At least three stabbed in melee at Ku Klux Klan rally in California
By Tori Richards
At least three people were stabbed on Saturday and one of them was critically wounded in a scuffle between members of the Ku Klux Klan and counter-protesters near a planned KKK rally in Anaheim, California, police said.
Four people were arrested following the melee, including one Klan member who is accused of the stabbing, said Anaheim Police Sergeant Daron Wyatt.
Three counter-protesters were taken into custody after stomping a KKK member on the ground, Wyatt said.
Wyatt said the altercation took place as soon as several Klan members arrived at the park in Anaheim, about 35 miles southeast of Los Angeles, for a planned rally there.
"As soon as they got out of their vehicle, immediately they were attacked by counter-protesters and this caused a melee down the block," he said.
The event was captured by Adelle Nazarian and broadcast "live" via Periscope.
Wyatt said at least three counter-protesters and possibly a fourth were stabbed in the ensuing confrontation. He said the most seriously wounded of the victims was taken to a local hospital's trauma center, where he was listed in critical condition.
Left: Stabbing victim seeks help. Right: Blood stains the sidewalk near the fire hydrant where stabbing victim sat. (Screen capture from video)
The Klan, known for their white robes and peaked hoods often worn by its members, has a long history of violence toward African-Americans, Jews and other groups, according the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups in the United States.
Several witnesses said that a peaceful counter-protest had been under way for about three hours in the park a mile north of Disneyland when the Klansmen arrived in a black sport utility vehicle.
The SUV pulled up and three men got out and began to unload signs when the group of about 50 counter-protesters ran over, yelling and throwing sticks, witnesses said.
I
reached Mckesson by phone soon after he announced his candidacy for
mayor. When I asked him how he funded all of his travel despite not
having a job, he initially replied, “I don’t have an answer to that.
There’s an answer in the New York Times article.”
After
being informed that the Times offered no such answer, Mckesson stated,
“You know, people ask me this, and I haven’t even had to answer this. I,
you know, me and you don’t have a relationship. You know, you’re a
reporter to me, you know—I’ve answered it many times. I will put that on
my list of things and try to double back with you.” Several hours later, Mckesson texted me the link to a Tweet from last spring claiming that his excursions were funded by unnamed “family and friends.”—Drew Franklin
DeRay Mckesson (Screen capture from YouTube video)
By Drew Franklin
For those who’ve never paid much attention, Teach For America sounds like a benevolent and benign idea: recruit bright college grads, give them some teacher-training and place them in some of the nation’s neediest schools for a two-year commitment to teach kids.
The reality behind TFA’s sunny exterior is somewhat more sinister. Education policy experts today consider the nonprofit founded by Wendy Kopp in 1990 to be at the vanguard of the school privatization movement. TFA is also a media juggernaut in its own right, known for deploying a sophisticated public relations arsenal to advance an agenda focused on crushing teachers’ unions and privatizing public school systems. TFA's funders, including the Waltons, Bill and Melinda Gates and top Fortune 500 corporations, all have plenty to gain from the commodification of public goods and the destruction of public service unions, and its 11,000 corps members provide a valuable service to that end.
Teach for America’s peculiar brand of social justice was on bold display at its 25th Anniversary Summit the weekend of February 5. The confab drew 15,000 corps members, alumni and supporters to Washington for three days of seminars on lofty issues like, “Allies, Co-Conspirators and Coalition Building: Showing Up for Justice Across Lines of Power.” But one of the biggest draws was the discussion on “The New Civil Rights Agenda and Education,” co-headlined by DeRay Mckesson, the TFA alum and 30-year-old Black Lives Matter activist who received a $10,000 award from TFA last year.
________________
The Cory Booker Effect
How A Republican Operative Turned Black Democrats Into Shills for School Vouchers, Charter Schools and Public School Privatization An exposé by activist and journalist Glenn Ford
________________
When Mckesson announced his campaign for mayor of Baltimore this month, his name topped the list of trending topics on Twitter for several hours. Even without outlining a strategy to defeat better-known, more entrenched candidates, Mckesson received nearly $130,000 in online donations, met with President Barack Obama (who said Mckesson and associates “were better organizers than I was”), and secured his status as one of the country’s most closely watched political outsiders. Headlines appeared across national media, from Slate to the Guardian to the Washington Post, with the progressive online magazine Truthdig proclaiming Mckesson "Truthdigger of the Week."
With his candidacy for a city whose public schools are a key target of the education reform movement, the time seems right to scrutinize Mckesson’s relationship with Teach for America more closely. His high-profile appearance at the TFA gala only days after filing his last-minute bid to enter the race was only the latest collaboration with the organization spearheading a sustained attack on teacher's unions and traditional public schools.
Promotion From TFA, Shade From Local Organizers
DeRay Mckesson is a prolific Twitter personality who first came to national prominence during the uprising of 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. His live-tweeting of protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s death quickly garnered a massive following, and as a wave of protests swept the United States, Mckesson was consistently among the first on the scene, making him and his Twitter feed an invaluable source of information for journalists.
With his rapid emergence, Mckesson developed a well-tailored image as a media darling, known in equal measure for his ubiquitous blue Patagonia vest and composed attitude, holding his own in interviews with the most confrontational cable news hosts. The name “DeRay” became synonymous with the Black Lives Matter protest movement, boosted by features in mainstream news magazines and promotion from international celebrities like Beyonce. His influence emanates from Twitter, where he maintains over 300,000 followers, mixing live updates from demonstrations against police brutality with commercial-style promotions of corporations like McDonald's and Spotify.
