The ring of the truncheon thing

by JEFFREY St. CLAIR

Poster by the Atelier Populaire from the student uprising in May 1968, Paris.

Paulo L dos Santos:

“If you insist on having statues of people who fought the U.S. military, how about Ho Chi Minh? For one thing, he actually won…”

+ The Democrats are absolutely desperate to smother the Defund the Police movement (not just the slogan, but the abolitionist ideology driving it) before it totally escapes their control, much as they defanged the Occupy Wall Street movement before the 2012 elections & transformed it from a critique of neoliberalism and casino capitalism into a support group for some of the same Democratic politicians who had enacted and abetted the very policies OWS sprang up to decry.

+ “Defund the police” should be an easy concept for our neoliberal penny-pinchers to understand, since they’ve ruthlessly applied it to almost every other line item in the budget, except cops, prisons and the military.

+ Even Sanders has joined the chorus of Democrats trying to defuse the Defund the Police movement. Of course, Bernie is a liberal reformer at heart. He proves it time and again. He’s no longer running for anything, so he’s under no pressure to moderate his views or language. This is is just who he really is. He’s not a socialist, not a radical. Many of his followers are far ahead of him. Let’s hope they don’t look back…

+ Some of the most verbose right-wingers, however, hear the sound of the ice breaking beneath their feet…Sean Hannity called for an end to police “chokeholds” and cities to develop “rigorous standard” for “holding crooked cops accountable.”

+ It’s more than 50/50 shot that by election day Trump and Sean Hannity will be to the left of Biden, Pelosi and Schumer on police reform…

+ Biden introduced a “Police Officer’s Bill of Rights” eight times as a senator that restricted the ability for police departments to investigate their own officers accused of misconduct….(He may well be the WORST nominee of my lifetime.)

+ You can always count on the AFL’s Richard Trumka to fall in line. In fact, he usually arrives early to secure his place at the head of it….Trumka says he’s against cutting ties with cop unions because “everyone who works for a living has the right to collective bargaining… and the best way to use our influence…is to engage with our police affiliates rather than isolate them.”

+ I’ll never forget this from Obama on Colin Kaepernick’s quiet and dignified protests agains police shootings and I hope you won’t either: “Kapernick needs to think about the pain he’s causing military families.” It really distills the whole Obama experience for me.

+ Obama’s unique function was to defuse and shame growing social and political movements from inside his own base, especially black movements.

+ So Trump plans to come out of his chicken coop on Juneteenth to hold a rally in Tulsa, site of the Black Wall Street Massacre, one of the worst acts of mass murder and violence committed against blacks in the 20th century. This can’t be an accident and is redolent of Reagan giving his race-mongering “states rights” speech in August 1980 at the Neshoba County Fair, a few miles from where Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered by the Klan…

+ On the registration page for Trump’s Juneteenth MAGAnacht rally in Tulsa, there is language advising attendees that they are signing away liability if they contract COVID-19…

+ Here’s why they need the MAGAvolk to sign the waiver releasing them of liability from a viral threat they have repeatedly discounted. The rolling 7-day average of COVID-19 infections in Tulsa is skyrocketing…

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