Tag: Caste

“Election Police” to Intimidate Florida Voters

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Republicans like Governor Ron DeSantis are attempting to scare formerly incarcerated people with felony convictions from voting. DeSantis launched an election police force to arrest people on trumped-up voter fraud charges. The arrests overwhelmingly targeted Black people and demonstrate “the state’s failure to have a system in place that can assure any American citizen that lives in the state of Florida whether or not they’re eligible to vote,” says Meade, who spearheaded an initiative to reenfranchise 1.4 million people with prior felony convictions, before it was overturned by Republicans. While several charges of alleged voter fraud in past elections have been dismissed, Meade says the arrests still intimidate qualified voters from casting a ballot.

Republicans are still trying to scare former felons away from voting, even as trumped-up charges of voter fraud in past elections have been dismissed in the lead-up to the

— source democracynow.org | Oct 28, 2022

Nullius in verba

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Climate Crisis Impact Worse in Black Cities Facing Disinvestment

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as we look at this crisis of climate, class and race coming together, one of the poorest states in this country, a city that’s over 80% African American, Jackson, Mississippi. More than 180,000 residents are on their third day without running water. We’re talking about water to drink. We’re talking about water to flush the toilet. We’re talking water to bathe in. Officials say the crisis could last indefinitely. the mayor, saying that the state is defunding majority-Black cities and mayors.

Let me describe a little bit of where I am. I’m currently in New Orleans. When the mayor issued the warning on Saturday for folks to evacuate, we took the situation very seriously and started organizing on a regional level our allies to start being able to deliver water to the city of Jackson. As the mayor noted, you know, we are not new to this situation, unfortunately. So we could anticipate that we were going to need some resources, independent of what the state was going to be able to offer and deliver, and in our case, not being — at least in our immediate community, not being reliant on the timeline, particularly of the state government, to deliver vital resources to our community. Too often they’ve declared emergencies and then not delivered, or not delivered in a substantial amount of time to actually help people on the ground. So, our organization, along

— source democracynow.org | Aug 31, 2022

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Richest 1% Now Owns Over 1/3 of US Wealth

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The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Tuesday published Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth, 1989 to 2019, a report revealing that while the total real wealth of U.S. families tripled over those 30 years, the growth was dramatically unequal.

Families in the top 10% and in the top 1% of the distribution, in particular, saw their share of total wealth rise over the period,” the report notes. “In 2019, families in the top 10% of the distribution held 72% of total wealth, and families in the top 1% of the distribution held more than one-third; families in the bottom half of the distribution held only 2% of total wealth.

The CBO report also highlights the persistent racial wealth gap in the United States. In 2019, white families’ median wealth was 6.5 times that of Black families, 5.5 times that

— source commondreams.org | Sep 28, 2022

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The FBI Is Still Targeting Black People for Entrapment

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Romeo Langhorne is the latest victim of an FBI phony terror entrapment scheme. On July 7, 2022 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for uploading a bomb-making video. Langhorne didn’t make a bomb. He uploaded a video while under the direction of an FBI informant. The video had in fact been produced by the government.

More than 20 years after September 11, 2001 Americans are still being told that they are at risk of terrorist attacks. The color-coded risk assessments, NSA surveillance of all electronic and internet activity continues. The threat of terror attacks is the justification for encroaching on civil liberties and phony terror schemes concocted by informants still get headlines and give legitimacy to the continued violations of our rights.

Langhorne is a 32-year-old Black man who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He fits the description of nearly every person whom the FBI has speciously claimed to be a terrorist in the past 20 years. They are Black Americans, Muslims from this country or immigrants who are often vulnerable economically or emotionally. The list of people who were said to

— source blackagendareport.com | Margaret Kimberley | Jul 17, 2022

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Jackson, Mississippi’s water disaster is a crime of capitalism

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The 150,000 residents of Jackson, Mississippi remain without access to clean drinking water this week following the collapse of the water and sewage system under the pressure of heavy flooding late last month.

While water service has returned to homes and businesses throughout the state’s capital, the city remains under a boil-water advisory that was issued in July, with reports that water remains foul and undrinkable. Residents once again queued in long lines at distribution centers throughout the city Tuesday, picking up bottled water to use for cooking and basic hygiene. Approximately 600 National Guard soldiers have been deployed to the city by Republican Governor Tate Reeves to oversee the distribution.

