Rally against police brutality ends near Grant Park after failed attempt to walk on Dan Ryan Expressway
By MADELINE BUCKLEY
CHICAGO TRIBUNE | AUG 15, 2020

Anti-police-brutality protesters gather in the intersection of East 35th Street and South Indiana Avenue as the group marches north on Aug. 15, 2020, in Chicago. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

A massive presence of Chicago police officers and Illinois State Police troopers blocked a group of about 200 protesters from marching on the Dan Ryan Expressway on Saturday afternoon, thwarting a planned protest meant to disrupt traffic there to draw attention to police brutality.

The group, which gathered at Robert Taylor Park at 39 W. 47th St. around noon, instead marched north through Bronzeville, and then onto Michigan Avenue in the South Loop, carrying signs with names of people who died due to violent encounters with police. The march wrapped up around 5 p.m. near Grant Park.

“We’re here on this stage to fight for justice for stolen lives,” organizer Rabbi Michael Ben Yosef told the crowd before the march.

People protesting police brutality march north on South Indiana Avenue from 47th Street on Aug. 15, 2020, in Chicago. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

Yosef, president of humanitarian group Tikkun Chai Inter-National, hoped for a crowd of up to 25,000 to march onto the expressway, reminiscent of a similar one in 2018 organized by the Rev. Michael Pfleger to put a spotlight on crime, joblessness and poverty plaguing city neighborhoods.

In that earlier march, demonstrators started by using half of the northbound lanes, while traffic proceeded in the remaining lanes. Eventually, though, the marchers took over all northbound lanes.

But Yosef acknowledged Saturday afternoon that the turnout fell short of expectations, saying the crowd should have been bigger.

He demanded an end to what he said was qualified immunity for law enforcement officers, an abolishment of police unions and the redirection of police funding to mental health services he said was shuttered by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The group is marching East away from the Dan Ryan with a lot of police on each side. pic.twitter.com/ZczolD7VX1— Madeline Buckley (@Mabuckley88) August 15, 2020

A woman carrying a poster board with a photo of her husband spoke to the crowd, relaying that her husband died of COVID-19 in the Cook County Jail in April.

“He walked in a healthy man,” she said, criticizing mass incarceration.

The event, though, drew some criticism, as a group of counterprotesters used microphones to proclaim that the event brought floods of officers into the South Side neighborhood and disrupted life in the neighborhood.

“Take this back to the North Side,” a counterprotester said.

Chicago and state police officers block East 43rd Street at the Dan Ryan Expressway as anti-police-brutality protesters march north. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)


A man hands out water bottles as Illinois State Police officers in riot gear wait in the intersection of East 35th Street and South Indiana Avenue. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

As the march began to step off, a wall of Chicago police officers and Illinois State Police troopers in riot gear blocked 47th Street so the crowd could not walk west to the Dan Ryan Expressway.
The marchers turned around and instead marched east on 47th, away from the highway, and then turned north on Indiana Avenue.

Lines of law enforcement officers blocked off cross streets on foot and bicycle, moving with the crowd, so the marchers could not try again to move toward the expressway. A trail of police vehicles followed the crowd from behind.

“I have been protesting since May almost every weekend,” said Amira Abuarqoub, a 20-year-old from the northwest suburbs, noting that she was not surprised to see such a large police presence.

Even though the crowd did not make it onto the Dan Ryan, Abuarqoub said it felt meaningful to take to the streets to send their message.

She carried a sign with the name of Joseph Jennings, an 18-year-old shot and killed in Kansas in 2014.

mabuckley@chicagotribune.com
Madeline Buckley
is a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. She has previously reported on criminal justice issues in Indiana and Texas and is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame.

The Texas Rangers' lore spurred cultural fawning and sports namesakes that have long masked a history of violence and racism

This year's prevalent and ongoing protests against police brutality have sparked calls for the Rangers' name to be stricken from the modern-day Texas Department of Public Safety investigative agency, North Texas’ Major League Baseball team and college mascots.

BY MEENA VENKATARAMANAN AUG. 15, 2020

Arlinda Valencia, 68, holds a photograph taken in 1918 of her great-grandfather Longino Flores, left, great-grandmother Juana Bonilla Flores and aunt Rosa Flores Mesa. Credit: Joel Angel Juarez for The Texas Tribun

Growing up in Monahans in the 1960s, Arlinda Valencia said she was used to hearing about the valor of the Texas Rangers in school and on television.

“I grew up watching The Lone Ranger,” she said, referring to the 1950s Western drama series. “The Lone Ranger was a hero, and that's what we grew up with, thinking that the Texas Rangers were heroes.”

But when Valencia learned from a relative that the Texas Rangers took part in killing her great-grandfather, Longino Flores, and 14 other unarmed Tejano men and boys in the 1918 Porvenir massacre, she slowly began to reevaluate her long-held perception of the law enforcement agency.

Now Valencia, 68, is spreading word of the massacre in hopes of shedding light on a piece of Texas history that historically has not been given widespread attention: the Texas Rangers’ racist and xenophobic past. She developed a website that details the massacre and has organized screenings of "Porvenir, Texas," a 2019 documentary about the killings.

