Donald Trump Is The Only One Who Should Be Going To School This Fall – CounterPunch

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In thinking specifically about the abolition of prisons using the approach of abolition democracy, we would propose the creation of an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the social problems that set people on the track to prison, thereby helping to render the prison obsolete. There is a direct connection with slavery: when slavery was abolished black people were set free, but they lacked access to the material resources that would enable them to fashion new, free lives. Prisons have thrived over the last century precisely because of the absence of those resources and the persistence of some of the deep structures of slavery. They cannot, therefore, be eliminated unless new institutions and resources are made available to those communities that provide, in large part, the human beings that make up the prison population.

Angela Davis

Our infantile President needs to be taught some lessons. Its not just the lessons that the liberal meritocracy wants him to learn. Trumps opposition in the majority of the Democratic Party and the corporate media who backs them up wants Trump to start listening to the expertswho are often in their position of power through many of the same tactics as Trump: ability to bullshit, lack of empathy, being boring enough to have ambition. Our country may be full of idiots but they are mostly at the top.

The larger problem with our society is a lack of education of citizenship a la Ralph Nader. Nader hits another home run in his latest radio hour with educator Barbara Lewis. Speaking of home runs, couldnt the Marlins use Ralph more than ever right now with most of their team sidelined with COVID? Lord knows the blue team could use a person who can catch some bases being stolen in Florida. Which is exactly what Nader does on the second half of his show with Greg Palast.

When cases inevitably pile up in the schools wouldnt Trump be just like the baseball commissioner who said the players need to be better. Trumps only governing strategy is deflection. Without at least some checks and balances of power the virus would be far worse. With the country structured as it is he can blame local officials who are cleaning up his mess because these officials do have some power. However, the dictator-in-Chief will do anything he can to get rid of all checks until we are the hoarded toilet paper in his bleached shithole of a country.

Just as Trumps fascist state has abandoned public health, public democracy and public lands it has abandoned public schools. The disinvestment from poor and minority schools can only be met with a reparations policy that considers all aspects of oppression in an intersectional and dynamic way. But why put the cart before the horse here? If the neoliberal state continues to present itself as incapable of funding public programs why should the public have to take on the health risk of partaking in them?

Mandatory schooling prevents another dynamic of criminalization of people with health conditions who can not afford to let their children take the risk. The dangerous rhetoric of children being immune from COVID obscures how the disease spreads between even mild cases and prevents a false security to children who could suffer permanent damage to their body even if they dont die.

One of the unique risks of children specifically being infected is paradoxically that they often dont show symptoms meaning they are more likely to spread to others at school because we cant tell that they are sick. According to Harvard Health, children exposed to COVID have developed multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) which results in life-threatening organ failure.

Trump is criminally threatening to remove funding for schools that dont reopen. While this blackmail may be the only kind of black or mail Trump supports, lets remember too that he is cutting the budget by tremendous amounts regardless. The fiscal year 2021 proposes cuts to education by 6.1 billion according to the National Education Association. They point to cuts to English Language Learners, Title I (low income students), Title II (disability) and rural. Our taxes are also being funneled to private schools through 5 billion in Freedom Scholarships. Public service loan forgiveness would meet its death like many of the American people and work-study funding would fall by 55%.

Schools in free fall are being abandoned by the federal government. Those who can stay afloat amidst budget crises are the schools funded by property taxesnamely where the rich kids live. The other truth is that safely reopening simply isnt realistic unless the budget radically changes. The estimated cost of safely reopening is 245 billion dollars according to The Council of State Chief School Officers. Compare that to Republican Senator Lamar Alexanders estimation of 50 billion. The aid is also being disproportionately allocated to private schools already as Betsy DeVos changes the formula of distribution to one based on distribution of total number of schools in a district rather than total number of low income students in a school.

The coronavirus is forcing us to consider space in a new way. In what ways is space utilized to reenforce inequality? How have closed spaces such as prisons and immigrant detainment centers left communities vulnerable to the virus? In what ways has the home been a similar trap for women, who now experience an alarming rise in domestic violence thanks to the enclosed space of the home? In what ways would the closed space of the school be a similar entrapment for children without access to health care and already suffering health consequences of a polluted environment? In what ways do the rich create their own spaces to be free of the dangers of being poor and dark skinned, whether that be policing, environment deregulation or austerity defunding through the logic of neoliberalism?

However to avoid cynicism we should also be asking what type of schools we want for our children. If we can determine a safe way for return then we should be looking at it. However, the numbers simply dont add up between what is needed for a safe reopening and what is being proposed to be given. While a district by district approach has some appeal we also should be problematizing this segregation of policy because it is obvious that for the richer schools with more funding there is less safety risk. Accepting a district by district approach does accept this inequality and leaves poor children further behind.

Who even needs school when you have Black Lives Matter? Why continue to send children to American Exceptionalism history classes when they could be attending statue removals? Now thats a bit of hyperbole but the basic point is this: if we cannot even properly educate the public on the dangers of the virus why are we sending people to risk their lives for an alternative story?

The silver lining of this virus is that it has forced us to imagine new possibilities. Rather than working all day for capital people have turned to protest to make demands for justice. On a parallel, the false guarantee of work is exposed under the virus as people have to turn to the government to survive. Hopefully, this will be the propaganda for socialism we need. But then again the American public may already be there. Bernie Sanders mentions winning the ideological battle on socialist programs. The deeper problem is that there is no democracy to give voice to these issues because of the very inequality that makes the policies obvious. While we wait for corporate duopoly racketeers to catch up hundreds of thousands die from austerity politics that have completely lost track of the poor who have the virus or are at risk of it. Even if the virus brings the revolution it will be at a tremendous cost.

For now, we simply dont have the revolution necessary to transform social relations and the idea of living to see another day politically and physically seems like an idea that will have to do. Meanwhile, children will have to deal with a multitude of problems especially from poor and working families reliant on the childcare and food from the school system. But while boycotting school may have many downsides, it also can amount to the same leverage as a strike, which teachers are already organizing. Go back to school and a certain cut will die and Trump and co. will say thats the cost and that for those of us not dead, America is back. Thats always been his political gambit. Some of you are disposable but the country benefits from it. Cowardly.

However if we boycott school now the government is forced to respond to more civil unrest. This is the sort of exposure of the state that will be necessary to transform it. Just as protest across the country has made the authoritarian state show its brutal hand, so too a boycott of the schools will expose the inability of neoliberal relations to deal with a public health crisis.

Trump defines himself by his wealth and fame. A true public education system can teach our children to be so much more than that. But under a corporate neoliberal model the only public we have is public death. Until we revolutionize our society into one that takes care of the least of us and not just the corporate class we will continue to have cyclical but continual crisis and unnecessary death. In the absence of this society the most responsible thing to do is prevent as many deaths as possible.

When the coronavirus first started I was sadly one of those who bought into the false choice presented by the right: work and die or dont work and die. I wanted people to be able to go back to work because I could only imagine a society where work could provide for the poor. However, the left must always fight against the reactionary politics of the right that aim to hold idealism captive. There are other ways for society to provide beyond dependent slavery to capital. It is our job to create these possibilities for alternative structures.

Examples of the false choices meant to smother idealism include: reopen the economy amidst a deadly pandemic so poor people can have enough to eat. Counter with a solution that gives people enough to eat without having to risk their lives. The worst-case scenario is the right reactionary one that only emerges because they neglected common sense and decency in their original question.

Another example: the right says invade and sanction Venezuela because their government has failed. The left could respond by pointing out that the economics are sabotaged by Empire and that by negotiating with terrorists like John Bolton we only increase the downward spiral. Resistance to the hegemony of United States must be supported in Venezuela especially when they represent almost a last stand against neoliberal free-market dominance in the entire region of Latin America.

The same logic goes on in the transition to green energy. The right says well lose jobs. Well how about we stop choosing between livelihoods and the very existence of life on earth being threatened from climate change. Here is where an emphasis on intersectionality is so key so that the right cant make disingenuous left arguments (rights of workers) to stop real left projects (transition to green economy which includes workers rights naturally).

It is that time of year again and I know it is a special election with a special shade of fascism but the same false choice argument is used for opportunistic Democrats. If you want something more than their corporate neoliberal agenda, you support Republicans is the argument. Lets give one up for Barack Obama, not just because he didnt use his eulogy time for a Civil Rights leader to take shots at black radicals as Bill Clinton did but also because he brought up the necessary fight for voting rights that are under severe attack by this authoritarian administration.

We can tell Obama really has the right amount of respect for his doofus successor Joe Biden. That is, zero respect. Obama would never have campaigned for himself to have a Democrat Congress because it would mean he would have to do something for progressives. Good for him for trying to fuck over Biden with a Democrat congress that he will eagerly ignore. Biden will be busy lost in his literal and political basement trying to juggle replacing what Biden called the first racist President with all the politically expedient racist policies that Biden built his career on.

Opening schools would be more of an argument if we had an administration that took the virus seriously. We know that this administration will not respond to the plight of children or workers and as a result, the question of catastrophe for school populations is not if, but when. The same disregard for human life can be found in the way this administration deals with public schools generally. In fact, both corporate parties have been gutting public health and public school resources. Under neoliberalism the public doesnt even exist, only the individual does. President Trump is the embodiment of this mentality as he will kill the entire public as long as it benefits himself. It is said that reading is the best way to create empathy because it gives you access to the world of another person. So Mr. Trump, shut up and read a book. It wont kill you.

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Donald Trump Is The Only One Who Should Be Going To School This Fall - CounterPunch

Winsted native writes book on Black poet Jupiter Hammon – Torrington Register Citizen

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Stanley A. Ransom Jr. has written and published Americas First Black Poet; Jupiter Hammon of Long Island. Ransom grew up in Winsted and is a graduate of The Gilbert School.

Stanley A. Ransom Jr. has written and published Americas First Black Poet; Jupiter Hammon of Long Island. Ransom grew up in Winsted and is a graduate of The Gilbert School.

Photo: Stanley A. Ransom Jr. / Contributed Photo

Stanley A. Ransom Jr. has written and published Americas First Black Poet; Jupiter Hammon of Long Island. Ransom grew up in Winsted and is a graduate of The Gilbert School.

Stanley A. Ransom Jr. has written and published Americas First Black Poet; Jupiter Hammon of Long Island. Ransom grew up in Winsted and is a graduate of The Gilbert School.

Winsted native writes book on Black poet Jupiter Hammon

With the publication of the 88-line broadside poem An Evening Thought in 1760, Jupiter Hammon became the first published African-American contributor to American poetry.

The book, Americas First Black Poet; Jupiter Hammon of Long Island, written by Stanley A. Ransom Jr., is a reflection of the authors fascination with the history of Long Island and its past, including the lives of slaves who were brought to that part of New York in the 1700s.

Ransom, 92, now retired, has made a mission of educating people everywhere of the great contributions of Black poets to society, and annually organizes Black Poetry Day in Plattsburgh, N.Y., where he has lived for many years.

He is past president of the Long Island Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, and is a descendant of Solomon Stoddard, a 17th-century minister quoted by Jupiter Hammon. Ransom first became interested in Hammon through the work of author Oscar Wegelin. In 1970, he proposed that Oct. 17, Jupiter Hammons birthday in 1711, be celebrated as Black Poetry Day, to recognize the contributions of African-American poets to American life and culture and to honor Jupiter Hammon, the first Black man in America to publish his own verse, according to the book.

Ransom was born in Winsted in 1928, and moved to West Hartland in 1935, to be closer to his fathers family. His father, Stanley Ransom Sr., worked as sales manager for the Gilbert Clock Co.; his mother, Charlotte Grace Adele Sheldon, was the soloist at the Winsted Methodist Church. The family resided on Walnut Street, and Ransom attended the Greenwood School.

After graduating from high school, Ransom worked for three years for the Connecticut Parks and Forest Commission, where he planted trees and fought forest fires. He graduated from Yale University in 1951 and from Columbia University Graduate Library Service School in 1953, then worked for the New York Public Library on 42nd Street for five years.

I realized Id gone as far as I could go there, and I took a job at the Huntingon, Long Island, public library out on the north shore, Ransom said. I learned a lot about being a librarian there from the director, and when he left, I became the director.

Ransom fed his interest in local history by exploring Huntington, and heard about Jupiter Hammon. His name popped up, Ransom said. A lot of people had heard of him; he was a neighbor, and lived in the area. Theres a peninsula thats now a state park, but in 1711, that whole area was the manor of a place called Queens Village, where members of the British hierarchy settled.

There, Henry Lloyd was a 24-year-old from Boston who came to what was known as Lloyds Neck, which was owned by his wife, he said. She received it from a man she was formerly engaged to, and he willed the land to her; when he died, she received the whole neck. When she married Henry Lloyd, it became theirs.

The Lloyds had eight slaves that they brought from Boston, who were from Barbados. In the early 1600s, the whole of Barbados was dedicated to developing sugar on plantations. (On Long Island at that time) there were 56,000 slaves on a plantation who were working on sugar, cutting the cane and pressing it.

Jupiter Hammon was among those slaves. The Lloyds settled on what is now known as Shelter Island, N.Y., bringing eight slaves, including Hammon, to their home. They owned all of Shelter Island, Ransom said. I went there when I was library director, and at that time the house was owned by a Mr. Fisk.

Finding out more about Jupiter Hammon wasnt easy.

We dont know what he looked like, or anything about him, Ransom said. I hunted everywhere, and there were no diaries, no newspapers that covered the time that he died, in 1805. I asked if he was buried in the African-American cemetery in Huntington, but he wasnt. Its probable that he was placed in the African-American burial ground, thats full of unmarked graves.

Jupiter Hammon wasnt the first Black poet, and I learned he was the first to publish his own verse, Ransom explained. Apparently the first Black poem was written by a woman named Lucy Terry, in a little town in Massachusetts, about an attack by Native Americans that killed settlers in a place called Bars Field, somewhere near Great Barrington.

