|
Post by Admin on Jun 19, 2020 19:59:50 GMT
JUNE 19, 2020 BY DANDELIONSALAD Chris Hedges: This is a Class and a Generational Revoltdandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2020/06/19/chris-hedges-this-is-a-class-and-a-generational-revolt/RT America on Jun 18, 2020 The US “War on Drugs” has ramped up in the Caribbean Sea, with the United States targeting alleged cocaine trafficking into the United States. Meanwhile, the United Nations reports the amount of land being used to grow the coca plant has decreased in Colombia. RT America’s John Huddy reports. Then Chris Hedges, host of “On Contact,” breaks down the “War on Drugs,” and comments on the recent US uprisings against police brutality and capitalism.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 20, 2020 11:26:59 GMT
Special Issue: Racial Trauma: Theory, Research, and Healing Guest Editors: Lillian Comas-Díaz, Gordon Nagayama Hall, Helen A. Neville, Anne E. Kazak Racial Trauma: Theory, Research, and Healing: Introduction to the Special Issuepsycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2019-01033-001.htmlAbstract Racial trauma, a form of race-based stress, refers to People of Color and Indigenous individuals’ (POCI) reactions to dangerous events and real or perceived experiences of racial discrimination. Such experiences may include threats of harm and injury, humiliating and shaming events, and witnessing racial discrimination toward other POCI. Although similar to posttraumatic stress disorder, racial trauma is unique in that it involves ongoing individual and collective injuries due to exposure and reexposure to race-based stress. The articles in this special issue introduce new conceptual approaches, research, and healing models to challenge racial trauma. The authors encourage psychologists to develop culturally informed healing modalities and methodologically sophisticated research and urge the inclusion of public policy interventions in the area of racial trauma.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 20, 2020 12:39:41 GMT
"Before eliminating racism, Davis believes we must eradicate racial capitalism — a term designed to “encourage people to think about the ways in which capitalism and racism are interlinked.” “There is no capitalism without racism,” she says." 'An Extraordinary Moment': Angela Davis Says Protests Recognize Long Overdue Anti-Racist Workwww.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/06/19/angela-davis-protests-anti-racism
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 20, 2020 12:41:18 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 20, 2020 13:54:38 GMT
JUNE 19, 2020 The Necessity of Rebellionby ROB URIE www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/19/the-necessity-of-rebellion/As protests over police violence continue in the so-called land-of-the-free, the largest police-prison industrial complex in the world can no longer assure the ruling oligarchy that the working class will remain docile and compliant no matter their provocation. Morality tales are being peddled of police as heroes who serve the public by acting against the deserving poor for the benefit of the rich and their agents. The thin blue line is what keeps bank accounts unmolested—except by bankers, and renters paying the rent. The serial crises of capitalism are facts of nature while opposition to capitalism is the whim of malcontents whose productivity zapping folly is that of the coddled and indigent. It’s no secret who is writing this script. Democrats are now in the unenviable position of promoting Joe ‘Super-Predator’ Biden, a key architect of mass incarceration, the militarization of the police, immunity for killer cops and writer of key portions of both the 1994 Crime Bill and the Patriot Act, as the solution to his own life’s work. Hah! The thesis that revolutionaries cause revolutions confuses cause with effect. Capitalism has done what it does, it raised incomes and wealth quite extravagantly for about 1% of the population, raised them significantly for the next 9%, and then went on vacation for four decades. Who cleans up the mess it left behind won’t be the rich. Revolution is the assertion of life against its graduated demise. Portrayal of protesters as the poor and unwashed ruining a good thing for everyone else doesn't wash and now the working class are demanding their due. Oligarchs and corporate titans had a good run but it is they who created and fertilized the seeds of revolt. Laws, sentencing and policing just don’t aggregate to the ‘freest’ nation in the world having the largest and most intrusive prison system. To the extent that institutions define nations, mass incarceration makes the U.S. a totalitarian hellhole. This may not be the way that it ‘feels’ to liberals, because higher up the economic stratum people live largely unaffected by intrusive and repressive policing. But the same has been true of repressive regimes throughout history. This division makes mass incarceration a tool of class warfare. The state of play is that political and economic power has been concentrated to the point where the interests of the rich are all that politicians know. Kente cloth and Kaepernick kneels— symbolic gestures that keep various constituencies mollified in times when power is more widely distributed, are but insult added to injury when the rich and powerful have it all in their own pockets. Congressional Democrats are but office managers stumbling forward with forced smiles to ‘explain’ how the ninth pay cut in a year will benefit workers. Oligarchs and executives aren’t giving anything up, so the Democrats have nothing to offer. More dangerous and debilitating by design is the effort to direct protesters and protests into official channels. The Democratic Party has long been known as ‘the graveyard of social movements,’ while Republicans quite like the occasional seig heil as long as the interests of capital are kept in clear focus. With Democrats, the left losses; with Rs, the right wins. Capitalism commodifies power— it creates and distributes its political currency as currency. Competing political schemes either earn this currency through service to it or they don’t compete, hence the term ‘revolution.’ The farther down the neoliberal rabbit hole the U.S. has gone, the less amenable that power has become to compromise. With respect to so-called public goods like healthcare, education, and infrastructure, distribution mirrors income and wealth. The rich live in substantively different worlds than other classes. This distance makes it easier for the rich to imagine the not-rich being deserving of their lot. But it also makes it easier for the poor and working class to imagine oligarchs and corporate executives with heads cleanly detached from their bodies. Class differences include the dependence of politicians on rich patrons, limiting the range of potential actions they might take to those that don’t alienate their patrons. This ties back to the Ds win, the left losses formulation where burning down the system is made the only alternative to being subsumed in the political wasteland of corporate party politics. Creating and destroying property is what the U.S. does. Through foreclosures, banks ‘passively’ destroyed large sections of the same cities that protesters have been active in. The gun violence the police allegedly exist to limit overlaps quite precisely with the neighborhoods destroyed by foreclosures in the mid-late 2000s. The ultimate consequences of this foreclosure process were well understood as it was underway. The Federal government chose to bail out banks and bankers rather than the neighborhoods that predatory lenders targeted. The banking system was quickly restored while the social carnage that bankers created was left to fester. Opportunistic politicians allowed capitalists to destroy neighborhoods, towns, and cities through targeted economic policies and then claimed the need for extraordinary measures like militarized police to manage the social consequences. Malfactors claim that ‘passive’ violence is the result of natural processes (e.g. urban decay), while the active violence that is its product is caused by malevolent actors (e.g. ‘super-predators’). By locating the physical destruction of businesses and neighborhoods in local struggles between ‘crime’ and the police, its true sources are kept hidden and the economic beneficiaries of social carnage are kept in power. The tired claim that poor people want police in their neighborhoods can reasonably be restated as: poor people want freedom from the threat of violence and security in their possessions. As the class distribution of police violence suggests, the police are a major source of violence in poor neighborhoods. And power is the currency of capitalist social relations. Poor neighborhoods are plantations where rents are harvested, and poverty wages paid. Why aren’t the police arresting slumlords and otherwise abusive landlords if protection from economic predators is what poor people want? If ‘crime’ is a natural, rather than social phenomenon, then why aren’t the police busy arresting rich people? Everywhere one turns, the equitable redistribution of political and economic power is the solution to what powerful interests now claim to support. So why is old-school Democrat Bernie Sanders sheep-dogging for lunchbucket Joe instead of the other way around? Until the rich and powerful have given up their wealth and power to join the rest of us in the human condition, divide and conquer strategies like race will be their preferred tool. Setting poor and working people against one another takes the focus off of more deserving rich targets. From an article by Rob Urie for Counterpunch
