6/11 Nina Turner Shares Her Thoughts About Police Brutality with/TYT; Booker Gets Another Major Endorsement & OT

Nina Turner, a firebrand in our circles, was a guest on TYT’s “The Conversation” program. Here’s the video, it is short of 15 min long. Lots of discussion about “defunding the police”, BLM, and yes, Joe Biden.

Charles Booker gets another major newspaper endorsement, this one from the Louisville Courier-Journal.

HUGE NEWS IN KENTUCKY https://t.co/8WuxMNFvMb
— Josh Miller-Lewis (@jmillerlewis) June 10, 2020

Our informed choice is clear: Charles Booker is the kind of political leader and change agent that our commonwealth needs. We believe he is worthy of the Democratic nomination.
The Kentucky state representative, born and raised in Louisville’s West End, has the background, experience, commitment and vision to help transform our state and nation. He brings a perspective and several well-crafted ideas that Kentucky voters need to consider as we approach November’s general election.
While Amy McGrath has broad support, as evidenced by her successful fundraising, she has not shown the progressive ideas and bold leadership necessary to move our state forward. She has been overly moderate, measured and cautious throughout this campaign, focusing more on her military service (which we applaud and sincerely respect) or her motherhood than offering a sweeping vision for the commonwealth — especially in these turbulent times.
Unfortunately, her message to voters has been unimaginative and uninspiring: “Let me tell you what’s wrong with Mitch McConnell instead of explaining why my vision for our commonwealth and our country is a better fit for Kentucky voters.”
We also believe the national Democratic Party was too quick to offer its full support and fundraising apparatus to a candidate who has never held public office and stumbled out of the gate when announcing her candidacy. McGrath’s self-described “common sense Kentucky Democrat” tagline — a campaign strategy to attract potential supporters of President Donald Trump who are looking for an alternative to McConnell — has fallen flat in these final weeks of the campaign.
Candidate Mike Broihier should continue to pursue public office. He supports the progressive ideas that Booker is pushing, including Medicare for All, universal basic income and the Green New Deal. He’s a retired Marine combat veteran with a good grasp of the issues Kentuckians face and the conviction to bring change, but he doesn’t possess the same political experience and passion that Booker brings.

Lots more news, tweets, and videos in the comments. See you there!

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Benny

Tip jar for the usual suspects.

Benny

Sorry I was not able to post a diary yesterday, but after seeing this interview of Nina, I thought her comments warranted FP notice.

Benny

NASCAR bans Confederate flags at tracks

NASCAR issued a statement that read, “The presence of the Confederate flag at NASCAR events runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry. Bringing people together around a love for racing and the community that it creates is what makes our fans and sport special. The display of the Confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties.”
While defenders of the Confederate flag maintain it is merely a sign of pride in Southern heritage, critics of the symbol argue that its presence represents support for the time and slavery and the subsequent racist treatment of black people.
The only full-time black NASCAR driver, Bubba Wallace, called for the organization to ban the Confederate flag during a Monday interview with CNN.
“My next step would be to get rid of all Confederate flags. No one should feel uncomfortable when they come to a NASCAR race,” Wallace said. “So it starts with Confederate flags. Get them out of here. They have no place for them.”
For more than five years, NASCAR has prevented its tracks and teams from flying the Confederate flag, but it hadn’t banned fans from doing so until Wednesday.
Brian France, then NASCAR’s chief executive officer, said in July 2015, “In all areas that NASCAR controls on a given race weekend, the flag has no presence. We have been clear in support of this position throughout our industry and to those across the country who have called for the eradication of the Confederate flag. …
“We will be as aggressive as possible to disassociate NASCAR events from an offensive and divisive symbol. We are working with the industry right now to achieve that goal.”
However, at the same time, NASCAR issued a statement regarding fans’ displays of the Confederate emblem, stating, that it “recognizes that freedom of expression is an inherent right of all citizens.”
Back in 2005, France told CBS’ “60 Minutes” regarding the prevalence of the Confederate flag at NASCAR events, “I think it’s a fading image. Well, look. I can’t — these are massive facilities. And I can’t tell people what flag to fly. I can tell you the flag we get behind. It’s the American flag.”

