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Venezuela's Racist Opposition Wants to Import Trump's Model |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54508"><span class="small">The Juan Ramon Lugo Afro-Revolutionary Movement, teleSUR</span></a>
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Friday, 29 May 2020 08:28 |
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Excerpt: "Police brutality is being reoriented under the broader spectrum of racial prejudice that includes African-Americans, Latinos, indigenous people, and others."
Students protest against Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro on Wednesday in Caracas. (photo: Ariana Cubillos/AP)
Venezuela's Racist Opposition Wants to Import Trump's Model
By The Juan Ramon Lugo Afro-Revolutionary Movement, teleSUR
29 May 20
The recent events in the city of Minneapolis (Minnesota) follows a chain of brutality and racial extermination that is becoming more acute each year.
 he Juan Ramon Lugo Afro-Revolutionary Movement condemns the systematic racial extermination taking place against the African-American population in the United States. Donald Trump's arrival to power is exacerbating this extermination.
The 19th Century racial extermination organization, the Klu Klux Klan, was reborn. Today, its most iconic figures are Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Trump, who are leading interventionist policies in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa.
Police brutality is being reoriented under the broader spectrum of racial prejudice that includes African-Americans, Latinos, indigenous people, and others. This bestial brutality is crossing the limits of institutional legality. It is licensed to kill under the rubrics of racial prejudice.
The recent events in the city of Minneapolis (Minnesota) follows a chain of brutality and racial extermination that is becoming more acute each year. Let's remember that last May 20, a white man and his son shot and killed young Afro Ahmaud Arbey in Georgia.
We cannot forget that the technique used, the police had practiced respiratory asphyxiation since 2014 when African-American Eric Garner was suffocated in New York City. "I cannot breathe….I can't breathe" until he died hanged by the police. The police responsible for this were acquitted a few months later.
The city of Minneapolis's racist police repeated the same action against African-American George Floyd, who cried out, "please, I can't breathe…..I can't breathe" in front of the passive gaze of other white police officers. Floyd was murdered cowardly last Monday. The Minneapolis Police Department immediately fired the four police officers.
Immediately outraged, people from the south, north, and center of Minneapolis took the streets to protest and demand that the police officers involved are arrest and prosecuted. This time they should not be released like they were in the case of Eric Garner's case in New York. In the early hours of Thursday, another Afro man was shot in the middle of the Minneapolis riots.
Police brutality is a whole system, and when you add COVID 19 to the mix, these two are leading to ethnic cleansing in the United States under the TRUMP government.
This is the kind of police that aspires to be in Latin America and, more specifically, in Venezuela that the white racist opposition in our country Voluntad Popular is leading is desperately begging to intervene militarily in our country. These are the same people who in 2017 burned nineteen Afro-descendants. It is a system that is being reproduced in the fascist mints of the governments that Trump has under his rule in Latin America.
As an Afro-Revolutionary Movement, we demand that this case be brought to the United Nations. The racial extermination taking place in the United States, Colombia, Brazil, and Honduras has become more acute. This all contradicts the United Nations Decade for Afro-descendant peoples.
We condemn the silent complicity of OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro.
We demand that the government of Donald Trump ceases its criminal blockade against the Venezuelan people.
We call on organizations at the continental level to speak out against police brutality not only in the United States but in Colombia, Brazil, and Honduras.
For the Juan Ramon Lugo Afro-Revolutionary Movement, the following organizations:
Afroaragueños, Afroamerica Foundation, AfroTV, Jose Leonardo Chirino Association, Ibarra Cumbe (Puerto Cabello), La Vega Autochthonous, Panecillos Association, Cimarrones de Vargas, IETPA JUAN DE DIOS DIAZ (Sucre State), Grupo Elegua, Cimarrones de Yaracuy, Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations, Network of Afro-descendants of Venezuela
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The Love and Rage of Larry Kramer |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54500"><span class="small">Matthew Schneier, The Cut</span></a>
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Thursday, 28 May 2020 12:45 |
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Schneier writes: "Dr. Anthony Fauci, who knew Kramer during his tenure at the National Institutes of Health - they were enemies and later became friends - long before he became America's coronavirus czar, once said: 'In American medicine, there are two eras: before Larry and after Larry.'"
