Ghost Robotics Office And House Vandalized

Submission



Early Monday morning October 14 before the start of the work week the offices of local weapons manufacturers Ghost Robotics was targeted with a message for Ghost Robotics and their backer the University of Pennsylvania: Ghost Robotics and Penn, THERE’S BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS!

The UPenn run campus known as Pennovation in the Grays Ferry neighborhood where Ghost Robotics has its offices was coated with a mix of red paint, broken glass, nails, and messages from Philadelphians to Ghost Robotics and their landlord and backer UPenn: no business as usual for evil fucks who make murder tech!
Ghost Robotics AI-enabled machine-gun-armed robot dogs have been used against Palestinians in Gaza and have been sold to the Department of Homeland Security for use in the US borderlands. Philadelphians won’t stand for the manufacture of killing machines in our backyard with our stolen tax dollars. Across the city people are taking action against Ghost Robotics, demanding an end to the manufacture and distribution of weapons of apartheid. We want Ghost Robotics out of Philadelphia, out of Palestine, and out of the borderlands. As long as Ghost Robotics exists and keeps peddling their killer robot dogs, there’s blood on all of our hands. We will not stop targeting Ghost Robotics and their backers. If you profit off of genocide, you are on notice.
As we cross the threshold of one year since the people of Palestine took a bulldozer through the apartheid wall, we must reflect on how far we have come, and how far we still have to go to see the liberation of Palestine and the liberation of all people from colonialism, militarism and imperialism. This last year of resistance to apartheid and genocide has mobilized millions, and support for the people of Palestine is stronger than ever before. Even still, the US and Israeli backed assault on the Levant carries on, with escalations in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran, and doctors estimating that 200,000 people have been killed. If the US government won’t stop sending weapons to Israel, we hope people will do what they can to stop the weapons themselves.
So long as Ghost Robotics exists and until Palestine is free, people in Philly and around the world will continue to fight against agents of genocide. Revolution until Liberation. Free Free Palestine!
House —
On the morning of October 10, an autonomous group targeted the home of Gavin Kenneally, co-founder and CEO of Ghost Robotics. The group painted “Funded By Genocide” across his garage, and “I Make Killer Dogs” on the sidewalk, threw paint at the door and ring camera, and smashed windows. We firmly say — we don’t want your dog shit in Philadelphia! And we don’t want it anywhere!
Gavin’s home is currently listed for sale for a whopping $1.9 million dollars. While his autonomous robots are shipped across the world to patrol and surveil Palestinians, Gavin awaits the sale of his lavish home he’s made with dirty money.
Other manufacturers of autonomous robots have stated their commitment to not arming robot dogs, but Ghost Robotics has positioned themselves as the dealer for these weapons. They clearly have no shame or concern about their robot dogs being used to surveil and kill people.
No genocide profiteer should sit comfortably in their home — we commit to draining funds from Gavin, to reminding him that his robot dogs are agents of U.S. imperialism, and to closing down Ghost Robotics.

Until all people are able to live safely and freely in the place they call home, we commit to fighting for our collective liberation.

Update Message from Hybachi LeMar On His Extradition to Pennsylvania DOC

from It’s Going Down

Update on anarchist prisoner Hybachi LeMar. For more information, check out Free Hybachi LeMar.

We are sad to announce that, although Hybachi LeMar was scheduled to be released on parole from IDOC Jacksonville Correctional Center on October 4, 2024, he was instead picked up by Pennsylvania authorities on a warrant for an alleged parole violation. He was transported overnight from Illinois to Pennsylvania and is now incarcerated at SCI Smithfield.

Update Message from Hybachi LeMar:

Solidarity Greetings.

The following are the events surrounding my October 2024 transfer from Jacksonville, Illinois.

On October 4th, I was exported by U.S. Security Transportation Services van from Jacksonville Correctional Center, first to Connersville, Indiana, where I slept in a hallway of its county jail overnight, en route to Pennsylvania. I arrived the next evening at SCI Smithfield.

And while the other two passengers who were picked up from different parts of the country were given their customary browns, clothing exchange, I was put in a cell in order to place all the clothes I had on into a box. No socks. No shirt. No underwear.

I was handed a smock—a thick, blue, velcro, padded observation garment with no sleeves, too hot to wear, ostensibly under the pretext that the nerve medication prescribed at the previous institution had to be taken and re-prescribed. And with me having to be monitored in such a way in case I would undergo any detox symptoms.

Doing jumping jacks; recalling knowledge I memorized from an almanac that Midwest Books to Prisoners mailed me in Cook County Jail; and planning what to do to assist uplifting communities once I’m released, were resourceful in centering my mind and keeping it balanced on a solid foundation of constructive thoughts, the two days I spent in that particular cell.

Due to my history of clairvoyance and clairaudience, which has been misnomered as schizophrenia, I was moved upstairs on the psychiatric wing for “closer observation” to see how I do.

In spite of it all, I remain cool and collected, and hope you are too.

Before closing this message, it’s important to always remember, whether you find yourself alone in your room, or naked inside of a cell: as we drift 67,000 miles per hour around the sun, no one can take away the fact that you can center your mind on a thought along the way.

The thought you choose is yours to make, yours to keep, one to be appreciated with genuine understanding. And it’s a gift, a primordial power that no one can take away.

Sending you solidarity, love, and strength.

Sincerely Yours,

Hybachi LeMar

You can continue to write Hybachi using this form or by sending a single sided letter to this forwarding address:

Hybachi LeMar
c/o Midwest Books to Prisoners
1321 N Milwaukee Avenue PMB 460
Chicago, IL 60622

Hybachi LeMar has finished his third book – “The Ghetto-bred Anarchist”

“A call to action .. a modern-day George Jackson, with all the pain, anger, determination and soaring prose, but with the loving care of a genuine anarchist.” – Anthony Rayson

“Forged from the front lines of the struggle, “The Ghetto-bred Anarchist” is an incendiary underground classic that burns bright with revolutionary wisdom. Hybachi’s hard-fought reflections and strategies show how we can liberate ourselves from within the cracks of capitalism.”

Accepting orders now! Support Hybachi by buying a copy of his latest book! You can also show support by purchasing his last book, “The Anarchybalion”!

* We are seeking distributors and bookstores to help share Hybachi’s works – please get in contact *

“The Ghetto-bred Anarchist” is also available for purchase from the IWW Store.

Police Mural Vandalized in West Philly

Submission

We painted over a mural memorializing a dead cop. We took this action as part of the October 7 Week Of Rage in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. We recognize amerikkkan police as part of the same machine that kills and oppresses Palestinians across the ocean. In death as in life may no cop rest peacefully

-some anarchists

How to: fill fire extinguishers with paint

‘Animus’ Reader Book Release Event + Film Screening – Oct. 20

from Reeking Thickets Press

Animus, animut, animul, animis, amirus…

Join us at ORCA (email orca.philly@protonmail.com for the location) on October 20th at 7pm for a free event for the release of Animus. Free copies (crudely bound+limited availability, reading and printing pdf’s will be free online after the event, and physical copies will be $5 after to cover some of the cost of materials, plus shipping) will be available and if you feel like hanging around we’ll be watching The Fever (2019, 98 min., by Maya Da-Rin) and having a short discussion. Masks will be available and are encouraged. If you’d like to throw cash to future publishing efforts or ORCA there will also be options for that, though not expected at all. If you have stickers, zines, etc. you’d like to give out feel free as well! You can read a pdf of the introduction here.

