Trump’s Record on Foreign Policy: Lost Wars, New Conflicts and Broken Promises

by MEDEA BENJAMIN - NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES

JULY 3, 2020 COUNTERPUNCH

On June 13, President Donald Trump told the graduating class at West Point, “We are ending the era of endless wars.” That is what Trump has promised since 2016, but the “endless” wars have not ended. Trump has dropped more bombs and missiles than George W. Bush or Barack Obama did in their first terms, and there are still roughly as many US bases and troops overseas as when he was elected.

Trump routinely talks up both sides of every issue, and the corporate media still judge him more by what he says (and tweets) than by his actual policies. So it isn’t surprising that he is still trying to confuse the public about his aggressive war policy. But Trump has been in office for nearly three and a half years, and he now has a record on war and peace that we can examine.

Such an examination makes one thing very clear: Trump has come closer to starting new wars with North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran than to ending any of the wars he inherited from Obama. His first-term record shows Trump to be just another warmonger in chief.

A Bloody Inheritance

First, let’s look at what Trump inherited. At the end of the Cold War, US political leaders promised Americans a “peace dividend,” and the Senate Budget Committee embraced a proposal to cut the US military budget by 50 percent over the next ten years. Ten years later, only 22 percent in savings were realized, and the George W. Bush administration used the terrorist crimes of September 11 to justify illegal wars, systematic war crimes, and an extraordinary one-sided arms race in which the United States accounted for 45 percent of global military spending from 2003 to 2011. Only half this $2 trillion spending surge (in 2010 dollars) was related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the US Navy and Air Force quietly cashed in a trillion-dollar wish list of new warships, warplanes, and high-tech weapons.

President Barack Obama entered the White House with a pledge to bring home US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and to shrink the US military footprint, but his presidency was a triumph of symbolism over substance. He won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize based on a few speeches, a lot of wishful thinking, and the world’s desperate hopes for peace and progress. But by the time Obama stepped down in 2017, he had dropped more bombs and missiles on more countries than Bush did, and had spent even more than Bush on weapons and war.

The major shift in US war policy under Obama was to reduce politically sensitive US troop casualties by transitioning from large-scale military occupations to mass bombing, shelling, and covert and proxy wars. While Republicans derisively dubbed Obama’s doctrine “leading from behind,” this was a transition that was already underway in Bush’s second term, when he committed the United States to completely withdrawing its occupation troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Obama’s defenders, like Trump’s today, were always ready to absolve him of responsibility for war crimes, even as he killed thousands of civilians in air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, including the gratuitous assassination of an American teenager in Yemen. Obama launched a new war to destroy Libya, and the United States’ covert role in the war in Syria was similar to its role in Nicaragua in the 1980s, for which, despite its covert nature, the International Court of Justice convicted the United States of aggression and ordered it to pay reparations.

Many senior US military and civilian officials deserve a share of the guilt for America’s systematic crimes of aggression and other war crimes since 2001, but the principle of command responsibility, recognized from the Nuremberg principles to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice, means that the commander in chief of the US armed forces, the president of the United States, bears the heaviest criminal responsibility for these crimes under US and international law.

Is Trump Different?

In January 2017, as Donald Trump prepared to take office, US forces in Iraq conducted their heaviest month of aerial bombardment since the “shock and awe” bombing during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This time, the enemy was the Islamic State (IS), a group spawned by the US invasion of Iraq and Obama’s covert support for Al Qaeda–linked groups in Syria. Iraqi forces captured East Mosul from the Islamic State on January 24, and in February, they began their assault on West Mosul, bombing and shelling it even more heavily until they captured the ruined city in July. A Kurdish Iraqi intelligence report recorded that more than forty thousand civilians were killed in the US-led destruction of Mosul.

Trump famously summed up his policy as “bomb the shit out of” the Islamic State. He appeared to give a green light to the military to murder women and children, saying, “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” Iraqi troops described explicit orders to do exactly that in Mosul. Middle East Eye (MEE) reported that Iraqi forces massacred all the survivors in Mosul’s Old City.

“We killed them all,” an Iraqi soldier said. “Daesh (IS), men, women, children. We killed everyone.” An Iraqi major told MEE,

“After liberation was announced, the order was given to kill anything or anyone that moved . . . It was not the right thing to do . . . They gave themselves up and we just killed them . . . There is no law here now. Every day, I see that we are doing the same thing as Daesh. People went down to the river to get water because they were dying of thirst and we killed them.”

By October 2017, Raqqa in Syria was even more totally destroyed than Mosul in Iraq. Under Obama and Trump, the United States and its allies have dropped more than 118,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in their campaign against the Islamic State, while US HIMARS rockets and US, French, and Iraqi heavy artillery killed even more indiscriminately.

The wholesale destruction of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and other major cities in Iraq and Syria cannot be legally justified under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, any more than the destruction of entire cities in past wars, like Hiroshima or Dresden. Despite the total lack of accountability, it is clear that American bombs, rockets, and shells killed thousands of civilians in each city and town captured. Obama and Trump share responsibility for these terrible crimes, but they are an escalation of the systematic war crimes the United States has committed since 2001 under three presidents.

In Afghanistan, as the Taliban gradually takes control of more of the country, Trump has resisted the temptation to send in tens of thousands more US troops, as Obama did, but he instead approved a major escalation in US bombing that made 2018 and 2019 the heaviest and deadliest years of US bombing in Afghanistan since 2001.

Trump has shrouded his war-making in even greater secrecy than Obama. The US military has not published a monthly Airpower Summary since February 2020, nor official troop deployment numbers for Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria for nearly three years. But the United States has dropped at least twenty thousand bombs on Afghanistan since Trump came to power, and there is no evidence of a reduction in bombing under the peace agreement the administration signed with the Taliban in February. Some US troops have been withdrawn under that agreement, but the remaining 8,600 are still being replaced as their tours end, keeping US troop strength at about the same level as when Obama left office.

