Thursday, June 28, 2012

Raúl Alcaraz Ochoa: Beyond the BS1070 Supreme Court Ruling

Beyond the BS1070 Supreme Court Ruling:
“Not even the highest court can turn back a determined people!”

By Raúl Alcaraz Ochoa / 25 June 2012

This can’t be said any other way. Our migrant/Latino community is getting crushed. In fact, we are getting stomped on and beaten like a colorful piñata. The piñata is electoral and the more they hit, the more political points are scored—at our expense.

On the surface, the political class wants to make us think they are at war with each other over immigration. When in reality we have a US Supreme Court ruling over BS1070 that is in complete alignment with Republican and Democrat immigration policies of exclusion, exploitation, and police and ICE collaborations.

In the wake of the US Supreme Court ruling, injustice and oppression are upheld once again. The “papers please” section of BS1070 has been upheld. In effect standing in the tradition of white supremacist historical Supreme Court decisions such as Dred Scott v. Sanford of 1857 in which the court ruled that slaves and their descendants were not protected by the Constitution and were not US citizens...

Read more...

Friday, June 1, 2012

PCWC: JT READY IS DEAD: FASCISM AND THE ANARCHIST RESPONSE IN ARIZONA, 2005-2012

JT READY IS DEAD: FASCISM AND THE ANARCHIST RESPONSE IN ARIZONA, 2005-2012 ~ Fires never extinguished: A blog of the Phoenix Class War Council

JT Ready is dead.  And by his own hand.  It took a while, but in the end JT took the free advice of his many anarchist adversaries and followed his leader into oblivion.  Though in the end he opted for the Goebbels style over that of his boy Hitler.  That's the thing with JT: despite being a consistent white supremacist, he could sometimes surprise you.  Not with something entirely new.  No.  But with variations on a theme.  Most of us figured he would blow up somewhere, at some point, and given the history of white supremacists with regard to child and spousal abuse, we are not surprised that his end mimicked his political practice perfectly: violence mostly aimed down the social hierarchy. Consider the death of National Socialist Movement leader Jeff Hall as another case in point.

According to the cops, on Wednesday, May 2, JT, a former president of the Mesa Community College Republican Club and Maricopa County Republican precinct committeeman, stormed the house of his much-abused and terrified girlfriend in Gilbert wearing full combat gear and then proceeded to open fire on everyone in the place.  The dead included Lisa Mederos, her daughter Amber (JT's former treasurer for his run for Pinal County Sheriff), as well as her fiance, Jim Hiott, who was a fellow militia member.  In a truly cowardly act, JT also killed Amber's 15 month-old baby.  Only Lisa's younger daughter survived, hiding under the bed in her upstairs room.

We in PCWC first began running into JT during the early parts of the immigration movement, around 2005, before there was a formal PCWC, really.  As many probably know, JT had a rather chaotic political career, but in those days he was allied with State Senator Russell Pearce and local car dealer Rusty Childress.  Even then political violence had already begun to rear its ugly head in the anti-immigrant scene.  It might be valuable to review some of what had happened in Arizona in the several years preceding JT's final bloody rampage, and it certainly would be worthwhile to consider the ways that anarchists in Phoenix and Arizona organized against him, his politics and his political allies (and enemies) over the last half decade or more.  While liberals advocated for his free speech, anarchists opposed him every step of the way.

Read more: http://firesneverextinguished.blogspot.com/2012/06/jt-ready-is-dead-fascism-and-anarchist.html