Larry Kramer, at home in New York in 1993. (photo: Getty)
ALSO SEE: Larry Kramer, AIDS Activist, Author, and Playwright, Is Dead at 84
The Love and Rage of Larry Kramer
By Matthew Schneier, The Cut
28 May 20
 read Faggots for the first time earlier this year — guiltily, belatedly. Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel is an acknowledged classic of gay literature, but most of the gay men I know knew of it but hadn’t read it. It was a prerequisite that no longer seemed entirely required. A picaresque about gay life in New York in the mid ’70s, the city’s own Weimar era, Faggots is nearly gory in its unapologetic pornography, incandescent in its provocations, starting with the title. (Liberated as I claim to be, I felt funny reading it on the subway.) Parts of the novel feel dated, but its boldness, its directness is shockingly modern. “There are 2,556,596 faggots in the New York City area,” it begins, which seems a fair enough estimate now. Forty years ago, Kramer had our number.
Faggots is funny, filthy, furious. It is a great book, if not always a good one, with an unwranglable cast of thousands. But its heart is Fred Lemish, who cruises the bathhouses and the Pines looking for love — a hero’s journey, or an antihero’s journey, no one could seem to agree which. “A grotesque Pilgrim’s Progress,” said the Washington Post, according to the cover of my 1979 paperback edition; “an odyssey,” in Warner Books’s own estimation.
If it is an odyssey, Larry Kramer (Fred Lemish’s puppeteer), is Odysseus. Or he is Cassandra, wailing her warnings to a deaf world. Or he is Perseus, the monster slayer. Those who describe Kramer always reach for Greek myth; that felt like his natural line. He spent decades railing at an unlistening world. He slew more monsters than any one man should be expected to. His odyssey was from an unhappy childhood and the closet to the frontlines of the bloody battleground of HIV and AIDS. Kramer wouldn’t be cowed by anyone into conformity or silence. The only thing that could do that was the inevitable. Kramer died on Wednesday at 84, of pneumonia. He had skirted death before, surviving liver disease and a liver transplant and rumors of his own demise, to go on living for many years with HIV.
Faggots is a loud book. Kramer was a loud person. He delighted in public exhibitions, finger-pointing, naming-and-shaming — not of those who were gay, but those who wouldn’t help them, wouldn’t fight for them, and those who wouldn’t fight for themselves. He was still mostly known as a novelist, as the author of Faggots (which many in the gay community condemned as moralizing), when he focused the righteous rage of Faggots on a terrible and worthy cause. In 1983, he wrote one of the signal pieces of the growing AIDS crisis, for the cover of the independent newspaper New York Native: “1,112 and Counting.” As in, deaths. “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble,” he wrote. “If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this Earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get.”
Kramer got angry; as time went on, and the death count went up, more and more gay men (and their friends) became angry. Kramer stayed angry. It was a righteous, impatient anger, and it never let up, even as it earned him as many enemies as friends. “When it comes to being an asshole, Larry is a virtuoso with no peer,” Rodger McFarlane, a former lover of his, told The New Yorker. “Nobody can alienate people quicker, better, or more completely.’’ (Kramer did eventually find love, and married David Webster, an architect and designer.)
I like to think of Larry Kramer as a necessary asshole — I think you could even make a case for him as St. Asshole. (Hello, Vatican? You remember him, from his long, bitter siege on Cardinal O’Connor and the Catholic Church.) Kramer co-founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis, to agitate for AIDS research and funding and eventually, to minister to the community. Then, when Kramer deemed it insufficiently radical, he co-founded ACT UP, which staged demonstrations and disruptions, an activism which sometimes felt close to anarchy. He was far from the only warrior of the AIDS crisis (eulogy tends to narrow the wide field of focus to the single person) but he was a brutally effective and enduring one. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who knew Kramer during his tenure at the National Institutes of Health — they were enemies and later became friends — long before he became America’s coronavirus czar, once said: “In American medicine, there are two eras: “before Larry and after Larry.’’