Trump made a great show of repositioning US troops in Syria in October 2019, leaving the United States’ Kurdish allies in Rojava to confront the Turkish invasion alone. But there are still at least 500 US troops in Syria, and Trump deployed 14,000 more US troops to the Middle East in 2019, including to a new base in Saudi Arabia.

Trump has vetoed every bill passed by Congress to disengage US forces from the Saudi war in Yemen and to halt the sales of US-made warplanes and bombs, which the Saudis use to systematically kill Yemeni civilians. He created a new conflict with Iran by pulling out of the nuclear deal, and in January 2020, he capriciously flirted with a full-scale war on Iran by ordering the assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi military commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Iraq.

Trump’s bizarre decision to move the US Embassy in Israel to a plot of land that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized borders — and partly on Palestinian territory that Israel is illegally occupying — quite literally took US international relations into uncharted territory. Then Trump unveiled a so-called peace plan based on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambition to annex the rest of Palestine into a “Greater Israel” with vastly expanded — but still unrecognized and illegal — international borders.

Trump has also backed a coup in Bolivia, staged several failed ones in Venezuela, and targeted even the United States’ closest allies with sanctions to try to prevent them from trading with US enemies. Trump’s brutal sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Cuba are not a peaceful alternative to war, but a form of economic warfare just as deadly as bombs, especially during a pandemic and its accompanying economic meltdown.

A Boon to the Merchants of Death

Once the large-scale US military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan ended under Obama, the US military budget fell to $621 billion by 2015. But since then, military spending for procurement, research and development (R&D), and base construction has risen by 39 percent. This has been a huge windfall for the Big Five US weapons makers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — whose arms sales revenues rose 30 percent between 2015 and 2019.

The 49 percent increase to more than $100 billion for R&D on new weapons systems in 2020, part of the enormous $718 billion Pentagon budget, is a down payment on trillions of dollars in future revenue for the merchants of death unless these programs are stopped.

The pretext for Trump’s huge investment in big-ticket, high-tech weapons, including a new Space Force with a $15 billion price tag for 2021, is the New Cold War with Russia and China that he officially unveiled in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Obama was already trying to shift away from the United States’ lost counterinsurgency wars in the greater Middle East through his “Pivot to Asia,” the US-backed coup in Ukraine, and the expansion of US land and naval forces encircling Russia and China.

But Trump has the same problem as Obama as he tries to wriggle out of the “forever wars”: how to bring US troops home without making it obvious to the whole world that this chronically weak imperial power and its extravagant multitrillion-dollar war machine has been defeated everywhere. Even the most expensive weapons still only kill people and break things. Establishing peace and stability require other kinds of power and legitimacy, which the United States does not possess and which cannot be bought.

Before President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961, he remarked, “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” Trump is obviously as dazzled by chests full of medals and whizz-bang technology as every other president since Eisenhower, so he will keep giving the Pentagon everything it wants to keep spreading violence and chaos around the world.

Just as Obama co-opted and muted liberal opposition to Bush’s wars and record arms spending, Trump has co-opted and muted conservative opposition to Obama’s wars. Now, with the outpouring of protests against domestic police repression and calls for defunding the police, there is a growing chorus to also defund the military. That is certainly not a call Trump would listen to, but would Joe Biden be more receptive to public calls for peace and disarmament than Obama and Trump?

Probably not, based on his long record in the Senate, his roles in authorizing war on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, his close ties to Israel, and his failure to rein in US war-making as vice president, despite personally opposing Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan. Biden is also trying to outdo Trump in his opposition to China. Like Obama and Trump, Biden would be mainly a new manager and salesman in chief to sell the military-industrial complex’s latest strategy for war and global military occupation to the corporate media and the American public.

We will not rescue our country from the iron grip of the military-industrial complex by picking the lesser evil and hoping for the best. That has not worked for sixty years, since Eisenhower defined the problem so clearly in his farewell address.

On the other hand, a civil society coalition, led by the Poor People’s Campaign and including CODEPINK, is calling for a $350 billion cut in the military budget to fund human needs and public services, and representatives Barbara Lee, Pramila Jayapal, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced a resolution in Congress to do just that.

At the margins, this campaign could have more impact on Biden than on Trump, but not if people sweep up the bunting on election night and think their job is done, as liberals did with Obama and anti-war conservatives did with Trump. Unless and until the American public applies overwhelming pressure to dismantle the US war machine and its futile bid for “full spectrum” global dominance, the US military will keep losing wars on its own terms, bleeding us dry (metaphorically), and bleeding our neighbors overseas dry (literally), until it loses a major war with mass US casualties or destroys us all in a nuclear war.

The US peace movement has always had huge passive public support, but it will take mass collective action, not just passive support, to secure a peaceful future for our children and grandchildren. Public outrage and activism are starting to take away the license to kill black and brown people with impunity from the militarized RoboCops on our streets. The same kind of collective political action can defund and disarm the US military and take away its license to kill black and brown people everywhere.

Building a new anti-war movement that is connected to the domestic anti-police struggle is the only thing that can rein in US militarism. Because reelecting a president with as much blood on his hands as Trump — or simply transferring the command of the war machine to Joe Biden — certainly won’t.

This piece first appeared in Jacobin.

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More articles by:MEDEA BENJAMIN - NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection. Nicolas J. S. Davies is a writer for Consortium News and a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq

Challenging the French Republic’s Color-Blindness

by PHILIPPE MARLIÈRE 
JULY 3, 2020 COUNTERPUNCH

Photograph Source: Mike Shaheen – CC BY 2.0

George Floyd’s killing by a policeman in Minneapolis reverberated across the world in an unprecedented fashion. On all continents, young people took to the streets to pay tribute to Floyd. They protested against police brutality which they regarded as ‘systemic’. Citizens expressed their anger at the racial profiling of Black people by the police.

Those American scenes had a strong echo in France for two major reasons. Firstly, racialised populations were the most affected by Covid-19. Secondly, the young racialised could identify with George Floyd as they experience the same discriminating practices as their American counterparts.

