The inaugural episode of Conversations had to include Angela Peoples.

Unlike so many of us, Peoples has range. Shes a seasoned organizer who has a keen sense of Black activisms past, present and future. Currently, shes the director of Black Womxn For and co-founder of The South. And shes a personable, hilarious interviewee who can easily translate complex thought processes to those who may not be as well-versed in the scholarly side of Black activism.

Thats why I keep coming back to her guidance for envisioning a world without police: Actually imagine the world that you want to live in. What is the outcome that you actually want when youre in a car accident, when theres someone whos without a home and you see them and they need care? Or there seems to be drug sales that are happening in your neighborhood to children that youre concerned about, what do you actually want to happen? And then, think about what actually happens when you call the police.

An America lacking carceral consequence and no police to enforce said outcomes can be difficult to conceptualize. But Peoples, whose love for her people is so evident, gingerly walked us through this and more during our conversation. Above you can watch our chatproduced by Britt Pullie and Faith Smithand below is a transcript of the discussion.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Q-Tip Mondays. Im Julia Craven. With me, I have Angela Peoples. Shes the Director for Black Womxn For and co-founder of The South. Im really happy that you were able to join me for this. Im so happy.

Thank you for inviting me, Julia. Im really happy to be here, especially today, especially right now. This is a really, really good time for this conversation.

I agree. Yeah, lets just hop into it. So Im super interested to hear what you think about the current wave of protests versus the protest against police violence that we saw between 2014 and 2016, because this moment feels a little bit different.

Yeah. I mean, it feels a lot different to me. I think that this moment, it builds and sits on top of the moments, and the work, and the mobilizing that happened, that was sparked by Mike Browns death and the uprisings in Ferguson. And even before that, with the murder of Trayvon Martin and the mobilizing that happened in Florida. What were seeing today, and what weve seen over the last few weeks is not even a rebirth, but a leveling up of the work that has been And also even just an exposing of the work that has been done.

One of the things that I always laughed a little bit about, in those years between the moments where it seemed like Black Lives Matter was on the news every single day, and now its folks would say, What happened to Black Lives Matter? Wheres the Movement for Black Lives? And the reality is that folks were working. Folks have been in cities like Minneapolis, in cities like Washington DC, in places like Atlanta. In places all over the country, people have been building, theyve been working to create demands of their local politicians, and to build a community that could withstand and respond to an uprising like this.

And so, what were seeing now, whats different now is I think that folks have learned a lot of lessons, a lot of hard lessons, a lot of pain, a lot of challenge, a lot of principled struggle, honestly, of organizers trying to figure out, what does it mean to be in a movement? What does it mean to take on white supremacy, to call in our allies or call them out when we need to? How do we do that in a way that actually moves us forward and doesnt just sort of keep having those same conversations over and over again?

The other thing I think that were seeing is the results of when you hear people say, Defund the police, thats a demand that is coming from the reality that we dont just want police to be arrested and charged and convicted of murdering Black women and children and men. Its not actually safety or justice if an officer is arrested or fired. We need systematic transformation. And so when you hear people say, Defund the police, thats because we recognize that simply arresting an officer, simply charging them, wasnt going to be enough for us to actually live the lives that we want to.

Right. And thats what feels different to me, is it feels like the prior bulk of protests that we saw between Ferguson and 2016 around the time of the election, it seemed like those were a bit more focused on reform, and now abolition and defunding the police has become a mainstream conversation. And, of course, that narrative has always been around, but that was not something that me and you would have been having a conversation about on Facebook Live a couple of years ago.

Absolutely. I think that part of what were also seeing, frankly, is that some of those reforms were tried. You know what I mean? A lot of police forces adopted body cameras. That was a call that came out of the initial protest in 2014 and 2016. Some was like, Okay, we got body cameras. Body cameras didnt work. Increased training didnt work. Some of these community accountability forces havent been working, right?

So all have been these reforms that have been tried. And organizers and abolitionists have been saying for a long time, We cannot reform police. We cannot reform the system. We need to dismantle it, defund it, and reimagine safety. As these reforms have been tried, and we still see video after video after video of the police harassing, killing, murdering, lying about all of these things, its become clear to more people that we simply cant reform, that these adjustments cant be made in a way thats actually going to be sustainable.

And there were frustrations at the time. I remember many organizers saying, Reform isnt the move. But part of what is required also is a level of community education, and public education, and increasing awareness.

Thats why organizing matters so much. Thats why being connected to different formations and different organizations that are trying to really change the awareness, change the analysis, change the way that we all are thinking about and imagining safety, that is what has brought us to this moment of saying, Actually, when you bring up a reform agenda, we know what that means and we know that its not going to work. Its not going to bring the systematic change that we need.

So what do you say to people who get antsy when you talk about abolishing the police, people who dont have the framework and cant really imagine what a world post-police, as it exists currently, looks like?

I will say a few things. The first thing I would say is to actually imagine the world that you want to live in. What is the outcome that you actually want when youre in a car accident, when theres someone whos without a home and you see them and they need care? Or there seems to be drug sales that are happening in your neighborhood to children that youre concerned about, what do you actually want to happen? And then, think about what actually happens when you call the police.

For many people, when they talk about what they want, they will name some version of a community intervention, right? Because we have this awareness, especially for Black folks and people who live in the areas that are overpoliced, that have a lot of really heavy police presence. We see on a day-to-day the response and what happens when the cops show up, and its almost never the outcome that you want.

Then I also would tell people to think about, does the current policing system actually solve crime? Does it prevent crime? Does it prevent? And again, thinking about what do we consider as crimes? I think one thing that we cant take for granted about whats happening right now is this moment where were seeing police use excessive force against protesters, simply for demanding dignity for Black lives. Seeing them use really aggressive force juxtaposed to seeing Donald Trump and all of his cronies on TV every day doing a lot of things that seem really clearly to be against the law to many of us, without any consequence.

So a lot of folks I find are asking, What is criminal? Or what should we be considering crime? And what harms are we putting resources in to actually address, versus what harms are having the most impact on people? So thats a conversation that I see more and more people having of, we want to talk about, we need the police to prevent crime and to keep us safe. But then we see a lot of things happening in our lives on a day-to-day that are not making us safe, and that are caused because of a lack of resources. Then we see the police getting all of this money, but not being able to address any of those harms.

So I think that when people are sitting and wondering, What do we do if we abolish the police? Think about what you actually want to happen and how close or far away that is from the reality based on our policing system right now.

Right. No, I think its great that you said all of that because I personally have not seen a well articulated argument that really explains how the police operate as a functional institution, especially when so much data and evidence shows us that there are a lot of issues with policing. I mean, just a myriad of problems.

So the Minneapolis school district broke their contract with the police department, and I would love to get your thoughts on that because policing in schools is just super problematic.

Yeah. Seeing that headline last week really gave me chills. I have a young daughter, and thinking about the chance for her to go to school without having police there, just really I was so inspired and hopeful for that. There has been a long campaign and a long effort led by many organizations talking about, Monique Morris in her book about the pushout of Black girls and being criminalized in school, or the Advancement Project and their campaign to get police out of schools.

Theres been a long ongoing effort, and I think that what were seeing in the case of police in schools and school boards like in Minneapolis, the L.A. teachers, folks in Portland, all making moves now, its a result of many years of pushing and making the case that we dont need police in schools. And I think policing in schools, or the idea of ending a police contract is a really great example of thinking about, what are the alternatives? Because right now there are much more what they call resource officers or police in school than there are nurses, counselors, social workers, even adequate food and space and teachers.

Last summer we saw all of these teachers taking to the streets saying, We need more resources for our students. We need more support. And you hear governors and state legislators saying, We dont have the money. We dont have the money. We dont have the money. But yet there are tons of policing in these schools, and these contracts are very expensive and the equipment, all the things that go into that.

And so, I think that schools are a really great example and a really great place to start right now. Get the police out of schools and then move those resources around to get the care that kids need in school right now, so that there isnt that higher rate And thats also about preventing crime.Its about preventing crime. Having more resources into schools means that you can prevent and change or adjust some of the outlying issues that come up and that might move someone to have to interact with the police department.

And just having police in school, it really speaks to how we criminalize kids and just the way the kids act and the issues that children have, particularly when those kids are Black. So yeah, I never really understood the idea of criminalizing a child who is acting out, criminalizing a kid who has ADD or ADHD. Maybe they just need somebody to talk to, right? They dont need to be arrested.

Right. When you put law enforcement in the calculation of school and of education, it forces any institution to judge a child based on these adult standards, the standards that we set by adults, not the standards that we set for children, you know what I mean? Its not as if these resource officers are specially trained to deal with children or to address adolescent issues. Theyre just police officers.

Part of it is, again, because school districts and states, they dont have the resources that they need, the money that they need to have those counselors and those social workers and those alternative institutions in schools, so they just shortcut it and say, Well, well have a resource officer and they can deal with all of the things. But those resources officers, theyre not equipped totheyre equipped to police and to patrol and to enforce, theyre not equipped to teach and to learn and to support.

Again, it really goes back to asking people when theyre raising questions about, What will we do without the police, or how could we abolish the police? What do you actually want to happen when your child acts up in school? Think about that, and then imagine whats happening now because the police are there.

And as we know, being tough on someone who needs help is not You cant bully people into being better.

Another thing that I really want to get your take on is, there have been so many protests for Black lives globally. I really just want to ask you what you think the movement looks like going forward.

Yeah. This is a really exciting question. I mean, I would just say hold onto your seats, guys. Its going to be a really powerful, a really intense summer, for sure. What were seeing right now, what we saw in Minneapolis, the community holding their elected leaders accountable in real time, thats where this movement is headed. Thats what were going to be seeing. Folks are mobilizing across the country, putting forward similar demands to defund the police.

Folks have already been running these campaigns, have these demands, shout out to the group here in D.C. where Im living that has been trying to hold our mayor accountable, who has not been prioritizing Black lives despite what it says on 16th and Pennsylvania Avenue. This is a movement of folks that are going to be putting pressure on candidates especially, you know this is an election year.

Theres going to be a lot more elected officials who are going to have to answer the question, why are we giving hundreds of millions of dollars to this police force that is literally killing us, in real time, and were watching it happen on our televisions, why? And what are you going to do to address that? What are you going to do to address this systematic impact of racism and white supremacy across our government?

And something that we did with Black Womxn For is really modeling what it means to be accountable to candidates. Its not just about election day. Its not just about election year. If you want our support, you want us to register voters for you, you want us to get people out for you, you want us to flank you when youre pushing some policy position? Cool. We have some asks too, and those asks need to be met. And if you dont meet them, were going to come and hold you accountable.

For elected leaders that want to be in that right relationship and want to be in that accountable relationship, I think youre going to see theyre going to feel what it looks like to be flanked and supported by a community that isnt just simply about donations or kickbacks, but is actually about a collective effort towards progress and accountability, not just for this group or that group.

The other thing I would just say is that Im a part of a group of folks that has been thinking about, what does it mean to really get at the root of, what is the foundation of the challenges that are coming up day after day after day? We see that especially when you talk about policing, but this is a stance across issues of disparity, the foundation of policing just like the foundation of the U.S. economy is built through chattel slavery and maintaining white supremacy, white male dominance.

And so, if we actually want to have a conversation about moving forward to an America that gets to realize and be who she actually says shes going to be, then we need to have a movement towards telling the truth, reconciling that and building towards reparations. Im working with a group thats trying to build that movement right now. Were really excited about helping to support the folks that are acting right now to hold police accountable in building momentum across institutions to really break and shake that foundation so that we can rebuild to be who we need to be as a country.

Right, because a lot of people dont even realize that modern day policing is a derivative of slave patrols.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And if you imagine why they would have a slave patrol, and then you put that idea or that notion on top of what you experience today, it makes so much sense. The way that the police sort of hunt Black and brown men, capture them in ways that dont seem to have a lot of rhyme or reason, and they take them away and families cant get ahold of them, are not able to track them down, and really just use force as a way to move and control people around.

The connections are very, very clear. What we need to do is to build a movement to tell those truths, to get the US government to recognize that, to apologize, and to make it right through reparations.

The last thing I want to run by you before we Because we have a few questions from people who are watching. So, were still in the middle of a pandemic.

Talk about it.

Coronavirus is still a thing. As much as it seems like some people would like to forget, its still a very real threat. And so, weve seen these mass protests against state violence during a crisis. What does that say about the urgency of addressing racism, which is the reason why more Black people are dying from coronavirus, the reason why more Black people have lost their jobs, et cetera.

Totally. I mean, Ill say a couple of things. One, we are still in the pandemic. So please, if youre out on the streets, thank you for being in the streets. Thank you for protesting. Please wear your face masks. Shout out to the movement for Black lives that is equipping people with beautiful face masks. Please stay six feet, wash your hands, all of that because were going to need each other. Three months from now, six months from now, we really are going to need people so please take care.

I would just say that in terms of the urgency question, I think it really speaks to Oh, and Ive been talking about this to a lot of folks that people are making the connection, maybe not verbally, but certainly cognitively between seeing report after report after report of disproportionately Black whole families being killed by the coronavirus because of a lack of access to healthcare and because of being at higher risk, because of our work and all of these things. Right?

So people are seeing these stories about Black folks and brown folks dying at disproportionate rates, and thats moving them and agitating them in a particular way. Then theyre also seeing this video really, really violent images, not just of George Floyd, but the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the killing of Breonna Taylor. All of these things on top of each other, I think really have blown up frankly, the imagination and the apathy that some folks might have felt towards showing up and going to the streets for Black lives.

So I think that there is a lot of urgency. I think frankly white folks feel like they need to be Folks are almost wanting to be held accountable for this, which is also again, why we need to have this truth and reparations process, because people are wanting to be able to find a way to make it right. People are seeing that at our core, its just not working.

And so, I think that the amount of folks that were seeing in the streets, especially white folks and non-Black people of color, is indicative of even in this pandemic, the fact that people are connecting the dots between racial and economic and health disparities, and are also willing and ready to make whatever sacrifice might need to be to make it right, which is inspiring and exciting.