We live in a world Kramer helped to make. My first HIV test, and some of my subsequent ones, were administered free, confidentially, at GHMC’s clinics, when I was panicked and terrified, knew only the family pediatrician, and had nowhere else to go. That you could speak about AIDS in the New York of my childhood — when the “Decision” comic strips appeared on the subway, the HIV melodrama of Julio and Marisol, when Rent played to packed houses every night — Kramer has a part of that. The endless insistence that the FDA and the CDC do their jobs helped spur the development of HIV drugs — he has a part of that too. Any reckoning of the essential art of the AIDS crisis — that, too. You can’t watch The Normal Heart (1985), finally made into a film by Ryan Murphy in 2014 with an all-star cast, and not be angry, still. And wonder why didn’t anybody listen to Ned Weeks, a character based on Kramer himself. “Ned Weeks” was Kramer’s personal email handle to the end.
Faggots was a pre-AIDS book, and far less tragically romantic than, say, Dancer From the Dance, which was also set in Fire Island and the baths, also published in 1978, and is far more likely to be found on the shelves of a Pines share house these days. Faggots had an agenda: He wanted to show how men treated each other. The name was a provocation and a dare but also a critique: Gay men should change your ways “before you fuck yourself to death.” Maybe because it hit too close to home, or it just came off as anti-fun, it wasn’t received well at the time. Then came the plague.
Some in the gay community continue to take issue with Kramer’s scolding about sex and its consequences, especially as the age of Truvada has helped — for those who have access to it — to separate sexual abandon from sexual risk. (He seemed to go back and forth on endorsing PrEP.) But he’d watched his corner of the world burn like the Everard Baths burned (an incident which is fictionalized in Faggots). That very recent world — 40 years, only a little more than my lifetime — is now visible to us mainly in glimpses: in the photos of Peter Hujar, Alvin Baltrop, Stanley Stellar, or Leonard Fink; in Parting Glances, Bill Sherwood’s single film before succumbing to AIDS; in the writing of Edmund White, David Wojnarowicz, and Thom Gunn. Kramer outlived most of them, and kept writing, and kept arguing, on and on. (The second volume of his years-long opus, The American People, came out just this year.) But that world forged him. And he never let down his guard.
Of course, the AIDS crisis isn’t history; it isn’t even past. That many of us are lucky to know it less viscerally than Kramer did is part of his complicated gift to us. It is a gift unequally distributed — HIV has become something more likely to affect communities of color. How much of the movement’s success was the success of sons of privilege who knew how to advocate for themselves and bend the ears of power? But fury is now our responsibility: the Kramer bequest. Larry’s legacy is assured, even if the work is not done.
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Pompeo Is Trying to Do Another Arms Deal With Saudi Arabia. Congress Must Stop Him. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54497"><span class="small">Sen. Bob Menendez, CNN</span></a>
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Thursday, 28 May 2020 12:45 |
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Menendez writes: "The American people have the right to know that while the Trump administration cannot seem to be bothered to build a political coalition to combat the biggest pandemic in a century, the administration has recently managed to find a way to double down on President Donald Trump's repulsive embrace of Saudi Arabia's murderous regime."
Saudi forces in Yemen. (photo: AFP)
Pompeo Is Trying to Do Another Arms Deal With Saudi Arabia. Congress Must Stop Him.
