https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJngqz5ejk8
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
'The Corruption Is Bottomless': Documents Reveal Chair of Postal Service Board Is Director of McConnell-Allied Super PAC
"Can the GOP's takeover of USPS be any more blatant?"
by
Jake Johnson, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/01/corruption-bottomless-documents-reveal-chair-postal-service-board-director-mcconnell
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's deep and longstanding ties to U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors chairman Robert Duncan are coming under heightened scrutiny after corporate paperwork filed Monday listed Duncan as a director of a major GOP super PAC closely aligned with the Kentucky Republican.
The new filing (pdf) with Virginia's State Corporation Commission—an independent regulatory agency that oversees political action committees—names Duncan as one of three directors of the Senate Leadership Fund, a massive super PAC that has spent nearly $18 million in support of Senate Republicans thus far in the 2020 election cycle.
Duncan—who raised more than $400 million for the GOP during his tenure as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2007 to 2009—was nominated to the USPS Board of Governors by President Donald Trump in 2017 confirmed by the McConnell-led Senate in August of 2018. A McConnell spokesperson told the Louisville Courier Journal last month that the GOP leader recommended Duncan to Trump.According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Senate Leadership Fund has recently received multi-million dollar donations from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, and other right-wing billionaires.
"As a businessman, a public servant, and a dedicated mentor to young people, Mike is an outstanding choice to help oversee the world's largest postal organization," McConnell said in an April 2018 Senate hearing considering Duncan's nomination.
News of Duncan's current high-level role on a super PAC closely linked to McConnell added fuel to growing concerns that recent USPS operational changes imposed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—a Republican megadonor to both McConnell and President Donald Trump—are a ploy to influence the outcome of the November election in the GOP's favor and, ultimately, privatize the Postal Service.
The sweeping changes—many of which DeJoy vowed to suspend last month in the face of immense public backlash—have dramatically slowed package deliveries across the nation and intensified concerns about the timely arrival of mail-in ballots in November. Last month, Democratic lawmakers urged the Board of Governors to remove DeJoy over his mail service changes and conflicts of interest, but members of the board—which unanimously appointed DeJoy in May despite his lack of USPS experience—have remained supportive of the postmaster general.
"Can the GOP's takeover of USPS be any more blatant?" economist Robert Reich asked Monday in response to the new filing.
"The corruption is bottomless," added Renee Graham, a columnist for the Boston Globe.
During a House Oversight Committee hearing last month, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) called attention to Duncan's ties to the Senate Leadership Fund and American Crossroads, another major Republican super PAC. Duncan confirmed that he on the boards of both GOP organizations while also serving as chairman of the USPS Board of Governors.
Lawmakers and progressive commentators suggested that McConnell's close relationship with the top official on the USPS Board of Governors could have something to do with the Republican leader's refusal to consider House-passed legislation providing $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service. In a tweet last month, McConnell dismissed widespread concerns about mail slowdowns across the U.S. as "overblown conspiracy theories."
"Is this why the Senate Majority Leader refuses to pass legislation to protect the USPS?" Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, asked Monday night in response to the new document.
Advocacy group Swing Left tweeted late Monday that the fresh details surrounding Duncan's ties to McConnell further highlight the need to oust the Kentucky senator, who is set to face off against Democratic challenger Amy McGrath in November.
"What a coincidence—the USPS chair's other job is at Mitch McConnell's super PAC, while Mitch kills Postal Service funding to secure our elections with his 'Senate Graveyard,'" the group said. "We have to take his gavel away this November."
COVID-19: Trump Covered Up Dire Reports
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/09/01/covid-19-trump-covered-up-dire-reports/
By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams
As President Donald Trump and administration officials have been publicly downplaying the Covid-19 crisis and even predicting its imminent disappearance over the past several months, the White House task force formed to coordinate the federal pandemic response has simultaneously been issuing dire assessments of the nation’s fight against the pandemic behind the scenes.
Those assessments were kept secret from the public until Monday, when the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a trove of task force reports dated between June 23 and Aug. 9 that highlight the extent to which Trump’s public proclamations about the Covid-19 crisis have diverged from the findings of experts operating in the White House.
“The task force reports released today show the White House has known since June that coronavirus cases were surging across the country and many states were becoming dangerous ‘red zones’ where the virus was spreading fast,” said Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), chairman of the subcommittee.