So its up to us, for those folks that are wanting to be in that community, to then get connected to organizations whether organizations that are working with other white folks or other people in their community, whether its teachers or health professionals or retail workers, any folks that are in your community. Find that core of folks and figure out how you can get organized, how you can be pushing back. Black folks in workplaces across the country are figuring out how they can band together to hold their employers accountable.

All of that matters and its important that we get together and stay connected and stay in community, and dont just wait for whatever the politicians are going to do or whatevers going to happen on election day, or whatever any other entity or individual might be doing. Its on all of us to stay connected to move this movement forward to the next stage.

All right. We have quite a few questions. Lets see where we should start. Katherine asked, Why do yall feel like the Black Lives Matter movement was controversial up until now? What was the factor that made the world care this time around?

I cant say one factor but I do think that its a couple of I would observe and name a couple of things. One is there has been a lot of work in the last six years and even before that but I think particularly in the last six years, to change the conversation about race, whether it was in newsrooms, right?

Yeah.

Whether it was in our schools, whether it was folks showing up in sports, the issue with Colin Kaepernick. Theres been a lot of conversations and a lot of repetition of this messaging of Black lives. Its not as if police werent killing Black folks between 2017 and 2020. They definitely were. And folks were definitely mobilizing and organizing for that. But its that repetition that were hearing over and over again in the media, in movies.

Its this idea, this notion of Black lives mattering. Also the lifting up of how racism and white supremacy shows up in all of these institutions, has created a drum beat that folks cant deny and now has given people the rhythm to march to, do you know what I mean?

So we were beating that drum for a long time and now folks have heard it so much that even the most off-beat person can vibe. And I think that thats a part of what were seeing. Thats how we know that movements and organizing work is that we were beating the drum, were going to continue to march and youre going to hear it so much that you get to join us. Youll feel the rhythm and youll join us. Youll be able to come in.

Right. Even if you on one and three, youll feel it. Youll feel it. I would just add to that. From the news side, I do think that the shift in how news organizations cover racism has played a really big role in it because so many people And also Twitter. Just the thing that struck me as so different about Ferguson and everything after it was that people were able to tell their own stories and share what was happening themselves. And they didnt have to defer to reporters who at the time were still very much taking the word of the police officers. And as we know, that narrative if its half true, thats a good story. And thats just what the evidence suggests. So I definitely think that Ferguson and social media just pushed newsrooms to do a better job, which in turn got more information out to more people.

Yeah. And also it helps that theres a blatant white supremacist, unapologetic white supremacist in the White House that says something racist every two weeks and folks are at home like, What? Thats the stuff that we whisper to each other. We dont say that on live TV. I think that theres a little awakening that folks are having of feeling a little bit uncomfortable of seeing who the United States of America has lifted up to be their leader, our leader and are wondering now, feeling that that being a very controversial perspective and wanting to align themselves at something different.

Even if they dont completely understand what the Black Lives Matter, or the movement for Black lives is meaning, folks are clear that they dont want to align themselves with this blatantly racist man in the White House.

Right. Another question we got is, would you share your thoughts on 8 Cant Wait? Do you think the changes proposed are enough?

I dont think the changes that are proposed are enough. I think that both from what the call from the communities have been, and what research and our knowledge over the last few years has shown us, is that reforming policing does not work. What needs to be done is a complete re-imagining of how we keep our community safe and where were putting those resources. And so, the 8 Cant Wait campaign initiative, therere a couple of things that I think are particularly challenging.

One is that it offers reforms in a way that requires more resources to policing, like more training, different review boards and things like that. Thats more money into policing, which is a part of the big problem, right? There have been different charts and graphs that Ive seen on social media the last few days, showing just how significant the citys police budget is versus its education budget. And so, defunding the police is just a call to defund police and take resources out of policing because its violent and harmful to our communities, but its also a call to invest in education, invest in healthcare, invest in alternatives to punishment, alternatives to incarceration.

The idea of an 8 Cant Wait kind of plan says, Lets continue to tinker around these edges while were ignoring the systematic and the foundational problems. And I would just lift up if folks are looking for more information about some alternatives, the 8 to Abolition campaign was just put out by my good friend K, who is @sheabutterfemme on Twitter, and a bunch of Ks homies. But it gives you eight points for how you can get from where we are now to abolition, and defunding the police is one of those eight points. But its just a part of it, right?

And so if youre thinking about, we need a plan towards actually addressing the harms that were facing and not maintaining the system as it is, then you really have to ask yourself, what would it mean to reform a system that was at its core rooted to hunt down and capture Black folks who were running away from chattel slavery. If youre thinking about trying to reform that policy, that institution, its going to be really, really hard and damn near impossible.

So if we want to build a world where all of us are safe in our communities, then we actually need to completely remove that form and that way of policing and of law enforcement, and really reimagine what were trying to keep safe, who were trying to keep safe and what does that even really look like? And I just dont think the 8 Cant Wait campaign does that. I think it also gives frankly politicians an out. We have people in these streets that are literally talking to their mayor, talking to their city council, Tell me to my face that youre not going to defund the police and invest in the education system. Tell me to my face.

An 8 Cant Wait campaign, it lets those elected officials off the hook to say, Well, this is another thing that a lot of other activists and a lot of other people are trying, which just isnt true and it does harm to the work that folks have been doing for the last few years, decades even. You can say a few years.

We have a question from Laura. She says, I am the wife of a police officer, and I would like to know how to have conversations about reform. I am 100 percent behind you, but how do I have the conversation with him? I dont know because I like to argue, so I cant answer you. I will let Angela answer that one.

Yeah. Thats a tough question. I have some friends and family in my life whose family are also in law enforcement, and were all having that conversation right now. I think that the place to start is really sharing your story and sharing your perspective. This has happened with a lot of issues in politics and in general. When were trying to persuade someone or change someones mind, we immediately go to like, These are the talking points. X percentage of these million dollars, X,Y, and Z.

What I find is most useful for me, particularly talking about policing and abolition, is to start from your own personal journey. I wasnt always someone who believed in abolishing the police or abolishing prisons. It took me some time to get there. And I think being clear and being open and honest about that, and also being clear that we dont have all of the answers. I may not have all the answers, but what we need to do and what we can commit to do, and I think that one thing to ask your husband to do is to commit to do something different.

We may not have all the answers. And a lot of people like to say, Well, how are you going to deal with this situation, and that situation, and this situation, and that situation? Some of those we have answers to, some of them we dont. But we do get to commit to figuring them out together in a way that recognizes that what were doing now just does not work and is not going to work.

Then the other thing I would just say is a lot of people try to bring up this question about jobs. A lot of Black folks work in the carceral system. A lot of Black people, a lot of working class Black folks are in police. And so the question comes, Well, what would I do? What will my job be? And again, this is about opening it up to the alternatives. Its not as if we say defund the police and then everybodys fired tomorrow.

Its about making some changes to the systems and the way that we imagine policing and safety, that can create other jobs and other opportunities, other openings and other ways to use our resources than simply grabbing someone up or putting a gun in someones hand and saying, Tell these people to get in order. Do you know what I mean?

Its a process, but right now were seeing that decisions can be made very quickly and in real time, that can have transformative outcomes. I think the best example is in a matter of two weeks, weve seen the Minneapolis City Council go from, Were going to fire these officers and we need to move to reform, to, Were going to dismantle the police department, and these are the ways that were going to do it.

Right. Which really speaks to, I think, how rioting works. It does compel people to be like, Oh wow, folks are really upset about this and maybe we should take them seriously. And so, that actually we have a question about Black police officers. Its from PJ. It said, How about more Black police officers in black communities?

I have written about this before. Black police officers dont really change the ways in which police interact with communities just because everyone is Black. Its really more about the system. It really is systemic because Black police officers can be just as forceful if not more forceful in Black communities, because the system is pushing them to prove themselves. So I just dont think more Black police officers or diversifying the force is necessarily the answer here. I mean, history just shows us that that also has not worked.

Totally. I completely agree with you. Its not about the individual, which is again why you see kind of an evolution of where the movement was. It went from calling for indictment, calling for arrest, calling for guilty verdicts on these individual actors. Weve moved and evolved from those individual asks to a systematic ask, an institutional ask, which is to defund the police. Because these one actor, two actors, individual people, thats actually not a solution thats going to stop police from killing black folks or frankly stop the police from beating protesters when theyre out in the streets demonstrating.

Right. Exactly. And lets see what those three got. Okay, let me rewind that because I jumped a question, because we were on Black police officers. So Christina asked, As people and institutions as diverse as Mitt Romney, Gushers , Muriel Bowser and Garfield shaped pizzauh, okaypublicly acclaimed that Black Lives Matter, do you worry that the messaging of the campaign may become diluted and less meaningful?

Ive been thinking quite a bit about this, because I live in DC and I saw the Black Lives Matter mural that Mayor Bowser put up. And I was shocked. I was shocked in a way of like, How dare you, Mayor Bowser? There have been a number of Black folks that have been killed by the police, even just in the last two years, Mayor Bowser has said nothing of remorse or challenge or adjustment. We love our police, we have to work with them. That just doesnt track with the experience of Black people in D.C. that I know.

Shes increased their funding and she continues just to sort of cape for them no matter what the harm is that they do. And so I really loved and appreciated the organizers of Black Lives Matter D.C. and BYP100 D.C., that added to that mural made to say, Black Lives Matter equals to defund the police, just so that were all clear on that.

But I think that to the question of the message being diluted, I think its two things to think about. One is, if you study social movements in moments of mass change, it does sort of require a bit of critical mass. You need your message, you need this issue and this story to reach a level of saturation across the country or just with the general public in order for the big transformative change that were seeing.

Think about the Civil Rights Movement. When that movement first started there was very little support, even among Black folks, right? But as you kind of grow and grow, it does become a bit of a mantra and becomes saturated, like I said in the media or in the discourse. And thats a good thing. The reason Im not so worried about the message being diluted is because I know that there are organizations, there are formations, there are leaders that have been around for many years and ones that are growing, that are emerging, that are popping up right now as we speak. That are going to be pushing the message further, that are going to be building

Its not just Black Lives Matter now, its Black Lives Matter and defund the police. Its defund the police and abolish prisons. Its abolish prisons and give us reparations. Do you know what I mean? I feel so confident in folks ability to hold the line of wanting to have as many people as possible aligning with the vision and showing up for Black lives, with also holding a strong firm line on what our demands actually are.

And thats why its important to be leery of campaigns like 8 Cant Wait, because thats one of those ways that the message can get diluted. Yeah, you might have these mainstream leaders or even people Kim Kardashian talking about our issues and thats fine. But if theres also then that counter voice, that can be seen as a representation of the community or what the movement demands are, that are also saying that more watered down version of the demands, thats where it can get dangerous.

But I just feel really confident in what Ive seen in the community of organizers that Ive been able to work with for the last few years, that weve got this, and were going to be welcoming more folks into our movement and into our organizations. Helping people to hold that line and that message, to get what we need and not just what the elected officials have decided is palatable for them.

Also just to add to that, I feel like companies and corporations and politicians saying, Black Lives Matter. I mean, theyre really just generating a statement of fact, like its true Black lives should matter, anyway. And I see it as just pushing a more truthful narrative, Black lives do matter. We should do something to address the system of policing in this country, we should address economic inequality, et cetera.

It looks like we have two more questions left.

Okay.

Because Im keeping you over time.

No, Im loving it. Lets do it.

Were just going to take over the live stream, like this is going on forever, its never ending. Recently de Blasio, Mayor de Blasio in New York, for watchers who may not know who that is, has mentioned cutting six billion from the NYPD budget of 90 billion dollars.

Really? I mean, who knows?

I would have to fact check that, but he wants to cut a sizable portion of money from a sizable budget. So the question is, do we as a community have a say in where that money will be reallocated? If so, how do we exercise that right?

Yes, absolutely.

Let me fact check that.

Yeah. We do and we should and we can. Thats why its really important to get connected to different efforts in your communities that are trying to figure out where that resource allocation goes. There might be a way for the Mayor to put in his budget but there is a review board of community groups, representative of folks from different bureaus or other kind of Is it 90 billion?

I really just want to fact check that now.

Read more:

A Conversation About Imagining a World Without Police - Slate

Out of touch

I just finished reading a very disturbing article in the Chronicle, Why nurses are joining the call for policing and prison abolition, July 16. Three PhD nursing candidates at Dalhousie University sent a letter calling for nurses across the country to join the movement for police and prison abolition.

My question to them would be: What do you plan to do with the murderers, rapists, drug dealers who suck people in, child abusers and all the other violent criminals?

What planet are those three and anybody who agrees with them living on? To even suggest getting rid of police and jails is insane. Who will they rely on if any of them ever get assaulted, raped, mugged, run over by a drunk driver or have some other criminal act done to them?

We often hear of nurses being abused by unruly patients. I guess for these three, it will never be an issue as they just wont allow it to happen to them. Im sure from their dislike of police involvement and jails, they certainly wouldnt call on police for help.

So far, at least, according to the article, letters sent to several nursing organizations across Nova Scotia and Canada have received no endorsements. Good to know there are still some people living in the real world.

W. N. Thompson, Upper LaHave

With regard to the recent Cats Meow Readers Corner (July 15), I think that is a great idea and encourages tourism within Nova Scotia. It would be good to let the public buy tickets and have some use of it.

Nonetheless, I cant help thinking the Cat has met the better part of its porpoise, or purpose rather, by providing employment to Bay Ferries and cover to the governing party.

One might say the Cat has meowed already!

Dermot Monaghan, Kingston

Premier Stephen McNeils comments last month concerning shutting down the Cat this year were not acceptable.

Nova Scotia taxpayers spent $17.8 million on a ferry service that didn't run in 2019 because work on the ferry terminal was needed in Bar Harbor. Why would we have to pay for a service not delivered and, on top of that, help pay for a terminal upgrade in Bar Harbor? In June, when asked by the Herald the cost to taxpayers in 2020, Premier McNeil said I dont know the exact number. This is a public health decision, not a financial decision. This is a financial disaster.

$34 million spent over two years for nothing. If we are bound to pay, we should get some service in return. We now have an Atlantic bubble. Why not use the Cat to ferry to P.E.I., Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia? It would be fast and increase tourism. Why pay to have the Cat docked in Charleston, S.C. for two years doing nothing? Lets put it to work.

