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Time for an Awakening with Bro.Elliott Sunday 7-07-19, guest Activist, Farmer John Ingrum
"Time for an Awakening" with Bro.Elliott, Friday 7/05/19 guest Dr. William Rogers part II
"Time for an Awakening" with Bro.Elliott 5-5-19, guest Organizers of the Ujima Peoples Progress Party
By Elliot Booker	— 2 months ago
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"Time For An Awakening" for Sunday 5/05/2019 at 7:00 PM (EST) 6:00 PM (CST) our guests was Activists, Organizers, of the Ujima Peoples Progress Party . We discussed with our guest Bro. Brandon and Bro. Namdi, the planks and platforms of the party, the initiatives currently in progress leading up to their Statewide Convention on May 11th 2019, and the need of our people to develop viable alternatives to the current political structure.
"Time for an Awakening" for Sunday 04/14/2019 at 8:00 PM (EST) 7:00 PM (CST) guest was Organizer, Activist, Ari Merretazon
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"Time for an Awakening" for Sunday 04/14/2019 at 8:00 PM (EST) 7:00 PM (CST) guest was Activist, Male Co- Chair of the Phila Chapter of N'COBRA, Ari Merretazon. The subject was Reparations, Black Political Representation, and other related topics with our guest, Bro. Ari Merretazon.
"Time for an Awakening" with Bro. Elliott, Friday 4-12-19 guest, Activist, Rev. Raymond Brown
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"Time For An Awakening" guest for Friday 4/12/2019 at 8:00 PM (EST) 7:00 PM (CST) was New Orleans Activist, Rev. Raymond Brown, President of National Action Now Civil Rights Organization. In the wake of the Black Church burnings in Louisiana, and the arrest of the White Extremist allegedly involved, we received an update from Rev Brown.
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As Black Activists Protested Police Killings, Homeland Security Worried They Might Join ISIS
Alice Speri
April 8 2019, 8:23 a.m.
As nationwide protests against police killings of black men began rolling across the country in 2014, federal and local law enforcement who were closely monitoring protesters' online activities repeatedly expressed a bizarre concern: that the mostly black activists demanding an end to police violence in the U.S. might join with Islamic fundamentalist groups promoting violence abroad.
That concern was unequivocally baseless, and no evidence ever emerged to substantiate it. Still, documents obtained by the government transparency group Property of the People, which were shared exclusively with The Intercept, reveal that officials with the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence exaggerated the significance of isolated social media activity, mostly by foreign accounts, advocating for a connection between the domestic movement against police brutality and foreign terrorism.
In intelligence reports and internal communications circulated around the time of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2015 Baltimore protests following the death in custody of Freddie Gray, DHS officials fretted that the Islamic State might attempt "to use the situation in Ferguson as a recruitment tool" or call on "Baltimore rioters to join them." And in July 2016, during nationwide protests against the police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a cabinet position, circulated a memo warning that a lone, foreign pro-Al Qaeda Facebook user sought to seize on the protests to urge "'Black' Americans to take up arms" and "start armed war against the US government.
A Fixation Born of Bias
These official warnings that U.S. activism against police violence might be exploited as a recruitment opportunity by violent foreign terrorist groups slightly preceded the FBI's designation of a "Black Identity Extremist" domestic terrorism category, which essentially cast large numbers of the same black activists as potential homegrown violent extremists. As The Intercept has reported, the FBI's "Black Identity Extremism" label, while first used in a 2017 threat assessment report, originated on the heels of the Ferguson protests, and the first individual the FBI designated as a "black identity extremist" was a young Ferguson protester the agency had entrapped. But just as there is no evidence that a "Black Identity Extremist" ideology actually exists, there is also no evidence that U.S. activists ever saw or in any way responded to sporadic social media calls to join foreign fundamentalist Islamic groups.
If anything, critics say, law enforcement's fixation on that nonexistent connection is testimony to both their anti-black and anti-Muslim bias.
