and the organs were removed 
to speed up decomposition and hinder 
identification.

Chile has become famous for disappearances by the 
military since General Pinochet took power in a 
coup that overthrew the very popular elected 
president Salvador Allende in 1973. Pinochet 
stepped down in 1990 to allow elections, but the 
farce of this so-called democracy is revealed by 
the position that Pinochet holds: he is still 
commander of the army.

The Frei government of Chile is responding to the 
protests by urging Chileans to have confidence in 
an investigation of the Soto killing. But the 
people of Chile have lived under the horror of 
dictatorship for long enough to see through these 
lies. Fear of brutal repression has kept many 
Chileans from taking to the streets after Pinochet 
massacred all of the Allende supporters and 
progressive activists he could find after his coup. 
But the large demonstrations by the youth this 
month show that a new generation of people who 
demand true democracy will take the place of those 
killed and terrorized. It is only a matter of time 
before Chileans reclaim their country from the 
dictators and MIM looks forward to the re-growth of 
Maoist parties leading this struggle.


NOTES: New York Times, 16 April 1997. p. A8.



* * *



HAITIANS BOYCOTT BOGUS ELECTIONS

by MCB52

The Haitian people know that elections do not a 
democracy make. On the election day of April 6, 
between 85% and 90% of those registered to vote sat 
out the phony choice-making. When Haitians could 
believe they had real choices, almost 100% voted--
and voted for populist leader Jean-Bertrand 
Aristide. Now that the U$ has demonstrated a 
tighter reign on the "democratic" process, Haitians 
refuse to vote for imperialism. This is a strong 
statement against the U$ model of "democracy," 
where the desires of multinationals are served 
before those of the people.

Basically ignoring the vast majority's boycott, a 
U$ official claimed "We believe these elections 
were an important step in the process of 
consolidating democracy in Haiti."(1) Haiti's 
ruling puppet, Preval, who throughout his two years 
if rule has tried to make Haiti a better place for 
multinationals, also refused to acknowledge the 
sharp indictment of his government expressed by the 
mass boycott. He said "This is an important moment. 
It expresses the will of the nation."(2)

The will of what nation, MIM asks. Ever since 
Haitians won their independence in a slave revolt, 
imperialists have been striving to get and keep it 
in their grasp. There are still more than 1000 UN 
soldiers and police in Haiti, leaving Haiti still 
basically occupied three years after the most 
recent U$ invasion.(3)

The bourgeois press tells the story of that 
invasion as a democratic process. For example one 
wire service gives the background in an article 
about the elections like this: "U.S. military 
intervention in 1994 marked the return of democracy 
with Aristide returning from exile after being 
ousted by the military in 1991."(3) MIM knows the 
real history. 

Haitians had a more free election in 1991. They 
voted in Aristide, the leader of a populist 
movement called Lavalas that promised land reform 
and justice. A CIA-trained goon then led a coup, 
which oppressed the people desperately. In order to 
keep the oppressed from rising up and taking power 
from the goons, Amerika reinstalled Aristide--just 
a few months before his term ended anyway--but with 
many conditions. Amerika rewrote the Haitian 
constitution to be friendly to multinationals, and 
patrolled the streets militarily. It has since made 
sure that its policy of having people vote as long 
as its not against Amerika stays entrenched.

Aristide now criticizes his successor, and has 
started his own faction of Lavalas called Fanmi 
Lavalas. He pointed out: "Democracy is not just 
(about) voting, but also (about) bread and human 
rights."(3) He criticizes the privatization plans 
of Preval, and speaks out against the 
multinationals. 

Ultimately, however, Aristide cannot provide a 
solution to his people. As progressive as his ideas 
are, he still has not recognized that in order for 
those nice words to translate into actions, there 
needs to be a means to defend a newly non-colonial 
state from the imperialists. If Haiti says "no" to 
their ventures, as it did under Aristide, the 
imperialists will attack either overtly or through 
covert operations. Without assuring the masses that 
he has dealt with this problem, he will not gain 
their support to make the same mistake twice. Only 
a people's war can defend a just state from 
imperialism.


NOTES:
1. Reuters North American Wire, 7 April 1997.
2. Reuters World Service, 7 April 1997.
3. Deutche Presse-Agentur, 7 April 1997.


* * *


"CAPITALISM RESTS ON RESERVE ARMY OF THE 
UNEMPLOYED," SAY BIG WIG AMERIKAN FINANCE 
CAPITALISTS

by MC45

In a not-so-stunning move in late March, the 
finance capitalists' finance capitalists--the men 
who run the Amerikan Federal Reserve Bank--declared 
that the health of capitalism relies on restrained 
economic growth and a substantial pool of 
unemployed workers. When the Federal Reserve Board 
announced that it was raising interest rates, a 
spokesperson for the bank explained that this rate 
increase was necessary to prevent inflation since 
unemployment is low in Amerika right now and the 
economy has been growing quickly.

Since this announcement and the subsequent rate 
increases, bourgeois economists have been 
speculating on the extent to which the Fed's 
motivations really are what the Fed says they are. 
All this speculation doesn't mean much to MIM 
because we are more concerned with the bigger 
picture of international capital and imperialism. 
MIM takes this opportunity to elaborate on Marx's 
theory of the reserve army of the unemployed under 
capitalism.

Amerikan unemployment doesn't mean much to this 
economy which thrives on exploitation and 
superexploitation of the international proletariat 
while the majority of working people within U.$. 
borders live at a very high standard. But this 
event, in which the chief finance capitalists in 
the imperialist economy have made such bald-faced 
admissions that capital is inherently at odds with 
full employment, is a good symbolic example of why 
capitalism is doomed. 

The U.$. Federal Reserve Board, also known as the 
Fed, is the central bank of the Amerikan government 
which sets interest rates for Amerikan loans. This 
includes bank loans, credit card loans, car loans, 
and money coming from all other lending agencies 
which are regulated by Amerikan law. As such, the 
Fed can in effect allow the Amerikan economy to 
speed up, or slow it down by doing what it did in 
March: making it more expensive to take out loans, 
and making people more reluctant to spend money. 

Communists must point out this contradiction of 
capitalism and drown out the laissez faire 
capitalists who only want freer competition. The 
Fed's existence says that competition does not work 
as a long-term motivator for production. The 
anarchy of capitalist production, in which one 
producer does not know what the other is doing, 
means that capitalism is constantly plagued with 
crises of overproduction and will be until it is 
replaced by the more rational planning economic 
system of socialism. This latest interest rate 
increase does not mean Amerika has just seen such a 
crisis, but it affirms the fact that such 
regulation is always necessary under capitalism--
either to prevent crises or to make them less 
severe. 

