News:

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice: for they shall be filled. Mine eye also shall see my desire on mine enemies, and mine ears shall hear my desire of the wicked that rise up against me. The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever: the Lord shall rejoice in his works. He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke. I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the Lord. Let sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more. Bless thou the Lord, O my soul. Praise ye the Lord.


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Topic Summary

Posted by: AGelbert
« on: August 20, 2023, 02:21:36 pm »

🕯️ Letters from an 🦅 American 🗽

August 19, 2023 By Heather Cox Richardson

Various constitutional lawyers have been weighing in lately on whether former president Donald Trump and others who participated in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election are disqualified from holding office under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The third section of that amendment, ratified in 1868, reads:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

On August 14 an article forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Law Review by William Baude of the University of Chicago Law School and Michael S. Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas School of Law became available as a preprint. It argued that the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment is still in effect (countering arguments that it applied only to the Civil War era secessionists), that it is self-executing (meaning the disqualification of certain people is automatic, much as age limits or residency requirements are), and that Trump and others who participated in trying to steal the 2020 presidential election are disqualified from holding office.

This paper was a big deal because while liberal thinkers have been making this argument for a while now, Baude and Paulsen are associated with the legal doctrine of originalism, an approach to the law that insists the Constitution should be understood as those who wrote its different parts understood them. That theory gained traction on the right in the 1980s as a way to push back against what its adherents called “judicial activism,” by which they meant the Supreme Court’s use of the law, especially the Fourteenth Amendment, to expand the rights of minorities and women. One of the key institutions engaged in this pushback was the 💵🎩😈 Federalist Society, and both Baude and Paulson are associated with it.

Now the two have made a 126-page originalist case that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits Trump from running for president . Their interpretation is undoubtedly correct. But that interpretation has even larger implications than they claim.   

Moderate Republicans—not “Radical Republicans,” by the way, which was a slur pinned on the Civil War era party by 👿 southern-sympathizing Democrats—wrote the text of the Fourteenth Amendment at a specific time for a specific reason that speaks directly to our own era.

When 👿 John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, Congress was not in session. It had adjourned on the morning of Lincoln’s second inauguration in early March, after beavering away all night to finish up the session’s business, and congressmen had begun their long journeys home where they would stay until the new session began in December.

Lincoln’s death handed control of the country for more than seven months to his vice president, Andrew Johnson, a former Democrat who wanted to restore the nation to what it had been before the war, minus the institution of slavery that he believed concentrated wealth and power among a small elite. 😈 Johnson refused to call Congress back into session while he worked alone to restore the prewar system, dominated by Democrats, as quickly as he could.

In May, Johnson announced that all former Confederates except for high-ranking political or military officers or anyone worth more than $20,000 (about $400,000 today) would be given amnesty as soon as they took an oath of loyalty to the United States. He pardoned all but about 1,500 of that elite excluded group by December 1865.

Johnson required that southern states change their state constitutions by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting enslavement except as punishment for a crime, nullifying the ordinances of secession, and repudiating the Confederate war debts. Delegates did so, grudgingly and with some wiggling, and then went on to pass the Black Codes, laws designed to keep Black Americans subservient to their white neighbors.

Under those new state constitutions and racist legal codes, southern states elected new senators and representatives to Congress. Voters put back into national office the very same men who had driven the rebellion, including its vice president, Alexander Stephens, whom the Georgia legislature reelected to the U.S. Senate. When Congress reconvened in December 1865, Johnson cheerily told them he had reconstructed the country without their help.

It looked as if the country was right back to where it had been in 1860, with legal slavery ended but a racial system that looked much like it already reestablished in the South. And since the 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole people for the first time, southern congressmen would have more power than before.

But when the southern state delegations elected under Johnson’s plan arrived in Washington, D.C., to be seated, Republicans turned them away. They rejected the idea that after four years, 600,000 casualties, and more than $5 billion, the country should be ruled by men like Stephens, who insisted that American democracy meant that power resided not in the federal government but in the states, where a small, wealthy minority could insulate itself from the majority rule that controlled Congress.

In state government a minority could control who could vote and the information to which those voters had access, removing concerns that voters would challenge their wealth or power. White southerners embraced the idea of “popular sovereignty” and “states’ rights,” arguing that any attempt of Congress to enforce majority rule was an attack on democracy.

But President LIncoln and the Republicans reestablished the idea of majority rule, using the federal government to enforce the principle of human equality outlined by the Declaration of Independence.

And that’s where the Fourteenth Amendment came in. When Johnson tried to restore the former Confederates to power after the Civil War, Americans wrote into the Constitution that anyone born or naturalized in the U.S. was a citizen, and then they established that states must treat all citizens equally before the law, thus taking away the legal basis for the Black Codes and giving the federal government power to enforce equality in the states. They also made sure that anyone who rebels against the federal government can’t make or enforce the nation’s laws.

Republicans in the 1860s would certainly have believed the Fourteenth Amendment covered Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of a presidential election. More, though, that amendment sought to establish, once and for all, the supremacy of the federal government over those who wanted to solidify their power in the states, where they could impose the will of a minority. That concept speaks directly to today’s Republicans.

In The Atlantic today, two prominent legal scholars from opposite sides of the political spectrum, former federal judge J. Michael Luttig and emeritus professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School Laurence H. Tribe, applauded the Baude-Paulsen article and suggested that the American people should support the “faithful application and enforcement of their Constitution.” 🦅 🗽

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-19-2023/comments


Notes:

https://newrepublic.com/article/174977/baude-paulsen-trump-14th-amendment

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/donald-trump-constitutionally-prohibited-presidency/675048/

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/19/politics/donald-trump-fourteenth-amendment-2024-race/index.html

https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1865?amount=20000

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4532751


Posted by: AGelbert
« on: June 19, 2023, 08:04:59 pm »


Brian H. Williams, MD, is a trauma surgeon.

June 19, 2023 by Brian H. Williams, MD

I Never Asked Why the Bodies Kept Coming

— An excerpt from Brian Williams' forthcoming book on racism, violence, and how we 🌿 heal

SNIPPET:
A roiling history of exploitation of and experimentation on Black people has fostered distrust of the medical establishment. A brief survey of history includes J. Marion Sims, MD, past president of the American Medical Association and often revered as the "father of modern gynecology," who performed barbaric vaginal operations on enslaved women. They were denied anesthesia, physically restrained, and repeatedly mutilated. Involuntary hysterectomies -- what Fannie Lou Hamer came to call the "Mississippi appendectomy" -- were frequently performed on Black women, often by medical students in training. These are part of the legacy of "dehumanizing attempts to control Black women's reproductive lives," as Dorothy E. Roberts describes in Killing the Black Body.

Full article: 👀 😞
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/105061
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: June 19, 2023, 06:44:38 pm »

June 18, 2023 By Heather Cox Richardson

🕯️ Letters from an 🦅 American 🗽

SNIPPET:

The addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 remade the United States. But those determined to preserve a world that discriminated between Americans according to race, gender, ability, and so on, continued to find workarounds. 😠

Read more:
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/june-18-2023
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: April 07, 2023, 02:28:48 pm »

AGelbert NOTE: The following was written in 2009 following 😒 President Obama's rhetoric filled speech which included such phrases as, “A more perfect union” and “bringing the races together”. It is EVEN MORE VALID TODAY (i.e. April 7, 2023) than it was then:

Citing his book, The Price of Racial Reconciliation (The Politics of Race and Ethnicity), Professor Walters zeroes in on the critical issue of who has the powerful last word:

The voice of the victim of racism has been devalued and the voice of the perpetrators of racism is elevated because of the power they hold over the interpretation and treatment of racial events. This is the curious way in which whites, who by every study I have seen experience racism far, far less than blacks, end up having the dominant interpretation over events. They control the power over the voice that interprets events and control over the resources dedicated—or not dedicated—to resolve them.

