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Lying Donald, Lies Again!

By Ernest Stewart

"She's very big into raising taxes, she wants to slash funds for our military at a level that nobody would ever believe, she's against fracking [...] extraordinarily nasty." ~~~ Lying Donald ~ on Kamala Harris

"We are measuring the pulse of the ice sheet-how much ice glaciers drain at the edges of the ice sheet-which increases in the summer. And what we see is that it was relatively steady until a big increase in ice discharging to the ocean during a short five- to six-year period" ~~~ Michalea King ~ a researcher at The Ohio State University's Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center

"Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Wednesday compared the difficulties of reopening public schools for the 2020-21 academic year during the coronavirus pandemic with obstacles faced by the U.S. Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011." ~~~ Valerie Strauss

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round
Help me get my feet back on the ground
Won't you please, please help me
Help ~~~ The Beatles

Lying Donald lies again. Yes, I know, that's not news, is it? Well, how about this then? Trump's often-repeated claim that the Obama administration illegally spied on his campaign has been refuted by Lying Donald's own FBI in a detailed report. Lying Donald made the claim during a rally in Wisconsin this week. "We are going to win four more years," he told the crowd. "And then after that, we'll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years." According to the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, however, "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice." Sure, I get it, when has Lying Donald ever obeyed the US Constitution? To my knowledge, never!

From our "I'm having a deja vu all over again" department comes Lying Donald questioning Kamala Harris' right to run for office as VP, as he did with Obama, because her parents were immigrants. "I heard it today that she doesn't meet the requirements - I have no idea if that's right." Of course, Lying Donald, you have no idea about anything. Harris was born in California and is eligible to serve. Trump appeared to be referring to a widely discredited op-ed that claims that the U.S. Constitution doesn't grant birthright citizenship. You may recall that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to all people born in the U.S. And, Article II Section 1 of the Constitution says that to be eligible for the vice presidency and presidency, a candidate must be natural-born U.S. citizen, at least 35, and a resident of the United States for a minimum of 14 years. Sounds like she qualify's to me, how about you?

Then there was the White House correspondent who asked Trump "do you regret at all the lying you've done to the American people?" Trump responded with "All the what?" Lying Donald has told more than 20,000 "false or misleading claims" over the course of his presidency. according to The Guardian and Washington Post! I gave up counting after 2,000 lies in his first three months in office!

Lying Donald said that "mail-in voting would perpetuate one of the greatest frauds in history," saying "if they don't get those two items, that means you can't have universal mail-in voting because they're not equipped to have it." He then added: "They don't have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can't do it, I guess. Are they going to do it even if they don't have the money?" Oh, and did I mention, that Lying Donald then voted by mail? And so it goes...

In Other News

I see where climate scientists sounded the alarm: warming Greenland ice sheet passes point of no return!

Even if the climate cools, study finds, glaciers will continue to shrink.

Nearly 40 years of satellite data from Greenland shows that glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking.

The finding, published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, means that Greenland's glaciers have passed a tipping point of sorts, where the snowfall that replenishes the ice sheet each year cannot keep up with the ice that is flowing into the ocean from glaciers. Which begs the question, "How long can you tread water coastal America?"

"We've been looking at these remote sensing observations to study how ice discharge and accumulation have varied," said Michalea King, lead author of the study and a researcher at The Ohio State University's Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. "And what we've found is that the ice that's discharging into the ocean is far surpassing the snow that's accumulating on the surface of the ice sheet."

King and other researchers analyzed monthly satellite data from more than 200 large glaciers draining into the ocean around Greenland. Their observations show how much ice breaks off into icebergs or melts from the glaciers into the ocean. They also show the amount of snowfall each year-the way these glaciers get replenished.

The researchers found that, throughout the 1980s and 90s, snow gained through accumulation and ice melted or calved from glaciers were mostly in balance, keeping the ice sheet intact. Through those decades, the researchers found, the ice sheets generally lost about 450 gigatons (about 450 billion tons) of ice each year from flowing outlet glaciers, which was replaced with snowfall.