There is strong anecdotal evidence that racialised populations were the most affected by Covid-19 in France and in the United Kingdom. In the UK, ethnic statistics were used to back up the claim, whereas in France it was only an assumption as no such statistics are available. People facing the greatest economic deprivation experienced a higher risk of exposure to Covid-19. Existing poor health put them at risk of more severe outcomes when they contacted the virus. Being poorer, living in overcrowded housing, poor health and access to health services largely increased the chances of contracting coronavirus. A British survey pointed to a strong correlation between those factors and the high rates of infection among the BAME population. What is more, BAME people were overrepresented among key workers (nurses, couriers, supermarket cashiers); the most exposed and affected workers during the pandemic.

The French media reported on the situation in the UK, but showed no interest in what was going on in France. Rare articles in the French press noted that in Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest French department, was the area which had the largest racialised population, many of them being key workers. Furthermore, the BAME population were also on the receiving end of the government’s most draconian lockdown measures. BAME people in Seine-Saint-Denis were three times as much arrested and fined as white people. Police brutality against ethnic minorities in poorer suburbs also made the headlines.

Why is there so much reluctance to address the question of racial discrimination in France? It can be best explained by the fact that French citizenship is granted to individuals in abstracto. To be a French citizen is to be part of a national community no matter what people’s ethnic or religious background is. France, which is deemed an ‘assimilationist’ country, differs from the ‘pluralist’ nations such as the United States or the United Kingdom in as much as it is theoretically indifferent to its citizens’ personal identity. The French State interacts with individuals, not with communities.

This is one of the legacies of the French revolution which broke with the class-ridden Ancien Régime by positing that all Men are born equal. It has now become one of the most ingrained features of French republicanism. As a result of this, it is illegal to implement any kind of positive discrimination action in education, housing or on the job market. A 1978 law regarding ‘data files, processing and individual liberties’ explicitly prohibits the collection and processing of personal data that reveals directly or indirectly, the racial and ethnic origins, or religion, of any persons.

Contrary to the liberal-multiculturalist way of thinking which reckons that this information is vital to identify and measure the extent of racial discrimination, France’s republican ideology thinks to the contrary: to collect ethnic-related data on individuals is allegedly ‘racist’ because it posits the unscientific notion that ‘races exist’. In truth, the lack of statistics makes it virtually impossible to judge the level of discrimination of Muslims and other ethnic minorities, since those populations are invisible in the rhetoric and data of the government and of the media.

The conditions were therefore ripe for the French youth to take to the streets and protest against police’s brutality, its arbitrary powers and racism. George Floyd’s killing gave young racialised that momentum. There have been several young people’s deaths under police custody. In a very large number of situations, the cases against policemen were dismissed and no sanction were taken against the perpetrators of violent acts against members of the public. The existence of institutional racism within French police is well documented. France has been sentenced several times by the European Court of Human Rights for breach of human rights such as torture or mistreatment. The Cour de Cassation – France’s highest court – condemned the State for ‘wilful misconduct’ in its racial profiling procedures. In a damning report, Jacques Toubon, the Ombudsman, singled out the ‘systemic’ racial profiling of youngsters subjected to repeated identity checks. The most high-profile case concerns Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old Black Frenchman who, according to his family and medical experts, was asphyxiated under the weight of three police officers in 2016.

Assa Traoré, Adama’s sister, set up the Justice and Truth for Adama committee, which has been demanding the indictment of the police officers involved in the arrest. Four years on, those three men are still active members of the police. On 2nd and 13th June, the Adama Traoré committee respectively gathered together 20,000 and 120,000 people in Paris despite a media blackout. No antiracist movement had ever managed to get off the ground in such spectacular fashion without any money or institutional support. The historic gathering in Place de la République showed that George Floyd’s death had struck a chord with young racialised people. They mostly demanded the prohibition of all the deadly techniques of arrest: the chokehold, strangling or kneeling on people’s backs.

The resurgence of anti-racist demonstrations – something relatively unheard of since the 1980s – was met by incredulous politicians. As ever when it comes to race, the French establishment was in denial. Most reverted to the tired argument that to talk about ‘race’ was ‘racism’. They argued that France had to uphold its ‘republican universal’ values, the best defence against racism and division. In a televised address to the nation, President Macron failed to pay tribute to George Floyd. In a thinly veiled critique of the Adama Traoré committee, he labelled the demonstrators of Place de la République ‘separatist’ and ‘communautaristes’ (a very pejorative word which implies that people reject the laws and traditions of the republic, and cultivate instead their own ‘community-driven’ values and lifestyles).

In a country which traditionally prides itself for rejecting all forms of ‘Americanisation’, the rise of antiracist activism was portrayed by some as an attempt to import American debates into French society. The use of a new repertoire of concepts to describe forms of racist discrimination was described by some as ‘political correctness gone mad’. Yet, the antiracist camp has been scoring important points: notions such ‘white privilege’, ‘racialised people’, ‘State racism’, ‘decolonial thought’ have lately been gaining traction and recognition in the public debate.

Under the impulse of the Justice and Truth for Adama committee, the fight against racism may be at a turning point in France. Never since the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, antiracism had taken centre stage in French politics. What is more, this new antiracist activism relies on the grassroots of the movement. These activists are young, ethnically diverse and intellectually ready to challenge some of the myths of ‘republican universalism’.

More articles by:PHILIPPE MARLIÈRE

Philippe Marlière is a Professor of French and European Politics at University College London (UK). Twitter: @PhMarliere

700+ Advertisers Boycott Facebook Over Hate Speech. Can The Social Network Change?

The Stop Hate For Profit campaign has garnered massive support in only a few weeks.

 But analysts say their dent in the social network’s profits won’t be enough.

By Kavish Harjai
Published on 7/2/2020 at 2:22 PM

You won’t see Ben & Jerry’s or Legos ads on Facebook in July.

These companies join more than 700 others that have said they will halt advertising on Facebook for at least a month starting July 1, according to an Anti-Defamation League spokesperson. The boycott is a part of the Stop Hate For Profit campaign and calls on Facebook to better handle hate speech and misinformation on its platform.