The last question for the premier is why are we in a contract with an American company with an American crew and an American-registered ship, with all of the advantages in their favour?

Grant Bergman, Halifax

We could all learn a lesson from a child.

One day (before quarantine) my seven-year-old granddaughter and I were driving in the car. The radio was reporting on a news item concerning the Home for Colored Children. She asked, Did they just say colored children? Yes, I replied. What are colored children? she asked. Uh thats what some people called children whose skin was darker than, say, yours or mine. She thinks for a sec and says, Well, why didnt they just call them children? Or by their names?

Bravo Bernadette! If only more of us could think like you!

Sally Walsh, Timberlea

Read more:

VOICE OF THE PEOPLE JULY 17, 2020 - TheChronicleHerald.ca

Although it was the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 that set off huge protests all over the world, theres another name echoing in the chants of those demanding criminal justice reform: Breonna Taylor. The 26-year-old African-American woman and emergency medical technician was killed by police during a no-knock drug raid in Louisville, Kentucky on March 13.

Activists have been calling for the prosecution of the officers involved in that shooting. But writers Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, in an op-ed published on Essence Magazines website on July 16, stress that prosecutions are not enough and that Taylors memory should be honored by a full-fledged abolition of the prison-industrial complex.

Taylors death shows why no-knock raids, in drug cases, are a terrible idea as journalist Radley Balko (who now writes for the Washington Post) pointed out time and time again in his articles for Reason Magazine. The main targets of the March 13 raid were Jamarcus Glover and Adrian Walker, who Louisville police suspected of selling drugs. Walker, a licensed gun owner, has said that during the raid, he believed he was the victim of a home invasion or a robbery and was acting in self-defense. Shots were exchanged, and Taylor was caught in the crossfire. No drugs were found during a search of the house.

One of the officers involved in the shooting, Brent Hankison, was fired from the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department, while two others were placed on administrative leave. So far, however, none of them have been arrested or prosecuted.

Kaba and Ritchie, in Essence, note: The FBI and a special Kentucky prosecutor are investigating Breonnas killing and whether charges can be brought against the officers. We fully support demands for accountability for Breonnas death, and her family and loved ones quest for justice. When agents of the state act violently against an individual and in this case, callously and negligently takes their life there is no doubt that collective responses are absolutely warranted and essential.

But Kaba and Ritchie quickly add that real justice for Taylor as well as George Floyd needs to involve comprehensive criminal justice reforms in the United States.

As Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) abolitionists, we want far more than what the system that killed Breonna Taylor can offer because the system that killed her is not set up to provide justice for her family and loved ones, Kaba and Ritchie emphasize. Experience shows that officers who harm are rarely arrested by the departments that employ them, and prosecutions and convictions are even more unlikely. Since 2005 there have only been 110 prosecutions of police officers who shot people, while police have killed 1000 people a year on average since 2014.

Kaba and Ritchie go on to say that while police officers who use excessive force are given every benefit of the doubt in the U.S., many African-Americans are guilty until proven innocent under the countrys criminal justice system.

The officers who killed Breonna Taylor will claim self-defense because a confused, half-asleep person defending his home and his fiance against what he reasonably believed to be a home invasion fired shots, Kaba and Ritchie write. And, even if they are arrested and brought to trial if past experience is any indicator the law will once again provide them with cover for killing another black person. Meanwhile, countless black women and trans people who act in self-defense when police fail to protect them languish in prison.

In their article, Kaba and Ritchie call for a broader and deeper conception of justice for Breonna Taylor and other survivors and family members harmed by police violence one rooted in reparation.

People who have been or who see their loved ones arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, and killed for the slightest infraction or none at all want the system to act fairly by arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating those who harm and kill us, Kaba and Ritchie stress. People who have consistently been denied protection under the law desperately want the law to live up to its promises.

then let us make a small request. AlterNets journalists work tirelessly to counter the traditional corporate media narrative. Were here seven days a week, 365 days a year. And were proud to say that weve been bringing you the real, unfiltered news for 20 yearslonger than any other progressive news site on the Internet.

Its through the generosity of our supporters that were able to share with you all the underreported news you need to know. Independent journalism is increasingly imperiled; ads alone cant pay our bills. AlterNet counts on readers like you to support our coverage. Did you enjoy content from David Cay Johnston, Common Dreams, Raw Story and Robert Reich? Opinion from Salon and Jim Hightower? Analysis by The Conversation? Then join the hundreds of readers who have supported AlterNet this year.

Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Help ensure AlterNet remains independent long into the future. Support progressive journalism with a one-time contribution to AlterNet, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you. Click here to donate by check.

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Why advocates make the case for abolishing the whole prison-industrial complex - AlterNet

A number of gatherings are happening around Portland on Saturday. PPB released a statement saying it encourages peaceful demonstrations.

PORTLAND, Ore. Portland Police Bureau released a statement on Saturday stating that Portland police will not discourage peaceful demonstrations tonight.

This comes after Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty released a statement criticizing Mayor Ted Wheeler and Portland Police Bureau for its actions after a candlelight vigil she put together at the Multnomah County Justice Center.

PPB's statement said it would stay clear of peaceful protesters. It claimed that late Friday night police dispersed the crowd because it was throwing projectiles, setting off "commercial grade" fireworks, and using pieces of fence to block Justice Center doors.

Beginning tonight, command from the Federal Protective Service will not work in the Portland Police incident command center, police said. Police and federal officers worked side by side to disperse demonstrators last night.

There are various events planned around Portland for Saturday.

Artists gathered at Peninsula Park on Saturday from 3-6 p.m. in Portland to celebrate and elevate art and music by Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

The gathering, according to the Instagram post, was in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter and supporting movements. The post asked for people attending to wear masks and practice social distancing.

Then at 6 p.m. also at Peninsula Park, the Direct Action Alliance and other activists are holding an Abolish the Police rally. According to its tweet, it is asking people to show up in mass to demand the abolition of PPB and to protest the killing of BIPOC in America.

At around 8:50 p.m. a "Wall of Moms" dressed in white will march to the Multnomah County Justice Center to create a human barrier between Portland police and peaceful protesters.

There will also be a Black Lives Matter March for Justice which will begin at Holladay Park and march to Pioneer Square. The march will begin at 5 p.m. and end at 8 p.m.

There is also a Black Lives Matter occupy event from 4-9 p.m. at Lents Park. There will be performances by Mic Crenshaw and gues speakers.

This story will be updated.

Read this article:

Portland Police Bureau said it will stay away from peaceful protesters - KGW.com

By Lin Chia-nan / Staff reporter

A touring exhibition of works of art by people who have been on death row began yesterday at the Bopiliao Historic Block in Taipeis Wanhua District (), with organizers inviting people to ponder inmates potential to change and alternatives to the death penalty.

The Not Who We Were exhibition displays more than 20 calligraphy works or paintings by 15 people, including Cheng Hsing-tse (), who spent 14 years behind bars until he was acquitted in 2017.

Not every prison offers art classes, but he had the opportunity to learn Chinese painting from 2014 at a prison in Taichung, Cheng told a news conference.

Some inmates sent their work to family members, but in that way, members of society would not see how they had changed, he said.

The death penalty is not the only way to solve problems. I hope people can see the possibilities for inmates who are sentenced to death, he said.

The exhibition features a simulated prison ward of 1.368 ping (4.5m2) with one toilet and two beds.

Some people say that inmates live a comfortable life, but the simulated cell shows that the walled space with only one window is very narrow, Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty executive director Lin Hsin-yi () said.

Death row inmates are usually known for their worst acts, but few know how they can transform after being in prison, Lin said.

The exhibition aims to encourage people to see the possibility of change in inmates and how that might be prompted through social assistance, she said.

Trade Office of Swiss Industries deputy director Beatrice Latteier, who also attended the opening, said she is impressed by the artwork and wished she could read the calligraphic characters so she could understand the creators mindsets.

For Switzerland, the promotion of human rights is an important concern and a foreign policy goal. The death penalty is against human rights and is neither a deterrent nor does it contribute to reconciliation, Latteier said.

Hopefully, Taiwanese society would be open to discuss the abolition of capital punishment, with both sides willing to communicate, she said.

The exhibition in Taipei runs through July 26 and would travel to Miaoli County from Aug. 1 to 9 and to Tainan from Aug. 22 to Sept. 3.

Comments will be moderated. Keep comments relevant to the article. Remarks containing abusive and obscene language, personal attacks of any kind or promotion will be removed and the user banned. Final decision will be at the discretion of the Taipei Times.

See the article here:

Taipei exhibition features art of death row inmates - Taipei Times

As people across North America protested police brutality and racism in late May, three nursing PhD candidates at Dalhousie University saw the need for nurses to take a stand.

So, Keisha Jefferies, Leah Carrier, andMartha Paynter came together to write a letter in early June. The letter called on nurses across the country to join the movement for police and prison abolition.

We feel its really necessary for our profession, if we are truly champions for public health, to confirm that by joining the movement, said Paynter in an interview Wednesday.

In the letter, the three friends highlight the ways in which police and prison are harmful.

In prisons, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour are disproportionately incarcerated and consequently bare what the letter refers to as the horror of prisons: isolation, restraints, infection, and injury.

To seek care while in prison requires compliance with traumatizing security protocols strip searching, observation, violations of confidentiality, the letter said.

The three colleagues believe nursing is a trusted and respected profession with a huge platform to advocate for communities experiencing harm.

Paynter said its also in the nature of nurses to intervene for the sake of their patients whether it was by administering medication or IV fluids.

What were saying is nurses need to adopt political interventions to change the course of social harm, she said.

The nurses also touched on the role of the police in the deaths of DAndre Campbell, who was shot by police in April in Ontario, and Regis Korchinski-Paquet, who fell from a Toronto balcony in May. The letter said the consequences of policing and prison challenge the efforts of nurses to provide care to their communities.

We will not have our work undone by police and prison systems, the letter reads.

The letter said any investment in reforming the police would be futile. Instead, governments should be investing in areas such as housing, education, and social assistance.

Why arent we deeply troubled by how the tables have turned to frankly dump money into policing, when policing does not work to eliminate harm? said Paynter.It actually creates not just harm but death in our communities.

Nurses are not the answer to the issue of policing, according to Paynter. But they can play a role in building public services that maintain the well-being of communities.

When these services are available, Paynter said policing and prisons would become unnecessary.

This is what she expects would happen if drugs were decriminalized.

Last week, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police released a statement to call on federal lawmakers to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of illegal drugs.

Paynter said the police shouldnt be championed for making the move this late. But if drugs were decriminalized nurses can help keep people safe by facilitating access to safe substances and providing all care thats associated with substance use.

While supporting community-based efforts to abolish policing is a priority for the three registered nurses, their letter also urges nurses in North America to start from within.

(We should) simultaneously be looking inward to see how our profession operates in a way that uses punishment and exclusion and discrimination in its operations, said Paynter.

Paynter gave an example for how nurses can be complicit in oppressing Black, Indigenous, and people of colour.

Nurses are taught to have really racist ideas about pain and policing access to pain relief based on those racist assumptions.

After releasing the letter in June, Paynter said about 1,000 people signed it. It was also translated into French, German, and Spanish.

But when she sent the letter to several nursing organizations across Nova Scotia and Canada, Paynter said she received no endorsements.

Our profession really struggles with divorcing itself from policing even though the evidence is clear that police brutality is one of the greatest infrastructures of systemic racism in this country, said Paynter.

She added that nursing organizations can start their fight against racism by increasing representation of Black, Indigenous and people of colour on their boards.

The letter Jefferies, Carrier, and Paynter wrote was published Wednesday in Public Health Nursing, a peer-reviewed journal.

Paynter said change is happening in policing and the nursing practice, but it needs to continue moving.

I envision nurses as really key leaders in a movement forward where police and prison do not exist.

Nebal Snan is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter, a positionfunded by the federal government.

RELATED:

See the article here:

Why nurses are joining the call for policing and prison abolition - SaltWire Network

In recent weeks, we have witnessed a historic reckoning over the meaning of policing in U.S. society. Thousands of people have collectively mourned the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and so many others, while demanding an end to the police violence that murdered them. Armed with riot gear, police have responded by unleashing weapons like rubber and real bullets and tear gas, which is banned in war. These police attacks against the people bolster the argument that the police cannot be reformed but must be abolished.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have reinforced these attacks.

On July 6, ICE announced it would reinstate rules prohibiting international students from enrolling in online courses. Although the COVID-19 crisis is worse than ever, compelling many universities and students to shift to online education in order to protect public health and save lives, this ICE directive targets international students for deportation and exclusion. It follows the White Houses onslaught of attacks against immigrants and migrants the border wall, the zero tolerance border policy, the Muslim ban, the attacks on DREAMers, and on and on.

Get the latest news and thought-provoking analysis from Truthout.

It also comes at a time of historic reckoning over the history of U.S. racism, particularly around the role of policing. Police have responded to protests against racist state violence with racist state violence deployed through rubber and real bullets and tear gas. These police attacks only bolster the argument that the police cannot be reformed but must be abolished.

These assaults on noncitizens, political dissenters and Black people do not stand alone, but in fact work together and emerge from shared foundations.

Indeed, ICE and CBP have reinforced police attacks on protesters.

Their participation in police violence reminds us of the tight connections between domestic policing and immigration enforcement, and why organizers pushing to dismantle policing and defend Black lives also demand that we #AbolishICE and #AbolishCBP. The webs connecting ICE, CBP and police show that policing is not just about official police departments. Policing is a means of social control over a society defined by structural inequalities by race, class, gender, immigration status and more. From its deep roots, policing grows multiple branches that extend in all directions, forming an entangled system of immigration, militarism and domestic state violence.

CBP and ICE officers have deployed to protests, even though their internal policies declare such public assemblies sensitive locations where they should not intrude for immigration enforcement. (Other sensitive locations include hospitals and churches.) However, there remains an exception to this rule. Both agencies can use their powers of arrest for criminal law. Even though immigration and criminal law are supposed to remain distinct arenas with separate enforcement agencies, courts and jurisdictions, the actions of CBP and ICE at protests work to dissolve any such distinction.

