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"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."

-- Samuel P. Huntington

News and Opinion

Goodbye, Columbus

Millions of white people glorify mass murderers because their sense of identity and place in society is deeply tied to white supremacy. The perpetrators of crimes against humanity are often elevated to positions of respect and admiration. It all depends on who did the killing, and who was killed. Now the murderers are being called to account. The new movement in the United States against police and other state violence has inspired this welcome change taking place all over the world. The criminals are being exposed decades and even centuries after their atrocities took place. ...

Statues of Belgium’s King Leopold have been defaced and even removed. Leopold held the Congo as his personal fiefdom, the Congo Free State, where he killed as many as 15 million people who were forced to work on rubber plantations. ... Instead of Adolf Hitler being the only European who comes to mind when genocide is mentioned, the name Leopold ought to have the same effect. But Hitler killed Europeans and Leopold killed Africans. The crimes of one are widely known while the other escapes condemnation because his crimes were erased.

The same can be said of Winston Churchill. During World War II he presided over a famine in colonial India caused by the theft of rice and wheat which supplied Britain’s armies. An estimated 3 million people died but starvation in Bengal province was not his first opportunity to commit mass murder. After World War I he advocated gassing Iraqis who rebelled against British rule. “I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes.” He had already ordered chemical weapons attacks against the Russian Bolsheviks in 1918. Now Churchill’s statue in London’s parliament square is covered in a large box to protect it from protesters. ...

Christopher Columbus is among those being exposed. His voyages on behalf of the Spanish crown were followed by other European invasions which brought disease and bloody conquest against indigenous populations from the tip of South America all the way to Alaska. ... But there is a reaction to every action and when the question of removing the Columbus statue in New York City was raised, governor Andrew Cuomo demurred, “But the statue has come to represent and signify appreciation for the Italian-American contribution to New York.” Columbus was born Cristoforo Colombo in Genoa.

This need for Cuomo and others to hang on to the criminal is obvious. Columbus puts Italians at the center of the settler colonial state. They are not the southern European catholic immigrants who were often looked down upon when they first arrived. Columbus makes them white Americans and they cling to him lest they lose that imprimatur. ... The hand wringing over monument removal is not just connected to reverence for these individuals. While millions of people want change, millions more do not and they hold on to Columbus or Leopold or Churchill or Robert E. Lee because their identity and place in society is firmly tied to white supremacy. If a Columbus statue comes down so might a small portion of white entitlement and its privileges.

San Francisco protesters topple statues of Ulysses Grant and other slave owners

On Friday night in San Francisco, protesters tore down and defaced statues of white men who enslaved black and indigenous people – among them Ulysses S Grant, the 18th president who in the civil war led the Union armies in the defeat of the slave-owning Confederacy. ... Statues of Father Junípero Serra and Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star-Spangled Banner, were also brought down.

Grant was the last US president to have personally owned another human being. Though his father was an abolitionist, Grant married a woman from a slave-owning family and personally directed the labor of enslaved workers at their plantation in Missouri. In 1859, two years before the civil war, he emancipated William Jones, a slave aged around 35 whom he had personally owned.

During the war, his wife, Julia, traveled with a woman named Jules who was still enslaved, a decision that prompted public condemnation. The Grant family did not free Jules after President Abraham Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation. Instead, according to the White House Historical Association, Jules ran away.

In light of events in San Francisco, some commentators argued that Grant’s legacy deserved respect. “As a general he smashed the Confederacy, and as president he crushed the Klan,” the journalist Adam Serwer, who writes frequently about America’s racist history, wrote on Twitter.

As president from 1869 to 1877, Grant pushed through Congress legislation cracking down on the Ku Klux Klan. He also called on the army to help federal officials “arrest and break up bands of disguised night marauders”, Allyson Hobbs wrote in the Guardian in 2017, arguing that Grant was a positive model for how the US government should crack down on white supremacist vigilantes after deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. But as the Smithsonian magazine reported, as president Grant also “launched an illegal war against the Plains Indians, and then lied about it”.

“Robert E. Lee Was a Brutal Slave Master”: Activist’s Call to Rename Louisiana School Goes Viral

Trump admin used drones, helicopters to surveil George Floyd protests in 15 cities

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used helicopters, airplanes and drones in more than 15 cities to watch protests over the killing of George Floyd and obtained more than 270 hours of surveillance.

According to data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by The Hill, DHS surveilled demonstrations in Dayton, Ohio, New York City, Buffalo, N.Y., and Philadelphia, among other cities. It then sent footage back to control centers managed by Air and Marine Operations, a CBP branch, that was then made available to other federal and local agencies.

The data comes amid a national conversation over the role police and law enforcement should play in dealing with protests, with scrutiny of certain local and federal tactics used during the demonstrations.

