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Privacy Org Presses 5th Circ. To Veto Border Phone Searches – Law360

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

Law360 (June 9, 2020, 8:07 PM EDT) -- The Fourth Amendment shields travelers from having their phones and laptops rifled through during routinesearches at the border, a civil rights group is telling the Fifth Circuit in defense of a Texas immigration attorney who is challenging the warrantless searches as unconstitutional.

Because of their ability to contain massive amounts of information, digital devices don't fall under the Fourth Amendment's exception for warrantless and suspicionless routine searches at the border, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Monday in an amicus brief.

"All border searches whether manual or forensic of the data stored on electronic devices are 'non-routine' searches that fall...

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Privacy Org Presses 5th Circ. To Veto Border Phone Searches - Law360

Felony DUI charge dismissed due to illegal breath test – Idaho Mountain Express and Guide

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

In accordance with an Idaho Supreme Court decision handed down last year, a charge of felony DUI has been dismissed for a Hailey man due to a violation of his Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful searches and seizures.

Jeremy Sean Matthews, 32, was charged with felony DUI on Dec. 29 after a Sun Valley police officer approached his parked vehicle in the Sun Valley Figure Skating Club parking lot. According to a probable-cause affidavit, the officer was responding to a report of an intoxicated driver on Sun Valley Road around 12:30 a.m.

According to the affidavit, Matthews was detained and transported to the Sun Valley Police Department to give a breathalyzer test. Prior to that, the affidavit says, the officer informed Matthews that he was under arrest for misdemeanor DUI.

Matthews public defender, Justin McCarthy, filed a motion on April 7 to suppress evidence of the breathalyzer test.

The Idaho Supreme Court ruled last year in the case Clark v. Idaho that officers cannot make misdemeanor arrests without a warrant or without witnessing the offense. According to court documents, the Sun Valley officer was not informed of Matthews prior DUI convictions, which raised the alleged offense to a felony, until after the breathalyzer test was conducted.

Because the vehicle was parked and off at the time of the detainment and because the officer did not witness Matthews driving, the misdemeanor arrest was illegal, according to McCarthys argument in his motion to suppress.

Court records indicate that the Blaine County Prosecutors Office filed a motion to dismiss the case on May 20.

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Felony DUI charge dismissed due to illegal breath test - Idaho Mountain Express and Guide

Federal judge restricts use of tear gas, non-lethal projectiles by Denver police – JURIST

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

A federal judge for the district of Colorado issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the Denver Police Department (DPD) on Friday.

The TRO was issued in response to a complaint filed by four Denver residents on Thursday. The four have participated in protests in Denver following the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of police. The complaint alleges the DPD has violated their Fourth Amendment right against excessive force and their First Amendment right of free speech. They specifically cite the use of pepper spray, pepper balls, rubber bullets, flashbang grenades, and tear gas to punish plaintiffs for demonstrating against police brutality.

In addressing the protestors claims, Judge R. Brooke Jackson noted that the behaviors of some police officers in Denver and across the nation against peaceful protesters . . . have been disgusting. Examining the wealth of video and eyewitness evidence, Judge Jackson found a strong likelihood that the DPD did violate the plaintiffs First and Fourth Amendment rights. In addition, she found that irreparable harm would result if immediate relief were not issued to the plaintiffs, as the protests are ongoing and continued use of chemical agents and non-lethal projectiles will have the effect of chill[ing] and outright den[ying] . . . plaintiffs speech.

Jackson did note that limiting officers options could theoretically limit their ability to defend themselves, however she also pointed out the range of other non-lethal options officers have, including tazers. The unlikelihood of such harm to officers is outweighed by the very real harm that has already been caused to plaintiffs, she determined. She also acknowledged that there could be an increase in property damage, but found that the harm to protestors outweighed the threat of harm to property:

The TRO specifically limits the ability of DPD officers to use chemical agents and non-lethal projectiles unless an officer of the rank of Captain or higher is on the scene and orders their use in direct response to specific acts of violence or destruction of property that the command officer has personally witnessed. They are also enjoined from firing non-lethal projectiles into crowds, nor may they fire them at a persons head, pelvis, or back. All officers are additionally required to have body cameras recording at all times, chemical agents may only be used after an order to disperse has been issued, and such orders must be followed by adequate time for protestors to disperse. The TRO provides that officers must allow room for protestors to leave if an order to disperse has been given, otherwise enjoining the practice of kettling or forcing crowds into a contained area lacking any egress.

City and county officials filed a motion to modify two parts of the judges TRO, to allow officers of rank of lieutenant or higher to authorize the use of chemical agents and non-lethal projectiles, and to eliminate the body camera requirement.

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Federal judge restricts use of tear gas, non-lethal projectiles by Denver police - JURIST

Can they do that? – USA TODAY

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

Police used gas to clear protesters from Lafayette Park before President Donald Trump walked over and held a Bible up at St. John's Episcopal Church. USA TODAY

Can police clear peaceful protests by force?Can the U.S. block migrants in the name of COVID-19?So much news, so many questions.

It's Ashley. Let's dive in.

But first, a modest pension: The last person in the USA to receive a Civil War-era pension died at age 90. She received a monthly check for $73.13.

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More than 1,200 former Justice Department stafferscallfor a review of Attorney General William Barr's role in forcefully removing peaceful protesters near the White House before President Donald Trumps photo op with a Bible outside St. John's Church. The former staffers said they were "disturbed" by Barr's involvement in the action, adding that the move violated the First and Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Though Barracknowledged deciding to expand the security perimeter around the area requiring the movement of protesters he has since said that he did not give the specific directive setting federal authorities in motion.

Police used tear gas to clear protesters from a park before President Trump walked over to St. John's Episcopal Church.(Photo: Getty)

The Justice Department showed a "gross abuse of prosecutorial power" in its push to drop the case against Michael Flynn, a court-appointed arbiter said Wednesday. Remember Flynn? Hes President Trump's former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia during RobertMueller's investigationinto election interference. Retired federal judge John Gleeson said the Justice Department's bid to dismiss Flynn's case should be denied because its arguments "are not credible," suggesting the government violated safeguards designed to prevent "dismissals of criminal cases that would benefit powerful and well-connected defendants."

The ACLU filed a lawsuitWednesday challenging the Trump administration's decision to block many migrants from entering the country including those requesting asylum in the name of public health during the coronavirus pandemic.The suit claims the administration violated federal law by ordering blanket denials and immediate deportations of some migrants. Though federal law allows for the government to screen, quarantine and expel would-be migrants for public health reasons, it does not, according to the lawsuit, allow for the elimination of the asylum system or other forms of humanitarian relief.

Red flags are being raisedby experts around the country about Arizonas COVID-19 situation. Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations have increased over the past two weeks,and experts say the disease's spread can'tbe attributed solely to increased testing. Instead, it looks like the state is trending upward in a way that is concerning and could need another stay-at-home order to curb. "I would go so far as to say alarming," said William Hanage, an epidemiology professor at Harvard University.Gov. Doug Ducey said last week that therise in cases was expectedas the state beganreopening. Regardless, this is as good a time as ever for me to remind everyone: Social distancing, wearing masks and washing hands are some of the easiest ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Across the country, health experts have taken notice of Arizona's COVID-19 trajectory.(Photo: Arizona Department of Health Services)

A dark twist has been added to the disappearance of two Idaho children missing since September a bewildering case tied to mysterious deaths andallegations of cult-like religious beliefs. The new husband of the mother of the two kids wasarrested Tuesday after authorities found what they suspect to be two sets of unidentified human remains at his home.We dont know who the remains belong to, as autopsy results are pending. Chad Daybell, arrested on suspicion of concealing or destroying evidence, is the husband ofLori Vallow,who was arrested in February after she failed to bring her missing children to authorities.

Joshua Vallow, 7, and Tylee Ryan, 17, were last seen Sept. 23, 2019, in Rexburg, Idaho. Their mother, Lori Vallow, is the second wife of Chad Daybell.(Photo: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children via Associated Press)

George Floyd's younger brother Philonise addressed the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday in a hearing on policing. "Thank you for the invitation to be here today to talk about my big brother, George. The world knows him as George, but I called him Perry," he said. "Im tired. Im tired of the pain Im feeling now, and Im tired of the pain I feel every time another black person is killed for no reason.Im here today to ask you to make it stop. Stop the pain. Stop us from being tired."Read his full statement here.

"Stop the pain," says Philonise Floyd, brother of George Floyd, during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on proposed changes to police practices and accountability June 10.(Photo: Michael Reynolds, AP)

Prince Philip, the oldest and longest-serving royal consort in British history, marked a big-timemilestone today: He turned 99! As usual, the husband of Queen Elizabeth IIopted for ano-fuss celebration.I'm not trying to make this weird, but here's a little fun fact:The royal couple, who have been married since 1947, are distant cousins, both descended from Queen Victoria. Cheers to royal bloodlines.

Prince Philip celebrates his 99th birthday June 10. He's spent more than 70 of them by the side of Queen Elizabeth II.(Photo: Steve Parsons, AP)

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Can they do that? - USA TODAY

Cops Who Allegedly Assaulted and Arrested a Man for Standing Outside His Own House Are Protected by Qualified Immunity – Reason

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

Two police officers who allegedly assaulted a man outside of his own house and arrested him on bogus charges after failing to identify themselves as law enforcement are protected by qualified immunity and cannot be sued, a federal court confirmed Monday.

Shase Howse, the appellant, alleges that on July 28, 2016, a group of men pulled up to his home in an unmarked vehicle without uniforms on and asked him if he lived at the residence. After Howse answered in the affirmative, Officer Brian Middaugh of the Cleveland Police Department (CPD) pressed Howse on if he was surehe lived there. "Yes, what the fuck?" Howse allegedly responded, still unaware Middaugh was a cop. Middaugh, commenting on Howse's bad attitude, then exited the unmarked vehicle and approached him on the porch, asking him once again if he lived there. Howse said he did.

Following that exchange, Howse alleges that Middaugh commanded him to put his hands behind his back because he was going to jail. Howse did not oblige, telling Middaugh that he lived at the residence and that he'd done nothing wrong. Middaugh then threw him to the ground, and with the help of CPD Officer Thomas Hodous, handcuffed him while Howse resisted. It was after he was tackled that Howse realized the men were police officers.

As he lay on the porch, Howse's mother, who heard the noise from inside, exited the residence, where she says she saw one man straddling her son while another punched his head with a closed fist, causing Howse's head to hit the porch. She, too, did not initially realize they were officers.

Howse was eventually jailed for several days before posting bond, and charged with two counts of assault and one count of obstructing official business. TheCuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office eventually dismissed those charges.

Howse then brought three claims against Middaugh and Hodous: one for excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, another for malicious prosecution in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and the last for assault and battery in violation of Ohio law. He also brought one claim against the City of Cleveland, arguing that the municipality shares liability for the officers' constitutional violations. He first filed his suit the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio at Cleveland, where a panel granted the officers qualified immunity and dismissed the case against the city. Howse then appealed.

In rejecting Howse's suit, Circuit Judge Amul Thapar of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals illustrated what makes qualified immunity so confounding: public officials can violate your civil rights without consequence if those rights have not been "clearly established" by existing case law.

"'Clearly established' means that the law is so clear at the time of the incident that every reasonable officer would understand the unlawfulness of his conduct," Thapar writes in his majority opinion. "To avoid 'paralysis by analysis,' qualified immunity protects all but plainly incompetent officers or those who knowingly violate the law."

Reasonable officers should know basic right from wrong, Thapar implies, yet according to qualified immunity, they also need the judiciary to spell out those fundamentals with myopic detail.

What's more, the doctrine has indeed been used to protect "plainly incompetent officers" and "those who knowingly violate the law." Consider the two cops in Fresno, California, who allegedly stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that "the City Officers ought to have recognized that the alleged theft was morally wrong," but that they "did not have clear notice that it violated the Fourth Amendment." Both officers were granted qualified immunity.

Then there was the sheriff's deputy in Coffee County, Georgia, who shot a 10-year-old boy while aiming at the family's non-threatening dog while in pursuit of a suspect who had no connection to the little boy or his dog. Because there was no case law saying that shooting someone while aiming at something else infringes on someone's rights, the deputy received qualified immunity. Or the police officer in Los Angeles who shot a 15-year-old boy one morning because he saw the boy's friend holding a plastic airsoft gun replica. In that case, there was no legal precedent that said accidentally shooting a bystander infringes on the bystander's rights, though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit acknowledged that "a rational finder of fact" would conclude that the officer's conduct "shocked the conscience and was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment." The officer got qualified immunity anyway.

But Thapar's decision is in a league of its own, says Clark Neily, vice president for criminal justice at the Cato Institute. "It requires a certain amount of effort to write an exceptionally bad qualified immunity opinion, but this is, by any standard, an exceptionally bad one," Neily says. "Simply refusing to interact with police, and even being rude to them, does not provide probable cause for them to make an arrest, which is really what this case boils down to."

Thapar disagrees. "Howse argues that the officers violated his clearly established right to be free from 'unreasonable government intrusions,'" he writes, calling that basic constitutional standard "much too vague." The officers needed to be specifically told by the courts that assaulting someone who disobeys an order and using "additional force" when that person resists arrest violates the Fourth Amendment.

The primary problem with that framing, Neily notes, is that it assumes Howse should have been arrested in the first place. Yet when determining whether to grant qualified immunity, the courts are legally required to accept the plaintiff's version of events. After all, the decision to withhold qualified immunity only gives someone the right to sue a public official.

For their part, the officers allege Howse was "lingering suspiciously" (in front of his own house) and that the area is "known for violence, drugs, and gang activity." They admit that Howse confirmed he lived at the home, but their doubts about his honesty led them to "investigate more," culminating in the violent confrontation. In his decision, Thapar pays lip service to Howse's account but proceeds to rule under the assumption that his arrest was warranted.

It's for that reason the Sixth Circuit erred in denying the petition for a rehearing en banc, said Circuit Judge Julia Smith Gibbons in a dissent published Monday. "In qualified immunity cases, we have long held that a plaintiff's right must be defined with careful attention to the 'specific factual circumstances' of the case," she writes. "And yet, in framing Shase Howse's right in this case, the panel fails to account for his suspected criminality (none), location (home), or conduct (truthfully answering questions)."

Gibbons also takes issue with the majority's dismissal of the malicious prosecution claima decision she calls "a precedent-setting error of exceptional public importance." Thapar asserts that, in resisting arrest "by stiffening up his body and screaming at the top of his lungs," Howse provides probable cause for the charge of obstructing official business. "And because there was probable cause for that charge," Thapar writes, "Howse cannot move forward with any of his malicious-prosecution claims," notwithstanding the fact that Howse's original crime was sitting outside of his own house.

On the assault and battery claim, the officers invoked "an Ohio statutory provision which provides a general grant of immunity to government employees." Thapar, a former federal prosecutor, granted that as well.

The Sixth Circuit's dismissal joins a mounting pile of decisions that protect public officials at the expense of the very people they've sworn to serve. But qualified immunity has come under new scrutiny amid protests surrounding George Floyd, the unarmed black man killed by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Rep. Justin Amash (LMich.) recently introduced a bill to kill the doctrine.

"We have an astonishing double standard in this country where members of law enforcement hold we the citizens to a very high standard of accountability," says Neily. "It is not a defense that you didn't know that your conduct was illegal. But when the shoe is on the other foot, and the question is what standard of accountability members of law enforcement should be held to, they insist that it be so low that it is practically zero."

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Cops Who Allegedly Assaulted and Arrested a Man for Standing Outside His Own House Are Protected by Qualified Immunity - Reason

From bail money to filming the police, here’s how to protect yourself as a citizen journalist at protests – The Retriever

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

Ways to protect yourself as a citizen journalist covering the protests include having a lawyer's number and carrying bail money. Graphic by Madeline Arbutus

Citizens recordings of the police beating and killing black men, women and children have been crucial in exposing the racist violence ingrained in police departments across the United States. People post these videos on social media, calling for action and fueling protest movements like those ignited by the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police officers.

