Radical Tradition: American Quilts and Social Changeat the Toledo Museum of Artthrough February 14, 2021

What the museum says:Disrupting our expectations of quilts as objects that provide warmth and comfort, this exhibition will explore the complicated and often overlooked stories quilts tell about the American experience, offering new perspectives on themes including military action and protest, civil rights, gender equality, queer aesthetics, and relationships with land and the environment.

Why its worth a look:The quilts on view in this show are set against the backdrop of social movements and political life in the United States. With examples of quilts documenting and memorializing the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam War, and systemic racism in the US, the stories woven into these works are small squares of a larger patchwork history.

The show traces the history of the craft by looking at the Gees Bend quilters, contemporary practitionerslike Judy Chicago and Bisa Butler, and anonymous artists who created some of the works on view. Butler, a native of Orange, New Jersey, says of her work: I am telling the storythis African American sideof the American life. History is the story of men and women, but the narrative is controlled by those who hold the pen.

What it looks like:

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, The Ragmud Series: Volume 8, Slave Epics (1987-2008). Toledo Museum of art.

AIDS Memorial Quilt panel from the NAMES project. Courtesy the Toledo Museum of Art.

Artist unidentified; initialed J.F.R. | Cleveland-Hendricks Crazy Quilt (1885-1890).American Folk Art Museum.Image Credit: American Folk Art Museum / Art Resource, NY.

TMA COVID-19 Quilting Bee Square by Caitlyn Gustafson. Image courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art.

Diana N. Diaye, So Many Twin Towers (2007). Courtesy of Michigan State University. Photo: Pearl Yee Wong.

Sabrina Gschwandtner, Hands at Work III (2017). Courtesy of the artist and Shosh and Wayne Gallery.

Abolition Quilt (ca. 1850). Courtesy of Historic New England.

Jean Ray Laury, Barefoot and Pregnant (1987). Courtesy of the International Quilt Museum, Univeristy of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Aaron McIntosh, small section from Invasive Queer Kudzu Project, (2015-2020). Courtesy of the Artist, Aaron McIntosh.

Judy Chicago, International Honor Quilt (IHQ) (1980). 2020 Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Faith Ringgold, Ben (1978). Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, Ohio) Image Credit: 2020 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York.

Gen Guracar, Vietnam Era Signature Quilt, (ca. 1965-1973). Image Credit: International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

See original here:

An Eye-Opening Exhibition in Ohio Looks at the Role of Quilting in Radical American Social MovementsSee Works Here - artnet News

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The demands are clear: defund and abolish police. As those calls grow, so will efforts by reformers to propose new rules and regulations that they say will improve and restore legitimacy to policing. These bureaucratic reforms reflect the failed thinking that built up the carceral state, and they will make policing harder to dismantle. Reforms like this are meant to pacify social movements, replacing community self-determination with the expertise of lawyers, academics, and other professionals who are complicit in oppression.

Bureaucratic reforms are not just too little. They are also dangerous. Decades of judicial oversight, transparency legislation, and self-auditing requirements have not reduced the power of the carceral state. To the contrary, they have created a vast punishment bureaucracy giving political legitimacy and social inertia to a system of mass caging rooted in enslavement. Applying this same regulatory framework to the governance of policing will only expand the reach and harm of policing, just as it has helped to make the prison-industrial complex bigger, harsher, more durable, and racist as ever.

The chief proponents of police bureaucracy are typically professionals whose authority depends on working closely with the carceral state. Consider the recent L.A. Times op-ed by University of Texas professor Sarah Brayne, One way to shrink the LAPDs budget: Cut costly and invasive big-data policing. Brayne spent years embedded within the Los Angeles Police Department as a doctoral student at Princeton. Despite the op-eds title, it never proposes reducing let alone cutting any police surveillance. Instead Brayne writes about the secrecy that shrouds LAPDs data systems. She notes that New York City recently required the NYPD to disclose which technology it uses and what data it collects. She proposes that Los Angeles should follow suit.

Brayne asserts that surveillance technologies are largely missing from todays urgent conversations. That voice is missing only if one ignores local activists. Here in Los Angeles, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has fought to dismantle LAPD surveillance since 2011, recently forcing LAPD to end its LASER, Chronic Offender, and PredPol surveillance programs. An abolitionist organization, Stop LAPD Spying has also organized against laws like the one Brayne proposes importing from New York. That law, named the POST Act, tasks the NYPD with writing surveillance impact and use policies to post on their website, where the public has 45 days to comment. While police are asked to consider the comments, NYPD is not required to make changes or to share the information that underlies their conclusions, which will be framed by NYPDs army of lawyers.

These laws are also often coupled with efforts to limit use of a particular surveillance technology, like the restrictions on facial recognition enacted by San Francisco and the recently proposed Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, introduced by Senator Ed Markey and others this June. Explaining the bill, Markey acknowledged calls to dismantle the systematic racism that permeates every part of our society and noted that face recognition physically endangers Black Americans. But at the same time that his bill seeks to freeze police use of face surveillance, it outlines details of the regulatory scheme that Congress would enact to end the moratorium, including auditing requirements, standards for use and management, and minimum accuracy rates.

The idea behind these reforms is that policing can be tamed through paperwork and rules. This whitewashes the harm of surveillance, which will be used for racial domination no matter if it is lawful or unlawful, no matter if accurate. The politicians and lawyers behind the POST Act last month celebrated their tremendous and vital victory. But the truth is that legislation like this is the easiest possible win in this moment, betraying the bolder visions of the mass movement calling to abolish police.

No one is taking to the streets facing down tear gas to demand police bureaucracy. To the contrary, todays protests originate in the failure of past reforms, which have done little to end policings death toll. These protests have made police abolition a serious conversation. Whether and how legislation can be abolitionist are important questions. But if legislation is a goal, that power should be used to ban particular forms of surveillance, not just create a bureaucracy to regulate them. Calls for surveillance oversight ignore the lessons of past struggles against federal national security surveillance and Red Squad repression, which led to the creation of bureaucracies like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the NYPDs Handschu guidelines. Rather than dismantling policing, reforms like this help police adapt to criticism, to reinvent and rebuild.

When the POST Act was enacted, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition criticized the reform as surveillance bureaucracy and observed that laws like this presume that our communities want to be surveilled, so long as the state follows a heavily stacked process, pretends to consider input, and checks off a few baseline legal requirements. At the time, it may have appeared odd for activists from Los Angeles to criticize local legislation in another state. But Stop LAPD Spying observed that the national uprising against police terror will be used to force similar reforms across the country. We are seeing that now.

To be sure, this isnt the first time a reformer who worked closely with police has proposed surveillance bureaucracy laws for Los Angeles. In 2015 the ACLUs local Director of Police Practices sent a proposal for a similar local law that he had drafted to an LAPD deputy chief, asking if you have any concerns with any of the provisions that are in here and inviting ideas for provisions you think should be in here but arent. The ACLU later pushed a statewide version of similar legislation. An ACLU press release announced that the bill would offer a seat at the table and foster public debate to build community assent for surveillance.

This relates to the deeper issue with reforms like the POST Act, reflected both in who is advancing these proposals and in what these laws will create. Reform like this is pacification: it takes power away from the people, directing opposition into a bureaucratic process that marginalizes community voices, while elevating voices that support police or at most compromise with them. And at the end of the day, these reforms allow police to say that the community controls surveillance (community control is even in the title of the ACLUs model surveillance bureaucracy legislation, curiously named CCOPS) when the truth is that police set the agenda and violently hold the power. After securing public approval, police continue their harm with a claim of legitimacy. This is nothing like abolition. Its not even de-policing, reducing the scope of what police do. Its police preservation.

Abolition is decolonization. More than just ending policing and prisons, its a practice of building a new world. Those institutions are weapons of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, but they arent the only ones. Abolition requires dismantling all the weapons made using those ideologies. It requires dismantling universities, which colonize and hoard knowledge while credentialing experts who work to maintain oppression. It requires ending imperialism, whose wars, borders, and extraction are police violence on a planetary scale. And it requires dismantling the legal bureaucracies that legitimate and sustain a system of mass torture and killing.

Far more than dismantling and defunding though, abolition requires building the autonomy and self-determination that the carceral state denies. This begins with advancing the political vision of those who policing harms. Academics like Brayne arent the only people with ideas about how to address the harm of surveillance in Los Angeles. Brayne is using her authority to argue against the views of movement organizers who are working to dismantle LAPD surveillance. No matter her intentions, Braynes expertise comes from riding around in police cars and helicopters, shadowing police as they hunted people. In contrast, grassroots organizers speak from working to empower the communities harmed by policing.

Academics and lawyers dont need to get in the way of liberation. Instead of solely thinking about social problems, they can think with movements struggling to transcend those problems. They can defer to the deep expertise of communities marginalized by the state and participate in the daily work of building political power, advancing self-determination, and dismantling oppressive structures. They can amplify community leadership in an effort to ensure lasting social change, contributing their expertise to collective liberation rather than being another cog in the technocratic management and bureaucratic rationalization of structural violence.

The positive task of surveillance abolition building a world without mass suspicion and supervision poses questions that need deep attention. Surveillance extends beyond the hard social control and violence of police and prisons. Surveillance, writes Simone Browne, is the fact of antiblackness. Its purpose is to harm communities and administer an oppressive social order. Rather than settling for community control of this violence, communities that are resisting surveillance from the perspective of liberation are creating a new historical horizon, where at first light these important questions can be confronted and then in the fuller light of a new day can help new ways of life built around democratic self-administration to bloom. Advocating for reforms like the POST Act keeps us lost in the darkness of our present condition.

Abolitionists have long known that the purpose of policing is to violently maintain an oppressive social order. New rules and criteria will not end that violence. Instead, they will just lead police to invest more resources and expertise into monitoring and avoiding compliance with the latest rules. This will make our system of mass suspicion, incarceration, and banishment harder to dismantle. If academics and lawyers wish to play a role in advancing liberation, they need a radically different approach to expertise as well as deference to those working to build a world without policing. Reforms that build police bureaucracy go in the opposite direction, placing more authority in elite hands and giving police new footing to expand their violence.

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Police Bureaucracy and Abolition: Why Reforms Driven by Professionals will Renew State Oppression - CounterPunch

Shreyas Gupta had just started to doze off at 2:45 a.m when a glass bottle smashed through his bedroom window.

His first thought was that there had been an explosion. Glass littered his windowsill; shards scattered across his carpet, reflecting moonlight. A bottle of Hells Belle beer rolled across the floor, still intact. He heard tires screeching on the street.

It was the night of Sept. 4, a Friday. Five days earlier, Gupta, a senior, had appeared on local TV news station WRAL to represent Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel, the group he helped start thats advocating for the abolition of 24 Duke fraternities and sororities. It was the first time he had spoken publicly about his involvement.

I just never thought something like that could happen while I was at Duke, he said of the act of vandalism.

Gupta cant prove the incident was related to his role in Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel. Still, he and other members of the team have received some backlash since the groups creation, but most antagonizers choose to wage their battles online, in Instagram DMs or on Facebook Messenger. After WRAL interviewed him, Gupta received a Facebook message from an older man he didnt recognize. Troublemaker! the message read. Why dont you leave Duke!

A few minutes after his window shattered, Gupta went outside to see egg yolks dripping down the wood panelling of the house. More broken beer bottles and egg shells littered the front lawn. Hell probably never know who vandalized his home or if they were retaliating against his calls for abolition, he said, but being physically threatened in his home made everything feel a lot more real.

Although the idea of abolishing Greek life isnt new, this iteration of the movement started with the creation of an Instagram page in mid-July, when criticisms fueled by the Black Lives Matter movement came to a head. The account, which was created before the Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel group, offers a space for students and alumni to share anonymous stories about their experiences in Duke Greek life. It now boasts more than 2,300 followers.

The students who began the Instagram page, who havent publicly revealed their identities, also started a petition calling for the formal abolition of all Duke chapters of the Interfraternity Council and Panhellenic Associationhistorically white Greek organizations The petition has garnered more than 400 signatures.

Conversations sparked from the Instagram prompted Gupta and four other students to launch the Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel website about a month later. The same day, Aug. 12, their open letter was published in The Chronicle. The group has since amassed more than 40 members, Gupta said, and the open letter has more than 350 signatories.

The movement has prompted campus sororities and fraternities to internally evaluate their organizations. Panhellenic Association members Zeta Tau Alpha and Alpha Delta Pi have since voted to relinquish their charters. The attempts were rejected by the organizations national councils, according to the chapters.

But although calls for abolition began two months ago, for the five student leaders of Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel, the movement has been a long time coming.

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Four of the five members of the leadership team chose to speak with The Chronicle: Gupta, Christine Bergamini, Elena Gray and Carmela Guaglianone. Gupta said vandalization of his house dissuaded the fifth member from publicly attaching their name to the group.

Bergamini, a senior and former member of Kappa Alpha Theta, said she decided to disaffiliate when the Duke chapter was prevented from signing the list of demands issued by the Black Coalition Against Policing, which outlined a number of steps including the eventual abolition of the Duke University Police Department. To Bergamini, this proved the organization was only willing to engage in performative activism.

Senior Victoria Sorhegui, president of Dukes Theta chapter, confirmed in an email to The Chronicle that Thetas national policy prevents the chapter from attaching the sororitys name to the list of demands because of its political undertones. Representatives of the national organization did not respond to an email or phone call seeking comment in time for publication.

Gray, a senior previously in Kappa Kappa Gamma, said she had overall positive experiences in her sorority, but as a white woman, eventually, I had to ask myself why I was able to benefit from it, what factors of my identity allowed me to be welcomed.

Once I started asking myself those questions, I couldnt run from the problems of Greek life anymore, she said.

Guaglianone, a senior, accepted a snap bid from Gamma Phi Beta her freshman year but dropped a few months later. Greek life controls much of Dukes social culture, she said, and she has watched the archaic system place the burden of reform onto the members it disadvantages, often forcing victims of racism and sexual assault to advocate for necessary changes to their organizations.

Gupta had planned to drop his fraternity, Pi Kappa Phi, before the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which he said allowed him to reflect on his own identity as an Indian man. He and his friends wrote an open letter to the fraternity detailing racism within the Greek system. A mass exodus of the junior and senior classes followed.