This year’s prevalent and ongoing anti-police brutality protests have added resonance to Valencia’s cause as calls have surfaced for the Texas Rangers name to be stricken from the modern-day Texas Department of Public Safety investigative agency, North Texas’ Major League Baseball team and college mascots. Meanwhile, historians and public officials are at odds over how to reconcile the law enforcement unit’s racist historical acts with its long-running exalted place in Texas history and culture.

The Porvenir massacre is one of many past acts of violence committed by the Texas Rangers against people of color in the state, including indigenous Texans, Black Texans and Tejanos, or Mexican Americans from the South Texas region, from the 19th century through the 20th century.

As a law enforcement agency, the Rangers were unofficially founded in 1823 for the purpose of a “punitive expedition against a band of Indians,” according to the Texas State Historical Association. They continued to drive indigenous people from their homelands during the Cherokee War in 1839, as well as the Council House Fight and Battle of Plum Creek against the Comanches in 1840.

In the mid-1800s, the Rangers captured runaway enslaved Black people seeking freedom in Mexico through the Callahan Expedition, according to the Texas State Historical Association.

In 1918, the Rangers slaughtered Tejanos during the Porvenir massacre, said John Morán González, a literature professor and the director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. According to the Texas Observer, the massacre occurred when a group of Rangers, U.S. Army soldiers and ranchers arrived at the Porvenir village near El Paso in pursuit of revenge for a series of cattle raids by Tejanos along the border. A 2018 El Paso Times article reported there was no evidence implicating the Porvenir villagers in the cattle raids, but the Rangers nevertheless separated 15 men and boys from their families and executed them.

Decades later, in the mid-1950s, Rangers helped the Texas governor, Allan Shivers, resist a federal court order for Mansfield High School to desegregate, according to the Texas Historical Association.

The Department of Public Safety investigative agency did not directly comment on calls to change its name, but wrote in a statement that it is “aware of recent stories about the history of the Texas Rangers and defers judgment on the veracity of those depictions to Texas historians.”

“The modern-day Texas Rangers are comprised of principled men and women of great skill and integrity who are fully committed to the rule of law,” it said in a statement.

Dr. John Morán González, director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and literature professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune

Doug Swanson’s 2020 book "Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers" prompted the removal of a statue of a Texas Ranger from Dallas’ Love Field Airport in June by city officials.

Meanwhile, progressive activists have petitioned for the Texas Rangers baseball team to change its name.

“While we may have originally taken our name from the law enforcement agency, since 1971 the Texas Rangers Baseball Club has forged its own, independent identity,” said John Blake, a team spokesperson. “The Texas Rangers Baseball Club stands for equality. We condemn racism, bigotry and discrimination in all forms.”


And ahead of the DPS investigative unit Texas Rangers’ bicentennial celebration in 2023, historians and activists are advocating for a more comprehensive portrayal of the law enforcement entity in the public eye.

Historians like González believe the Texas Rangers name should be retired entirely from the modern agency, the baseball team and local mascots, like that of San Antonio College, which decided to change its mascot’s name last month, according to KENS. Along with Benjamin Johnson, a Loyola University Chicago history professor, González co-founded Refusing to Forget, an organization that hopes to educate people about state-sanctioned violence against Tejanos in the early 20th century.

“I just think it's impossible to talk about this particular organization and use the word ‘ranger’ without invoking this 200 year-old actual history of violent policing, especially against communities of color,” Johnson said.

But Jerry Patterson, a former Texas land commissioner and state senator, said he believes scrapping the Texas Ranger name from various organizations is “total bullshit.”


Patterson, 73, said he has seen nationwide public perception of the Rangers move “like a pendulum swing,” from glorifying the Rangers to demonizing them — both of which he believes are misguided approaches. Instead of taking down statues and changing names, Patterson said, Texas historians and activists should portray the multidimensional history of the Rangers, which he said was his goal when he worked on the "Porvenir, Texas" documentary.

“We have to tell the story, the complete story, warts and all, good, bad and ugly, and that's not what's being done,” he said.

Former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson holds up a Winchester Model 1895 carbine, a model favored by the Texas Rangers. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune

The role of media

González, 54, remembers watching Walker, Texas Ranger in the early ’90s — a television series starring Chuck Norris and one of many examples of mass media that he believes has exalted the Texas Rangers and gifted them with an almost mythical position in Texas culture.

As a child growing up in Houston, Johnson, 48, recalls reading books about the Rangers that would lionize them, “telling these stories of heroism and bravery and apprehending various criminals and fighting various people” while ignoring the carnage.


“To put it more simply, that glorification of the Rangers, it's built on a lot of blood,” said González, who is half-Tejano and was raised in Brownsville.

Byron Johnson, the director of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, a state-designated historical center, said there are thousands of books, hundreds of films and a handful of television programs about the Rangers, making them a “legendary” force in Texas history and culture.

But the museum has been the subject of controversy among historians and officials who are concerned it only presents the positive aspects of the Texas Rangers.

“They lionize some of the murderers that our scholarship has looked at and that have come to light in recent years,” Benjamin Johnson, the history professor, said. “They simply ignore critical takes so you can't find any critical books, of which there have actually been a lot for decades and decades, [in the museum].”


