TheBaltimore Banner, an online news outlet, broke a story in November (11/2/23) about a man’s death being ruled a homicide due to “trauma to the body.” The man, Paul Bertonazzi, had been transported by Baltimore Police to Johns Hopkins psychiatric hospital, where he died five days later. The death occurred in January 2023, but the ruling had just been determined.
The original version of the story was short on details, with information vaguely sourced to “Baltimore Police.” It described the man (initially unidentified) as “combative” and self-harming. A second article (11/3/23) on the evolving story was published the next day with more information, including that the man’s spine had been severed at some point. That article includes quotes from a police report.
"The Sinclair TV owner bought The Baltimore Sun for the same reason Elon Musk bought Twitter," opined one critic. "Power."
NewBaltimore Sun owner and right-wing media executive David D. Smith raised eyebrows and ire in media circles and beyond following a Tuesday meeting at which he reportedly insulted journalists at his new acquisition and told them to focus on profit.
This month marks the 90th birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr the iconic American civil rights and human rights leader who forced America to live up to its rhetorical ideals of freedom, democracy and equality. For his efforts, he was assassinated in 1968.
The fallen Nobel laureate and “drum major for justice” - vilified, ostracised and loathed in life, monitored and hunted by the government - was honoured posthumously with a federal holiday in the United States. Yet, as that holiday has been diluted and repositioned into a national day of service, and Dr King’s character has been neutered and rendered a passive, innocuous and idealistic dreamer who gave rousing speeches, Americans have lost sight of the man’s revolutionary philosophy.
Five decades ago, Martin Luther King warned of America’s triple evils: racism, economic exploitation and militarism. These evils continue to plague the country to this day, necessitating the radical restructuring of society the black leader so urgently promoted.
“I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values,” King said in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech. “We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Racism, the original American sin born from the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of indigenous peoples, has not abated. In his 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech, King said as black people were concerned, the US had failed to honour its promises written in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. “Instead of honouring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’. But we refuse to believe that bank of justice is bankrupt,” he said.
Today, the US has yet to address reparations to African Americans to repair the damage of enslavement and the continuing legacy of institutional racism, including both de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination.
Open and avowed white supremacists operate in the government, engaging in whites-only policies based on a false racist theory of white genocide, with an immigration policy of ethnic cleansing, separation of migrant families and imprisonment of 15,000 children - all designed to keep whites in the majority. Meanwhile, white supremacist hate groups are thriving in the streets, with a sharp increase in hate crimes and school bullying in the era of Trump.
The US is a “flawed democracy” according to the Economist’s 2018 Democracy index, ranking only 25th globally in terms of political participation and culture, governmental functions, electoral process, civil liberties and pluralism. In states such as Georgia and North Carolina, white conservatives of the Republican Party employ segregation-era voter suppression tactics against people of colour and the poor, including restrictive and unjust voter ID laws, voter purges, rigged elections and votes stolen, and gerrymandered legislative districts.
Despite professing to be the self-proclaimed “land of opportunity”, the US maintains a predatory capitalist system with pathological levels of economic inequality. In a land of abundance, only a handful enjoy its wealth. With 40 million people in poverty, the US is the most unequal advanced nation, with the least social and economic mobility in the developed world. The US profits from misery through private prisons, and a for-profit healthcaresystem that forces people to go bankrupt and into poverty while paying for medical bills.
The wealthiest one percent owns 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the top 10 percent controls 77 percent of the wealth. While working Americans are drowning in nearly $1.5 trillion student loan debt they are unable to pay off. And as conservatives shake their heads and proclaim nothing can be done, the nation engages in policies of plunder of poor and working people, such as a $1.5 trillion tax cutalmost entirely for the benefit of the top one percent.
Meanwhile, Trump forces a government shutdown over his vanity border wall that leaves 800,000 federal workerswithout pay, and he advises furloughed workers to make adjustments and, barter with their landlords and hire an attorney.
A culture of corruption precludes the US from solving its problems. Politicians are beholden to moneyed interests rather than held accountable to the public, a Harvard Business School report suggests. Laws promoting gun proliferation, environmental degradationand “loyalty oaths” to other nations reflect the largesse bestowed upon these politicians by lobbyists who seek to enact them.