“Rather than being straight with the American people and creating a national plan to fix the problem,” Clyburn continued, “the president and his enablers kept these alarming reports private while publicly downplaying the threat to millions of Americans.”
Each of the eight task force reports released by the subcommittee on Monday contain analyses and conclusions that run counter to the recent public statements of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, the chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. The White House sent its reports privately to states but never made them available to the public until the subcommittee requested (pdf) that Pence and task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx turn them over late last month.
In a report (pdf) dated July 19 — the same day Trump confidently predicted that the coronavirus is “going to disappear” even as cases surged across the country — the White House task force estimated that 20 states were in the “red zone,” meaning more than 10 percent of new Covid-19 tests were positive.
On June 29, just days after Pence declared that “all 50 states are opening up safely and responsibly,” the task force issued a private assessement (pdf) warning that “Mississippi reported an 117% increase in new cases in the week ending June 26, resulting from increased community transmission in multiple counties attributed to reduced social distancing.”
Chuck Idelson, communications senior strategist for National Nurses United, tweeted that the newly released task force reports are evidence of a “White House cover-up” and yet “another indication of how Donald Trump could care less how many people die due to his malfeasance on protecting lives from the Covid-19 pandemic.”
In a press release, the House coronavirus subcommittee listed several other examples of the internal reports contradicting Trump’s public pronouncements on the Covid-19 pandemic, which has infected more than six million people in the U.S. and killed at least 183,000:
June 23 Report. On June 16, Pence claimed in an op-ed that “panic” over a resurgence of coronavirus infections was “overblown.” But on June 23, the White House task force concluded that seven states were in the “red zone,” indicating the highest risk of coronavirus spread. The task force found new cases were up 70 percent in Arizona, 72 percent in Texas, 87 percent in Florida, 93 percent in Oklahoma, and 134 percent in Idaho.
July 14 Report. On July 14, Trump stated, “No other country tests like us. In fact, I could say it’s working too much. It’s working too well. We’re doing testing and we’re finding thousands and thousands of cases.” The same day, the task force concluded 19 states were in the “red zone” and recommended they increase testing. The report noted, “Disease trends are moving in the wrong direction in Georgia with record numbers of new cases occurring in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Testing positivity continues to increase. The number of tests has increased, but more testing is needed.”
July 26 Report.On July 21, Trump tweeted: “You will never hear this on the Fake News concerning the China Virus, but by comparison to most other countries, who are suffering greatly, we are doing very well — and we have done things that few other countries could have done!” On July 26, the task force reported 22 states were in the “red zone,” and stated: “Georgia is experiencing widespread community spread without evidence of improvement. Improvement will require much more aggressive mitigation efforts to change the trajectory of the pandemic in Georgia.”
2 Report.In a July 28 interview, Trump stated: “They are dying, that’s true. And you have — it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.” On Aug. 2, the task force concluded 23 states were in the “red zone.” The report noted, “Widespread transmission continues to occur from rural to urban areas” in Louisiana; “Aggressive continuation of mitigation efforts will be required” in South Carolina due to “widespread community spread throughout the state in urban, periurban, and rural areas”; and, “The virus is spreading deeper into the rural areas” of Oklahoma.
9 Report.On Aug. 3, Trump tweeted: “Cases up because of BIG Testing! Much of our Country is doing very well. Open the Schools!” On Aug. 9, the task force reported that 48 states and the District of Columbia were in either red or yellow zones. In Indiana, the Task Force warned: “Cases continue at a high plateau in Indianapolis and mitigation efforts, testing, and contact tracing need to be aggressively implemented. Covid-19 is widespread throughout the state and mitigation efforts should be statewide.”
The subcommittee went on to warn that despite the continued spread of Covid-19 around the U.S., the Trump administration has refused to support private task force recommendations aimed at stemming the pandemic.
“The task force reports released today recommend that state and local governments implement heightened public health measures to combat the spread of the virus — including requiring face masks in public, closing bars and gyms, and strictly limiting gatherings on a statewide basis in certain states,” the subcommittee said. “Yet the Trump administration has failed to publicly support most of the task force’s recommendations. For example, President Trump has refused to call for a nationwide mask mandate.”
In a statement, Clyburn said that “as a result of the president’s failures, more than 58,000 additional Americans have died since the task force first started issuing private warnings.”
