Atty. Gen. Lynch Backtracks on Killer Cop Stats
Black activists are outraged at Attorney General Loretta Lynch for backing away from her predecessor’s verbal commitment to require local police departments to send reports to Washington when they kill civilians. Former attorney general Eric Holder said failure to keep such data was “unacceptable.” But Lynch called the information “minutia.” “It’s an extraordinary statement,” said Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, the renowned whistleblower and activist with Hands Up Coalition-DC. “I guess she considers it bothersome to demand that these police account for the number of people they kill. Who would think, after only a few months, that we would long for Eric Holder to come back?”
Columbia Students Host “Rise Up October” Rally
Dr. Cornel West, a co-founder of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, challenged Columbia University students to help build a more just society. “Unfortunately, our universities are not sites that generate the cultivation of courage,” said West, who teaches at the nearby Union Theological Seminary. Young people wind up “forgetting what they ought to be faithful to: something called justice.” The rally was a prelude to huge demonstrations planned for New York City, October 22 through 24.
Students cheered Edward “Noche” Diaz, a key organizer in the Network who was been jailed many times in the fight against police lawlessness. “The moment we’re in right now is something I haven’t seen in my lifetime,” said Diaz. “The ones who are called ‘the worst of the worst,’ the ‘thugs,’ the ‘criminals,’ those who are ‘capable of nothing,’ showed us that they are capable of tremendous courage in the face of injustice and tremendous possibility for a whole new world.”
Hillary Runs Away from TPP
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who boosted the Trans Pacific Partnership corporate trade deal countless times when she was Secretary of State, now opposes the treaty. That’s “very significant,” said Kevin Zeese, of Popular Resistance, part of a broad coalition opposed to TPP. “What it shows is the politics of it,” said Zeese. “She knows which way the political wind is blowing. What she found was: TPP stands for Toxic Political Poison.”
TPP is an Anti-China Weapon
The treaty is “really about trying to build an alternative economic framework to marginalize China” and to “more deeply integrate the societies of 11 Asian Pacific nations into that of the United States,” said Joseph Gerson, author of The U.S. ‘Pivot’ to Asia and the Pacific. “At the moment, for example, in Korea more students are interested in studying in China, where they think their future lies, than in the United States,” he said. “This is an effort to reorient them away from China and towards the United States.” Gerson is director of programs for the American Friends Service Committee, New England.
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