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'If You Want to End Unrest, End the Conditions That Create It,' Declares Ocasio-Cortez Amid Nationwide Protest
Instead of calls for things to simply calm down and "go back to normal," said New York Congresswoman, "let's create a new world—one where all people are held to the same standard of the rule of law."
by
Jon Queally, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/30/if-you-want-end-unrest-end-conditions-create-it-declares-ocasio-cortez-amid
In a video message posted to Instagram on Saturday amidst days of nationwide protest in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota earlier this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued a plea to anyone calling for the end of the "unrest" stirred by brutality and oppression to focus on the root causes of poverty, distrust, and violence in American society.
"If you are calling for an end to this unrest... but you are not calling for the end to the conditions that created the unrest, you are a hyppocrite," Ocasio-Cortez said in the post.
"If you're trying to call for the end to unrest, but you don't believe healthcare is a human right. If you're afraid to say Black Lives Matter. If you're too scared to call out police brutality—then you aren't asking for an to unrest. You are asking for injustice to continue and for your people to continue to endure the violence of poverty, the violence of lack of housing access, the violence of police brutality and not say a damn thing. That's what you're asking for."
"So if you're out here," she continued, "asking for an end to unrest, you better be asking for healthcare as a human right, you better be calling for accountability in our policing, you better be supporting community review boards, you better be supporting the end of housing discrimination, you better be standing up to for-profit real estate developers that are intimidating people and trying to evict them from their homes—that's what you better be calling for. Because if you don't call for those things and you're asking for the end of unrest—all you're asking for is the continuation of quiet oppression."
Ocasio-Cortez said lawmakers, politicians, and anyone else making such calls must make sure that there is no demand for an end of protest that is not coupled with demands for "measures that actually liberate people in their lives from the oppression of economic and social inequity."
Watch the 6-minute video post:
Allowing people to struggle and die within unjust systems, said Ocasio-Cortez, is "just wrong" and should no longer be tolerated. She said none of her remarks are meant to condone the violence and property destruction by some people amid the protests in cities nationwide, but that her intent is to ask people to consider a more "holistic view of this moment" and recognize that only by centering justice and recognizing the broader systemic failures can peace and prosperity be shared by all.
As of this writing, the video had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times between Instagram and other social media platforms where it was shared.
"We have to really examine why so many people were okay ignoring these problems until a window got broken," she said. "Why does it take that for people to pay attention? Because it shouldn't."
Instead of calls for things to simply calm down and "go back to normal," said Ocasio-Cortez, "let's create a new world—one where all people are held to the same standard of the rule of law. And one where the justice a person gets for their crimes is not dependent on who they work for or how much money they have, but by the actual deed that was done."
A world like that, she concluded, "is what justice looks like."
Cornel West Says 'Neo-Fascist Gangster' Trump and Neoliberal Democrats Expose America as 'Failed Social Experiment'
"I thank God people are in the streets," said the Harvard philosopher and activist. "Can you imagine this kind of lynching taking place and people are indifferent? People don't care? People are callous?"
by
Jon Queally, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/30/cornel-west-says-neo-fascist-gangster-trump-and-neoliberal-democrats-expose-america
Harvard University philosophy professor Dr. Cornell West appeared on CNN Friday night amid nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota and offered a searing indictment not just of white supremacy, the neo-fascism of President Donald Trump, and a criminal justice system that repeatedly brutalizes the poor and people of color—but also of a deep depravity that exists within the neoliberal capitalist system of the 21st Century in the United States that dominates both major political parties.
As protests raged in Minneapolis, outside Trump's White House, and U.S. cities nationwide—including Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Oakland—West told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an interview, "I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment."
"What I mean by that," explained West, "is that the history of black people for over 200 and some years in America has been looking at America's failure. Its capitalist economy could not generate and deliver in such a way that people could live lives of decency. The nation-state, it's criminal justice system, it's legal system could not generate protection of rights and liberties. And now our culture, of course is so market-driven—everything for sale, everybody for sale—it can't deliver the kind of nourishment for soul, for meaning, for purpose."