Swanson, the journalist and author, agreed. He said it’s important to acknowledge the Rangers’ positive contributions to Texas — such as fighting the Ku Klux Klan and saving Texans from lynch mobs. But, Swanson said, the museum ignores the perspectives of Native Americans, Hispanic Texans and Black Americans and omits the Porvenir killings from its website.

Byron Johnson, the museum’s director, said its current and rotating exhibits have covered the Porvenir massacre and women, Hispanic people and Native Americans in the Texas Rangers.

“However, exhibit space and resources have limited what needs to be covered in the exhibits,” he wrote in an email.

He added that in March, the museum approved a contract to review its programs and consider expanding its exhibits that will “involve a diverse group of citizens, historians, authors and Texas Rangers.”


Valencia, the great-granddaughter of Longino Flores, said the museum needs to hold itself accountable for portraying an accurate history of the Rangers.

“I think they should keep the museum, but they need to put the people that are responsible for all these deaths, they need to fess up and there needs to be in that whole thing a section of the dark past,” she said.
Reforming Texas history curricula

Benjamin Johnson said that Refusing to Forget wants Texas education officials to incorporate more events that happened between 1910 and 1920 along the Texas-Mexico borderlands into Texas history classes that are required for fourth and seventh graders. The Porvenir massacre is currently not explicitly mentioned in the curricula.

“We would like these episodes to be represented,” he said.


He and González want Texas history curriculum to include more perspectives on the Rangers.

“[State history education] has been part of the process of glorifying the Rangers,” González said. “Even starting at those early moments where the true history of the Rangers and their role in promoting white supremacy has to be made clear.”

But it is up to individual school boards and teachers in the state to decide what aspects of Texas Rangers to include and what history books to use.

Refusing to Forget, a project Dr. John Morán González is a part of, aims to increase awareness on the Ranger's use of violence towards Texans, Black Texans and Tejanos between 1910 and 1920. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune

“Districts have the ability to choose from the state-adopted materials or use their funding to select something that was not State Board of Education-adopted so they're not all using the same book,” said Georgina Pérez, the secretary of the Texas State Board of Education and a board representative from El Paso.


Pérez added that it is possible that certain teachers in conservative areas may choose to teach lessons on the Texas Rangers that present them in a more heroic light than others.

“I think that in fourth grade I can almost guarantee everyone is taught like [the Rangers] are heroes or it’s just not addressed, perhaps because of the [students’] age,” she said. “Whereas in seventh grade, it's, it's a bit more likely that a teacher feels comfortable teaching both perspectives.”

Pérez said the State Board of Education approved a Mexican American studies high school elective course in 2018 that she says paints a more accurate portrait of the Texas Rangers than the fourth and seventh grade curricula. Recommended lessons for the course include one on the Porvenir killings. But Pérez said offering Mexican American studies as an elective in high schools is not enough — she wants to see it become integrated into general history curricula.

“I'm not a fan of making Mexican American studies an ‘other’ versus mainstream history,” she said.

Modern issues

The modern Texas Rangers, an investigative agency within the state’s Department of Public Safety, evolved from the historical police force but no longer carries out the same duties. Today, Rangers focus on investigations as a unit within DPS.

Swanson said there is still much progress to be made in terms of diversifying the force and reckoning with its complex history. Of the agency’s 157 members, there are currently seven Black, 31 Hispanic and four women rangers, according to a statement from the agency.

“As late as the 1960s, 1970s, there were many Rangers — high ranking Rangers — who were quite hostile to the idea of having women and Blacks [as members], especially,” Swanson said.

Swanson said the Rangers were “quite tardy” in diversifying their ranks.

“The first African American [Ranger] was in 1988 and that was only after an NAACP complaint,” he said. “The first two women were in 1993 and that was when Ann Richards was governor and so she pushed very strong for that. The first Hispanic or Latino Ranger of the modern era was in 1969.”

The modern Texas Rangers said they value diversity in the agency.

Longino Flores was among the 15 men and boys killed in the 1918 Porvenir massacre. Juana Bonilla Flores would later take her own life two years after the massacre following a battle with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to Arlinda Valencia. Credit: Joel Angel Juarez for The Texas Tribune

“The department is in continuous pursuit of qualified minorities and women to serve as Texas Rangers,” a spokesperson from the agency wrote in an email Wednesday.

Valencia now lives just outside El Paso, where she says anti-Latino violence is alive and well, especially in the aftermath of the Walmart shooting that killed 23 people and injured 23 others just over a year ago. She said she hopes the Rangers will publicly apologize for their history of racism and xenophobia against Latinos and other communities, which she said they have not yet addressed.

“If they want to keep their name, keep it, but you need to step up and say, ‘this is what we did in the past, and we apologize,’” she said. “That's what I want. I want them to apologize for what they did to all those people.”

The El Paso Times, San Antonio College, Texas State Historical Association and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Chile: Mapuche People's Spiritual Advisor Stops Drinking Water

Mapuche People's Spiritual Advisor Machi Celestino Cordova. | Photo: Twitter/ @portadasonada

Published 15 August 2020

Machi Celestino Cordova holds President Sebastian Piñera's administration responsible for his eventual death.

Mapuche people's spiritual advisor (machi) Celestino Cordova early Saturday stopped drinking water after Chilean authorities rejected a petition in favor of the Mapuche prisoners.

