Monthly Archives: February 2021

In 2019, the government of Hong Kong proposed a bill that allowed the extradition of Hong Kong citizens to mainland China for trial. The bill set off months of protests, and eventually the Chinese government responded with a stricter measure that allowed for arrests of anyone in Hong Kong who voiced political dissent.

In doing so, the Hong Kong and Chinese governments effectively ended the 'one country, two systems' framework, and subjected Hong Kong's residents to the dictatorial rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

The sweeping national security law paved the way for a fascistic crackdown, with several high-profile pro-democracy figures arrested. Now, with every week that passes, there is a new, tragic case of a brave soul speaking out against Beijing and finding themselves locked away.

One recent example is radio DJ Edmund Wan Yiu-sing. "Giggs", as he is better known, is charged with four counts of "doing an act with a seditious intention". In other words, the Chinese government believes that Wan used his media platform to stir hatred and contempt against the authorities although it has not offered any details of what "seditious" things he is alleged to have said.

Wan's case is notable for a troubling reason. He was not charged under the national security law, or any other hurried new legislation from the last couple of years designed to quash brewing unease among pro-democracy activists. Instead, he was charged under the Crimes Ordinance, which has not been amended since 1972, when Hong Kong was still under British colonial rule. For a first offence on this charge, Wan could end up with a fine of HK$5,000 and two years in jail.

Last year, a group of British members of Parliament all members of the governing Conservative Party formed the China Research Group to campaign on issues relating to Hong Kong, and other China-adjacent areas of foreign policy. While their efforts have been admirable in drawing attention to China's atrocities and forcing the government's hand on matters of diplomacy, there has so far been a lack of appreciation of the role Britain has played in laying the foundations in Hong Kong for the oppression we are seeing today.

The Wan case is not the first time colonial-era British laws have been used to malicious ends by the CCP-controlled Hong Kong government. For instance, in April of last year, in an extraordinary indication of the disdain the ruling regime feels for those who speak out against it, Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam doubled down on a ban on face masks which had been introduced in October of the previous year.

Lam even went to court to defend her right to prevent dissenters from covering their faces, despite the raging coronavirus pandemic, thanks to another colonial-era British law. The law in question the Emergency Regulations Ordinance was introduced in 1922 to combat strikes by Chinese fishermen who were protesting against their pitiful wages. It was passed in a single day with minimal scrutiny, and it remains on the statute book, with appalling consequences a century later.

Unlike the CCP's genocidal campaign against the Uighur ethnic minority in the country's Xinjiang province, where Beijing claims nothing of note is taking place, the Chinese Communist Party likes to draw the world's attention to its deeds in Hong Kong. It is as if the CCP is taunting Britain, the region's former ruler. For instance, it released a statement via state propaganda channels last July urging the UK to 'abandon the illusion of continuing its colonial influence' there.

So while the Chinese government makes out as though it is rescuing Hongkongers from the grip of its British imperial overlords by oppressing them and reneging on its international commitments, it is in fact making use of the legacy of British rule in Hong Kong for its own dictatorial purposes. This fact ought to be acknowledged in the UK, and it should inform the UK's response to China's aggression in the region.

Last month, after the governments of China and Hong Kong said that they would no longer recognize British National Overseas (BNO) passports as valid travel documents, the British government implemented a new visa scheme, granting Hong Kong residents a path to UK citizenship. This is a good start, but in light of the above, it plainly does not go far enough.

Hongkongers, through no fault of their own, are caught in the middle of a deeply unpleasant diplomatic divorce between the UK and China. They are stuck under the thumb of an abusive parent and it is Britain's duty to do everything in its power to help them upend and relocate their lives to the UK, even if that means embracing radical ideas. Half-measures will not suffice. Britain is Hongkongers' only safe refuge now they must be made to feel welcome.

Jason Reed is a policy analyst and political commentator. He is the UK liaison at Young Voices. Jason writes for the Times (of London), the Independent, the Telegraph, and many other outlets.

