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by Myles Hoenig / June 16th, 2020
Why is this not an Emmett Till moment?
The quick, simple response is because the Democratic Party is where social movements go to die and this will be absorbed into their own conservative narrative.
The open casket for Emmett shocked the nation, the white nation that is. It was neither shocking nor surprising for the majority of black Americans. They’ve seen it all too often before, just not with the exposition that Mrs. Till orchestrated in order to shock the world with an open casket. Many would rightfully say the civil rights movement truly began with this horrific murder and necessary showcase.
Attitudes …
Democrats and Republicans Play Good Cop/Bad Cop
by Roger D. Harris / June 16th, 2020
A long smoldering and now massive popular response to injustice has been catalyzed by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th. Even Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson concedes, “this was without precedent in the modern era.”
A broad consensus critical of the coercive police function of the US state is building. The mass movement around Black Lives Matter has many currents, some reformist and others angling for bigger fish. A sea change may be in the making. In opposition, state officials from the police chief of Ferguson to any number of politicians are making …
by Medea Benjamin / June 16th, 2020
Credit: Cubacooperation
A team of 85 Cuban doctors and nurses arrived in Peru on June 3 to help the Andean nation tackle the coronavirus pandemic. That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced another tightening of the sanctions screws. This time he targeted seven Cuban entities, including Fincimex, one of the principal financial institutions handling remittances to the country. Also targeted was Marriott International, which was ordered to cease operations in Cuba, and other companies in the tourism sector, an industry that constitutes 10 percent of Cuba’s GDP …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 15th, 2020
When the superseding indictment was returned by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia against Julian Assange on May 23, 2019, there was one glaring omission. It was an achievement, it might even be said the achievement, that gave the WikiLeaks publisher and the organisation justified notoriety. Collateral Murder, as the leaked video came to be called, featured the murderous exploits by the crew of Crazy Horse 1-8, an Apache helicopter that slew 11 people on July 12, 2007 in east Baghdad. Among the dead were Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and a driver and fixer, Saeed …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / June 15th, 2020
The current uprising against police violence and racism is just beginning. It is rapidly shifting public consciousness on issues of policing, violence against Black people and others, and systemic racism. The movement is deepening and becoming broader as well as putting forward solutions and making demands.
The confluence of crises including recent police violence, the COVID-19 pandemic, and economic collapse along with the ongoing crises of lack of healthcare, poverty, inequality, homelessness, personal debt, and climate plus awareness of mirage democracy in the United States have created a historic …
or A Democratic Socialist Urges Trumpsters to “Follow the Leader”
by Mark W. Bradley / June 15th, 2020
Politics, in its most elemental form, is primarily a game of numbers. Let’s say I am running for office, and I manage to garner more votes than my opponent. Result? I win. Similarly, if I manage to prevent my opponent from getting as many voters to the polls as I do, I also win. These conclusions are (or should be) self-evident.
What might not be so self-evident, however, is why an atheistic democratic socialist such as myself would come out and boldly advocate for so many of President Trump’s strongly …
by Dr. Hakim / June 15th, 2020
The family of a killed protester demand fair distribution of bread (Credit: Tolo News)
COVID-19 is clarifying a significant source of global anger and angst: inequality.
At the start of the COVID-19 crisis, Afghanistan had 300 ventilators, only one ventilator for every 110,000 Afghans.
As a medical physician, I gasped, my heart racing at the dilemma of who gets the ventilator. What if I was near death with serious COVID-19?
The head of a global vaccine alliance advised that “nobody is safe unless everybody …
by Pepe Escobar / June 14th, 2020
The marriage of post-Lockdown and George Floyd protests has nurtured a rough beast that is still immune to any form of civilized debate in the U.S.: the Seattle Commune.
So what really is the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone cum People’s Republic all about?
Are the communards mere useful idiots? Is this a refined Occupy Wall Street experiment? Could it survive, logistically, and be replicated in NYC, L.A. and D.C.?
