Daily Archives: August 23, 2022

Our relationship with work can be summed up in two words: Its complicated.

Here in the United States (and elsewhere, too), work dominates our lives. Upon meeting someone new, our standard first question is What do you do for a living? Our identities, even our names, often reflect an occupation.

And yet, for too many people, their work is a thankless task for which they are undercompensated. It provides just enough sustenance to get through the day, so they can wake up the next and start over. And the countless hours take a toll on physical and mental health, relationships, and families.

Ill sleep when Im dead is a common refrain. Earlier generations said, Idle hands are the devils tools, a phrase that may have come from a 4th-century letter written by St. Jerome, in which he captured the essence of the ancient workaholic: fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum. Or, Engage in some occupation, so that the devil may always find you busy.

Theres nothing like the threat of eternal damnation to motivate you to drag yourself out the door for another day in the trenches.

Some people may like, or even love, the work they do. But for many others, work is a compendium of indignitieslow pay, inadequate benefits, toxic and abusive environments, to say nothing of the disrespect, discrimination, and exclusion that greets many people of color and other historically excluded groups.

But what if it wasnt? What if work were a thing we chose to do with our time because we wanted to do it and not because we needed to keep destitution at bay? What if our worth as people in society was measured by something other than where we punch a clock? What if work was something that lifted up and supported our whole lives, instead of something that we endure just so that we may live?

A straight line can be drawn through the history of work in Western societies, from the slavery of the Roman Empire (scholars estimate as much as 10% of the population of the empire was enslaved), to the feudalism of medieval Europe, to the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. That line is ownershipthe wealthy could buy and sell people, land, or labor to accrue more wealth, all at the expense of the poor.

Whether one places the beginning of capitalism in the heart of industrializing England or in the merchant classes of the Renaissance, by the time Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about the problems of capitalism in 1848, the economic system was rooted firmly in place across Europe and the Americas.

Marxs point (one of many) was that slavery, feudalism, and capitalism have something very similar in common. In all of those systems, a very small number of people are in the catbird seat, says Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School in New York City.

Capitalisms initial promise, Wolff contends, was that it would replace slavery and feudalism, which is what formed the intellectual backdrop of the American and French revolutions. Many workers and even elites saw the end of these oppressive systems to be a step toward freedom. But deposing monarchies and freeing serfs often just resulted in the replacement of one overlord with another, as wealth transferred from the landed gentry to a new moneyed elite (who in some cases were the same people), and businesses were incentivized to keep their workers poor and powerless.

Capitalism is its own obstacle to achieving the very things capitalism promised in overthrowing feudalism and slavery, Wolff says.

Today, the workplace remains dehumanizing, even with more labor protections in place than in eras past.

The 40-hour work week was itself a compromise. Enacted in U.S. law in 1940, it was intended not to prevent laborers from working 16 hours a day, six or seven days a week, but to reduce unemployment by preventing one person from holding what is now the equivalent of two or more full-time jobs. Even today, there are enough loopholes in federal law that many employees simply cant clock out at 5 p.m. if they want to remain employed.

Pair this with a widespread societal notion that we must love our jobs, or find them fulfilling, and were set up with a disconnect, given that so many jobs are grinding, exhausting, demeaning, and even dangerous. Or they serve no purpose other than to perpetuate work. But we do them because we need the money.

As the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged our communities and upended the world economy, it became clear there was a demand for something new. Unregulated capitalism was shown to be broken: Supply chains shattered, workplaces became disease vectors, and relationships with families and friends were severed by death, chronic illness, and polarization.

The unemployment rate peaked at nearly 15% in April 2020, the highest recorded level since 1948, according to the Congressional Research Service. Between January and April of that year, more than 22 million non-farm jobs were lost. Other people found themselves labeled essential workers, forced to continue working in person in order to keep the meatpacking plants producing and the deliveries of food, toilet paper, and cleaning products dashing to the doors of middle-class people now working from the relative safety of their homes.

Frontline workers, especially in health care, child care, education, and public safetymany of whom are women, people of color, or bothhad to make significant adaptations to how they performed their jobs, and many health care workers experienced significantly higher levels of risk of infection, anxiety, depression, and burnout. Lacking government mandates, only some businesses offered hazard pay for those forced to work in close quarters, and even that meager benefit quickly expired.