By Sen. Bob Menendez, CNN
28 May 20
he American people have the right to know that while the Trump administration cannot seem to be bothered to build a political coalition to combat the biggest pandemic in a century, the administration has recently managed to find a way to double down on President Donald Trump's repulsive embrace of Saudi Arabia's murderous regime. And as usual, it involves arms. The administration is currently trying to sell thousands more precision-guided bombs to the President's "friend," Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Before we went into pandemic lockdown, I received draft State Department documentation that it is now pursuing this previously undisclosed sale -- details of which have not yet been made public -- even though the Saudis seemingly want out of their failed and brutal war in Yemen, and despite the fact that a bipartisan majority in Congress rejected previous sales of these weapons. The administration has refused to answer our fundamental questions to justify this new sale and articulate how it would be consistent with US values and national security objectives.
This is not an isolated problem. The administration's attempt to carry out this arms deal comes on the heels of Trump's firing of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick, who was reportedly investigating the administration's special treatment of Saudi Arabia over the $8 billion deal, among other issues. The IG's probe allegedly focused on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's decision last year to declare what a bipartisan majority of Congress rightly condemned as a false emergency to avoid Congressional oversight of an $8 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Linick's firing casts the first anniversary of that multi-billion dollar mistake into stark contrast. Not only has the President admitted to removing the IG at Pompeo's behest, but the administration is also trying to get Congress to rubber stamp another massive sale of munitions to the Saudis. Congress has the ability to disapprove of the sale unless an emergency is declared -- as it was last year.
Last year's "emergency" arms sales debacle should serve as a warning to prevent history from repeating itself.
To review, as the Senate Democrat with jurisdiction over US arm sales, I initially stopped the $8 billion sale until the administration could prove that Saudi Arabia had stopped bombing Yemeni markets, funerals, school buses full of children, and hospitals. After Washington Post columnist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered on what US intelligence agencies concluded were the orders of the Saudi Crown Prince, the campaign to justify the sale abruptly stopped.
Instead, the administration tried to sidestep Congress' statutory oversight role to finalize the sale. In May 2019, Pompeo relied on deception to declare 22 arms sales were an "emergency," including nearly 60,000 precision-guided bombs that the Saudis had previously rained down upon innocent Yemeni civilians. The so-called emergency? To "deter further Iranian adventurism."
Sadly, subsequent Iranian attacks against oil facilities at Abqaiq and aggression in the Arabian Gulf confirmed these sales had little to do with deterrence of Iran and everything to do with placating bin Salman. In fact, Iran's continued aggressive behavior and advances in nuclear technology development reconfirm its malign intentions in the region.
There was no emergency. It was a fabricated tale to reward an eager and unsavory customer of US arms.
As a result, I led a bipartisan coalition that passed 22 Senate resolutions disapproving the sales. The House of Representatives followed suit. While we couldn't overturn Trump's veto, we made clear that the Congress strongly rejected the administration's sellout of US security and moral principles. Today, a year later, there is still no justification for the US to sell bombs to Saudi Arabia.
That is why I am particularly troubled that the State Department has again refused to explain the need to sell thousands more bombs to Saudi Arabia on top of the thousands that have yet to be delivered from last year's "emergency." The secretary of state needs to answer our questions. What is their reasoning to continue selling weapons to the Saudis? Why should Congress allow Trump to continue currying personal favor with a capricious Saudi despot who thinks he can butcher his critics without consequences?
Ironically, that is why Inspectors General exist. They are key to a functioning democracy and their independence is paramount to conducting effective oversight of our federal agencies. Not coincidentally, Pompeo choked that accountability mechanism when he had Inspector General Linick silenced. We still don't know exactly why Pompeo did it, but we know that Linick was seeking answers to these questions. That is why I joined forces with House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel to open a bicameral investigation into what appears to be a politically motivated act of retaliation designed to protect Pompeo.
As inconvenient as the President and the Secretary might find Congressional oversight or Inspectors General, we will continue doing our jobs. The question remains: why is the President and his top diplomat working so hard to prop up one of the world's worst despots? Until we have an answer, Congress must reject this new multi-million dollar sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
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RSN: Amy Klobuchar, Minneapolis Police, and Her VP Quest |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Thursday, 28 May 2020 11:59 |
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Solomon writes: "Eighteen years before Minneapolis police killed an unarmed black man named George Floyd on Monday, Minneapolis police killed an unarmed black man named Christopher Burns. Today, U.S. senator Amy Klobuchar decries the killing of Floyd. Back then, Minneapolis chief prosecutor Amy Klobuchar refused to prosecute city police for killing Burns."