A first foray into small-scale bookmaking, this initial edition is unfortunately quite rough, with some edges trimmed on a slant, too-small margins, some occasional slightly faded text or misprints not significantly preventing legibility, a too-stiff cover, and the possibility of some toner rubbing off over time.

Animus is an unauthorized collection, a 446pg. paperback of mostly already-published, excerpted writings which brings together anarchist pieces (anti-civilization, queer, insurrectionary, illegalist, and nihilist) with anthropological ones on the indigenous peoples of Amazonia, the North American Eastern Woodlands, Siberia, and Oceania (in the currents around ‘new animism’, Amerindian perspectivism, the so-called ontological turn, and on egalitarian `societies against the state’ and the relationships with these and with hierarchy/civilization of gender, magic, ontology, and violence – also as it concerns animals or spirits, predation, on `supernatural’ planes, or as a quality or possibility), some history, and a few studies of insurgent strategy.

The Fever is a realist, myth-like film by Maya Da-Rin, in collaboration with an indigenous team, featuring some relevant Amazonian cosmologies explored in the book, in industry, humanity, and the wild’s mirroring clashes. From the Criterion Channel description: “This spellbinding narrative feature debut from Maya Da-Rin is an entrancing, enigmatic meditation on the material, spiritual, and dream lives of Brazil’s Indigenous people. Justino (Regis Myrupu, winner of the Best Actor prize at the Locarno Film Festival) is a forty-five-year-old member of the Desana people who works as a security guard at a cargo port in Manaus, an industrial city surrounded by the Amazon rainforest. Since the death of his wife, his main company is his youngest daughter (Rosa Peixoto), a nurse who will soon be leaving him to study medicine in Brasilia. As the days go by, Justino is overcome by a strong, unexplained fever. During the day, he fights to stay awake at work. At night, a mysterious creature follows his footsteps. Torn between the oppression of life in the city and the distance of his native village, Justino can no longer endure an existence without place.”

The book has recurring focuses on the origins and concealed qualities of state-like forms, the paradoxes of semiosis as key to both civilized and anti-civilized forms, and the complication of relations between ‘opposites’ beyond a simplified dualism or nondualism. Animus is a chaotic, naive attempt at collection and distribution emerging from a historical and personal period spent both adrift and under torque. It’s intended as a broad and efficient introduction to the depths of some particularly incisive or relevant approaches in anarchy and anthropology (the specific varieties share some important influences and perspectives, yet differ on others and appear quite compartmentalized), catalyzing as much magico-insurrectionary rupture and insight as possible, for those both well-versed or unfamiliar. A compulsive, propulsive effort (not exactly the fruit of this book’s editor or, in its triangulated particularity, that of the authors either) to weave a fabric that might unravel a few of the threads making up our worlds; those instituted as well as those counter-posed.

Original contributions include an introduction, compiled timeline of the anarchist propaganda of the deed era, a very brief overview of the Bonnot gang’s activities and international illegalist dispersions of that period, a historical outline of the origins of contemporary insurrectionary anarchism focusing on Italy and a timeline of some contemporary insurrectionary attacks, and a preface to two of the included sections on gender in historical Lenape/Delaware and colonial contexts.

Though queerness is a main focus throughout, only a relatively small portion of the material directly focuses on explicitly queer sexuality, gender, or experiences as conventionally understood. Instead, it’s queer in the sense that it’s grounded in and meant to inform and sharpen our lived, mutual relation of hostility with the core structures of gender, sexuality, group and individual identity, morality, sociopolitical organization, semiosis, and indeed ontology, cosmology, and metaphysics that underpin civilization’s power.

In consciously engaging with the `anthropological’, we aim to use the means provisionally designated under this broadly understood, nebulous field against itself, as its best practitioners (opponents?) often seem to do. This indeed can characterize the approach of both its best from a redemptive reapplication of the practice of trying to better understand, complicate, perceive, relate to, or encounter people and the social and of those from its sinister colonial locus. In both – a differing of mentation and a mentation of the different. We find, both in the looking and what is seen, that two impulses of these kinds often impersonate or appropriate each other but genuinely have radically different, opposing trajectories. Many of the included pieces likewise seem to imply that stratified institutions, civilized sexual, gender, and ethno-racial regimes, nationalism and oppressive xenophobia, the alienating order of language, and quasi-Cartesian humanism may have emerged or cloaked themselves under the necessarily possible inversion of forms created specifically for their prevention, and continue to be partly powered by these functions persisting in them as a residue, as well as potentially subverted by them. These egalitarian forms still extant in indigenous `societies against the state’ include the chiefs whose structural power (not properly their own) exists in them being prevented by everyone else from exercising hierarchy. Localized kinship bands whose version of unity exists to violently ensure broader dis-unity. The many indigenous origin myths of how all beings were once human, unlike the civilized myths of animal descent. Humanity as a bodily (yet agent-ed and not scientifically biological or materialist) way of creating one’s self common to all beings (but only through each kind of being’s view) and resting, always unstably, on the capacity to appropriate other kinds of beings’ hostile, animal otherness through a play of mimetic-empathic, mutually defining, metamorphic, violent contact, without getting lost and oneself becoming appropriated into the `humanity’ of the others. A threatening yet all-sustaining given ground of potential sociality and culture (one conflictual and egalitarian) common throughout the cosmos.

Shut Down “The Power Of Unity”

from Twitter

On Sunday October 13, the Doylestown Sports and Events Center (northern Philly suburbs) is hosting an event called Power of Unity featuring Scott Presler, Tim Pool, and Jack pieceofshitbiec. Shut this shit down and send Angela packing back to Cali. 120 Pheasant Run Newtown, Pa

Call for Autonomous Acts of Rage Against Colonization Everywhere on monday october 14th 2024

Submission

Wolf = Humility


Indigenous Day of Rage

“We will need each other to make sure that the flames, if they were to come, clear the area that we will live in together. We will need to clear it of the fuel that would end up repeating the problems we are currently having. We will need to make sure that the seeds, nutrients and soil are scattered beyond our ability to control.” Aragorn

We don’t just want a cease fire, we want the Right of Return for all Palestinian people, for water to flow, and the traditions to stay alive. We can’t get back the countless lives lost, but we can honor and avenge them. And we will.

For the end of the struggle that is settler colonialism everywhere. Where the land is stolen, consent violated, the old ways forgotten – let it burn.

We hope that every colonizer who robs the lives and dignity of the land and the people on it understands that their great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren’s children are not going to be here because of their violence and indeterminent destruction.

We will still be here fighting for the next seven generations, but we will never forget the slaughter, and we will remember to make sure those grandchildren stay afraid of all that is wild.