In an audio message of farewell to the Mapuche community, Cordova said he holds President Sebastian Piñera's administration responsible for his eventual death.

"I am willing to give my life for the freedom of the Mapuche and non-Mapuche political prisoners, for the rights and dignity of the Mapuche people, and the return of our ancestral territories," Cordova said.

"I will rest physically on this earth, but my life will continue. In my next incarnation I will continue to fight," the machi said.

VITACURA: Marcha en apoyo a Machi Celestino Córdova al cumplirse 100 días en huelga de hambre.
"MACHI CELESTINO A SE REWE" pic.twitter.com/7YgbsC2tca— PIENSAPRENSA 220,6 mil Seguidores (@PiensaPrensa) August 11, 2020

In an audio message of farewell to the Mapuche community, Cordova said he holds President Sebastian Piñera's administration responsible for his eventual death.

"I am willing to give my life for the freedom of the Mapuche and non-Mapuche political prisoners, for the rights and dignity of the Mapuche people, and the return of our ancestral territories," Cordova said.

"I will rest physically on this earth, but my life will continue. In my next incarnation I will continue fighting," the machi said.

US Police Regularly Trained By Israeli Military: Amnesty Report


Police detain a protester during a protest in response to the police killing of George Floyd on May 30, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. | Photo: AFP

ISRAEL ANTI BIBI DEMO JULY 2020

Hundreds of law enforcement officials traveled to Israel for training, while thousands of others received training from Israeli officials in the U.S.

As several cities across the United States become hotspots of unrest following the violent death of black man George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, Amnesty International recalled Sunday that U.S. police trains in Israel alongside military officers, who “have racked up documented human rights violations for years.”

The rights group reported that hundreds of law enforcement officials from Baltimore, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state as well as the DC Capitol police all travel to Israel for training, while thousands of others received training from Israeli officials in the U.S.

“Many of these trips are taxpayer-funded while others are privately funded,” the group noted, adding that “since 2002, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have paid for police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains to train in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

Critics of these programs, including human rights groups, point to Israel’s record of human rights abuses and state violence toward Palestinians, Black jews, and African refugees.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2018 brought almost a 70 percent increase over the previous year in Israeli settler violence toward Palestinians, and a rise in Palestinian deaths and injuries in Gaza.

In the year since 2018 Great March of Return demonstrations began, more than 190 Palestinians were killed and 28,000 were injured by Israeli Forces.

In the U.S., many Black and Hispanic neighborhoods have been experiencing disproportionate violence and rising trends in fatal police shootings.

In Georgia for instance, an investigation of deadly police shootings revealed that in the years after 2010, at least 185 people were shot and killed by police, almost half of them unarmed or shot in the back.

Amnesty International, other human rights organizations and even the U.S. Department of State have also been citing Israeli police for carrying out extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings, using ill-treatment and torture, suppression of freedom of expression and association, through government surveillance, and excessive use of force against peaceful protesters.

“Police departments (in the U.S.) should find partners that will train on de-escalation techniques, (...) and how to appropriately respond to those using non-violent protest to express their opinions. Israel is not such a partner,” the rights group concluded.

Dictionary Merriam-Webster to Edit 'Racism' Entry Upon Request

Screen capture of the Merriam-Webster dictionary entry for the term racism. | Photo: Merriam-Webster
Published 10 June 2020

Kennedy Mitchum, 22, a recent graduate of Drake University in Iowa, emailed the dictionary last month, following the killing of black U.S. citizen George Floyd by a white police officer.

U.S. dictionary Merriam-Webster will update its definition of the term racism after a young Black woman from Missouri contacted the editorial team saying the current definition does not reflect the oppression of black people as it should, media have reported.

Kennedy Mitchum, 22, a recent graduate of Drake University in Iowa, emailed the dictionary last month, following the killing of black U.S. citizen George Floyd by a white police officer.

"I kept having to tell them that definition is not representative of what is actually happening in the world," Mitchum told CNN. "The way that racism occurs in real life is not just prejudice, it's the systemic racism that is happening for a lot of black Americans."

"It's not just disliking someone because of their race," Mitchum wrote Friday in a Facebook post.

Merriam-Webster's editorial manager, Peter Sokolowski, told AFP that the definition would be changed.

The dictionary currently offers three definitions of racism, and Sokolowski said the second definition touches on Mitchum's point - but that "we will make that even more clear in our next release."

In the current version of the second definition, racism is "a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles," and "a political or social system founded on racism"

"This is the kind of continuous revision that is part of the work of keeping the dictionary up to date, based on rigorous criteria and research we employ in order to describe the language as it is actually used," Sokolowski said.

One of the dictionary's editors told Mitchum that the definitions of other words that are "related to racism or have racial connotations" would also be updated, without specifying which ones.

"We apologize for the harm and offense we have caused in failing to address this issue sooner," the editor wrote, according to a message published by Drake University and retweeted by Mitchum.

Merriam-Webster has published its dictionaries since 1847. Its site, where definitions are available for free, had nearly 50 million unique visitors in May, according to the SimilarWeb site.

No, Black people aren't to blame for police brutality

CNN is working to answer questions you have about race. Like this one: Is there a link between gun violence in Black communities and the excessive use of force by police? The question itself is questionable. Here's why.