In total, 31 members reported disaffiliating, according to Abolish Duke IFC & Panhels disaffiliation tracker, a number confirmed by Gupta. Pikapp President Brian Hu, a senior, told The Chronicle that the number has risen to 35.

Other than providing the number of members who have disaffiliated, Hu did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Gupta clarified that the call for abolition does not apply to the Multicultural Greek Council or the National Pan-Hellenic Council, which, as Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel wrote in their open letter, provide community to BIPOC students on Dukes campus.

Gray and Bergamini said they recognize that their privilege as white women allowed them to benefit from and enjoy many aspects of their affiliations. Yet all three female leaders cited sexual assault by fraternity members, which Bergamini labeled innate to the Greek system, as a central motivation for their calls for abolition.

Pretty much every single one of my friends, including myself, has experienced sexual assault to some degree by fraternity members, Bergamini said. Its normalized. Why is that something were allowing?

In a 2018 survey, 48% of female students reported having experienced sexual assault at Duke. But from May 2018 to May 2019, only 169 cases were reported to the Office of Student Conduct.

Gray said misogyny in the Greek system stems from the binary and heteronormative nature of Greek life, which creates a power imbalance between fraternities and sororities.

If you break down a single fraternity partythey have the alcohol. They control the venue. They choose the clothes the mostly female participants are wearing, the theme, and how you get there and back, she said. You want to feel empowered as a woman, but that isnt an option.

Senior Rohan Singh, president of the Duke Interfraternity Council, wrote in an email that the members of the IFC executive board absolutely condemn acts of sexual assault and are aware that it is an issue that plagues our community.

We are taking measures to be proactive about eliminating sexual assault within the IFC, and encourage students to report acts of assault to Duke Student Conduct, he wrote.

Those opposed to abolition have argued that reforming the Greek system at Duke is a more feasible and desirable response to the criticisms lodged against Greek life. But Gupta, Bergamini and Gray said theyve tried to reform their organizations from the inside. They said it cant be done.

Bystander intervention trainings, a common reform strategy within fraternities and sororities to address the incidence of sexual assault, can only be so effective, said Gupta. He recalls one session hosted by his fraternity, led by a brother who is by no means an expert, and while attendance was mandatory, he said many members never showed up.

For trainings designed to combat implicit bias, the session takes two hours max, one day a year even when most members are in attendance, Bergamini said. Those reforms can be implemented, but they dont change the makeup of the organization.

Reforming the rush process has its limits, too, she said. Although dues can be lowered and sororities can make efforts to increase diversity, dues are never going to cost zero dollars, and being in a sorority has other associated costs, like formal dresses and costumes, she said. You can never eliminate the selectivity issue of whos allowed entrance into these organizations to begin with.

Bergamini also said Duke employs experts to tackle university reform while relying on unpaid student labor to address issues in Greek life like rampant racism without institutional support.

Gupta remembers feeling the burden of justifying the actions of members of his fraternity against students of color. But its not the responsibility of people of color to teach you how to not be racist, he said.

Mary Pat McMahon, vice provost and vice president for student affairs, highlighted several structures at Duke that serve to address misogyny and racism in Greek life, including the Office of Student Conduct, the bias response group and University Center Activities and Events staff, but she acknowledged that student training also plays a role.

Its definitely my goal to not burden students who are most impacted to have to do the training and the work, she said. Theres plenty of work that we have to do to become a more inclusive and truly equitable campus.

Yet the central issue with attempts at reform, said Gupta, is that the Greek system isnt broken. The group wrote in their open letter that fraternities were created after the Civil War to separate wealthy white male college students from the rest of the increasingly diverse student body. Therefore, Gupta said, Greek life is functioning exactly as it was intended, to uphold power structures and reinforce white privilege.

To make this system equitable and safe, Bergamini said, it would have to turn into something that its not.

Formal abolition would require that the Duke administration terminate their contracts with each of the national Greek organizations, as outlined in the Panhellenic executive boards abolition clarification statement.

McMahon noted that she hasnt yet heard from the national councils of ADPi or Zeta, the two Duke Panhel chapters that voted to relinquish their charters.

What our students are seeking is going to be the priority for how we think about going forward, she said.

Senior Kate Chen, president of the Duke Panhellenic Association, responded in an email to Abolish Duke IFC & Panhels statements. Reform within Duke Panhellenic is integral, she wrote.

Panhellenic members have the power to change how we support our members, include potential members, and treat other members of the Duke community, she wrote. These changes are much needed, regardless of whether Panhellenic as a greater community exists.

She also stated that the board seeks to lessen the association between IFC and Panhel and plans to indefinitely end all mixers with all-male organizations.

Singh said he felt obligated as a person of color to seek a leadership role in his fraternity. But he agreed that people of color should not be forced to educate white fraternity members on issues of racism, and said the IFC executive board is considering working with external consultants and Duke programs to design an anti-hate-and-bias curriculum.

The board also set up a task force to address campus sexual assault and is working with Duke Panhel and the Office of Student Conduct to promote better reporting practices, Singh said.

As a council, we are hoping to transform, rather than reform, our fraternities, he said.

Abolishing Greek life feels radical because Duke has never dared imagine what the universitys social culture would look like without it, Gupta said.

Theres no consideration of what the best option might be, he said. Its like, we have Greek life, and we will continue to have Greek life, so lets just tweak it so people are okay with it.

Although dissolving on-campus Greek housing would be a step in the right direction, it cant solve the major inequities inherent to Greek life, he said. In place of Greek organizations, Gray suggested a residential college system similar to those at universities like Yale and Princeton, which would address many concerns of advocates for Duke housing reform and change the face of Dukes social scene.

Asked if the administration is considering housing reform in response to racism and misogyny in Greek life, the short answer is yes, McMahon said. This is the time to ask the question, because everything is in its own funky spot right now.

This is going to be a year where we think a lot about the larger systemic connections around housing, student organizations, selectivity, and structures that are inherently racist or sexist, or in which students assume a certain identity or status, McMahon said.

Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel also wants Duke to halt the rush process for the spring semester to allow for continued discussion about the future of the Greek system.

Chen confirmed in an email that the Panhel executive board will have a vote Sept. 25 to determine what sorority rush will look like in the spring semester, including the possibility of postponing or canceling rush altogether, and that they plan to release a final decision Oct. 1. Senior Adam Krekorian, IFC recruitment director, wrote in an email that IFC plans to hold virtual recruitment in January.

Before the abolition of campus fraternities and sororities is possible, Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel wants the Duke administration to publicly recognize them.

If we can be brought in to have these conversations with administrators, at least they know what the students want, Bergamini said. That way, the administrators arent just relaying messages by themselves.

The group began exchanging emails with McMahon on Tuesday, which Gupta said is the first time they have formally reached out to set up a meeting with Duke administrators, having recently broken their anonymity. They plan to meet with Gary Bennett, vice provost for undergraduate education, and John Blackshear, dean of students, along with McMahon.

Gupta did meet individually with Duke administrators after his house was vandalizedgetting a bottle thrown through your window is a quick way to get an administrator to listen to you, he said.

Still, he said many students involved with Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel now feel afraid to speak out. The leadership team discussed releasing their names many times, and until recently wanted to remain anonymous, fearing potential repercussions.

But, Gupta said, Its bigger than us.

Editors note: The author of this article was briefly a member of a Panhellenic Association sorority during her first year at Duke but disaffiliated because of the cost.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly characterized the open letter that Shreyas Gupta and his friends wrote to his fraternity. It detailed racism in the Greek system generally, not just instances they had experienced, and not all the authors were people of color, as was originally stated. This article has also been updated to reflect that Panhel will hold a vote on spring rush Sept. 25, not a town hall to discuss it. The Chronicle regrets the errors.

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'It's bigger than us': Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel fights to get rid of two dozen Greek organizations - Duke Chronicle

The past few months have sparked conversations about defunding the police, specifically through the Black Lives Matter protests held around the world. I want to explain, from a criminological point of view, why this is imperative.

We know that there have been more than 440 Aboriginal deaths in custody, according to Guardian Australia, since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody report and recommendations were released in 1991. We know that Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people make up approximately 28% of the total prison population in Australian prisons, despite making up only 2% of the total adult population in Australia.

We know and have witnessed police brutality, we have seen the lack of police discretion when it comes to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people in the community. We know that police surveillance on our young people is occurring through taskforces particularly in New South Wales. This includes children as young as nine years of age.

We know that deaths in custody would not occur if racist legislation was overturned, specifically in relation to the summary offence of public drunkenness. Victoria is still yet to decriminalise public drunkenness, despite the commitment to do so in August, 2019.

Defunding the police, prison abolition and dismantling the systems that created and continue the ongoing oppression, violence, discrimination and the othering of this countrys Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, is not a radical idea.

I was recently interviewed on Progressive Podcasts about prison abolition and defunding the police. The main points of this podcast are to look beyond punishment as a way to address crime. It is, after all, a social problem. I am certainly not denying there are people who need to be protected in society and vice-versa. However, in 2016, we knew that approximately 46% of people in Australians prisons were incarcerated for non-violent offences. The cost of incarceration of people in prisons for non-violent offences equates up to $1.8bn nationwide.

We need to be looking at redirecting those funds to services that adequately and appropriately address the social issues around non-violent offences. Prison abolition is not about simply opening the prisons up and letting dangerous people into the community. It is about supporting the services that are integral to society. This includes housing, health, education and employment. These areas have all been defunded, yet this is not seen as radical it is almost expected and accepted.

Police brutality is another reason why we should be looking to defund the police. Korey Penny, an Aboriginal man, said he was violently thrown off his bicycle by police officers in Melbourne recently and called a black cunt. An Aboriginal teenager in New South Wales was kicked to the ground by police officers in an incident caught on camera. Video footage also showed an Aboriginal man being arrested and hit by police in Adelaide, in June 2020. In Sydney, Aboriginal man Kris Bradshaw was tasered in the face and was thrown to the ground in June 2020. These examples have occurred over the past few months, but police brutality is a practice that has occured since colonisation.

We have seen time and time again that police are not held accountable for their excessive use of force and violence towards people in society.

What is radical is living in a society where acts of violence are accepted because a blue uniform is worn or where racist legislation exists.

It is not so radical to say we need to defund police and pour much needed funds and resources into areas that improve social issues such as housing, health, education and employment. These, in turn, reduce the incarceration rates of Aboriginal people and reduces the over-reliance of degrading and dehumanising punitive measures such as prisons. It also addresses the social issues that impact on the disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal people in prison. We need to be exploring alternatives to prison and stop violence in the community. We must address the issues at the beginning, not looking for services to respond and fix issues created by the criminal justice system.

Robyn Oxley is a Tharawal woman and has family connections to Yorta Yorta. Robyn is an activist and a lecturer at Western Sydney University in criminology. Her field is in the space of the criminal justice system and Aboriginal rights to self-determination. Her work primarily focuses on human rights, social justice, systemic racism and improving outcomes of Aboriginal people in relation to the criminal justice system.

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Defunding the police and abolishing prisons in Australia are not radical ideas - The Guardian

SEATTLE, Washington The Coalition for the Abolition of Prostitution (CAP International) is a global advocacy network that works towards protecting and supporting victims of sexual exploitation and prostitution. Prostitution and poverty often go hand-in-hand, particularly for women and children. However, CAP International empowers its 33 member NGOs to educate their domestic communities on the realities of sexual exploitation and solicitation in order to stop the long-time connection of prostitution in poverty.

Without access to education or work in the formal economic sectors, some people living in poverty around the globe may turn to prostitution as a way to earn an income, particularly vulnerable women and children. One study estimated that at least half of all female sex workers (FSWs) around the globe are raped and/or experience physical violence while working. However, most FSWs do not report incidents of violence to the police, particularly in countries or regions where sexual solicitation is illegal.

A 2006 study performed in Vancouver found that 57% of FSWs in the study had experienced gender-based violence on the job over a two year period. Similarly, a 2014 study estimated that 10-50% of FSWs in India had experienced physical violence during their time as a prostitute.

CAP International is currently working on four strategic campaigns to advocate for survivors of sexual exploitation. These include Human-Rights Based Approach, Parliamentarians for Abolition, Last Girl First and Access to Decent Work. Each of these campaigns works towards educating youth in communities around the world about sex work and what sexual exploitation looks like. By training professionals and educating youth on the facts of sexual violence, CAP International hopes to create a global support system for victims and eliminate sexual violence occurrences.

Victims of incest and sexual violence, indigenous women and children, low caste communities, migrant women and children and women and girls from ethnic minorities are still the primary victims of sexual exploitation. the organization said in a statement on its website.

The organizations Access to Decent Work coalition has mobilized several trade unions, representing more than 10 million workers worldwide, to promote non-exploitative work and stop the need for prostitution in poverty. The organization also works closely with the United Nations and its member countries legislatures to promote domestic legislation that both holds sexual abusers accountable and supports victims of sexual exploitation. By creating these domestic laws and bringing this conversation into diplomatic forums like the UN, CAP International hopes to create an international standard to support survivors and condemn sexual exploiters.

Prostitution is a part of a long patriarchal tradition of making womens bodies available for mens benefit, CAP International President Sarah Benson said in the organizations 2018 Annual Report. It exploits multiple forms of inequality: mens domination over women, rich over poor, North over South, majority groups over minorities.

For people who have escaped prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation, it can be extremely difficult to recover from the emotional and physical trauma they experienced. Additionally, it can be difficult for survivors to receive the proper healthcare needed to treat sexually transmitted diseases they may have acquired when they are still living in poverty. CAP International recognized these difficulties during the organizations establishment. It produces weekly newsletters on its website that offer domestic resources from member NGOs on recovering from sexual exploitation.

By connecting survivors with NGOs in their communities, survivors can receive a number of local resources to re-acclimate to life outside of prostitution or trafficking. For example, Embrace Dignity is a member NGO from South Africa that provides exit resources for survivors of prostitution, sexual exploitation and gender-based violence. Exit resources include access to safe housing, child care, psychological support and more.