“A more perfect union” is not about “bringing the races together” but about bringing equal access to economic and political power to the races.

It is not about “individuals of every ethnic or racial group” getting along better but about them getting by better.

It is not about the “inflamed tensions” of interracial group dynamics but about human potential and hope turned into ashes by group discrimination.

It is not about an “honest dialogue on race” but about an honest diagnosis of America’s racial inequities.

It is not about making the ism disappear from “race” but about removing racism from America’s institutions.

It is not about being “colorblind” but about being colorful.

It is about making America’s white-controlled 💵 hierarchy of access disappear.

It is about every person’s right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Rev. William E. Alberts, Ph.D. is a hospital chaplain and a diplomate in the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy. Both a Unitarian Universalist and a United Methodist minister, he has written research reports, essays and articles on racism, war, politics and religion. He can be reached at william.alberts@bmc.org.
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: March 06, 2023, 02:36:44 pm »

AGelbert NOTE: The history, all the way to the present, that Heather Cox Richardson relates is 100% accurate, but Biden is IMHO, just giving lip service to the injustice of the events and plight of the victims, not really doing anything to reverse the Republican AND Supreme(ly Corrupt) Court sponsored racist tyranny. Graphics, colored font and large font size emphasis are by me. 

March 5, 2023 By Heather Cox Richardson

🕯️ Letters from an 🦅 American 🗽

President Joe Biden spoke this afternoon in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 58th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when law enforcement officers tried to beat into silence Black Americans marching for their right to have a say in the government under which they lived. Standing at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which had been named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, Biden said: “On this bridge, blood was given to help ‘redeem the soul of America.’”

The story of March 7, 1965, commemorated today in Selma, is the story of Americans determined to bring to life the principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence that a government’s claim to authority comes from the consent of the governed. It is also a story of how hard local authorities, entrenched in power and backed by angry white voters, worked to make the hurdles of that process insurmountable.

In the 1960s, despite the fact Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So, in 1963, local Black organizers launched a voter registration drive.

It was hard going. White Selma residents had no intention of permitting their Black neighbors to have a say in their government. Indeed, white southerners in general were taking a stand against the equal right of Black Americans to vote. During the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration drive in neighboring Mississippi, Ku Klux Klan members worked with local law enforcement officers to murder three voting rights organizers and dispose of their bodies.

To try to hold back the white supremacists, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, designed in part to make it possible for Black Americans to register to vote. In Selma, a 👿 judge stopped voter registration meetings by prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.

To call attention to the crisis in her city, voting rights activist Amelia Boynton traveled to Birmingham to invite the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the city. King had become a household name after the 1963 March on Washington where he delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.

King and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965, and for seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. 😈 County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so 😈 he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.

Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.

On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black 🗽voting.

Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.

Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King 🕊️ led the marchers in 🙏🏼 prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.

On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

The marchers were determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, and when Alabama’s governor, 👿 George Wallace, refused to protect them, President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama state capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.

On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”

That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 🗽 . Johnson recalled “the outrage of Selma” when he said, "This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies."

The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”

But less than 50 years later, in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression.
Since then, 🐘 states have made it harder to vote.

In the wake of the 2020 election, in which voters handed control of the government to Democrats, Republican-dominated legislatures in at least 19 states passed 34 laws restrict­ing access to voting. In July 2021, in the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision, the Supreme 🐘😈 Court ruled that 🐘 election laws that disproportionately affected minority voters were not unconstitutional so long as they were 😈 not intended to be racially discriminatory.


When the Democrats took power in 2021, they vowed to strengthen voting rights. They immediately introduced the For the People Act, which expanded voting rights, limited the influence of money in politics, banned partisan gerrymandering, and created new ethics rules for federal officeholders. Republicans in the Senate blocked the measure with a filibuster. Democrats then introduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would have restored portions of the Voting Rights Act, and the Freedom to Vote Act, a lighter version of the For the People Act. 🐘 Republicans blocked both of those acts, too.

And so, in 2023, the right to vote is increasingly precarious.

As Biden told marchers today, “The right to vote—the right to vote and to have your vote counted is the threshold of democracy and liberty. With it, anything is possible. Without it—without that right, nothing is possible. And this fundamental right remains under 🐘 assault.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/march-5-2023-sunday



Notes:

https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/37721510v1p2.pdf

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/august-6-1965-remarks-signing-voting-rights-act

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/selma-montgomery-march

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/25/fight-to-vote-newsletter-voting-rights-act

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/10/john-lewis-black-lives-matter-protesters-give-until-you-cannot-give-any-more/

​​https://www.wsfa.com/2022/03/06/vp-harris-speak-selma-bloody-sunday-anniversary/

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-december-2021

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-february-2022

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/brnovich-v-democratic-national-committee

https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/whats-next-for-voting-rights-after-brnovich/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/03/05/remarks-by-president-biden-commemorating-the-58th-anniversary-of-bloody-sunday/

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-15-1965-speech-congress-voting-rights

https://www.axios.com/2021/08/24/john-lewis-house-voting-rights-bill

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/freedom-vote-act


Posted by: AGelbert
« on: February 20, 2023, 12:09:45 pm »

AGelbert NOTE: Heather Cox Richardson 🗽 gives a history lesson to 😈 those who disingenuously claim that there "has never been, nor is there now", SYSTEMIC Racism in the USA.

This quote from a recent Stephen F. Eisman 🗽 article summarizes WHY the USA is so systemically racist.
Quote
"The United States is afflicted by a basic fault, a lack, arising from the failures of its founding parents. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and the rest, despite Blake’s idealization, endorsed slavery, racism and the laws and institutions that supported them. Succeeding generations of elected and appointed officials fostered Civil War, Jim Crow, and Klan terrorism; they thwarted school de-segregation and chipped away at the protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964; they created COINTELPRO, waged a racist war on drugs, and allowed police brutality and mass incarceration to reign. Gross inequalities of income, wealth and health characterize the current social order." -- 2023 Stephen F. Eisman

February 19, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Today in the Washington Post, Nick Anderson showed how the Advanced Placement course on African American studies changed between February 2022, when its prototype first appeared, and February 2023, when the official version was released. One word, in particular, had vanished: the word “systemic.” In February 2022, “systemic” appeared before “marginalization; in April 2022, “systemic” came before “discrimination, oppression, inequality, disempowerment and racism.”

By February 2023, that word was gone. While the College Board, which produces the AP courses, says it did not change the course in response to its rejection by Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who said it contributed to a “political agenda,” its spokespeople have acknowledged that they were aware of how the right wing would react to that word.

The far right opposes the idea that the United States has ever practiced systemic racism. Shortly before former president Trump left office, his hand-picked President’s Advisory 1776 Commission produced its report to stand against the 1619 Project that rooted the United States in the year enslaved Africans first set foot in the English colonies on the Chesapeake, and went on to claim that systemic racism had shaped the eventual American nation.

Trump’s 1776 commission rejected the conclusions of the 1619 Project’s authors and instead declared that “the American people have ever pursued freedom and justice.” While “the American story has its share of missteps, errors, contradictions, and wrongs,” it asserted, “[t]hese wrongs have always met resistance from the clear principles of the nation, and therefore our history is far more one of self-sacrifice, courage, and nobility.”

Since Trump left office, far-right activists have passed laws prohibiting teachers from talking about patterns of racism and have worked to remove from classrooms and school libraries books whose subjects must overcome systemic discrimination.

