25 June 20
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25 June 20
Jamaal Bowman Is Just the Politician This Moment Needs
Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone
Bort writes: "On Tuesday, the 44-year-old former middle-school principal toppled longtime Democratic stalwart Eliot Engel in the party's primary for New York's 16th District."
Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone
Bort writes: "On Tuesday, the 44-year-old former middle-school principal toppled longtime Democratic stalwart Eliot Engel in the party's primary for New York's 16th District."
EXCERPTS:
Jamaal Bowman’s challenge is to make all this mean something.
On Tuesday, the 44-year-old former middle-school principal toppled longtime Democratic stalwart Eliot Engel in the party’s primary for New York’s 16th District. Engel was seeking a 17th term in office, having represented the district — a diverse swath of the Bronx and suburban New York that includes New Rochelle — since 1989. Bowman, who had never run for political office before entering the race last June, appears to have won by more than 25 points.
“Our movement is designed to restore that faith, to restore that hope, to bring back the belief in what is possible, to root our values in everything we do,” he told supporters after sealing the victory. Bowman was buoyed by a platform built around racial justice and community engagement. As the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum this spring, so did Bowman’s campaign. Now, he’s tasked with using his and the movement’s values to bring about real, systemic change.
He firmly believes this is possible, but as he explained to me earlier on Friday following a press conference in Co-Op City, in the Bronx, it’s going to take “full participation,” both from the community and every level of government, right down to the school boards. “I feel this time it’s different,” Bowman told me of the potential for change following the demonstrations. “I also understand people from the African-American community who don’t have that same amount of faith because we’ve been bamboozled and hoodwinked throughout this nation’s history.”
The nation’s relentless oppression of people of color, exacerbated generation after generation by the hollow promises of the American Dream and the politicians who peddle it, are why many are skeptical as they plead for the kind of engagement Bowman has preached. “They have all these rallies. Everybody wants justice, everybody wants peace, but nobody ever interacts,” Clarke said in front of Flowers’s home. “The only way you’re going to know about this side of town, is to interact with this side of town.”
Before the killing of George Floyd sparked a nationwide reckoning over police violence, Bowman wrote an op-ed for NBC News in March describing multiple occasions in which he was racially profiled and arrested. He went on to decry former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg for stocking schools in communities of color with police and metal detectors, effectively criminalizing the students.
After Henderson Clarke spoke in front of his slain brother’s home, the demonstrators in New Rochelle marched back to the park, chanting for Governor Cuomo to get the state’s attorney general to open an independent investigation into the circumstances of Flowers’s death. According to the police, Flowers fled the scene after a car he was in was pulled over. The police said Flowers pulled a gun when an officer — later identified as Alec McKenna — attempted to tase him. McKenna fired six shots, one of which struck Flowers fatally. Flowers’s family, and the New Rochelle NAACP, are skeptical, and want answers. Flowers was only 24 years old. His daughter is 6.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks before a crowd of 25,000 in front of the state capitol building on March 25, 1965, in Montgomery, Alabama. (photo: Stephen F. Somerstein/Getty)
Andrew Bacevich | Martin Luther King's Giant Triplets: Racism, Yes, but What About Militarism and Materialism?
Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch
Bacevich writes: "In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans are finally - or is it once again? - confronting the racism that afflicts this country and extends into just about every corner of our national life. Something fundamental just might be happening."
READ MORE
Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch
Bacevich writes: "In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Americans are finally - or is it once again? - confronting the racism that afflicts this country and extends into just about every corner of our national life. Something fundamental just might be happening."
READ MORE
People lined up to vote at Riverside High School in Milwaukee on Tuesday. (photo: Morry Gash/AP)
US Virus Cases Continue to Rise at Near-Record Rate
Jennifer Peltz and Elaine Kurtenbach, Associated Press
Excerpt: "The number of new coronavirus cases per day in the U.S. stood near an all-time high Thursday at more than 34,000, hovering close to the peak reached in late April during some of the darkest and deadliest days of the crisis."
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Jennifer Peltz and Elaine Kurtenbach, Associated Press
Excerpt: "The number of new coronavirus cases per day in the U.S. stood near an all-time high Thursday at more than 34,000, hovering close to the peak reached in late April during some of the darkest and deadliest days of the crisis."
READ MORE
Scottsdale, Arizona Republican councilman Guy Phillips. (photo: Reuters)
To Protest Face Masks, Arizona City Councilman Uses George Floyd's Words: 'I Can't Breathe'
Meagan Flynn, The Washington Post
Flynn writes: "He said it again, louder: 'I can't breathe' - echoing the dying words of George Floyd that have become a rallying cry in nationwide protests against police violence."
