Filler – June 2017

“US QUEERS AIN’T FREE TIL THE PRISON WALLS BURN DOWN”
~ photo: banner from an Illegal Queers PGH benefit dance party ~

---

---

Every year on June 11th, anarchists and anti-authoritarians from around the world send some love and rage to our comrades who are serving lengthy prison terms. We write letters, we organize poetry readings and movie screenings, we throw parties and benefit shows, we ditch work and school to paint our comrades’ names all across town, we attack state and corporate infrastructure as much for the thrill of it as for the political and strategic implications. On J11, we remember the prisoners of war. With their names on our minds, we face the anxiety and misery of the everyday with just a little more strength, a little more passion… because, like, holy shit, prisons are fucking evil, and maybe our thoughts and actions might just sneak a few rays of light through the bars and help our comrades face another day too. 

On that note, a couple of us queer-as-fuck Filler kids want to remind our friends here in Pittsburgh that J11 would never have become the insurgent holiday that it is today without the courage of long-term anarchist prisoner, Marius Mason. Marius is an eco-warrior whose daily life is one of struggle against a state that seeks to control his body on every level, from his incarceration to the undermining of his gender identity. This year, we hope that Pittsburgh will prove that we have not forgotten his struggle.

This year, we hope that Pittsburgh will affirm our complicity in not only Marius’s struggle, but also in the struggles of all who come into conflict with the state and capital. So in the spirit of J11, let’s support our neighbors who are challenging the co-optation of Pittsburgh Pride, organizing to support incarcerated people at the Allegheny County Jail while working towards the jail’s abolition, and rallying to defend their communities against the nationalist reaction. Most importantly, we sincerely hope you remember to indulge your private wars. Do what you need to do to reconnect to life: attack the things you hate, embrace the people and hobbies you love, call in sick and stay at home all day to write letters to the folks on the inside while you binge-watch netflix (or Sub.Media!) – take whatever it is that you love, nurture it, and make it dangerous. 

Anyways, below is an (in)complete rundown of some cool shit to do this week. 

Welcome home Maxx and Shea. Much love to Top Squat. Shoutout to Torchlight.

Fire to ALL prisons!

---

Friday, June 9th

---

Emergency Protest – No More Jails, No More Deaths!

Anti-Repression Picnic!

Radicals in Pittsburgh are facing an unprecedented wave of repression: hundreds of felony charges, several eviction threats, etc. etc. etc….so some folks decided it’d be fun to get together and celebrate our struggles over some vegan food! We’re in this together, so let’s soak up some sun together (weather depending). 

If you or your comrades and accomplices are feeling the heat, ask around or hit us up for the time and location!

Click HERE to donate to various legal defense funds.

---

Saturday, June 10th

---

GREY OUT Rainbow Capitalism

People are asking if they should be boycotting CERTAIN Pittsburgh Pride events, which we feel would be ineffective since –

1. Most non-profit orgs spent time and energy raising money to participate in what should be a free event, and have the right to get value for that cost (since obviously no refunds will be given).

2. It’s counterproductive to miss out on the opportunity to reach out to the community non-profit orgs are trying to serve.

3. The presence of a few individuals or a small organization might not be missed, but showing UP will show strength in numbers, which also sends the larger message of how many LGBTQ+ individuals, supporters, and allies there are in Pittsburgh (which is one of the actual reasons to have Pride events in the first place).

4. It’s not fair to every single person who worked hard and waited all year to come together with their community only to feel guilty or bad for participating. Instead we are going to show SIGNS OF RESISTANCE. We invite everyone to “GREY OUT RAINBOW CAPITALISM” and show solidarity, strength and unity by wearing GREY tshirts, armbands, hats, bandanas, suits, socks- whatever. WEAR YOUR GREY and spread the message that although you might be in the parade, or at the event, YOU ARE NOT IN LINE with the organizers of the EQT-sponsored march. We will be showing up for what PRIDE means to YOU and not we are being told it should mean. GRAB SOME GREY AND SPREAD THE WORD.