Sen. Amy Klobuchar. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty)
Amy Klobuchar, Minneapolis Police, and Her VP Quest
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
28 May 20
 ighteen years before Minneapolis police killed an unarmed black man named George Floyd on Monday, Minneapolis police killed an unarmed black man named Christopher Burns. Today, U.S. senator Amy Klobuchar decries the killing of Floyd. Back then, Minneapolis chief prosecutor Amy Klobuchar refused to prosecute city police for killing Burns.
A year ago, The Washington Post published a thorough news article under a clear headline: “As a Prosecutor in Heavily White Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar Declined to Go After Police Involved in Fatal Encounters With Black Men.” Her refusal to seek justice after Burns died was part of a pattern.
With Klobuchar now on Joe Biden’s short list for vice president, the gruesome killing of Floyd has refocused attention on Klobuchar’s history of racial injustice. In sharp contrast to her prosecutorial approach two decades ago, she has issued a statement calling for “a complete and thorough outside investigation” into Floyd’s death and declaring that “those involved in this incident must be held accountable.”
During the first years of this century, with a bright political future ahead of her, Klobuchar refused to hold police officers accountable. And her failure to prosecute police who killed black men was matched by racially slanted eagerness to prosecute black men on the basis of highly dubious evidence.
While Klobuchar has occasionally been subjected to media scrutiny of her record as a prosecutor in Minnesota, she has routinely enjoyed favorable coverage often sliding into outright puffery. In short, much of the media establishment adores Klobuchar and her corporate centrist politics.
When Amy Klobuchar was running for president, corporate media served as her biggest political base. News coverage and punditry often supplied praise, while rarely bothering to delve into her 12-year record in the Senate. Klobuchar’s image as a “moderate” was endearing enough to many powerful media outlets.
When the time came for endorsements from newspapers early this year, Klobuchar scored with big publications like the San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Houston Chronicle. Notably, The New York Times co-endorsed her (along with Elizabeth Warren). In fact, no candidate did better than Klobuchar with daily paper endorsements during the presidential primary season.
Unfortunately for Klobuchar, media elites don’t cast many votes in Democratic primaries and caucuses. Her drumbeat about being a fellow Midwesterner fell flat in Iowa, where she finished fifth in the caucuses with 12 percent. Days later, corporate media went gaga over one-liners she delivered in a debate just before the primary in New Hampshire, where she came in third with almost 20 percent of the vote. But Klobuchar went on to receive only 4 percent in the Nevada caucuses and then 3 percent in the South Carolina primary. Two days later, she withdrew from the race.
Since then, Klobuchar has risen to the top tier of Biden’s possible VP picks. Her selection would likely be disastrous.
As I told The Hill newspaper recently, “Someone like Klobuchar is anathema to broadening the ticket. If Biden is serious about unity then he’s got to pitch a tent big enough to include progressives.”
Klobuchar’s political record, when it comes to light, simply can’t stand up to scrutiny. While mainstream media rarely seem interested in her Senate record, it has been no less contemptuous of equal protection under the law than her career as a prosecutor.
When the progressive advocacy group Demand Justice issued a “Report Card” about the confirmation votes of Senate Democrats on President Trump’s right-wing federal judge appointees, it explained that the report graded “willingness to fight Trump’s judges.” Elizabeth Warren received an “A,” Bernie Sanders an “A-” and Kamala Harris a “B+.”
Amy Klobuchar got an “F.”
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national director of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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y social media feeds have been full of comparisons between the treatment by police of Reopener mobs, some of whom invaded the Michigan state house while fully armed with assault weapons, and the treatment of protesters in Minneapolis regarding the killing of George Floyd by a policemen who kept his knee on his neck. 