A coalition of civil rights groups, including the ADL, NAACP, and Color of Change among others, launched the Stop Hate For Profit campaign on June 17.

“The social media company is amplifying the messages of white supremacists, permitting incitement to violence, and is failing to disrupt bad actors using the platform to do harm,” the group said in a press release.

Some of the brands participating in the boycott, such as consumer mega-corporation Unilever, have said they’ll pause advertisements on all social media, not just Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram. Unilever said it’ll halt all such advertisements until the end of 2020 in part because of a “polarized election period in the U.S.”

Companies including Starbucks and Coca-Cola have pledged to a 30-day pause on Facebook advertisements, but didn’t officially endorse the Stop Hate For Profit campaign.

Facebook’s ad dollars made up nearly 99% of the company’s $70 billion global revenue last year. But several experts and reports predict that the month-long boycott will hardly affect Facebook’s bottom line. Those observers have argued that most of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from small and medium-sized businesses, and that a boycott would need to involve thousands of advertisers to be effective.

A CNN business analysis concluded that most of Facebook’s top 100 advertisers, including Walmart and American Express, are not participating in the boycott. One Wall Street firm said the boycott will impact less than 5% of Facebook’s overall revenue.

Since the boycott was announced, Facebook has tried to placate some of its critics with policy updates. On June 26, Zuckerberg said the company would restrict ads that claim people of a certain race and ethnicity “are a threat to the physical safety, health or survival of others.” He also announced that Facebook would affix “newsworthy” labels to posts that the company would otherwise take down, marking a departure from its previously intransigent stance on labeling objectionable content that it says has news value. This policy could affect politicians’ and world leaders’ posts more consequentially than the company’s actions have in the past.

In May, Facebook came under intense scrutiny for not taking action on a post by President Trump that said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The post was in reference to nationwide unrest after the police killing of George Floyd. Twitter, on the other hand, labeled Trump’s post with the same language, saying the tweet violated the platform’s rules on “glorifying violence.”

The Stop Hate For Profit coalition said on June 29 that Facebook’s recently announced policy changes are insufficient.

“Businesses did something incredible last week: they got Facebook’s attention,” the coalition said. “Sadly, none of these initial steps will make a significant dent in the persistent hate and racism so prevalent on the largest social media platform on the planet. That’s why we need to keep up the pressure.”

The coalition directed participating companies to ask Facebook 10 questions, such as whether the company will hire executives with civil rights expertise to evaluate its products and if the company will remove public and private groups “dedicated to hate or violent conspiracies.”

On July 1, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s VP of Global Affairs and Communications, wrote in AdAge that the company “does not profit from hate.” Clegg said the company invests billions of dollars in “people and technology to keep [the] platform safe.” The VP also said that in the first quarter of 2020, the company ”took action against” 9.6 million pieces of content. But Clegg acknowledged that with 100 billion messages being sent on the platform every day, some objectionable content falls through the cracks. He used a similar defense during a June 28 appearance on CNN, to which NYT opinion writer Charlie Warzel responded in a July 1 piece.

“Mr. Clegg’s defense is also an admission: Facebook is too big to govern responsibly,” Warzel wrote. “There will always be more work to do because Facebook’s design will always produce more hate than anyone could monitor. How do you reform that? You can’t.”

In private, Zuckerberg is reportedly unmoved by the ad boycott. Reporting from The Information revealed that the CEO told Facebook staff that the company will not change any policies “because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue.”

“I tend to think that if someone goes out there and threatens you to do something, that actually kind of puts you in a box where in some ways it’s even harder to do what they want because now it looks like you’re capitulating, and that sets up bad long-term incentives for others to do that [to you] as well,” Zuckerberg reportedly said in private remarks on June 26.

Zuckerberg will meet with the boycott’s organizers next week, according to Reuters.

While Joe Biden’s campaign has aggressively pressed Facebook on content policies — most recently about the company’s June 26 updates — it will not participate in the boycott. However, Bill Russo, a campaign spokesman, told CNN that the campaign “shares the concerns” of the companies that are participating.

"But with less than five months until Election Day, we cannot afford to cede these platforms to Donald Trump and his lies,” Russo said. “Our campaign will be present every day to get our message in front of every voter to ensure Trump doesn't get another four years."
Since April 2019, the Biden campaign has spent less than $27 million on Facebook ads.

The Trump campaign, which has spent nearly $10 million more on Facebook ads than its rival campaign, will also not participate in the boycott.

NYPD Shoved Protesters And Used Pepper Spray During Queer Liberation March

Several videos show police aggressively shoving marchers and using their batons during Sunday’s peaceful march.

By Ashleigh Carter
Published on 6/29/2020 


NYPD officers were shown in videos and photos using their batons and pepper spray and shoving peaceful protesters. Credit: Gabriele Holtermann-Gorden/ Reuters

New York City police officers appeared in multiple videos pepper spraying protesters and using aggressive force during a peaceful Pride march on the anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots that sparked the LGBTQ+ movement. Advocates including GLAAD have condemned law enforcement’s response.

Thousands of people attended the Queer Liberation March for Black Lives Matter and Against Police Brutality on Sunday afternoon, gathering in downtown Manhattan after the city’s annual Pride parade was canceled this year due to coronavirus. Dozens of videos and photos show police officers shoving crowds of marchers and using their batons and pepper spray against demonstrators.

These cops just got ran up on people pic.twitter.com/RnibVPjKfm— Eliel Cruz (@elielcruz) June 28, 2020

NYPD officers are chased off after altercations and arrests with #QueerLiberationMarch protestors in #NYC #NYCPride #nycprotests @SWNS @agreatbigcity pic.twitter.com/Ak7kvMv27J— Adam Gray (@agrayphoto) June 28, 2020

Pepper spray, including of a cop, another falls off a motorcycle, other cops pushing.... at splitter Pride march. pic.twitter.com/kauOXsAwbG— Matthew Chayes (@chayesmatthew) June 28, 2020

Organizers estimated that 50,000 people attended the march.