The united states government now “recognizes” indigenous people’s day alongside columbus day. we must make this impossible to reconcile. We will remain illegible to them, and unknowable to all but each other and the stars above, the water below, and all that of the earth fighting back. We call out to the brave and the humble – all that is striving towards life, while defying management, capture, and domestication with a strength they could never know.

find the connections, funders, manufacturers, advisors, politicians, gentrifiers, and all enemies of the people and the earth. you know who they are.

find some friends and haunt those motherfuckers ghosts

Targeting Home of Ghost Robotics CEO in Philly

from Unity of Fields

“On the morning of October 10, an autonomous group targeted the home of Gavin Kenneally, co-founder and CEO of Ghost Robotics in Philadelphia. The group painted “Funded By Genocide” across his garage, and “I Make Killer Dogs” on the sidewalk, threw paint at the door and ring camera, and smashed windows. We firmly say — we don’t want your dog shit in Philadelphia! And we don’t want it anywhere!

Gavin’s home is currently listed for sale for a whopping $1.9 million dollars. While his autonomous robots are shipped across the world to patrol and surveil Palestinians, Gavin awaits the sale of his lavish home he’s made with dirty money.

Other manufacturers of autonomous robots have stated their commitment to not arming robot dogs, but Ghost Robotics has positioned themselves as the dealer for these weapons. They clearly have no shame or concern about their robot dogs being used to surveil and kill people.

No genocide profiteer should sit comfortably in their home — we commit to draining funds from Gavin, to reminding him that his robot dogs are agents of U.S. imperialism, and to closing down Ghost Robotics.

Until all people are able to live safely and freely in the place they call home, we commit to fighting for our collective liberation.”

Indego is seeing an ‘unprecedented’ spike in vandalism

from Mainstream Media

Indego is suffering from a dramatic upsurge in vandalism that forced the company to remove five stations, mostly in South Philadelphia.

The Indego bike docking station in Point Breeze.
The Indego bike docking station in Point Breeze.

Philadelphia’s bike-share system, Indego, is suffering a wave of vandalism and theft so intense that it has had to remove five stations.

“Since July, we have had unprecedented level of vandalism to our stations,” said Nate Bowman-Johnston, Indego’s general manager. “It’s just a massive scale that we’re dealing with at this point.”

Thieves have been physically breaking bikes out of the docking stations where they are locked up waiting for paying users. In some cases, the damage to Indego’s infrastructure rendered entire stations inoperable.

Stations have been removed at 16th and Wolf Streets, Fourth Street and Oregon Avenue, 24th and Jackson Streets, 57th Street and Westminster Avenue, and 21st Street and Washington Avenue.

“South Philly’s been the epicenter of the activity for some reason,” Bowman-Johnston said. There are also some stations where only one or a handful of docks have been affected.

Indego is working with law enforcement on the issue. While there have been no arrests, Bowman-Johnston says there are several active investigations.

He said Indego is waiting for parts and plans to reinstall all of the lost stations in the next two months. “The goal is to reinstall every station,” he said.

Stations outfitted with the latest equipment have proven more vulnerable to this kind of theft, while the latching mechanisms on Indego’s more antiquated stations are more resilient. The 16th and Wolf station, for example, will likely be replaced with tougher, older equipment the company already has in its inventory.

Bowman-Johnston said that despite this summer’s setbacks, Indego ridership is up 20% year-over-year, and that this week it hit 1 million trips for the year so far. The network plans to expand into new neighborhoods soon.

Vandalism and theft have long plagued bike-share systems, and images of bikes or scooters floating in rivers or piled in parks occasionally go viral. But while the North American Bikeshare & Scootershare Association (NABSA) does not have data on the number of incidents, such attacks are not unique to Philadelphia and are less frequent than industry experts initially projected.

“When bike share and scooter share first started [in 2008 and 2009], the general consensus was that there would be a ton of vandalism,” said Laura Mallonee, membership and engagement director with NABSA. “But unlike other street infrastructure, we don’t necessarily see as much as we expected.”

*This story has been updated with the full list of shuttered stations.

 

Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re a Cop: On Bad-jacketing

from North Shore

Read the full text, including visuals, online as a PDF.

Find the full text ready for printing as an imposed PDF.

Since the commencement of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, millions around the world have taken to the streets in support of Palestine against the genocidal Zionist entity. We are, globally, in an unprecedented moment of anti-imperialist mobilisation, which threatens not only the Zionist occupation but the colonial powers that uphold it.

This text was written through the summer and early autumn of 2024 from Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory (so-called Southern Ontario, Canada), where people, many new to the left, have been facing intensified violence and harassment from both police and Zionists. Protests are regularly met with arrests and other attacks, which have created a climate of fear among attendees and organisers.

At the same time, that fear, combined with a disconnect from previous generations of struggle and an often-unchallenged fear of militancy, has led to practices that end up putting our comrades in more danger. This text hopes to address one such recurring issue.

 

what is bad-jacketing?

“Bad-jacketing” (or “cop-jacketing,” “fed-jacketing,” or “snitch-jacketing”) is the practice of accusing people of being a cop, informant, fascist, or other kind of bad actor on specious or non-existent evidence.

The term has been used since at least the 1960s, where it primarily described COINTELPRO operations that bad-jacketed legitimate members of the Black Panther Party and other organisations. It was, ironically, rumours from infiltrators consolidating their own positions that led to organisations not only isolating but, in some cases, severely beating or executing innocent individuals.

 

why is bad-jacketing a problem?

A 2015 text titled “No badjacketing: the state wants to kill us; let’s not cooperate” by the Twin Cities GDC, Local 14, says:

  1. At the least, it pushes away people who have, or are willing, to do work and make sacrifices for the movements.
  2. Worse, it silences entire groups by sowing mistrust within them and making discussion of strategy and tactics difficult.
  3. Very commonly, those accused of acting as informants become so alienated from their accusers that they actually become snitches.
  4. Worst-case scenario, people die. That worst-case scenario is all too common and real, and there is a famous regional history to it as well, in the case of Anna Mae Aquash, a Native American woman from Canada who had worked and sacrificed tireless for the American Indian Movement, or AIM.

Southern Ontario in 2024 is, of course, not the US in the 1960s and 1970s. Our contemporary movements do not act on false accusations of snitching by killing the accused. And while we know that the police are trying to infiltrate us and turn people into informants, the vast majority of these accusations are definitely not coming from people on the state’s payroll.

The biggest threat that bad-jacketing poses to us, here and now, is that it singles people out for state repression. Militants are more likely to be on the receiving end of these accusations, but also, anecdotally, people of colour, neurodivergent people, and anyone who “does not belong” (and, of course, people who fall into all of those categories). In doing so, the people who make these accusations in effect carry out the work of the state. They reproduce the oppressive dynamics of the outside world and push people out – often, the very people our movements are supposed to be fighting for. By pushing them out, bad-jacketing then denies support to people who are often already at heightened risk of criminalisation. It makes people into easy targets, signaling to the police that they can get away with brutalising, arresting, and jailing someone without outcry from the community.

