Commentary by Black Kos editor JoanMar
I have many problems with CNN. I tire of their bothsiderism, the penchant to blame Democratic Presidents for systemic problems, the overuse of the breaking news chyron, their self-congratulatory smugness, and on and on. But every now and again they do manage to hit the nail on the head with a sledgehammer. Case in point, John Avlon on his 6/2/2022 Reality Check program. It was a devastating commentary on the Republican Party actively promoting and encouraging a politics and culture with guns as the centerpiece. Not both parties (as loudmouth Stephen A. Smith said as he erroneously claimed that the Democrats had “50 Senators and two Independents caucusing with them”).
The Republicans and the Republicans alone of the two major parties are responsible for the proliferation of semi-automatic guns in the hands of private citizens in this country. The Republican death cult, ably aided and abetted by the terroristic National Rifle Association, is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the thousands of gun deaths and mass murders committed with semi-automatic guns, (and, by their inaction, for the thousands killed each year by law-enforcement officers,) and they need to be called out.
John Avlon came with receipts. He told no lies. See for yourself:
Transcript:
You know the Onion’s headline, right? “’No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this regularly happens.” It cuts to the heart of our bloody American exceptionalism when it comes to guns. How did we get here? Where we don’t blink at the fact that we’ve had more mass shootings than days so far this year. Where the mass shooting last night at a hospital in Tulsa, which killed at least four people, is the twentieth mass shooting in America since the slaughter of 19 school kids just over one week ago.
This is not about the 2nd Amendment. It’s not about self-defense. And it’s definitely not going to be fixed by thoughts and prayers. We all know, on some level, that this stalemate is because of our politics and culture. Gun politics. Gun culture. Take a look at our political ads, because they’ve increasingly gone gun nuts. This is a frog in a boiling pot of water problem. The ads are local so it’s hard to see the national trends. But get this, there have been more than 100 political ads so far this year featuring guns according to an analysis by the New York Times. This isn’t just fringe figures trying to appeal to single issues 2nd amendment voters anymore... although that accounts for some of it.
[Gun ads]
You notice how many of those ads boil down their values to three words like: babies, borders, bullets, or Jesus, guns, babies? There’s no way they could have known that we would be reeling from the second deadliest elementary shooting in our history. But it’s a reminder that babies and bullets are a bad combination, especially if you fancy yourself pro-life. But these aren’t accidents or outliers, right, it’s part of a play to the base strategy. And even incumbents can’t wait to take their constituents to the gun show.
[more Republican ads]
Now we should all know that being responsible isn’t an asset in the Republican primaries these days, so you might as well be blowing stuff up, right. Look, I get it in states where winning the primary is like winning the general election, but this cycle we’ve seen would-be senators from a swing state strain to out-gun each other.
[more ads]
And what passes for a scandal these days is Dr. Oz trying to deny that he once repeatedly warned that America’s high rate of gun violence were unhealthy and that anything else would be malpractice. But in the wake of an attack on our Capitol, when the rhetoric of civil war is getting thrown around in our politics, this reflexive obsession with showing off your guns feels like folks preparing for Amageddon. And here’s the thing, it didn’t happen overnight. More than a decade ago there were trend pieces being written about guns increasingly showing up in political ads with the same frame dusted off for the 2014 midterms. And that was before a presidential candidate who doesn’t look so at home on the range was bragging about how he could shoot somebody and not lose any support.
[Video of the braying orange jackass boasting about shooting people]
Why does this matter? As former Pence advisor Olivia Troye explained, it is normalizing and mainstreaming weapons designed and meant to kill. We see evidence of that almost every day now. And when we blur guns and politics, or shooting a semi-automatic on camera serves as character witness and a substitute for political debate, we are heading to a very dangerous place.
Because as any advertising mad man will tell you, it’s the selling that creates the demand, and that’s your reality check.
Well done, John Avlon.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The slavery reparations movement has hit a watershed moment with the release of an exhaustive report detailing California’s role in perpetuating discrimination against African Americans. ABC: California details racist past in slave reparations report
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The slavery reparations movement hit a watershed moment Wednesday with the release of an exhaustive report detailing California’s role in perpetuating discrimination against African Americans, a major step toward educating the public and setting the stage for an official government apology and case for financial restitution.
