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AMERICAN PROTEST-Despite pre-election plywood covering store fronts in cities across the United States, it was total fearmongering that far right militias, Black Lives Matter, or Antifa would initiate street violence during or after the November 3 presidential election.

Why? We clearly know who are the major purveyors of violence in the United State, especially who has the guns and military equipment, extensive training, and uses them every day to attack and often kill people in the United States and other countries. It is not the far-right militias, Black Lives Matter, or Antifa. Instead, it is local and federal police departments and the countrys military.

First, the largest armed group in the United States is the countrys military. They have an annual budget of at least $750 billion, with another $400 billion scattered among other federal agencies and departments. They have about 500 domestic military installations and control 800 foreign military bases.At present the United States government is engaged in nine foreign wars, and whenever there is a serious domestic rebellion, presidents routinely order the countrys military to enter cities like Detroit and Los Angeles to suppress civil disturbances.

Furthermore, a branch of the armed forces, the National Guard, has trained units in Alabama and Utah ready to instantly deploy to any part of the United States to quell new civil disturbances.

Second, there are nearly 15,000 police departments in the United State and least 75 percent of them have SWAT teams trained in commando operations and bestowed more military equipment than they can use.They engage in over 100,000 quasi-military operations every year, and in May-July 2020 these SWAT teams were widely used to quell demonstrations opposing excessive police violence over the entire United States.

Third, the FBI has 52 field offices, and each office has a trained, heavily armed SWAT team of at least 42 people. Like U.S. Marshalls and ICE officers, they can be instantly deployed to oppose street demonstrations, as they recently were in Washington, DC and Portland, Oregon.

Fourth, these groups are connected through Fusion centers and other administrative mechanisms to operationally link them together to suppress mass movements, like Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Their tools include drones, spy planes, and mass surveillance.

Fifth, the FBI has made it clear that the main domestic terrorist threat in the United States (ignoring the 1000 people per year that the police murder) comes from Alt Right white supremacists, not unarmed mass movements, like Black Lives Matter (BLM).

The latter is a protest organization with a nationalist outlook, with no military component, but extensive support from large, social justice philanthropies (e.g., Ford Foundation). While BLM and the sympathy demonstrations it sparked in June 2020 could not prevent organized criminals, undercover cops, provocateurs, and deranged people from showing up, BLM does not recruit, organize, or train these opportunists.

Sixth, Antifa is not even an organization; it is a loose 80-year-old alliance of local anti-fascist individuals and informal small groups that coalesce to confront fascist groups when they initiate violence.Also, there is no connection between Antifa and Black Lives Matter. They are rarely at the same events and neither group engages in electoral politics.

Too bad so many trees had to needlessly die for all that plywood.

(Victor Rothman is a California-based political analyst.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

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Why Street Violence from Militias, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa Never Appeared - City Watch

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) Starting this Friday, some local businesses are hosting a weekly holiday pop-up event to support local businesses on 'Black Lives Matter Way'.

The Community Action Network of Western New York is pushing people to shop small this holiday season in Buffalo.

On Friday, Leslie's Boutique and Anderson's Flower Shop are hosting pop-ups selling gently used clothing and flowers from 1-6 p.m. at 1474-1476 Fillmore Avenue.

Next Friday, Nikki's Chocolates is hosting a pop-up event selling assorted chocolates from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 27 Chandler Street.

On November 27th, LadySuperb is hosting a pop-up event selling women's handbags and accessories all-day online; you can find them by clicking here.

On December 4th, Ansar Fragrances and More is hosting a pop-up event selling essential oils and more from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 1371 Fillmore Avenue.

On December 11th, People Helping All Mankind (PHAM) is hosting a pop-up event selling t-shirts and hoodies all-day online; you can find them by clicking here.

On December 18th, Soulfully Prepped LLC is hosting a pop-up event selling breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 68 Tonawanda Street.

Originally posted here:
Weekly holiday pop-up event to support small businesses on 'Black Lives Matter Way' starting Friday - WKBW-TV

People protest against abuses by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in Lagos, Nigeria, Oct. 12.

As a Nigerian-American, I was very disappointed in myself for my lack of knowledge about #EndSARS protests in Nigeria that have captivated the world recently. (In Nigeria, SARS stands for the so-called Special Anti-Robbery Squad police force unit.)

The dissonance between my words and my action was painfully obvious. Ive been saying that all Black lives should matter, no matter what part of the world they inhabit, and I was ignoring an important movement from my mother country. Rectifying that, I spent the past week reading up on #EndSARS protests.

