@randtntx
Well, I read this early and had to get out to do stuff in the garden before it gets hot.

So, on your suggestion, I sent it out to a whole bunch of people. I totally agree. I hope many people watch Kimberly Jones.

Her monopoly analogy is so right on. The msm just needs to go away. All of it. I am so done just being nice. fuckthisshit.

Thanks so much for your comment. Hope tx is not too hot. Take good care and have a good one.

I hope this woman's voice reaches a huge audience. This is why people need their own media. The corporate media deserves nothing but absolute and complete contempt. The power of media is immense and they have misused that power in a horrible way. We should have been hearing voices like this woman's loudly and clearly for the past 40 years. If any entity could be labeled as treasonous it would be corporate media. Their contribution to the ruin of our society's better possibilities is huge and unforgivable.

@wendy davis

You so rock. Thanks for all the hard work you do. Really appreciate it.

Take good care and have a good one.

said it right; thank you both. my mind is careening with images and pain right now, so i'll need to simmer down a bit on order be able to comment further.

rec'd ++++, magiamma.

@Raggedy Ann
Your posts always make me smile so big. May the change happen now for all those in need.

Thanks for posting this video. I am sending it out to folks I know.

Take good care and have a good one.

Thanks for re-posting that video - I think it is so powerful because of the truth it conveys.

Reading your essay reminded me of my own life - only as a Hispanic woman. I was lucky because I had a dad who thought his daughters needed an education and ability to earn their own way. Not many Hispanic fathers were on that page. Anyway, I had other ideas and dropped out of college, married, had kids, and found myself a single parent with few prospects for providing a decent life for my children. Back to college I went on the Pell Grant (it paid the whole thing including books back then), got a waitressing job, and put myself through school. If not for food stamps and welfare child care support, I wouldn't have made it, but they wanted people like us to make it back then. What a horrible, different world we live in today where deprivation is king.

Things are changing, though. It's time. The masses are awakening - thank you virus for bringing about awareness by focusing our attention AWAY from living outside ourselves and thinking we, too, can be the next Warren Buffet. Reality is sinking in and change will come. I breathe a sigh of relief and watch with wonder that the universe is pulling it off.

Have a beautiful, changeable day, everyone!

@lotlizard
SurFuckingReal. The pics in that article are fabulous. Lost souls roaming the ethers must be appeased. If it's not the oligarchs it's them all. Go figure.

Take good care and have a good one.

https://www.1843magazine.com/dispatches/vietnams-ghosts-are-hungry-for-i...

Not so different, perhaps, from our custom of burning real cars and buildings as an offering to those who have gone before, the dead unjustly killed and oppressed.

@enhydra lutris
I am so pissed. Enough already. Time to change. No more incrementalism. Fucking Juneteenth and in Tulsa no less. Thanks for your comment.

Take good care and have a good one.

That's at least the second time I've seen the first one and probably the third for the second and they're both still great. your connecting narrative, however, makes them even more compelling. Thanks again.

The sitting fascist will kick off his formal campaign on Juneteenth, in Tulsa. This could very well be something cataclysmic. It cannot be an accident; he may or may not be a completely ignorant lout, but surely not all of his advisers and consultants are. This is intentional in-your-face provocation conjoined with rallying the racist neo-fascist core.

Thanks again for the great column.

Be well and have a good one.

@Granma
Delighted that you can watch videos now. I have a hard time watching all that I would like to. There are so many here that are important.

The way the 'system' is set up, it makes it hard to really disengage from color. Hopefully this wave will change that. It has to change.

Take good care and have a good one.

That making decisions or judgements about people based on the color of their skin is the height of ignorance and stupidity. One might as well try to guess personality based on shoe size. That is a poor comparison, but I have never found an equal comparison in terms of ridiculousness and stupidity.
I seldom watch videos but will try to see these 2 later today.

@wendy davis

here is the correct link for the Tulsa riot

https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/5/31/21276084/tulsa-race-massacre-bl...

wow...

first, thanks as well to Raggedy Ann for giving you the heads-up on the kimberly jones clip. as to the burniing of black wall street (and i’d remembered it, the buildings were fire-bombed from the air, but this history doesn’t record that:

‘99 years ago, one of America’s worst acts of racial violence took place in Tulsa
It was covered up for decades’, Emily Stewart vox.com, May 31, 2020

May 31 and June 1 mark the 99th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, when a white mob descended on an affluent black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Greenwood District, which was known as “Black Wall Street,” was decimated in a matter of days. Roughly 1,200 homes were burned, 35 blocks burned, and an estimated 300 black people killed.

that massacre and the massacre in rosewood were partially sparked by emmett till sorts of accusers, and those ‘protected’, not ‘arrested’ were as today.

one comment under the kimberly jones video was this:

“The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.” Frederick Douglas

others reminded ms. jones that there are also false flags (infiltrators and agents provocateurs afoot), and simple opportunistic looters, or so i remember. the first (?) man arrested for the burrning of precinct 3 in minneapolis fits the former designation, designation, imo

on one of my recent threads cassiodorus had quipped that Wall Street didn’t seem to might the looting’ (Mr. Market continues to up up up!)