Source: CNN

SOCIAL JUSTICE
City Takes Action on Police Violence—By Restricting Those Protesting Police Violence


Written By JONATHON SADOWSKI MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN
AUGUST 14, 2020

A group of several dozen protesters lock arms Thursday night at the Milwaukee-Wauwatosa border, the first night of demonstrations after Mayor Dennis McBride limited protests to the hours of noon to 8 p.m. The demonstrators crossed into Wauwatosa and protested outside McBride's house early Friday morning, but no one was arrested. (Screenshot via Ryan Clancy, Milwaukee County supervisor)

Wauwatosa mayor announces changes a week after one protest escalated, with its cause in dispute.

A week after tensions boiled over and someone fired a gun during a protest against police brutality in Wauwatosa, Mayor Dennis McBride announced the Milwaukee suburb will clamp down on protests by instituting what amounts to a protest curfew and enforcing all applicable ordinances to keep demonstrations in line.

McBride said in a Thursday afternoon statement that protests are now only allowed from noon to 8 p.m., that demonstrations will no longer be tolerated on private property, and that individuals will no longer be allowed to obstruct traffic in any way. Violating those ordinances could result in arrest or a $5,000 fine, McBride said.

“It’s absolutely wrong,” said Rep. Jonathan Brostoff, D-Milwaukee, who has marched with protesters almost every day since demonstrations began over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. “It would be a better policy to take on police brutality, instead of taking on the people protesting against police brutality.”

The announcement was a stunning turnaround for the city, which for months, with minimal police resistance, allowed the overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrators to gather on the streets, in municipal buildings, and at Mayfair Mall, where a Black teen was killed by a police officer earlier this year. Protesters have spoken out against the continued employment of Officer Joseph Mensah, who is currently suspended after having killed three people — including the teen at Mayfair — in the past five years.

Protesters visited Mensah’s girlfriends house last week in Wauwatosa, and the demonstration ended in chaos after someone fired a gun at the home.

Mensah claimed protesters “tried to kill” him and shot at him as he retreated into his house, and the Wauwatosa Police Department echoed his claims. However, Rep. David Bowen, D-Milwaukee, who was present at the protest, said Mensah and the police are lying. Mensah antagonized and assaulted protesters, shot pepper spray at the crowd, and grabbed a demonstrator’s gun, which fired into the house, Bowen said.

Mensah was “out of control,” “ill-tempered,” and “reckless,” Bowen told UpNorthNews.

“He was focused on inciting violence, provoking protesters to fight him,” Bowen said.

McBride, in a Friday interview with UpNorthNews, defended his new hardline stance on protesters.

“There are conflicting versions of the event, but there are indisputable facts,” McBride said. “People went to the house, people taunted, people threw toilet paper, people went on the property, there was a scuffle.”

“My bottom line is this,” he continued. “The one indisputable fact is that none of that would have happened if the protesters had not gone to that house. That’s beyond dispute.”

The incident led U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the Republican who represents a swath of Milwaukee suburbs including Wauwatosa, on Tuesday to offer sending federal forces to quell the protests. McBride declined the offer on the grounds that the presence of federal agents would only serve to destabilize the situation further.

Yet McBride issued his warning to the demonstrators two days later.

“It’s only going to help pour gas on a situation that’s already on fire,” Bowen said.

McBride acknowledged there has already been pushback from protesters and some members of the public for his announcement, especially over his decision to impose a limit on the hours during which people can protest.

“I expected that some people would be offended by that, but what’s the alternative?” McBride said, referencing how some demonstrations have gone down sleepy residential streets in the early morning hours.

Nonetheless, protesters crossed into Wauwatosa late Thursday and early Friday morning. In a video captured by Milwaukee County Supervisor Ryan Clancy, a few Wauwatosa squad cars blocked a group of several dozen marchers at the Wauwatosa-Milwaukee border. Demonstrators lined up before walking across the street into Wauwatosa, causing the police to reverse their vehicles and retreat into the city.

McBride told UpNorthNews those protesters set up outside his house around 12:30 a.m. Friday, but no one was arrested, despite the hardline stance in his initial statement. He said citations would be issued in the coming days.

Just hours before McBride instituted the new restrictions on Thursday, the head of the Wauwatosa police union announced 70 of the union’s 72 members have no confidence in McBride’s leadership. The Wauwatosa City Council voted 13-1 last month to formally urge the city’s Fire and Police Commission to fire Mensah; McBride signed the resolution. The no-confidence vote is in opposition to the Mensah’s likely firing.

McBride denied the union’s announcement had any effect on his decision to begin the protest crackdown.

“We had been working on that statement all week,” McBride said. “It had nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

Jonathon Sadowski A Racine native, Jonathon most recently reported for the Racine Journal Times. He has a degree in multimedia journalism from Columbia College Chicago and was a digital news intern for two Chicago stations, WMAQ and WLS-TV.

Sanders and Obama: Trump’s Attack on Postal Service a Direct Assault on Election

A USPS mail worker wearing a mask is seen driving between houses on August 13, 2020, in Ventnor City, New Jersey.

