Sanders Speech on Senate Vote to Block $8.8 Billion Sale of Heavy Bombs to Israel

PREPARED REMARKS: Sanders Speech on Senate Vote to Block $8.8 Billion Sale of Heavy Bombs to Israel

April 3, 2025

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/prepared-remarks-sanders-speech-on-senate-vote-to-block-8-8-billion-sale-of-heavy-bombs-to-israel/

WASHINGTON, April 3 – After filing Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) to block the sale of two of the most egregious Trump Administration offensive arms sales to Israel, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today rose to bring the JRDs up for a vote by the full Senate.

The sales would provide almost $8.8 billion more in heavy bombs and other munitions to Netanyahu, including more than 35,000 massive 2,000-pound bombs.

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Biden Lied about the Threat of Nuclear War

Biden Lied about the Risk of Nuclear War

By Ann Batiza

As Adam Entous wrote on March 29, 2025, in the New York Times, “The Secret History of the War in Ukraine”, the Biden administration lied to us constantly about the real threat of nuclear war. The quote below from Entous’s article, based on 300 interviews, shows how the Biden administration knew they were operating with a 1 in 20 or 1 in 10 chance that their actions in Ukraine would lead to a nuclear response from Russia, with that soaring to a 50/50 chance if the Ukrainians were successful.

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535 Days: Where Is Your Line?

535 Days: Where Is Your Line?

By James Hinden

I, James Hinden, am a writer you don’t know behind a screen, telling you how to think. You, the reader, are new to this page - you have to be, because so am I. The majority of what will be written here going forward will have a fair amount of humor built in to make otherwise heavy (or ADHD-unfriendly) topics more palatable. This piece isn’t one of them - there's nothing to laugh at in genocide. On that positive note, let’s begin.

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This Tattoo Could Land You in Guantanamo

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Revenue Of Weapons Manufacturers Continues To Rise

Amid Global Wars And Conflicts.

US arms suppliers recorded a 29% jump in sales in 2024 and constituted a total share of 42% of the world’s total arms trade in 2023.

US weapon manufacturers and military contractors registered an unprecedented increase in sales of arms and military services in 2024, according to a US State Department fact sheet. This made 2024 one of the most profitable years ever, in large part thanks to wars in Ukraine and Gaza as well as the military build up around China.

According to the figures released by the US State Department, the total revenue from arms sales in 2024 reached a record USD 318.7 billion registering a 29% increase from the previous year. The top US military contractors include Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (RTX), and General Dynamics, among others.

According to the state department figures, private contractors saw a massive jump in “Direct Commercial Sales” from USD 157 billion in 2023 to over USD 200 billion in 2024. The rest of the revenue was generated through indirect sales arranged through the government, “Foreign Military Sales”, which also increased from nearly USD 81 billion in 2023 to almost USD 118 billion in 2024.

The State Department noted that the indirect sales recorded over 45% increase in 2024 which garnered “highest ever annual total of sales and assistance provided to our allies and partners.”

The US recorded an increase in arms sales to countries such as Israel and Ukraine which were involved in active wars. The US supplied arms and other military assistance to Israel, in the form of military aid, despite allegations of genocide and grave human rights violations in Gaza, ignoring both international and US domestic law prohibitions.

Israel killed over 47,000 Palestinians in almost 15 months of daily bombings and ground offensives. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

US arms sales to Israel include a nearly USD 19 billion deal to supply F-15s, which played a key role in Israel’s aerial carpet bombing of both Gaza and parts of Lebanon.

Arms Sales In Violation Of International Law

The US has reportedly violated its domestic prohibitions and international laws by supplying arms to Israel as it has done in the case of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and others in the past. Some of these countries have been accused of using US supplied arms to carry out war crimes and human rights violations in Yemen and elsewhere.

The Joe Biden administration defied calls by human rights groups and members of Congress, to stop weapons sales to Israel in light of human rights violations.