CBP has deployed drones and helicopters to provide aerial surveillance over protests in Detroit, Buffalo, Chicago, Washington, El Paso, San Diego and Minneapolis.

Especially concerning are its drones flying over Minneapolis, 250 miles from the U.S.-Canada border, well beyond its already expansive jurisdiction 100 miles from any U.S. border. Within this bloated area, CBP regularly searches people without probable cause, since Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures do not apply within the border zone. Its surveillance of Minneapolis protesters speaks to the expanding attacks on constitutional protections, in terms of space (beyond the 100-mile jurisdiction) and constitutional rights, including First Amendment rights to assembly and rights to privacy. This surveillance also shows an expansion of targets, as both citizens and noncitizens are being surveilled. These incursions on rights pose a grave danger not only to immigrants, but to democracy.

CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan boasted about these incursions on Twitter, as he sent officers to Washington, D.C.: These protests have devolved into chaos & acts of domestic terrorism. @CBP is answering the call. He used the label terrorist to delegitimize protesters and to legitimize state violence. Hundreds of CBP and ICE officers joined Washington, D.C., police to crush public assembly. They cleared the way for Donald Trumps photo op in front of St. Johns Church.

While the dangers of CBPs and ICEs expanding powers concern everyone in the U.S., these agents still overwhelmingly target our immigrant and Latinx neighbors. On June 3, five agents tackled, subdued and held at gunpoint a Puerto Rican man attending a protest in New York City. The mans Latinx identity suggests the agents used racial profiling to capture a person they suspected to be an immigrant. However, the agents dismissed the accusation by falsely claiming the man possessed a gun. Afterward, an ICE spokesperson asserted, ICE has the authority to make criminal arrests. This was not immigration related.

That mans U.S. citizenship gave him a modicum of protection from ICE that immigrants do not have. ICE colludes with local police to sweep up immigrant activists who have Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status. On May 30, Phoenix police arrested, detained and transferred three DACA-mented activists to ICE custody. Because the police charged them with felonies, including rioting, ICE can now launch deportation proceedings against them.

Anyone who seeks to abolish policing should be alarmed that ICE does not have to directly patrol protesters in order to ensnare them in its net. The entanglement between police forces and immigration enforcement did not start with these Black Lives Matter protests. They have been interlocking for decades.

ICE could seize the DACA-mented activists because of longstanding laws and policies that have increasingly entangled immigration and local law enforcement in shared policing, detention and data technologies.

For example, launched in 1996, the 287(g) program deputizes local police to enforce immigration law. A police officer can arrest a person for an immigration violation in the regular course of their duties, like while patrolling a Black Lives Matter protest.

The 287(g) program has often worked hand-in-hand with Secure Communities (S-Comm), which links local jails and prisons to federal criminal databases. Through S-Comm, ICE can ask local jails to hold an immigrant suspected of an immigration violation until its own agents can arrest, detain and deport the person.

S-Comm led to the deportations of nearly 400,000 people between 2009-2014. That the Trump administration promotes advancing the interoperability the collusion and data sharing among federal and local enforcement agencies at its base should alarm and mobilize us.

We need only to look to the agents policing protesters to see how this interoperability flows in both directions. ICE and CBP are there together, in force, exposing the flow not only from police to immigration agents, but also from immigration agents to police. And it is rooted not just in immigration-specific policies, like 287(g) and S-Comm, but also in criminal law.

For example, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 is infamous for its mandatory minimum prison sentences that filled prisons in ways that targeted Black people. The law also targeted immigrants. It mandated deportation for any drug violation and created the aggravated felony, a category of deportable offense that includes minor infractions that are neither aggravated nor felonies and that applies only to immigrants. Laws like this work together with mundane law enforcement tactics like broken windows policing. Such policing has inflicted violence on Black and Brown communities and fed immigrant detention and deportation pipelines.

The deployment of ICE and CBP to recent protests expands the power of law enforcement to subdue public assemblies. Yet it also targets solidarity, threatening deportation against immigrant activists. This targeting suggests the danger that solidarity poses to our unjust, inequitable social order and to the police that uphold it.

The calls to abolish ICE and CBP are enmeshed with the decades-long movements to abolish policing and prisons. #AbolishICE and (to a lesser extent) #AbolishCBP gained mainstream media attention in 2018 in response to Trumps zero tolerance border policy and ensuing family separations. But these calls started with the very creation of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and CBP in 2003.

Their roots reach back even further, emerging from groundwork laid by movements to abolish institutions of state violence. Organizations like Critical Resistance have brought together criticisms of the U.S. military, police and prisons, and how such institutions target and criminalize a range of oppressed people, including Black people and immigrants, for removal from society via incarceration, deportation and hyper-aggressive policing of certain neighborhoods. Migrant justice organizations like No More Deaths have in turn acknowledged how their calls to abolish ICE and CBP are rooted in centuries of Black abolitionist thought and organizing.

And Black abolitionist organizing has long sought liberation for immigrants. Since its launch in 2014, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) platform has demanded ending the war on Black people, including the Black immigrants who endure anti-Black racism and anti-immigrant attacks. It thus calls for the abolition of police, prisons and immigration enforcement simultaneously.

As The Rising Majority, a coalition born out of the M4BL, stated in response to the Supreme Court decision to uphold DACA (for now): The police are just one component of state sanctioned violence. As we call for the defunding of police, we also unapologetically lift up the call for the abolition of ICE and CBP. Each tentacle needs to be cut off and replaced by systems of community control of health, wellness, [and] security.

These organizers remind us that cutting off one tentacle of state violence on its own cannot achieve the future that is needed for all people to thrive. Black-led abolitionist movements and organizations, like Critical Resistance and Black Lives Matter, and immigrant justice organizations like UndocuBlack, United We Dream and Mijente together demand the simultaneous dismantling of police, ICE, CBP, military, and other institutions of state violence, as well as the ideologies of racism, imperialism, patriarchy and capitalism that undergird them. To achieve the goal of abolishing police and creating a new society where all can thrive, we need to make these connections and fight against all fronts of policing power.

More here:

Abolishing Police Includes Abolishing ICE and Border Protection - Truthout

The development of the coronavirus pandemic, its aggressiveness, is also the bitter fruit of the devastation of nature, the loss of species biodiversity, the destruction of the habitat of wild species, deforestation, pollution of the environment, seas and air and climate change caused by capitalism and imperialism.

Italy in 2020, which has faced the pandemic virus, is an Italy weakened by decades of cuts, privatizations, reduction of hospitals and beds, dismemberment of locally based medicine, weakening of intermediate and home care and of the network of general practitioners and paediatricians .

An Italy that has constantly cut healthcare personnel, blocked the recruitment of doctors, nurses and healthcare technicians.

An Italy that, under centre-right and centre-left governments, as well as the "technocractic" governments, had already taken 37 billion euros from the health service in 10 years, but whose cuts have now lasted almost thirty years. It has resulted in corporate organisation, privatization and the progressive breaking up of all solidarity between the different parts of the national territory.

All this has inevitably contributed, in the phase of the pandemic explosion, to the deaths of thousands of people and two hundred health workers.It is necessary to radically change direction, to say enough with this state of affairs.

For these reasons, seeking the widest possible unity of action with all the political, trade union and social forces, we collecting signatures in support of a popular petition for:

* a single public and secular National Health Service, managed by the State, resolving the current system of regional autonomies;

* ending the forms of direct or indirect financing of private healthcare, with the absorption of the staff employed in it; abolition of healthcare provided by the third sector with public funds or with tenders financed with public money;

* setting up a public centre for research, production and distribution of medicines and medical devices;

* abolition of all prescription charges, all forms of payment by users;

* a big increase in the financing of the national health service, to be achieved also through the cutting of military spending, the reintroduction of highly progressive taxation on incomes and an asset tax on wealth;

* the redefinition of the structures of prevention, treatment, rehabilitation, hospital and territorial services, also through the reopening, where necessary, of closed hospitals and ending outsourcing

* reproductive rights and proper financing of Family Advice Centres, free abortion and contraception for all women;

* reducing waiting lists to the absolute minimum, reviewing existing organizational and management models, ending specific payments for external doctors, , investing in means and personnel; obligation to manage demand for all health activities, without leaving people in the tentacles of the free market;

* ending the limits on the numbers allowed to accessuniversity training for doctors and health professionals;

* an emergency plan to give secure contracts to all personnel with temporary contracts and to hire all medical personnel, professions, and health care workers, with permanent contracts, which will facilitate the training of stable teams, with improved care;

* a policy to adequately recognise the work of health care personnel;

* the maintenance of the single text on safety in the workplace (81/2008), against any hypothesis of criminal immunity for employers.

We are for a public health service, free, secular, and of real quality!

Read more:

For a public health service that is universal, secular and free of charge - International Viewpoint

IN 2017 the Co-op Group was presented with the Thomson-Reuters Stop Slavery award.

This was made for its impressive work against modern-day slavery, winning praise for its Bright Futures programme which offers paid employment for slavery and trafficking victims.

Im not sure if the founders of what had been the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) would have felt about this pride no doubt that their values where still being upheld but shock that something they had fought against was still going on.

The CWS was formed in Manchester in 1863 almost in the middle of the American civil war.

The trade mark of the society, the Wheatsheaf, includes the motto Labor and Wait.

Note that Labor is the American spelling. It comes from the last line of the poem by US poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life.

Let us, then, be up and doing,With a heart for any fate;Sill achieving, still pursuing,Learn to Labor and to wait.

The use of this motto was a clear statement of the founders of the CWS of its support for the abolitionist cause during the civil war.

The war had a huge effect on Manchester and the cotton districts in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

In 1861 when the war began there where approximately half a million workers employed in the cotton industry of northern England.

The huge wealth of Liverpool and Cottonopolis, as Manchester was known following Richard Arkwrights development of the steam-driven textile mill, was based on mass production.

By 1853 there where over 100 cotton mills in Greater Manchester, making it the worlds centre of cotton spinning.

In parallel with this technological development Manchester was also a centre of radical politics.

In 1845, Friedrich Engels wrote: Manchester is the seat of the most powerful unions, the central point of Chartism, the place which numbers the most socialists.

There is a strong historical continuity between Chartism the development of trade unions and the roots of co-operation in the strike committees formed in the 1840s to help members of artisan traders during industrial disputes.

When the American civil war began, initially sentiment among radicals was mixed.

Given slavery was present across the United States, there was a split between those who supported the right of the Southern states to secede from the Union and the more radical supporters of full suffrage.

Interestingly, the great free-trade liberal newspaper the Manchester Guardian took this former position, undoubtedly under pressure form the considerable cotton interests in the City.

Prior to the civil war there had been an anti-slavery committee in Manchester that had raised money for the underground railway through which slaves could escape to free states.

Many radicals in the cotton districts saw only too clearly the links between their own conditions and the conditions of those in slavery in the United States.

Writing in the New York Daily Tribune on October 14 1861, Karl Marx wrote: As long as the English cotton manufacturers depend on slave-grown cotton, it could truthfully be asserted that they rested on two-fold slavery, the indirect slavery of the white man in England and the direct slavery of the black man on the other side of the Atlantic.

Involved in this anti-slavery society was Edward Owen Greening (1836-1923), a Quaker who went on to become an important co-operator involved in the very first Co-operative Congress in 1869.

There were at the time of the civil war 118 co-operative societies in the cotton districts. They had been gradually coming together to form a collective buying and wholesale operation.

These discussions included two other key figures Edward Hoosen, who came from Halifax, had little formal education but gained his outlook from the Chartist newspaper Northern Star and was Manchesters leading Chartist, and John Charles Edwards, president of the Manchester and Salford Equitable Society.

Both were to become original members of the Board of the CWS.

In April 1861 Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of the Southern ports, cutting off the supply of cotton.

This had a devastating effect on the cotton districts. By November 1862, 330,759 cotton workers had been laid off and were seeking relief.

We have an excellent record of what happened in the cotton districts because of the work of John Watts who was the secretary of the central relief committee during the famine and who complied a magisterial report of the famine published in 1866.

The loss of work and resulting famine had a devastating effect on many co-operative societies with many smaller ones going to the wall.

They also suffered from the way the local Poor Law boards dealt with relief, forcing those seeking relief to give up their shareholdings in co-operative societies before they could get relief and even issuing relief tickets that could not be used in co-op stores.

In many ways these slights hardened the positions of both workers and co-operators, enhancing their support for the Union and accelerating progress towards the formation of the CWS to enhance the commercial strength of co-op societies.

This came to a head on New Years Eve 1862. The following day Lincoln had said that all persons held as slaves within the rebellious states, are, and henceforward shall be free.

An advertisement appeared in the Manchester Guardian:

TONIGHT FREE-TRADE HALLWORKINGMENS MEETING for Union and Freedom, andto prepare an Address to President Lincoln.Chair to be taken at seven oclock. members of the committee to be at the Hall at half past five.Doors open at six.J.C. Edwards Hon. Secretary

This meeting had been called by Hoosen and Edwards, who had raised the 30 to pay for the hall. Their call did not go unheeded.

That night the Free Trade Hall was full to overflowing. Despite the hardship the blockade was causing, over 6,000 people packed inside. The Union and Emancipation Society was formed.

The first resolution of the meeting was moved by Edwards: That this meeting, recognising the common brotherhood of mankind and the sacred and inalienable right of every human being to personal freedom and equal protection, records its detestation at negro slavery in America, and of the attempts of the rebellious Southern slaveholders to organise on the great American continent a nation having slavery as its base.

Despite the Manchester Guardians detestation of Lincoln, it duly reported the proceedings of the evening in the next days newspaper.

The outcome of the gathering was a letter of solidarity from the working people of Manchester to Lincoln: The erasure of that foul blot on civilisation and Christianity chattel slavery during your presidency, will cause the name of Abraham Lincoln to be honoured and revered by posterity.

Astonishingly on January 19 1863, Lincoln replied by sending an address to the working people of Manchester.

He recognised their suffering as an instance of sublime Christian heroism, and added: It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent truth and the ultimate and universal triumph of justice humanity and freedom.