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Because of its colonial past, the UK has a duty to help residents of Hong Kong - Business Insider

Fake German heiress Anna Delvey was released from prison last week. She spent 19 months at Rikers Island awaiting trial, and then another 21 months at Albion Correctional Facility after she was convicted of scamming hotels, restaurants and banks out of more than $200,000. Features in Vanity Fair and New York magazine led to that sticky sort of fame, sickly and delicious to so many of us, so of course people were clamouring to interview her when she came out. Prison, she told the press, two days after her release, Its just pointless. Its a huge waste of time I feel like its insane. To take people, to lock them up, take everything away from them, and just to expect them to reform. She continued: They have this universal solution for everyone and that should not be the case. And the thing is, even if you can only hear this as a whinge, the bored complaints of a bratty grifter, spat through a mouth of gum, shes right.

The pandemic, along with its horrors, has also offered an opportunity to reshape how we live. From the small, like the clothes we wear, to the large a move away from offices, or the provision of hotel rooms for homeless people. There was even a moment for prisons. Last April, justice secretary Robert Buckland launched an early-release scheme to ease the pressure on prisons. But despite around 4,000 prisoners being eligible, by the time it paused in August, just 275 had been released. The moment passed. Now, one in eight prisoners in England and Wales has tested positive for Covid-19, and staff warn of a mental health crisis as prisoners are confined to their cells, with visits and education programmes restricted.

Prisons, each an identity crisis in brick and steel, wobble in intention between deterrent and punishment, rehab facility and cage. It doesnt really matter where they land none work. Prison is not a deterrent: the UKs prison population has risen by 69% in the past 30 years, yet theres no link to levels of crime. It doesnt rehabilitate either: almost half the people who leave prison reoffend within a year of release. For those serving sentences shorter than a year, it leaps to 65%. The Prison Reform Trust reports prisoners and staff are less safe than they have been at any point since records began; since 2012, sexual assaults in prison have quadrupled. Shall I continue? Why not? I have the fury and I have the ink.

The penal system perpetuates racial and economic oppression; more than a quarter of the adult prison population and nearly half of all children in custody are from a minority ethnic group. On release, adults are given 46 (a figure thats stayed the same since 1995), with 16% of them ending up on the streets. Prison doesnt work. Unless no. Unless, it does. Unless the aim of prison is not really one of the polite ideas above. Unless the aim is to simply remove undesirable bodies from society, in which case yep, all going well. All good.

Getting rid of prisons once seemed like a radical and dangerous idea. Its difficult, wrote abolitionist Angela Davis in 2003, to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families. Prison had been so successfully embedded into society that it was hard to imagine life without it. But while social structures have barely changed, it appears the average human has; today fewer than one in 10 people believe having more people in prison is the most effective way to deal with crime.

Perhaps this is because it costs the taxpayer 41,000 per year to keep a single prisoner behind bars. Or because prison separates 17,000 children from their mothers every year. Perhaps it comes from a realisation of the fluidity of what, or who, is decided to be dangerous a sex worker, a woman who hasnt paid her TV licence (this crime accounts for a third of all criminal prosecutions against women), the people who signed off on the Grenfell cladding, the ministers responsible for illegally detaining child refugees? In Everybody, Olivia Laings upcoming book about freedom, she reminds us that, Any human body can be criminalised by the state, not because of a crime thats been committed, but because that particular body has been designated criminal in its own right. I read this chapter quite late at night by the light of my phone. Its hard to know how a shared freedom can be achieved while prisons exist in their present form, silos for bodies that were never dangerous in the first place. I slept badly.

During this pandemic, the government had a real chance to reduce prison numbers, or even abolish womens prisons altogether. They failed. But below stairs, our civilian minds are changing. Along with tireless activists, high-profile villains like Anna Delvey (whose glamorous crimes come soon to Netflix) are contributing to a mainstreaming of the idea that prison not only damages those locked up, but also erodes the humanity of those of us walking free.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman

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Prison reform is slow, but could the will to change be growing? - The Guardian

This article is part of Liberations commemoration of Black History Month, 2021.