Lucy wrote a long poem about it, and the poem wasnt printed until 1866, I think, Ransom said. But Jupiter, and Phyllis Wheatley, were the first Black persons to publish their own poems Jupiter in 1760, and Phyllis about 10 years later. She got a lot of publicity, but Jupiter was somewhat of a mystery. But he was the first Black poet to publish his own verse.

Eventually, Ransom learned about that the Lloyd Harbor Historical Society building, a 1711 saltbox house near Huntington, was the closest to a resting place for Jupiter Hammon.

Its become kind of a shrine for him, he said. Groups of people who are interested in African-American history have put decorations on the house, and awarded plaques to the house. So that seems to be a substitute for a cemetery marker.

A natural intelligence and a deep religious fervor led Hammon to publish his poetry and prose, and his Address to the Negroes of the State of New York, which first appeared in 1787, was later reprinted and distributed by the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, according to Ransoms book. Some of Hammons most productive years were spent in Hartford during the American Revolution, he said. With newly found genealogical information on Jupiter, this present volume with newfound poems has become the most complete and authoritative work on this early American black poet, according to the books publisher, Outskirts Press.

Hammons poetry reveals his joyous intoxication with religion, and in this vein he precedes the composers of those Black spirituals which are today an integral part of American culture, Ransom wrote. This collection of his poems and writings now includes two newly discovered poems found in New York Historical Society Library and in the Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University. Ransom noted that Hammon used several codes and indirect ways to let his fellow slaves know his real feelings about slavery. He used his Biblical knowledge as a cover.

Ransom has observed Black Poetry Day at Plattsburgh since 1970. Id like to see a national observance of Black Poetry Day, having people read the poems of Black poets, he said. Up here in Plattsburgh, theyve had nationally known Black poets come to Plattsburgh University. Im trying to get all the states to do it.

On Oct. 17, its all about Jupiter Hammon and Black Poetry Day, he said. I have a poetry day committee, and we feel that it is important to have some ways to promote racial harmony. This book, I think, is timely. Its a way to accept and appreciate Black poetry as a major expression of the Black experience. Im trying to enable the use of Black poems to celebrate person of color.

Ransom said he doesnt benefit personally from the celebration. But it seems to me that with all the terrible problems weve experienced lately, that this might help, he said. There are so many Black poets who have written such good poems for people to read. They write about life and family, and their experiences. ... Their poems should be read for the benefit of hearing what they have to say.

Since founding the annual event, Ransom has had readers including former Connecticut Poet Laureate Marilyn Nelson, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy Smith; Gwendolyn Brooks; and Derek Wolcott, who in 1992 was the days reader a week after winning a Nobel Prize. These poets have a lot to say, Ransom said. And for schoolchildren and college kids poetry is still a good way of expressing your feelings. Thats my aim to get people to experience and appreciate poetry.

Ransom writes poetry, too, but is more inclined to short story writing, and has become a professional storyteller and a member of the National Storytellers Institute, sharing his skills with libraries, childrens programs and schools. Hes also a singer and musician, and goes by the name Connecticut Peddler.

I also play hammer dulcimer, guitar, mandolin, auto harp and ukulele, he said. With my wife, Christina, we have volunteered every morning at our hospitals skilled nursing facility. We go up and talk to the patients, and sing to them. But with COVID-19, there are no more volunteers allowed at the hospital.

In September, Ransom is performing four songs during a yearly event on the Battle of Plattsburgh, honoring the date in 1814 with the U.S. Navy defeated an army of British soldiers trying to invade the area. Ransom has recorded 10 CDs of historic music. He has also written two musical compositions, the Jupiter Hammons Jig and the Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley, based on Jupiter Hammons second poem, a four-part arrangement for Gospel Choir by Shirley Baird, Canadian musician and educator.

I like to do creative things, he said.

Ransom is an Army veteran of WWII. He and his wife, Christina, have four children, including a step-daughter, and eight grandchildren.

For more information or to contact the author, visit http://www.outskirtspress.com/JupiterHammon. The book is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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Winsted native writes book on Black poet Jupiter Hammon - Torrington Register Citizen

Abolishing Police Is a Step Toward Larger Goals — Overthrowing White Supremacy and Capitalism – Truthout

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Something has come unstuck. The common sense about policing has abruptly changed.

This shift was a long time coming: Prison abolitionists a movement of scholars and activists, notably spearheaded by Black women such as Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have spent decades organizing toward a goal of abolishing the prison system. The Black Lives Matter movement and a new generation of Black-led organizing have kindled a new moment in which a world without police feels truly possible.

After decades of expanding police power bolstered by a hegemonic law and order discourse and a bipartisan tough on crime agenda something snapped when Minneapolis police were filmed callously suffocating George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. Suddenly once-staunch defenders of the police even their own unions are calling for reform, and moderates advocate defunding specific programs or entire departments. The police have come to be seen as a threat to public safety rather than its instrument, and the ideological framing of Black criminality has given way, at least for the moment, to that of institutional racism. More than two-thirds of Americans (69 percent) believe that Floyds death is a sign of broader problems in [the] treatment of black Americans by police, and 81 percent believe police in America need to continue making changes to treat blacks equally to whites. As recently as 2014, it was a minority (43 percent) who saw similar incidents as a sign of broader problems.

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As cities burned and crowds fought with cops, surveys showed that three-quarters of Americans (78 percent) saw the anger driving the uprisings as at least partially justified, and a majority (54 percent) felt similarly about the protesters militant tactics, including the burning of Minneapoliss Third Precinct station house. Twice as many people including a majority of whites report being concerned about police violence as express concern over protester violence. A large majority (74 percent) express support for the protests (47 percent strongly support them).

Riots get results. The cops who killed George Floyd are being prosecuted; many departments are banning chokeholds; and police chiefs, district attorneys and other law enforcement leaders have resigned, one after another, across the country. Police budgets are being slashed, with the funds reallocated to social spending reversing the trajectory of the last half-century. The Minneapolis City Council voted to disband its police force altogether and try something else instead.

Some of the concessions responded to long-standing complaints, and others represent changes that no one had even demanded: Lego is de-emphasizing police-themed toys. Babynames.com featured a stark black banner on its front page listing dozens of victims of racist violence, beginning with Emmett Till, and reminding us that, Each one of these names was somebodys baby. The long-running television program Cops was abruptly cancelled. Corporations started pouring money into civil rights organizations, and celebrities publicly challenged each other to bail out arrested protesters.

Twenty years ago, I began work on a history of policing in the United States, which appeared in 2004 under the title Our Enemies in Blue. (It is now in its third edition.) The main argument of the book is that the core function of the police is not to fight crime, to protect life and property, or even to enforce the law, but instead to preserve existing social inequalities, especially those based on race and class. In making that case, I looked at the origins and development of the institution, the centrality of violence in police work, and the persistent bias in the law and its enforcement. I also forwarded a number of contentious (and at the time, almost heretical) claims: that modern policing originated not in the New England town watch, but in the Southern slave patrols militia groups responsible for enforcing pass laws and preventing uprisings; that cops are not workers and police unions are not labor unions; that community policing is not a program for progress but a counterinsurgency strategy; and that the institution of policing must be abolished rather than reformed. At the time, none of those were accepted positions, even among many strident critics of the police. They remain today minority views, but it has become a substantial minority. These points have entered the mainstream discourse: Historians increasingly acknowledge the significance of slave patrols. Unions are calling into question the legitimacy of police unions, and even breaking ties with them. The military literature has become increasingly explicit in comparing community policing with counterinsurgency. And even mainstream politicians find themselves debating the question, not merely of reforming the police department, but of defunding or disbanding it.

Meanwhile, the agenda of activists has quickly expanded beyond policing: Around the world, crowds pulled down statues of Confederate generals and slave owners. Popular Mechanics ran articles offering practical advice on avoiding police surveillance at protests, and a how-to guide to pulling down racist statues. NASCAR barred displays of the Confederate battle flag, and Mississippi decided to remove the Stars and Bars from its state flag. A street adjacent to the White House has been renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza. Employers adopted Juneteenth as a paid holiday. And Johnson and Johnson announced a new line of darker Band-Aids.

Many of these gestures are purely symbolic. But while some changes may not do much, that is not to say that symbolic gestures are meaningless: the symbolism itself demonstrates something of the emerging consensus.

In addition to being a pivotal moment for organizers, this shift in public consciousness would seem to recommend an expanded agenda for researchers. Most crucially, we should find ways to put our work in the service of social movements, always remembering that it is the movement, and not the scholarship, that propels change.

We should, of course, continue to document the prevalence of police violence, analyze its causes and evaluate proposed reforms. But in the present crisis, provisional answers are already available and widely circulating. What is more urgently needed is further work documenting and evaluating alternatives to policing, identifying best practices and organizational features that correlate with good outcomes.

Furthermore, we must work to situate abolition as part of a revolutionary program, to make clear the limits of defunding (or even disbanding) the police, and to make the argument that abolition cannot end with policing, but must extend to the entire criminal legal apparatus the machinery of prosecutions and punishment, even probation and community-based corrections. We must not be afraid to embrace the radicalism of such proposals. Just as we highlight the structural role the police play in economic exploitation and racial oppression, we must articulate the importance of abolition in the broader revolutionary project of overthrowing white supremacy and capitalism.

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Abolishing Police Is a Step Toward Larger Goals -- Overthrowing White Supremacy and Capitalism - Truthout

Shah Faesal will either rejoin IAS or go to US to study, says new chief of his JKPM party – ThePrint

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Srinagar: The Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Movement announced Monday that its founding president, IAS officer-turned-politician Shah Faesal, has stepped down, and that Feroze Peerzada would be its new president.

The announcement comes a day after ThePrint reported that Faesal had removed President JKPM from his official Twitter handle, raising speculation that the IAS topper who resigned from the service last year would either rejoin it or leave the country for higher studies. Now his Twitter account shows no tweets of his own, with the last like registered on 4 August 2019.

Peerzada confirmed to ThePrint after his appointment that Faesal will either rejoin the IAS or go to the US for further education, though Faesal, who claims to be under house arrest, was not available for a comment when ThePrint contacted him through phone calls. His resignation from the IAS was never accepted.

We have had month-long deliberations with Dr Shah Faesal, trying to convince him to stay in the party and continue politics for the good of people. However, he was firm on his decision to leave politics, said Peerzada, 52, a businessman-turned-politician who was earlier the vice-president of the JKPM.

Dr Shah Faesal was the main reason behind me joining politics. I truly believed that he is the person to usher in great social changes, but unfortunately, what has happened in the last year has left no space for politics. Dr Faesal realised this, but I am sure whatever he does, be it civil services or getting higher education, he will continue to work for the people of Jammu and Kashmir, Peerzada said.

Also read: Shah Faesal sparked an IAS craze in J&Ks Lolab, his arrest has now dampened enthusiasm

In a statement, the JKPM said: State Executive Committee of JKPM in an online meeting today discussed the ongoing political developments in the state. In the said meeting, the request of Dr Shah Faesal to spare him from the organisational responsibilities was discussed.

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Dr Shah Faesal had informed State Executive Members that he is not in a position to continue with political activities and wants to be freed from the responsibilities of the organisation. Keeping in view this request, it was decided to accept his request so that he can better continue with his life and contribute whichever way he chooses, the statement added.

The committee also accepted the resignation of chairman Javed Mustafa Mir and accorded farewell to him. Javed Mustafa Mir a veteran political figure of the J&K has been under house arrest since 5 August 2019.

Faesal had formed the JKPM last year, and then entered into an alliance with the Awami Ittehad Party headed by Sheikh Abdul Rashid, more commonly known as Engineer Rashid.

However, Faesal was detained days after the scrapping of Article 370, when several other politicians were also being held. Just before his detention, Faesal, the 2009 UPSC exam topper, had taken to Twitter to express his displeasure against the Narendra Modi governments decision to revoke J&Ks special status.

Kashmir will need a long, sustained, non-violent political mass movement for restoration of political rights. Abolition of Article 370 has finished the mainstream. Constitutionalists are gone. So you can either be a stooge or a separatist now. No shades of grey, Faesal had tweeted.

Faesal was detained by immigration authorities at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi last year in August and handed over to the Delhi Police, which put him on a flight back to Srinagar. Officials said Faesal was on his way to Istanbul at the time.

He was charged under the stringent Public Safety Act (PSA) in February 2020, before being released in June, when the PSA was revoked.

In his PSA dossier, the J&K administration had alleged that Faesal advanced the separatist ideology and challenged the decision of the central government to scrap the special status of J&K.

According to an official source, Faesal had expressed his wish to leave India for higher studies, but the idea was not acceptable to the Centre, which was more interested in his return to the IAS.

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Shah Faesal will either rejoin IAS or go to US to study, says new chief of his JKPM party - ThePrint

Opinion: 55 years after the Voting Rights Act, there’s still work to do – Billy Penn

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The nations historic Voting Rights Act was signed into law on Aug. 6, 1965, formalizing key provisions to allow Black voters across the country to participate in local and national elections without obstruction, discrimination, violence or intimidation.

Effects of the legislation were immediate and transformative. Black voter registration increased by 14% to 19%, and overall turnout grew by nearly a fifth. Tens of thousands of Black people across the United States have been elected to public office, including six U.S. senators and the countrys first Black president.

Yet structural barriers persist that disproportionately keep Black residents from casting ballots, from voter ID laws to long lines and limited hours at polling places.

Just before his recent death, U.S. Representative John Lewis wrote of the ways in which the current Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality and systemic racism recalls his work as a leader in the U.S. civil rights movement.

Emmet Till was my George Floyd, he wrote, remembering the lynching of the 14-year-old boy who was just one year his junior at the time.

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, Lewis was there, along with two other instrumental leaders of the U.S. civil rights movement, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Many others also loomed large in the room.

People like Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair, the young girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, were there in spirit.

