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(The Center Square) Over 600new lawswent into effect Wednesday in Texas.

The laws were passed both the House and Senate during the 87th Legislative Session and were signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott. The new laws exclude several bills that went into effect immediately earlier in the year.

The new laws include several conservative priorities, including the Heartbeat Bill, Texas becoming a Second Amendment sanctuary state, legalizing constitutional carry, ensuring that police departments remain funded, prohibiting public homeless encampments, and providing funding for homeschooling and school choice options, among others.

"The 87th Legislative Session was a monumental success, and many of the laws going into effect today will ensure a safer, freer, healthier, and more prosperous Texas," Abbott said. His two priority legislative items, election reform and bail reform, failed to pass during the regular session and the first special session. They both passed during the second special legislative session.

Laws related to law enforcement include ensuring that cities and municipalities cannot defund their police departments, and enhancing criminal penalties for some offenses.

After the Austin City Council voted to defund its police department and crime increased, the legislature passed House Bill 1900, whichpenalizes cities that defund their police departments. Cities with populations over 250,000 that seek to defund their police departments will have their property tax revenue frozen, according to the new law.

The bill also allows the state to withhold sales taxes collected by a defunding city and give it to the Texas Department of Public Safety to pay for the cost of state resources used to protect residents of a defunded municipality.

For counties with a population of more than 1 million, another new law, Senate Bill 23, requires voter approval to reduce law enforcement budgets. If voter approval is not received, but the county still defunds police, the county's property tax revenue will be frozen by the state.

Two notable new laws are SB 576, whichmakes human smuggling a felony in the state of Texas, and SB 768, whichenhances criminal penalties for manufacturing and distributing fentanyl in Texas.

Laws increasing criminal penalties include HB 9, which enhances the criminal penalty to a state jail felony offense for anyone who knowingly blocks an emergency vehicle or obstructs access to a hospital or health care facility, and HB 2366, whichenhances criminal penalties for the use of laser pointers and creates an offense for the use of fireworks to harm or obstruct the police.

Laws aiding law enforcement include HB 103, which created an Active Shooter Alert System in Texas, and HB 3712, whichprovides increased training and transparency during the hiring process for peace officers.

Laws furthering gun rights include HB 2622, whichmakes Texas a Second Amendment sanctuary state and protects Texans from new federal gun control regulations, and HB 1927, which allows law-abiding Texans to legally carry a handgun without a license.

Other notable new laws include creating civil liability protections for farmers and ranchers (HB 365), allowing homeschooled students to participate inUniversity Interscholastic League activities (HB 547), reducing regulatory burdens for learning pods, and outlawing abortion outright in the state of Texas if or when Roe v. Wade is overturned (HB 1280).

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Over 600 new laws on the books in Texas - The Center Square

A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete, by Geo Maher Verso hide caption

A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete, by Geo Maher

For many, the story of Kyle Rittenhouse seemed like an exceptionally sordid and violent tale in the racial conflict of 2020.

Rittenhouse stands charged with the murders of two protesters and the attempted murder of another who was severely wounded in Kenosha, Wisconsin, at a protest two days after Jacob Blake, who was Black, was shot seven times from behind by a police officer. Rittenhouse was 17 at the time.

When protests erupted in Kenosha, a former city alderman started a militia called the Kenosha Guard, and posted a call on Facebook for "Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property." According to widespread reporting, Rittenhouse drove from Illinois to a car dealership where he met with some police officers affiliated with the Kenosha Guard. After he shot demonstrators trying to apprehend him, he allegedly approached a police officer, who told him to leave the scene. That evening, clips of Rittenhouse shooting the demonstrators and being tossed water from police officers, went viral. Ever since, his case has become a cause clbre for conservatives and supporters of vigilante action against "antifa." Rittenhouse's trial this November stands to be a high-profile affair he is expected to say the shootings were in self-defense one that Paige Williams at The New Yorker argues "has been framed as the broadest possible interpretation of the Second Amendment."