CAP Internation has intervened in 20 different countries. It has supported more than 15,000 people exploited by prostitution and spread awareness to almost 430,000 people. Millions of people are victim to prostitution in poverty every day, but CAP International is working to connect NGOs around the world in order to bring attention to this global issue.

Myranda CampanellaPhoto: Flickr

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CAP International Is Trying to End Prostitution in Poverty - BORGEN - Borgen Project

What is it that unites us as citizens of a republic where a former slave becomes a great orator for the abolition effort and insists upon education as the means for keeping all men and women free?

Frederick Douglass a slave traveled to New England embraced by many and stated his case. Wisely, he resisted being drawn into politics and appealed instead to mans higher nature, Lincolns leadership, and The Declaration of Independence as guidance. He, after all, credited a white slave owners wife who taught him to read opening the door to thought and reason causing him to understand many things.

Race relations today and the vast achievement gap of Black and brown students that do not allow them to participate in that vision articulated over 150 years ago must be addressed. For this parents need school choice.

Equally important, all students need a long view of our countrys history that keeps us free and united. We are quickly losing this battle as politics and socialism replace our history and students hear different voices causing them to march, claiming systemic racism. Real progress in race relations relies on knowledge of our Declaration and Constitution as context for progress made: Progress evidenced by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments; progress noted by the work of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders who looked to the past to build on the future, not to tear it down; progress made in the future for school choice which is a necessary hand up!

Todays high school students desire an end to racism, and focus on the history curriculum in their suburban schools as the culprit for not preparing them for race relations today. Yet racism doesnt exist in a vacuum apart from the history and civics which has been given short shrift in social studies since the early 1980s! Only when our countrys history is respected and focused on the past and present as a continuum to the future are we allowed to see the progress made in race relations since our founding in 1776.

At the same time students learn uncomfortable truths about our country, including slavery, which many have risen above. Our Declaration and Constitution must once again be understood.

Susan Harris is a retired U.S. History teacher from Cheshire.

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More here:

To overcome racism, students need a better understanding of our history, Declaration of Independence and Constitution - The CT Mirror

For Lorde is everywhere today; we see the flowering of her most subtle ideas. In the essay Poetry Is Not a Luxury, included here, she describes poetry as the skeleton architecture of our lives: It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. The rise of the prison abolition movement has followed the decades of activism by Lorde and fellow Black feminist writers, including the Combahee River Collective, and many others. She feels present in every call to reconceive models of care and justice in the work of the organizer Mariame Kaba, for example (Poetry helps me to imagine freedom), and the scholar Akwugo Emejulu, who spoke at a recent series of conversations on abolition inspired by Lorde. (I hope that we can be brave, that we can be courageous, that we allow ourselves to think expansively about this idea of abolition, Emejulu has said. I hope that we allow ourselves to have our imaginations run wild.) I hear Lordes words in Arundhati Roys essays on Covid-19: Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal.

But to Lorde, Without community, there is no liberation. And community, for her, involved parsing difference, honoring it. In her time, as in ours, to speak of difference can court charges of divisiveness, even opportunism, but she regarded it as a fund of creativity and connection the chance to hone ourselves upon each others courage.

On this point, a few omissions in this collection rankled the pieces that reveal what it means to negotiate difference, with all its risks and rewards. I missed Eye to Eye, perhaps the most self-critical and self-revealing piece Lorde ever wrote, about the sources of anger between Black women. I missed her letter to Daly, too, and her public conversations with Adrienne Rich and James Baldwin, which felt like genuine events in their time.

Lorde loved to be in dialogue, loved thinking with others, with her comrades and lovers. She is never alone on the page. Even her short essays come festooned with long lines of acknowledgment to those who have sharpened their ideas. Ghosts flock her essays. She writes to the ancestors and to women she meets in the headlines of the newspaper missing women, murdered women, naming as many as she can, the sort of rescue and care for the dead that one sees in the work of Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe. In The Cancer Journals, in which she documented her diagnosis of breast cancer, she noted: I carry tattooed upon my heart a list of names of women who did not survive, and there is always a space left for one more, my own.

The boon in this book is its wealth of poetry. Lorde is beloved for her essays and her groundbreaking memoir, Zami, with its vivid, sexy, very funny depictions of the drama of Downtown gay-girl life in the 50s, but she insisted she was a poet first.

For those familiar with her biography, the poetry becomes a shadow journal a document of her inner life, her hungers, as she left home young, labored in factories, taught high school students, taught cops. She married, bore two children, divorced, fell in love again (and again), with the brilliant women who were to become some of her chief interlocutors. The poems grow cleaner and clearer, with the years. The last ones are still full of appetite and the taste of loving even as she weakened, with a tumorous town growing in my liver.

I am dying / but I do not want to do it / looking the other way, she wrote.

Her work was interrupted; her work continues, as she knew it would. In The Cancer Journals, she described talking with Black women trying to organize New Orleanss first feminist book fair. She was galvanized by their energy, and deeply moved: These women make the early silence and the doubts and the wear and tear of it all worth it. I feel like they are my inheritors, and sometimes I breathe a sigh of relief that they exist, that I dont have to do it all.

Excerpt from:

A Timely Collection of Vital Writing by Audre Lorde - The New York Times

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal wants answers after hearing a report of forced sterilizations carried out on migrant detainees at an ICE detention facility.

Dawn Wooten, a former nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, said in a complaint released Monday that incarcerated women received hysterectomies and that some didnt understand why they were performed on them. Wooten is working with the social justice advocacy group Project South.

Blumenthal and more than 100 of his congressional colleagues want the U.S. Department of Homeland Securitys Office of the Inspector General to examine Wootens whistleblower complaint.

This kind of focus on a minority community with unnecessary alleged hysterectomies echoes the worst chapters in our medical history like forced sterilization -- or the Tuskegee Institute experiments -- and thats why there needs to be an investigation of these claims, Blumenthal said.

If the allegations are true, Blumenthal said, all contracts with the private company that runs the Irwin County Detention Center -- LaSalle Corrections -- should be terminated.

In the meantime, ICE should immediately institute enhanced oversight of the operations of ICDC and all other facilities operated by LaSalle, Blumenthal said.

Connecticut Public Radio received a statement, issued by an ICE public affairs officer, featuring LaSalle Corrections response to the whistleblower complaint.

LaSalle Corrections has a strict zero tolerance policy for any kind of inappropriate behavior in our facilities and takes all allegations of such mistreatment seriously, the statement reads. Our company strongly refutes these allegations and any implications of misconduct at the ICDC.

The statement refers to Wootens complaint as false allegations that overshadow work done by staff amid a pandemic.

In Wootens complaint, the correctional facility is also cited for not testing detainees for COVID-19 and allowing staff to continue working while awaiting test results despite being symptomatic. The testimony also includes a statement from a detained immigrant saying shed heard of five hysterectomies carried out between October and December of last year.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement says that only two women at the Georgia detention center have been referred to gynecological and obstetrical specialists for hysterectomies.

The accusations will be fully investigated by an independent office, however, ICE vehemently disputes the implication that detainees are used for experimental medical procedures, Dr. Ada Rivera, medical director of the ICE Health Service Corps, said in a written statement.

But Rivera also said that medical personnel are responsible for medical care decisions -- not the agency.

When I met all these women who had had surgeries, read one womans testimony to Project South, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like theyre experimenting with our bodies.

The allegations are intensifying calls from those who advocate on behalf of the immigrant community for the abolition of ICE. Two city council members in Hartford, Wildaliz Bermudez and Josh Michtom of the Working Families Party, released a joint statement blaming federal law enforcement if the report of forced hysterectomies is true.

We need to call for the abolition of this cruel and violent department, Bermudez and Michtom said in the statement. Trump and his administration cannot be trusted to respect the human rights of the immigrant community, and now is the time for Democratic members of Congress to take the bold stands that this atrocity demands. We must abolish ICE.

Its not clear whether the inspector generals office will launch a formal investigation. Connecticut Public Radio reached out to the office for clarity and didnt hear back.

See the original post here:

Reports Of Hysterectomies Carried Out On ICE Detainees Prompt Call For Action - Connecticut Public Radio

TNA spokesman says the alliance must pursue its objective of a dignified solution to the Tamil national question and provide better economic lives to people .

Sri Lankas Tamil National Alliance (TNA), that chiefly represented the Tamils living in the north and east in the post-war decade, suffered a huge setback in the August general elections, losing six seats in Parliament. With the Alliances presence in the legislature having weakened and the Rajapaksas back in power at the Centre, that too with a thumping two-thirds, what are the prospects for TNAs long-standing demand for a political solution? Alliance spokesman and Jaffna MP M.A. Sumanthiran weighs in

It is a very serious setback. We have been reduced from 16 to 10 seats in parliament. This is not very different to the local authority election results of February 2018.

One of the primary reasons is that we supported the [Sirisena-Wickremesinghe] government in office from 2015 to 2019. The expectations of the people were very high then. They hoped that all their problems will be fully resolved during that period. Although there was substantial progress in most matters, all the issues [pending since the war ended] were not fully resolved. I think there was a lot of disappointment over that fact.

Even the political solution, which is a historic demand of the Tamil people, did not materialise by way of a new constitution that was promised. We made great progress on that front too, but finally the question is whether it was achieved or not. When it was not achieved, it was counted as a failure. In regard to the release of military-held lands, there were considerable gains. But overall, since the expectations were not met, we also suffered an anti-incumbency sentiment, although we sat in opposition right through that time.

Secondly, our party has been mainly, or one could say solely, looking for a political solution. We have been disregarding a lot of economic issues faced by our people. In that last five years we did try to address some of those economic issues, because the government in office was favourable to us, yet the people did not actually see the benefits realised. With the political solution also evading us, people who hoped that at least their economic lot would be made better were disappointed. There may be other reasons also, but I think primarily these are the two reasons that explain why we ceded ground on both sides the hard-line Tamil nationalist side, who are looking for a final solution to the Tamil national question, and to government allies, who appealed to some of the people looking for better economic prospects.

Well, the TNA must pursue its objective of a dignified solution to the Tamil national question. That is fundamental. Our efforts in that area must continue and I think people must realise that in democratic space like what we have now, with a preponderant majority in the country being Sinhalese and Buddhists, for a solution to emerge, we must win over at least a sizeable section of the majority community. Without that, it is not achievable. Certainly not achievable if we keep antagonising them and heightening their own fears. That is one.

The other is, even as a political party we need to get involved in providing better economic lives for our people. If the government is not cooperative in that regard, then I think we must at least facilitate job opportunities, increase economic activity etc through participation by our diaspora community. And for that we will have to set up certain structures that will actually make a difference on the ground.

The justice question is linked to the political solution. Questions of justice and accountability arose because of the ethnic conflict. Whenever we asked for our legitimate political rights that is when we suffered violence. So the whole struggle for political rights itself became violent and then ended up in a full-scale war as they call it here now.

The processes in the UN Human Rights Council for justice took the form of transitional justice, in which you have truth, justice, reparations and the guarantee of non-recurrence. In 2015, the Sri Lankan government offered a political solution by way of a new constitution as the guarantee of non-recurrence. All the other pillars of transitional justice are also important, and we have been pursuing those as well. But eventually, it must result in a permanent solution to the root cause of the conflict. Sometimes, it is better to solve the root cause of the problems first and then look at the justice issues that had come up in the interim. This is something we learnt in South Africa. To secure the future before looking at the past. I think that is the more sensible way of addressing these issues. Our pursuit of a political solution taking primary place in our political agenda is due to that factor.

The present government, in trying to get back to office after suffering defeat in 2015, appealed to narrow communal forces amongst the majority community, igniting fears about others who are numerically in the minority.

Unfortunately, this is a political game that is often resorted to by politicians of the majority [Sinhalese] community. The failure on the part of the previous government between 2015 and 2019 to deliver on its promises, particularly in achieving reconciliation within a united country not only affected the confidence of the Tamil people but also that of the Sinhala majority.

So, they [Rajapaksas] were able to actually come back to power with the support of a more vociferous, hard-line Sinhala opinion, which wanted to assert the dominance of the Sihala-Buddhist people over the others who live in the country. Naturally, having come to power the government is now seeking to appease those forces and deliver their promise to their core constituency. In doing that, they have promised a new constitution, but as an immediate delivery they brought forward the 20th Amendment Bill to show that the President, or the Executive, will be a strong Sinhala-Buddhist ruler who will keep everybody else in the country in check and assure that the rights and safety of the majority community will be ensured.

The 20th Amendment seeks to go back to the pre-19th Amendment situation, where you have a super powerful Executive President with unparalleled powers anywhere else in the world, without any real checks and balances. But that seems to have caused concern even among their own supporters who either think that these powers in the hands of the current incumbent itself is excessive or that another president later in the future will abuse these powers. So, the first attempt by the government in showing their core constituency that they are delivering on their promise seems to have run into trouble.

Moreover, there is a context to the country wanting to abolish executive presidency, and the majority Sinhalese community repeatedly giving that mandate for over a quarter of a century. That is because, repeatedly, the country has witnessed abuse by those who come to that office. And that abuse impacts not only minority communities, but also the majority community. Memories of that abuse of unbridled powers vested in the executive presidency is a one that cautions people in the south as well. That is the reason why, although this government was apparently given the mandate to remove the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, when the draft 20th Amendment came, even those who had given that mandate have become sceptical. They do not want to give that kind of powers to one person.

This time too the mandate given to the Rajapaksas is no different from the southern voters repeated mandates, at least from 1994, to abolish executive presidency. It is more to do with the working arrangement between the President and Prime Minister, and people being told that incidents like Easter bombings were possible because the standoff between the President and the Prime Minister, and that the 19th Amendment was responsible for it. But there was no mandate from the people to revest in the President the powers in executive presidency prior to the 19th Amendment.

As for the 13th Amendment, although the Provincial Councils were set up in 1987 as a solution to the Tamil national question, it didnt satisfy the Tamil side for one, who continuously claimed it is insufficient and not meaningful sharing of powers. But it has also contributed to accentuating the fears of the majority community by propaganda that strengthening the provincial councils will result in the secession of the country. While the Tamil side has been clamouring for more powers to the provinces, in order that power sharing be meaningful, hardliners amongst the Sinhalese have been resisting that, claiming that it will lead to a division of the country. That too finds a resonance within the core constituency of the current government -- that fear, that any strengthening of the provincial councils will result in the country dividing. In order to assuage the feelings of that constituency, we are seeing rhetoric from the government side that they will keep that under control either by removing the provincial council system in its entirety or at least by reducing its powers.

