Wednesday, June 3, 2020
Pompeo Attacks ‘Corrupted’ ICC Again As War Crimes Investigation Continues
Daniel Davis June 1, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/pompeo-attacks-corrupted-icc-again-as-war-crimes-investigation-continues/
“When the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, made public her plans to bring a case to the court last year, the US revoked her visa as punishment.”
The International Criminal Court is set to begin investigating the US for the first time since it began operating in 2002. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pushed back on the notion that the court has the jurisdiction to try US citizens and, in particular, its soldiers. At the center of the investigation are allegations that the US military committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the war in Afghanistan.
‘Never’
Pompeo was interviewed on the “What the Hell Is Going On?” podcast, a production of American Enterprise Institute think tank, a conservative organization, POLITICO reported.
“You’ll see in the coming days a series of announcements not just from the State Department, [but] from all across the United States government that attempt to push back against what the ICC is up to,” Pompeo said.
The secretary pushed further, calling the court “corrupted” and declared the court will be unable to force American solderers to take the stand.
“We’ll never let that happen. We’re working along many fronts to prevent that from happening.”
‘Breathtaking Action’
The ICC green lit the investigation in March after a lower court decided not to escalate the case. Critics argued the lower court had caved to the Trump administration, The New York Times reported.
When the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, made public her plans to bring a case to the court last year, the US revoked her visa as punishment.
At the time, Pompeo called it a “truly breathtaking action by an unaccountable, political institution masquerading as a legal body.”
America, Pompeo noted, is not a member of the treaty that established the court, the Rome Statute. The US alongside Israel, Sudan, and Russia, is a signatory states but under the George W. Bush administration, announced it would not ratify the treaty.
The upcoming investigation is the exact scenario former President George W. Bush envisioned when he decided not to pursue ratification of the treaty, BBC reported. Although his predecessor, Bill Clinton, negotiated concessions to prevent frivolous lawsuits and signed the treaty, Bush and Republican leadership felt ratifying it would concede too much power and threaten Washington’s sovereignty.
President Donald Trump took an even firmer stance, telling he UN General Assembly in 2018 that the “United States will provide no support or recognition to the International Criminal Court. As far as America is concerned the ICC has no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority.”
Reasonable Basis for Investigation
Even so, Americans can still be tried under the court because Afghanistan is a member. However, the Afghan government has protested the move on the basis that its own mechanism for investigating war crimes, the New York Times reported.
The investigation into alleged war crimes committed by American servicemen in Afghanistan is only part of Bensouda’s case at the ICC, NPR reported. She is also looking into attacks by the Taliban and other militias that played a role in the war. When the court probes a conflict, it holds perpetrators and officials higher up the chain accountable. For the US, this means officials who led occupation efforts and even interrogation programs.
“There is reasonable basis to believe that, since May 2003, members of the US armed forces and the CIA have committed the war crimes of torture and cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape and other forms of sexual violence pursuant to a policy approved by US authorities,” the prosecution told the ICC.
Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, ended the hearing that saw the appeals chamber allow the investigation to proceed.
“In the case of U.S. torture, who bears responsibility has been well-documented,” Gallagher said.
The threat of retaliation by Washington is not the first time it has challenged the court. On May 15, Pompeo warned the ICC the Trump administration would “exact consequences” over a possible investigation into war crimes in Palestine. Although Israel is not a member of the court, Palestine has ratified it, making crimes committed there open to investigation, Human Rights Watch reported.
Promising Effort in Congress Builds to Release Prisoners and Treat Marijuana Like a Normal Industry
Phillip Smith June 1, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/promising-effort-in-congress-builds-to-release-prisoners-and-treat-marijuana-like-a-normal-industry/
When, in mid-May, House Democrats rolled out the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (Heroes) Act, H.R. 6800, as the latest congressional response to the coronavirus pandemic, they also included a handful of criminal justice and drug policy reforms in the broad-ranging $3 trillion bill. Most of those reforms are aimed at shrinking the prison population in this time of public health crisis, but also on the list is language that would finally allow state-legal marijuana businesses to gain access to banking and other financial services.
The bill passed the House on May 15, but faces clouded prospects in the Senate.
The spread of the coronavirus within the federal prison system is a real concern. The story of the first female federal prisoner to die of the coronavirus, a South Dakota Native American woman named Andrea Circle Bear, brought media attention to the plight of federal prisoners. Sent into the federal system on a two-year drug charge in March, the pregnant Circle Bear came down with coronavirus symptoms on March 31. She gave birth to a premature baby via C-section on April 1 and died a few weeks later on April 28, according to a statement by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
As of June 1, the federal prisoner death toll had risen to 67, with more than 5,900 inmates infected across the system.