During the 2020 Black liberation uprisings in the US, posts flooded our feeds, warning of “agents provocateur.” Decontextualised videos of police unloading bricks spread like wildfire among both far-right and far-left social media networks. Fascist fear-mongering about out-of-town “ANTIFA” inciting riots trickled down into leftist hyper-vigilance against “white outside agitators.” These warnings often ventured into the realm of conspiracy theories, where protests with unknown organisers or cop cars on fire were signs of a police set-up.

All this has had devastating consequences. The normalisation of this paranoid urge to see false flags around every corner has empowered people “on the left” to share images and openly work to identify individuals carrying out illegal actions. Contrary to what they may believe, these people’s efforts to “root out infiltrators” have in many cases now become the actual basis for the state to arrest and jail its opponents.

Beyond that, bad-jacketing leads to feelings of insecurity and distrust that can tear apart a movement – even without any real infiltrators being involved. Both online and on the ground, we can hear breathless accusations that someone at a protest is an undercover Zionist operative, often for no reason beyond that “they make us look bad.” Zionists, constantly on the lookout for ammunition against us, gladly stoke the flames. Projects like the “Shirion Collective,” a Zionist doxing campaign that claimed on social media to be training undercover operatives, see and celebrate when the left eats its own. We must be equally vigilant against these psychological attacks, which are more subtle and yet can do more damage than any one undercover’s testimony.

 

“professionally trained to make us look bad”
– Kristina Beverlin on Isaiah Willoughby

On October 5, 2021, Isaiah Willoughby, a Black man, was sentenced to two years in prison for lighting a fire outside an abandoned police precinct in Seattle in June 2020. Willoughby acted because of the murders of Manuel Ellis, his former roommate, and George Floyd at the hands of the police.

When it happened, Kristina Beverlin, a white woman who now wears a kufiya and a “Free Palestine” hat in her profile picture, immediately blasted out a photo of Willoughby. She tweeted that he “just tried to start a fire at the abandoned precinct” and called on “everyone in Seattle to retweet the photo of this man.”

In subsequent tweets, she stated her belief that “SPD wanted the precinct to catch fire to make the peaceful protesters look bad, after SPD had looked like monsters for days.”

It was her initial tweet that appeared in a court affidavit against Willoughby, and her photo that the police disseminated to identify him. In other words, it was this white woman’s insistence that the police wanted someone to set fire to the precinct, and that anyone who did so could only have been directed by the police, that sent a Black man to prison. Like any other white vigilante, the self-deputised liberal peace police will discipline, with violence if necessary, Black or people of colour who step out of line. Unlike any other, she does it in the name of anti-racism, with an hashtag in the same breath.

Similarly, social media users widely disseminated photos of a white woman suspected to have carried out the arson of the Atlanta Wendy’s where police murdered Rayshard Brooks. That she was white was proof to them that bad actors with no connection to the movement were behind property destruction during the uprisings, and that without those bad actors, the protests would have been peaceful. As it turned out, the woman in question was Natalie White, who Brooks had called his girlfriend on the night of his death. Two Black men, Chisom Kingston and John Wesley Wade, were later charged for the Wendy’s arson as well. As of December 2023, White and Kingston had accepted plea deals for probation, a fine, and community service, while Wade was scheduled to go to trial.

In both these examples, the people who sought to identify state agents “instigating” at protests were ultimately the people who acted as cops. The gravity of these actions cannot be overstated – they, and we, already know that police kill and torture Black people on the streets, and prison guards do the same against their captives on the inside.

Following the May 2022 leak of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Jane’s Revenge shared a communiqué about the fire-bombing of a predatory anti-choice “pregnancy centre” in Madison. The action sparked the usual uproar among the right about “woke ANTIFA terrorists” waging war against Christianity. But rather than defend the action’s righteousness, much of the left instead occupied itself with speculation about whether cursive graffiti and a “too-neat” circle-A meant that it was a false flag. The underlying logic here was that if something looked “too perfect,” if it made the right too angry, it couldn’t possibly be real. We may talk of rioting against the Supreme Court, but no one seriously means it.

In response to the right-wing outrage campaign about Jane’s Revenge, the FBI offered a bounty of up to $25,000 for information. Days later, in January 2023, the US Department of Justice indicted two people for graffiti on anti-abortion centres in Florida, actions that were also broadcast through Jane’s Revenge. The Florida investigation eventually produced in a total of four arrests, all but one of the defendants being women of colour. Worse, the Florida 4 were prosecuted under the FACE Act, a law intended to protect abortion access. Meanwhile, an investigation that involved 11 different state agencies and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force culminated in the March 2023 arrest of Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury for the Madison fire-bombing. Though the right jumped at the opportunity to gloat, widely publicising the defendants’ photos and personal information, charges against Roychowdhury and the Florida 4 received little attention from the left. Roychowdhury pled guilty after being denied pre-trial release and was sentenced to 90 months (7.5 years) in federal prison on April 10, 2024. Three of the Florida 4, after taking felony pleas that avoided convictions under the FACE Act, were also handed down prison time on September 12 of this year, ranging from 30 days to 1 year and 1 day. Popular support may not have prevented those prosecutions, but the significance of solidarity shouldn’t be understated. Instead, much of the left’s message to militants turns out to have been: “we’ll call you feds, and when it turns out we were wrong, we’ll abandon you anyways.”

Though we never had our own Third Precinct moment, left networks in Ontario fell victim to many of the same conspiratorial impulses. Reposted Instagram stories warned of “suspicious piles of bricks” left as bait near march routes and even “black blocs from Montréal” coming into town to start riots.

While, regrettably, no such riot materialised here in 2020, the bad-jacketing of the black bloc has a long history in Southern Ontario, as in other regions. A particularly egregious example came in the wake of the Toronto G20 in 2010, where liberals convinced themselves that the property damage was all an inside job and set out looking for proof. They singled out a muscular white man in combat boots and “cop-like” black pants for looking suspicious, digging up every image of him they could find. All of this crowd-sourced evidence built a convenient case for the police, who arrested and jailed the target of their suspicions.

A pattern emerges: subsequent repression draws only a fraction of the concern that the broad left had earlier put into interrogating the legitimacy of an action. This is one of the most insidious functions of badjacketing and disavowal – it aids the state project of disappearing people. Speculation about false flags, made exponentially worse by social media and algorithms that egg on endless engagement, steals away energy that could be spent preparing for the repression to come. It turns actions into abstractions ripe for every person to project their own arguments. That abstraction removes militants’ humanity from the picture, enjoining us to forget that real people, putting their lives on the line for the movement, must have lit the match or thrown the brick. The collective failure to adequately show up for each defendant and prisoner in this section – and many more not named – goes beyond a culture of disposability. It is a mass forgetting that makes each of us who partakes in it complicit in the work of the police, prisons, and the carceral state to not only extinguish our resistance but also erase our memory of its very possibility – and our memory and connection to the people who’ve sacrificed to keep that possibility alive.