“It is long past time that the administration finally implement a national plan to contain this crisis, which is still killing hundreds of Americans each day,” Clyburn added.
CHRIS HEDGES’ TAKEDOWN OF BIDEN AND TRUMP
By Popular Resistance.September 1, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/chris-hedges-takedown-biden-trump/
“I Fight Fascists Because They Are Fascists.”
On Sunday, August 30, Chris Hedges spoke to the Movement for a People’s Party at their “People’s Convention.” Here is the video and transcript of his comments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=38&v=w-7pZnvVzI8&feature=emb_logo
Transcript
There is only one choice in this election. The consolidation of oligarchic power under Donald Trump or the consolidation of oligarchic power under Joe Biden. The oligarchs, with Trump or Biden, will win again. We will lose. The oligarchs made it abundantly clear, should Bernie Sanders have miraculously become the Democratic Party nominee, they would join forces with the Republicans to crush him. The oligarchs preach the mantra of the least-worst to us when they attempt to ram a Hillary Clinton or a Joe Biden down our throats but ignore it for themselves. They prefer Biden over Trump, but they can live with either.
Only one thing matters to the oligarchs. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate breakdown. It is the primacy of corporate power — which has extinguished our democracy and left most of the working class and working poor in misery — and the continued increase and consolidation of their wealth. It is impossible to work within the system to shatter the hegemony of oligarchic power or institute meaningful reform. Change, real change, will only come by sustained acts of civil disobedience and mass mobilization, as with the yellow vests movement in France and the British-based Extinction Rebellion. The longer we are fooled by the electoral burlesque, the more disempowered we will become.
Dr. Cornel West and I were on the streets with protesters in Philadelphia outside the appropriately named Wells Fargo Center during the 2016 Democratic Convention when hundreds of Sanders delegates walked out of the hall. “Show me what democracy looks like!” they chanted, holding Bernie signs above their heads as they poured out of the exits. “This is what democracy looks like!”
Sanders’ greatest tactical mistake was not joining them. He bowed in fear before the mighty altar of the corporate state. He had desperately tried to stave off a revolt by his supporters and delegates on the eve of the convention by sending out repeated messages in his name — most of them authored by members of the Clinton campaign — to be respectful, not disrupt the nominating process and support Clinton. Sanders was a dutiful sheepdog then and is a dutiful sheepdog now, attempting to herd his disgruntled supporters into the embrace of the Clinton and now Biden campaign.
Sanders apparently believed that if he was obsequious enough to the Democratic Party elite, they would give him a chance in 2020, a chance they denied him in 2016. Politics, I suspect he would argue, is about compromise and the practical. This is true. But playing politics in a system that is not democratic is about being complicit in the charade. Sanders misread the Democratic Party leadership, swamp creatures of the corporate state. He misread the Democratic Party, which is a corporate mirage. Its base can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props at rallies and in choreographed party conventions. The Democratic Party voters have zero influence on party politics or party policies. Sanders’ naivete, and perhaps his lack of political courage, drove away his most committed young supporters. They are right. He is wrong. We need to overthrow the system, not placate it.
Trump and Biden are repugnant figures, doddering into old age with cognitive lapses and no moral cores. Is Trump more dangerous than Biden? Yes. Is Trump more inept and more dishonest? Yes. Is Trump more of a threat to the open society? Yes. Is Biden the solution? No.
Biden represents the nostalgia of the ruling elite for the old neoliberal order. He personifies the betrayal by the Democratic Party of working men and women that sparked the deep hatred of the ruling elites across the political spectrum. He is a gift to a demagogues and con artists like Trump. A Biden presidency will ensure that far more competent demagogues will rise to take power. Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only offer more of the same. And most Americans do not want more of the same. The country’s largest voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of apathy or disgust do not vote, will once again stay home. This demoralization of the electorate is by design.