As Mckesson rose to prominence, TFA was there to provide promotion through its powerful PR apparatus.
Mckesson had no connection to Ferguson when he first arrived on Aug. 16, 2014, according to an interview he gave Huffington Post later the same year. But it didn’t take him long to connect with another protester named Brittany Packnett, with whom he began working the same day. The fact that Packnett is executive director of TFA’s St. Louis chapter likely contributed to their immediate rapport.
At the time, Mckesson was senior director of human capital for Minneapolis Public Schools. He says he commuted to Ferguson on weekends before eventually quitting his job to protest full-time.
A Twitter search query produces a clear timeline of Mckesson's subsequent transition from human resources manager to social justice talent, aided by promotion from Teach For America. It begins with a post to TFA’s official blog, in which Mckesson pontificates on his activities in Ferguson. TFA tweeted a link to that post on Aug. 21, 2014, at which point Mckesson would have been in the besieged midwestern town for five days.
The next item on the timeline, dated October 29, is an advertisement for a “national conference call featuring TFA alumni @MsPackyetti [Packnett] and @deray.” Two weeks after that, the Washington Post published a profile of McKesson and TFA promoted it on social media, identifying him again as a “TFA alumnus.” On Dec. 10, Time Magazine named him along with a handful of peers, collectively referred to as the “Ferguson protesters,” as runners-up to its 2014 Person of the Year, and TFApromoted that too.
Mckesson’s big break, however, was a cover story for the May 4 issue of the New York Times Magazine, with the headline "Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us." The
6700-word article profiles McKesson and fellow overnight celebrity
Ferguson protester Johnetta Elzie, as they drop in to demonstrations in
cities across the United States over the course of nine months.
I
reached Mckesson by phone soon after he announced his candidacy for
mayor. When I asked him how he funded all of his travel despite not
having a job, he initially replied, “I don’t have an answer to that.
There’s an answer in the New York Times article.”
After
being informed that the Times offered no such answer, Mckesson stated,
“You know, people ask me this, and I haven’t even had to answer this. I,
you know, me and you don’t have a relationship. You know, you’re a
reporter to me, you know—I’ve answered it many times. I will put that on
my list of things and try to double back with you.” Several hours later, Mckesson texted me the link to a Tweet from last spring claiming that his excursions were funded by unnamed “family and friends.”
By Felix Horne
“Badessa” was a third-year engineering student in western Ethiopia in April 2014 when he and most of his classmates joined a protest over the potential displacement of ethnic Oromo farmers like his family because of the government’s plan to expand the capital, Addis Ababa, into the farmland.
The night of the first protests he was arrested and taken to an unmarked detention center. Each night he heard his fellow students screaming in agony as one by one they were tortured by interrogators. “I still hear the screams,” he told me later. Eventually his turn came to be interrogated. “What kind of country is it when I voice concern that my family could lose their farm for a government project and I am arrested, tortured, and now living as a refugee?”
Since mid-November, large-scale protests have again swept through Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region, and the response from security forces has again been brutal. They have killed countless students and farmers, and arrested opposition politicians and countless others. On January 12, the government announced it was cancelling the master plan, but that hasn’t stopped the protests and the resultant crackdown.
Although the protest was initially about the potential for displacement, it has become about so much more. Despite being the biggest ethnic group in Ethiopia, Oromos have often felt marginalized by successive governments and feel unable to voice concerns over government policy. Oromos who express dissent are often arrested and tortured or otherwise mistreated in detention, accused of belonging to the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), a group that has long been mostly inactive and that the government designated a terrorist organization.
The government is doing all it can to make sure that the news of these protests doesn’t circulate within the country or reach the rest of the world. Ethiopia’s allies, including governments in the region and the African Union, have largely stood by as Ethiopia has steadily strangled the ability of ordinary Ethiopians to access information and peacefully express their views, whether in print or in public demonstrations. But they should be worried about what is happening in Oromia right now, as Ethiopia — Africa’s second most-populous country and a key security ally of the US — grapples with this escalating crisis.
This may prove to be the biggest political event to hit Ethiopia since the controversial 2005 elections resulted in a crackdown on protesters in which security forces killed almost 200 people and arrested tens of thousands .
Although the government focuses its efforts on economic development and on promoting a narrative of economic success, for many farmers in Oromia and elsewhere economic development comes at a devastating cost. As one Oromo student told me “All we hear about is development. The new foreign-owned farms and roads is what the world knows, but that just benefits the government. For us [Oromos] it means we lose our land and then we can’t sustain ourselves anymore.”
It has become almost impossible for journalists and human rights monitors to get information about what is happening, especially in smaller towns and rural areas outside Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia is one of the most restrictive environments for independent investigation, reporting, and access to information, earning the country a top-10 spot in the global ranking of jailers of journalists. For the past decade, the government has limited access to information by regularly threatening, imprisoning, and prosecuting individual activists, bloggers, and journalists and sending a clear public message that the media must self-censor and that dissent or criticism of government policy will not be tolerated.
Independent media have dwindled—more than 70 journalists have fled the country since 2010 and five of the last independent publications closed down before the May elections. Meanwhile the state-run media parrot the government line, in this case claiming that the Oromo protesters are linked to “terrorist groups” and “anti-peace elements” who are “aiming to create havoc and chaos.”
Very few international journalists are based in Ethiopia. Those who have attempted to cover events on the ground since the protests began have braved threats and arrest, but these are a few lone voices.