 

when people are occupied, resistance is justified

The movement for Palestine has long been one of the most hyper-surveiled and attacked. Only when it comes to the Palestinian struggle will even the most mild, pacifist expressions of support land someone on McCarthyist blacklists like Canary Mission, extensive repositories of personal information stretching back years. It is no wonder, then, that people are – correctly – concerned about being targeted by our enemies, which include not just the settler colonial state itself but also Zionists who self-organise outside of it.

Unfortunately, this has once again meant a dangerous resurgence of bad-jacketing. In February 2024, social media posts from the “Shirion Collective” sparked mass outrage and panic among supporters of Palestine. Announcing an “Operation Global Insight,” the posts claimed to be launching an “undercover operation” in key locations such as Toronto. “Volunteers willing to wear keffiyehs and walk [masked] in these demonstrations” would “be provided an hour long basic training by one of [their] ex-Mossad team leads.” Further, “individuals with Arabic-sounding names and Middle Eastern appearance may be uniquely positioned for deeper infiltration and will receive cash compensation for their vital role in [the] operation.”

Though the collective is, without a question, real, there is plenty of reason to believe that the reaction to the post was disproportionate to their actual abilities. Sensationalist claims of Mossad ties in an emoji-studded public tweet do not paint a picture of a sophisticated intelligence operation. Neither do their existing “exposés” on social media, which, despite techno-babble buzzwords about AI, are largely limited to reposting other people’s footage and open-source information that anyone with access to Google could easily retrieve. The description of walking around at protests and “law enforcement presence” suggests no actual knowledge of how Palestine solidarity groups organise or bring in new members. A few people with bad intentions joining a march of hundreds or thousands, where every angle is already recorded and streamed live on Instagram, can hardly be characterised as “infiltration.”

If that were not enough on its own, the White Rose Society, an anti-fascist research group, shared internal screenshots from Shirion’s Telegram channel that confirmed the post’s real purpose was to sow fear and distrust. One Shirion volunteer is quoted as saying:

We won’t need to do anything. They will:

  1. Tone down
  2. Police their own
  3. Maybe even beat up their own just because they think those are us

That summary of their goals succinctly re-states the risks that bad-jacketing poses to our movements.

Even before the Shirion scare, claims that someone was secretly a Zionist or cop were already commonplace. People who wear the symbols or fly the flags of the Palestinian resistance have been accused of being “agitators,” sent by Zionist organisations like B’nai Brith to make protestors look bad. Over-the-shoulder glimpses of someone’s phone or poor fashion choices have been presented as evidence that a protestor is actually an undercover. Online, Palestinians have been accused of being Zionist sockpuppets off of little more than bad feelings. And, naturally, even minor disagreements or political critiques will end in allegations that so-and-so is a fed. While, thankfully, conspiratorial crowds here have not at least yet handed over one of our own to the cops, these accusations are sometimes accompanied by calls to act against someone. In one case recently, a queer person of colour known to other attendees was followed, harassed, and filmed aggressively at a protest because someone had decided for no clear reason that they were a Zionist in disguise.

As the police continue to crack down on us, it is all the more crucial that we learn from the mistakes of the recent past. We cannot let our rightful vigilance lead us to attack our own comrades. Nor should we water down our political lines, our demands, or our tactics for fear that the media and the right will smear us – they do that regardless. It may not be possible to eliminate some, faint chance that an infiltrator is behind a resistance flag, a punch thrown at a Zionist, a brick through a window, but far more likely is that some brave person, who has chosen to more boldly and unabashedly confront this genocidal system and its supporters, is responsible. For that, they deserve our support and our solidarity against whatever repression may come, not our condemnation.

 

knowing our enemies

An over-emphasis on undercovers may lead to an under-emphasis on other security vulnerabilities. Rather than acting according to a one-size-fits-all checklist or, worse, reacting to threats only as they appear, it’s important to proactively identify and individually study threats in order to understand how to address them. That is to say, what – specifically – is your enemy trying to do? How do they do it? The process of answering these questions is known as threat modeling.

Accounts like Shirion, Leviathan, or StopAntisemitism are real threats, as any of their victims know all too well. But OSINT, as well as everyday acquaintances, are much likelier to be the source of their information.

Your personal Instagram or TikTok page might already give away your identity, the protests you attend, your work or school, and the identities of your friends and family members. Your employer might publicly share profiles, including photos, of all of their staff on their website. Tools like PimEyes and FaceCheck.ID allow anyone willing to pay for them to run facial recognition technology and search the Internet for a given face.

If you’re a student, a Zionist classmate could easily recognise you from criticising racism in class and look up your personal information in a school database. A right-wing former colleague could remember you for being politically outspoken at your shared workplace. Knowing the true identities of everyone at a march will do nothing to prevent doxing if, for example, that march is being streamed online, your face is exposed, and your social media is public.

 

what about the real infiltrators and provocateurs?

Infiltration – actual infiltration, where someone comes into our organisations and our lives, pretending to be our friend, only to hand information over to the state – should not be taken lightly. But our baseline understanding of it often takes the form of a few convenient tropes, reinforcing existing biases against militancy and justifying dismissiveness towards criticism. These tropes prevent us from truly knowing our enemies.

The late Matt Cicero wrote that:

[there is a] misconception that all infiltrators act as agents provocateurs who try to manipulate activists into taking illegal, violent, unpopular, and ineffective actions. But as Gary T. Marx points out in his theory of social movement infiltration, social movements are damaged by “opposing organizational, tactical, and resource mobilization tasks.” In other words, infiltrators suppress social movements by fomenting divisions and internal conflicts, diverting energies toward defending the movement rather than pursuing broader social goals, sowing misinformation or damaging reputations, obstructing the supply of resources (money, transport, meeting spaces), or sabotaging planned actions. Many infiltrators are thus better described as agents suppressants, who are there to gather intelligence and channel groups away from militant action. 

[…]Incidents of provocation can be high-profile and sensational, such as undercover police posing as members of the black bloc at Montebello. This can lead activists to paint all militant action as the work of agents provocateurs, even if there is no evidence that this is true. Conversely, because of the low-profile of most agents suppressants, activists are often unaware of their role and impact in pacifying and controlling social movements.

The spectre of the provocateur itself, then, carries out the suppressant role of “put[ting] a damper on evolving movement militancy.”

The single-minded focus on the agent provocateur often goes hand-in-hand with a short-term view of state repression as having only two main goals:

  1. Criminalising individuals in order to take them off the board while making an example out of them; and
  2. Smearing the movement in the media, stigmatising it to the public, by associating it with criminality.

But as Cicero describes, the state is additionally engaged in a long-term project of suppression and counter-insurgency. The police cannot arrest every dissident – but they don’t need to jail us all to successfully maintain the colonial order. The central goal of counter-insurgency is to preserve legitimacy and control.

To that end, some further goals of state repression include, but are not limited to:

  1. Exploiting existing tensions in the movement in order to sow discord and distrust;
  2. Defanging the movement by discouraging forms of action that exceed accepted norms of protest; and
  3. Collecting intelligence to inform repressive operations, for the purposes of criminalisation and suppression.

