The Lynching of Kevin Cooper

The pending lynching of Kevin Cooper is a good reminder of the need for a labor general strike not only to abolish the death penalty but also to shut down the prison system, promote education, and kick all of the death penalty Democrat-Republicans out of office.

Some of us remember when that good liberal Democrat Governor Pat Brown, father of that good liberal Democrat, former governor and now fascist "independent" mayor of Oakland, Jerry Brown, used Caryl Chessman as a political football whom Brown allowed to be murdered by the State of California on May 2, 1960 so as to appeal to the fascist vote to be re-elected. It worked for Brown, and guaranteed fascist Ronald Reagan's election in 1966 since no decent person wanted anything to do with the death penalty Democrat Pat Brown.

It also demonstrated again that the only reason the Democrats exist is to keep the Reds out of office as there is no other need for two capitalist parties, funded by the same corporations. Peace & Freedom Party, a socialist party on the California ballot, and the Green Party, are the two anti-death penalty parties on the California ballot and thus by definition are the only two parties that can be considered viable. There is not only nothing viable about the death penalty Democrat-Republicans, these twin parties are outright fascist, election-frauding thug parties whose candidates should never be supported at any level.

Today, not much has changed. We get the darkest photos of Kevin Cooper in the local death penalty rag, the San Francisco Chronicle, accompanying news articles on the pending execution, always referring to Cooper as a killer, when it is the capitalist class of California that is the killer. The editorial page of that capitalist rag did come out for an investigation of new evidence on January 30, 2004, but defended the old false evidence. See http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/30/EDGCS4K6TA1.DTL

We have the entire medical community silent in the face of medical doctors clearly violating the Hippocratic Oath and international law in participating in the lethal injection executions, just like the Nazi doctors.

Instead of executions occurring at 10 a.m., they occur in the middle of the night so as to hide the horror of their criminality and barbarity.

We have a stupid, incompetent governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who left a country, Austria, and a continent, Europe, where the death penalty has been abolished, to come here to promote the death penalty and all the rest of the fascist agenda. He happens to be a Republican and his wife happens to be a Democrat, but clearly, it makes no difference. They are cut from the same murderous cloth.

Any study of the case clearly reveals that Cooper was framed and would never have been arrested if he were not poor and black. Evidence that demonstrated other people committed the crime was deliberately destroyed; witnesses who had information as to the real murderers were ignored as was a confession to the murders.

As to the death penalty, it is dead wrong and should be abolished, and all of the people on death row should be immediately retried and resentenced. The death penalty is first and foremost a class weapon of terror against the workingclass by the capitalist class, and in racist USA, it is also a racist weapon used primarily against the black workingclass, a bitter legacy of slavery.

The foundation of this country was built with the genocide of Native Americans and African slave labor, followed by the vicious exploitation of the labor of all the rest of the workingclass. By definition, we never had democracy in this country as there can be no political democracy where there is economic inequality and exploitation.

We opponents of the death penalty are of all colors, including white. We will never give up the fight until we win total abolition of the death penalty and of the prison-concentration camp system.

We need a labor general strike now to end the death penalty, save the economy from total collapse, abolish prisons and the war department, and kick the murderers and election frauders out of office at all levels of government. The Latino workers have shown the way, by staying home one day to demand driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants. That was a very effective general strike and caught a lot of attention. Imagine doing that on class lines with workers of all colors shutting down this state to abolish the death penalty.