“Philadelphia Three” Political Prisoner Khalif Miller Languishes Pre-Trial in Federal Prison

  • August 31, 2022 1:03 am

from Unicorn Riot

By Niko Georgiades and Dan Feidt, Unicorn Riot August 30, 2022

Philadelphia, PA – Federal inmate in the Bureau of Prisons, Khalif Miller, says his rights are being violated while in prison awaiting trial on federal arson charges from the 2020 anti-police uprisings. Miller said he hadn’t had an attorney visit for his first 19 months incarcerated, that he was stabbed 10 times and almost killed in an attack, and has caught COVID-19 twice in prison while awaiting trial as part of a what he says was political targeting by former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain.

Miller was arrested on October 28, 2020, and charged along with three others, Carlos Matchett of Atlantic City and Anthony Smith, a prominent activist, for allegedly throwing flaming materials into a police car near Philadelphia’s City Hall on May 30, 2020, during the George Floyd Uprising.

Miller has dubbed them the “Philadelphia Three” and the federal government say they conspired together to burn the cop car. Yet, Miller said he’s never even “met nor spoken” to the other co-defendants of the alleged conspiracy and said he was simply taking a picture from atop the police car when it was set aflame.

“The same photo that should’ve set me free, the federal government used to create an elaborate plot in which I have become a political prisoner that I’ve termed the “PHILADELPHIA THREE”, because there are two other people that I’ve never met nor spoken with who the federal government has roped together and charged us with arson and conspiracy all in their endless effort to dismantle and alter the progress of the “BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT.”

Khalif Miller

Miller wrote to Unicorn Riot from his prison cell and called for support by sharing his story, writing him, and donating for legal support (full letter below with address). Miller is one of over 300 people across the United States who were federally charged during the height of the anti-police and anti-racist uprising of mid 2020. (This wave of prosecutions contradicts claims by supporters of January 6 riot defendants, who often falsely claim the government has declined to serious prosecute nearly anyone for rioting in 2020.)

Miller, a father and business owner, was only 25 years old when he was arrested.

Khalif Miller in 2016 (L, M) and 2018 – via social media

The Philadelphia Three were indicted (pdf) on October 20, 2020, after a grand jury charged them with obstruction of law enforcement during a civil disorder and two counts of arson. If convicted, they face a mandatory minimum of seven years in prison with a maximum of 65 years, with three years of supervised release and a fine of up to $750,000.

Guilty Plea, Arson Charges Dropped, and Sentencing for Woman Who Set Police Cars on Fire

After the massive uprisings against anti-Blackness and police terror across the country in 2020, dozens of cities were left with millions of dollars in property damage. The federal government then levied arson charges and a rare 1960s vintage civil disorder charge in attempts to punish protesters with long federal prison sentences. For more on the recent use of civil disorder charges, see our 2020 report on an Illinois man charged with civil disorder by the feds for participating in the uprising in Minneapolis.

In Philadelphia, there were several other high-profile arson cases from activity on May 30, 2020. Directly related to the Philadelphia Three was the case of Lore Elisabeth Blumenthal, a 32-year-old white massage therapist. Wearing a bandana over her face along with goggles, Blumenthal was seen in photographs throwing flaming material toward a police car. Authorities traced the t-shirt she was wearing to an Etsy review and arrested Blumenthal within days.

Image of Lore Blumenthal with flaming material directed toward a police car – Khalif Miller is seen standing on a police car in the distance – image taken on May 30, 2020 – source: U.S. District Court

In March 2022, Blumenthal pled guilty to two counts of interfering with law enforcement officers during a civil disorder in connection with what the feds state was “arson of two” police vehicles, the same vehicles the Philadelphia Three are charged for. Her arson charges were dropped in the plea deal. She was subsequently sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.