But for Geo Maher, an abolitionist activist, historian and author of the new book, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete, nothing about Rittenhouse's case is exceptional. In the very first chapter of the book, Maher establishes the police as a fundamentally rotten institution that is rarely distinguishable from the white mob or vigilante killers; instead, he writes, "self-deputized defenders of property and whiteness have almost always served as a brutal adjunct to the police." The line between them is almost nonexistent throughout American history, Maher contends. The police, as with the Rittenhouse case, have always been complicit, Maher argues; from vigilantism on the southern border, to lynch mobs, and modern militias.

Details that have come into focus after the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6 have made clear, Maher writes, just how the police and the violent far-right of this country blur together. Neither Ahmaud Arbery nor Trayvon Martin, among countless others, were killed by active police officers, but they were nonetheless killed by what Maher calls the "pig majority" which includes not just police but their "volunteer deputies...the judges, the courts, the juries, and the grand juries... the mayors and the district attorneys who demand 'law and order'... the racist media apparatus that bends over backwards to turn victims into aggressors." As Tupac Shakur famously put it, the police is "the biggest gang in America," Maher contends.

This all may seem ripped from an overly broad, unrigorous, and dogmatic polemic, but Maher's book is nothing if not exhaustive. From transit police to the police unions under the Fraternal Order of the Police to a complicit Black elite, Maher implicates the police and its allies in the history of American violence writ large. "Police embodied the division of the poor," he writes about the days of slave patrols, "and in their practical function they uphold that division every day, patrolling the boundaries of property and that most peculiar form of property that is whiteness." In that context, Kyle Rittenhouse's story is not surprising, because his victims were people the police institution was never meant to serve or protect.

This may be more visibly obvious today but that's because of how grand the police as an institution has become in terms of sheer scale and power in past decades. There are many times more police officers on streets today as compared to decades ago and state and local spending on police has increased as well, as Maher details. This despite the fact that, as political scientist David Bayley puts it in the book: "one of the best kept secrets of modern life" is that "police do not prevent crime." Maher uses data do support this claim. Meanwhile, there is scant evidence that "police reform," the usual answer to problems with policing, has actually made anything safer: If anything, from bodycams to chokeholds to more diverse police departments, the evidence impressively detailed by Maher suggests that each has actually exacerbated the problems it was meant to fix; while making perpetration of crime by police more likely.

Gallingly, according to several federal court rulings, police often are not legally required to serve and protect communities. One particularly shocking case that Maher points to is the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, during which the armed sheriff's deputy hid in the school. A federal court ruled that the sheriff's office had no duty to protect the students. This joined a spate of federal and SCOTUS rulings, detailed by Maher, that concluded, in cases from child abuse to domestic violence, the police have no legal duty to protect the public from private, third-party actors.

Maher joins contemporary scholars and organizers including Beth Richie, Michelle Alexander, Ruth Wilson Gilmore who have made sense of the American carceral state through a variety of terms Prison Nation, The New Jim Crow, organized abandonment. They conjoin with a tradition of Black Marxist scholars like W.E.B DuBois, Angela Davis, Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, Robin D. G. Kelley in the broad indictment of capitalism and colonialism as active producers of "modern" policing. A recent turn in popular discourse also seemingly breaks from the Marxist tradition in seeing through the lens of both race and class neither subservient to the other as the forces that stratify American society. It should not be surprising then that abolitionism of the carceral state writ large, not merely of police as the demand to defund the police might suggest is ambitious. As the organizer Mariame Kaba has noted, "We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don't want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete."

A World Without Police is of a piece with the current vein of abolitionism espoused by Kaba, Yamahtta-Taylor and others. Indeed, published the same year as Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us, Maher's book, occasionally redundant but mostly complementary, is an indicator of the growing popularity of the radical abolitionist framework. But the title of Maher's book suggests that it serves to answer the "what now?" question that is often asked by critics who find abolitionism to be a grandiloquent suggestion of utopianism, with reform its "pragmatic" counterpart. While the question clearly provides no response to Maher's hefty critique, the title A World Without Police is still a bit of an albatross.