The housing struggle in Harlem during the Great Depression took New York City by storm, as some of the most oppressed sectors of society united and stood tall in the face of exploitation. Their resistance won major gains and taught future activists mass-action tactics that are still relevant in a winning strategy for change.

The Great Migration saw more than a million-and-a-half Black people flee the Klan-ridden, destitute South for better opportunities in Northern industrial jobs.Harlem became a prime destination. Due to segregation, Black people were relegated to live in pre-designated areas where landlords took advantage by charging exorbitant rents in comparison to what was charged white immigrant communities.

Communist Party and the HarlemTenants League

The Harlem Tenants League laid the foundation for militant mass action in Black communities for substantive change against racist rent hikes. The Leaguewas formed in 1929 at the suggestion of Richard Moore, a Black member of the Communist Party. Moore was to be elected the Leagues first president.The capitalist caste system, Moore wrote, which segregates Negro workers into Jim Crow districts makes these doubly exploited black workers the special prey of rent gougers. Black and white landlords and real estate agents take advantage of this segregation to squeeze the last nickel out of the Negro working class who are penned in the black ghetto. Rents in Negro Harlem are already often double and sometimes triple those in other sections of the city.

The Communist Party played a major role in both the Harlem Tenants League and the Unemployment Council, another significant organization of that period. The multi-national CP prepared itself to do neighborhood organizing. It raised consciousness among European immigrant members living in Harlem on the urgent need to fight systemic racism, the absolute necessity of rooting out any racism or backwardness within its ranks, and the need to be in full solidarity with both the Black communities and its Black members.

The CP became known by Black Harlem residents and gained respect when it initiated a national campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers falsely charged with raping a white woman in Alabama in 1931. For example, a CP-initiated Harlem rally that year demanding freedom for the Scottsboro defendants and an end to legal lynching began with a few hundred mostly white members, but swelled to several thousands as Black people joined it in the streets because the issue was of vital concern.

Segregation and high rents

The Harlem Tenant Leagues initial organizers recognized that the rising rents in Harlem had become an inherent feature of segregation. The League decided to take action by holding protest meetings, organizing marches and strategically interrupting rent-law proceedings to galvanize community support. They organized rent strikes to resist rent increases. This tactic, although at the time new and unfamiliar to many, would evolve as the cornerstone of collective tenant activism during the Depression.

The most comprehensive gain the League helped win was more favorable tenant laws. The Civil Practice Act included both the Rivers and Perkins bills which addressed poor living conditions and rent increase protection; these bills were the earlier forms of New York City tenant laws.

1934 Harlem rent strike

By the onset of the Depression the Black community was especially ravished by unemployment with rates hitting 65%. The Harlem Tenants League had gained popularity in the community as it became a community support program that aided Harlemites against eviction. It helped create a culture of support and taught community members practical support skills like organizing rent parties and pressuring government agencies to support struggling Harlemites.

The Depression raised class consciousness, and the political and organizational influence of the Harlem Tenants League was felt in the Harlem rent strike of 1934. The first building to go on strike was a modern elevator building on Edgecombe Avenue in the Sugar Hill area, which had became increasingly popular for middle-class Black people in the formerly all-white neighborhood. But the new Black residents were subjected to sharp increases in rents with maintenance quality suffering tremendously. Enraged by the racist landlords, other Edgecombe Ave. tenants banded together and joined the rent strike and picket lines to protest high rents and poor conditions. Victories were won in all the organized buildings.

Another significant strike that year was among the tenants of Knickerbocker Village on the Lower East Side which produced the Knickerbocker Village Tenants Association. Both strikes played prominent roles in popularizing mass action housing reform.

Harlem Unemployment Council battles evictions

The Harlem Tenants League remained primarily a community support program. As the Depression raged on, there was clearly a need for other kinds of organizations more deeply embedded in the grassroots. The CP initiated Unemployment Councils, mass organizations which, while led by communists, were open for all to join. The Councils developed significant roots within the community.

