By World Beyond War – If you’ve never heard of the U.S. Institute of Peace, please keep reading. It works everyday with your money in a fancy new building next to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It just doesn’t work for peace. If you know the USIP’s record and consider it a lost cause, please keep reading. This institute can be made to do some good. A number of us will be meeting with USIP in late September and bringing along this petition. Please click here to sign it. The petition to USIP reads: “We urge you to oppose U.S. militarism and begin working for an end to U.S. war-making by providing to Congress and the public information on the disastrous results of recent U.S. wars and the superior results of nonviolence and diplomacy. We ask that you recommend to the President of the United States the removal from your board of Stephen Hadley, Eric Edelman, and Frederick M. Padilla, and their replacement by three seasoned peace activists, along with a recommendation to maintain at least three seasoned peace activists on your board at all times — right now there are none.”
By Sam Smith – Another reason we find it hard to recognize or talk about real change is that we haven’t seen its positive form on any scale in some time. Thus, it is not surprising that many don’t seem to realize that while politicians can help to create change, they are rarely its source. Even the best politicians need a community of creative and conscientious pressure to discourage their response to those forces that have never succumbed to believing for themselves the advertising slogans they foist on others. Even the best president steps into the Oval Office surrounded, beleaguered and manipulated by the most skillful organizers in the country – those who organize the bankers, corporations, religious extremists, polluters and other assorted hustlers – while well intentioned but nave ordinary constituents of that president assume their work was finished when they left the voting booth.
By Kate Aronoff in Waging Non-Violence – At a towering 1,600 feet, Stone Mountain is a majestic outgrowth from the suburbs of Atlanta. Less majestic, for many, is the three acre bas-relief monument to the Confederacy on its north side. Originally forged by Mount Rushmore creator Gutzon Borglum, the project was abandoned over creative differences in the 1920s, only to be completed once Stone Mountain’s grounds were purchased by the state of Georgia in 1958. The carving memorializes Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and the famed secessionist generals Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee, who led the charge to maintain slavery in the South. Fittingly, Stone Mountain has long been a home to the South’s nostalgic white supremacists, and in 1915 became the birthplace of the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan.
By Yesenia Barragan in TeleSurTV – Since the Ferguson riots last August, Black Lives Matter has radically shifted the national conversation on anti-Black racism and police brutality through massive protests, demonstrations, and online mobilizations that have galvanized a new generation of youth of color in the United States and around the world who refuse to allow the police to turn them into another murder statistic. Just last month, hundreds of Black activists gathered together in Cleveland, Ohio in a historic meeting for the inaugural Movement for Black Lives Convening, which featured panels and workshops on Black labor organizing, queer and trans justice, lessons from the Black Panther Party, among others. A new Pew Research Center poll released this month further shows how Black Lives Matter is transforming the racial views of Americans (and particularly white Americans) in astounding ways.
By Walden Bello in Focus Web – It is great to see so many of those who have been part of Focus on the Global South’s twenty-year journey here today, cherished comrades and friends, all of who are also 20 years older…but all still burning with youthful energy like Focus. Focus was born in the same year as the World Trade Organization, with the goal of challenging that force of which the WTO was said to be the cutting edge: corporate-driven globalization. When we were founded, we were said to be on the wrong side of history. We were told that we were like the people who claimed that the earth was flat, that globalization would sweep all before it and deposit us in the dung heap of history. We were undeterred because we were convinced we were on the right side of history, on the side of the vast majority of people who were hurt and devastated by globalization.
By Clarence Lusane in Progressive – I had the great fortune to have had Julian Bond as a colleague at American University. On a number of occasions, I sat in on his lectures or talks. These were mostly small, intimate gatherings away from cameras and the media. That is when Julian Bond the agitator became Julian Bond the educator, effortlessly mesmerizing young minds eager for his knowledge and experience. Bond left his fingerprints on pretty much every major civil rights organization and issue of the last five decades. From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to the Southern Poverty Law Center to the NAACP, he fiercely fought to defend the goals and aspirations of many millions who wanted human rights and social justice. Many students saw his wisdom but often missed the path by which it came.
Interview with Lawrence Hamm by Chris Hedges in The Real News – Police brutality is deeply rooted in contemporary urban communities, especially African-American communities, but not exclusively African-American communities. And for African Americans, of course, they are part of an overall system–this is my opinion–of racial control that has existed essentially since Africans came to the United States. Laws and instruments of state power were established to essentially hold slaves in check and put down slave rebellions. We can go all the way back to the colonial period, almost from the time that Africans first appear in large numbers in the colonies, and see the establishment of slave patrols and night watches and all kinds of precursors to what we would call contemporary modern day policing. And their job was to use force, and they used it in the most brutal, most terrifying ways, the force that was used.