since then i keep hearing these line from jefferson airplane’s ‘Lather’:

‘Sergeant Dow Jones 27 years old...commanding his very own tank’

...as a metaphor for militarized police and the Rise of the Warrior Cop, as well as police as the enforcers for the white capitalist class. Plus, as emblematic of the truth that ending the draft was a fucking brilliant move, in that now for the lower classes, including people of color, the USian military acts as the Jobs Program from Hell. and no, including ‘free college tuition' hasn’t worked out for most as far as i’ve read. the bonuses for re-enlistment offer some serious cash incentives.

it’s always good to hear from black voices who have skin in the game, unlike the comprador congressional black caucus and and fellow congress critters.

i’m struggling to find the right words for this, but our black/azteca son has always been a member of ‘the suspect class’, as in: ‘busted for driving while black’ and shopping while black’. but it’s gotten creepier since the george floyd protests began. although he lives in the far NW corner of colorado, police are everywhere, and watch him like a hawk.

in a phone call he'd told me that two mornings ago he was biking his usual ten miles on the bike path, and a cop car came by partially on the bicycle path, swung the passenger side door open, causing him to have to swerve and crash into a cyclone fence. if i could take the causes of his fears of injury or death because of his black skin, i sure would even give my life for it. (i’m old and in the way, and ready to go, so that’s not much of an offer, though.) try as i might, as a white woman, i have no idea what it really feels like for him and other people of color. (indigenous are the second highest victims of police killings and political imprisonments.)

but thank you, magiamma, for your empathy for, and solidarity with...black pain and rage.

on later edit: i'd meant to add that blacks die at disproportionately higher rates of covid-19 than whites.

@Lookout
Excellent point. Race and class do feed each other. Except if you are winning at the monopoly game you have a lot more leverage. No? And if you are a racist then the deck is stacked. Thanks for the video.

I really really really hope that Guy McPherson is wrong. Either way it's all about be here now, love the ones your with, fuck this shit. (lol).

Take good care and have a good one.

I think it was C S King that said "the color isn't black or white, it's green." We need a jobs program with a decent SALARY for all. (As well as M4A)
The story of American poverty, as told by one Alabama county (10 min)

The UN Special Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty paid a visit to the U.S. last year, drawing worldwide attention to his findings. NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Simon Ostrovsky followed in his footsteps to report from Lowndes County, Alabama.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytd06hadrsM&t=32s]
Surprise, surprise Lowndes county is largely black. I've seen this my whole life. So have others, but most are willfully blind.

Perhaps change is in the air, and things may be better after this shit show. At least I find the protests hopeful. As you suggest it may all be moot considering the looming climate disaster.

Guy thinks we only have a decade remaining due to a massive methane release. His ability to accept this fate and still live a meaningful life is interesting. (10 min)
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03Jcqds7Ypc]

Thanks for the OT and have a good one.

@studentofearth

James Baldwin's whole speech is riveting.

Divide and conquer is a purposeful strategy of the oligarchs. I think that if there was ever any chance to change things, it is now. The consequences are way too grave if we do not.

‘Make Us All Safe. Go Back to Your Bunker’ Seattle Mayor Tells Trump
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-go-back-to-you...

Free Food, Free Speech and Free of Police: Inside Seattle’s ‘Autonomous Zone’
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/us/seattle-autonomous-zone.html

In a neighborhood that is the heart of the city’s art and culture — threatened these days as rising tech wealth brings in gentrification — protesters seized the moment. They reversed the barricades to shield the liberated streets and laid claim to several city blocks, now known as the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.”

“This space is now property of the Seattle people,” read a banner on the front entrance of the now-empty police station. The entire area was now a homeland for racial justice — and, depending on the protester one talked to, perhaps something more.

What has emerged is an experiment in life without the police — part street festival, part commune. Hundreds have gathered to hear speeches, poetry and music. On Tuesday night, dozens of people sat in the middle of an intersection to watch “13th,” the Ava DuVernay film about the criminal justice system’s impact on African-Americans. On Wednesday, children made chalk drawings in the middle of the street.

One block had a designated smoking area. Another had a medic station. At the “No Cop Co-op,” people could pick up a free LaCroix sparkling water or a snack. No currency was accepted, but across the street, in a nod to capitalism, a bustling stand was selling $6 hot dogs. It was dealing in U.S. dollars.

And then there is the school-to-prison pipeline...

https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/Dismantling_the_School_to_Pr...

Thanks for the links. Take good care and have a good one.

