Tag Archives: the final straw

The Mumia Law

Have you heard about the new law passed in Pennsylvania? Super-fascist Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett recently signed a law that potentially eliminates prisoner public speech. This comes on the heals of Mumia Abu-Jamal giving a commencement address at a college he attended.
On the one day of the year that the U.S. didn’t start a new war, Mumia became a news story and Maureen Faulkner heard about Mumia’s commencememt address on the radio. Faulkner is the widow of the Philadelphia cop who shot Mumia in the chest and then forgot how to duck. She claims that hearing about Mumia is just TOO PAINFUL and she needs Pennsylvania to pass a law and shut up Mumia so she won’t have to hear about him.
Yeah. No kidding. And so far, no one in Pennsylvania is smart enough to realize it’s cheaper to hire someone to teach Frootloop Faulkner to change the channel on her radio. Instead they pass a law to silence Mumia and even call it “The Mumia Law.” Well, unless that’s TOO PAINFUL for Faulkner. She may have to get another law passed to prevent Pennsylvania lawmakers from calling this The Mumia Law and make them refer to him as “The M-word,” not to be confused with the “N-word,” which the judge used several times in Mumia’s trial. Continue reading →

Jwow Speaks

The Final Straw gave Governor Jwow equal time after Sean Swain’s statements about his campaign for Ohio Governor.

This is a transcription of Jwow’s seemingly unscripted speech.

Is this fuckin’ thing on? Testing, Testing. Okay…
My fellow Ohioans… My fellow Americans… Uh, my fellow humans… and I guess that includes all of you filthy, scruffy anarchists out there who don’t plan on voting for me anyway: Suck it.
I’ve got a script here (sound of crumpling paper) but you know what? I feel pretty loose. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to down those painkillers with alcohol. I sluged them down with a bottle of vodka and I feel great. Also, you should know, behind this podium, I’m totally naked.
Last week, the idiot who normally rambles through this segment talked about running for governor. He said I’m obsessed with his penis. Previously, the bomb-throwing moron claimed I have unprotected sex with dogs and fireworks behind the Masonic Lodge. I’d like to dispel all of those nasty slanders, as well as tell you about what I’ve done for the last 4 years since Ed What’s-His-Name can’t beat me.
Hey, Ed: Suck it.
First, those nasty slanders. For the record, I am NOT obsessed with Sean Swain’s penis… I’m obsessed with the penis on his anatomically-correct action figure. That doll is hung like a mule. Sean Swain in real-life has a mundane human penis. We have satellite photos to prove it.
As to the claims that I have unprotected sex with dogs while blasting fireworks behind the Masonic Lodge, what Swain’s implying is totally outrageous. One, they don’t even make condoms for dogs, and C, fireworks are perfectly legal in Ohio. So, having cleared all that up, let’s talk about my leadership in Ohio for the last 4 years. Continue reading →

November 3rd

This originally aired on the Final Straw Radio show.

I’ve gotten mail recently asking how my campaign for governor is going. In case you didn’t know, I’m running for Ohio Governor and the election is November 3rd.

Hope I can count on your support. My platform is pretty simple and can be summed up with a catch-phrase that’s as inspiriting as it is grammatically incorrect:
I MAKE TOTAL DESTROY.
Ohio calls itself The Heart of It All. That’s what you see on the signs alongside the highway when you have the misfortune of coming here. So, it’s my goal, as Governor of Ohio, to drive a wooden stake right through The Heart of It All.
Here’s my ninety-day plan:
First, by executive order, I would decommission the Ohio National Guard and give their heavy weaponry to the Native American tribes who were here first. They can use that to take back what they want.
Second, I’ll empty all the prisons. 50,000 prisoners liberated. Not one fence to remain standing. Continue reading →

REFORMISTS, PART II

This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.

Emma Goldman once told unemployed workers in New York, “Ask for work. If they won’t give you work, ask for bread. If they won’t give you bread, TAKE BREAD.” Her next words were uttered from a jail cell.
When we look at reformists, their strategy is bankrupt because of an unwillingness to challenge power– to “take bread,” as Emma Goldman put it. So, it follows that their tactics serve a bankrupt strategy.
When talking about prison reformism specifically, you’re working with 3 main tactics that are pretty reflective of everything else reformists do, and taking a look at those tactics will give a good sense about why reformists fail even when they succeed.
The Big 3 for prison reformists are “coalition building,” “hungerstrikes,” and “work stoppages.” All 3 tactics seek to create some kin leverage against authority, or an incentive FOR authority, to exercise authority differently. All 3 tactics say, “Give us X and we’ll return to our assigned seats.” All 3 tactics leave the same authority in power to take back what’s given.
First, coalition building. Prisoners and advocates push for legislation. Problem is, prisoners don’t vote, politicians don’t care, and the money is on the other side. Coalition building is doomed. Continue reading →