Given restrictions on local and international media, you might think that ordinary citizens, local activists, and nongovernmental organizations would fill the gaps and document the events in Oromia. But Ethiopia’s human rights activists and independent groups have been crushed by draconian legislation and threats, and even ordinary people are often terrified to speak out. People who dare to speak to international media outlets or independent groups have been arrested. The government taps phone lines and uses European-made spyware to target journalists and opposition members outside the country.
Since the protests began, the restrictions have become even harsher. Authorities have arrested people, including health workers, for posting photos and videos or messages of support on social media. The state-run telecom network has also been cut in some areas, making it much more difficult to get information out from hotspots.
Radio and satellite television outlets based outside Ethiopia, including some diaspora stations, play a key role disseminating information about the protests within Oromia, as they also did in 2014 during the last round of protests. Last year numerous people were arrested in Oromia during the protests merely for watching the diaspora-run Oromia Media Network (OMN).
The government has frequently jammed foreign stations in the past, violating international regulations in the process. When the government is unable to jam it puts pressure on the satellite companies themselves. Throughout the protests government agents have reportedly been destroying satellite dishes.
Yet despite the clear efforts to muzzle voices, information is coming out. Some protesters are losing their fear of expressing dissent and are speaking openly about the challenges they are facing. Social media plays a key role in disseminating information as people share photos and videos of rallies, of bloodied protesters, and of expressions of peaceful resistance in the face of security forces using excessive force.
In the coming days and weeks Ethiopia’s friends and partners should condemn the use of excessive force by security forces that is causing tragic and unnecessary deaths. But they should also be clear that Ethiopia needs to ensure access to information and stop disrupting telecommunications and targeting social media users. The world needs to know what is happening in Oromia—and Ethiopians have a right to know what is happening in their country.
Reprinted with permission from Human Rights Watch.
By Carey Wedler
Throughout the United States, Americans believe there is a “war on police.” A recent survey found 58% of Americans agree with this sentiment. A new, privately-funded billboard campaign hijacks the “Black Lives Matter” moniker to read “Blue Lives Matter,” highlighting powerful pushback from law enforcement sympathizers against activists.
The FBI’s 2014 report, Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA), released this week, appears to support the notion that police officers are in danger and unduly targeted. The number of officers killed by individuals committing “felonious acts” jumped from 27 in 2013 to 51 last year, and police apologists are all but guaranteed to point to this increase as proof their concerns are justified. A deeper examination of the data, however, reveals that police are not only safe, but still running rampant in their liberal use of violence against the citizens they allegedly serve.
In 2013, the FBI reported that 27 police officers were killed in the line of duty. By 2014, according to the new data, that number rose to 51. While this seems like a sharp uptick — in fact, it nearly doubled — the comparison on its own is misleading. Out of 536,119 officers included in the FBI’s 2014 analysis, .0095 percent of the force was killed on the job — less than one percent. While this represents an increase from the .005 percent of officers killed on the job in 2013 — the safest year for police in decades — neither figure signals an unrelenting assault on police officers.
“[W]hen police advocates say that 2014 saw an 80+ percent increase in homicides of cops over 2013, remember a few things: First, 2013 wasn’t just an all-time low, it was an all-time low by a significant margin. Second, the 2013 figure was so low that even a small increase will look large when expressed as a percentage. Third, the figure for the following year, 2014, (51 officers killed) was essentially consistent with the average for the previous five years (50 killed), and still lower than any five-year average going back to 1960. Fourth, again, 2015 is on pace (35 killings) to be lower than any year but 2013.”
The nature of the officers’ deaths also provides insight into the “war on police”. Though the total number of officers murdered did increase from 27 to 51 from 2013 to 2014, the two biggest jumps came when officers were responding to disturbance calls or making traffic stops. In 2013, the number of officers killed during disturbance calls jumped from four to eleven, while traffic stop deaths increased from two to nine. In contrast, the number of ambushes on police officers — premeditated actions intended to hurt the officers — only increased by two, from five to seven. While this is nothing to celebrate, it actually constitutes a drop in the proportion of officers killed by ambush — the most intentional way to kill, or ‘wage war against’ — a cop. In 2013, 18.5% of all felonious deaths were a result of an ambush . In 2014, 13.7% of cops who died were ambushed.
Perhaps most revealing, however, is the FBI’s data on officers “assaulted” on the job. The FBI lists a startling figure for 2014:
Of 536,119 officers included in the report, 48,315 were assaulted. With 9% of all officers having been “assaulted,” on the job, it seems impossible to deny a concerted attack against law enforcement. However, that rate is lower than the previous year (9.3%). Further, the data becomes much less daunting when considering officers who were assaulted and injured as a result of the attack. In 2014, 13,654 officers reported sustained injuries from assault: just 2.5% of the entire force. This is also a small drop from the previous year, which saw 14,565 of 533,895 total officers injured (2.7%). This is an injury rate lower than that of construction workers, who clock in at 3.8%. Further, these figures do not take into account instances where officers claimed they were assaulted but in reality were not. There seems to be great potential for this discrepancy, especially since the FBI notes that “assailants used personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc.) in 79.9 percent of the incidents.”
Interestingly, in both cases of assault and murder, the majority of assailants were white. In 2014, of 54 perpetrators, 42 were Caucasian while only 12 were African American. Two were Native American, one was Asian/Pacific Islander, and two were unknown. In 2013, 15 of 28 alleged killers were white — more than half. The government’s own data on attackers refutes another common, media driven falsehood: that rabid Black Lives Matter activists are spurring attacks against police.
Regardless of the facts the FBI itself released this week, one overarching factor should be cause enough to silence those who lament a war on police: every single year, the FBI constructs its meticulous LEOKA report from thousands of police departments around the country, crafting dozens of charts and tables to break down and detail the manner in which officers died (full report here). There is currently no such system in place for regular civilians killed by police, though one community database places the total at 1,108 for 2014.