On-the-ground recordings and depiction of the protests become further evidence of police brutality as people upload videos of police shooting tear gas at distant protestors, police instigating violence and police SUVs driving into crowds of protestors. As major news media like CNN and FOX fail to contextualize and accurately depict the violence protesters face at the hands of police, peoples videos and live accounts become important in accurately documenting the protests. These are often picked up by local news media and help correct the narrative around protesters.

If you are one of these people tweeting, recording and distributing live information about the protests, you are participating in citizen journalism. Citizen journalism is reporting on news events by people who are not professional journalists, usually shared via social media.

This definition encompasses a lot of people posting right now, so it is important to know how to protect yourself and your rights.

Pack your bag with the protest essentials: food, water, identification, portable chargers, and, if you can, enough cash to post bail. Bail varies person to person and crime to crime, but the National Press Photographers Association says people should carry between 75 and 200 dollars.

Travel in a group of friends, acquaintances or coworkers. If going to a protest alone, tell a friend or family member that, if you do not contact them by a certain time, they should assume you were arrested.

Whether traveling in a group or not, write down the name of a lawyer or a family member who can get in contact with a lawyer on your arm in permanent marker. This ensures that you have someone to call if you are arrested and the police confiscate your belongings. If you do not have a lawyer, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press offers legal aid to any reporter arrested while covering an event.

If getting arrested, Rima Kikani, a lawyer with Rollins, Smalkin, Richards & Mackie L.L.C and professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, emphasized that anything you say during the arrest can and will be used against you. She specifically advised to not say anything once your arrest begins.

Do not talk to anyone except your lawyer, Kikani said. You dont know how those statements will be used against you or twisted.

Videos of your arrest or the arrests of others are crucial in accurately depicting the police violence occurring at the protests. You, as both a citizen and a citizen journalist, have the right to film government officials, including law enforcement officers, in the discharge of their duties as stated in Glik v. Cunniffe.

However, Kikani says if you continue to record after an officer tells you to stop, you can have the additional charge of disobeying an officer brought against you even if the charge would not hold up in court. Dr. Eric Easton, a professor of law emeritus at the University of Baltimore School of Law, also counsels citizen journalists to follow any orders given by the police.

A journalist receiving an order to cease and desist and move on, it may be prudent to comply with that order, whether it turns out to be a proper order or lawful order in the long run, Easton said.

While Easton advises citizen journalists to obey officers, he does say that you can later question the police officers order and infringement on your First Amendment rights in court. This is particularly important as many members of the press have followed orders only to be pepper sprayed or detained.

If you do have video, photos or writing on your phone, camera or another device that you believe are important to your case or that could be used against the police, hand that device off to a trusted individual during the arrest. While it is illegal for police to seize, unlock and delete videos, photos and other content off a persons device without a warrant, as stated by the Fourth Amendment, giving your device to someone prevents it from ever being held by police. Easton explains that newer technologies like the use of facial recognition to unlock phones have yet to be ruled as unlawful for police to use, so it is in your best interest to ensure your devices are not in the hands of police.

While these are all ways to protect yourself, it is important to note that there are no special legal protections for citizen journalists.

When youre actually out there on the streets protesting, youre following the same laws as everyone else, Kikani said.

In general, Easton advises citizen journalists to be careful and try to identify yourself as a member of the press, even if you do not have official credentials, as that might prevent your arrest.

You dont do any good as journalists when youre taken out of the picture, Easton said.

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From bail money to filming the police, here's how to protect yourself as a citizen journalist at protests - The Retriever

The Glaring Hole in the Democrats’ Police Reform Bill – The New Republic

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

Cops, along with other state and local officials who violate a persons constitutional rights, can already be sued in federal court under Section 1983, a major provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1871. Over the past half-century, however, the Supreme Court has crafted a doctrine known as qualified immunity, which shields officials from liability unless they violated clearly established law. The Justice in Policing Act would abolish this controversial rule by explicitly stating in federal law that it cant be invoked as a defense. A related provision would make it easier for federal prosecutors to bring civil rights charges under Section 242, the criminal equivalent of Section 1983.

Naturally, there are practical and constitutional limits to the power of Congress to reform local police departments. Many of the bills provisions, including bans on chokeholds, racial profiling, and no-knock warrants in drug cases, would apply directly to federal law enforcement officials. But those and others, including body-camera reforms and racial-bias training, cant be imposed by Congress on state and local police through federal law. Instead, Congress would try to compel departments to make those reforms by withholding Justice Department grants if they dont comply. The law would also make lynching a federal crime for the first time, after 120 years of failed legislative efforts.

But while federal law enforcement officials would be covered on some of the proposed laws most sweeping changes, the bill avoids taking steps that would address several problems that are unique to the federal sphere. For instance, though the bill would strengthen Section 1983 by scrapping qualified immunity, that provision only allows civil rights lawsuits in federal court against state and local officials. There is no general statutory equivalent for civil rights violations committed by federal officials. The nearest comparable option is whats known as a Bivens lawsuit, which draws its name from the 1971 Supreme Court case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents.

In Bivens, the court sided with a plaintiff who accused federal narcotics agents of conducting an unconstitutional search. The justices held that the lawsuit was allowed under the Fourth Amendment even if no federal law specifically permitted it. Here, too, the justices have steadily pared back what could be a formidable tool against civil rights abuses by federal officials. In the 2017 case Ziglar v. Abbasi, for example, the court rejected a Bivens lawsuit brought by a group of men of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent who were arrested and detained for months without sufficient cause in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The justices further held that they would not expand Bivens any further beyond the few circumstances where it had already been applied. Congress has not acted to fill that void.

We are not even close to the end. America faces another economic and social upheaval and once again it includes race – MarketWatch

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

A number of people have asked me if the protests happening across the nation are what I was predicting in my latest book, The Storm Before the Calm. They asked because they thought my predictions were arriving too early. This unrest is very much the kind of thing I was expecting and about the time I expected it to start. But we are not even close to the end. I wrote in my book that the 2020s will be a decade of social, economic and international instability. Not all crises will be this intense. Many, particularly the economic crises, will be less intense but will last longer.

To get a sense of where we stand now, think of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered and riots broke out across the country, with the police and National Guard using force to control the rioters. In summer of 1968, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, thousands of anti-war protesters showed up against the Democratic Party, which they saw as the party of imperialist wars and domestic oppression. Richard Nixon was elected that year, and in 1971, facing what was really minor inflation compared to what came later, he imposed wage and price controls, and impulsively took the U.S. off the gold standard. He later resigned to avoid being impeached following the Watergate scandal.

There was then a period of relative peace under Gerald Ford, who took over from Nixon in 1974. During this time in the U.S. there was also a massive economic crisis, with high inflation, soaring interest rates and unemployment nearing 10%. This was driven by the Arab oil embargo, triggered by an Arab war with Israel, which left Americans waiting in long lines at gasoline stations only to find there was none available. Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 and tried to take the country back to the model that Franklin Roosevelt created. It failed, and he delivered a famous speech about the countrys malaise. Then the Iranian revolution and kidnapping of diplomats came, ending in a disastrous hostage rescue attempt. The Roosevelt era was exhausted. Ronald Reagan was elected and created a radically new structure that led to a cycle of prosperity.

Now the Reagan Cycle is coming to an end. And just as the Roosevelt Cycle culminated in a bit more than a decade of dysfunction and even despair, so too we are now entering such a phase. The coronavirus signaled that, although it had nothing to do with the failing system. But the eruption of nationwide protests are a more systemic announcement of the beginning of the transition.

The original American sin was not slavery. (Americans were not unique in holding slaves.) Rather it was a betrayal of the nations own principles.

Just as the final decade of the Roosevelt Cycle had near its beginning a racial event, the end of the Reagan Cycle is being signaled by the death of George Floyd, with consequences similar to those after Martin Luther King was killed. There is an intimate relationship between race and the American economy that goes back to the country's founding. As I said in my book, the original American sin was not slavery. (Americans were not unique in holding slaves.) Rather it was a betrayal of the nations own principles where Thomas Jefferson had written, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Read: George Floyd laid to rest in Houston; He is going to change the world, brother says

The South was a plantation society dependent on cheap labor. It needed slaves to function. It also needed power against a growing North that had slaves but was not dependent on them, and had a nascent abolitionist movement. The South rejected the idea of freeing the slaves. But it demanded that the slaves be counted in the census, so that the Souths representation in Congress would be as large as possible. The North objected, and there could be no republic without a compromise. The compromise was that slaves counted as three-fifths of a person.

The founders believed deeply in the equality of men. But they could not form a republic if blacks were seen as equal. So in the act of designating them three-fifths of a person, they declared them less than human. In this way, they preserved the principle of universal equality but did so by designating a class of humans as subhuman.

The Hayes era grew out of the Civil War, which was about the status of blacks. The Roosevelt era was forged out of an alliance of Southern segregationists and Northern blacks. One of the central features of the era that spanned from Roosevelt to Carter was the civil rights movement and the attack on segregation. The Reagan era struggled with the issue as well, with heated debates over affirmative action and other measures.

The issue of race has torn the country apart many times, and many explanations can be offered as to why. Its a personal issue for all of us. I went to a predominantly black high school in the mid-1960s. It was a frightening experience. High school boys emerge as men through testing themselves physically. In the suburbs, football was the key. Jackson High in Queens, N.Y. had no football team. The tests were found in fighting and violence, and I was forced to face black teenagers who were bigger and tougher than me. I learned to fear them. They were doing nothing but what was normal for 16-year-olds, but they posed what seemed at that time an existential challenge to me.

It took years for me to move beyond my high school experience and to realize the kids I went to school with were just kids like any others, and likely had the same fear of me that I had of them. They saw in me the perpetual sin that was perpetrated against them. Did I ever learn to lose the fear? I think so, yet does anyone really lose the fears that dominated him when he was young? Each day is combat for boys, and that combat shapes them. That is my story. Each one of us experiences the tension of race and each emerges from it differently.

Whenever a cycle fails, and things that were certain suddenly become mysteries, one of the first things that emerges is the deeply rooted tension between black and white. It is a tension that is always there. The history is long and deep and filled with fear. When things become uncertain the thing that suddenly shows itself is the fear between the races, and the attempt on all sides to use that fear to their advantage. It is as if the Israelites were freed, but continued to live in Egypt.

Americas original sin still haunts it, and goodwill and wishes are just words.

I felt myself at war with blacks and losing. A teenage boy cant imagine the degree to which blacks felt they were losing, and the truth is that, for the most part, they were losing. They knew that, and the fights we had were rooted in that knowledge. When they see one of their own slowly strangled to death, they feel rage but also, as I understand in retrospect, helplessness and despair. This is the original sin of our republic, and none of us know how to solve it, least of all the enlightened whites who side with them.

The problem is that we are not monsters, white or black. We are humans and we are filled with fear, hope and a breathtaking inability to understand the complex realities that come from being human. And we love to feel superior to those who are different and those who disagree with us.

So to the question of whether I expected this, the answer is yes, and much of what I say here is scattered throughout my book. But this is not the end. Race is always there, and frequently the breakout of race-related protests and violence is just the beginning. But it is never the end because Americas original sin still haunts it, and goodwill and wishes are just words. So, the U.S. begins the 2020s, a decade of transformation, as it began other transformations with the matter of race.

George Friedman is chairman ofGeopolitical Futuresand author ofThe Storm Before the Calm: Americas Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond. (Doubleday, 2020)

More:The only way to truly solve the race problem in America is to narrow the wealth gap, black economists say

Plus: George Floyd, white supremacy and the otherization of African-American men

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We are not even close to the end. America faces another economic and social upheaval and once again it includes race - MarketWatch

The only way to truly solve the race problem in America is to narrow the wealth gap, black economists say – MarketWatch

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

The unrest in cities across the U.S. this week is just the latest manifestation of a struggle that will continue until the wealth gap between white people and black people is addressed, black economists said.

What is the wealth gap? It is the stark divide between how much capital white people and black people control.

By one estimate, the typical white family has wealth of $171,000. This is nearly ten times greater than the $17,150 for an average black family.

Put another way, the typical black household remains poorer than 80% of white households.

This stunning wealth gap between the races has persisted, in good times and bad, for the past 70 years. It did not get better after the civil rights era legislation was passed in the 1960s or during the Obama administration.

And it will continue to fuel unrest, economists said.

As long as we have racial wealth gap, were going to have a problems with race, said Patrick Mason, an economics professor at Florida State University.

The wealth gap is one of the reasons there are protests today, said Linwood Tauheed, a professor of economics at The University of Missouri-Kansas City and the president of the National Economics Association.

I dont necessarily want to use the phase it was the straw that broke the camels back...but we have lots of evidence that this economic system is not benefitting the majority of the population, he said.

African Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are thats not new for us but now you find young college students dissatisfied with their future.

See: Protesters support Floyd, Black Lives Matter on 3 continents

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fact that African-Americans have a lack of income to buy necessary health care, food and medicine and are suffering in greater numbers than white Americans.

Since the 1960s, the wealth gap has been largely ignored by the economics profession, black economists say.

For years, black economists struggled in the American Economics Association to even study the subject of wealth disparity between the races, black economists said. Universities and think tanks also didnt support the work.

Black economists formed their own association, the National Economics Association, in 1969 to study the economic situation of black Americans.

It was very difficult for a black economist to present a paper at an AEA conference that was questioning whether mainstream economists were understanding the economic disparity between the white and black community, Tauheed said.

So called mainstream economists were really interested in more efficiency. The wage gap is a question of equity or how to expand the pie, said Karl Boulware, an economics professor at Wesleyan University. The best way to think of wealth is to think of it as power, he said.

In a statement to her membership Friday, former Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen, who is the president of the AEA, said her organization has only begun to understand racism and its impact on our profession and our discipline.

Black economists say one historical cause of the wage gap is slavery.

I dont want to offend anybody, and dont want to be labeled a radical but the wealth gap has its roots in the starting of America, said Samuel Myers, an economist at the University of Minnesota.

JIm Crow laws put in place shortly after the Civil War also kept black people impoverished.

A more recent and complex cause was the systemic exclusion of black people from the U.S. housing market beginning in the 1920. Housing is one of the main engines of accumulating wealth in America.

Restrictive covenants were put on houses that limited where black people could live, said Tauheed. These covenants, combined with discriminatory credit policies, kept black people from building wealth.

At the same time, government policies were put in place to assist whites to build wealth through housing.

For instance, in Minneapolis, where the current protests began after the death of George Floyd while being detained by police, white Americans first benefitted from the Homestead Act.

Then white soldiers coming home from World War II were given cheap loans to buy homes in the surrounding suburbs. These neighborhoods were off limits to black people, said Myers.

And the only prosperous black community in the city was razed to the ground to build a highway to St. Paul, he added.

My feeling is until and unless white people acknowledge that their wealth holdings and therefore the wealth gap is attributable to unearned entitlements from public policy, then were not going to even have a conversation about solutions to the wealth gap, Professor Myers said.

Black economists think that reparations the direct payment to descendents of former slaves would narrow the wealth gap.

But they are under no illusion that this policy could be easily become law as blacks make up 12% of the population.

Reparations run into conflict with the American mythology of how you get ahead, which says that its all individual effort, said Professor Mason from Florida State.

Sen. Cory Booker, the black U.S. Senator from New Jersey, pushed for baby bonds during his brief run for the presidency last year. The accounts, presented at birth, would be seeded with $1,000 and receive up to $2,000 extra every year depending on family income. They could only be used once the child reached the age of 18, with the funds limited for paying college, a home, or to start a business.

This idea is race-neutral and poor whites would benefit the most from such a program, Professor Myers noted.

I dont really think in the final analysis baby bonds are going to dramatically narrow the wealth gap but Id be really happy if Im wrong, Myers said.

