Month: September, 2017
A New Joke – “Jim-Crow Helps The Negro Race”
worker | September 30, 2017 | 8:38 pm | African American history, struggle against fascism, struggle against slavery | Comments closed

https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1941/05/joke.htm

J.R. Johnson

A New Joke – “Jim-Crow Helps The Negro Race”

(5 May 1941)

The Negro’s Fight, Labor Action, Vol. 5 No. 18, 5 May 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

“Oh, Judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.”

This, is what Shakespeare makes Mark Anthony (that great faker) say in the famous speech over Caesar’s dead body. Often when one looks at capitalist politics today one is tempted to say the same thing.

Friends, Americans and countrymen, lend me your ears. This war is a war for “democracy.” It is a war to preserve “a way of life,” it is a war against tyranny, persecution, aggression. It is a war for freedom. So our modern Mark Anthony, Franklin Roosevelt, says. And all the liberals and the labor leaders follow him shouting “Hosannah!”

State Attorneys Give Their View

Now one of our most precious “free” institutions is Congress, and in this Congress is one solitary Negro, Representative Arthur W. Mitchell. Brother Mitchell tried to travel in a Pullman coach in the South and was kicked out and made to go into another carriage. He filed an action. The case is before the Supreme Court. So far, nothing unusual. This happens regularly. (Since this column, was written, the Supreme Court has upheld the right of Negroes to travel in Pullmans. We will comment on this decision next week. – Ed.)

But note now what has been the result. The attorney generals of ten states, Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, these men who are the expounders of the laws of democracy, they drew up an appeal and sent it to the Supreme Court, asking it not to take any decision on this question. These lawyers of democracy say that the Jim Crow jungle laws (most elegantly called, “segregation statutes”) “were enacted for the purpose of promoting the welfare, comfort, peace and safety of the people of both races.” And these attorney generals of “democracy” say that “it” is a matter of common knowledge, which this court probably knows, “that in those states which are parties to this brief, where large numbers of both races reside, such statutes do, in truth and in fact, promote the welfare, comfort, peace and safety of the people of both races.”

In other words, these men of “democratic” law say this:

“If Representative Arthur Mitchell or any black man travels with whites, he is personally offensive to the whites. We don’t want him. He offends our welfare and our comfort.

“If he insists on traveling, we southerners are going to beat him up. That will offend his peace and safety. In the course of beating him up of lynching him, he and his friends may hurt some of us. That offends OUR peace and safety. So the laws are for the benefit of both of us. Therefore, Supreme Court, do not interfere.”

These Is a Reason for What They Say

Is it any wonder that Hitler laughs at Franklin Roosevelt’s pretentious to being a defender of “democracy”? There are ten million Negroes in the South whom these and similar laws directly affect. There were only about half a million Jews in Germany. If Hitler had said that the laws against the Jews were passed for their comfort, peace, welfare and safety, how. Mark Anthony Roosevelt would have thundered. Hitler, however, says simply and plainly: “We don’t want you Jews. Get out.” But these southern democrats say that their fascist types of racial laws are FOR the BENEFIT of the Negroes; and the men of law, the attorney generals, write to the Supreme Court and say the same thing.

We began by quoting the passage from Shakespeare, saying that men had lost their reason. Have these southerners lost their reason? Oh, no! They want to keep the Negro where he is in order to exploit him, to work him hard and pay him cheap. That is why they tell these abominable lies and talk this abominable legal nonsense. They SEEM to have lost their reason. In reality they have very good reasons for saying what they do. But the Negroes have very good reason for saying:

“You and your holy war against fascism may suit you, but they don’t suit me! I have my war. And it is against you, Messrs. Attorney Generals, to break that system which is so rotten that it compels its defenders to talk like men who have just come out of a lunatic asylum.”