In spite this dearth of information on who the government kills, the federal government only took action this month to attempt to record police shootings and deaths caused by officers — even though this problem has crippled communities, especially minority for years, if not decades. In contrast, despite the ongoing, intensive reporting by the FBI on police deaths, President Obama signed the “Blue Alert” law earlier this year to provide for even further calculation and analysis of threats and assaults to law enforcement. There is still no official total on the number of civilians killed by police.
While many outlets in the media propagate the narrative that police officers are under attack, the government’s own data speaks for itself. Though loud voices may decry police accountability activists and millions of Americans concerned about police overreach, the FBI’s report only further justifies their outrage.
Finally, Black perceptions of the actual racial situation in the United States are catching up with reality, after years of collective delusion under The First Black President. “Black perceptions on race have swung 20 percent – from 48 to 68 percent negative – in the year since the emergence of an incipient movement against police violence.” Black pessimism about race relations is up 38% since the “’we HAVE overcome’ days of delusion, in 2009.”
“’Good feelings’ in ‘bad’ and ‘dangerous’ times serve only to accelerate the processes of disaster.”
More Black Americans think race relations are generally bad than at any time since the Rodney King rebellion in Los Angeles, a generation ago. Whites feel pretty much the same way, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll.
Sixty-eight percent of Black people today believe race relations are bad, substantially more than the 59 percent negative recorded when Barack Obama was presenting himself as a candidate for president, back in 2008. The great dip in the statistics (or peak, depending on one’s perspective), was registered in 2009, the year of Black euphoria that began with Obama’s inauguration. By April of 2009, only 30 percent of Blacks told pollsters they saw race relations in a generally bad light. Half of Blacks’ negative perceptions on race disappeared the moment a Black family set up residence in the White House.
I don’t pretend to understand what white Americans generally mean by “bad” or “good” race relations – except that it is certainly very different than what Black Americans mean, when using the same terminology. I suspect that most whites think relations are “good” when they don’t have to hear Black people complaining too loudly. The perceptions of the people at the receiving end of racial oppression are usually more reflective of racial realities than the impressions of members of the dominant/oppressor group, who in all cultures minimize the degree of harm inflicted by their group. However, the oppressed are also quite subjective in their analyses of conditions. They hope against hope, or are overcome by despair – emotional swings directly related to their perception of the forces allied with, or against, them.
The polls show two recent periods of great volatility in Black perceptions of the general racial climate: the soaring euphoria of 2009, whose effects continued through 2010; and the dramatic year-long rise in Black discontent (translated in polls as pessimism on race relations) that began in August, 2014, when Ferguson, Missouri, rebelled against the police killing of Michael Brown. In between, we see a slow but steady erosion of Black perceptions of “good” race relations beginning in 2012, the year Trayvon Martin was gunned down in Florida, when Blacks’ negative ratings on race climbed above the 40 percent level for the first time since Obama took office.
Percentage of Blacks that viewed race relations as generally bad, according to New York Times/CBS News poll:
July, ’08 59
April, ’09 30
Jan, ’12 37
Aug, ’12 41
Apr, ’14 46
Aug, ’14 48
Dec, ’14 54
Feb, ’15 58
Apr, ’15 65
July, ’15 68
Black perceptions on race have swung 20 percent – from 48 to 68 percent negative – in the year since the emergence of an incipient movement against police violence. There has been a 38 percent rise in Black pessimism on race since the “we HAVE overcome” days of delusion, in 2009.
“Half of Blacks’ negative perceptions on race disappeared the moment a Black family set up residence in the White House.”
Race relations, as measured by Black perceptions, are now 9 percent “worse” than they were in 2008, before Obama’s election. The objective reality, of course, is that the Black economy collapsed during the financial meltdown that reached its peak in 2009 – the very year when Blacks perceived race relations as “least” bad, at 30 percent. So deep was the “Obama delirium” in 2009, that 39 percent of Blacks told pollsters for the Pew Research Center that African Americans were better off than five years before – even though Black unemployment was hovering around 16 percent, nearly twice the level of 2004, and Black wealth had fallen to one-twentieth of whites, as evidenced by wholesale home foreclosures in Black neighborhoods. Black people’s collective (subjective) perception at the dawn of the Age of Obama, according to the Pew poll, was that “the state of black progress in America [has] improved more dramatically than at any time in the last quarter century.” Every indicator of Black economic well being crashed in 2009, yet Black folks believed the opposite.
The steady rise in “bad” feelings about the racial situation – which is inextricable from the Black economic condition – is, therefore, a good thing. Gross misperceptions, wildly misplaced optimism, and the outright delirium experienced by so many Blacks at the start of the Obama presidency, greatly weaken and disarm a people. “Good feelings” in “bad” and “dangerous” times serve only to accelerate the processes of disaster. We need more “bad” feelings about racial oppression, mass Black incarceration, late-stage capitalism, mad-dog imperialism, and the survival of the biosphere.
No More Empty Celebrations and False Optimism
The Black Misleadership Class, which for two generations has pursued its own narrow interests with no regard for the masses of Black folks, thrives on the illusion of progress, which gives the false impression that their leadership has born fruit. This perfidious class celebrated not only Obama, but also the brief and delirious “era of good feeling” that accompanied his rise, offering no resistance whatsoever to The First Black President’s corporate neoliberalism and hyper-aggressive imperial policies. “Good” feelings led to disastrous results.