See also: Black Americans, their lives and livelihoods on the line, suffer most from the pandemic

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The only way to truly solve the race problem in America is to narrow the wealth gap, black economists say - MarketWatch

Fast moves in India-Australia relations risk pushing millions more into modern slavery – The Conversation AU

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

This week the leaders of India and Australia reaffirmed their mutual interest in closer diplomatic and economic ties.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison during their long-delayed Thursday virtual summit:

India is committed to expanding its relations with Australia on a wider and faster pace. This is important not only for our two countries, but also for the Indo-Pacific region and the world.

But I will not say that I am satisfied with this pace. When a leader like you is leading our friend country, then the criteria for the pace of development in our relations should also be ambitious.

Australia should be ambitious for its friendship with India. We have a long-term interest in India developing as another prosperous, harmonious democracy.

Standing in the way of that is Indias chaotic web of labour laws. There are hundreds at both national and state levels. Theyve long been a disincentive to trade and investment because of the compliance challenges for law-abiding foreign businesses.

Yet those same laws are so loosely enforced domestically that dodgy and unlawful working conditions are rife.

Indeed of Indias workforce of 500 million, it is estimated about 450 million are in the informal sector, with no minimum pay rates, let alone other benefits.

So there are good reasons for Australia to support India reducing its sheer number of labour laws. But there are also good reasons to encourage it to enforce the commitments required of both nations under international labour conventions.

In the shadows of the agenda to accelerate trade and investment is the risk of pushing more Indian workers into slave conditions.

In truth, no one knows the exact size of Indias informal sector. Statistics are unreliable for work defined as disorganised.

As in other countries, Indias COVID-19 response has hit these workers in lowly paid, insecure manual labour hardest. This was amplified by the severity and swiftness of measures.

Modis March 24 orders for a complete lockdown were issued at 8:58pm, and took effect at midnight.

Shops, markets, factories and construction sites were shut down. All public transport services were stopped. Indias population of more than 1.3 billion people was told to stay home.

But hundred of thousands had to get home first.

India has an estimated 139 million internal migrant workers. They come from poor regions all across India to find work in the wealthiest cities such as Mumbai, Delhi and Surat. Typical jobs are in building and manufacturing, where the average daily pay rate is about US$4.60.

With no work, no money, in fear of having no food and of catching the coronavirus, migrant workers have for weeks queued at train and bus stations for restricted services to get home.

Tens of thousands opted to walk home.

A survey of about 3,200 of these walkers in early April found nearly a third were in debt, usually to money lenders from their communities.

Bhagwan Das, who walked for three days to get back to his village after losing his job as a construction worker in Delhi, told his story to the Thomson Reuters Foundation

Unable to maintain repayments on the 60,000 rupee (US$787) loan he took out in 2017 for his daughters wedding, Das had no choice but to offer his sons labour to service the rising debt.

The Global Slavery Index 2018 estimates about 8 million Indians are in some form of modern slavery in situations were they are forced to work under threat; are owned or controlled by another; are dehumanised or treated as a commodity; and are not free to leave.

Globally there is an estimated 40 million modern slaves. About 25 million are in forced labour. This may be through use or threats of violence, physical or emotional restraints, or bonded labour also known as debt bondage, forcing people to work to pay off a debt.

Read more: Human trafficking and slavery still happen in Australia. This comic explains how

Debt bondage is the most prevalent form of forced labour. In India, a 2016 investigation in the southern state of Tamil Nadu (Indias largest producer of cotton yarn) found 351 of 743 spinning mills used so-called Sumangali schemes to lure young women with the promise of lump sums for use as a dowry.

In practice this lump sum is made up of withheld wages, and used as a means to bind workers to the mill. Girls only receive the lump sum if they fulfil their three to five years contract period, under exploitative and unhealthy conditions. Girls who fail to do so, and many do because of health problems, abuse and exhaustion, most often do not receive the withheld wages.

This despite bonded labour being outlawed since 1976, and dowries since 1961.

So clearly law enforcement in India needs work. As things stand, however, the push is on to do even less. Half a dozen of Indias 28 states have already signalled their desire to suspend labour laws.

The northern state of Uttar Pradesh, for example, summarily suspended most laws including its minimum wage act. It reportedly plans to maintain most suspensions for three years.

As Radhicka Kapoor, of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, has put it, these policies are creating an enabling environment for exploitation.

The International Labour Organisation, which sets international labour standards, has written to Modi asking him to ensure India upholds its international commitments.

Read more: Modern Slavery Bill a step in the right direction now businesses must comply

Both India and Australia are signatories to the International Labour Organsiations Declaration on the Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, which states these rights are universal and apply to all people in all states - regardless of the level of economic development.

Ensuring they apply to all of Australias supply chains is crucial for the Morrison government to continue to be a world leader in eradicating modern slavery as Home Affairs Minister Jason Woods declared just three days before the Modi-Morrison meeting.

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Fast moves in India-Australia relations risk pushing millions more into modern slavery - The Conversation AU

How COVID-19 can push modern slavery into the Australian supply chain – Anthill online

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

It is no news that COVID-19 has changed the way we live our lives! In these unprecedented times every organisation has had to adapt. The lucky ones are challenged to keep up with increased demand and the less fortunate are managing decreased revenue, or worse, having to close their doors.

Desperate times call for desperate measures has been proven to ring true with governments and organisations under pressure to perform, cut costs and meet demand, but how is this going to impact quality and ethics?

Nationally and internationally, normal ways of working have been adjusted to comply with government guidelines put in place to ensure the safety of their citizens. Social distancing, border closures and halts on production have all had significant impacts for most Australian workers. And we are still not clear about the long-term consequences of this extraordinary event.

Statistically, low-skilled workers are more likely to be exploited, often due to cost reduction strategies implemented for financial gain. For those on minimum wage, the repercussions of the current working climate can be debilitating particularly when it comes to seeking secure income. Thus, the defenseless may face greater risk of succumbing to modern slavery or exploitation.

Modern slavery describes serious exploitation in the workplace, such as human trafficking, slavery, servitude and forced labour, amongst others. Findings from the Global Slavery Index estimate there were approximately 15,000 people living in conditions of modern slavery in Australia in 2016.

Coronavirus has made it clear that the Western world is certainly not immune to exploitation, with countries such as the USA using prison labour to create medical-grade facemasks and hand sanitiser in exchange for less than minimum wage. Opportunities to exploit Australians are heightened during times of crisis where people may:

The desperate times call for desperate measures mindset is not only relevant to the government and large corporations. Struggling Australians are more likely to be exploited while seeking alternative methods of income in times of crisis, where desperation can often be more powerful than the elusive search for fair and just employment. Often it is too late by the time these workers recognise the unstable and risky circumstances they find themselves in. Thus, the cycle of modern slavery continues.

To avoid subjecting vulnerable Australian workers to mistreatment, organisations of all sizes need to ensure there is transparency across every phase of their supply chain. Transparency from suppliers and third-party operators is key in maintaining an economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable supply chain strategy.

Businesses must maintain supplier relationships and open communication around the Human Rights risks associated with COVID-19 and its carryover effects. Supplier liaison is essential in ensuring organisations support their vulnerable workers through flexibility to the ever-changing situation. It is

crucial to communicate and reinforce the rights and roles of each operational party that is from the CEO down to the line workers. This includes access to sick and carers leave, the correct protective equipment, the availability of grievance mechanisms and whistleblowing options, and availability of increased cleaning and sanitisation in workplaces.

Support network groups such as employee, investor, civil society, peak bodies, and suppliers provide collaboration opportunities to create solutions-based approaches particularly when adapting to industry changes to safeguard ethical workplaces. This includes educating staff around the current situation and identifying what modern slavery is and how it can happen during the existing pandemic.

Lastly, staying up to date with national and international legislation and resources will support operations and assist practical application of any relevant changes in line with the current trading climate. Practicing human rights, fair trade and fair labour guidelines should be an ongoing part of your business strategy and process. If we can learn anything from COVID-19, it is the importance of ethical and transparent trade.

But little has been done yet to look to the future, i.e. what are we learning? How can we better integrate sustainability into all supply chain processes? How can we use this experience as a catalyst for change? It is imperative that we, as a society, move towards a structure that equally promotes ethical economic, social, and environmental sustainability.

Nicholas Bernhardt is the CEO of Informed 365. With a passion for sustainable workplaces and positive world change, Nicholas started Informed 365 after seeing a disconnect in organisations corporate social responsibility and the tools at their disposal to harness and understand data. Informed 365 is now the leading tech solution for over 3,000 Australian companies legally required to report under the Modern Slavery Act with high-profile clients such as the Property Council of Australia, Wesfarmers Industrial & Safety, Origin, Zoos Victoria, and Michael Hill.

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How COVID-19 can push modern slavery into the Australian supply chain - Anthill online

Opinion: CT teacher questions what he thought he knew of racism – The Advocate

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

Matt Pavia, a teacher at Darien High School, chats with students during a reception for his book An American Town and the Vietnam War at Darien High School in 2018.

Photo: Tyler Sizemore / Hearst Connecticut Media

Matt Pavia, a teacher at Darien High School, chats with students during a reception for his book An American Town and the Vietnam War at Darien High School in 2018.

Opinion: CT teacher questions what he thought he knew of racism

If Im being totally honest with myself, I have to admit that even though I grew up in a city as proudly multicultural as Stamford was in the 1980s and 1990s, and had friendships with all kinds of kids, it took me longer than it should have as a young person to truly, fully comprehend how deep the roots of American racial inequality spread in all directions.

I want to be careful not to impugn the abilities or the motives of my teachers; they were, to a person, dedicated, talented people who chose to teach in a school system that embraced diversity before it was a buzzword. Yes, we were taught that slavery was part of our creation, and that it was unequivocally evil. But the Civil War ended slavery, the story went, and then the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments made clear what should already have been obvious. Yes, we learned about segregation in the South, and we watched the films of peaceful protesters being attacked by fire hoses and police dogs. There was no ambiguity about those evils, but I sort of got the sense that Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Civil Rights Movement fixed it. I dont know that I learned what racism really was.

To be fair, there may have been more nuance to the curriculum than I recall. Plus, we were kids; perhaps the adults believed that our early encounters with American history needed to highlight justice prevailing over evil so we didnt become dispirited or cynical at a young age.

But the unintended consequence for a white, middle-class student like me whod never been personally subject to discrimination was that I grew up believing racism was mostly just a feeling, the way that an individual, immoral person might act. No one in my world acted or spoke hatefully, so the sources of the evil seemed to have been overcome. Even after watching the 1992 Los Angeles riots on TV after school as a sixth-grader, it didnt fully sink in that what had happened to Rodney King after a routine traffic stop was anything more than an anomaly. Those police officers were so clearly out of control; there was no way a civilized society would let that kind of thing happen more than once.

And yet, I have clear memories of certain things I observed as a kid that troubled me: a conversation I overheard a few of the Black kids in my fifth-grade class having at lunch about what they heard a police officer in their neighborhood say; the way clerks eyes followed certain kids (but never me) around the store; the unmistakable whiteness of the honors classes at Stamford High School in the mid-1990s; or that the white kids I knew all seemed to live in one half of the city, while most of the Black and Hispanic kids lived in the other.

Reconciling these inequities with my early education about America has been a decades-long process of questioning what I thought I knew. Only in college the first time Id ever heard the terms restrictive covenant, Black Codes, one-drop rule, and concerned citizens councils did I start to see a larger, more complicated reality: that no matter how many individuals feelings about people of color had changed, no matter how many white people had genuine friendships with Black people, the combined legacy of lynching, segregation, unconscious bias, and wage discrimination had been embedded into the structure of our society even in the North. It didnt require Jim Crow laws or lynchings to do its damage; it could be just as effective working through zoning laws, redlining, the War on Drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing, or the way our states fund their school systems.

This was a hard thing for a young person whose family had only ever benefited from Americas opportunities to accept. If the opportunities that allowed my forebears to climb the socio-economic ladder and enable my success had been systematically denied to an entire group of people, what had I really earned? That kind of question triggers defense mechanisms, the minds way of shutting out the cognitive dissonance.

After a period of wrestling with this contradiction, I stopped fighting myself. I was exhausted by the effort it took to square my overwhelmingly positive experience as an American with the much harsher experiences of so many African Americans and people of color. It ceased to be a question of whose lived experience in America was the true one. Both of these Americas exist side by side, though too often they fail to acknowledge each others existence.

To accept that the America of 2020 is hobbled by the lingering effects of racist laws and policies is not to place blame on any individual white American, though to us it might sometimes feel that way. In almost 20 years of teaching American literature, Ive seen how hard it can be for good-natured students to push through their instinctive (and very human) defensiveness, to reassure them that frank discussions about race are not predicated on blaming them for the sins of the past. And yet, if we refuse to face our nations past without fear of what we find if we do not force ourselves to ask why certain injustices persist and why our perceptions of America are so polarized we deny ourselves the possibility of a future free from ghosts of the past.

Since were being honest, let me suggest a choice: we can search our memories until were blue in the face for some long-lost era when America was great, or we can embrace the notion that Americas greatness has always been aspirational just over the horizon, just beyond our reach. It resides in our capacity to change, but it requires the courage to acknowledge injustice and make good on the promises of our founding.

Matt Pavia is a native of Stamford and a 1998 graduate of Stamford High School. He teaches English at Darien High School, and is the co-author of An American Town and the Vietnam War, published by McFarland & Co. in 2018.

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Opinion: CT teacher questions what he thought he knew of racism - The Advocate

Ten Days that May Have Changed the World – The Bullet – Socialist Project

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

Anti-Racism June 7, 2020 Richard Greeman

Sparked by the police murder of George Floyd and fueled by Minneapolis authorities reluctance to arrest and charge the murderers three police accomplices, mass protests have been sweeping across the US with an intensity not seen since the 1960s. In over 150 cities, African Americans and their allies have flooded the streets, braving the COVID-19 pandemic, braving police violence, challenging centuries of racial and class inequalities, demanding liberty and justice for all, day after day defying a corrupt, racist power structure based on violent repression.

Today, after ten consecutive days in the streets, this outpouring of popular indignation against systematic, historic injustice has opened a number of breaches in the defensive wall of the system. The legal authorities in the state of Minnesota, where George Floyd was murdered, have been forced to arrest and indict as accomplices the three other policemen who aided and abetted the killer, against whom the charges were raised from third to second degree murder. A split has opened at the summit of power, where the Secretary of Defense and numerous Pentagon officials have broken with their Commander in Chief, Donald Trump, who has attempted to mobilize the US Army against the protestors.

This historic uprising is an outpouring of accumulated black anger over decades of unpunished police murders of unarmed African-Americans. It articulates the accumulated grief of families and communities, the sheer outrage over impunity for killer cops in both the North and the South. It reflects anger at capitalist Americas betrayal of Martin Luther Kings dream of non-violent revolution and horror at the return to the era of public lynchings cheered on by the President of the United States. It impatiently demands that America at long last live up to its proclaimed democratic ideals, here and now. In the words of one African-American protester, William Achukwu, 28, of San Francisco: Our Declaration of Independence says life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We are only dealing with the life part here. This is a first step. But liberty is what a lot of people are marching for.

It came as no surprise that local and state officials across the US reacted to largely peaceful, spontaneous mass protests against police brutality and racism by unleashing a maelstrom of militarized police violence. For a generation, the Federal government has been quietly gifting huge stocks of surplus military equipment, including tanks, to local police forces and sheriffs offices eager to play with lethal new toys designed for counter-insurgency in places like Afghanistan. Under both Democrats (Clinton, Obama) and Republicans (Bush, Trump) the federal state has been arming law enforcement in preparation for a preventive counter-revolution. This is precisely what President Trump is calling for today: full dominance by means of military crackdowns, mass arrests, and long prison sentences in the name of law and order. Thanks to the determination of these masses of militant but largely non-violent protestors, the military is divided, and Trump will not have his way.