West explained the current anger over Floyd's murder by police—one of whom, officer Derek Chauvin, was arrested Friday and charged with 3rd-degree murder and manslaughter—adds to a "perfect storm" of multiple failures and inequities that pre-exist under an American imperial system that people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and others have been warning about since the middle of last century.
"When I saw those pictures there of Atlanta," West said, "you could see Brother Martin right there in Atlanta, saying: 'I told you about militarism. I told you about poverty. I told you about materialism. I told you about racism in all of its forms. I told you about xenophobia.' And what you're seeing in America is those chickens coming home to roost. You are reaping what you sow. And in this instant, you have Brother George—it is so clear—it was a lynching at the highest level. Nobody can deny it."
While solidarity protests erupted far beyond Minneapolis Friday night in outrage over Floyd's murder—and the killing by police of other black, brown, and other marginalized victims—West said, "I thank God people are in the streets. Can you imagine this kind of lynching taking place and people are indifferent? People don't care? People are callous?"
Watch:
West denounced President Donald Trump as the "neo-fascist gangster in the White House," but said the failure of the nation—one that allows for endemic inequality and a culture of greed and consumerism that tramples on the rights and dignity of poor people and minorities decade after decade—goes much beyond the current president.
"The system cannot reform itself," West argued and pointed to a dynamic in which identitarian representation is asked to be a stand in for class equality, shared prosperity, and a functional democracy that actually expresses the will of the people and satisfies the material needs of the working people and the poor.
"We've tried black faces in high places," he said. "Too often our black politicians, professional class, middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state, too accommodated to the market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that means so much to so many fellow citizens."
"You've got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party that is now in the driver's seat with the collapse of brother Bernie [Sanders] and they really don't know what to do," West added, "because all they want to do is show more black faces—show more black faces. But often times those black faces are losing legitimacy, too—because the Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security, and they couldn't deliver. So when you talk about the masses of black people—the precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color—they're the ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless—then you get rebellion."
According to West, the nation faces a choice now between "nonviolent revolution" and continuing the status quo failures. "And by revolution what I mean is the democratic sharing of power, resources, wealth and respect," he explained. "If we don't get that kind of sharing, you're going to get more violent explosions."
While reiterating the inherent dangers of Trump, West said one benefit of the president is that he tells the world exactly who he is. On the hand, the broader failures of the system under the neoliberal capitalist economy is rarely called out or revealed for what it is.
"White supremacy is going to be around for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time, don't be surprised when this happens again," West said.
"But the question is we must fight," he concluded. "Even in the moment where we have a failed social experiment, we must fight. We must have an antifascist coalition against what's going on in the White House and the Republican Party. And we have to tell the truth about the milquetoast, cowardly activity too often we see too often in the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party. And we must be critical of ourselves in terms of keeping alive the highest moral and spiritual standards of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fanny Lou Hammer and Ella Baker. And you see that work in the soul of brother George Floyd's family."
New PEN America Report Warns Surge of Anti-Protest Laws in Trump Era Is 'Danger to Expressive Rights of All'
"There has been a determined movement, occurring largely outside the public eye, to delegitimize public protest and paint demonstrators as dangerous or even criminal."
by
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/27/new-pen-america-report-warns-surge-anti-protest-laws-trump-era-danger-expressive
As protest movements against racist police violence, planet-destroying pipelines, and the policies of President Donald Trump have intensified and spread rapidly across the U.S. in recent years, so have efforts by state lawmakers from both major political parties to criminalize protest by hitting peaceful demonstrators with draconian jail sentences and financial penalties.
Nearly a third of all states have implemented restrictions on the right to protest over the past five years, the report found.That's according to a new policy paper released Wednesday by PEN America, which found that between 2015 and 2019, state lawmakers have introduced a total of 116 bills aimed at curtailing protest rights, 23 of which have become law in 15 states. In 2020, an additional 16 anti-protest bills have been introduced and four have become law.