We should examine the issue of infiltration with all of these goals in mind. David Gilbert says, “[t]here is no simple litmus test to differentiate sincere militancy from provocation or honest caution from suppression.” The same extends to the search for infiltrators more broadly. Most of the time, the only truly conclusive proof that someone is a police infiltrator comes from seeing the evidence against you that they’ve handed over to the state after you’ve been charged. That isn’t of much help – by the time you have those court documents in your possession, the damage will already have been done. That is assuming that the information they collect ever goes to court at all. RCMP documents from the G20 suggest that there may have been as many as 12 undercover officers. Far fewer than that were ever exposed by name, and the remainders’ identities may never be known.

People who’ve experienced the profound betrayal of finding out that someone they knew was an undercover or informant often end up drawing conclusions that are diametrically opposed from one another. But a common thread persists through most of their takeaways: there are few ways to prove for certain that someone is a cop, and many ways that the hunt for infiltrators itself instead undermines our work and furthers the state’s goals.

Accordingly, we should turn our energies to proactively building a security culture that protects us from both infiltration and other security threats. Much has been written on this subject already. In short: solid security practices should mean that an undercover cop is prevented from gathering meaningful information even if we do not know who they are, and that security risks are dealt with regardless of whether an individual is specifically acting on behalf of the state. If you do everything right, a plainclothes still won’t know who among the bloc smashed that ATM, even if they saw it happen with their own eyes.

As the ever-green “Why Misogynists Make Great Informants” reminds us, many of the greatest threats to our movements may not officially collaborate with the police either. In the Toronto anti-fascist scene alone, multiple people accused of misogyny and sexual violence/gender-based violence later went on to renounce the left, consort with their former opponents, and attack (verbally, physically, and with legal threats) their former comrades. None of those people, to our knowledge, were undercover cops, nor were they secretly fascists all along. Looking for a non-existent smoking gun to show that someone was lying about their identity would – and did – only delay people from taking necessary action against them when the myriad of other red flags should have been more than enough.

 

naming our enemies

The epidemic of bad-jacketing is inseparable from the problem of peace policing. Many organisers advocate for a policy of de-escalation at all costs, even in the face of potentially deadly violence from police and Zionists. They speak of “agitators” who disrupt and “escalate” “peaceful protests” – a nebulous euphemism that they apply to both the Zionist who shows up with a knife and the militant who comes prepared to fight back.

We should be clear: our enemies are not “agitators.”

Our enemies are the police, who brutalise us and lock us away to enforce settler colonial order. Our enemies are Zionists and other white supremacists, who assault and harass us in the streets, and stalk and threaten us in our everyday lives. Our enemies are politicians and other establishment liberals, who carry out colonial and imperialist genocides, here, in Palestine, and around the world, all the while crying crocodile tears about a so-called humanitarian crisis that they created. Our enemies are legacy media institutions, who smear resistance as terrorism and mobilise support for each of these attacks.

We must take care to differentiate between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, and to distinguish between enemies and potential friends. Too often, we see organisers reject co-strugglers in order to appeal to liberal institutions that will never be on our side. They may frame the conservative path as the only strategic option, rejecting open support for armed struggle, militant direct action, and anything else that would create “bad optics.” Disagreements from co-strugglers are treated as threats worse than that of liberal media, who we must appeal to for sympathy, or Zionists and cops, who we must appease for our safety.

When our enemies attack us anyways, these organisers pin the blame not on the perpetrators but on the co-strugglers who deviate from their line. They forget that to be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing. Our enemies do not strive for unity with us, knowing that ours is an antagonistic contradiction, knowing that our collective liberation requires their annihilation. It is better that we, too, abandon any notions of conciliation and recognise our enemies as enemies.

For all these reasons, we urge people to draw a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. Abandon the euphemisms and name our enemies. When we struggle through our differences, let us do so with a shared understanding of what we are for and what we are against.

 

by every means necessary

Not only is bad-jacketing dangerous, it is disempowering and demobilising. It forecloses entire realms of possibility, insisting that we limit ourselves to the same set of legal, non-violent tactics. It threatens state violence against people who do not comply with those limitations being imposed upon their actions. Many people cannot take the risk of arrest. But something being risky does not make it impossible. Just because some of us cannot act does not mean that no one should.

While its meaning is sometimes lost, respecting a “diversity of tactics” means refusing to impose non-violence upon our co-strugglers and declining to condemn those that destroy property or take up arms. As a group of autonomous UCLA students writes in the wake of vicious assaults on their encampment:

We have noticed a trend of the desire to appear peaceful for the media taking precedent over the right of protestors to self defense, mirroring the world’s response to Palestinians’ right to self defense in the face of blatant fascist attacks and eliminationist violence.

We cannot allow our resistance movement to demand obedience over safety in the same way as western imperialist forces against the colonized.

Without drawing false equivalence with a people living under active bombardment and military invasion, the liberal urge that leads people to denounce burning precincts or fake clinics as “giving police an excuse to crack down” is the same that denounces the Palestinian resistance for “giving Israel an excuse to destroy Gaza.” We must refuse any invitation to distance ourselves as the “good,” “peaceful,” “innocent” ones. Instead, we affirm the right of Palestinians and all people to resist colonial domination by any means necessary.

We would remind our co-strugglers, too, that our enemies do not care about the truth, and they have no conscience. We see this in the viciousness with which the police enforce an unprecedented ban on overpass protests in Toronto, where people rallied on the sidewalk to wave flags and chant. We see it in the eagerness with which a long list of electeds, including the Prime Minister himself, leapt to denounce a protest of a Jewish hospital that never happened. We see it in the adamance with which Zionists call the very existence of Palestinians a terrorist threat against them, no matter how young, no matter how innocent, no matter how non-violent. Right-wing propagandists will fabricate scandals out of thin air, and the establishment will happily take up their version of the story. Even if each and every one of us swears to turn the other cheek to our assailants, as long as we challenge the colonial status quo, in our enemies’ eyes, we will never be peaceful.

Another path is possible, and the movement to Stop Cop City sets a powerful example. In February, a journalist asked spokesperson Mary Hooks of Vote to Stop Cop City whether organisers condemned arsons of police vehicles. She answered:

Hell no. No. Not at all, And to be honest with you, Atlanta deserves more than that. Real talk, they’re lucky, this city is lucky, this country is lucky. Atlanta has its hands in literally murdering Palestinians right now. You think we give a damn about some equipment? Not at all. Not at all.

But some of us, we cannot take that risk. And those who can, bless them. Bless them. I cannot take that risk. But Lord knows, I’ll sit with my lighter and be like, damn.

[…]We need every, every means necessary to deal in the police state we are dealing with. So I don’t care, no, and I would imagine my comrades would say the same. No, not gonna condemn nobody for doing righteously what they need to do when our city has silenced every quote-unquote proper, democratic process.

The movement’s aboveground and clandestine elements are two parts of a whole. Both are necessary for our victory.