One of the major tactics of the Harlem Unemployed Council was eviction resistance,sometimes organizing whole neighborhoods to stop evictions in progress. They frequently organized sit-ins, demonstrations and disruptions of government home relief bureaus. Their actions spurred mass support within the community, as they often won immediate reforms to alleviate desperate Harlemites.

Harlems Unemployment Council stood as an example, and sparked rebellion and action as other communities took notice and adapted their own tactics. In the Bronx, tenants became so emboldened by solidarity that when a marshal would come to evict a tenant it became common practice for the community to band together and return their items back inside the home. The city paid the marshals for individual evictions; as a result of this resistance in some instances the marshals were repeatedly sent back to unsuccessfully attempt the same eviction, making them too expensive. So people won the right to stay in their apartments.

If the city tried to intimidate the community with a large police presence, many communities did not hesitate to come together and fight back.In the Bronx, there were sometimes as many as 4,000 militants in the streets and on buildings, resisting the police and demanding the right to a home. Most were women. They threw hot water down on the police from buildings, threw marbles under the feet of police horses, or stuck the horses with the long needles used by hat makers.

The movement was national. In Chicago, when three Black communist organizers were killed in 1931 by police during one of these rent riots, 50,000 people took the streets in a memorial march.

Comparisons with conditions today

The heroism of the Black Harlem masses was rooted not only in the economic implosion of the Depression era but also in the fact that, while housing is a basic human right, landlords sought to exploit suffering for profit.

Today the COVID-19 pandemic has made even clearer the inability of the system to put people above profit. Some 78 million claims for unemployment were filed in the last year due to the governments mishandling of the pandemic. With so many unable to pay rent, there is the possibility of thousands or even millions of evictions once the eviction moratorium is lifted, yet rents have not been canceled. There are six empty homes for every homeless person in the United States, as landlords warehouse apartments to keep profits high.

Much as the struggles in the 1930s exposed the role of the police, the Movement for Black Lives uprising over the summer of 2020 sparked a mass rebellion that tied in the fight against killer cops and police brutality.

Pickets, marches, rent strikes, creating organizations and building localized pressure campaigns are the order of the day just as they were in the 1930s. The organizers in Harlem and elsewhere have taught us that the power lies with the people coming together and it is possible to win. For the Harlem community, it was a struggle for reform, but the most necessary element was the struggle for liberation.

Today, the Black struggle still leads the way in the fight for housing andthe fight against all forms of oppression. Let us take note, and build a movement, not just against the forms of oppression by themselves, but a movement against the whole capitalist system which benefits from such vile exploitation.

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Fired up! Harlem's fight for housing in the 1930s - Liberation

The impact of COVID-19 has made it starkly clear to those who live with disability that the imposed barriers of societal organisation make them disabled, explains Penny Pepper

In the early days, I watched every Government COVID-19 announcement and realised there were new labels placed upon me and millions of others.

The sick, the elderly, the disabled the vulnerable. What an interminable hollow mantra of pseudo-caring.

So, Im more vulnerable and disabled people feature too high in the COVID-19 death tally. Why? Answers may lay outside the obvious mainstream thinking.

The first question is: who the hell are these disabled?

Theres a likelihood of every human being experiencing impairment and perhaps disability in their lifetime (yes, they are different states), but you wouldnt know it from our presence in mainstream life.

Official Government figures stated in 2014 that there are more than 11 million who fall within their definitions, which includes those with mental health issues, diabetes and invisible impairments. We are the largest minority group in the UK, if not the world.

But oh, the disabled are tragic. Or sporty brave. Or embarrassing. Theyre ungrateful. Theyre a burden. More recent history condemned us as scroungers.

How we reclaim our place within the human family explicitly and fully included underpins much of my work.

Many of us have fought to move the oppression of these markers we never chose, including the new smothering COVID-19 blanket of the extra vulnerable.