REFORMISTS, PART I

Reformists suffer from a kind of pathology. They believe in the possibility of “fixing” existing systems like the government or the economy, by way of making new laws or mobilizing support to institute new policies about how those systems operate. I say they suffer from a kind of pathology becuz believing in the potential of “reform” is kind of like believing in unicorns and magical beans.
At the root, when we’re talking about reform, we’re talking about a strategy for ASKING those in authority to exercise their authority differently. Unlike revolutionaries or insurrectionists, who seek to topple those in authority or to disassemble authority all together, reformists want to WORK WITH authorities to get authorities to WORK WITH them.
But consider this: Every change to an existing system is a “reform.” Right? Before the change, whatever it is, it was doing one thing; now, after the change, it does something else. So, reforms are occurring constantly, and reforms have been occurring from the very beginning of swivelization when humans made the mistake of settling in one place and growing crops.
Six thousand years or more of constant reforms has gotten us to this hot mess of mayhem that reformists now seek to reform.
Reformists are the ones who have been digging for 6,000 years in an effort to get out of a hole, only to find it getting deeper, so they now commit themselves to digging twice as fast.
Right. Pathology. Doing something for 6,000 years, over and over, expecting a favorable result… as if more of the problem is the solution to the problem.
And the thing is, even the reformists know what they do is an exercise in futility. Just ask a reformist some time, “How long before the system is perfected? What’s your timeline?” And that’s a valid question, isn’t it? I mean, they ARE trying to fix the system… So how long before it’s fixed, before we no longer need to tinker with it? How long before it simply works?
A reformist will stare at you with blank eyes, like a cow watching a passing train. No answer. No answer becuz a reformist, deep down, doesn’t believe– any more than you or I do –that a system like a government or an economy can be fixed and left to run perfectly well. Even reformists, for all of their talk of fixing a system, cannot conceive of an endpoint when the system is fixed, when reformists stop reforming, when lawmakers stop lawmaking, when everything is finally in its proper place and functioning fine.
So just imagine for a moment if auto makers shared this reformist mindset in manufacturing. If auto makers thought like reformists, everywhere you drive, you would have a team of mechanics running alongside your vehicle, tinkering with it as you go. They would never stop modifying your vehicle the whole time you own it. They would NEVER get done fixing it.
But what’s WORSE for reformists, the machine they’re working on is 6,000 years old. They’re still running alongside it, trying to get it running properly. What do I know? I’m a captive at a super duper max, a former gas station attendant. But I have a question to throw out there: If you have a machine you haven’t been able to fix after 6,000 years, and if you don’t even have a reasonable timeline for predicting when the machine will be running smoothly all on its own, isn’t it time to stop trying to fix it… To recognize the machine sucks… And to just scrap it once and for all?
Reformists are the parents who stay up all night before Christmas morning, trying to follow the nonsensical instructions and piece together that stupid, complicated toy… Failing over and over… Frustrated… For 6,000 years.
Where’s the plastic toggle switch? And why do I have these screws left over? Oh, what the fuck?!
Yeah. Like that.
And even when reformists succeed, they fail. Consider the example of prison reformists who seek furloughs and better conditions, conjugal visits and community diversions. You realize, not so long ago, all those things were staples of the prison system– and were taken out. So that means earlier generations of reformists already succeeded and achieved those reforms… That were later taken away. And modern day reformists seek to reintroduce reforms they know were introduced before… And will be taken away again.
So… Reformists are people who struggle to get the solution they had yesterday… So they can get it back today… Even though it will be taken away tomorrow.
THAT’S the recipe for perpetual wheel spinning. The time for fixing the machine is past. Let’s liberate ourselves from the reformist pathology and disssemble this unfixable machine once and for all.
For Ihsan, this is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from Ohio’s supermax facility. If you’re listening, you are the resistance… Continue reading →

Resistance Radio: Human Rights

This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.

The American public school system devoted twelve years to convincing us that the United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave, that this country is exceptional in guaranteeing freedom. The U.S. commitment to human rights makes it the greatest country in the world, according to the story it projects to every corner of the globe.