Benny

So. Let's set the stage…
President Trump has chosen as the venue for his first rally in months, Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of a horrific massacre of African Americans. And he has set the date for June 19th, Juneteenth, a celebration of the end of slavery in the United States.
— Dan Rather (@DanRather) June 10, 2020

Benny

Meantime…

Navy moves to ban Confederate flag

Benny

Racism Is Surging in Germany. Tens of Thousands Are Taking to the Streets to Call for Justice

ens of thousands of anti-racism protesters took to the streets in cities across Germany this weekend, in what may be the largest demonstrator turnout outside of the United States.
In Berlin, organizers expected 1,500 people to show up. Instead, an estimated 15,000 protested in Alexanderplatz, Berlin’s city center, with signs that read “Germany is not innocent” and “Black Lives Matter,” German media outlet DW reported. Demonstrators held a moment of silence that lasted eight minutes and 46 seconds, the amount of time the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck.
But the protests extended far beyond Berlin, with rallies organized in nine other cities across the country. Munich saw a crowd of at least 20,000 people and 14,000 people rallied in Hamburg. Even German football teams—including Werder Bremen, Wolfsburg, Borussia Dortmund and Hertha Berlin—kneeled in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Protests.
But protesters in Germany are not simply expressing outrage at police violence and racial discrimination happening in the United States, they’re calling it out in their own backyard. Here’s what to know:
How big a problem is racism and police brutality in Germany?
A United Nations (UN) group that visited Germany in 2017 concluded that there are systemic problems with racism and an “incomplete understanding of history” throughout the country. They found that institutional racism is entrenched within police institutions. “The repeated denial that racial profiling exists in Germany by police authorities and the lack of an independent complaint mechanism at [the] federal and state level fosters impunity,” Ricardo Sunga, the head of the UN group, said in a statement.
Institutional racism among police officers has been noted especially in the eastern state of Saxony, where in 2016, a video surfaced of officers from the region violently dragging a refugee out of a bus. Police racism in the region prompted Martin Dulig, Saxony leader of the Social Democratic Party(SPD)at the time to ask “if sympathies for Pegida[an anti-Islam movement] and the AfD [the far-right Alternative for Germany party] are more widespread in the police than among normal citizens.”
Despite the UN sounding the alarm bell in 2016, the problem did not improve—it got worse. The number of reported cases of racial discrimination significantly increased in Germany, rising by 59% between 2016 and 2019, according to an annual report presented on Tuesday by the German Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency (ADS). In January, the office of Germany’s only sitting African-born lawmaker, Karamba Diaby, was riddled with bullet holes. Diaby later reported receiving death threats from neo-Nazi groups. Bernhard Franke, the head of ADS said Germany has an “ongoing problem with racial discrimination and does not give enough consistent legal support to victims,” noting that “discrimination wears people down.”
But the true extent of Germany’s racism problem remains unknown. The country does not collect data on race and ethnicity, meaning that officials do not know exactly how many of their residents and citizens are people of color or the full extent to which these populations face poorer health, social, and economic outcomes. While the UN group encouraged Germany in 2017 to collect data on ethnicity in order to better identify and address systemic racism, this data has not yet been collected.

Benny

Good grief!

My car took the bullets. I am safe.
When I say that I am the people I serve, it’s not a slogan!
A bullet went through my door handle on one side of the car, another went through my tire on the other side.
I’m committed to taking us from “surviving St. Louis” to “living it.” pic.twitter.com/iBqSSzc43G
— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) June 11, 2020

orlbucfan

She knows those streets and ‘hoods. Hope she tightens up on staying safe.