In a key photograph, Miller is visible in the background standing on the police car, while Blumenthal is the right foreground with the flaming material in her hand. Miller is being charged with arson for the vehicles, yet, he maintains his innocence:

“As the protest started to take a turn, I was taking photos when suddenly mid-photo chaos erupted and the car that I was standing on (a government official vehicle) erupted into flames as it was firebombed. Eventually every vehicle in the area received the same fate.”

Khalif Miller letter to Unicorn Riot

From Coast to Coast: Open Letter by Anarchist Prisoner Toby Shone

  • August 27, 2022 1:21 am

from Philly ABC

toby-shone-statement.jpg

I’ve previously written about the need to recreate an Atlantic bridge, based on international revolutionary solidarity and reciprocal knowledge, that moves towards affinity and direct action in support of our imprisoned comrades. Since then, I was recently visited by a comrade from Anarchist Black Cross Philadelphia here at the G4S facility in which I’m held. G4S is originally an American company, Wackenhut, which has pioneered the private prison and security industry all over the world. As part of our discussion between the comrade from ABC Philadelphia and myself, we spoke of the need to prevent our groups and commons becoming inward-looking and closing in on themselves in microscopic scenes and myopia. The anglophone world is particularly susceptible to this trend, although it is not solely confined to English-speaking territories. How can we translate rhetoric into practical activity? Words and deeds must coincide, and that is what?

For too long, a kind of one-way discourse has been in effect, breached by too few valiant individuals and groups. We can speak of a loss of solidarity flowing across the Atlantic between north and south, east and west. Without wanting to advocate any kind of anarcho-tourism or the colonial approach of the wholesale export-import political programs of the activist left, I’m in favor of strengthening our international networks in the face of an increased technocratic authoritarianism. To remain locked up in our local areas without considering the struggles elsewhere is self-defeating, as repressive operations seek to confine us and stem our anarchic contagion specifically to promote sterility. Can we renew an Atlantic bridge that connects our tendencies, that connects the uprisings in the North American metropolises to those in Europe, Latin America and Asia? Can we join together the struggles of the long-term COINTELPRO prisoners with those elsewhere in the global prison industrial complex?

As a very basic contribution with the small means I have, I’ll join the Running Down The Walls 5K run event organized by the comrades of the American chapters of the ABC, called for September the 11th-18th this year, during the time I have out of my cell on the yard or the gym. This event aims to create a sense of togetherness through athletics. Keeping our fitness and health is important outside, and money raised by the event will supply funds to the ABC Warchest.

The real challenge is to enable an evolution in self-organization, osmosis, decentralization and cooperation; critical and practical action. As a first principle and minimum start, we can mention the exchange of letters and postcards that break the isolation of the prison walls and national borders that separate us. Since I am forbidden a large part my correspondence, and especially that of political content, it is fair to say that this constitutes meaningful solidarity of a certain type. Then there is the collation and publication of the letters and updates of our imprisoned comrades, and the incendiary dialogues which are always breaking out and multiplying as written about by comrades Alfredo, Gabriel, and Gustavo. This dialogue between inside and outside is very important. We need to cut through the bars which divide us all to support our hunger strikes, to identify structures of repression, to raise funds, to carry out campaigns, to hold events and give a helping hand to those next to our side even though an ocean may seem to separate us. I hope certain comrades can forgive me for laboring the topic as I’m positive everything I’ve written about already exists to varying degrees over several territories, but I’m aware of the need occasionally to reiterate key aspects of our practices to spread them and create new connections.

Let your voices be heard in protest from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Maine to Mexico. Serve notice upon the murderous capitalistic class that you will not again stand idly by and see your brothers made victims because they so will it, and they will dare not do it!

– Lucy Parsons, The Proposed Slaughter, 1905

Everyone to the streets,
Toby Shone
19 August 2022

Construction equipment vandalized in part of FDR Park

  • August 27, 2022 1:17 am

from Mainstream Media

It was an act of vandalism and destruction in South Philadelphia’s FDR Park, where a revitalization project is underway.

