Global

The mass marches against racism and police brutality have changed us all.

But they’re not enough.

All these gatherings need voter registration tables with detailed information on how to save the election currently scheduled for November 3.  

Too many uprisings have shaken the nation, then faded away. 

We all must vote. But this year, there’s much more to do. 

Stripped voter rolls, a sabotaged vote by mail system, a flipped vote count … these chokeholds can kill American democracy. Come November 3, unless we act, we can’t breathe.  

Millions of election protection activists must work every precinct, county, and state election center. Grassroots networks must protect how this election will be conducted. Our very survival depends on making sure there’s a national vote this fall that truly reflects the will of the American people.

That means dealing with 2020’s “election protection trinity”:

Registration rolls  

Sixteen million Americans have been stripped from our voter rolls. We need to get them re-registered. 

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Southeast Asia is resisting the harsh U.S.-China
blame game over COVID-19, preferring to maintain financial links with
both, but Beijing appears to enjoy a better image among the region's
hearts and minds.

"Southeast Asian countries are standing on the sidelines of the
Washington-Beijing COVID-19 quarrel, not taking sides with one or the
other," Paul Chambers, an international affairs lecturer at Naresuan
University in northern Thailand, said in an interview.

"Given that China is the region's leading trading partner and provider
of new foreign investment, and China came out of the coronavirus
pandemic earlier than the U.S., Beijing has an edge over the
Washington right now.

"The continuing COVID-19 problems in the U.S. shows Southeast Asians
that the U.S. political system is not a good model for dealing with
the virus," Mr. Chambers said.

Southeast Asian countries often try to balance relations with the U.S.
and China to avoid endangering extensively interconnected business,
military and other links.

Now that Trump is sending actual troops into our streets, the shape of his planned coup d’état is becoming ever clearer.

A critical piece will be an outright armed assault on the polling places during this fall’s election.

Trump’s GOP has already raised $20 million for anti-democracy lawsuits. While claiming the fall election will be “rigged,” Trump’s minions say they’ll raise a 50,000-strong vigilante army to terrorize “suspicious” (i.e., young, non-white, non-millionaire) voters at the polls.

Here’s the premise: 

On November 3, thousands of KKK/Gestapo-style “Trump volunteers” will swarm over the usual long lines in critical swing state/minority-heavy precincts. We’ve seen their neo-Nazi ilk in Charlottesville, among the Proud Boys, etc.

Many will be armed and dressed in military garb. Lacking legal credentials, but likely at gunpoint, they’ll demand ID and other “proof” of voter qualifications. 

Their purpose will be to drive away potential anti-Trump voters and turn the election into chaos.

Here’s what should happen now, judging by what I see on social and other media.

The U.S. Military and the National Guard and other war-making outfits should clear out of the streets of the United States, get on some airplanes, and head off to properly murder lots of men, women, and children very far away. It’s simply inappropriate to kill people in this enlightened land where we’ve figured out that lives all matter.

War making should not be based on lies about protesters being violent or black people being savages or Trump needing his religion fix. Wars should be based, as established by long tradition, on lies about foreign governments and terrorists and fossil fuels and babies in incubators and WMDs and phantom missiles and chemical attacks and impending massacres.

There is apparently no limit to what the United States and Israel can get away with without any consequences. The United States has been waging devastating economic warfare against Iran and Venezuela while also blaming China for a global health crisis that it is unwilling to help address due to its withdrawal from the World Health Organization. Israel meanwhile is planning on illegally annexing significant parts of the Palestinian West Bank in July, with a green light from the Trump Administration, and no one in Europe or elsewhere is even interested in initiating serious sanctions that might lead to the postponing of that decision. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has even stated flatly that the remaining Palestinians who would be annexed will not become Israeli citizens – they will instead be “subjects” of the Jewish state with no guaranteed rights or privileges.

The nationwide outpouring of protests during the last 10 days has provided a historic moral response to the murder of George Floyd. In one city after another, people braved tear gas, pepper spray, clubs and other weaponry -- as well as mass arrests -- to nonviolently challenge racist police violence. Those same people were also risking infection with the coronavirus.

Is George Floyd today’s Emmett Till?

Is the nation moving beyond, oh God, its third manifestation of “legal” racism? The first manifestation was, of course, slavery, which was eliminated via the Civil War. The second manifestation was the Jim Crow/KKK era, with its lynchings, black vote suppression, unending segregation and unquestioned white supremacy; the civil rights movement undid at least the legal aspect of this horror, but hardly the racism itself. The third phase, which started percolating in the ’70s and came to a full boil in the ’80s and ’90s, began with expanding the prison-industrial complex, militarizing the police and, of course, engaging in endless wars abroad. This, along with quasi-legal vote suppression, kept American racism institutionally intact and — son of a gun! — turned out to be enormously profitable. And people of color continued to suffer.

The war on Vietnam plays an infinitely larger role in history in the common understanding of a typical U.S. citizen than does what the U.S. government did to Indonesia in 1965-1966. But if you read The Jakarta Method, the new book by Vincent Bevins, you will have to wonder what moral basis there can possibly be for that fact.

During the war on Vietnam a tiny fraction of the casualties were members of the U.S. military. During the overthrow of Indonesia, zero percent of the casualties were members of the U.S. military. The war on Vietnam may have killed some 3.8 million people, not counting those who would die later from environmental poisoning or war-induced suicide, and not counting Laos or Cambodia. The overthrow of Indonesia may have killed some 1 million people. But let’s look a bit further.

https://worldbeyondwar.org/the-problem-with-the-space-force-is-not-a-dimwitted-general/

One cannot help but appreciate the speed with which it became acceptable to produce comedy about the U.S. Space Force. I don’t think any military branch or war or weapon or coup or base or boondoggle has been taken off its holy pedestal more rapidly. Recent clownish yet endearingly murderous efforts to overthrow the government of Venezuela are unlikely to be mocked in a movie for decades to come. But — as with most Hollywood productions — the new Netflix comedy about the Space Force has a set of predictable shortcomings.