In America you are only allowed to vote against what you hate. But by voting for Biden you do vote for something. You vote for the humiliation of courageous women such as Anita Hill who confronted their abusers. You vote for the architects of the endless wars in the Middle East. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. You vote for wholesale surveillance of the public by government intelligence agencies and the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social Security. You vote for NAFTA, free trade deals, de-industrialization, a decline in wages, the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and the offshoring of jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in Mexico,China or Vietnam. You vote for the assault on public education and the transfer of federal funds to for-profit and Christian charter schools. You vote for the doubling of our prison population, the tripling and quadrupling of sentences and huge expansion of crimes meriting the death penalty. You vote for militarized police who gun down poor people of color with impunity. You vote against the Green New Deal and immigration reform. You vote for limiting a woman’s right to abortion and reproductive rights. You vote for a segregated public-school system in which the wealthy receive educational opportunities and the poor are denied a chance. You vote for punitive levels of student debt and the inability to free yourself of debt obligations through bankruptcy. You vote for deregulating the banking industry and the abolition of Glass-Steagall. You vote for the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations and against universal health care. You vote for bloated defense budgets. You vote for the use of unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy our elections. You vote for a politician who during his time in the Senate abjectly served the interests of MBNA, the largest independent credit card company headquartered in Delaware, which also employed Biden’s son Hunter.
What the public wants and deserves will again be ignored for what the corporate lobbyists demand. If we do not respond to the social and economic catastrophe that has been visited on most of the population, exacerbated by our failure to control the pandemic, we will be unable to thwart the rise of corporate tyranny and a Christian fascism or halt the ecocide that will wipe out the human species, along with most life forms.
Right-wing violence, along with lethal police violence, will explode, with or without Trump in office, if we do not build robust socialist programs to reintegrate those who have been pushed aside back into the society, to heal the ruptured social bonds, to give workers jobs that provide a sustainable income and dignity, empowerment and protection, to provide free and well-funded schooling through college, if we do not rebuild our labor unions, along with instituting universal health care and end to the squandering of our resources on endless war.
Yes, we need new radical parties, which is why I am here today, in this election and from now on. We need to stand up for our values, not surrender them, which is why I urge you to vote in this coming election for The Green Party.
I am not willing to surrender every issue I care about to become an accomplice in this moral squalor and death march to extinction. I am also not naïve enough to tell you we can win. The corporate state has built very effective mechanisms of control and oppression. But these corporate forces have us by the throat, and they have my children by the throat. In the end, I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
WHY CONFLICT IS ESCALATING IN PORTLAND
https://popularresistance.org/why-conflict-is-escalating-in-portland/
By David Rovics, Make Popular Education Popular Again.
September 1, 2020
| RESIST!
If There Is A Point At Which We Realize We Are Taking Our Lives In Our Hands By Just Going Downtown And Marching In The Streets, This Might Be It.
Last night a man was shot to death near the Justice Center in downtown Portland, where protests have been taking place every night for over three months. Details are still coming in, but it appears the deceased was a heavily-armed member of the far right. Another member of the far-right was just arrested this morning in the working-class Portland suburb of Milwaukie. He was arrested for having fired into a crowd the day before with live ammunition, apparently, in a separate incident from the killing at the Justice Center.
For those of you who might just be tuning in here, I’ll try to set the stage.
Prior to Trump, prior to the pandemic, Portland was a city experiencing multiple crises, as with many other cities across the country, but perhaps more so. Between the last two censuses, Portland lost more than half of its Black population due to gentrification, a phenomenon known to many as ethnic cleansing. During that time, Portland also achieved #1 status in the nation in terms of the numbers of Black people killed by the police, per capita. Portland also achieved the status as the most rent-burdened city in the country, as determined by the cost of rent relative to the average income of renters in the city. For many comfortable homeowners living in the hills of the west of downtown and shopping in the malls of Beaverton, the reality that they were living in a city that was experiencing multiple acute crises may have passed them by. We live in a very divided city, in so many ways. Just take a day-long walk down Burnside Boulevard from the hills west of downtown to the desolate trailers in outer southeast, and you’ll get the picture of the class structure of this society.
Prior to Trump, prior to the pandemic, groups like Don’t Shoot PDX and a multiplicity of other networks focused on police brutality, institutional racism, gentrification, and the unaffordability of housing for most Black and working-class people were active on the streets, online, and in electoral politics. While the state government is dominated by the interests of big landlords, like the Democratic Party everywhere, in local government on the city and county levels, increasing numbers of solidly progressive people have been getting in, in the city council as well as among elected officials in the judicial branch, such as the District Attorney who just dropped the charges of so many protesters who have been arrested over the past months.
Long prior to Trump, Portland was a hotbed of conflict between fascists and antifascists, between militant believers in white supremacy and militant antiracists. As with cities like Minneapolis, there is a lot of history to this conflict. The streets of Portland, as with the streets of Minneapolis and other cities, were contested ground. Oregon was founded as a white homeland, and Portland was a national home to organized racism for a long time, until relatively recently, and the supporters of these groups have not all moved to Idaho.