"The right to protest is enshrined in the First Amendment, and a bedrock element of the free speech rights we enjoy as Americans," Nora Benavidez, PEN America's director of U.S. free expression programs, said in a statement. "Yet as individuals have exercised these rights more visibly and volubly in recent years, there has been a determined movement, occurring largely outside the public eye, to delegitimize public protest and paint demonstrators as dangerous or even criminal."
PEN America is part of the PEN International network which defends free expression and fights censorship and repression of artists, writers, and others worldwide.
The new report—titled "Arresting Dissent: Legislative Restrictions on the Right to Protest"—connects the sharp uptick in state anti-protest proposals in 2017 to the surge in mass demonstrations that followed Trump's election to the presidency in 2016. According to the paper, 56 anti-protest bills were introduced at the state level in 2017, up from just six such proposals in 2015 and 2016 combined.
"The sudden increase in the number of anti-protest bills introduced at the state level in 2017 coincided with a burst of public protests following the election of President Donald Trump, from the Women's March the day after the 2017 inauguration to spontaneous demonstrations against the Trump administration's travel ban at airports across the country in early 2017," the report notes. "It also followed a year of significant protests by Native American communities against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota."
The trend of lawmakers introducing anti-protest legislation in the wake of major demonstrations has been most prominent in Minnesota, Missouri, Massachusetts, and North Dakota, PEN found.
"North Dakota is the site of the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline," the report says. "The protests in Ferguson, Missouri—as well as in Massachusetts—brought the Black Lives Matter movement to national recognition. Minnesota, meanwhile, has hosted major Black Lives Matter, anti-Trump, and environmental protests. These states are also among those that have seen the highest number of anti-protest bills introduced between 2017 and 2019: Minnesota saw nine bills, Massachusetts with thirteen, Missouri with eight, and North Dakota with seven."
In an article last October, ACLU attorney Vera Eidelman described the wave of anti-protest bills as "a direct reaction from politicians and corporations to some of the most effective tactics of those speaking out today, including water protectors challenging pipeline construction, Black Lives Matter, and those calling for boycotts of Israel."
PEN's report describes in detail a number of proposals and laws cracking down on protest at the state level, including a Texas law enacted in 2018 that makes "interference" with "energy infrastructure construction"—e.g., pipelines—"a third-degree felony punishable by two to ten years imprisonment—equivalent to the punishment for the crime of attempted murder."
"Since the law took effect, fourteen protesters and one journalist have been arrested under its provisions," PEN said.A Louisiana law passed in 2018 "targets protests near gas and oil pipelines by expanding the definition of critical infrastructure and providing for the offense of unauthorized entry of a critical infrastructure," the report notes. Protesters arrested for trespassing under the law could be hit a with felony charge carrying up to five years in prison.
PEN argues that while there may be good public health reasons to impose temporary restrictions on mass gatherings during the Covid-19 pandemic, "it is critical that such constraints occur within the boundaries of the Constitution and with a long-term view to protecting Americans' protest rights."
The group points out that the enthusiastic support that right-wing protests against coronavirus lockdown measures have garnered from Trump and other Republican politicians "is potent evidence of the political motivations that have shaded" crackdowns on protest rights in recent years.
"In some instances these measures have been tailored in ways that reveal a determination to suppress the robust expression of particular viewpoints, for example by banning protests near public infrastructure projects that have been flashpoints for environmental concerns," said Benavidez. "At the same time, the president expresses hostility towards certain protest movements, and vociferous support for others, depending on whether or not they align with his views."
"This selective approach to respect for First Amendment rights," Benavidez warned, "flies in the face of the constitution and poses a danger to the expressive rights of all."
James Tager, PEN's deputy director of free expression research and policy, said in a statement that the "explosive number of bills across so many states points to an increasingly hostile attitude among legislators toward protesters."
"Even in these unprecedented times, while some constraints on our liberties may be necessary to preserve public health," Tager said, "we must ensure that the right to publicly and peacefully express our views is safeguarded."
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