By Robin D. G. Kelley in LA Times – As we mark 50 years since the Watts riots, expect endless newsreel footage of buildings aflame and National Guard units occupying Central Avenue, experts rattling off gruesome statistics, eyewitness accounts of that stifling hot night on Aug. 11, 1965, when Marquette Frye’s drunk driving arrest became the flashpoint for one of the worst incidents of civil unrest in U.S. history. But a focus on violence and looting reduces the people of Watts to “rioters” rather than residents confronting social and economic catastrophe. What they burned is less important than what they built, both before and after the insurrection. By 1965, Watts faced double-digit unemployment, rampant poverty and a shortage of livable housing. Restrictive covenants, real estate agents, lending institutions and white civic associations conspired to maintain racial segregation.
Before recent days, who among us had ever heard of Ferguson, Missouri? Because of what happened there, the brief but intense experience of state repression, its name will be transmitted by millions of Black mouths to millions of Black ears, and it will become a watchword for resistance, like Watts, like Newark, Harlem and Los Angeles. But Ferguson wasn’t 60 years ago – it’s today. And for young Blacks from Ferguson and beyond, it was a stark, vivid history lesson – and also a reality lesson. When they dared protest the state’s street-murder of one of their own, the government responded with the tools and weapons of war. They assaulted them with gas. They attacked them as if Ferguson were Fallujah, in Iraq.
By Vincent Intondi in Zinn Ed Project – When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. announced his strong opposition to the war in Vietnam, the media attacked him for straying outside of his civil rights mandate. In so many words, powerful interests told him: “Mind your own business.” In fact, African American leaders have long been concerned with broad issues of peace and justice—and have especially opposed nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, this activism is left out of mainstream corporate-produced history textbooks. On June 6, 1964, three Japanese writers and a group of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) arrived in Harlem as part of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki World Peace Study Mission. Their mission: to speak out against nuclear proliferation. Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American activist, organized a reception for the hibakusha at her home in the Harlem Manhattanville Housing Projects, with her friend Malcolm X. Malcolm said, “You have been scarred by the atom bomb. You just saw that we have also been scarred. The bomb that hit us was racism.”
By Rebecca Traister in Huffington Post – For only five nights in the fall of 1973, a documentary called “Year of the Woman” played at the Fifth Avenue Cinema in Greenwich Village. Crowds lined up around the block. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., described it as “the greatest combination of sex and politics ever seen in a film.” And then “Year of the Woman” all but vanished for 42 years, robbing us of a movie that captures–in its raucous, weird, unmistakably ’70s style–one of the most pivotal moments in feminist history. The setting is the Democratic convention in Miami Beach. The time is July 1972. New York Rep. Shirley Chisholm has just completed a groundbreaking campaign for the presidency (“I ran because someone had to do it first,” she would later write), and the National Women’s Political Caucus, founded by icons including Betty Friedan, Dorothy Height and Gloria Steinem, is trying to leverage women’s power at a political convention for the first time.
By Christian Parenti in Information Clearinghouse – How did we get here? The numbers are chilling: 2.2 million people behind bars, another 4.7 million on parole or probation. Even small-town cops are armed like soldiers, with a thoroughly militarized southern border. The common leftist explanation for this is “the prison-industrial complex,” suggesting that the buildup is largely privatized and has been driven by parasitic corporate lobbying. But the facts don’t support an economistic explanation. Private prisons only control 8 percent of prison beds. Nor do for-profit corporations use much prison labor. Nor even are guards’ unions, though strong in a few important states, driving the buildup. The vast majority of the American police state remains firmly within the public sector.
By Tasbeeh Herwees in Magazine Good Is – The names of female victims of police violence—names like Rekia Boyd, Natasha McKenna and Mya Hall—however, remained unknown to most people. Cullors, Garza, and Tometi have been tireless in their campaign to change that, using Black Lives Matter to push for a more thorough rejection of state violence—one that considers the specific ways that this violence impacts the lives of black women. This means focusing on stories of black women who have been victimized by police or the prison system. But it also means cultivating a strong cohort of black women leaders within the movement at large. Unlike the Occupy protesters of 2011, who claimed to be leaderless, the co-founders of Black Lives Matter instead assert that their movement is—in their words—a leaderful one. And those leaders are frequently black women like Richards, women who are carrying out grassroots community work in their neighborhoods in service of a global struggle against police violence.
By Christine Smith in Rabble – The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir might be a small book, but it carries a punch to it that all Canadians need to read and understand: a firsthand account of the impact residential schools had on Indigenous children forced to attend, told by a young boy, Joseph (Augie) Merasty, and how this experience shaped his life. Indian Residential Schools have played a long, sad and harmful history in Canada since they first opened in the 1840s until the last one closed in 1996. Merasty, one of 150,000 children taken from their families during this era, was taught to be ashamed of his family and his culture, and experienced emotional, physical and sexual abuse that no child should ever have to experience.
By Thomas Ruffin, Jr. – Indeed, with a legacy such as this, Obama deserves to be recognized for what he is: a president no different fundamentally from his white predecessors. If we honestly examine the presidencies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B. Hayes, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and all the rest, we see that they managed and served a racially bigoted system of white capital supremacy. This system, and especially the regime that put it to work, made modest changes over the years in its form, in its operations, in its constituency, and, occasionally, as time passed, in the skin color of a few of its leaders. Nevertheless, the system remained intact, with its dominion continuously over our people.
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