Facing the carceral coronavirus crisis, the Justice Roundtable, a broad-based coalition of more than 100 organizations working to reform federal criminal justice laws and policies, released a set of recommendations for supporting prisoner releases as a public safety response to the pandemic. Those included spending nearly $12 billion on supporting access to housing for released prisoners and another $1 billion to incentivize states and localities to release prisoners and support critical reentry services, as well as ending federal bans on various forms of assistance for ex-offenders, making Medicaid available before prisoners get back on the streets, ensuring that people impacted by the criminal justice system get access to federal relief funds, and spending another $650 million for expanding federal workforce and educational programs for prisoners.
The Heroes Act does not do all that, but in Division A, Title II (“Office of Justice Programs: State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance”) it does provide $250 million for offender reentry programs and another half-billion dollars for efforts to reduce the spread of the virus among arrestees and prisoners at all levels. There is also another $200 million for the Bureau of Prisons to respond to the crisis, with funding for medical testing and services and necessary protective supplies.
And there is more. Incorporating various already existing pieces of legislation, Division S, Title XI of the act (“Prisons and Jails”) is the Emergency Community Supervision Act, which during a declared emergency related to communicable diseases “mandates the release into community supervision of federal prisoners and pretrial detainees who are non-violent and, for instance, pregnant women, older prisoners and detainees, and those with certain medical conditions.”
Title XI also modifies probation and supervised release policies to reduce unnecessary in-person contact with probation officers, mandates the pretrial release of non-violent offenders without cash bail, and gives federal courts more authority to reduce sentences and order compassionate release for prisoners, with a special provision for elderly prisoners.
On another important drug policy front, the Heroes Act incorporates wholesale the Secure and Fair Enforcement (Safe) Banking Act, which provides much-needed access to the banking and financial services sector for the state-legal marijuana industry. Republicans are already sniping at that, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell complaining about a provision that would fund studies about diversity and inclusion in the industry.
“There’s a lot in this bill,” said Kara Gotsch, who heads federal advocacy for the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based criminal justice reform group and member of the Justice Roundtable. “What’s critical is to address the inability to do social distancing within correctional facilities,” she said.
“We’ve had a huge spread of the virus in prisons—not just federal, but state and local, too. Letting those people out into home confinement is critical not just to their health, but also for the health of the people who might stay behind. It creates space, an opportunity to follow the guidelines,” Gotsch continued.
The Heroes Act is the work of House Democrats, and while it has passed the House, that’s only half the battle. In what is certain to be a titanic political struggle, Senate Republicans are pondering their own version of yet another massive coronavirus relief package. In such a huge—and hugely important—struggle, the fate of some federal prisoners and legal marijuana entrepreneurs may not loom large, but it hangs in the balance.
“It’s clear that McConnell doesn’t have the same sense of urgency to move another stimulus package, but I think the pressure is going to increase on the Senate to take some action,” said Gotsch. “This pandemic and its consequences are not going away, and the consequences are severe—more and more people are likely to be infected and lose their lives.”
And that means Gotsch and the other criminal justice reform advocates will be hard at work in the coming weeks to see that as many of the House-passed reform measures make it into the final bill as possible.
“I’m hopeful we could see the Senate moving in June, and as far as our priorities are concerned, I’m hopeful [we] can get some of those provisions in the final package,” said Gotsch. “We’ll be taking the next few weeks to talk to and educate Senate offices. Federal judges are growing increasingly frustrated with the Justice Department’s obstruction on compassionate release and its stinginess on home confinement, which is having a disastrous effect. Our goal is to get the word out to Senate staff to make them aware of how dire the situation really is.”
She pointed to the sad story of Andrea Circle Bear.
“I think that galvanized a lot of people,” said Gotsch. “She puts a human face on the concerns we’ve been trying to articulate about the tragic circumstances the prisons are facing. With more education and as these tragic stories come to light, I think we’ll be able to get some change.”
Minnesota Announces ‘Contact Tracing’ for Protesters As Police Increase Brutality Nationwide
Alec Pronk June 1, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/police-increase-brutality-nationwide-minnesota-announces-contact-tracing-for-protesters/
Despite repressive curfews and police brutality, chants of “No Justice, No Peace” ring around the country.
