Author: Linn Washington

London -– Hearing hard-core Republicans applaud the use of the death penalty during a recent televised forum for GOP presidential candidates incensed Sara Callaway, an African-American living in London for the past 25-years.

“It was like a declaration of war against all of us committed to justice,” said Callaway, one of over two hundred people who gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in London’s upscale Mayfair section for a silent, candle-lit vigil protesting the execution of U.S. death row inmate Troy Davis.

That London vigil beginning hours before Davis’ execution in Georgia was among many held in cities across Europe. Georgia officials executed Davis by lethal injection ignoring not just the hundreds of thousands of appeals from Americans (and the overwhelming evidence that his trial had been a fraud and a lynching), but worldwide protests against that action.

European, American and supporters across the globe opposed the death of Davis, whose conviction stood on evidence now severely compromised by eyewitness recantations, improprieties by authorities and identification of a suspect–one of the witnesses for the prosecution — who one juror in the case alleges she heard admit to killing the off-duty policeman whose murder sent Davis to death row.

The killing of Troy Davis may have hurt the US reputation as a just society worldwide more than the Iraq invasion

London – Simon Woolley, the Executive Director of the London based Operation Black Vote, was one of the first British citizens to fly into the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks when he participated in a tour of America sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

Woolley was originally scheduled to fly into the U.S. on September 12, 2001 but the cancellation of all commercial air flights in and into the U.S. in the wake of the attacks postponed his trip for a couple of days.

When Woolley arrived stateside he was amazed at what he encountered.
“There was a truly historical, magical movement of unity during the days after 9/11,” Woolley said.

Unknown to most Americans, nearly 70 British citizens died when the twin World Trade Towers in New York City collapsed during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the highest death total of any single country behind Americans.

“I stood in a line for an hour in the rain outside of the U.S. embassy ten years ago to sign the book of condolence. People forget how much empathy there was for the USA post 9/11,” London resident Paul Bower said.

“The biggest wreath was from the Communist Party of Kurdistan.”

Many Muslims came to the U.S. embassy to pay their respects.
9-11 Sculpture in London made from steel from the Twin Towers in New York (photo by Linn Washington)

 
Brixton and Peckham, two of the communities in London rocked by the recent riots, are not mere dots on a map to Paul Bower. He’s lived in both communities, including living through a riot in Brixton thirty years ago.

Bower says people need to carefully distinguish between legitimate grievances festering in the now riot-scared areas – things like lack of employment – and the lawlessness of youthful looters.

The fiery and destructive looter rampages, Bower stresses, like inner city riots in the US in the US during the 1960s, have destroyed many small businesses owned by non-whites and the homes of poor people, white and non-white alike.

“These riots were not about unemployment. Yes, there is a lack of opportunity but [the looters] weren’t saying they want to work. They were saying I want what’s in that window,” Bower said during a telephone interview from London.

Bower’s work includes increasing job opportunities for London residents, so he’s well acquainted with the difficulties people have finding jobs in the UK these days.

“In hip-hop terms this is not Public Enemy ‘Fight the Power.’ It is 50-Cent ‘Get Rich or Die Trying,’” explained Bower, who now lives near London’s Camden section, which also experienced some of the rioting.

Rioting in Britain has spread through London and to other cities over several days

U.S. President Barack Obama suddenly takes hard-line stances against his Republican political adversaries after over two years of meek accommodation.

International media mogul Rupert Murdoch suddenly exhibits uncharacteristic humility when dealing with escalating scandals in England and America erupting from vicious and illegal activities by employees of his many media entities.

Do these unprecedented actions by these two extremely powerful men make them candidates for “Do the Right Thing” awards?

President Obama is publicly lashing GOP Capitol Hill leaders for being obstructionist.

Obama’s new strident rhetoric arises from his being stung by Republicans spurning his rather conservative compromise solutions to the impasse on increasing America’s debt ceiling, solutions that include the President’s shocking many in his Democratic base by embracing domestic spending cuts favored by conservatives—like slashing Social Security and Medicare.

Rupert Murdoch, a man not noted for demonstrating any capacity for contrition, has shocked many by offering apologies and even embracing investigations.

In seeking to staunch the spiraling governmental investigations and public dissatisfaction arising from illegal activities by some of his employees and top executives, Murdoch is even accepting resignations from some of his most trusted executives.

One of those executives is Wall Street Journal publisher Lee Hinton who worked with Murdoch for fifty-years. Hinton appears to have provided England’s Parliament with misleading information during a cover-up of a previous misconduct scandal by Murdoch’s English news employees.