The most encouraging development since the emergence of an incipient, grassroots movement against police violence – an occurrence that is inseparable from the increase in “bad” feelings about race in the U.S. – is the growing rejection by young people of a Black Misleadership Class that strives for better “race relations” (peace) rather than a thorough transformation of U.S. society (justice). These are the kinds of Negroes that study the polls, wishing most of all for an increase in whites who sympathize with Blacks (whatever that subjectively means), rather than hoping that huge numbers of Black people get mad enough to make a MOVEMENT.
If an oppressed people don’t believe they are oppressed, they will not do much of anything to change their condition. In the words attributed to Harriet Tubman: “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”
The report mentions the "security" corporation's "intelligence partners" based at the Fort Meade Army base. The report indicates that at least 249 activists and protesters were under surveillance by the corporation which was apparently hired by government officials. Government organizations use private "security firms" to spy on citizens so the government can claim that it does not engage in such unconstitutional activities.
Peaceful organizers Johnetta Elzie (left) and DeRay Mckesson (who made several appearances on CNN) were both labeled as "high" severity, "physical," and "#mostwanted" threats. Black activists get far more scrutiny from government agencies and private "security firms" than the heavily armed and violent KKK, skinheads, white militias and other racist- supremacist groups. Private "security firms" are used to spy on Americans so the government can claim it does not spy on the legal political activities of its citizens.
By Brandon Ellington Patterson
Documents from a "crisis management" report produced by the cybersecurity firm ZeroFox indicate that the firm monitored Black Lives Matter protesters during the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore earlier this year. The documents, which surfaced online last Wednesday, also state that the firm "protected" the online accounts of Maryland and Baltimore officials and members of the Baltimore Police Department and Maryland National Guard.
Harlem Suarez (left) allegedly expressed support for ISIS on
Facebook and that was enough for the FBI to send provocateurs to trap
him in a "terror plot" initiated by the FBI itself. Meanwhile
Dylann Roof (right) was posting racist manifestos with this picture
holding the pro-slavery battle flag on social media and he went
untouched by the FBI's army
of social media watchers, informants and provocateurs, costing the lives of nine black church goers, including a member
of the South Carolina legislature.
___________
The report identifies DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, two prominent Black Lives Matter organizers who took part in the Baltimore protests, as "threat actors" for whom "immediate response is recommended." It describes McKesson and Elzie as "high" severity, "physical," and "#mostwanted" threats and notes both have a "massive following" on social media. It says that ZeroFox was engaged in "continuous monitoring" of their social media accounts and specifies their geographical locations at the time of the report. The report does not suggest that the pair were suspected of criminal activity but were "main coordinators of the protests."
In emails exchanged in April, ZeroFox's CEO, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake's chief of staff, and the president of the Maryland chapter of an FBI intelligence partnership program discussed ZeroFox's potential surveillance "help" for Baltimore. These emails were released to the Baltimore Sun last week following a public records request. The emails also indicate that ZeroFox "briefed our classified partners" at the Fort Meade Army base in Maryland on "intelligence" it had collected during the Gray protests. Other emails from the Baltimore Police Department indicate the department had collected "intelligence regarding potentially violent agitators."
The report on the Black Lives Matter organizers is dated the day after the Fort Meade briefing. It states that ZeroFox intended to "alert Baltimore PD on all monitoring threat actors and influencers." According to the leaked report, ZeroFox monitored 62 "threat actors" and 187 "threat influencers," including a Twitter user who was "a main local protest organizer" and another who was "sending supplies from New Jersey."
Apparently 20-year-old Maile Hampton (top right, and bottom) has become quite an effective activist and therefore a
thorn in the side of authorities that had to be "made an example of."
By Channing Joseph
In the year 2015—just over a century after Romeo’s tragic end—the lynching era has been so thoroughly forgotten by most of us that a young black woman is now facing a four-year prison term in a case that turns the meaning of the word “lynching” inside out.
On Jan. 18, a pro-police rally was being held near the Capitol building in Sacramento, Calif., and Maile Hampton, a 20-year-old activist, was attending a counter-rally. She and others were raising their voices against killings, by both police and vigilantes, of unarmed black people—such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York last year. (It’s an issue that some might argue is the contemporary analogy to lynching.)
As Hampton’s group marched on the Capitol Mall, officers ordered it to move onto the sidewalk, and those marchers who did not immediately comply were arrested. In a YouTube video of the incident, some protesters—and Hampton is allegedly one of these—appear to try to pull their comrades out of police custody, a felony that the California penal code defines as “lynching.”
On Feb. 23, more than a month after the protest, Hampton was arrested at her home, saddled with both “lynching” and obstruction-of-justice charges. She spent the night in jail before being released on $100,000 bail, and she is scheduled to be arraigned in Sacramento Superior Court on April 9. Her defense lawyer, Linda Parisi, has advised her not to speak to reporters.
Understandably, Hampton’s case has caused both bewilderment and outrage among activists in Northern California and elsewhere. ANSWER Coalition—an anti-war, anti-racist organization—has started an online petition demanding that Sacramento’s district attorney, Anne Marie Schubert, drop the charges.
Schubert and the police in California’s capital are apparently unaware of the irony of prosecuting a black social-justice activist under a 1933 law meant to protect people of color from the kind of racist vigilantes that kidnapped and killed Romeo in my hometown.
By JTA Caroline Dorn resigned as the student president of the Hillel chapter at Muhlenberg College to protest Hillel International’s restrictions against hosting anti-Israel speakers.