This weekend’s images of police brutality and militarized police across the nation solidified America’s status as a full-blown police state. The list of video footage and images of police officers instigating citizens and indiscriminately deploying violence to quell protests and uprisings is nearly endless if you turn on the TV or look at social media.
The unrest began in Minneapolis after one officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck and murdered him while 3 fellow police officers looked on.
Police across the country have used rubber bullets, pepper spray, flashbangs, and other violent tactics in an attempt to bludgeon the demonstrations against police brutality. Police action has cost both protestors’ and news media workers’ eyes from rubber bullets, hospital trips, and countless untold injuries.
To add to the police presence at least 5,000 National Guard troops were deployed in now 21 different states and the District of Colombia.
Despite all the militarized force, Americans in nearly all major and medium-sized cities demonstrated, calling for racial justice and an end to police brutality. In vain, cities across the country imposed curfews to restrict protestors’ ability to demonstrate during the night.
Deploying Coronavirus Rhetoric
The current coronavirus pandemic has barely begun to tail off, but officials gave already begun using rhetoric built in the response to coronavirus to track protestors and demonstrators.
In Minneapolis where it all began, officials announced they have begun ‘contact tracing’ protestors and demonstrators they have arrested.
Speaking vaguely about the contact tracing strategy, Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said, “we are in the process right now of building that information network.”
Harrington and other Minnesota politicians were quick to blame outsiders and criminal networks for being behind much of the looting and rioting.
On Saturday St Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said, “every single person we arrested last night, I’m told, was from out of state.”
Additionally, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz estimated that 80% of those arrested came from outside of the state.
However, officials had to backtrack including Carter who said he was given “inaccurate information… during a police briefing.”
Blaming Outsider and Foreign Influence
Rather than place the blame directly at police, politicians and many political commentators, both liberal and conservative, have pushed the idea that outside agitators and even foreign influence have turned the protests violent.
In a viral tweet, MSNBC host Joy Reid repeated words from Minnesota mayors, governor and attorney general, and said, “all alleging outside forces, domestic and possibly foreign, have post-Tuesday infiltrated the state.”
Governor Walz even alleged drug cartels were getting in on the action, without providing any evidence to back such a claim.
The outside agitator message coincided with President Donald Trump designating Antifa, a loosely-defined group without a single death to their name, a terrorist organization.
President Obama’s former National Security Adviser appeared on CNN and said, “we have extremists who have come to try to hijack those protests and turn them into something very different… based on my experience this is right out of the Russian playbook.”
To what Rice is exactly referring to is completely unknown, and the former National Security Adviser provided no evidence for her claim.
National security journalists and security officials have gone hard in pushing the foreign influence element. According to Jeff Seldin of Voice of America, a government propaganda multimedia agency, Russia, China, and Iran are all ‘seizing upon’ George Floyd and the ensuing protests.
National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien mentioned social media posts from China, Zimbabwe, and Iran taking pleasure in the events unfolding in America. O’Brien also appeared on CNN and said, “I don’t think there’s systemic racism,” in America’s police force.
Much of the American political establishment is quick to blame anything but its own internal failures to distract from the reality of a country with mounting civil insurrection.
Really? Obama Officials Blame Russia For Mass Protests Sweeping USA
On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker and John Kiriakou are joined by Max Blumenthal, a bestselling author and journalist, whose latest film is “Killing Gaza,” and who is also the senior editor of Grayzone and co-host of the podcast “Moderate Rebels.”
by John Kiriakou, Brian Becker
https://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/202006021079491431-really-obama-officials-blame-russia-for-mass-protests-sweeping-usa/
click on link above for PODCAST
00:00 / 118:27
Former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice made a wild and unsubstantiated accusation over the weekend, saying that Russia and Vladimir Putin were behind the uprising in Minneapolis and subsequent nationwide rioting following the police murder of George Floyd. She offered no evidence for the accusation and went on to say that the Trump Administration’s decision to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization was “fine.”
The country is in the midst of an uprising not seen since the 1960s, with anti-police marches, demonstrations, and violence taking place in hundreds of cities and towns across America. The protests began when a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota knelt on the neck of George Floyd and killed him. But frustration and anger have bubbled over, and in many cities, the violence is now out of control. Twenty six states and the District of Columbia have activated the National Guard, many for the first time since World War II. For his part, President Trump has been notably silent, except on Twitter, where he has threatened retaliation against demonstrators. Last night he did that from a bunker underneath the White House, to which he was evacuated during demonstrations in Washington. Eugene Puryear, an author, activist and host of the new program BreakThrough News, joins the show.