Meanwhile, out west, it's burning hot with 3 digit temps all over Southern California, Arizona and Nevada, driving the fires breaking out due to 10,000 lightning strikes all over California creating some 350 fires from L.A. to Napa Valley. Over in Death Valley they had perhaps the hottest temperature ever recorded there of 130 degrees fahrenheit. When I crossed Death Valley in July of 1976 (See Uncle Ernie's Hollywood Daze) the temperature was 126 degree fahrenheit. I stoped at a gas station/diner as my engine was over heating and there was little I could do to fix my problem as I had a radiator full of summer coolant. Fortunately a truck driver told me to unlatch my hood one step so it was open but still connected. So I did and when I went back out on the freeway the temperature went down and after climbing out of Death Valley went back to normal. I think that was a record temperature for that time but soon it maybe par for the course! To put that in perspective, Lying Donald and Covid-19 are no big things when compared to global warming, which, unabated, may well kill us all!

And Finally

Florida Governor Ron DeSanis is comparing sending children back to school as easy as shopping at Home Depot and Walmart. Ron said, "I'm confident if you can do Home Depot, if you can do Walmart, if you can do these things, we absolutely can do the schools."

This was far less persuasive than he seemed to realize: when shoppers go to big-box stores, they tend to walk through spacious aisles and remain in the stores for relatively short periods. When kids go to schools, they tend to sit for many hours in classrooms and walk through crowded hallways. So Ron switched analogies to, "Martin County Superintendent Laurie Gaylord told me she viewed re-opening her schools as a mission akin to a Navy SEAL operation. Just as the SEALs surmounted obstacles to bring Osama bin Laden to justice, so too would the Martin County School system find a way."

Ron will follow Lying Donalds whim even if it kills both teachers and students. I should mention that 8,000 people caught Covid-19 in Florida yesterday and the number of COVID-19 cases among Florida children has more than doubled over the past month. So guess what? Why do I always see the same hands go up? That's right, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wins this week's Vidkun Quisling Award!

Keepin' On

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08-07-1951 ~ 08-14-2020
Thanks for the music!

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So how do you like Trump so far?
And more importantly, what are you planning on doing about it?

Until the next time, Peace!

(c) 2020 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, philosopher, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. Visit me on Facebook. and like us when you do. Follow me on Twitter.

22% of all mail-in ballots don't get counted - that's according to an MIT study conducted before Trump took office. And the Post Office has always been a problem, even before a Forever Trumper was appointed as Postmaster General.

Safest way to vote: Ask for an absentee ballot 2 months in advance. If it doesn't arrive by October 15, pick it up at your county Board of Elections (Google yours), fill it out, and return it right there - and demand validation of your signature.

In 2016, more than 141,000 ballots were rejected because someone challenged the signature. If you mail in your vote, make sure to follow your states insane rules - a witness for signatures is required in Wisconsin and many states. And most states require first time absentee voters to include a copy of their ID.

Don't go postal: drop your ballot off at the your County Clerk's office, early polling station, or drop box if you're in a state that has them. And protect your ballot with my special "Ballot Condom."

In this excerpt from his interview with Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert for the Keiser Report, Palast offers more tips for protecting your vote and cautions that if we don't overwhelm the steal, under the terms of the 12th Amendment, Trump could "constitutionally" cling on to power even if he doesn't win the election.

Transcript

Max Keiser: It seems like America slipping into a situation where we're going to see an actual coup in 2016, when Trump took over, we now, now looking back, it appeared as though there was a coup attempt in the United States. There's been a couple in the past. FDR faced a coup attempt, in his administration, you've probably done some work on that. And I believe there was one going back even further than that. But, Greg, what you're describing here sounds like America is slipping into what we jokingly refer to in other countries as banana republics. Is that where we're heading Greg?

Greg Palast: Well, the banana has already been peeled. Because in 2016, as I point out in my book, Trump didn't win the Electoral College. As I say at the beginning of the book, you're not guilty America. You don't have to hide your hands in shame that you elected a kind of orange stained, porcine, bloviating bigot. No! Quickly, in Michigan, 75,000 ballots were not counted in Detroit, machines broke down. Trump supposedly worn by 10,000. How do you win the state if you don't count 75,000 ballots and you win by ten? Excuse me, who won that state?