The draft 20th Amendment may address those fears as well. Sinhala people believe that if there is strong President, then any attempt to divide the country can actually be dealt with by that President, as opposed a weak Executive, not being able to prevent any fissures in the country.

The call for abolition of the Executive Presidency comes from these excessive powers that are given to the President. People have been consistent in that position. What I said about the governments core constituency is that if there are fears that arise in regard to the country facing a split, then they fall back on Executive Presidency to be able to control that.

Even in our negotiations in our last five years, to strengthen the provincial councils, coupled with the abolition of Executive Presidency, there was one area of the Executive Presidency that was retained and that was in relation to the Presidents power over the provincial councils. We also ceded that as a comfort factor to assuage the fears of the majority that somehow one, central power was necessary to prevent any attempt by a province to secede.

The TNA didnt work to postpone the provincial council elections. What we were engaged in was the enactment of a new constitution, with more powers to the provinces. That effort to enact a new constitution had three major areas devolution, a new electoral system and the abolition of Executive Presidency. When we had to agree on an electoral system, a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system was agreed upon. It was decided that there should be one system at all three tiers at parliament, provincial and local government levels. That is why even before the constitution was enacted, the system that was agreed upon in the Constitutional Assembly deliberations was brought into the local government electoral system, and local government elections were held under that system.

The expectation was that in the new Constitution, Parliament and provincial council polls will also be changed to MMP. That was the reason for the delay in holding the provincial council elections. It was because the delimitation process that was conducted for the provinces was rejected by parliament. If we had succeeded in enacting the new constitution, a uniform election system would have been implemented at all three levels and provincial council elections would have been held. Unfortunately, the new constitution did not materialise. That is why the provincial council elections had got postponed. Our expectation was that the new provincial councils, emerging out of the new constitution, will be more powerful and more effective and meaningful in exercising devolved powers.

The Rajapaksas, when they were in office previously, before the end of the war as well as after the war ended, had repeatedly assured the world that there will be a proper settlement of the Tamil question in this country. Before the end of the war, they assured India, the West, and at one point, the co-chairs, the US, EU, Norway and Japan, that once the LTTE is defeated there would be a proper solution on the lines of what was recommended by the All Party Representative committee and its experts committee.

Now we have reports of both, the APRC, as well as the experts committee. Those provide for a more meaningful devolution of powers. That is the direction in which the Rajapaksa regime assured the world that they will settle the Tamil national question.

After the war ended, assuring India at least three times, the Rajapaksa government agreed to implement the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in full and also build upon it so as to achieve meaningful devolution. The promise was again in the direction of greater devolution. Now, again a Rajapaksa regime seeking to give the country a new Constitution cannot forget those repeated assurances given to the world at large, in very specific terms, and try to travel in the opposite direction. They must necessarily take that historic context, very recent historic context, into consideration and deliver on their promise.

We, on our part, will cooperate fully as we did with them in 2011, when we had 18 rounds of talks, and as we did later with the other government for about three years in the constitutional assembly process. We will continue to constructively engage in the processes. Even in the 2015 to 2018 process, the Rajapaksa camp which was represented in parliament as the UPFA agreed to greater devolution through their representatives in the steering committee and in the various sub committees. There was a great amount of consensus on the question of devolution. The disagreements were mostly in regard to executive presidency and the electoral system. But in regard to devolution there was a great measure of consensus. So, while they were in office and while they were out of office, they had taken a particular stand and we expect that stand to continue into the new constitution making process as well.

The way the TNA addressed those issues in the last 10 years, after the war ended, is to repeatedly assure the people in the south that the solution will be within a united, undivided country. In the constitutional assembly process, we even suggested that the word indivisible be included in the description of the State. Secondly, we ourselves have asked that the new constitution be approved by the Sri Lankan people at a referendum, meaning thereby that we do not want to do anything behind their backs. And that the majority community should be comfortable with and agreeable to the terms of the new Constitution. That transparent approach we think will win over the Sinhalese people. Progressive forces amongst them too must give them the confidence and assurance that such a compact will continue to remain.

Sri Lanka is physically an island, but metaphorically no country can be an island. In todays world, we must all live adhering to certain universal values and respect each others concerns. Sri Lankas foreign relations have always been mindful of that.

As its closest neighbour, Indias concerns over political stability in this island is something that all Sri Lankans appreciate and value very much. So that is why in 1983, when PM Indira Gandhi offered her good offices, that was gratefully accepted by the Sri Lankan government. And that [sentiment] continues to date.

The conflict in this island has had its impact on India as well, with over 1 lakh refugees having to be sheltered in India for three decades of war. It is foolhardy to say that conflicts in this island have no bearing on India or other countries in the world for that matter.

That is why successive Sri Lankan governments engaged with India and the rest of the international community and gave these assurances in the past. To that extent, Indias continuing good offices will be necessary and will be appreciated by all parties in finally resolving this conflict.

Engagement with the rest of the international community is also important. Recently, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has sounded a warning at the opening session at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and has highlighted the attempt to pass the 20th Amendment and how that might negatively impact the rights and freedoms, and reconciliation in this country. Those valid concerns must be seriously taken on board and addressed by the government.

Excerpt from:

Rajapaksas must honour their past commitments to India and the world - The Hindu

With the London Pact of 1915, Primorska was promised, and later by the Treaty of Rapallo, also granted to Italy. The implementation of the provisions of the London Pact with the Rapallo Treaty resulted in tearing away from Slovenia not only a large territory with about 300,000 inhabitants, but also an extremely nationally conscious and intellectual potential. The Slovenes from the Primorska region found themselves in an unfavourable environment. Attempts were made to suppress Slovenian culture and spirit by the abolition of Slovenian societies and prosecution of the Slovenian language. But Slovenian books found their way into Slovenian homes. Slovenian songs and Slovenian words did not disappear. The Slovenes from the Primorska region did not give up.

Despite the extraordinary denationalisation that occurred on the scale of the ethnocide during fascism, you were the first in Europe to start a revolt against fascism, launched by the TIGR organisation. The decades-long struggle of the Primorska patriots against national oppression, the armed resistance of the TIGR and Primorska partisans, and the military victory within the Allied forces, created favourable conditions for the reunification of the entire Slovenian national territory to its homeland. Unfortunately, state policy at the time, blinded by internationalist ideology, was not able to take full advantage of these arguments.

Gratitude for the fact that Primorska remained committed to Slovenia throughout history, goes to many Primorska patriotic organisations and individuals. Their work, effort, sacrifices, and struggles for Slovenia contributed greatly to the fact that Primorska was returned to its homeland on 15 September, when the Peace Treaty with Italy came into force in 1947. Thus, the injustice brought to us in 1915 by the London Pact was partly internationally corrected.

The crimes that had taken place against the Slovenes from Primorska have left deep traces. But humiliation and suffering did not break the Slovenian spirit. It grew, strengthened, and "found its true face in struggles, humiliation, victories, and suffering." Thus, the Primorska anthem, Vstala Primorska, rang even louder when it announced a new time and a new life for the people of Primorska. Today's holiday is therefore, first and foremost, an expression of respect and gratitude to the generations of Primorska people for their national pride, perseverance, resistance against cultural colonisation and fascism, and their loyalty to Slovenia.

Just as with perseverance the seed germinates into new life, the brave Slovenians of Primorska proved how powerful national consciousness can be, and how strong and far-reaching its power can be if it is directed towards the right goals. One of these real goals, for which the Slovenian community in Italy has been striving for many years, and which has finally come true this year, is the return of the Narodni dom (National Hall) in Trieste. The return of the Narodni dom to the Slovene community and the conciliatory actions of the presidents of the two countries represent a laudable step of reconciliation and rapprochement between Slovenes and Italians, a reflection of common European values of solidarity and coexistence, and a step towards dismantling the burdens of the past.

The belief that together we can "weather all storms" is a faith that has preserved us as a nation despite difficult trials. It is a faith that gave us the strength to rise and to continue standing strong. It is a source of strength and energy from which Slovenia can still draw today. Our homeland, for which Simon Gregori wrote: "My first song was glorified by her, the last will be sung to her, and the last voices will be: God save my homeland!"

Sincere congratulations on the National Holiday for the Day of the Return of Primorska to its Homeland!

Read more:

Prime Minister Janez Jana's official letter for the Day of the Return of Primorska to its Homeland - Gov.si

This years New York Film Festival (which begins Thursday and runs through October 11th) is taking place by way of online screenings and drive-in presentations. The 2020 festival calendar has been thrown into disarray because of the pandemicand because of ongoing closings of movie theatres and doubt over whether theatrical releases will be commercially viable when theatres reopen. (Films that earn acclaim at the N.Y.F.F. often open in theatres soon after; this year, with most films, its unclear when or how theyll be available after the festival ends.) The social side of the festival is, of course, absent; in a normal year, its public screenings and press screenings alike are meeting places, like an annual cinephiles convention. The festivals very festivity is among the double-edged swords of cinematic experience: although at times an enormous celebration is whipped up around an artistic nonentity (it happens every year), theres also at times the joyful yet solemn sense of grand occasion when a new masterwork is unveiledan occasion that renders the social side double-edged, too, when, greeting friends long-unseen, theres still a great impatience to get out into the night and walk alone to exult in the experience of the film, to keep it under pressure, to let it take root and grow. This years festival, which will be watched mainly at home, will be differentthough the differences will be distinct and unforeseeable for each film. (Ill be doing a short roundup for each of the festivals three weeks.)

Two of the festivals main offerings work intricately with time and do so to greater emotional effect, worldly insight, and artistic imagination than anything Ive seen by Christopher Nolan. (I havent seen Tenettheatres arent open in New York, and I wouldnt be inclined to go to one yet.) One of these highlights is simply called Time; its a documentary, by Garrett Bradley, about a couple, Sibil Fox Richardson and Robert Richardson, who, in 1997, when the clothing store they owned, in Shreveport, Louisiana, was in danger of closing, took part in a bank robbery. She was imprisoned for three and a half years; he was sentenced to sixty years without parole. The Richardsons are Black, and Sibil took clear and furious note of the cruelly excessive sentence that Robert receivedand of the racist basis for it. After her release, she devoted herself to raising their six sons, to restarting her professional life (she became a successful auto dealer), and to working for the release of Robertall the while video-recording her family life as if preserving it for Robert to experience should he get home. Bradley and her crew draw on this footage and are present to record later stages of Sibils efforts, as Robert was coming up on twenty years in prison. Time goes into the intricacies of the familys bureaucratically nightmarish and financially ruinous confrontation with the judicial system, of the normalized horrors of incarceration and the destruction of family life that it entails, and of Sibils activism on behalf of the abolition of a system that sheand not she alonecalls a new form of slavery. It also details Sibils devoted work of atonement, her unsparing candor about the crime that wrenched the family apart, and her exertions to restore and sustain the family in Roberts absenceand the love that sustains the couple despite his absence. In the process, the movie opens vast political vistas on the deep-rooted and unchallenged forms of white supremacy at work throughout American society (whether involving legal or economic inequality) and displays the enormous depths of emotional strength, the daily heroism, that endurance demands. The movie, in black-and-white, blends its mournful tones and its dramatic energies with a romantic ardor and a historic grandeur.

The prolific young Argentinian director Matas Pieiro is Shakespeare-obsessed, which is to say that hes also performance-obsessed and theatre-obsessed, and his new film, Isabellacentered on a planned production of Measure for Measureleapfrogs through time, and through performances and productions, with a whimsically graceful yet intimately passionate cinematic imagination. Mariel (Mara Villar), a thirty-eight-year-old actress in Buenos Aires whos seven months pregnant, auditions for the lead role of Isabella in a production of the play. Its a strange audition, for which she needs to deliver a personal monologue, which she builds around an incident that had occurred a while ago, in Crdoba, with her brother (Pablo Sigal), and his so-called lover (Agustina Muoz), an actress whos also auditioning for the role. Meanwhile, Mariel has written a play thats about to be stageda personal one, endowed with ingenious stagecraft (its striking imagery figures in the movie throughout), centered on the problem of doubt and action, and regarding which she herself faces an ongoing doubt, as to whether shell act in it or ever act again. Shattering Shakespeare into shards of personal experience, rhythmically repeating sequences and actions in a sort of cinematic music, and catching actors in highly inflected and extended closeups, Pieiro fuses performance and daily life into a quietly mighty architecture of psychological complexity. Working with an extraordinary cast of many regulars in his films, he sustains a tensely balanced tone that, as in films by ric Rohmer, reveals the piercingly intimate and passionate element of intellectual pursuits.

The festival includes eight programs of short films; the eighth of those programs, New York Stories, features Object Lessons, or: What Happened Whitsunday, Ricky DAmbroses historically resonant work of documentary dramadrama rooted in fictitious documents. Its the story of a young woman who is murdered at a nature preserve in New Paltz, New Yorkon a site that was about to become an art complex showing the holdings of one late collector. The killing became politicized, through the actions and claims of a right-wing anti-immigration activist planning to run for office. (The story is loosely based on the killing of Kathryn Steinle, in 2015, and its place in Donald Trumps 2016 campaign.) DAmbrose tells the story with documents made for the filmfaux newspaper articles, a death certificate, maps, and architectural plans, as well as film footage of the rustic site and other relevant venues. With its allusions to rallies, Internet harassment, and the abuse of religious occasions, its a clear and subtly furious unfolding of the prime political pathology of the times.