The combination of Trump’s election and the social forces he continually strives to unleash, the pandemic, the growing numbers of blatantly racist police murders across the country, the economic crash, the apparent withdrawal of any more real help from the federal government, and the complete incompetence and/or captured-by-the-landlords nature of the state authorities in Oregon and elsewhere, have altogether created a massive powder keg. Add to that a tremendous increase in gun sales over the past several months across the country, very much including Oregon. Add to that wannabe vigilantes speaking at the Republican National Convention, and real vigilantes in Wisconsin being praised by the president, with the blood still fresh on the streets of Kenosha.
OK, stage-setting over.
It’s always been mythology that in the USA the First Amendment gives people the right to peacefully protest. It’s always been mythology that when people commit acts of civil disobedience, such as marching or sitting down in the street, that they will generally be gingerly carried off with one cop taking each limb, carrying the arrested to an awaiting vehicle, and carefully placing them inside it. It’s always been mythology that when there are two opposing groups of protesters, the police are there to act as a neutral party to keep them from hurting each other. Under certain circumstances, peaceful protests go off without a hitch, police escort marchers in the streets, and they keep protesters from killing each other, but there’s nothing predictable about any of these things going that way. In fact, most often, they don’t go like that at all, in Portland, or in most US cities.
And yes, most US cities are Democrat-run, as Trump is so fond of pointing out. There are reasons for that. Unfortunately, these Democrats, like their Republican counterparts, are largely also wealthy landowners, such as Mayor Ted Wheeler, and/or politicians paid off by corporations, incapable of doing anything more than mouthing progressive slogans while they screw the entire working class over and over again with their actual actions. And what is especially telling is that in these progressive hotbeds, the police forces are full of unaccountable human rights abusers and members of the far-right, and most of each city’s budgets go to them every year. And despite the fact that these police departments are constantly losing lawsuits brought against them by the citizens they kill and maim, their killer cops not only almost never go to prison, but they almost all keep their six-figure jobs as our armed protectors.
While it is a mythology that there’s anything like a set of rules to adhere to for proper protesting etiquette, to avoid getting attacked by police or fascists, for example, or to get positive media coverage, or any media coverage at all, it is true that there are general tendencies in a given country at a given historical moment in terms of how things will go the vast majority of the time. And to the extent that it was generally the case that you didn’t use to have to worry about people shooting at each other with live ammunition at protest rallies in front of a federal courthouse in the center of a city in this country a few years ago, this expectation is increasingly not valid.
Whoever shot the heavily-armed member of the far-right downtown last night, the context was that other members of the far-right were spraying crowds with gunfire, a massacre of protesters had just been committed in Wisconsin by a member of the far-right, and hundreds of beefy white people with big flags throughout downtown Portland were involved with vehicular assaults on pedestrians and other vehicles, and lots of people were spraying each other with bear mace, hitting, and kicking each other.
Although no one has been killed by a politically-motivated leftwinger or anarchist in the United States in decades to my knowledge, while members of the far-right kill us regularly at this point, if it indeed is the case that this man was killed in the course of a conflict with a counterprotester, this really shouldn’t come as any surprise. Many people we might broadly define as antifascists embrace armed self-defense and do shooting practice regularly, from Anti-Racist Action to the John Brown Gun Club and new groups like that seem to be forming daily, along with neighborhood associations forming for people to defend one another from the coming waves of evictions.
Knowing that the police are either unwilling or unable to effectively police events such as the Trump Cruise and ensuing urban combat that we saw last night, given that going downtown to protest, whether you’re protesting in a way that the authorities deem to be “peaceful” or “violent,” you are risking your life by being there.
Of course, you’re also risking your life every time you cross a busy street or ride your bicycle down one. And when you’re in a crowd of enthusiastic, community-minded protesters from all walks of life, of all ages, catching up with each other, playing music, shouting at the mayor, and taking over the streets, it’s easy to feel invincible. At least for me, it is. It’s easy to rationalize away fear, and perhaps for some of us more than others, easy to feel like these bad things can’t possibly happen to me. But if they happen more and more often, people start to change their orientation.