 

Listen to Isaiah Willoughby speak in his own words on Kite Line Radio:

kitelineradio.org/tag/isaiah-willoughby/

 

Support defendants and prisoners from the George Floyd Uprisings:

uprisingsupport.org

 

Contribute to the Florida 4’s commissary and find other ways to support through the Anti-Repression Committee of South Florida:

linktr.ee/sfl_arc

 

more on peace policing

“ACAB Includes Peace Police: Three Report Backs from Palestinian Solidarity Actions” (November 2023) on Archive.org, online at archive.org/details/acab-includes-peace-police-en-print-8/page/2/mode/2up

“Peace Police are Police: How Protest Marshals Sabotage Liberation and Protect the State” (December 2023) on North Shore Counter-Info, online at north-shore.info/2024/03/11/peace-police-are-police-new-zine-classic-image/

 

more on security

“Confidence. Courage. Connect. Trust. A proposal for security culture” (November 5, 2019) on North Shore Counter-Info, online at north-shore.info/2019/11/05/confidence-courage-connection-trust-a-proposal-for-security-culture/

“Doxcare: Prevention and Aftercare for Those Targeted by Doxxing and Political Harassment” (August 26, 2020) on CrimethInc., online at crimethinc.com/2020/08/26/doxcare-prevention-and-aftercare-for-those-targeted-by-doxxing-and-political-harassment

The Threat Library by the No Trace Project, online at notrace.how/threat-library/

“Threat Modeling Fundamentals” by Håkan Geijer on Riot Medicine, online at opsec.riotmedicine.net

 

more on infiltration

Fuck the (Hamilton) Police, online at fuckhps.noblogs.org

“Infiltrated! How to prevent political police from undermining grassroots solidarity” (May 1, 2017) in Briarpatch Magazine, online at briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/infiltrated

“Living among us: Activists speak out on police infiltration” (July 1, 2011) by Tim Groves, online at briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/living-among-us

“Stop Hunting Sheep: A Guide to Creating Safer Networks” (2011) on Sprout Distro, online at sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/security/stop-hunting-sheep/

“The G20 Main Conspiracy Group: The Charges and How They Came to Be” (2012) on the No Trace Project, online at notrace.how/resources/#toronto-g20-main-conspiracy-group

“Why Misogynists Make Great Informants” (Spring/Summer 2010) by Courtney Desiree Morris on Incite! National, online at incite-national.org/2010/07/15/why-misogynists-make-great-informants-how-gender-violence-on-the-left-enables-state-violence-in-radical-movements/

What I Did On My Summer Vacation: Report Backs From the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair And The ACAT International Gathering In Hambach Forest

Submission

Discussion on internationalism, the role American anarchists can play in borderless insurrection and the growing threat of global conflict.
Oct 14 @ O.R.C.A. 6pm
https://orcaphilly.noblogs.org/events/event/what-i-did-on-my-summer-vacation-report-backs-from-the-balkan-anarchist-bookfair-and-the-acat-international-gathering-in-hambach-forest/
O.R.C.A
Anarchist Social Space in Philly
https://orcaphilly.noblogs.org/

In Contempt #45: Florida Four Sentenced, Casey on Hunger-Strike, Repression of Palestine Protesters

from It’s Going Down

[This post only contains information relevant to Philadelphia and the surrounding area, to read the entire article follow the above link.]
In this column, we present our monthly roundup of political prisoner, prison rebel, and repression news, happenings, announcements, action and analysis. Packed in as always are updates, fundraisers, and birthdays.

There’s a lot happening, so let’s dive right in!

Running Down The Walls

September saw Running/Pushing Down the Walls events in solidarity with political prisoners held in Mexico City, Olympia, WA, Portland and Eugene, OR, Los Angeles and Huntington Park, CA, Chicago, IL, Philadelphia, PA, Bloomington, IN, Lowell, MA, Brooklyn, NY, and Bristol, UK. Collectively, over 40K was raised for political prisoners and the Anarchist Black Cross warchest.

 

Group photo from Running Down the Walls in Philadelphia, PA

Unicorn Riot have also produced a video from the Philadelphia event.

Upcoming Events

A Curbfest event in support of political prisoners will be held in Philadelphia on October 5th.

Further ahead, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak are still calling for people to organize Shut ‘Em Down demonstrations and actions during the week of December 6th-13th.

Political Prisoner News

 


Events have been held in NYC and Philadelphia for I Am Maroon, the new book about Russell Maroon Shoatz.

Vaughn 17

There’s a call for someone based in the Delaware area to get involved in organizing the campaign to free Dwayne “BIM” Staats of the Vaughn 17. BIM recently took part in a Black August event where he was able to speak to audiences in Albuquerque and San Francisco about the urgent need to free Joseph “Joe Joe” Bowen and all political prisoners. His codefendant Jarreau “Ruk” Ayers recently shared some comments on the execution of Marcellus Williams, and Alejandro “Capo” Rodriguez Ortiz has published a new poem and a short audio message on the legacy of the Vaughn 17.

Uprising Defendants

See Uprising Support for more info, and check out the Antirepression PDX site for updates from Portland cases. To the best of our knowledge they currently include:

David Elmakayes 77782-066
FCI McKean
Federal Correctional Institution
P.O. Box 8000
Bradford, PA 16701

Khalif Miller #70042-066
USP Big Sandy
U.S. Penitentiary
P.O. Box 2068
Inez, KY 41224

 

Sabotage at Bartram’s Area Construction Site

Submission

One night not too long ago we hit the construction site beside the Grays Ferry bridge. We tore out surveying stakes and smashed the windows on one of the machines that’s turning another of Philly’s wild spots into an ugly ass dirt pile. We get off on frequent, diverse acts of sabotage that target the state’s compulsive war on wildness. Stay wet and wild!
-a feral band of saboteurs

Palestiniana Prisoner Letter Writing Night

from Making Worlds Books

ADVANCE REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED

Join us for a night of revolutionary education and communication as we learn about, and reach out to, some of the 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in Zionist dungeons. We’ll talk about conditions in the prison, prisoner organization and resistance and what we can do to get their voices outside of the prison walls. Organized by Philly WAWOG and Samidoun.

Laura Martin is a labor historian and a member of Philly WAWOG and the Bay Area Anti-Repression Committee, a bail fund and political education collective.

Abu Ali is a coordinator with the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity network, an international organization that supports and uplifts Palestinian political prisoners

  • Thursday, October 10, 2024
  • 6:00 PM 7:30 PM

Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States 

Aramark Concession Workers Strike at Philly Sports Complex

from Unicorn Riot

Philadelphia, PA — The unionized workforce that handles concessions at the South Philadelphia Sports Complex started to strike on Monday, September 23. Hundreds of Aramark stadium workers that bargain with the UNITE HERE Philly Local 274 union are demanding new contracts.

Unicorn Riot was told that Aramark, which is headquartered in Center City Philadelphia with a market capitalization value of $9.8 billion, has tried to prevent the unionized workers from qualifying for healthcare plans by dividing their hours between the three stadiums – Citizens Bank Park, Lincoln Financial Field and the Wells Fargo Center. (In a statement to NBC10 Aramark claimed it has now offered to count all stadium hours towards health coverage in a new contract.)