People like Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was brutally murdered by police during a peaceful protest in 1965 as he was protecting his mother. His death inspired the Selma to Montgomery marches, where 25,000 people joined arms to demand revolutionary change, giving rise to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. He was there too.

People like Herbert Lee, who fought against literacy tests, poll taxes and other discriminatory practices that barred Black citizens from voting across the South, and who was targeted, shot, and killed by a Mississippi State Representative in 1961 for his advocacy.

And people like Philadelphias Octavius Catto, who was born free and spent his lifetime fighting tirelessly for the abolition of slavery, for the desegregation of public space, for Black suffrage, and for quality Black education. Catto was shot and killed in 1871 for exercising his right to vote in his native city, where a monument in his honor became Phillys first public statue commemorating a person of African American descent when it was erected in 2017.

Today, on the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, our movement leaders, our fallen martyrs. We celebrate this landmark civil rights victory and commit ourselves to the unfinished work of fully-realized Black citizenship.

Voting is just one important part of citizenship, but as we reckon with the legacies of centuries of violence, oppression and racism, it is critical to protect what Lewis called the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democracy.

While the tasks ahead of us are many, there are concrete steps we can take to protect Black peoples right to vote now and in the future.

At the local level, we must ensure ample polling places are available and safe for Novembers elections, particularly in Black neighborhoods. We must support covering the cost of stamps for mail-in ballots and efforts to make sure everyone is aware voting by mail is easy and secure. We must also work to ensure Pennsylvania U.S. Senators Bob Casey Jr. and Pat Toomey understand how important it is to pass the pending John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

We can also work with neighborhood leaders, community-based organizations and political leadership to empower all citizens of voting age to register and to cast their ballot in the pivotal election on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Lastly, we can continue to honor the legacy of John Lewis and those that came before him by pursuing new state legislation that makes voting accessible, convenient and safe for all citizens.

Automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, restoring voting rights to people who have been incarcerated, streamlining vote by mail, and making Election Day a national holiday would dramatically increase voter participation.

The fight for the Black vote has never been more important. The road to justice has been paved with blood and with heartache. But the lives of those who have been lost in the fight against white supremacy, police violence, and voter suppression are not in vain. They galvanize us into action.

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Opinion: 55 years after the Voting Rights Act, there's still work to do - Billy Penn

Letters: Surely now we ought to bring to an end the school examination and certification process – HeraldScotland

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THIS years SQA debacle clearly demonstrates that the end of schooling examination and certification process in Scotland is divisive and dysfunctional. Without question, it is not fit for purpose. It compounds then consolidates, in formal qualifications, the disadvantage of those already most disadvantaged. There is an urgent need for the most radical root and branch reform. But, since this cannot be done without challenging the interests of those who benefit from the current system, radical change will not be easy.

Reactions to the debacle demonstrate the gulf between those who design and administer the system and those who "experience" it. Parents, students and teachers highlight the failure of the system to recognise the hard work of learners, their application and commitment to task, together with their personal and academic problem-solving abilities all skills and qualities that modern employers tell us they value most. On the other hand, politicians and examination body spokespersons emphasise their statistical processes and historical comparisons.

A quarter of candidates this year have been told: Sorry, but you are not as good as you (and your teachers) think you are. We the "system" know better because we have a model weve used before. These are the same young people and their parents that, if Scotland is to compete successfully in the 21st century world, we need to convince of the value of a lifelong commitment to education and training. How exactly does this contribute to reducing the attainment gap and promoting a "can do" culture?

This debacle was not an accident, the consequence of an aberrant computer glitch or systems/personnel malfunctions. The process of assessment and grading worked this year exactly as intended and designed by the examination body and politicians. Every year candidate results are manipulated, by the same process, to fit the demands of the normal curve of distribution a statistical process increasingly regarded as spurious, as a mechanism for producing valid assessments of anything but the simplest of human capabilities.

For those prepared to look critically at the evidence there is an irrefutable case for the abolition of current models of assessment and certification in Scotland.

Students were demonstrating in Saturday in George Square and Dalkeith to protest about their treatment. They have been failed by the system. They deserve our strongest possible support.

Jim Rand, Blanefield.

WHATEVER the rights and wrongs of the recent SQA marking furore and the consequences that may fall from it, I think that a degree of naivety and/or benign ignorance may be present in the approach and beliefs of some of those seemingly disadvantaged by apparently poorer exam results than expected.

Put simply, and using mathematics as an example of a subject discipline whose "answers" in a test must surely be as objectively "correct" as is possible, it is not the case that a person's test score of, say, 65 per cent on the day will be the mark/grade that ends up as that person's final mark/grade. For a variety of reasons, that "raw" score is then subject to an equal variety of "adjustments" based on all sorts of indicators.

The Bell Curve, for example, the rationale of which argues that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and that, ipso facto, is therefore a better predictor of many outcomes, is a common type of distribution for a variable on which the highest point represents the most probable event in a series of data while all other possible occurrences are systematically distributed around the mean. This has the consequence of forcing groups of people to be categorised as poor, average, good. Also, for smaller groups, having to categorise a set number of individuals in each category to "fit" a Bell curve will do a disservice to those individuals.

Of course, none of the above in any way, diminishes the sense of anger and frustration felt by those most affected. There are many people, too, who hold that such social engineering, for whatever reason, is simply not on. However, the point is that these types of assessments/ re-adjustments, and many more, are taken into account when final grades are being awarded.

Consequently, those who believe, like the head of Clifton Hall school in Edinburgh, that the professional standards of teaching staff are being called into question are aiming at the wrong target. It's not the teacher marking that's in any way imperfect; rather it's the myriad statistical contortions gone through by those who have rarely seen the inside of a classroom or struggled face-to-face with the learning difficulties of many of our youngsters that are the issue.

Finally, as an anecdotal pointer to the invariable cries of marking inconsistencies that arise every year, as a teacher and SQA marker of many years, many's the time when I and other colleagues have smiled wryly at the idea of appealing for some students' grades to be downgraded, such is our surprise when they "over-achieve". But we don't. Nor have I ever come across a student who, having done better than expected, has appealed their grade.

But then, as Mark Twain reportedly said: "I've never let my schooling get in the way of my education."

Gerard McCulloch, Saltcoats.

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Letters: Surely now we ought to bring to an end the school examination and certification process - HeraldScotland

Stimulus, Beirut, National Seashores: Your Thursday Evening Briefing – The New York Times

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Good evening. Heres the latest.

1. Another disappointing monthly job report is looming over lawmakers locked in stimulus talks.

The Labor Department will report Friday on how many jobs the economy created in July as America climbs back from the depths of the pandemic recession. New claims for unemployment benefits have exceeded 1 million a week for 20 straight weeks, though the latest figure was not as dire as in some weeks early in the pandemic. Above, a job center in Helena, Ark.

There is a good chance that senators will not reach a deal on an economic rescue package before they leave Washington on Friday for a one-month recess. President Trump threatened to act unilaterally by issuing a series of executive orders, which may have helped lift the S&P 500 near a record high.

Separately, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio tested positive for the virus as he was screened to greet Mr. Trump in Cleveland. He did not meet with the president.

2. Americas failure to control the virus has set it apart among wealthy nations. We investigated to try to understand why, and two themes emerged.

First, the U.S. faced longstanding challenges in confronting a major pandemic, including the prioritizing of individuals over government restrictions and an unequal health care system. The second is the Trump administrations defiance of expert advice.

Meanwhile, schools continue to open on shaky ground. Photos of a packed school in Dallas, Ga., above, have quickly come to symbolize a chaotic first week back in U.S. classrooms.

And experts are revising their views on the best methods to detect infections, saying quicker but less accurate testing may be the best chance to rein in the sprawling outbreaks.

3. Europe is a facing a viral resurgences.

The scale is nowhere near that in the U.S., but France reported 1,695 new cases on Wednesday, and Germany reported more than 1,000 on Thursday higher numbers than either had seen in months. Other Western European countries, like Spain and Belgium, are also experiencing surges.

Some health experts said Germans were becoming lax about upholding social-distancing and mask-wearing requirements. Above, Berlin this week.

And a French scientific panel warned that a second wave of infections by the fall was highly possible, urging cities to prepare for new lockdowns.

4. International rescue teams arrived in Beirut as Lebanon entered a period of official mourning over the huge explosion that brought the capital to its knees.

Heres what video footage tells us about the blast.

Public anger is growing over evidence that government negligence allowed more than 2,000 tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate seized from a ship to be stored in the port for years. The port, a crucial economic hub, has been destroyed, and with it the nations grain supply, raising concerns about food security in a country of 6.8 million people.

President Emmanuel Macron of France visited the area, but no major Lebanese politicians did so.

In an essay in Times Opinion, Lina Mounzer, a Lebanese writer and translator, connects the disaster to the warlords who have warped Lebanon for decades. Yet I couldnt imagine how spectacular and lethal the incompetence of the Lebanese state could be, she says.

5. New Yorks attorney general, Letitia James, filed a civil suit seeking to dissolve the National Rifle Association over claims of corruption. The battle may take years.

Ms. James charged that years of improper action and misspending that enriched officials and their friends, families and allies had irreparably undermined the N.R.A.s ability to operate as a nonprofit and cost the organization $64 million over three years.

Ms. James, who has regulatory authority over the group because it is chartered in New York, also sued four current or former top N.R.A. leaders, seeking tens of millions of dollars in restitution and the ouster of the groups chief executive, Wayne LaPierre.

The lawsuit will leave the 148-year-old N.R.A. long the nations most influential gun-rights lobby fighting for survival. The group has recently been hobbled by financial woes and infighting.

6. This year is shaping up to be one of the most active hurricane seasons on record.

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said there could be 19 to 25 named storms (those with sustained winds above 38 miles an hour) by the time the season ends on Nov. 30. Seven to 11 could be hurricanes.

Forecasters originally predicted 12 to 19 named storms, but the season has already brought nine the most on record for the first two months of a season including Hurricane Isaias, above, which dealt a powerful blow to the Bahamas and much of the East Coast of the U.S. this week.

7. Aug. 6, 1945.

Setsuko Thurlow was 13 years old and in Hiroshima when the U.S. dropped the first of two atomic bombs on Japan. Ever since, she has been fighting for the abolition of nuclear weapons, sharing a Nobel Peace Prize for the work in 2017.

Our Tokyo bureau chiefs profile of Ms. Thurlow, now 88, comes on the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and serves as a reminder of the urgency of hearing the stories of a dwindling number of survivors.

A new book documents the human impact of the bombings, which ended World War II, with photographs that the U.S. once banned both at home and in Japan.

8. Professional athletes voicing exasperation in the heat of the moment is nothing new. Doing so without the sound buffer of a live crowd is entirely different.

As Major League Baseball stages an untraditional 60-game campaign amid the pandemic, players and coaches are trying to be more mindful of their colorful language. Theyre doing so with varying levels of success.

The league also tightened its safety protocols in an effort to slow virus outbreaks among teams. Players and staff members must restrict their travel and, in the ballpark, wear face coverings when they arent on the field, such as in the dugout and the bullpen.

9. A slice of summer by the (national) seashore.

From California to Cape Cod, federally protected coastlines offer a different kind of outdoor experience: The primary attraction is water and uncrowded stretches of sand. Today, the National Park Service protects 809,000 acres of shorelines abutting thousands of miles of oceans and lakes. Here are eight of the most scenic ones, like Cumberland Island National Seashore in Georgia, above.

Public pools have been more subdued than usual. We visited a popular pool complex in the East Bay area of California that lacked the normal flap of flip-flops and splashy entrances. Still, a small group of kids had enough time during family swim hour to pretend to be mermaids.

10. And finally, a different kind of back to school.

Giuseppe Patern graduated with honors last week from the University of Palermo, with a degree in history and philosophy. Mr. Patern is 96.

That he reached his lifelong goal despite an impoverished childhood, World War II and family demands drew attention across Italy, resonating as millions of schoolchildren faced extraordinary uncertainty amid the pandemic.

Dont get lost because you find obstacles because there will always be obstacles, Mr. Patern said after donning the traditional red-ribboned laurel wreath. You have to be strong.

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Stimulus, Beirut, National Seashores: Your Thursday Evening Briefing - The New York Times

Prisoners Justice Day Is Every Day for Those of Us Who Have Lived Inside – Filter

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Prisoners Justice Day is every day of the year to all of us who have been incarcerated. But we come together annually on August 10 to raise awareness of injustices, to remember those who have lost their lives behind prison walls, and to educate communities about the reality of the justice system.

This year has been a particularly difficult one to advocate for people who have been criminalized, who continue to be criminalized, and who currently remain behind bars. With COVID-19, access to prisoners for the community-based organizations and agencies that fight to protect their rights and hold correctional systems accountable has been stripped away.

This has allowed prisons to further dehumanize, discriminate against, violate and profit off those they house, without fear of being held accountable. According to Global Prison Trends 2020, the worldwide prison population rose from 8 million in 2002 to 11 million in 2018an increase of over 20 percent.

Within this, the prison population of women continues to grow, by an estimated 50 percent during that time period, even though it has been 10 years since the United Nations adopted the Bangkok rules that were meant to protect the rights of women prisoners. Among other jurisdictions, women are the fastest-growing segment of the United States prison population, which is the worlds largest.

How did Prisoners Justice Day begin and evolve? It all started in Canada on August 10, 1974, when Edward Nalon bled to death in the segregation unit of Millhaven Maximum Security Prison in Bath, Ontario.

Many of the alleged leaders in this one-day, peaceful protest would still be in segregation a year later.

In 1975, on the first anniversary of Eddie Nalons suicide, incarcerated people at Millhaven held a day of action. They refused to work, went on a one-day hunger strike and held a memorial service, even though these actions would mean a stint in solitary confinement.

Many of the alleged leaders in this one-day, peaceful protest would still be in segregation a year later, still fighting for the rights of prisoners. Although refusing to eat or work are among the only options for peaceful protest available to prisoners, both are viewed as disciplinary offences by prison administrations.