Today in Amerika, the purpose of financial 
regulation is to sustain capitalism, and to stall 
proletarian revolution. While the majority in 
Amerika will not be revolutionized by unemployment 
or inflation, keeping the U.$. economy strong means 
sustaining imperialist activity abroad and 
continuing efforts to squelch proletarian politics 
internationally. Tomorrow under socialism, the 
government will still control the economy because 
following capitalist anarchy of production it will 
be necessary to have the economy grow in a 
controlled setting. But this controlled growth will 
take place in the context of guaranteed employment 
and basic human necessities for the masses.



* * * 



FEDERAL COURT STRIKES BLOW TO CHIPPEWA FISHING 
RIGHTS

On 9 April, the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of 
Appeals postponed until June a ruling on Chippewa 
netting and spearfishing on Lake Mille Lacs. This 
is a blow to the Chippewa, whose claims to the fish 
in that lake not only pre-date the Amerikan 
settlers but whose rights to the fish were 
preserved in an 1837 treaty. This year's Chippewa 
fish harvest must be postponed until the court 
rules.

The Chippewa shouldn't have to go to the white 
man's courts to decide these disputes. Legally 
speaking, the only courts with jurisdiction would 
be international courts. The Federal government can 
not impartially decide cases between non-citizens 
(the First Nations) and the Federal government, 
state governments or Amerikkkan citizens.


NOTE: Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) 11 April 1997, 
p. 7B.



* * *



ORGANIZE AGAINST IMPERIALISM
OPPOSE MORE CAMPUS COPS

At the UMass Amherst, both candidates for the 
office of president of the Student Government 
Association ran on platforms of more lights and 
call boxes. Call boxes are special phones designed 
to be used to call the police if you are being 
chased by a strange attacker. The campuses are way-
over policed and yet somehow the students are still 
scared. About the only thing that could be safer 
than most college campuses would be the inside of 
their suburban homes.

The winning candidate went so far as to say "There 
are places around Haigis Mall where there are no 
lights or call boxes. The escort service is 
inadequate. By the time you get to [the escort 
service], you might as well have gotten mugged."
RAIL finds that First World students have an 
irrational view of their physical safety. To hear 
some of them talk, you would think that these 
students lived in the Warsaw ghetto and were being 
abducted or shot down by fascist stormtroopers 
regularly. Not only is this not the case, but the 
opposite of the Warsaw ghetto -- we see the 
students cementing an alliance with the government.

Unlike the paternalist "women's centers" on college 
campuses which tell men to cross to the other side 
of the street to avoid scaring women, RAIL argues 
for a more rational approach regarding risk. RAIL 
isn't arguing that assaults on strangers don't 
happen on college campuses; just that they are very 
rare. More importantly, college students are a lot 
safer than most people in the world. We'd certainly 
not equate fear of a hypothetical attack with the 
actual attack as the SGA candidate did.

The patriarchy wants wimmin, especially young white 
wimmin, to be scared. This helps control them and 
allows the pigs to build support for their agenda 
of military control. The police love it when 
students demand that cops play a more active role. 
It increases their control over the campus and 
their flexibility to carry out their real purpose: 
the repression of the internal colonies.

Many white students will doubt the above assertion. 
We suggest they try this simple test: Ask five 
white students and five Black or Latino students 
how often they get pulled over on campus. You'll 
find that the white students are pulled over very 
rarely.

The escort service consists of security guards who 
drive students around at night. It's popular 
partially for the convenience (why walk when you 
can be chauffeured) and partially as a result of 
the irrational fear of Black men in bushes.

In fact, if you look at the statistics for escort 
service usage, you will find a big upsurge around 
October 1992, when Black students were holding a 
series of outdoor, evening rallies against the 
beating of a Haitian Resident Assistant.

About a year ago as a result of other political 
discussions RAIL remembered overhearing numerous 
white women at the time talking about their fears 
of "rampaging Black students" and their increased 
reliance on the escort service. These recollection 
inspired RAIL to get the statistics for escort 
service usage, which backed up an admittedly 
informal survey by eavesdrop.


NOTE: Massachusetts Daily Collegian 26 March 1997, 
p. 1.



* * *



FORMER DEALER OF CIA CRACK SAYS:
"I DO NOT EVER WANT TO BE A PIG AGAIN."

***"On 20 December 1994, before the public knew 
that much of the cocaine dealt in Los Angeles was 
supplied by smugglers connected to the U.S. Central 
Intelligence Agency (CIA)'s Nicaraguan Contra army, 
the Los Angeles Times printed a 2,400-word article 
portraying Ricky Ross as central to the spread of 
crack cocaine. The headline read, "Deposed King of 
Crack; Now Free After 5 Years in Prison, This 
Master Marketer Was Key to the Drug's Spread in 
L.A."

"If there was an eye to the storm," it began, "if 
there was a criminal mastermind behind crack's 
decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw 
capitalist most responsible for flooding Los 
Angeles' streets with mass- marketed cocaine, his 
name was Freeway Rick....Ross did more than anyone 
else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing 
prices and spreading disease on a scale never 
before conceived." The article called Ross "South-
Central's first millionaire crack lord," and said 
that "While most other dealers toiled at the bottom 
rungs of the market, his coast- to-coast 
conglomerate was selling more than 500,000 rocks a 
day, a staggering turnover that put the drug within 
reach of anyone with a few dollars."

Once it became publicly known that CIA-connected 
counterrevolutionaries were Ross' cocaine 
suppliers, the same reporter did an about-face. On 
the front page of the 20 October 1996 Los Angeles 
Times, he wrote that Ross was one of many 
"interchangeable characters," and that he were 
"dwarfed" by other dealers. "How the crack epidemic 
reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to 
do with Ross," he said, without explanation of the 
inconsistencies in his reporting. ("Snow Job," 
Extra! magazine, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting 
(FAIR), Jan 1997) The LA Times' willingness to 
ignore CIA involvement in the drug trade when it 
was convenient to do so shows the hypocrisy of the 
bourgeois media and its links to the Amerikan 
state.

Ricky Ross sent the following letter to MIM in 
January. We normally avoid running letters with 
bylines because of the security concerns of our 
comrades. But this case has gotten a fair bit of 
media play, and Ross' side of the story has been 
little heard. MIM's response follows.***


DEAR MIM, [...] I also want to tell you that I just 
finished my book and will be starting to produce my 
own movie. I want the public to see how the 
Amerikkkan government has set me up and used me to 
sell drugs to the American people, how the 
government KKK worked with the Contras in Central 
America to supply drugs to this country for their 
own selfish greed for money and power. The CIA and 
NSC worked me for many years as their conduit to 
the people on the streets of America. This will be 
my message to the movie-going public. And if you 
have any thoughts or ideas on this, please feel 
free to contact me and give me all the information 
you might have concerning this subject matter as 
soon as possible. I am open to all suggestions. The 
book should be ready for sale sometime around 
March.

