'Shut down the globalization death machine'
Mass march to greet new U.S. prez
By Greg
Butterfield
Whoever the next president is--Gov. George W. Bush or Vice
President Al Gore--state-sponsored executions will
continue.
But the next president will also have to confront a
growing, youthful and militant new movement dedicated to
ending the racist death penalty.
That's the message death-penalty foes, community
activists, union members, students and anti-war forces around
the United States plan to send with a mass march in
Washington on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.
The march, entitled "Shut Down the Globalization Death
Machine," also targets what sponsors call the extension of
racist, anti-worker U.S. policies through the World Trade
Organization, Pentagon intervention in Colombia and Iraq, and
U.S. support for Israeli repression against the Palestinians,
among other issues.
During the election campaign, Gore said, "I support the
death penalty." Later he said he would not enact a national
moratorium on executions despite mounting evidence that the
death penalty is applied in a racist way.
Among Democrats Gore is considered even more devoted to
the death penalty than President Bill Clinton--who left the
campaign trail in 1992 to personally officiate over the
execution of a mentally disabled man in Arkansas.
Bush, who has presided over 147 Texas executions, said,
"No innocent person has been executed in Texas." Yet Shaka
Sankofa/Gary Graham, who had powerful evidence to clear his
name, never got a hearing in a court of law. He was lynched
by the state of Texas last June 22. And Sankofa/Graham is far
from being the only example.
Bush would have killed John Paul Penry on Nov. 17 if the
U.S. Supreme Court hadn't stepped in to grant the prisoner a
60-day stay after an international outcry. Penry, a mentally
disabled man, has the comprehension of a 6-year-old
child.
On Nov. 15, James Thessin, acting legal adviser for the
Clinton State Department, admitted that the U.S. violated
international law when Arizona executed two German brothers,
Karl and Walter Legrand, without granting them access to the
German Consulate.
Germany, like most of Washington's European capitalist
rivals, has abolished the death penalty.
Thessin, at a hearing at the World Court in The Hague,
apologized to Germany for what he called "a breach" in U.S.
obligations under Article 36 of the Vienna Convention. But
Thessin rejected German calls for reparations.
Why? Because denying foreign citizens their consular
rights is common in U.S. death-penalty cases. Bush, for
example, has claimed that since Texas "never signed" the
Vienna Convention, his state is under no obligation to grant
foreign citizens their rights.
This was one of the issues in the case of Mexican national
Miguel Angel Flores, who was executed in Texas Nov. 9 despite
numerous appeals from the Mexican government and the
immigrant community.
Growing movement to stop legal lynchings
The movement to stop racist legal lynchings has grown
rapidly in the past year. Already it has won a moratorium on
executions in Illinois and passed resolutions in dozens of
U.S. city councils demanding a national moratorium.
The movement has brought the racist, anti-poor character
of U.S. executions into the media spotlight, especially
highlighting the case of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal
in Pennsylvania.
Throughout the campaign Gore and Bush did their best to
ignore this sea change. But both faced anti-death-penalty
protests all over the country, especially after the execution
of Sankofa/Graham. Ending legal lynchings was a major demand
of mass protests at both the Republican and Democratic
conventions last summer.
"More than 2 million people will observe Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s birthday in U.S. prisons," noted march organizer
Johnnie Stevens of the International Action Center and
Millions for Mumia. "Mumia and nearly 4,000 others wait on
death row. U.S. big business makes big profits from prison
construction and prison labor.
"We must stop capitalist deathonomics at home and abroad,"
Stevens asserted. "U.S. transnational corporations and banks,
along with their puppet institutions like the WTO, the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, continue to
impose globalization on the world. They reap super-profits
while more than a billion people go hungry and at least 2
billion live in abject poverty."
Growing list of endorsers
Stevens told WW that the list of endorsers is growing
daily. It includes the International Action Center;
International Concerned Family & Friends of Mumia
Abu-Jamal; Al-Awda, the Palestinian Right of Return
Coalition; Refuse & Resist; Rainbow Flags for Mumia; the
Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty; Jahahara
Alkebulan-Ma'at, the National Coalition of Blacks for
Reparations in America; Hunter College Student Liberation
Action Movement; the League of Indigenous Sovereign Nations;
Queers for Racial and Economic Justice; and many more.
Interested readers are urged to buy bus tickets and to
organize others--including co-workers, classmates, union
members, etc.--to come to Washington Jan. 20. A list of
organizing centers and bus information will be available soon
on the Web site www.mumia2000.org.
Posters, flyers and fact sheets for Jan. 20 can also be
downloaded from the Web site. Financial contributions are
urgently needed. Volunteers are needed at many mobilization
offices.
To have your group listed as an endorser or mobilizing
center, send an e-mail to iacenter@iacenter.org.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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