The Air Force inspector general is also probing whether the military inappropriately used a reconnaissance plane to watch over demonstrators in Washington and Minneapolis and the National Guard in the District of Columbia has probed the use of a military helicopter that hovered at low altitudes during another Washington protest.

Media Project Trump Crimes Onto Empire’s Enemies

US President Donald Trump threatened on June 1 to send active duty troops to crush the anti-racist rebellion sweeping the country in the wake of George Floyd’s police murder. The announcement was followed by a photo op in front of St. John’s Church in DC’s Lafayette Square, which was brutally cleared of demonstrators by military police.

The reaction from corporate media was to chastise Trump’s move as “un-American” (CNN, 6/3/20), obscuring the domestic sources of inspiration for his vicious crackdown.

A cascade of op-eds likened Trump and his militarized attempted power grab to Washington’s official bogeymen. Foreign Policy (6/2/20) compared the president to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, while CNN (6/7/20) declared that Trump is “reading out of the Middle East autocrats’ playbook.”

“Mr Trump is infatuated with military and political strongmen. He sides with authoritarians like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Rodrigo Duterte,” decried the Guardian’s editorial board (6/4/20), linking to a New York Times column (6/4/20) that lambasted the US leader for “follow[ing] a strongman’s playbook.”

The Washington Post (6/3/20) rolled out Western media’s favorite analogy (FAIR.org, 5/7/20), likening the US president who just threatened a coup d’etat to the literal victim of a Washington-sponsored coup: Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Post columnist Francisco Toro accused Venezuela’s popular elected leader of having “broke[n] the back of Venezuelan democracy” by activating a plan to deploy active duty military to the streets.

The Venezuelan emigre blogger falsely claimed that the “army stumbled into staging a coup, but not one anyone had calculated ahead of time,” suppressing the extensive evidence that military brass and business elites had planned Chávez’s overthrow weeks, if not months, in advance, with full US knowledge.

Similarly, Edward Asner penned an op-ed for the Daily Beast (6/10/20) headlined, “Trump’s Anti-Protest Authoritarianism Has Echoes of Venezuela.” The famed actor equated white supremacist pro-Trump militas with black and brown people in Venezuela’s barrios organizing community self-defense groups, or colectivos, long vilified by opposition elites and the Western media to justify anti-Chavista violence and murderous US economic sanctions (e.g., Voice of America, 4/10/19; Washington Post, 8/14/19).

Other pundits compared the repression in Lafayette Square to that seen during China’s 1989 Tiananmen protests. Washington Post reporter Adam Taylor (6/4/20) complained that by savagely escalating the clampdown on the eve of the 31st Tiananmen anniversary, Trump had “surrender[ed] soft power” and done more to distract from the commemoration “than Beijing’s censors ever could.” Taylor also scolded Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton for failing to mention the anniversary in his now notorious New York Times op-ed (6/3/20) cheerleading Trump’s crackdown, though the Post journalist did not otherwise criticize the op-ed’s argument.

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (6/3/20) similarly appropriated Tiananmen to question Trump’s “manhood,” while safely cordoning off the US empire and its military from critique:

No, United States troops won’t massacre protesters, as Chinese troops did, but Trump’s deployment of troops for political purposes would betray our traditions, damage the credibility of the armed forces and exacerbate tensions across the country.

He apparently did not appreciate the irony of fretting over the “credibility” of a genocidal institution literally responsible for killing millions of people across dozens of countries, including Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Korea, Haiti, Philippines and North America—and indirectly involved in arming and training client regimes guilty of murdering millions more.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin (6/4/20) doubled down on Kristof’s Orientalism, claiming that US military brass’ reticence to enter politics “is what separates us from China, Russia, Turkey, Egypt and others, and the way their autocrats use the military to put civilians down.”

Rubin and other commentators’ outrage at Trump’s “fetish” for military violence (New Republic, 5/29/20; Washington Post, 6/3/20; Guardian, 6/7/20) concealed their own idolatry of US exceptionalism.

As Louis Allday observed, the Trump administration’s threat to target the imperial death machine on the domestic “battle space” is hardly unprecedented, having been brought to bear by previous US rulers now normalized by the corporate media (FAIR.org, 9/19/17, 3/7/17).

From the white supremacist and anti-labor massacres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the FBI’s COINTELPRO of the 1960s and ’70s, to the bombing of the MOVE black liberation organization in Philadelphia in 1985 that leveled 61 houses, the US state and its proxies have not hesitated to employ terrorism against the population.

The US national security state’s unfulfilled intentions are even more terrifying. In 1950, the FBI drew up plans for the “permanent detention” of 12,000 US citizens accused of subversion in Guantánamo-style military prisons, while Congress passed a bill authorizing the construction of concentration camps for dissidents, six of which were in fact built. In the 1960s, the Pentagon prepared to wage counter-insurgency warfare in 25 US cities if the popular uprisings against white supremacy and imperial militarism overcame the brutal state crackdown and continued to escalate.