I will send you the details of this when I have the 
date confirmed. I want to tell you that all 
proceeds from my movie and soundtrack thereof will 
go to a Youth Center in South Central L.A. My 
reason for this is simple: I do not ever want to be 
a PIG again. [...]

--Ricky Ross, a California prisoner, 27 January 
1997

MIM RESPONDS:  Thank you for writing. First, we'd 
like to put your case and CIA-sponsored drug 
trafficking in context. In the late 60s and early 
70s, the u.s. government destroyed the Maoist Black 
Panther Party (BPP), the Puerto Rican Revolutionary 
Workers' Organization (PRRWO, formerly Young 
Lords), and the Brown Berets. It also wreaked havoc 
on the American Indian Movement (AIM). The 
"neutralization" of the Black, Latino and First 
Nations' revolutionary and progressive leadership 
paved the way for genocidal attacks on the Black, 
Latino, and First Nations ever since. 

Since 1970, the u.s. government has used CIA-
imported cocaine and heroin as an excuse to wage a 
"war on drugs" and a "war on crime and gangs." 
These "wars" and the violence spawned by the CIA-
backed drug trade have had a devastating effect on 
the Black, Latino and First Nations.

Drugs also played a part in the destruction of the 
BPP. BPP leader Huey Newton's political 
degeneration went hand in hand with his addiction 
to crack cocaine and other drugs. One suspicious 
fact raised by Gary Webb's series in the San Jose 
Mercury (http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs) is that 
crack cocaine was invented in the San Francisco Bay 
Area, where Newton lived, no later than 1974. Also 
suspicious is the fact that the u.s. government 
would not publish the study which pinpointed the 
origins of crack (without noting the Panther 
connection)--even though the researcher who wrote 
the study worked for the u.s. government at the 
time.

Second, MIM supporters did attend the rally you 
mentioned. It is a good thing when progressive 
rallies draw a large turnout. As far as sending a 
message to the "right people:" The main message we 
want to send is the message that the masses should 
make anti-imperialist revolution, and "the right 
people" we want to send this message to are the 
masses. We are not concerned with being heard by 
the imperialist press or politicians. Our highest 
priority is ideological and political line--that 
is, summing up the lessons of history in order to 
know what the most effective revolutionary strategy 
is. Our supporters attended the rally to encourage 
its progressive participants to struggle with, work 
with, finance and join MIM. MIM's central task at 
this time is to build public opinion and 
independent people's institutions to prepare the 
masses to make anti-imperialist revolution.

Finally, we hope that you will add to your movie's 
political value by using the movie to show the 
connection between the U.S. government's 
"neutralization" of the Black, Latino, and First 
Nations' revolutionary and progressive leadership 
of the 1960s and 1970s, and the U.S. government's 
subsequent genocidal attacks on the Black, Latino 
and First Nations. As a matter of collective self-
defense, the Black, Latino and First Nations need 
to organize and prepare to make anti-imperialist 
revolution.

We are glad that you are critical of your past 
participation in the CIA's genocidal drug trade. It 
is outrageous that the U.S. government has jailed 
you but not your CIA-connected suppliers. At the 
same time, you too have accumulated a debt to the 
people. Your current illegitimate imprisonment has 
nothing to do with paying that debt back. Such a 
debt can only be paid by serving the people.



* * *



TRIP THROUGH AMERIKKKA

***In March, MIM took a trip through several East 
Coast states to distribute newspapers. This log 
reflects some of the sights, sounds and discoveries 
from the trip.***


DAY 1: RADIO TALK SHOW DISCUSSES PRISON SLAVE LABOR

A few hours into the trip, MIM discovered a 
discussion about prison labor on Jim Hightower's 
radio program. Hightower is a former Secretary of 
Agriculture for the state of Texas and now has a 
radio program and gives lectures supporting the 
class demands of the labor aristocracy. This 
particular show was rather progressive, and was a 
welcome break from the radio psychologists who 
populate the airwaves.

Hightower argued that prison labor was in fact 
slave labor, because the prisoners do not consent 
to the jobs. In particular, he argued that the 
prisons often use the refusal to take a job as a 
reason to deny the accrual of good time and hence 
lengthen sentences.

Hightower discussed the many companies that use 
prison labor, and mentioned a few that MIM had not 
heard of before. Particularly, that Eddie Bauer 
makes jeans in a Tennessee prison, and that Honda 
makes car parts in an Ohio prison.

Hightower make the surprisingly Maoist-sounding 
statement that this a "Third World" labor situation 
within u.s. borders. For moral reasons, he is 
correct to oppose prison labor as slavery. Where we 
disagree with Hightower is his arguments against 
prison labor because it "keeps domestic labor 
prices down."

For many decades, social-democrats and other 
opportunists have been arguing that the shift of 
physical production from the white nation to Third 
World countries is hurting white nation workers as 
a class. Rather, reality has shown that this class 
of people have been promoted up from the labor 
aristocracy into the white collar professions.

This reality conflicts with Hightower's assertion 
that like Third World workers, prison labor 
depresses the wages of First World (un 
incarcerated) workers outside the walls. What is 
really going on is that the super-exploitation of 
Third World workers and prison labor allows the 
First World workers to be paid beyond the value of 
what they produce, and furthermore, funds the 
employment of tens of millions of paper pushers who 
produce no value at all. MIM sides with the world's 
exploited majority, and opposes this parasitic 
relationship.

And unlike Hightower, we don't make subtle calls to 
boycott one product over another, nor do we 
campaign to "Buy American". Individual purchases 
can not change material conditions. MIM opposes 
slave labor, but if our cadre and supporters stop 
buying prison-labor produced products (assuming we 
could identify all of it) that wouldn't change 
anything. The capitalists are only able to afford 
to retain the limited number of Amerikkkan 
production workers--and of the legions of paper 
pushers--because of the immense profits produced by 
slave labor, which will continue to be sold 
regardless of MIM's efforts or those of Hightower. 
In addition, sparking such a movement would lead 
directly to fanning the flames of white 
nationalism; a reactionary proposition that needs 
no further assistance from MIM.

In a few targeted circumstances related to larger 
proletarian struggles, a boycott can have political 
utility, but MIM opposes the lifestyle politics 
line that says that we can reform capitalism by 
voting with our dollars. That's not a winnable 
battle.