On May 21, 1976 another prisoner, Robert Landers, died in the segregation unit of Millhaven. Bobby, as he was known, had been a leader in the struggle for prisoners rights.

According to the Prison Justice website: Called to testify at the inquest, the warden of the institution said in effect that the punishment (solitary) had been intended to stop the victim from getting prisoners rights respected.

Landers had tried to summon medical help, but the cells panic buttons werent working, and his and other prisoners shouts were ignored by nurses and guards, recounts the John Howard Society. He died of a heart attack; a heart specialist said at the inquest that he should have been in intensive care, not solitary.

From its Canadian origins, Prisoners Justice Day has increasingly been recognized and marked by incarcerated people and their allies all around the world. But no history of the prisoners rights movement in Canada would be complete without a section on Claire Culhane.

Culhane spent over two decades of her life single-handedly taking on the system. She was many things to many people, but to prisoners all across this country she was the voice that would speak on their behalf, fighting for the rights of people who historically had no voice.

In 1974, she volunteered to teach a Womens Studies class at the Lakeside Regional Correctional Centre for Women in British Columbia. But the event that would draw her into the struggle for prisoners rights began on June 9, 1975.

Three prisoners who were about to be returned to solitary confinement at British Columbia Penitentiary took 15 hostages. The standoff with prison officials lasted 41 hours, and ended with the emergency response team storming the hostage-takers. In the process, the guards shot and killed one of the hostages, Mary Steinhauser, a young correctional officer who had gained the respect of prisoners by implementing educational courses in solitary.

Over the next month, Claire Culhane would join demonstrations in support of prisoners who were staging sit-ins and work strikes over the conditions inside. Her participation with the Prisoners Union Committee would result in the cancellation of her Womens Studies class, but that was not about to keep her out of prisons. A group of Vancouver area activists soon set up the Prisoners Rights Group (PRG), and she was one of its founding members.

I was deeply thankful for the legacy of her activism as I sat in a correctional facility in 2015.

The mandate of the PRG was to help prisoners to help themselvesespecially in matters of involuntary transfers, finding competent lawyers, filing and following up grievances, qualifying for parole hearings, getting access to healthcare, educating the public and finally, advancing the philosophy of prison abolition.

Culhane staged many sit-ins at wardens offices, picketed outside prison gates and on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, hosted a cable TV show called Instead of Prisons, responded to every press article about prison, wrote articles of her own, and spoke extensively on the subject of prisons as a form of social control.

Although Claire Culhane died in 1996, I was deeply thankful for the legacy of her activism as I sat in a correctional facility in 2015.

I was incarcerated in a Federal Womens Prison in Canada. Inspired by activists like Culhane and Landers, I, too, became an advocate for prisoners rights, spending each day fighting the injustices within the walls.

I worked with the Elizabeth Fry Society, the Citizens Advisory Committee, Members of the Canadian Parliament and Senate, social justice advocates, and many other wonderful people from the community to facilitate change.

It didnt come without its cost! I was constantly being targeted by staff and management, urged to stay quiet, and threatened with being reprimanded for speaking out. This, of course, only hardened my resolve to fight. My advocacy would not be silenced.

Ask yourself, today and every day: What am I doing to make a difference?

When I was finally released on day parole earlier this year, I took my fight with me into the community. I currently work for a prison outreach initiative to house people being released back into the community. I am a peer support worker for those who have faced, or are facing, criminalization, marginalization, discrimination and racism, with an emphasis on the 2SLGBTQI2+ community.

To further the principle of nothing about us without us, I sit on numerous policy committees, providing lived experience and advice in getting much-needed resources and support to people both inside and in the community. I am also a law school candidate for fall 2021, and I engage in public speaking, panels, education and social activism.

I may have joined the fight for social justice while incarcerated, but coming out into the community has not dampened my determination. I fight as an individual who has seen the injustices unfold first-hand, and as a collective with all those who stand up for change.

I hope that people reading this, including incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people around the world, will see that it isnt only the people that come from privilege who have the power to enact change; it takes individuals from all walks of life.

So ask yourself, today and every day: What am I doing to make a difference?

Photo via uihere/Public Domain

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Trinidad & Tobago: Emancipation and the challenges of freedom | ICN – Independent Catholic News

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Leela M Ramdeen

Last Saturday, 1st August, we commemorate the 182nd Anniversary of Emancipation in Trinidad and Tobago. Although The Abolition of Slavery Act was passed in August 1833 and came into effect on August 1, 1834, slavery was not really abolished in the British Caribbean until 1838.

After 1834 a "new raft of law-and-order measures" came into effect. "Under the new 'apprenticeships', newly 'freed' people were still expected to remain on the plantations and put in 10-hour days. Absenteeism would result in imprisonment in one of the many new jails (equipped with treadmills) that were being built to contain recalcitrant workers. Additional tiers of 'special officers' and stipendiary magistrates were created to police the changes. 'Apprentices' could still be flogged without redress; females includedThe effects of emancipation in the British West Indies varied from island to island. The apprenticeship scheme would come to an end only in 1838".

As someone who has African blood running through my veins, it is with a deep sense of pride that I continue to educate myself about the struggles of those persons of African origin whose indomitable spirit and relentless quest for freedom have led us eventually to this juncture. Do our educators find time in the curriculum to share information about resistance/uprisings/rebellions by slaves in various parts of the world e.g. Nanny of the Maroons in Jamaica, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines in Haiti, Bussa in Barbados; Nat Turner in the USA? How many of you have told your children the story of people like abolitionist and political activist, Harriet Tubman, who fearlessly risked her life to rescue more than 70 enslaved persons, including family and friends in the USA? Or do we only tell students/children about action to end slavery by people such as William Wilberforce?

Too often the history of people of African origin starts with the transatlantic slave trade, when it should commence with the rich history of Africa from which millions were enslaved and taken to various parts of the world. Let us not forget to highlight the devastating negative effects of colonialism and imperialism, not only on persons of African origin, but on many other ethnic groups. Sadly, it is estimated that about 40.3 million individuals are victims of modern day slavery, with 71% of those being female, and one in four being children.

What does Emancipation mean to people of African origin in TT today? Is our democracy working for everyone today? TT has gained Independence and Republican status; we are paddling our own canoe. We have made progress in many spheres of life, but we still have some way to go to create conditions that will enable everyone to live with a modicum of dignity. Many still dream of equality and equity.

The Vatican II document: Gaudium et Spes, reminds us that: "A just society can become a reality only when it is based on the respect of the transcendent dignity of the human personHence, the social order and its development must invariably work to the benefit of the human person, since the order of things is to be subordinate to the order of persons, and not the other way around."

While it is important to celebrate our rich African heritage, and acknowledge the many accomplishments of people of African origin, let us also reflect on the areas that we need to address. NJAC chairman, Aiyegoro Ome, rightly stated in Newsday on 22 July: "Africans should use Emancipation Day as a family commemoration so that they can become more knowledgeable about their several African achievements. Remember, Africans are now halfway through the UN-declared International Decade of Persons of African Descent (2014-2025).

"We should use Emancipation Day at home to pay attention to our health, covid19 notwithstanding". He mentions issues such as non-communicable diseases, especially diabetes and hypertension, prostate cancer, sickle cell trait and sickle cell disease. "At the social level, African families, in certain marginalised communities where people are stigmatised, must take action against the decline of their living, trapped as they are within dysfunctional families, subjected to inferior schooling and abused by criminal elements...Emancipation Day at home 2020 must become yet another stepping stone toward an African Renaissance..."

As we prepare to go to the polls on 10 August, let us not forget that we will only truly achieve our goals as a nation when we view our diversity as a source of strength. I believe that it is possible to have unity and harmony in diversity.

Leela Ramdeen is Chair of the Catholic Commission for Social Justice in the Archdiocese of Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, (CCSJ) and Director of CREDI

Tags: Leela Ramdeen, Trinidad and Tobago, Emancipation, Toussaint Louverture, Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Slavery, BLM, Black Lives Matter

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Trinidad & Tobago: Emancipation and the challenges of freedom | ICN - Independent Catholic News

Let thousand flowers bloom – MENAFN.COM

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(MENAFN - Caribbean News Global) Denys Springer is an educator and freelance writer trained in social sciences, labour studies and industrial relations, education, conflict, resolution, and mediation. Denys Springer lectures part-time at the Open Campus UWI in Saint Lucia on supervisory management the psychology of management.

By Denys Springer

'It is a defect in language that words suggest permanent realities and people do not see through this deception. But mere words cannot create reality. Thus, people speak of a final goal and believe it is real, but it is a form of words and the goal, and as such is without substance. The one who realizes the emptiness of objects and concepts does not depend on words. Perfect wisdom is beyond definition, and pathless is the way to it.' (Prajnaparamita).

I ponder on these words aware that the prime minister of Saint Lucia seems invariably to use words he does not understand and make unfounded statements commonplace with a flawed mindset.

As an academic, I am at times truly lost why such utterances come from the mind of a country's leader. Is it to lead people astray part of the European experts unable to understand the culture of the country and therefore uses phrases to pacify and appease?

I, therefore, put forward a statement that was made by the prime minister in terms that 'colonialism had a conscience'. I am of the view that any West Indian leader with such an ethos his followers should immediately differentiate themselves from such. Here we are celebrating Emancipation Day when according to those words only the chains have been removed from hands and feet but the majority of minds are still suffering from mental and economic slavery while persons of such echelon perpetrate servile and submissive practice.

Guided by the examples that Saint Lucia has a wonderful destination called Rodney Bay named after the English Lord Sir Walter Rodney. Yet how many have gone into his background in the era of 'Black Lives Matter'?

Sir Rodney was a vicious, pernicious slave owner. A proponent that slavery should not be abolished. Yet, we hear that 'colonialism had a conscience'. Where are the historians, the academics or learned people among us to refute such a statement? This must not be allowed to be washed over lightly as if it was a passing phrase.

Yes, it was not too long ago I heard a historian making it clear that African leaders were against the abolition of the slave trade. Yes, that is true because in their wars they took slaves but what she failed to tell the world is that many so-called slaves rose to be chief of that tribe (she studied African Civilization) but took out what suited her xenophobic mind. Not only that, but until the Portuguese arrived with their guns, tribal wars were fought with bows and arrows. The guns were given to a certain tribe to go into the interior of the west coast of Africa to bring out captured blacks to become slaves for export. Facts are facts if we are prepared to look and to learn from it.

So if 'colonialism had a conscience' here we have a United Workers Party (UWP) government in Saint Lucia who made that statement, and is it not ironic that it is now a country where public opinion does not influence government policy whatsoever.

Saint Lucia has a prime minister who is intent on pursuing his ambitions and interests and does not have to care or worry for five years. Public opinion supposedly part of the democratic system, in effect only counts superficially close to an election as we are witnessing at present. The public has been reduced to becoming a reason for justifying the use of resources and a target of media manipulation instead of a nation reflecting the fundamental values and goals of a democratic system.

This government leads by suppressing public opinion, by instilling fear of external pressures rather than listening to learned public opinion

I have said time and time again that the UWP government is a source of democratic dictatorship. Saint Lucia's democracy has degenerated into a means to obtain power and the dictatorship is expressed in the rush (unnatural high) the government gets from its arbitrary use of power.

The recent 'Fresh Start' incentives are a classic case for blatant illegality and presumptive corruption, however, the Cabinet Secretary who is purportedly an astute professional in the public service and should have advised the Cabinet is himself left wanting, on the wrong side of the Fiscal Incentives Act. Wilful blindness to laws and regulations has become a staple of Saint Lucia's democracy. A lot of work is needed to put things back on track.

Moreover, I say to all Saint Lucians 'if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor'. Here we have a government hell-bent on borrowing and have even made fun of the former prime minister for his fear of borrowing.

How do they have the nerve when the nation's economic outlook is so gloomy? Is borrowing the answer to our plight and suffering and in latter years accumulate debt for generations? Can we not feed ourselves when we have such excellent volcanic land?

By most indication, employment prospects remain unfavourable post-COVID-19 and this government does not have a clue how to tackle the nation's economic woes. The issue of natural resource (talent shortages) in Saint Lucia has become a hot topic for many years however this government is not interested in developing the skill sets of the future. This government should be nurturing a higher quality workforce by removing regulatory barriers to technology and innovation and assist SMEs scale-up production.

There are no quick fixes to decades of mental anguish and false doctrines; but there are many increment steps to solve Saint Lucia's economic woes such as investment in education, innovation, and infrastructure.

I, therefore, refer this government to Carl Jung writings many years ago, that 'study your theory; practice your techniques inside out, and when in the presence of a living soul, respond to the soul'. This current dialogue, in my mind, reflects an effort to address the second challenge.

When a government uses an election to secure control of the legislative and by a weird constitution control a senate that was not elected and uses this majority to implement policies that run counter to public opinion, while the system lacks the tools to counterbalance these actions, then there is something wrong with this democracy. That is why the prime minister 'colonialism has a conscience' becomes his colonial world in a convoluted mind.

And when society abandons logic, reductionism, history, and science; and becomes mired in mysticism that sinks into sentimentality and naivete' and lose the parts of resolution which rely on reason, science, strategy, technique and planning. It is from thinking that we develop that critical political virtue, common sense. It is a faculty we need if we are to be able to live with others and with ourselves in this real pristine land of ours.

I hope and pray that this article will be a lesson to the powers that be coming from the heart and not one that is colonized. Many years ago; I was released from mental slavery and colonial masters; therefore, let a thousand flowers bloom and turned into thousands of those released from mental slavery.

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Let thousand flowers bloom - MENAFN.COM

COVID-19 and the Case for Prison Abolition – Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

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This story was originallypublished in The Chicago Maroon.Click hereto view the original story.

The carceral state isnt color-blind, and neither is COVID-19. Since the pandemic broke out earlier this year, it has taken a disproportionate toll on people of color, reflecting glaring racial disparities in public health in the United States.