As I read, I noticed similarities between violence carried out by SARS in Nigeria and violence doled out by the men in blue in the U.S. Both forces rely on profiling in order to identify targets for their attacks. The SARS forces carouse the streets looking for suspects based on certain lifestyle traits, such as the car they are driving or the jewelry on their wrists. SARS used this disturbing method on Oct. 3 to rob a yet-to-be-identified young adult of his life in Ughelli, a town in southeastern Nigeria. He was killed for the dangerous crime of driving a Lexus. Two days later, SARS forces shot and killed Daniel Chibuke, a 20-year-old up-and-coming rapper, for daring to sit near a hotel with a friend.

I was reminded of the laws and methods U.S. police use to target Black people, such as stop and frisk. Black men and masculine of center people are targeted by police for the most frivolous minutiae, such as wearing a hoodie or driving a car with the radio too loud. Basic things that people of other ethnicities can do without a second thought can endanger the lives of Black masculine people.

In both countries, Black masculine people are harassed, beaten and killed for not buying into classist respectability politics and daring to live as their true selves. The young mens deaths remind me of a time when I was profiled and patted down by a police officer for having the audacity to go to a grocery store wearing a hoodie on a chilly night. The fear I felt at that moment must have been exactly what those two men and others were experiencing as they met their tragic end.

In Nigeria the deaths of the two young men became a call to action for that countrys marginalized, just like Trayvon Martins death in 2012 provided the impetus for the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S.

Nigerian LGBTQ+ resistance builds

Learning about the origin of the #EndSARS movement piqued my interest. To find out more about this grassroots organizing, I googled SARS and discovered this hashtag: #QueerNigerianLivesMatter. Seeing those four words pleasantly surprised me as its not often that LGBTQ+ people in Nigeria are granted such visibility.

There, as in the States, queer and trans people live under the specter of police violence. Earlier this year, police raided a Lagos Hotel and arrested 57 men on the mere suspicion of being gay. Similar police raids are conducted all over Nigeria on gay men and lesbian women.

Since President Muhammadu Buhari signed the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act into law, police violence against queer and trans people has skyrocketed. It is noteworthy that many current oppressive anti-queer laws stem from the colonial era when the British instituted puritanical,Western-style sexual mores into law against Nigerias many ethnic groups.

For Nigerian LGBTQ+ people, the #EndSARS movement could potentially be their Stonewall movement. That uprising in the U.S. in late June 1969 was the culmination of frustration and anger that the most marginalized LGBTQ+ people felt at being on the receiving end of police brutality.

The Stonewall Rebellion sent shockwaves throughout the world and compelled generations to fight for queer liberation. As the current rebellion against police violence is waged in Nigeria, queer and trans activists leading the charge could serve as inspiration to the BLM activists in the U.S., like the Stonewall activists have inspired millions.

In Nigeria, people such as non-binary activist Matthew Blaise and queer liberation organizer Ani Kayode Somtochukwu could be the Marsha P. Johnson and the Storme DeLarverie of the modern day. Queer and trans Nigerians fight to have the #EndSARS movement recognize their trials and tribulations mirrors the fight for Black LGBTQ+ people to gain visibility within the mainstream Black Lives Matter movement in the States.

In the U.S., local grassroots organizations have worked hard to recognize Black queer and trans victims of police brutality, but Tony McDade and Layleen Polanco havent been able to garner as much notice as George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and even Breonna Taylor. McDade, a Black trans man, was gunned down by Tallahassee, Fla., police, and Polanco, an Afro-Latinx trans woman, died because of medical negligence by Rikers Island prison staff in New York City. They have been rendered invisible relative to the cisgendered, heterosexual Black victims of police brutality.

The spirited fight of queer #EndSARS protesters in Nigeria could provide the impetus for Black LGBTQ+ activists in the U.S. to increase their fight for representation within the broader Black Lives Matter movement.

Womens pivotal role in #EndSARS

As someone with lifelong sympathies with feminism, I feel proud of the role women have played in the #EndSARS movement. While a large focus on police brutality centers on cishet men, women are also victims of sexual violence at the hands of SARS and the Nigerian police in general. One grassroots organization in particular, the Feminist Coalition, is playing a pivotal role in the ongoing protests, providing food, shelter and medical treatment to protesters fighting for an end to police brutality.

Black Lives Matter was founded in the U.S. in 2012 by three Black women, at least one of whom identifies as gender-nonconforming. Black women and femmes have been a major presence at protests against police brutality,

It warms my heart to witness the long tradition of Black women and femmes continuing and driving political movements forward. From Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth during the 19th-century abolition movement, to todays protests spearheaded by Damilola Odufuwa, Odunayo Eweniyi, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and so many more, Black women have contributed immensely to the fight for Black liberation.

The week I spent educating myself about #EndSARS has taught me that the global fight for Black lives is alive and well. In an era of increasing fascism, Black people no matter which part of the world they inhabit need to band together to rebel against oppression no matter how it manifests itself.