DAY 2: REACTIONARY STUDENTS MOCK MAOIST SOJOURNER


The next day MIM discovered on the Livingston 
campus of Rutgers, the State College of New Jersey, 
a parody of Maoist Sojourner. Apparently, Maoist 
Sojourner got sufficiently under the skin of the 
editors of the weekly Rutgers Review that they 
dedicated the cover and some of the inside of their 
6,000 copy weekly publication to poke fun at the 
life and death struggles of the oppressed.

Entitled "Finast Sojourner" the cover articles 
attacked the legacy of Chinese revolutionary Jiang 
Qing by reducing her existence to sex. In another 
article, the Finast Sojourner mocks the heroic 
resistance of the anti-fascist fighters in Spain.

Maybe the editors of the Rutgers Review think its 
fun to call each other comrade, or to paste their 
faces over those of Peruvian martyr Edith Lagos or 
Filipino revolutionary Jose Maria Sison but MIM 
doesn't. In a world where 40,000 children die from 
preventable causes every day (mostly starvation) 
MIM doesn't find a whole lot of humor. Some people 
have called our other English-language newspaper 
"Grim Notes" because it contains information about 
how "the world sucks and here's why." But instead 
of depressing we find the portrayal of reality to 
be uplifting because we are struggling to lead the 
North American people out of the cesspool of 
imperialism.

In the Third World societies, many of our Maoist 
comrades have already advanced to the stage of 
armed struggle. Struggling to liberate their 
nations from the grip of imperialism, there have 
been huge advances in the people's livelihood, but 
also many martyrs. We honor the daily sacrifices of 
these revolutionaries by helping them in the best 
ways we can: by organizing for a revolution here, 
and through printing their words in Maoist 
Sojourner.


DAY 3: AFSCME SUPPORTS PRISONS


In Connecticut, the AFSCME union is putting up 
billboards against cuts in public sector jobs. The 
first two billboards showed an tipped-over trash 
can with garbage and rats spilling out. The 
implication was that if the government makes too 
many cuts in public spending, the quality of life 
for Amerikans will go down.

MIM doesn't have any problem with adequate sewage 
and garbage disposal. We think that is a good goal 
for all people of the world to have. But as the 
photo essay in the current issue of MIM Theory 
shows, adequate waste treatment is a rarity in the 
Third World.

Normally, this run of the mill labor aristocracy 
propaganda wouldn't get a response from MIM, but 
another billboard in their series has crossed the 
line to earn a response from MIM. The billboard 
contains the same message "Do NOT cut public sector 
jobs" or some similar wording, but the picture was 
of 3 prisoners being let out of a very small cage. 
The implication was that if enough guards aren't 
employed, then prisoners will have to be let go.

The size of the cage used in the billboard is 
indicative of how AFSCME in Connecticut treats the 
welfare of prisoners. In the past, AFSCME has 
organized publicly against prisoner rights in the 
name of advancing the interests of the guards. That 
AFSCME thinks a small cage is a preferable to a 
humane way to treat other human beings shows which 
side of the system this union is on.



* * *



REMEMBRANCE OF STALIN'S RED ARMY

by RC68

***MIM Notes is proud to take the opportunity of 
our May 1 issue to honor the memory of the Soviet 
Red Army and its heroic defeat of fascism 52 years 
ago, at the end of World War Two.***

On May 2, 1945, the heroes of the Soviet Red Army 
took Berlin and crushed the Nazi German army, 
breaking the military back of the international 
fascist movement. Imperialist manueverings over 
whom the Germans would surrender to followed the 
military defeat. Germany wanted to surrender to its 
Western enemies to avoid the harsher penalties the 
socialist state would hand down to the defeated 
Nazi power; and England and the United Snakes 
wanted to accept the German surrender rather than 
give due credit to Comrade Stalin for defeating 
Nazism militarily.

But as with the World War Two up until the point of 
Germany's surrender, Stalin's Red Army and the iron 
will of the Soviet people had addressed and 
resolved the principal contradiction while the 
bourgeois propagandists were playing their Public 
Relations tricks. The Soviets had won the real 
battle for public opinion and will forever be 
heroized in the hearts and minds of the 
international proletariat for their role in the 
war. The war was over, Hitler was dead and the 
bright red hammer and sickle flag flew proudly over 
the German Reichstag. 

Joseph Stalin had the most correct line on the 
fascists and the anti-fascist wars of any leader in 
World War Two. The Soviet Union was the only 
country to offer any aid to the Spanish left in its 
fight against Franco. England and Amerika turned 
their backs (Amerika prevented volunteers from 
going to fight in Spain by stamping all U.S. 
passports "NOT VALID FOR TRAVEL IN SPAIN" beginning 
in March, 1937)(1), even as Hitler's and 
Mussolini's tanks rolled into Spain and placed 
Franco in power.

The fascists' primary stated objective was to 
destroy communism, and this position convinced the 
Western imperialists to stay out of the way of 
German aggression. Then as Hitler began to build 
his empire with Amerikan, French and English 
collaboration, Stalin had no choice but to divert 
the attention of the fascists and exploit the 
contradictions among the imperialists through his 
1939 pact with Hitler. This was the only way Stalin 
could maximize the preparation time the Soviet 
Union would have before the war against the Nazis. 

In 1939, England and France declared war on 
Germany, after it had become clear Hitler was not 
going to spare the West. Hitler's war on the 
Western front gave Stalin more time to prepare the 
USSR for war. In June of 1941, Hitler attacked the 
USSR along with the help of Finland, Romania, 
Italy, and Spain. For a while it looked as if they 
might even succeed. But the Soviet people had an 
iron will.

Stalin knew he could not rely on the Western 
alliance. In 1917, England, Amerika, France, Italy, 
and Japan had 2,000 troops in Russia fighting 
against the revolutionary Red Army and trying to 
save Czarist Russia. Hitler had come to power with 
the approval and aid of other imperialists. Even 
after the Allied powers declared war on Germany, 
Japan and Italy, they refused to attack fascist 
Spain. Franco's Blue Legion was then actively 
involved on the Eastern Front helping Hitler in his 
holy crusade against communism. The western 
imperialists were not bashful about displaying 
their real interests--the preservation of the 
international status quo and the destruction of the 
world's first people's republic.

Despite overwhelming odds and tremendous obstacles, 
the Soviet Union began to turn the tables. In 
November, 1942 just when it seemed all was lost, 
the Soviet Red Army heroically halted the Nazi 
advance at Stalingrad. This was the beginning of 
the end for Hitler and all of the fascists. From 
here out, the Soviets would be on the offensive. In 
three years the Soviet Red Army heroes destroyed 
everything that the fascists had done. The Red Army 
roared across Eastern Europe, trashing all fascist 
and collaborationist governments between Moscow and 
Berlin. Stalin now made it plain to the 
imperialists what his interests were, the total 
destruction of fascism and imperialism, and the 
continuation of the world proletarian revolution. 