Restorations and revivals are also a major part of the festival, and one of the best is in the first week. Joyce Chopras 1985 drama Smooth Talk, based on a story by Joyce Carol Oates, stars a teen-age Laura Dern as Connie, who lives with her parents (Mary Kay Place and Levon Helm) and older sister (Elizabeth Berridge) in a rustic home in Northern California, far from town. Connie, whos in the summer between her freshman and sophomore years of high school, is sneaking around with her friends, claiming to be going to movies when theyre actually trying to meet boys (and shes trying a little harder). Tensions with her family are rising over their efforts to control her actions and supervise her time; her encounters with young men grow increasingly tense and risky, and reach a crisis when shes stalked and pursued to her home by a man (Treat Williams) whose smooth talk she rightly perceives as a threat of violence. Chopra strikes an astoundingly tactile, intimate vision of Connies terror together with the burdens of self-doubt and silence that she enduresand that predators foster. The films power is enormous throughout; spare means (long-held closeups, a four-minute take of sisterly confessions) evoke a drama that seems to have been filmed holding its breath.

Originally posted here:

Highlights from Week One of the New York Film Festival - The New Yorker

Sep 19th 2020

STRIVING TO OBEY an order from President Xi Jinpingnamely, that extreme poverty must be eliminated in China by the end of 2020officials have given many things to Jizi Arimo, a 47-year-old widow and mother of four. Chaguan met Ms Jizi last week in a newly built apartment block in Yuexi, a once-remote rural county in the south-western province of Sichuan.

One way to tell Ms Jizis story is with economic statistics. In her old home, high in the mountains, she was officially deemed impoverished. The poverty line varies a bit by region, but is set at around 2,300 yuan ($340) a year. As this year began, roughly 5m Chinese still needed to cross that line for Mr Xis promise to be kept. Officials in Sichuan paid the lions share of the costs of Ms Jizis relocation, and now employ her as a cleaner at her housing complex, paying her 550 yuan a month.

Yet poverty alleviation is about more than numbers. Like much else in Mr Xis China, it is also a strikingly political endeavour. Ms Jizis home was one stop on a recent government tour of poverty-related work, organised for foreign and domestic journalists. This was not a trip for verifying government claims independently, or for probing reports that some rural folk have been kept off poverty registers by bureaucrats anxious to hit targets. Officials stood over Ms Jizi as she answered questions. Throughout the visit, minders followed journalists who tried to break from the pack.

A frail figure in a checked overcoat and hat, Ms Jizi spoke perched on a sofa, beneath a colour poster of Mr Xi with the caption: Be grateful to the party. Listen to the party. Follow the party. A member of the Yi minority, she is hesitant in Mandarin Chinese. To approving nods from officials, she declared: If it werent for General Secretary Xi, I wouldnt have such a lovely home. Every flat visited by the press was decorated with the same photograph of Mr Xi. A second poster on display in each apartment featured photographs of residents old and new homes, and slogans like Relocation warms our hearts and we are forever grateful to the party and Welcoming a new life with a smiling face. The whole housing estate is hung with party slogans and banners. Home to 6,660 relocated villagers, its name is Gratitude Community.

Ms Jizis new home is not exceptional. Other model communities visited on the tour were also plastered with posters praising the party and Mr Xi. The party secretary of Sichuan province, Peng Qinghua, told reporters that encouraging thankfulness was part of poverty-alleviation work. Conservative and outdated thinking is the root cause of poverty, he explained. In his telling, the partys focus on moral education is a unique advantage of socialism with Chinese characteristics. In particular, he charged that the Yi, of whom about 2.5m live in Sichuan, needed to be led away from such undesirable habits as paying lavish dowries for brides, or holding extravagant funerals despite not caring for their elderly parents while they are still alive. Mr Peng praised party members who lead by example. He paid tribute to officials killed in mountain car-crashes, and told of a party secretary who, rather than quit a rural posting and return to her home city to look after a newly widowed mother, brought her mother to live in the country.

That vision of party members as self-sacrificing, secular missionaries, leading the masses towards more productive lives, comes from the top. State media never tire of showing Mr Xi touring rural areas to inspect the latest cash-generating crops and industries, like an austere but benevolent monarch. Almost four decades ago the countryside was freed from misery by the abolition of collective farms, as Deng Xiaoping, the then paramount leader, allowed peasants to choose which crops to grow and to start their own businesses. In the Xi era officials seem confident, once more, that the government knows best. Technocrats interviewed in Liangshan prefecture, where Ms Jizi lives, deny that they are returning to central planning. They describe a hybrid model harnessing both state resources and market discipline. In many places, villagers are encouraged to rent their small plots of land to agricultural co-operatives, creating larger, more efficient farms which may then employ some of them as herdsmen or to pick crops. Government bodies and state-owned enterprises in the prosperous east are urged to buy Liangshan-grown apples, walnuts or buckwheat tea, as a patriotic duty.

In part, poverty alleviation is an urbanisation scheme. In the past two years alone, nearly 10m Chinese have been physically relocated from rural homes deemed inhospitable. Officials say that all choose to move, with only a few older folk struggling to adjust. Some families move to cement-walled houses a short walk from their former homes of wood and mud. Others leave for apartments many miles away. Lots of youngsters head farther afield to work as migrants. The Yi are strong and unafraid of heights, enthuses an official. That makes them sought-after workers when electricity lines need stringing between pylons.

Young children learn Mandarin as well as the Yi language in the kindergartens now found in each village, readying them for the workforce. In Liangshan the government is building new boarding schools, some with subsidised books and accommodation. Lin Shucheng, Liangshans party chief, is proud of outdoor night schools that teach farmers modern agricultural techniques, and village women embroidery and other handicrafts. If the poor are not educated and given incentives to work, he says, they will sit in the sunshine in a corner, waiting for a government cheque.

The past should not be romanticised. Not long ago, farmers in Liangshan lived harsh, isolated lives. For all that, poverty alleviation is not an act of disinterested charity. Chinas poorest are being integrated into the national economy and trained to thank the party for it. Putting money in peoples pockets is one measure of success. The greater prize is putting ideas in peoples heads.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "The politics of poverty"

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Chinas anti-poverty drive is not disinterested charity - The Economist

'This decision was not made based on one belief or one person, it was about the well-being and standards of our entire newsroom'

The decision to remove Alexia Isais from her position at The State Press was made objectively. The personal and political beliefs of those who were involved in the decision were put to the side and the decision was made purely with the intent to uphold our organizations standards.

After a flurry of misinformation hit the internet following her firing, we want to set the record straight.

Isais was not fired for an anti-police tweet as she claims, she was fired because those tweets promoted violence or harm toward a person, and we would take a tweet like that seriously regardless of who it came from or whom it was referencing.

Another major factor behind the decision was because having those original tweets out in public, on behalf of The State Press which was tagged in her bio can endanger our staff and newspaper as a whole.

This decision was not made based on one belief or one person, it was about the well-being and standards of our entire newsroom. None of us celebrate this decision, but it came down to protecting our staff from outside harm.

We understand that police are not a marginalized or minority group of people, and we acknowledge that our original statement could have been more accurately worded. We also understand firsthand and acknowledge the harms and traumas that BIPOC have endured in the way of policing and police brutality.

In her time as a columnist, Isais published roughly a dozen columns which garnered more than 14,000 page views on The State Press. We defended each column, many of which were subject to scrutiny and controversy. We would continue to do so had Isais not advocated for harm in her tweets. Her political views were never the problem.

We highly valued her work as an opinion columnist, as she started important conversations in the ASU community.

In regard to the comparison drawn with RaeLee Klein, these situations are not parallel.

Students at Blaze Radio did not have the authority to fire Klein, whereas student leaders at The State Press do have that power.

Additionally, Klein never worked at The State Press. If she did, we would have fired her. We believe that the process of her removal took far too long.

Both Klein and Isais feel that their First Amendment rights were violated. The First Amendment does not protect you from the consequences of your words.

Simply put, the decision to remove Alexia Isais from her position was not an effort to violate her First Amendment right, nor silence her voice as a woman of color.

We believe that this incident crossed a line and, as a newsroom, we have standards that we must uphold.

If any member of our staff, regardless of status or affiliation, had made such comments, no matter the subject of the tweet, they would have faced the same punishment.

Two things can be true at once: You can support the Black Lives Matter movement and believe that there needs to be major police reform or abolition while simultaneously condemning the celebration or encouragement of violence publicly while representing a news organization.

Additionally, we will not ignore allegations that our newsroom is silencing select voices when we are making a consistent, active effort to uplift and promote those same voices.

BIPOC State Press employees were involved in making this decision, and such allegations discredit the work they have done to make not only themselves heard, but also those they have fought tooth and nail to uplift.

Two other columnists resigned following our decision to remove Isais from her position. These columnists could have continued to write columns that reflect their views, and we also would have let them address Isais firing in our pages and internally within the organization.

We have stopped the production of opinion columns until we have properly re-evaluated the purpose and mission of the section and recruited a diverse group of columnists to appropriately represent various points of view.

Additionally, we are open to having conversations with any students or organizations about this decision and encourage them to reach out to us with Letters to the Editor about the decision if they feel compelled to do so.

Adrienne Dunn, Executive Editor

Andrew Howard, Editor-in-Chief

Joseph Perez, Magazine Editor-in-Chief

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Letter from the Editors: Concerning the removal of Alexia Isais - The State Press

A sign on the old Bethel Chapel, Cambridge Street, pictured in 2006

Cambridge Street or Coal Pit Lane was the town boundary and originally stretched from Union Street to Holly Lane.

West Street was at that time West Fields and Pinstone Street was Pinstone Lane. The street that we now call The Moor was a path between 16 acres of common land with grazing animals and some scattered dwellings and possibly some small coal pits.

Coal Pit Lane was so called because mining coal had once taken part there, but by the late 17th century it was becoming more part of the town.

Joseph Downes, master cutler, is recorded as having six hearths there in 1693 which would suggest a substantial house.

By the 1730s the apprenticeship records show the lane bustling with activity. In 1735 Edward Bennet took on the wheel at the bottom of The Moor (where Decathlon is).

He had a house at the corner of Coal Pit Lane and Pinstone Lane, a smithy on The Moor and a barn. In 1738 his son Edward Junior was born.

Edward senior and his wife Hannah were early Methodists. Often sheltering John Wesley from the mob in their house, and making several attempts to build a chapel, which the mob frequently burned down.

Young Edward took a job in London to mend the armour in the Tower of London and returned, having married a widow in 1756 and not long after, returned to Coal Pit Lane with a method for refining sugar.

His refinery was to become the second largest in England. He built his sugar house at the bottom of Coal Pit Lane where it met Union Street.

Methodist minister George Whitfield sometimes preached from its doors.

Whitfield was to become at the heart of the Abolitionist society, yet Bennet was at the heart of slave trading acquiring his sugar from Liverpool.

For the English slave traders it was a three-legged journey called the triangular trade. Slaves were exchanged for trade goods including tools and guns, the slaves were then transported for sale in the West Indies and North America, and the money used to buy rum and sugar to sell back in England.

One of the principle slave trader merchants was Thomas Staniforth, originally from Darnall. It is estimated he helped finance the transport of 7,000 slaves a year.

It is known that some Sheffield manufacturers sold trade goods to the Liverpool merchants but how many did it is difficult to say.

At least 70 percent of the 12 million or so captives who left Africa were destined for sugar colonies. The average life span of a mill hand on the plantation was said to be only seven years.

Overworked slaves who fed the cane stalks into the mechanical rollers often lost hands or were pulled into the rollers and dismembered.

This outcome was common enough that a slave was often stationed nearby with a sword to sever the mill feeders arm before she could be pulled to her death in the rollers.

The death rates on such plantations were compounded by malnutrition and disease, and were so obscenely high that the ranks of the enslaved needed constant replenishment.

By such wicked and inhuman ways, the English are said to enslave towards 100,000 yearly, of which 30,000 are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year, Thomas Paine, 1775.

Around 1774 Bennet built an independent chapel near the sugar house and officiated as preacher.

In 1787 the abolitionist societies were formed throughout England, including Sheffield.

Edward died in 1788 the same year that The Moor was enclosed.

Edward Bennet had no direct heirs and his estate fell to George Bennet, a bookseller and stationer and friend of James Montgomery. The sugar refinery continued for a while after Bennets death.

In 1807 the slave trade was prohibited. But changes to beet sugar and the Quaker-led boycott of sugar from slave plantations made many cane sugar refineries. In 1836 the refinery was pulled down.

Montgomery and George Bennet created the towns Sunday School Union, uniting a Sunday school in Coal Pit Lane with six others in the city, expanding the union to include a total of 48 affiliated schools by 1824.

In 1790 a bequest from Edward Bennet had led the congregation in Bennets chapel to build a new chapel in Howard Street and in 1825 Bennets chapel was demolished and the present Methodist chapel built.

A new Sunday school was built next to it in 1852.

George Bennet spent his uncles bequest on missionary work and fighting for the abolition of slavery.

He was a close friend of the Reads in Wincobank and fascinated their daughter, who became the passionate abolitionist Mary Ann Rawson.

Bennet and Montgomery, however ,were for staged freedom of the slaves, whereas Rawson wanted total, immediate freedom.

She also criticised missionaries for enabling slavery rather than challenging it.

George Bennet died in 1841 and was buried in the General Cemetery. His monument is close to the Samuel Worth Chapel.

Bennets wheel seemed to have been demolished in the 1830s. Coal Pit Lane was widened and its name changed to Cambridge Street in 1857.

In 1859 a notice was posted in the paper for the return of a 20-year-old slave to a South African farmer.

The general public were outraged as slavery had been abolished. He appeared again at Cowmouth Farm in Norton, knocking on the farmers door asking for food. He spent several weeks living in the woods at Norton.

The police and anti-slavery society took an interest and hundreds of workmen searched for him. He was found near Aston but escaped. No-one seemed to know what happened to him.

But a few years later in Backfields, next to Coal Pit Lane, a black South African was working as a porter, married to a local girl and with a young daughter. Maybe that was him?

Thank you to all who support local journalism with a digital or print subscription to The Star. The events of 2020 mean trusted, local journalism is more reliant than ever on your support. We couldn't do it without you. Subscribe here http://www.thestar.co.uk/subscriptions so we can keep campaigning on your behalf. Stay safe.

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A complex history of Sheffield's links to the slave trade - The Star

By Alex Lantier 18 September 2020

On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) regional director for Europe, Dr. Hans Kluge, warned that Europe faces a catastrophic resurgence of COVID-19.