Wisconsin, they knocked out over a hundred thousand students two weeks before the election by changing the ID rules, making using a student ID illegal to vote. So you lost a hundred thousand students and 50,000 African-Americans, according to University of Wisconsin.

So Trump didn't win 2016. And when you are ruled by someone you didn't pick, you're a slave. Okay. So we've had a coup d'etat and we're slaves now. Now I'm talking about how How Trump Stole 2020 is a warning. I'm hoping to kick off a slave revolt where we let the voters pick the president. How about that for a change?

And you're right, we've had this history [of coups] in America, and will it happen again? Now, do we have another chance that there will be something like an obvious coup d'etat in November? Here's how it could run, and it can be a "constitutional" coup d'etat. The way it goes is that there'll be complete mayhem over mail-in balloting, which is going to cause absolute chaos and an implosion at the Post Office. Counting those ballots is going to implode. And you add to that civil unrest fermented by the Trump vigilante force. You're going to have 50,000 guys in Hawaiian shirts creating mayhem. You've got federal police on the street, which are gonna provoke incidents.

So what happens... Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, where you have right wing legislatures, could well say there's too much chaos, we can't certify the vote. So veryone knows Biden's won by the exit polls, but they're not going to certify those states. When that happens. you don't have 270 votes for anyone in the Electoral College, then it goes under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution which says it goes to the house and every state gets one vote. California, Wyoming, get the same vote, Trump is reelected - constitutionally under the 12th amendment in that situation. Are you ready for it?

Keiser: I'm getting it. I'm feeling it. You're laying out the case here... you're bringing in the historical precedence. You're kind of spit balling how it might work, how it goes into the house, the constitution, and I'm seeing what's brewing here is that this election is a complete failure. Trump clings to power, he's in power, ostensibly, and the country is in a huge crisis.

Palast: It doesn't have to be that way, that's the point, Max. The point of How Trump Stole 2020 is you can steal it back. I wouldn't bother writing a book if I thought it was all over with. I'd just go to the beach and forget about it. Isolate somewhere on a top of a mountain. But, no, you can bust the burglary. We can steal it back. That's why at the back of the book, I have something called "Greg & Ted's New and Improved Ballot Condom."

No, you don't put around your ballot. What you do is you follow the rules. Number one, they wiped out literally millions of voters off the voter rolls. So reregister. Check if you're still registered. I did... I looked at my registration in California and it said no such voter.... So I reregistered online.

Go to either vote.org or even better, your Secretary of State or your county Board of Elections, make sure that you are listed, that you're listed as active. If you're listed as inactive, you contact them and say, here I am, I'm an active voter. Simply that, calling your voting office will turn you from inactive to active under the law.

So there's lots of things you can do to make sure you protect your vote, and your loved ones.

And make sure that you're mail-in ballot counts. Number one, you're not going to mail it in if you don't get it. So you have to be registered and you have to be active. Second, if you don't get it in time, you'd better call your office and say, where is my ballot? That's very, very important because you see all those people in those lines in Milwaukee and in Atlanta in those primaries? We talked to the people in those lines. Overwhelmingly, the vast majority are people who never got their mail-in ballot, so they were stuck waiting in lines, worrying that they're going to get a deadly virus. Don't let that happen to you. Make sure you're getting the ballot.

Then when you get it, fill it out like you're taking the SAT. Don't skip a line. Don't leave an extra mark. Don't use a red pen. When I was in Michigan looking at the ballot recount - which was stopped by Trump, by the way, by his lawyers - the Republicans were challenging every single Hillary ballot. If it was done in red pen, they said this is the wrong color pen or, oh, they used an X instead of filling in the bubble. I'm not making this up. They're going to challenge every vote. So be so careful with how you fill out your vote and make sure you sign on the outside of the envelope with your correct name. Make sure that you use proper postage. A hundred thousand people lost their right to vote for postage due on their mail-in ballot. And can you imagine what's coming up?

In six states you have to have a witness, in three states like you have to have a notary public sign off on your ballot, notarize your ballot. It's crazy stuff. Protect your vote so that they can't steal it from you.

(c) 2020 Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

Economic indicators - data points, trends, and micro-categories - are the widgets of the big information industry. By contrast, indicators for our society's democratic health are not similarly compiled, aggregated, and reported. Its up and down trends are presented piecemeal and lack quantitative precision.