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — It was an act of vandalism and destruction in South Philadelphia’s FDR Park, where a revitalization project is underway.

Police say this happened near the golf course.

A total of six pieces of equipment were ruined sometime between Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

Crews say wires were also cut and sugar was put in the diesel tanks.

New equipment is now on site so construction crews can resume operations.

Defend the Meadow Graffiti on Bulldozer

  • August 23, 2022 1:32 am

from Twitter

Looks like other people think the city’s plan to destroy the meadows is garbage. 🔥🔥🔥

Solidarity from the PHL FDR Meadows

  • August 23, 2022 1:24 am

from Scenes from the Atlanta Forest

Banners went up in the trees in South Philly’s FDR Meadows, where nearly 200 acres of wetlands and meadows, which serve as habitat for endangered migrating monarch butterflies and many other species of wildlife, are threatened by the city’s plans to bury the earth in astroturf for more sports fields and other capitalist ventures. Public outcry in Philadelphia has already forced the city to compromise on their original plans, but we will accept no compromise in defense of the meadows and monarchs. Solidarity from Philadelphia to Atlanta. We live here.

A banner in a tree reads "PHL to ATL, WE LIVE HERE" with a monarch butterfly in the middle.

A close-up picture of a banner in a tree reads "PHL to ATL, WE LIVE HERE" with a monarch butterfly in the middle.

Philly Anarchy Fair Schedule

  • August 23, 2022 1:18 am

Submission


Anathema Volume 8 Issue 1

  • August 22, 2022 1:34 am

from Anathema

Volume 8 Issue 1 (PDF for reading 8.5×11)

Volume 8 Issue 1 (PDF for printing (11×17)

In this issue:

  • Land & Freedom
  • Munich Raid
  • The Electrification of the World
  • On Hopelessness
  • Situational Awareness
  • Jane’s Revenge
  • The Facts of Art

August Free Market Postponed

  • August 21, 2022 1:40 am

from Instagram

Our Next RRFM for August will be post-poned due to team availability. We post a new date soon for September. We are also planning an interest meeting for folks that want to collaborate. Stay tuned!

Federal judge questions push to imprison trans activist found with a Molotov cocktail at 2020 protest

  • August 20, 2022 1:47 am

from Mainstream Media

A federal judge on Thursday questioned prosecutors’ push to imprison a trans activist who was arrested after a New Year’s Eve 2020 protest outside the Federal Detention Center in Center City.

Philadelphia police officers found Josie Robotin, 26, of Willow Grove, carrying a backpack filled with what they described as a Molotov cocktail, several firecrackers, lighters, and a container filled with flammable liquid near the demonstration, which had been organized to protest for the rights of trans prisoners.

She was federally charged with possession of an unregistered destructive device and later pleaded guilty to that crime.

But at her sentencing hearing Thursday, U.S. District Judge John R. Padova credited her story that she brought the incendiaries not to use at the protest but rather for a bonfire she and her friends planned to attend later that night to celebrate the New Year’s holiday.

He sentenced her to a day in prison — or time served — far less than the two years prosecutors were seeking.

“Isn’t it fair to say we have a defendant who was engaged at the time in a fair exercise of freedom of speech?” the judge asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Vineet Gauri before announcing his decision. He wondered aloud whether Robotin and her crime were “the time, the place, the person to make an example of.”

Robotin’s sentence is only the latest in a string of cases arising from the 2020 protest movement in Philadelphia in which federal judges have imposed sentences far less punitive than those sought by the government.

Last month, Lore-Elisabeth Blumenthal, a Philadelphia-area massage therapist, was sentenced to 2½ years in prison for setting police cars ablaze during protests over the police killing of George Floyd. The government had asked for four.

That same month, another defendant charged with torching police cars during the demonstration — Ayoub Tabri, 25, of Arlington, Va. — received a prison sentence of 364 days. Prosecutors had pushed for three to four years.