By August 1945, communist victory over the fascists 
had been consolidated in Europe. Now it was time to 
deal with Japan. The Red Army heroes were ready. 
With revolutionary sweep, the Red Army smashed the 
Japanese fascist swine in a number of countries and 
ensured the survival of several people's liberation 
movements. The Japanese fascist aggressors were now 
in the position of a beheaded snake.

The world would be terrible place if it had not 
been for the brilliant leadership of Joseph Stalin, 
the iron will of the Soviet people, and the 
selfless sacrifices of the Red Army heroes. Thank 
you for our lives comrade Stalin. We will never 
forget the great victories of May and August 1945 
when the great powerful tide of proletarian 
revolution burst the damn of collaboration and the 
ensuing flood of liberation swept aside and 
destroyed the fascist enemies of the people.


NOTE: 1. MIM Theory 8 "The Anarch ist Ideal and 
Communist Revolution", p. 28.



* * *



MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM ONLINE

SUPREME COURT HEARS COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT 
ARGUMENTS

At the end of March, the Justice Department 
appealed the constitutionality of the 
Communications Decency Act (CDA) before the Supreme 
Court. The CDA, which was ruled an unconstitutional 
restriction of free speech by a three judge panel 
last year, intends to make the knowing transmission 
of "patently offensive or indecent speech" to 
minors over the Internet illegal. While MIM regards 
all state censorship as dangerous for progressive 
and revolutionary forces -- we hope our material is 
patently offensive to bourgeoisie! -- and we would 
be happy to see the CDA ruled unconstitutional, we 
have no illusions about this as a case of free 
speech. Maoists understand that neither side of 
this power struggle believes in free and 
unrestricted speech of the masses, and that their 
disagreements over how best to maintain bourgeois 
cultural hegemony are merely tactical. What is 
interesting about the arguments before the Supreme 
Court is what both sides agreed on, and also what 
the potential consequences are for the structure of 
the Internet, which far exceed the content of any 
specific "indecent" speech. The Court is due to 
rule on the case this summer.


Both sides agree children should be controlled

The Justice Department is arguing that the 
technological controls at the level of the Internet 
user -- the functional equivalent to television's 
V-Chip -- are inadequate to control minors' access 
to certain portions of or sites on the Internet. 
The ACLU-led coalition against the CDA argued that 
these measures are adequate, and that to shift the 
burden of regulation to the content provider would 
be to effectively ban certain types of speech that 
are appropriate among adults -- just because they 
might be inadvertently accessed by children.

So the disagreement, with regard to children, is 
just whether parents or the government should 
control them and the information they consume. The 
coalition of forces opposing the CDA, including the 
ACLU and the American Library Association, 
represents some of the companies that provide 
blocking or filtering software for the Internet, 
such as "SurfWatch" and so has a direct material 
interest in maintaining a market for those 
products. The supremacy of parents was further 
underscored by an exchange between one of the 
Justices and Seth Waxman, the attorney for the 
Justice Department. The Justice asked if parents 
who allowed their children to use their computers 
for Internet access, knowing that they might access 
indecent material, should be considered felons 
under the CDA. Waxman said no, "because there's a 
very clear record before Congress that what 
Congress was concerned about was not protecting 
children from their parents, but protecting 
children and their parents from the children 
getting access to [indecent] material ..."(1)

Finally, Justice Breyer asked if the CDA would make 
high school students across the country felons for 
discussing sexual experiences online in an indecent 
manner, which he said they probably do routinely 
over the telephone, for example. Waxman responded 
that that was a small price to pay if the 
alternative is every child in Amerikkka having 
access to so-called indecent material.


ALL AGREE THAT REGULATION IS EXPENSIVE


The technology exists for commercial Web sites to 
provide "adult verification systems" (commonly a 
form that asks for a credit card number) allowing 
them to regulate the purchase of their materials by 
the age of the consumer. But both sides agree and 
understand that a) not all Web servers have the 
capability to use forms and b) credit card 
companies will not provide account verification 
unless there is a commercial transaction. 
Therefore, both sides agree that this system is 
"prohibitively expensive" for anyone other than a 
rich commercial site. That's why the opponents of 
the CDA want the burden of regulation to be on the 
user, and why the upholders of the Act want 
legislation to be able to criminalize these un- 
regulatable transmissions of "indecency."


CONSEQUENCES OF CDA RULING COULD FAR EXCEED 
INDECENT "SPEECH"


Justice Scalia pointed out that other forms of 
publishing, such as radio, are subject to so many 
regulations as to be "prohibitively expensive" to 
the average person -- and that there is no 
Constitutional problem with that. So if the Court 
rules in favor of the Justice Department, and 
content providers become responsible for making 
sure they know the ages of their consumers, this 
will dovetail with existing privatization trends on 
the Internet that will make the relatively easy and 
inexpensive communications we now enjoy difficult 
or impossible.(2) And clearly, anyone engaged in 
anti-imperialist agitation over the Internet should 
be concerned about the phrase "patently offensive" 
which is left to the subjective whim of courts to 
interpret.

The Justice Department is arguing that the reason 
"parental control software programs" are 
ineffective is due to the volume of Web sites (and 
the speed at which that is increasing); the diffuse 
and decentralized nature of other Internet 
communications (including e-mail, Usenet, 
listservs, chat rooms, etc.); and the availability 
of the Internet outside the home and the sphere of 
parental control (in schools, libraries, community 
centers, etc.) If the Supreme Court rules in their 
favor, these other forms of Internet communications 
could be seriously threatened -- not just in terms 
of the content that is transmitted, but in terms of 
the relatively decentralized structure itself.

The ACLU, et al argues that so much "indecent" 
speech comes from countries in which the United 
States has no jurisdiction. The billion dollar a 
year pornography industry will be protected by 
their budgets and their ability to comply with laws 
like the CDA. And the bourgeois media columnists 
insist that such a situation makes legislation like 
the CDA moot. But MIM understands that something 
which is difficult to enforce "across the board" is 
still easy to enforce selectively as an excuse to 
target political opponents of capitalism, 
imperialism and patriarchy.


NOTES:
1. Transcript of ACLU vs. Reno.
2. Internet privatization trends include the 
ability of cable companies to enter the Internet 
provider market, as part of the 1996 
Telecommunications Act.



* * * 



WORLD WIDE WEB REVIEWS

Aztlan Hoy 
www.aztlanhoy.com

Letter to MIM: I picked up your newsprint and 
enjoyed it. I will look for it again. In the 
meantime I would like to introduce you to Aztlan 
Hoy.

