27 June 20
It’s quite close to the end of June and we are really not very close to covering our expenses. Many have given, many, many more have not.
A few thousand dollars would make a huge difference.
RSN needs your assistance now.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
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Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
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27 June 20
Michael Moore | One Month Ago Today. George Floyd. Murdered.
Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page
Moore writes: "One month ago today. George Floyd. Murdered. Lynched by a cop's knee with a lynch mob of cops helping with the lynching."
Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page
Moore writes: "One month ago today. George Floyd. Murdered. Lynched by a cop's knee with a lynch mob of cops helping with the lynching."
His little girl was right: “My daddy changed the world!” Now it’s up to ALL of us to make sure those changes really take place and transform this broken country to a something worthy of the sacrifice George Floyd made. The way police do their business — that shit is over. But it won’t end on its own. Each of us must force our local mayors and city councils to remake their public safety departments and shift funds to social services to help people in need. And in the name of George Floyd, let’s fix our income inequality, end mass incarceration, and commit to anti-racism and anti-capitalism. Our “health care” system, our schools, our neighborhoods — it’s all wrong, unjust and meant to prop up the wealthy to maintain their control and the status quo. This movement can’t be stopped. Welcome everyone into it and let’s fight until we create a fair and just new normal. Rest in Power, Mr. Floyd. We can’t bring you back, but you will always be with us. #blacklivesmatter #defund #disarm #dismantle #heal
Immigrant children in a detention center. (photo: Ross D. Franklin)
Judge Orders US to Free Migrant Children From Family Detention, Citing Virus Spread
Associated Press
Excerpt: "A federal judge in the United States has ordered the release of children held with their parents in US immigration jails and denounced the Trump administration's prolonged detention of families during the coronavirus pandemic."
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Associated Press
Excerpt: "A federal judge in the United States has ordered the release of children held with their parents in US immigration jails and denounced the Trump administration's prolonged detention of families during the coronavirus pandemic."
READ MORE
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) greets Washington mayor Muriel Bowser during a joint news conference in advance of Friday's historic House vote on District of Columbia statehood bill on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
House Approves DC Statehood in Historic Vote
Emily Cochrane, The New York Times
Cochrane writes: "It is the first time a chamber of Congress has approved establishing the nation's capital as the 51st state. The measure is all but certain to die in the Republican-led Senate."
Emily Cochrane, The New York Times
Cochrane writes: "It is the first time a chamber of Congress has approved establishing the nation's capital as the 51st state. The measure is all but certain to die in the Republican-led Senate."
The legislation, which is unlikely to advance in the Republican-led Senate, would establish a 51st state — Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, named in honor of Frederick Douglass — and allow it two senators and a voting representative in the House. The National Mall, the White House, Capitol Hill and some other federal property would remain under congressional jurisdiction, with the rest of the land becoming the new state.
The vote was 232 to 180, with every Republican and one Democrat voting “no.”
Jamaal Bowman greets supporters on June 23, 2020, in Yonkers, N.Y. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
The Left's Resurgence Is for Real
Miles Kampf-Lassin, In These Times
Kampf-Lassin writes: "Jamaal Bowman and other progressive and democratic socialist challengers had a very good night, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cruised to victory - proving that the left wing is a force to be reckoned with."
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Miles Kampf-Lassin, In These Times
Kampf-Lassin writes: "Jamaal Bowman and other progressive and democratic socialist challengers had a very good night, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cruised to victory - proving that the left wing is a force to be reckoned with."
READ MORE
A community-wide protest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after the death of George Floyd. (photo: Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Getty Images)
Black Lives Matter Wants to End Police Brutality. History Suggests It Will Go Much Further.
Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Schwarz writes: "Huge numbers of Americans have been brutalized physically, emotionally, or financially by the coronavirus pandemic. And as the number of diagnosed cases trends ominously up, we have no idea what's next."
Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Schwarz writes: "Huge numbers of Americans have been brutalized physically, emotionally, or financially by the coronavirus pandemic. And as the number of diagnosed cases trends ominously up, we have no idea what's next."
And as the number of diagnosed cases trends ominously up, we have no idea what’s next. Everyone with eyes to see knows the path that brought the United States to this dreadful place is a dead end. The question is whether America can change enough to head anywhere else.
The most promising direction isn’t well-known outside of activist circles. In 2016 the Movement for Black Lives, made up of dozens of Black-led organizations, issued a six-part platform called “A Vision for Black Lives.” The introduction stated, “Neither our grievances nor our solutions are limited to the police killing of our people,” and much of it is devoted to economic issues. This year the MBL also released specific policy demands in response to Covid-19.
The logic of history and the present time suggest that if the Black Lives Matter movement sustains itself, it will inevitably become about this larger agenda. Some who joined a movement because they hoped for comparatively modest reforms will find themselves bumping up against the limits of the current system, and learn from experience that everything has to change or very little will.