We can get the process started and lay the basis for qualitative and quantitative refinement. Years ago, when we started "re-defining progress" and questioning the very superficial GDP and its empirical limitations, professional economists took notice. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, economists cling to the yardsticks that benefit and suit the plutocrats and CEOs of large corporations.

Here are my offerings in the expectation that readers will add their own measures:

1. A society is decaying when liars receive mass media attention while truth-tellers are largely ignored. Those who are chronically wrong with outrageous and baseless predictions are featured on news broadcasts, op-ed pages, and as convention and conference speakers. On the other hand, those who forewarn and are proven to be accurate are not regaled, but instead, they are excluded from the media spotlight and significant gatherings. Consider the treatment of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz post-Iraq invasion, compared to people like Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn who factually warned Washington not to attack illegally a country that didn't threaten us.

2. A society is decaying when rampant corruption is tolerated, and its perpetrators are rewarded with money, votes, and praise. When President Eisenhower's chief of staff, former New Hampshire Governor Sherman Adams, accepted a vicuña coat from a textile manufacturer, he was forced to resign. The daily corruption of Trump and the Trumpsters towers beyond measure over Adams' indiscretion. Yet calls for Trump and his cronies to resign are rare and anemic. Tragically, the law and the norms of decency have done little to curb the corrupt, criminogenic, and criminal excesses of Trump & company. Even government prosecutors and inspectors generals have been fired, chilled, and sidelined by Trump and his toady, Attorney General Barr.

3. A society is decaying when a growing number of people believe in fantasies instead of realities. Social media makes this an ever more serious estrangement from what is actually happening in the country and in the world. Believing in myths and falsehoods leads to political servitude, economic disruption, and social dysfunction. The corrupt concentration of power ensues.

4. An expanding economy focusing increasingly on 'wants and whims' while ignoring the meeting of basic 'needs and necessities' shatters societal cohesiveness and deepens miseries of many people. Adequate housing, healthcare, food, public services, education, mass transit, health & safety standards, and environmental protections are the prerequisites for a humane democracy. The economy is in shambles for tens of millions of Americans, including hungry children. Minimal economic security is beyond the reach of tens of millions of people in our country.

5. With few exceptions, the richer the wealthy become, the more selfish they behave, from severely diminished contributions to charities to the failure to exert leadership to reverse the breakdown of society. Take all the failures of the election machinery from obstructing voters to simply counting the votes honestly with paper records. The U.S. Senate won't vote to give the states the $4 billion needed for administering the coming elections despite the Covid-19-driven need for expanded voting by mail. The Silicon Valley, undertaxed, mega-billionaires could make a $4 billion patriotic donation to safeguard the voting process in November and not even feel it.

6. Rampant commercialism knowing no boundaries or restraints even to protect young children is running roughshod over civic values. Every major religion has warned about giving too much power to the merchant class going back over 2000 years. In our country, justice arrived after commercial greed was subordinated to humane priorities such as abolishing child labor and requiring crashworthy cars, cleaner air, water, and safer workplaces. Mercantile values produce predictable results, from excluding civic groups from congressional hearings and the mass media to letting corporations control what the people own such as the vast public lands and public airwaves.

7. Then there is the American Empire astride the globe, enabled by an AWOL Congress and propelled by the avaricious military-industrial complex. In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower presciently forewarned that "[W]e must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." All Empires devour themselves until they collapse on the countries of their origins. Over 55% of the federal government's operating spending goes to the Pentagon and its associated budgets. The military-industrial complex increasingly leads to quagmires and creates adversaries abroad, as it starves the social safety net budgets in our country. Our country's military spending with all its waste is surging and unaudited. The U.S. spent more than $732 billion on direct defense spending in 2019; this is more than the next ten countries with the largest military expenditures.

8. A society that requires its people to incur crushing debt to survive, while relying on casinos and other forms of gambling to produce jobs, is going backward into the future.