Apropos of violence, it was feared at first that the numerous incidences of setting fires, smashing shop fronts, and looting, especially after dark when the large, orderly crowds of mixed demonstrators had gone home, would in some way spoil the uprising and provide a pretext for the violent, military suppression of the whole movement, as called for by Trump, who blamed it all on an imaginary terrorist group called ANTIFA (short for anti-fascism, in fact, a loose network). At the same time, reports of gangs of young white racists wearing MAGA (Make America Great Again) hats committing vandalism, of accelerationists systematically setting fires in black neighborhoods to provoke revolution, and of violent police provocateurs are not entirely to be discounted.

Such actions play into Trumps hands. On the other hand, the more reasonable voices of the hundreds of thousands of angry but nonviolent protestors might not have been listened to by the authorities if it had not been for the threat of violence from the fringes if their voices were ignored. Instead of burning their own neighborhoods as has happened in past riots, todays militants are strategically hitting symbols of state repression and capitalism lighting up and destroying police property, trashing the stores of million-dollar corporations, and even pushing against the gates of the White House. In any case, as far as looting is concerned, as the spokeswomen of BLM argued at George Floyds memorial, white people have been looting Africa and African-Americans for centuries. Pay-back is long over-due.

What is especially remarkable and heartening to see as we view the impassioned faces of the demonstrators through images on videos, newspaper photos, and TV reports is the realization that at least half the demonstrators in the crowds proclaiming Black Lives Matter are white people! Here again, a serious breach has been opened in the wall of systemic, institutionalized racism that has for centuries enabled the US ruling class to divide and conquer the working masses, pitting slave labourers and their discriminated descendants against relatively privileged white wage slaves in a competitive race to the bottom. Today, they are uniting in the fight for justice and equality. Equally remarkable is the continuing. leadership role of women, especially African American women in the founding of both the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the Womens March against Trumps Inauguration. The participation of young and old, LGBT and physically challenged folks is also to be remarked.

This convergence of these freedom struggles across deeply-rooted racial divides promises to open new paths as US social movements emerge from the Covid confinement. Even more remarkable, albeit limited, are incidents, also recorded on citizen video, of individual cops apologizing for police violence, hugging victims, and taking the knee with demonstrators. Public officials, like the Mayor of Los Angeles, have also been obliged to meet with the protestors and to apologize for the previous racist remarks. Moreover, as we shall see below, serious cracks have emerged in the unity of the US military, both among the ranks, which are 40 per cent African American, and also among top officers. Such is the power of this massive, self-organized, inter-racial movement demanding freedom and justice for all (as stated in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Republic).

Today, after ten days, during which the protests have continued to increase numerically and to deepen in radical content, cracks have opened in the defenses of the ruling corporate billionaire class and have reached the White House, where Donald J. Trump, the self-deluded, ignorant bully and pathological liar supposedly in charge, has finally been challenged by his own appointed security officials.

It must be said that todays billionaire ruling class has the representative it deserves in Trump, and the Donalds ineptitude, visible to all, is symbolic of its historic incapacity to retain the right to rule. Trumps flawed, self-centered personality incarnates the narrow class interests of the 0.01% who own more than half the wealth of the nation. His obvious selfishness exemplifies that of the billionaires he represents (and pretends to be one of). Out of his willful ignorance, Trump speaks for a corporate capitalist class indifferent to the global ecological and social consequences of its ruthless drive to accumulate, indifferent to truth and justice, indifferent indeed to human life itself.

Trumps clownish mis-rule has embarrassed the state itself. First came the childish spectacle of the most powerful man in the world hunkering down in his basement bunker and ordering the White House lights turned off (so the demonstrators outside couldnt see in?). Then came the order to assault peaceful protestors with chemical weapons so as to clear the way for President Trump to walk to the nearby Presidents Church (which he never attends and whose pastor he didnt bother to consult) in order to have himself photographed brandishing a huge white Bible (which he has most likely never read) like a club.

Trump, whose only earned success in life was his long-running reality-TV show The Apprentice, apparently devised this bizarre publicity stunt to rally his political base of right-wing Christians and show how religious he is. But it backfired when the Bishop of Washington pointed out that Jesus preached love and peace, not war and vengeance. The next day, even demagogues like Pat Robinson of the far-right wing Christian Coalition spoke out against him, while the anti-Trump New York Times triumphantly headlined: Trumps Approval Slips Where He Cant Afford to Lose It: Among Evangelicals.

Let us pause to note that American Christianity, like every other aspect of American civilization, is a knot of contradictions all rooted in the fundamental problem of the color line. Although the racist, conservative, pro-Israel, Christian right has been the core of Trumps support, liberation theology and the black church have long been the base of the Civil Rights movement for equality. Indeed, George Floyd the murdered African-American (known as Big Floyd and the Gentle Giant) was himself a religiously motivated community peacemaker. So are many of the demonstrators, white and black, chanting No Justice, No Peace.

Trumps phony populist act may have helped catapult him into office in 2016 (thanks to Republican-rigged electoral system and despite losing the popular vote by three million votes), but as Abraham Lincoln once remarked of the American public, You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cant fool all of the people all of the time. Today, Trumps time is up.

To me, the most emblematic image of the moment is that of a self-deluded Donald Trump, huddled (like Hitler) in his underground bunker with the White House lights turned off, shivering with fear and rage at the demonstrators outside, and threatening to sick (purely imaginary) vicious dogs on them. Trump has the Doberman mentality of the junk-yard owner from Queens he incarnates; he is the spiritual descendant of the slave-catcher Simon Legree chasing the escaped slave Eliza with his dogs (see Uncle Toms Cabin).

Vicious dogs of the bourgeoisie: thats what the police are paid to be (even if a few of them may turn out to be basically friendly German Shepherds underneath, like those who took the knee with the protestors). Their canines are the sharp teeth of the American state. Along with the Army, cops are the essence of the actual deep state which Marx defined as special bodies of armed men, courts, prisons, etc. (as opposed to the people armed in democratically-run popular militias).

Although subservient to the bourgeois state, this police apparatus, like the Mafia with which it is sometimes entwined, has a corporate identity of its own based on omert or strict group loyalty. This unwritten rule is the notorious Blue Wall of Silence which prevents cops who see their brothers committing graft and violent abuses from speaking out or testifying against them. The blue wall assures police impunity and is organized through police unions which, although affiliated with the AFL-CIO, are violently reactionary, anti-labour, and pro-Trump. The President of the International Police Union has been filmed wearing a red Make America Great Again hat and shaking hands with Trump at a political rally, while protesters in Minneapolis have been calling for the ousting of Bob Kroll, the local police union president who has been widely criticized for his unwavering support of officers accused of wrongdoing.

The Blue Wall of silence extends up the repressive food chain to prosecutors, District Attorneys, and even progressive mayors, like New Yorks Bill Di Blazio, who defended New York police driving their SUVs straight into a crowd of demonstrators, although his own mixed-race daughter was arrested as a Black Lives Matter demonstrator! Di Blazio, like his reactionary predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, former law and order District Attorney and current Trump advisor, knows that his political future is dependent on the good will of the Police Union (like junk-yard owners who are afraid of their own vicious dogs).

This customary coddling of the police even extended to the New York Times initial coverage of violent police attacks on members of the press in Minneapolis and elsewhere. In its report, The Times hid behind a twisted notion of objectivity (blame both sides) to avoid pointing fingers at cops, thus observing the blue wall of silence even when reporters are victims. (At this writing, over a thousand such attacks have been recorded.) Using passive voice rather than naming the actual assailants (brutal racist cops), the New York Times report conflated a single isolated incident where a crowd attacked news people from Trumps FOX network, with systematic, nationwide police attacks on members of the media.

A week later, that sacrosanct Blue Wall is beginning to crumble. Not only have the D.A. and Governor of Minnesota been forced to escalate the charges against Derek Chauvin, George Floyds killer, to second degree murder (why not first?) and arrest his three police accomplices, the latter have begun to rat each other out. Facing 40 years in prison and a bail of at least $750,000, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng, both rookies, are blaming Chauvin, the senior officer at the scene and a training officer, while Tou Thao, the other former officer charged in the case, had reportedly cooperated with investigators before they arrested Chauvin.

Such is the power of todays mass Black Lives Matter uprising, that it has opened a breach in US capitalisms most important defense wall: the military. For if the police are American capitalisms junk yard Dobermans, the Armed Forces are basis of its domination over the world. And if the cry for equal justice has opened a tiny crack in the Blue Wall of Silence, the breach in the ranks of the US military, which is 40% colored and recruited from the poorest classes of American society, is more like a gulf.

The rank and file in todays US Army, Navy and Air Forces are a reflection of American society, of a population of mainly poor and minority people for whom the military provides one possible solution to unemployment and discrimination. The mood of the troops reflects that of the communities they are recruited from, and their officers, who are responsible for their morale, discipline, and loyalty, must be sensitive to their feelings. This situation is epitomized by the following quotations from the New York Times:

Chief Master Sgt. Kaleth O. Wright of the Air Force, who is black, wrote an extraordinary Twitter thread declaring, I am George Floyd.

The Navys top officer, Adm. Michael M. Gilday, said in a message on Wednesday to all sailors: I think we need to listen. We have black Americans in our Navy and in our communities that are in deep pain right now. They are hurting.

Although Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, released a message to top military commanders on Wednesday affirming that every member of the armed forces swears an oath to defend the Constitution, which he said gives Americans the right to freedom of speech, The Generals and Admirals, retired and active, who have been speaking out for racial justice and the rights of demonstrating citizens this week are not all sudden converts to the cause of peace and justice. Rather, the America officer class is sharply focused on its global mission, which is to protect American domination around the world by leading these troops to kill and be killed in bloody civil war situations in mainly non-white countries.

We are at the most dangerous time for civil-military relations Ive seen in my lifetime, Adm. Sandy Winnefeld, a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an email. It is especially important to reserve the use of federal forces for only the most dire circumstances that actually threaten the survival of the nation. Our senior-most military leaders need to ensure their political chain of command understands these things.

For the troops, policing the world for capitalism is an endless, incompressible and demoralizing mission of violent counter-insurrection from which they return physically and psychologically damaged, often haunted by guilt, only to face unemployment and lack of support from the public and the underfunded Veterans Authority. As for the officers, it is a question of maintaining discipline and morale. The top brass know that deploying troops trained in counter-insurrection to control civil disturbances on US soil would inevitably have one of two negative results (if not both): 1. Un-acceptable violence against civilians and/or 2. fraternization with the protestors, mutiny, and disobedience among the ranks. Hence the Pentagons open break with their law and order Commander in Chief. The danger of fraternization is especially real in National Guard regiments, whose troops are drawn from the populations of the states their families live in.

Senior Pentagon leaders worry that a militarized and heavy-handed response to the protests, Mr. Trumps stated wish, will turn the American public against the troops, like what happened in the waning years of the Vietnam War, when National Guard troops in combat fatigues battled antiwar protesters at Kent State. Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denounced the use of the military to support the political acts of a president who had laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country.

Although the eternal showman Trump apparently appointed Mark Milley chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the basis of the Generals physical resemblance to John Wayne, Milley happens to be a serious military historian. So is Secretary of Defense Esper. Both are aware that revolutions can only happen when there is a split in the ranks of the soldiers. In their West Point courses on counter-insurgency, they have certain read of the classic example of Russia in 1917 when the Cossacks were sent to block the demonstrators in St. Petersburg. These fierce cavalry men sat passively still on their horses as the strikers dove between their legs, leading Trotsky to famously remark that the revolution passes underneath the belly of a Cossacks horse. And indeed, not long after this incident the Russian soldiers formed Soviets (councils) and joined the workers and peasants in overthrowing the Czar.

Of course Russia in 1917 was in the middle of a social crisis, led by an inept, self-deluded Autocrat, bleeding lives and treasure into an endless, pointless foreign war. Nothing even vaguely similar could ever happen in optimistic, triumphant, happy, America under the firm leadership and uniting presence of our loveable President, Donald J. Trump.

American society has been riddled with contradictions since its beginnings, and these contradictions, rooted in race and class, are still being played today out in the streets of over 150 US cities. Todays uprisings, interracial from the beginning, express popular frustration that after centuries of struggle against slavery, after a bloody fratricidal Civil War in the 1860s and after the second American revolution of Reconstruction, after the Civil Rights movement and the urban riots of the 1960s, the lives of the descendants of black slaves are still not safe in the land that first proclaimed the human right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The American Revolution of the 18th century professed the universal principle, as expressed in the 1776 Declaration of Independence that All men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. Yet, despite the participation of free blacks in the Revolution (Crispus Attucks), that promised equality was quickly contradicted by the inclusion in the US Constitution of notorious clauses which not only institutionalized black slavery in the American Republic, but also assured the permanent predominance in the federal government for the slaveholding Southern states.

The electoral system created by that slave-owners Constitution was based on the relative male populations of the several states, however allowed the Southerners to include their slaves as three fifths of a man (!) in the census. Thus the minority of white Southerners could always outvote the more populous North and dominate the Union. This hypocritical compromise was the price of national unity in a nation half-free and half-slave. Accordingly, ten of the first twelve American Presidents were slave-owners, and more and more such compromises favoring the slave-owner interests were introduced as new states were added to the Union, spreading the Southern slave empire further and further west. This rickety, lopsided Federal Union based on Southern domination held until 1860.

However, when Northern moderate Abraham Lincoln took office as President in 1861, most of the slave-owning states seceded from the Union, formed a rebellious Confederacy, launched a war on the United States, and sought recognition from Great Britain the Confederacys main customer for slave-grown cotton. It is often been argued that the bitterly fought US Civil War, which lasted four years and registered higher casualty rates than even WWI, was not really about slavery. But it was. To hide this ugly truth, the white Southerners still call it the War Between the States. Yet the war was precipitated by white Abolitionists like John Brown, who aided and provoked slave rebellions. Moreover, the huge numbers of young farmers and mechanics who volunteered and even re-enlisted to fight for the North knew they were fighting for human freedom, as their correspondence with their families and hometown newspapers indicated.

Finally, the Civil War, long a bloody stalemate, was won by the Union North only after Lincoln unleashed the fighting power of the Negro slaves in the South by reluctantly issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, as Karl Marx, writing on behalf of anti-slavery British textile workers, had urged American President in a famous letter. Soon, slaves began escaping from their plantations and flocking to the Union Armies, depriving the white South of much of its black labour force. The Union Army fed them, immediately put them to work, and later enrolled them in Negro regiments who fought bravely and effectively to defeat the slaveocracy. Not about slavery?

Marx, speaking for the boycotting white English textile workers, had explained their unity with the slaves: Labour in the white skin can never be free as long as labour in the black skin is branded. A century and a half later, African-American workers in the US are no longer branded like their enslaved ancestors, but even today the color of their skin brands them and makes them prey to oppressors, like bosses, landlords, discriminatory banks, and the violent racist police who, up to now, have correctly assumed they can mistreat and even murder them with impunity.

The tragedy of the Civil War, which as we have seen was fought over slavery, is that although the North won the War, the South won the peace. Lincoln was shot in 1865, and his Vice-President, a border state Republican name Johnson, had strong pro-slavery Southern sympathies, and he used his power to sabotage the efforts to reconstruct the slave South on a new basis of freedom and equality. Although the Union passed three Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution, granting the former slaves and their descendants citizenship and full civil rights including the ballots. Reconstruction of the South was a Second American Revolution, making real and legal the freedom and equality promised by the Revolution of 1776.

Tragically, under President Johnson the former Confederate leaders, instead of being tried for treason, were pardoned and allowed to take high office. Supported by armed mobs of whites, they proceeded to discourage the newly-freed slaves from voting and owning property through Ku Klux Klan racist terror, even though the South was still occupied by victorious Union troops. President Johnson was impeached (but not convicted) by Congress, and by the time President Grant took office and attempted to use the Federal Troops occupying the South to protect the nascent democracy of elected Negroes, it was too late. Thousands of Northern whites went South to help newly freed blacks through literacy and political education, at the risk of being lynched by local racists. Great progress was made and Americas first free public school system established (only to be later forcibly segregated and privatized by racists).