Prisons, with their overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, have exacerbated the spread of the virus as COVID-19 hotspots. Because of this, mass incarceration has severely endangered the lives of those in prison, whogiven the inequality in the criminal justice systemare predominantly people of color. Given the extent to which prisons have contributed to the coronavirus pandemic and compounded the existing racial inequalities in the criminal justice system, the pandemic has made one thing clear: Tackling coronavirus will require us to radically rethink our systems of justice.

The racial health disparities associated with COVID-19 are undeniable. African Americans bothcontractthe disease at higher rates than their white counterparts anddiefrom it at over 2.5 times the rate of whites, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. Indeed, despitecomprisingonly 13.4 percent of the US population, Blacksaccountfor 23 percent of COVID-19 victims where race is known. COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Latino communities as well: In Iowa, for instance, Latinos are only 6 percent of the population butaccountfor over a fifth of the states coronavirus cases.

And its not biology that discriminates. The virus has not simply chosen to undertake a vehement rampage against Black andbrowncommunities. Its humansand the systems weve builtthat discriminate. Health disparities reflect that. To naturalize the racial health disparities of COVID-19 as nothing more than an immutable biological reality is to deny the effect of racism on health outcomes.

Nowhere is the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 on people of color more evident than in American prisons, which have become hotbeds for the virus. Given that Blacks areincarceratedat over five times the rate of whites in the United States, COVID-19s toll on incarcerated populations means that African Americans are severely affected. While prisons across the country havebecomecoronavirus hotspots, Chicagos Cook County Jail has been hit particularly hard. By over-incarcerating to such an extent and maintaining overcrowded, unsanitary conditions, the jail has enabled the rapid spread of the virus,makingCook County Jail the nations largest source of COVID-19 as of April. And according to research conducted by Eric Reinhart of the UChicago Pritzker School of Medicine, justcyclingthrough Cook County Jail is associated with 15.9 percent of COVID-19 cases in Chicago and 15.7 percent of cases throughout Illinois.

As the situation in Cook County shows, COVID-19 and mass incarceration are inextricably connected. Both perpetuate racial disparity and have combined during the pandemic to wreak deadly havoc as the virus sweeps through American prisons. Indeed, we are fighting twopandemics, one coronavirus, the other the racism that undermines the integrity of criminal justice systems worldwide. Unless we recognize this connection and begin to interrogate the systems that allow for rampant racism to persist, we wont solve either pandemic.

Importantly, COVID-19 has exposed the fractures in the American prison system, revealing it as a racist institution that compromises public health. It has reminded us that we cannot continue to attempt to build better prisonsdoing so wont address the police misconduct, wrongful conviction, racist attitudes, and plethora of other factors that cause African Americans to be disproportionately incarcerated in the first place, and moreover, wont address the fact that prisons arent working to effectively deter crime. Indeed, recidivism ratesshowthat nearly one-fourth of those released from prison return for a new crime within three years of release, demonstrating the failure of prisons to successfully deter crime. Importantly, prisons also fail to provide access to adequate mental health resources, which is particularly problematic given that incarcerationexacerbatesmental health whereas investing in mental health resources can actuallyreducecrime.

Political activist Angela Davis reminds us why attempting to reform prisons instead of reimagining justice entirely wont work. In her bookAre Prisons Obsolete?she writes, Frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison, limiting our ability to reimagine justice and focus on decarceration. Moreover, prison abolitionist Ruth Gilmoreremindsus that in a world with different attitudes towards punishment, well actually see less crime: In Spain for instance, which takes a less punitive approach towards violence offensesthe average time a person spends in jail for murder in Spain is seven yearsmurder is actuallylesscommon.

COVID-19s disproportionate toll on incarcerated populations throughout the United States has made it clear that in order to combat both coronavirus and racism in this country, we need to reimagine justice and rethink systems of punishment entirely. And Im not just talking about the tearing down of prison walls. As Georgetown law professor and political theorist Allegra McLeodexplains, abolition is less about the physical tearing down of prisons and more about abolishing both the culture of racialized punishment in the United States and the conditions that caused the carceral state to come about. The recent deluge of Instagram activismboth in response to COVID-19 and to the death of George Floydis inspiring. However, being liberal is not enough. We cannot use our progressivism as political armor or as an excuse for complacency. Its time we realized that to fight COVID-19 we need to dismantle the carceral state.

Meera Santhanam is a fourth-year in the College and a Viewpoints editor.

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COVID-19 and the Case for Prison Abolition - Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

Westminster at war: House of Lords diversity row laid bare as abolition calls mount – Express

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In recent weeks, the House of Lords has been a subject of heated debate after Prime Minister Boris Johnson handed out 36 peerages to Conservative Party loyalists, Brexit supporters and even his own brother. The list of peerages, granted by the Queen last week also included Evgeny Lebedev, Russian proprietor of the London Evening Standard newspaper and son of a former KGB agent, former cricketer Ian Botham and Ruth Davidson, former head of the Scottish Conservative Party. Ken Clarke and Philip Hammond who fell out with Mr Johnson over Brexit and subsequently had the Tory whip withdrawn were also given peerages. Seats in the upper chamber were also awarded to Claire Fox who represented the Brexit Party in Brussels as well as Labour rebels who had campaigned to leave the EU Kate Hoey, Frank Field and Gisela Stuart. This has led many to question the role of the Lords but diversity has also been a key criticism levelled at the upper chamber.

In March 2020, 48 or 6.1 percent of Members of the House of Lords were from ethnic minority groups, according to research by Operation Black Vote.

In February this year, it emerged that minority ethnic staff were asked to show their security passes more often than white counterparts.

This was found in a report which also outlined accounts from BAME staff who said they were not allowed to eat or drink in the same rooms or even use the same toilets as the mostly white members of the House of Lords.

The research carried out by workplace equality network ParliREACH listed examples of times when they felt that the lack of diversity and understanding of race had resulted in racist (inadvertent or otherwise) behaviours.

In response, a Lords spokesperson said: The House of Lords administration is determined to ensure that all who work for the house are treated equally and with respect and creating an inclusive working environment.

As part of this work, the board decided to remove access restrictions to catering facilities based on grade of staff, and remove misleading historic signage suggesting some toilets were restricted to members of the house.

All signs have now been removed and replaced. This was part of our wider inclusion and diversity strategy.

A petition calling for the abolition of the Lords gained over 100,000 signatures in 2018.

It took aim at the upper chamber as an undemocratic yet powerful overly influential fixture of British politics.

READ MORE:Jeremy Corbyn admitted NOT including state pension in tax return

The petition said: The House of Lords is a place of patronage where unelected and unaccountable individuals hold a disproportionate amount of influence and power which can be used to frustrate the elected representatives of the people."

The Electoral Reform Society chief executive David Hughes also hit out at the Lords after it was revealed in 2017 that more than 100 peers, who made no spoken contributions for a year, claimed 1.3million in expenses.

The ERS says: The House of Lords totally fails to represent the diverse skills and experience of UK citizens.

It is out of control with over 800 members the second largest legislative chamber in the world after China.

"And it costs far too much for an institution that fails to reflect the British public.

The House of Lords also played a crucial role in the Brexit process, frustrating eurosceptics with its decisions.

DON'T MISSCorbyn humiliated as Labour peers chosen for 'contribution' to Boris[INSIGHT]Petition to SCRAP unelected House of Lords exceeds 340k signatures[ANALYSIS]'300-a-day undemocratic Brexit-blockers' but Boris wants MORE Lords[INSIGHT]

In September last year peers supported a bill which prevented a no deal Brexit.

The Benn Bill mandated Boris Johnson to seek an extension to Brexit until at least January 31 if he could not secure a deal or gain MPs' consent for no deal.

A spokesman for Number 10 said at the time: The PM will not do this. It is clear the only action is to go back to the people and give them the opportunity to decide what they want: Boris to go to Brussels and get a deal, or leave without one on October 31.

When the Lords passed a bill in 2018 which threatened to give Parliament the power to set the terms on Brexit, a Tory Leaver called for it to be abolished.

Daniel Kawczynski said: This is rapidly moving towards a constitutional crisis of unprecedented magnitude.

In my lifetime I cannot think of anything like it.

The House of Lords is an elitist chamber which is trying to block the will of the people.

The time has come for us to start talking about the abolition of the House of Lords and I will start agitating for this.

The 90 Liberal Democrat peers are completely determined this is a highly undemocratic effort to neuter Brexit."

Defending the upper chamber, Lord Fowler pointed out: "[Abolishing the Lords] would do little to improve levels of scrutiny when a government is returned with a big majority.

"In those circumstances, having a second chamber to ensure legislation does not slip through without proper debate and analysis is absolutely essential."

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Westminster at war: House of Lords diversity row laid bare as abolition calls mount - Express

COVID-19, Protests, and a Budget Crunch: How shifting funds can improve the quality of life in Milwaukee – Milwaukee Independent

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When an argument escalated earlier this summer, one person in the house called Milwaukee police, Leonard said, and someone else called 414LIFE a team of community violence interrupters who are trained to intervene. With her adrenaline pumping, Leonard said she was already in fight mode when the officers arrived, and their response only antagonized those involved in the dispute, adding to the stress.

We didnt need someone to come say that we could all be arrested, she said.They talked to everyone individually. They were just making sure that everyone in the space was good.

The violence interrupters quickly dissolved that tension once they arrived, Leonard said, and it helped that some people in the house knew one team member.

It was just a completely different approach to domestic violence that a lot of people arent usually privileged to see, said Leonard, who aims to uplift Milwaukees Black residents in her own organizing work holding healing events and calling for the abolition of police. It just made it clear, this is why we dont need police officers in our communities.

Calls to defund the police have grown louder in Milwaukee and other cities after the May 25 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis fueled nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism.

Floyds death came as Milwaukee grieved the loss of Joel Acevedo, who died days after Michael Mattioli, an off-duty Milwaukee police officer, acknowledged putting him in a 10-minute chokehold during an April fight, according to media reports. Mattioli was charged with first-degree reckless homicide, and the department suspended him with pay.

Some say the goal of defunding the police is to shift funds away from police and towards public health, housing and other programs to alleviate conditions that lead to crime. But many local and national advocates eye a more ambitious goal: to abolish police over time. Abolitionists see reallocation as the first step toward dismantling policing and prison institutions, replacing them with neighborhood-based public safety models.

Milwaukees defunding movement comes as city officials set next years budget, and the police department wants to grow its slice of the pie. Meanwhile, a coronavirus pandemic is wreaking havoc on the economy, promising to slash city revenue and leave less money for a host of government services.

Even if the tragic death of George Floyd and nationwide protests had not occurred, there was very good reason for citizens and policymakers to take a look at the Milwaukee Police Department budget, and that has nothing to do with any kind of opinion or bias with putting municipal budgets into police departments, said Rob Henken, president of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, who noted that Milwaukee faced tremendous economic stress even before the pandemic.

The conditions and debate transcend Milwaukee. During calls to divest from police, the Madison School Board in June voted to terminate its Madison Police Department contract for resource officers at high schools. Critics of the officers presence highlighted disproportionate arrest rates for Black students and said the school should handle discipline outside of the criminal justice system.

We didnt get here overnight

Law enforcement in 2018 accounted for nearly 22% of Milwaukees $1.4 billion in total expenditures the largest category in the budget, according to Wisconsin Department of Revenue data. That hovers above law enforcements 20% share of municipal spending statewide, according to a Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis of state data.

The Milwaukee Police Department consumes an even bigger share of the citys general purpose budget the portion controlled by the mayor and Common Council. MPD accounted for about 47% of that spending in 2020, up from 40% in 2012, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. The police budget in each of the last five years has eclipsed the citys entire property tax levy, one of three main revenue sources. Nearly 95% of the police budget funds salaries, wages and benefits.

MPD is requesting nearly $316 million for next year as Milwaukee wades into the countrys worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That proposed $18.5 million increase from last year is 20 times the Milwaukee Health Departments $15.7 million request.

The health department houses the $2.1 million Office of Violence Prevention, which encompasses the 414LIFE team, a small-scale example of policing alternatives.

The team is trusted in the neighborhoods it engages, said Derrick Rogers, program director for 414LIFE. It is among groups globally that practice an evidence-based Cure Violence model that sees violence as a treatable epidemic. The 414LIFE team aims to stabilize people deemed at high risk of committing violence, helping them secure housing, jobs, therapy and relationship support. The interrupters check in with people involved in disputes even months after they defuse them.

When Rogers responded to the dispute at Leonards grandmothers house, he helped one person pull weeds in a garden while talking through the frustrations that fueled the conflict. They constructed a plan to avoid future conflict and discussed how to file a restraining order. Rogers later called the persons friends and offered connections to mental health providers.

But Milwaukee is spending roughly $504 per resident on policing compared to less than $4 per resident on such direct violence prevention.

We didnt get here overnight, Reggie Moore, director of the Office of Violence Prevention, said this month during an online Wisconsin Police Forum event. These were generations of decisions and policymaking and investment where unfortunately a lot of cities and counties responded to situations of community crisis with greater investment in law enforcement, versus looking at public health and taking more innovative approaches.

Grassroots organizers have spent years helping Milwaukee residents envision such an approach in a city that last year declared racism a public health crisis and saw annual eviction rates of up to 15% of households in some neighborhoods even before the pandemic left thousands jobless and waiting on rent assistance.

How do we address the root causes of the trauma and pain that were seeing as opposed to trying to manage it with punishment and the criminal justice industry? added Moore added.

Calls to shift funding grow

Common Council members last month reported a flood of constituent requests to defund the police. The council on June 16 approved a resolution to study a 10% cut to the MPD budget about $30 million. The Milwaukee School Board two days later unanimously resolved to remove police officers from public school grounds.

Thats not enough for advocates such as Markasa Tucker, director of the African-American Roundtable, a coalition serving Milwaukees Black residents. The coalition and other groups are calling for a $75 million cut to MPDs budget that would shift $50 million to public health and $25 million to housing cooperatives in a campaign called LiberateMKE.

