Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“Former President Donald Trump on Sunday called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime “immediately.”
The remarks — delivered by Trump at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, just 36 days before the election — did not amount to a new policy proposal, according to a Trump campaign official.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/29/trump-violent-day-policing-crime-00181619
“I’m very supportive of efforts to either essentially bribe localities into doing the right thing through a Race to the Top program if you don’t reduce exclusionary zoning. I think that’s a good effort, but I think that the Economic Fair Housing Act offers something both substantively and politically that’s better.
I think part of the problem with the existing federal proposals is that they suggest that exclusionary zoning is bad policy because it blocks opportunity and makes housing less affordable and damages the planet. All of those things are true, but what I think the Economic Fair Housing Act tries to do is say it’s not just bad policy, it’s immoral for governments to erect barriers that exclude and discriminate based on income … because it’s shameful what’s going on.”
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“In the 21st century, segregated communities are kept that way not through laws that explicitly attempt to keep certain areas white but through a more insidious method — exclusionary zoning and land-use regulations that make it illegal to build affordable types of housing, laws that allow wealthy Americans to block things from being built, and a failure to consistently use federal civil rights laws to desegregate.
All of this has resulted in the prices of housing and rent skyrocketing. Over the last year, diminished supply as a result of these laws has pushed the cost of shelter higher than ever, straining the pockets of working-class, middle-class, and even some high-income Americans.”
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“In certain communities, there is still an intent to segregate by race, so I don’t want to downplay that, but having said that, there’s certainly evidence that the issue of exclusionary zoning is not only about race.
We know in predominantly white communities that wealthy whites will use zoning to exclude lower-income whites. We also know, for example, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a predominantly Black community, that there are efforts by wealthier Black people to exclude lower-income Black people through exclusionary zoning.
In some white, liberal communities, you will hear people say they are delighted to have a Black doctor or lawyer move in next door. And so they feel virtuous for no longer excluding directly based on race, without acknowledging that they’d be highly uncomfortable with working-class Black people or white people moving into the neighborhood.
So I think it’s important that we recognize that there’s exclusion going on by both race and class, which is why we need some new tools to beef up the existing laws.”
“For Europeans watching events unfold across the Atlantic — as thousands took to the streets across the U.S. — it was the massive, and seemingly effective, response that followed George Floyd’s death as much as the brutality of his killing that spurred them to action. At a time when U.S. President Donald Trump has tarnished the national brand in the eyes of many in Europe, activists took cues and borrowed slogans from a civil rights movement that has inspired people on both sides of the Atlantic for decades.
In Belgium, some 10,000 people gathered in front of Brussels’ Palais de Justice for a protest organized by the Belgian Network for Black Lives. In a sea of hand-drawn “Black Lives Matter” and “No justice, no peace” placards, people held up signs calling out the country’s history of racism — “Belgium, too” and “We need to talk about Leopold II and Belgian colonies” — and the names of recent victims of police violence.
A planned protest last week organized by families of victims of police brutality in France — including Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old black man who died in police custody in 2016 — drew record numbers of people in Paris. In cities across Germany, Spain, the U.K. and the Netherlands, protesters also flouted lockdown rules to flood public squares to demand justice for the people of color who died in police custody in their own countries. They filled streets in Dublin, Copenhagen and Milan. In Bristol, in the U.K., protesters tore down the statue of a 17th-century slave trader, dragged it through the streets and threw it in the harbor.”
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“Europe’s history with race relations is so different from that of the U.S. There was no large-scale system of slavery in modern Europe; it largely “exported” its racism to its colonies, which it plundered for wealth and cheap labor. Most migration from Africa to Europe is relatively recent, starting in the 1960s. In most European countries, there are people who remember when large numbers of migrants first arrived.
Colonialism is still a touchy subject in a number of countries, particularly in France and Belgium, which have largely failed to grapple with their bloody legacies. There is a “selective amnesia” in Europe about its imperial legacy and a “toxic nostalgia that to this day taints their misunderstanding of that history,” the British journalist Gary Younge wrote in a piece for the New York Review of Books.”
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“Although most of Europe, unlike the U.S., has never put in place a system of legal discrimination explicitly targeting people of color, like the Jim Crow laws, the daily racism experienced by Europeans is no less shocking. In some cases, it’s more so.
“Levels of incarceration, unemployment, deprivation and poverty are all higher for black Europeans,” according to Younge. “Perhaps only because the Continent is not blighted by the gun culture of the U.S., racism here is less lethal.”
Being a black or brown person in Europe means being confronted from a young age with teachings that paint colonialism as a worthy enterprise. It means you’re more likely to live in poorer, heavily policed neighborhoods. It means your job applications will often go unanswered and you will have a hard time renting property or buying a house.
You’ll have seen people black up their faces and dress up as Zwarte Piet every year in early December. You’ll have watched far-right parties rise in the polls on openly racist platforms and loose language comparing migrants to vermin. You’ll have seen footage of football fans throwing banana skins at black players. And you’ll have seen politicians, most of whom do not look like you, stay silent.”
“The world response to the COVID-19 epidemic has been completely unprecedented. At the time of writing, 82 countries have restricted travel through their borders and 37 have completely closed them completely. Both the invisible and physical walls that separate the world have grown less penetrable, but no region has enacted measures as strict as Latin America, whose governments fear their vulnerable health systems will not be able to cope with widespread outbreak.
A dozen Latin American countries—with a combined population of more than 175 million people—have placed their citizens on full lockdown, a measure which some countries are enforcing by deploying soldiers to the streets.”
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“The primary barrier to governments enacting controversial power grabs are the critics and institutions who would object, so a handful of Latin American leaders are taking dramatic steps to silence those who check their power. They’re now muzzling journalists through intimidation, arrest, or character assassination.
In Honduras, the government passed an emergency measure that temporarily suspended constitutional protections on free speech for both citizens and journalists. On March 25, the Bolivian government announced a decree that allows imprisonment for up to 10 years of those who “misinform” or “promote non-compliance” with government regulation. The nonprofit Human Rights Watch has criticized the language of the law, saying it is intentionally vague and could be used to prosecute political opponents and journalists alike.
In Venezuela, freelance journalist Darvinson Rojas was arrested by Special Action Forces (FAES) and imprisoned for his coverage of the coronavirus crisis. The local Venezuelan press has covered half a dozen instances of journalists being intimidated. And on April 6, FAES arrested Luis Serrano, a civil assemblyman who would have determined the next election oversight board in Venezuela, according to WOLA, a human rights group in Latin America. They seized masks and protective gear Serrano’s organization had donated to journalists covering COVID-19 and detained politicians who’d been contradicting the government’s official coronavirus statistics, which many medical experts consider unbelievably low.
In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has turned the crisis into a political weapon, claiming that the press is trying to destroy his presidency through misinformation. Despite ignoring advice from health officials within his own party about the danger of the epidemic, he used the crisis as justification to release an executive order that abolished freedom of information legislation, effectively undermining the ability of journalists or NGOs to obtain public health information. The executive order was quickly struck down by Brazil’s Supreme Court.”
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“Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia have all been heavily criticized by the United Nations for violent repression of a continent-wide wave of protests that swept through Latin America just months ago. If civil unrest flares up again over economic or health issues during the current state of emergency, protesters in many countries may find themselves facing down state forces with extralegal powers and a muzzled press.
The degree of authoritarianism varies by country”