The words James Baldwin spoke early in the full speech described a worldwide problem and not restricted to simply race in America. We see this over and over again in our domestic and foreign policies.
(video 16:53-18:10)
[video:https://youtu.be/oFeoS41xe7w?t=1013]

Transcript (my bold)

I, have to speak as one of the people who’ve been most attacked by what we now must here call the Western or European system of reality. What white people in the world, what we call white supremacy – I hate to say it here – comes from Europe. It’s how it got to America. Beneath then, whatever one’s reaction to this proposition is, has to be the question of whether or not civilizations can be considered, as such, equal, or whether one’s civilization has the right to overtake and subjugate, and, in fact, to destroy another. Now, what happens when that happens. Leaving aside all the physical facts that one can quote. Leaving aside, rape or murder. Leaving aside the bloody catalog of oppression, which we are in one way too familiar with already, what this does to the subjugated, the most private, the most serious thing this does to the subjugated, is to destroy his sense of reality.

The millennia of bloody wars in Europe were primarily family feuds between different close family members and cousins. Each trying to get a larger piece of the game board of Europe and the wealth extracted from the people living on the lands. The rivalry spilled over into the rest of the world, formalized with the Treaty of Tordesillas.

Ruling class in the colonized world believe they are the rightful heirs of this tradition. Most common tactic is to divide and conquer. We have seen it over and over again taking a complex issue into a binary choice French vs British, British vs American, Indians vs Settlers, South vs North, Democrat vs Republican, Urban vs Rural, Sanders vs Biden. Once enough of the "agitators" of the non-ruling class population has made a choice the remainders are crushed. Then a new binary choice appears.

The economic class wars have created a larger pool of those seeing a hopeless future and the long cycles of oppression. We need to stay with this long enough to unmask all the puppet masters. Change will only last a few years, same problem will come back quickly if we don't alter the core of the cycle and change our automatic expression of unspoken beliefs.

@Anja Geitz
Thanks so much!

Take good care and have a good one.

Thank you Magi for including Kimberly Jones powerful testimony. Ms. Jones words reminded me how little most of us know of this country’s history. And while I cannot step into her shoes to fully understand the pain and anger she is expressing, I can empathize as a fellow human being how pain and anger feels.

I’d also like to thank you and RA for sharing your stories as well. Like you and RA, my Mother also struggled with making a living after my Father left her with two small children to raise. Unfortunately, for my Mother, the idea of going to college must have been something impossible to imagine. In fact, it’d be fair to say that having been born in Germany during the war and growing up in country with very little economic security, the message she received as a young girl coming of age was not that of empowerment. Neither was growing up in a home with a raging alcoholic. Since her death, I’ve tried to imagine what that must’ve been like for her as a little girl to live a life where there was no sense of security inside her home, or outside her home. There was a time, as a teenager myself, when I saw what was fear in my Mother as merely being unambitious. I simply did not have the capacity to comprehend the cumulative effect her childhood had on her. I wish I had. I would’ve been much kinder to her while she was alive.

An eye opening a Open Thread this morning to be sure.

@Unabashed Liberal
Baldwin is a powerful speaker. I watched it several times and was riveted each time. He was debating William F Buckley. Can't even imagine.

You know, I have taken to 'selecting all' of my comment and then copying it before I hit save just in case the post 'goes away'. Then it's saved in the buffer. Then when you can try again, do a paste and voila there is your post. Should work for you.

I hope they cancel it. Absolutely.

Take good care and have a good one.

a lengthy comment, and, didn't save it to Note Pad. (which I should start doing, since, lately, I've noticed that sometimes, comments sorta float off, and, I have to try to resubmit them--may be because I'm on a loaner laptop with different settings)

Anyhoo, thank you for posting Baldwin's remarks. Once I finish some bill and business-related tasks, I'll be back to watch both videos. In a nutshell, I'm with you--no time for 'incrementalism.' I'm skeptical of the DP Leadership's capacity to step up, but, hopefully, this time they'll come through (for a change).

BTW, was gobsmacked by the scheduling of the MAGA Rally on Juneteenth. Many moons ago, lived in SW OK. At that time, Tulsi was considered the most progressive city in the state. May be wrong, but suspect that city officials will either cancel, or insist on rescheduling, the rally. Hope so.

Hope COVID hasn't resurged in your neck-of-the-woods.

Take good care; be safe.

Mollie

“Revolution is not a one time event.”
~~Audre Lorde

“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die, I want to go where they went.”
~~Will Rogers, Actor & Social Commentator

@Dawn's Meta
It really should go viral. I hope it does. It's time to move beyond 'language'. There are times when there are no other ways to say things. Her language is so very justifiable. Of course, if people take offense to the language then they will not hear the message. So, not an easy call. Here I don't worry.

Thanks. Take good care and have a good one.

Kimberly's video is even better the second time. I learned more. Thinking about posting on my FB timeline right after the one I posted from Trevor Noah. But it has...language.

I think everyone should hear and watch this lady. She has it right.

I cried. This just shouldn't be.

@smiley7
Backatcha. Hope you are faring well with the onslaught of paperwork. May the force be with you.

Take good care and have a restful rest of the day.

thank you for moving this conversation.

May the tide keep on rising.

Be well and safe.