Time to to lose the chains!

 This is just classic. It's hard to prove racism because home insurance companies have the right to keep their policy information secret. "Where data is publicly available, such as auto insurance, researchers have found that policies discriminate against Black drivers by charging them higher premiums. But homeowners’ insurance has been opaque."

So if your policies were made public your racism would be seen. The solution: keep your policies secret. How do you do that. You get Congress and state legislatures to pass laws allowing companies to keep private information that they think will put them at a competitive disadvantage in the free market (i.e., the free to discriminate against black people and other minorities market).

And how do you do that? You lobby Democrat and Republican lawmakers and contribute money to their campaigns (you bribe them). Elementary civics, and the reason civics class is being discontinued in high school. This is how institutional racism works and is perpetuated by our two capitalist parties and corrupt political system.

And it will continue at full steam under Republicans (Trump and his successors and followers) and toned down but not stopped under Democrats (Biden and the so called moderates grouped around the likes of Obama and Clinton) and won't stop until the leaders of the working class finally rally working people to stand up to these racists and renounce both racist parties and build a real anti-racist working class movement and socialist mass party.

It won't be easy and it won't be quick but we have to quit turning the crank on the generator which keeps the capitalist racism breathing on its two party ventilator. If we don't pull the plug who will? What were we told long ago? We have only our chains to lose. Well, let's take'm off and lose'm.

NYTIMES.COM

Black Homeowners Struggle to Get Insurers to Pay Claims

Black policyholders suspect discrimination as they deal wit

88

Who Poisoned Navalny?

 Something to keep in mind when all crimes are laid at Putin's doorstep. In an ultimate sense, as president, the buck stops there, but he is not an all powerful dictator, and the system he oversees appears to be overly decentralized with many actors engaged in activities he either can't prevent or won't condemn post facto. He may not fully control the security apparatus itself (as U.S. presidents also have found out). Western style bourgeois democracy seems as ill fitted to the Russian socio-political culture as was the philosophy of Karl Marx when it was applied in Russia and mutated into a new form suited to a backward pre-industrial state (and was used to modernize it) but was qualitatively different from anything Marx, Engels, or for that matter Lenin, would have conceived. A problem that still plagues the international Communist movement today as well as Russian political life. [No Russian Luther or Reformation of the backward Christianity inherited from Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire after its fall in 1453.]

THEMOSCOWTIMES.COM

Russia’s Murderous Adhocracy - The Moscow Times

Opinion | A system in which everyone wants to earn the president’s favor means political murder is no longer a monopoly of the state.

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Community Control of Police More Urgent Than Ever

 This article should also alert us about police, FBI, etc., in the US. The German government at least officially, de jure if not de facto, wants to clean up its police forces but in the US we have a President who encourages neo-Nazi groups, white supremacists, and contempt for immigrants, asylum seekers, and minority people in general. The police are already protected by special laws that exempt them from the same results of criminal behavior that ordinary citizens are subject to and they are even more decentralized than the German police-- a perfect breeding ground for fascist infiltration and recruitment. Biden's defeat of Trump will only inspire these neo-fascist and fascist elements to up their ante by more vigorous organizing. This election victory on the surface looks like a big defeat of the fascist forces but under the surface they will be more secretive, violent, and dangerous than ever. The genuine Left has got to demand even more supervision of the police, the repeal of protective legislation that makes it hard to charge and prosecute criminal police behavior, and civilian control boards with subpoena powers. The police should be professional and apolitical. Police unions engaging in political activity should be decertified. All federal, state, and local police should be held to the same standards and be open to full civilian control and scrutiny. We have won a skirmish, the real battle has yet to come.

NYTIMES.COM

She Called Police Over a Neo-Nazi Threat. But the Neo-Nazis Were Inside the Police.

Death threats linked to police comp

Biden's Faux Progressivism

 “Nominating Tom Vilsack, a secretary of agriculture in the Obama administration, to run the department again would enrage Black farmers and threaten Democratic hopes of winning two Senate runoffs in Georgia, the N.A.A.C.P. head, Derrick Johnson, told Mr. Biden.Mr. Biden promptly ignored the warning. Within hours, his decision to nominate Mr. Vilsack to lead the Agriculture Department had leaked, angering the very activists he had just met with.”

A method to Biden’s madness? Biden has been a conservative corporate shill and Establishment supporter of the Military Industrial Complex his entire political career. The wolf has been forced to dress up in progressive sheep clothing in order to get elected. If he faces a Democratic controlled Congress his basically status quo ante hand will be forced and some truly progressive initiatives will sent his way. His ruling class backers could not be more pleased with the Senate remaining in Republican hands by a Democratic defeat in Georgia. Biden will then have an excuse to retreat from his faux progressivism on the grounds of being hamstrung in Congress. The Democratic left will be served with pauper’s broth for next four years while the only genuine left in the country, the socialist, and especially Marxist, left will have the task of radicalizing the American people to prevent a Trump, or worse, Republican resurgence.

NYTIMES.COM

Biden Faces Intense Pressure From All Sides as He Seeks Diverse Cabinet

The pressure on the Democratic president-elect is intense, even as his efforts to ensure ethnic and gender diversity already go far beyond those of President Trump. And it’s coming from all sides.

The Pope and the Uighurs

 “I think often of persecuted peoples,” Francis said in one passage. “The Rohingya, the poor Uighurs, the Yazidi — what ISIS did to them was truly cruel — or Christians in Egypt and Pakistan killed by bombs that went off while they prayed in church.” Any degree of persecution is unacceptable and there is debate on the left about what is actually going on in China re those parts of the Uighur population thought to be susceptible to recruitment to extreme Islamic fascist movements. However there is a qualitative difference between China's actions and those of the others mentioned in the Pope's passage. The Rohingya, the Yazidi, Egyptian Christians and Pakistani religious (the Pope only prayed for the Christians but all minority religious groups including Muslim groups are being terrorized) are being subjected to mass murder by groups who want to physically exterminate them-- the Rohingya by the government, the Yazidis by the Islamic fascist ISIS, and the suffering of the Egyptian and Pakistani victims due to their governments failure to take robust action to protect them and, as both depend on both financial and political support from United States imperialism, the latters failure to demand that they do more to protect those victims and is itself inflicting deadly persecution and mass killings on peoples around the world. The worse that has been actually shown being done to the Uighurs is that a significant number are being forced to take re-education courses and job training instruction by the Chinese government. Whether using force in this manner is the best way to prevent the resurgence of the terrorist attacks that were occuring and the spreading of violent Islamic groups in Sichuan, which called forth this reaction from the Chinese government, is a legitimate cause of concern but it is not legitimate to classify it with what has befallen the Rohingya and the Yazidi. In fact, if Egypt and Pakistan were not run by imperialist sponsored reactionary fascist regimes, the Chinese model might even be recommended.

NYTIMES.COM

Pope Calls Uighurs ‘Persecuted,’ Prompting Pushback From China