Dorn said she stepped down because the Hillel at the Allentown, Pa., college was barred by Hillel International rules from hosting four Jewish civil rights veterans currently on a speaking tour of U.S. colleges called “From Mississippi to Jerusalem: In Conversation with Jewish Civil Rights Veterans.”
Hillel International’s rules prohibit college Hillel chapters from partnering with or hosting groups or speakers who deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish or democratic state; delegitimize, demonize or apply a double standard to Israel; or support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel.
The Jewish civil rights activists on the tour — Dorothy Zellner, Larry Rubin, Mark Levy and Ira Grupper – are supportive of BDS tactics against Israel. Their tour is being sponsored by Open Hillel, which aims to challenge Hillel International’s rules on Israel issues.
By Sarah Lazare
Participants in a nonviolent Black Lives Matter protest at the Mall of America last December were not only aggressively confronted by law enforcement and heavily prosecuted by the Bloomington attorney's office, but they were also—as it turns out—preemptively spied on by local police and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Journalist Lee Fang exposed the surveillance in an article published Thursday in The Intercept, shedding light on an internal email he obtained:
The email from David S. Langfellow, a St. Paul police officer and member of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, informs a fellow task force member from the Bloomington police that "CHS just confirmed the MOA protest I was taking [sic.] to you about today, for the 20th of DEC @ 1400 hours." CHS is a law enforcement acronym for "confidential human source."
Jeffrey VanNest, an FBI special agent and Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisor at the FBI’s Minneapolis office, was CC'd on the email. The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces are based in 104 U.S. cities and are made up of approximately 4,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officials. The FBI characterizes them as "our nation’s front line on terrorism."
Fang went on to explain:
According to an FBI spokesman, Langfellow's Confidential Human Source was "a tipster with whom Mr. Langfellow is familiar" who contacted him "after the tipster had discovered some information while on Facebook" that "some individuals may engage in vandalism" at the Mall of America protest. Upon receiving the email, Bloomington police officer and task force member Benjamin Mansur forwarded it to Bloomington’s then-deputy police chief Rick Hart, adding "Looks like it’s going to be the 20th..." It was then forwarded to all Bloomington police command staff. There is no mention of potential vandalism anywhere in the email chain, and no vandalism occurred at the Mall of America protest.
The protest, which took place December 20, 2014, saw an estimated 3,000 people flood the Mall of America, one of the largest such shopping centers in the world, demanding an "end to police brutality and racial inequities affecting Black and brown Minnesotans," according to a statement from the Minneapolis chapter of Black Lives Matter.
Police, many of whom donned full riot gear, responded to the protest by shutting down several areas of the mall for hours. Twenty-five demonstrators were arrested.
Just days after the demonstration, Bloomington City Attorney Sandra Johnson vowed to aggressively build a criminal case against alleged organizers, in a bid to win restitution for money allegedly lost by the mall during the partial shutdown, as well as by the police and city. Eleven protesters have been charged with six misdemeanors, and the city is seeking thousands of dollars.
Emails obtained by Black Lives Matter-Minneapolis through a public records request, and reported by the Star Tribune earlier this week, reveal that Bloomington attorneys colluded with mall officials—who pressed for stiff charges against the demonstrators.
The revelations that protesters were targeted on numerous fronts have not crushed organizing, but rather, have fueled ongoing resistance. According to Black Lives Matter-Minneapolis, over 4,000 people have joined the chapter's call to boycott the MOA, more than 40,000 have called for charges against the protesters to be dropped, and community members—from clergy to professors to local politicians—have vigorously defended the demonstrators.
In a Facebook post on Thursday, Black Lives Matter-Minneapolis called Fang's newest revelations of police and FBI spying "disturbing," adding: "We will not be intimidated."
Haiti boycott against US occupation, Martelly dictatorship, high cost of living – Feb 7, 2015
By Ezili Dantò
Since January 12, 2015, Michel Martelly has ruled Haiti by decree with US-UN guns backing up his dictatorship. The UN Security council, led by Samantha Powers, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, recently visited Haiti to legitimized and reinforce their commitment to Martelly over the objections of the people of Haiti.
Twenty-nine years ago, on February 7, 1986 Haiti ousted the bloody, US-supported Duvalier dictatorship and swore never to allow dictatorship in Haiti ever again.
Today, February 7, 2015, tens of thousands of demonstrators in Haiti swarmed the streets to mark this anniversary, commitment and again to boycott and demand an end, not to another US-supported Haiti dictatorship, but worse, a US-installed dictatorship and an 11-year military occupation of Haiti.
For eleven years, outraged Haitians against dictatorship and occupation have, in various waves, taken to the streets to demand an end to the US-UN occupation behind NGO false benevolence. Since the 2010 doctored elections, Haiti demonstrators have demanded the removal of the puppet Martelly government. As carnival time approaches, this February month is slated to see more anti-dictatorship and anti-corruption demonstrations. More recently, as world gas prices go down, with Haiti prices remaining high; as the Haiti elites continue to block natural desires for sovereignty and a participatory Haiti democracy, the demonstrators are also boycotting businesses, agitating against the high cost of living, low wages and high gas prices.
Each time Haitians take to the streets, they know that the powerful, US-trained militarized police will teargas, shoot and even kill unarmed demonstrators, as they’ve done before. According to eyewitnesses and reports found here and here, after the February 7th march, militarized CIMO/police vehicle #1-608 in Haiti opened fire on protest leaders who went to the home of two journalists. Yet, Haiti fights on, will demonstrate again, with no weapons, except their bodies, songs, slogans, the divine within and the certainty that their call to the Ancestral powers and universal force for goodness shall not return void.