Aztlan Hoy is an on-line newsletter concerned with 
bringing harmony amongst the various ethnic 
American communities, in particular the Black and 
Hispanic communities. The Internet address for 
Aztlan Hoy is www.aztlanhoy.com which is available 
without a password. I have provided our description 
sheet that provides further details. You may be 
interested in use of the Free Web Page or the 
Calendar Listing.

If you like Aztlan Hoy, maybe you would give us a 
write up in your On-Line column. I hope to hear 
from you soon.


MIM RESPONDS: Thanks for writing to MIM to alert us 
to your site. First, MIM believes that genuine 
unity among the Black, Latino, Asian and First 
Nations in Amerikkka (which we do not regard as 
"ethnic American communities" but oppressed nations 
deserving of full self-determination from Amerika) 
will be best forged in their struggle against the 
white oppressor nation and imperialism. As Maoists, 
MIM supports that struggle as part of the socialist 
revolution.

The April issue of Altzan Hoy has a good focus on 
anti-prison agitation, and correctly argues that 
greater incarceration does nothing to change the 
crime rate and that oppressed peoples are 
imprisoned at alarming rates for "crimes" that 
whites commit with impunity. 

As communists, MIM disagrees with Aztlan Hoy's 
support of electoral reform, including Ralph Nader 
and Tom Hayden as progressive electoral candidates, 
believing instead that the total overthrow of 
imperialism and the construction of socialism is 
necessary to end oppression -- not just the 
changing of a few of imperialism's faces.



* * *



PRO-LESBIGAYTRANS LOBBYISTS: CORRECT ON PROP 209, 
OPPORTUNIST ON STRATEGY

by MC45

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) 
came out strongly against the decision of the U.S. 
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to 
uphold Proposition 209 which legally bars 
affirmative action in California. NGLTF is a self-
described "progressive organization that has 
supported grassroots organizing and pioneered in 
national advocacy since 1973."(1)

MIM agrees with NGLTF that "so long as there are 
forces at work in this country trying to dismantle 
policies geared toward remedying continued 
discrimination against women and people of color, 
we cannot expect recognition of the human dignity 
and civil rights of gays."(1) It is important to 
recognize that struggles against oppression are 
contingent on each other if we are to have any hope 
of eliminating oppression altogether. We also agree 
with NGLTF's basic goal of eliminating the gender 
differential between the sexual orientations, and 
we see this step as part of the struggle against 
gender inequality overall. But we disagree sharply 
with NGLTF's approach to discrimination and with 
its priorities.

As part of its mission statement, NGLTF states: "In 
all its efforts, NGLTF helps to strengthen the gay, 
lesbian, bisexual and transgender movement at the 
state level while connecting these activities to a 
national vision for change."(1) In a press release 
on American Airlines' sponsorship of gay pride 
events and gay organizations, NGLTF congratulates 
American and "urges activists around the country to 
stand up for the American way."(2) This is an 
excellent example of NGLTF's liberal lobbying group 
strategy. NGLTF wants to achieve its goals by 
convincing the state and capital that the activists 
share imperialism's goals.

By contrast, the litmus test for all of MIM's 
efforts is that they be anti-imperialist, and this 
is the root of our opposition to Prop 209. In 
keeping with Lenin's and Mao's analyses of the era 
of imperialism, MIM understands that the principal 
contradiction in the world today is between 
imperialism and the oppressed nations. In practice 
this means that successful national liberation 
struggles of the oppressed against imperialism will 
do the most to unravel the fabric of oppression of 
groups of people over other groups. For this reason 
we must prioritize national liberation of the 
oppressed above gender struggles at this time.


NOTES:
1. NGLTF Press Release "Task Force Disappointed at 
California Proposition 209 Decision," on the World 
Wide Web at http://www.ngltf.org/press/209.html
2. NGLTF Press Release "National Gay and Lesbian 
Task Force Commends Airline for Commitment to the 
American Way," on the Web at 
http://www.ngltf.org/press/AACOMM.HTML



* * *


UNDER LOCK AND KEY: NEWS FROM PRISONERS AND PRISONS

THE DEATH PENALTY IN AMERIKKKA

GOVERNMENT APPROVED MURDER

by a South Carolina prisoner

Capital Punishment has been around since the 18th 
Century in the United States. Movements to abolish 
it have been around just as long. There once were 
Public Executions where a whole town could watch a 
person be killed. But the reformers saw this type 
of public murder as being too cruel. So they fought 
for the end of Public Executions, a battle which 
they won. The executions were transferred from 
local to state authorities, in the attempt to 
institute what they considered a more efficient and 
somehow more humane method of execution. They 
limited the death penalty to murder in the first 
degree (i.e., premeditated murder or murder 
committed during the perpetration of a felony.)

The government approved murders had been on the 
decline since the early 1930s. Litigation was put 
forth by the NAACP, which were submitting that the 
Peoples' right to "due process" and "equal 
protection" were being denied. Because nearly all 
those government approved murders were racially 
biased against Black People. These lawsuits brought 
the death penalty to a halt in 1968. But four years 
later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that capital 
punishment was not in itself unconstitutional. Or 
as to say that it wasn't barbarically cruel and 
unusual punishment. But that the way it was being 
carried out was wrong. Because it was 
discriminatory, capricious and the fashion in which 
it was enacted was arbitrary. So all State and 
Federal capital punishment laws were struck down. 
The states that had government approved murder laws 
before 1972 quickly enacted new ones to satisfy the 
courts requirements that the murders be 
administered in a regular and equitable manner. The 
government approved murders were reinstated in 1976 
and the murders were resumed in 1977.

Since 1977, there have been approximately 358 
government approved murders in the U.S. (Not 
including the arcane government approved murders.) 
And it will steadily rise. There are 38 states, 
including the Federal government and military 
service that now have government approved murder 
laws. Of the states only, there are 19 authorized 
murders by lethal injection, 14 by electrocution, 7 
by lethal gas, 2 by hanging and 1 by firing squad.

In 1995 there were 56 government approved murders. 
Reason being because the prisoners appeal process 
was shortened. But in 1996 the number of government 
approved murders had declined to 45. This was 
because the prisoners filed litigation that held up 
the murders in Texas for most of the year. Texas 
led the nation in government approved murders in 
1995 with 19, but in 1996 there were only 3 
prisoners murdered [in Texas] with the government's 
approval. The prisoners lawsuits challenged a 1995 
law that shortened the appeals process for death 
row prisoners.

