Archive | June, 2020

Bring down the statues, surely. But more than that: cancel the debt and provide reparations to the formerly colonized for the centuries of theft and brutality.

Richard Heinberg is a very important scholar and an apparently lovely human being. His books are always penetrating, and both his contribution to and his review of Michael Moore’s corporate-green-censored movie, Planet of the Humans, demonstrate his continuing efforts to speak crucially unheard truths.

The announcement by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the federal unemployment rate declined to 13.3 percent in May, from 14.7 percent in April, took most analysts by surprise. The economy added 2.5 million jobs in May, the first increase in employment since February. Most economists had predicted further job losses and a rise in the unemployment rate to as high as 20 percent.

Reform efforts will fail. Only a power shift to communities can improve public safety.

“Mayor Downplays Rough Police Treatment of NYC Protesters” (AP, 6/5/20)

In the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25 offers an expanded vision of what it could mean to be a human being. Human beings, it notes, have ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for [their] health and well-being’. This includes ‘food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services’; human beings also have the ‘right to security’, which means they have the right to compensation for any lack of livelihood due to circumstances beyond their control.

Hunger, homelessness, and evictions were features of the Great Depression in the United States. Jobs disappeared and working conditions deteriorated. Some “250,000 teenagers were on the road.” And how many others? By 1933 one third of farm families had lost their farms. Unemployment that year was 25 percent. The lives of working people were devastated.

China has announced the suspension of debt repayment for 77 developing countries and regions as the nation is working with other G20 members to carry out the G20 debt relief initiative for low-income countries, Chinese officials said at a press briefing at the State Council Information Office on Sunday.

The NYPD is famous for violating civil rights so it comes as no surprise that protests over the police brutality in the city have elicited a violent crackdown from the city’s finest.

In the midst of national protests against racism and police brutality, President Donald Trump on Monday walked a short distance from the White House to St. John’s Church. The visit was for a photo op in which Trump held up a bible as though it were a ticket he had just plucked from a raffle drum.

Since protests have spread to all 50 states in response to the police murders of George Floyd and countless other Black people, law enforcement has responded with a violent show of force against protestors as well as journalists, street medics, and legal support.

Indian activist and journalist Gautam Navlakha is in prison as part of what many observers have termed a crackdown on dissent in India. The 68-year-old has been fighting a years-long legal battle against the Indian state.

As protests rage across America against police brutality and systemic racism, Akunna Eneh, an activist from Boston, argues that the movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd has exposed the true face of American society.

This weekend, hundreds of thousands of workers and youth will protest the police murder of George Floyd, not only in the United States, but in Australia, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Brazil, South Korea and many other countries.

British climate activist and socialist Martin Empson writes on why the fight against climate change must be a fight for system change and for socialism.

U.S. counties where lynchings were more prevalent from 1877 to 1950 have more officer-involved killings

The opening quotation, “Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight! Matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight!,” was taken from Chicago attorney and civil rights activist, Thomas “TNT” Todd.

Unapologetically honest, attendees witnessed some of the Bay’s most outspoken youth poets.

WE ARE WITNESSING a truly unprecedented attack on press freedom in the United States, with journalists are being systematically targeted while covering the nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

At the highest of levels of unemployment following the 2007-08 crash, there were 15.3 million jobless Americans.