George Padmore interviews Ho Chi Minh in Paris (1946)
worker | September 30, 2017 | 8:31 pm | African American history, class struggle, George Padmore, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam | Comments closed

http://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2017/09/george-padmore-interviews-ho-chi-minh-in-paris-1946.html

09/23/2017

George Padmore interviews Ho Chi Minh in Paris (1946)

Padmore

I was delighted to learn that George Padmore (né Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse) interviewed Ho Chi Minh (Nguyễn Sinh Cung, also known as Nguyen Tat Thanh and Nguyen Ai Quoc) while both were in Paris: Ho was there for the Paris Peace Conference (29 July to 15 October 1946), engaged in “confidential negotiations,” and Padmore was covering the conference for the Free India Press. According to James Hooker, one of the articles Padmore wrote “remains a good introduction to Vietnamese affairs,” the piece having been published by the Defender (28 September 1946, with an autographed photo of Ho!). In Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (Praeger, 1967), Hooker further describes Padmore’s article as “a concise introduction to the Vietnam tangle, one which holds up surprisingly well after nearly two decades of persistent journalistic rediscovery of the situation in South East Asia” (in this instance, Indochina). We further learn that a portion of the article was reprinted in the December issue of (Dwight Macdonald’s) politics (sic) as “The Story of Vietnam.” It seems the journal’s readers took Padmore to task for “play[ing] down Ho’s communist associations.” Padmore defended his work, decrying the “preoccupation with anti-communism which seemed so tiresomely characteristic” of the American Left.

Finally, Hooker mentions one consequence of Padmore’s exclusive interview at the private hotel provided Ho by the French government: “Padmore became the unofficial guardian of Viet-Minh interests in London, to which city Ho despatched a representative for English language training.”

Ho at Paris peace conference

In Houston, Texas – the fourth largest city in the United States – two Chinatown business communities have prospered due to an expansion in US-China cultural exchanges.
worker | September 30, 2017 | 8:18 pm | Analysis, China, Local/State | Comments closed

https://news.cgtn.com/news/7a516a4e78597a6333566d54/share.html

Houston Chinatowns prosper thanks to growing US-China exchanges

Culture
CGTN
2017-09-30 17:20 GMT+8

In Houston, Texas – the fourth largest city in the United States – two Chinatown business communities have prospered due to an expansion in US-China cultural exchanges.

The first Chinatown is located east of downtown, but today, a second area of the city has emerged as a thriving international district.

In the 1980s, the younger generation of Chinese entrepreneurs gave rise to this new Chinatown, creating a bustling community that covers an area of 16 square km in southwest Houston, roughly 20km from downtown Houston.

Dun Huang Plaza in Houston’s Chinatown. / Photo via 365thingsinhouston.com

The first business opened in the new Chinatown in 1983, which was designed and developed to meet the needs of America’s car-based society.

Today, thanks to many years of support and nurturing by the local Chinese community, the new Chinatown is home to an array of large and small shops, businesses, supermarkets and national banks, as well as being the shopping and business center for the local Asians population.

Because of the presence of the many banks in what is a relatively concentrated area, this new Chinatown has gained the nickname as “Houston Wall Street”, exemplifying its prosperity and importance.

And the prosperity of this new Houston Chinatown goes hand-in-hand with the rise of the new generation of ambitious and upwardly mobile Chinese.

“In the past, the old immigrants needed to spend a lot of time and hard physical work to make bread (money), so the progress was slow,” said Kenneth Li, chairman of Southwest Management District and member of Houston mayor’s International Advisory Board.

The Houston Police Department’s Chinatown station. /Photo from China Daily

Many young Chinese in Houston are now students and have a high educational background which gives them a bigger advantage in society and the marketplace, Li said in an interview with Xinhua.

Ruling Meng, a retired superconductivity scientist at the University of Houston and founding president of the Chinese Association of Professionals in Science and Technology (CAPST), said that she is a beneficiary of US-China people-to-people exchanges.

“I have always said that I am very grateful to the motherland for my training,” said Meng, who is over 80. “I was a college student in the 1950s in China, and the United States provided me with new opportunities for development.”