One notable effect of this radical societal reordering has come to be termed the Great Resignation. More than 47 million people in the U.S. voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. And while many of those workers quit because theyre fed up with an unrewarding job, others are rethinking the overall role of work in their lives, or fighting to improve their working conditions by forming labor unions at companies like Amazon and Starbucks, or even staging walkouts at non-unionized workplaces.

The pandemic proved to be the tipping point. Many of the people who died during the early stages of the pandemic were the essential workers in the service, health care, and manufacturing sectors: Those who kept the world moving while others had the privilege of staying home, says Angelica Geter, the chief strategy officer of the Black Womens Health Imperative in Atlanta.

Geter, who also holds a doctorate of public health, says that this was mostly Black and Brown workers, and especially women.

Most workers who died from COVID in 2020, before vaccines became available, were in retail, service, or blue-collar jobs that offered no opportunities for remote work.

According to one 2022 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, most workers who died from COVID in 2020, before vaccines became available, were in retail, service, or blue-collar jobs that offered no opportunities for remote work. Nearly 45% of non-White women in low-wage jobs worked in the service industry, and about 60% of men of any race in low-wage jobs worked in blue-collar professions.

Another study documented the death rate of Black workers being higher than any other racial group and found that among essential workers, those higher rates were also because Black people are disproportionately represented among many jobs that expose them to higher risks of infection.

The decision for many of those people was simple: go to work and risk illness, or stay at home with their families and risk impoverishment. The pandemic exposed the inequalities that we already knew about but seldom saw in such stark terms.

Thats exactly what COVID did, Geter says. It painted the whole picture and brought it forth.

The Black Womens Health Imperative was founded in 1983 to target the most pressing issues facing Black women and girls in the U.S. Its long-running initiatives include programs in diabetes prevention, HIV prevention and care, a network at historically Black colleges and universities, and distributing menstrual products in Black communities.

Frustration with discrimination, racism, and workplace toxicity, along with the cumulative negative health effects, boiled over when COVID exerted maximum pressure on the workplace and brought many people outside into the streets.

It was not a coincidence that years of frustration with discrimination, racism, and workplace toxicity, along with the cumulative negative health effects, boiled over when COVID exerted maximum pressure on the workplace and brought many people outside into the streets, first protesting poor working conditions, and then racism and police brutality.

Enough was enough, Geter says.

Most people dont make the connection between being overworked and the impact on your health, Geter adds. Recovery from burnout can take years, because it often has been compounded by the experience of discrimination. Even the expectation of discrimination or microaggressions in the workplace takes a mental and emotional toll, which can lead to precursors of heart disease, breast cancer, and other health conditions that disproportionately affect Black women.

When I go into an office of other people, I represent the entire Black community, Geter says. The stress of anticipation of thatit just wears on you.

Many companies tried to meet that need for their own workers with enhanced benefits during the pandemic and new diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

During 2020 we saw Fortune 500, Fortune 1,000 companies allocate billions of dollars to promote equity in their workplaces, Geter says. They needed tools and information and resources to know what to do with them.

But DEI programs alone arent enough to make sustainable changes. There are still too many barriers that keep people of color out of promotions, hiring opportunities, pay increases, and retention. Education is needed, but so is accountability, and the funding to pay for both.

If we dont create change that empowers the people who have the least amount of privilege and experience discrimination the most, we will see the same issues over and over again, Geter says.

The Health Imperatives answer to that was to develop a multipart initiative, including an employee-centered wellness toolkit for businesses that highlights workplace culture, training, hiring, and research that centers the voices of Black womenin an effort to reduce the physical, mental, and emotional harm that so many experience in their workplace environments.

Tiffany Jana, a writer, speaker, and pleasure activist who has consulted with businesses for nearly 20 years to create more human-centered workplaces, also says its necessary that businesses recognize what their employees are going through in the present day, not just as employees, but as full human beings.

What I think is missing from the workplace is the acknowledgement and the honoring of, essentially, the sanctity of humanity, Jana says. Everyone who chooses to raise their hand and then come and work for your company, thats a deeply sacred gift, thats an incredibly special, beautiful thing that we have failed to honor appropriately.

Another consideration for businesses in creating a more people-centered workplace lies in their structure as profit-making enterprises. Jana has incorporated two of their three companies as B Corps that adhere to triple-bottom-line accounting: focusing as much on social and environmental concerns as profits.