This was followed in February by the first food relief ship from New York to Liverpool, the ship the George Griswold carried boxes of bacon and bread, bags of rice and corn and 15,000 barrels of flour and was greeted on the docks by a crowd of 4,000. This was the first of several relief ships.

Before the war ended the CWS had been formed and Edwards went on to be its first secretary and cashier.

Sadly, although Hoosen became one of the founder members of the board of the CWS, he only lived to 1869 and was buried near Ernest Jones in Ardwick Cemetery.

The Co-operative movement survived the American civil war.

The Rochdale Society alone donated 1,500 towards unemployment relief, establishing soup kitchens and organising education workshops and activities.

Watts, secretary of the relief committee, went into write for the Co-operative News.

In his famous History of the Rochdale Pioneers, George Jacob Holyoake wrote that co-operative societies had no small share in enabling the people of the two great cotton-spinning counties to resist the recognition of a slave dominion.

Today in the appropriately named Lincoln Square between Brazenose Street, Albert Square and Deansgate in Manchester is a statue of Abraham Lincoln.

The inscription on the plinth says it is dedicated to the support the working people of Manchester gave in the fight for the abolition of slavery in the American Civil War.

Thats one statue that should not be pulled down.

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The Co-op, anti-slavery and the Lancashire cotton famine - Morning Star Online

Hennepin County commissioners asked the county's law enforcement officials Thursday how they plan to avoid the problems dealing with people of color that are troubling the Minneapolis police.

Several said they were concerned that the Sheriff's Office may be forced to handle the work not done by the police, or at least cover for the department's perceived lack of responsiveness.

Commissioner Jan Callison wanted reassurances that the Sheriff's Office would follow different policies and procedures from the Minneapolis police, who have been criticized for brutality and lax discipline. Several City Council members are calling for the department's defunding or even abolition.

Sheriff Dave Hutchinson and other leaders told the County Board about his office's initiatives to train deputies, control COVID-19 in the jails and provide medication for inmates with drug addiction. Hutchinson said there have been only five use-of-force complaints filed against the Sheriff's Office in nearly three years.

"In the Sheriff's Office, we work really to have an outstanding culture as far as use of force," said Chief Deputy Tracey Martin. "We hire and train outstanding people who understand our culture of dignity and respect for all the people we serve."

Commissioner Angela Conley asked if the sheriff was planning to require anti-racism training and if the office's budget next year would include more community-based options that go beyond typical law enforcement practices.

Commissioner Debbie Goettel praised the Sheriff's Office for new policies of not charging inmates for phone calls and expediting the DNA backlog in a variety of cases. Commissioner Irene Fernando said she supported placing a social worker in the 911 dispatch center to help employees.

Commissioner Jeff Johnson said there was no tougher job right now than public safety, but added he didn't want the Sheriff's Office to "get sucked into the mess that is Minneapolis right now."

Johnson said the number of inmates in the county jail is at its lowest since 1985 and asked how that could be during a major crime wave in Minneapolis.

"Cops in Minneapolis don't feel they have support from its political leaders," he said. "Do sheriff's deputies feel supported by the County Board?"

Conley wanted to know specifics about how the Sheriff's Office is working with the Minneapolis police to handle problems such as drag racing on Park and Portland avenues and the homeless encampments in Powderhorn Park.

When she asked how the Sheriff's Office might re-evaluate its budget request for 2021, Johnson said the agency shouldn't include items that deal with social issues.

"I want to see a public safety budget," he said. "We will do a social service budget. I hear about people spitting on officers and they don't show up when we need them. We need to support the good cops trying to protect us."

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Hennepin County Board, Sheriff Dave Hutchinson discuss law enforcement's role in the wake of pandemic, Floyd killing - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Juneteenth 2020 was a proud day for Duluth. 100 years after a white mob desecrated this sacred Anishinaabe ground with the blood of Black men, Duluths downtown swelled with a transformative hope: dignified rage and Black joy. For one afternoon, our streets were blessed with rap music, poetry, and the heartbeat of Ojibwe drum circles. With Black women and queer people at the lead, speakers gifted us with education, raw honesty, and visionary ideas.

Their demand was clear: Abolish the police.

When I first heard calls for abolition, I dismissed them as fantasies gone too far. If you feel that way reading this, I simply encourage you to keep listening. Abolition isnt going to happen tomorrow, but the steps to get there can.

A core abolitionist principle is that the police do not keep us safe. For the most part, the police do protect my white body and private property. But its not just about me, and its certainly not just about my private property. I am not truly safe until every member of my community is safe.

Heres a tip for white people: You probably wont see the danger of the police by looking at your own experiences. Youre going to need to listen to and research the experiences of Black and Indigenous folks, People of Color, migrants, and queer people. If it doesnt hurt, you probably arent listening closely enough.

Police abolition demands community interconnectedness and creativity for the long haul. It challenges us to invest in food, medicine, and shelter for all so that we dont have to use weapons, fear, and division to control each other.

Abolitionists dont tell us to flip a switch and turn off the police. Instead, they teach us how we can build unarmed and more specialized community safety teams. They teach us how to eliminate the root causes of violent crimes. They teach us to care for one another with a humanity that militarization denies.

And, you know what? We can start all of that tomorrow.

Alternatives to the police exist around the country and around the world. Just three hours away, organizations like Reclaim the Block, Black Visions Collective, and MPD150 have done much of the visioning work already. Their websites alone hold decades of ideas, lessons learned, and careful research. Some of their proposals that could be implemented in Duluth immediately are to freeze all increases to the Duluth Police Departments budget, remove Duluth Police resource officers from our schools, and conduct a racial bias audit of the Duluth department. Duluth could then invest all that money, time, and labor into social services that actually prevent crime, provide safe housing, treat the opioid epidemic as the health crisis it is, educate our youth, ensure our youth have access to therapists and social workers, and so much more.

Police abolition can feel scary. Its also a path to hope, inspiration, and a new level of human care. If you are horrified by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and so many others, I encourage you to dig into that fear and give abolitionism a serious look. We need you; we need everyone.

Perhaps the core of abolition is that simple: No human life is disposable. We cannot sacrifice one single more Black or Native life to systems we know are not working. The time to act was centuries ago. The opportunity is now.

Claire Bransky of Duluth majored in political science with a focus on state violence at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. She works now for the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA).

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Local View: Police abolition is the logical and safest path forward - Duluth News Tribune

If there is a problem with Spike Lees new film, Da Five Bloods, is that it doesnt know what it it is. Which genre is it? Action adventure? Politico-historic drama? War film? Buddy movie? Or just a plain Spike Lee caper, which means it is slightly bonkers. The movie starts with clips of Mohammed Ali, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the latter stating, when you take 20 million black people and make them fight all your wars and pick all your cotton . . . sooner or later their allegiance towards you is going to wear thin. Of all enlisted men who died in Vietnam, blacks made up 25% of the total killed in combat. This came at a time when they made up 11.0% of the young male population nationwide. During the early years of the Vietnam War, thousands of young African-American men eagerly enlisted in the armed forces because they believed the military afforded them educational and vocational opportunities in supposedly the most integrated institution in the United States. By the end of the 1960s, however, reports of the inherent racial bias in the draft, discriminatory treatment in the armed forces, and institutional racism in all branches of the services enraged and shocked African-Americans by their longstanding belief that military service was a civil rights imperative. Anger over the second-class treatment of blacks in the military was a major reason for Martin Luther Kings, and other civil rights organisations break with the Johnson administration over the Vietnam War.

In September 1969, The New York Times Wallace Terry, who had spent more time with black soldiers than any other journalist and had previously reported on the positive nature of black-white relations, came out with a decidedly bleaker assessment. There was, he said, another war being fought in Vietnam, the one between black and white Americans.

The drama follows four Vietnam veterans, the Bloods, Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), who return to the country with a dual purpose, to recover the remains of their fallen comrade and to retrieve the gold they buried. Pauls estranged son David also turns up in Vietnam to join the four on their quest. Spike Lee makes cinematic references to Apocalypse Now, with some rousing Wagnerian Valkeries riding overhead as they set off upstream in boat from Ho Chi Minh City, and also the large sign in an Apocalyse Now nightclub. The Treasure of Sierra Madre, a film about gold, greed and paranoia, set in Mexico, is cited when Paul asks a gun-toting bandit, who claims to be a Vietnamese officer, for his credentials, he replies, We dont need no stinking official badges, referencing a famous line from John Hustons 1948 adventure about gold prospectors in Mexico, uttered by a Mexican bandit, in response to a similar request from Fred C. Dobbs, played by Humphrey Bogart, who, like Paul, grows paranoid that his buddies might rip him off. This is a puzzling movie, with some droll lines and serious points being made about race. The action jumps all over the screen like a firecracker, with preposterous explosions and gunfights breaking out in both the Vietnam of the 1960s and the present day, which Lee directs like a kid in a toy shop.

An award-wing documentary entitled 13th was shown recently on television courtesy of Netflix, which could not have been better timed. It tells the shocking story of the incarceration of Afro-Americans in the US, made by Ava DuVernay, who also directed Selma, which was about Martin Luther Kings Civil Rights Movement. The film was written by DuVernay and Spencer Averick, who also edited it. Produced and filmed in secrecy, 13th was revealed only after it was announced as the opening film for the 2016 New York Film Festival, the first documentary ever to open the festival. The film explores the intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States; and it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. The film opens with an audio clip of President Barack Obama stating that the US had 5% percent of the worlds population, had but 25%of the worlds prisoners. This film also features several activists, academics, political figures from both major US political parties, and public figures, such as Angela Davis, Bryan Stevenson, Van Jones, Newt Gingrich and Cory Booker.

It explores the economic history of slavery and post-Civil War racist legislation and practices that replaced it. DuVernay contends as systems of racial control and forced labor from the years after the abolition of slavery to the present. Southern states criminalized minor offenses, arresting freedmen and forcing them to work when they could not pay fines; institutionalizing this approach as convict leasing which created an incentive to criminalize more behaviour. She contends they disenfranchised most blacks across the South at the turn of the 20th century, excluding them from the political system, including juries, at the same time that lynching of blacks by white mobs was all too common. Corruption, lack of accountability, and racial violence resulted in one of the harshest and most exploitative labour systems known in American history. Slavery, effectively, never went away.

Essentially, the criminal justice system colluded with private plantation owners, logging companies and other business owners to entrap, convict, and lease blacks as prison labourers. The constitutional basis for convict leasing is that the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment, while abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude generally, permits it as a punishment for crime. The film throws up a truly shocking indictment of just how backward America is, particularly in the South, in terms of bigotry, racial hatred and disenfranchisement. In 1970, there were about 200,000 prisoners in American jails, but when the film was made in 2016, the prison population was more than 2 million, the majority being black. Bryan Stevenson quotes the Bureau of Justice, which reported that one in three young black males is expected to go to prison during his lifetime, which is an unbelievably shocking statistic. She ends the film with graphic videos of fatal shootings of blacks by police, which Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, Manohla Dargis, describes as, having the effect of a piercing, keening cry. Amongst the dozens of awards it attracted, 13th won a BAFTA for Best Documentary, which it well and truly deserved.

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Black and White movies KCW London - Kensington Chelsea & Westminster Today

11 July 2020

With the unveiling of Bernie Sanders and Joe Bidens joint task force proposals for the 2020 Democratic Party platform, Sanders has put the final nail in the coffin of his so-called political revolution.

The joint task force initiative was first announced when Sanders gave his endorsement of Biden in mid-April. The task forces were composed of leading members of the Sanders and Biden campaigns, including two members of the Democratic Socialists of America: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. The initiative was meant to promote party unity ahead of the election.

The result of the Biden-Sanders collaboration is nothing short of a total repudiation of all the central pillars of Sanders campaign amid the greatest social and economic catastrophe in US history.

Most notably absent in the proposals is Sanders hallmark Medicare-for-all plan, which has been replaced by calls to re-open the Affordable Care Act marketplaces and provide a public option. A reduction in the age of eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 60 is meant to serve as Bidens progressive fig leaf on health care. Just four years ago, Hillary Clintons campaign had called for a lowering of Medicare eligibility to age 50.

Other policies central to the Sanders campaign that were dropped include a federal jobs guarantee, the Green New Deal, free college tuition and the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Instead, the non-binding recommendations for the Democratic Party platform consist of platitudes about ensuring equity for all Americans and minor policy reforms that the Democratic Party has no intention of implementing.

The Democratic Party platform has no practical import in any event. Many young people and workers will recall that when Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton, he proclaimed that she and the party had adopted the most progressive party platform in history.

Sanders, who is proving in real time to be the Democratic Partys most enthusiastic cheerleader, is once again getting out his pom-poms ahead of the 2020 elections. Following the announcement of the task force proposals, Sanders went as far as predicting that Biden could become the most progressive president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Who does he think he is fooling? Biden has a nearly 50-year history of carrying out the dictates of the ruling class. He supported the Iraq war and the end of the GlassSteagall restrictions on financial speculation. He helped pass legislation that led to the mass incarceration of the poorest and most oppressed layers of the population. If elected, a Biden administration, with the participation of many of those involved in the unity initiative, will preside over an intensification of austerity, further attacks on democratic rights and an expansion of war and militarism.

The prostration of Sanders before the Biden campaign was entirely predictable and in line with the nature of his campaign. As reality has demonstrated so clearly the need for socialism, Sanders response has been to shift ever further to the right.

The events of the last four months in particular are worth reviewing.

The last act of the Sanders campaign was the senators vote for the $2.2 trillion CARES Act on March 25. Prior to voting yes on the bill, Sanders hailed it on the Senate floor as a boon to workers. In reality, the bill was a boondoggle for corporate America that allowed for the funneling of $6 trillion to keep the stock market afloat and cover any losses suffered by major corporations.

On April 8, as coronavirus cases in the US were reaching their first peak and hospitals were being overwhelmed, Sanders announced that he was dropping out of the race, and he held his groveling discussion with Biden on April 13.

His capitulation to Biden was followed by an interview with the Associated Press in which he slandered as irresponsible any of his supporters who failed to campaign for Biden. Just a day earlier, Biden had signed on to Trumps back-to-work campaign, as the US COVID-19 death toll reached 10,000.