The 500-page document lays out the harms suffered by descendants of enslaved people long after slavery was abolished in the 19th century, through discriminatory laws and actions in all facets of life, from housing and education to employment and the legal system.
“Four hundred years of discrimination has resulted in an enormous and persistent wealth gap between Black and white Americans,” according to the interim report of the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.
“These effects of slavery continue to be embedded in American society today and have never been sufficiently remedied. The governments of the United States and the State of California have never apologized to or compensated African Americans for these harms.”
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Beverly Burkett, owner of F&B Associates, is using the expertise she gained during her career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency to help Black farmers in Arkansas keep their land for future generations. She is working with the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff Small Farm Program to reverse the trend of land loss among Black farmers because of complications related to land being designated as heirs' property.
Challenges associated with heirs' property status are the leading cause of involuntary land loss among Black farmers, Burkett said. Heirs' property refers to family-owned land passed down without a will and held by descendants as "tenants in common."
"In these cases, each owner has an undivided interest in the land," she said. "Any owner or anyone that purchases a small interest in the land can file with the court to force other owners to sell. These 'partition sales' often occur against the wishes of other family members. The result is often a sale that does not meet fair market value and may result in the dispossession of family members from their inherited land."
Heirs' property is also often the target of predatory developers, Burkett said.
"Some developers keep their eye out for property with delinquent taxes," she said. "Once land goes delinquent, it is put up for sale by the state. Predatory developers can pay the delinquent land taxes and then purchase the land at a huge discount. If they purchase part of the land that is heirs' property, they are able to force the partition sale of the rest of the property."
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The unit's heroism during its failed assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina inspired tens of thousands of Black men and others to sign up for the Union Army, helping turn the tide of the war. The Grio: Monument honoring Black Civil War unit rededicated
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A Boston memorial to a famed Civil War unit made up of Black soldiers was rededicated Wednesday after a three-year long restoration with a ceremony filled with song and somber reflection.
The Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial — considered the nation’s first honoring Black soldiers — underscores how ending slavery was not just about one man, but many, said Dr. Ibram X. Kendi in his remarks.
“The Black soldiers of the 54th were as much the great emancipators as Abraham Lincoln,” the author of “How to Be an Antiracist” and founder of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research said. “The 54th are a testament to ‘We freed us.’ There wasn’t a single person that abolished slavery. It was something we did together.”
Dr. David Blight, a Yale history professor, said the memorial is considered the country’s greatest work of public art not just because of its beauty but also because of the message it tells.
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The fossil fuel industry faces a reckoning in the Niger Delta after a disaster left families ‘eating, drinking, breathing the oil’ The Guardian: The village that stood up to big oil – and won
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On 10 October 2004, Eric Dooh received an urgent call from one of his father’s employees: the waterway surrounding their houses was running black with oil. Near the outskirts of Dooh’s village of Goi, a pipeline built by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1960s carried oil from inland Nigeria to an offshore terminal where it would be barreled and exported around the world. Dooh suspected the pipeline had sprung a leak. He attempted to alert the pipeline operator, but both Shell and its Nigerian subsidiary had largely abandoned oil operations in Goi a decade earlier in response to local uprisings. On that day, Shell’s community relations officer was unavailable, Dooh recalled. He reported the leak to a nearby police station instead.
It wasn’t until the next day that officials climbed onboard a helicopter, ascended over Dooh’s village situated on the banks of the Oroberekiri Creek in Nigeria’s southern Niger Delta region, and confirmed what villagers already knew: oil was spreading and not letting up.
Later that day, the situation in Goi went from bad to worse. Oil spilled into a local farmer’s house and connected with a cooking fire. The village, its oil-seeped creek and the surrounding mangrove forests erupted into flames.
On 12 October a team of investigators – made up of locals, government officials, and employees for Shell’s Nigerian offshoot, Shell Petroleum Development Company – located the source of the leak: an 18-inch hole in an exposed portion of the pipeline. They temporarily plugged the split pipeline with wood chips and later sealed it with a clamp, but over the course of the three-day leak, the operators never shut off the flow of oil at its source. By then, more than 23,000 litres of oil had spilled and nearly 40 acres of mangrove forest had burned, poisoning the land and fishponds that were the lifeblood of the village.
