by Eric Ribellarsi

The verdict for Oscar Grant's murder, a 23 year old Black father who was murdered by the police for the crime of sitting down on the floor of the subway, has just been announced. Oscar Grant's murderer, who instructed another cop to "step back" pulled his gun and shot Oscar Grant in a cold calculated murder, as five different people video taped it, even catching on video another cop calling Oscar Grant a "bitch ass nigger." The verdict, however? Involuntary manslaughter, with a sentence of 2-4 years. How the fuck does handcuffing someone, telling your pig friends to step back, and then shooting them in the back equate to "involuntary manslaughter?" This is outrageous.

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Introduction by Mike Ely, originally posted at Kasama.

Arizona has become a lightening rod of anger — from those who hate the persecution of immigrants. That is a good thing — an exciting and much needed jolt!

But we all need to ask whether there should also not be much more attention on those actively doing the deporting: I.e. the Obama Administration.

We should ask ourselves if there isn’t some conscious and calculated misdirection  involved in the Democratic establishment  denouncing specifically a very mean-spirited Arizona law (passed by Republicans), while their team (which after all has power!) has escalated the deportations nationally.

Let’s be clear on a key point:

The White House accuses the Arizona law of unjustly profiling Latinos who are legal — while they themselves escalate the deportation of those who are illegal.

Is that a stand we want to take? No.

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We received the following statement from a new network that is forming in the South of the United States. Their site is accessible here.

Leftists in the U.S. South is a new multi-tendency network that has been established to help Leftists in the southern United States network, share information, organize and more.

We are interested in fostering communication and collaboration among the broad Left. This is perhaps controversial, but many of us involved in the network would like to see everyone from the left of the Democratic Party to left communists talking. This is not because we believe naively that if we just get people discussing more, everyone will magically come together and we will have a mass revolutionary movement in this country; nor do we think that questions of line and other ideological differences are irrelevant and should be set aside altogether.

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There are few professors with a higher profile than Jared Diamond, whose 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel (referred to hereafter as G, G & S) enjoyed blockbuster bestseller status and whose appearances on PBS have made him an instantly recognizable figure. With his avuncular beard, Diamond is the perfect figure to explain to middle-class television audiences why some people are on top and others are on the bottom. As the PBS Web site on G, G & S puts it, he will answer "Why were Europeans the ones to conquer so much of our planet?"

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by Eric Ribellarsi

Beneath Everest is a new documentary film depicting the revolution in Nepal. While containing some interesting footage and criticisms of the Nepalese monarchy, this film is an obnoxious, arrogant attack from a western liberal perspective on the oppressed of Nepal and their revolution.

The film’s central thesis is the "Sandwich Theory," or the claim the people are caught between two oppressors. Yet the film’s own footage frequently disproves this claim. Beneath Everest primarily condemns the Maoists for violence, even while admitting most of the violence came via the monarchy.

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