But Padova was the first judge in those cases to explicitly question whether the Justice Department’s stance was overly harsh toward the defendant exercising their right to protest.

He noted prosecutors had presented no evidence that Robotin had planned to commit any crime with the incendiary device in her backpack.

Gauri, the prosecutor, stressed that Robotin had pleaded guilty and stressed that the Molotov cocktail she was carrying could very well have proved more dangerous than a gun.

“This is a destructive device,” he said. “It’s designed to inflict serious injury and casualties. It’s not designed for bonfires and parties.”

But ultimately, Gauri offered little pushback, acknowledging that the Justice Department had taken a “holistic view” of protest cases around the country when deciding on sentencing recommendations for the Philadelphia defendants.

In all, former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain charged six people with federal arson charges tied to the 2020 demonstrations, vowing to pursue the mandatory minimum sentence of at least seven years in each case — part of a wider Trump-era Justice Department strategy to crack down on property destruction tied to the protests.

But since Trump and McSwain left office, prosecutors have extended deals to many of the defendants, offering to drop the arson count if they pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder. That crime is punishable by up to five years.

In Robotin’s case, she hadn’t been charged with arson or accused of starting a fire, her attorney Marni Jo Snyder noted Thursday.

“My client was participating in the exercise of freedom of speech in the right way,” she said, adding later: “No one at that protest at the FDC tried to set anything on fire.”

Still, Robotin was arrested on Dec. 31, 2020, along with six others as part of what Philadelphia police described at the time as a “large group of 40 to 50 unruly antifa protesters” who broke windows and spray-painted buildings on the streets around the detention center.

The crowd set off fireworks, painted buildings with slogans such as “ACAB” — an abbreviation for All Cops Are Bastards — and smashed a Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office vehicle parked nearby.

But police investigators later walked back their claim that those charged had direct ties to antifa — a loose network of far-left groups often accused of an array of antigovernment misdeeds — saying instead that the vandalism and destruction that night appeared antifa-inspired.

Addressing the judge Thursday, Snyder sought to separate Robotin from the vandals. Aside from the unused incendiary device Robotin was carrying, the lawyer noted, prosecutors had presented no evidence that she had been involved in any of the other crimes that occurred after the protest.

Robotin, meanwhile, said the events of 2020 — from the pandemic to Floyd’s death, to a rise in bias-related crimes — had served as a “powder keg” that prompted her presence at the protest outside the FDC that night.

Still, she told the judge, she was not trying to minimize the crime to which she had pleaded guilty.

“My intention was to hand out firecrackers to partygoers [at the planned bonfire later that night] and to use what was described in the report as an incendiary device to light logs that would not light on fire on their own,” she said. “In hindsight, I can see how alarming that would be [for officers] to find.”

When it came time to impose his time-served sentence, Padova said he’d been persuaded that Robotin had learned her lesson and that he was impressed by her record of activism and volunteering in the trans community.

He responded: “I know that you don’t believe you’re being blessed for that criminal conduct. You have pleaded guilty to a very serious crime. Fortunately, no one was hurt.”

Of the seven protesters arrested that night, only Robotin was charged with a federal crime. The others faced state charges. Their cases have all since been dismissed, withdrawn, or resolved in plea deals resulting in only a court-imposed fine.

LORE IS FREE!

  • August 19, 2022 1:42 am

from We Love Lore

A message from Lore:

It’s Lore here! I am out of prison and safely in the arms of family! Thank you all for your two+ years of urgent work and generous donations that all built up to my liberation! These efforts sustained myself and my peers in FDC. You filled my heart, my hands, and kept my mind free.

I look forward to bringing you all in for continued support of the disproportionately affected Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people and parents incarcerated right now. If you can, please continue donating to my commissary drive, and keep your attention and action focused here for upcoming ways you can support those on the inside. Your sweet support in the future will swell my big dreams for those who remain stolen. Thank you all for being a light for punished people who need love, healing, accountability and liberation most of all.

