WARS
ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
Indispensable
public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a long and important article
situating the issue of mass incarceration within the historic African American
experience of “unfreedom” and the evolving forms of social control deployed to
enforce it. Read it all (at the link below) if you can. No excerpt can
remotely do it justice.
TA-NEHISI
COATES:
The
Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration
The
United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s
inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants…
The
blacks incarcerated in this country are not like the majority of Americans. They
do not merely hail from poor communities—they hail from communities that have
been imperiled across both the deep and immediate past, and continue to be
imperiled today… For African Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm… Under
Jim Crow, blacks in the South lived in a police state. Rates of incarceration
were not that high—they didn’t need to be, because state social control of
blacks was nearly total. Then, as African Americans migrated north, a police
state grew up around them there, too. That early-20th-century rates of black
imprisonment were lower in the South than in the North reveals how the carceral
state functions as a system of control. Jim Crow applied the control in the
South. Mass incarceration did it in the North. After the civil-rights movement
triumphed in the 1960s and toppled Jim Crow laws, the South adopted the tactics
of the North, and its rates of imprisonment surged far past the North’s. Mass
incarceration became the national model of social control. Much More!
Woman
held in mental health facility because police didn't believe BMW was hers
A
woman is suing New York City after she claims she was forced to spend eight days
in a mental health facility and given a $13,000 (£8,500) bill because a police
officer didn’t believe the BMW she was driving was hers. Kamilah Brock, 32, who
is a banker, said that police had initially pulled her over at a red light in
Harlem and… was then asked to get out of the car… Brock was then taken into
custody and transported to the NYPD’s 30th precinct where she says she was held
for several hours before being released without charges… She goes on to say that
when she returned to claim the car, police said they didn’t believe she was the
rightful owner of the vehicle… She was taken to Harlem hospital psychiatric
ward, where she claims medical records obtained by her attorney, Michael
Lamonsoff, show she was forced to take lithium and injected with powerful
sedatives. More
Ferguson
"People's Report" Unveils Bold Plan To Achieve Racial Equity
A
panel of activists, researchers, community members, and other volunteers on
Monday unveiled a new report with 189 "calls to action" to address the scourge of
racial inequity in and around St. Louis, Missouri, illuminated by a year of
protests following the police shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael
Brown last August… the Ferguson Commission's venture has been particularly
anticipated, due in part to its solicitation of local residents and activists,
rather than outside experts, to identify the complex elements at the core of
those systems—and how to break down and rebuild them within the affected
communities. The report, entitled "Forward Through Ferguson: A Path Toward Racial Equity" (pdf),
candidly addresses race as an issue to be confronted and worked through… the
commission outlined 189 proposals to tackle issues such as police brutality,
racial profiling, criminalization of poverty, and barriers to equality in
majority-black schools. More
GREENWALD:
Arrest of a 14-Year-Old the Fruits of Anti-Muslim Fearmongering
The
U.S. government just formally renewed the “State of Emergency” it declared in the aftermath
of 9/11 for the 14th time since that attack occurred, ensuring that the country
remains in a state of permanent, endless war. , subjected to powers that are
still classified as “extraordinary” even though they have become entirely
normalized. As a result of all of this, a minority group of close to 3 million people is routinely targeted with bigotry
and legal persecution in the Home of the Free, while fear and hysteria reign
supreme in the Land of the Brave. What happened in Irving, Texas, yesterday to a 14-year-old Muslim
high school freshman is far from the worst instance, but it is highly
illustrative of the rotted fruit of this sustained climate of cultivated fear
and demonization… You can’t have a government that has spent decades waging
various forms of war against predominantly Muslim countries — bombing seven of them in the last six years alone — and then
act surprised when a Muslim 14-year-old triggers vindictive fear and persecution
because he makes a clock for school. More
VIDEO: The Youth
recounts what happened here
Trump
Pledges to Investigate Muslim-Americans for “Terror Camps”
On
Thursday, Trump in Rochester, NH, tried out a town hall format and took
unfiltered oral questions from the audience. And that his audience was full of
people who are not entirely well became quickly apparent.
MAN:
“We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. You know our current
president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”
TRUMP:
“We need this question. This is the first question.”
MAN:
“Anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my
question: When can we get rid of them?”
TRUMP:
“We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. You know, a lot of
people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are
happening. We’re going to be looking at that and many other things.”
More
*
* * *
RAISEUP
MASSACHUSETTS
Campaign
TO Fund Our Schools and Transportation
The best way to
help working families and build a stronger economy for us all is to make sure
that we have quality public schools for our children, affordable higher
education, and a transportation system that lets people get to work and
customers get to businesses. Without investment in these common goals, working
families fall behind and our communities suffer. New revenue is necessary to
improve our public schools, rebuild crumbling roads and bridges, make college
affordable, and invest in fast and reliable public transportation. To move
forward, the campaign must gather 64,750 certified signatures in 2015 and get at
least 50 votes in the state Legislature in two constitutional conventions before
going to the ballot in 2018. To achieve these goals, the campaign is building a
broad coalition that brings together leading organizations on transportation and
education with business leaders and community, labor and faith organizations.
What Our Constitutional
Amendment Would Do
Our proposed
constitutional amendment would create an additional tax of four percentage
points on annual income above one million dollars. The new revenue generated by
this tax could only be spent on quality public education, affordable public
colleges and universities, and for repair and maintenance of roads, bridges, and
public transportation. To ensure that the tax continues to apply only to the
highest income residents, who have the ability to pay more, the one million
dollar threshold would be adjusted each year to reflect
cost-of-living
increases.
To find out more or
to volunteer to work on the Constitutional Amendment Campaign see here.