Over the last, say, eight, nine years, the pressure has been coming up from the bottom. [People] within organizations and institutions are saying, Wait a minute, you know, we really love the work, we really love the company, but we dont feel like were being valued, Jana says. And theyve been demanding culture-based work to help create an environment that is more gracious and welcoming and human-centered.

If the current trend in workplace evolution is toward a more human-centered environment, the question then becomes whether that evolution is possible in businesses whose only goal is to maximize profits for their shareholders. Wolff, who has studied and written extensively about the history of capitalism and socialism, says it isnt. But what can support a human-centered future is more worker-owned co-ops and democratic governance structures, and not just in small shops or artisan manufacturers.

Im not sure that scaling is all that big a deal, he says. If making big units is going to cost us the ability to have a democratic system, we should at least question the size, and if thats necessary.

The world already has seen how a smaller co-op can evolve into a larger but still democratic organization. Mondragn, a diversified corporation founded in 1956 in Spains Basque region, is the worlds largest worker-owned cooperative, with 80,000 employees, and incorporates democratic decision-making at all levels of the company.

It is arguably one of Spains most successful companies, with branches in 31 countries. It incorporates 96 self-governing cooperatives in sectors as wide-ranging as industry, retail, finance, and education.

Mondragn is only the largest example. About two-thirds of the 4.5 million people in the Italian region of Emilia Romagna, one of the wealthiest areas in the European Union, are co-op members, and they produce 30% of the regions gross domestic product.

Its a society in which co-ops and top-down businesses coexist peacefully.

Its a real laboratory for the question How could a society be a mixed society? Wolff says. Theyve normalized it.

In the U.S., examples of thriving co-ops include S Se Puede Womens Cooperative, a house- and office-cleaning cooperative run largely by Hispanic immigrant women. Founded in Brooklyn, New York, in 2006, the organization is now one of several immigrant-run cleaning cooperatives in the city.

The history of co-ops in the U.S. extends back to pre-colonization Indigenous communities, and practices created in the Black community after the Civil War, rooted in African traditions.

Indigenous societies were and still are much more communitarian. Strong ties to families and tribes keep many Native Americans in close proximity to their communities. That makes for some difficult choices: If forced to choose between having a job and building a career in a distant city, or returning to a rural reservation to care for family and participate in their culture, many choose the latter.

That also contributes to the level of unemployment in Indigenous societies, which is already the highest in the nation.

In one study, in which several members of Native reservations were interviewed about their work lives, the lead researcher, Ahmed Al-Asfour, then a professor at Oglala Lakota College and now the director of the Center for Workforce Development at Southern Illinois University, found that strong community ties often took priority in decisions about work.

As one participant said, it is all about we not I and this is a core belief for individuals living in collectivistic societies, Al-Asfour wrote.

Thats led to a mismatch between those ties and the expectations of the non-Native economy.

The discrimination highlighted in the interviews stresses the cultural tensions between Natives and non-Natives as the Natives culture, values, and traditions continue to be undermined and underscored by non-Natives, Al-Asfour wrote.

A wholesale evolution of capitalism into a more democratic system is possible, but it has to start with a shift in ideology, Wolff says.

Human beings have come to adapt to capitalism by thinking there is something necessary or logical or socially efficient by having the nature of work defined by and governed by profitability, he says.

In other words, we have bought into the idea that pay is equivalent to worth.

But that ideology doesnt measure all of the consequences of a human being who works: The effort of performing labor changes the body and mind of the worker, it changes people who interact with the worker, and it changes the natural environment.

If work were to be truly fully compensated, youd have to do what hasnt ever been done: Figure out all the effects, Wolff says.

That means structural change becomes as important as an ideological shift. If a business that makes a product loses its market, the business usually cuts workforce to preserve its profits. A democratically run co-op that prioritizes worker well-being might take a different actionchange products being made, retrain workers, or cut hours of work so production meets the existing demand.

This kind of structural changewhich is anathema in capitalismthis also would have to be in place. That would make this a much easier conversation, Wolff says.

Another key development would be a society that disassociates value from the workplace. Policies like universal health care or basic income would reduce the need for people to remain in dehumanizing jobs and allow them to pursue endeavors more in line with their value system.

Thats something Tiffany Jana has tried to pursue in their own life, designing their work to be fulfilling and complementary to their life, and encouraging others to follow that example.