Our Pride should not be about who can pay the highest price.
Pride is political. Pride should be for everyone. Pride needs to be inclusive, intersectional and wholly accessible to all. Pride should be free (for non-profits to participate specifically, not necessarily food, drinks/specialty events). Pride should be a celebration of how far we have come from the time we were forced to live in a closet. Pride should be a reflection of our history as well as an effort to move forward. It is up to us as a community to make the change.

Be proud, come on out and join your community at (mostly) free, local, independent Pride events:

Veil of Remembrance– Steel City Sisters
Roots Pride: Final Edition with Junglepussy & Co.
Freedom! Renaissance City Choir Pride Concert
Express Yourself: A Resistance Workshop with Hello Mr.
Smoke and Mirrors OUT Loud Kick-Off: Reflections Meal
Smoke and Mirrors-Penn OUT Loud Art Crawl
Queer Craft Market
Free Pride Shorts
Peoples Pride March 2k17

[ https://www.facebook.com/events/111478759443101 ]

---

No Bars to Healthcare-Documentary Screening

Sunday, June 11th

---

JUNE 11TH MARCH & PICNIC

---

Wednesday, June 14th

---

History of Social Movements in Pittsburgh

Mijente in Pittsburgh: Community Dinner + Discussion

[ https://www.facebook.com/events/289897328087978 ]

---

Don’t Criminalize Transit Riders!

THIS SUMMER, Port Authority plans to have ARMED police Officers checking fare payment on the T…..

We demand that the Port Authority delay implementation of this policy until we have a PUBLIC process, a commitment NOT to work with ICE, and a commitment of NO arrests or criminal charges for “fare evasion.”

Join Pittsburghers for Public Transit, Casa San Jose, the Alliance for Police Accountability and the Thomas Merton Center to find out how to get involved to stop the criminalization of transit riders.

4th River Music Fest 2017

Statement from the Pittsburgh Anarchist Black Cross
Received 5.18.2017

---

---

Today we are happy to report our friends Maxx and Shea were released early from the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh. Far from being an example of goodwill and magnanimity from Judge Mariani, their initial 3-12 month sentence from him (when the D.A. only asked for a weekend) was the real show of his great benevolence. We are excited to have our friends out to enjoy the beginning of the summer.

While two of our accomplices now transition into probation, we have handfuls of Pittsburgh comrades still going back and forth to court appearances with stacks of felonies held above their heads, in what is the new normal for anarchists and anti-authoritarians in this country. While we predict these large and exaggerated cases will get increasingly common for us in Pittsburgh and around the U.S., we want to be ready to support our friends and ourselves in what should be looked at as the inevitability of, in the least, wasted cash in courts; in the most, long prison sentences. Tabling information, talking to lawyers, conference calls, getting legit, putting on shows and letter writings, crowd funding, meetings and late night talks, hanging outside of that stupid jail, and Signal upon Signal loops—we got this, in a sense. But what can we do beyond responding to the crisis of individual repressions? How can we create a culture of defiance and rejection to police, jails, prisons and snitching on a local level beyond reaction and into action? As we move forward with supporting our friends locally, and reach out to folks across the country, we aspire to move towards actively promoting an anarchist total rejection of the court and policing systems, and to respond to their tactics of fear head first, horns down.

Pittsburgh Anarchist Black Cross
PGHABC [at] riseup [dot] net
PO Box 9021
Pittsburgh, PA
15224

---

DONATE HERE to support and welcome back our friends Maxx and Shea.
Click HERE or HERE to read the report-backs from the action and subsequent arrests.

DONATE HERE to support the ACJ 10.

DONATE HERE to support Pittsburghers arrested on J20 at the intersection of L&12th streets. 

DONATE HERE to support Victoria and Phil, two comrades arrested during an action at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Torchlight, a new anarchist counter-info site based here in Pittsburgh, released this response to an anonymous submission we published several weeks ago. (Pretty cool to see a dialogue starting, although it looks like they think we wrote “Solidarity in the Streets,” which we didn’t. We just used to be the only counterinfo game in town, but now we’re not!)