Please stay in touch with me here and on email (freelore [at] protonmail [dot] com), if you have ever written to me please send me your address again, I’m excited to stay in touch!

We’ve got this!

Call to Action to Defend the Meadows! Stop A.P. Construction!

  • August 9, 2022 1:19 am
Submission

“DEFEND THE MEADOWS! A. P. Construction INC. has been given a permit by the City of Philadelphia to Destroy and Gentrify over 100+ Acres of Lenni-Lenape Land at so called “FDR” Park in South Philly.
The Lenni-Lenape name for the unceded area is “Pahsayunk” and “Chingsessing”  Pahsayunk translates to ” A place between the hills.” Chingsessing translates to “A place where there is a Meadow”.
The Proposed $20+ million dollar development would devastate and privatize the unceded Autonomous land with plastic “Astro-Turf” sports fields and over-priced shops.
This would ruin the habitat and life of thousands of sacred animals, trees, mushrooms, plants, and insects such as the endangered Monarch Butterfly!
For all life we must stop this and all Ecocidal development by any means necessary!
Please take Direct Action and contact A. P. Construction Inc. to demand that owners and the management drop the contract and cancel the “1954 Pattison Ave.” development.
A. P. Contruction Inc. – Philadelphia Office –  Phone Number: *67 (215) 922-2323 – Address: Navy Yard Corporate Center, 1 Crescent Drive, Suite 104, Philadelphia, PA 19122
Main Office in New Jersey – Phone Number: *67 (856)227-2030 –  Address: 915 S Black Horse Pike, Blackwood, NJ08012
Send an anonymous email to: Mailbox@APConstruction.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/apconstructioninc
Instagram: @APConstructionInc
Twitter:@APConstruction_

August Reading: Anarchy & Strategy

  • August 7, 2022 1:36 am

from Viscera

Join us Sunday, August 14th from 1-3 for our next reading discussion. We’ll be talking about “Anarchy & Strategy,” an essay by Aragorn! originally published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed (AJODA).

An anarchist strategy is not a strategy about how to make a capitalist or statist society less authoritarian or spectacular. It assumes that we cannot have an anarchist society while the state or capitalism continues to reign.

You can find the reading here.

As usual, this discussion will be held outdoors at Clark Park – we’ll be meeting, as usual, near the chess tables (look for the disreputable-looking people mostly dressed in black who aren’t playing bocce).

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072

  • August 6, 2022 1:54 am

from Making Worlds Books

Making Worlds Book Reading and Discussion: Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 [Philadelphia launch]

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world’s governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.

Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people’s efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

Registration required, click here.

About the Author

M. E. O’Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She coedits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, and Turkish. Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements. You can support her writing through patreon.com/meobrien, and find her on twitter @genderhorizon. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 is her first book.

[Saturday, August 13, 2022 6:00 PM 7:30 PM Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States (map)]

Judge orders encampment at University City Townhomes to be dismantled Monday

  • August 6, 2022 1:53 am

from mainstream media

“The encampment is trespassing on private property,” the judge said.

Signs erected outside of the University City Townhomes in Phila., Pa. where an encampment and protest has been ordered to end.
Signs erected outside of the University City Townhomes in Phila., Pa. where an encampment and protest has been ordered to end.ELIZABETH ROBERTSON / Staff Photographer

A judge has ordered that the protest encampment at University City Townhomes in West Philadelphia be cleared out by 9 a.m. Monday.

“The encampment is trespassing on private property and I have ordered it to be dismantled” by the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office, Common Pleas Court Judge Joshua Roberts said during a hearing held via Zoom on Thursday afternoon.

The encampment, a mix of tenants and supporters, was formed with around 15 tents and a border of wooden pallets on the sidewalk nearly a month ago in response to the efforts by IBID Associates, owners of the townhomes, to sell the property for redevelopment.