Today is the anniversary of the day in 1942, during World War II, that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 enabling military authorities to designate military areas from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” That order also permitted the secretary of war to provide transportation, food, and shelter “to accomplish the purpose of this order.”

Four days later, a Japanese submarine off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, shelled the Ellwood Oil Field, and the Office of Naval Intelligence warned that the Japanese would attack California in the next ten hours. On February 25 a meteorological balloon near Los Angeles set off a panic, and troops fired 1,400 rounds of antiaircraft ammunition at supposed Japanese attackers.

On March 2, 1942, General John DeWitt put Executive Order 9066 into effect. He signed Public Proclamation No. 1, dividing the country into military zones and, “as a matter of military necessity,” excluding from certain of those zones “[a]ny Japanese, German, or Italian alien, or any person of Japanese Ancestry.” Under DeWitt’s orders, about 125,000 children, women, and men of Japanese ancestry were forced out of their homes and held in camps around the country. Two thirds of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens.

DeWitt’s order did not come from nowhere. After almost a century of shaping laws to discriminate against Asian newcomers, West Coast inhabitants and lawmakers were primed to see their Japanese and Japanese-American neighbors as dangerous.

Those laws reached back to the arrival of Chinese miners to California in 1849, and reached forward into the twentieth century. Indeed, on another February 19—that of 1923—the Supreme Court decided the case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. It said that Thind, an Indian Sikh man who identified himself as Indo-European, could not become a U.S. citizen. Thind claimed the right to United States citizenship under the terms of the Naturalization Act of 1906, which had put the federal government instead of states in charge of who got to be a citizen and had very specific requirements for citizenship that he believed he had met.

But, the court said, Thind was not a “white person” under U.S. law, and only “free white persons” could become citizens.

What were they talking about? In the Thind decision, the Supreme Court reached back to the case of Japan-born Takao Ozawa, decided a year before, in 1922. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that Ozawa could not become a citizen under the 1906 Naturalization Act because that law had not overridden the 1790 naturalization law limiting citizenship to “free white persons." The court decided that “white person” meant “persons of the Caucasian Race.” “A Japanese, born in Japan, being clearly not a Caucasian, cannot be made a citizen of the United States,” it said.

As the 1922 case indicated, Asian Americans could not rely on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, to permit them to become citizens, because a law from 1790 knocked a hole in that amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment provided that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” But as soon as that amendment went into effect, the 👿 new states and territories of the West reached back to the 1790 naturalization law to exclude Asian immigrants from citizenship based on the argument that they were not “free, white persons.”

That 1790 restriction, based in early lawmakers’ determination to guarantee that enslaved Africans could not claim citizenship, enabled lawmakers after the Civil War to exclude Asian immigrants from citizenship.

From that exclusion grew laws discriminating against Chinese immigrants, including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that prohibited Chinese workers from migrating to the United States. Then, when Chinese immigration slowed and Japanese immigration took its place, the U.S. backed the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 under which Japanese officials promised to stop emigration to the United States. The United States, in turn, promised not to restrict the rights of Japanese already in the United States, although laws prohibiting “aliens” from owning land meant Japanese settlers either lost their land or had to put it in the names of their American-born children, who were citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 1942, the assumption that Japanese Americans were dangerous and anti-American was rooted back in the earliest years of the country, in the 1790 naturalization law designed to make sure that Africans could not become United States citizens.

After the 1923 Thind decision, the United States stripped the citizenship of about 50 South Asian Americans who had already become American citizens. One of them was Vaishno Das Bagai, an immigrant from what is now Pakistan who came from wealth and who settled in San Francisco in 1915 with his wife and three sons to start a business. Less than three weeks after arriving in the United States, Bagai began the process of naturalization. He became a citizen in 1920.

The Thind decision took that citizenship away from Bagai, making him fall under California’s alien land laws saying he could not own land. He lost his home and his business. In 1928, explicitly telling the San Francisco Examiner that he was taking his life in protest of racial discrimination, Bagai died by suicide. His widow, Kala Bagai, became a community activist.

World War II changed U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen as global alliances shifted and all Americans turned out to save democracy. From Japanese-American internment camps, young men joined the army to fight for the nation. In 1943, the War Department authorized the formation of Japanese-American combat units. One of those units, the 442d Regimental Combat Team, became the most decorated unit for its size in U.S. military history. Their motto was “Go for Broke.”

Congress overturned Chinese exclusion laws in 1943 and, in 1946, made natives of India eligible for U.S. citizenship. Japanese immigrants gained the right to become U.S. citizens in 1952.

“[ S ]elf-sacrifice, courage and nobility” definitely enabled people like Thind, Vaishno Das Bagai and Kala Bagai, and the soldiers of the 442d Regimental Combat Team to assert “the clear principles of the nation.” But it’s hard to see how a teacher can explain “missteps, errors, contradictions, and wrongs” from 1942 that were rooted in a law from 1790 without using the word “systemic.”


https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-19-2023

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/ap-african-american-studies-controversy/

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066#transcript

https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/pioneerlife/id/15297

https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/artifact/h-r-40-naturalization-bill-march-4-1790

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/260/178/

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/261/204/

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-Presidents-Advisory-1776-Commission-Final-Report.pdf

https://www.saada.org/tides/article/united-states-of-america-vs-vaishno-das-bagai

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/27/1151725129/florida-advanced-placement-african-american-studies-backlash

https://immigrationhistory.org/item/thind-v-united-states%E2%80%8B/

https://scholarscollaborative.org/PuertoRico/items/show/79

https://history.army.mil/html/topics/apam/442rct.html

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2020/07/22/berkeley-ca-racism-housing-discrimination-south-asian
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: January 18, 2023, 12:14:20 pm »



"We must recognize that we can't solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power... this means a revolution of values and other things.” — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 🕊️

January 17, 2023

Martin Luther King Jr.’s 🕊️ true radical ideology was his dissatisfaction with the status quo

SNIPPET:

Every day, our communities grapple with the consequences of life-altering experiences like racial discrimination, corporate-backed housing insecurity, and increased cost of living regardless of zip code or income. We must reflect on Dr. King's life and work, while also waiving a 🚩 warning flag for politicians that often pay lip service to his ideals, while doing their 😈 best to keep his dream 🕊️ of equality and liberation unrealized.

Read more: 🕊️
https://medium.com/@popdemoc/martin-luther-king-jr-s-true-radical-ideology-was-his-dissatisfaction-with-the-status-quo-7b4015076fd4
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: December 15, 2022, 08:33:22 pm »

VIDEO:

Richard Wright’sLegacy of Exposing Racial Violence Honored on Anniversary of Elaine Massacre in Arkansas
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/10/4/richard_wright_s_legacy_of_exposing

Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to Part 2 of our interview about this 103rd anniversary of the Elaine massacre, commemorated this past weekend in Arkansas.

Before the massacre, Elaine was home to Richard Wright, who became one of the most famous Black writers in United States history. He was known for his acclaimed novel Native Son and his memoir, Black Boy, in which he describes how his uncle Silas Hoskins was lynched in 1916 near Elaine by white people who wanted his business. Richard Wright was 9 years old when he and his family were forced to flee. He wrote, quote, “There was only silence, quiet weeping, whispers and fears. Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.” Richard Wright was describing a true story.

Three years later, on September 30th, 1919, a white man was shot and killed near Elaine when guards stopped a group of white men from breaking into a meeting of Black sharecroppers with the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America to demand fair pay for their crops. Mobs of white people responded in Elaine, Arkansas, with three days of anti-Black racist violence, backed by hundreds of U.S. soldiers. Historians estimate hundreds of Black people were killed, much of their land stolen. The anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells investigated the 1919 Elaine massacre and wrote, quote, “Negroes were in a fair way to become independent and it was not to the interest of white landowners to let them do so.”