In the 1980s, the Miami Herald (7/5/87) reported, the Federal Emergency Management Agency drew up, under the direction of the National Security Council’s Oliver North,

a secret contingency plan that called for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis.

Refusing to reckon with these horrors, Western journalists from across the political spectrum accused Trump of tarnishing Washington’s image as “the world’s moral guardian” (CNN, 6/6/20) and allowing official enemies to “us[e] the protests…to undermine the US’s criticism of their own authoritarianism” (Business Insider, 6/2/20; also Politico, 6/1/20; NBC, 6/3/20; BBC, 6/5/20; ABC News, 6/6/20; Newsweek, 6/8/20; Washington Post, 6/8/20).

Senior military brass likewise raised the alarm that Trump was not only delegitimizing the domestic “forces of order” but also, as Brookings Institution president and former four-star Marine Gen. John Allen warned, “wreck[ing] the high regard Americans have for their military” (Foreign Policy, 6/3/20), which should only be mobilized to crush internal dissent as a last resort.

Former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen (Atlantic, 6/2/20) touted the “compassion” of the US military, which he said must never treat “fellow citizens” as an “enemy.” The admiral, who helped direct Obama’s drone terrorism program responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings around the world, including US citizens, urged us not to “lose sight…of institutional racism.”

But behind their pandering, elite pundits and anti-Trump war criminals’ main concern is not the president’s coup-mongering per se, but the danger that his thuggish repression will further discredit the US empire, especially its police, military and media (FAIR.org, 6/4/20, 6/7/20, 6/9/20).

They justifiably fear that, emboldened by Trump’s naked criminality, the growing mass movement against white supremacy will radicalize into a full-scale rejection of the system as a whole, which no amount of kente-clad kneeling can appease.

Black Lives Matter vs. Donald Trump

After US Bullying, Every Mention of United States Stripped From UN Resolution Spurred by George Floyd Killing

The United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday unanimously adopted a resolution condemning police abuses and ordering an inquiry into law enforcement actions that "resulted in the death of George Floyd and other Africans and people of African descent."

But rights groups immediately slammed the resolution as overly broad and "absurd" because it was weakened to remove all references to one particularly relevant country: the United States.

"The final resolution passed by the United Nations strips mention of the United States, where police kill people, particularly Black people, at alarmingly higher rates compared to other developed countries," Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU's Human Rights Program, said in a statement.

An earlier draft of the resolution—which was introduced by African nations this week in the wake of Floyd's killing on May 25—explicitly called for a U.N. investigation into police violence against black people in the United States, but all references to the world's most powerful country were scrubbed from the text in closed-door negotiations.

Ahead of the vote on the final version of the resolution, Dakwar accused the U.S. of "bullying other countries to water down what would have been an historic resolution and exempting itself from international investigation."

"The United States is yet again turning its back on victims of police violence and Black people," said Dakwar.

Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization based in the U.S., warned as the resolution was being finalized Thursday that stripping any mention of the United States from a resolution sparked by U.S. police violence "would transform it into an 'all lives matter' text, and risk making it so vague as to be meaningless."

AFP reported Friday that "Washington complained of being singled out in the draft text, and a number of its allies, including Australia and Israel, spoke out against the U.S. focus during the debate." The Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the Human Rights Council in 2018.

One earlier version of the resolution called for an inquiry into "violations of international human rights law and abuses against Africans and people of African descent in the United States of America and other parts of the world recently affected by law enforcement agencies."

Here's what happens when the US & allies strong-arm @UN_HRC members, arguing "racism is everywhere," "we shouldn't single out one country," "US has strong democratic institutions so we shouldn't subject it to international scrutiny." Resolution as passed today, without a vote: pic.twitter.com/qWDZdWgq2w

— (((Amy Bergquist))) (@alb68) June 19, 2020

The adopted resolution orders U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to prepare a report on systemic racism and law enforcement abuses against people of African descent.

As Reuters reported, the resolution also mandates that Bachelet "examine government responses to peaceful protests, including accusations of the excessive use of force, and deliver findings in a year's time."

Dakwar of the ACLU said in a statement Friday that "the United Nations needs to do its job—not get bullied out of doing it—and hold the United States accountable."

"The country must face independent global scrutiny for its oppression of Black people," said Dakwar.

FBI trawled Facebook to arrest protesters for inciting riots, court records show

On May 27, just two days after George Floyd died at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, an activist from St. Louis decided to drive the 540 miles north to the Twin Cities to participate in the protests there. “We promise to do our very best to be safe and not do anything to get arrested," Mike Avery wrote on Facebook.

Three days later, the FBI arrested Avery for encouraging rioting across a handful of Facebook posts, according to his lawyer, Marleen Suarez. FBI agents had been reading his and other protesters’ social media posts looking for “potential flashpoints for violence,” according to police records.

