Last week, the Supreme Court boosted the openly white supremacist campaign to suppress the Black vote in the Deep South. It ruled that districts jerry-mandered to discriminate against Black voters are constitutional. CC Cambell-Rock, an independent Black journalist from New Orleans, spoke with Pacifica’s Steve Zeltzer about what this means to her community.
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At the Microsoft Build conference in San Francisco, an annual event for engineers and other tech professionals, a former Microsoft worker and other activists spoke out against profiting from the use of the Azure cloud computing platform, AI, and other tech to commit genocide and war crimes. They called for a boycott of Microsoft products and a fight against massive public subsidy of the tech companies to wage war in the Middle East and around the world.
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Lital Singer of the Spartacist League spoke at a Partisan Defense Committee fundraiser for Class War Prisoners in NYC focusing on the case of political prisoner and veteran journalist Mumia Abu Jamal. Singer demands that a new generation take up the fight for Jamal’s freedom and against this racist frame-up system.
Next, we hear Mumia Abu Jamal’s message from prison addressing the attendees. In Mumia’s message from prison he highlighted the case of Alvaro Luna Hernandez aka Xinachtli, a political prisoner of the State of Texas and the U.S. government. Xinachtli is serving a 50 year prison sentence for an “aggravated assault” conviction stemming from a July 1996 incident in which he disarmed a Brewster County Sheriff who was attempting to shoot him. Alvaro vehemently denies the charge that he assaulted the Sheriff. To Mexican-Americans in the cities, slums, plains, deserts, and prison cages of the Southwest he is a civil rights hero, a Chicano freedom fighter true to his barrio roots and eternally fearless in the face of injustice.
For years, he has been internationally recognized by amnesty movements and human rights lawyers and experts as a U.S. political prisoner, yet inside the United States, the name Alvaro Luna Hernandez is little known. He is housed at the William McConnell Unit in Beehive, Texas, where he is a well-known jailhouse lawyer assisting other incarcerated people in their pursuit of justice.
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And that concludes today’s edition of Capitalism, Race & Democracy.We thank all of Pacifica’s sister stations and affiliates that contribute to the production of this show. Today’s program was produced by the Capitalism, Race & Democracy collective, with contributions from Steve Zeltzer, Ann Garrison, Polina Vasiliev, and Thomas O’Rourke.
You can find this and all previous episodes at our website “capitalism race and democracy dot ORG”. Make sure you click the subscribe button. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, @PacificaCRD.
Thanks for listening.
Music:
Common, “I have a dream”
Fela Kuti, “Colonial Mentality”