According to a report released by Brown University’s Costs of War project, between October 7, 2023 and September 30, 2024, the US sent 17.9 billion dollars in direct military aid to Israel. This accounts for the largest amount of military funding ever granted to Israel in a single year. Wikileaks estimated that this accounts for 73% of Israel’s total war expenditure in Gaza during that period.

Most of this money went to private military contractors in the US as Israel must use its military aid to buy arms and assistance from them.

The US provides billions of dollars of military aid to countries such as Ukraine and Israel which in turn have to use that money to buy arms from the country’s private contractors. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2022, the US has provided nearly USD 70 billion in military aid to Ukraine.

Arms sales remains one of the largest US exports to the world. The US has a global share of over 42% of all arms traded in 2023 followed by France (almost 11%) and Russia (10.5%). According to data released by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in December, in 2023 the world’s top five weapon suppliers were all from the US. These companies have remained the top five arms suppliers in the world since 2018 earning billions of dollars every year by supplying arms and military services, profiting from wars and conflicts around the world.

In 2023 the US had a total of 41 arms suppliers in the world’s top 100 weapon supplier companies. The total share of US companies in global arms sales revenue was more than half of the total revenues of top 100 companies across the world.

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How Biden's foreign policy destoyed his presidency

THE NATION MAGAZINE

How Biden’s Foreign Policy Destroyed His Presidency

Biden’s domestic agenda was the most progressive of any president since Lyndon Johnson. But it was entwined with a foreign policy that leaves his legacy drowned in blood.

January 17, 2025

Jeet Heer

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-gaza-legacy-foreign-policy/ 

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Why I’m voting against the military budget Bernie Sanders Sat 8 Dec 2024

Why I’m voting against the military budget

Bernie Sanders
Sat 8 Dec 2024

Today in America, 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, 85 million people are uninsured or underinsured and 21.5 million households are paying more than 50% of their income on housing. We have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of almost any developed country on Earth, and 25% of older adults are trying to survive on $15,000 a year or less. In other words, the United States has fallen far behind other major countries in protecting the most vulnerable, and our government has failed millions of working families.

But while so many Americans are struggling to get by, the United States is spending record-breaking amounts of money on the military. In the coming days, with relatively little debate, Congress will overwhelmingly pass the National Defense Authorization Act, approving close to $900bn for the Department of Defense (DoD). When spending on nuclear weapons and “emergency” defense spending is included, the total will approach $1tn. We now spend more than the next nine countries combined.

I don’t often agree with Elon Musk, but he is right when he says the Pentagon “has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800bn is spent.” The Department of Defense is the only government agency that has been unable to pass an independent audit. It recently failed its seventh attempt in a row and could not fully account for huge portions of its $4.126tn in assets.

Very few people who have researched the military-industrial complex doubt that there is massive fraud, waste and cost over-runs in the system. Defense contractors routinely overcharge the Pentagon by 40% – and sometimes more than 4,000%. For example, in October, RTX (formerly Raytheon) was fined $950m for inflating bills to the DoD, lying about labor and material costs, and paying bribes to secure foreign business. In June, Lockheed Martin was fined $70m for overcharging the navy for aircraft parts, the latest in a long line of similar abuses. The F-35, the most expensive weapon system in history, has run up hundreds of billions in cost overruns.

Today, as a result of massive consolidation in the industry, a large portion of the Pentagon budget now goes to a handful of huge defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. That consolidation has been extremely profitable for the industry: since 2022, these four contractors have brought in $609bn in revenues, including $353bn in US taxpayer funds, and recorded $57bn in profits. During that same period, they have spent $61bn on dividends and stock buybacks to make their wealthy stockholders even richer.

These defense contractors also provide their CEOs with exorbitant compensation packages. In the last three years for which information is available, these companies paid their CEOs more than $257m combined – with annual salaries that are about 100 times more than the secretary of defense and 500 times more than the average newly enlisted service member.