When I meet people, I dont ask them, What do you do? or Where do you work? Jana says. I ask them, How do you spend your time? And it confuses the crap out of them.

Each of us has a beautiful opportunity, in this season, to decide how we want to define ourselves, how we want to contribute to this new societal structure, this new way of being, and then work diligently towards creating that change, Jana says.

See the original post here:

The Past, Present, and Future of Work - YES! Magazine

Both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are currently promoting the benefits of the deregulated special economic zones known as freeports, despite evidence that they encourage organised crime, money-laundering, drug-trafficking and terrorist finance, though admittedly the first three of these supposed problems appear to be common leisure activities for most Tory MPs. Im here all week! Try the Colombian!!

Joined-up thinking, or paranoia depending on your point of view, suggests the next logical step from freeports is charter cities, allowing whole regions to be run as corporate fiefs by big business, stripped of tiresome regulations in the pursuit of profit. As long ago as 2010, the rightwing Tufton Street-based Taxpayers Alliance thinktank proposed that Hull became our own version of a charter city [with] minimum wage, working-hours regulations, social benefits for working-age citizens, and central government planning regulations abolished. Businesses that have made themselves useful to the Tories will doubtless be the beneficiaries here, just as they were when the PPE billions were doled out with due diligence.

Could Boris Johnsons wedding venue donors at Daylesford Organic be given a south Devon section incorporating the whole of Dartmoor and the entire South Hams region? Could Ultimo, the lingerie company formerly owned by the Tory peer Michelle Mone, be handed the entire east Midlands from Burton upon Trent to Upper Broughton? Will the Tory-adjacent businesswoman Jacqueline Golds Ann Summers organisation be left to run the Humber sector from Spurn Head to Howden, including Hull? Can Matt Handcocks local pub landlord be allowed to do whatever he wants with both Needham Market and Clacton-on-Sea? And if this is the case, can these companies be trusted to respect the rights of the citizens of whom they will have dominion, when there are no regulations to protect them?

Should the people of Chagford and Yelverton be made to eat deregulated Daylesford Organic pork pies, which could possibly fuse with their genes at a subatomic level and turn them into half-human pig creatures? Should the people of Corby and Kettering be forced to wear untested Ultimo corsets, which could explode on contact with back sweat? Should people from Hull, and their orifices, be used as guinea pigs for untried, and potentially unsafe, Ann Summers sex toys, such as a turbo-charged, post-Brexit version of the Ann Summers bestseller the Anal Training Kit? As if Brexit wasnt enough of a disaster as it is, are these some of the new Brexit benefits currently rolling down the sewage outlet of post-Brexit Tory deregulation?

Its fun, isnt it, to joke about the Brexit Tories attempts to turn Britain into a horrible dystopia designed to make money for their friends at the expense of the environment, the arts, education, human rights and so forth. Ha! Ha! Ha! But, here at the Edinburgh fringe, I popped out between my own shows to see two Ukrainian standups in From Ukraine With Laughs. Pavlo Voytovych presented a slick club set with cosmopolitan, pan-European reference points that would chime in his adopted Berlin; Dima Watermelons deadpan absurdity was darkened by attempts to deal with the systematic stealing of his homeland, the militarised erasure of the culture he grew up in. It made me think about what it would be like to lose the country you loved. And I realised I was.

Its hysterical, of course, to compare the Brexit Tories stealthy but determined dismantling of the Britain we cherish with Putins physical assault on Ukraine. But if youve ever shown an interest in architecture, gardening or nature, doubtless the infiltrated algorithms of your social media feeds are steering you towards the respectable-looking Restore Trust organisation, which is reminding National Trust members to renew their memberships before 26 August, so they can vote in the charitys autumn AGM. All well and good, surely?

Nominally a forum where members and friends of the National Trust can discuss their concerns about the charitys future, the innocuous-sounding Restore Trust is in fact designed to stem the National Trusts drift towards wokeness (by addressing links between its sites and slavery, for example). Restore Trust backer Neil Record, for one, is a financier and sometime Tory donor who has funded the climate-denial lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, also based on Tufton Street, and chairs Net Zero Watch, a thinktank spin-off on the same street lobbying to scrap net zero commitments. This is a worrying development given the vast tracts of land the National Trust manages and the millions of non-politically affiliated invertebrates in its keep. Butterflies dont care about unisex toilets. They just want the plants they lay their eggs on to flower when they are supposed to.