The simultaneous protests in Nigeria and the United States are a positive development in working toward a world where all Black people are truly free.

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Black Lives Matter from Nigeria to the U.S. - Workers World

NEW YORK (AP) Black Lives Matter has been a lot of things in its brief, fiery life.

It has been a slogan, a rallying point. A movement that led protests coast to coast, calling for America to get serious about preventing Black deaths at the hands of law enforcement. A heaven-sent resource for people like Helen Jones, desperate for justice after her son died in a Los Angeles County jail.

Black Lives Matter saved us, because we had nobody, said Jones.

Now, BLMs influence faces a test, as voters in Tuesdays election consider candidates who endorsed or denounced the BLM movement amid a national reckoning on race.

Were a very young organization with a whole lot of visibility in a really short amount of time, Patrisse Cullors, one of three BLM co-founders, told The Associated Press. It would be false, she said, for anyone to put it on us solely around what happens in this election cycle.

And in fact, many Republican and Democratic candidates vying for federal, state and local office have moved vociferously toward the political center or further to the right, making it clear that they back the blue or do not support calls for defunding the police. Neither President Donald Trump nor former Vice President Joe Biden would reduce police budgets in local communities.

Still, there are reasons for BLM supporters to feel optimistic, some activists say. The group is flush with cash, which it is using in the hopes of playing a significant role in the election. There is a growing roster of candidates whove been nurtured, inspired or supported by the movement: For example, St. Louis area residents are all but certain to elect Cori Bush, a Ferguson protester who is running for Congress.

For the first time, people can hear and consider candidates who will come out and acknowledge the fact that police commit harms against Black and brown folks, said Tiffany Cabn, a national political organizer for the Working Families Party who helped the party recruit progressive-minded prosecutors.

___

In the blink of an eye, BLM has gone from social media hashtag to an immensely influential movement and an organization with millions of dollars at its disposal to push messaging around defunding police departments as a way of addressing systemic racism.

It began just seven years ago, with the emergence of the movement amid its organizers outrage over the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the Florida man who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

A year later, BLM marched onto the global stage after an uprising in the wake of Michael Browns death at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

The three women who founded BLM were already activist powerhouses. Cullors had established her own social justice organization in Los Angeles, Power and Dignity Now. Opal Tometi had been executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, advocating for social and economic prosperity of Black immigrants to the U.S. Alicia Garza, had been a special projects director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, fighting for the rights of professional nannies and other caregivers.

They saw the need to make BLM more than a slogan, Garza said.

We were getting people who were wanting to start chapters, and they were from all over the place, she said. We would be asking them, Well, what else do you have in your community? And they would say, Nothing. We were in the middle of a literal storm and needing to fly a plane as youre building it.

BLM formed a network of chapters in 2015, building infrastructure and an organization that drew funding from celebrities like Beyonc, Jay-Z and Prince.

Its first-ever Los Angeles chapter came to the aid of Helen Jones. She believes her 22-year-old son, John Thomas Horton III, was murdered in 2009 through neglect of sheriffs deputies who stuck him in a closet-sized, windowless cell and left him in solitary confinement for weeks. Though officials determined that Horton hanged himself, Jones said injuries on his body suggest that he was brutally beaten.

She needed a champion to keep her sons case in the spotlight. Enter Black Lives Matter. She worked with local movement organizers and other victims families to demand stronger civilian oversight of the county jails via a 2020 ballot initiative. Voters approved the measure in March, granting a sheriff oversight commission subpoena powers to investigate civilian complaints.

BLMs profile increased quickly. In 2017, the founders were awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.

In 2018, Cullors appeared on stage at the Academy Awards ceremony with prominent voices in the #MeToo and transgender rights movements. Across social media platforms, the Black Lives Matter movement boasts a following of millions.

I think over the past seven or eight years, so many people within Black Lives Matter have been asking what started out as questions that were only ever asked in academia questions like, What can we do about police brutality? and What to do when we feel we cant call the police, said Janaya Khan, the networks international ambassador and co-founder of its Canadian branch.

So now in this time of pandemic, when so many people are experiencing a kind of precarity, one that so many Black people already know intimately, there are questions that theyre asking and we have some answers that we can offer, Khan said.

Since the wave of protests sparked by George Floyds death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, BLM has undergone a somewhat quiet transformation. As the words Black lives matter began appearing in city-sanctioned street murals coast to coast, the BLM network banked millions of dollars from a surge of donations so much that Cullors established a grant fund of more than $12 million.

While Garza and Tometi stepped away from day-to-day stewardship of BLM years ago, Cullors remains executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Its existing chapters, including those in Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit, are now autonomous entities that are eligible to receive funding from the network, Cullors said.