"They try to make it more scary, it's like, 'If we link Islam to it, and we link Muslims to it, then people will see this as a real threat, because nothing is scarier than Muslims,'" Umar Lee, a well-known St. Louis activist, who is Muslim, told The Intercept, referring to the movement for black lives that started in Ferguson. "Nothing is scarier than, 'Hey, if the Muslims get together with these scary black dudes, then we got a real problem, so we need every resource available to stop this.'"
"They already have a massive amount of funding to do quote unquote counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism, and all these other things that they do," Lee noted, referring to well-funded domestic intelligence initiatives that have primarily targeted U.S. Muslims. "And they come up empty because the reality is that there are very few, hardly any people that are engaged in these activities."
Civil rights advocates maintain the documents' message is both baseless and dangerous.
"Blackness and Muslim identity have been cast as threatening since America's founding," said Omar Farah, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which sued the FBI and DHS to obtain more information about its surveillance of black activists. "No surprise, then, that these documents reveal near obsessive fear of their intersection."
"It's inflammatory," echoed Nusrat Choudhury, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Racial Justice Program. "Just because members of foreign organizations are calling on domestic protesters to join their movements, that does not show those people in the United States are posing any threat of violence."
The ACLU, which together with the Center for Media Justice also sued the FBI to obtain more information about the secretive "Black Identity Extremism" label, warned that casting individuals who express legitimate grievances as "extremists" risks exposing them to police harassment and stifling a movement that is badly needed. "There are long-standing, deep, structural, racial injustices in America, and people are allowed to call on this country to do better," Choudhury said. "They're allowed to do it under our Constitution, and frankly we need them to do it, because that is what has always led to racial justice in America."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept. DHS declined to comment on the record.
Fictional Connections to International Terrorism
The documents obtained via public records requests by Property of the People supplement similar documents previously made public by CCR and the racial justice group Color of Change. The earlier set of documents includes Islamophobic press coverage shared by DHS officials during the Baltimore protests, such as a Fox News story claiming that "Muslim groups seek to co-opt Ferguson protests" and an op-ed warning that the Islamic State, "which has stunned the world for its filmed beheadings and abuse of non-Muslims, is looking to capitalize on growing racial tension in the American city by claiming there is 'no difference between black and white' in their society." It also includes an FBI situation report, issued less than two weeks into the Ferguson protests, warning that "ISIS supporters are urging Ferguson protestors to embrace radical Islam and engage in further violence. They are also reportedly telling any ISIS supporters in the US to travel to Ferguson."
"Senior federal law enforcement assessing hysterical tabloids about ISIS co-opting the Ferguson protests is foolish," said CCR's Farah. "It would be comical if there weren't dangerous implications for people of color and Muslims who speak out for justice only to be met with militarized police responses."
The new set of documents, a selection of which The Intercept is publishing with this story, includes more internal assessments and emails exchanged by federal and law enforcement officials between 2014 and 2016.
In a partially redacted document marked for "DHS internal use only," circulated days after a grand jury in Missouri declined to indict officer Darren Wilson for Brown's killing, officials warned that "a purported fighter with the Islamic state, posted two images earlier today regarding Ferguson calling for the protesters to swear loyalty to the Islamic State." The document also noted that the images were "making their rounds on English-language support accounts for the Islamic State," though it made no mention of whether anyone affiliated with the Ferguson protests actually saw or responded to them.
DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis Ferguson Protests November 20142 pages
In another redacted DHS intelligence document, released at the height of the 2015 Baltimore protests, officials warned that the account of a "presumed USPER," a term used by intelligence officials to refer to U.S. citizens and residents, had called upon "'indigenous peoples' of the Americas and 'Afro-Americans who are oppressed' to attack 'Anglo-American supremacists.'" The report continued: "There were multiple references to the riots in Ferguson, Missouri which was likely designed to resonate with an audience wider than [redacted name] has typically targeted. The messaging reflects
[redacted name's]
awareness of recent US media coverage of perceived racial and other issues in American society, which the group is trying to exploit." As in the earlier case, this assessment, too, offers no indication that anyone involved with the protests actually saw the posts.
DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis Baltimore Protests May 20152 pages
In December 2015, in Minneapolis, following the police killing of Jamar Clark, DHS posted a report indicating that it was closely watching the social media accounts of a number of people, and noted that one user "expresses support for Islamic State" and another posted a photo revealing an "Islam Is Life" tattoo. DHS again reported that a "US person posted a call for Islamic State support" in July 2016, days after the police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.