Through armed white violence, slavery had been replaced by segregation, inequality and a racist economic system of boss over black. In 1876, twenty years after the Civil War, the ruling classes of the industrial North and formerly rebellious cotton-producing South united politically. They celebrated this ruling class unity by withdrawing the Federal occupation from the south, leaving the Negroes helpless before the armed KKK and racist local authorities. Why? The troops were needed in the North to crush the violent strikes of the industrial workers, who were organizing unions (but largely on a whites only basis). Later, unwitting blacks were brought North by train to be used as strikebreakers another ploy in the capitalists racist divide and rule.

By 1900, W.E.B. Dubois, the black Marxist sociologist, historian of Reconstruction, and founder of the NAACP, was describing the US as a country with two working classes, one black one white. African American troops fought bravely (in segregated units) for the United States in the First World War in the hope of having their manhood recognized, but they returned to face increased racist repression. President Wilson pronounced Griffiths racist pro-KKK film Birth of a Nation a masterpiece, and 1919 was a record year for lynchings, especially of uppity black soldiers who returned in uniform.

The struggle to make the Second American Revolution established by the post- Civil War Reconstruction Amendments a reality was resumed after the Second World War and gave birth to the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s in the hope of completing Americas promise, the dream of Martin Luther King. Federal troops were once more mobilized to prevent white racist mobs from attacking African Americans to exercise their legal right vote and attend the same schools as whites: by Eisenhower in 1956 at Little Rock and by JFK in Mississippi in 1962. Yet once again, despite legal victories and more blacks in visible the media and government, nothing fundamental changed on the ground. Sixty years later, African Americans are just a poor, just as segregated, just as excluded from first-class health, education and housing services, and just as subject to racist police violence as were their grand parents.

The murder of George Floyd is said to be the straw that broke the camels back. It was the straw that set fire to the haystack of anger and frustration that was smoldering for generations. Will this blaze be yet another fire of straw, fated to die out? I think not. The context has changed. US society, like the whole capitalist world, is in crisis. The economy, with productivity declining, with inequality and unemployment increasing, with debt and speculation ballooning was already in crisis. The pandemic pushed it over the top, and the resulting recession has only just begun. Thirty years after the post Cold War new world order of democracy, peace and un-ending growth was proclaimed, few Americans believe that their lives and those of their children likely to improve, what with social and ecological doom impending. The system has little to promise them and its leaders little to inspire confidence in them. In other words, they are no longer politically and socially hegemonic and must depend on coercion to hold power. Today, the credibility and legitimacy of that coercive power, the cops and army, is being called into question by the masses, white and colored, demanding justice and equality.

The police may well continue to attack the demonstrators and while Trump and his followers call for militarization of the country in the name of protecting property, law, and order, it is clear that a breach has been opened in the Blue Wall of Silence protecting the privileges of the billionaire class against the power of the working masses who today face not only a political crisis but also the crisis of an ongoing pandemic, the crisis of poverty and mass unemployment, and the impending climate crisis of which Covid is a symptomatic forerunner.

Throughout US history, from the white Abolitionists, to the Yankee Civil War volunteers, to the Northern carpetbaggers who worked for Reconstruction, to the white Civil Rights marchers of the 1960s to the millions of whites in the streets proclaiming Black Lives Matter today, the unity in struggle of Americas racialized peoples has brought about whatever progress in freedom and democracy this race-benighted Republic has ever known.

Like the British workers in Marxs day, todays privileged white demonstrators, themselves victims, to a lesser degree, of American capitalism, know in their hearts that they can never be free and never be safe from state violence until Black Lives really do matter and black skins are no longer branded. They know that Black and White Unite and Fight is the only possible way to block authoritarian government, prevent fascism, establish democracy, institute class equality and face the future with a modicum of hope.

Richard Greeman has been active since 1957 in civil rights, anti-war, anti-nuke, environmental and labour struggles in the U.S., Latin America, France (where he has been a longtime resident) and Russia (where he helped found the Praxis Research and Education Center in 1997). He maintains a blog at richardgreeman.org.

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Ten Days that May Have Changed the World - The Bullet - Socialist Project

Solidarity Will Turn the Impossible Into the Inevitable – Common Dreams

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

Starting with the original sin of slavery, those in our nation who were born White have exerted power over those who were born Black. Black Lives Matter is a powerful response to the implicit attitude that Black lives are disposable.

As horrific as it was to watch the torture and murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police, all of us owe a debt of gratitude to the brave young woman who captured it on video for all the world to see. (She is being rewarded with harassment and the need to move to an undisclosed location.)

In response to that unspeakably painful video, people are rising up across the country in massive protests seeking to finally eradicate the systemic forces that led to Mr. Floyds torture and death. An underlying message of the protests is that if any of us is treated as disposable, we all are in danger.

Those protesting represent all races, ages, genders, and sexual orientations. One of the tens of thousands of Americans who joined protests demanding that our country value Black lives was Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old peace activist. During the June 4 protest in his hometown of Buffalo, Gugino unthreateningly walked up to a group of police. They responded by violently shoving him, knocking him to the ground, where he hit his head and lay unmoving and bleeding.

"An underlying message of the protests is that if any of us is treated as disposable, we all are in danger."

The police let him lie on the ground, by himself, unconscious, blood pouring from his head. He was eventually taken to a hospital, acutely injured, in serious condition. Gugino is White, but because of his decision to stand up for Black lives, his life was treated as disposable, too.

In blasting the unconstitutional, dictatorial use of force by President Donald Trump against peaceful protesters, General James Mattis stated, Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that The Nazi slogan for destroying us ... was 'Divide and Conquer.'

The Normandy invasion marked the turning point in our fight against Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime, which saw many lives as disposable. The German language even has words for these supposedly lesser humans. Untermensch are sub-humans, those who are useful for slave labor. Lebensubwertes leben are an even lower category, life unworthy of life. Those the Nazis deemed unworthy of lifeJews, homosexuals, people with disabilities, among otherswere taken to concentration camps for extermination.

If you dont understand that todays protests are in opposition to the same forces that motivated Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime, you are part of the problem. It is time for people of all races, all ages, all religions, genders, and sexual orientations to stand together in solidarity and protest under the banner of Black Lives Matter.

Former President Jimmy Carter clearly sees the deeper connection: People of power, privilege, and moral conscience must stand up and say no more to a racially discriminatory police and justice system, immoral economic disparities between whites and blacks, and government actions that undermine our unified democracy.

As humans, all of us are physically vulnerable. From the dawn of humanity, we have engaged in collective activity to reduce that physical vulnerability. Police, in theory organized to reduce our common physical vulnerability, have instead become an instrument of increased physical vulnerability of some humans simply because of the color of their skin.

"It is well past time for systemic police reform. To those who say that it is just a few bad apples, they should remember that a few bad apples rot the entire bunch."

It is well past time for systemic police reform. To those who say that it is just a few bad apples, they should remember that a few bad apples rot the entire bunch. A 2006 FBI report reveals that law enforcement has been infiltrated by White Supremacists.

The institution of White Supremacy cannot be reformed. It must be dismantled to safeguard everyone. We need accountability, including the following actions:

1. Defund police budgets by at least 15 percent and allocate those funds to social programs and affordable housing.

2. Every year in cities across this country, millions of dollars are awarded in civil lawsuits to settle cases of police misconduct. Instead of the money coming from the citys budget in general, it should be taken from both the police department budget and the salary/pension of the officer in question. This, more than anything else, will immediately alter the behavior of rogue cops.

3. Prohibit asset forfeiture unless there is a conviction; when there is, the funds should go to the community, not to the police, who should not have a self-interest in forfeitures.

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4. For every police force, create a citizen review board with the power to fire, indict, and prosecute officers for misconduct.

5. Any officer who causes the loss of life of any person who is unarmed and found to be innocent of any felonious wrongdoing should be automatically fired and subject to prosecution.

6. Create national databases for all police shootings and for all complaints filed against individual police officers.

7. Require all police to wear body cameras and keep them turned on when in the community. If a complaint is made against a police officer whose camera was off, the irrebuttable presumption is that the complaint is accurate.

8. Ban all chokeholds and neck restraints.

9. Require police that work in a community to live in that community.

10. Restrict the power of police unions to negotiating only about wages, hours, and benefits. Eliminate their involvement in issues of police misconduct.

But reforming the police and increasing physical security is only the first step. To build a more perfect union, we must work for economic justice and security for all.

Measures that would benefit all of usbut especially Black people and other people of colorinclude increasing the minimum wage, strengthening workers ability to join together and collectively bargain, expanding Social Security, and enacting an improved Medicare for All. Increased economic justice and security also mean ensuring that we have clean water to drink and air to breathe, as well as safe food to eat.

"Measures that would benefit all of usbut especially Black people and other people of colorinclude increasing the minimum wage, strengthening workers ability to join together and collectively bargain, expanding Social Security, and enacting an improved Medicare for All. Increased economic justice and security also mean ensuring that we have clean water to drink and air to breathe, as well as safe food to eat."

The intertwined crises of a worldwide pandemic, economic collapse, and racial injustice have shined bright spotlights on long-simmering problems. Exposed by the crises is that people of color disproportionately hold essential jobs that are dangerous and life-threatening.

Laid bare is the fact that Black people have disproportionately suffered premature death due to a number of discriminatory factors, including the lesser ability to access high quality health care. Laid bare is their disproportionate economic insecurity. And laid bare is the fact that their lives are disproportionately treated as disposable.

People of color disproportionately suffer these threats, but no one is immune. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick infamously called on older Americans to sacrifice their lives to protect Wall Streets profits because theres more important things than living.

Similarly, Rep. Trey Hollingsworth (R-IN), argued that saving the economy was more important than preventing the deaths from COVID-19, disproportionately suffered by seniors, people with disabilities, and Black people. He condescendingly claimed that deciding to treat some lives as disposable was to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say This is the lesser of these two evils.

No life is disposable. No human is inherently superior to any other. Today is one of those moments in history when the impossible turns into the inevitable. The nations Founders wrote that all of us are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. If all of us stand together and make our voices heard, we can finally, together, make that inspiring goal a reality for one and all.

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Solidarity Will Turn the Impossible Into the Inevitable - Common Dreams

Forum, June 6: America is reaping what it has sown – Valley News

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

Published: 6/5/2020 10:00:22 PM

Modified: 6/5/2020 10:00:10 PM

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said a riot is the language of the unheard. While not condoning violence, much less encouraging it, I am compelled to observe that the sometimes-violent methods recently adopted by protestors seeking redress of long-festering social issues is, sadly, understandable. When a match is tossed into a pile of dry brush, the result is as predictable as it is tragic.

The unrest seen in many parts of our nation this past week following yet another egregious policing overreach that caused the death of a fellow citizen, a black American, is not, in my view, an overreaction.

This unrest rises from a deep foundation: more than four centuries of exclusion, injustice, emotional abuse, lack of basic human decency, and yes violence systematically perpetrated by our establishment institutions and, via our votes, by ourselves upon our fellow American citizens of differing genetic lineage.

Violence begets violence; mistreatment begets mistrust. Slavery. The lack of any meaningful economic justice post-slavery. Lynching. Jim Crow. The unrealized promise of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Separate but equal. Systemic racism. Mass incarceration. Wage inequality. Opportunity inequity. Rising from all of these, black Americans to this day have a palpable fear of being found suspect based only on the color of their skin, a fear I can never know.

Whatever the recent violence, it falls far short of the cumulative scale of these past sins, sins so long unaddressed as to embed them in the American soul. We reap what we sow, and weve been sowing a crop of racism in this nation for a very long time.

Therefore, the noteworthy news is not the violence but rather, in the face of the past, the praiseworthy restraint exhibited by the vast majority of protestors.

MARK KIRK

Unity

Rising to meat demand (May 24) is another Valley News article fostering animal cruelty. The demand for animal flesh, secretions and dead embryos is a false demand there are no nutritional needs to eat animals and therefore no ethical reasons exist to force-breed and kill animals for consumption. And Vermont Packinghouses claim of humane slaughter is a joke. Unnecessary killing is not humane.

Animal-free diets are not fads; they are the only ones humans can afford if we want a future. Popular Mechanics reported that plant-based diets are healthiest for humans, the planet and animals. The World Health Organization categorizes processed meat as a carcinogen. A number of studies have suggested that dairy products are a risk factor for prostate cancer. These science-based truths are what our family, including the dogs, live by without problems.

Kaiser Permanente, the largest health care management company in the U.S., has a 36-page ebooklet about the advantages of plant diets. Humana, the third-largest insurance company, trains doctors in plant-based health. The U.N. urges everyone to eat plant-based diets as the surest and least destructive way to slow global warming and to end hunger and starvation because 80% of farmland grows monocrops for farmed animals, croplands that in the U.S. alone could feed 800 million people. Worldwide, farmlands could produce ample food to feed all humanity healthful plant-based meals, and reduce the greenhouse gases from the farmed animal industry that drive global warming, and dramatically reduce the poisoning of the land, water and life with runoff from farming animals fed antibiotics and ground up garbage. And it would end the slaughter of 3 trillion animals annually for human food.

Why does the Valley News promote animal-based foods and print articles about slaughterhouses, for example, as if they are necessary? Why take the corporate oppressors side with language like stunning unruly animals instead of writing animals struggling for their lives? To not tell the whole story with compassion is lazy reporting.

MARGARET D. HURLEY

Claremont

My name is Keith Stern and I am announcing my campaign for a Windsor County Senate seat.

Some of you may recognize me as a candidate for governor two years ago. My platform has not changed. I want to see a more responsible budget, end Act 46, and make sure Act 250 goes back to its original goal and not become an excessively restrictive hurdle to responsible development. Above anything, the federal and state constitutions must be followed to avoid an abusive government.

Humorist Dave Barry once said that Democrats are good people with good intentions but are incompetent. They would stop to help someone change a tire and end up setting the car on fire. They have good intentions but they fail to understand how to accomplish their goals, so they end up hurting us with ineffective and restrictive laws. We can see this every day with struggling businesses, low wages and an overall cost of living that exceeds our wages. Affordable housing is a major issue here because of excessive regulations for building, high property taxes, and lack of landlord protection against destructive, disruptive and deadbeat tenants. Ultimately, it isnt the landlords who bear the cost, it is the tenants. I will work to fix these issues to create more affordable housing. At the same time, I will introduce an effective tenant protection bill as well.

The cost of health insurance is very high in comparison to other states, again due to overregulation. I will introduce a bill that will lower health care and health insurance costs.

I hope you visit my Facebook page, Keith Stern for Windsor County, and see how a vote for me will be a vote for lowering taxes, a better, more cost-effective education system, and a stronger economy.

KEITH STERN

North Springfield

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Forum, June 6: America is reaping what it has sown - Valley News

A WORD FROM THE CHAIRMAN – TheRecordLive.com

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

Why am I a Democrat?

I am a Democrat because I believe in social justice. I believe in equality before the law for every person, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or social status. The American ideal is in the Declaration of Independence, which says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness". As a nation we have never achieved that lofty goal, but since our founding, we have moved slowly and unevenly toward it.

No political party is perfect, but the Democratic Party has done by far the most to bring about social justice in our country. Since the coming of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in 1932, the Democratic Party has given us Wage and Hour laws, Child Labor laws, the G.I. Bill, the Federal Housing Act (FHA), the FDIC, Medicare, Medicaid, The Affordable Care Act, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Head Start, the Peace Corp, the National Institutes of Health, the National Labor Relations Act, and many more. The Republican Party has opposed or tried to water down those progressive laws but there is no doubt that we have all been elevated because of them.