But the fascists in the States Supreme Court of 
Appeals upheld the law in late December, clearing 
the way for resumption of Texas government approved 
murders in 1997. Or in other words the Amerikan 
Auschwitz is now being resumed in Texas. (For those 
who don't know what Auschwitz is, it the largest 
Nazi death camp.)

Any and everyone who cares for that simple yet 
complex thing we call life, they should strive to 
become politically and socially conscious. So you 
can become aware of the unscrupulousness of the 
government approved murders. Then you can help 
fight against it. Because in the next 2 years we're 
looking at maybe 175 to 200 prisoners being 
murdered by these fascists.

So not yesterday, not tomorrow, but Today is the 
time to start learning about this fascist 
government so YOU can join the struggle against it. 
Because if not now, then when?
Fight the Power Structure!


THE ROLE COLLABORATORS IN THE MURDER OF COMRADE 
AJAMU NASSOR


***More information about the execution of Comarde 
Ajamu Nassor can be found in Under Lock & Key in 
MIM Notes 121.***

On December 8, 1994, the State of Indiana brutally 
murdered comrade Ajamu Nassor (s/n Gregory 
Resnover). Prior to Ajamu's murder, a prosecuting 
attorney admitted that certain pertinent facts were 
not brought out in his appeal process due to 
ineffective appellate counselors. But, the attorney 
general, Pan Carter (a black collaborator with the 
system), stated that the omission of facts didn't 
matter. When has it ever mattered that a black man 
or woman got any justice in america?

The reason why this collaborator could make such an 
illogical statement without any conscious guilt is 
because she's a part [of] that Black petty 
bourgeoisie who has opted to sell out their people 
for key positions inside this illegitimate system. 
Black people like her easily forget the enslavement 
of our ancestors. They forget the numbers of 
innocent lives of our people who died horrible 
deaths aboard slave ships, how many were sold on 
auction blocks like cattle, how many were tortured 
and raped for mere kicks, how many children were 
snatched from their mothers' arms, and placed on 
other plantations without ever being heard from 
again.

If you black collaborators are so concerned about 
right and wrong, why aren't you crying out toward 
the injustices that were done to our foreparents 
during slavery, and the injustices that are still 
heaped upon Black America as a whole? Why weren't 
any white people give the death penalty for the 
atrocities committed on black people and Native 
Americans as a whole? Are you so forgiving that you 
would expel their deeds of the past, and be so 
ready to give one of your own over to the 
executioner? How can you as black people be so 
ready to give one of your own over to the 
executioner? How can you as black people feel 
comfortable in supporting a system that was founded 
on injustice? These are the same people who 
annihilate nations of Native Americans in the name 
of freedom. They don't have any right to sit in 
judgment of any black man or woman. If anyone is a 
victim we are.

Historically, america has revealed its attitude 
toward non-whites. And today, when you take into 
consideration that black men only make up six 
percent of the nations population, but make up 
around forty-six percent of the prison population 
and forty percent of those currently on death row, 
one can notice a paradox occurring in america. Are 
we to honestly believe that half of the crimes 
committed in this country, are being committed by 
black males? I think not. But, if we listen to 60 
Minutes, the night news, or some lofty speech by a 
political candidate, you would think that crime is 
a disease peculiar to the socio-economic and socio-
political stratum where only the black, brown and 
poor dwell. Through these mediums the public is 
influenced into believing that crime is a normal 
behavior characteristic among certain classes of 
people.

It was easy for the state to murder Ajamu since he 
was black and considered by them a cancer to 
everyone he came into contact with. After all, 
seventy-five percent of public opinion in the U.S. 
was on their side. Plus, they had a black attorney 
general stamping her approval by saying, "He 
deserves what he is getting." And last but not 
least, they had a black warden who would give the 
order to pull the switch on the electric chair.

To you the collaborators of the state, when 
retribution is being handed out against the enemies 
of the people, your participation in the murder of 
this comrade will not be forgotten.

Uhuru Sasa!
-- An Illinois Prisoner, 3 December 1996


TEXAS THE LAND PLENTY - THE REALITY OF PRISONER 
TRANSFERS

MASSACHUSETTS PRISONER IN TEXAS EXPOSES GOVERNOR 
WELD'S REPRESSION

Dear Friends:  I have recently received my MASS 
RAIL and was elated to see both the front page 
article "Weld's Plan: MA pigs can change prison 
rules at will" and pg 4 "Massachusetts prisoners 
still stuck in Texas." I am also glad that your 
publication is not censored here.

At this point I wish to ask a question or two and 
add to these article. First I'll add:

For the uninformed the "rules" of which your 
article refers are CMR's (Code of Mass 
Regulations), the purpose of which are to restrain 
the establishment from violating human, civil, and 
legally mandated rights. These rights, albeit 
cursory in nature, aid the incarcerated in 
presenting grievances and set a minimum standard by 
which the establishment must operate.

Although they seem restrictive to the "ruling 
class", they were hard won victories in the 
struggle for the basic necessities in an 
incarceration situation (lest we forget the riots 
of the 70s). These were what brought about change. 
And for a while the changes they made actually were 
better than what we had.

Now we have a tyrant who had made his career in 
oppression, at the helm and he is bound by his 
campaign rhetoric to avenge (allegedly) the "moral" 
majority.

If Weld and his henchmen are allowed to replace the 
C.M.R.s with "prison rules" greater atrocity will 
occur to a much larger number. "We need a 
champion!"

As your front page article aptly pointed out, 
Regulations are public documents and require a 
public hearing in order to be changed, but these 
public hearings must be foretold far enough in 
advance so to allow all concerned parties to attend 
and give testimony. The public sees so many legal 
notices in the newspaper that when they run across 
one (in the last page or two) they disregard it as 
more b.s. and don't even read them. This is such 
the case when, in June of 95, a public hearing on 
103 CMR 420 was held and the changes that allowed 
the D.O.C. to transfer 299 prison captives to 
Dallas. This C.M.R. deals directly with 
classification. The old C.M.R. gave the right for 
an inmate to be present at his classification board 
and to actively present information which would 
either move him/her to a lower security level, or 
not to be moved to a higher one. We here in Dallas, 
Texas are classified "in absentia" and submissions 
as to reasons why we should be brought back to 
Massachusetts and our families is largely ignored, 
making this C.M.R. an insult to the system of which 
it is a part. Further, the new wording allows the 
establishment to move prisoners to a higher 
security (out of state) without giving a reason or 
charging him/her with an infraction of their rules 
or without a hearing until after the transfers.

Now for the questions: What is being done to combat 
the establishments attempts to do away with the 
C.M.R's? Weld announced that our stay in Texas is 
extended 8 more months. This is the end of the 
original contract with Dallas. Is the contract 
going to be renewed? Are we in for a longer stay?