Last night a man was shot to death near the Justice Center in downtown Portland, where protests have been taking place every night for over three months. Details are still coming in, but it appears the deceased was a heavily-armed member of the far right. Another member of the far-right was just arrested this morning in the working-class Portland suburb of Milwaukie. He was arrested for having fired into a crowd the day before with live ammunition, apparently, in a separate incident from the killing at the Justice Center.
For those of you who might just be tuning in here, I’ll try to set the stage.
Standing on the precipice we’re all standing on right now here in the USA, my mind delivers me historical parallels, as a sort of desperate measure, trying to make sense of it all. I’m not sure how relevant any of them are, but any of them might be. There are too many different factors that go into creating the future.
But at least in retrospect, some things seem clear. Retrospect is good like that. The massacres at Kent State and Jackson State, along with so many more killings by the authorities of Black radicals especially, in no small part gave rise to networks such as the short-lived Black Liberation Army and the Weathermen. Developments like these tend to reinforce the maxim that violence is made inevitable through the suppression of more peaceful means.
Similarly, in Northern Ireland, there was a civil rights movement, that sought equality for the oppressed Catholic minority in the Occupied Six Counties. The movement was consciously modeled after the civil rights movement in the US. Like its counterpart in the US, it was met with tremendous violence, which ultimately took the forms of racist pogroms in 1969, the burning of hundreds of homes by anti-Catholic mobs, a massive propaganda campaign of fake news brought on by the authorities, vilifying the largely Catholic movement, and ultimately a massacre of movement organizers by British troops. All of these events of 1969 and 1970 ultimately led people to conclude that peaceful marches were not working if they would just end in massacres. And this understanding gave rise to the armed resistance movement that followed, which in turn gave rise to a conflict that took the lives of thousands of people over the following quarter-century.
There are those examples of fires being fueled by the authorities. Then there are other examples when governments with intelligent leaders who know they’re in a race against time act decisively. A somewhat random example that comes to mind is how at the end of the Second World War, after years of a terrible occupation that involved a famine and many thousands of deportations and executions, with many more shipped off to work as forced laborers, after the Netherlands was liberated by Allied forces from Canada, the US, Poland and elsewhere, but also in no small part including by Dutch resistance forces as well, the first thing the government did when it came back from exile was collect all the guns that were now all over the country. They were desperately concerned that after all these years of Nazi occupation, there could be terrible conflict in society between those who resisted in some form, and those who collaborated to one degree or another. If there were to be such conflicts, they wanted to make sure that they did not involve firearms.
My orientation is admittedly Eurocentric. I’ve spent most of my adult life somewhere between North America and Europe, and much less of it anywhere else in the world. One of the guests I interviewed for one of my livestream shows/podcasts recently, an Argentinian anarchist and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Graciela Monteagudo, says the fascist comparisons aren’t so relevant, that the divisions in US society and the incompetent, corrupt state ostensibly at the helm of it are much more like a typical kleptocratic banana republic than a well-oiled fascist fighting machine.
Either way, if there is a point at which we realize we are taking our lives in our hands by just going downtown and marching in the streets, this might be it. What comes next, I don’t know that anybody knows – I sure don’t. I only know a little, mostly selective tidbits about what has happened before. The time and place we’re in now are not like those other times and places, however. It’s new, and in so many ways, as they never tire of pointing out in the news, unprecedented.
| RESIST!
If There Is A Point At Which We Realize We Are Taking Our Lives In Our Hands By Just Going Downtown And Marching In The Streets, This Might Be It.
Last night a man was shot to death near the Justice Center in downtown Portland, where protests have been taking place every night for over three months. Details are still coming in, but it appears the deceased was a heavily-armed member of the far right. Another member of the far-right was just arrested this morning in the working-class Portland suburb of Milwaukie. He was arrested for having fired into a crowd the day before with live ammunition, apparently, in a separate incident from the killing at the Justice Center.
For those of you who might just be tuning in here, I’ll try to set the stage.
Prior to Trump, prior to the pandemic, Portland was a city experiencing multiple crises, as with many other cities across the country, but perhaps more so. Between the last two censuses, Portland lost more than half of its Black population due to gentrification, a phenomenon known to many as ethnic cleansing. During that time, Portland also achieved #1 status in the nation in terms of the numbers of Black people killed by the police, per capita. Portland also achieved the status as the most rent-burdened city in the country, as determined by the cost of rent relative to the average income of renters in the city. For many comfortable homeowners living in the hills of the west of downtown and shopping in the malls of Beaverton, the reality that they were living in a city that was experiencing multiple acute crises may have passed them by. We live in a very divided city, in so many ways. Just take a day-long walk down Burnside Boulevard from the hills west of downtown to the desolate trailers in outer southeast, and you’ll get the picture of the class structure of this society.