DHS Open Source Information Report December 20157 pages
DHS Open Source Information Report July 20162 pages
Shortly after that, as the deaths of Castile and Sterling were followed by deadly attacks on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a warning based on the Facebook posts of a Bangladesh-based Al Qaeda supporter. The user called on black Americans to draw inspiration from Micah Johnson, who on July 7 had killed five police officers and injured several others at a protest against police brutality in Dallas. "Like the Dallas attacker in US, we appeal to the other negro Americans to jump into the agitation to realize their rights," the user wrote, according to the intelligence memo. "Pick up arms, like this attacker, against the terrorist US Armed Forces. Fight for your rights."
Office of the Director of National Intelligence July 20162 pages
The reports quickly trickled down to local law enforcement and fusion centers across the country. In a July 2016 assessment by the Greater Cincinnati Fusion Center, for instance, officials preparing for an upcoming NAACP convention in that city warned that "FTOs such as the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula, have encouraged HVEs to conduct attacks within the Homeland," the memo noted, using acronyms for Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Homegrown Violent Extremists. "These groups use social media to inspire and urge violent extremists to attack targets in the Homeland, including mass gatherings such as the NAACP convention."
Greater Cincinnati Fusion Center Field Analysis Report July 20167 pages
That assessment listed a number of potential threats to the gathering and included references to a series of recent incidents of white supremacist violence specifically targeting African-Americans. But it also included much vaguer warnings that "ISIL" had recently "released an audio message urging its supporters to launch lone wolf attacks against military and civilian targets within the Homeland." Theodore Sampson, a member of the fusion center and captain with the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office, wrote in a statement to The Intercept that the threat assessment, conducted in partnership with DHS, was "intended to support the security and public safety efforts of government agencies and private sector partners in identifying, deterring, preventing, and responding to potential threats during the convention" and that such "threat assessments are designed to look objectively at potential threats towards an event or venue without bias."
"In 2016, foreign terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula had repeatedly called for homegrown violent extremists to conduct attack within the United States. This messaging was published in al-Qa'ida's magazine Inspire and ISIL's Dabiq publication and recordings sent our through the internet and radio. Additionally, these terrorist organizations and sympathizers utilized social media to encourage attacks within the Homeland," Sampson wrote. "In this particular threat assessment, the reference to the audio message was to illustrate a recent example of the messaging encouraging lone wolf attacks towards mass gathering events and point out that homegrown violent extremist attacks were a persistent threat to mass gathering events."
The NAACP, which last month requested that Congress hold hearings on domestic terrorism and "the ways in which Black activists are being tracked and monitored by government agencies," could not immediately be reached for comment.
Absent from all these documents is any evidence that anyone associated with protests in the U.S. had responded to the exhortations of Islamic extremists — or that they had ever even seen those calls in the first place. Still, law enforcement's close scrutiny of these isolated instances, even when none of them seem to have amounted to anything more substantial than social media posts, and the fact that these calls were prominently included in intelligence assessment reports, risked conflating, in the eyes of law enforcement, legitimate domestic protest with foreign terrorism.
Ryan Shapiro, Property of the People's executive director, noted that government efforts to denigrate domestic critics by associating them with foreign enemies was an old and tested repressive tactic. "Since even before the FBI was named the FBI, U.S. intelligence agencies have preposterously targeted progressive dissent at home as tied to enemies abroad," he told The Intercept. "Today's obscene attempts to link Black Lives Matter to ISIS and Al Qaeda stand on the shoulders of a century of similar efforts to tar American dissent, especially in struggles for racial justice, as fronts for enemy agents."