Today’s “Education for Liberation” is education for liberation at a time of mass uprising. Our guest has been fighting for economic, racial, and social justice in the streets for decades. Brian and John speak with Bill Ayers, an activist, educator and the author or co-author of many books, including “About Becoming A Teacher” and “You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones: And 18 Other Myths About Teachers, Teachers Unions, and Public Education,” and a 1960s central national leader of Students for a Democratic Society, who’s at www.BillAyers.org.
President Trump tweeted over the weekend that he intends to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, a move that constitutional scholars already are declaring unconstitutional. Antifa, which stands for anti-fascism, is a broad-based group of people who support oppressed communities and who protest the amassing of wealth accumulated by corporations and elites. Another tactic that governments use to try to suppress protesters is to slow the wheels of justice against police who kill and carefully craft any indictments against police who kill to be able to wait out the protests and let the police off the hook later on, like Daniel Pantaleo, the policeman who choked Eric Garner to death but who emerged from several investigations years later without criminal charges. Mara Verheyden Hilliard, the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, joins the show.
Monday’s regular segment Technology Rules is a weekly guide on how monopoly corporations and the national surveillance state--where this week they focus on the technologies and surveillance tactics that the government has already been using at all levels to suppress the protests for Justice for George Floyd, manipulate the narrative, and criminalize dissent. This is your guide to what’s going on behind the scenes of the nationwide protests demanding justice for George Floyd and the countless people killed by police. Web developer and technologist Chris Garaffa and software engineer and technology and security analyst Patricia Gorky join the show with John.
We'd love to get your feedback at radio@sputniknews.com
Capitalism Is Not the Solution to Urban America’s Problems — Capitalism Itself Is the Problem
By David Harvey
Jacobin
http://davidharvey.org/2020/06/capitalism-is-not-the-solution-to-urban-americas-problems-capitalism-itself-is-the-problem/#more-3342
It is quite possible that if and when we collectively emerge from the torments being inflicted by COVID-19, we will find ourselves in a political landscape where the reform of capitalism is very much upon the agenda. Even before the virus struck, there were minor hints of such a transition. Major business leaders who were gathered at Davos, for example, heard that their obsession with profits and market value and neglect of social and environmental impacts was becoming counterproductive. They were advised to take shelter from rising public wrath in some form of “conscience” or “eco-capitalism.”
The lamentable state of society’s public-health defenses against the onslaught of the virus, after forty years of neoliberal politics in many parts of the world, has increased the degree of public agitation. Austerity on anything other than military expenditures or subsidies to supposedly needy — though often filthy rich — corporations left behind a bitter taste, increasingly so after the bank bailout of 2008. In contrast, the collective and state-led measures to address the pandemic that did seem to work have generated more favorable public attitudes towards government.
In his remarkable daily news conferences, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo insists that the eventual exit from the current crisis will not only require a reimagining of the economic, social, and political landscape, but will also rest on what he sees as a unique reconciliation between expressions of the popular will and government powers. For those of us who have lived through the recent New York nightmare, this declaration of confidence in the value of state intervention makes some sense.
Unfortunately, Cuomo’s preparatory moves for his reimagining exercise have so far involved recruiting a billionaire’s club of Michael Bloomberg (to organize testing), Bill Gates (to coordinate education initiatives) and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt (to re-calibrate communications and governmental functions). The ground-up democratic surge that has become more prominent at street level has yet to make much of a mark on political power. In the Cuomo imagination, the reimaginings and reconstructions required will be tailored to the needs of capital and people as defined by a progressive capitalist elite.
The Cities We Need
Throughout the long history of bourgeois governance, there have been some remarkable phases of radical reform in the United States, such as the Progressive era at the turn of the twentieth century, the New Deal of the 1930s, and the Great Society of the 1960s. The consensus seems to be building that we are overdue another one.
It is in such a context that a head of steam is building to reconstruct urban life in particular, and to revitalize urban processes so as to promote not only more rational — and more eco-friendly — forms of economic development, but also more adequate ways of organizing daily life. As well as wreaking untold direct damage upon the quality of everyday life for most New Yorkers, the virus has also revealed the huge amount of rot beneath the surface glitter of conspicuous consumerism, indulgent individualism, and flamboyant architectural interventions.
It is in this spirit that the recent New York Times Editorial Board reflections on “The Cities We Need” — supplemented by several invited expert op-eds — invite some commentary. The central theme is simple enough. Once upon a time, “cities worked. Now they don’t.” We need to get them working again.