“Our contracts have all expired in all three buildings so we’re trying to consolidate the work. So, three different buildings doing the same job, you get different pay rates now. We want it to be the same pay rate. So if you’re a cook, a cook, a cook [at those locations] you get the same pay. It’s not like that. We want the hours to count from all three buildings to qualify people for health care. Right now they keep the hours separate.”

Kathy Hazel, Aramark concessions worker at Wells Fargo Center for 24+ years

“We might have worked all three buildings in a week, we still get one check from Aramark. But we get three different wages, that’s the issue here. […] They don’t want to agree to benefits like PTO. I understand it’s a ‘part time’ in one building, but when you’re in all three buildings you’re working like full time, you’re getting full time hours… but they’re still trying to treat us as if we are part time.”

Tarell ‘Doe’ Martin, Aramark concessions worker

On Sept. 24, outside a Phillies baseball game, union members called on fans to avoid purchasing food, drink and clothing inside the stadium, to pressure the company to negotiate a better deal. Aramark touts that “total income inclusive of wages and tips for this group of employees have risen 61% over the past five years,” while we heard from the workers that this is disingenuous because the tips have come from the public, not their employer. For an hourly cost of living increase, Aramark offered fifty cents a year, then another ten cents on top of that a year,

Many of the Aramark workers are not tipped at all, so they want to improve their base pay and benefits. “I noticed that they did not thank the Philadelphia fans for helping pay the salaries of their workers,” said picketing union member Kathy Hazel. “They don’t get any credit for any money I get from tips. […] There’s a lot of workers that are not tipped workers. And we’re here to support them, so that the hourly workers get an increase. They’re not getting tips, and we stick together.”

Down the street, independent vendors offered pretzels with notes on their carts saying that Aramark was on strike. Anthony Oliver with the striking Aramark workers pointed out that once again the ‘Counter Terrorism’ unit of the Philadelphia Police has turned up at Aramark labor protests. Forty-five Aramark workers were arrested in June by a force that included the same type of police we saw outside the recent presidential debate with ‘Counter Terrorism’ markings. Outside a Biden fundraiser last December, one officer on that team told Unicorn Riot that they are always deployed to protests but declined to name the specific policy which enables this.

UNITE HERE Philly Local 274 represents about 4000 private sector hotel and food service workers throughout the Philadelphia region, according to their website.


Aramark Notorious in Prison Food World

Prison labor is “remarkably common within the food system,” according to the Hunter College New York City Food Policy Center, and Aramark is at the heart of this game: it is notorious for its role in the food side of the prison-industrial complex. Its subsidiary Aramark Correctional Services provides services to hundreds of U.S. prisons and jails, privatized Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails operated by CoreCivic, along with contracts in at least 35 states, according to an investigation by American Friends Service Committee. It has long been notorious for substandard, contaminated and undercooked food.

Aramark investors benefit from prison labor used to prepare and package food in some prisons under the In2Work program. Students at Barnard College, New York University and Ireland’s Trinity College successfully got Aramark campus contracts cancelled. Georgetown University has been another site of pressure against Aramark both because of its prison labor and over on-campus workers’ contract in March.

In its corrections FAQ, Aramark says it’s in this business because “all people deserve healthy, nutritious meals.” A September 2023 Prison Journalism Project report by Justin Slavinski, “Meet the Company Getting Rich Off My Prison’s Awful Food,” described how the “100-or-so” residents in a Florida penitentiary who cook and clean are “wholly unpaid,” slashing Aramark’s labor costs to a small fraction of what legal employees would cost. Jail inmates have pushed for wages, and a prison strike protested Aramark.


Stadiums a Hot Issue in Philly

This isn’t the only major political issue with the stadiums and sports construction in the city. The 76ers professional basketball team is seeking to move away from the Sports Complex and into Center City in 2031, by demolishing part of the Fashion District mall and building a $1.55 billion new sports arena site called “76Place” which is said to include 395 residential units.

This plan is opposed by many people involved with the Chinatown neighborhood a block away. “Save Chinatown” supporters argue that the 76Place project will displace and damage their neighborhood. Nonetheless, on September 18 first-term mayor Cherelle Parker announced her administration reached an agreement to move the Center City arena forward. On Sept. 25, the mayor announced more details in a community meeting, while further protests are expected.

Earlier this month, we heard from local activists trying to “ban artificial turf installation on city property including parks and recreation centers,” specifically in a huge set of proposed soccer fields at the large FDR Park which is directly west of the Sports Complex. (The FDR Park construction project has attracted opposition and protests since 2022.)

Another corporate giant in the city, Comcast, has its own designs on the Sports Complex. In February, Comcast Spectacor unveiled a $2.5 billion multi-phase master plan. Some observers suspect that Comcast will once again fleece the public coffers and obtain a development subsidy, like the tens of millions it obtained for the construction of their Center City skyscraper, along with tax breaks.

Philadelphia will be hosting six games at an upcoming FIFA World Cup in the Lincoln Financial Center, which runs during June-July 2026. FIFA scandals may have affected Philadelphia’s earlier bid in 2015. The push for this bid started in 2016. The city got up to $10 million in aid for the FIFA event from the state legislature via House Bill 1300 which was signed by Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro on December. In 2021 the city pitched using FDR Park for practice fields; however, as we heard at the PFAS protest, FIFA does not host World Cup games on artificial turf, so all 2026 matches will need to be on natural grass.

Running Down the Walls 2024 Recap

[This post only contains information relevant to Philadelphia and the surrounding area, to read the entire article follow the above link.]
What follows are recaps from many of the runs that took place on September 15, 2024. This was the 25th anniversary of Running Down the Walls. Since 1999, prisoners and supporters throughout North America have participated in this annual event, often running or walking simultaneously in many cities and prisons at once. As reportbacks come in, they will be posted here. Read more about Running Down the Walls and the ABCF Warchest.

If you missed the chance to donate, you still can via these links:
https://fundrazr.com/RDTW2024ABCF
https://fundrazr.com/supportpdtw24
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/nycabc

Philly

Philly ABC held 2024 RDTW on Sunday, September 15th in solidarity with Palestinians resisting genocide. Philly ABC’s RDTW cleared 400 participants: 2 from inside prison and 398 outside plus multiple dogs and a kitten. People rolled in wheelchairs, bikes, and roller skates aswell as participating on foot. A Samidoun member joined us to speak about their important work supporting political prisoners in Palestine.

In addition to our very popular main shirt design by Sugarbombing, wemade two limited edition shirts in solidarity with Gaza and commemorating 25 years of RDTW. We are selling the last of the stock on our website at phillyabc.org/merch/, with the proceeds going towardsthe ABCF Warchest/Gaza mutual aid split.

Due to ongoing shirt sales, our total funds raised is still growing. Wealso are working with two matching donors to maximize the impact, which should help us clear over $40,000 in total. We will post the full reportback with details to phillyabc.org in November.