How does this happen? How do we keep handing huge amounts of money to companies that routinely overcharge the American taxpayer and often engage in fraud? The answer is not complicated. These companies – like the drug companies, insurance companies, Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry – spend millions on campaign contributions and lobbying. In the recent election cycle, defense contractors spent nearly $251m on lobbying and contributed almost $37m to political candidates. Surprise, surprise! Most members of Congress vote for greatly inflated military budgets with few questions asked.

The lack of accountability at the Department of Defense is not just costing American taxpayer dollars. It’s costing lives. The United States is providing many billions of dollars to help defend Ukraine from Putin’s invasion. When defense contractors said they couldn’t ramp up production without more taxpayer support, Congress repeatedly appropriated emergency funding, with roughly $78.5bn going to buy equipment and services from the major defense contractors.

How did those “patriotic” companies respond? They jacked up prices. RTX increased prices for Stinger missiles from $25,000 in the 1990s to $400,000 in 2023. Lockheed Martin and RTX raised the price of the Javelin missile system from about $263,000 per unit just before the war to $350,700 this year. Similar price hikes took place for Patriot missiles and other weapons. And make no mistake: every time a contractor pads its profit margins, fewer weapons reach the frontlines. The greed of these defense contractors is not just costing American taxpayers; it’s killing Ukrainians.

The United States needs a strong military, but we do not need a defense system that is designed to make huge profits for a handful of giant defense contractors. We do not need to spend almost a trillion dollars on the military, while half a million Americans are homeless and children go hungry.

In this moment in history, it would be wise for us to remember what Dwight D Eisenhower, a former five-star general, said in his farewell address in 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” What Eisenhower said was true in 1961. It is even more true today.

I will be voting against the military budget.

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Diary of a Heartland Radical: THE COMPATIBILITY OF MATERIAL AND MORAL ARGUMENTS: BERNIE SANDERS MEETS REV. WILLIAM BARBER

Saturday, November 9, 2024

THE COMPATIBILITY OF MATERIAL AND MORAL ARGUMENTS: BERNIE SANDERS MEETS REV. WILLIAM BARBER

 Harry Targ

(The essay below was written in January 2018, I found it by accident and decided to repost it as we move beyond the 2024 elections. The ideas of Sanders and Barber still make sense to me as a vision and basis for tactics and strategy. November 9, 2024).

An article appeared recently on the internet announcing a public conversation to be held January 19, 2018 at Duke University between Senator Bernie Sanders and Rev. William Barber. The discussion, “The Enduring Challenge of a Moral Economy: 50 Years After Dr. King Challenged Racism, Poverty, and Militarism,” will be moderated by Duke University Chapel Dean Luke A. Powery.

As prior dialogues between them suggest, this conversation will not be a debate but an articulation of parallel theoretical and practical insights about politics by two of the most compelling progressive leaders today.

At root, but not in so many words, Sanders offers a narrative about a class society in which one class, the one percent, exploit and oppress another class, the 99 percent. Implicitly this dynamic is driven by the pursuit of profit. For him the antidote to this system is democracy and socialism.

The Sanders vision draws from the Marxist theoretical tradition but more importantly it is infused with the historic US tradition of populism and the socialism of such prominent and diverse political leaders as Eugene V. Debs, Jane Addams, and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Sanders prioritizes in his analysis, the capitalist system, autocratic political institutions, “false” ideologies that only recognize individuals, not communities or society, and institutionalized greed and immorality. Change, he believes, requires the mobilization of the 99 percent in the electoral arena and the streets to transform societal institutions.

Rev. Barber’s Moral Mondays movement, begun over a decade ago, was inspired by the dramatic rightward shift in North Carolina (and later national) public policies which effectively increased poverty, diminished access to health care and education, suppressed the right to vote, and in other ways attacked workers, people of color, women, and gays. Moral Mondays catalyzed a variety of groups who were morally outraged about the substantial increase in varieties of pain and suffering of vast majorities of people. And Rev. Barber realized that while groups and communities were angry over a variety of issues, their concerns overlapped. He was convinced that various angry constituencies could be brought together to collectively challenge an immoral system that hurt everybody; workers, people of color, women, LBGTQ individuals, and people of spiritual or secular traditions. Thus, the idea of “fusion politics” was articulated.