ALEXI ROSENFELD / GETTY IMAGES

BYJulia Conley, Common Dreams
August 15, 2020

Both Sen. Bernie Sanders and former President Barack Obama on Friday raised alarm over President Donald Trump’s open attempt to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service by refusing to provide emergency funding in what critics call an effort to hamper the general election—in which millions of Americans are expected to vote by mail.

In an email to supporters, Sanders denounced Trump’s “outrageous” Thursday statement, in which the president dismissed Democratic leaders’ demand for $3.5 billion in election assistance for states and $25 billion for the USPS in order to cope with major delivery delays. Trump told reporters that as long as the Postal Service isn’t given emergency funding, universal mail-in voting—which the president has claimed would be a “rigged” system favoring Democrats—can’t happen.

“He told the American people that he was going to defund and destroy the United States Postal Service so that, during this pandemic, they cannot have the opportunity to vote for president and in other important races,” wrote Sanders. “In other words, he is forcing people to make a choice between getting sick and even dying, or casting a ballot.”

“Elections should be about candidates making the best case they can to their constituents and letting the voters decide,” the Vermont independent senator added. “What elections should not be about in a democratic society is winning because your opponents are prevented from voting. And that is exactly what Trump is doing right now.”
We will not let Trump sabotage our Postal Service or destroy our democracy.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 13, 2020

Sanders’s criticism was echoed by Obama, who called Trump’s explicit attempt to discourage participation in the election “unheard of.”

“What we’ve never seen before is a president say, ‘I’m going to try to actively kneecap the Postal Service to [discourage] voting and I will be explicit about the reason I’m doing it,'” said the former president. “My question is what are Republicans doing where you are so scared of people voting that you are now willing to undermine what is part of the basic infrastructure of American life?”

The two leaders’ statements came amid news that 46 states and Washington, D.C. recently received letters from USPS general counsel and executive vice president Thomas J. Marshall, warning that tens of millions of Americans could be effectively disenfranchised in the November election because the Postal Service can’t guarantee mail-in ballots will be delivered in time to be counted.

Oregon, Rhode Island, New Mexico, and Nevada are the only states that haven’t received warnings from the USPS; seven states were told that a limited number of voters could have their ballots cast aside due to mail delays, while 186 million voters could be affected by delays in the rest of the states.

“It’s completely outrageous that the U.S. Postal Service is in this position,” Vanita Gupta, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told The Washington Post, accusing Trump of weaponizing “the U.S. Postal Service for the president’s electoral purposes.”

Marshall’s warning was due to concerns that arose even before the president named Louis DeJoy, a top Trump donor, postmaster general earlier this year. DeJoy has been condemned by voting rights advocates and Democrats for ordering drastic cuts of overtime and spending by the USPS, delaying delivery times by as much as a week. The Postal Service is also currently decommissioning 10% of its mail-sorting machines, which can sort 21.4 million pieces of paper mail per hour and allow carriers to focus on delivering mail promptly.

Before DeJoy’s actions sparked outrage and fears of severe mail delays when millions of Americans cast their votes from home to avoid spreading Covid-19, Marshall became concerned that the Postal Service does not currently have the capacity to help facilitate the election, with 10 times the usual volume of mail-in ballots in November. The battleground states of Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan were all identified as states whose tight deadlines for requesting, mailing, or counting ballots would not allow the over-strained post office to deliver all ballots in time to be tallied.

Election officials in Pennsylvania asked the state Supreme Court on Thursday to extend its ballot-counting deadline by three days to give voters time to mail in their votes.

With DeJoy’s actions putting further strain on mail carriers, University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck called Trump’s open sabotage of the Postal Service “as serious a threat to our democracy as anything any President has ever done.”

“I’m not overreacting; this is a five-alarm fire,” he added. “And Republicans who aren’t vigorously pushing back are complicit.”

Sanders called on his supporters to sign a petition demanding that Congress provide funding to the USPS to support vote-by-mail in November.

“Donald Trump is moving our country in an authoritarian direction and is attempting to dismantle the foundations of our democracy,” wrote the senator. “Democracy must be saved. Trump must be defeated.”

Q&A: What’s happening at the US Postal Service, and why?
By NICHOLAS RICCARDI

FILE - In this March 31, 2020, file photo United States Post Office delivery trucks are reflected in the side mirror of a vehicle as postal delivers set off on their daily rounds in Arvada, Colo. The U.S. Postal Service is warning states that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted, even if mailed by state deadlines. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

The U.S. Postal Service is warning states it cannot guarantee that all ballots cast by mail for the Nov. 3 election will arrive in time to be counted, even if ballots are mailed by state deadlines. That’s raising the possibility that millions of voters could be disenfranchised.

It’s the latest chaotic and confusing development involving the agency, which has found itself in the middle of a high-stakes election year debate over who gets to vote in America, and how. Those questions are particularly potent in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, which has led many Americans to consider voting by mail instead of heading to in-person polling places.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends mail ballots as a way to vote without risking exposure to the virus at the polls. But President Donald Trump has baselessly excoriated mail ballots as fraudulent, worried that an increase could cost him the election. Democrats have been more likely than Republicans to vote by mail in primary contests held so far this year.

Some questions and answers about what’s going on with the post office and the upcoming election:

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE POST OFFICE?

The Post Office has lost money for years, though advocates note it’s a government service rather than a profit-maximizing business.