According to multiple reports, the largely peaceful protests became more violent during a rally in Washington Square Park where police attempted to arrest a man for tagging a cop car with graffiti.

An NYPD spokesperson told NowThis on Monday that officers arrested three people, though a legal observer told Gothamist that police arrested at least four people.

Attendee Mike Perles told Gothamist that before the police arrived at Washington Square Park, marchers were celebrating and dancing.

“We were dancing right in front of the arch on 5th ave and out of nowhere, cops started storming into the crowd,” Perles, who is reportedly a city employee, told Gothamist. “They pushed everyone in front of them out of the way and onto the ground. They pushed a reporter who was taking photos down and started randomly pepper spraying people. I couldn't see anyone instigating. It seemed like they felt out numbered after entering a huge group and panicked and started beating people up.”

The organizers of the march, Reclaim Pride Coalition, put out a statement Sunday calling the NYPD’s intervention in the march “a vast and brutal overreaction.” Organizers also said officers “punched and violently shoved” marchers and slammed a woman on a bicycle to the ground.

“I wish that I could say what I saw today was shocking, but how could I reasonably expect anything else from the NYPD?” Jake Tolan, one of the march organizers, said in the statement. “51 years after the Stonewall Rebellion, the NYPD is still responding to peaceful, powerful, righteous queer joy with pepper spray, batons, and handcuffs.”

We could not have pulled this off without the continued support of our Black & Trans organizers, supporters, endorsers, volunteers, and of course all of you marchers.
THANK YOU ALL!— Reclaim Pride Coalition (@queermarch) June 29, 2020

On the anniversary of the start of the Stonewall riots, the NYPD is attacking LGBTQ people who are marching for Pride. Let that sink in. https://t.co/j4ZL4jMHsa— GLAAD (@glaad) June 28, 2020

The celebration continued into early Monday near the Stonewall Inn, where an uprising in response to police brutality helped ignite the modern Pride movement 51 years ago. On June 28, 1969, police raided the historic gay bar, inciting a days-long riot.

Last year, former NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill apologized on behalf of the NYPD for the actions of police officers that sparked the 1969 riots.

“I do know that what happened at Stonewall should not have happened,” O’Neil said during a 2019 Pride Month community safety briefing. “The actions taken by the NYPD were wrong, plain and simple. The actions and the laws were discriminatory and oppressive, and for that I apologize.”

Several people have criticized New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio for tweeting about his support of the LGBTQ+ community on the anniversary of the movement despite police response to this year’s protests. (De Blasio has been under fire in recent weeks, after he ran on a platform of improving the city’s relationship with police.)

he tweeted this while his cops pepper sprayed the queer liberation march https://t.co/MxHt8sSo9j— alex (@alex_abads) June 28, 2020

Black, brown and white queer and trans Lives were threatened and harmed by police during a peaceful March and protest In NYC today. While the @NYCMayor shared tweets of support of our community the police shared mace pepper spray handcuffs and violent force against us.— Black femme life is precious (@IndyaMoore) June 29, 2020

Shame on @NYCMayor rainbow flags flying at city hall while the police are still beating our folks 50 years later, this was a peaceful march vulnerable communities many who have faced police violence were triggered by this violence you are complicit with the photos speak— BlackTransMedia (@BlackTransMedia) June 29, 2020

Several city officials expressed their disappointment in Sunday’s events, including Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson.

On the 51st anniversary of Stonewall, which should be a time of celebration, I am concerned that in these instances the NYPD failed in their duty to protect NYers & de-escalate. We need answers, especially as we approach a potential budget agreement defining our city’s values. https://t.co/QxhEuFbGLe— Gale A. Brewer (@galeabrewer) June 28, 2020

The first #Pride started as a response to police brutality. Today, peaceful protesters were pepper sprayed on the 51st anniversary of Stonewall. This is incredibly disturbing.

We need a full investigation into what happened today. https://t.co/QpUG9OIej7— NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson (@NYCSpeakerCoJo) June 29, 2020

51 Years After Stonewall, New York’s Queer Liberation March Faces Police Violence

This is a moment of reckoning that is knitting together seemingly disparate social movements.

By Jay Walker

Protesters confront NYPD officers after they arrested a person for disorderly conduct following the Queer Liberation March in New York City. (Gabriele Holtermann / Sipa USA)

At about 4:30 PM on Sunday, June 28, I was both elated and exhausted. After marching for two and a half miles as a lead organizer of the Queer Liberation March for Black Lives and Against Police Brutality, I had taken a short break to rest and replenish near our end point, Washington Square Park. But now I was ready to go back into the post-march celebration in the center of the park. I saw in the distance that there seemed to be a commotion at the north end of the park, near the Washington Square Arch, and started to walk toward it. On my way, I ran into my friend Liz, who told me that the NYPD had pepper-sprayed the tail end of our march and that Sasha Alexander of Black Trans Media, who was running the post-march speak-out at the small stone stage in the middle of the park, had successfully implored the White people viewing the speak-out to form a barrier around the perimeter of the area to protect the Black and Brown and Trans folks speaking and watching. I glanced over at the stage area and saw the line of White faces lined up facing any danger that might be on its way and felt proud to be among these people. Then I headed to the arch. Soon, I saw people on the ground trying to flush their eyes out and ran into my friend Dinetta, who gave me more details on the police’s actions: She had seen cops ramming into protesters with their motor scooters, unleashing pepper spray on the crowd and intentionally escalating tensions. How had we gotten here?