Avery is one of four known people across the United States indicted on charges of incitement to riot solely on the basis of social media posts, according to federal court records. One man was charged for posting a crude napalm recipe that is widely available online. His charges were dropped several days later. Another man was questioned by the FBI for jokingly tweeting that he was the local head of antifa — a loose anti-fascist and left-leaning political movement with no clearly-defined organization, structure or leadership.

Taken together, the cases offer some insight into how federal law enforcement continues to monitor online speech related to social movements and pursue what legal experts say is a fairly aggressive approach to prosecution. ... Since the protests started, federal investigators have been trawling through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media channels, looking for rioters and looters, according to FBI affidavits submitted in four cases reviewed by NBC News. The FBI has used undercover accounts to infiltrate activist groups, as Politico reported, while other times they use software to search for specific keywords in public posts or carry out manual searches.

Colorado’s Progressive Governor and Legislature Just Ended Qualified Immunity for Police Officers

Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D), a progressive, signed an omnibus reform bill into law on Friday to end qualified immunity for police officers in the state.

“This is a long overdue moment of national reflection,” Polis said at the signing ceremony. “This is a meaningful, substantial reform bill.”

A summary of the sea change from the Colorado legislature notes:

The bill allows a person who has a constitutional right secured by the bill of rights of the Colorado constitution that is infringed upon by a peace officer to bring a civil action for the violation. A plaintiff who prevails in the lawsuit is entitled to reasonable attorney fees, and a defendant in an individual suit is entitled to reasonable attorney fees for defending any frivolous claims. Qualified immunity and a defendant’s good faith but erroneous belief in the lawfulness of his or her conduct are not defenses is not a defense to the civil action. The bill requires a political subdivision of the state to indemnify its employees for such a claim; except that if the peace officer’s employer determines the officer did not act upon a good faith and reasonable belief that the action was lawful, then the peace officer is personally liable for 5 percent of the judgment or $25,000, whichever is less, unless the judgment is uncollectible from the officer, then the officer’s employer satisfies the whole judgment.

...

Qualified immunity for police officers was invented by the Supreme Court in the 1967 case of Pierson v. Ray in response to Civil Rights protesters who sued a Mississippi judge and several local police officers over their unjust arrest and imprisonment. ...

For years, critics have decried a system wherein individual police officers are, by and large, protected from lawsuits no matter how egregious their alleged behavior. High hurdles for plaintiffs–created and accepted by judges–have also likely discouraged many would-be plaintiffs and attorneys from raising 1983 claims in the first place, qualified immunity’s opponents insist.

Two Brooklyn Lawyers Accused of Throwing Molotov Cocktails Are the Public Face of Trump Administration’s Crackdown on Dissent

The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in late May ignited protests in cities and towns across the United States. These largely peaceful demonstrations have been punctuated by acts of violence, frequently committed by the police themselves. But other incidents of both violence and property destruction have also been reported. Among them was the case of two young Brooklyn lawyers accused of burning the dashboard of a New York Police Department cruiser — a case that has become a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s legal and public relations response to the protests.

Urooj Rahman, 31, and Colinford Mattis, 32, are accused by the government of tossing a Molotov cocktail through the broken window of an empty police cruiser in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The alleged incident, said to have been caught on video, took place during the early hours of May 30, amid the wave of protests. ... Following a raft of new charges announced by federal prosecutors last week, the two lawyers — neither of whom have previous criminal records — now face a mandatory minimum of nearly half a century in prison if convicted of the charges. The maximum penalty in the case is life imprisonment. ...

One might chalk up the draconian legal moves in this case as a bid to reestablish “law and order.” But, like most instances in which that phrase is invoked, a healthy dose of politics seems to be undergirding the government effort. In this case, it appears to be a public relations move in keeping with the politics of President Donald Trump’s administration.

In a June 4 press release, Attorney General Bill Barr laid down a marker for how the administration planned to respond to the ongoing national unrest. Barr’s statement acknowledged the apparent injustice of Floyd’s killing, but also darkly warned of “extremist agitators who are hijacking the protests to pursue their own separate and violent agenda.” The Attorney General raised the specter of foreign involvement in the protests, mentioning the alleged role of antifa, an amorphous decentralized movement that Trump has threatened to designate as a domestic terrorist group. (Police and federal agents interrogating protesters have invoked antifa in their lines of questioning.)

Lacking clear targets, it seems that the administration latched onto the case of Rahman and Mattis to construct a public narrative about who has been protesting and why. Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio have all promoted news of the case on social media, helping amplify the political importance of prosecution. By all accounts, the Trump administration is going to incredible lengths to involve itself in the case, elevating it from the state to federal level based on the strained argument that the New York Police Department engages in interstate commerce by importing its cruisers from outside of New York. Legal observers said that the Trump administration is likely playing a role in the prosecution’s extremely punitive approach, pushing for the harshest possible charges, sentences, and pretrial treatment.