Europe has seen over 228,000 COVID-19 deaths and five million cases, according to the WHO, mostly in a wave that peaked in March. However, as scientists had warned, the premature ending of lockdowns is producing an explosive resurgence of the virus. Even as hospital wards in Madrid and across southern France begin to fill and death rates mount, European governments continue to loosen social distancing and impose back-to-school and back-to-work policies that spread the virus.

Speaking at a WHO press conference in Copenhagen, Kluge said: Weekly cases have now exceeded those reported when the pandemic first peaked in Europe in March. Last week, the regions weekly tally exceeded 300,000 patients. More than half of European countries have reported a greater than 10 per cent increase in cases in the past two weeks. Of those, seven countries have seen newly reported cases increase more than twofold in the same period.

Kluge called these alarming rates of transmission across the region. Yesterdays figures provided a stark picture: Spain saw 11,291 confirmed new cases and 162 deaths; France, 10,593 cases and 50 deathsboth surpassing the largest daily infection totals this springand Britain, 3,395 cases and 21 deaths. The Czech Republic saw 2,136 new cases Wednesday, the first time this figure exceeded 2,000. Daily cases are rising in Germany (2,021), Italy (1,585), the Netherlands (1,753), Romania (1,679), and Belgium (1,153).

The reckless elimination of social distancing in schools and workplaces is having a devastating impact. In the spring and early summer, we were able to see the impact of strict lockdown measures. Our efforts, our sacrifices, paid off. In June cases hit an all-time low. The September case numbers, however, should serve as a wake-up call for all of us, Kluge said, adding, If you lift the pressure from the virus, naturally you're going to see this increase.

COVID-19 deaths follow the increase in cases with several weeks delay, and with deaths already increasing in Spain, it is only a matter of time before death totals explode across Europe.

WHO officials also warned against calls to slash the amount of time workers are legally allowed to self-isolate after being exposed to the virus. While it takes up to 14 days for an infected person to show symptoms, French officials are cutting quarantines to only seven days and British officials to only 10. Spain may cut the quarantine to seven or 10 days. This would ensure that infectious patients resume normal activities and spread the virus before finally falling ill.

Knowing the immense individual and societal impact even a slight reduction in the length of quarantine can have... I encourage countries of the region to make scientific due process with their experts, Kluge said.

WHO official Catherine Smallwood said the WHO is not changing the recommended quarantine length, indicating that the French and British proposals have no scientific basis: Our quarantine recommendation of 14 days has been based on our understanding of the incubation period and transmission of the disease. We would only revise that on the basis of a change of our understanding of the science.

Kluge said prompt and resolute action is required to prevent an overwhelming resurgence of COVID-19. Warning that the virus has been merciless whenever partisanship and disinformation prevailed, he said, Where the pandemic goes from here is in our hands. We have fought it back before, and we can fight it back again.

The main obstacle to adopting a rational, scientifically based policy to fight the pandemic is the conscious hostility of Europes governments and financial aristocracy. All echo the positions of French President and investment banker Emmanuel Macron, who ruled out further lockdowns last month, telling Paris Match, We cannot stop the entire country.

Lockdowns were adopted this spring only after the collapse of Italys medical system under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic in February and early March triggered a wave of wildcat strikes in Italian auto, steel and machine tool firms that spread across Europe.

The focus of European banks and officials this spring, however, was organizing a massive transfer of wealth to the super-rich. While the euro zone adopted 1.25 trillion in quantitative easing (QE) handouts to the banks and a 500 billion European Union (EU) corporate bailout, London adopted 635 billion in QE handouts and at least 110 billion in corporate bailouts. Afterwards, they focused on forcing children back to school so their parents could return to work to produce profits to back up the massive amounts of capital handed to the banks.

These bailouts have the unions enthusiastic support. The German Union Confederation (DGB) and Frances General Confederation of Labor (CGT) signed a joint statement explicitly endorsing the EU bailout negotiated primarily between Berlin and Paris. The union bureaucracies are complicit in the EUs politically criminal pandemic response, which they play a leading role in organizing.

Only the independent intervention of the working class can impose necessary lockdown policies to halt the pandemic surge and avert a renewed, catastrophic loss of life. For this, however, workers need to organize independently of the union bureaucracies and their political allies, who are complicit in the murderous policies of the capitalist class.

In Spain, currently the pandemics European epicenter, health officials are urgently demanding lockdowns. In Madrid, the worst-hit region, Dr. Miguel Sanchez told ABC that emergency rooms are once again on the verge of collapse. With 24.4 percent of COVID-19 tests coming back positive, Dr. Cesar Carballo told Telemadrid: It is already too late... It is no longer sufficient to lock down neighborhoods, we will have to put all of Madrid on lockdown.

State-organized polls found that 56.8 percent of Spaniards do not trust the states response, while 58.3 percent want more demanding isolation measures.

The Spanish Health Ministry said, however, that regional authorities alone now set policy. Madrids right-wing regional premier Isabel Ayuso has refused even selective lockdowns in the worst-hit neighborhoods. Ayuso, who has said she believes practically all children, one way or another, will be infected with COVID-19, appealed instead to fascistic sentiment, blaming the spread of the virus on the lifestyles of our immigrants.

In France, where hospitals in the Marseille and Bordeaux regions are beginning to overflow with severe COVID-19 patients, Health Minister Olivier Vran announced yesterday that France would maintain its unscientific seven-day quarantine policy despite WHO warnings. This came after Prime Minister Jean Castex again insisted that there will be no all-out lockdown policy, and that his government wants France to live with the virus.

The French government, which stepped up army deployments to major cities as the lockdown began this spring, is terrified of working class anger and is doubtless preparing repression of mass protests. Dr. Mathias Wargon, head of emergency care at Delafontaine hospital in Saint Denis, near Paris, said, I have noticed that the Interior Ministry is taking back control from the Health Ministry. The Health Ministry no longer controls what happens, but the police prefects and state officials.

IFOP pollster Frdric Dabi told Le Monde that public opinion is tired and worried... In this explosive and unpredictable context, the government is trying to ensure that the pressure cooker does not explode.

The way forward for workers and students to protect themselves against the pandemic is to form independent safety committees in workplaces and schools across Europe and beyond. These committees can prepare a general strike against back-to-school policies and continued nonessential economic activity, and for the right to shelter at home under decent conditions. This requires above all a political struggle for the socialist reorganization of society and the abolition of the capitalist social order that is the root cause of the disastrous response to the pandemic.

Excerpt from:

World Health Organization warns of alarming resurgence of COVID-19 in Europe - WSWS

Wilmington College's Westheimer Peace Symposium has always prided itself as being international in its scope of presenters, topics and concerns. This fall, the 30th annual event will be available for a global audience with exclusively online programming Oct. 1 and 2.

The Colleges milestone 30th annual Westheimer Peace Symposium will be held virtually while highlighting "The Nuclear Threat: Past, Present, Future.

The two-day symposium will commemorate the recent 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through a collaboration between the Peace Resource Center, which houses an extensive, internationally recognized archive of atomic bombing materials and artistic presentations on the topic through The Response Project.

The program is to the public via Facebook livestreaming on the Peace Resource Center and Wilmington College Facebook pages. However, series of special concurrent workshops on both days require pre-registration for availability on Zoom. Due to participation limits, advance registration is required for the general public, who can sign up now. See http://www.wilmington.edu/westheimer for registration details and a full schedule of events.

The Peace Symposium opens Oct. 1 at 10 a.m. with opening remarks from Mary Westheimer, daughter of founding benefactors Charles and May Westheimer, and Tanya Maus, director of the Peace Resource Center (PRC) and Quaker Heritage Center (QHC). The morning's keynote address will follow as Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, will speak on "People of New Mexico Who Were Negatively Impacted by the Trinity Nuclear Test."

What then transpires are three concurrent workshops, from 11:20 a.m. to 12:50 p.m., requiring advance registration. Programs include Dr. Russell Kincaid, professor of mathematics and physics at WC, providing insight into the Manhattan Project with Dr. Bonnie Erwin, associate professor of English, presenting survivors' accounts of the atomic bombings. Rumi Hanagaki and Toshiko Tanigawa will share their experiences of wartime Japan, while the third session will feature Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, who will speak on the circumstances that led to Japan attacking the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbor.

Available for all viewers with registration not required is a fourth workshop, from 11:20 a.m. to 12:50 p.m., at which David Richardson, a professor with the University of North Carolina's Dept. of Epidemiology, will speak on "Radiation and Cancer: From the Manhattan Project to Today." This lecture will include observations on the health and mortality of persons involved in the nuclear weapons complex.

The afternoon will feature a plenary session open to all with Susan Southard presenting a program, from 1:50 to 2:30 p.m., titled "Beneath the Mushroom Cloud: Life after Nuclear War." Using historic and contemporary photographs and survivors' personal stories, she will take her audience on a journey of post-nuclear survival and how their stories should impact nuclear politics today.

From 2:40 to 4:10 p.m., four additional concurrent workshops will be held for which registration is required. Carlos Umana, M.D., a member of the Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, will present "The Dimensions of the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons: An Evidence-based Approach to Campaigning and Policy-making." Also, Yuki Miyamoto, associate professor of religious studies at DePaul University, will present a workshop titled "Beginning Our Conversation with Our Knowledge of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Also, Susan Southard will present a second workshop, "Writing as Healing: A Creative Writing Workshop," and Mitchie Takeuchi, will speak from personal experience when presenting "Growing into Hiroshima: A Story of Second Generation Hibakusha (atomic bombing sufferer)."

During that same 2:40 to 4:10 p.m. period, Tanya Maus, director of the College's PRC and QHC will present a plenary program open to all, "The Archives of Knowledge and Action: Introducing the Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College and the Barbara Reynolds Memorial Archives."

An especially unique component of this year's symposium is the Response Project from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. and open to all. The Response Project is a multidisciplinary fine arts endeavor that draws together seven artists from across the United States to produce original artistic works in response to the PRCs Barbara Reynolds Memorial Collection. They range from filmmaker Brian L. Frye and poet elin o'Hara slavick to WC's own art professor Hal Shunk. After viewing the collection, the seven have created responses using their preferred artistic genre. Different artists will be featured during both days' programming.

The opening day's presentations will conclude with the keynote address, "Don't Bank on the Bomb: How Small Steps Lead to Lasting Change," by Susi Snyder, coordinator of the organization, Don't Bank on the Bomb.

Day two, Oct. 2, will start with a presentation, from 10:20 to 11:20 a.m., titled "Replacing CO2 with Plutonium? Why Nuclear Power Is a Poor Approach to Reducing CO2 Emissions" by Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

Four concurrent workshops will follow, each requiring registration.

They include "The Chernobyl Disaster by Keith Orejel, assistant professor of history at WC, who will examine the disastrous nuclear reactor meltdown that occurred in Russia in 1986, and a presentation by Kathleen Sullivan, director of Hibakusha Stories, titled "Staying Awake, Staying Alive: Maintaining Active Hope for Nuclear Abolition. Other concurrent workshops are "Mining Personal Connections to Lessons in History," which will be presented by Napoleon Maddox, creative director of the Underworld Jazz Festival, and Carmichael and Carna Capelle's "The Legacies of Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands and the Fight for a Fair Compact Agreement."

Also, in that 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. time slot will be a lecture for which registration is not required titled "Truman's Kyoto Misconception: The Hidden Meaning of Hiroshima" by Alex Wellerstein of the Stevens Institute for Technology.

Additional artists in the Response Project will present from 12:40 to 1:40 p.m. followed by a plenary session open to all featuring Kathleen Sullivan, director of Hibakusha Stories, presenting "The Art of Storytelling: Hibakusha Testimony and Artful Action for Disarmament from 1:50 to 2:50 p.m.

Four more workshops for which registration is required will be presented from 3 to 4 p.m. They include "Talking Peace: Listening to the A-Bomb Trees of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" by Katy McCormick, associate professor at Ryerson University's School of Image Arts; "Animating the Archive" by interdisciplinary artist Migwa Orimo; "What Washington Is Thinking about Nuclear Weapons 75 Years into the Nuclear Age" by Anthony Wier, legislative secretary for Nuclear Disarmament and Pentagon Spending with the Friends Committee on National Legislation; and "Turning Knowledge into Action: Practical Steps Toward Political Activism" by Susi Snyder of PAX Netherlands.

Also running concurrently from 3 to 4 p.m. is a lecture not requiring registration titled "Beyond the U.N.: The Work of Small Acts in Nagasaki's City Diplomacy for Peace" by Hirokazu Miyozaki, professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.

The final Response Project segment will commence from 4:10 to 5:10 p.m. followed by the Symposium's closing keynote address, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., "Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Through Humanitarian Disarmament: A Fight for All of Us" by Carlos Umana, an officer with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

The Westheimer Peace Symposium was established in 1991 after philanthropists Charles and May Westheimer endowed an annual lecture series to reflect the Quaker commitment to peace making, social justice, humanitarian service and respect for all persons. Since then, the annual Symposium has brought together national and international speakers to address peace, society and the environment during daylong conversations with the College, community and guests.

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Wilmington College to discuss 'past, present and future' of the nuclear threat at 30th edition of Westheimer Peace Symposium - The Highland County...

Five years ago this month, Pope Francis embarked on his apostolic visit to the United States.

I look back with immense gratitude at the privilege I enjoyed as a communications professional serving the Church in the Washington, D.C., area, which allowed me to closely follow the Holy Fathers footsteps during his Sept. 22-27 visit.

It was both thrilling and exhausting (that man kept a packed schedule!) to accompany reporters to the canonization Mass for St. Junpero Serra, his address to Congress, and the closing of the World Meeting of Families.

I look back on those memories with wonder and gratitude that I could be so close to Peter, who came to bring Jesus to me.

Each major metropolitan city came to a standstill as crowds in the thousands flooded streets and plazas. I cant think of a comparable experience Ive had in the United States.

Who can forget the images of Pope Francis embracing persons with disabilities after his Masses, visiting Catholic schoolchildren and the incarcerated, greeting priests and religious, meeting elected officials, and kissing babies who were dressed like him?

It was a unifying moment for the Church and country. He lifted our gaze toward something higher and bigger than ourselves.