For more, we continue with Julia Wright, the daughter of the literary giant Richard Wright, and she is in Portugal. We’re also joined by Paul Ortiz ✨, professor of history and director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at University of Florida, Gainesville. They were both part of symposium this weekend hosted by the Elaine Legacy Center and the Richard Wright Civil Rights Center. Professor Paul Ortiz is also author of the book, An African American and Latinx History of the United States.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Professor Ortiz, let’s begin with you, because, I mean, you’ve written this African American and Latinx History of the United States, so much of which is not included in the standard history books that children in the United States grow up with. I mean, the Elaine massacre, and the commemoration this weekend, hardly got paid attention to. Can you talk about why it’s so important to remember something that happened in 1919?

PAUL ORTIZ: Amy, it’s so important for a number of reasons. You mention, you know, Latinx history. And this summer I was in the National Archives doing research. The same situation that faced African American farmers, and whether they were landowners or sharecroppers, faced Mexican and Puerto Rican farmers and sharecroppers in the Southwest. The same forces of state violence were targeting Mexican farmworkers and farmers in the Southwest. Now, the face of that violence was 🦍 law enforcement and the 😈 Texas Rangers. What they were doing was disenfranchising Mexican American farmers, lynching, committing horrific acts of violence, to keep Mexican farmers landless, to keep them powerless , the same way that federal troops and law enforcement in Arkansas colluded to keep African American farmers powerless and landless, to keep them as a landless proletariat.

And when you begin to kind of put those pieces together, it adds up to a picture of American history, Amy, which most historians are very uncomfortable with. We’re used to thinking of the U.S. as the freest country on Earth. But how do you square that with the Elaine massacre of 1919?

AMY GOODMAN: And for those who haven’t heard the first segment of our show, if you could summarize what happened in 1919?

PAUL ORTIZ: African American farmers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, landowners were beginning to organize. Many of those African Americans, Amy, who were targeted for violence by white people were actually World War I veterans. They had served in the United States Army. And when they returned to the Arkansas Delta, when they returned to rural Alabama, when they returned to rural Florida and other parts of the South, they expected equal citizenship. They had just made huge sacrifices to help win the Great War for Democracy, as it was known. But when they begin trying to purchase more land, purchase more land for their crops, try to get higher prices for their cotton, whether they’re sharecroppers or landowners, the white power structure in places like Helena, Arkansas, fought back and began to engage in vigilante violence. But, Amy, one of the things I want to point out here is the term “vigilante violence” is probably overused, because the reality is that the courts, judges, sheriffs, police, federal troops were involved in suppressing African Americans, keeping them landless, keeping them powerless. But Black people fought back.

And you mentioned Ida B. Wells-Barnett. She was a great crusader against lynching, you know, years before the Elaine massacre. She wrote an amazing exposé of the Elaine massacre and really gave voice to African Americans who had been brutally tortured, had been driven off their land. Ida B. Wells created an itemized list of the property that African Americans lost as a result of the Elaine massacre, including land, including cotton, including the fact that white people went into Black-owned houses and stole their kitchen, their cutlery, their china, everything they could get their hands on, Amy. And none of those white perpetrators were ever charged with any crime whatsoever. And this really outraged Ida B. Wells. And if you know anything about her, you know that once she got onto a campaign, she continued investigating, but also mobilizing. She went back to Chicago. She went to New York.

And also, this, the Elaine massacre, part of the aftermath was to help the NAACP gain greater credibility, because Walter White did his own investigation. The NAACP helped mobilize people. There was a huge defense fund. So, the Elaine massacre resulted in a national mobilization in support of African Americans who had been put in jail, who had been tortured, who had been convicted of murder, in fact, when they themselves were the targets of violence.

AMY GOODMAN: And you also spoke about this in the first part of our discussion, but now you have time to really flesh it out, the fact that this massacre led to a seminal Supreme Court case. And talk about what was decided. I mean, again, no white people were charged. It was African Americans that were charged in this case?

PAUL ORTIZ: Yes. So, there were five — as best as we can tell, five white individuals were killed during the course of the massacre, which unfolded not just in one day but over several days and even weeks. So, the defendants, the men who were actually incarcerated, charged with murder, these were all African Americans. But much of that testimony, Amy, was coerced. These men were literally electrocuted. They were whipped. They were beaten savagely in order to coerce them into testifying against each other.

This is something that Ida B. Wells highlighted. The fact that Ida B. Wells wrote a report about what she had witnessed, and based on the testimony of these Black defendants, the fact that the NAACP did an investigative report, the fact that the local Black attorney Scipio Jones, who was a Black legal activist for decades, the fact that they publicized this case really embarrassed not just the criminal justice system in Arkansas but the entire nation, because there’s old traditions that go back to the common law which say that you’re not supposed to use testimony which was coerced via torture.

And so, the Moore v. Dempsey case, this goes all the way to the Supreme Court. And what the Supreme Court decides in Moore v. Dempsey is that the trial of the 12 Black defendants was conducted in a lynch mob atmosphere. And in the majority opinion, what the majority of this Supreme Court said was, I mean, look, not a single white person on that jury — and by the way, the jury was all white, and this was part of what the NAACP was arguing was part of the injustice. But the Supreme Court said, basically, not a single member of that jury could have returned anything other than a guilty verdict against those Black defendants, because had any one of those jurors said that any one of those Black defendants was innocent, they would have had to leave the state, literally. And so, the argument in Moore v. Dempsey is that you can’t have a court proceeding in a lynch mob type of atmosphere, because you’re denying the defendants due process, you’re denying them equality under the laws, and those types of things. So, Moore v. Dempsey becomes an important case for the NAACP to build upon, and it becomes a precedent that the organization uses as we move into the Scottsboro Boys case during the Great Depression, and the later civil rights movement.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this year, children of the descendants of the 1919 Black massacre in Elaine, Arkansas, gathered memorial soil from where Richard Wright’s uncle, Silas Hoskins, was thought to have been lynched, near Elaine, and they brought it to Montgomery to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, where founder Bryan Stevenson personally received the jar of memorial soil.

BRYAN STEVENSON: We have Silas Hoskins, Elaine, Arkansas, 1916. And this is a significant one because Silas Hoskins was the uncle of Richard Wright, the very famous author, who wrote amazing books. And Richard Wright talked about what happened to his uncle, and that’s how we know his story. And because you have these two jars, we will be able to put them in our exhibit, and I’m really grateful for that. And so, if you will turn that over, I will take it, and we will put this in our museum. And the next time you come, you’ll be able to see the work that you’ve done. All right? Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s children of the descendants of the Elaine massacre victims, handing jars of soil to the great civil rights leader Bryan Stevenson, which brings us to Julia Wright, the daughter of Richard Wright, the acclaimed writer who lived there in Elaine. Can you talk about this moment, the memorial that is happening now, and what happened then, Julia?

JULIA WRIGHT: It was absolutely — I have no words for what happened. We were watching through Zoom, because the family couldn’t travel. And we watched those 12 children with their hands in the soil. And Dr. Mary Olson, who’s the director of the Elaine Legacy Center, was telling them, “Your hands will be forever on that soil.” And just the idea of those children, who are survivors, bringing the soil, the memorial soil of my own great-uncle, was like the closing of a circle. And it made me think a lot about intergenerational trauma and how it’s handed down, and how it’s prevented from being handed down, by silence. And what struck me, Amy, on Friday, listening in to the symposium and to the descendants speaking, is that they were all breaking that silence. They were speaking their own narratives, and the joy of being able to break silence, to break — you know, that sentence my father has in Black Boy, my mother — the fear my mother had slapped me into silence. She slapped me into silence, she was so afraid. And what happened on Friday in Elaine was a reversal of that. Everybody was breaking through their own silence with their own narratives.