Moral Mondays was initiated by the spiritual community and it was motivated by the basic proposition that what was happening to people’s lives was immoral. Rev. Barber, therefore, built a movement based upon ethical systems derived from constitutional and/or theological premises that promoted social justice, human rights, and human dignity.

The Sanders campaign was grounded in material reality: economic exploitation, profit seeking at the expense of human development, and the maintenance of an economic system based on institutionalized avarice. Rev. Barber’s campaign was based on an ethical reality; that is that exploitation, poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia were morally wrong. Although the basic constituents of each campaign varied (Sanders supporters tended to come from the working class, labor, and young people interested in socialism while Barber’s constituencies included leading civil rights organizations, faith communities, and issue-oriented advocacy groups) the constituencies overlapped.

At the dawn of 2018 (now 2025), most human beings, workers, people of color, women, gays, and almost everyone alive who lives in a physical space threatened by environmental change, have a stake in resisting the shift toward an apocalyptic economic, political, cultural, militaristic, and environmental universe. They could support a vision of a new society that prioritizes community over individualism, participatory democracy over authoritarianism, and human solidarity over hate.

Consequently, the movements coming out of the two currents (Our Revolution out of the Sanders candidacy and the New Poor People’s Campaign out of Moral Mondays) should join hands in a common struggle. Analyses of public troubles can begin with stances on political economy or public immorality but they cover the same ground AND they propose the same solution; a caring, participatory, just society.

So the vision of this latest dialogue between Senator Sanders and Rev. Barber should be inspirational. It should stimulate both communities to act in unity.

That is the political task of 2025 and beyond.

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Israel's War on the World

Israel’s War on the World


Photo credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, Wikimedia Commons

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, World BEYOND War, October 17, 2024

Each new week brings new calamities for people in the countries neighboring Israel, as its leaders try to bomb their way to the promised land of an ever-expanding Greater Israel.

In Gaza, Israel appears to be launching its “Generals’ Plan” to drive the most devastated and traumatized 2.2 million people in the world into the southern half of their open-air prison. Under this plan, Israel would hand the northern half over to greedy developers and settlers who, after decades of U.S. encouragement, have become a dominant force in Israeli politics and society. The redoubled slaughter of those who cannot move or refuse to move south has already begun.

In Lebanon, millions are fleeing for their lives and thousands are being blown to pieces in a repeat of the first phase of the genocide in Gaza. For Israel’s leaders, every person killed or forced to flee and every demolished building in a neighboring country opens the way for future Israeli settlements. The people of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia ask themselves which of them will be next.

Israel is not only attacking its neighbors. It is at war with the entire world. Israel is especially threatened when the governments of the world come together at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law, under which Israel is legally bound by the same rules that all countries have signed up to in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967 is illegal, and that it must withdraw its military forces and settlers from all those territories. In September, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution giving Israel one year to complete that withdrawal. If, as expected, Israel fails to comply, the UN Security Council or the General Assembly may take stronger measures, such as an international arms embargo, economic sanctions or even the use of force.

Now, amid the escalating violence of Israel’s latest bombing and invasion of Lebanon, Israel is attacking the UNIFIL UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, whose thankless job is to monitor and mitigate the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

On October 10 and 11, Israeli forces fired on three UNIFIL positions in Lebanon. At least five peacekeepers were injured. UNIFIL also accused Israeli soldiers of deliberately firing at and disabling the monitoring cameras at its headquarters, before two Israeli tanks later drove through and destroyed its gates. On October 15th, an Israeli tank fired at a UNIFIL watchtower in what it described as “direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.” Deliberately targeting UN missions is a war crime.