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 20, 2020 15:25:27 GMT
Superior: The Return of Race Scienceby Angela Saini Where did the idea of race come from, and what does it mean? In an age of identity politics, DNA ancestry testing and the rise of the far-right, a belief in biological differences between populations is experiencing a resurgence. The truth is: race is a social construct. Our problem is we find this hard to believe. In Superior, award-winning author Angela Saini investigates the concept of race, from its origins to the present day. Engaging with geneticists, anthropologists, historians and social scientists from across the globe, Superior is a rigorous, much needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of the belief that race is real, and that some groups of people are superior to others. www.angelasaini.co.uk/superiorwww.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/27/superior-the-return-of-race-science-by-angela-saini-book-reviewen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior:_The_Return_of_Race_Science
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 20, 2020 20:48:10 GMT
Black Antifa AF: The Enduring Legacies Of Black Anti-FascismBY JEANELLE HOPE PH.D. · JUNE 20, 2020 AS BLACK PEOPLE WAGING A BATTLE FOR OUR VERY LIVES, WE MUST REMEMBER THAT OUR FREEDOM IS TIED TO THE FALL OF FASCISM, AND THAT MANY ANTIFA PROTESTORS ARE WORKING ALONGSIDE OUR MOVEMENTS AS ALLIES. www.essence.com/feature/fascism-black-antifa-rallies/
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 20, 2020 21:44:07 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 21, 2020 11:48:21 GMT
Press Release: National Coalition of Mental Health Activists Calls for Ending Police Role in Mental Health CrisesWASHINGTON (June 20, 2020)—In light of the repeated senseless killings by police officers of African Americans—many of whom are in a mental health crisis—the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery (NCMHR) strongly supports the call by racial justice groups to “unbundle the police” and transfer a significant portion of police funding to health and human services—especially voluntary, community-based services. “A report by the Ruderman Family Foundation indicates that up to 50 percent of individuals killed by police in the U.S. had disabilities, and a large percentage of those were people with mental health conditions,” said NCMHR founder Daniel B. Fisher, MD, PhD, who himself has lived experience of a mental health condition. “And African Americans are at higher risk than other individuals.” In addition to their demand to increase funding for housing, job training, and health care, advocates representing a variety of human rights organizations have called for increased funding of mental health and substance use disorder services. “This would protect community members from the intrusion of police into situations involving mental health issues, for which they are insufficiently trained,” Dr. Fisher continued. “However, there is the risk of replacing police force with mental health coercion,” Dr. Fisher noted. Rather than expanding forced mental health treatment and the number of beds in psychiatric institutions, NCMHR calls for using the increased mental health funding to expand voluntary, trauma-informed, community-based care. These services—such as peer-run crisis respites, warmlines, crisis stabilization units, and crisis outreach services—need to be delivered by ‘peers’—people with lived experience of a mental health condition—as alternatives to institutions. “These services, which are evidence-based, could greatly reduce the killing by police of people with mental health conditions—especially African Americans, indigenous persons, and other people of color, who are most at risk,” Dr. Fisher said. The NCMHR consists of member organizations in 27 states and the District of Columbia, and proudly joined 14 other disability rights groups run by persons with disabilities as a founding member of the National Disability Leadership Alliance. Contact: Daniel Fisher, MD, PhD, info@ncmhr.org, 202-642-4480 ymlp.com/znFe3g
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 21, 2020 14:26:14 GMT