Shapiro also noted that the documents showed a propensity by federal law enforcement to base their "open source" intelligence-gathering on the conspiracy theories of conservative news outlets, which officials uncritically circulated during the protests. In addition to Islamophobic coverage, DHS officials shared during the Ferguson and Baltimore protests, for instance, in July 2016 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence circulated news stories, by Fox News and the U.K. tabloid Daily Mail, about a photo posted on Facebook in the aftermath of the Dallas killings that showed "a man dressed in black slashing a uniformed officer's throat with a knife as blood spills out of the cop's neck." By contrast, earlier that summer, DHS officials monitoring protests in Minneapolis had also shared a story by the liberal publication AlterNet revealing that a local police union leader who had called Black Lives Matter a "terrorist organization" had a history of racist attitudes and was connected to a "white power-linked" bike gang. In that case, however, the officer circulating the story added a comment: "This article sounds like a drummed up hit piece to me," the officer wrote. "But it's nonetheless interesting to see all the race-related drama in Minneapolis at the moment."
Office of the Director of National Intelligence Press Clippings July 20167 pages
DHS Press Clippings June 20166 pages
"Homeland Security is basing terrorist intelligence assessments of Black Lives Matter on articles from Fox News and a British tabloid that literally warns of the great menace posed by Putin's purported army of hypnotic, shapeshifting super squid," said Shapiro, referring to DHS officials sharing a report about Islamic State members calling on black protesters to join them by the U.K.'s Daily Express, which also published a particularly outlandish story about the Russian president. "Meanwhile," Shapiro added, "DHS and other U.S. agencies are contorting themselves to ignore clear evidence of the dire threat from the far right."
Exposing Activists to Serious Risk
Federal officials weren't the only ones seeking to associate domestic dissent to foreign terrorism. Starting in Ferguson, a number of elected and law enforcement officials across the country referred to protesters not only by using racist terms such as "thugs," but also, increasingly, by calling them "terrorists," a reference that the FBI's "Black Identity Extremism" report only seemed to validate.
Indigenous and environmental rights activists involved in the Standing Rock protest movement were also repeatedly characterized as "terrorists." As The Intercept reported, private security contractors hired by the oil company behind the Dakota Access pipeline referred to the peaceful protest movement born to oppose the pipeline as a "jihadist insurgency" — and routinely shared intelligence assessments with law enforcement that portrayed activists as dangerous threats.
At Standing Rock, as in Ferguson, those watching the growing protests also paid particular attention to displays of solidarity with Palestine, with private security in North Dakota, for instance, noting that "the presence of additional Palestinians in the camp, and the movement's involvement with Islamic individuals is a dynamic that requires further examination."
"To them, a Palestinian flag might as well be an ISIS flag," said Lee, the Ferguson activist, referring to the baseless conflation of the Palestinian struggle with Islamic extremism.
"It wouldn't shock me at all to see misinterpretation of symbols, conflation of different groups, of different racial and ethnic and political and religious backgrounds, under this vector of challenging a Muslim boogeyman," echoed Choudhury. "It's absurd."
A protester waves a Palestinian flag in solidarity with Gaza during a demonstration after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 16, 2014.
Photo: Bilgin Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Choudhury, who for years has worked to expose an FBI "racial and ethnic mapping program," noted that following the 9/11 attacks, the ACLU has obtained a number of intelligence documents that revealed the surveillance of Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian groups, premised on what she called a "totally unsubstantiated" recruitment threat from foreign Islamist groups. The ACLU, she added, also exposed intelligence training material filled with racial stereotypes about people of Arab descent and Muslims, showing the agency's profound ignorance about the very people it was surveilling.
But while there was never any evidence that foreign extremists' isolated appeals to U.S. activists had any effect, critics said the mere suggestion exposed those activists to serious risk.Join Our NewsletterOriginal reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you.I'm in
"That is the inevitable result of the creation of such a flawed intelligence product, that it inspires fear, and that it is going to lead to federal and state and local law enforcement's targeting of black activists based on nothing close to wrongdoing or violence," said Choudhury. "It's very dangerous, because it leads to this kind of targeting of human beings here in America, who are calling for equality and justice, just because there are other threats abroad."
Lee, the St. Louis activist, said that during the Ferguson protests, online trolls and conservative commentators especially targeted him and a couple of other Muslim activists with smear campaigns and racist and Islamophobic attacks, calling them terrorists and suggesting they were affiliated with Al Qaeda. One such smear, picked up widely by right-wing blogs, accused Lee of "threatening to behead critics."