But I also look back with sorrow as I think about how much our country, Church, and world have changed in the mere five years since his visit: statues of St. Junpero are being torn down or removed throughout California; the nuncio who greeted Pope Francis on his visit called for his resignation in the wake of a new iteration of the sexual abuse crisis; and a pandemic swept across the globe, exacerbating the pain of the people and causes the pope has championed, including the poor and the hungry, the elderly, immigrants and refugees, and a planet in peril.

This is to say nothing of the polarization across the aisles political and ecclesial that has deepened with the widespread use of social media and targeted news and information-sharing.

Pope Francis blesses a prisoner as he visits the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in Philadelphia Sept. 27, 2015. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

In general, many people, including political and Church leaders, seem angrier, more anxious, and less interested in mercy and redemption than they were just a few short years ago.

Pope Francis 2015 visit shows how this disposition and the tactics that accompany it are inauthentic to the message of the Gospel and an ineffective means of spreading it.

In re-reading his speeches and homilies, it becomes clear that a divided America, one in which many people distrust their neighbors, does not have a bright or lasting future. On the other hand, if we can bridge the real or imagined gaps which polarize us, we have a shot at building up this land of dreams.

What did Pope Francis encourage us to do then which we might recommit to now?

In his canonization homily, the pope encouraged us to consider the mission that God has given to each of us. In the wake of the pandemic, which has wreaked havoc on so many peoples futures, this has become even more pressing: People have lost hope as well as a sense of meaning and purpose. They need a reason to go on, a means to provide for their families, and meaningful ways to contribute to the common good.

Mission is never the fruit of a perfectly planned program or a well-organized manual, Pope Francis preached. Mission is always the fruit of a life which knows what it is to be found and healed, encountered and forgiven. Mission is born of a constant experience of Gods merciful anointing.

His speech to Congress masterfully built on the idea of mission by reminding our legislators of their own: to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good.

He had them consider why they should defend life in every stage of development and outlined what a just society looks like, from its care for immigrants to the abolition of the death penalty. He painted for them the picture of an America that embraced the principles of Catholic social teaching, one built on the firm foundation of the family and one which continues to strive to live up to its founding ideals.

Pope Francis addresses a joint meeting of Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington Sept. 24, 2015. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

He addressed how polarization and division cripples these efforts head-on:

But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.

And he added:

The challenges facing us today call for a renewal of that spirit of cooperation, which has accomplished so much good throughout the history of the United States. The complexity, the gravity, and the urgency of these challenges demand that we pool our resources and talents, and resolve to support one another, with respect for our differences and our convictions of conscience.

I found that one of the most compelling parts of that speech was when he named four Americans whose faith inspired them to work for justice: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton.

Their personal experience of Gods mercy moved them to create a society in which neighbors extended mercy to one another.

I think of their contributions, along with American saints like Serra, Father Solanus Casey, Mother Cabrini, Kateri Tekawitha, Elizabeth Ann Seton, and Katherine Drexel, as living out the vision summed up by Robert Kennedy to make gentle the life of this world. They embody the principles of faithful citizenship and can still inspire us today to do the same.

Siempre adelante! Keep moving forward! For [Serra], this was the way to continue experiencing the joy of the Gospel, to keep his heart from growing numb, from being anesthetized, Pope Francis proclaimed.

My anesthetized heart warmed up again by reliving Pope Francis visit five years ago. Maybe if more Americans remember his words and the graces of that trip, theirs will, too.

Read more here:

Five years later, Pope Francis advice to the US is worth revisiting - Angelus News

USA September 16, 2020 Chris Wright

At a time when unemployment is skyrocketing in the US and millions of out-of-work Americans have been abandoned by the federal government, it may be of interest to consider how an earlier generation responded to an even greater crisis, the Great Depression (1929-1936). In particular, we might draw inspiration from the remarkable story of the now-forgotten Workers Unemployment Insurance Bill that was introduced in Congress in 1934, 1935, and 1936.

Despite essentially no press coverage and extreme hostility from the business community and the Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) administration, a popular movement developed in support of this bill that had been written by the Communist Party. The mass pressure that was brought to bear on Congress secured a stunning victory in the spring of 1935, when the bill became the first unemployment insurance plan in US history to be recommended by a congressional committee (the House Labor Committee). It was defeated in the House by a vote of 204 to 52 but the widespread support for the bill was likely a factor in the easy passage later in 1935 of the relatively conservative Social Security Act, which laid the foundation for the American welfare state.

Aside from its direct legislative importance, the Workers Bill is of interest in that it shows just how left-wing vast swathes of the US population were in the 1930s and can become when a political force emerges to articulate their grievances. This bill, which was far more radical than provisions in the Soviet Union for social insurance, was endorsed by over 3,500 local unions (and the regular conventions of several International unions and state bodies of the American Federation of Labor), as well as practically every unemployed organization in the country, fraternal lodges, governmental bodies in over seventy cities and counties, and groups representing veterans, farmers, Blacks, women, the youth, and churches. In the West, the South, the Midwest, and the East, millions of citizens signed petitions and postcards in support of it. And this was all despite the active hostility of every sector of society with substantial resources.

It is puzzling, then, that historians have almost entirely overlooked the Workers Bill. For instance, in his book Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, Alan Brinkley doesnt devote a single sentence to it. Neither does Robert McElvaine in his standard history The Great Depression: America, 19291941. David Kennedy devotes half a sentence to it in volume one of his Oxford history of the Depression and World War II, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. Instead, the less sophisticated and less radical Townsend Plan for old-age insurance, which was proposed around the same time and was widely publicized in the press, tends to monopolize historians attention (only to be ridiculed). The neglect of the Workers Bill lends credence to a still-dominant interpretation of the American citizenry during the Depression and throughout its history, viz. as being relatively centrist, individualistic, and conservative, especially in comparison with the historically more socialist populations of Western Europe.

Brinkley sums up this strain of thinking derived from the postwar liberal consensus school of historiography, which still influences pundits, politicians, and academics:

The failure of more radical political movements to take root in the 1930s reflected, in part, the absence of a serious radical tradition in American political culture. The rhetoric of class conflict echoed only weakly among men and women steeped in the dominant themes of their nations history; and leaders relying upon that rhetoric faced grave, perhaps insuperable difficulties in attempting to create political coalitions

This is a simplistic interpretation. For one thing, there is a serious radical tradition in American political culture, as embodied, for example, in the Populist movement of the 1890s and the Socialist Party and IWW of the early twentieth century. But even insofar as a case can be made that the rhetoric of class conflict echoe[s]weakly, it is plausible to understand this fact as simply a reflection of the violent repression of class-based movements and parties in American history. When they have a chance to get their message out, they attract substantial support precisely to the extent that they can get their message out. There is no need to invoke deep cultural traditions of individualism or a lack of popular understanding of class. One need only adduce the skewed distribution of resources, which prevents leftists from being heard.

In this article Ill tell the story of the Workers Unemployment Insurance Bill, both to fill a gap in our historical knowledge and because it resonates in our own time of troubles and struggles.

As soon as the Communist Party had unveiled its proposed Workers Unemployment Insurance Bill in the summer of 1930, as the Depression was just beginning, it garnered extensive support among large numbers of the unemployed. The reason isnt hard to fathom: it envisioned an incredibly generous system of insurance. In the form it would eventually assume, it provided for unemployment insurance for workers and farmers (regardless of age, sex, or race) that was to be equal to average local wages but no less than $10 per week plus $3 for each dependent; people compelled to work part-time (because of inability to find full-time jobs) were to receive the difference between their earnings and the average local full-time wages; commissions directly elected by members of workers and farmers organizations were to administer the system; social insurance would be given to the sick and elderly, and maternity benefits would be paid eight weeks before and eight weeks after birth; and the system would be financed by unappropriated funds in the Treasury and by taxes on inheritances, gifts, and individual and corporate incomes above $5,000 a year. Later iterations of the bill went into greater detail on how the system would be financed and managed.

Had the Workers Bill ever been enacted, it would have revolutionized the American political economy. It was a much more authentically socialist plan than existed in the Soviet Union at the time, where only 35 per cent of the customary wage was paid to those not working, and that for only a limited time (unlike with the Workers Bill). Nor was the Soviet insurance system administered democratically by workers representatives.

By 1934, when the plan had become widely enough known to be critically examined by economists and other intellectuals, it was frequently criticized for incentivizing malingering. Defenders of the bill and by then it was advocated by many left-wing economists, teachers, social workers, lawyers, engineers, and other professionals replied that this supposed flaw was in fact a strength. By withdrawing workers from the labor market, it would force wage rates to rise until they at least equaled unemployment benefits. The benefits to the unemployed, economist Paul Douglas noted, could thus be used as a lever to compel industry to pay a living wage to those who were employed. It was the abolition of poverty and economic insecurity that was envisioned by a frontal attack on such fundamentals of capitalism as the private appropriation of wealth, determination of wages by the market, and maintenance of an insecure army of the unemployed.

The Unemployed Councils were at the forefront of agitation for the proposed bill, but it was also publicized through other auxiliary organizations of the Communist Party, in addition to activists in unions. As mass demonstrations for unemployment relief became more frequent daily hunger marches in cities across the country, occupations of state legislative chambers, marches on city halls, eviction riots the demand for unemployment insurance echoed louder and farther every month. From Alaska to Texas, requests for petitions flooded into the New York office of the National Campaign Committee for Unemployment Insurance. United front conferences of Socialist and Communist workers organizations took place from New York City to Gary, Indiana, and beyond. In February 1931 delegates presented the Workers Bill and its hundreds of thousands of signatures to Congress, which ignored them.

So, activists continued drumming up support for the next few years. Hunger marchers in many states demanded that legislatures pass versions of the bill; two national hunger marches the Communist Party organized in December 1931 and 1932 gave the bill further publicity; delegates periodically presented more petitions to Congress, and campaigns were organized to mail postcards to legislators. Despite the fervent hostility and smear campaigns of the national American Federation of Labor (AFL) leadership, several thousand local unions eventually endorsed the bill, especially after it had been sponsored, in 1934, by Representative Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party. Its newfound national prominence in that year gave the movement greater momentum, and a new organization was founded to lend the bill intellectual respectability: the Inter-Professional Association for Social Insurance (IPA). Within a year the IPA had dozens of chapters and organizing committees around the country, as distinguished academics like Mary Van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation proselytized for the bill in the press and before Congress.

Meanwhile, conferences of unemployed groups grew ever larger and more ambitious. For instance, in Chicago in September 1934, hundreds of delegates from such groups as the National Unemployed Leagues, the Illinois Workers Alliance, the Eastern Federation of Unemployed and Emergency Workers Union, and the Wisconsin Federation of Unemployed Leagues in the aggregate claiming a membership of 750,000 endorsed the Lundeen Bill (as it was now called) and made increasingly elaborate plans to pressure Congress for its passage.

Congress took essentially no action on the bill in 1934, so Lundeen reintroduced it in January 1935. This would become the year of the Second New Deal, when the Roosevelt administration turned left in response to massive discontent and disillusionment with its policies. Senator Huey Long had become a hero to millions by denouncing the wealthy and proposing his Share Our Wealth program, an implicit criticism of the New Deals conservatism. The radio priest Father Charles Coughlin had acquired heroic stature among yet more millions by constantly talking about a living wage, about profits for the farmer, about government-protected labor unions, as one journalist put it. He insists that human rights be placed above property rights. He emphasizes the wickedness of private financialism and production for profit.

The tens of millions of people who flocked to the banners of Huey Long and Father Coughlin not to mention the Communist Workers Bill (or Lundeen Bill) put the lie to any interpretation of the American people as being irremediably conservative/centrist or wedded to capitalism. During the Great Depression, arguably a majority wanted the US to become, in effect, a radical social democracy, or a socialist democracy.

The hearings in 1935 that were held before the Labor subcommittee on the Lundeen Bill are a remarkable historical document, probably the most unique document ever to appear in the Congressional record, at least according to the executive secretary of the IPA. Eighty witnesses testified: industrial workers, farmers, veterans, professional workers, African-Americans, women, the foreign-born, and youth. Probably never in American history, an editor of the Nation wrote, have the underprivileged had a better opportunity to present their case before Congress. The aggregate of the testimonies amounted to a systematic indictment of American capitalism and the New Deal, and an impassioned defense of the radical alternative under consideration.

From the representative of the American Youth Congress, which encompassed over two million people, to the representative of the United Council of Working-Class Women, which had 10,000 members, each testimony fleshed out the eminently class-conscious point of view of the people back home who had gather[ed] up nickels and pennies which they [could] poorly spare in order to send someone to plead their case before Congress. At the same time, the Social Security Act known then as the Wagner-Lewis Bill, since it hadnt been passed yet was criticized as a cruel sham, a proposal to set up little privileged groups in the sea of misery who would be content to sit on their small islands and watch the others drown (to quote a professor at Smith College). What most Americans wanted, witnesses insisted, was the more universal plan embodied in the Lundeen Bill.

Interestingly, most congressmen on the subcommittee were sympathetic to this point of view. For instance, at one point the chairman, Matthew Dunn, interrupted a witness who was observing that all the members of Congress he had talked to had received far fewer cards and letters in support of the famous Townsend Plan which the press was continually publicizing than in support of the more radical Lundeen Bill. I want to substantiate the statement you just made about the Townsend bill and about this bill, Dunn said. May I say that I do not believe I have received over a half dozen letters to support the Townsend bill [But] I have received many letters and cards from all over the country asking me to give my utmost support in behalf of the Lundeen bill, H.R. 2827.

Many of the letters congressmen received were probably in the vein of this one that was sent to Lundeen in the spring of 1935, when Congress was considering the three competing bills that have already been mentioned (the Wagner-Lewis, the Townsend, and the Lundeen):

The reason I am writing you is, that we Farmers [and] Industrial workers feel that you are the only Congressman and Representative that is working for our interest. We have analyzed the Wagner-Lewis Bill [and] also [the] Townsend Bill. But the Lundeen H.R. (2827) is the only bill that means anything for our class The people all over the country are [waking] up to the facts that the two old Political Parties are owned soul, mind [and] body by the Capitalist Class.