HOW CORPORATIONS BANKROLL US POLICE FOUNDATIONSBy Gin Armstrong and Derek Seidman, Eyes on the Ties. June 20, 2020 | EDUCATE! popularresistance.org/how-corporations-bankroll-us-police-foundations/Corporate Backers Of The Blue. As calls to defund the police gain traction, bloated police budgets are coming under scrutiny for siphoning public resources away from black and brown communities. While police budgets are typically public documents that must be approved by elected officials, there are other institutions in place with the sole purpose of funneling even more resources toward law enforcement. Police foundations across the country are partnering with corporations to raise money to supplement police budgets by funding programs and purchasing tech and weaponry for law enforcement with little public oversight. Annual fundraising events and parties like the St. Paul Police Foundation’s “Blue Nite Gala” and the Chicago Police Foundation’s “True Blue” event are huge moneymakers. The NYC Police Foundation reported that it raised $5.5 million from its annual benefit in 2019. If police departments already have massive budgets – averaging 20% to 45% of a municipal budget – why do these organizations exist? Police foundations offer a few unique benefits to law enforcement. First, these foundations can purchase equipment and weapons with little public input or oversight. The Houston Police Foundation has an entire page on its website showcasing the equipment it purchased for the police department, including SWAT equipment, LRAD sound equipment, and dogs for the K-9 unit. The Philadelphia Police Foundation purchased long guns, drones, and ballistic helmets. The Atlanta Police Foundation helped fund a major surveillance network of over 12,000 cameras. In Los Angeles, the police used foundation funding to purchase controversial surveillance software from Palantir. If the LAPD purchased this technology through its public budget, it would have been required to hold public meetings and gain approval from the city council. By having the foundation purchase it for them, the LAPD was able to bypass that oversight. Second, these foundations provide a public-private structure wherein the corporate elite can overtly support police departments through direct donations, sponsorships, special programs, and by serving as directors on foundations’ boards. The ongoing protests have emphasized that police exist to enforce a racist social order that protects corporations, capital, and buildings rather than black and brown lives. Police foundations are a key space for orchestrating, normalizing, and celebrating the collaboration between corporate power and the police.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 21, 2020 16:24:54 GMT
Published on Sunday, June 21, 2020 byInequality.org For a Racism-Free 22nd Century, We Need a Billionaire-Free 21stThe dead hand of grand fortunes past is still poisoning our present. bySam Pizzigati www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/21/racism-free-22nd-century-we-need-billionaire-free-21st"The novel coronavirus just keeps coming — and so do the billions for America’s top billionaires. The nation’s five richest — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison — have added a combined $101.7 billion to their net worth since the virus hit hard nationally in March. These five exceedingly affluent souls, notes the latest billionaire update from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, now hold a combined fortune worth nearly half a trillion dollars, $493.9 billion to be exact. How much damage will this colossal concentration of wealth and power eventually wreak upon our nation? We won’t know for quite some time. Grand private fortunes can do ill long past the passing of the kingpins who amass them. How long past? The reality we face here in 2020: If Donald Trump and his enablers keep power this November, they’ll owe their victory in no small part to one of the richest Americans alive — in 1920. That Jazz Age deep pocket, the Pittsburgh banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon, wrote into the U.S. tax code a series of changes that have now, a century later, turned his personal fortune into the seed corn for the 2020 Donald Trump reelection campaign. Mellon’s grandson Timothy, the Washington Post has just reported, currently ranks as “the top donor supporting President Trump’s reelection and GOP congressional lawmakers.” Timothy Mellon’s donations to America First Action, “the main super PAC supporting the president’s reelection,” rate as “the biggest known contributions to the group by far,” the Post notes. How did Timothy Mellon end up as the Trump reelection campaign numero uno? The dollar trail from Andrew Mellon to the 2020 Trump reelection starts with the 1920 presidential election, a battle that came on the heels of two exceedingly deadly shots at global well-being, the catastrophic conflict we now know as World War I and the catastrophic pandemic that contemporaries dubbed the Spanish Flu. Those twin shocks had millions of Americans yearning for a return to “normalcy,” and