Broad visibility and influence have come at a high personal cost for prominent BLM voices. Black Lives Matter, as a slogan, elicited All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter responses from foes. It also meant Cullors, Garza, Tometi and many others associated with the BLM movement have faced threats, as well as surveillance by local and federal law enforcement, Cullors said.

Days before the election, Cullors released a video announcing she and Garza had been contacted by the FBI after their names were found on a list of activists a white supremacist allegedly intended to harm.

No threats against me or my movement will stop this revolution, Cullors said in the video. And we will be here. We will show up to the polls and we will organize.

___

BLM has launched a political action committee to support candidates, campaigns and legislation. And as the voting wraps up, the organization is hosting pandemic-safe drive-in rallies, text-banking voters and leveraging its millions to run ads focused on increasing the Black vote.

One aim is to press sweeping federal legislation known as the BREATHE Act, a bill drafted by the policy table of the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition formed in 2014 that now includes more than 150 affiliate organizations that make up the broad Black liberation struggle.

The act, not yet introduced in Congress, would divest federal resources from incarceration and policing, including the elimination of a Department of Defense program that allows local law enforcement agencies to obtain excess military equipment equipment that has been used against BLM protests.

At the state and local level, the Working Families Party, a coalition member, said it expects a stellar Election Day performance from its slate of progressive district attorney candidates in Texas, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Colorado and Florida. The candidates, some of them incumbents, have pledged to take up or continue policies such as declining to prosecute low-level drug offenses, not seeking cash bail, and holding police accountable for brutality.

There is some concern that the results of the presidential election might be misinterpreted as either an endorsement or a rejection of BLM.

I do worry that people will see a Biden victory and say that it shows Black Lives Matter was supported, said Justin Hansford, a Ferguson protester and law professor who now serves as director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University. Thats sort of like the most twisted thing you can think, because he has adamantly stated that he will increase police budgets.

Biden has supported providing more funding to law enforcement so that they can hire and train officers to better deal with calls involving emotionally distressed or mentally ill citizens. Trump has threatened to pull federal funding from cities that vote to decrease police department funding.

If theres going to be any sort of success for Black Lives Matter on a political platform, Hansford said, its going to be traction at the local level, in cities and states across the country.

___

Morrison is a member of the APs Race and Ethnicity team. Follow Morrison on Twitter at https://twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.

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Black Lives Matter faces test of its influence in election - The Associated Press

The Poynter Institutes Politifact claimed it was mostly true that an anti-Black Lives Matter Flag replaced the American flag behind President Trump at a recent rally but the flag that was referenced was the pro-police thin blue line flag.

The thin blue line is a symbol that represents the police officers who separate order from chaos, according to Thin Blue Line USA, a company that sells merchandise featuring the flag supporting law enforcement, veterans and first responders.

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The thin blue line flag is flown to show support for our heroes in law enforcement and serves as a consoling reminder they will always be there to protect us, the Thin Blue Line USA website notes. For those who walk it, the thin blue line is a reflection of courage, a pledge of brotherhood and a tribute to those who have fallen in the line of duty.

However, Politifact claimed a Facebook post that labeled the flag an anti-Black Lives Matter flag is mostly true.

Free Beacon executive editor Brent Scher noticed the article and was in disbelief, writing WTF?

The flag was flown behind Trump during a campaign event in Wisconsin earlier this month, prompting a college professor to declare it was intended to reject Black Lives Matter.

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"Tonight in Wisconsin. First the anti-Black Lives Matter flag flew outside his rallies, then beside the American flag. Now it has replaced the American flag. Thats significant, a Dartmouth College professor claimed.

Politifact explored the claim, noting that Thin Blue Line USA began marketing the flag in 2014, shortly after the Black Live Matter movement picked up steam. Politifact even cited a Marshall Project story about the origins of the flag.

The flag has no association with racism, hatred, bigotry, Thin Blue Line USA president Andrew Jacob told the publication. Its a flag to show support for law enforcementno politics involved."

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Jacobs told Marshall Project that the flag was not a direct reaction to the first Black Lives Matter protests, but admitted he mayhave first noticed the image during widespread pro-police response to the protests.

Politifacts takeaway is that the Thin Blue Line flag has become a prominent part of the pro-police Blue Lives Matter movement -- which arose to counter the Black Lives Matter movement.

That said, while it is possible to support both, Trump has made clear he opposes the Black Lives Matter protests -- and made that opposition, and a strong law-and-order message, a prominent part of his re-election campaign. So, those attending the rally or seeing the images could easily see the flag as an anti Black Lives Matter flag, Politifact wrote. We rate the claim Mostly True.

Fox News Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.

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Politifact: 'Mostly true that pro-police thin blue line flag is anti-Black Lives Matter' - Fox News