The first Queer Liberation March and rally, held on June 29, Pride Sunday, 2019, had been an on a enormous success. The march’s organizers, the Reclaim Pride Coalition (RPC) had conceived it as an alternative to the mainstream parade, produced by the organization Heritage of Pride. We planned a march that wouldn’t have the overwhelming presence of the NYPD, whose route wouldn’t be fully barricaded, and that would avoid the overweening corporate presence in the traditional Pride parade. In addition, we sought to uplift the voices of the most marginalized communities among our larger LGBTQ+ family. After months of negotiation with the NYPD, the mayor’s office, and the Parks Department, we had successfully produced a march of 45,000 from Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street to the Great Lawn of Central Park, where a rally featuring speeches and performances from a wide swath of largely Black, Brown, Indigenous, Immigrant, Disabled, Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and Neurodivergent LGBTQ+ activists and performers. The long-standing history of police violence against members of these communities and the lasting trauma resulting from it prompted the RPC’s insistence on a minuscule NYPD presence at our march and rally. That goal was with accomplished with no barricading along our march route, which shifted to Sixth Avenue after we departed from Christopher Street, replicating the route of our inspiration, the June 28, 1970, Christopher Street Liberation Day March, the first Pride march, conceived and executed by the Gay Liberation Front.

After that extraordinary success and the appreciation we heard from many of New York City’s queer communities, the Reclaim Pride Coalition recognized a mandate to move forward with plans to replicate that success in 2020. That is, until some lady named Rona came to town and blew our Pride plans for June to smithereens. We quickly decided that we would pursue some virtual programming for Pride Sunday. But by the time we had determined the content we wanted for the livestream, we were hit by a steady stream of shocks to our systems. First, the inaction in response to Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, then the police execution of Breonna Taylor, then a white woman calling the police on birdwatcher Chris Cooper in the Central Park Ramble, and the one-two gut punches of the death of legendary activist Larry Kramer, less than a year after he had delivered an impassioned speech after our inaugural 2019 Queer Liberation March, and the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Our members and organizers took to the streets in protest. Soon, there was unanimous agreement that we would reconstitute our Pride march in person, not just virtually, one that would be held in the fully intersectional spirit of our organization’s founding. And we had to get all of that done in three and a half weeks.


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Somehow, it worked. After we announced our plans, the NYPD reached out to us through our pro bono attorney, Norman Siegel, who has been a part of our efforts since the fall of 2018. Through Norman, we told them we would not be seeking a permit and they replied that they wouldn’t interfere. We planned to begin in Foley Square in Lower Manhattan and proceed up to the Village passing the Stonewall Inn and ending in Washington Square Park, but we resolved not to reveal our route publicly and only announced our end point on the Friday before the march.
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On Sunday morning, we awoke to sunshine and cloudless skies. Our team arrived at Foley Square at 11 AM to prepare. There were almost no cops in sight. We began with brief opening remarks at approximately 12:45 and after pouring libations to our murdered Black and Brown siblings, singer Xavier Smith started the march off with a stirring a cappella rendition of the “Negro national anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” We had no difficulties along the march route. At the front of the march, there was almost no visible police presence beyond a couple of unmarked cars driving a couple of blocks ahead to ensure that the streets ahead of us were clear and an experienced plainclothes police liaison marching ahead of the marshals and staying apprised with our decisions along the route. After marching past the Stonewall Inn, we looped back on West 10th Street to Fifth Avenue and then down into Washington Square. Once inside the park, I led the lead marchers over to the small park stage to get things situated for the speak-out. Afterward I took that replenishing break and then reentered the festivities, only to find that the NYPD had caused the end of the march to descend into chaos.

Once I passed the arch, I was relieved to see that our marshals were still there on Waverly Place. I spoke to them and got the details. A truck blaring dance music had joined the rear of the march at some point during the route. That truck parked just west of the arch entrance and an impromptu dance party ensued along Waverly Place and at the bottom of Fifth Avenue. At some point shortly after the dancing began, the hordes of cops—many unmasked and improperly masked—invaded the marchers’ space.


According to several trained RPC marshals who were present throughout the melee, although the NYPD had promised not to interfere with our march, they had decided to amass a large phalanx of officers in the area north and east of the Fifth Avenue entrance to the park. Soon they were arresting a man for scribbling with a black Sharpie on the back of a police car parked nearby. Angered by the sudden police presence after a virtually cop-free march against police brutality, the crowd drew toward the arresting officers chanting, “Let him go!” Perhaps recognizing the fundamental illogic of storming into a space filled with hundreds of New Yorkers who are intent on defunding, dismantling, and abolishing policing as it exists, the cops began to panic. They called for backup and began pushing chaotically into the crowd. Cops on scooters drove directly into marchers. Using pepper spray, billy clubs, and their fists, they attacked anyone within reach, whacking people on their lower legs to cause them to fall, and generally “wilding out.” Fortunately, the trained marshals, led by veteran ACT UP activists Jamie Bauer, Alexis Danzig, and BC Craig, managed to de-escalate the situation, convincing the marchers to sit and squat down to allow people to be able to see. The cops arrested an additional two people whom they themselves had attacked. The protesters began chanting, “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?” Soon, the marchers gave the cops an exit path going west along Waverly Place and the protesters advanced along with them so as not to cede space.

Once the central arch-adjacent area had been cleared of cops, I joined the marshals in directing folks to get out of the street and back onto the sidewalks and into the park. Just as we had the area calm, scores of cops wearing riot gear trooped in marching from east to west along Waverly. The marshals kept people from surging back into the street; but not from reading the riot cops for filth verbally. Within two or three minutes, the riot cops, realizing that their presence was unnecessary and clearly provoking the protesters, exited in the direction from whence they came. Order at least temporarily restored, the lead marshals and I departed to go provide jail support for those arrested at the Sixth Precinct house on West 10th Street. It was only later that we would hear on the news that the NYPD had charged those people they had attacked and arrested with assaulting an officer. It was going to be a long night.