Martin Luther King, aware of the connections between injustice at home and abroad, spoke out against US proclivity for war. “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems,” King said. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
Today, the US meddles in the affairs of other nations, waging drone wars and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in the name of the “war on terror”, assassinating people and engaging in regime change. Decades of US intervention in Central America caused skyrocketing levels of corruption and violence that fuelled a migrant crisis.
Meanwhile, King predicted “spiritual doom” for an America that continues to spend more on war than on social uplift. Today, a nation which claims it must cut social welfare spending and cannot afford free universal healthcare or college spends trillions of dollars on defence - 37 percent of world military spending and more than the next seven highest spenders combined - and yet cannot account for how the military allocates that money.
Rather than heed his message, America killed King, the messenger. Then, it watered down his message to render it more palatable and digestible to the “white moderate” who is “more devoted to order than to justice”, and prefers that we wait for a “more convenient season” for freedom rather than take direct action now. If America hopes to redeem itself, it must change now.
This article originally appeared at LAProgressive.org on January 15th, 2024.
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Three years ago, a right-wing mob stormed the United States capitol building as the 2020 presidential election results were being certified. The attempt was of course unsuccessful, and Joe Biden was inaugurated as President on January 20, 2021.
Three years later and after 1,240 arrests, 170 convictions, 210 guilty pleas to felony offenses, 720 sentences, the longest being 22 years for Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right organization the Proud Boys, it seems as if there has been some retribution for a brazen attempt to install a candidate by violent means that the majority of people in the US did not want to see in the presidency.
The fact is, however, that January 6 was not a populist uprising, although many of the participants were indeed working class people swept up in the fervor of the moment. At multiple levels, January 6 was an operation financed and led by establishment political figures and ultra-wealthy donors.
Trump laid the groundwork
Since the November 2020 Presidential election, Trump had been fomenting the idea that the election was somehow rigged and “stolen” from him, and that he was the true victor. It was around Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rallying cry that the mob formed on January 6 and stormed the US Capitol, where the results were being certified. And following the rally, which took place at the Ellipse park near the White House. Trump himself explicitly directed the crowd to the US Capitol, where police had set up barricades in anticipation of a disruption of election certification proceedings.
“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. And we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,” Trump said at the Ellipse.
The financiers of January 6
Beyond political direction, rich and powerful figures provided explicit financial support to the events of January 6. Members of the former President’s inner circle bragged about fundraising millions for the rally. Publix heiress Julie Fancelli, who has donated millions to right-wing political causes including Trump’s 2020 campaign, offered as much as USD 3 million to finance the January 6 rally that preceded the insurrection. Prominent mainstream right-wing organizations such as Turning Point USA and the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) also backed the rally, providing buses, making mass calls, and funneling money to speakers. “This historic event will likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history,” wrote Turning Point leader Charlie Kirk about the rally, in a tweet. “The team at @TrumpStudents & Turning Point Action are honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” This tweet has since been deleted.
These groups are not considered fringe. TPUSA donors include the foundation of notable right-wing donor Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot, and the Koch Brothers. The Republican Attorneys General Association boasts a variety of corporate donors, including Amazon, Walmart, Visa, Capital One, MasterCard, Walgreens, General Motors, Home Depot and JPMorgan Chase’s Political Action Committee (PAC), which all have resumed donations to RAGA despite the organization’s embrace of the conspiracy that the 2020 election was stolen.
Those who faced material consequences for storming the Capitol, however, did not represent this wealthy donor class. Out of those arrested, 60% had experienced financial problems over the previous 20 years. 18% had experienced bankruptcy in the past (double the rate of the general public), 20% had eviction or foreclosure proceedings, and 25% had been sued by a creditor for not paying money owed.
And while the mob of people who were arrested for participating in the events of January 6 were not necessarily from the most oppressed sectors of the United States—40% were business owners or white collar workers, and 90% were white—these people are a far cry from the level of wealth and power of the backers of the “Stop the Steal” rally.