The FBI is now reportedly investigating allegations of illegal acts by Murdoch employees including their trying to illegally obtain the telephone records of relatives of 9/11 victims. Evidence of telephone and email hacking scandals in England by Murdoch employees now include police investigations into their misdeeds against former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

On the surface, it might appear that Obama’s willingness to offer major spending cuts to achieve compromise with Republicans and Murdoch’s decision to close his most profitable newspaper in England plus shake-up his secretive empire are laudable examples of doing ‘The Right Thing.’

But looks are deceiving.
Rupe Murdoch: It's not easy being (obsessed with) green (and power)

So, some black folks are bashing Princeton Professor Cornell West for his sharply phrased critiques of President Barack Obama’s failure to specifically address crisis- proportion problems in a long-suffering segment of American society: the black community.

Black supporters of the first African-American president echo the rationale advanced by Obama himself that he is the president of all Americans so addressing issues specific to African-American would be inappropriate.

However, that view side-steps the critical issue of the very American right to criticize a U.S. President.

Compounding the First Amendment criticism issue is the reality that Obama has addressed issues important to specific groups, including gays and women. He has even been addressing the issues of his political adversaries, the Republicans, like his embracing their demands for deficit reducing austerity by slashing services to the most needy.

“Are African Americans expected to shut up and suffer?” asked Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chair of Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies, in a commentary about the controversy over criticism of Obama by blacks. “That’s just not democratic.”
Blacks are increasingly critical of Obama…and critical of blacks who criticize him

Given the stark desperation stalking so many communities around an America oozing from miseries embedded in the stagnant economy, it’s almost an inane exercise to contemplate the state-of-democracy in this nation on July 4th -– Independence Day.

All of the flag waving, fireworks and fun of this national holiday can’t mask the disturbing fact that democracy in America is under unprecedented onslaught from forces intent on engaging in economic exploitation comparable to the colonial crown domination that compelled Americans to rebel against England over two hundred years ago.

Examples of this onslaught abound with one of the most pronounced being federal and state level elected officials – overwhelming Republican – bludgeoning and eliminating benefits that have aided the middle class and the poor, in the name of budget balancing austerity, while simultaneously battling to protect the profits and assets of the wealthy.

A “long train of abuses” by the King of England is what triggered America’s then leaders to adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia.

Today those usurping what the Declaration defined as “unalienable rights” are not a despotic king and his royal court but corporate titans and the conservative elected officials dutifully serving the interests of wealth.

In 2011 public sector employees have faced unprecedented assaults against rights like their right to collective bargaining by Republicans in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states (and by Democrats in Massachusetts). These assaults cripple the capacity of public employees to attain what the Declaration called the desired “pursuit of happiness.”

A few days before July 4th 2011 New Jersey’s bombastic Republican Governor Chris Christie vetoed a proposal to generate $600-million for the revenue-starved Garden State through imposing a measly 1.78 percent increase in the tax paid by millionaires…a tax that would expire in two-years.

Christie, who is often touted as a GOP presidential prospect, defended his tax break-bestowing veto as a case of stopping what he feared might be an exodus of 16,000 millionaires, all chaffing at that 1.78 percent (temporary) tax increase.

Days before his veto helping millionaires, Christie rammed through legislation raising pension and health care contributions by all public employees in New Jersey.
Fat cats are do well as ordinary folks struggle this July 4

Hampton Coleman, a military veteran, felt secure in his constitutional free speech rights until a few weeks ago when three U.S. Marshals showed up at his Delaware home issuing demands Coleman considered threats.

Those U.S. Marshals, two male and one female from Philadelphia, came to Coleman’s home last month accusing him of sending a threatening letter to a federal magistrate judge.

“Why would I put my name and address on a letter containing a threat? I’m not crazy,” Coleman said during a recent interview.

Those Marshals warned Coleman to not send any more letters to U.S. Magistrate L. Felipe Restrepo.
Coleman claims the Marshals service is overreacting to his three-sentence, 28-word letter voicing concern about bias he felt Restrepo had exhibited in a race discrimination case handled by that judge, who ordinarily has a reputation for fairness.

Coleman attended an April 2011 hearing in that case.

Coleman said when he asked the three Marshals about his supposed Constitutional right to freedom of speech, “one of the marshals said “that’s an old document.” Coleman said that response startled him implying that the U.S. Constitution is “irrelevant.”