Late in the day on Monday, June 29, after over 24 hours in custody, the three arrestees were released, two with desk appearance tickets and one on bond. But, the further damage to the reputation of the NYPD was undeniable; just as the many instances of horrific brutality and illegal and unwarranted acts of force over the last month have. In this moment of reckoning that has come in the wake of this spring’s police murders of Black Americans, the United States appears to have entered a new phase in the intersectional activism initially prompted by the election of Donald Trump. The three and a half years of resistance, the Women’s March movement, the Dreamer and immigrant rights mMovements, the #MeToo movement, the Extinction Rebellion movement, the Indigenous peoples and sacred lands movement, the HIV/AIDS and health care equity movements, and the March for Our Lives have paved the way for the multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, multigender, multiply sexually orientated protests that have swept the nation. And all of that work builds on the foundations laid 50 or 60 years ago, the last time we had a similarly broad national reckoning that knitted together seemingly disparate movements like the Gay Liberation Front, the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the farmworkers movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmentalist movement. That period of common-cause activism was allowed to wither and die in the ’80s; but it appears that we may have more stamina in this moment, as well as an ability to connect with each other and maintain our movements digitally in a way that the forces of political and capitalist orthodoxy may not have the wherewithal to undo. This might be the moment that heralds a true opportunity to dismantle the White supremacist patriarchy upon which this country was founded. Can we use our information technology and organizing momentum to make progress quickly so that we are not fractured into our constituent parts again? Well, I suppose that is up to us. The only thing I can be certain of is that the third Queer Liberation March will be held on Pride Sunday, June 27, 2021.




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Jay WalkerJay W. Walker is an organizer, activist, and cofounder of the Reclaim Pride Coalition. He has conceived, produced, and co-produced numerous fundraising events, public awareness campaigns, rallies and protests focusing on LGBTQ issues, HIV/AIDS (Jay is a longtime HIV survivor), hate crimes, the movement for Black lives, and other issues over the last 20 years.

U.S. Coronavirus Cases Per Day Higher Than Wuhan Total Infections

AMERIKAN PLAGUE #CORONAVIRUSA #COVIDTRUMP

BY SOO KIM ON 7/3/20

New cases of the novel coronavirus in the U.S. climbed past 50,000 for the second consecutive day on Thursday. The latest daily figures surpassed the total confirmed cases seen in Wuhan, the Chinese capital of the Hubei province where the virus was first reported earlier this year.

The U.S. reported a record number of around 52,300 new infections Thursday, the highest daily case count since the outbreak began. Around 51,200 new cases were recorded Wednesday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Around mid-April, by which time the outbreak was reported to have been largely contained in China and restrictions were lifted in Wuhan after a two-month lockdown, Wuhan's health authorities reported total confirmed cases in the city were 50,333, China's state media Xinhua news agency.


Following a review of the city's epidemiological data, the Wuhan municipal headquarters for COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control issued a notification stating, as of April 16, confirmed infections in Wuhan were at 50,333, following an update of 325 additional cases. The death toll was also raised by nearly 50 percent, with 1,290 more fatalities, bringing the city's total fatalities to 3,869.

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"Previously, Wuhan reported a total of 50,008 confirmed cases of COVID-19 by the end of April 16. A total of 217 repeatedly counted cases should be deducted from the previous figure due to the fact that there were patients who saw doctors in different districts or visited more than one hospital," an official of the Wuhan municipal headquarters confirmed, Xinhua reported in April.

"Meanwhile, a total of 542 cases that were previously not tallied due to belated or missed reporting should be added to the figure. The accumulative number of confirmed cases was revised to 50,333," the official said.

Doubts over the COVID-19 data officially reported by China have swirled for months since the outbreak began. Back in April, 900 cases appeared to have been wrongly counted as recoveries in Wuhan, according to the latest figures from China's National Health Commission.

In February, China's health commission also reportedly removed 108 casualties from the death toll in Hubei after it emerged that some deaths were counted twice, Agence-France-Presse reported.

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The notification issued in April by Wuhan health officials cited several reasons for the recent "data discrepancies," including delayed, missed or mistaken reporting due to hospital staff being overwhelmed by the surge in patients at the height of the outbreak, Xinhua reported in April.

The latest daily case counts in the U.S. approached nearly the same number as the total infections seen across the Hubei province, which has seen 68,135 cases to date, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. daily case totals for Wednesday and Thursday were each over three times the highest ever daily case count seen in China, which saw a record 15,100 new cases on February 13. The number of daily new cases in the U.S. began surpassing China's record daily case count from March 26 and continued to do so throughout the outbreak since, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.


Daily new cases in the U.S. have been on a mostly increasing trend from early June, with several states, including Florida, Texas and California, seeing large spikes in recent weeks.

Last month, Beijing reported its first new domestic case in nearly two months after a 52-year-old man tested positive for COVID-19.

Thousands of protesters wearing masks gathered in Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn for a peaceful protest in support of the Black Lives Matter movement on June 19, 2020.GETTY IMAGES


Fears of a second wave of the outbreak were raised last month following a new cluster of cases linked to Beijing's Xinfadi wholesale food market, a sprawling complex over 20 times larger than the seafood market in Wuhan where the first outbreak is suspected to have originated, Reuters reported.

The new cases saw the Xinfandi market closed, while 11 residential areas near the market were placed under a strict lockdown. Ten communities near the Yuquandong market, which reported cases linked to Xinfadi, were also placed under lockdown.

The novel coronavirus has infected over 10.8 million people across the globe, including 84,830 in China and more than 2.7 million in the U.S. Over 521,300 people have died, while more than 5.7 have reportedly recovered from infection, as of Friday, according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University.


The graphics below, provided by Statista, illustrate the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S.
1 of 2


STATISTA

The graphic below, provided by Statista, illustrates the portion of people who wore a mask in April and May amid the ongoing pandemic.

STATISTA

The graphic below, provided by Statista, illustrates the seven-day rolling average of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and European Union.
A graph comparing newly confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and Europe.STATISTA

NONFICTION

The Day the White Working Class Turned Republican

New York construction workers, May 8, 1970.Credit...Neal Boenzi/The New York Times
By Clyde Haberman
July 1, 2020
THE HARDHAT RIOT
Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution
By David Paul Kuhn

The nation, we keep hearing on television and in social media blather, is politically divided as never before. Nonsense. The ostensibly united states have been disunited many, many times, and “The Hardhat Riot,” by David Paul Kuhn, vividly evokes an especially ugly moment half a century ago, when the misbegotten Vietnam War and a malformed notion of patriotism combined volatilely. They produced a blue-collar rampage whose effects still ripple, not the least of them being Donald Trump’s improbable ascension to the presidency.