Prior to Trump, prior to the pandemic, groups like Don’t Shoot PDX and a multiplicity of other networks focused on police brutality, institutional racism, gentrification, and the unaffordability of housing for most Black and working-class people were active on the streets, online, and in electoral politics. While the state government is dominated by the interests of big landlords, like the Democratic Party everywhere, in local government on the city and county levels, increasing numbers of solidly progressive people have been getting in, in the city council as well as among elected officials in the judicial branch, such as the District Attorney who just dropped the charges of so many protesters who have been arrested over the past months.
Long prior to Trump, Portland was a hotbed of conflict between fascists and antifascists, between militant believers in white supremacy and militant antiracists. As with cities like Minneapolis, there is a lot of history to this conflict. The streets of Portland, as with the streets of Minneapolis and other cities, were contested ground. Oregon was founded as a white homeland, and Portland was a national home to organized racism for a long time, until relatively recently, and the supporters of these groups have not all moved to Idaho.
The combination of Trump’s election and the social forces he continually strives to unleash, the pandemic, the growing numbers of blatantly racist police murders across the country, the economic crash, the apparent withdrawal of any more real help from the federal government, and the complete incompetence and/or captured-by-the-landlords nature of the state authorities in Oregon and elsewhere, have altogether created a massive powder keg. Add to that a tremendous increase in gun sales over the past several months across the country, very much including Oregon. Add to that wannabe vigilantes speaking at the Republican National Convention, and real vigilantes in Wisconsin being praised by the president, with the blood still fresh on the streets of Kenosha.
OK, stage-setting over.
It’s always been mythology that in the USA the First Amendment gives people the right to peacefully protest. It’s always been mythology that when people commit acts of civil disobedience, such as marching or sitting down in the street, that they will generally be gingerly carried off with one cop taking each limb, carrying the arrested to an awaiting vehicle, and carefully placing them inside it. It’s always been mythology that when there are two opposing groups of protesters, the police are there to act as a neutral party to keep them from hurting each other. Under certain circumstances, peaceful protests go off without a hitch, police escort marchers in the streets, and they keep protesters from killing each other, but there’s nothing predictable about any of these things going that way. In fact, most often, they don’t go like that at all, in Portland, or in most US cities.
And yes, most US cities are Democrat-run, as Trump is so fond of pointing out. There are reasons for that. Unfortunately, these Democrats, like their Republican counterparts, are largely also wealthy landowners, such as Mayor Ted Wheeler, and/or politicians paid off by corporations, incapable of doing anything more than mouthing progressive slogans while they screw the entire working class over and over again with their actual actions. And what is especially telling is that in these progressive hotbeds, the police forces are full of unaccountable human rights abusers and members of the far-right, and most of each city’s budgets go to them every year. And despite the fact that these police departments are constantly losing lawsuits brought against them by the citizens they kill and maim, their killer cops not only almost never go to prison, but they almost all keep their six-figure jobs as our armed protectors.
While it is a mythology that there’s anything like a set of rules to adhere to for proper protesting etiquette, to avoid getting attacked by police or fascists, for example, or to get positive media coverage, or any media coverage at all, it is true that there are general tendencies in a given country at a given historical moment in terms of how things will go the vast majority of the time. And to the extent that it was generally the case that you didn’t use to have to worry about people shooting at each other with live ammunition at protest rallies in front of a federal courthouse in the center of a city in this country a few years ago, this expectation is increasingly not valid.
Whoever shot the heavily-armed member of the far-right downtown last night, the context was that other members of the far-right were spraying crowds with gunfire, a massacre of protesters had just been committed in Wisconsin by a member of the far-right, and hundreds of beefy white people with big flags throughout downtown Portland were involved with vehicular assaults on pedestrians and other vehicles, and lots of people were spraying each other with bear mace, hitting, and kicking each other.