An outraged President Trump has described it as a plot by “domestic terrorists” in a city “run by radical left Democrats”. He called for “LAW & ORDER” (in caps, according to his Tweetology).
Shades of …
by David Rovics / June 14th, 2020
?
The system based on a combination of police brutality, mass imprisonment, and evictions at gunpoint may be collapsing, but if it’s going to fall in the direction we want it to fall in, we need to push it that way. And if we want to make that happen, we have to organize to stop the impending wave of evictions before it starts.
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This society is at a crossroads in so many ways. In recent weeks, a multiracial uprising in the streets …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 13th, 2020
Fawlty Towers
It’s all getting nasty. The urge to remove statues in hurried indignation; the lust to censor programmes now deemed offensive; the erasure of history, which, any sensible sort should know, is often a panoramic account of crimes and slaughter worth knowing rather than banning and hiding. This is surely not what the late George Floyd intended, but it hardly matters anymore. His death has propelled a movement that has capitalised on a publicised event of police brutality in the United States to re-order matters and …
by Yves Engler / June 13th, 2020
The Palestinian solidarity movement is unsettling Canada’s diplomatic apparatus. In the final week of their multi-year campaign for a seat on the United Nations Security Council they’ve been forced to respond to a well-documented, strong campaign in defense of Palestinian rights.
Yesterday, Canada’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Marc-André Blanchard, delivered a letter to all UN ambassadors defending Canadian policy on Palestinian rights. Blanchard was responding to an Open Letter organized by Just Peace Advocates signed by more than 100 organizations and dozens of prominent individuals. Over the past week more than 1000 individuals have used that letter as …
by Terry Everton / June 13th, 2020
“I do believe God is working through you to try to call us together.” — Matt Gaetz, R-Fla speaking to the brother of George Floyd
“Defund the police, abolish ICE, disarm Americans and then surrender our cities to the Antifa mob — if this is the rulebook for the new Woketopia, count me out!… Antifa has now designated Seattle their capital.” — Matt Gaetz
“He [Matt Gaetz] represents, however, everything that is wrong with the modern Republican Party: from racism, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism; to conspiracism and anti-intellectualism; to a slavish and sycophantic loyalty to Donald Trump.” — Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept
In a world of depleting resources and contracting economies, states are preparing for future uprisings by a growing underclass
by Jonathan Cook / June 12th, 2020
It is hard to ignore the striking parallels between the recent scenes of police brutality in cities across the United States and decades of violence from Israel’s security forces against Palestinians.
A video that went viral late last month of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, killing a black man, George Floyd, by pressing a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes has triggered a fortnight of mass protests across the US – and beyond.
The footage was the latest disturbing visual evidence of a US police culture that appears to treat Black Americans as an enemy …
by C.J. Hopkins / June 12th, 2020
So, the GloboCap-Resistance Minneapolis Putsch appears to have not gone exactly to plan. Once again, Trump failed to go full-Hitler, despite their best efforts to goad him into doing so. They gave it quite a good shot, however. It was more or less a textbook regime-change op, or “color revolution,” or whatever you call it. All the essential pieces were in place. All they needed Trump to do was declare himself dictator and impose martial law, so the generals could step in and remove him from office.
Unfortunately for the Resistance, Trump didn’t do that. Instead, …
by David Penner / June 12th, 2020
Medicine has changed. We used to be a calling that catered to the public welfare, and our prime consideration was the patient. Now we are a business, and some of us practice as impersonal corporations, with the bottom line the profits, not the well-being of the patient.”
— From The Doctor, by Dr. Edward E. Rosenbaum, 1991
The most shocking thing about the neoliberal health care model is not that it bankrupts and murders hundreds of thousands of Americans each year, but that vast numbers of physicians continue to support it. The insatiable depravity of the anti-single-payer virus has metastasized …
by Kim Petersen / June 12th, 2020
Muslims in Canada deserve to feel what non-Muslims feel when they hear of a vicious crime or a foiled plot committed by someone who looks like them: abhorred by the crime but knowing the crime reflects the perpetrator alone. Any other thought process should never occur.