Soon after, former top advisors to the Sanders campaign harnessed its organizational structure to launch a new super PAC, Future to Believe In, to direct resources to the election of Biden.

On May 23, as the US COVID-19 death toll was nearing 100,000 and the wealth of the super-rich was booming, Sanders political team issued a threat to his delegates: they would be removed from their positions if they criticized Biden or other Democratic Party leaders.

Two days later, George Floyd was brutally murdered by police, triggering massive multi-racial and multi-ethnic protests against police brutality across the US and around the world. In response to the protests, Trump attempted to carry out a coup that would involve the mobilization of active-duty troops to put down the protests and establish a presidential dictatorship.

In response to these developments, Sanders was silent. When he did finally address the situation, he called for police officers to receive a pay raise.

Now, as a direct result of the bipartisan policies of the government, the pandemic is spiraling out of control. This week, over 375,000 coronavirus cases were reported in the United States, more than the number of cases reported in February, March and the first week of April combined.

Workers are waiting in lines for over five hours in states like Florida and Arizona just to receive tests. Many states are nearing ICU bed capacity. And over 1.3 million people filed for unemployment for the first time last week, the 15th week in a row that new unemployment claims have been above 1 million and more than six times the number who newly filed this week last year.

On top of this, there is mounting pressure for schools to pursue a reckless reopening in the fall and massive resistance brewing among key sections of the industrial working class.

It is under these conditions that Sanders has chosen to release his so-called unity proposals.

Sanders' actions express his political function--to keep social opposition within the framework of the Democratic Party. As the WSWS wrote in February 2016: Sanders aims not to create a revolution, as he asserts in his campaign speeches, but to prevent one.

There are many groups in and around the Democratic Party, most notably the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), that have spent the last five years promoting illusions in the Sanders campaign. Since the ending of his campaign, the DSA has held dozens of call-in meetings to urge workers and young people not to leave the Democratic Party. Eventually, it explains, such a break will be needed, but not now. In the bankruptcy of the Sanders campaign, the DSA has exposed its own bankruptcy as well.

Workers and young people have to draw the necessary lessons from the Sanders experience. It is not, at its root, a question of proving the bankruptcy of Sanders as an individual, but more fundamentally the bankruptcy of the political perspective he represents--that of reformism. Every advanced capitalist country has its own variety of Sanders. In Great Britain there is Corbynism, in Greece there is the experience of Syriza, and in Spain, Podemos.

The attitude of the SEP toward the Sanders campaign, and its cousins around the world, is based on a scientific, historically grounded Marxist analysis, which proceeds not from what political tendencies or individuals say about themselves, but from their history and program and the class interests they represent.

The only way forward for the working class is on the basis of a genuinely revolutionary policynot a political revolution to promote the Democratic Party, but a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism.

The Socialist Equality Party is running its own presidential campaign to elect Joseph Kishore and Norissa Santa Cruz for president and vice president of the United States. We are running our campaign in order to bring our program and international perspective to the widest possible audience of working people and young people, both in the United States and worldwide. We call on all workers and young people to join this campaign and support this fight.

Genevieve Leigh

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Sanders-Biden task forces and the debacle of Sanders' political revolution - World Socialist Web Site

BRITAIN has a staggering 100,000 modern day slaves, a damning report has found.

The shocking figure is ten times bigger than the official number accepted by the government.

1

William Hague, the former Tory leader, said 200 years after the formal abolition of slavery, the terrible crime continues hidden in sweat shops and brothels across the country.

The findings come after shocking reports that sweat shops churning out clothes for brands like Boohoo were behind the Leicester coronavirus spike.

The report, by the Centre for Social Justice and the charity Justice and Care warned the slavery scandal will only get worse in the wake of the pandemic.

Lord Hague said: Most people find it hard to believe that, nearly 200 years after Britain formally abolished slavery, the terrible crime of holding another human being enslaved is still widespread here.

That is because modern slavery is hidden from view, even though it is all around us.

The report found that modern slaves were used by gangs as sweat shop workers, for sex trafficking, and to carry out benefits fraud.

Victims were often controlled with alcohol and drugs and may be forced to beg in the streets.

bojo's planBoris targets '9 months to near-normal' with 'lightning lockdowns' on cards

VIRUS STRIKEPM to unveil 'lightning lockdowns' with 500k tests a day & 3bn for NHS

HACK IN THE USSRPutin behind bid by Russian 'Cozy Bears' hackers to steal UK virus vaccine

LOCK OFFLeicester mayor accuses Government of 'sledgehammer approach' as pubs stay shut

MP QUITSLabour frontbencher steps down after 'torrent of online hate' amid JK Rowling row

FURLOUGH BLOWThird of firms preparing to lay off staff before furlough ends

Justice and Care boss Christian Guy, said the figures and stories in the report are simply the tip of the iceberg: By nature, human trafficking is a hidden crime but it is happening in our towns and cities.

What we have heard are known stories - there will be many more that are yet to cross the path of police, local authorities or charities.

Whilst the UK has made progress fighting modern slavery, not least in the passing of the Modern Slavery Act five years ago, so much more work is needed to combat the issue in the UK.

GOT a story? RING The Sun on 0207 782 4104 or WHATSAPP on 07423720250 or EMAILexclusive@the-sun.co.uk

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Britain has 100,000 modern slaves working in sweat shops and brothels, damning report finds - The Sun

Before thousands of people took to the streets demanding the abolition of police, abolish ICE was the rallying cry of activists protesting the Trump administrations immigration policies.

Democrats on the debate stage were asked about the movement to abolish the agency, also known as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Two candidates made dismantling the agency part of their platform, and those who did not still embraced calls for more aggressive reform. The movement pushed ideas about abolition further into the mainstream, changing the conversation around criminal justice reform.

Activists for police abolition see the two movements as intertwined, and say it isnt a coincidence that both have risen to prominence in recent years.

The activist communities that are involved in engaging people with the idea that we should defund the police or abolish the police or abolish ICE have a lot of cross-fertilization, said Csar Cuauhtmoc Garca Hernndez, a law professor at the University of Denver. These are activists who often are people of color in communities where law enforcement agents of various types have a deleterious effect on them and the people around them. For lots of people who have been doing this work for many years, they view the police and ICE as working hand in hand.

Movements to abolish ICE and the police have amassed significant support. By August 2018, about a quarter of Democrats supported calls to dismantle the agency, and more than half had come to view the agency negatively. Similarly, polls conducted in the wake of recent protests have shown an almost 15 percent increase in support for cuts to law enforcement funding.

It would be wrong to say that the movements messaging has had no impact, Garca Hernndez said. The notion of abolishing ICE has become one worthy of consideration by a much broader segment of society, he said. There has been an enormous shift.

Many of the organizations and movements calling for the abolition of ICE are the same ones that have been working to abolish the police; they see both moves as part of their objective to dismantle repressive law enforcement.

By these activists definition, ICE, which has more than 20,000 agents nationwide, operates as a police force that targets and criminalizes non-white communities.

I dont differentiate between abolishing the police and abolishing ICE, said Monica Mohapatra, one of the authors of #8toAbolition, a platform for police abolition. She listed ICE, along with sheriffs, highway patrol, campus police, school safety guards, corrections officers, and military officers, as among the forms of law enforcement that her group views as toxic.

The calls to abolish the police are informed by the work of migrant rights organizers who have opposed detention and family separations and sought to frame calls to secure the border as a product of American imperialism, Mohapatra added.

Police have long worked in cooperation with ICE to arrest immigrants, leading to their detention and possible deportation. During recent Black Lives Matter protests in Phoenix and New York City, ICE agents worked alongside police to take protesters into custody, even though thats prohibited under the agencys guidelines.

ICE can send a written request to a local jail or other law enforcement entity asking officers to continue to detain immigrants for an additional 48 hours beyond when they would otherwise be released so that the agency can take them into custody and begin deportation proceedings. ICE doesnt need court approval to issue these requests it can do so even if an immigrant isnt facing any pending charges, and without probable cause that they have committed any violation.

ICE has access to a number of federal databases that help it identify immigrants to deport, including those of the Department of Motor Vehicles and the National Crime Information Center. But police can also informally share information with ICE to notify them of someone in their custody whom they suspect may have committed an immigration violation.

For many unauthorized immigrants, coming into contact with police for an offense as minor as a traffic violation could result in their deportation. Advocates have therefore understood the importance of police reform at the local level.

This cooperation between the two agencies is why some states and cities have adopted sanctuary policies barring local law enforcement from complying with detention requests or sharing information. The Supreme Court recently left in place a California law that prevented most state and local law enforcement officials from providing detainees release dates or home addresses to ICE unless its already public information. That law also barred immigrants who have not been convicted of a crime from being transferred to immigration custody absent a court order, with some exceptions.

But those sanctuary policies cant entirely shield immigrants from ICEs reaches, and other states have taken the opposite tack, encouraging cooperation between police and ICE, such as with Arizonas SB 1070. That controversial law was largely struck down by the Supreme Court in 2012, but one provision that still stands requires immigration status checks during law enforcement stops, arrests, and detention.

Immigrant rights activists have been very clear about engaging local elected officials for many years on policing reforms, Garca Hernndez said. [Being stopped] in the street because of a traffic violation or because of some suspicion of criminal activity becomes the key moment that then sets the tone for whether or not this individual ends up in ICEs hands and potentially getting deported.

The movements to abolish the police and to abolish ICE often work in tandem. Some activists work on both causes, and others see their work as ideologically sympathetic.

ICE and the police are built on the same foundation of racism and white supremacy, said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, one of the first organizations to call for abolishing immigration detention.

For police, it was to patrol and catch enslaved people and protect white property and corporations. For ICE as an agency, it was an isolationist and Islamophobic response to the September 11th attacks, she said. The call to abolish ICE is a call to shift away from a system that targets, abuses, and exiles immigrants to one that values migration and human life.

Abolitionist ideas can be traced back to at least the 1960s and 70s, when activists focused on mass incarceration. At the time, abolishing prisons felt almost inevitable, as Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd wrote in the Guardian in 2018. Even a commission created by the Nixon administration, which later went on to espouse a tough on crime stance, proposed the closure of all juvenile prisons and acknowledged overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.

But the ensuing decades brought crackdowns on both crime and immigration. The US experienced a crime wave that peaked in the early 1990s, with violent crimes jumping almost fourfold during that period. The federal government reacted by increasing prison sentences, making it harder to challenge wrongful convictions, enabling police searches and seizures, and enacting strict criminal codes.

As crime dropped in the 90s, the federal government turned its attention to immigration. In 1996, the Clinton administration backed what is now recognized as one of the most punitive immigration laws on the books, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The law, which was touted as centrist at the time, is largely responsible for the federal governments massive detention and deportation engine as it exists today. It laid the groundwork for ICEs creation in 2003 as a response to 9/11.

Immigrant advocates have opposed ICE since its inception, arguing that it has criminalized and unjustly targeted communities of color. But the agency didnt attract widespread scrutiny until Donald Trump came into office and started using the agency to enforce his hardline immigration policies, especially the separation of immigrant families that began in 2018.

The view of the agency as something that was purely malignant really happened after Trump was elected and ramped up interior enforcement in a way that was tied pretty explicitly to the creation of a white ethnostate, said Sean McElwee, the co-founder of nonprofit think tank Data for Progress who is credited with coining the #AbolishICE hashtag.

The abolish ICE movement drew from that of abolishing prisons in developing strategies to defund, shame, and create popular dissent around deportation, Mohapatra said. Leading progressives, most notably Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, popularized the idea of abolishing the agency, bucking the prevailing view of mainstream Democrats at the time who called for keeping the agency intact while reforming it.

Over half of voters in 2018 said they didnt support dismantling ICE, and center-left commentators warned that endorsing the movement would cost Democrats congressional seats in the midterms. But that never came to pass. Instead, the idea became a rallying cry for protesters and eventually worked its way into presidential candidates platforms. Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed breaking up ICE and redistributing its functions to other agencies.

More moderate candidates, meanwhile, positioned themselves against outright abolition while still embracing more aggressive reforms than Democrats had in the past. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said he would keep the agency intact but introduce reforms to improve accountability for ICE officials and limit its ability to target unauthorized immigrants who have not committed any crimes. California Sen. Kamala Harris, who is reportedly on the shortlist to be Bidens running mate, was careful to distinguish between her proposal to complete[ly] overhaul ICE and the calls to abolish it entirely.

Centrist Democrats efforts to distance themselves from the abolish ICE movement, however, have had their advantages: The movement was able to evolve outside the realm of electoral politics and without the baggage of the Democratic brand, McElwee said.

The fact that politicians wont even come close to touching it has given a lot of freedom, he said. If Biden embraced it, it would become much more polarized and partisan, whereas as it is now, its sort of a vision for a different society. That allows you to change peoples hearts and minds.

Advocates of abolition say their goal isnt just to shift the Overton window, the range of ideas that the public is willing to consider. They urge people to take them at their word when they say they want to dismantle the police and ICE.

When Detention Watch Network started advocating for abolishing detention in 2012, the idea was not the norm for the criminal justice reform movement, Shah said. But over time, the advocacy community began to embrace the idea of abolition rather than reforming a system that they believe harms and punishes immigrants, especially since it was an idea that originated in the communities most impacted by oppressive law enforcement.

To actualize our vision, to move us forward, we have to talk about the world we want to see, Shah said. Today we have people talking about the issues in ways that seemed far-fetched just a few weeks ago. There is a lot of self-education happening, a lot of conversations, and a lot of action. I dont think we can discount the role of powerful slogans in that respect.

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How abolish ICE protests brought abolish the police into the mainstream - Vox.com

Six abolitionists joined Injustice Watch on June 29 for a virtual salon conversation about abolition hosted by audience engagement manager Charles Preston (top-center).

Organizers and activists calling to abolish the prison-industrial complex and other carceral systems is not a new phenomenon. However, in recent months, abolition, an ideological framework long considered as a radical solution to systemic oppression and violence, is gaining momentum and attracting mainstream attention as protests against racism and police violence continue.

With more attention comes more skepticism, misrepresentation, and misinterpretation about what abolition truly means today. The general public, journalists, elected officials, and even activists fighting for police accountability can be subject to or perpetuate the problem.