What does Maher think the world without police looks like? It's unclear but not from lack of trying on his part. After all, nobody ever argued that remaking society was supposed to be easy. Maher details the lessons from both failed and tentatively successful grassroots efforts across the country, experiments in restorative justice within city and neighborhood campaigns to "free not only from the police but also from all forms of intra-community violence." He gives the demand to abolish ICE impressive space, connecting immigration and American complicity in the state of Central and Latin American societies with the goal for the global abolition of police. The insistence on "breathing room for over-policed communities to regenerate a lost social fabric and to build real alternatives" and global solidarity is predictable but it tapers off into a haze hard that's to fault Maher for. Abolitionism requires not just the end of the police and prisons but global capitalism: Seeing the world beyond that is famously hard.

"Deep down, we all know what a world without police looks like," Maher claims. A community, maybe. But the world? not so much. Perhaps this is because of a problem with Maher's "global" argument. Under the shadow of empire, including American military interventionism in the present, "the policing of imperial power has developed in conjunction with the domestic policing of colonized and formerly enslaved populations." Global policing binds the specific history of the U.S. to the world writ large, because empire truly was and is global. But a crucial piece of the puzzle seems to be missing. Is the legacy of Western empire sufficient to explain the ubiquity of police in societies across the world?

How did the police even originate? Mileage varies. Maher, like many, argues that the police are an invention meant to protect racial capitalism, and subjugate the working class. The historian Jill Lepore, more reformist than radical thinker, ascribes its origins to slavery. Both seem to be explaining the uniquely powerful iteration of modern police, but militias, torture, vigilantism, and mechanisms of controlling society are all mythological. Every major religion and ancient civilization has its version of a policed society. Is policing as a mechanism of power a feature of human history?

The world beyond police is hard to imagine. But making it easy to want is enough of a feat. Geo Maher's vision may not get readers to see past the horizon into a world without police but it is as convincing as any book can be that we must at least try.

Kamil Ahsan is a biologist, historian and writer based in New Haven. He is an editor at Barrelhouse and his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Prospect, Salon and Chicago Review.

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Book Review: Geo Maher's 'A World Without Police' On Abolishing The Police - NPR

What is socialism? For academics its a systematic way of organizing the distribution of goods and services. Said former President Harry S. Truman, in reference to socialisms opponents: Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people. Dr. Martin Luther King later observed ironically that, in light of American racial and economic inequality: We have socialism for the rich and rugged free-enterprise capitalism for the poor.

To utter the word in public in todays America is to open a red-hot can of worms. People who cant quite define socialism use it as a convenient curse. But it doesnt necessarily have to be that way. In the spirit of Michael Moores 2009 Capitalism: A Love Story, director Yael Bridges energetic new documentary The Big Scary S Word builds its argument for socialismperhaps our societys most widely misunderstood political/ philosophical systemon a case-by-case, ground-level basis, with plenty of help from the history books and such public figures as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, philosophy professor Cornel West and sociologist Adaner Usmani.

Bridges entertaining history lesson lays it out clearly. The friction between cooperative living and the proprietary interest began about the time that hunter-gatherers were first notified that someone else owned the land they considered open to everyone. With the enshrinement of private property and the profit motive, labor became a salable commodity and the concept of rent reared its ugly head. Taken to its extreme, this fundamental inequality eventually led to the current situation, in which the five richest persons on the planetgo ahead, guess who they areown more wealth than 3.5 billion of their fellow human beings.

Economic inequality in the 21st-century United States is, of course, shockingly widespread. The battle between diehard capitalismand its apologistsand working people goes back to the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the late 18th century. Surprisingly, socialist thinking has deep roots in the U.S. Organized labor, workplace rules, occupational safety regulations, Social Security, the minimum wage and unemployment compensation are just part of the legacy of socialist action. Poet Walt Whitman was an American socialist, as were disabled rights activist Helen Keller, scientist Albert Einstein, civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., author James Baldwin and Francis Bellamy, who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance. One of the docs talking heads points out that Teddy Roosevelts presidential campaign platform was to the left of Bernie Sanders.

