President Trump’s favorite news channel Fox has been caught out falsifying protests in Seattle, giving the distorted impression that the city is overrun by armed anarchists. That conveniently set Trump off on a rant in which he threatened to send in military forces to “take back” the city from “domestic terrorists”.
The current uprising against police violence and racism is just beginning. It is rapidly shifting public consciousness on issues of policing, violence against Black people and others, and systemic racism. The movement is deepening and becoming broader as well as putting forward solutions and making demands.
John Steppling “European Left-wing political scientists find difficult to understand that the colonial contradiction is at the heart of our present, they think it’s a conceptual error, something anachronistic, that the joyful postmodernity – the one that delivers their Macs to them at home – has gone beyond all that, and that Trump or Bolsonaro …
By Paul Schmutz Schaller for The Saker Blog There were a number of protest marches and rallies in Switzerland, in different cities and with a quite impressive number of participants.
The Democrats and the rest of the DC establishment are using the weakest sections of society to mobilize opinion against President Donald Trump for the election.
Free West Media
Former president Barack Obama, in a video, claimed that the federal government cannot hope to solve the crisis at the ground level and that the crucial changes have to come at the local level.
The May 25th killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota shocked the world and set off mass protests against racism and police brutality in dozens of cities from the mid-western United States to the European Union, all in the midst of a global pandemic.
In earlier articles, I noted that America has been skirting the precarious cliff-edge of ancient antagonisms, dating back to the Civil War – Red versus Blue. The two irreconcilable visions of American life: on the one side, the ‘Federalists’, who partly have morphed into cosmopolitan ‘Sorosites’, and claim the moral high ground on matters of life; and on the other, a tradition of state co-sovereignty, dating back to the 1871 (the Articles of Confederacy). That divide remains. It is – as it has long been – aside from the FDR era, an overarching frame.
The system based on a combination of police brutality, mass imprisonment, and evictions at gunpoint may be collapsing, but if it’s going to fall in the direction we want it to fall in, we need to push it that way. And if we want to make that happen, we have to organize to stop the impending wave of evictions before it starts.
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Debra J. SAUNDERS
In the war for social justice, academic freedom is an early casualty.
Consider the plight of UCLA Accounting Professor Gordon Klein.
A student sent Klein an email, screenshots of which were reviewed by Inside Higher Ed, that asked for “no-harm” grading for the final exam. (That term means counting a grade only if it improves a student’s overall course grade.) The student also asked for shorter exams and extended deadlines for black students who attended protests after the death of George Floyd.
With America in turmoil following the murder of George Floyd, the talk is all about police reform – defunding them, abolishing them, or subjecting them to greater federal oversight. It brings to mind the nineteenth-century British member of parliament who supposedly cried out in despair, “Reform! Reform! My God, aren’t things bad enough as they are?”