These are our tax dollars. This is our money, and we get to say where we want it to go, Tucker said at a June Facebook event.

The campaign is one step toward a longer-term goal of upending the citys approach to public safety, said Devin Anderson, lead organizer for the LiberateMKE campaign.

We believe a world without police is possible, he said. Defund is the goal, and divestment is the process.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett will begin holding budget hearings in August and plans to present his budget to the Common Council in September.

The funding of our police department is one aspect of the review, but a funding cut, alone, does not address a multitude of other issues we must consider, Barrett said in a June statement. Our upcoming budget process is an opportunity to take a comprehensive look at how city government views public safety.

Crime surges following decline

The conversation unfolds as homicides in Milwaukee are surging to levels not seen since the 1990s following a four-year decline a trend playing out nationwide during the pandemic. Violent crime does not necessarily correlate with a need for police officers, the Wisconsin Policy Forum noted in a 2019 report showing how Milwaukee and some other Wisconsin cities are boosting police spending even as they lose officers.

Defund advocates say many factors outside of law enforcement affect crime rates and create safety, and Milwaukee has never invested to scale in community-based strategies to keep people safe without police.

Monique Liston, chief strategist at Ubuntu Research and Evaluation, a Black women-led consulting firm for education, policy and advocacy, underscored that societies havent always relied on police, and that many of Americas police systems were created to control Black people and protect the interests of the wealthy.

Policing was built around protecting stolen property and protecting stolen people, she said. One of the big disservices weve done in history is to act like police are a natural part of organizations. Its so ingrained in people that police have to be there.

Distrust of Milwaukee police not new

Distrust of police runs deep in some of Milwaukees Black and brown-majority neighborhoods, and some residents are tired of waiting on piecemeal reforms to change policing tactics that have disproportionately harmed people of color.

Reforms like banning chokeholds, adding body cameras and that we need more trainings in many ways those are not enough, said Anderson of LiberateMKE. By investing so much in a system that was never meant to keep us safe, thats leaving no space and no room for the other investments, and its hurting us. In some cases, its literally killing us.

Milwaukee police officers have for years been the subject of reform debates and criminal and civil proceedings, including after the police killings of Dontre Hamilton in 2014, Sylville Smith in 2016 and Acevedo.

Recommendations have followed from the U.S. Department of Justice in 2017 and the city-convened Collaborative Community Committee in 2019. But the city has yet to implement many such proposals. Barrett in June announced yet another reform commission, which some activists viewed as dj vu.

Milwaukees Fire and Police Commission, a civilian oversight board with the power to change policy and investigate complaints, this week issued a set of directives to Morales demanding changes. The commission itself faces allegations that it acts slowly and lacks transparency.

Were constantly being put where were in the position for these tough conversations needing to hold cops accountable, Leonard said. Im not trying to demand reform from them anymore. The whole system needs to be abolished.

Stop-and-frisk persists

In 2018, Milwaukees Common Council approved a $3.4 million settlement of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The group alleged Milwaukees stop-and-frisk program led to unjustified stops, racial profiling and harassment of residents without cause for suspicion.

In a June report monitoring the departments progress on the settlement, the Boston-based Crime and Justice Institute found that officers undercounted frisks and failed to properly justify 81% of documented frisks during the second half of 2019, showing no improvement on those measures from earlier in the year.

The report also showed that officers stopped and searched Black people at disproportionately high rates. Black residents make up roughly 39% of Milwaukees population but faced nearly 60% of police encounters and 80% of frisks.

Theyre not really living up to their end of the bargain, said Molly Collins, associate director of the ACLU of Wisconsin. It can be the police firing tear gas or rubber bullets at protesters, but also it just looks like continued patterns of police interactions with Black and brown folks that continue to break the relationship between the police department and the community.

Said Grant, the MPD spokeswoman: Our members continue to receive training, and MPD continues to make progress in our compliance efforts.

The community knows what keeps them safe

Fueled by frustration with Milwaukees status quo, neighborhood leaders have long brainstormed ways to reinvest funds flowing to police. One tiny example: When Anderson would wrap up LiberateMKEs meetings last year at city public libraries, he noticed the buildings would stay full until closing time, with staff asking people to leave.

What if we took money from the police for that? he said, suggesting staffing the libraries for longer hours.

LiberateMKE encourages residents to envision new uses for their tax dollars. The coalition surveyed more than 1,100 residents in that process. Last years participants recommended rerouting $25 million from MPD to community-based violence prevention programs such as 414LIFE. They also called for bigger investments in employment opportunities for young people and affordable, quality housing.

Many of those recommendations referenced the Office of Violence Preventions 2017 Blueprint for Peace, a set of community-driven goals and recommendations.

That involved hundreds of community members who sought to identify the root causes of Milwaukees violence. Among those flagged: lack of quality, affordable housing, neighborhood disinvestment, limited economic opportunities and persistent trauma. Participants determined what Milwaukee should leverage to make neighborhoods more resilient, including already strong community-building groups, schools, arts and cultural expression and welcoming public spaces.

The blueprint spurred the creation of 414LIFE and other investments in youth programming, mental health and domestic violence prevention.

We understand that when we look at the production of public safety in our city, it really takes beyond policing and the criminal justice industry, and I think thats really what this movement and moment is challenging us to think about, said Moore, the Office of Violence Prevention director. When we look at neighborhoods throughout the city and throughout the country where large police presences arent required, those communities tend to have thriving businesses. They have thriving families who are gainfully employed.

Moore said Wisconsin leaders should help Milwaukee and other cash-strapped cities invest in violence prevention.

State Representative David Bowen and State Senator Lena Taylor, both of Milwaukee, and other Democratic lawmakers in March proposed funneling tax revenue from vaping products into a statewide violence prevention fund. The bill failed to draw a hearing. Other Milwaukee groups have helped lay the groundwork for this moment.

Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, which aims to invest in and empower Milwaukees Black residents, released a 2019 Platform for Prosperity. It incorporates voices from thousands of who responded to the question: What would it look like for your community to thrive?

The group is now surveying residents online and via text about their vision for policing. Rick Banks, the groups political director, said support is growing to defund MPD.

Police brutality and things have been an issue for generations, but right now the energy around it, coupled with the budget cycle, is a huge opportunity for people to explore that idea, he said. It doesnt feel like a far-fetched idea.

The pandemic has added momentum to the push for change, said Liston of Ubuntu Research and Evaluation.

I dont think a lot of people knew how badly these systems were failing people, and it took a pandemic for people to realize how bad things are, she said.

The virus is disproportionately infecting and killing Milwaukees people of color, and it is worsening economic hardship and flooding courts with eviction cases. Even before the pandemic, about half of Milwaukee renters paid more than 30% of their income in rent, according to a 2018 report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. The same report showed 42% of the citys renter households earned less than $25,000 a year, while only 9% of rental units charged rents considered affordable to those households.

The pandemic is also spurring more grassroots efforts to provide food, financial help, child care and other services proving that residents can take care of each other, Anderson said.

Mutual aid, that is community care. That is community safety, he said. Those are people on the ground making sure that peoples needs are met by offering support to their neighbors. The community knows what keeps them safe.

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COVID-19, Protests, and a Budget Crunch: How shifting funds can improve the quality of life in Milwaukee - Milwaukee Independent

Labor Provisions of the USMCA: What Multinational Employers Should Know – Retail & Consumer Products Law Observer

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The new United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaced the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), became effective on July 1, 2020. Historically, free trade agreements like the NAFTA have been criticized for their lack of strong labor provisions to address low wages and inadequate labor standards that advocates argue support worker rights and improve economic growth in developing countries. The USMCA seeks to address those concerns. In fact, as a precondition to the passage of the USMCA, the U.S. Congress reopened the negotiations at the end of 2019 and amended the agreement to bolster Mexican workers rights and to include stronger enforcement provisions like the Rapid Response Mechanism to hold companies in Mexico accountable for violating the rights of free association and collective bargaining.

The Rapid Response Mechanism is perhaps the most novel aspect of the labor provisions of the USMCA. It applies between the U.S. and Mexico, and between Canada and Mexico, but not between the U.S. and Canada. Within the U.S., the Rapid Response Mechanism can be triggered when any person in the U.S. files a petition claiming the denial of rights at a covered facility in a priority sector in Mexico to the Interagency Labor Committee for Monitoring and Enforcement (Interagency Labor Committee), co-chaired by the U.S. Trade Representative and the Secretary of Labor. The Interagency Labor Committee can request that Mexico conduct a review to determine whether there is indeed a denial of rights, or. If Mexico does not agree to conduct a review, the Interagency Labor Committee may request a panel to be convened to conduct its own verification under the USMCA.

Denial of rights is defined as the denial of the right of free association and collective bargaining under Mexican legislation that complies with the USMCA. A covered facility is defined as a facility in a priority sector that (i) products a good, or supplies a service, traded between the parties; or (2) produces a good, or supplies a service, that competes in the territory of a party with a good or service of the other party. Priority sectors are those that manufacture goods, supply services, or involve mining. Manufactured goods include, but are not limited to, aerospace products and components, auto and auto parts, cosmetic products, industrial baked goods, steel and aluminum, glass, pottery, plastics, forgings, and cement.

While the Rapid Response Mechanism is ongoing, the U.S. may suspend liquidation of imports from the covered facility. If a denial of rights has been found at a Mexican covered facility after the Rapid Response Mechanism has concluded, the U.S. may suspend the preferential treatment of goods manufactured at the covered facility, impose penalties on the covered facility, or deny entry of the goods from the covered facility if the covered facility had two prior denial of rights determinations.

Mexicos labor law reform, passed in May 2019 in response to the negotiations under the USMCA, drastically modified labor matters in Mexico, notably through the implementation of a new labor justice system and the creation of the Federal Conciliation & Labor Registry Center (CFCRL), whose main tasks will be to: (i) supervise the proper conduct of collective affairs; and (ii) act as a conciliation authority before any judicial proceeding.

The CFCRL, once it is created and operating, will also be in charge of carrying out the internal investigation process that constitutes the first step of the Rapid Response Mechanism in Mexico. In the meantime, the Mexican Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare and the Federal Conciliation and Arbitration Board will carry out the internal investigation process.

Accordingly, even though the CFCRL does not yet exist, the Rapid Response Mechanism could still be triggered to enforce existing obligations in collective affairs, as the USMCA and its dispute mechanisms or proceedings are not contingent on the creation of government bodies or other domestic issues pursuant to the implementation of the Labor Law Reform by Mexico.

The USMCA contains an entire chapter on labor within its main agreement. The labor chapter, Chapter 23, requires that parties adopt and maintain laws consistent with the rights as stated in the International Labor Organization Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, which includes the freedom of association and recognition of the right to collective bargaining, the elimination of forced labor, the effective abolition of child labor, and the elimination of discrimination with respect to employment and occupation.

Specifically, each party shall prohibit importation of goods produced in whole or in part by forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory child labor. The USMCA states that each party must prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex (including sexual harassment), pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity and caregiving responsibilities, although the U.S. is deemed to have fulfilled its obligations with respect to discrimination by virtue of Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Mexico, however, is required under the USMCA to implement specific labor reforms to ensure the right of workers to engage in collective bargaining and to organize. As mentioned above, many of these reforms have already been enacted with the new Mexican legislation that went into force in May 2019. As for other notable modifications, all existing collective bargaining agreements in Mexico also must be revised at least once during the four years after the legislation went into effect (by 2023), and unions will need to follow new requirements to negotiate collective bargaining agreements within work centers to ensure employees accurate representation.

With respect to automobile production, the USMCA introduces the concept of Labor Value Content (LVC), which, along with a higher Regional Value Content threshold (75%, up from 62.5%), determines whether an automobile import qualifies for tariff-free treatment. The LVC rules require that at least 40% of a passenger car be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour, with at least 25% of those high-wage workers be involved in materials and manufacturing. These new LVC rules will be fully phased in over three years.

One major goal of the USMCA is to effect changes in Mexicos labor rules. While a major reform of Mexicos labor legislation was implemented in May 2019 in anticipation of the USMCA becoming effective, many of the rules ensuring workers freedom of association and collective bargaining are still being discussed in the Mexican legislation process. In addition, the Mexican labor law reform is still in its early implementation stage, meaning that years could pass before the new legislation be effectively and fully enforced. Multinationals that relocated parts of their operations or manufacturing to Mexico to take advantage of NAFTA or otherwise have operations in Mexico are facing a changing landscape in terms of labor relations, and likely increased costs, over the next few years as Mexico updates its laws to comply with the labor provisions of the USMCA.

Multinationals should also keep an eye on the activities of the Interagency Labor Committee, which has been created as part of the U.S. Department of Labor. While the Interagency Labor Committee is tasked to receive petitions from private companies as part of the Rapid Response Mechanism discussed above, the legislation implementing the USMCA in the U.S. also grants the Interagency Labor Committee the power to monitor Mexicos compliance with the USMCAs labor requirements, including by creating a hotline for workers in any of the USMCA countries to report labor violations in Mexico. The enforcement actions triggered by these petitions and reports may lead to factory inspections, the loss of preferential tariff treatment or denial of imports of products.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has announced that, through the first six months of implementation, it will show restraint in its enforcement and will instead focus on supporting companies efforts to comply. Despite this announcement, the above labor provisions described above, became fully enforceable immediately on day one.

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Labor Provisions of the USMCA: What Multinational Employers Should Know - Retail & Consumer Products Law Observer

As The Night Gets Longer – The Jewish Press – JewishPress.com

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Photo Credit: Jewish Press

For most of us, the 15th Av is little more than a day on which davening is shorter because no Tachanun is said. In fact, though, the day has deep significance. The Talmud (Taanis 31a; Bava Basra 121b) states, From now on, whoever adds increases. Rashi explains: From the 15th of Av onward, whoever adds nights to the days by studying Torah adds life to his lifetime.