Here are a few factoids to chew on: The U.S. abolition of slavery during the Civil War was the largest transfer of wealth in human history, according to one of the docs experts. Abraham Lincolns Republican Partythe latter-day hideout of corporate pirate Donald Trumpwas founded on the principles of anti-slavery socialism. Furthermore, Lincoln and Karl Marx, the founder of communism, famously exchanged views with each other on the issues of slavery and labor in 1865their letters were published in newspapers in the U.S. and Britain.

However, the ownership class continues to tenaciously fight back against workers rights. Low wages and debt, the twin nemeses of working Americans, have been wrecking families since the 1970s. The Wall Street Bailout of 2008also known as the Emergency Economic Stabilization Actleft everyone else in the country behind, while rescuing the bankers. The current Coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated the inequality. Capitalism may even destroy the possibility of human life [through climate change], warns sociologist Vivek Chibber.

Whats a struggling American wage-earner to do? The first challenge sounds abstract but makes sense: rebuild faith in ourselves for a more equitable economic/social system. Support organized labor and collective bargaining. Keep in mind Harvard sociologist Usmanis blueprint for a just economic principle: in the best of all possible worlds we wouldnt have preconceptions about each other, and wed all be in this together equally. This Labor Day weekend, see The Big Scary S Word and take a long, hard look around you.

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Whats so bad about socialism, asks The Big Scary S Word - East Bay Express

Ed Asner. (Photo by Greg Doherty / Getty Images)

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When we can discuss socialism rationally. It will be as if a heavy curtain has been lifted from mans eyes. Those were not the words of Karl Marx or Eugene Victor Debs, though either of those radical thinkers might well have uttered them.

Those were the words of Ed Asner, the actor who became a household name in the role of gruff but lovable Lou Grant, the boss at a TV station, in the 1970s TV comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He then carried the character over, with a new job as a Los Angeles newspaper editor, to one of the most socially conscious programs in the history of television, the eponymous Lou Grant of the late 1970s and early 80s.

When he died Sunday, at age 91, after a storied career that included multiple runs on Broadway, dozens of TV and movie roles, and even a star turn as the voice of Carl Fredricksen in the Academy Awardwinning 2009 film Up, the Associated Press obituary described Asner as a liberal.

Asner chose more robust language.

A self-proclaimed old-time lefty, he proudly embraced the label socialist at a time when many of the most radical people in public life avoided it. In the 1970s, as author and activist Michael Harrington led the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, Asner was among the early supporters of the groupalong with US Representative Ron Dellums, feminist Gloria Steinem, and International Association of Machinists president William Winpisinger. When DSOC merged with the New America Movement to form Democratic Socialists of America, Asner became not just a member but an enthusiastic advocate for the organization, penning fundraising appeals.

There was a time, before Bernie Sanders ever thought about running for the presidency, and before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born, when Asner was arguably the best-known democratic socialist in the United States. As an instantly identifiable celebrity, with an image as a no-frills newsman with a big heart, he used his prominence to define the word for generations of Americans who rarely heard it mentioned in a positive light. Socialist means a thing that will curb the excesses of capitalism: the increasing wealth of the rich and decreasing wealth of the poor, Asner explained. Id like to see a national guarantee of health, a national guarantee of education (through college), fair housing, and sufficient food.

At the peak of his fame, Asner ramped up his activism. When Lou Grant was one of the best-rated shows on TV in 1981, he ran for and was elected as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Under his leadership, the union took militant stances in defense of its own members and in solidarity with the broader labor movement. There have been few actors of Ed Asners prominence who risked their status to fight for social causes the way Ed did, said current SAG-AFTRA President Gabrielle Carteris. He fought passionately for his fellow actors, both before, during, and after his SAG presidency. But his concern did not stop with performers. He fought for victims of poverty, violence, war, and legal and social injustice, both in the United States and around the globe. Current Issue

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With a top-rated TV show, and as the head of a major union in the first year of Ronald Reagans right-wing presidency, Asner emerged as one of the countrys most outspoken critics of the new president, a former actor who had himself served as SAG president during the red scare era of the 1950s. When Reagan fired striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, Asner joined their picket line in Los Angeles. A former GM assembly-line worker, he preached an old-school gospel of labor solidarity, telling members, Our union is our bill of rights.