9. Public officials who repeatedly obstruct voters from having their votes received and counted accurately and in a timely fashion continue with impunity to try to steal elections. Then Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (now governor of Georgia) "stole" the election in 2018 from gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Abrams said Kemp was an "architect of voter suppression." And that because Kemp was the Georgia Secretary of State during the race, he was "the referee, the contestant and the scorekeeper" for the 2018 gubernatorial election. He escaped accountability. Democracy decays.

10, Access to justice is diminishing. Tort law - the law of wrongful injuries - has been weakened in many states with arbitrary caps on damages for the most serious injuries. It also is harder than ever for citizens to get through to real people in government agencies.

It is righteous and correct to say the names of victims of police violence, but we must also "Say the names!" of our living political prisoners. "They can't wait for 'Abolition.'" BAR executive editor Glen Ford made the following remarks on August 15 to the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, which was holding a virtual national conference under the theme, "Fight for Black Power: Free All Political Prisoners."

Power to the People... and good morning.

We're going to talk about Political Prisoners, of which the United States has many -- despite the fact that the United States claims it does not, and never has, imprisoned people for political reasons.

Scores of these prisoners are listed by the Jericho Movement. They have been incarcerated for many decades, some for half a century.

Many more have died in prison, and others have been released after enduring years of torture and attempts to break and humiliate them.

That includes esteemed members of the Black Is Back Coalition, who continue their work in the struggle, as do the brothers and sisters that remain behind bars. They have never left the struggle.

Of course, some people and institutions are totally immune from imprisonment - like banking executives, who are considered too big to jail.

But that's because they are the state - or rather, the State works for people like them. They are part of the ruling class.

The ruling classes have shaped the State to protect their interests. The Capitalist State exists for the purpose of making the nation and the world safe for the Rule of Capital. These people will never be prisoners of any kind - until they are overthrown and removed from power, by the people

That's why we say, Power to the People.

But the rest of us are subject to become prisoners, whether our offenses are overtly political, or not. Lots of folks who were politically opposed to the laws and practices of the U.S. State have spent some time in jail.

Some of them are eventually exonerated in the eyes of the State, and even venerated - and held up as political icons and paragons of virtue. People like the late John Lewis, who bragged incessantly that he's been arrested 40 times, in addition to having his head bashed in by police on a bridge that will likely be named after him, now that he's dead.

But John Lewis's many periods of incarceration were brief, for a number of reasons. The most important reason, is that Lewis was part of a broad movement, the civil rights movement, that had actively engaged many tens of thousands of people and was supported by many millions more in the United States and around the World. However, it is very important to understand that this "civil rights" movement was supported - at least tacitly - by a segment of the U.S. ruling class, and by large sections of the U.S. State, in various regions of the country and in the federal government.

Northern Democrats and many Republicans were opposed to Jim Crow. These politicians opposed segregation laws because many of their bosses in the ruling class were against legal segregation.

Many Big Capitalists opposed segregation laws, because Jim Crow put limits on the uses of Capital. Legal Jim Crow prevented the southern states from becoming fully integrated into the national U.S. economy. Segregation limited how investment money could be spent in the South, and the kinds of projects that could be developed.

You can't have a project like Peachtree Plaza, in Atlanta, if you have to have two sets of escalators, one for whites and one for Blacks. And you can't make Atlanta or Charlotte or New Orleans an international city, and still keep Jim Crow segregation.

So, much of the U.S. ruling class wanted Jim Crow to go. And this created political space for the civil rights movement in the South - because powerful sectors of the ruling class saw their own interest in ending legal segregation and denial of Black voting rights.

That's why John Kennedy made that call to Coretta Scott King when her husband was serving time in a Georgia jail, in 1960. Martin Luther King was a political prisoner of the State of Georgia, but elements of the national ruling class intervened, to voice their disapproval.

So, during that period in history, in the early Sixties, Big Capital and many of their political servants were at times allies of the civil rights movement. And they fully expected that civil rights activists, and Black folks in general, would repay them by becoming allies of Big Capital and the U.S. imperial state.

John Lewis totally fulfilled those expectations. He became a loyal servant of the Democratic Party, and a beloved spokesman for U.S. exceptionalism and Washington's right to rule over the planet.

John Lewis was an imperialist, ruling class success story - and they're very glad that they didn't keep him in jail, and that those cops didn't kill him on the bridge.

Dr. King was a different story.