My life experience as a Baptist Christian, a lawyer and a historian has molded me into a strong believer in social justice. The Bible has over 2,000 passages in it emphasizing social justice, and Jesus' earthly ministry was about justice for the poor and downtrodden. My profession as a trial lawyer has driven me to believe in the rule of law, and to fight for justice for my clients. As a historian I have studied our slow and uneven progress toward equality for all Americans. In my long life I have personally witnessed the collapse of Jim Crow laws, Segregation and the success of the Civil Rights Movement but now I am seriously concerned about the present state of our country. For the past forty years, our progress toward equality under the law has stalled, and now some people want to turn back the clock. America's great middle class is shrinking, not growing. When the top 1% of our population possesses 40% of the nation's wealth, and the bottom 80% possesses only 7%, something is seriously wrong. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. That has never worked in any nation, and it must be must be reversed. I'm not against people getting rich and I don't support state socialism, but serious reform is needed, and only the Democratic Party has proposals that can accomplish it. We need fairer tax laws and more social programs that promote legal equality and more opportunity for the underprivileged and less fortunate, and the dwindling middle class must be preserved. But we need more than changed laws. We need changed American hearts, minds, and attitudes about "the least of these" in our society. "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" means universal medical care, a good education for all of our children, accessibility to decent housing, a fair minimum wage, and an absence of discrimination because of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. "A rising tide lifts all boats" and the water is very shallow in today's America.

We are at a critical point in our nation's history. The 2020 election is the most important since 1860. What direction are we going to take? Are we going to move toward the Constitution's goal of "forming a more perfect union", or are we going to stay divided and unequal? History will be kind to leaders who, although imperfect, are dedicated to the principle "that all men are created equal". The choice is clear. Either we continue down the disastrous road of division and inequality or we move toward the goal of equality and "a more perfect union". I know that if America continually moves toward the ideal set forth in the Declaration of Independence, we will be prosperous and unified. America's "original sin" of slavery, white supremacy, and racism must be expunged from our national culture. The Democratic Party is the only party moving in the right direction toward being "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Martin Luther King, Jr. quoting a pre-civil war preacher said, "The arc of moral history is long, but it bends toward justice". I believe that and that is why I am a Democrat. I hope that someday soon I can say that is why I am an American, because when that day comes, America will truly be great.

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A WORD FROM THE CHAIRMAN - TheRecordLive.com

Opinion: Why the rage? Some words about violence and human rights – Long Beach Post

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

People Post is a space for opinion pieces, letters to the editor and guest submissions from members of the Long Beach community. The following is an op-ed submitted by L.S. Pearce, a Long Beach based therapist and clinician, with a lifelong passion for supporting human rights, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Long Beach Post.

Editors note: This opinion piece contains language some readers may find objectionable.

I was 12 when the Rodney King riots happened. A group of cops was seen on tape beating a black man senseless, and for maybe the first time white America got to witness for itself the disparity between black and white policing and get a glimpse of the divide that not all men are equal in America.

It was something people of color had been saying for 100 years and no one was listening, or maybe nobody cared. And so when the cops were acquitted, the rage bubbled over. I lived in Long Beach at the time and I could feel the tension in the air; I remember understanding in my adolescent way that something important was happening, something I wanted to be a part of, but knowing I was too young to be out in the streets with the adults.

That was almost 30 years ago, and its true what they say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Were seeing a particular story emerge as the media attempts to control the narrative, the same way they have with BLM, with Occupy, with the WTO. Newscasters keep referring to the protests as violent, which is a dangerous tactic to demonize protesters, in order to legitimize the eventual use of vicious and abhorrent force that the cops and National Guard will visit upon citizens.

Lets get really clear about something: Property damage is not violence. Violence is what you do to another human being, a living thing, not an inanimate object or a bunch of drywall and bricks in the shape of a building.

Violence is kneeling on a mans neck for 9 minutes while he begs for his life until he dies.

Violence is bursting into the wrong apartment in the middle of the night and gunning a sleeping woman down in her bed.

Violence is shooting a young man with a cellphone in his grandmothers backyard, or a little boy playing with a toy gun.

Violence is shooting a man while he livestreams it, and then joking on video that hes going to need a closed casket.

Violence is 400 years of slavery and rape and whippings and public mutilations that were so commonplace and accepted by society that they were the subject of postcard photos, with a hundred white people standing around smiling and taking an ear or toe of the murdered person home as a souvenir.

Violence is a 150 years of Black Codes and lynchings and Jim Crow and a criminal justice system that targets people of color and ruins families and lives.

You cannot do violence to things. Violence is what you do to people. And so far, I have not seen citizens attacking each other; I have seen them attacking the symbols of their own subjugation: police stations, banks, corporations, the media. And when you decry the violence of smashing a window with the sameor moreferocity than youve decried the brutality and murder of your fellow citizens for hundreds of years, you demonstrate to the black community, to your peers, to your family, to God, that you value insured property that isnt even yours more than human life. Personally, I dont give a fuck about a Starbucks. Burn it to the ground in the neighborhood it gentrified.

A few years ago I read about an epidemic of elderly people choosing suicide rather than homelessness when they have to choose between medicine and housing. Unless something major changes financially in my own life within the next 30 years, Ive gotta be honest, suicide is my retirement plan too. Boomers can turn a blind eye as they enter their golden years, but our generation doesnt harbor any illusions about the grim reality and futures we face. We inherited a dying planet and a nation being constantly plundered by politicians and the companies that own them.

Most of the people of my generation will never be able to buy homes or start families, and we will never be able to retire, working to support ourselves until we literally drop dead. Deaths of despairdrug overdose and suiciderun rampant in economically depressed areas; not just urban centers, but rural communities where coal mining or factory jobs have disappeared.

Mental health problems are on the rise even for people doing well by societys standards, with 1 in 6 Americans being prescribed a psychiatric drug. Wages have been stagnant since the 70s, weve been working harder and longer hours for less and less while the CEOs take home ever more astronomical salaries as they bust unions, automate our jobs away or send them overseas.

The fifth of our earnings removed through tax money rarely goes into infrastructure, education, healthcare, taking care of the elderly, homeless, or veterans or building up our communities in any way, but instead to offset an endless parade of tax cuts and bailouts for the rich, to fund the surveillance infrastructure of our own enslavement, and endless wars to dominate and exploit the resources of other nations. Its been getting worse and its only going to keep getting worse for as long as we let it. And if at this point you cant see any of this incredibly large and legible writing on the wall, well, Id have to question your intelligence. And if you can see it but want to continue to champion a dog-eat-dog system of selfishness and murder and environmental degradation and wage-slavery on the hope of that 0.00000001% chance that you will one day join the 1% and get your own turn at the enhanced exploitation of your fellow human beings and the natural world, well, I would certainly have to question your morality and indeed, your humanity.

This system is sick and evil. That is not to say that we as individuals are evil. Nevertheless, we passively participate in evil every day whether we want to or not. We fund the wars, we buy the cellphones containing materials that were mined with child labor and made in sweatshops so terrible that the companies put out suicide nets. We stand by and film the murder of our neighbors by police because we feel powerless to do anything else. But the truth is, there are other ways. Those ways may be uncomfortable to get to, but are we comfortable now?

In reality, nobody with power ever willingly surrenders it; you take it. America was founded on taking what was not given by the British Empire: our independence. Every meager scrap of human rights has had to be fought and scraped and in some cases died for: womens rights, gay rights, labor rights, civil rights, disability rights. And that fighting and scraping and dying has not been pretty; it has not been warm and fuzzy. That is what we are experiencing now: the discomfort of change, of growth. There is enough on this planet for everyone if we distribute it more equitably rather than allowing 1% to hoard almost 50% of the worlds wealth, and it can be had in ways that dont destroy our own habitat. We just have to decide that enough is enough and were willing to fight for it.

So when I hear people complain about the riots or rather, the REVOLT I hear people crying But why would you burn down your own plantation?! White people, rich people, you are on this same sinking ship, you just have better seats. The poor and the people of color will go under first but it wont be long before you too are thrashing about in the icy sea that will snuff out your life.

Just how long do you think your skin color will protect you when you lose your job in a failing economy, and become one of the desperate dispossessed that the police have free rein to brutalize when you do whatever you need to do to feed your family? Just how long do you think money will isolate you from the ravages of a crumbling society on a dying planetexactly how much money will you need to pay your armed guards to save YOU and YOUR RESOURCES instead of saving their own loved ones?

We can come together, now, while we still have a chance to save ourselves and the whole damn world. Or we can descend over the next two decades into madness and chaos, tearing at ourselves and each other while the world burns around us.

This is nothing new; civilizations have fallen here and there into periods of chaos and destruction throughout time. The only difference is that now we live in a global community and so this time, it will be a global collapse (consider the virus, spreading rapidly around the world and all the shortages and supply chain disruptions it brought, as the dress rehearsal). The only difference is that now the planet is getting hotter and the waters are rising and the land is less farmable and the species we rely on to survive are going extinct.

I am personally very happy and excited that people are rising up and I hope it continues. Because I recognize that Kali is the goddess of both destruction and creation. You cant build a new home until you raze the old one; you cant plant your crops until you till the field. Our society is sick. Burn it all down and lets build something new.

I believe that within the next 30 years, we as individuals will either witness or participate in a fight to the death. Either we will crush this system and crush capitalism, or the system and capitalism will crush us. If we win, we dont know what will happen. Maybe the fault is in our stars and humans are innately terrible and we can never create anything better. We would certainly be stepping into the unknown and that is scary. But if we fail, we do know what will happen: The whole world will perish.

The rest is here:

Opinion: Why the rage? Some words about violence and human rights - Long Beach Post

Reparations to African Americans should be payed by Wall Street – SF Bay Area Indymedia

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

African Americans are used as prison labor a.k.a. slave labor in prisons.

By Lynda Carson - June 8, 2020

There was a time when families, children women and men were sold only two streets away from the present site of the New York Stock Exchange, in New York City.

Reportedly, during the 19th century some of the Wall Street corporations involved in the slave trade included New York Life, AIG, AETNA, and JP Morgan Chase. Some of the former companies that became what are now known as Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo reportedly have also profited from the slave trade.

The largest sugar refiner in the U.S. used to be Domino Sugar, and slave-grown sugar cane was processed by the company.

Brooks Brothers used to process southern cotton grown by the slaves into high-end fashion for the wealthy, and Americas railroads profited from the slave trade.

Presently, China is reportedly is using forced labor in factories that make products for American companies, including the GAP Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, Apple which is headquartered in nearby Cupertino, Cisco Systems which is headquartered in San Jose, and Google which is headquartered in Mountain View, including other major corporations.

In 2007, activist attorney Tony Serra sued the federal government over slave labor practices occurring in the prisons.

According to Wikipedia, Penal labor in the United States is explicitly allowed by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Private publicly traded corporate prison companies such as the GEO Group, and CoreCivic, also profits from penal labor that is also known as slave labor.

George Zoley, is the the CEO of the GEO Group. The GEO Group, Inc., Political Action Committee presently has $644,249 in total receipts.

Another corporate profiteer making lots of money from penal labor also known as slave labor is Damon T. Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic. Presently, the CoreCivic Inc., Political Action Committee (CORECIVIC PAC) has around has $162,329 in total receipts.

During 2019, the Geo Group and CoreCivic faced class action lawsuits alleging prisoner slave labor practices. According to Prison Legal News, Washington State alleged that GEO violated its minimum wage statute, which requires pay of at least $11 an hour, and sought recovery of wages owed to people confined by the company on civil charges. Colorado and California also sued GEO for requiring prisoners to work maintenance jobs for $1 a day, whereas the company receives $160 a month for each prisoner it confines.

Both CoreCivic, and the GEO Group are public trading corporations on Wall Street with stock priced at more than $13 a share presently.

The Federal Prison Industries, Inc., known as Unicor also profits from penal labor also known as slave labor that pays the inmate anywhere from $0.23 to $1.15 per hour.

Reportedly, prison inmates in California are used for firefighting and are only paid slave wages of $2 a day, and $1 dollar an hour for risking their lives to fight active forest fires. Meanwhile, their salaried firefighter co-workers earn around $74,000 a year plus benefits.

It appears that now is the time for Black Lives Matter to seek reparations for slavery and slave labor practices from the Wall Street corporations for African Americans. Especially now while they presently have a lot of attention because of the murder of George Floyd, and other African Americans murdered because of police brutality, and killer cops.

See a few more links below about documented slavery and slave labor practices.

Lynda Carson may be reached at tenantsrule [at] yahoo.com

>>>>>> Slavery Era Insurance Registry

http://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/150-other-prog/10-seir/

>>>>>> Slave Era Insurance Registry Report

http://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/150-other-prog/10-seir/slavery-era-report.cfm

>>>>>> List of slaveholder Names

http://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/150-other-prog/10-seir/slaveholder-names.cfm

>>>>>> List of slave names

http://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/150-other-prog/10-seir/slave-names.cfm

>>>>>> Policy documents submitted by AETNA.

http://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/150-other-prog/10-seir/upload/PolicyDocuments.pdf

>>>>>> New York Life Cancelled Policies

http://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/150-other-prog/10-seir/upload/NYLife_Cancelled_Policies.pdf

>>>>>>

More here:

Reparations to African Americans should be payed by Wall Street - SF Bay Area Indymedia

The Fire This Time – Boston Review

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

Protesters and police in Seattle, Washington, on May 30, 2020. Image: Flickr / Kelly Kline

A Statement from Scholars for Social Justice

At the end of May streets once emptied by COVID-19 have filled with protesters in over 700 U.S.cities and towns. They demand justice in the wake of a new wave of state-sanctioned violence against black peoplein particular the brutal murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arberythat recall with sickening familiarity the police murders of Eric Garner, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and so many other black Americans. They were mothers, fathers, daughters and sons, leaving behind grieving friends and family members and a collective sense of outrage. The Trump administrations ineffectual, race-baiting, and militaristic response to the uprising has only served to heighten the crisis.

Emotions are raw in a nation already mourning a COVID-19 death toll of more than 108,000. The disease has disproportionately taken black and brown lives and pushed low-wage people further into the margins where so many are facing an uncertain economic future. People have taken to the streets to vent their anger and demand systemic change. Black Lives Matter, Justice for George, Say Her Name, and I Cant Breathe have become global rallying cries as protest has spread to Europe, Africa, and South America.

Racism doesnt look only like a knee on the neck. The fires burning on U.S. streets are symbolic of fires that have smoldered for some time. The foundation of racial capitalism produces and reproduces vast racial disparities in wealth, income, job opportunities, education, and health care. Indeed the wealth of the United States was built on a long history of looting the land, labor, and lives of racialized peoples. Many of the most prestigious institutions of higher education where we were trained profited from their involvement in the system of slavery and the continued exploitation of black labor in the years after the end of the Civil War.

Racism doesnt look only like a knee on the neck. The fires burning on U.S. streets are symbolic of fires that have smoldered for some time.

Black people who were able to gain an economic foothold faced violence and looting. During the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, white mobs attacked one of the mostprosperous African American communities in the nation. Over several days the vicious attack on this black communityknown as the Black Wall Streetleft 300 people dead, and businesses looted and destroyed, yet it has been excised from U.S. history. Colonialism and imperialism from Hawaii to Puerto Rico and beyond has generated enormous wealth for the United States, often at the expense of black, indigenous, and other people of color. Immigrant workers, from migrants on farms to employees of meat processing plants toiling in unsafe and exploitative conditions, are criminalized and debased as intruders while simultaneously deemed essential to the U.S. food chain and economy and exploited for their labor. This history of dispossession persists through predatory lending, payday loans, municipal fines and forfeits, and institutionalized disparities in wages and benefitsand it has often been supported by state-sanctioned violence.

In response to protests, many public figures have praised nonviolent demonstration but staunchly condemned more direct forms of confrontation with police. The demand for peaceful, civil, respectable law-abiding engagement with an uncivil and oppressive system negates a long history of civil disobedience, insurgency, and righteous anger by dissenting groups. Protesters disrupt. The impulse to sort protesters and their strategies into acceptable and unacceptable categories reflects Americas racial logic: it tolerates heavily armed, white right-wing protesters and white sports fans destroying property, breaking windows, and setting fires after a victorious game, while criminalizing people defending black lives and opposing police violence.

The impulse to sort protesters and their strategies into acceptable and unacceptable categories reflects Americas racial logic.