Trump Fires Top U.S. Prosecutor as William Barr Moves to Expand “Imperial Presidency”

Worth a full read, here's an excerpt:

Armed Vigilantes Antagonizing Protesters Have Received a Warm Reception From Police

As the uprisings that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis spread across the country, far-right counterprotesters have mobilized in large cities like Chicago, as well as small towns like Bethel, Ohio. Some are members of groups like the Boogaloo, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters. Others are local supporters of police. The warm police reception they have received stands in stark contrast to the violent treatment law enforcement has dealt Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Two weeks before the shooting in Albuquerque [click story link for details -js], the city’s police were caught on film encouraging men in tactical gear preparing to guard property against police brutality protesters.

The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which tracks white supremacist and far-right groups, has counted nearly 200 appearances by vigilantes and far-right extremists at protests in the United States over the past few weeks. Alexander Reid Ross, a researcher at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right and author of “Against the Fascist Creep,” separately counted scores of such appearances, 12 of which involved police collaboration or support.

Many officials, including President Donald Trump, have repeatedly blamed protest violence on the anti-fascist movement known as antifa and the “radical left.” But the violence in Albuquerque isn’t the first instance of right-wing vigilantes being criminally charged for actions during recent protests. On June 2, federal prosecutors in Nevada charged three members of the Boogaloo movement, which seeks to accelerate collapse of the political system via civil unrest, with conspiracy to damage and destroy by fire and explosives. An Army Reserve member and two military veterans were allegedly headed to downtown Las Vegas with gas canisters and Molotov cocktails. On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in California charged a U.S. Air Force sergeant linked to the Boogaloo with murder for killing a federal security officer near a courthouse in Oakland. He was also charged separately for killing a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Cruz County.

Trump’s racist statements and praise of white supremacists over the course of his presidency have emboldened right-wing extremist groups, according to organizations that track their rise. Nonetheless, experts have been shocked at the number of vigilante incidents and reactionary counterprotests over the past few weeks. “I expected a backlash,” Ross said, “but the extent is mind-boggling.”

Five Black & Brown Men Have Been Recently Found Hanged in Public. Were Some of Them Lynched?

Elderly Black Lives Matter protester injured by police and trolled by Trump in hiding after death threats

Martin Gugino, the protester shoved to the ground by Buffalo police officers during the George Floyd protests, is recuperating in a secret location due to threats he's received. Mr Gugino's attorney said on Thursday that his client had received "concerning and threatening messages and one letter" since he was assaulted by police officers in Buffalo. ...

Days after the video began circulating online, President Donald Trump tweeted out a conspiracy theory that Mr Gugino could have been an "antifa provocateur" who was trying to "scan police communications in order to black out the equipment."

The president's tweet – as well as other conspiracy theories alleging that Mr Gugino, a Catholic peace activist, was a plant or he was faking his injuries – has made the elderly activist a target of the far right. ...

The police officers who shoved him, Robert McCabe and Aaron Togalski, were suspended from the Buffalo police department and were charged with assault. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Following their suspension, 57 of their fellow officers resigned their assignments on the Buffalo police department's emergency response team. Originally the resignations were publicised as an act of solidarity by the police union representing the department, but officers later refuted that claim, instead attributing the mass resignations to fears that the union wouldn't cover their legal fees if they were sued over actions they took in the George Floyd protests.

Here’s Exactly What Black People Were Promised on Juneteenth 155 Years Ago

This year’s Juneteenth has taken on an additional significance after the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery reignited the fight for Black equality. Americans are petitioning for it to be a federal holiday, while some companies are already giving their staff paid time off in observation of the day. It's a big enough deal for President Donald Trump to claim that he’s made the historic anniversary “famous.” Of course, he didn’t.

Juneteenth stretches back through presidencies, winding through generations of institutional and systemic racism to June 19, 1865, the day when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger finally made it to Galveston, Texas, to tell enslaved people they were free. ... Two months after the war ended, the Union general and his troops finally made it out West to deliver General Order No. 3, the announcement that informed the enslaved of their new legal status:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

The formerly enslaved didn’t actually have “absolute equality” in practice, though. They faced immediate violence from former slave owners and Confederate sympathizers if they tried to act on their freedom. ...

The recent spate of deaths caused by America’s racism against Black bodies makes this year’s Juneteenth more urgent because they recontextualize the past. Because it’s one thing to tell people they’re free, and it’s another to treat them as if they are. Black Americans have more of a stake in this democracy 155 years after Granger’s journey, and they’re using that today to openly challenge the systems that have refused to grant them their absolute equality.

Yemen Was Already Facing the World's Worst Humanitarian Crisis, Then Coronavirus Came

When Rammah al-Misraa, a nursing student in Sana’a, contracted cholera last year while treating patients, he thought he’d seen his country’s darkest hour. But since then, the 27-year-old has been drafted to join the few hundred doctors and nurses tasked with Yemen’s next crisis — a deadly outbreak of COVID-19.

