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, …
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.”
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
Not the only “finest” but the ones with the biggest TV and movie coverage
While it may be common knowledge that fire departments originated as private organisations to defend the interests of property insurers, it has probably been forgotten that in the US police were originally the hired gangs of landowners and merchant-industrialists. As urban conurbations like New York City grew, the police were the action arm of the political machines that served to dominate native and immigrant workers. A job in the police department was a patronage …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / June 10th, 2020
Demonstrators on Wednesday, June 3, 2020 in downtown Los Angeles (AP Photo: Ringo H.W. Chiu)
The breadth of the uprising is astounding with antiracism protests in all 50 states and more than 500 cities plus more than 13,500 arrests in 43 cities. This weekend there were larger numbers of protesters in the streets including cities and towns of all sizes. In Washington, DC, where we were, the crowds were multi-racial and crossed all ages but were dominated by black youth. People were united in their opposition to racism and …
Reinstate Colin Kaepernick to a Place of Prominence to Lead the NFL!
by Kim Petersen / June 9th, 2020
The National Football League is ruing the day it denigrated the peaceful protests by some players against police brutality and inequality.
The NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has been pushed to condemn racism and admit to being wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier. He encouraged speaking out and peaceful protest. He said Black lives matter. He said he will be reaching out to players who have spoken up.
Goodell’s Missing Words
What Goodell did not do is apologize. He did not mention the most prominent peaceful protester …
In the near-two decades since the International Criminal Court was set up to try the worst violations of international human rights law, it has faced harsh criticism for its highly selective approach to the question of who should be put on trial.
Created in 2002, the court, it was imagined, would act as a deterrent against the erosion of an international order designed to prevent a repetition of the atrocities of the Second World War.
Such hopes did not survive long.
The court, which sits in The Hague in the Netherlands, almost …
Justin Trudeau is campaigning aggressively for a seat on the UN Security Council. Over the past month he has called about two dozen world leaders and recently organized calls with groupings of UN ambassadors from the Americas, Africa, Arab states and Asia. Just prior to the pandemic the PM attended the African Union Summit in Ethiopia and met with all African ambassadors in Ottawa to make his pitch for Canada’s Security Council bid.
Why devote so much energy to winning the seat? Some have labeled it a “vanity project”, which is not far off the mark. A more apt description of …
Censorship of alternative media is becoming more widespread in the COVID19 era. This article documents the case of SouthFront.
Introducing SouthFront
Where do you find daily news, videos, analysis and maps about the conflict in Syria? Detailed reports about the conflicts in Libya, Yemen and Venezuela? News about the rise of ISIS in Mozambique? Original analysis of events in the US and Russia? SouthFront is the place.
SouthFront is unique and influential, reaching a global audience of hundreds of thousands. They have opinion articles but their reports and videos are informational and factual. Their website says,
SouthFront focuses on issues of international relations, …
Beginning in December 1951, Ernesto “Che” Guevara took a nine-month break from medical school to travel by motorcycle through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. One of his goals was gaining practical experience with leprosy. On the night of his twenty-fourth birthday, Che was at La Colonia de San Pablo in Peru swimming across the river to join the lepers. He walked among six hundred lepers in jungle huts looking after themselves in their own way.
Che would not have been satisfied to just study and sympathize with them – …
In early November 1966, my sister and I?armed with a bucket of home-made paste, a wide brush, and a thick roll of “Vote No” posters?headed off from my student apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to plaster the surrounding area with the signs. The Patrolman’s Benevolent Association (PBA), a very powerful police union, had placed a referendum on the New York City ballot to remove civilians from the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
We were a very small part of a long struggle?one that continues to this day?to develop a public policy that would curb police misconduct, often …
Lockdowns imposed in response to Covid-19 forced millions of people to stay at home, businesses closed and a widespread hush descended. The major beneficiary of the controls has been the natural environment; in particular there has been a dramatic reduction in air pollution everywhere. But as countries begin to lift restrictions, road traffic levels are once again increasing, air and noise pollution rising.
Changes to working patterns and daily living have created a unique opportunity to re-imagine how we live and work. Central to any new pattern needs to be the environment; many people recognize this and the importance of not …
I shouted out,
Who Killed the Kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me.
— Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, “Sympathy for the Devil” from the 1968 album Beggar’s Banquet
Destroying my 46″ Magnavox flat screen was the most liberating act of a lifetime. Damn thing told me one too many lies, so I put my right Birkenstock through it and sent it to the landfill in the next Tuesday garbage truck. There are downsides though. For example, I completely missed the Great Toilet Paper Stampede at the beginning of the premier episode of “Coronamania”. Lucky for me, I had a few rolls on hand, thus avoiding painful dog-style butt-scoots on a …
What I am saying here is familiar to many people with a knowledge of actual history, rather than the fantasy version in the textbooks. But actual history is a hidden thing, and therefore frequent reminders are necessary. Here’s my effort in this regard for today. We can call it an editorial.
*****
Trump wants riot police and soldiers to “dominate,” one of his favorite words as well as pastimes. While there is certainly wanton police brutality happening every day against demonstrators and other people across this country, many …
Wafaa Aludaini is a witness to many of Gaza’s recent tragedies and also never-ending resistance. She experienced the violent Israeli occupation, the subsequent blockade on the impoverished Strip, and several wars that resulted in the death and wounding of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
But none of Israel’s wars impacted Aludaini’s life as much as the 2014 onslaught which Israel dubbed ‘Operation Protective Edge.’
Of the nearly 18,000 houses destroyed, two homes, one belonging to Wafaa’s family and the other to her in-laws, were also destroyed by Israel’s bombs.
Gaza’s infrastructure, which was already dilapidated as a result of previous wars and …
The “lost child” endures as motif and theme, the stalking shadow of much literature, the background to a society’s anxiety. The child, often deemed innocent, becomes the ink blot of loss in such disappearance. In Australia, it was captured by Peter Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety(1999). In wide spaces, innocence has much room to go wrong in, to vanish and encourage judgment.
Madeleine McCann was never merely a lost child who disappeared in the Algarve from her family’s holiday apartment on May 3, 2007. She remains a fixation of the British media stable, and, it …
Who could have guessed that the Floyd protest was the best Coronavirus vaccine? The same people that warned us that the virus is the deadliest plague and staying-at-home is the only escape, now commanded us to march amongst throngs, shoulder-to-shoulder against police! It appears they have the dreadful pandemic under their command, on tap: now it’s coming, now it’s not. Not every demo has the same curative potential: it is very dangerous to demonstrate against lockdown, but it is perfectly …
It’s been a historic and heavy two weeks in the US, following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. Calls for justice have grown from a mid-sized protest outside a precinct to a nation-wide uprising, leading Donald Trump to run to his bunker and threaten to call in the army. We will be continuing to follow events as they develop, but thought we’d send out a quick email with our latest vids, and some resources for navigating threats from repression, misinformation and political division.
The ABCs Insider program broadcast each Sunday morning is one of the ABCs most watched and most important programs. The three guests are drawn from the country’s mainstream media outlets. This is perhaps itself a limitation considering the broad range and frequently high standards of much political analysis in the country are non-mainstream outlets. The invited person subjected to questioning by the show’s host is almost invariably a politician drawn from either the Liberal or Labor parties.
One would be unwise to expect much more than a partisan view from the weekly political guest. It is, however, not unreasonable to think …