---

Pittsburgh activism has long and sordid history of cooptation by the police. Liberal organizers invariably honor a tacit agreement in which they guarantee that their “actions” generate minimal material disruption of the prevailing order, in exchange for the cops’ allowing them to proceed unimpeded. The police, notoriously lazy in Pittsburgh, benefit from protest organizers doing most of their work for them, plus they don’t have to tarnish their image by pepper spraying and arresting protesters. Organizers in turn get to boost turnout by offering a risk-free, conscience salving experience, while claiming success based on nothing more than seamless logistics, regardless of the lack of movement toward their claimed goals.

On the ground the result will be familiar to anyone who has attended a protest in Pittsburgh in this century. Dozens of marshals, police liaisons, and PR flacks, few to no legal observers or medics; inspiring speeches by carefully chosen “leaders”, zero opportunity for spontaneous action; occasionally unpermitted, but always pacified.

Sometimes though, an action breaks this mold and the police end up having to do some work, which brings us to a recent article by the Filler Collective. The piece is a criticism of a pair of noise demos at Allegheny County Jail at which some windows were broken, the most recent of which took place on March 20. Eleven people were arrested and are currently being charged with multiple felony counts. The other noise demo happened on New Years Eve 2011 and resulted in dozens of protesters being detained, but no arrests. The author focuses their criticism on the 2011 demo, claiming that they weren’t at the more recent one and do not wish to risk jeopardizing the cases of the arrestees. However the timing of the piece, and in fact the very inclusion of the recent demo, make a joke of this posture. If Filler really doesn’t want to criticize the March action why mention it at all?

Instead, the author uses the 2011 noise demo as a proxy, in an attack that is misguided as well as displaced. Their thesis is that since the organizers didn’t intend or prepare for windows to be broken, the window breakers are responsible for the detentions that followed. More generally, they believe that all protests should have a pre-planned and communicated level of risk so that participants can make informed decisions about whether and how to involve themselves.

That’d be nice wouldn’t it? If you could know ahead of time exactly how risky an action was going to be, if everyone who showed up could be counted on to follow the same script, if there was never any uncertainty about how the cops would respond to a particular tactic? The only problem is it’s impossible. There is no way to reliably predict what will happen at a protest without going full liberal and extinguishing any possibility of militancy before it can begin – the usual approach in this town.

That doesn’t mean organizers haven’t tried, and Filler cites a couple of very selective examples from recent history. One is the mobilization against the 2009 G20 summit meetings in Pittsburgh, which featured the Pittsburgh Principles, a framework designed to let activist groups with different politics work together effectively throughout the demo. (Ignore for now the vast difference between a multi-day mass mobilization and a half hour jail noise demo.) While the Pittsburgh Principles were reasonably successful in their purpose, they didn’t prevent the cops from brutally attacking a completely non-confrontational protest against police brutality on the Pitt campus in the final hours of the event, not because any windows got broken, but just because they wanted to. The author of the Filler piece conveniently fails to mention this.

Filler’s other example is the J20 mobilization in DC against Trump’s inauguration, where a wide variety of tactics were used by a broad coalition of groups, all of which were clearly announced ahead of time, supposedly allowing participants to gauge the risk involved. While the various blockades, rallies and permitted marches were left comparatively unmolested (by G20 standards at least), J20 was hardly a testament to the predictability of police repression at mass mobilizations. The 200-plus felony arrests at the black bloc march were an unprecedented departure from past police practice in DC, even to the point of violating court orders.

A broader look at the history of big demos (not to mention small ones) reveals similar patterns. The practice of designating red, yellow, and green zones during the global justice movement never worked. In fact arrests were probably more frequent in green zones because protesters there weren’t expecting them. The Miami Model of protest policing involves cracking down on protesters of all stripes, peaceful or otherwise, actually protesting or not. Witness the raids against the puppet warehouse at the 2000 RNC in Philadelphia, and the convergence center and legal support office at the 2008 RNC in St. Paul, where no one was even protesting anything, let alone breaking windows.