Meng said that economic conditions were not good then for Chinese people, but everyone studied hard. Even today, Meng is grateful to those who helped her along the way, and said she founded the CAPST in 1992 in order to give this type of care and support to younger Chinese scholars in Houston’s campuses when .

A shopping center in Houston’s Chinatown. /Photo via texasmonthly.com

Charlie Yao, president and CEO of Yuhuang Chemical Inc., which is based in Houston, is the former chairman of CAPST. He is among the new immigrants from China to the United States.

Many young Chinese today are white-collar professionals who have critical thinking skills and are open-minded, he said.

“China’s vigorous economic growth has helped to promote overseas Chinese to a higher level of living,” Yao said. “No other country in the world has been developing at a rate of more than 10 percent in the past few decades, but China made it.”

Jon R. Taylor, political science professor of University of St. Thomas in Houston, agrees with Yao. He said young Chinese professionals moved to Houston from other parts of the United States in pursuit of job opportunities and a better life, which in turn pushed the development of the new Chinatown in Houston.

Dun Huang Plaza in Houston’s Chinatown. /CNN Photo

Furthermore, Kenneth Li encouraged the new generation of Chinese to treat American mainstream society as a way of promoting the development of US-China cultural exchanges. It’s a win-win proposition as both cultures learn from and gain knowledge about each other.

Li believes that cultural exchanges are two-way in nature, as some local Chinese groups invite Americans to visit China.

“We should try our best to promote the people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States,” Li said. “With Confucian thought prevailing, Chinese are peace-loving people. We must send that message to the world.”

The street signs along Bellaire Boulevard in Houston’s Chinatown are posted in Mandarin characters as well as English script. /CNN Photo

Brian Lantz, a senior executive of Schiller Institute in Houston, said he is glad to see the emerging young generation of Chinese professionals in Houston, both in Chinatown and elsewhere.

“America will benefit from the growing roles of American Chinese and Chinese who are here in business,” he said.

While Chinese people are doing important work in academia and science, they also are bringing about improvements in the greater Houston community, saying, “I think we can all benefit.”

Source(s): Xinhua News Agency
Copyright © 2017
The forgotten holocaust: The 1965-66 massacre against Indonesia’s communists
worker | September 30, 2017 | 8:12 pm | Analysis, class struggle, Discrimination against communists, Imperialism, Indonesia | Comments closed

Saturday, September 30, 2017

The forgotten holocaust: The 1965-66 massacre against Indonesia’s communists

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-forgotten-holocaust-1965-66.html
By Nikos Mottas*.
 
Without any doubt, the WWII Holocaust and the 1915 Armenian genocide consist the two largest mass slaughters of the 20th century. They are crimes which must never be erased from the collective memory of the peoples, no matter how many decades will pass. 
 
However, there are also less known sides of History, the “forgotten” holocausts to which the bourgeois historiography has given little importance, either by downgrading them as insignificant details of world history or by distorting their true dimensions. 
 
A major example of such a “forgotten” holocaust is the mass slaughter of the communists in Indonesia by Suharto’s dictatorship during the 1965-66.
The criminal called General Suharto was the man who, with the tolerance and silence of the U.S. and British governments, was responsible for one of the most barbaric bloodshed of the previous century: the mass slaughter of more than 1,000,000 people, mostly communists, members and supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia [1].
If we want to have a comprehensive image of the social and political conditions that led to the 1965-66 massacre, we must refer to the historical background of developments in Indonesia after the end of Second World War. These developments are related to the role of the British and Dutch imperialists, the conditions under which the independence of the Republic of Indonesia took place, the formation of the class struggle in the country and, of course, the position of Indonesia in the post-WWII imperialist plans which led to the active involvement of the US in the domestic political processes.
In the mid of 1960s, the sharpening of the intra-bourgeois contradictions (with the steady interference of US-British governments) led to a series of military coups and counter-coups that ultimately resulted to the overthrow of the elected president Sukarno. In the morning of October 2, 1965, numerous military vehicles were patrolling at the streets of Jakarta in order to capture the insurgents and lead them to prison. A day earlier, a failed coup attempt had been organised by the commander of the presidential guard Colonel Untung. From his side, in a message transmitted via radio, the Colonel had justified the coup attempt by arguing that its role was to prevent a conspiracy planned by the CIA and army officials to overthrow President Sukarno.
The army crushed the failed coup’s insurgents, with a General called Suharto playing a decisive role. This man would subsequently override Sukarno’s leadership thus becoming the new powerful leader of the country. Suharto and his imperialist allies point the Communist Party of Indonesia as the source of the failed coup – after all, the well-organised and popular Communist Party had played a leading role in the anticolonial struggle and had significant influence in Sukarno’s policies.
 