In last years National Trust board member elections, one of the six preferred candidates that Restore Trusts supporters hoped to vote into a position of influence was the self-styled reverend Stephen Green, who has supported the death penalty for gay sex in Uganda, believes all Muslims are going to hell and, when he was campaigning against a theatre piece I worked on decades ago, refused to shake the hand of a gay journalist because he knew where it had been. It is not known if Green believes garden design in National Trust properties should reflect one specific period in the houses history or attempt to illustrate many simultaneously. We do know, however, that he thinks it is impossible for a husband to rape his wife.

It seems bizarre that it is suddenly necessary for reasonable people, who probably only joined the National Trust because they like carrot cake and a firm hanging buttress, to make sure they vote in the organisations 5 November AGM to prevent fun days out in historic locations becoming weaponised as yet another front in the far rights culture war against everything nice. But we are where we are.

Read the rest here:

National Trust members: get ready to choke on your carrot cake - The Guardian

No, because the face of a little girl in Bangladesh, or a little boy in Cambodia, and the thought of a nuclear blast going off close enough to them for them to lose their life, is enough. Again, this is a love letter. This is a love letter to all the civilians of the planet. Philipos Melaku-Bello, in response to a question from Jacob Morgan of Slate Plus about whether he had ever thought about ending his now-41-year-old antinuclear vigil outside the White House gates.

In conjunction with Stan Coxs In Real Time monthly dispatches with City Lights Books, I am working on an artwork titled Its Time, starting with a central image and adding drawings that expand the work outward, in concentric ovals, tracking the pivotal events of the next two years, month by month. As part of Its Time, I am also including images that portray people and events that have been either deliberately or lazily almost lost to the popular historical imagination but are still very much part of and connected to the existential kismet of the inhabitants of this heating Earth.

These portraits of human persistence are not actually lost, of course; rather, they serve as connecting threads to the present state of things. Both Tariq Ali and Gore Vidal wrote about this hole-in-history phenomenon and gave it their own labels: respectively, The Extreme Center and The United States of Amnesia.

These threads, frayed and forgotten as they are, must be acknowledged for their timeless place in history, and repaired. Because if we fail to do that, we cant move forward in creating a fairer, more just world. Reparations and justice are part of the same tapestry. Justice for the past goes hand in hand with justice for the present and future.

The first five portraits that Ive placed in this dark center of the Its Time series are those of John Brown, Leonard Peltier, Philipos Melaku-Bello, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Julian Assange.

If you notice, all of these five men, aside from having been thorns in the side of a state machinery that would rather they disappear from the annals of a dark, white-elitist history, happen to also have long gorgeous hair and/or beards. As if now theres physically more of these five men for the state to disappear. In this age of unrestrained, ecologically destructive growth, the one kind of growth I can wholeheartedly support is this nonviolent, defiant growth on the face and scalp!

Stan and I live in the heart of the conterminous United States. And as we all know, this heart was beating fast and hard on August 2nd when Kansans flocked to the polls and voted no on an amendment that would have stripped women of their right to an abortion. All eyes and ears of the country and the world were on Kansas that evening as the results were coming in, and we demonstrated via the ballot box that womens rights are human rights.

But this wasnt the first time that Kansas voted No on a moral issue of great consequence. On August 2, 1858, 164 years to the day before the abortion referendum, Kansans voted down a ballot initiative that would have legalized slavery in our then-territory. Which brings us to the first of these portraits, that of John Brown, who carried out his militant abolitionist action in Kansas in the three years leading up to the slavery vote, the era of Bleeding Kansas. Brown said No! to slavery and was hanged for it in December, 1859, a year before his vision was partially achieved and Kansas was finally admitted to the Union as a free state.

We all know of Leonard Peltier, Americas longest-held Indigenous political prisoner, who was wrongly convicted of the deaths of two FBI agents in June 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Peltier, a member of the American Indian Movement, was there that day protecting his people against the white supremacists of the time and was handed two consecutive life sentences for it. Many witnesses whose testimony was used to convict him later admitted that FBI agents had coerced them into lying. In 2000, then-President Bill Clinton considered granting clemency to Peltier, but he was hounded by hundreds of FBI agents marching pathetically around the White House, so that put a stop to that.