This is far from the first time the soldiers of UNIFIL have come under attack by Israel. Since UNIFIL took up its positions in southern Lebanon in 1978, Israel has killed blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers from Ireland, Norway, Nepal, France, Finland, Austria and China.

The South Lebanon Army, Israel’s Christian militia proxy in Lebanon from 1984 to 2000, killed many more, and other Palestinian and Lebanese groups have also killed peacekeepers. Three hundred and thirty-seven UN peacekeepers from all over the world have given their lives trying to keep the peace in southern Lebanon, which is sovereign Lebanese territory and should not be subject to repeated invasions by Israel in the first place. UNIFIL has the worst death toll of any of the 52 peacekeeping missions conducted by the UN around the world since 1948.

Fifty countries currently contribute to the 10,000-strong UNIFIL peacekeeping mission, anchored by battalions from France, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal and Spain. All those governments have strongly and unanimously condemned Israel’s latest attacks, and insisted that “such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated.”

Israel’s assault on UN agencies is not confined to attacking its peacekeepers in Lebanon. The even more vulnerable, unarmed, civilian agency, UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), is under even more vicious assault by Israel in Gaza. In the past year alone, Israel has killed a horrifying number of UNRWA workers, about 230, as it has bombed and fired at UNRWA schools, warehouses, aid convoys and UN personnel.

UNRWA was created in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to provide relief to some 700,000 Palestinian refugees after the 1948 “Nakba,” or catastrophe. The Zionist militias that later became the Israeli army violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, ignoring the UN partition plan and seizing by force much of the land the UN plan had allocated to form a Palestinian state.

When the UN recognized all that Zionist-occupied territory as the new state of Israel in 1949, Israel’s most aggressive and racist leaders concluded that they could get away with making and remaking their own borders by force, and that the world would not lift a finger to stop them. Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the United States, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.

Netanyahu now brazenly stands before the whole world and displays maps of a Greater Israel that includes all the land it illegally occupies, while Israelis openly talk of annexing parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Dismantling UNRWA has been a long-standing Israeli goal. In 2017, Netanyahu accused the agency of inciting anti-Israeli sentiment. He blamed UNRWA for “perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem” instead of solving it and called for it to be eliminated.

After October 7, 2023, Israel accused 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff of being involved in Hamas’s attack on Israel. UNRWA immediately suspended those workers, and many countries suspended their funding of UNRWA. Since a UN report found that Israeli authorities had not provided “any supporting evidence” to back up their allegations, every country that funds UNRWA has restored its funding, with the sole exception of the United States.

Israel’s assault on the refugee agency has only continued. There are now three anti-UNRWA bills in the Israeli Knesset: one to ban the organization from operating in Israel; another to strip UNRWA’s staff of legal protections afforded to UN workers under Israeli law; and a third that would brand the agency as a terrorist organization. In addition, Israeli members of parliament are proposing legislation to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem and use the land for new settlements.

UN Secretary General Guterres warned that, if these bills become law and UNRWA is unable to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, “it would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.”

Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a breaking point. When Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly in New York in September, he called the UN a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” But the UN is not an alien body from another planet. It is simply the nations of the world coming together to try to solve our most serious common problems, including the endless crisis that Israel is causing for its neighbors and, increasingly, for the whole world.

Now Israel wants to ban the secretary general of the UN from even entering the country. On October 1st, Israel invaded Lebanon, and Iran launched 180 missiles at Israel, in response to a whole series of Israeli attacks and assassinations. Secretary General Antonio Guterres put out a statement deploring the “broadening conflict in the Middle East,” but did not specifically mention Iran. Israel responded by declaring the UN Secretary General persona non grata in Israel, a new low in relations between Israel and UN officials.

Over the years, the U.S. has partnered with Israel in its attacks on the UN, using its veto in the Security Council 40 times to obstruct the world’s efforts to force Israel to comply with international law.