The rise of General Suharto- a man who had the support of the US imperialists- in Indonesia’s leadership led to unprecedented violent persecutions against communists, including mass killings, executions, tortures and every kind of barbaric act. Even the CIA had admitted in a subsequent report that the 1965-66 events were “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century” [2]. Of course, both the CIA and the British intelligence services had an active role in the massacre by supporting the Suharto regime. Information about the role of the governments of the United States, Britain and Australia in the anticommunist holocaust of Indonesia were unveiled years later.
On May 17, 1990, based on testimonies by personnel who had worked at the US embassy in Jakarta during the 1960s, an article by the States News Service of Washington DC reported that the US embassy had provided Suharto regime lists with over 5,000 names of communists and supporters of the Communist Party [3].
 
The role of the imperialists in the Indonesia massacre has been confirmed by professors and researchers. For example, Professor Brad Simpson of Princeton University and author of “Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968”, has said that the U.S and British governments did “everything in their power” to ensure that the Indonesian army would carry out the mass killings [4]. The massacre against the communists in Indonesia was followed by an organised plan for the entry of foreign monopoly capital in the country. According to the documentary “The New Rulers of the World” (2001) by Australian journalist and researcher John Pilger, the dictatorial regime of Suharto proceeded to business deals with known monopoly and banking groups such as General Motors, Daimler-Benz, Chase Manhtattan Bank, Siemens, Standard Oil etc.
Imperialism cares to erase its bloody past in order to safeguard its future.
 
Dictator Suharto meets US President Richard
Nixon in Washington DC, May 26, 1970.
The massacre of the communists in Indonesia by the authoritarian Suharto regime, with the support and tolerance of the US-British imperialists, consists one of the darkest pages of the 20th century. It consists a deliberately “forgotten” holocaust that the bourgeois propaganda tries to downgrade as a “collateral damage” of the Cold War. They try to downgrade the historical significance of the 1965-66 massacre of Indonesia’s communists because it is one more example that exposes imperialist brutality.
Imperialism tries to erase its bloody past in order to safeguard its future. For that reason, the imperialists distort History in every possible way. Because they know the actual power that the working class, the proletariat in every country, has. That is why the working people, the people, must know their history and fight against distortion and oblivion, in order to have a powerful weapon in the struggle against the big enemy of humanity which is the rotten exploitative system that generates barbarity, poverty and wars. 
 
NOTES:
 
[1] The Communist Party of Indonesia, the first one established in Asia (1920), reached during the 1960s a significant party strength with approximately 3,000,000 members, especially in the Java region. However, opportunist political choices by its leadership led to the subsequent weakening of the party ties with broader masses. Despite its organisational strength and the extraordinary large number of its members, the CPI didn’t avoid the trap that had been set by both its domestic enemies and their imperialist allies.
 
[2] Blumenthal, T.L.H. McCormack (Ed.), The Legacy of Nuremberg: Civilising Infuence or Institutionalised Vengeance?. International Humanitarian Law Services, Martinus Nijhoff.
 
[3] I.A. Tie Asserted in Indonesia Purge, The New York Times, July 12, 1990.
 
[4] The 1965-1966 Indonesian Killings Revisited, Conference at the National University of Singapore, 17-19 June 2009.
 