On another matter: Have you heard anything on the 
state trying to adopt a new law which would allow 
for individuals to be civilly committed after they 
finish their sentences? It was brought to my 
attention that Washington state has already adopted 
such legislation which has already reincarcerated 
people who completed their bids years earlier. It 
is speculated that some states are waiting on the 
federal court in Tennessee to make a determination 
on the matter before they propose this bid of 
legislation to their own lawmakers. Have you been 
following the developments on this topic?

Any information you can provide me on the above 
inquiries will be greatly appreciated. Again thank 
you for your well written articles and your 
constant endeavor to persevere!

Eternally yours,
-- A Massachusetts prisoner.


RAIL RESPONDS: Thanks for the additional 
information on the C.M.R.s. In response to your 
questions about what is being done to combat the 
establishment's attempts to do away with them, we 
continue with our protests, education and other 
agitation around the Massachusetts criminal 
injustice system, putting pressure on the 
administration to repeal or avoid passing further 
reactionary legislation. We know that the system 
cannot be changed through reform and so we always 
put our reform work in the context of the need to 
overthrow this unjust imperialist system.

We do not have any information to offer you 
regarding the new law about being civilly committed 
but we are printing your letter in our newspaper in 
the hopes that folks with information will share it 
with us.

Please stay in touch and continue to send us news 
and information about what's going on in Texas.


HUNDREDS OF MISSOURI PRISONERS SHIPPED TO TEXAS
SOME RETURNED RECEIVE A NIGHTMARE WELCOME

***The following letter is re-printed from Cry 
Justice Journal, a quarterly newspaper published by 
the New Life Evangelistic Center.***


As of last summer, 508 Missouri prisoners had been 
kidnapped (usually in the middle of the night) and 
sent to Texas prisons in Pearsall and Crystal City. 
This past September, they kidnapped 300 more, 
warehousing them in Brazoria County Detention 
Center in Angleton, Texas. Apparently, some 
prisoners were transferred back to Missouri. This 
letter describes their "welcome home": 

"When the inmates in Crystal City were told we were 
all being returned to Missouri we were overjoyed, 
with the exception of a few high security inmates 
who were being sent to a maximum security detention 
center in Angleton, Texas. We thought our 
nightmares of being kidnapped against our will and 
the inhumane conditions we had endured were finally 
over.

"The real nightmare began at 8:30 p.m. on September 
16th when about 20 guards, along with the warden 
carrying a long black jack, came into N-Tank and 
told several inmates to grab their property and 
follow. I watched from M-Tank as inmate X told them 
he still had some property left in his tank and a 
guard pushed him in the back of the head out of the 
door. Y in my tank said, "Hey, that's not 
necessary." A guard wearing an eye patch named 
Murphy said, "We will be back to get you in a 
minute." They handcuffed X and then put legcuffs on 
him, at which point they jerked the chain on the 
legcuffs, making X's feet come out from beneath 
him. All inmates in M-Tank could see all the guards 
and warden kicking and stomping him.

"At 9:00 p.m. they came back to M-Tank and the 
warden pointed at Y and said, "That's the big 
S.O.B. right there." Several guards grabbed Y and 
slammed his head against the cement wall and cuffed 
him behind his back. They then led him out of the 
tank and cuffed his legs, at which point he was 
jerked by his legcuffs off his feet, his face hit 
the cement and the guards started kicking and 
stomping him. We were told that this was our going 
away party. We were put on buses September 17th, 
early in the morning, and we arrived in Missouri at 
around 11:00 a.m.

"After arriving here I learned that a whole lot of 
inmates had been beaten at Crystal City by the 
warden and his goon squad. You wouldn't believe how 
many black eyes and bruises there are on the 
inmates. This is just the beginning of the night-
mare. A day after we got here on September 18th in 
the tank next to the one I'm in, the deputy 
sheriff's squad which runs this jail, rushed into 
the 20 man tank, because inmates were smoking 
cigarettes. "They started screaming for everyone to 
lay on the floor, then made them crawl on their 
bellies on the floor out of the door and down the 
hall in front of our tank. As they crawled through 
the doorway they were shocking inmates with 
zappers. Also, they had a large German Shepherd dog 
which they allowed to bite a few inmates. As this 
was going on they were all laughing and saying, 
"This is your welcome to our county jail."

"On September 20th they dragged an inmate out of a 
tank down the hall and knocked him to the floor. 
Then, they started kicking him in the face. It was 
September 22 before we got our property or were 
given any state clothing. You wouldn't believe what 
it is like to go six days without being able to 
wash your hair or put on deodorant with 20 other 
men right next to you. "This is a maximum security 
county jail and is locked down. Most of us here are 
low security inmates and should not even be in this 
place. For breakfast here they serve coffee, if you 
don't drink coffee, too bad. Lunch is a cold 
sandwich and a piece of fruit, nothing to drink, 
this is everyday! No salt or pepper with any meals, 
powdered milk for cereal, no real milk at all. By 
the Interstate Compact Agreement, I'm guaranteed 
the same privileges as Missouri inmates. Please 
alert the officials in Missouri in my behalf and 
let them know what has been happening to us here.

-- A Missori Prisoner in Texas

Cry Justice Journal, New Live Evangelistic Center, 
P.O. Box 2525, New Bloomfield. MO 65063

***WHAT NON-PRISONERS CAN DO TO SUPPORT 
PRISONERS***

*1. Struggle with, work with, finance and join MIM. 
The best way to support prisoners is to overthrow 
the system under which capitalists profit from the 
exploitation of prisoners. History shows that the 
best way to do this is to build a Marxist-Leninist-
Maoist party. The oppressors will not give up their 
power without a fight.
*2. Finance MIM's prison work. Our biggest bill 
each month is postage. Most of the prison comrades 
who read MIM Notes have no way of paying for it. So 
if you have money, send what you can afford. Every 
cent helps, and stamps are as good as cash to us.
*3. Distribute MIM Notes and Notas Rojas. Bring the 
voices of prisoners and their supporters to as 
large and wide an audience of people as possible. 
Contact MIM for bulk rates and distribution tips.
*4. Start or join a prison support group. MIM can 
provide advice and resources to help you build 
public opinion for prisoners and their struggles.
*5. Fight censorship, beatings, torture and other 
fascist outrages. Under Lock and Key often features 
the addresses of prisoners' friends and enemies. 
Work with the friends and let the enemies know 
you're watching. (Don't expect to win the fascists 
to the side of humanity, however. See #1 in this 
list).
*6. Stay in touch. Keep us informed of pro-prisoner 
work you do. Our readers might find it educational 
or inspirational.