PAUL STREET—Looting of retail stores is about economic desperation, as well as civil and human rights. Covid-19, and the economic depression that the coronavirus has sparked in the US, has hit already deeply impoverished and highly segregated black communities with special and tragic virulence.
POLICE & REPRESSION
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BRUCE LERRO—Most people in the United States think that social life operates as social contracts, just as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau described it. Secondly, they think normal social life is neutral and non-violent. Violence, they believe, begins at the point of a physical confrontation between people and usually includes lethal weapons. If there is no physical confrontation, there is no violence.
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Racism Today: Intervu w. Chairman Fred Hampton, Jr., the Black Panther Pantha Cubs & their revolution for self-determination
118 minutes readJEFF J. BROWN—Few interviews over the years have touched me the way this one has, with Chairman Fred Hampton, Jr. … William Blake wrote about the doors of perception. Already humbly further along my arc of anti-imperial awareness (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/china-rising-the-book/) than most Westerners, researching about the Black Panthers, getting to know Chairman Fred and chatting with his mother, Akua Njeri, quite simply blew my understanding of the United States off its metaphorical hinges and into outer space.
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GLEN FORD—Researchers are hoping to find a vaccine for Covid-19, possibly within the year, but the Blue Plague only grows more deadly over time and enjoys a host of immunities. Although Black people had hoped that the historic expansion in the number of Black elected officials would create political antibodies to limit the spread of the Blue Plague, the opposite has happened. In 2014, just months before Michael Brown’s life was cut short by the Blue Plague, in Ferguson, Missouri, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus voted to continue funneling billions of dollars in military weapons, gear and training to local infestations of the plague, despite ample evidence that such infusions have made the scourge even more toxic to Black life.
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RENEE PARSONS—The question remains whether any amount of ‘reform’ can make the FISA Court acceptable from a Constitutional perspective or whether continued existence of the Court is necessary given its unabashed record of facilitating near-unanimous approvals to conduct surveillance, in other words, the Court is needed for the mindless approval of surveillance applications to create the false impression for a gullible public that there is an independent Constitutionally-valid process at work.