“Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report has settled—or all but settled—important questions about the Trump-Russia matter.Did Russia intervene in the 2016 election with the conscious and articulated intent to help elect Donald Trump? Yes.How important were these interventions to the outcome? Large, possibly decisive.”
Source: The Mueller Report Didn’t Tell Us Trump’s Secrets – The Atlantic
Right now we need to admit that our nation is sick and rapidly declining. There is little doubt that this President is a parasite, a national cancer—and his Administration is rapidly sucking the goodness and the progress from us day by day, offense by offense, attack by attack, violation by violation.
Source: When Your President is a Global Cancer
Trump claimed that former President Obama had been disloyal to America, as congressional investigators are digging into his relationship with Russia.
Source: Trump Claims Obama Was Disloyal To America As Investigators Close In
“The Bureau counts incarcerated people as residents of the towns where they are confined, though they are barred from voting in 48 states and return to their homes after being released. The practice also defies most state constitutions and statutes, which explicitly state that incarceration does not change a residence.”
Source: The Problem | Prison Gerrymandering Project
“A quarter-century ago South Africa’s blacks finally were able to vote, bringing democracy to the country. But long after the brutal apartheid system of racial discrimination, speakers said many still struggle to find a decent life.“What is the meaning of freedom if many people in a township are unemployed?” asked David Makhura, premier of Gauteng province, which includes South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, and the capital, Pretoria.“What is the meaning of freedom if you don’t have a job? Or if you don’t have a house or land?” Makhura said the government of the African National Congress party is working to get title deeds for black South Africans: “The land must belong to our people!”All South Africans must respect the rights of the country’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex citizens, the premier added, saying many in the LGBTI community still suffer violence and discrimination in their workplaces, in church and elsewhere.”
Source: South Africa marks Freedom Day, apartheid ended 25 years ago
“This history helps us understand how the world has been structured and how imperialism continues to play a role in the reproduction of inequality and indignity.”
Source: THE TRICONTINENTAL
South Carolina hospitals are using a loophole in state law to scoop millions of dollars a year from the pockets of the poorest of patients. It mostly takes place outside the courts and the public eye.
A law originally written to help state and local governments collect debts is being used to seize tax refunds from people with past-due medical bills. The S.C. Department of Revenue does the legwork, and the cash flows straight into the coffers of some of the region’s largest health care companies.
The payoff is huge.
The American people also learned from the report that Mueller declined to prosecute Donald Trump Jr. because, in plain English, he was too dumb to know that he was likely committing crimes.Of course, poor and working-class people are not allowed such latitude, or given the benefit of the doubt regarding how their emotions or intelligence may have impacted their decision-making and other behavior. This is true more generally for nonwhites, Muslims, immigrants and all those viewed as the un-American “other.”
“We are aware of the concerns regarding dog walking across campus. Howard is a private institution nestled in the heart of an urban city and we’ve shared a long-standing positive relationship with our evolving community for more than 150 years, which we look forward to continuing in the future.
We saw the news stories, too. Move the campus, my ass. This is Howard. Open-campus, but we’re private and we make the rules ‘round here. We’ve been in the game for years, educating and affecting DC’s culture and the nation’s culture focusing on us and now these gentrifying ass white people show up, change up the neighborhood, try to shut down the go-go IN THE MIDDLE OF A COMMERCIAL DISTRICT IN A MAJOR U.S. CITY and decide that we need to be concerned about them. To quote one of our most famous students, Sean “Puffy” Combs, “we ain’t goin’ nowhere, we ain’t goin’ nowhere, we can’t be stopped…” They better go on with that bullshit. We were here first. Shit, real talk, we came before Columbus. They might be changing up DC, but this here is Howard.”
Source: Howard University Statement About Walking Dogs On The Yard
“At the heart of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told is the claim that the profits and accumulations of slavery contributed to the formation of contemporary capitalism. Like Beckert, he turns to the history of the cotton industry, though he focuses on the United States from the colonial era to the end of the Civil War. Yet if Beckert’s story is the world the slave owners made, Baptist’s is the world made by the slave. “Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States,” he declares, “and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.” We know the claim that enslaved African Americans built the modern United States is not new. This “half” has, in fact, been told—multiple times and more often than not by black writers, some of whom are fleetingly mentioned in Baptist’s footnotes. But the claim that African Americans built the world is simply wrong. Baptist’s book is marked by such rhetorical excesses, which lend themselves to a blinkered and narcissistic American exceptionalism. The result is an oversimplified view of capitalism and slavery that ignores the historical contributions to modernity of Africans in the Caribbean and in Africa itself.”
Source: The Racist Dawn of Capitalism | Boston Review
OCG 