And that is why it’s so appropriate to have Paul Ortiz here today, because Paul Ortiz is an oral historian who gives value to — how can I say? — oral testimony, not written testimony, the oral, the words that we can say when we break through our silence. And I know — I can remember Noelle Hanrahan, the director of Prison Radio in Philadelphia, telling me that everybody in Philadelphia knows how corrupt the police are, but what the criminal justice system doesn’t want is it to get into the written record. It must remain unsaid. It must remain part of the silence. So, our oral testimony is our voyage towards getting it written. And the work of Paul Ortiz and all the oral historians is invaluable.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul, let’s talk about that issue of oral history, who gets documented and who doesn’t, as it relates to Elaine and so much more. It is what you are a master of. You are running an entire program called the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at University of Florida, Gainesville.

PAUL ORTIZ: Well, Amy, one of our — one of the greatest honors that I’ve ever had as an oral historian, of course, is to be able to work with Julia Wright. And in 2019, the Elaine Legacy Center invited the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and our students and staff to Elaine to help document this history. And what’s so important is, you know, I think, as historians, we — any type of source we can get, we’re going to use. To echo what Julia Wright said, the oral sources are so important because oftentimes the official sources were created by the perpetrators of anti-Black violence. Oftentimes the official sources were created by the perpetrators of anti-Mexican violence.

This is why the work of Ida B. Wells is so important. I would consider her one of the first great oral historians, and maybe the greatest oral historian in this country’s history, Amy, because Ida B. Wells went behind the official sources to talk directly to the families of those who had been lynched. She went to Elaine. She talked directly to the victims of torture, of persecution. And so her narrative is radically different than the narrative of the front page in The New York Times, Amy. Their response to the Elaine massacre initially was that Black people had been involved in a plot to kill all white people. That ran on the front page of The New York Times. So, the work of Ida B. Wells as oral historian is to go behind that story and actually dig to find the truth.

This is what we try to do in the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program today. We’re involved with communities in Elaine and also in communities in Ocoee, Florida, which suffered a horrific anti-Black massacre on Election Day in 1920. We have done work in Rosewood, Florida. We’ve done work in our own county, Alachua County.

AMY GOODMAN: The massacre in Rosewood.

PAUL ORTIZ: Yes, in the massacre in Rosewood. But the thing I think to remember, as Julia knows, the Elaine massacre is horrific, but it’s one of many, scores, perhaps hundreds, of massacres. It happens during Red Summer. And it happens during a time when especially African American farmworkers and farm owners are trying to create new ways of becoming economically viable. They’re going to cooperative purchasing and marketing of their crops. They’re beginning to unionize. And they’re beginning to try to break through the system of white supremacy.

And I think the Elaine Legacy Center has really nailed it when they talk about Elaine as being really one of the key founding places of the civil rights movement, because even though the Elaine massacre ends up in this horrific — these horrific incidents of anti-Black violence and murder, there’s a power that Black people find in collective organizing, and they refuse to allow the victims of the Elaine massacre to be — to go away silent.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of hearing the voices that Professor Ortiz is just talking about, I want to go back to Julia Wright. I want to go back to Elaine and Richard Wright, where Richard Wright lived as a child. I want to go to the clip from the Emmy Award-winning film, Richard Wright: Black Boy, the first documentary on Richard’s life, work and legacy.

AMIRI BARAKA: It was Wright who was one of the people who made me conscious of the need to struggle. You understand what I mean? Even though later I come up and say, “Well, man, I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree with that.” Still, in the sense of him describing and analyzing the whole existence of Black people as an oppressed nation, that’s priceless.

RICHARD WRIGHT: I was scared. Scared! All my life, I heard of Black men being killed because of white girls. And there I was.

JOHN HENRIK CLARKE: Richard Wright proved that a Black writer could write considerably better than most of the white writers of his day. And after Native Son, the condescending attitude toward Black writers was over.

MARGARET WALKER ALEXANDER: He said, “Nothing comes before my art.” For him, his art was sacred. He didn’t care about anything else but that. What he had to do was the most important thing.

AMY GOODMAN: The clip from Richard Wright: Black Boy. Julia Wright, if you can talk more about what they are getting at and the power of your father’s work? Of course, you’re the executor of his estate.

JULIA WRIGHT: Well, it stands the test of the murder of George Floyd. It stands the test of the denied justice to Emmett Till for 67 years. His work is more — I don’t know, maybe I can use the word; it’s a bit cheesy, but — prescient than ever. My father did see very far ahead. He paid the price for it.

But I’d like to come back to something absolutely marvelous that I discovered because of what happened Friday in Elaine and seeing all these guests singing and speaking and breaking their silence, that actually Black Boy was born from that very breaking of a silence. In 1943, my father had traveled down South with Horace Cayton, who was a psychoanalyst — a sociologist interested in psychoanalysis. And they had gone to Fisk, where my father was invited to speak. But they were in the train, and on the train down South they experienced a racial incident. They were segregated behind a curtain. And my father, as usual, was very angry. And he arrived in Fisk without any notes written. He hadn’t written his lecture because he was so upset. And he advanced towards the lectern without anything prepared in advance. And he broke the silence of his mind, and he poured out his emotions, the emotions born on that train. And when the lecture ended, the whole room was so silent, you could hear a pin drop. And people started — it was a biracial audience. People started clutching their pocketbooks and leaving with their heads low. And one professor came up to him and said, “Wow, you’ve told the truth. Everybody’s leaving because you’ve told the truth.” And that’s when my father realized that he was going to write Black Boy.

AMY GOODMAN: Julia, I wanted to ask about — well, we’re speaking to you in Portugal now. We’ve spoken to you when you — you know, when you’re in Paris, France. Your father moved to France. If you can talk about how what has happened in the United States — I mean, you’re an American, but you live outside of the country, you come in occasionally — how it led you to live in Europe?

JULIA WRIGHT: Well, first of all, my father chose self-expatriation, and the whole family followed. We have remained loyal to that choice.

However, Amy, this lynching goes on everywhere in the world, because we are everywhere. We are a diaspora everywhere. And to go full circle back to the lynching memorial museum, I’ve been speaking with sisters and brothers in Europe about a need, perhaps, for their own lynching museum there. And I’ll only mention one case in Brussels, about a — they call him the Belgian George Floyd. He was choked in very much the same manner. And his family, who are very poor — he’s an African. His family, very poor, decided to question his manner of death. And much pressure was put on the state to dissuade them from questioning the murder, but the father persisted. And so, the body had to be put in the morgue. And during the time of the trial, the body stayed in the morgue, because that’s the law. And it is the family who had to pay 25 euros a day to the morgue, to the state, because they had dared question the manner of murder.

So, it’s everywhere, Amy. And just as Paul Ortiz was saying that perhaps survivors of massacres throughout the country should unite and exchange experiences, and even have massacre reunions — there’s a whole hidden map of massacres, we could link up — in the same way, there are lynchings throughout the world we must pay attention to.

AMY GOODMAN: And before we end, if you could talk more about the Elaine Museum in Arkansas that held the memorial 103 years after the Elaine massacre, and the Richard Wright Civil Rights Center, that is planning to be built in Elaine?

JULIA WRIGHT: I have not been there. It’s a wrench, Amy, but I — because of my age and COVID, I was unable to travel. It’s a work in progress. I am so proud. They invited me in Elaine to be a member of the Elaine Legacy Center, so I’m now a member. And it’s very exciting. We’re going to plan what the first initiative of the Richard Wright Civil Rights Center is going to be.

