John Bolton Plumbs the Depth of Trump’s Depravity - The Atlantic

Trump's former national security adviser accuses the president of putting his reelection above everything else and of endorsing the persecution of China’s Uighur minority by agreeing that they should be put into concentration camps.

According to John Bolton's book, in June 2019, Donald Trump was desperate for a win - and he was willing to endorse Chinese concentration camps to get it.

According to a forthcoming book by John Bolton, who was then serving as Trump’s national security adviser, Xi explained to Trump why China was building concentration camps for the Uighur minority in the western part of the country.

Bolton claims: “According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

Trump’s willingness to prioritize his political fortunes was not limited to this one incident, but rather, Bolton writes, was part of a pattern: “Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on trade questions but across the whole field of national security. I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.”

This is a stunningly blunt conclusion from the man Trump handpicked to advise him on national security—though not one that will come as a great surprise, after Trump was impeached for trying to use American aid to Ukraine to extort assistance for his reelection campaign.

Bolton’s account is notable for two reasons. The first is the messenger: Bolton had not only a front-row seat but a seat at the table for the events he recounts, and there is no question about his conservative bona fides.

Second, it shows the scale and depth of Trump’s depravity and corruption—even to the point of allegedly encouraging concentration camps for a persecuted minority.

The full article is available here

Accused Killer Of California Cops Was Part Of Far Right Movement - Forbes Magazine

The FBI announced that Carrillo chose the timing of his attacks to "take advantage of a time when this nation was mourning the killing of George Floyd."

The FBI announced Tuesday that Steven Carrillo, the U.S. Air Force sergeant who allegedly murdered law enforcement officers in California during protests earlier this month, was associated with the right-wing Boogaloo movement. 

The FBI announced that Carrillo chose the timing of his attacks to "take advantage of a time when this nation was mourning the killing of George Floyd."

According a review of court documents of 51 individuals facing federal charges related to protests, none is alleged to have links to the Antifa movement.

Among all the cases brought by the Justice Department thus far, the only extremist group mentioned in court documents is the right-wing "Boogaloo movement."

The movement has evolved from a gathering of militia enthusiasts and Second Amendment advocates into a full-fledged violent extremist group, which inspires lone wolf actors and cell-like actors alike.

The full article is available here

The "Black on Black Crime" Whataboutism - Troy L Smith

Yes, racial disparities in crime and punishment are real. However, they have been produced in large part by the systemic and structural racism against dis-empowered minorities, particularly African Americans.

A common whataboutism raised when discussing police brutality is “why aren’t we talking about black on black crime?”  (That is a specious argument since a lot of people - especially within the Black Community - have been and continue to talk about it, but let's get into why crime rates are the way that they are).

If we want to have a good faith discussion about crime, we need to talk about all of the factors that contribute to crime happening in the first place.

According to the Bureau for Justice Statistics, people in households with income below the federal poverty threshold are twice as likely to commit a violent crime than people in high-income households, regardless of race.

But, since we live in a country where the poverty rate is more than twice as high among black Americans than white. And that has as much to do with 400 years of systematic racism as it does anything else.

Yes, racial disparities in crime and punishment are real. However, they have been produced in large part by the systemic and structural racism against dis-empowered minorities, particularly African Americans.

Even though overt racial discrimination has been prohibited by law for decades, it still occurs at an alarming rate.

Additionally, the brutal structural legacy of racism, segregation, concentrated poverty, and violence remains.

The full article is available here

What "Defund" Advocates Are Calling For In Municipal Budgets - New York Times Explainer

City budgets would be restructured to shift more funding to educational, health care, and social services.

Advocates who have been saying "defund" police are not calling for the abolition of police departments.  What it actually means is no longer asking officers to do resolve family and school disputes, move homeless people into shelters and so on.

As a result, city budgets would be restructured to shift more funding to educational, health care, and social services.

Some cities have already made changes. In Austin, Texas, 911 calls are answered by operators who inquire whether the caller needs police, fire or mental health services — part of a major revamping of public safety that took place last year when the city budget added millions of dollars for mental health issues.

In Eugene, Ore., a team called CAHOOTS — Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets — deploys a medic and a crisis worker with mental health training to emergency calls.

The full article is available here

Retired Generals Sound Alarm On Trump Using Military Domestically - David Knowles, Yahoo News

Retired top generals reacted with alarm to President Trump’s plan to use active-duty military to patrol cities.  They have also taken issue with Trump’s use of U.S. soldiers to counter demonstrators.

“It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel — including members of the National Guard — forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church,” retired Gen. Mike Mullen, a former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in an extraordinary op-ed in the Atlantic.

“I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump’s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.”

Former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Gen. Martin Dempsey, was similarly bothered by Trump’s actions, tweeting, "America is not a battleground. Our fellow citizens are not the enemy."

Retired Gen. Tony Thomas, former head of Special Operations Command, said Trump’s promise to flood the streets of cities with U.S. soldiers is “not what (the country) needs to hear.”

The full article is here

Structural Racism and Infrastructure In U.S. Cities - Johnny Miller in The Guardian

Urban infrastructure is not value-free. Government decisions made from the 1930's to the 1960's set the course for the inequality we face in U.S. cities.

To get an understanding of how infrastructure transforms communities, there’s no better place to start than the Federal Housing Authority “redlining” housing maps.

Commissioned by the federal government in the 1930's, these maps were critical to decisions of where and what type of infrastructure, lending and housing each neighborhood of each American city would be able to receive.

“The FHA promoted home ownership in new – and primarily suburban – neighborhoods so long as they were white and not ethnically or economically diverse,” writes Antero Pietila in Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City.

FHA maps were created for every major city in the US. Original assessment documents unearthed by researchers at the T-Races project reveal the cold, casually racist way in which data collectors consigned vast neighborhoods to neglect and poverty.

Nowhere is infrastructure so obviously structurally racist as with the vast interstate highway system.

By the 1950's and 60's, during the Interstate Highway building boom, the process of routing roads through black communities was so common it even had a name among critics: “White roads through black bedrooms.”

The result was decay, pollution, and crime.

The full article is available here