So lets talk about human rights in the Americas. The Organization of American States (OAS) is a treaty organization, founded in 1948, under the United Nations Charter, and 36 nation states in the Americas are member states of the OAS, including the United States. The principles of the OAS are related in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, a petty radical declaration as far as hierarch state worshipers go. Besides the criminal justice rights normally understood, and the right to freedom of belief and speech, the American Declaration lists freedoms like the right to residence and movement; right to asylum; right to health; right to culture, education and fair pay… all rights that go even beyond the U.S. Constitution guarantees. Continue reading →

Jesus and Ferguson

This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.

I think its high time we have a discussion, maybe globally, about this Jesus guy who’s name keeps popping up again and again, even in the early days of the Ferguson uprising. Jesus really seems to be getting in the way of things. I haven’t met him myself, but it appears plenty of other people have. A large number of his friends seem to be painters. Its clear from depictions of Jesus over the last two thousand years, he doesn’t age much. So he must be at least a distant relative of Dick Clark, or New Years Rockin Eve fame.

Although Jesus has clearly had some cosmetic work done. If you look at his nose he used to have a real honker, now from the copious renderings of him available in any American trailer park, Jesus looks a lot like Billy Rae Cyrus in a bedsheet and sandals. It seems that, of late, his primary mission is to bring his achy-breaky heart to any site of resistance against the tyrannical state so he can wrap his loving arms around his followers, hold them defenseless and let the cops punch kick teargas, tase and perhaps even shoot them to death. Jesus restrains his followers while cops knock the snot out of them and then his followers, inevitably bleeding from any number of bodily orifices invariably say “thank you Jesus.”

The popular consensus worldwide is that Jesus is opposed to violence, but during his two thousand year career as a community organizer his catagorical opposition to violence plays out the same way over and over. Jesus restrains the oppressed from their liberatory violence while agents of the state continue unfettered brutality, assaulting and killing, employing unilateral state violence with reckless abandon. And because of Jesus’ strict policy, his followers and those who join them are doomed. Continue reading →

Ferguson

This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.

Let’s talk about Ferguson MO. A Black unarmed teen was shot repeatedly by a white officer while Brown had his arms in the air. Since then, an angry community has been protesting, which led to small scale rioting and looting. To talk about the situation in Ferguson honestly though, I think we’d have to talk about it in a broader context. A couple years back I wrote a piece called, “On the Morality of Killing Police” which is still posted at SeanSwain.org. I wrote that in response to a good friend of mine being brutally and unnecessarily assaulted by a St Louis police officer. I argued then that it’s a legitimate question to ask whether defense of human life necessitates the pro-active and pre-emptive killing of police.
The fact that I wrote that for posting two years ago demonstrates that the rampant problem of sadistic and over-aggressive trigger happy cops in the St Louis area is not a new phenomenon. And to revisit my argument from that article, consider: if that cop who committed the most recent shooting had been found dead in his police cruiser after I wrote that article, Michael Brown would still be alive. Continue reading →

Anger Management

This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.

I enrolled in Anger Management to get the second of two programs I need to complete in order to get out of solitary. I had already taken the Money Smart program, which indoctrinates convicted felons in the benefits and virtues of using the U.S. banking system. I got my certificate even though I included a critique of the banking system on the back of my homework, along with cartoons of masked characters with cans of gasoline around burning banks.

So, Anger Management would give me my second certificate and qualify me to get out of solitary. How it works, OSP offers a million programs you can watch on TV and mail in your answers. Thing is, none of these programs count as the two to get you out of solitary. It looks good that they offer these programs, but to get to lower security you need one of select few programs that staff teach in the unit. And thats not easy to get because there are few staff and there are only six phone booth sized cages for six prisoners to take each cycle of programs. Hundreds are waiting. Six get selected. Continue reading →

Prison Food

This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.
I’ve been locked up for twenty three years roughly. I’ve eaten more than 25,000 consecutive meals in state custody, and that means I’ve likely developed an immunity to just about every food-borne pathogen known to humans -bacterial, fungal, viral… you name it. Considering everything my digestive tract has been exposed to, I could probably eat machine parts and lead paint with a side order of radioactive isotopes, and I’d end up pooping out a tiny x-ray machine.
Whenever people write to me, the two most popular topics for inquiry are prison rape and prison food. Free world people seem concerned most about what’s getting shoved into either end of human captives. Let’s talk about the food.
In 23 years, I’ve witnessed the evolution of prison food delivery. With each successive “improvement” the food situation has gotten markedly worse. I can foresee a scenario where, if food service improves much more, all 50,000 of us Ohio captives could die of malnutrition, or food poisoning before the end of the next contract cycle… and thats coming from the guy who could snack on radioactive isotopes. Cesium 137, please mustard, hold the relish. Continue reading →