The WHO estimates that at least half of the country could be infected with the coronavirus, a crushing blow to the its' already-depleted healthcare system. At least half of the hospitals there are not fully functional, with less than 1,000 ventilators and ICU beds across the country, according to the WHO.

Do Masks Really Protect Against Covid?

Global Experts Alarmed at Signs US Has 'Given Up' Fight to Stop Covid-19

Global public health experts are looking on in "alarm and disbelief" as the U.S. economy reopens even as Covid-19 case numbers continue to rise in a number of states, with President Donald Trump signaling he has no intention of calling for more economic shutdowns regardless of the outcome.

As The Washington Post reported Friday, newspapers across Europe have recently published articles and editorials expressing shock at the Trump administration's approach to the pandemic.

"U.S. Increasingly Accepts Rising Covid-19 Numbers," read a headline this week in the Swiss paper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

While images of Americans crowding onto beaches and other public places may have given the international community the impression that the public have grown impatient with social distancing, a survey by the Associated Press last month showed 83% of Americans were concerned lifting lockdown orders too quickly would lead to more coronavirus infections.

But as the country's overall case numbers have risen in recent days, with 10 states this week reporting their highest seven-day average since the pandemic started, Trump and other leaders are pushing Americans to return to work and their normal routines.

"We won't be closing the country again. We won't have to do that,” the president said Wednesday.

Infectious disease specialists around the world—some of whom used U.S. scientists' research to guide their own governments' strategies in confronting the pandemic, pushing them to prepare for long-term lockdowns necessitating robust economic relief packages—are struggling to understand the logic of reopening the country as case numbers grow, the Post reported.

"It really does feel like the U.S. has given up," Siouxsie Wiles, a specialist at University of Auckland in New Zealand, told the Post.

After spending 4% of its GDP on coronavirus relief—which covered all wages for New Zealanders who had to leave work to self-isolate, doubled healthcare spending, and provided subsidies to businesses so they could maintain their payrolls—New Zealand announced in late April that it had effectively eliminated the coronavirus. As of Friday, the country had only three confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the past three weeks.

Other countries where case numbers have dropped significantly in recent weeks, including Canada, Denmark, and Germany, also introduced far-reaching economic relief packages early on in the crisis to enable people to stay at home and avoid overwhelming healthcare systems.

Those spending plans contrast sharply with relief measures in the U.S., which included a one-time direct payment of $1,200 to some Americans and $600 per week on top of regular unemployment benefits. Republicans plan to let the unemployment benefit expire in July, and House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) admitted in May that a paycheck guarantee was the "most efficient" way to protect Americans' jobs and incomes during the crisis, but dismissed Rep. Pramila Jayapal's (D-Wash.) proposal as too expensive.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you it wasn’t possible. https://t.co/FkoNxmknRe

— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) June 19, 2020

Nursing homes THROWING OUT patients to make more money

Tennessee paper religious ad claims 'Islam' will detonate nuclear bomb in Nashville

A Tennessee newspaper said on Sunday it was investigating what its editor called a “horrific” full-page advertisement from a religious group that predicts a terrorist attack in Nashville next month.

The paid advertisement that appeared in Sunday’s editions of the Tennessean from the group Future For America claims Donald Trump “is the final president of the USA” and features a photo of Trump and Pope Francis.

It begins by claiming that a nuclear device will be detonated in Nashville and that the attack will be carried out by unspecific interests of “Islam”.

The group also ran a full-page ad in Wednesday’s editions of the newspaper stating its intention to warn Nashville residents about next month’s event “so that they may be able to make a decision intelligently”.

In a story on its website Sunday afternoon, the Tennessean said the ad violated the newspaper’s long-established standards banning hate speech. Vice-president and editor Michael Anastasi said the paper’s news and sales departments operate independently. ... Sales executives ordered the ad removed from future editions, the newspaper said.

Dr. Cornel West on Protests, Bernie's Campaign, His New Podcast, and Much More | Useful Idiots

Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s “Tough On Crime” History Has Become a Political Liability

For Carolyn Maloney’s entire career, the longtime representative from Manhattan has been among the most vocal supporters of aggressive police tactics, a prominent champion of the tough-on-crime legislation that is now being challenged in the streets of New York. Now that record has become a major liability in the veteran representative’s bid for office.

Her opponents in the June 23 primary, Suraj Patel and Lauren Ashcraft, both took aim at her record on policing and mass incarceration at a recent debate, as the protests around the country have upended primaries from New York to Kentucky and Texas. Patel ramped the attack up a notch on Saturday, telling the New York Times that Maloney is a “vicious, vindictive person who uses racist tropes to attack a brown man running against her because it makes her uncomfortable,” and that she “weaponized my race against me” with a digital ad calling Patel “creepy.” Patel, in a statement, worked to connect the ad attacking him to the broader protests against systemic racism. “Unfortunately being called ‘creepy’ has happened to Black and Brown men in America — and frankly the world — for too long. It’s an amorphous word that intentionally lacks an accusatory action,” he argued. Maloney, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, told the Times the ad merely used Patel’s own words, and his campaign’s prior practice of using Tinder to reach voters, in casting its judgment.

