Subjects Archives: Inequality

Defunding the police might end the armed and uniformed force as we know it, but the ruling class will then hire mercenaries to protect their wealth and enforce their will.

The media described the uprising as a “riot” involved in violence and property destruction but the movement responded by using videos to show black organizers trying to stop people, some of whom seemed to be undercover police or white supremacists.

We ourselves live in a pretty sick society that seems incapable of feelings of sisterhood, brotherhood, solidarity.

As the George Floyd protests against police violence erupted around the nation, a massive amount of evidence of police brutality was widely captured through social media. Unfortunately, very little of it made it to mainstream outlets until much later.

The censorship of alternative media is becoming more widespread. The latest victim to fall to Facebook and YouTube’s overzealous banhammer is well-known conflict watchdog website, SouthFront.

Black rebellion brings insecurity to those in power, as editors, mayors and even long dead criminals are being called to account.

Despite conspiracy theories, there is no evidence whatsoever that the virus was manufactured in or escaped from a laboratory, in China or anywhere else. Such accusations ignore how easy viral transmission can be when other factors come into play.

Fred Hampton’s politics are a lesson in how to fight racism and capitalism together, argues Sean Ledwith

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.

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.

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.