To educate ourselves, and our readers, Injustice Watch hosted a conversation with six abolitionists entitled Abolition: They said what they said. The title comes from a recent commentary we published by community organizer and public policy consultant Amara Enyia. Our guests were: Timmy Chau, Monica Cosby, Hoda Katebi, Jasson Perez, Lisa Sangoi, and Ric Wilson.

We wanted to give you the opportunity to hear about abolition directly from abolitionists. Below is a snapshot of our hour-long conversation with our guests that has been edited for length and clarity.

Jasson Perez

Jasson Perez organizes with Afro-Socialists & Socialists of Color Caucus and is a senior research analyst at the Action Center on Race and the Economy focusing on the areas of police violence, mass incarceration, and economic inequality.

Jasson Perez

At its most basic level [abolition] is having a world without carceral institutions, like prisons and jails and police. But then that means a lot of things, especially when it comes to solutions around what we call public safety and in response to the things that we call violent crime and then crime in general. I look at abolition, not just as the elimination of police and prisons, but also the elimination of the conditions that cause what we understand to be violent harm in our society. Usually, people [just] think of the most extreme examples of violence: murder, rape, and then usually some forms of like strong-arm robbery, things like that.

We would have to change how our economy is organized, how our political system is organized, and then a lot of things like how our even social and cultural industry is organized, in order to have an abolitionist world. But a first step to that is fighting against police power and prison power.

Monica Cosby

Monica Cosby

Monica Cosby is an organizer for Mothers United Against Violence and Incarceration. She describes herself as: Im a grandma dreaming & building a world in which my grandbabies, all of us, can live freely.

We have to leave room for people to learn. I think thats really important. I think a lot of times that, depending on the space Im in, Ill talk about abolition without actually saying the word. So, when you tell people [that] everybody deserves housingits not even a matter of deserving. Its a right of the people. You tell people you believe everyone should have housing, you believe health care should be for all people, all of these things. People are always like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, say abolition, theyre like, Oh, no, but what do we do about the bad people?

When I was growing up, if I did something, if I even looked like I was going to do something, there was some grown person somewhere that was going to go tell my mom or my dad. It was that way of taking care of each other in community, and dealing with harm when it happens, in ways that are not dependent on the stateIts happening now in all kinds of places, and it always has, so lets just go beyond that.

Its also teaching out violence. Its getting rid of the violence of the state, but its also not codifying, or coddling violence, especially interpersonal violence, and domestic violence.

Lisa Sangoi

Lisa Sangoi

Lisa Sangoi is co-founder and co-director at Movement for Family Power.

This is something I have been having a deep craving to do more reading about: It seems to me that abolition is not a destination, but just a constant sort of work-in-progress. I dont imagine theres any perfect future that we, or future generations, will occupy.

Maybe thats just pessimistic of me, but I think of it less as a destination and more as a calling in terms of how we do the work, and how we are in relation with each other, and how we build.

Timmy Chau

Timmy Chu

Timmy Chu is an abolitionist, co-director of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project, and co-founder of Dissenters.

For me, the basic ideais trying to move through the world and envision a world without policing and prison and carceral apparatuses.

Its not just about the institutions of policing and prison, but also the logic and ideological frameworks that justify prisons and policing and what they representthe impulse to control, dominate, disappear communities, and harm communities.

Those are all also logics that play out, not just in policing and prisons themselves, but also in other institutions.

Hoda Katebi

Hoda Katebi

Hoda Katebi is an Iranian-American writer & creative, founding member of Blue Tin Production, host of #BecauseWeveRead, and organizer with Believers Bail Out and the No War Campaign.

I think that abolition, at its core, is the understanding that human life has value intrinsically, and human lives arent disposable, and were holistic capable beings

But its also how we interact with each other, how we hold each other accountable, how the state violence is replicated in our relationships on an intimate level in dealing with each other, from children to parents to even friends, and how were holding each other accountable and creating the world that we want to see both in terms of institutions and in terms of just our neighborhoods. Something that, for me, has been particularly striking, these past few weeks especially, is how we, in order to really be ready for systemic abolition, need to at least know who our neighbors are.

If we want to be able to hold each other accountable in a way thats holistic and caring and from love, we need to be able to have that love and have that trust and view each other as humans. But like, Im guilty of not even knowing who lives across from me.

Ric Wilson

Ric Wilson

Ric Wilson is a recording and performing Artist, Abolitionist, and Lover.

I was 16, and I became a Chicago Freedom Fellow. I have a big huge love for history, so Mia Henry and Mariame Kaba gave me a bunch of books to read.

It didnt really hit until I was stuck up and robbed by somebody that lived around where my cousin lived, and I went through a whole system of identifying them. It was these two cousins, they were 14 and 15, and I went through the whole court [process] thinking that Id get my stuff back that I got stolen from me.

And after I pointed them out, they went into juvie, and I didnt get anything back. I didnt feel good after that.

From there, I [thought] theres got to be some different-ass way to deal with this shit that happens to me. Then I also realized that the police, theyre not fucking for us. Thats what kind of got me into just thinking this shit is fucked up, and this shit is not for us. Thats my little story.

Monica Cosby

Well, some of it is from me being in prison for 20 years, but even before thenI have always been in Chicago and I have seen, since I was a kid, what the police do. I know that theyre not for us. I can remember the police coming and dragging my dad to jail.

Its people that I follow on Twitter that I learn from. Theres folks that, if they put something up, Yall should check out this article. Listen to this podcast, thats what I do. Theres like Kelly Hayes, Mariame [Kaba], of course, Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Im learning a different language for a lot of stuff that I already felt, with what Ive already been believing and feeling, and work that Ive been doing. There are new things that Im learning and new approaches.

Lisa Sangoi

We definitely hear about abolition, or even defunding, in terms of prisons [and] police. The carceral, really, deeply, deeply racist and fucked up nature of our society runs deep, way, way, way, way, way beyond prisons and police. I would say the foster system, child welfare agents. This is just one small example of many, many, many carceral institutions.

I think a big part of abolition is its transforming our very conception of violence and harm.

Jasson Perez

In terms of how abolition is looked at in the media, defund police is doing for abolition what Medicare for All did for socialism. Medicare for All, in and of itself, isnt a socialist project or isnt necessarily socialist in any meaningful way. But its something that socialists organize around and then connect it to the larger, broader ideas of what socialism is, at its core democratizing the economy, not just government support for things, but democratizing all things that deal with the economy.

So I feel like defund the police is that. When it comes to the medias understandings of it, that is our job. Thats our work as organizers, as change-makers, as influencers, whatever, however, you want to call it, as musicians, to make that clear to people. I think a part of how we get there is giving people tangible decarceral options of how to get there. I think defund the police is part of it.

Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly said that all six participants in our salon event were based in the Chicago area. Lisa Sangoi is based in Washington, D.C.

Go here to read the rest:

Abolition: 'They said what they said' - injusticewatch.org

Creative industries in London and across the country should celebrate Mondays Home Office announcement of the new Graduate Route visa.

The timing could hardly be better. These are crucial days in the university admissions cycle: anxious international students holding offers at London's engines of creativity - whether coding at Imperial, fashion textiles at UAL or graphic design at the RCA - are making final decisions on whether to come this academic year.

The confirmation of a massive boost to our post-study work offer should encourage many waverers to enrol this September.

International students completing a degree here from summer 2021 onwards will be able to stay on for two years (three years for PhDs) and work at any skill level. They will also be eligible to switch into work routes and stay on longer if they find a suitable job. And there will be no limit on the number of international students who can come to the UK each year.

The impact this will have in countries like India, where the duration of post-study work is a critical factor, could be sensational. It will help defend the UKs competitive position, which has suffered gravely from Theresa Mays abolition of the post-study work visa in 2012 (following the mistaken inclusion of students in the now abandoned 100,000 net migration target).

The UKs market share has fallen from 12% in 2012 to below 8 per cent, with countries such as Canada gaining at our expense.

Coming days after Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden announced a 1.6bn rescue package for Britains arts and heritage sectors, this is encouraging evidence of joined-up policy in support of the creative industries. And rightly so.

Up until the Coronavirus struck, they were growing at five times the rate of the economy and generating around 15 per cent of national gross value-added. Enabling historic palaces, museums, galleries, live music and independent cinema to access emergency grants and loans while their doors are closed is a no-brainer.

For policy to be fully joined up, however, the Department for Education must take care over how it operates recently re-imposed domestic student number controls. This risks turning into a crude process to allocate places - and therefore funding - on the basis of flawed measures of graduate earnings. This would unfairly penalise creative arts courses already in the cross-hairs of higher education sceptics in Parliament fired up by Gavin Williamsons denunciation of the Blair-era target for 50 per cent of young people to go to university. If we have learnt anything lately, it is to value socially useful but lower-earning professions.

It would be incoherent to open the door to international talent to work across our economy, while restricting opportunities for domestic students to prepare themselves for careers in the arts. An economic nonsense too: the creative industries were generating 13 million for the economy every hour before Covid-19 enough to repay the subsidy to arts courses in the student loan book many times over.

Our creative industries will only recover if we supply them with the skills and talent vital for their success.

Jo Johnson, former Universities Minister, is Chairman of Tes Global

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Jo Johnson: Dont betray the next generation of creatives - Evening Standard

Paul Ciccarelli walked out of the Whalley Avenue jail and into freedom to find himself greeted by three dozen protesters rallying for the release of more inmates during the Covid-19 pandemic.

We love you, stay strong! the protesters sang. We love you, stay strong!

That was the scene Monday afternoon on Hudson Street outside of the western entrance to the New Haven Correctional Center at 245 Whalley Ave.

Roughly 40 people from New Haven, Bridgeport, New London, and Hamden marched from County Street to Goffe Street and over to Hudson as part of a Free Them All demonstration organized by the Connecticut Bail Fund and New London Building It Together along with formerly incarcerated people and their families.

As they marched on foot, another dozen people drove in a car caravan around the state jail, honking and cheering to let those on the inside know that the protesters were outside and rallying on their behalf.

Ciccarelli, a 51-year-old North Haven resident, didnt know that the protest would be taking place at the same time that he happened to be released from the state jail after more than two years on the inside.

Holding a brown paper bag filled with his belongings and wearing a light blue surgical mask wrapped around his mouth and nose, Ciccarelli was in shock.

Its overwhelming, he said. To be greeted the way I was just greeted. It feels really good.

Instead, they were there as part of the CT Bail Funds months-long campaign to pressure the state to reduce Connecticuts prison population and enact a host of reforms designed to protect inmates during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mondays protest organizers called for the state to release at least half of the the state Department of Corrections (DOC) current incarcerated population because of the near impossibility of practicing social distancing, improve hygiene at existing facilities, enforce mask wearing among correctional staff, and establish new independent review bodies for everything from sentence modifications to sexual assault complaint investigations. (A complete list of their demands appears later in this article.)

Richardson said that the Bail Funds demands werent pulled from thin air. Rather, they are based on comments and concerns that Bail Fund prison hotline volunteers have heard directly from inmates over the past four months as theyve called to check in on conditions in prisons and jails throughout the state.

Four of those hotline volunteers put together a scathing written assessment of conditions at the New Haven jail in particular based on their conversations with inmates. A DOC spokesperson denied several of the allegations included in the report, and heralded the extraordinary job that DOC has done so far at protecting inmates while also reducing the states prison population by more than 2,500 people in the last few months. See more below.

When asked about conditions on the inside, he chuckled to himself.

Id rather eat off this street than some of the stuff inside there, he said.

Food complaints aside, Ciccarelli said that the prison staff did a mixed job in protecting inmates like himself from Covid.

He said that he received a care package with shampoo, soap, deodorant, and toothpaste every two weeks. (He said he believed that package came from a donation from Yale, though he wasnt sure.)

Prison staff would hand out one new, washable cloth face covering to each inmate every two weeks. Earlier in the pandemic, he said, staff handed masks out just once a month.

Ciccarelli said he knew 12 fellow inmates among the 51 detained in his cell block who contracted Covid-19. He said they were all sent to a quarantine unit, some at the states supermax Northern Correctional Institution and some at the Whalley jail itself. Theyre not really using Northern anymore because its inhumane, he said.

Conditions need to be better, he said. The air conditioning needs to be on more. And they need to give us hand sanitizer.

He said that the medical care overall was sufficient at the jail. The majority of the nurses down there are spot on, he said. But, like anywhere, you always have a few that arent.

And he said that, after a little debacle of failure to keep Covid-symptomatic inmates separated from the rest of the population towards the beginning of the pandemic, the prison staff ultimately did a good job at moving Covid-positive people into a quarantine unit and only reintegrating them into the general population when they were no longer sick.

Things are supposed to be starting to change, he said about the prison taking more safety measures and releasing more inmates in response to the states settlement of a recent class action lawsuit with the ACLU regarding how best to protect older inmates and those with preexisting conditions who are most vulnerable to suffering adverse consequences from Covid.

But he wont get to see those firsthand, Ciccarelli said, because hes now a free man. His initial plan was to go home to North Haven, and then see if he can find someone to give him a ride so he can visit his late fathers burial spot in town.

According to state judicial records, Ciccarelli was arrested and detained in 2018 for possessing child pornography.

She called for the abolition of the existing prison system, the police, and even the public education system as it currently exists. They all systematically oppress Black people, she said, and need to be fundamentally reconfigured.

She said he describes the conditions there as horrible, and that she worries about him every day because he has asthma and is therefore uniquely vulnerable to suffering serious health consequences if he contracts Covid.

She said she feels buoyed by knowing that shes not alone in thinking about, worrying about, and advocating for her son while hes behind bars.

Something like this gives me hope, she said about Mondays protest.

He said he spent 12-and-a-half years locked up in Corrigan and MacDougall state prisons. And he said he still has friends who are behind bars in Connecticut.

Santiago said that, based on his experience and his friends experience, state prisons are not safe places to be during a pandemic. He said he showed up Monday to show his support for those still on the inside, and stand in solidarity with other prison reformers and abolitionists.

Their assessment, based on four months of conversations with people incarcerated in New Haven and throughout the state, is scathing. Click here to read their full report.