The Talmud notes that the suns power and intense heat start to noticeably weaken at this time. As the Rashbam explains, the nights get longer and the days get shorter, and therefore one should study Torah at night, too. In fact, the Talmud states, Night was created only for Torah study (Eiruvin 65a).

The Rambam goes even further: Although there is a commandment to study Torah [both] during the day and at night, a person learns most of his wisdom only at night. Therefore, a person who wishes to be privileged with the crown of Torah should be careful with all his nights, not to waste even one with sleep, eating, drinking, conversation, and the like, but only with Torah study and subjects of wisdom (Hilchos Talmud Torah 3:13).

Subjects of wisdom, in this context, say the commentaries, mean the most profound Torah subjects, which Rambam earlier defined as pardes maaseh merkavah and maaseh bereishis, knowledge of Hashem and His creation (Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah 4:13).

Night is ideal for studying Torah because normal daytime disturbances and problems dont disrupt our attention and concentration, making it easier to explore subjects in depth and remember them.

At night, we are more spiritually attuned, we are free of daytimes material influences, and we are more open to humility and holiness. Therefore, Torah study at this time has the ability to bring us spiritually closer to Hashem in a more conscious and profound way. For the above reasons, night is also ideal for a cheshbon hanefesh (spiritual stocktaking) in Krias Shema or saying Tikkun Chatzos.

So when Rashi writes of adding life to [ones] lifetime, he doesnt just mean better health and longer life; he also means an improved quality of life not just in the next world, but even in this one. As our Sages say, You will see your world [to come] in your lifetime [in this world] (Berachos 17a).

Chassidus, based on the Kabbalah of the Arizal, highlights the full moon thats visible on the 15th of Av. The moon symbolizes the Jewish people, who are compared to the moon (as we say in Kiddush Levana) and who therefore count their years based on the lunar calendar. Gentile nations, on the other hand, base their calendar on the sun, the heat of which represents, in Kabbalah, the overwhelming power of the forces of evil.

The 15th of Av is even greater than the 15th say of other Jewish months since it immediately follows the low point of Tisha BAv. The ascent from that low point to the 15th has the advantage of light shining into darkness, which makes it more effective and most appreciated.

The high point achieved on 15th Av when the heat of the sun, representing the powers of evil, begins to diminish is therefore a time to intensify the forces of holiness by studying more Torah at night and delving deeper into our studies, making both quantitative and qualitative improvements.

Other reasons the Talmud gives for celebrating 15th Av are connected to Jewish unity and love of ones fellow Jew. So its an appropriate time to improve in these areas too, replacing the reason for this exile baseless hatred with unconditional love thereby bringing the ultimate geulah of Moshiach, may he come now!

(Based on teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe)

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The Life and Legacy of Torah Scholar and Prolific Author Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz – Jewish Journal

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Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, Torah scholar, longtime educator, prolific author and one of the greatest commentators on Judaism of his generation, died Aug. 7 in Jerusalem. He was 83.

The Jerusalem Post reported the cause of death was acute pneumonia. He had been hospitalized since Aug. 4 due to a lung infection.

Steinsaltz, perhaps best known for his groundbreaking commentary of the Babylonian Talmud, which is credited with making the ancient Jewish texts more accessible, was buried on the Mount of Olives. Hundreds of family members, colleagues and students stood in the heat and Chasidic nigunim (melodies) following the burial.

My husband, Yaakov, and I had the privilege of working for him, and my husband also studied under him.

Once in a generation is there a project so expansive, so extraordinary, that it revolutionizes Jewish scholarship for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of people, and for future generations. Steinsaltz is perhaps best known for his seminal Babylonian Talmud, and as the lyrics of the Haggadah song Dayenu say, That would have been enough for us.

He also produced commentaries on the Tanakh, the Mishnah, the Mishneh Torah and Tanya. All of these now are available to scholars and lay people and, in the future, they will become accessible digitally.

Two years ago, a dinner was held in Jerusalem in honor of Steinsaltzs 80th birthday. The eclectic collection of guests, like those who attended his funeral (streamed live on Facebook), varied in age and appeared diverse in religious style. This reflected Steinsaltzs greatest achievement: To be a giant whose intellect could reach the stars yet communicate and interpret the treasures of the Torah to those below, who are as numerous as the sands of the Earth.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Congregations of the Commonwealth of Britain, was a keynote speaker at Steinsaltzs dinner. He said, He was trained as a scientist but has the soul of a poet. He was brought up by very secular parents. Adin told me that his parents insisted that he learn Gemara because they wanted him to be an apikoros (heretic), not an amaretz (ignoramus) . With his creative genius, he has taken the most complex texts and turned them into the simplest messages. Sacks quoted the verse in Isaiah, Vekol baneich limudi HaShem And all your children shall learn of God, and noted how there have been attempts to create egalitarianism in wealth and in power and they have failed, but that Steinsaltz has dedicated his life to creating something egalitarian by opening the doors of study to everyone.

According to Rabbi Meni Even-Israel, Steisaltzs son and executive director of the Steinsaltz Center, which continues his work, Steinsaltz became Torah observant when he was 16. He studied chemistry and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem but he spent most of his time on Jewish studies and spent many hours with Rabbi Shmaryahu Sasonkin and the late Rabbi Shlomo Zavin. He also studied for a brief time at the Chabad Yeshiva in Lod, Israel, and published essays, gave lectures and conducted educational activities for teens.

In 1965, Steinsaltz married his wife, Sara. He opened a small hesder yeshiva where students divide their time between study and military service and founded the Israel Institute of Talmudic Publications in Jerusalem in cooperation with the Prime Ministers Office and the Ministry of Education and Culture. With that, he began his lifes work: Translating the Talmud from its original Aramaic into modern Hebrew, and adding a commentary that a layperson could understand. He was only 28. This isnt as surprising as one might think because at 24, he had been appointed the youngest school principal in Israel, at a school in the Negev.

Although the small yeshiva couldnt sustain itself beyond the first year, it was a microcosm of things to come. My husband who was one of the six students, recalled, The highlight was the seudat shlishit (the third Sabbath meal) that we had at the home of the Rav every week. The singing, his inspirational stories, the atmosphere this was what made the yeshiva special. teinsaltz went gone on to found a plethora of educational institutions, and that special atmosphere permeates them all.

The work of a lifetimeSteinsaltz expected to complete his Talmud project within 13 years. It took 45. The first volume was published less than a year after opening the center. It was followed by 40 additional volumes and the project was completed in December 2010. The English version is titled The Essential Talmud.In 1991, he changed his last name to Even-Israel under the guidance of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, with whom he became very close, but retained his given name. In 1988, Steinsaltz was awarded the Israel Prize, considered the nations highest cultural honor, along with many other prestigious prizes.

The Steinsaltz Hebrew Talmud received endorsements from several great rabbis including Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Admor of Erlau.

While working on the Talmud project over those 45 years, Steinsaltz also published more than 60 books, numerous essays, recorded video classes and taught and lectured throughout the world. He established a network of educational institutions for the Jewish community in the former Soviet Union, including the first yeshiva formally acknowledged by the authorities (in 1989, before the fall of the Soviet Union), a Jewish university and a training school for preschool and elementary school teachers.

Steinsaltz also established other schools that are inspired by his worldview, including an army yeshiva (Yeshivat Hesder) in Tekoa, Israel, and the Makor Chaim elementary, middle and high schools in and near Jerusalem. Sadly, the Makor Chaim high school yeshiva in Kfar Etzion became well known when two of the three teenage boys who attended that yeshiva were kidnapped and killed by terrorists in 2014. (One of them, Naftali Fraenkel, was my student.)

But the yeshiva has morphed its tragedy into days of unity, in which the yeshiva sends students to secular schools in Israel to interact and create dialogue. During the seven years I taught at Makor Chaim, I discovered it was a high school yeshiva with out-of-the-box thinking and an atmosphere of curiosity, creativity and joy.

By 1976, Steinsaltz also had created the Shefa Institute, comprising an elite group of students who would study, write pedagogical materials and teach educational programs for adults creating a new dialogue with Jewish texts. My husband was one of the researchers, and Steinsaltz hired me to help produce Shefas adult educational activities.

I vividly remember meeting with him in his private office in the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. It is written in Talmud Succa 21:2, Even the prosaic conversations [sihat hulin] of wise men are equal to the entire Torah. And indeed, even Steinsaltzs comments on prosaic matters were filled with rich philosophical insights and colorful anecdotes. It was a privilege just to sit quietly and listen while he expounded on educational issues and Israeli society, by way of introduction to the next project. The benefit of this close contact gave us a rare opportunity to know Steinsaltz when he was much younger, and even then, a visionary and dreamer.

Yehudit Shabta, an editor and translator, worked for Steinsaltz from 1989. She tells the following story to illustrate his worldview: When our daughter was a year old, we brought her to the Rav for a bracha (blessing). He said to the child, I bless you that your parents will not get in the way of your growth.

Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov, filmmaker and daughter of Sylva Zalmanson, one of the 12 Soviet Jews who tried to escape the USSR in 1970 by hijacking a plane and was imprisoned for years, wrote in a public Facebook post on Aug. 7 about her experience with Steinsaltz. She was 16 and rebellious. Everyone had advised her mother to be tough on her. Zalmanson took her daughter to Steinsaltz and he had one piece of advice: Only love.

We have many books by Steinsaltz in our home that have informed our teaching on Talmud, Chassidut, Tanakh, Jewish mysticism and more. One of my favorites is a little book that I consult when authoring a new biblical musical Biblical Images: Men & Women of the Book, which always enchants with refreshing and deep insights on biblical figures central to our national shared consciousness.

Am Yisrael has lost a Torah giant. His wisdom and his smile, which lit up the world, now will continue to glow through his students and the works he left behind.

Toby Klein Greenwald is an award-winning playwright and director of biblical musicals for Raise Your Spirits Theatre.

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The Life and Legacy of Torah Scholar and Prolific Author Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz - Jewish Journal

The Survivors’ Talmud: When the US Army Printed the Talmud – The Jewish Voice

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By: Dr. Yvette Alt Miller

As World War II drew to a close in 1945, survivors of the Nazi death camps tried to rebuild their shattered lives in Displaced Person (DP) camps, many of which were housed in the very concentration camps in which Nazis had recently tortured and murdered Jews and others.

On September 29, over three months after the end of the war in Europe, US President Harry S. Truman wrote a scathing letter to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was in charge of American troops in occupied Germany, describing the horrific conditions that Jews were still living in. Pres. Truman quoted from a report on the conditions in the DP camps that hed commissioned: As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.

Truman argued that we have a particular responsibility toward these victims of persecution and tyranny who are in our zone. We must make clear to the German people that we thoroughly abhor the Nazi policies of hatred and persecution. We have no better opportunity to demonstrate this than by the manner in which we ourselves actually treat the survivors remaining in Germany.

With American support, Jewish life slowly began to return to the camps. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee moved into many DP camps and helped distribute food and medical supplies. They also helped set up Jewish schools in the camps, aided at times by the American army and also by some remarkable rabbis whod survived the Holocaust and were determined now to rebuild Jewish life.

One huge problem prevented the resumption of Jewish education and religious services: while the Nazis murdered as many Jews as possible and tried to wipe out Jewish existence, they also destroyed countless Jewish books, Torah scrolls and other ritual objects. Allied officials were able to find some Jewish prayer books in Nazi warehouses, but the ragged Jewish survivors in DP camps still lacked many basic Jewish books and supplies.

One leader who stepped in to help was Rabbi Avrohom Kalmanowitz. Born in Russia, Rabbi Kalmanowitz was head of the renowned Mir Yeshiva, one of the greatest yeshivas in the world. In 1939, with war looming, Rabbi Kalmanowitz decided to relocate his famous school from Lithuania to Kobe, in Japan. He set out to bring 575 members of the school, but soon found himself leading nearly 3,000 Jews who were desperate to escape Nazi Europe. He led this group, which included many sick and elderly Jews, across Russia and Siberia and onto Japan. For much of the journey, stronger members of the group would carry those who couldnt walk on their backs.

After Japan attacked the United States, Rabbi Kalmanowitz moved his yeshiva once more, to Shanghai. There he improvised printing presses using stones and managed to publish 38,000 Jewish books. While Hitler was burning books and bodies, Rabbi Kalmanowitz later recalled, the men of Mirrer (the Mir Yeshiva) who had traveled 16,000 miles from Lithuania to Shanghai were using stones for printing presses to keep the light of learning alive. After the end of the war, Rabbi Kalmanowitz returned to Europe, and once more championed the printing of Jewish books and preservation of Jewish life.

Rabbi Kalmanowitz was a leading figure in the Agudat Harabbanim and the Vaad Hatzalah. He cultivated contacts with American military officials and oversaw the printing of Jewish prayer books, Passover Haggadahs, copies of the Megillah of Esther for Purim, and even some volumes of the Talmud. Rabbi Kalmanowitz is a patient and appreciative old patriarch, Gen. John Hilldring, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Areas, wrote to a colleague. I can think of no assistance I gave anyone in Washingtonthat gave me more satisfaction than the very little help I gave the old rabbi. Rabbi Kalmanowitz requested resources to print even more Jewish books but was told that with the acute shortage of paper in Germany, more ambitious plans to print Jewish books was impossible.

Seeing Rabbi Kalmanowitzs success in printing some Jewish books and even some volumes of the Talmud, another Jewish leader in Europe at the time began to dream of an even more ambitious project. The chief rabbi of the US Zone in Europe was Rabbi Samuel Abba Snieg. He was a commanding figure. Before he was captured by the Nazis he was a chaplain in the Lithuanian army. He was sent to the Jewish Ghetto in Slabodka, a town near Kovno in Lithuania which was renowned as a center of Jewish intellectual life. From there, Rabbi Snieg was sent to the notorious Dachau concentration camp. He survived, and after being liberated dedicated his life to rebuilding Jewish life. He was assisted by Rabbi Samuel Jakob Rose, a young man whod studied at the famous Slabodka Yeshiva before the Holocaust. They resolved to approach the US military for help in printing copies of the Talmud the first volumes of the Talmud to be printed in Europe since the Holocaust.