The corporate media, human rights industry, charitable industrial complex, and other Ndòki forces for empire remain silent about the outsourced US occupation of Haiti. The colonial narrative and racism at play is that the Internationals are “helping” Haiti, have no partisan interests. They’re effective at using this false credibility to get funding, legitimize themselves and the foul acts and lies of the US Ambassadors to Haiti, the US State Department, the OAS and the UN.
The Internationals reinforce each other. The US State Department freely funds and uses the human rights industry, like the UN, Amnesty International, Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health and others in the crisis caravan, to give credibility to the neocolonial tyranny in Haiti.
For instance, the Haiti protestors are demanding the removal of the Martelly dictatorship, the US occupation, a stop to white supremacy, arbitrary arrests, corruption and an accounting of what former president Bill Clinton and his crew did with the $10 billion collected in earthquake monies.When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threatened dissenting Haiti officials with lost of visas if Michel Martelly was not allowed into the second round during the “elections” (though he didn’t have the votes), the human rights industry said nothing. For 11-years, the international human rights industry and corporate media have remained fairly mute about the outsourced US occupation, the US false aid that’s money laundering, the widespread military rapes of Haiti children, the UN shooting live ammunition at peaceful demonstrators and killing unarmed Haitians. When they touch on these subjects, it’s to obfuscate the real issue, minimize the foreign savagery as if these are not criminal acts in need of fair and independent scrutiny. Mostly, when the international human rights industry mentions Haiti, it’s to promote the occupation and the US-installed dictatorship.
But Amnesty International recently sent an open letter, not to ask the UN to stop shooting at unarmed demonstrators, nor to ask Bill Clinton why donation monies meant for homeless people were used to build luxury hotels. No. Amnesty International, sent a letter to Martelly’s newly appointed prime minister. The pretext is that Amnesty International wants to influence the new prime minister and non-government to provide housing for homeless Haiti quake victims and to respect the demonstrators’ right to peacefully protest. The sudden concern is suspect to say the least because the protestors have been in the streets for years and pushed alone to get political prisoners released.
Martelly has ruled by decree informally for three years and besides the quake victims being abandoned, evicted and abused, has steadily taken away peasant lands for the corporatocracy. Where’s the Amnesty International concern that Martelly stop making more homeless Haitians by taking their lands, offshore islands through presidential decree to give to luxury resort developers? The real effect of the strategically timed “Open Letter” was to immediately put the weight of Amnesty International behind the defacto Prime Minister. Publicly signalling to any squeamish cohort that Martelly, formally ruling by decree and his unilateral appointment of a prime minister, even after Parliament was dissolved, is legitimate governance. The people on the streets want the usurpers gone. The Internationals are writing to them, recognizing their authority, providing firepower to them and receiving them in the halls of power with UN Security Council visits. (See, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch Paid to Destabilize Eritrea ; Bombshell proof! Hillary paid Amnesty International to prepare coup d’état: US taxpayers looted to destroy sovereign nations; Leaked Memo: Amnesty International paid to destabilize Eritrea, The Hypocrisy of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in Peru.)
After 300 years of direct European enslavement in Haiti and 200 years of unremitting US-Euro tyranny, containment-in-poverty, abuse and exploitation, Haiti is without hate and still rated the least violent nation in the entire Caribbean. It demonstrates peacefully. Suffers interminably the rape, abuse and atrocities of power elites with the faces of Samantha Power, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Paul Farmer, Amnesty International and Hollywood celebrities.
In myriad ways, Haiti lives are swapped around and cashed in, while the colonial bullies circulate in polite company as if nothing will unveil them. As if their impunity, degeneracy and gross corruption is the newest, shiniest hit record or song.
Haiti protest, Feb. 7, 2015. Calling
the Ancestors for strength to combat and end US occupation and its newly
minted Martelly dictatorship.
Haiti demonstrators call and put the Ancestors forth. Starting the protest march with traditional prayers that reMEMBERed the lives and generations lost before the February 7, 1986 end to the Duvalier dictatorship and to demand an end to the new Martelly dictatorship. The photos here show their drawn sounds - vèvè - calling forth Ogou and Dantò – the energies, vibration or irreducible essence for raw power, a will of steel, the warrior mother, warrior father, justice defenders, healing, love and creation.
Just like their foreparents, Haitians are deeply committed to liberty and justice. Death is not the worse fate. To live as a slave zombie, is.
Dantò, manman mwen. Ogou, papa mwen: Nou se Ginen depi Lè Marasa, Lè Mò e Lè Mistè. San yo se san nou. Nou fè yon sèl kò. Inyon nou ak Zansèt e TiMoun yo fè fòs nou. Pouvwa Zansèt yo se pouvwa nou. Papa Legba, souple, ouvrè pòt la pou yo. Ohh, mwen wè yo monte anwo, soti Anba Dlo, monte sou tèt dlo a, rale soti lan venn nou, kè nou. Lasous nou rive. Nou wè yo- soti lan lamè, soti lan gròt Ayiti yo, twou wòch yo, anba tè sakre Ayiti Toma a, lan syèl la… Zansèt yo e Timoun yo vini. Nou la. Toupatou. San yo se san nou. Pouvra yo se pouvra nou. Se fòs Bon Dye Zansèt nou yo kap kondwi bra nou pou nou ranpòte la viktwa.– Ezili Dantò, Free Haiti Movement, February 7, 2015
“Grenadye alaso sa ki mouri n’ap vanje yo!” –Indigenous Army of Ayiti, 1791
Reprinted with permission from Center for Research in Globalization.