AMY GOODMAN: And —

JULIA WRIGHT: Maybe some — yeah?

AMY GOODMAN: And —

JULIA WRIGHT: Maybe something — yes?

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.

JULIA WRIGHT: Maybe mass incarceration.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal has been very close to your heart for many, many years. Can you talk about what’s upcoming in his case?

JULIA WRIGHT: A very important date, Amy: 19th of October is the date where he will appear in court in Philadelphia, where we hope to have a maximum of mobilization around the court, because, at last, after 36 years, the hidden boxes, where proof of his innocence were hidden in the prosecutor’s office storage room, will be submitted by the defense in front of a judge in the appeals court. They gathered dust for 36 years. In one of the boxes, there is a letter written by one of the witnesses, asking the prosecutor, “Where is my money?” There is further proof that the jury was tampered with, so that it would be all the Blacks would be stricken off. And other proof of corruption is contained in those boxes. But time is ticking. The proof was hidden. And Mumia’s health is deteriorating.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Julia Wright, I want to thank you so much for being with us, daughter of the literary giant Richard Wright, and she herself a writer, a poet in her own right. I want to thank you for being with us, today joining us from Portugal.

JULIA WRIGHT: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: And I want to thank Paul Ortiz, professor of history, director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at University of Florida, joining us from Raleigh, North Carolina, where he’s giving a Hispanic heritage speech at Duke University. Professor Ortiz is author of the book An African American and Latinx History of the United States. To see Part 1 of our discussion, you can go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/10/4/richard_wright_s_legacy_of_exposing
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: October 07, 2022, 02:43:02 pm »



News and views from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. Find more at ncrc.org.

Just News for October 7, 2022

Why 🎩 Banks Are Suing For The Right To 😖 Discriminate – And Why They’re Wrong

SNIPPETS:

Powerful corporations are mounting an audacious new attack on the federal government’s work to protect Americans from discrimination. They have neither logic, nor law, nor popular opinion on their side. ... ...

We all should be very concerned about both the 😈 intended and unintended consequences of this lawsuit. If it is successful it would be a precedent for questioning the funding streams supporting other government agencies. [Read more 👈]
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: October 04, 2022, 02:25:38 pm »

Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism


At the Heart of Theistic Evolution, an Inescapable Contradiction


Mike Keas: Unbelievable (Playlist)


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Category Science & Technology
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: October 03, 2022, 01:26:33 pm »

Herero genocide

by Marc Ambler

Like most visitors to Namibia,1 one of the memorable pictures I carried away was of the noble-looking Herero people.  Their women wear colourful, voluminous Victorian-style dresses and hats (see p. 55), and the men wear uniforms on ceremonial occasions.  How terribly sad it was to learn that 100 years ago, their great-grandparents had been the victims of the first genocide of the 20th century.

During the colonial land-grab of African countries by European nations after the 1884–85 Berlin Conference,2 Germany annexed Namibia, then known as South-West Africa.  German settlers quickly ran roughshod over the historical rights and claims of the Herero tribal inhabitants, and for the next 20 years plundered their lands, houses and livestock. 

Of this period, the Governor, Theodor Leutwein, wrote that the German settlers had an ‘inborn feeling of belonging to a superior race’.3  Thus racism was rife.  The Herero were regularly referred to as ‘baboons’; the men were commonly beaten to death for minor infringements, and the women were made sex slaves by the soldiers and settlers.


Uprising


Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha

Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha’s beliefs of racial superiority led him to contemptuously state: ‘I wipe out rebellious tribes with streams of blood and streams of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge’. And ‘… I find it appropriate that the [Herero] nation perishes instead of infecting our soldiers’.

In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that an uprising occurred.  On 12 January 1904, fighting broke out between Herero tribesmen and the settlers, in the town of Okahandja, where there was a German fort.

The response of the Berlin government to this insurrection by a colonized people who had dared to resist the might of the German nation was fast and ruthless.  Kaiser Wilhelm II dispatched 14,000 troops to the region under the command of Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha.  Von Trotha was renowned for the ruthless efficiency with which he had helped to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, and to quash resistance to his nation’s occupation of German East Africa (today’s Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania).

Von Trotha’s written goal was: ‘I believe that the [Herero] nation as such should be exterminated.’4  He stated: ‘The exercise of violence and crass terrorism and even with gruesomeness was and is my policy.  I destroy the African tribes with streams of blood and streams of money.  Only following this cleansing can something new emerge, which will remain.’5

That the German settlers and a high-ranking officer like General von Trotha would hold to these ‘superior race’, ‘survival-of-the-fittest-through-“cleansing”-of-the-weakest’ views is hardly surprising.  Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (which is subtitled By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) had been translated into German in 1875, and his evolutionary theories had for decades been avidly promoted to all and sundry by the popular books and theatrical presentations of Ernst Haeckel.6  The German nation had also been subjected for many years to the ‘God-is-dead’ atheism of Nietzsche.7


This, too, was a consequence of Darwin­ian thought. Nietzsche believed that Dar­win­ian evolution would eventually produce the Übermensch, ‘a superman whose distance from the ordinary man was greater than the distance between man and ape’.8  Then a ‘super-race’ of such beings would impose its will on the weak and the worthless. 

Decades later, Hitler would proclaim the same Darwinist superiority views to justify his own subjugation of the ‘lesser’ peoples of Europe.9

In the light of this attitude of racial superiority, it is interesting to compare probably the two most famous documents to come out of the Herero war.  In his infamous Vernichtungsbefehl (annihilation order), von Trotha stated: ‘[E]very Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot.  I will no longer accept women and children, I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot at.’10

The response of the ‘lesser’ people

In contrast, a letter of Herero chief Samuel Maharero to his people shortly after the outbreak of war11 states that Englishmen, Boers, missionaries and people of other tribes were not to be harmed.12  History has shown that both instructions were diligently carried out. :emthup:

In a decisive battle at Hamakari, near Waterberg, on 11 August 1904, von Trotha’s troops surrounded the Herero tribespeople on three sides and brutally defeated them.  In a cynical ploy, he left open only the way into the Omaheke area of the Kalahari Desert. The battle plan was that those who escaped the German bullets should die of thirst.  Waterholes for 150 miles (240 km) around the desert were either patrolled or poisoned, and those Herero who came crawling out of the Omaheke, desperate for water, were bayoneted. This left the Herero ‘with but one option: to cross the desert into Botswana [then called Bechuanaland], in reality a march to death.  This, indeed, is how the majority of the Herero perished.’13

Due to missionary pressure and a growing shortage of labour in the colony, von Trotha’s extermination cam­paign was eventually stopped by Berlin, and the surviving Herero people were put into concentration camps.


‘Put to slave labor, overworked, hungry, and exposed to diseases such as typhoid and smallpox, more Herero men perished in these camps.  Herero women, meanwhile, were turned into sex slaves.’14 

The result of this policy was that from 1904 to 1908 the Herero were reduced ‘from a tribe of 80,000 persons to 15,000 starving refugees.’15 

Following the war, all Herero persons over the age of seven were forced to wear a metal disc around their necks with their registration number, designating them as free labour. This was an ominous foretaste of the Jewish Holocaust star years later, when Hitler similarly enslaved those he considered to be members of inferior races.

Genocide and ‘race branding’

There are powerful links between the Herero genocide, the Holocaust 40 years later, and the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s.16


1.Francis Galton, the anti-Christian cousin of Charles Darwin, visited South-West Africa in the early 1850s. He went on to develop his theory of eugenics, a term he coined in 1883. This pseudo-science helped promote the racial superiority views which played such a major role in the fate of the Herero people years later.