In June, Louis DeJoy, a Republican donor and logistics company executive, took over as the new postmaster general and Trump tasked him with trying to make the Postal Service more profitable. Doing so would also squeeze businesses such as Amazon. Its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, has come under criticism from Trump because of the coverage the president has received from The Washington Post, which Bezos owns.

DeJoy cut overtime, late delivery trips and other expenses that ensure mail arrives at its destination on time. The result has been a national slowdown of mail.

The Postal Service is hoping for a $10 billion infusion from Congress to continue operating, but talks between Democrats and Republicans over a broad pandemic relief package that could have included that money have broken down.

On Thursday, Trump frankly acknowledged that he’s starving the postal service of that money to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots. Trump on Saturday attempted to re-calibrate his position. He said that he supports more funding for the postal service but refuses to capitulate to other parts of the Democrats’ relief package—including funding for cash-strapped states.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER IN AN ELECTION YEAR?

Mail-in ballots have exploded in popularity since the pandemic spread in mid-March, at the peak of primary season. Some states have seen the demand for mail voting increase fivefold or more during the primaries. Election officials are bracing for the possibility that half of all voters — or even more — will cast ballots by mail in November.

Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington state have universal mail voting, and California, Nevada and Vermont are starting universal mail voting in November. But the rest have little experience with such a volume of ballots cast through the mail.

Timely mail is key to voting by mail. In states without universal mail-in voting, applications for mail ballots are generally sent out to voters by mail. They’re returned, again, by mail. Then the actual ballots are sent to voters by mail, and returned, again, by mail, usually by Election Day.

Late last month, Thomas J. Marshall, the post office’s general counsel and executive vice president, sent states a letter warning that many of them have deadlines too tight to meet in this new world of slower mail.

Pennsylvania, for example, allows voters to request a mail ballot by Oct. 27. Marshall warned that voters there should put already completed ballots in the mail by that date to ensure they arrive by Nov. 3.

This has been a potential problem since the Obama administration, when the post office relaxed standards for when mail had to arrive. But it’s particularly acute when the volume of mail ballots is expected to explode in states such as Pennsylvania, which only approved an expansion of mail voting late last year. It’s also acute when the president has said openly he wants to limit votes by his rivals by keeping them from voting by mail.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

It’s unclear. The first question is whether there will be a coronavirus relief bill that could help fund the post office. Republicans and Democrats are far apart on the measure and Congress has gone home for a few weeks.

If there’s no resolution of the coronavirus aid, the matter is sure to come up during negotiations in September to continue to fund the federal government. The government will shut down if Trump doesn’t sign a funding bill by Sept. 30.

States can also act to change their mail balloting deadlines. That’s what Pennsylvania did this past week, with the state asking a court to move the deadline for receiving mail ballots back to three days after the Nov. 3 vote, provided the ballots were placed in the mail before polls close on Election Day.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and some other Democratic lawmakers are also seeking a review of DeJoy’s policy changes. In response to the letter, spokeswoman Agapi Doulaveris of the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General said the office is “conducting a body of work to address the concerns raised.” She declined to elaborate.

___

Associated Press writer Anthony Izaguirre in Charleston, West Virginia, contributed to this report.

Trump Didn’t Invent State Violence Against Protesters — But He’s Escalating It

Federal police face off with protesters in front of the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse in downtown Portland as the city experiences another night of unrest on July 27, 2020, in Portland, Oregon.SPENCER PLATT / GETTY IMAGES
BY Sasha Abramsky, Truthout  August 15, 2020

Over the past month, a series of investigative reports have detailed the extraordinary way in which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has come to see journalists and political protesters as domestic enemies. At least two journalists covering the Portland protests were, apparently, targeted by DHS officers, who wrote “intelligence reports” on their activities, and compiled on them the sorts of dossiers more frequently used against overseas terrorists.

    POLICE BRUTALITY BUSTER KEATON 1919

Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection-operated Predator drones, and helicopters and planes operated by an array of other agencies, have been used to spy on Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis and other cities in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and others. And, this past week, The Nation magazine reported that the Trump administration was using DHS’s Tactical Terrorism Response Teams to monitor anti-fascist activists, as well as a left-wing podcast host, for supposedly coordinating with foreign governments to attack the United States. Once U.S. citizens are designated as agents of foreign powers, the legal doors are opened to warrantless spying on their actions.

In response, many writers have expressed shock and horror at such “un-American” activities being unleashed by those in positions of power. But, while they surely merit both shock and horror, they shouldn’t merit surprise. Trump’s latest methods, while certainly crude and dangerous, are actually as American as apple pie.

BUSTER KEATON 1919



We have a tendency to whitewash our own past, to assign, with hindsight, a nobility of intent that doesn’t truly reflect the goals and the practices of past holders of power. In fact, there is a long and ugly history of U.S. government security agencies labeling any and all dissenters as terrorists.

To take just a few examples: In the fearful days following September 11, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies monitored antiwar groups, human rights organizations and other progressive, nonviolent entities. The ACLU reported on the “Orwellian scope” of the FBI’s domestic surveillance program in this post-9/11 environment.