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘In Defense of Communism’.
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Can Corbyn’s Labour be the West’s new political center?
worker | September 29, 2017 | 8:25 pm | Jeremy Corbyn | Comments closed
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/29/can-corbyns-labour-be-the-wests-new-political-center/?utm_term=.6d9594ac2d0c

Can Corbyn’s Labour be the West’s new political center?

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Jeremy Corbyn has all the momentum. Britain’s opposition leader, an inveterate leftist, presided over his Labour Party’s annual conference in the seaside town of Brighton this week and preached an uncompromisingly socialist vision of the future. And the curious part? It doesn’t seem to be hurting his chances of winning power in the slightest.

After being written off as a fringe anachronism who would take Labour into the wilderness for a generation, Corbyn is now solidly the bookmakers’ favorite to be the next British prime minister. That’s in part a reflection of widespread disaffection with the ruling Tories and the cynicism of Prime Minister Theresa May, who misread the British public’s mood in calling for early elections this year in a bid to consolidate her own position.

That backfired, with Corbyn’s Labour shrugging off prophecies of doom and significantly closing the gap on the Conservatives’ once-commanding majority in parliament. May’s lurching management of the Brexit process has only compounded her unpopularity.

The @ArchitectsUK are taking over my Snapchat and Instagram accounts ahead of my Labour Conference speech – live streamed from midday

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn)

But it’s also a sign that Corbyn’s message is resonating. A decade removed from the neoliberal centrism of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, Corbyn’s Labour has moved strikingly left, promising uplift for the dispirited British working class and the disciplining of corporate elites. Corbyn’s platform seeks the nationalization of a host of utilities, including the railways, the abolition of tuition fees for universities and increased taxes on the wealthy.

Not long ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a program this radical gaining traction in the West. Now, it may be a winning ticket.

In a speech Wednesday, Corbyn declared that “2017 may be the year when politics finally caught up with the crash of 2008” — when a financial crisis upended European governments, wrecked the social contract with citizens in a number of countries and fueled anti-establishment movements across the continent.

From the Netherlands to France to Germany, traditional center-left parties that once dominated politics suffered stinging defeats in elections this year. Voters associated them with the ruling liberal establishment and blamed them for growing inequities in their societies, as well as the grinding austerity demanded by major lenders and international organizations elsewhere on the continent.

We are now the political mainstream.

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn)

Corbyn doesn’t have that problem. Backed by a strong grass-roots movement, his straightforward socialism seems a genuine alternative to the ham-fisted schemes of the Tories, whose championing of Brexit could lead Britain toward economic calamity. Although Labour politicians remain split on their approach to Brexit, they’re happy to let the Tories own it while promoting their own social agenda.

This week, Corbyn confidently declared that “we are now the political mainstream — our manifesto and our policies are popular because that’s what most people in our country actually want, not what they’re told they should want.”

Looking on somewhat euphorically, left-wing Guardian columnist Owen Jones styled Corbyn as the next in line in a succession of epoch-defining prime ministers, following Clement Attlee, the architect of Britain’s postwar welfare state, and Margaret Thatcher, the conservative giant who rejected an era of state socialism in favor of unshackled capitalism.

“At the time of the 2008 financial crash there was a widespread misplaced schadenfreude on the left. Surely market fundamentalism had been discredited; surely the west’s ruling economic elites — and their political representatives — would be held to account; surely the left would rise from the ashes,” Jones wrote, gesturing to what fueled Britain’s Brexit vote and the broader populist mood in Europe. “Instead came a tidal wave of austerity, devastating attacks on the remaining social gains of social democracy, and the poison of rightwing xenophobia.”

But Corbyn is rising at a moment when a new direction seems possible. “It is often said that elections can only be won from the center ground,” he said on Wednesday. “And in a way that’s not wrong — so long as it’s clear that the political center of gravity isn’t fixed or unmovable, nor is it where the establishment pundits like to think it is.”

Corbyn’s many critics insist that he is still too far left, especially on foreign policy, where they claim he clings to a worldview more skeptical of the ambitions and effects of Western power than the actions of left-wing regimes or even anti-Western militant groups overseas. But even there, he may not suffer politically.