Herr Dok­tor Eugen Fischer hard at "evolutionary studies" work!
2.Making his rounds of the Herero concentration camps was Herr Dok­tor Eugen Fischer. It was here that Fischer did his first ‘medical’ experiments on race, genetics and eugenics, using as his guinea pigs both Herero full-bloods and the mulatto offspring of Herero women and German men. Under his supervision, the preserved bodies and severed heads of Herero who had been hanged were sent to Germany for dissection.4
Anything for the advancement of EVOLUTIONARY science, eh?
 
Fischer went on to become the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics.  He co-authored the book The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene,17 which became the standard textbook in Germany on this subject.  Hitler cited it in his Mein Kampf [My Struggle] , which became the basis for the destruction of millions of people in his own pursuit of ‘racial purity’.

Hitler appointed Fischer as rector of the University of Berlin in 1933, where he taught medicine to Nazi doctors. Fischer is sometimes referred to as the father of modern genetics. One of his prominent pupils was Josef Mengele, the so-called ‘Angel of Death’, who went on to repeat his teacher’s cruel experiments on Jewish children, and directed the operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.


http://creation.com/herero-genocide




Agelbert NOTE: Please observe the similarity in the above photograph with the one taken around 1908. That is, NAZI concentration camp victims in exactly the same circumstances as the Herero victims of "evolutionary" studies (1904-1908) in the (by the 1940s) PRACTICED Concentration Camp MEDICAL Modus Operandi  that Fischer HANDED OFF TO MENGELE.    Thank these hapless Jews for the Minimum Recommended Daily Allowances of Vitamins and Minerals. WE recovered them from the STUDIES in the Concentration Camps by the NAZIs!   

To Darwinian Worshipers, we just need to apply EVOLUTION more "correctly" (I.E. Take healthy food AWAY, give processed crap food and Sterilize the "useless eaters" with pollution so no more "useless eaters" get a chance to be born!). TRUE BELIEVERS in "Survival of the Apex Predators" smile at the those clever Germans who got the Missionaries to make the Hereros believe in "Pie in the Sky"  ;) so they would not fight back! So for Darwinists, Christian Missionaries might help CLEANSE Homo SAP of the lesser SAPS! LOL!

Stupid is as EVIL and STUPID does. Have a nice evolutionary day.
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: September 25, 2022, 02:55:47 pm »

Collectivist Action > AGelbert
Worth repeating:
"Apparently, Yoksas and fellow Capitalists, blinders thoroughly fixed about their heads with 🎩 Capitalist crazy glue, only see a "threat" when the government has a monopoly, but never when a greeball Capitalist 🦍 has it without ANY oversight whatsoever by we-the-people."


AGelbert > Collectivist Action
Yup. I ran into a some cogent quotes yesterday that say a great deal while saying very little. I think they are worth passing along. One is an old quote you are, no doubt, familiar with; the others are hard truths most people do not take into consideration when pondering the now-upon-us-and-getting-worse-every-month Existential THREAT of Catastrophic Climate Change:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James Baldwin ✨

"Advertising and Marketing are the polite terms in our society for Propaganda."

"Affluent people tend to know the least about how to get by on less."

SOURCE: Truths We Can’t Bear Alone: Facing an ‘Inconvenient ApocalypseSeptember 16, 2022 Wes Jackson ✨ president emeritus of The Land Institute. and Robert Jensen ✨ emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: September 25, 2022, 01:54:16 pm »

Collectivist Action >AGelbert
Wow, AGelbert, we're apparently on the same page with this.

Good comment & video.

I saw your comment after I wrote mine.

AGelbert > Collectivist Action
I say in all seriousness that am fortunate to be thinking along the same Hunger and Thirst for Justice lines as you. If more people were as prudent and principled as you, human society would not be in such a sorry state of greed based corruption. God Bless you, bro.



Collectivist Action >Yoksas
You're late, Yoksas.
Behavior modification already exist.
The ruling capitalists have been 'modifying' our behavior since they codified and nationalized white supremacy, through private property laws and public policies since the state was established.
Think: Naturalization and Jim Crow laws, and commercial media.etc.

Nevertheless, the OPed raises some very provocative ideas about how we could transition away from the catastrophic rule of capital, by drawing on a rich, past and present tradition of cooperative economics and the best of global social democratic experiments.*

Of course, many of the reactionaries I see you, mostly, backslapping in cyberspace, and others, on and offline, imo, will be CONSCIOUSLY opposing most of the above proposals, mainly because, afaics, they are arch enemies of social equality and democracy, which expanding public ownership would advance.

Rightwingers are generally diametrically opposed to both of those things (with a LONG & BLOODY history to boot!), , esp., if they threaten their private property. . .and requires paying more taxes.

AGelbert > Collectivist Action
Well said. In addition to my comment (which you have already read and approved), I want to add that, when Yoksas wrote that hyperbole FUD about liquor licenses being a State sponsored "instrument of control", I was flabbergasted at the selective blindness exhibited 🤦‍♂️. I wanted to direct this at Yoksas (but tried to do the same thing with words instead):

The GOAL of EVERY Capitalist is to 🦍 "corner" (SEE: MONOPOLY) the market for whatever good or service they profit from, PERIOD. If a MONOPOLY on a good or a service (or BOTH) isn't an 📢 INSTRUMENT OF CONTROL, I don't know what is.

Apparently, Yoksas and fellow Capitalists, blinders thoroughly fixed about their heads with 🎩 Capitalist crazy glue, only see a "threat" when the government has a monopoly, but never when a greeball Capitalist 🦍 has it without ANY oversight whatsoever by we-the-people. Yeah, Capitalists just want to be left alone to do their "economy improving" (SEE: Orwell) thing with "Holy St. Adam Smith's 😇" (SEE: MORE Orwell) invisible hand "helping" (SEE: Orwell on STEROIDS!) society...

V4V posted a graphic on hypocrisy the other day. Hey V4V, if you read this, Yoksas's comment is good place to put it.
https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-supreme-court-is-gutting-regulatory.html#more
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: September 24, 2022, 03:47:24 pm »

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

The 👿🎩 Supreme Court Is Gutting the Regulatory State. Let's Look at Our Other Options

SNIPPET:

Whither Social Democracy?

Social democracy was initially founded on the idea that society could transition from capitalism to socialism peacefully via democratic political institutions. But in its modern incarnation, the term more often refers to a political and economic system based on the idea that the excesses and injustices of capitalism can be ameliorated primarily through state regulation of private enterprise, rather than large-order shifts in the ownership of those enterprises. As the German revisionist Marxist Eduard Bernstein, often considered the father of social democracy, once put it, socialization ​“can also take place if the general public intervenes ever more strongly in support of economic life through laws and ordinances,” via, for instance, minimum-wage legislation, occupational safety standards, price controls and other regulations. This regulatory approach is, then, usually combined with both a strong social safety net supported by tax-and-spend policies and the extension of political and social rights to traditionally marginalized groups.

Following World War II, social democrats (in either name or deed) came to power in many countries around the world, especially those in Europe that had been economically and socially devastated by the war. With the economic and business elite in many of those countries temporarily discredited by their associations and infatuations with fascism, some of these countries were able to build strong welfare states characterized by empowered trade unions, reductions in economic inequality, and marked improvements in health and living standards. In the United States, a weaker version of social democracy took hold through the federal government’s robust response to the Great Depression (the New Deal) and the centralizing forces of war mobilization.