“The jackleg preacher with the signature pimp-adour hairstyle appears to believe the young organizers are as morally debased and materially obsessed as himself.”
By Glen Ford, BAR Al Sharpton and Oprah Winfrey are scared witless that the Black Lives Matter mobilization will become a sustained, independent political movement – one that challenges both the rich white rulers and their junior partners in the Black Misleadership Class. The viciousness of Winfrey’s and Sharpton’s assaults on the new crop of organizers is a good barometer of the nascent movement’s effectiveness, to date, in discomforting the comfortable. If one thing is clear to African American youth, it is that so-called Black leadership has been complicit in the catastrophe that has engulfed their communities – that the “leaders” are part of the problem, not the solution. Therefore, although the movement-in-the-making is not yet large and coherent enough to shake the foundations of the State or cause Wall Street to shudder, it has already created a crisis of legitimacy for the Black Misleadership Class.
Sharpton’s and Winfrey’s defense is to infantilize the young activists, to deflect the implicit indictment of what currently passes for Black leadership by framing the conflict as generational, rather than substantive. Sharpton launched into a panicked rant at a recent meeting of his National Action Network, in Harlem: “Anytime you have movements, whether it’s in Ferguson, whether it’s in New York, whether it’s in Denver, wherever it is, when they got you more angry at your parents then they got you at the vote you’re supposed to be out there for, you’re being tricked and you’re trying to turn the community into tricks. And they are pimping you, to do the Willie Lynch in our community,” said one of the most accomplished whores in Black American history.
Al Sharpton, a highly ecumenical prostitute who has serviced clients ranging from the most rightwing, down-and-dirty Republicans (Roger Stone, 2003-04); to plutocrats from Hell (Michael Bloomberg); to his current (but now endangered) hookup as the snitching King Rat and activism-deflator for a corporate Democratic president; a man who has lain down with whole kennels of flee-bitten dogs, now defames as “tricks” the young people who stood up to militarized police and dared to make grassroots politics a reality in 21st century America. “Although the movement-in-the-making is not yet large and coherent enough to shake the foundations of the State or cause Wall Street to shudder, it has already created a crisis of legitimacy for the Black Misleadership Class.”
The jackleg preacher with the signature pimp-adour hairstyle – whose self-proclaimed heroes are not MLK or Malcolm X, but sports gangster Don King and entertainer James Brown – appears to believe the young organizers are as morally debased and materially obsessed as himself; that self-aggrandizement is their real motivation. “And they play on your ego. ‘Oh, you young and hip, you’re full of fire. You’re the new face.’ All the stuff that they know will titillate your ears. That’s what a pimp says to a ho.”
Sharpton is actually confessing to his own deepest yearnings.
The youth have scoped Sharpton’s whole card: he is a fraud, an activist-for-hire who has found his niche in the bosom of the beast. But he strains to maintain the posture of Movement Man. “How you going to be more mad at folk that are marching for the same cause then you are against the folks y’all are marching against? Don’t you see a trick in there?” Sharpton asked.
Yes, they do – they see that Sharpton is the trickster, whose aim is to Shanghai Black people’s energies and grievances into service to the Democratic Party – just as did an earlier generation of misleaders. What followed was 45 years of demobilization, a “Winter in America,” as Gil Scott-Heron put it, “where “ain't nobody fighting, cause nobody knows what to save.” The rulers used this long period of non-resistance to build the Black Mass Incarceration State that the Ferguson-inspired rebellion seeks to dismantle. To accomplish this, the new activists have no choice but to challenge the legitimacy of the State’s Black operatives, like Sharpton.
Oprah Winfrey, the media mogul who began her self-marketing journey on the beauty pageant circuit, claims that the young activists don’t have goals. “I think it’s wonderful to march and to protest and it’s wonderful to see all across the country, people doing it,” she says. “But what I’m looking for is some kind of leadership to come out of this to say, ‘This is what we want. This is what we want. This is what has to change, and these are the steps that we need to take to make these changes, and this is what we’re willing to do to get it.’”
“Oprah’s beef is the same as Sharpton’s: she rejects the validity of activism outside electoral politics.”
What Oprah is really looking for is a movement that reveres the opinions and privileges of Black billionaires, and wishes only that there were more of them. As Black Lives Matter activists have tried to remind her, they have been promulgating public demands and taking them to the streets since the middle of August. Oprah, the journalist, should know that. Her beef is the same as Sharpton’s: she rejects the validity of activism outside electoral politics. Indeed, for Oprah, periodic exercise of the ballot is the only serious kind of politics. Selma, the movie produced by her company, put words to that effect in Dr. Martin Luther King’s mouth – a crime against truth and Dr. King’s legacy.
The problem with Winfrey and Sharpton is not their ages (61 and 60, respectively), but their allegiance to Power. (Based on her wealth, Winfrey is one of the very few genuine Black members of the ruling class, while Sharpton is a mere servant.) To describe their conflict with the burgeoning movement as generational is an insult, not only to young activists, but to the Black strugglers of the Sixties and early Seventies, some of whom remain in prison two and a half generations later. Many of those who participated in the grassroots struggles of this period are only a couple of years older than Winfrey and Sharpton, but younger than lots of the misleaders in the Congressional Black Caucus.
The budding new movement confronts the same power relationships that crushed a previous generation of activists, leaving Black American political leadership in the hands of the most opportunistic, self-serving elements of the community – men and women who made common cause with the growing Mass Black Incarceration State. They are still in place, and more duplicitous than ever. The fight against them – that is, the internal Black struggle – is inseparable from the fight against what we used to call The Man.
_______ BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.