However, there were several major right-wing groups, some who practice or promote political violence, who were key players on the ground. The leaders of the Oath Keepers militia and the Proud Boys received the heaviest charges. Armed militia groups including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters brought weaponry. Openly neo-Nazi organizations such as the Nationalist Social Club-131 also participated. Due to the heavy presence of right-wing groups and sympathizers, January 6, 2021 was the first time a Confederate battle flag was displayed inside the US Capitol.
Trump is facing limited consequences for his role in the January 6 riots, due to lawsuits in Maine and Colorado, it is possible that Trump’s name will no longer be on the Republican primary ballot due to his attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 election. The Supreme Court has agreed to review Colorado’s decision in February. Colorado used a part of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, designed to keep former Confederate rebels out of Congress, to keep Trump off the ballot. The Supreme court decision is bound to have national implications, as similar challenges to Trump’s ballot are pending in several states.
Although the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack recommended criminal charges against Trump for obstructing certification proceedings, the Select Committee does not actually have the authority to enforce this recommendation.
Trump, his inner circle, and top January 6 backers and donors remain at large—meaning those that funded and directed the events of January 6 are not being held accountable for the near overthrow of a popular election.
This article originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch on January 6th, 2024.
The African country, one journalist noted, "fought for its own liberation against an apartheid regime supported for decades by the U.S."
"No one knows apartheid like
those who fought it before," said one Palestinian rights advocate on Friday in response to
the news that South Africa has taken a "historic" new step to hold Israel
accountable for its relentless bombardment and violent yearslong occupation of
Gaza—calling on the International Court of Justice to declare that Israel has
breached its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
The Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) in South Africa said it is "gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants" and called on the ICJ to take action to force Israel to "immediately cease" its current attacks on Gaza's 2.3 million residents.
The motion was filed as the death toll in Gaza surpassed 21,500 people and tens of thousands of displaced residents fled an Israeli ground offensive, as airstrikes continued in southern Gaza.
Noting that South Africa has consistently condemned all attacks on civilians, including the assault by Hamas on southern Israel on October7, the country's representatives at hte ICJ said Israel's bombardment of Gaza is "genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and [ethnic] group."
"The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction," reads the application filed at the ICJ.
South Africa took its latest action regarding Israel less than two weeks after President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the government had submitted documents to the International Criminal Court (ICC) supporting its demand, made in November with several other countries, that the court investigate Israel for war crimes.
While the ICC prosecutes individuals and governments for committing war crimes, the ICJ operates under the United Nations to rule on disputes between countries. The ICJ's orders are binding for Israel, as the country is a U.N. member state.
South Africa has joined international human rights experts—including the U.N.'s top expert on human rights in occupied Palestine—in saying Israel's blockade of Gaza and violent treatment of those in the enclave and the West Bank is a form of apartheid, comparing Israeli policies to the racial segregation that was imposed for nearly five decades by the white minority that controlled South Africa.
Last month, the government voted to suspend diplomatic ties with Israel until Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government agrees to a permanent humanitarian cease-fire.
"South Africa has continuously called for an immediate and permanent cease-fire and the resumption of talks that will end the violence arising from the continued belligerent occupation of Palestine," the government said Friday.
Journalist Jeremy Scahill was among those who recognized the significance of South Africa's application at the ICJ, noting that the country "fought for its own liberation against an apartheid regime supported for decades by the U.S.," which is backing Israel's assault on Gaza despite international outcry and protests within the United States.
"The U.N. Genocide Convention must be upheld. Israel must be held accountable," said former U.N. human rights official Craig Mokhiber, who resigned from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in October in protest of the U.N.'s failure to stop Israel's massacre of civilians. "International law must be preserved."
At the ICJ, South Africa called for an expedited hearing on Israel's actions and asked the court to indicate provisional measures under the Genocide Convention to "protect against further, severe, and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people."
Article 2 of the Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948, states that genocide includes acts committed with the "intent to destroy, either in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group."
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, pointed out Friday that "the three leading Israeli officials have declared the intent" to wipe out Gaza's population.
Bishara noted that Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in October that all civilians in Gaza are "responsible" for Hamas' attack on southern Israel, days after Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the military would collectively punish the enclave's population, who he called "human animals."
