Jimmy Tobias at The Nation writes—These Cities Are Putting Our Fractious Federal Government to Shame. Dispatches from the Urban Resistance, from Denver to Minneapolis:
This country’s problems, everyone knows, started long before Trump and will outlast him too. In the United States, in 2016, before our current president took office, police killed at least 309 black people in cities across the country, the Mapping Police Violence project has reported. During the final fiscal year of President Obama’s tenure, federal enforcers deported more than 240,000 undocumented immigrants. A report out last year by the economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues showed that US income inequality has continued to grow more severe. Private health care in this country is a laughingstock, and will get much worse if the GOP has its way. Our national parks are in disrepair, and our roads and bridges and highways are falling apart. We’re in the midst of a mass-extinction crisis. We’re at war. Climate change has arrived.
All of these are long-accruing, generational crises. They can’t be blamed on a single administration, no matter how violent and vile, no matter how racist and reactionary. Folks understand that fact. They act on it. And in the last month, as in the many months before, they have been busy, busy, busy: In small cities and huge metropolitan centers, in the heartland and the high plains and beyond, good people have mobilized against ongoing police violence, resisted the deportation state’s creeping authoritarianism, organized against plutocratic tax policies, and launched electoral campaigns with bold and radical platforms, among other promising progressive developments. These are people who, at this very moment, are working to clean up the systemic corruption that has beset us, and of which Trump is just a particularly grotesque consequence. Even last week’s sordid Scaramucci burlesque couldn’t distract them. [...]
More than 130 local elected officials from around the country arrived in Austin, Texas, in late July for the annual gathering of Local Progress, a nationwide network of progressive council members, mayors, and more that pushes for “a strong economy, equal justice, livable cities and effective government.” Larry Krasner, the civil-rights attorney running to be Philadelphia’s next district attorney, was there. So was Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, the young leftist member of Chicago’s City Council. Tishaura Jones, the St. Louis treasurer who ran a bold campaign to be the city’s mayor last fall, attended, as did Greg Casar, the Austin city councilman who has led the fight against Texas’s vicious anti-immigrant law SB 4. And there were many others as well—officials from Berkeley to Denver, from Indianapolis to Albany, from Flagstaff to Tacoma to Kansas City.
They came for panels and workshops and meetings on a range of topics, including discussions about strategies to resist Trump’s Department of Justice, fight back against right-wing preemption laws, and build renewable-energy infrastructure at the local level. They also came to protest. During the first day of the gathering, attendees marched to the Texas State Capitol to rally against SB 4, which imposes harsh penalties on cities and local officials that refuse to collaborate with federal immigration law enforcement in the state. Austin, among other Texas cities, has sued to overturn the law.
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“Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight.”
~Bob Marley, Burnin’
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At on this date in 2003—Pure idiocy:
Jack Kelly is a former undersecretary of the Air Force and a goddamn idiot. His idiocy must have been the key to his employment by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, which is the non-Richard Melon Scaife paper in Pittsburgh. How he missed his calling there is beyond me. Our readers corrected me and for that I am glad.
Vietnam is mostly jungle. I don't like jungles, but guerrillas do. There is plenty of cover and concealment. There is plenty of water. There are a lot of things to eat. Creepy crawly yucky things, but you can eat them if you have to. A large guerrilla force can live, relatively securely, in jungles for long periods. Iraq is mostly desert. Desert offers little cover or concealment, less food and water.
No. Iraq is one of the most urbanized countries on earth. Most Iraqis live in cities. Not that deserts have stopped rebellions. But then you would have to read history to know that. They have maps of this, you know.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: An all-new, pre-recorded show to help you hit the ground running. Why Zombie Treasoncare isn’t dead yet. Putin pre-retaliates on sanctions. How Donald Trump’s first licensing deal went south, but he still managed to pay off the mob and scam a Cadillac or two out of it.
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