"Some of those people were spreading rumors that I was in Ferguson recruiting for ISIS," Lee told The Intercept, noting that even some fellow protesters, when he once joined a protest right after leaving his mosque and while still wearing a thobe, commented "Here comes ISIS."
But Lee put the blame for smears and harassment campaigns squarely on government-sanctioned racism. He also pointed to the recent vilification of the black and Muslim Congressperson Ilhan Omar as another example of how ignorant and hate-filled campaigns are enabled by official discourse — whether by law enforcement and intelligence agencies or by lawmakers themselves. "It's institutionalized Islamophobia," Lee said. "It's institutionalized crusader mentality.
READ MORE AT: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/08/black-protesters-terrorism-threat-isis/
Why Every African Should Embrace the Pan-African Struggle for a United Africa
Sebastiane Ebatamehi Mon, Apr 1, 2019
The Pan-African struggle is not an individual one, it is collective, and Africa needs you.
The concept of Pan-Africanism is perhaps more popular now than it ever was. There are great Pan-African activists scattered on the continent of Africa but only a few like Professor Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba and Kemi Seba can match the determination of the early pan-African heroes.
One thing that has contributed to this, however, is the fact that modern education and innovation has taken the minds of African youths off Pan-Africanism. So, even though it is something they have heard of, they do not believe it is a worthy cause. To them, slavery and colonialism were in the past and Africans should embrace the future.
It is even surprising that many Africans see Pan-Africanism as a cult or fraternity of some sort, how sad?
Africa is battling with unthinkable poverty and underdevelopment despite its wealth and natural resources. Our people are dying and terror is upon the land. We have a duty to fight for Africa because we do not have any other continent that we can call our own.
To achieve this, we must all put aside our individual agendas as countries in the African continent, and uphold the general agenda of African unity, development, and progress. It is only by this that we can truly succeed as individual nations and collectively as a continent.
All it takes to be pan-African is to decolonize one's mind from western interference that tends to put us at war with ourselves and people. It is in a simple acceptance that Africa's redemption lies in her unity and to preach this ideology to others.
The definition of Pan-Africanism is not a bogus one. Schools of thoughts are divided as to whether it is a movement or barely an idea. In all fairness, it is safe to say it is both.
Pan-Africanism is generally accepted to umbrella the ideas and policies that preach Africa as a single entity which must unite in order to experience any tangible progress. There is a fundamental similarity among people of African descent and we share the same history.
Africans everywhere all live with the horrid history of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. We have a common enemy as we have always had. In the past, it was slavery and colonialism, now it is neo-colonialism (or imperialism).
Also, the cultural and traditional similarities between African nations are proof that we share the same roots and belong together. This is perhaps the greatest credit of pan-Africanism in its proof that African peoples share a common destiny.
The struggle for Pan-Africanism is not one that involves arms or war. In fact, the intellectuals are needed more than the laborers if we are to succeed.
To be a Pan-African, you do not need to register anywhere or belong to a particular group. Although there are various political and civil Pan-African groups and movements structured for different purposes around Africa, membership in a group or movement is not needed to be a Pan –African.
What we all need to do individually is to decolonize our minds and eliminate the beliefs imprinted in us that we are different and lesser than the white man.
Africa is one and colonialism is in its worst stage than it ever was during the slave era. What we are experiencing today is neo-colonialism and as Kwame Nkrumah said in his book, this is the last stage of imperialism. Africans cannot remain slaves forever.
Where does Africa stand today? Where we created by a lesser God? Are we as they say that Africans were created to serve the white man as hewers of wood and drawers of water? Do we not have a right to own and control our resources? Are we created to be exploited? Is our continent a lab for European superpowers to test their assault and chemical weapons? Why is the West so interested in Africa's disunity? Why can't we be truly independent? Why must Europe and America control our economies and leaders?
In your sincere answers to the aforementioned questions, lie the true reasons why we must all be pan-Africans. Africa needs you!