“The Cold War is ancient history to first-time voters,” noted Rafael Behr, another Guardian columnist, who pointed to Corbyn’s supposed soft spot for the Soviet Union. “To remember two Germanys you have to be well into your 30s, and the memory alone is not enough to guarantee suspicion of grey-haired politicians who once equivocated over preference for the western one.”

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Britain’s conservative press seems to concur. “It’s time to admit it’s the Tories who are stuck in the past, not Jeremy Corbyn,” declared a column this week in the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper identified with the Tories.

“The real danger is that the Tories might have vaccinated Corbyn. By botching their attacks, they may have given him immunity,” lamented the Spectator, a right-of-center magazine. “When they point to all his hard-left positions, his dodgy economics and his sympathy for various terrorist groups, voters might just shrug and say: ‘We’ve heard it all before.’ At the same time, Corbyn sounds very different to how he did two years ago. Voters tuning into him for the first time will find his agenda presented in a far more seductive and less sectarian way.”

Although Britain’s political situation is unique, Corbyn’s continued ascent may echo elsewhere. Across the pond in the United States, there’s a right-wing government battered by low approval ratings and burdened by the ideological contradictions of its own party. And who is the most popular politician in America? A gray-haired democratic socialist who is sticking to his beliefs and calling for sweeping reforms that no one would have taken seriously just a decade ago.

Experts: Impact of ongoing NFL protests unclear
worker | September 29, 2017 | 8:22 pm | African American history, police terrorism, Struggle for African American equality | Comments closed

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3163444e78597a6333566d54/share.html

Experts: Impact of ongoing NFL protests unclear

Sports
CGTN
10073km to Beijing

2017-09-29 18:21 GMT+8

‍Almost a year after then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest police brutality, similar protests swept the National Football League (NFL) and are set to continue, with experts describing the past week as one of the most significant displays of athlete activism in decades, but doubts about the long-term impact remain.

More than 150 NFL players – mostly African-American – chose to kneel or sit during the playing of The Star-Spangled Banner on Sunday in an unprecedented protest following a tirade by President Donald Trump.

Trump created an uproar in America’s most popular sport by attacking players who symbolically refused to stand during the national anthem in an effort to draw attention to racial injustice.

Members of the Detroit Lions take a knee during the playing of the national anthem on September 24, 2017 in Detroit, Michigan. /AFP Photo

The US leader’s remarks were widely condemned by NFL chiefs and billionaire team owners — several of whom had donated to Trump’s election campaign — before the players staged their day of action.

Yet as a fresh round of NFL games kick off this week, it remains unclear whether last Sunday’s protests will gather momentum or slowly fizzle out. Some players who knelt last weekend have already said they do not plan to repeat the protest. Oakland Raiders tackle Donald Penn said his protest was intended as a riposte to Trump’s remarks.

“I’m not going to do it again next week,” he told reporters. “I didn’t want to do it this week. This all had to do with President Trump’s comments.”

Tennessee Titans wide receiver Rishard Matthews meanwhile said he would continue to kneel “until the president apologizes.” The Green Bay Packers have urged fans to link arms in solidarity when they face the Chicago Bears in what is intended to be a “display of unity.”

US President Donald Trump reacts at the White House in Washington DC, US September 27, 2017. /Reuters

The mixed messages have created debate about the long-term effectiveness of the protests.

Losing the meaning?

For some analysts the meaning of the demonstrations has been lost.

Trump has reframed the debate as a question of patriotism, accusing those players who choose to kneel or sit as being disrespectful of the military and the United States.

Orin Starn, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University who has written about sports and society, sees the protests as continuing a tradition of activism started by black athletes in the 1960s.

“There’s a thread connecting Tommy Smith and John Carlos in 1968 to what we saw on Sunday — black athletes using sport to protest racial injustice, to say to America that it doesn’t have its racial house in order,” Starn told AFP.