Patel nearly bested Maloney in 2018. The race revolving around the issue of racism is not firm political ground for Maloney, who famously torched her shot at a Senate seat when she publicly dropped the n-word in 2010. Her record, though, is her bigger liability among a Democratic electorate that now rejects ‘80s and ‘90s-style criminal justice policies.

Trump’s Reelection Playbook: Racist Tropes & Downplaying COVID Pandemic by Slowing Down Testing

Brad Parscale faces Trump 'fury' after Tulsa comeback rally flops

Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, was under pressure on Sunday after claiming hundreds of thousands of people had applied for tickets to the president’s return to the campaign trail in Tulsa, only for the rally to attract a sparse crowd. At the BOK Center in the Oklahoma city on Saturday night, as the president took the stage to give his first campaign speech since the Covid-19 pandemic put large parts of America under lockdown, vast banks of empty seats could be seen.

The Tulsa fire department said 6,200 people attended. The Trump campaign claimed 12,000. The arena holds 19,000. The campaign had built an “overflow” stage outside the BOK Center, to host brief remarks by Trump and Mike Pence. Those speeches were cancelled. ...

Trump’s demeanour on returning to Washington was widely scrutinised. He was initially quiet on Twitter on Sunday but the president was reported to be “furious” at the “underwhelming” event, which followed a week of controversy about whether it should even be held. According to NBC, Trump was “particularly angry that before he even left DC, aides made public that six members of team in Tulsa tested positive for Covid-19”. ...

It has been reported that the number of applicants for tickets to Saturday’s rally was inflated by young users of the social media platform TikTok applying but then deliberately not attending.

Establishment Dems SHAME Bernie for not headlining big money Biden fundraisers

Voting Rights Advocates Warn of Impending 'Disaster' in Kentucky After Bid to Increase Slashed Number of Polling Sites Fails

Voting rights advocates sounded alarm Friday after a federal judge denied an effort to expand the number of polling places in Kentucky.

The state, which holds a primary election on June 23 in which Democrats will determine the candidate to face off against Sen. Mitch McConnell, will have "[f]ewer than 200 polling places," reported the Washington Post, "down from 3,700 in a typical election year."

Most of the state's 120 counties will have just one polling location. That includes the most populous county, Jefferson, home to Louisville. "About 1 in 5 residents in the county is African American, the largest black population in the state," the Post noted.

Kentucky officials have slashed the number of polling sites from 3700 to 200 statewide.

Jefferson Cty, where Louisville sits, will have 1 site for 767K people. The county is 1/5 Black, 54 miles long w/ poor public transit.

This is POOR decision-making.https://t.co/rWl5U3PwFW

— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) June 20, 2020

"This is going to be a disaster," tweeted author and voting rights expert Ari Berman, and People For the American Way president Ben Jealous said the scenario represented "our next electoral nightmare."

Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, after reaching an agreement with Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams, unveiled in April an executive order loosening restrictions on who can receive an absentee ballot in light of the coronavirus pandemic. The order also allowed counties to open a singular polling site regardless of a county's population.

Local NPR affiliate WVIK reported:

In a ruling issued Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Charles Simpson said there was no evidence that only having one polling location in the affected counties would result in voter suppression.

"Comprehensive plans were put in place which included making absentee ballots available for all voters, providing early in-person voting options for 15 days leading up to Election Day, and establishing a polling place for Election Day in-person voting," Simpson wrote.

"This Triple Crown of voting options wins against the pandemic's risk of disenfranchising the Kentucky voter."

In a joint statement Thursday, state Rep. Jason Nemes, a Republican who filed the suit along with voters to increase polling locations, and Louisville Metro Councilwoman Keisha Dorsey, a Democrat who filed a motion to join the suit, expressed disappointment with the ruling.

"We believe the judge disregarded evidence from our expert witness that one location will suppress the vote, particularly among African Americans," Nemes and Dorsey said.

The pair announced they would not appeal the ruling, citing fears of putting "our community into confusion over where to vote this close to Election Day."

'Shell Must Not Get Away With This': Niger Delta Still Waiting for Big Oil to Clean Up Devastating Pollution

In 2011, a ground-breaking report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) on oil pollution in Ogoniland highlighted the devastating impact of the oil industry in the Niger Delta and made concrete recommendations for clean-up measures and immediate support for the region's devastated communities.

Now, nearly ten years later, a new report published Thursday by Friends of the Earth Europe, Amnesty International, ERA, and Milieudefensie, details Shell's failure to implement the "emergency measures" laid out by UNEP and says only 11% of contaminated areas in the Niger Delta have begun the clean-up process.