READ MORE AT: https://www.africanexponent.com/post/9984-pan-africanism-africas-only-chance-for-unity-progress-and-development
How Reconstruction Still Shapes American Racism
By Creator	— 4 months ago
A group portrait of the first African-American legislators in the 41st and 42nd Congress
By Henry Louis Gates Jr. April 2, 2019
During an interview with Chris Rock for my PBS series African American Lives 2, we traced the ancestry of several well-known African Americans. When I told Rock that his great-great-grandfather Julius Caesar Tingman had served in the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War — enrolling on March 7, 1865, a little more than a month after the Confederates evacuated from Charleston, S.C. — he was brought to tears. I explained that seven years later, while still a young man in his mid-20s, this same ancestor was elected to the South Carolina house of representatives as part of that state's Reconstruction government. Rock was flabbergasted, his pride in his ancestor rivaled only by gratitude that Julius' story had been revealed at last. "It's sad that all this stuff was kind of buried and that I went through a whole childhood and most of my adulthood not knowing," Rock said. "How in the world could I not know this?"
I realized then that even descendants of black heroes of Reconstruction had lost the memory of their ancestors' heroic achievements. I have been interested in Reconstruction and its tragic aftermath since I was an undergraduate at Yale University, and I have been teaching works by black authors from the second half of the 19th century for decades. But the urgent need for a broader public conversation about the period first struck me only in that conversation with Rock.
Reconstruction, the period in American history that followed the Civil War, was an era filled with great hope and expectations, but it proved far too short to ensure a successful transition from bondage to free labor for the almost 4 million black human beings who'd been born into slavery in the U.S. During Reconstruction, the U.S. government maintained an active presence in the former Confederate states to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves and to help them, however incompletely, on the path to becoming full citizens. A little more than a decade later, the era came to an end when the contested presidential election of 1876 was resolved by trading the electoral votes of South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida for the removal of federal troops from the last Southern statehouses.
Today, many of us know precious little about what happened during those years. But, regardless of its brevity, Reconstruction remains one of the most pivotal eras in the history of race relations in American history — and probably the most misunderstood.
Reconstruction was fundamentally about who got to be an American citizen. It was in that period that the Constitution was amended to establish birthright citizenship through the 14th Amendment, which also guaranteed equality before the law regardless of race. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, barred racial discrimination in voting, thus securing the ballot for black men nationwide. As Eric Foner, the leading historian of the era, puts it, "The issues central to Reconstruction — citizenship, voting rights, terrorist violence, the relationship between economic and political democracy — continue to roil our society and politics today, making an understanding of Reconstruction even more vital." A key lesson of Reconstruction, and of its violent, racist rollback, is, Foner continues, "that achievements thought permanent can be overturned and rights can never be taken for granted."
Another lesson this era of our history teaches us is that, even when stripped of their rights by courts, legislatures and revised state constitutions, African Americans never surrendered to white supremacy. Resistance, too, is their legacy.
By 1877, in a climate of economic crisis, the "cost" of protecting the freedoms of African Americans became a price the American government was no longer willing to pay. The long rollback began in earnest: the period of retrenchment, voter suppression, Jim Crow segregation and quasi re-enslavement that was called by white Southerners, ironically, "Redemption." As a worried Frederick Douglass, sensing the storm clouds gathering on the horizon, put it in a speech at the Republican National Convention on June 14, 1876: "You say you have emancipated us. You have; and I thank you for it. You say you have enfranchised us; and I thank you for it. But what is your emancipation? — What is your enfranchisement? What does it all amount to if the black man, after having been made free by the letter of your law, is unable to exercise that freedom, and, after having been freed from the slaveholder's lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder's shotgun?"
What confounds me is how much longer the rollback of Reconstruction was than Reconstruction itself, how dogged was the determination of the "Redeemed South" to obliterate any trace of the gains made by freed people. In South Carolina, for example, the state university that had been integrated during Reconstruction (indeed, Harvard's first black college graduate, Richard T. Greener, was a professor there) was swiftly shut down and reopened three years later for whites only. That color line remained in place there until 1963.