Andrew Mellon supplied a major chunk of the campaign dollars that helped Warren Harding, the Republican presidential nominee, skate to an easy victory. A grateful Harding would make Andrew Mellon the secretary of the treasury. Mellon would hold that position for the next 11 years. The first five years of that tenure would see a bitter struggle over the tax-the-rich legacy of the war years. In 1914, the year World War I began in Europe, no wealthy individual in the United States faced a tax rate higher than 7 percent on any income dollar. By the war’s end, personal income over $1 million faced a 77 percent tax rate. Mellon didn’t like that rate. He liked even less the 25 percent estate tax on bequests over $10 million enacted during the war. “The social necessity for breaking up large fortunes in this country,” Mellon sternly pronounced, “does not exist.” As treasury secretary, Mellon would make steady progress in his campaign to whittle down the top income tax rate. On the estate tax, he encountered a rockier road. In 1924, Congress actually raised, not lowered, the top estate tax rate, from 25 to 40 percent. And lawmakers didn’t stop there. They enacted a “gift tax” — a levy on large transfers of wealth from the wealthy to their favored inner circle — to prevent the wealthy from sidestepping the estate tax by “giving” their money away to family and friends. A displeased Mellon would then dig in for a final assault on tax fairness. In 1925, after GOP victories in the November 1924 election, he proposed chopping the top income tax rate — 46 percent on earnings over $500,000 in 1924 — down to 20 percent, as well as eliminating both the gift and estate taxes. Progressives in Congress decried this latest “Mellon plan.” If Mellon carried the day, argued the fiery New York congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, federal taxes would no longer have the capacity “to prevent the accumulation of enormous fortunes and the control of industry and commerce that goes with such large fortunes.” Mellon did carry the day. By an overwhelming margin, Congress killed the federal gift tax, halved the estate tax, and slashed the top income tax rate from 46 to 25 percent. The overall federal tax bill on $1 million in income would drop by two-thirds. Mellon’s personal net worth, just over $80 million in 1923, would be estimated as high as $600 million — about $9 billion today — six years later. The ever-so-convenient 1926 repeal of the federal gift tax that Mellon had engineered would enable him to start shifting this fortune tax-free to his heirs. Mellon, ever the class warrior, would generously invite his fellow plutocrats to share in the looting. Treasury officials quietly spread the word their Department would gladly review any requests for refunds on taxes paid since 1917. The requests — from lawyers and accountants for America’s super wealthy — would flood in, and the list of refunds granted would eventually total $1.27 billion. Mellon himself would personally pocket $7 million in refunds, with another $14 million in refunds for his corporate holdings. The end result: The bulk of Andrew Mellon’s private fortune would go untouched by Uncle Sam. In 1957, Fortune magazine would rank four Mellon heirs among America’s eight richest individuals. One of those heirs, Mellon’s daughter Ailsa, had a fortune grand enough in the mid-20th century to support three residences in New York City, two in Connecticut’s Greenwich, one in Palm Beach, and one more out on Long Island. Ailsa only spent three weeks a year at her Long Island manse, but maintained a year-round staff. The 12 domestics and 22 gardeners, notes historian David Cannadine, kept the cut-flowers in the manse’s 32 rooms “changed daily, whether she was present or not.” Timothy Mellon, the 77-year-old Trump reelection campaign’s top benefactor and Ailsa’s nephew, grew up amid that gilded, privileged milieu. His attraction to Donald Trump should come as no surprise. Like Trump, another heir to grand fortune, Timothy Mellon only rages against handouts that go to those born without silver spoons. In his self-published 2015 autobiography, he argued that expanded social programs have only made black people “even more belligerent.” “For delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cell phones, WIC payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on,” Mellon wrote. “The largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass.” How Trumpian — even to the out-of-place capitalization. Timothy Mellon will be long gone by the 2120 election. Will some heir to today’s billionaire fortunes step in to fill his shoes? That seems almost certain, unless we achieve what our progressive forbears could not: a lasting deconcentration of America’s wealth."