Even before he began to publicly oppose the Vietnam War and U.S. imperial policy, before he publicly indicted the U.S. state and society for, what he called, the Three Evils of racism, poverty, and war, Dr. King had become the most important Black leader in the country.

And although, in the first half of the Sixties, King had not yet begun denouncing American imperialism or the capitalist system, King was still made a target of the FBI's COINTELPRO program.

He was to be neutralized, along with communists and Black radicals, especially Black nationalists. Dr. King was on the same FBI list as the young Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture.

J. Edgar Hoover feared that Dr. King might become a "Black Messiah" that could unify the Black Nationalist Movement. Hoover admitted that King was no Black nationalist, but Hoover feared that he might become a Messiah of the Black nationalists in the future. So King had to be neutralized, along with the actual Black radicals and revolutionary Black nationalists on the COINTELPRO list. And Dr. King did become more radical. He did break with U.S. imperialism. He did start speaking out more forcefully against capitalism.

But the U.S. Secret Police had a problem with eliminating Dr. King. King was famous for his Gandhian nonviolence. He had a Nobel Peace Prize.

So, how do you criminalize that kind of man, and make him a political prisoner? What kind of pretext could they use to discredit and incarcerate Reverend Dr. KIng, or run him out of the country - like they did Robert Williams, the former NAACP leader from North Carolina who found asylum in Cuba in 1961.

But Robert Williams advocated, and practiced, armed self-defense. Dr. King didn't mess with guns.

The Secret Police couldn't set King up, and King refused to commit suicide, as they strongly suggested. So, since they couldn't make him a prisoner, they made him a martyr.

Now, the reason I spent so much time on Dr. King, who was not a longtime political prisoner, is to point up the fact that the same forces that targeted Dr. King, in order to neutralize him, politically - those same forces put all of our surviving political prisoners behind bars.

Even if the U.S. Secret Police were NOT responsible for the death of Malcolm X in 1965, they would have killed or imprisoned Malcolm later on the decade.

If you threaten to lead Black people on an independent political path, the U.S. State will attempt to neutralize you, imprison you, or kill you.

If you exercise your right to defend yourself, and your people, from the oppressive arms of the State, they make you into an outlaw, and hunt you down.

And if you somehow escape from their clutches and find asylum in a comradely country, they will put a bounty on your head - as they have Assata Shakur.

When Malcolm's political children formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, in late 1966, they were exercising their right under California law to bear arms on the street.

In the beginning, the Party was a kind of armed cop-watch. The idea was that the cops would be less likely to casually kill people in the Black community if they knew they were being watched by armed Black people.

The Party was the White Settler State's worst nightmare: Black revolutionary nationalists with guns. Real Black revolutionaries, not figments of J. Edgar Hoover's imagination.

They didn't hide their socialism, and they actively sought fraternal relations with revolutionary movements and socialist governments around the world.

The Panthers characterized the police as an army of occupation in the Black community.

An occupation army. Those words were carefully chosen.

Malcolm X told us that we should stop talking about "civil rights" - which are the rights that the government chooses to give you - and instead demand our "human rights," as spelled out in United Nations documents.

Oppressed people should not have to appeal to their Oppressor for justice. They have the human right to resist oppression, by any means necessary. No matter what the oppressor says.

Brother Malcolm had done his homework. He knew that back in 1949 the Geneva Convention had declared that Occupied People have a human right to resist that occupation. The Black Panther Party put that right into practice, in response to the blue army of occupation in our communities.

When Dr. King was murdered in 1968, rebellions erupted in virtually every heavily Black city in the country. And thousands of sisters and brothers were soon knocking on the doors of Panther Party offices across the country, volunteering to join the resistance.

When Brother Yeshitela talks about revolution being "in the air" in 1968, that's no exaggeration. The numbers of Panther volunteers were, in fact, far too large for the Party to handle.

The State set COINTELPRO on War mode. Infiltration was even more pervasive than folks ever imagined. The SWAT TEAM was invented, and the Party was soon on the defensive, everywhere.

The bodies were piling up, and much of the Party was facing charges of one kind or another. Many were already in prison.

