BOMBING AND BIGOTRY:

The Wars Abroad, the Wars at Home

 

Martin Luther King: “The bombs that are falling [overseas] are exploding in our cities”

 

BPD Petitions - Please Sign & Share!

Many of you have already signed the ACLU petition to the BPD calling for three key reforms. The petition is now online here: End Racially Discriminatory Police Practices in Boston (for residents of Boston) and Support the Movement to End Racially Discriminatory Police Practices in Boston (for people who aren’t residents of Boston).

We encourage you to please sign one of these two petitions and share widely among friends and supporters!

 

THE MAKING OF FERGUSON

Long before the shooting of Michael Brown, official racial-isolation policies primed Ferguson for this summer’s events… Although policies to impose segregation are no longer explicit, their effect endures. When we blame private prejudice and snobbishness for contemporary segregation, we not only whitewash history but avoid considering whether new policies might instead promote an integrated community… Polluting industry, taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution were permitted in black neighborhoods but violated zoning rules elsewhere.  More

 

Police in Ferguson committed human rights abuses: Amnesty International

The Amnesty International report said law enforcement officers should be investigated by U.S. authorities for the abuses, which occurred during weeks of racially charged protests that erupted after white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, 18, on Aug. 9… The report also criticizes a Missouri law that the group said may be unconstitutional because it allows police to use deadly force against someone even if there is no imminent threat of harm.  The report calls on state lawmakers to make Missouri law comply with international standards making lethal force by police a last resort, said Rachel Ward, director of research at Amnesty International.   More

 

Will the U.S. Go to "War" Against Ebola?

These days, two “wars” are in the headlines: one against the marauding Islamic State and its new caliphate of terror carved out of parts of Iraq and Syria, the other against a marauding disease and potential pandemic, Ebola, spreading across West Africa, with the first cases already reaching the United States and Europe.  Both wars seemed to come out of the blue; both were unpredicted by our vast national security apparatus; both have induced fears bordering on hysteria and, in both cases, those fears have been quickly stirred into the political stew of an American election year… Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised then that, while President Obama was sending at least 1,600 military personnel (and the drones and bombers) to fight ISIS, his first response to the Ebola crisis was also to send 3,000 troops into Liberia in what the media has been calling an “Ebola surge” (a reflexive nod to the American troop “surge” in Iraq in 2007).  More

 

Ebola Fears Turn Into an Epidemic of Racism and Hysteria

Thus far, there have been just eight confirmed cases of Ebola in the United States following an outbreak in West Africa. Far more contagious here has been a new virus of hysteria — and of the sort of ignorant discrimination that immigrants in general and Africans specifically have endured for decades… More worrisome than grassroots Ebola hysteria are the calls for official national security policies rooted in the same sort of ignorance. Rep. Fred Upton (R-Michigan) is among those in favor of a ban on travel to and from countries stricken with Ebola outbreaks. “No, you’re not coming here, not until this situation is solved in Africa ,” Upton said recently. “We should not be allowing these folks in, period.” Talk-show host and noted icon of religious tolerance Bill Maher has also thrown his support behind the idea of national quarantines.   More

 

Ebola’s grim original secret: How capitalism and obscene military spending got us here

Missing from the wall-to-wall coverage of the global Ebola crisis is a root-cause analysis that shows how unfettered free market global capitalism and our obscene spending on the military both play a part in creating the environment for this latest outbreak and the ones that are sure to follow. Annually the world spends more than $1.7 trillion on the military. According to the Wall Street Journal the world spends a whopping $27 billion on the world’s public health. Keep that obscene imbalance in your mind the next time you see pictures of Liberians bleeding out in the street. No missile killed them, but our greed and global death-oriented spending priorities have left fingerprints on all these bodies.   More

 

Pentagon plans Ebola domestic-response team of medical experts to aid doctors

The Pentagon announced Sunday that it will create a 30-person team of medical experts that could quickly leap into a region if new Ebola cases emerge in the United States, providing support for civilian doctors who lack proficiency in fighting the deadly virus… Despite the apparent control health officials have over Ebola’s spread, military officials decided to take no chances and are now constructing the equivalent of a medial SWAT team. Five military doctors, five trainers and 20 nurses will begin training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio within the next week, according to Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon’s spokesman.   More

 

Don’t Ask the Pentagon Where Its Money Goes: It won't tell

Every taxpayer, business, and government agency in America is supposed to be able to pass a financial audit by the feds, every year. It’s the law, so we do our duty. There’s one exception: the Pentagon.  Year after year, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) declares the Pentagon budget to be un-auditable. In 2013, for example, the GAO found that the Pentagon consistently fails to control its costs, measure its performance, or prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse. Congress thankfully, did give the Pentagon a deadline to get itself in better financial shape – 25 years ago. Taxpayers are still waiting.  More

 

Time to reduce economic dependence on Pentagon spending

The Pentagon’s base budget has come down a modest 10 percent since its peak in 2010.  This isn’t much compared to other post-World War II builddowns, but it has been enough to cause economic disruption in key cities and states… Given this reality, it makes sense for defense dependent areas to devise plans to diversify their local economies now, before more shifts in Pentagon spending leave them with few viable alternatives.  A more diversified local economy is better in any case, since it shields communities from the inevitable ups and downs of Pentagon contracting.  And economic development specialists agree that it is far better to plan before a crisis hits than try to scramble at the last moment when a key program is reduced or scaled back.   More

 

KRUGMAN: Plutocrats Against Democracy

…the political right has always been uncomfortable with democracy. No matter how well conservatives do in elections, no matter how thoroughly free-market ideology dominates discourse, there is always an undercurrent of fear that the great unwashed will vote in left-wingers who will tax the rich, hand out largess to the poor, and destroy the economy… And now you understand why there’s so much furor on the right over the alleged but actually almost nonexistent problem of voter fraud, and so much support for voter ID laws that make it hard for the poor and even the working class to cast ballots. American politicians don’t dare say outright that only the wealthy should have political rights — at least not yet. But if you follow the currents of thought now prevalent on the political right to their logical conclusion, that’s where you end up. The truth is that a lot of what’s going on in American politics is, at root, a fight between democracy and plutocracy. And it’s by no means clear which side will win.  More

 

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Texas' New Voter ID Law Is Racist

It is not the only voting rights litigation that will affect who can vote in the midterm elections this fall. There is Georgia’s refusal to process more than 50,000 voter registrations from a minority voter drive. But as Ginsburg’s blistering 7-page dissent made clear, the fight over Texas’s voter ID law is in a class by itself. That’s because a lower federal court held a trial and found that the law’s intent was to discriminate and disenfranchise, calling it a “poll tax,” and then that record was ignored by higher federal appeals courts—including the Supreme Court.  More

 

The Disgust Election

This year, the Koch brothers and their extensions — just to name one lonely voice in the public realm — have operations in at least 35 states, and will spend somewhere north of $120 million to ensure a Congress that will do their bidding. Spending by outside groups has gone to $1 billion in 2012 from $52 million in 2000.  And it gets worse. At the same time that this court has handed over elections to people who already have enormous power, they’ve given approval to efforts to keep the powerless from voting. In Texas, Republicans have passed a selective voter ID bill that could keep upward of 600,000 citizens — students, Native Americans in federally recognized tribes, the elderly — from having a say in this election… We Americans have long boasted of having free and fair elections. Thanks to this Supreme Court, they are neither.   More