Although no one has been killed by a politically-motivated leftwinger or anarchist in the United States in decades to my knowledge, while members of the far-right kill us regularly at this point, if it indeed is the case that this man was killed in the course of a conflict with a counterprotester, this really shouldn’t come as any surprise. Many people we might broadly define as antifascists embrace armed self-defense and do shooting practice regularly, from Anti-Racist Action to the John Brown Gun Club and new groups like that seem to be forming daily, along with neighborhood associations forming for people to defend one another from the coming waves of evictions.
Knowing that the police are either unwilling or unable to effectively police events such as the Trump Cruise and ensuing urban combat that we saw last night, given that going downtown to protest, whether you’re protesting in a way that the authorities deem to be “peaceful” or “violent,” you are risking your life by being there.
Of course, you’re also risking your life every time you cross a busy street or ride your bicycle down one. And when you’re in a crowd of enthusiastic, community-minded protesters from all walks of life, of all ages, catching up with each other, playing music, shouting at the mayor, and taking over the streets, it’s easy to feel invincible. At least for me, it is. It’s easy to rationalize away fear, and perhaps for some of us more than others, easy to feel like these bad things can’t possibly happen to me. But if they happen more and more often, people start to change their orientation.
Last night a man was shot to death near the Justice Center in downtown Portland, where protests have been taking place every night for over three months. Details are still coming in, but it appears the deceased was a heavily-armed member of the far right. Another member of the far-right was just arrested this morning in the working-class Portland suburb of Milwaukie. He was arrested for having fired into a crowd the day before with live ammunition, apparently, in a separate incident from the killing at the Justice Center.
For those of you who might just be tuning in here, I’ll try to set the stage.
Standing on the precipice we’re all standing on right now here in the USA, my mind delivers me historical parallels, as a sort of desperate measure, trying to make sense of it all. I’m not sure how relevant any of them are, but any of them might be. There are too many different factors that go into creating the future.
But at least in retrospect, some things seem clear. Retrospect is good like that. The massacres at Kent State and Jackson State, along with so many more killings by the authorities of Black radicals especially, in no small part gave rise to networks such as the short-lived Black Liberation Army and the Weathermen. Developments like these tend to reinforce the maxim that violence is made inevitable through the suppression of more peaceful means.
Similarly, in Northern Ireland, there was a civil rights movement, that sought equality for the oppressed Catholic minority in the Occupied Six Counties. The movement was consciously modeled after the civil rights movement in the US. Like its counterpart in the US, it was met with tremendous violence, which ultimately took the forms of racist pogroms in 1969, the burning of hundreds of homes by anti-Catholic mobs, a massive propaganda campaign of fake news brought on by the authorities, vilifying the largely Catholic movement, and ultimately a massacre of movement organizers by British troops. All of these events of 1969 and 1970 ultimately led people to conclude that peaceful marches were not working if they would just end in massacres. And this understanding gave rise to the armed resistance movement that followed, which in turn gave rise to a conflict that took the lives of thousands of people over the following quarter-century.
There are those examples of fires being fueled by the authorities. Then there are other examples when governments with intelligent leaders who know they’re in a race against time act decisively. A somewhat random example that comes to mind is how at the end of the Second World War, after years of a terrible occupation that involved a famine and many thousands of deportations and executions, with many more shipped off to work as forced laborers, after the Netherlands was liberated by Allied forces from Canada, the US, Poland and elsewhere, but also in no small part including by Dutch resistance forces as well, the first thing the government did when it came back from exile was collect all the guns that were now all over the country. They were desperately concerned that after all these years of Nazi occupation, there could be terrible conflict in society between those who resisted in some form, and those who collaborated to one degree or another. If there were to be such conflicts, they wanted to make sure that they did not involve firearms.
My orientation is admittedly Eurocentric. I’ve spent most of my adult life somewhere between North America and Europe, and much less of it anywhere else in the world. One of the guests I interviewed for one of my livestream shows/podcasts recently, an Argentinian anarchist and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Graciela Monteagudo, says the fascist comparisons aren’t so relevant, that the divisions in US society and the incompetent, corrupt state ostensibly at the helm of it are much more like a typical kleptocratic banana republic than a well-oiled fascist fighting machine.
Either way, if there is a point at which we realize we are taking our lives in our hands by just going downtown and marching in the streets, this might be it. What comes next, I don’t know that anybody knows – I sure don’t. I only know a little, mostly selective tidbits about what has happened before. The time and place we’re in now are not like those other times and places, however. It’s new, and in so many ways, as they never tire of pointing out in the news, unprecedented.
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