Eric Reid and Colin Kaepernick (R) of the San Francisco 49ers kneel in protest during the national anthem in 2016. /AFP Photo

Starn is uncertain though how effective the NFL protests will be in the long-term, suggesting that the opposing viewpoints in the latest round of America’s culture wars remain too deeply entrenched.

“About such a pivotal matter for American culture like racism and police brutality, people already have their opinions,” Starn said. “I doubt many minds have been changed one way or the other by this weekend or by Kaepernick’s initial, courageous protest.”

“This is a divided country. One part of it thinks that African-Americans have been given too many breaks; the other, a big segment of America, thinks we have real problems with racism and police brutality and wants to do something about it. But it is not clear to me that the status quo is changing.”

Going to ‘next step’

Members of Arizona Cardinals link arms during the National Anthem before the start of the NFL game on September 25, 2017 in Glendale, Arizona. /AFP Photo

Mary-Frances Winters, who heads The Winters Group, a consulting firm which specializes in diversity and inclusion programs, praised the protests as “symbolic.”

“But now it needs to go the next step,” she told AFP. “People need to sit down and have a proper dialogue. When you look at history, people who are protesting are often persecuted. It’s not until 50 years later that they are viewed differently.”

Winters agreed that the point of Kaepernick’s original protest — launched in response to several killings of unarmed black men by law enforcement who subsequently received little or no punishment — has been forgotten.

“There is a misunderstanding what this is about,” she said. “It’s not about the flag, it’s not about the anthem — it’s about racial inequities.

Indianapolis Colts players kneel during the playing of the National Anthem before the game against the Cleveland Browns at Lucas Oil Stadium. /Reuters Photo

“If you look at the history of our country, we’ve always had protesters who love their country but who also see the flaws in their country and simply want the country to be better.”

Starn, meanwhile, was uncertain about the significance of the number of team owners who joined players linking arms, noting that there appeared to be a division on racial lines between players kneeling and those who chose to stand.

“They (the owners) were linking arms with the players — but they were linking arms with the players who were not kneeling,” Starn said. “There seemed to be a pretty clear racial divide. I didn’t see many white players kneeling.”

© 2017 AutoNavi – GS(2015)2681号
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Source(s): AFP
Copyright © 2017
ICE arrest over 100 people in LA immigration sweep
worker | September 29, 2017 | 8:19 pm | Immigrants' Rights, struggle for latino equality | Comments closed

https://news.cgtn.com/news/7759444e78597a6333566d54/share.html

ICE arrest over 100 people in LA immigration sweep

World
CGTN
10071km to Beijing
2017-09-29 15:58 GMT+8

In Los Angeles, California, over 100 people were arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as part of a four-day nationwide sweep of the so-called “sanctuary jurisdiction”, federal authorities said on Thursday.

Photo from CBS Los Angeles

ICE officials said this sweep, codenamed “Operation Safe City” which ended on Wednesday, mainly targeted people who had “violated US immigration laws, prioritized aliens with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, known gang members and affiliates, immigration fugitives and those who re-entered the US after deportation.”

Roughly 500 people were arrested across the country in the past few days.

AP Photo

Besides in Los Angeles, raids were also made in San Francisco and San Jose, and in other states like Illinois, Colorado, New York, Oregon and Massachusetts.

“Sanctuary jurisdictions that do not honor detainers or allow us access to jails and prisons are shielding criminal aliens from immigration enforcement and creating a magnet for illegal immigration,” ICE Acting Director Tom Homan said.

“As a result, ICE is forced to dedicate more resources to conduct at-large arrests in these communities.”

Reuters Photo

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) began tightening the crackdown on illegal immigration when Donald Trump was sworn in as president in January, but the move has been hindered by “sanctuary cities.”

The DOJ then threatened to cut federal funds to these cities, but this initiative was challenged by the “sanctuary cities” themselves. In particular, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago filed lawsuits with the DOJ.

(With input from Xinhua News Agency)

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 in a four-day nationwide sweep

Copyright © 2017
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