The stories we have heard from those inside Connecticuts cages describe an approach that is at best systematic negligence and at worst state-sanctioned murder, they wrote about the DOCs efforts to protect the states incarcerated population so far. In either case, it is a complete abdication of responsibility for the extrajudicial death sentences being meted out to the overwhelmingly Black, Brown, and poor peoples incarcerated in Connecticut.

The state is re-opening while the worst of the pandemic still rages inside its prisons and jails. And though prisons have walls, people do leave: Incarcerated people travel to, from, and through the carceral system, and staff return to their communities. In fact, the virus has only been able to enter these facilities because COs [correctional officers] and other DOC staff introduced it and because police continue to arrest and incarcerate community members, spreading sickness among those trapped inside.

They wrote that the hotline has received numerous reports of horrifying conditions from inmates inside of the Whalley jail.

According to the hotline volunteers, NHCC inmates were routinely denied tests and access to medical care despite showing symptoms of Covid-19 in March. They said that, for months, testing involved only temperature checks and not viral swabs or antibody tests.

COs, they said, were not required to wear masks. And by the time the NHCC started distributing masks made from prison uniforms which were so inadequate that people wrapped T-shirts around their faces instead in early April, six COs, a mail handler, and a nurse had already tested positive.

The hotline volunteers wrote that the NHCC responded to those positive staff tests by implementing a lockdown. They wrote that people were allowed outside their cells for only 40 minutes a day for recreation, phone calls, and showering.

NHCC unconscionably replaced part of the kitchen staff with COs, they wrote, people who travel to and from the facility daily but are still not required to get tested or screened.

The report quotes one inmate who continued working a shift on the kitchen staff as saying, In late March, early April, I went down Im a kitchen worker I went down to get my temperature taken before work, and my temperature was at 100.3 degrees. They cleared me to go to work for the day.

They also wrote that the jail experienced a slew of plumbing problems during lockdown, during which toilets began to spew sewage.

They said that cellmates received access to a single hotel-sized bar of soap per cell every two weeks.

Vents blew dirty air throughout the facility, rotten food was served, and the commissary was largely shut down, they wrote. People with asthmawere denied access to their inhalers, medication was withheld, and medical requests were routinely ignored.

The hotline volunteers wrote that DOC staff ignored or did not respond quickly in providing medical care for those who did display Covid-19 symptoms. On at least two occasions, they wrote, symptomatic prisoners had to wait until they could not walk or were coughing up blood to receive any acknowledgment of their illness from DOC.

They also laid into the DOC for its policy of sending Covid-sick inmates to the states super-maximum security prison, Northern, where they were placed in solitary confinement until their symptoms abated or they died.

They wrote that, as more people became sick, they became more and more terrified to report their illness out of a fear of being sent to Northern.

They said one caller told them, If you get sick and you go to Northern, youre gonna end up dying.

The hotline volunteers wrote that people with positive and negative test results, meanwhile, were placed together on the same block or in the same cell. New people brought into NHCC were immediately placed in the general population without any period of quarantine, they wrote. Healthy people successfully grouped together were crowded into a single block and forced to eat thirty at a time in confined quarters.

They wrote that the DOC conducted a facility-wide Covid-19 test in New Haven on June 2. They said this was a viral swab, and not an antibody test. Whatever data the DOC has collected about infection rates at NHCC are likely deflated and distorted, they wrote, and anyone who was sick in March, April or May will not show up as positive if they received only a viral swab.

While they wash their hands of the violence theyve overseen, the disastrous conditions persist at NHCC, they continued, and all calls weve received in June and July indicate that, despite facility-wide testing, little to nothing is being done to address the lethal situation inside.

The hotline volunteers wrote that, despite the state prison systems overall reduction in population during the pandemic, the population at NHCC rose in May from 603 to 681.

This cruelty cannot be overstated, they wrote, especially when the overwhelming majority of NHCCs population are Black, Brown, and poorpeople who experience conditions like asthma, high blood pressure, and diabetes at greater rates due to environmental racism and the violence of poverty.

The hotline volunteers conclude the report by listing the bail funds demands of the state. Those include: a 50 percent reduction of the states current incarcerated population by the end of 2020; an independent review of sentence modifications; an independent review of allegations of sexual and physical abuse against incarcerated people; a legal resource center in every facility; an end to the denial of parole, transitional supervision, halfway house eligibility, and other forms of release; the restoration of visits, weekly distribution of personal hygiene supplies; and functional disinfectant products; fines for any DOC staff not wearing masks; and medical care for incarcerated people released after contracting Covid-19 while behind state bars.

We know that all of these demands are steps along the road to the abolition of the prison industrial complex and the massive re-direction of resources into Black and Brown communities, they wrote. We need no less if we want truly healthy communities, now and beyond the pandemic.

This record of the violence inside NHCC exists because of the courage of incarcerated people and the people who love them. They are the ones speaking up on the phones and in the streets. They are the ones risking retaliation by CT DOC while enduring the everyday violence of incarceration. The family and friends of incarcerated people fear for the safety of their loved ones inside as much as they fear for the safety of their loved ones outside, struggling with illness, unemployment, and police brutality. The people who call us have dreams and desires to live healthy and free, to return and contribute to their communities. But they fear they will die of COVID-19 before they have the chance.

Below is a response from DOC Director of External Affairs Karen Martucci to Mondays protest and to the CT Bail Funds report on conditions at the Whalley jail.

When faced with challenges associated with COVID-19, the first responders from the Connecticut Department of Correction did an extraordinary job.

A preparedness plan was quickly established which included enhanced cleaning efforts, the separation of new intakes for 14 days, screening protocols for both the incarcerated population and employees, and the establishment of both quarantine and medical isolation units.

In addition to the safeguards put into place at the onset of the pandemic, the agency focused on the safe release of eligible offenders, while prioritizing offenders that were considered high risk if exposed to the virus based on CDC guidelines.

As a result of these efforts, Connecticut witnessed a significant drop in the incarcerated population which ranked the state as a national leader in these efforts. Since March, the agency has reduced the population by more than 2,500 people.

Allegations that offenders were not seen until they were vomiting blood and that the agency placed positive and negative cases in the same cell are not only false, they are insulting to the dedicated correctional professionals that answered the call to duty and reported to work day in and day out of the crisis.

We continue to collaborate with the Department of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to ensure we are taking measures to best protect our selfless employees and the incarcerated population.

Below is a list of the 10 demands put forth by Bail Fund organizers during Mondays protest.

1) Initiate large-scale decarceration, coupled with public divestment from the prison industrial complex and reinvestment in Black communities. Social distancing is impossible in every facility in CT. Because of DOC negligence and abuse, thousands have been infected and many have even died. The state must create a comprehensive plan to immediately release at least 50% of its incarcerated population.

2) Establish a new body and a new process, independent of the Office of the States Attorney, to review Sentence Modifications and other similar motions. This body should be accountable to communities, not law enforcement. Presently, the same individuals who have imposed excessive sentences on our community members are the ones reviewing them.

3) Create a legal resource center in every facility. Due to the fact that the courts are severely backed up with cases, incarcerated people should have legal resources to help them understand their defense options and prepare their legal advocacy. Presently, no such resources exist, and the vast majority of prisoners have, in practice, no legal rights available to them through a court of law.

4) Restore visits. This can be accomplished in a safe way, especially with conducting visits in outside spaces and ensuring the ample availability of PPE.

5) DOC should ensure the provision of medical after-care for anyone who contracted COVID-19 while incarcerated.

6) Immediately stop denying people parole, Transitional Supervision, halfway house eligibility, and other forms of release from incarceration.

7) Provide personal hygiene supplies on a weekly basis to everyone incarcerated. Stop lying to the public about the provision of these supplies inside facilities.

8) Mandate that everyone incarcerated is able to clean their living area whenever they want. Presently, cleaning is not possible, and disinfectant supplies have been severely watered down to the point of uselessness.

9) Mandate that all DOC staff keep their masks on while in the facility. If they are found to be breaking this rule, they should be immediately sent home from their shift and fined.

10) DOC should have an independent body investigate all allegations of sexual and physical abuse against incarcerated people. The State of CT has yet to acknowledge the wide-spread brutality being visited upon its incarcerated residents.

Read more:

"Free Them All" Rally Targets Whalley Jail - New Haven Independent

Conservatism is in trouble in the capital and now desperate Tories are lobbying to reduce the powers of a Mayor whose policies they don't like

There is, of course, precedent for this type of thing. In 1986, affronted by the impertinence of Ken Livingstone, Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher completed the abolition of the Greater London Council, the city-wide body which had grappled for 21 years with the capitals huge housing, transport and pollution problems. For half of its existence Tories had run the GLC, but Livingstones leadership of it since 1981 had driven The Iron Lady mad. Arguments mustered for expunging it included that the capitals 32 boroughs could do the GLCs jobs in a more streamlined way. Critics rightly said the true motivation was political pique. Are some of todays Conservatives dreaming of repeating history?

The eight-strong London Assembly Conservative Group and is not without strengths: the experience of Tony Arbour; the precision of Gareth Bacon; the independence of Andrew Boff. Their colleague Tony Devenish is, for all I know, immensely kind to animals and a more rounded individual than his sometimes peevish public manner suggests, but an article he has written for Conservative Home fails to elevate him to that select blue Assembly pantheon.

It pains him, you understand, to advocate inspectors replacing the Greater London Authority, set up under Tony Blair in 1999 as an (admittedly cautious) revival of London-wide government, but he regrets that it will have to be done. The problem, you see, is, welland here Devenishs case begins to look a little thin. It offers no agenda for enhanced devolved powers, perhaps along the lines so keenly advocated by Boris Johnson when he was London Mayor: control over the spending of property taxes; more funds for affordable housing; full TfL regulation of suburban rail. It provides no vision of how a post-Covid, post-Brexit engine room of the UK economy would function and thrive better under a Tory Mayor. It just moans a lot about Sadiq Khan.

There are respectable critiques of Mayor Khans first term performance and, to be fair to Devenish, he briefly touches on one of these: it is true that some, including Labour borough leaders, find Khan personally distant, politically over-defensive and insufficiently interested in the larger strategic themes that brought the best out in Livingstone when he was restored to the head of London government in 2000. It is also felt in some broadly sympathetic quarters that Mayor Khan has been too quick to pick fights with the government when a more co-operative approach might have produced better results for the city.

But mostly Devenish just wildly over-claims for Johnsons eight years as Mayor and lists a bunch of Khan policies he happens not to like, indulging freely in the electioneering claptrap we seem destined to have to live with from his Assembly colleague, the Tory mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey, from now until the postponed mayoral election day. (It is, to repeat, utter rubbish to blame Khan for the congestion charge going up and operating for longer hours. The government required this as a condition of its financial bailout of TfL and could have vetoed the details had it wished to unless, of course, the letter of 14 May from Grant Shapps setting all this out was, in fact, an unusually subtle work of political satire which got sent to the wrong address by mistake).

Thats the problem with elections: sometimes your side loses. And the problem Tories in London have had throughout this century is that theyve been losing a lot more than they have won. Even at last years general election, when Jeremy Corbyns clueless Labour was being evicted from parliamentary seats all over England, the Tories could not improve on their meagre London haul of 21 out of 73. Johnsons mayoral wins in 2008 and 2012 were unusually good days at the ballot box. Bailey has trailed spectacularly in every mayoral opinion poll theres been. The Tories are in deep electoral disfavour across most of the very capital of the nation they run. Could it really be that some of them think the solution to their City Hall problem is to re-enact Thatchers folly? Or at least to stealthily so reduce mayoral autonomy that much the same thing is achieved?

It is striking that Devenish applauds the Johnsons governments recent clod-hopping intrusions into City Hall affairs, including by the unfortunate Robert Jenrick. Last month, the Telegraph more of a Boris Johnson fanzine than ever of late raised the question of abolition on its comment page. You cant help wondering if some of the several Mayor Johnson lieutenants now ensconced in and around 10 Downing Street are having similar not very bright ideas. After all, like Devenish, some them appear to honestly believe their bosss generally indifferent eight-year City Hall tenure was an unrepeatable triumph and that London really would be much better off were it back under their remote control.

Post-Covid, Brexit Britain needs more devolution not less and not only to London, if it is serious about levelling up. As for Londons Tories, they would serve themselves and their city better by giving some overdue thought to how to get more Londoners to vote for them.

OnLondon.co.uk exists to provide fair, thorough, and resolutely anti-populist news, comment and analysis about the UKs capital city. It now depends more than ever on donations from readers. Give 5 a month or 50 a year and you will receive the On London Extra Thursday email, which rounds up news, views and information from a wide range of sources. Click here to donate via Donorbox or contact davehillonlondon@gmail.com. Thanks.

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Dave Hill: The Tories have little chance of winning City Hall. Are they now plotting its... - onlondon.co.uk

A small but passionate crowd marched through the streets of Spokane on Sunday to call for the abolition of ICE.

About 40 people gathered at the Lilac Bowl in Riverfront Park to hear speakers and march to the ICE office in downtown Spokane. They held a candlelight vigil of remembrance once they arrived. Human Rights Activists Coterie of Spokane member Chris, who declined to give his last name, said "ICE Out Spokane" is part of keeping the movement for change alive in the community.

"We're protesting the injustices. The fact that we have have kids locked up in cages and unsanitary conditions. The fact that kids under ICE custody are going missing and nobody's doing anything about it," Chris said.

He's also one of many people concerned about international students, especially if all of their classes go online because of the pandemic.

"My mother is an immigrant who actually emigrated here and stayed on an expired student visa. Growing up, I watched her go through her struggles and I know it's a tough life," Chris said. "With all these new international students, it just bothers me. It hurts me that politicians talk about keeping the best and the brightest of foreign citizens here in the United States for us, yet for something completely out of their control, they're essentially kicking them back out."

He's calling on local activists to remember who and what they stand for, along with the work that still needs to be done.

"Now as the weeks pass by, small protests get smaller and smaller. We're coming in to try and step up," Chris said. "Try and make Spokane come alive again for justice. For change."

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"ICE Out Spokane" event calls for change in the Spokane community - KHQ Right Now