Let’s remember what the United States was like in 1970: a country torn apart after years of political assassination, unpopular war, economic dislocation, race rioting and class disharmony. The last thing it needed in 1970 was more open fighting in the streets. But that’s what it got on May 8, days after President Richard Nixon had expanded America’s Southeast Asia misadventure into Cambodia and Ohio National Guardsmen shot dead four students during antiwar protests at Kent State University.

Kuhn, who has written before about white working-class Americans, builds his book on long-ago police records and witness statements to recreate in painful detail a May day of rage, menace and blood. Antiwar demonstrators had massed at Federal Hall and other Lower Manhattan locations, only to be set upon brutally, and cravenly, by hundreds of steamfitters, ironworkers, plumbers and other laborers from nearby construction sites like the nascent World Trade Center. Many of those men had served in past wars and viscerally despised the protesters as a bunch of pampered, longhaired, draft-dodging, flag-desecrating snotnoses.

It was a clash of irreconcilable tribes and battle cries: “We don’t want your war” versus “America, love it or leave it.” And it was bewildering to millions of other Americans, including my younger self, newly back home after a two-year Army stretch, most of it in West Germany. My sympathies were with the demonstrators. But I also understood the working stiffs and why they felt held in contempt by the youngsters and popular culture.

New social policies like affirmative action and school busing affected white blue-collar families far more than they did the more privileged classes that spawned many antiwar activists. For Hollywood, the workingman seemed barely a step above a Neanderthal, as in the 1970 movies “Joe,” about a brutish factory worker, and “Five Easy Pieces,” in which a diner waitress is set up to be the target of audience scorn. (Come 1971, we also had “All in the Family” and television’s avatar of working-class bigotry, Archie Bunker.)

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It was, too, an era when New York was changing fast and not for the better. Corporations decamped for the suburbs and warm-weather states. Kuhn notes how between 1967 and 1974 the number of Fortune 500 headquarters in the city fell to 98 from 139. Whites moved out in droves. Crime rose, and if you proposed getting tough on felons you risked being labeled a racist. Roughly one in three city residents was on public assistance. Municipal finances were in tatters. In short, 1970 New York was a caldron of misery, one rare bright spot being its basketball team, the Knicks, neatly integrated and en route to its first championship.

Kuhn quotes the estimable Pete Hamill as observing back then that the workingman “feels trapped and, even worse, in a society that purports to be democratic, ignored.” One could go further. Many blue-collar workers felt scorned — by the wealthy, by the college-educated, by the lucky ones with draft deferments, by every group that qualified as elite. They sneered back, especially at the patrician New York mayor. The way many of them referred to Lindsay, you’d have thought his first name was not John but, rather, an all-too-familiar obscenity.

Understanding hard-hat resentment, however, does not translate into excusing the violence that hundreds of them inflicted that May 8, the 25th anniversary of the Allied victory over Germany in World War II. Self-styled paragons of law and order, they became a mob, pounding and kicking any antiwar youngster they could grab, doing the same to bystanders who tried to stop the mayhem and justifying it in the name of America. Kuhn ably and amply documents the cowardly beating of women, the gratuitous cold-cocking of men and the storming of a shakily protected City Hall, where the mayor’s people, to the hard hats’ rage, had lowered the flag in honor of the Kent State dead.


“A tribal tension had infused downtown,” Kuhn observes. Among the tribes were the police, who were anything but New York’s finest that day. Mostly, they stood aside while the hard hats ran amok; examples of their nonfeasance abound. Some of them even egged on the thuggery. When a group of hard hats moved menacingly toward a Wall Street plaza, a patrolman shouted: “Give ’em hell, boys. Give ’em one for me!” Yet the police were never held accountable for failing to stop the marauding, and “few hard hats owned up to the extent of their violence.”

Kuhn favors straightforward journalistic prose, with few grand flourishes. In setting scenes, he tends toward a staccato, some of it overdone: One speaker “exuded Establishment. The jacket and tie. A WASP face with a Roman nose. The side-swept hair, straight and trim with delicate bangs, a tidy mustache, pinkish skin.” Hardly every antiwar protester merits his go-to characterization of them as potty-mouthed hippies.

But over all, this is a compelling narrative about a horrific day. In their fury, the hard hats left more than 100 wounded, the typical victim being a 22-year-old white male collegian, though one in four was a woman; seven police officers were also hurt. Kuhn concludes that while the workers plainly came loaded for bear, their tantrum was essentially spontaneous and not, as some believed, part of a grand conspiracy.

That said, they were just what some conservative strategists were looking for. Patrick Buchanan, then a Nixon aide, said of blue-collar Americans in a memo to the boss, “These, quite candidly, are our people now.” He wasn’t wrong. Republicans have since catered as ever to the rich but they have also curried favor with working-class whites, while Democrats seem more focused on others: racial minorities, gays, immigrants. Thanks in good measure to white blue-collar disaffection, Trump in 2016 narrowly won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, a hat trick he may yet pull off again in November.

In a way, Vietnam continues to cast its shadow. A short walk from those 1970 streets of chaos, there is a memorial to the 1,741 New Yorkers who died in the war. Its dominant feature is a wall of thick glass etched with reflections on combat, including part of a haunting letter sent home from Vietnam in 1968. “One thing worries me — will people believe me?” The Navy lieutenant Richard W. Strandberg wrote. “Will they want to hear about it, or will they want to forget the whole thing ever happened?”

Indeed, most Americans forgot about Vietnam long ago. The same has been true about the shameful hard-hat riot of 1970. Until now.




Clyde Haberman, United States Army 1968-70, is the former “NYC” columnist for The Times.

THE HARDHAT RIOT
Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution
By David Paul Kuhn
Illustrated. 416 pp. Oxford University Press. $29.95.