And then, in June of 1969, J. Edgar Hoover made the declaration of war official. He said the Black Panther Party was, "without question, the greatest threat to the internal national security of the United States." Hoover vowed to put the party out of existenceby the end of the year.

The U.S. State was handing down an ultimatum: Give up the struggle, or become a prisoner, or a corpse.

Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were among those killed before the year was out.

Many of the brothers and sisters who rejected Hoover's ultimatum became political prisoners -- and the survivors' pictures are on the Black Is Back Coalition poster that we prepared for this conference.

The latter part of the Black Liberation Movement was marked by calls to "Free Huey," "Free Bobby," and "Free Angela."

These particular prisoners were freed. But ultimately, the revolutionary Black movement was smashed by the raw, murderous power of the State.

However, the U.S. State had an even bigger plan.

COINTELPRO and related Secret Police programs are designed to target and neutralize the leadership of revolutionary movements. But Black people were feeling rebellious all over the country in the late Sixties. Federal troops were called in to occupy Detroit in 1967, and to occupy Washington DC and other cities in 1968, when over a hundred cities burned.

The U.S. State answered this resistance with the Mother of All Counterinsurgency programs: Mass Black Incarceration.

A mass Black Incarceration regime requires the criminalization of a whole people. Black neighborhoods were placed under the most intense surveillance.

It was in the last days of Lyndon Johnson's presidency that Congress created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which vastly increased federal spending on local police. Essentially, the federal government was massively reinforcing the Blue Occupation Army in Black America.

The mission was to create a vastly larger prison infrastructure: The Black Prison Gulag. In just over a generation, the U.S. prison population would swell from only 200,000, in 1970, to well over two million - half of them Black.

One out of every eight prison inmates in the world is a Black American. And one out of every three Black male children will go to prison sometime in their lives.

That was the U.S. State's answer to the Black Liberation Movement of the Sixties. It was as if the Rulers said: Since you Black folks won't stay in your place, we've got another place for you: prison.

But the advent of the Mass Black Incarceration Regime raises the question: If the State makes a political decision to criminalize Blackness, aren't all Black prisoners of the state political prisoners?

That's a question that is wrestled with, inside and outside the prison walls. But we do know for certain who went to prison in the service of our Movement in the struggle to free our people - whether they were armed or unarmed.

And we embrace our duty and our obligation to these political prisoners - not just during Black August, but in the totality of our political work.

The State had help in eradicating the threat of Black revolution.

The struggle against Jim Crow Apartheid engaged all classes of Black people. But not all Black people wanted a total transformation of society. Some just wanted to get rid of the impediments to their own ability to get rich, or to become a General in the Armed Forces, or to climb the corporate ladder.

They didn't want to Overthrow the ruling class - they wanted to join it.

For them, the Movement was about Black REPRESENTATION at all levels of the Capitalist structure - not self-determination for the mass of Black people.

It definitely was not about revolution. That would spoil everything for the aspiring Black bourgeoisie - the people we at Black Agenda Report call "The Black Misleadership Class."

They didn't hate the Democratic Party - even though it was the Democrats who created Jim Crow in the South. Instead, they wanted to join the Democratic Party, and to rise within the Party ranks.

And they opposed independent Black politics. They wanted to shut down the mass movement as soon as possible, so that it would not continue to disrupt the Rich White Man's Political Order - an order that they wanted to become a part of.

They had a slogan, back then: "Taking it from the streets, to the suites."

We saw early on what this Black Misleadership Class was up to - and it had nothing to do with Black Liberation.

The first Black big city mayor was Carl Stokes, of Cleveland. He was elected in 1967. Among his first acts was to appoint a Black general as the city's police commissioner. And the first thing his general did was issue dum-dum bullets to the cops, so that they could kill more Black people.

Atlanta's first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, quickly moved to break the overwhelmingly Black sanitation workers union - the same union that Martin Luther King was supporting in Memphis when he was assassinated. Maynard Jackson said his main mission was to create a new class of Black millionaires.

Long before McFadden and Whitehead composed their hit record, "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now," the Black Liberation Movement was brought to a stop by the State, with the collaboration of this rising Black political class.

We would not see even a glimmer of a mass Black grassroots movement for two generations.