Enraged by police executions of unarmed black peopleon top of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the organized abandonment of black communitiesprotesters have in some cases engaged in direct action, disruption, and disorder. That said, the majority of protests have been peaceful despite provocation and violence from the police. Much like the civil rights movement, the violence in todays movement has come largely from the state; over a hundred incidents of police attacks on journalists and countless other episodes of brutality have been recorded since the start of the protests. The police chief in Louisville was fired after officers involved in the fatal shooting of a black business owner had not activated their body cameras, and six officers in Atlanta have been charged after the televised taser attack on two black college students.

In the past, urban rebellions served as important seedbeds for raised consciousness and political organization. Members of the Oakland Black Panthers worked tirelessly to channel anger into organization. Prominent members of organizations like the League of Revolutionary Black workers in Detroit had taken part in the Detroit Uprising in 1967. Welfare rights activists demanding state assistance organized disruptive demonstrations targeting welfare offices. The current protests have targeted businesses and property, not innocent bystanders, unlike the New York City Draft riots of 1863 or the Tulsa Riot of 1921, in which hundreds of black people were murdered.

White supremacist organizations and agent provocateurs have also attempted to sow strife and make the mobilization against police violence seem chaotic and destructive, obscuring the political content that is at the core of the protests. Simultaneously, the outside agitator narrative has been weaponized by politicians to fuel harsh and militaristic crackdowns on sincere dissent. The news medias disproportionate coverage of fires, theft, and vandalism, at the expense of more systematic analysis of the root causes, has opened the door for President Trump to insist that he is the friend to all peaceful protesters, while berating governors nationwide for their weakness, demanding arrests and domination, and threatening to turn the military against citizens and residents. The phrase law and order is a racist dog whistle used to appeal to conservatives and liberals who might decry police violence, but who ultimately support tough policing and believe current problems can be addressed through piecemeal reforms.

As the COVID-19 crisis opened a wedge for unprecedented political possibility, the changes it imposed have also pushed longstanding goals of the left into the mainstream.

But COVID-19 makes a return to normal impossible and presents an opportunity for imagining a new world. Indeed a transformative vision has the potential to erupt from the ashes. Longstanding local organizations and community activists are calling for political accountability, structural transformation, prison abolition, democratic engagement, and social investment. In this moment of crisis people are coming together across difference, building and rebuilding, protecting each other and finding mutual goals. Recently, in Washington, D.C., dozens of protesters found overnight shelter in the home of a stranger who protected them from arrest. While some black women mayors have emerged as keepers of law and order, black women and feminist activists on the ground are exercising a different kind of leadership. Their leadership is horizontal, collaborative, group-centered, decentralized, and does not rely on a singular figure or a centralized authority. The Movement for Black Lives, for example, organized a nationwide call on to forge abolitionist strategy during a week of action as part of the people of colorled Rising Majority coalition.

As the COVID-19 crisis opened a wedge for unprecedented political possibility, the changes it imposed have also pushed longstanding goals of the left into the mainstream. Decarceration has unprecedented traction as jails reduced their detained populations, in humanitarian releasesdemonstrating, in effect, that many people in jails did not need to be there in the first place. Domestic violence and homelessness, likewise, gained new visibility as stay-at-home orders highlighted the precarity of those who could not shelter in place safely. Essential workers, the elderly, people without resources, black, indigenous, and other people of color have been COVID-19s greatest victims, setting in sharp relief the glaring economic disparities in the United States. While they have been forgotten by policy makers, they have gained greater visibility. They have organized work stoppages in Amazon warehouses and hospitals and created mutual aid networks. They have gained support beyond daily 7 p.m. clanging of pots and pans, a sound which has been drowned out by protest and demands for even more far-reaching reforms.

Thousands of people have taken to the streets to reopen the United States in ways that seemed unimaginable just one week ago. And as protests spread globally, it echoes a rich history of both international support for the black liberation movement as well as the black freedom movements support for national liberation struggles all over throughout the world.

These protests are too widespread to simply go away. Protesters have made it clear that there will be no peace without justice on a multiple of terrains: from prisons, to voting rights, policing, extreme inequality and corporate greed, excesses of U.S. foreign policy, intimate partner violence, environment, and health care. The uprisings have pushed us further from the notion of a return to normal. What are the possibilities for a more just future?

Original post:

The Fire This Time - Boston Review

White Supremacism and the Earth System – Resilience

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Danzig

The US is on the brink of becoming a racist failed state. It is no accident that this terrible moment arrives in the midst of a global pandemic; an escalating economic crisis; an oil sector meltdown. This is a perfect storm of simultaneous, complex crises. How did we get here? How do we solve this?

If were not confused, perplexed and alarmed about this intensifying sequence of overlapping crises, we are not paying attention.

Its time to start paying attention. Right now: We, the human species, stand at the dawn of a great civilizational inflection point. This is the fork in the road. The decisions we, you, make in this moment are about to make history.

The convergence of events we are witnessing is a symptom of a wider process of global systemic decline. This convergence is happening due to the unsustainable nature of a system that can no longer keep going in its current form without sparking further crisis. The ultimate hidden driver is a way of living and being premised on self-maximization through plunder of the Other: whether Others are different humans, different species, or the planet itself.

That is what the Black Lives Matter protests are. They are an uproar from centuries ofinter-generational traumarooted in the systematic enslavement from which the modern industrial capitalist world system emerged, a system that is now in overshoot of planetary boundaries. And so the crisis of white supremacism in the United States is not just about America and its not just about race: its about the Earth, and how American racism represents our broken relationship with our own planet.

So we need to face up to reality if we want to get through this: Until we begin developing the capacity to see and adapt to the complex interconnections between human systems and the wider natural systems in which they are embedded, we will be unable to move off a trajectory of accelerating societal collapse.

Ten years ago, if youd said that America would become engulfed by race riots that would make a civil war look possible, most people would have laughed you out the room. At that time, Id warned that the failure to address the root structural causes of the Crisis of Civilization would lead world governments to become increasingly militarized and authoritarian. Business-as-usual would intensify the risk of political conflict and civil unrest, I argued, and countries like the US would see an escalation of such unrest along ethnic, religious and class lines.

In my book,A Users Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It which integrated the analysis of crises across climate change, energy, food, the economy, state-militarization and terrorism through a systems-lens I urged the need to recognize that all these crises are deeply interconnected through the operation of a single global system.

The failure to do so would guarantee short-sighted emergency responses that focus on the symptomsof crisis rather thanchanging the systemsbehind them government would react to public outrage and political instability through attempting to expand political and military policing powers to stave off growing instability. Id warned that if these trends continue unchecked, our societies will sacrifice liberal values for increasingly polarizing and exclusivist conceptions of group identity which normalize political violence:i.e., militarization.

The events of the past decade have borne out this assessment.

In 2014, in the wake of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, IinterviewedPentagon defense analyst and Iraq War veteran Terron Sims, who is also president of the North Virginia Black Democrats. He told me that if we dont deal with the root cause in terms of widespread racial discrimination against black people, this will be our tomorrow therell come a point where the combination of unaccountable, rampant and racist police repression will inflame community tensions in circumstances of growing levels of deprivation and hopelessness. And thats where race riots could become far more of a norm than we might expect. So unless something changes, yes, Ferguson is our future.

Two years after I spoke to Sims, Iinterviewed Professor Johan Galtung, the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated founding father of peace and conflict studies as a scientific discipline, who had previously predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, along with many other major geopolitical events. Galtung went on to predict that US global power would come to an end by 2020, amidst the emergence of a new phase of reactionary fascism. The election of Donald Trump, he told me, was consistent with his forecast. Many of the processes he described to me as key features of US collapse are accelerating right now in the wake of the pandemic: resurgent white supremacism; deteriorating conditions for minorities; US withdrawal from the very international institutions it helped create as instruments of power projection from the UN, to the WHO to the WTO; and the descent of domestic US politics into polarization and unrest.

Galtung foresaw these events on the basis of a sophisticated complex systems analysis of 15 structural contradictions across, political, economic, cultural, environmental and social spheres. If left unresolved, he argued, these would unravel US society as we know it.

That process is now underway. The great unravelling is happening right now, beneath our feet.

The prescience of both Galtung and Sims demonstrates that we cannot understand this crisis if we insist on seeing racial injustice as separate from wider social, cultural, political and ecological crises.

The eruption of protests across at least 140 cities in the United States, triggered by the racist murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, is the worst outbreak of civil unrest since the 1960s. In at least 21 cities, the National Guard has been deployed as clashes between protestors and police have turned violent.

The protests represent a point-of-no-return emerging from a history of rising civil unrest and entrenched institutional racism, rooted in an inherently destructive model of life. That model connects rampant white supremacism with a predatory socio-economic order hellbent on the destruction of Others a system which Otherizes not just humans, but other species, and even the very natural environment in which we are irretrievably embedded yet blind to in the everyday.

The crisis has prompted further radicalized state, police and military responses, risking an unprecedented expansion of authoritarian powers exemplified in President Donald Trumps call on the US military to quell ongoing unrest in the homeland under the Insurrection Act (which was in play since two years ago as Ivepreviously reported).

Why are these protests happening right now? Why are they unfolding in the midst of a global pandemic? Is there a connection? Or is it just a case of bad luck?

In reality, it is no accident that this unprecedented socio-political crisis is occurring in the midst of a long anticipated pandemic, which as of the end of May had killed 100,000 Americans and driven 40 million into unemployment while overwhelmingly and disproportionately impacting Black and ethnic minority communities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the staggering racial divide that plagues our societies, and our planet. In the US, Black Americans are dying from the disease at a ratenearly three times higherthan white people. In the UK, Black and Asian minority groups aretwice as likely as white Britonsto die if they contract the disease according to Public Health England, with people of Bangladeshi background facing the biggest risk. Other studiessuggestan even worse picture, that Black men andwomen fou>r times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white people. Similar trends have emerged in Europe. In Norway, residents originally born in Somalia faceinfection ratesmore than 10 times above the national average.

We still dont know for sure why this is happening, but the factors arecomplex. Studies indicate that entrenched socio-economic and health inequalities play a direct role, but not the only role. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) tells us that chronic conditions associated with worse COVID-19 outcomes (like diabetes, asthma, hypertension, kidney disease, and obesity) are all more common in ethnic minorities than white populations. But the CDC also identifies other factors: ethnic minorities are more likely to live in more densely populated areas and housing, to rely on public transport, and work in lower paid service jobs with no sick pay. In the UK, many ethnic minorities disproportionately suffer from overcrowding and work as keyworkers or as frontline healthcare staff.

Which makes it all the more shocking given that just days after US police officers wilfully suffocated George Floyd to death, the UK governmentcensoredevidence from its own review into the ethnic disparities in COVID-19 deaths, highlighting the potential role of structural racism and discrimination in driving poorer life chances for minorities. That evidence was supplied by over a thousand community organizations and individuals representing Britons from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds. Their voices were silenced.

When wetrace these complex factors back, we are led inexorably to the elephant in the room: the societal prevalence ofstructural racism.

According toProfessor Sandro Galeaof the Boston University School of Public Health, the core problem is that our society is structured in a way that can deny minority populations, particularly black Americans, access to the resources that generate health.

Health is a symptom and signifier of much deeper socio-economic and political systems. African Americans have the highest poverty rate among racial and ethnic groups, at 27.4 percent. Only 57 percent of black students can access all of the math and science courses needed for college readiness. Black Americans are more likely to live in segregated, economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.

This is not an isolated problem. It is global and systemic.

In 2012, theAnnual Review of Public Healthauthoritativelyconcludedthat:

Disparities in the health of socially and economically disadvantaged compared with more advantaged populations are observed worldwide.

Health disparities are a result of a failure of societies to distribute equitably the resources needed to support health for all. The implications for the injustice of the COVID-19 pandemic are stark. If more minorities are dying, it is because their ethnicity puts them at a health and social disadvantage rooted within the institutions, social stratification, and cultural norms of societies. These are entrenched societal characteristics that are difficult to change, because they provide the underpinnings of power, privilege, and social advantage.

In other words, if more black and brown people are dying from COVID-19, itsbecause our societies are designed that way.

The social structures, that you and me are part of and perpetuate, are killing minorities extending and amplifying the inter-generational trauma thatconnectshistoric colonial structures with contemporary racism directed most viscerally against Black communities.

But the immediate impacts of the pandemic are just the beginning. It is Black and ethnic minorities who have experienced the brunt of the economic fallout. While unemployment rates are rocketing for everyone in the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns, they have beeneven higherfor Black people. The pandemic has amplified pre-existing structural disparities that have meant that minorities are more likely than their white counterparts to be unemployed or in zero-hour contracts.

As COVID-19 lockdowns around the world have ushered in more draconian policing to monitor and enforce social distancing restrictions, it is Black people who face the biggest fall out fromincreasing acts of police brutality and violence this time justified in the name of public health. In the US, Black people are nearlyfive times more likelyto experience police-related injuries than white people. And those who get injured are twice as likely to die from those injuries as their white counterparts. Most people who get stopped by police are Black or Latino. Men who get stopped frequently by police are three times more likely to exhibit post-traumatic stress disorder and high anxiety. People in neighborhoods where pedestrians are more likely to face police questioning are also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma and obesity the very same illnesses which lead to the most severe COVID-19 symptoms.

The pandemic has wrought a perfect storm of disease, violence and poverty onto Black and minority communities across the Western world, amplifying problems they were already facing. In doing so, the murder of George Floyd was a catalyst, a match to long-burning flames, tipping over a declining system into a spiral of chaos.

But this perfect storm of structural racism, effectively weaponized by the COVID-19 pandemic, cannot simply be removed with platitudes of support, affinity and allegiance, or goodwill gestures of solidarity.We have to start by recognizing this structural racism for what it is the extension and legacy of a global imperial system, premised on ecological plunder: A system of accelerating resource extraction and wealth centralization premised on imperial violence that is literally destroying the ecosystems on which all life on Earth depends.

The structural racism behind current national and global health inequalities was woven from the blood of slaves. Slavery lives on in the discriminatory structures that inflict health inequalities across our societies today. In the words of public health expert Professor Sando Galea:

The legacy of slavery, especially, remains core to many present health challenges, undermining health through segregation, mass incarceration, and other pernicious influences. There are even patterns of present-day poor health which roughly match the geographic outlines of where slaves were imprisoned. For example, a high concentration of stroke mortality in the US, especially among African Americans, aligns with where slaves were concentrated in earlier eras a haunting rejoinder to those who would dismiss history as irrelevant to contemporary life and health. These stroke patterns also inform yet another racial health disparity black Americans are at greater risk of stroke than any other group in the US; risk of experiencing a first stroke is about twice as high for blacks than for whites.

As Africana studies pioneer Professor Locklsey Edmondson of Cornell Universitywroteover twenty years ago, the consequences of the slave trade are still secreted in the contemporary world. By conditioning the nature of developing contacts between Europe and Africa, slavery affected the original systematization of white-world and black-world relationships as part of a developing European and white-world search for global influence and power. It thus laid the foundation for emergent patterns of a white dominant international order.

The systemic enslavement of Africans was integral to the emergence of the global economy as we know it. It was part of a trans-Atlantic emerging capitalist world system, designed to establish a labour force for the expansion of plantations across colonial America, which fuelled Britains industries and helped augment the processes behind the Industrial Revolution.

The acceleration of slavery also coincides with the dawn of the age of the Anthropocene, what some scientists consider to be an entirely new geological era characterized by the predominant impact of human activities on the Earths geological processes. British geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslinput the pivotal datefor the onset of this new geological epoch at 1610. This date marks the irreversible exchange of species following the collision of the Old and New worlds, which coincided with an associated unusual drop in atmospheric CO2 captured in Antarctic ice cores.

Its truly shocking that this historic drop in CO2, visible today in the ice cores, resulted from vegetation regrowth on abandoned farmlands following the deaths of 50 million indigenous Americans (mostly from smallpox brought by Europeans), write Lewis and Maslin. The annexing of the Americas by Europe was also an essential precursor to the Industrial Revolution and therefore captures associated later waves of environmental change.