— Graeme Truelove, Un-Canadian: Islamophobia in the True North (Nightwood Editions, 2020): location 35%
The police murder of George Floyd set off the powder keg filled by centuries of oppression of Black peoples in the United States. The United States has been beset by countrywide protests, some marred by violence of protestors and police. Many would …
Symbols are Invested with Power
by Jonathan Cook / June 12th, 2020
I did not expect to be returning to this issue so soon but I was surprised, to put it mildly, to discover that my last post on anti-racists toppling a statue of the notorious slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol proved to be the most polarising article I have ever written. Given the many controversial topics I have addressed over the years, that seems noteworthy in itself.
It may not be surprising that those on the right are troubled by ordinary people challenging authority, demanding change rather than conserving what we already have, and “taking the law …
Exoneration Visible?
by Michael H. Fox / June 12th, 2020
Across cultures, darker people suffer most. Why?
— T-shirt worn by rapper Andre 3000 at a recent concert.
Exonerations of wrongfully convicted suspects continue to dominate the news. For many years, wrongful convictions were considered the result of honest mistakes. Mistaken eyewitness judgments were considered the major factor. But contemporary research has disproved this hypothesis. We now know that police and prosecutorial malfeasance — suborning perjury, concealing evidence, falsifying scientific reports, etc., is the leading factor in wrongful convictions. And the majority of victims are people of color.
Racial prejudice has a long history in the USA. Jailing people of color is …
by Michael Howard / June 12th, 2020
If I’m gonna die I’ll die now, right here, fighting you.
— Muhammad Ali to a white college student who challenged his opposition to the Vietnam War
As has been made plain to the entire world, things are not going very well in the Land of the Free. Extreme police violence, normally reserved for poor people, and poor minorities in particular, is now being inflicted indiscriminately across the nation. Mainstream journalists (including foreign press), Hollywood actors, elderly men with cancer, you name it: if you’re attempting to exercise your Constitutional right to peaceably assemble, expect to be attacked with nightsticks, …
by Andre Vltchek / June 12th, 2020
While I am following closely various discussions on Western mass media and social media, simultaneously engaging in several direct exchanges, one overwhelming leitmotif that I see is clearly emerging: “What is happening in the United States (and the UK, France and other parts of Western Empire) is not really about the race. Let us protest peacefully, let us not allow ‘rioting’ to continue, and above all, please let us not single out the white race, Western culture as a sole villain. Let us have peace, love each other… Then things will miraculously improve; terrible occurrences will soon go away.”
I have …
by Shawgi Tell / June 12th, 2020
It is no surprise that many are exploiting the “COVID Pandemic” to advance their narrow self-serving agendas. Charter school advocates are no exception.
Crises often generate instability, chaos, and confusion that can make it easier for such forces to get away with antisocial policies and arrangements that would be far more difficult to implement under normal conditions.
Charter school promoters support the antisocial outlook that says: “never let a serious crisis to go to waste.” This was most evident in New Orleans, Louisiana back in 2005 when disaster capitalists imposed privately-operated charter schools on everyone. Charter schools there have failed in many …
by Daniel Borgström / June 11th, 2020
San Francisco Public PressJune 3 was the night of a protest to defy the recently declared curfew in Oakland and defend our Constitutional rights. Thousands attended, the plaza was packed full. This was the community calling the bluff of Law Enforcement, and the latter didn’t enforce their curfew.