The five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution include barring the federal government from “abridging the freedom of speech” and from blocking “the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Coleman’s chilling encounter with those Marshals comes at a time when some experts and individuals across America are raising alarms about actions by governmental entities which are eroding Constitutional rights under the cloak of counterterrorism. Recent actions include revelations about surveillance of activists by FBI agents, court rulings limiting Bill of Rights protections and recent congressional renewal of the rights- curtailing Patriot Act.

Persons attempting “to exercise their rights will often be forced to defend themselves against an increasingly inflexible and uncompromising government,” warns John W. Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties organization, in a recent commentary.
The First Amendment: Just "an old document"?

The U.S. government won convictions against 23,506 drug traffickers nationwide during 2010, sending 96 percent of the offenders to prison, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission statistics.

Yet one of the biggest entities busted by the feds for involvement in drug trafficking last year received just a wrist-slap deal from federal prosecutors with nobody getting prison time.

During 2010, the U.S. government also won convictions against 806 persons involved in smaller-time drug-related money laundering, sending nearly 77 percent of those offenders to prison.

Yet when it came to a case involving billions of dollars in illegal drug profits, the federal government gave the same unusual wrist-slap to the same entity caught giving greed-blinded assistance to Mexican drug cartels by laundering billions of dollars in illegal profits for them.

So, what is this entity that federal prosecutors found worthy of big breaks for its laundering of billions of dollars, and for its blatant facilitating or tons of smuggled cocaine?

Meet Wachovia – once the nation’s sixth largest bank by assets and now a part of Wells Fargo Bank… a too-big-to-fail bank that for the feds is apparently too-big-to jail.

Wachovia's Slogan: "Uncommon wisdom"

Three days after President Barack Obama visited Ground Zero in New York City on May 5th with his message of “justice being done” with the slaying of terrorist Osama bin Laden, disturbing news broke about this administration’s blocking of a quest for justice in the infamous May 1970 killing of four Kent State students.

Those four students fell in a barrage of gunfire on May 4, 1970 by Ohio National Guardsmen who opened fire during a peaceful protest against the Vietnam War on Kent State’s campus. That lethal fusillade of 67 shots during a 13-second period also wounded nine others, some seriously.

That blocking action by Obama officials includes an apparent unwillingness to investigate new evidence providing damning insights about that shooting orgy forty years ago, which heightened criticism about U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam and about the abuse of domestic political dissidents.

The inaction on this case comes as opposition grows to Obama’s escalation of the unpopular war in Afghanistan and its expansion into Pakistan.

Ongoing U.S drone attacks inside Pakistan, seen by Pakistan as a violation of its sovereignty, have provoked outrage throughout that country. The country’s parliament recently passed a resolution calling for an end of drone attacks and a “review of the country’s relationship with the U.S.” The U.S., according to CNN’s Pakistan bureau, unleashed at least four drone attacks since the raid that killed bin Laden. It was just one of two dozen such attacks inside Pakistan this year alone.

One of those students injured during the Kent State shooting, Alan Canfora, met with U.S. Justice Department officials last Fall requesting a new federal investigation based on an analysis of an audio tape conducted early last year which revealed what two forensic audio experts say is a military-style order to open fire on student protesters.

Ohio Guardsmen firing live ammunition at peaceful, unarmed Kent State U. student demonstrators and killing four, in 1970

In the wake of the Obama Administration’s ballyhooed elimination of Osama bin Laden, thousands of government workers across the United States wonder when their president will provide them the ‘comfort of closure’ through his attacking a terrorism they confront daily.

This terrorism ravishing government employees working in entities from mega-federal agencies to small municipalities fits the classic dictionary definition of terrorism: using force or threats to demoralize, intimidate and subjugate.

This terrorism is a tyranny predating the birth of al Qaeda: institutional racism and its related deprivations like vicious retaliation against anyone objecting to unlawful institutional inequities.
Interestingly, a raging battlefield in the institutional racism wars is the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights, where numerous organizations have blasted that office’s director for his failures to enforce civil rights.

Additionally, that director, Rafael DeLeon, allegedly engages in improper behavior inclusive of sexist and racist remarks according to critics, including the National Whistleblowers Center and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), asserts DeLeon himself is the subject of numerous discrimination complaints.

The Washington Post’s influential Federal Diary columnist Joe Davidson published an article in late April stating that “if” the EPA’s Civil Rights Office “were a chunk of ground, it would be declared a disaster area.”