A set of Talmud called Shas is made up of 63 tractates, comprising 2711 double-sided pages. For millennia, its many volumes have been studied day and night by Jews around the world. Printing a complete set of the Talmud would send a powerful message that Jewish life was possible once again.

Whom to ask for help? General Joseph McNarney was the commander of American forces in Europe. The rabbis wondered if there might be a way to reach him with their request, and decided to approach his advisor for Jewish affairs, an American Reform rabbi from New York named Philip S. Bernstein.

Rabbi Bernstein came from a very different background from the black-hatted Orthodox rabbis laboring in the DP camps. On the surface, perhaps, the men looked very different. But Rabbi Bernsteins mother had come from Lithuania and he had a deep attachment to Jewish life and was open to requests for help in rebuilding Jewish education in the DP camps. Rabbi Snieg and Rabbi Rose explained their proposal to print whole sets of the Talmud on German soil, and Rabbi Bernstein became an enthusiastic supporter of the plan.

They arranged a meeting with Gen. McNarney in Frankfurt where they asked if the US army would lend the tools for the perpetuation of religion, for the students who crave these texts Gen McNarney realized that printing sets of the Talmud would be a powerful symbol of the triumph of Jewish life supported by American forces in the lands where it had so nearly been wiped out. On September 11, 1946, he signed an agreement with the American Joint Distribution Committee and Rabbinical Council of the US Zone in Germany to print fifty copies of the Talmud, packaged into 16 volume sets. It would be the first time in history that an army agreed to print copies of this core Jewish text. The project became known as the Survivors Talmud.

The team immediately ran into obstacles. First, it was impossible to find a set of Shas (the entire Talmud) anywhere in the US Zone of former Nazi lands. Every Jew in Poland was ordered, upon pain of death, to carry to the Nazi bonfires and personally consign to the flames his copy of the Talmud, one testimony recorded. In the end, a member of the American Joint Distribution Committee brought two complete sets of the Talmud from New York.

Even though the US Army had agreed to print the volumes, some officials objected to the expense. The timeframe and scope of the project kept changing. Then there was the sheer labor involved in printing what eventually became nineteen-volume sets of the Talmud: each copy needed 1,800 zinc plates which had to be painstakingly set and proofread. The project began in 1947 and was finally completed in late 1950. we are Gott sie Dank (Thank God) packing the Talmud an American Joint Distribution Committee employee wrote in November, when they began distributing the Talmud. The Joint paid for additional sets of the Talmud to be printed; in the end, about 3,000 volumes were made. These were then shipped all over the world wherever Holocaust survivors from the the DP camps were settling. The Survivors Talmud made its way to New York, Antwerp, Paris, Algeria, Italy, Hungary, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa, Greece, Yugoslavia, Norway, Sweden, and Israel.

From the outside, these sets of the Survivors Talmud looked like any other set of Shas. Their special origin is only visible on the title page, which shows a picture of the Land of Israel as well as a concentration camp surrounded by a barbed wire fence, with the words From bondage to freedom, from darkness to a great light. Below is this touching dedication:

This edition of the Talmud is dedicated to the United States Army. The Army played a major role in the rescue of the Jewish people from total annihilation, and their defeat of Hitler bore the major burden of sustaining the DPs of the Jewish faith. This special edition of the Talmud, published in the very land where, but a short time ago, everything Jewish and of Jewish inspiration was anathema, will remain a symbol of the indestructibility of the Torah. The Jewish DPs will never forget the generous impulses and the unprecedented humanitarianism of the American Forces, to whom they owe so much.

Some individual owners of this remarkable set of Talmud wrote their own dedications as well. One rabbi of a small town in Israel near Jerusalem recalled how he lost his wife and children when they were murdered in the Holocaust. Living in Israel, he spent his days studying from his Survivors Talmud. On the first page he hand-wrote his own dedication as well, which surely was the hope of many other survivors who studied this remarkable Survivors Talmud as well:

May it be Thy will that I be privileged to dwell quietly in the land; to study the holy Torah amid contentment of mind, peace, and security for the rest of my days; that I may learn, teach, heed, do and fulfill in love all the words of Thy Love. May I yet be remembered for salvation for the sake of my parents who sanctified Thy name when living and when led to their martyrs eath. May their blood be avenged! May I merit to witness soon the final redemption of Israel. Amen.

This was the prayer of so many of the Jews who helped print and then studied the Survivors Talmud. This remarkable undertaking was a way of declaring that no matter how terrible circumstances became, Jews would always find a way to return to the Jewish texts that have always sustained us.

(www.Aish.com)

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Mind Over Milkshakes – The Jewish Press – JewishPress.com

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In a fascinating study conducted at Yale University, participants were each given a 380-calorie milkshake. Half the participants were told it was a sensible, 140-calorie shake, and half were told it was an indulgent, 620-calorie shake. In reality, everyone received the same 380-calorie milkshake.

In a true testament to the subjectivity of satiation, the people in the indulgent milkshake group rated themselves fuller than those in the sensible milkshake group.

But the researchers didnt just rely on peoples self-reporting on how full they felt. They also measured the levels of ghrelin, a gut hormone whose presence is associated with feeling hungry. They found lower levels of ghrelin in the people who thought they were drinking the indulgent shake even though in reality they ingested the same number of calories as the people who thought they drank the sensible shake!

In other words, our mindset can actually impact the biology of how full we are, which in turn affects the subjective sensation of how full we feel.

InParshat Ekev, Moshe informsBnei Yisraelthat when they enter the Land of Israel, they will eat, be satisfied, and bless G-d. These words are the source of the commandment to sayBirkat HaMazon Grace After Meals. The trigger for this obligation is feeling satisfied. Yet, the rabbis of the Talmud set a precise amount of food that obligates one sayBirkat HaMazonif eaten (either an olive-sized or egg-sized amount of bread).

The Talmud presents an enigmaticaggadicdialogue between G-d and the angels in which the angels ask G-d how He can show favor to the Jewish people (as is implied in the Priestly Blessing) when fairness and justice usually preclude showing favoritism. G-d replies by noting that even though the Torah only requires Birkat HaMazonto be said after being satiated,Bnei Yisraelsay it even after only eating an olive- or egg-sized piece of bread.

This cryptic passage, and the rabbinic criteria for saying Birkat Hamazon, requires explanation. If the message lies in the importance of going above and beyond bare requirements, why chooseBirkat HaMazonas the example? Additionally, if one is only obligated to say Birkat HaMazonwhen full, isnt saying it when not full problematic? Wouldnt it be a blessing made in vain (beracha levatala)?

Perhaps the significance of reciting Birkat HaMazonon an olive- or egg-sized piece of bread is as follows: Its not that Jews recite blessings even though they arent full. Rather, its that they worked on their attitude, and as a consequence their biology changed as it relates to being full. They trained themselves to become satiated with a smaller amount.

Mishlei states, A righteous person eats to satisfy his soul. The ideal is to eat enough to have energy to serve G-d, not to indulge if there is no physical or spiritual benefit.While we should all consult relevant health professionals for guidance on what and how much to eat, perhaps the Talmuds message is that we can adjust our mindset to decrease the amount of food we require in order to feel satiated.

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Why Is the Ketubah Written in Aramaic? – Questions & Answers – Chabad.org

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The Ketubah is the marriage contract that outlines the obligations of the husband to his wife, as well as the financial compensation due to the wife in the event of the marriages dissolution through divorce or widowhood. Similar to a Get (divorce document), the Ketubah is traditionally written in Aramaic, the common language of the Jews during Talmudic times.

Why was it originally written in Aramaic, not Hebrew? And why is it still written in that language today, when most of us are more proficient in English or another language?

The importance of the Ketubahs precise and exact language cannot be overstated, due to the legal nature of the Ketubah as well as its deeper spiritual significance.

In fact, having a properly written kosher Ketubah is so criticalnot just to the marriage ceremony itself, but to married life in generalthat it is problematic for a couple to live together, even temporarily, without a kosher Ketubah. (In the event that the document is lost or destroyed, or if a serious error is found in its text, the couple must immediately obtain a replacement from a rabbi.)

For centuries, going back to Talmudic times, the sages have pored over the Aramaic Ketubah formula, ensuring that each word is precise, and especially looking out for words that may have multiple meanings.

As with contemporary contracts, the more important the contract, the more experts youd have review the language to tighten it and make sure it is precise. So it is no wonder that the contract for marriage, one of the most important and monumental steps that one takes in life, bonding two half-souls into one union, needs to have extremely precise language. Thus, we use the traditional Aramaic text, which has gone through the rigor of centuries of Talmudic scholars.

Although it is theoretically possible to have a Get or Ketubah in another languageif written precisely, in accordance with all the relevant laws, etc.halachah only permits this in extreme situations.

To be sure, there are many translations of the Ketubah, both in English and Hebrew (including on our site). And since the Ketubah is a legal document, one should certainly read a translation to understand what is written in it (or at the very least, have the rabbi explain the basics of the document). Nevertheless, the actual Ketubah used for the marriage should be the traditional text, ensuring that it is precise and kosher.

Aside from the legal aspect of the Ketubah, there are deeper reasons for the Aramaic as well.

The Ketubah has been written in Aramaic going back to Second Temple times, imbuing the text with holiness and the tradition of our ancestors. Thus, using the traditional Aramaic text of the Ketubah links us and our future family to our ancestors rich and illustrious heritage.

The Ketubah and the Get are actually written in Aramaic with a sprinkling of Hebrew. A document that alternates between two languages is generally invalid. So why is it OK here?

Among other explanations, Rabbi Moses Isserlis explains that Aramaic has a certain holiness to it (going back to Mount Sinai ) and can therefore go together with Hebrew, the Holy Tongue.

In fact, parts of the Bible itself, as well as the Oral Torah as recorded in the Talmud, are written in Aramaic. Furthermore, some of the special prayers, such as the Kaddish, are also recited in Aramaic, signifying that Aramaic is considered a special and unique language.

But why was Aramaic chosen over Hebrew?

On a homiletic level, many cite a Midrash regarding the time before Gd gave the Jewish people the Torah. Wishing to keep the Torah in Heaven, some angels claimed that mere mortals could not be trusted to study the Torah. In reply, Gd promised that the Jewish men would occupy themselves with learning Torah.

Yet, in the text of the Ketubah, the Jewish men accept upon themselves unconditionally to work their very hardest to support their wives. This can theoretically be used by the angels to bolster their case that the Jews cannot be relied upon to study Torah assiduously.

The sages teach us that the angels understand all languages except for Aramaic. Thus, some explain, by writing it in Aramaic we prevent the angels from using the Ketubah in their argument.

In a somewhat similar vein, some cite another Midrash.

When the time came for Gd to create Adam, Gd consulted the ministering angels. The Angel of Truth said, Dont create humans, for they will be full of lies. The Angel of Peace said, Do not create them, for they will be in constant strife! What did Gd do? He grabbed the Angel of Truth and hurled him to the earth.

While that took care of the Angel of Truth, the commentaries ask, how did Gd contend with the Angel of Peace?

The commentaries explain that, based on the halachah that one is allowed to bend the truth to keep the peace, now that the need for absolute truth had been thrown down, it was possible to maintain peace.

However, part of the text of the Ketubah reads, I will work, honor, feed and support you in the custom of Jewish men, who work, honor, feed and support their wives faithfully. The Aramic word translated as faithfully, , literally means in truth. Thus, when we are creating a union that will, with the help of Gd, result in more of mankind, we are stating that it will be with truth. This gives room for the Angel of Peace to again raise objections that there will be a lack of peace. To avoid this, we write it in a language that the angels dont understand.

These homiletical explanations, while not the main reasons for the Aramaic Ketubah, stress the importance of being mindful to imbue our new home with Torah and peace.

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Yeshiva Education – The Best of Both (OPINION) – BKLYNER – BKLYNER

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Pincus Orlander

My great-great-uncle, Rabbi Levi Yitchok Gruenwald, fled Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938 and came to New York City with my grandparents where he started his own congregation. His Williamsburg-based synagogue included a yeshiva with dual curriculum within its education system, focusing on the faith as well as skills to live in New York. Rabbi Gruenwald was able to form his congregation and its educational extension because of the religious freedom that America prides itself on.

The yeshiva system is the best of both worldsit allows for a cultivated religious education coupled with academic skills to help its students become productive members of society. It prioritizes the philosophy and values of Jewish heritage and religion to play a major role in our childrens educational experience and personal development by relying on rigorous Talmudic study to continue to be the primary source of guidance and inspiration of the Jewish people. Yet the New York State Education Department is trying to sanction yeshivas because their curriculum is different.

The yeshiva system requires students to read, speak and learn in multiple languages, a skill that is proven to improve memory and concentration in young people. This allows students to develop an analytical brain to really grasp a wide variety of information. All of my children are currently in yeshiva schools and they are becoming intelligent, valuable members of society through an education rooted in their faith.

I attended the yeshiva Belz Elementary and High School in Brooklyn, New Yorkthe same school as a critic of yeshivasand then went on to receive my degree in speech pathology from Touro College. My experience with yeshiva education guided me on this path and allowed me to become the successful professional that I am today. It put me in a position to create a practice focused on multiculturalism, helping children of all backgrounds improve their speech, reading, writing and overall educational experience. My yeshiva education taught me to give back to the community which has provided me with so much.

Freedom of religion and cultural diversity are cornerstones of the American experience. That is why my great-uncle fled to New York: he knew he would be able to live as who he was and practice what he believed in. The NYS Education Department stepping in and taking away our rights to lawfully teach our pupils ethnic, religious and moral values beneficial to their personal development and their communities is nothing other than wholly un-American.

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