This dating for the Anthropocene associates it directly withthe violence of empire, with the 1610 date bridging the destruction of mass Native Americans with the mass slavery of Africans, both acts ofgenocidal violenceintegral to the emergence of capitalist industry.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, between nearly 17,000,000 and 65,000,000 Africans were killed in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, according to R. J. Rummel in hisDeath by Government.

University of Essex sociologist Robin Blackburn inThe Making of New World Slaverydemonstrates the centrality of slavery to the emerging extractive capitalist economy. The momentous profits of slavery were accumulated in the triangular trade between Europe, Africa and America, and contributed directly to Britains industrialization. Profits from triangular trade for 1770 would have provided from 20.9 to 55 per cent of Britains gross fixed capital formation. These profits werereinvestedin manufacturing, ship-building, canals and coal-mining the core arteries of British industry which in turn triggered industrialization across Europe, and beyond.

The dawn of industrialization was, in turn, an inflection point for the human species. It ushered in the age of fossil fuels oil, gas and coal which enabled a bold new era of exponentially increasing material throughput, fuelling a new paradigm of endless growth economics.

This economic paradigm haswidened income inequalitiesfor more than 70 percent of the world population, even as it has also escalated the destruction of natural ecosystems.

We have produced and consumed at rates equivalent to the exploitation oftwo whole planets.

And worse, multiple warnings backed by aglobal consensusof climate scientists have warned that human activities, through the escalating consumption of fossil fuel resources, is destabilizing the Earths natural carbon cycle with potentially catastrophic consequences for al life on the planet within our lifetimes.

For hundreds of thousands of years, the planet has sustained an equilibrium,a safe operating spaceoffering an optimum environment for human and other habitation in which the quantity of carbon emitted and absorbed by planetary ecosystems remains stable.

But since the Industrial Revolution, built on the back of empires enabled by the sinews of slavery human civilization has inexorably expanded, consuming greater quantities of fossil fuel energy along the way, and exponentially increasing associated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions overwhelmingthe planets capacity for absorption. The result has been a steady increase in global average temperatures. Scientists warn that the extra addition of CO2 into the atmosphere, capturing greater heat, is in turn playing havoc with the Earths climate, weather and ecological systems.

As human civilization continues its expansion, burning up escalating quantities of fossil fuels along the way, the climate science community warns that above a certain level of CO2, planetary ecosystems could shift passed a key tipping point into a new, dangerous era one outside the stable boundaries of the preceding hundreds of thousands of years, and certainly outside anything human beings have ever experienced.

Our civilization is on the brink, right now. A landmarkstudyin theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesfound that at the current level of an approximate 1C temperature rise above the pre-industrial average, we are already breaching so many planetary boundaries at such scale, that we could be at immediate risk of triggering a cascade of runaway processes leading to an uninhabitable planet. The complexity of these boundaries is such that wemaynot even be able to detect whether these processes are in play until after the fact. We just dont know.

What we do know for sure is that if we continue on this pathway of business-as-usual, conservative projections suggest we are heading towarda 3 to 6 degrees Celsiusglobal average temperature rise within 80 years. Even a 2C planet, to which at minimumwe are already heading within 16 years, should be considered extremely dangerous for human societies; and a global average temperature rise within the 34C threshold would probably create conditions that makethe core infrastructures of human civilizationincreasingly unviable.

The same process of relentless global industrial expansionlaid the conditionsfor the COVID-19 pandemic. As industrial activities have grown exponentially, they have encroached increasingly onto wildlife and natural habitats, forcing animals carrying tens of thousands of unknown exotic diseases into closer interaction with human settlements. Thats why scientists havewarnedfor decades that a pandemic would be inevitable this century.

Yet this very expanding global industrial system which is breaching planetary boundaries and triggering increasingly dangerous disease outbreaks is the legacy of colonial racism.

It is a legacy all too few of us are aware of, and so it lives on in invisible structures and institutions shaped by a grim history of imperial bloodshed and conquest. The global expansion of industrialization was inseparable from the empires that enabled it, via the systematic construction of new racial categories designed to legitimize imperial conquest and expansion.

It was precisely within the crucible of colonization that we saw the dawn of scientific racism, the biologically-justified concept of multiple races, the grotesque legacy of which we continue to struggle with today. The idea that there are different races can be traced back to the political appropriation and distortion of neo-Darwinian theories of evolution. The concept of race was used to underpin racial hierarchies which positioned white Europeans at the pinnacle of civilized human advancement in this juggernaut of global industrial expansion.

Racism, then, is not discrimination against other races. It is the very act of creating the notion of distinctive races of people who possess fixed, generalized characteristics and behaviours within a hierarchy of superiority.

In the early nineteenth century, racism manifested largely as a religious ideology linked to interpretations of the Bible, viewing non-European groups as inherently inferior due to their heathen beliefs and ancestry, and frequently targeted Jews. From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, racism evolved on the basis of scientifically-justified biological theories which attributed fixed traits, behaviours, characteristics, abilities and disabilities to constructed groups of people based on their supposedly distinctive biological characteristics. Since then, racism has continued to evolve until it became underpinned by subliminal cultural theories.

The late sociologist Stuart Hall famously described race as a floating signifier. Rather than being a fixed concept, he explained, race has always been an inherently political construct, projected by powerful dominant groups, justifying unequal power relations with other groups. As such, it is a construct that changes and adapts to historical circumstances of power. That is why the new cultural racism focuses on the imagined fixed cultures of imagined fixed groupings of people, permitting homogenized abstractions about their natures, beliefs and practices, projecting a hierarchy of inferior and superior cultures with Western Europeans consistently at the apex. Racialized stereotypes can then cut across colour divides, while encompassing non-racial categories like faith, culture and civilization, which end up becoming racist code for the same brand of longstanding discriminatory practices.

Thats why contemporary racism has become so insidious and difficult to detect. It often operates by disavowing its biological roots. So Black people and other minority groups are still homogenized and demonized as repositories of inferior behaviour and characteristics such as crime, terrorism, lawlessness and beyond, without necessarily believing in biological or genetic inferiority, enabling the refrain, I have Black friends. I dont hate people because of their skin colour. Im not racist. But

And this is why identity-politics has not gone away.Thats whyracism is deep-rooted, because its structural; itsembeddedin our societies; racisms impacts and consequences and behavioural patterns and assumptions areembedded in who and how we are, due to the power relations that define our ways of living and being.

Racism therefore wont be fought by parading ourselves as wonderful non-racists, but only by owning up to this horrifying heritage so that we can learn how to move beyond it by creating new systems, behaviours and understandings.

As industrial civilization continues on its relentless path of maximum extraction, exploitation and centralization of resources, its power centers continue to invent and entrench multiple ideological dividesbetweenhuman beings, andbetween human beings and the natural world, to justify its unequal power relations. And so, the devastating impacts of the Earth system crisis remain racialized, with the worst consequences disproportionately affecting poorer, darker peoples all over the world.

Thus, the pandemic and the protests are interlinked in complex ways which our prevailing institutions of government, media and education are largely blind to. They are twin sides of a single coin of global systemic decline, representing its most core interacting components: Earth system disruption and human system destabilization.

It is Earth system disruption that destabilizes human systems. This destabilization and the inequalities, chaos and violence it perpetuates inhibits us from seeing and responding adaptively to Earth system disruption. The result is that we are more vulnerable than ever to the next cycle of Earth system disruption and human system destabilization, which continue to feed into each other on a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

We need to break the cycle. But we cant break what we refuse to see.

Its only by facing up to the mistaken choices weve made as a species, by taking responsibility for who we are and what weve done, that we might be able to step-up together and make different choices that can convert this trajectory of systemic decline into a chance for civilizational renewal. But to do so we must accept some humility, recognize that we didnt see this coming, and know that this is because our current way of seeing the world largely misses the true, interconnected complexity of whats really going on.

The George Floyd protests follow on the back of a steady rise in the frequency and intensity of protest events, political instability and civil unrest, both in the US and around the world. They were preceded by a rising tide of racism and white supremacism in the US, and symbiotically interconnected with escalating political instabilities in many other parts of the world, from the 2008 Occupy movements to the 2011 and 2018 Arab uprisings.

As Ive shown in myscientific monograph,Failing States, Collapsing Systems: Biophysical Triggers of Political Violence(Springer Energy Briefs, 2017), this rising trend in political unrest correlates intimately with the escalation in Earth system disruption: the intensification of climate chaos, the diminishing returns from ever-expanding resource extraction, the widening of structural inequalities, and the increasingly complex intertwined impacts on food, water, energy, and health systems.

What we are experiencing right now, this intensifying convergence of crises across multiple simultaneous points of systemic failure, is part of a deeper transitional process.

We are in the midst of a global phase shift, a great transition from one systemic configuration to another.

The outcome of this transition is undetermined, except for one thing: the previous systemic configuration is in decline, and will not survive this century.

Clear economic and biophysical signals of this decline are legion, as long as one is brave enough to acknowledge them.

Prior to the pandemic, we were wildly spearheading near-exponential increases inenergy consumption,public debt,population growth,greenhouse gas emissions, andspecies extinctions. But this exponential growth has brought diminishing returns, which can be understood through the scientific concept of Energy Return on Investment (EROI).

The metric, pioneered by systems ecologist Professor Charles Hall of the State University of New Yorks College of Environmental Science and Forestry, is the foundation of the emerging discipline of biophysical economics.

EROI is designed to measure how much energy is needed to extract energy from a particular resource. Whats left is known as surplus net energy, which we can use to support goods and services in the economy outside the energy system. The higher the ratio, the more surplus energy is left for the economy. Over the last decades, that surplus has run increasingly thin.

In the early twentieth century, the EROI of fossil fuels was sometimes as high as 100:1. This means that a single unit of energy would be enough to extract a hundred times that amount. But since then, the EROI of fossil fuels hasdramatically reduced. Between 1960 and 1980, the world average value EROI for fossil fuelsdeclinedby more than half, from about 35:1 to 15:1. Itsstill declining, with latest estimates putting the value at between 6:1 and 3:1.

As we use more and more energy just to extract energy from our resource base, we are left with less net energy to support financing of public goods and services. This has acted as abackground brakeon the rate of economic growth for the worlds advanced industrial economies, which hasalso declinedsince the 1970s. In other words, industrial civilization is overshooting its own fossil fuel energy base, and as a result the economy is running out of steam. Everyone is feeling the squeeze, but the first people to do so at the highest intensities are Black people and minorities.

According to Professor Mauro Bonaiuti, an economist at the University of Turin in Italy, mainstream economics hasfailed to accountfor these key biophysical underpinnings of the economy: material flows are dependent on energy. Since the 1970s, industrial societies have been in a phase of declining returns, he argues, measured across GDP growth, EROI, along with labour and manufacturing productivity.

To make up the shortfall, Bonauiti argues, we have kept the economy growing based on accelerated levels of debt. After the 2008 financial crash, a massive program of quantitative easing (QE) drove global debt even higher than pre-crash levels barely sustaining a much slower level of GDP growth. But the scale of debt keeping the industrial machine chugging along far outweighs our energy resource base. At some point, he warned, this unsustainable heyday was bound to grind to a halt.

These dynamics have made the economics of oil particularly unsustainable. In 2005, conventional crude oil entereda long plateau. To meet growing economic demand the industry shifted to more expensive unconventional forms. Since then, US shale supplied some 71.4 percent ofglobal oil supply growth.

In February, as much of the world was sleepwalking into the COVID-19 pandemic, the Geological Survey of Finland a Finnish government agency overseeing the EUs mineral resource modelling publisheda comprehensive study. Although there is plenty of oil left, it is increasingly expensive to access, the report warned. Record shale oil production came at higher costs and declining well productivity. Most shale oil companies faced negative cash flow, compensated for by drawing down billions of dollars of unrepayable debt. The pandemic was a pin that burst this oil bubble.

Its not clear that this bubble can reinflate, but even if it can, doing so threatens the environment, and undermines the economy by requiring more unsustainable debt-expansion.

This is what planetary overshoot looks like from an energy perspective.

All this data begins to make sense when viewed inthe context of the life cycle of ecological systems, as defined pre-eminently by the late ecologist CS Holling who identified four stages in the growth and decline of a system, which we can apply to industrial civilization.

The first stage isgrowth. Industrial civilization has experienced its most rapid period of growth over around 200 years or so from the nineteenth century until the late twentieth century. But this growth stage did not begin in the nineteenth century. If we use thedataput forward by Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, the crucial moment began in the 1600s, coinciding with the colonization of the Americas, and the emergence of trans-Atlantic slavery.

The second stage ofconservation during which a system self-consolidates reaching a phase of stability appeared shortly after the Second World War. It reached its strongest point of stasis between 1970 and the early 2000s, but even within this period, the seeds of decline began to be detectable in the slow-down in growth rates and many other trends.

During this conservation stage, the structural racism of the preceding centuries experienced degrees of rehabilitation and reconfiguration, as the systems expansion generated new arenas of conflict. The pressures and demands of industrial capitalist growth played key roles in the transition away from slavery toward new forms of wage-labour organization, with a need to absorb Black people and minorities into the circuits of fossil fuel-dependent capital accumulation in new ways. The combination of mass struggles with internal socio-economic and cultural changes helped drive the concessional legislative victories of the civil rights movements of the 1960s.

By the 1990s, the Otherizing dynamics of the expanding system were focused increasingly on external rather than internal enemies. The system shifted from theexaggeratedthreat of external Communists, toward making sense of the increasing geopolitical fractures across key areas in the Muslim world from the Middle East to Central Asia where the worlds largest reserves of fossil fuels can be found.

At some point in the twenty-first century, we began to enter Hollings third stage, thereleasephase a period of uncertainty and chaos as the system begins to decline. The weakening of the global system is visible most clearly in the mounting evidence of Earth system disruption, but is particularly conspicuous in the systems inability to sustain the material growth rates that brought its current structures into existence.

As Earth system crisis has accelerated, it has increasingly destabilized the human systems we have taken for granted in recent decades during the previous relatively stable conservation phase.

One of the most obvious dynamics we are seeing in this release phase is the heightening of Otherization through the stale, broken lens of national security: instead of recognizing the sequence of crises asa global systemic crisis, our institutions built from the sinews of slavery and empire are focused instead onsymptoms, on the upheaval ofpeoples, on the unravelling ofnations, on the weakening ofthe liberal order, and how thesethreaten the power relations that enable business-as-usual; so the locus of response is not system change, but escalating violence to crush those visible surface symptoms, those peoples, those nations, that liberal order, to defend the business-as-usual that seemed to be working so wonderfully a few decades ago.

As we are entering deeper into the release phase, human system destabilization is accelerating these Otherizing dynamics. One of its outcomes is the eruption, thelaying bare, of: the structural racism at the heart of this system; the increasing unbearableness of the consequences of this racism; and the tremendous, latent violence on which this system is premised.

Yet there is another dimension of the release stage that is crucial to recall. As the prevailing system declines, breaks down, weakens, elicits the unleashing of rage and angst, this very process of weakening creates a clearing of systemic uncertainty. That systemic uncertainty opens up new possibilities for change, where small perturbations in the system can have deep impacts in a way they could not do during the first and second phases of growth and conservation.

This is what I call theglobal phase shift. This is the transition point where small, local actions can have wider, accumulative, system-wide effects. This is the moment where each of our choices has a momentous, history-forging potential.

Because we are at the cusp of what Holling saw as a fourth stage in the life cycle of a system:reorganization.

As we move toward this fourth stage in the last stages of the life cycle of industrial civilization, the choices each of us make during the global phase shift play an integral role in determining the structures, values, behavioural patterns, and relationships of an emergent system, which will then form the basis of a new systemic life cycle for human civilization.

The decisions we make right now will plant the seeds for the task of rebuilding, redesigning, and recreating the next life cycle for our species.

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White Supremacism and the Earth System - Resilience

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