Netanyahu also said this week that so-called "voluntary migration" of Gaza residents is the ultimate objective of Israel's assault.
On Friday, the spokesperson for Israel's Foreign Affairs Ministry, Lior Haiat, dismissed South Africa's motion as "baseless" and a "despicable and contemptuous exploitation of the court."
Despite top officials' recent statements, Haiat said the government has "made it clear that the residents of the Gaza Strip are not the enemy."
Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch, called South Africa's move "a vital step to propel greater support for impartial justice."
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams on December 29th, 2023.
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A few months back, two Black state representatives, Rep. Justin Jones, (D-Nashville), and Rep. Justin Pearson, (D-Memphis) protested gun violence in Nashville, and was briefly expelled from Tennessee’s House of Representatives. They did return to office days later but they were forced to win “special” elections, months later to serve out their original terms.
Their brief expulsion drew nationwide attention to Tennessee’s racial and partisan politics, amplifying the ongoing tensions between Black Democrats and White Republicans there. The brief expulsion triggered a very public display of party loyalty amongst Black Democrats that quickly turned this show of racial politics into a political spectacle.
The bright lights and camera flashes surrounding this spectacle managed to dim attention or urgency around the Republican supermajority in Tennessee’s state legislature that enabled the expulsion. Taking advantage of the low hanging fruit in electoral politics – race and partisan politics, there was a massive marketing campaign catapulting the “Justin’s” into the limelight.
"These raises are the outcome of over a decade of workers organizing with Fight for $15," said the National Employment Law Project.
Tireless campaigning by economic justice advocates helped to secure minimum wage hikes for nearly 10 million U.S. workers starting in 2024, and one think tank noted on Wednesday that further successes at the state and local levels are expected in the coming year—but experts said the federal government must catch up with state legislators to deliver fair wages to all workers.
In an important election year — featuring races for governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer, secretary of state, attorney general and several local government seats — Louisiana saw historically low voter turnout. Experts are still looking at why.
Only about 36% of registered voters cast ballots in October’s primary election, marking the lowest turnout in a Louisiana gubernatorial primary since 2011. The general election in November saw even lower turnout, when only about 23% of registered voters made it to the polls.
“This entire state didn’t show up,” said Ashley Shelton, president and CEO of the Power Coalition, a nonpartisan civic engagement group.
From the picket lines to state houses to the White House, champions in the fight against inequality landed huge wins.
Looking for something positive to celebrate on New Year’s Eve? Consider lifting a glass to the hardworking people behind these inspiring victories of 2023.
1. The ‘Year of the Strike’
More thanhalf a million American workers walked off the job this year. In October, companies lost more workdays to strikes than in any month during the past 40 years.
Big 3 auto workers, Hollywood writers and actors, Las Vegas and Los Angeles hotel staff, and Kaiser Permanente health care employees were among those who used strikes to score big bargaining table wins. For UPS drivers, the mere threat of a Teamsters strike was enough to securehistoric wage hikes and safety protections.
After renewing contracts with Ford, GM, Stellantis, and UPS, the UAW and the Teamsters doubled down on efforts to organize the unorganized. The Teamsters picketed outside 25 Amazon warehouses, demanding a fair contract for unionized drivers at a California-based delivery service for the notoriously anti-union retailer. The UAW set their sights on non-unionized car companies, causing so much indigestion among Nissan, Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai executives that they immediately hiked wages for their U.S. employees.
Homeless residents face uncertainty as encampment sweeps gain steam.
SAN DIEGO — Tracy Bennett has packed up and moved her tent and possessions so many times when the city periodically clears her sidewalk encampment, she jokes she could run her own moving company.
The black canopy that she’s wrapped in blue tarps and filled with blankets, food, a coloring book and the rest of her belongings, stood on a sidewalk on a Friday morning this month, a few blocks from the Gaslamp Quarter, a downtown San Diego nightlife hub. Her shelter had a bit of holiday flair: On the corner of her tent, near its entrance, sat a stuffed elf and two red stockings tied in green and red tinsel.
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