And, of course, using legal memos written by Department of Justice attorney John Yoo as cover, the Bush administration embraced a wholesale torture program against suspected terrorists that utilized waterboarding, attack dogs, sexual humiliation, beatings, mock executions and other methods banned by the Geneva Conventions. (Yoo has, this summer, reentered the national conversation by providing Trump with legal advice on how he can use the Supreme Court’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals ruling as a rationale to craft a series of broad-brush executive orders that, in the areas of immigration, health care and even financial responses to the COVID crisis, would allow Trump to basically rule by diktat).Pick pretty much any time of social upheaval in the United States and one encounters a stunning, almost automatic, resort to state violence.

In the 1990s, as the U.S. consolidated its post-Cold War dominance, groups protesting the World Trade Organization (WTO) were met with the full might of the state. In 1999, anti-WTO protesters were gassed, clubbed and arrested en masse in Seattle. Afterward, the FBI and local law enforcement agencies set up Joint Terrorism Task Forces to monitor left-wing protesters.

But it’s not only in the recent past that the state has resorted to violence and high-tech monitoring in its efforts to squash protest. Pick pretty much any time of social upheaval in the United States and one encounters a stunning, almost automatic, resort to state violence.

One need only think of COINTELPRO in the late 1960s, in which an array of state agencies were sicced on the anti-Vietnam War movement. Or the way the FBI and local police departments in Chicago and elsewhere worked to sabotage the Black Panthers and to kill off its leaders. Or, slightly earlier, the FBI efforts to slime Martin Luther King Jr. Or, in the 1950s, McCarthyism’s marshalling of the full might of the federal government and of Congress to attack communists, civil rights groups, and an array of political progressives.

I remember, as a child visiting my grandparents in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, talking with older men and women in their social circle who, a generation earlier, had had their careers as musicians and Hollywood artists destroyed by anti-communist witch-hunters. Their fury, their sense of betrayal, remained incandescent. I remember one man in particular, Sam Albert, a debonair musician with a Clark Gable mustache, who had been hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee to be interrogated about his political beliefs, and had then been drummed out of his job. More than 30 years later, deep into his old age, he was still unable to talk about McCarthy without yelling in fury.

Going back further, during the heyday of trade union organizing, in the early decades of the 20th century, the police, squads of Pinkerton detectives, and even federal troops often served as virtual private militias protecting the interests of big business. On occasion, sheriffs’ officers would beat and even kill farmworkers who tried to organize in California and elsewhere — including sharecroppers in the Deep South — during the 1930s. On other occasions, police, sheriffs and National Guard forces were deployed to counter striking miners, railway workers and others, oftentimes with lethal consequences.Condemning Trump’s hideous embrace of state-sanctioned violence, intimidation and spying techniques against protesters and journalists alike as somehow “un-American” obscures more than it reveals.

During the Red Scares that followed the Russian Revolution, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer authorized raids that netted hundreds of so-called Reds, many of whom were, with no due process, unceremoniously deported to the Soviet Union. A little over a decade later, during the Great Depression, tens of thousands of starving World War I veterans and their families mobilized for a huge march on (and occupation of parts of) Washington, D.C., to demand the federal government pay them promised bonuses for their military service in Europe. At President Hoover’s behest, they were met by massive military force — battalions of soldiers, some of them in tanks, sweeping the streets and ultimately burning down the encampments of the so-called Bonus Army.

In the 19th century, the Texas Rangers served largely as a paramilitary force for unleashing racist violence in the contested borderlands between a newly enlarged U.S. and a newly shrunken Mexico. And, of course, many police forces are the institutional descendants of posses formed to track down and kidnap people escaping slavery.

As Trump veers ever closer to authoritarian, dictatorial rule, it’s important not only to point to the uniquely demagogic and tyrannical qualities of Trumpism — of which there are many — but also to look for the ways in which there is continuity on display. Condemning Trump’s hideous embrace of state-sanctioned violence, intimidation and spying techniques against protesters and journalists alike as somehow “un-American” obscures more than it reveals.

When, for example, the Trumpified DHS hacks into journalists’ social media or ferrets around their private financial records, or looks for ways to label Black Lives Matter protesters as terrorists, it is following in the footsteps of Hoover’s FBI in the 1960s or Palmer’s goon squads in the post-World War I years.

When the Trump era ends, as surely it one day will, there must be a national reckoning. The scale of Trump’s malfeasance, and the ramping up of quasi-military law enforcement activities that are — and have always been — inimical to democracy will have to be publicly confronted. Without such a reckoning, there will be no way to lance the political boil that Trump represents.

What these last months have laid bare isn’t that Trump’s national security agenda is anomalous; but, rather, that the system of control embodied by DHS, by Customs and Border Protection, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the various other agencies, has evolved to the point where it now primarily serves to aid and abet authoritarianism. These ugly times have provided us a warning: that the military-industrial state, the national security infrastructure that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about 60 years ago, is now in full bloom. Trump didn’t cause that bloom to come out of nowhere; rather, his presidency is, at least in part, the end consequence, the coming to a head, of decades of fetishization of state-sanctioned violence and brutality.

Unless we now embark upon a fundamental reckoning with these forces that have been allowed to fester and then to grow largely unchecked within the U.S. body politic over the decades (and, indeed, over the centuries), the very threads of democracy will, at ever-greater speed, come unraveled.