Asners battles with Reagan became legendary. I was brought up believing that the presidency was a very honorable office, Asner said in 1985. I would prefer being able to trust the guy. But I cant and I dont. That was especially the case when it came to foreign policy. Asner was an outspoken critic of apartheid in South Africa. And he came to be known as one of the most prominent foes of the Reagan administrations support for right-wing regimes in Central America. Asner cofounded the group Medical Aid for El Salvador and was active with the Committee of Concern for Central America. When he and a group of actors and activists appeared outside the US State Department in February 1982 to announce that they had raised $25,000 to aid Salvadorans who were victimized by the regime, The Washington Post described Asner as the most articulate and the most politically savvy of the group.

The Post noted that

Asnerso closely identified with his successful television show that he was introduced as Lou Grant, er, Ed Asner yesterdayhas emerged as a political beast. His sincere-looking, gruff mug is turning up in magazine and TV ads, at fund-raisers, and demonstrations. During the past few years Asner has lent his name to the ERA, the Freedom of Information Act, Ralph Naders consumer organization, Public Citizen, and most recently, El Salvador. He has called himself a union loyalist and a staunch unionist. He was an outspoken critic of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, charging the panel with opening a vendetta similar to the anticommunist crusade in Hollywood in the 1950s.

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As his political profile rose, Asner announced, I delight in the issues we deal with. I long for greater activity in the presentation of them. Did he fear red-baiting and retribution? Im quite comfortable and believe I have an ability to speak out, perhaps sometimes too rashly, but I think in this day and age there are far too many who dont speak out at all, he said. I would consider it an attribute.

The powers that be did not share that view. Though Lou Grant won 13 Emmy awards for its groundbreaking examinations of issues ranging from nuclear proliferation to LGBTQ rights, and was garnering top ratings for CBS, it was canceled in the fall of 1982. CBS has never convincingly denied that the cancellation was based partly on Asners politicshis sponsorship of a medical relief committee for war victims in El Salvador and his activist rampage as president of the Screen Actors Guild, observed TV critic Tom Shales. Asner shared that view, telling the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation, Most insiders seem to think that the show would not have been canceled had it not been for the controversy that arose over my stand on El Salvador. I thought at the time that Id never work again.

He would work again. A lot. Asner won a second term as SAG president with 73 percent of the vote. He appeared onstage and screen regularly, remaining busy until his last days. And he kept agitating for economic- and social-justice movements. (Asked about Republican attempts to undermine voting rights in an interview earlier this year, he replied, What kind of bullshit is that?) A proud recipient of the Eugene Victor Debs Awardan honor named for the five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate that he accepted at the height of his wrangling with ReaganAsner once replied to an inquiry about what he stood for with a single word: socialism.

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Ed Asner, American Socialist - The Nation

As the Socialist Equality Party candidate for California governor, I demand the immediate implementation of the most far-reaching measures to suppress the devastating fires that have engulfed the state. There must be a massive redistribution of wealth from the states ruling oligarchy to rebuild and modernize power infrastructure to protect current and future generations from the ravages of human-induced global warming.

The ongoing fires in California have burned through more than 1,650,000 acres of land, and wildfires nationally have now consumed more than 5,020,000 acres. More than half the total is still on fire, and only one of the 85 active large fires has been contained.

Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, over 1,000 homes have been destroyed, with thousands facing the trauma of losing everything. Some are reliving the nightmare from the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, killing 86 people.

Air quality continues to range from unhealthy to hazardous for large parts of Northern California and Oregon. Smoke from the fires has traveled as far south as Louisiana, to the south, and Newfoundland, Canada, to the north. Health officials warn that extended exposure to high levels of smoke can cause asthma or other long-term health problems, as well as make those impacted more vulnerable to COVID-19.