When we still had a Movement that demanded "Free Huey," "Free Bobby" and "Free Angela," those particular political prisoners were released. But after the Movement was shut down, scores of other political prisoners were left to die in the Gulag.

Meanwhile, the new class of Black Democratic leaders became the managers of the Mass Black Incarceration Regime. Instead of defending Black people's interests and Black human rights, this class defended the System that criminalized Black people as a group.

They were proud to serve the infernal machinery that condemned the best and brightest or our activists and thinkers to die in America's dungeons.

For two generations, there was no Black grassroots mass movement in the United States. But the Black street never stopped resisting, even without a radical political leadership.

The Los Angeles rebellion of 1992 - the "Rodney King" rebellion - registered a higher death toll and more property damage than any urban uprising of the Sixties.

And, a generation after Rodney King, our young people rebelled again in the wake of Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson.

And this year they scared the hell out of the State in cities across the country, in response to Covid 19 and economic depression. Unprecedented numbers of people were in the streets, with young Black folks in the leadership.

But in those protests, we don't hear demands for the release of our political prisoners. They call for "abolition" of prisons. But that's a long-term goal. But many of our political prisoners have already died, and the rest are old. They can't wait for Abolition.

The failure of Black Lives Matter demonstrations to demand freedom for all political prisoners is unacceptable and must be criticized.

The current Movement makes a ritual of saying the names of the recent dead -- the victims of police violence. And that is righteous, and correct: "Say their names!"

But also, we must "Say the names!" of our political prisoners who still live.

So, we're gonna say their names, from the list published by the Jericho Movement:

Abdul Azeez, Virgin Islands 5
Mumia Abu Jamal, Black Panther Party
Sundiata Acoli, Black Panther Party and Republic of New Africa
Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
Jalil Muntaqim, Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army
Joseph Bowen, a US Political Prisoner
Veronza Bowers, Black Panther Party
Kojo Bomani Sababu, Black Liberation Army
Fred "Mohammad" Burton, a US Political Prisoner
Byron Shane Chubbuck, First Nation Political Prisoner
Bill Dunne, a Class War Prisoner
Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald, a US Political Prisoner
David Gilbert, Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner
Jeremy Hammond, Anarchist and Computer Hacker Political Prisoner
Hanif Shabazz Bey, Virgin Islands 5
Alvaro Lunes Hernandez, Chicano Political Prisoner
Kamau Sadiki, Black Panther Party

And that's only a partial listing. Political prisoners are being created all the time, because wherever there is political struggle, there will be political prisoners, and political casualties.

We must Say Their Names While they are still alive to hear us.

Say their names, while it can still do some good for the living.

Say their names, because we owe them a debt that can only be repaid by a lifetime of service to the people - as our political prisoners have already done.

Free them All!

In this horrible time of economic collapse, it is truly touching to see so many corporate chieftains reaching out in solidarity with the hard-hit working class.

We know theyre doing this because they keep telling us they are - practically every brand - name giant has been spending millions of dollars on PR campaigns in recent weeks asserting that they're standing with us, declaring over and over: "We're all in this together."

Except, of course, they're really not standing anywhere near us. While we're waiting in endless lines at food banks and unemployment offices, the elites are still getting fat paychecks and platinum-level health care. The severity and gross disparity of our country's present economic collapse is not simply caused by a sudden viral outbreak, but by a decades-long plutocratic policy of intentionally maximizing profits for the rich and minimizing everyone else's wellbeing. As the eminent economist Joseph Stiglitz rightly put it, "We built an economy with no shock absorbers."

Jobs, once the measure of a family's economic security, have steadily been shriveled to low-wage unreliable work, untethered to a fair share (or any share) of the new wealth that workers create. In a relentless push for exorbitant, short-term profits, today's executives have abandoned any pretense that a corporation is a community of interdependent interests striving to advance the common good. Instead, while the honchos are richly covered, they're washing their hands of any responsibility for the health, retirement, and other essential needs of their workforce. "Rely on food stamps, Obamacare, and other publicly-funded programs," they say, even as their lobbyists and for-sale lawmakers slash the public safety nets so rich shareholders and speculators can take evermore profit.

These forces of American greed have shoved millions of working families to the economic precipice - and all it takes is a virus to push them over.