Titled "No Clean-Up, No Justice," the new report explains that for "more than five decades, the people of Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta, have struggled against oil pollution, destruction of the environment and human rights violations."

According to estimates, Shell Oil has dumped an estimated nine to 13 million barrels of crude oil into the Niger Delta since 1958.

"Oil and gas extraction has caused large-scale, continued contamination of the water and soil in Ogoni communities," said Friends of the Earth in a statement. "The continued and systematic failure of oil companies and government to clean up have left hundreds of thousands of Ogoni people facing serious health risks, struggling to access safe drinking water, and unable to earn a living."

As Common Dreams reported earlier this year, the local government has also worked with Shell to suppress the right of people in Ogoniland to fight against pollution.

"The discovery of oil in Ogoniland has brought huge suffering for its people," said Osai Ojigho of Amnesty International Nigeria. "Over many years we have documented how Shell has failed to clean up contamination from spills and it’s a scandal that this has not yet happened."

The ecological damage, Ojigho added, "is leading to serious human rights impacts—on people’s health and ability to access food and clean water. Shell must not get away with this—we will continue to fight until every last trace of oil is removed from Ogoniland."

Researchers SHOCKED as Arctic Circle records 100 degree temperature

'This Scares Me,' Says Bill McKibben as Arctic Hits 100.4°F—Hottest Temperature on Record

A small Siberian town north of the Arctic Circle reached 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday, a figure that—if verified—would be the highest temperature reading in the region since record-keeping began in 1885.

"This scares me, I have to say," environmentalist and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben tweeted in response to news of the record-breaking reading in Verkhoyansk, where the average high temperature in June is 68°F.

Washington Post climate reporter Andrew Freedman noted Sunday that if the reading is confirmed, it "would be the northernmost 100-degree reading ever observed, and the highest temperature on record in the Arctic, a region that is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the globe."

"On Sunday, the same location recorded a high temperature of 95.3 degrees (35.2 Celsius), showing the Saturday reading was not an anomaly," the newspaper reported. "While some questions remain about the accuracy of the Verkhoyansk temperature measurement, data from a Saturday weather balloon launch at that location supports the 100-degree reading. Temperatures in the lower atmosphere, at about 5,000 feet, also were unusually warm at 70 degrees (21 Celsius), a sign of extreme heat at the surface."

The World Meteorological Organization said Sunday that is "preliminarily accepting the observation as a new extreme" as it conducts a more thorough review of the Verkhoyansk reading.

Siberian town tops 100 degrees F, the hottest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle.
This scares me, I have to say. https://t.co/NatjQhuLGn

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) June 21, 2020

"100°F about 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle today in Siberia. That's a first in all of recorded history," tweeted meteorologist Eric Holthaus. "We are in a climate emergency."

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

The Assange Case and ‘Collateral Murder’

Bolsonaro Fraudulently Circumvented Trump’s COVID-19 Immigration Ban to Smuggle His Scandal-Plagued Ex-Education Minister Into the U.S.

Not Just “Cops”: It’s Time to End the Entertainment Industry’s Anti-Black, Pro-Police Programming

Homeless People Are Taking Over Vacant Homes to Escape the Coronavirus

Wall Street Veterans Call Out the Fed for Creating a Dangerous Stock Market Bubble

Rep. Eliot Engel’s Positions on Foreign Policy Are Hawkish — and Shameful

Beyond Jamaal Bowman, Progressives Targeting New York Incumbents Up and Down the Ballot

A West Virginia town of 8,400 people just picked up an MRAP for some reason

Trump Wanted to Send in the Troops. Now Some Are Ready to Quit.

The Racist Origins of Silicon Valley

Jimmy Dore: Judge Sides With Bolton: Trump Book To Be Publish!

Jimmy Dore: Trump Mistakenly Retweets Max Blumenthal & Hilarity Ensues

Progressive CO challenger calls out Schumer, Warren for backing establishment Hickenlooper

Zaid Jilani: U.S. economic response was WORST in world, here are the numbers

Krystal Ball: TulsaFlop! The real reason Trump's rally FAILED

Krystal and Saagar: Majority think Biden is in mental decline, but he's still up by TEN points

A Little Night Music

Amos Milburn & His Chicken-Shackers - House Party

Amos Milburn - All Is Well

Amos Milburn - The Hammer

Amos Milburn & His Chicken-Shackers - Real Pretty Mama Blues

Amos Milburn & His Chicken-Shackers - Baby, Baby, All the Time

Amos Milburn - Every Day Of The Week

Amos (Milburn Jr.) & Marilyn (Renee All) - Jump & Shout

Amos Milburn - Rocky Mountain

Amos Milburn & His Chicken-Shackers - Birmingham Bounce

Amos Milburn - Chicken Shack Boogie