Massive demonstrations had risen up across the country after the George Floyd murder. Police had responded violently with the encouragement of President Trump, who threatened to send the military and told governors to …
by Bill Hackwell / June 11th, 2020
Cuban medical brigade returning from Italy (Photo: Ismael Fransisco Gonzalez)
Every evening for the past two and a half months the people of Cuba have come out on their streets and porches to applaud and cheer for the 3,000 members of the Henry Reeve medical brigades who are fighting the Covid-19 pandemic on the front lines in 28 countries with 34 brigades. For the Cuban people these medical professionals are not just doctors going abroad but representatives of a society where health and human life are considered an …
by Jason Holland / June 11th, 2020
Society must return to truth or cease to exist.
— Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 1892
In these times the establishment continues to bellow out hippie like rhetoric that we’re all in this together, that we must find unity and peace, put down our differences, sing kum ba yah, and hug this shit out. Great. I want peace too, but forgive me if I find the words coming from those in power to be a little less than authentic.
The way I see it is that peace isn’t found on the top of a bloody mountain of suppressive violence stemming from nation …
by Nigel Clarke / June 11th, 2020
These, the derisive words of then-President Obama to an unruly crowd at a campaign stop for Hillary Clinton in 2016. They would become, in the years that followed, a calling card for Democratic operatives, printed on stickers and hats and coffee mugs, taken up as organizational slogan and event title. They are words which would become particularly relevant after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers and subsequent protests which erupted in the Twin Cities and across the country and world. As people poured into the streets, Democrats like 71-year-old white millionaire Senator Ron …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 11th, 2020
It’s the sort of thing that ruffled the image of a composed and tranquil existence. In some countries, doing away with political leaders is a periodic affair, deemed necessary to clean the stables. But in Sweden, change is barely discernible, stability nigh guaranteed and institutions revered. “It’s in the tradition of Sweden to put itself forth as a moral role model,” observes author Elisabeth Åsbrink.
Then came that thorny, troubling issue of Olof Palme. Palme minted a reputation berating the bullying actions of great powers and forging an internationalist platform for progressive politics. He took issue with the crushing of …
by Ramzy Baroud / June 11th, 2020
A 32-year-old man with the mental age of an 8-year-old child was executed by Israeli soldiers on May 30, while crouching behind his teacher near his special needs school in the Old City of Jerusalem.
The cold-blooded murder of Iyad al-Hallaq might not have received much attention if it were not for the fact that it took place five days following the similarly heartbreaking murder of a 46-year-old black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis, at the hands of American police.
The two crimes converge, not only in their repugnancy and the moral decadence of their perpetrators, but also because countless American …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / June 10th, 2020
Defund the police, defund the military (Credit: CODEPINK)
On June 1, President Trump threatened to deploy active-duty U.S. military forces against peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in cities across America. Trump and state governors eventually deployed at least 17,000 National Guard troops across the country. In the nation’s capital, Trump deployed nine Blackhawk assault helicopters, thousands of National Guard troops from six states and at least 1,600 Military Police and active-duty combat troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, with written orders to pack bayonets.
After …
by Ralph Nader / June 10th, 2020
The nationwide street protests following the gruesome murder of George Floyd, who was pinned to the ground and choked by a Minneapolis police officer and three accomplices, were spontaneous and diverse. No leaders, charismatic or otherwise put out the call for people to turn out in the face of militarized police legions. It was a wondrous display of civic self-respect.
Showing up is half a Democracy.
The New York Times asked some of the protesters who stood in solidarity, why they turned out? Their responses boiled down to inner compulsions that required action. A municipal employee in Minneapolis, Don Hubbard said “…I feel like if …
by John Steppling / June 10th, 2020
European Left-wing political scientists find difficult to understand that the colonial contradiction is at the heart of our present, they think it’s a conceptual error, something anachronistic, that the joyful postmodernity – the one that delivers their Macs to them at home – has gone beyond all that, and that Trump or Bolsonaro are racist accidents of History, or of the “free world”. It’s just the opposite. Under the advertising varnish of capitalist globalization, the deep History of our world has never disappeared, it has even come back to the surface, even stronger. The revolt that is happening in the …