Already BLM has put on the table the concept of a redirection of public money from policing to health care, housing, schools, and jobs. But as of 2017, state and local governments — responsible for the great majority of expenditures on police and corrections — spent just $194 billion on them. This sounds like a lot of money, but it’s less than 1 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, and only one-fifth of the $1 trillion the U.S. spends on Medicare and Medicaid. Even if somehow all of that $194 billion were shifted to different uses, it wouldn’t be enough for deep social change.
While it’s largely been forgotten now — on purpose — the civil rights movement during the 1960s faced a similar reality, and confronted it head-on. Because of this, the movement was never just about ending America’s legal caste system; it always had a powerful economic component. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech at a 1963 rally that was officially named the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. One common sign at the march was “Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom.”
After passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King stated that they were the “first phase” of the civil rights movement, and the time had come for a “second phase” focused on economic equality. He helped promote a Federal Freedom Budget for All Americans, which called to “wipe out poverty in a decade” via universal health care, a government jobs guarantee, and much more.
In a famous 1967 speech, King was clear about what would be required to get decent lives for African Americans: “We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. … The problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.” When King was assassinated the next year, he was planning to lead a Poor People’s Campaign to Washington, D.C., to get results via direct action.
America then successfully evaded and beat back these questions for 50 years. But they didn’t disappear, they stayed right here. Now the coronavirus pandemic has simultaneously demonstrated how high the stakes are, and that all of society’s supposedly iron-clad rules can be thrown out at a moment’s notice. If there ever were a time when Americans might be ready to rewrite the basic handbook, it’s now.
The MBL is currently revising and expanding all of the Vision for Black Lives platform, but here’s where things stand now.
The first plank is called “End the War on Black People.” Among other things, it demands the demilitarization of law enforcement, an end to the death penalty, an end to the war on drugs, and an end to people with criminal histories being excluded from housing, education, and employment.
The second plank calls for reparations from “the government, responsible corporations and other institutions that have profited off of the harm they have inflicted on Black people.” It lists reparations in the form of free public college and a guaranteed minimum income for Black people, and mandated changes to public school curriculums to examine “the social impacts of colonialism and slavery.”
The third plank, “Invest-Divest,” demands a reallocation of public money from policing, incarceration, and the national military to, among other things, education, local restorative justice, and universal health care.
The fourth plank, “Economic Justice,” calls for a progressive restructuring of the tax code, federal and state job programs targeted at marginalized Black people, the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, and the right for workers in both the public and private sectors to organize unions.
The fifth plank, “Community Control,” demands local control of law enforcement and schools. It also calls for participatory budgeting, an invention of the Brazilian Workers’ Party, in which regular people directly debate how portions of government money are spent.
The sixth plank, “Political Power,” calls for the release of political prisoners, public financing of elections, and protection of voting rights.
Then there’s the MBL’s specific platform on Covid-19 policy, filled with so many obvious, lifesaving ideas that it’s excruciating to realize none will be executed anytime soon.
Instituting all or even some of these policies would transform the United States. In fact, the MBL platform acknowledges “we seek not reform but transformation.” Countries, like people, can sometimes change significantly. It generally happens when their current existence becomes too painful to endure. What we’ll find out now is whether America has gotten to that point.
Berta Cáceres, Honduran environmental activist and indigenous leader, was murdered on March 2, 2016. (photo: Jacobin)
How a Journalist Came to Cover the Brutal Murder of Honduran Activist Berta Cáceres
Audrey Wilson, Foreign Policy
Wilson writes: "In March 2016, gunmen stormed into the home of Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres and murdered her in her bedroom."
Audrey Wilson, Foreign Policy
Wilson writes: "In March 2016, gunmen stormed into the home of Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres and murdered her in her bedroom."
EXCERPT:
The killing came after years of threats against Cáceres and her powerful grassroots activism. Just a year earlier, she had been awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for leading a successful campaign against the construction of four large dams in Indigenous Lenca territory—a project involving the Chinese company Sinohydro and the International Finance Corp., in partnership with a Honduran company.
Honduras remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental activism. Most killings go unpunished, but seven men were convicted of Cáceres’s murder in November 2018. The hitmen included army officers, and two had received military training in the United States. Nina Lakhani, now the environmental justice correspondent for the Guardian US, covered Cáceres’s grassroots movement for years while based in the region and was the only foreign journalist present at the trial.
Lakhani puts Cáceres’s life and death at the center of her new book, Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet. She spoke with Foreign Policy about Cáceres’s activist education, the experience of covering her killers’ trial as a foreign reporter, and questions that remain about the case.
In early June, a firefighter lights a backfire to stop the Quail Fire from spreading near Winters, California. Backfiring is a 'fight fire with fire' strategy emergency responders use to stop a large fire from reaching more fuel and growing. (photo: Noah Berger/AP)
COVID-19 Complicates an Already Dire Wildfire Season
Sarah Gibbens, National Geographic
Gibbens writes: "In 2019 the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection - known simply as Cal Fire - responded to over 1,500 fires. In 2020, they've already seen more than 2,700."
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Sarah Gibbens, National Geographic
Gibbens writes: "In 2019 the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection - known simply as Cal Fire - responded to over 1,500 fires. In 2020, they've already seen more than 2,700."
READ MORE
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