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 21, 2020 16:52:45 GMT
"Those in power today want nothing more than to stop this kind of movement," said Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. Published on Sunday, June 21, 2020 byCommon Dreams As Trump Sows Division, Poor People's Campaign Ignites 'Transformative Action' to Address Interwoven Injustices"Those in power today want nothing more than to stop this kind of movement," said Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. byAndrea Germanos, staff writer www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/21/trump-sows-division-poor-peoples-campaign-ignites-transformative-action-address"Hours before President Donald Trump held a Saturday evening rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he gave self-congratulatory, division-sowing speech, the Poor People's Campaign offered a progressive counterpoint with a virtual social justice assembly that uplifted the stories of those suffering from poverty and racial injustice and unveiled a policy platform to spur "transformative action." "Poverty and racism are systemic problems that need systemic solutions. We are that solution," said Jamilla Allen of Durham, North Carolina, one of the testifiers who spoke Saturday at the online event. Entitled the Mass Poor People's Assembly and Moral March on Washington, the event—moved online in light of the coronaviurs pandemic—was sponsored by The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. The campagn is co-chaired by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach, based in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice in New York City. "Those in power today want nothing more than to stop this kind of movement," said Theoharis. "It's why they spend so much time and money trying to deny us the right to vote, why they attack protesters, spread lies meant to narrow our vision and limit our aspirations, divide us up by issue and by region, by race, gender, immigration status, political party." The digital assembly was broadcast twice on Saturday, and airs for a third and final time on Sunday at 6 pm EST. Organizers say the first broadcast drew 1.2 million Facebook viewers, a tally that doesn't caputure viewers from other media platforms like MSNBC's YouTube broadcast of the gathering. Trump's in-person gathering, in contrast, was far smaller than his campaign expected, wth huge sections of the 19,000-seat arena empty."
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 21, 2020 17:53:43 GMT
Socialists have a long history of fighting against slavery. Karl Marx, who wrote extensively about the Civil War and slavery in the United States, made it abundantly clear that enslaved Black people in North America had to be free before all the wage slaves of the working class could be free of exploitation Juneteenth: A Marxist PerspectivePost on: June 19, 2020 Scott Cooper This year’s commemoration of Juneteenth — the day the last of the enslaved Black people in the United States were formally emancipated — is also a reminder that the job of ending all forms of slavery is not yet finished. As Karl Marx wrote, we have nothing to lose but our chains and a world to win! www.leftvoice.org/juneteenth-a-marxist-perspective
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 21, 2020 18:45:47 GMT
“The Police Killings No One Is Talking About”: Native Americans Most Likely to be Killed by CopsSTORYOCTOBER 19, 2016 www.democracynow.org/2016/10/19/the_police_killings_no_one_isA new investigation by In These Times explodes myths about who is most likely to die at the hands of police by revealing that, compared to their percentage of the U.S. population, Native Americans were more likely to be killed by police than any other group, including African Americans. It also found that cases of African-American police deaths tend to dominate headlines, while killings of Native people go almost entirely unreported by mainstream U.S. media. We speak with reporter Stephanie Woodard, who wrote the article, “The Police Killings No One Is Talking About,” and with James Rideout, the uncle of Jacqueline Salyers, a 32-year-old pregnant mother and member of the Puyallup Tribe who was killed by police earlier this year in Tacoma, Washington.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jun 21, 2020 19:34:45 GMT
Megachurch pastor calls slavery a “blessing” to white people churchandstate.org.uk/2020/06/megachurch-pastor-calls-slavery-a-blessing-to-white-people/Atlanta megachurch pastor Louie Giglio gave the obligatory apology Tuesday after attempting to repackage the phrase “white privilege” as a “white blessing” during a talk about race and religion. “We understand the curse that was slavery, white people do,” Giglio said Sunday during the conversation. “And we say that was bad. But we miss the blessing of slavery, that it actually built up the framework for the world that white people live in.” Giglio, who presides over Passion City Church, provided a bit of context for his rebranding attempt, saying that “white privilege” is striking the wrong nerve and that because he was born in a segregated Southern city in 1958, he is “living in the blessing of the curse that happened generationally that allowed me to grow up in Atlanta.”
|
|