Month: November 2016

Suffragist Frances E. Willard talked about her family background and expressed concern for the plight of blacks. But she also stated that “the best people I knew in the South” had told her black people were threatening the safety of white women and children. She continued, “It is not fair that a plantation Negro who can neither read or write should be entrusted with the ballot.” More here.

John Henley: What appears to have made the biggest difference on the night was the turnout for Trump of white voters across the board – of both sexes, almost all ages and education levels, and from mid- and higher income levels. More here.

Jeremy Scahill: A few days ago, we learned that Private Chelsea Manning attempted to take her own life last month for the second time since being sentenced to 35 years at the U.S. military prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. The whistleblower, who provided the collateral murder video, the Iraq and Afghan war logs, and the hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. State Department cables to Wikileaks, was convicted of espionage. […] The U.S. public is now getting a taste of the way hacking, phishing, and an overwhelming dependence on fallible machines and networks can impact politics. But let’s be clear: None of the disclosures in this campaign — not one thing in any of the hacked emails or those declassified and released from Clinton’s private server — has brought to light anything of greater importance than the documents Chelsea Manning provided to Wikileaks. She revealed war crimes, including murder and torture, dirty and duplicitous dealings of the U.S. and its allies, exposed liars, documented a secret history of America’s longest running war, and forced a much needed debate about the U.S. role in the world. And for that, she is being tortured. More here.

Jaisal Noor: I say this as a minority, immigrant and journalist: I refuse to cower in fear, for even a second. Now is the time to show the world what we are made of people. We were born for this. We gotta stand up for the people who can’t. No going back now.

#BlackLivesMatter #NoDAPL #endmassincarceration #SayHerName #FightFor15 #Health4All #solidarity #resistance

Asim Rafiqui: Do you think the HRC camp will now remember that it was merely a few months ago that this nation rallied around a new political movement led by a man called Bernie Sanders? Will they remember that millions spoke out against the Democratic establishment and worked to construct something close to a popularly led alternative political space? Will they remember the Podesta revelations about how the DNC worked hard to destroy this movement, and to nullify any possibility of the calls for greater social and economic justice to take the front seat, and to hand-pick a ‘candidate’? Will they see that rather than blaming a tiny group that vehemently critiqued HRC, it is their pandering to a vile, corrupt, elitist, corporate supported, socially disconnected political machine that has brought us to this new morning in America? I hope they do!

Shailja Patel: It matters that the head of Empire be as hateful and gut-churningly repellent as the mass death and destruction Empire wreaks across the planet. Eight years of Obama’s rainbow imperialism with great production values disarmed the world’s opposition like a hot knife through butter. That’s over. May we now see a global resurgence of resistance.

Ladonna Bravebull Allard: When I began to look into the Bundy’s standoff at the Malheur Refuge, I became angry. That place is a locus of ancestral heritage of the Burns Paiute Tribe, which the Bundys knowingly desecrated. They reportedly dug latrines through recognized cultural sites. As a tribal historic preservation officer, my heart broke when I heard they allegedly rifled through some 4,000 cultural items that had been kept in the museum. Some of the sacred objects they destroyed were hundreds of years old.

The Bundys did not reclaim that land. It was never theirs. It is Paiute land.

From the beginning, we at Standing Rock gathered in a spirit of prayer and non-violent resistance to the destruction of our homeland and culture. We came together with our ceremonies, songs and drums. Weapons are not allowed into our camps. The Bundys’ occupation began with threats and guns. It was violent from the outset, and the people they pretended to represent did not even condone it.

Last week we saw how justice works in this country: armed ranchers are treated with compassion and their charges are dropped, while indigenous people are physically attacked and charged with trespassing on our own ancestral lands. More here.