We start with the realisation that impairment comes easily with the intricacy of our complex human biology the human animal breaks easy. But, we who live disability, know it is the confrontation with the imposed barriers and breakdown of societal organisation that makes us disabled.

This is the social model of disability.

This understanding of disability, the social model, has been around for more than 40 years and continues to liberate the minds of disabled people.

It underpins our civil rights movement. Developed in the 1970s by disabled anti-apartheid refugee Vic Finkelstein, this led to the formation of UPIAS the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation and the intellectual foundation of the social model in The Fundamental Principles of Disability, the manifesto for any self-respecting disabled activist to this day.

It defined us as oppressed. Now we knew not whats wrong with us, whats wrong for us.

The simplest way to demonstrate the social model is to use me as an example.

I became a wheelchair user at 14 after childhood illness. I didnt have the language of the social model, but I was soaked in rebellion even as a baby writer, able to see that endless tweaking of me medically would never make a difference to whether I could get on a bus. I saw the barriers and instinctively knew they should be removed.

By the time I went through punk and found my tribe, I was fortunate to live through the emergence of the social model, particularly in disability culture. Vic Finkletstein took an early role in the London Disability Arts Forum, where later I served on the editorial committee and received early writing commissions.

I understood, at last, it was not my fault I couldnt get that job in an office up four flights of stairs or use the tube to get there. The fault was caused disability was caused by societys failure to competently and comprehensively ensure our equality and inclusion. Not only in how the environment is arranged but in attitudes that continue to marginalise by the lack of access which can be defined loosely into three key areas.

First, the environment perhaps the most obvious in explaining the social model. An example is the requirement that buildings are not reliant only on stairs.

Secondly, information a barrier is printed material in inaccessible formats. While technology should have made these barriers easier to remove, in some cases it has multiplied them. But this isnt merely about printed or online material. Access is created through audio as well as print. British Sign Language as well as verbal language.

Thirdly, negative attitudes from which all the other barriers manifest and magnify, which are the toughest to dismantle. A rallying cry, Nothing About Us Without Us, reflects our frustration at what is imposed and, while our activism grows, we remain marginalised in the big Out There.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I wake up and am not disabled in my fully accessible, barrier-free home, with a personal assistant employed to the Choice and Control concept developed by disabled people.

When I leave home, the first barrier a lack of dropped kerbs reminds me quickly I am disabled again.

The sombre truth is that the social model highlights how the failure of governments to fully respond within this framework brings us firmly to the current COVID-19 impact that the unnecessary barriers still experienced cause such an excessive number of disabled people to be affected, beyond any existing comorbidities.

My own experience with COVID-19 highlights this. Me, the gobby old punk, entirely charming but scathing in the face of injustice and barriers.

Ive needed two tests over the past year and the first saw me set off with my PA to the testing centre, where I was assured on the phone of access and parking. When we arrived, I was confronted with a flight of steps and nowhere to get out of my car (environmental barrier), and no signage as to where I could actually get in (information barrier). Negative attitudes opposed me at the No Entry gate when I was blanked by security staff and let through only after my PA was lectured, the old does she take sugar? trope.

The second was a home test. I couldnt open the packet or read it as the font too small. Fortunately, my PA removed those barriers and, when it came to my vaccine, ironically, there was not a single barrier. But I am an old rebel. I know how to fight.

Ive screamed at my TV hearing the reports about the disproportionate death toll of COVID-19 among people with learning difficulties and within the disabled population as a whole. The statistics are grim, showing up to 60% of Coronavirus deaths are within our community.

If accessible information is not available, if there are barriers to care or transport, then these are the horrific obstacles removable obstacles to access a vaccine. It sounds basic and it is obvious, but little action is being taken.

We dont need yet more enforced circumstances that create a specific vulnerability arising from our social exclusion.

If I dont scream, I weep. Yet, along with other activists, Ive learnt how to fight through my words and have a responsibility for those disempowered to speak, who have faith that I raise their concerns and share their stories.

The social model, if put into full practice, would not only liberate disabled people from oppression (including those yet to come), it would transform outmoded concepts of the human condition.