While some significant ownership shifts did occur, especially in the early days of the New Deal, the U.S. variant of social democracy was always primarily regulatory in nature, with famous examples being financial laws such as the Glass-Steagall Act (which limited the activities of private banks), environmental laws (which restrict pollution and extraction), food, drug and medical device quality laws, labor laws, and so on. Moreover, actual implementation and enforcement of these laws was often delegated to regulatory agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, giving rise to the term the ​“regulatory state.” Like in Europe, this approach initially found some success. By the late-1970s, income and wealth inequality had hit historic lows, poverty was falling, rivers and the air were being cleaned up, labor unions were still comparatively strong, living standards had risen, and life expectancy had improved dramatically.

However, since its inception, 👿🎩 business elites and their 🐘 political allies have chafed against this regulatory approach to moderating capitalism (while, paradoxically, often using it to their own material benefit). Commenting on the opposition he faced, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) once famously stated ​“we had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering… Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” Like today, these business interests attempted to thwart the implementation of FDR’s social democratic programs through the Supreme Court — but, ultimately, he was able to face them down through, for instance, threatening to ​“pack” the Court.

However, the real counterattack against the regulatory state began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Capitalizing on the social and economic upheavals of the time, the business community and economic elite, along with their ​“free market” allies in academia, sprang into action. In 1971, just a few months before he was nominated to serve on the Supreme Court, 😈 Lewis F. Powell Jr. — a corporate lawyer who sat on the board of the tobacco company Philip Morris — wrote a letter to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce castigating the business community for its supposed inattention to (and complicity in) the ​“attack on the American free enterprise system.”

The 😈 business elite responded, and soon vast sums of money began flowing to an array of new and existing 🦀🐘🦕🦖🐍🦍🐉🐀 right-wing organizations — including the American Enterprise Institute (founded in 1938), the Reason Foundation (founded 1968), the Heritage Foundation (founded in 1973), the Cato Institute (founded in 1977), the Manhattan Institute (founded in 1977), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC; founded in 1973), and the Federalist Society (founded 1982). The effort was so successful that by Ronald Reagan’s first term, these organizations provided more than half of his high-level presidential appointments.

Under the influence and direction of these organizations and their acolytes, deregulation of the U.S. economy kicked into high gear, championed by both Republicans and Democrats alike. This includes high-profile legislation like, for instance, the 😈🎩 1999 law which essentially repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. However, more insidiously, it also includes a full-blown assault on the agencies tasked with implementing and monitoring regulatory rules. Regulatory agencies are regularly swamped with industry lawsuits and lobbying, vilified by corporate-funded propaganda campaigns, purposefully saddled with leaders who are hostile to their mission (e.g. Rick Perry’s being appointed Secretary of Energy in 2017, an agency he called to be eliminated a few years earlier), sapped of talent by the private sector and, most recently, undercut by the 👿🎩 Supreme Court.

Full article:
https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-supreme-court-is-gutting-regulatory.html

AGelbert COMMENTS:

The Supreme Court has been a tool of 👿🎩 Oligarchs from the start. The Supreme Court was DESIGNED to be the lackey of the Oligarchs (see snippet below), so they will ALWAYS obstruct any move to real democracy at the workplace, or anywhere else, in the USA, PERIOD. 😠

SNIPPETS:
Luther Martin: Representative for Maryland and dissenting Anti-Federalist. Was shocked at the attempt by the elite to overthrow the existing government in secret in 1787, and swore to tell the people what Washington, Madison and Hamilton were up to. ... ...

He said we were going to lose our freedom under the reintroduction of a hated standing army and that we would suffer under the despotism of a Supreme Court with no citizen jury.
Source: the Actual Anti-Federalist writings...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Anti-Federalist

Adam G. Yoksas 
It would be interesting to look at examples from the states to show how public ownership could work. Unlike the Federal government, states have a lot of autonomy to enact policies for themselves that work for them, policies that can, in turn, serve as models for how Federal reform could work.

I can think of a few experiments off the top of my head. The Green Bay Packers is a publicly owned football team, an anomaly in a culture that is defined by a kind of neofeudal impresario model of dynastic ownership. I think a case can be made that this dynastic ownership model no longer serves the public, as these dynasties think nothing about extorting the public to pay for ever more lavish stadiums and infrastructure, with the threat that they will pack up and leave.

Then there is the Alaskan oil and gas dividend, where a portion of the revenue gained by fossil fuel extraction is paid to the citizens of Alaska as a consideration for the use of the Alaskan territory for such purposes.

In many locales--even today--you have publicly owned liquor stores; you simply cannot buy alcohol at a supermarket or a private retail enterprise. How do those work? And I think, more importantly, what is the purpose behind this arrangement? Because it isn't so much aimed at equitable distribution. It's an instrument of control.

Now booze is important to many. But it is far from essential. The greatest fear I think you'll 😈 encounter when proposing public ownership of something like utilities is how that arrangement would be used. For many 😈🎩😉 fear that if something like electricity or heating fuel would become a publicly owned, state owned endeavor, that endeavor would be used as a cudgel against political enemies, or as a means to push behavior modification on a recalcitrant population.

AGelbert > Adam G. Yoksas
Your post leaves out a rather large amount of evidence in U.S. history, where that very Mens rea type behavior by States, that you are, as an alleged "consequence" of more democratic workplaces (i.e. Coops), presently concerned with, took place for nearly a century (in some States, it is STILL going on!).

However, that Court Approved Unjust Abuse had NOTHING to do with Coops, and EVERYTHING to do with Mens rea serial, rampant, continual pecuniary exploitation of certain U.S. Citizens under the color of Law.

Speaking of "using a cudgel against" political (or any other kind of "perceived") enemies or as a means to push behavior modification on a "recalcitrant" population, the States (Southern AND Northern) engaged in exactly THAT after the Civil War (i.e. after African-Americans were, according U.S. LAW, FREE U.S. citizens, entitled to all the Rights inherent to U.S. citizenship) while the Supreme Court looked the other way or voiced approval with legalese code speech.

There were MANY abuses but the Land Grant College abuse by the States was what I wish to bring to your attention. Millions of dollars (in 19th and early 20th century dollars!), were legally coerced in the form of "education" taxes from African-American U.S. Citizens under the guise of "education for all" (i.e. U.S. Law after the Civil War). ALL that money went to WHITE Land Grant colleges and WHITE public schools, and not a PENNY to traditionally BLACK Colleges OR Black public schools. Talk about ABUSE! These Black citizens, among the poorest people in the USA, were being cynically DEFRAUDED.

Details of that and much more (Near the end in the Panel Discussion) too many people do not want to talk about: 😞

1619 and the Making of America
Posted by: AGelbert
« on: May 26, 2022, 12:55:21 pm »


May 26, 2022 By Valley News

Store manager accuses Upper Valley grocery co-op of racial discrimination

SNIPPET:

The woman put on her mask, but shortly thereafter, Hall was alerted that she had pulled it down below her nose while still in store. Hall pointed out to the woman that masks were needed during the COVID-19 pandemic for the safety of customers and employees.

Doren was trying to tell her if she did not wear her mask properly that she would have to leave the store,” a Co-op employee who witnessed the incident later recalled. “👿 She proceeded to argue with him, then she took down her mask, spit in his face and walked out.”

An in-store video camera captured the encounter.

After identifying the woman — she was a regular shopper — Hall wanted her banned from the store. Working with Lebanon police, the Co-op sent her a “no trespass” letter.

But a few days later, after an exchange of emails with the woman’s husband, Co-op General Manager Paul Guidone lifted the ban.

Full article:
https://vtdigger.org/2022/05/25/store-manager-accuses-upper-valley-grocery-co-op-of-racial-discrimination/