As stated above, while the House Labor Committee recommended the Lundeen Bill, it was inevitably defeated in the House. Being opposed by all the dominant interests in the country, it never had a chance of passage. But as far as its advocates were concerned, the fight was not over. Throughout the spring and summer of 1935 the flood of endorsements did not let up. The first national convention of rank-and-file social workers endorsed it in February; the Progressive Miners of America followed, along with scores of local unions and such ethnic societies as the Italian-American Democratic Organization of New York (with 235,000 members) and the Slovak-American Political Federation of Youngstown, Ohio. Almost identical state versions of H.R. 2827 were, or already had been, introduced in the legislatures of California, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and other states. Conferences of unions and fraternal organizations were called in a number of states to plan further campaigns for the Workers Bill.

In January 1936, Representative Lundeen introduced the bill yet again, this time joined by Republican Senator Lynn Frazier of North Dakota. It didnt even make it out of committee that year, and was never introduced again.

Despite its failure, the Workers Unemployment Insurance Bill was a significant episode in the 1930s that certainly hasnt deserved to be written out of history. Both substantively and in its popularity, a case can be made that it was more significant than the Social Security Act and the Townsend Plan, its two main competitors.

As a coda to this forgotten story, which reinforces the lesson that most working-class Americans were and are quite left-wing in many of their values and beliefs, we might consider an unusual incident that occurred in March 1936. Earl Browder, head of the American Communist party, was, bizarrely, invited by CBS to speak for fifteen minutes (at 10:45 p.m.) on a national radio broadcast.

He seized the opportunity for this national spotlight and appealed to the majority of the toiling people to establish a national Farmer-Labor Party that would be affiliated with the Communist Party, though it would not yet take up the full program of socialism, for which many are not yet prepared. He even declared that Communists ultimate aim was to remake the US along the lines of the highly successful Soviet Union: once they had the support of a majority of Americans, he said, we will put that program into effect with the same firmness, the same determination, with which Washington and the founding fathers carried through the revolution that established our country, with the same thoroughness with which Lincoln abolished chattel slavery.

According to both CBS and the Daily Worker, reactions to Browders talk were almost uniformly positive. CBS immediately received several hundred responses praising the speech, and the Daily Worker, whose New York address Browder had mentioned on the air, received thousands of letters. The following are representative:

Chattanooga, Tennessee: If you could have listened to the people I know who listened to you, you would have learned that your speech did much to make them realize the importance of forming a Farmer-Labor Party. I am sure that the 15 minutes into which you put so much that is vitally important to the American people was time used to great advantage. Many people are thanking you, I know.

Evanston, Illinois: Just listened to your speech tonight and I think it was the truest talk I ever heard on the radio. Mr. Browder, would it not be a good thing if you would have an opportunity to talk to the people of the U.S.A. at least once a week, for 30 to 60 minutes? Lets hear from you some more, Mr. Browder.

Sparkes, Nebraska: Would you send me 50 copies of your speech over the radio last night? I would like to give them to some of my neighbors who are all farmers.

Arena, New York: Although I am a young Republican (but good American citizen) I enjoyed listening to your radio speech last evening. I believe you told the truth in a convincing manner and I failed to see where you said anything dangerous to the welfare of the American people.

Julesburg, Colorado: Heard your talk It was great. Would like a copy of same, also other dope on your party. It is due time we take a hand in things or there will be no United States left in a few more years. Will be looking forward for this dope and also your address.

In general, the main themes of the letters were questions like, Where can I learn more about the Communist Party? How can I join your Party? and Where is your nearest headquarters? Some people sent money in the hope that it would facilitate more broadcasts. The editors of the Daily Worker plaintively asked their readers, Isnt it time we overhauled our old horse-and-buggy methods of recruiting? While we are recruiting by ones and twos, arent we overlooking hundreds? Again, one can only imagine how many millions of people in far-flung regions would have been quickly radicalized had Browder or other Communist leaders been permitted the national radio audience that Huey Long and Father Coughlin were.

But such is the history of workers and marginalized groups in the US: elite efforts to suppress the political agenda and the voices of the downtrodden have all too often succeeded, thereby wiping out the memory of popular struggles. If we can resurrect such stories as that of the Workers Bill, they may prove of use in our own age of crisis, as new struggles against authoritarianism begin.

Read more from the original source:

Popular Radicalism in the 1930s - The Bullet - Socialist Project

When the 2,000-member Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) at the University of Michigans Ann Arbor campus went on strike on September 8, the unions demands focused on two main concerns: COVID-19 safety, and reducing the on-campus police security force by fifty percent.

After the police killings of so many Black people this summer, the movement for Black lives demanded the removal of police from schoolselementary through university.

According to Jeff Horowitz, co-chair of GEOs North Campus Organizing Committee, the university is currently slated to spend $12.5 million on the salaries and benefits of sixty police and 130 security officers, many of them assigned to the Universitys Medical Center in Ann Arbor. Add in the universitys two other campuses in Dearborn and Flint, Horowitz tells The Progressive, and this years policing budget balloons to $17 million.

University of Michigan Students, faculty, and staff see these expenditures as unnecessary and like their colleagues and peers throughout the country, have organized a wide-ranging movement, often using the hashtag #copsoffcampus, to demand greater transparency in university budgetary decisions as well as a reduction in spending on campus security.

Jess Slattery, a senior studying anthropology and economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, credits the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others for this Falls surge in campus activism and notes that U-Mass anti-policing campaign, called DEFUND UMPD, is a direct outgrowth of the schools Racial Justice Coalition.

Our goal is to defund the campus police force by 90 percent within five years, Slattery says, to a still high $6.4 million per year. We want to see money moved to programs such as the Center for Women and Community and the Center for Counseling and Psychological Health.

DEFUND UMPD is also demanding an end to police patrols of residential areas on campus. Calling the patrols reminiscent of broken windows policing, where minor infractions become the focus of police attention, Slattery says that the Universitys southwest quadrant is the most heavily patrolled section of campus; not coincidentally, it is where the majority of the schools students of color live.

Transparency in budgetary decision making is also a major concern. Students want stronger pathways so they can be better informed about how the UMPD spends its money, Slattery explains. We want more information to get a fuller picture of police work over the past few years, with access to reports on things like property damage and accidents.

Because of COVID, Slattery reports that most of DEFUND UMPDs work is being done remotely over Zoom. But, she says, despite the challenges of online work, U-Mass students and their faculty supporters are resolute in demanding that administrators take their concerns seriously. Were working to build relationships with every student group and academic department so we'll have the broadest base of support possible as we go forward.

Like DEFUND UMPD, budgetary transparency is also a key focus for activists connected to UnKoch My Campus, a six-year-old national organization founded to expose the influence of big donors on college campuses. The groups #copsoffcampus campaign has developed a police divestment toolkit of sample letters and petitions to school administrators, along with a step-by-step guide on how to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. To date, the campaign has a presence on ten campuses, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts.

Jasmine Banks, UnKochs executive director, admits that, though the connection between donor transparency and campus policing may seem tenuous, there is a direct pipeline between the Koch networks promotion of public safety through increased community surveillancetracking devices, cameras, and other electronic monitorsand their efforts to promote limited government, personal responsibility, and unregulated capitalist expansion.

After the police killings of so many Black people this summer, the movement for Black lives demanded the removal of police from schoolselementary through university, Banks explains. Since we are committed to anti-racist action, we knew immediately that creating a digital campaign and helping students with political education, outreach to media, and putting a campaign together was a natural fit with our other work.

Other schools, including Harvard, Northwestern, and all ten campuses of the University of California, have mounted similar anti-policing efforts.

When students at UCLA, for example, got wind that the campus police budget was going to be increased by $519,367 for the 2020-21 academic year, they were outraged.

Victoria Copeland, a Ph.D. student in social welfare, notes that this funding increase is occurring at the same time as fiscal austerity measures are being imposed in other areas of university life. In addition to the economic downturn provoked by COVID-19, she says, UCLAs decision to reduce financial aid packages by $9,000 for some of its students is causing extreme hardship. Its clear, now more than ever, what UCLA deems a priority and its certainly not the lives of its students, she says.

UC students and their faculty supporters find this appalling and have articulated a clear set of demands including the abolition of the entire University of California Police Department and the reallocation of the $138 million expended annually to address community and student needs.

The movement has been building for nearly a year.

Dylan Rodriguez, a professor of media and cultural studies at University of California, Riverside, notes that the current anti-policing efforts grew out of a movement led by graduate students and contingent faculty at University of California, Santa Cruz, last fall. They organized for a Cost of Living Allowance [COLA], and many people on every UC campus supported their living wage campaign. That campaign began with the withholding of fall 2019 grades and became a wildcat strike in the winter 2020 quarter to demand that the university increase their $2,400 monthly stipend by $1,200.

Grad students were living in their cars because they could not afford rent, Rodriguez says. Some were not eating properly. But the administration at Santa Cruz responded by calling in the local police; cops came in full riot gear, with plastic face shields, as if they were going to war. This ignited peoples rage over policing on campus. You can say that the COLA campaign turned into a police abolition campaign.

Colleges and university administrators, meanwhile, argue that having a robust police force on every campus is imperative, not only to maintain public safety but to comply with the 1990 Clery Act, which mandates that all colleges that disburse federal financial aid must record and disclose information about crimes that occur on or near campus.

According to the James S. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 75 percent of campuses had armed officers on patrol in 2015, up from 68 percent a decade earlier. But its worth noting that patrols are nothing new. Yale University hired New Haven officers to patrol the grounds as early as 1894 to protect buildings from property damage.

While other elite schools quickly followed suit, police ranks remained relatively thin until the 1960s when campus protests escalated and officers were brought in to put down student sit-ins and building takeovers. Still, it was not until 2007, when thirty-two students were murdered on the campus of Virginia Tech, that security began to significantly ramp up.

Although recent statistics are unavailable, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in the 2011-12 school year, 15,000 sworn police officers, 11,000 non-sworn officers, and 5,000 civilians worked in campus law enforcement. Most were authorized to carry firearms, tasers, pepper spray, and tear gas.

More than eight years later, the number of officers is likely similar. In fact, The Atlantic reports that more than 4,000 police departments now patrol public and private campuses across all fifty states.

Activists working to get #copsoffcampus know that theyre fighting an uphill battle, but they nonetheless believe that they will win. There is momentum on police abolition, UC professor Rodriguez concludes. We, as students, faculty, and staff, want to be on the right side of history.

Graduate students at the University of Michigan want that, too, and say that their strike will last as long as it takes to make headway on their demands.

More here:

A National Call to Remove Cops and Kochs from College Campuses - Progressive.org

In many parts of the world, people collectively reset their clocks twice a year. Depending on the season, clocks are either wound an hour forwards, or an hour backwards - a practice designed to maximise the overlap between our waking hours and the available daylight.

Now, members of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) Public Safety Team and Board of Directors have published an advisory calling for the practice of daylight saving to be abolished.

"Daylight saving time is less aligned with human circadian biology - which, due to the impacts of the delayed natural light/dark cycle on human activity, could result in circadian misalignment, which has been associated in some studies with increased cardiovascular disease risk, metabolic syndrome and other health risks," they write in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

"It is, therefore, the position of AASM that these seasonal time changes should be abolished in favour of a fixed, national, year-round standard time."

Their paper is focused on the US, citing health statistics connected with the changing of the clocks in spring - from standard time to daylight saving time. This is when the clocks are wound back an hour, so that everyone loses an hour, usually from their sleep schedule.

Ostensibly, the major economic reason for daylight saving time (DST) is to reduce energy usage, an effect that has been found to result in savings from0.5 to 1 percenttoa potential energy useincrease in some areas as dependence on home heating and cooling rises.

It's also thought that daylight saving time allows additional daylight leisure time in the warmer months; however, if it does, people don't seem to be making use of it.

These inconclusively demonstrated benefits, according to AASM, are not worth the human lives lost to daylight saving. Conversely, there may be significant health benefits, both physical and mental, to a regular time schedule.

"Existing data support the elimination of seasonal time changes in favour of a fixed, year-round time," the members wrote.

"DST can cause misalignment between the biological clock and environmental clock, resulting in significant health and public safety-related consequences, especially in the days immediately following the annual change to DST.

"A change to permanent standard time is best aligned with human circadian biology and has the potential to produce beneficial effects for public health and safety."

The human circadian rhythm is the 24-hour biological cycle that, among other things, regulates our sleep-wake cycle - although this cycle can be artificially altered, as shift workers well know. As we also know from studies on shift workers, such alterations can lead to dangerous and health-degrading sleep disorders.

AASM believes that a similar effect is at play when our sleep time is abruptly shifted back an hour. And there's certainly plenty of evidence that the DST switch can have effects a lot worse than being more sleepy than usual for a few days while you adjust.

Some effects are relatively mild. Immediately after the shift to daylight saving time, people are less productive, and slack off at work more. Students have been found to perform more poorly on tests.

It gets worse from here. Judges are more likely to issue harsher penalties in their courtrooms - so you'd best hope your court date doesn't fall immediately after the spring DST shift. Medical professionals make more mistakes, too.

Several studies have found that fatal accidents of all kinds temporarily increase immediately following the spring shift to daylight saving time. Non-fatal workplace accidents also increase; and those accidents are more likely to be serious.

You're more likely to have a heart attack following the spring shift; in fact, total mortality of a population has been found to rise. And, tragically, male suicide rates increase in the weeks following the shift to daylight saving time.

The effects after the autumn shift back to standard time are not nearly so pronounced. However, it does still compromise sleep and the rest-activity cycles.

Daylight saving time isn't even that popular. Only around 70 countries still observe it, and that number is dropping. The European Union voted to abolish it last year (although they're yet to set a date for when that will come into effect).

And, according to a survey of 2,000 people conducted by AASM in July, 63 percent of respondents wanted to abolish daylight saving time, compared to just 11 percent who wanted to keep it.

"There is ample evidence of the negative, short-term consequences of the annual change to daylight saving time in the spring," said medical doctor Kannan Ramar, director of AASM.

"Because the adoption of permanent standard time would be beneficial for public health and safety, the AASM will be advocating at the federal level for this legislative change."

The advisory has been published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Read the original post:

Sleep Experts Call For The Abolition of Daylight Saving Time in The US - ScienceAlert