Behind this lies a somewhat nostalgic reconstruction of an era when “American cities were the hammering engines of the nation’s economic progress, the showcase of its wealth and culture, the objects of global fascination, admiration and aspiration.” In those good old days, “cities supplied the keys for unlocking human potential; an infrastructure of public schools and colleges, public libraries and parks, public-transit systems and clean, safe drinking water,” even though they were “deformed by racism, bled by the profiteering of elites and fouled by pollution and disease.” But above it all, those cities “offered opportunity.”
The problem now — and this is what the virus has revealed in such gut-wrenching detail — is that “our urban areas are laced by invisible [?] but increasingly impermeable boundaries separating enclaves of wealth and privilege from the gap-toothed blocks of aging buildings and vacant lots where jobs are scarce and where life is hard and all too often short.” Life-expectancy rates in the poorest neighborhoods are just sixty years, compared to ninety years in the affluent suburbs. To hammer home this point, the Times later published elaborate maps of differential life expectancies in US cities.
All Together Now?
It is unarguable that life chances depend upon the zip code of one’s birth. The litany of current failures is long (and far from invisible). As the Times observes:
Over the last half century their infrastructure of opportunity has badly decayed. Their public schools no longer prepare students to succeed. Their subways are reliably unreliable. Their water runs with lead.
The lack of affordable housing in good locations means long and tedious commutes for low-wage workers on failing public-transit systems. It means thousands of homeless camping on the streets, on the buses, and in the subways. Educational opportunities map onto local differentials in income and wealth, serving to solidify and deepen class and racial divides.
The Editorial Board’s conclusion is that “the rich need labor; the poor need capital. And the city needs both.” We all need to pull together to make for ourselves a more satisfying and more equitable form of urbanization. This is an astonishing conclusion. It simply reasserts the primacy of the structures that lie at the root of most of the problems of contemporary urban life.
To be sure, the rich need labor because it is labor that makes them rich. But it is capital that has taken the lion’s share of wealth produced during these last forty years. It is also capital that has reduced labor to a fragment of itself through precarity, technological displacements, deindustrialization, and all the other ills that leave cities with a population that lives from paycheck to paycheck, unable to survive without resorting to charity at the food banks and free meals. It produces a population largely unable to afford the rent, let alone a mortgage payment, when unemployment or some personal tragedy or illness strikes.
Ronald Reagan famously remarked that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Until we realize that “capital is not the solution to our problem, capital is the problem,” we will be lost. Capital builds Hudson Yards and not affordable housing for those who are trying to live on less than $40,000 a year. Until capital can do the latter, all attempts at reform, however well-meaning, are sure to be coopted into the cycles of endless capital accumulation for the benefit of the few. Capital will continue to function in this way irrespective of the social and ecological consequences, while leaving the mass of the population to scrimp and save — if that is even possible — just to get by.
A Familiar Tune
The Editorial Board leaves us solely with hopeful exhortations to our superior moral instincts, our supposedly better angels, to solve a problem that calls for root-and-branch structural reform. “Reducing segregation requires affluent Americans to share but not necessarily to sacrifice,” they say. Heaven forbid that the affluent might have to sacrifice! “Building more diverse neighborhoods, and disconnecting public institutions from private wealth,” they hopefully claim, “will ultimately enrich the lives of all Americans — and make the cities in which they live and work a model again for the whole world.”
I am eighty-four years old, and I have heard this sort of thing too many times before to take it seriously. In 1969, I moved to a segregated Baltimore a year after much of the city was burned down in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. It did not take long for me back then to grow weary of heart-felt moralizing — the kind the Editorial Board resurrects — and the do-gooder spirit of those who genuinely (but alas so naively) believed it would all work out, if only those of us with good will (supplemented, presumably, by an empathy pill specially designed for reluctant subjects) would recognize that all of our fates are intertwined, that all of us are in this city together.
I wrote a book about the whole experience, Social Justice and the City, in which I sought to address the long-term continuity of capitalism’s urban problem. And here it is fifty years later and we seem set for a repeat performance, making exactly the same mistakes. It was abundantly clear back then that the market mechanism — which requires the production of scarcity to function — was the main culprit in a sordid drama. Thinking in these terms helped explain why almost all policies devised for the relief of urban inequality end up being crucified on an underlying contradiction.
If we engage in “urban renewal,” we merely move the poverty around (Engels, in his 1872 essay on the housing question, suggested that this was the only solution the bourgeoisie had to its urban problems). If we don’t, we merely sit by and watch as continuous decay takes place. “Gilding the ghetto” — as it was then called — plainly did not work, so the dispersal of impacted populations across urban space must be the answer. That also did not really work. The latter approach may have dispersed the ghetto somewhat, but it did not reduce levels of poverty or diminish racial discrimination.