That such massive catastrophes continue to occur every year is a staggering indictment of capitalism and its media and ruling elite. Every year, increasingly massive wildfires erupt across California and large portions of the American west as has been predicted by climate scientists for years. Yet the resources necessary to both fight and prevent these fires across and the state and country have remained essentially static over the past decade.

And when more personnel have been directed toward firefighting, they are often drawn from the states prison population. Each year, an estimated 3,000 inmates are worked in 24-hour shifts for as little as $2.90 to fight fires, through policies defended by Vice President Kamala Harris when she was California Attorney General, and carried out under a series of state administrations, both Republican and Democratic.

The systematic defunding of infrastructure and public safety is the other side of the vast transfer of wealth from public coffers to the states wealthiest individuals and corporations. According to data from Forbes, 160 billionaires reside in California and are collectively worth more than $984 billion, much of which was gained during the pandemic as a result of government bailouts through the CARES Act and similar legislation. Just one percent of this wealth is more than triple Californias fire budget and would provide for a vast and necessary expansion of the states firefighting and fire prevention efforts.

Among the companies directly responsible for the fires, none stands ahead of Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which has prioritized ensuring billions in stock dividends are paid to investors by divesting any efforts to maintain and modernize the power grid. The utility giant has also been found criminally liable for specific fires, including the catastrophic Camp Fire in 2018, which their antiquated equipment sparked. To evade compensating the victims of the Camp Fire, and wildfires started by the company, PG&E declared bankruptcy. At the same time, California Governor Gavin Newsom moved to bail the company out indirectly through utility rate hikes and directly with public funds.

There is widespread anger at both PG&E and Newsom for their actions, anger which was tapped into to spur the recall campaign itself. Newsoms ruling class opponents in the recall election are, however, just as beholden to capitalism as he. Republican Kevin Faulconer is seeking to militarize firefighting, having called for a war footing to fight the blazes. Republican John Cox has similarly called for an air armada to fight fires.

The dangers of wildfires are also exacerbated by the accelerating coronavirus pandemic. Hospitals across the state are filling up with cases as schools open amid an explosion of the Delta variant nationally and internationally. Not only do the fires and resultant smoke make cases of COVID-19 worse, full hospitals mean there is less space for any injuries caused by the wildfires. And the tens of thousands fleeing the flames are forced to temporarily reside in close proximity with hundreds of others, further spreading the deadly disease.

Like the coronavirus pandemic, a fight against the wildfires is not just a question for California workers. The fires reflect the broader changes of Earths climate as a result of global warming and are now causally linked to increased global temperatures as a result of capitalist industrial and agricultural activity. It is thus scientifically necessary that a concerted, systematic and international response be mounted to combat climate change on a global scale, lest the fire seasons of the past several years become normal, with even more extreme infernos to come.

Climate change is also behind the increasing incidents of extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Ida, which devastated New Orleans and led to the massive flooding catastrophe in New York City and the surrounding region. More than 60 people have been killed in eight states. The fires sweeping across the Mediterranean and the floods in western Germany are part of the same deadly process.

Any effort to address climate change is blocked by two factors: first, the subordination of Earths resources to private profit, which drives the overuse of fossil fuels and other activities for the enrichment of corporate executives and Wall Street bankers. Second, the necessary globally coordinated response to climate change is blocked by the division of the world into competing nation-states, all fighting for the interests of their own financial elite.

The only genuine solution is for the working class to fight for its own independent class interests. Climate change and the coronavirus pandemic will never be resolved without an international strategy that places social need over private profit. The fortunes of the ruling elite in California and around the globe must be expropriated and that wealth used to fight wildfires and the underlying problem of climate change.

I urge all those who agree with this perspective to contact my campaign and take up the fight for socialism among the working class in California, the United States and around the world!

Support the campaign of David Moore for governor!

new wsws title from Mehring Books

The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

A left-wing, socialist critique of the 1619 Project with essays, lectures, and interviews with leading historians of American history.

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Fighting the California fires requires an international and socialist strategy - WSWS