American obstruction offers no solution to this crisis. It can only fuel it, as the violence and chaos grows and spreads and the United States’ unconditional support for Israel gradually draws it into a more direct role in the conflict.

The rest of the world is looking on in horror, and many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the UN system. These mechanisms were built, with American leadership, after the Second World War ended in 1945, so that the world would “never again” be consumed by world war and genocide.

A US arms embargo against Israel and an end to U.S. obstruction in the UN Security Council could tip the political balance of power in favor of the world’s collective efforts to resolve the crisis.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, with a new, updated edition due out in February 2025.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

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The Continued War on Black America by Jess Devitt

Rest in Power Samuel Sharpe (right) and D’Vontaye Mitchell (left)

The Continued War on Black America

by Jess Devitt

Your author began writing this in a coffee shop near the lake, as what seemed like a whole squadron of Charlotte, North Carolina police officers swarmed to grab an iced beverage to stay cool in the Milwaukee summer heat, on the third day of the Republican National Convention being hosted here. Tuesday, the second day, “dialogue officers” from the Columbus, Ohio Police Department shot and killed Samuel Sharpe, a homeless man at a tent city near the old social services building on Vilet Street. Samuel had chosen to live in King Park with the homeless residents there in solidarity. His faith was a driving factor in his life, wanting to show the people in King Park that they weren’t alone. The other residents of the park, his family, and local organizations he worked with remember him fondly as a compassionate man who gave everything to his community.

A vigil was held Tuesday night for Sam Sharpe near the King Center on Vliet St. Beyond the cement barricades and 12-foot black metal fencing marking the border between Milwaukee and the Convention, the downtown area designated as a “protest zone” or “free speech zone” was abandoned; a dozen or so bored-looking, orange-shirted event staff chatted the shade or found busy-work. The only other visible residents of the entire downtown, besides a few scattered fanatics, were police, hundreds and hundreds of police, tense but polite, and obviously scared.

Parking was surprisingly easy to find downtown; perhaps this was because so many people assumed it would be difficult-to-impossible. In the same way, it seems plausible that, as many assumed that the climate was so ripe for confrontation and violence, most everyone stayed home, except the cops.

Within certain privileged parameters, one got the sense that we locals were afforded some leeway in our dealings with the police; they feared actual violence, and so were more likely to let slide, say, a Milwaukeean spitting on the ground at their feet, or telling them how unwelcome they are.

That’s within privileged parameters, as mentioned: outside of them, if you are poor and/or Black or Brown, you still had no rights, and could be killed even by out-of-town police with few repercussions. The mayor and police chief will even support the murderers.

Thursday, a March was held at Red Arrow Park, with the families of Samuel Sharpe (the man killed Tuesday) and D’Vontaye Mitchell (a man killed by Hyatt hotel security in mid-June). Attendees heard from his sister that Mr. Sharpe had multiple sclerosis, and, in conversations with his family, had told them that he and his dog were being threatened, which was why he appeared to be attacking another man when Columbus PD shot him (within about 10 seconds of having seen him).

Prior to the murder of Sharpe was that of D’Vontaye Mitchell, who was murdered by private security guards. Private security firms may not have the same prestige with boot-licking sectors of the general public as do sworn police officers, but they serve the exact same function: guarding businesses, enforcing white supremacy, and protecting capital. The difference in prestige is accounted for by the fact that private security guards/rent-a-cops , do not pretend to be serving some higher calling; they just in it for the money. Big establishments like the Hyatt have the money to pay and are enabled by the racist culture of American society.

The out-of-town cops are gone now, but the roughly 1,600 strong Milwaukee Police Department remains, to enforce white supremacy and to keep capital and its possessors safe from those they rule over and exploit. About 700 people have been killed around the country by police this year.

D’Vontaye Mitchell and Samuel Sharpe were working class Black men, whose lives who were not seen as valuable by the system. Their lives mattered, and we will fight for them and to bring down this racist system.

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