Frustration with such failed outcomes led to the conclusion that the poor must bear the blame for their parlous condition, locked away as they were in their own distinctive “cultures of poverty.” The only proper response, said Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the time, was one of “benign neglect.” This presaged the neoliberal trope of personal responsibility and entrepreneurialism of the self, which justified blaming the victims, and in turn helped evade the kind of awkward questions which continuous policy failures inevitably posed. Few commentators scrutinized the forces which govern the very heart of our economic system. (Moynihan just happens, incidentally, to be Cuomo’s political mentor and role model.)
Emotional Tourism
The upshot is that all manner of solutions were devised and explored in those days, except ones that might challenge the continuation of the capitalist market economy. Yet this is the economy which, left to its own devices, inevitably produces spiraling impoverishment of the sort that the current pandemic has so starkly revealed.
When 40 percent of the thirty million people who are now unemployed had been earning less than $40,000 a year, surely we have to recognize the bankruptcy of contemporary capitalism in terms of providing for basic human needs. The neoliberal line of personal responsibility and human capital formation that developed back in the 1970s proved to be a convenient way for the capitalist class and the corporations to escape from the failures of the 1960s reform wave, while endlessly filling their own pockets.
It is vital, therefore, to subject the very basis of our society to a rigorous and critical examination. This is an immediate task. But let me say first what this task does not entail. As I concluded back in the early ‘70s, it does not mean yet another empirical investigation of the social conditions in our cities. In fact, mapping even more evidence of man’s patent inhumanity to man is actually counterproductive, in the sense that it allows the bleeding-heart liberal in us to pretend that we are contributing to a solution when in fact we are not. This kind of empiricism is irrelevant, even though it may earn us a Nobel Prize.
There is already enough information available to provide us with all the evidence we need. Our task does not lie in this field. Nor does it lie in what can only be termed “moral masturbation,” of the sort that accompanies the masochistic assemblage of some huge dossier on the daily injustices to which the urban populace are subjected, over which we can beat our breasts and commiserate with each other before retiring to our fireside comforts. This, too, is counterrevolutionary, for it merely serves to expiate guilt without ever forcing us to face the fundamental issues, let alone do anything about them.
Nor is it a solution to indulge in the kind of emotional tourism which attracts us to live and work with the poor “for a while,” in the hope that we can really help them improve their lot by volunteering at a soup kitchen or donating to a food bank (helpful though that may be in the short run). So what if we help a community win a playground in one summer of work, only to find that the school deteriorates in the fall? These are the paths we should not take. They merely serve to divert us from the essential task at hand.
A New Framework
This immediate task is nothing more nor less than the self-conscious construction of a new political framework for approaching the question of inequality, through a deep and profound critique of our economic and social system. We need to collectively mobilize our powers of thought to formulate concepts and categories, theories and arguments, that we can apply to the task of bringing about a humanizing social transformation.
These concepts and categories cannot be formulated in abstraction from social reality. They must be forged realistically with respect to the events and actions as they unfold around us. Empirical evidence, the already assembled dossiers, and the experiences gained in the community can and must be used here. And the surging wave of political empathy that is cresting in appreciation for all those who have lived their lives in the face of evident dangers must be taken at the flood. That wave will come to nothing if it is not consolidated by long-term, deep-rooted reforms.
The virus, it is said, does not discriminate. Well no! Like the New York TimesEditorial Board, I live comfortably isolated at home drawing my salary, dependent upon a segregated workforce that has to grapple with the existential choice between eviction and starvation through unemployment on the one hand, or keeping the city and its networks of care and comfort running for a measly wage on the other. And they also have to confront a potentially deadly virus on a daily basis. In what zip code do those workers reside? And what proportion of them are people of color, recent immigrants, Latinos and Latinas? How many laptops do the kids possess?
There is a distressing continuity to all this over the past century and a half. Surely it is time to break with this long and well-rehearsed history. We need to make a break for it, and plot the creation of more democratic and socially just forms of urbanization, animated by a different political economy and a different structure of social relations.
The disparities that underpinned the urban uprisings of the 1960s are still with us. In fact, they are deeper than ever. A few more months of lockdown and capitalist collapse, and the uprisings will almost certainly begin. But remember: “capital is the problem, not the solution.”
This piece was written in May, before the ongoing protests began.
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