Benny

Protests fucking work https://t.co/lkivlgnBJl
— Kevin Nguyen (@knguyen) June 11, 2020

LieparDestin

Bernie Sanders Should Embrace the Demand to Defund the Police

This week Bernie Sanders, now out of the running for the Democratic Party presidential nominee, expressed some skepticism about the demand to defund the police in an interview in the New Yorker. That demand has become a rallying cry for the protests against racist police brutality that have arisen in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But while Sanders echoed some of the core concepts animating the demand — like reassigning mental health and addiction services to non-police agencies — he didn’t explicitly lend it his approval.
Sanders didn’t outright say we shouldn’t defund the police, though he did say police officers should be well-paid. Instead, he expressed disagreement with the idea that police departments should be abolished, which he seemed to conflate with defunding. The interviewer also conflated them in his question, asking, “A lot of people in the progressive movement now are calling for defunding or abolishing the police. Do you —” to which Sanders responded, “Do I think we should not have police departments in America? No, I don’t. There’s no city in the world that does not have police departments.”
One of Sanders’s political strengths is his ability to pinpoint demands that are ambitious enough to raise ordinary people’s expectations and transform the way they think about the relationship between politics and their daily lives, but not so much that they seem impossible and fail to resonate. Sanders has always carefully walked a tightrope of trying to expand people’s imaginations without losing credibility or popular confidence.
That orientation toward reforms is precisely why he should publicly embrace the demand to defund the police.

orlbucfan

Hey LD! 🙂 The FRighties are working their usual psycho-linguistical malfeasance on that phrase. It needs to be rewritten.

jcitybone

Yes it’s easy to demagogue and is causing needless division on our side.

Torabs

Disagree. Why should we allow bad-faith attacks dictate the language we use? Defund the Police is perfectly clear, people like the interviewer need to become educated as to what the demand means.

Not happy with Bernie’s answer to the question.

jcitybone

Wrong spot

LieparDestin

‘Their greed is gonna kill us’: Indian Country fights against more fracking

few winters ago, Sam Sage started getting strange phone calls.
Families living in rural areas south-west of Counselor, New Mexico, were telling him they saw sickly bull snakes and near-death rattlers above ground during the snowy, winter months of the south. Sage, the administrator at the Counselor Chapter House, a Navajo local government center, was incredulous.
“In February? There’s no snakes in February,” he said.
Sage had a theory for what was happening: underground vibrations from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, forced the snakes from their dens and on to the surface.
Over the years, he’s noticed other changes. Vegetation died off and the climate became drier. People living in homes with dirt floors told him they had felt vibrations from the ground late at night, from 2 to 4am.
The Navajo and Puebloan lands of north-western New Mexico where Counselor is located are no stranger to drilling. The first oil well in the area was reportedly drilled in 1911 with natural gas following soon after.
Today, the US Bureau of Land Management is considering a plan, known as the Mancos-Gallup Amendment, which could lease land in the region for some 3,000 new wells – many of which would be for fracking oil and gas. The plan would expand drilling into some of northern New Mexico’s last available public lands, threatening the desecration of sacred Native artefacts near Chaco Canyon while bringing in a swath of new public health risks to a place that’s already reeling from one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the world.

LieparDestin

George Floyd’s brother, Philanese Floyd, went before a congressional committee on police brutality and delivered an emotional opening statement advocating for reform. Former Bernie Sanders National Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray joined the CBSN special, “Red & Blue: State of Our Union,” to discuss police reform and what next steps look like to enact such changes.

Torabs

The speech is worth watching, it was quite good.

LieparDestin

Bernie Sanders Is Not Done Fighting

The senator on the protests, his phone calls with Joe Biden, and when to compromise.

(sorry for repeats!)

LieparDestin

Jamil Smith spoke with Killer Mike of Run the Jewels about their new album ‘RTJ4,’ the national Black Lives Matter protests and his speech at an Atlanta press conference, and why he supported Bernie Sanders for President.