While tens of thousands have been forced to rely on bottled water or use buckets to collect water from wells in the wealthiest country in the world, Jackson sits on and draws its water from the Ross Barnett Reservoir, the largest source of drinking water in the state.

The ongoing crisis in Jackson is part of a series of disasters in the US, from rolling blackouts in California to routine power outages in Metro Detroit and the water poisoning in Flint. Under conditions where climate change is fueling extreme weather events and pandemics, systematic planning is needed to meet the danger. However, this challenge is met

— source wsws.org | 6 Sep 2022

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Grades Are Capitalism in Action

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The capitalist economic system has major failures. It generates extreme, socially divisive inequalities of wealth and income. It consistently fails to achieve full employment. Many of its jobs are boring, dangerous and/or mind-numbing. Every four to seven years, it suffers a mysterious downdraft in which millions of people lose jobs and incomes, businesses collapse, falling tax revenues undermine public services, and so on. If these failures were widely perceived as the inherent failures of the capitalist system, the desirability and thus sustainability of capitalism itself might vanish.

How, then, has capitalism survived? Its persistence can best be explained in terms of ideology. The system produces and disseminates interpretations of its failures that blame these problems not on capitalism itself, but on other altogether different “causes.” Institutions have developed mechanisms to anchor such interpretations widely and deeply in the popular consciousness.

One key example is the concept of “meritocracy.” Schools are a key institution that teaches and practices meritocracy via the mechanism of grading. From primary school through

— source truthout.org | Richard Wolff | Aug 5, 2019

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Grand Jury Declines to Indict Woman for Role in Lynching of Emmett Till

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In Mississippi, a grand jury has declined to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham for her role in the lynching of Emmett Till nearly 70 years ago. Till was a 14-year-old Black teenager who was brutally abducted, tortured and killed in Mississippi in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at Donham, a white woman who worked as a store clerk. Her husband and his half-brother were tried for Till’s murder and acquitted by an all-white jury. Earlier this year, a team searching for evidence in the Emmett Till case found an unserved warrant charging Donham in his kidnapping. On Tuesday, Emmett Till’s cousin and best friend, the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., responded to the news by saying, “The fact remains that the people who abducted, tortured and murdered Emmett did so in plain sight, and our American justice system was and continues to be set up in such a way that they could not be brought to justice for their heinous crimes.”

— source democracynow.org | Aug 10, 2022

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Black Maternal Mortality in U.S.

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With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the battleground for abortion access now shifts to the states, even as the U.S. faces the worst rates of maternal mortality among all rich nations, with Black maternal mortality three to four times higher than the national average. Now a new documentary examines the crisis of Black maternal mortality through the families of two young Black women who died after giving birth. “Aftershock” is co-directed by Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt, who join us to discuss how Black women navigate a healthcare system built against them and efforts underway to reduce racial disparities. “We know that Black women’s health and infants’ health is the marker of the health of a nation,” notes Lee. “In a system that puts profit over people, doesn’t listen and center birthing people already, Black women are even more affected by this due to the systemic racism that’s ingrained into our system,” adds Eiselt.

Amber Rose Isaac, as you mentioned, died in April 2020. She had what is called HELLP syndrome, which is a very treatable condition that many pregnant women get, but, unfortunately, when she showed up to her doctor with symptoms of HELLP syndrome, she was dismissed. They did not listen to her. And unfortunately, by the time she had a C-section, it was too late to save her.

And it is clear that these women were loved women. They were loving women. And their partners, Omari Maynard, the partner to Shamony, and Bruce McIntyre, the partner to Amber, loved them so much. And through their grief — and what I’ve learned from these families is that grief really is an expression of love — through their grief, they’ve become activated to improve outcomes for all of us. And they’re doing amazing work. Omari is a painter. He paints portraits of other women who have passed away. He reaches out to the other fathers when they lose a partner from childbirth complications, to offer support. And that’s how we met Bruce McIntyre, because Omari reached out to Bruce when Amber passed

— source democracynow.org | Jul 25, 2022

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