Meagan Flynn, The Washington Post
Flynn writes: "He said it again, louder: 'I can't breathe' - echoing the dying words of George Floyd that have become a rallying cry in nationwide protests against police violence."
EXCERPT:
McSally, sharing a video of his comments, said, “This is a serious moment in history and it’s disgusting you are mocking the dying words of a murdered man.”
Despicable. This is a serious moment in history and it's disgusting you are mocking the dying words of a murdered man. twitter.com/rexchapman/sta…
613 people are talking about this
McSally’s opponent in the Republican primary, Daniel McCarthy, spoke at Wednesday’s anti-mask rally in dramatic terms, describing the mask mandate as a “communist insurrection” and saying, “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees” before leading the crowd in anti-mask chants. President Trump has previously endorsed McSally.
Border Patrol agents are pictured detaining and processing a group of migrants near the Paso Del Norte International Bridge. (photo: Paul Ratje/Getty)
The Supreme Court Just Allowed Trump's Expansion of Deportations to Go Unchecked
Nicole Narea, Vox
Narea writes: "The Supreme Court just issued a ruling with sweeping, immediate implications for the immigration enforcement system, potentially allowing the Trump administration to move forward in deporting tens of thousands of immigrants living in the US with little oversight."
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Nicole Narea, Vox
Narea writes: "The Supreme Court just issued a ruling with sweeping, immediate implications for the immigration enforcement system, potentially allowing the Trump administration to move forward in deporting tens of thousands of immigrants living in the US with little oversight."
READ MORE
An unarmed Palestinian protester facing Israeli soldiers at the Tayasir checkpoint near the West Bank city of Tubas on 25 February. (photo: Reuters)
Saeb Erekat | Stop Treating Israel as a State Above the Law and End Annexation
Saeb Erekat, Middle East Eye
Erekat writes: "Trump and Netanyahu's plans and actions are an attack on the international community as well as Palestinians."
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Saeb Erekat, Middle East Eye
Erekat writes: "Trump and Netanyahu's plans and actions are an attack on the international community as well as Palestinians."
READ MORE
Juneteenth commemoration at a burial site for enslaved people, located in a field where Formosa plans to build one of its facilities. (photo: Courtesy of Ron Moyi/Louisiana Bucket Brigade)
Louisiana Environmental Activists Charged With "Terrorizing" for Nonviolent Stunt Targeting Plastics Giant
Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Brown writes: "Civil liberties attorneys are calling the charges a dramatic escalation of a years long effort by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries to criminalize efforts to halt the expansion of polluting facilities in the state - part of a nationwide trend of cracking down on dissent around climate change issues."
Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Brown writes: "Civil liberties attorneys are calling the charges a dramatic escalation of a years long effort by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries to criminalize efforts to halt the expansion of polluting facilities in the state - part of a nationwide trend of cracking down on dissent around climate change issues."
EXCERPT:
The accusations against the activists, Anne Rolfes and Kate McIntosh, stem from a seemingly innocuous activist stunt carried out in December, the day after a festival designed to draw attention to the environmental misdeeds of Formosa Plastics. The Taiwanese petrochemical company plans to build a massive plastics manufacturing complex in a largely Black Louisiana community that has already suffered health problems linked to local industry. In October, Formosa agreed to a $50 million settlement for dumping pollutants, including the small pellets that form the building blocks for plastic products known as nurdles, into Texas’s Lavaca Bay — the largest settlement of a Clean Water Act lawsuit filed by private citizens.
With a key environmental permit still pending for Formosa in Louisiana, the action — dubbed “Nurdlefest” — was meant to pressure the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to scrutinize the company’s record. Boxes of the plastic pellets, used as evidence in the Texas case, were carted to the front of the agency, where around 75 people gathered in the rain.
What apparently terrorized community members, however, was a container of the pellets that appeared on the porch of an oil and gas lobbyist, with a detailed note attached, explaining what they were and their Texas origin. “We have delivered this package of nurdles as a reminder – Louisiana does not need anymore pollution, plastics or otherwise,” the letter said. “We demand that LDEQ DENY Formosa’s air emissions permit application.”
The letter was signed by Concerned Citizens of Louisiana and included the phone number of Bill Quigley, the activists’ pro bono attorney. It also included warnings against leaving the nurdles around children or pets and a Formosa phone number for safely recycling the contents.
Rolfes and McIntosh, who are respectively the director of and a program assistant at the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, which provides support to groups of community members living near polluting facilities, face a maximum of 15 years in prison and $15,000 in fines for so-called terrorizing — defined as “the intentional communication of information that the commission of a crime of violence is imminent or in progress or that a circumstance dangerous to human life exists or is about to exist” — with the intention of causing members of the public to fear for their safety.
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