Danny Armenta, A Hero for Our Time: New Modesto Anarcho Crew Poster

will you please post the text too?

Danny Armenta, A Hero for Our Time...We Need Only Steal Back Our Lives!

In early February, police arrested a 48 year old Turlock man after he attempted to walk out of a grocery store with a cart full of goods without paying for them. Armenta was not just taking several items, but over $100 worth of stuff including meat, beer, and other foods. When workers at the store approached Armenta and asked him for a receipt, Armenta took off running. Two clerks quickly gave chase as Armenta crossed the street into another parking lot and then finally turned around and pulled out a knife to get the two clerks off his back. Police then arrived on the scene and found Armenta trying to scale a wall in order to escape. Officers ordered Armenta to stop and face imminent arrest, but Armenta remained steadfast and again tried to escape. At this point, Ceres police used a police attack dog to bring Armenta down. Armenta then attempted to defend himself by throwing his small knife at the animal. This act proved useless, as the police dog quickly overtook Armenta and brought him to the ground and into the hands of the authorities. He was then taken to the hospital for wounds inflicted by the police dog and was held on $75,000 bail.

We support the actions of Danny Armenta, because we support poor and working people appropriating (taking back) what belongs to them: the products that we as working and poor people create, distribute, and are forced into buying. We exist in a world where the rich and powerful own all the things that we need to survive: shelter, food, water, land, and even living things. We, those who are exploited and excluded by this system, are forced to sell our time and labor to this ruling class in order to make money through wages; wages which we then use to buy back the products that we create and pay for everything from health care to a place to sleep. This is a system of wage slavery, in which the rich hold all the cards and we struggle just to survive.

And no one knows better about survival in this brutal economy than those living in the Central Valley of California. We are facing the brunt of the economic crisis brought on by capitalism itself. The rich have created this perfect storm, along with the looming ecological disaster that is starting to unfold now and threatens to set fire to the future. People are being pushed from their homes as more and more are faced with foreclosure and homelessness. People are losing their jobs as millions join the ranks of the unemployed or face cuts in pay and work hours. People are feeling the effects of a rising cost of living, transportation, and a reduction of access to basic services. Everywhere we face an ongoing social war waged at us by those who benefit from this pyramid scheme of repression and misery. In the work place, in the streets, and across the globe. For those that would dream of not playing by the system's rules, the rich are happy to flood our communities with millions of police, check points, prisons, detention centers, and surveillance systems.

In times like this, people like Danny Armenta are heros, because they attempt to hit back against the current conditions that are imposed on all of us. While individual acts of sabotage and appropriation against the bosses and the rich help keep us from having to buy more things back from them, (and also give us a sense of power and autonomy), we need to start thinking about how we can make these acts not just individual, but collective. In this way, these actions can involve more and more people and build more and more power against the rich and their economy of exploitation. We can start to organize to stay in our homes when we become foreclosed on and help to take back the ones that are already vacant. We can organize with our neighbors to take back land to grow food and network with co-workers and friends to channel goods out of the economy and into our hands. We can organize at work and go on wildcat strikes and occupy our workplaces; maximizing our own power while fighting against the daily conditions of our lives. We have to start acting for our own interests and against those of the rich - before we're all pushing shopping carts down the street with everything we own.

Modesto Anarcho Crew

http://www.myspace.com/modanarcho - anarcho209 [at] yahoo.com