Shell would later argue in court that locals brought the disaster upon themselves; the leak was the work of saboteurs, they claimed. Vandalism and theft are common in the region, but so too is old and abandoned pipeline infrastructure that’s prone to leaks. Dooh and his father, Barizaa, who was the chief of their village, attested the oil spill was the result of a poorly maintained pipeline.
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I’ll focus here on the festival and not the city of Cannes, though the festival is a reflection of the city. Before going into detail about my experience last month, I have to first talk about what went down in 2019.
On the first day of my arrival in May 2019, I stood outside the Carlton, wearing all black. I had just picked up a screening ticket and had the envelope in my pocket. A woman approached me and asked, “Do you have tickets to sell?” I told her no, but the question kept resurfacing in my mind and bothered me all day. “What did she mean by that?” I wondered. I asked a journalist colleague of mine (a veteran of Cannes) about the incident. She explained that even though people are always hungry for tickets and will ask anyone for an extra if they see you with a ticket, many think Black people who hang around the festivities could be scalping tickets for film premieres. I was stunned to silence.
The next day after, as I entered the security area with many other journalists heading into the Palais, I was the only one “randomly” stopped for a bag search. When the security guard found a pack of gum, the man immediately began to scream at me in French. I don’t understand French, but I know aggression. “Why are you yelling?” I asked. His demeanor changed to shock — like he was surprised I spoke English. Another woman got involved and told me — calmly and respectably — not to bring gum into the Lumière theater next time. Embarrassed isn’t the word for what I was feeling. People were staring at me, thinking I had committed a crime! Flying off the handle over gum? I wondered if he’d react like that to everyone who had a pack of gum in their bag. Or just me that day?
If that wasn’t humiliating enough, I ran into a moviegoer who said something shocking to me the following day. I went to an early-morning screening of Mati Diop’s Atlantics. When the film was over and I was standing outside the theater getting my bearings, an older French White woman came up to me, put her arm on my shoulder — without permission — and said, “Wow! You did such a good job, you should be proud,” and walked off. “What was that about?” I thought. After 30 minutes, it dawned on me: This woman thought I was in the movie and probably thought I was the leading actress (Mame Bineta Sane). By now, I wasn’t angry, more disappointed than anything.
During my five-day trip, there were several other slights, but you get my point. My time in 2022 was much harsher, and I believe the enhanced access exposed me to a new set of issues, which seems part and parcel of a Cannes festival culture of elitism and exclusion.
On May 16, the first day I got there, I made my way to the American Pavilion when I was again “randomly” stopped by security. Their reasoning: I had a large bag with me. But everyone else had large bags as well. You would think Interpol was searching my bag as security dumped its entire contents onto the table so they could examine the items and check every crevice of my bag. Even passersby were shocked by what they saw. I thought to myself, “Here we go.”
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The asphyxiation death of a Black man shown in a video being held by two officers of Brazil's Federal Highway Police inside an SUV's smoke-filled trunk is sparking outrage among Brazilians. Images of the police stop Tuesday in Umbauba, in the northeastern state of Sergipe, show the officers forcibly keeping Genivaldo de Jesus Santos, 38, in the back of their police vehicle as a dense cloud of white smoke, which appears to be tear gas, emerges from the SUV.
The man can be heard screaming and his legs, which stick out of the SUV, kick for a time, until they eventually stop moving. The officers seem undisturbed by onlookers surrounding them.
Social media erupted over the images, and dozens of people gathered to protest Wednesday in Umbauba, where they blocked a road and burned tires.
"The population is outraged," a man can be heard saying in a video of the protest posted on Twitter. "They murdered the guy!" another told the crowd through a loudspeaker.
In a statement, the Federal Highway Police said the man had displayed aggressive behavior and was "actively resisting" the officers who pulled him over. The agents immobilized him, the statement said, then used "instruments of lesser offensive potential" to contain him.
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