It is quite possible that Philipos Melaku-Bello was present at the north side of the White House that December day as the agents marched. But how many of us have heard of him? I certainly did not know of him until this past Juneteenth weekend when Stan and I went to DC to join the Poor Peoples and Low-Wage Workers Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. After the march, we saw Mr. Melaku-Bello and what he calls his makeshift tent outside the White House fence. He sat in a wheelchair wearing a Rasta cap and Freedom Bus Riders t-shirt, surrounded by human-rights and earth-rights photos, posters, and mementos going back decades. He had a needle and thread and was darning a black pouch adorned with pink and white hearts.

Scroll to Continue

Just beside him was a poster on which the number 40 had the 0 whited out and replaced with a 1, thereby announcing, 41 YEARS 24/7 ANTI-NUCLEAR PEACE VIGIL. Surviving thru: Rain or Shine; thru Hurricanes; Sleet; Hail; Blizzards; Tornados; H1N1; Coronavirus; 3 BLM Closures. Holders of the 24-Hour Permit for the Black Lives Memorial Fence.

Philipos told us that hes been sitting there since 1984, manning the William Thomas Memorial Peace Vigil, which was established in 1981. He has volunteers that help him maintain the vigil day and night. But the Feds are waiting, he emphasized in an interview with Slate Plus. Theyre waiting for it to be abandoned by way of snowfall, blizzard, hurricaneThats the way it can be taken away, by abandonment.

To me that 4-by-4 foot area that Philipos legally occupies holds within it everything that the moneyed elite of the post-industrial world have had a hand in perpetuating, to the point of no return. Everywhere I looked in that small square I saw messages and images seeking justice for the earth, the civilians of the planet, for Peltier, for Indigenous, and Black and Brown people, for Palestinians, for the poor, for the countless victims of war and displacement, and yes, for Mumia Abu-Jamal and Julian Assange. They were there too.

We know that Mumia will be free. We just want to delay Mumias release as long as possible. Maureen Faulkner, wife of Daniel Faulkner speaking at the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5.

Mumias fight for justice has been going on since 1981, the year Philipos anti-nuclear peace vigil was established. He has been appealing for a new trial in the shooting of Philadelphia Police officer Daniel Faulkner since then. Just a couple of days ago I got a newsletter from Mumia supporters at Prison Radio, which read that the current delays are a tactic designed to prevent justice and delay accountability Fighting to keep Mumia in prison is all about limiting exposure. It is all about preserving the fiction that decades of mass incarceration prosecuted by former Philadelphia police chief and mayor Frank Rizzo and former governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell are not tainted by police and prosecutorial misconduct. The goal is to prevent the white hot spotlight on Philadelphias long sordid racist history. Having had double bypass surgery in 2021, Mumia has a life-expectancy of 5 years. He will be back in court on October 19.

The United States uses the whole earth as a petri dish for its bottomless extractive and exploitative pursuits and leaves people like Brown, Peltier, Melaku-Bello, Abu-Jamal and Julian Assange, respectively, with a noose; 45 years behind bars and counting; a 4x4 not-to-be-abandoned liberated space; 41 years behind bars and counting; and a possible jail term of 175 years for exposing U.S. war crimes to the world.

What they couldnt tolerate was when Julian Assange was sent video footage which showed an Apache helicopter in Baghdad killing civilians. Ordinary people. That is the principal reason, the exposure of war crimes that caused outrage especially in the intelligence agencies of the United States. Tariq Ali, AlJazeera, August 15.

Was it any coincidence that Assange was clutching a book titled 'Gore Vidal: History of the National Security State in his hand as he was being physically dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London and into a police van in April, 2019? He was trying to send a message. Is it a coincidence that Melaku-Bello was sitting there like a cuddly Rasta Buddha repairing an old pouch? Maybe it was a subconscious message telling us that we need to repair the present and the past for a fairer, more just future.

Whether its criminalization of abolitionism or criminalization of abortion, it isnt hard for one to connect the dots of time to see a pattern emerge. A pattern extinguishing any sparks of accountability for the status quo.

Death by hanging for being an abolitionist; 45 years and counting for being Indigenous; an open air jail cell for a non-violent civil disobedience vigil; 41 years and counting for being Black; and possibly 175 years for exposing war crimes. Thats American justice for you. And how many years does the state give the earth for exposing climate crimes? Well know in less than two years wont we?

Read more here:

Lost Yet Connected in Time: Brown, Peltier, Melaku-Bello, Abu-Jamal, and Assange - LA Progressive