Calling the judge’s ruling “absurd b.s.,” townhomes resident Krystal Young, 28, said Thursday night that people of the encampment have decided they will resist any attempt to break it up.

“We are gonna stand up and defend ourselves,” she said, without elaborating.

Darlene Foreman, 60, a member of the People’s Townhomes Residents Council, an encampment leadership group, concurred with Young.

“We are gonna do what we need to do, the best way we can,” she said. Asked to explain, Foreman said: “I can’t give you all the secrets.”

The 2.7-acre affordable-housing complex sits at 40th and Market Streets. As many as 69 primarily Black and Hispanic families are set to be displaced.

On July 22, Roberts issued the original order saying the encampment would have to be disbanded.

News of the Monday clear-out didn’t surprise people at the encampment, who had expected this outcome.

That didn’t make the judge’s order any easier to accept.

“This process is turning us upside down,” said Foreman, one of two townhomes residents who spoke during the court proceeding. “We feel disrespected. We could wind up living in some of the tents.”

A statement from IBID last month called the encampment “an unfortunate and ill-advised decision.” Those who gathered there had “no legal right to assemble,” it said.

In an unusual back-and-forth during the hearing between Roberts and attorney Daniel McElhatton, who represents IBID, McElhatton referenced the clear-out, and strongly suggested to the judge that anyone refusing the order to vacate should be “taken into custody.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Roberts responded.

“How about putting them on a bus and sending them to Baltimore?” McElhatton said.

Roberts didn’t respond directly to the remark. But he said: “Everyone is going to be asked to leave. No one will be detained.”

McElhatton didn’t respond to requests for comment.

IBID has owned and operated the townhomes for 40 years.

In 1982, the federal government agreed to make housing-assistance payments to IBID in exchange for IBID’s development and leasing of dwelling units on the property at subsidized rents, according to court records.

Once the 20-year term expired in July, IBID had a choice to renew its contract with HUD or opt out of the housing-assistance program.

In statements and conversations, people participating in the protest encampment have said that they wish to remain in the fast-gentrifying neighborhood, and that they’d be uncomfortable if compelled to relocate to areas outside West Philadelphia.

Tenants will be given housing vouchers, but they fear landlords won’t take the vouchers and they won’t be able to find affordable housing because of an ongoing shortage.

The townhomes are in the Black Bottom neighborhood, a historically Black neighborhood.

The property has long been zoned for commercial mixed use, which allows for high-density commercial office, research and development, and residential uses, court records show.

“Unfortunately, the owners are entitled to sell the property or do with it as they wish,” said Dennis Culhane, professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania and a national expert on homelessness.

“However, it’ll mean a net decline in low-income units.”

The program that the federal government used to offer favorable terms to IBID in exchange for making affordable housing available doesn’t exist in the same form that it did decades ago, Culhane said.

Because the government no longer makes these deals, there isn’t a pipeline of low-cost housing for people who need it.

“We have an affordable-housing shortage in this city,” Culhane noted.

Phone Zap for Vaughn 17 Prisoner John Bramble

  • August 5, 2022 1:36 am

from Twitter

URGENT: #V17 prisoner John Bramble is being retaliated against in Delaware and needs our help getting moved out of state. Please call in today, tomorrow, and any time next week!

Johnny is on Day 3 of fasting for #BlackAugust. Last time he went on an official hunger strike to protest retaliation in Delaware, they wrote him up for every meal he missed, for causing a “health, safety and fire hazard” and “failing to obey an order.”

Johnny is an anti-racist prison rebel who was indicted for alleged participation in the 2017 uprising at the same facility he is currently housed in. For more information about the #Vaughn17, see vaughn17.com and itsgoingdown.org/united-we-s…

Please send any info you receive when you call or questions about the phone zap to phlbailfund@riseup.net.