Hell, the cops don’t always manage to honor their own designated safe areas. At the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto police pepper sprayed and beat people in the free speech zone. And let’s not forget the 2001 FTAA meetings in Quebec City, where the cops used so much tear gas it got into the ventilation ducts of the building where the delegates were meeting.

In short, the idea that we can predict what the cops will do in the face of any meaningful protest is ridiculous. It might look like we can in Pittsburgh, where protest theater too often takes the place of militant action in the streets. But that’s just policing ourselves to save the cops the trouble. So instead of blaming arrests, detentions, beatings and other repression on our own comrades, let’s pin the blame where it belongs – on the cops. Instead of relying on our enemies to restrain themselves if we don’t provoke them, let’s rely on ourselves. It’s time to build the support structures necessary to resist police action as it happens, to propagate a culture of tactical awareness, instead of expecting followers to show up and blindly follow the orders of few self appointed organizers.

Determining what this might look like in practice is left as an exercise for the reader, but in the Trump era it is one well worth undertaking. Just don’t forget to tell Torchlight about it…

On March 20th, 11 comrades were arrested during an demonstration outside of Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, PA. They were joining in solidarity with the 80 inmates that had launched a 24-hour strike with demands for decent living conditions, including but not limited to having access to medical services, having their grievances heard and responded to, and requiring the DOC and Prison board to ensure that all administrative rules and DOC policies are made accessible to inmates. Police instigated violence and our friends were arrested and are now facing exorbitant legal fees. Please donate to this fund to help out with the high costs that follow arrest; Solidarity is everything and with help from everyone, we can continue to keep fighting!

CLICK HERE TO DONATE

---

---

Pittsburgh: Rebellion Inside and Outside Allegheny County Jail

Originally published on It’s Going Down
CLICK HERE TO DONATE to the arrestees

---

On March 18th, prisoners at Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania began a sit-in. Eighty prisoners took part in the action to demand more case workers, better medical services, and a legitimate grievance procedure. Last night, masked demonstrators converged on the jail in solidarity with those protesting inside and smashed windows of the jail, a security camera, and several police vehicles. The action was broken up after police arrested eleven protesters.

Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) imprisons more than 2,500 people, and its population has increased by 70% in the last two decades. ACJ has a long history of abuse and was the subject of a 2010 FBI investigation that found officials there were covering up abuse of prisoners. Health conditions at the jail are also notoriously bad; eleven people died while incarcerated at ACJ in just 2014 and 2015.

Eighty-one percent of the people being incarcerated at Allegheny County Jail haven’t been convicted of a crime and are in being incarcerated pretrial. Many of these people are being held on bail they cannot pay, meaning they are only incarcerated because they lack access to a certain amount of money.

In a monetary bail system, access to money determines whether someone will be released or detained pretrial. Someone who can’t afford bail will likely be incarcerated for the duration of their trial, which could be years. Even a few days of pretrial incarceration often means the difference between working and being fired or paying rent and being evicted. Right now, more than 450,000 people are incarcerated in US jails—most of them in pretrial detention and most of those people because they cannot pay bail. In effect, our legal system is punishing people for being poor.

In the past year, there has been a dramatic increase in action being taken by incarcerated people across the US, most recently at Vaughn Correctional Facility where prisoners demanding better conditions took over a wing of the prison. In August and September of 2016, 22 mothers held at an immigration detention center in Pennsylvania went on hunger strike to protest the ongoing incarceration of themselves and their children. Last September’s national prisoner strike involved at least 29 prisons in 12 states. The strike was organized by the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) with support from the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC), and a wide variety of anti-prison organizations. Tens of thousands of prisoners participated in the strike, affecting facilities across the country.

Especially as Trump and Sessions push for even more criminalization of targeted communities, it essential that we pay close attention to and amplify resistance inside US jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers.

Solidarity with those rising up and resisting at Allegheny County Jail.