Progress is evident but equality remains elusive as the horror of COVID-19 shows.

I fight on, social model my eternal touchstone from those that went before me.

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Who the Hell are the Disabled? Byline Times - Byline Times

MARYLAND More Confederate monuments were removed in 2020 across the United States than during the five previous years combined, the Southern Poverty Law Center said in its most recent "Whose Heritage?" report that tracks public displays related to the Confederacy.

Ninety-four of the 168 Confederate symbols removed or renamed nationwide in 2020 were monuments, the report found. Fifty-eight were removed from 2015 to 2019.

In Maryland, one Confederate symbol was removed in 2020, according to the Law Center.

The Jeb Stuart Trail at Woodstock Equestrian Park in Dickerson, in Montgomery County, was renamed the Northern Edge Trail in December. Stuart was a Confederate Army general.

Some residents said the name change didn't go far enough, and called it a missed opportunity to honor someone who fought against racism.

"Very negative names were deliberately placed on these signs for wrong-headed purposes, racist purposes," County Remembrance and Reconciliation Commission Member Okianer Christian Darktold Montgomery Community Media. "I think you put a name there that says 'we're not this way. This is not what we value.'"

The SPLC report said three monuments remain in Maryland, but did not specify where they are located.

The "Talbot Boys" monument dedicated to Talbot County residents who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War remains near the entrance of the county courthouse in Easton, the Baltimore Sun said. It is believed to be the only Confederate statue remaining on public ground in Maryland.

In 2017 Baltimore officials removed four Confederate monuments from public land overnight to avoid protests. They are: The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on W. Mount Royal Avenue; the Confederate Women's Monument in Bishop Square Park, N.; the Roger B. Taney Monument on Mount Vernon Place and the Robert E. Lee and Thomas. J. "Stonewall" Jackson Monument in Wyman Park.

A statue to Maryland native Roger Taney, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who wrote the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery, was taken from the State House grounds in Annapolis in 2017, and a plaque honoring a Confederate general was removed from the courthouse grounds in Wicomico County, the Baltimore Sun reported.

Lecia Brooks, chief of staff for the Law Center, called 2020 a "transformative" year in the movement to remove Confederate symbols nationally.

"Over the course of seven months, more symbols of hate were removed from public property than in the preceding four years combined," Brooks said in a statement.

The Law Center began tracking the movement to take the monuments down in 2015, when a white supremacist entered a South Carolina church and killed nine Black parishioners.

Virginia by far saw the most Confederate symbols removed in 2020 with 71, the Law Center's report found. The states with the next highest number are North Carolina with 24, and Alabama and Texas, both with 12.

While the greatest concentration of symbols remains in former Confederate and border states, many exist in Northern states and states formed after the Civil War. California, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Washington, Idaho and Montana all house a small number of monuments.

Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson are the top Confederates with statues, roads and schools named in their honor, according to BeenVerified.com.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, has the sixth highest number of monuments.

Brooks praised Virginia, which changed its preservation law and, according to Brooks, "led by example" by removing so many Confederate symbols in 2020. Preservation laws in several other Southern states including Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina still exist and prohibit individual communities from removing certain displays.

The movement to remove these symbols from public spaces became part of the national reckoning on racial injustice following the killing last May of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd's neck for several minutes.

All but one of the 168 symbols that were removed last year came after Floyd's death. The symbol that was removed before May 30 was Virginia's decision to replace Lee-Jackson Day with Election Day in April.

The Law Center considers public Confederate symbols as any government buildings, monuments and statues, plaques, markers, schools, parks, counties, cities, military property and streets or highways named after anyone associated with the Confederacy.

The organization said 2,100 Confederate symbols remain in the country into 2021. Monuments account for 704 of the symbols, the Law Center said.

"These dehumanizing symbols of pain and oppression continue to serve as backdrops to important government buildings, halls of justice, public parks and U.S. military properties," she said.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.

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Confederate Symbols Removed From Maryland In 2020, What Remains - Patch.com