In addition to their moves to strip African Americans of their voting rights, "Redeemer" governments across the South slashed government investments in infrastructure and social programs across the board, including those for the region's first state-funded public-school systems, a product of Reconstruction. In doing so, they re-empowered a private sphere dominated by the white planter class. A new wave of state constitutional conventions followed, starting with Mississippi in 1890. These effectively undermined the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the right of black men to vote, in each of the former Confederate states by 1908. To take just one example: whereas in Louisiana, 130,000 black men were registered to vote before the state instituted its new constitution in 1898, by 1904 that number had been reduced to 1,342.
And at what the historian Rayford W. Logan dubbed the "nadir" of American race relations—the time of political, economic, social and legal hardening around segregation — widespread violence, disenfranchisement and lynching coincided with a hardening of racist concepts of "race."
This painfully long period following Reconstruction saw the explosion of white-supremacist ideology across an array of media and through an extraordinary variety of forms, all designed to warp the mind toward white-supremacist beliefs. Minstrelsy and racist visual imagery were weapons in the battle over the status of African Americans in postslavery America, and some continue to be manufactured to this day.
The process of dehumanization triggered a resistance movement. Among a rising generation of the black elite, this resistance was represented after 1895 through the concept of "The New Negro," a counter to the avalanche of racist images of black people that proliferated throughout Gilded Age American society in advertisements, posters and postcards, helped along by technological innovations that enabled the cheap mass production of multicolored prints. Not surprisingly, racist images of black people — characterized by exaggerated physical features, the blackest of skin tones, the whitest of eyes and the reddest of lips — were a favorite subject of these multicolored prints during the rollback of Reconstruction and the birth of Jim Crow segregation in the 1890s
We can think of the New Negro as Black America's first superhero, locked in combat against the white-supremacist fiction of African Americans as "Sambos," by nature lazy, mentally inferior, licentious and, beneath the surface, lurking sexual predators. The New Negro would undergo several transformations within the race between the mid-1890s and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, but, in its essence, it was a trope — summarized by one writer in 1928 as a continuously evolving "mythological figure" — that would be drawn upon and revised over three decades by black leaders in the country's first social-media war: the New Negro vs. Sambo.
The concept would prove to be quite volatile. Supposedly New Negroes could be supplanted by even "newer" Negroes. For example, Booker T. Washington, the conservative, accommodationist educator, would be hailed as the first New Negro in 1895, only to be dethroned exactly a decade later on the cover of the Voice of the Negro magazine by his nemesis, W.E.B. Du Bois, the Harvard-trained historian. Du Bois had globalized his version of the New Negro in a landmark photography exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition and then, three years later, in his monumental work, The Souls of Black Folk, mounted a devastating attack on Washington's philosophy of race relations as dangerously complicitous with Jim Crow segregation and, especially, black male disenfranchisement. Du Bois, a founder of the militant Niagara Movement in 1905, would co-found the NAACP in 1909. And while Douglass had already seen the potential of photography to present an authentic face of black America, and thus to counteract the onslaught of negative stereotypes pervading American society, the children of Reconstruction were the ones who picked up the torch after his death in 1895.
This new generation experimented with a range of artistic mediums to carve out a space for a New Negro who would lead the race — and the country — into the rising century, one whose racial attitudes would be more modern and cosmopolitan than those of the previous century, marred by slavery and Civil War. When D.W. Griffith released his racist Lost Cause fantasy film The Birth of a Nation in 1915, New Negro activists responded not only with protest but also with support for African American artists like the pioneering independent producer and director Oscar Micheaux, whose reels of silent films exposed the horrors of white supremacy while advancing a fuller, more humanistic take on black life.
Their pushback against Redemption took many forms. Denied the ballot box, African American women and men organized political associations, churches, schools and social clubs, both to nurture their own culture and to speak out as forcefully as they could against the suffocating oppression unfolding around them. Though brutalized by the shockingly extensive practices of lynching and rape, reinforced by terrorism and vigilante violence, they exposed the crimes and hypocrisy of white supremacy in their own newspapers and magazines, and in marches and political rallies. But no weapon was drawn upon more frequently than images of the New Negro and what the historian Evelyn Higginbotham calls "the politics of respectability."
Assaulted by the degrading, mass-produced imagery of the Lost Cause, its romanticization of the Old South and stereotypes of "Sambo" and the "Old Negro," they avidly counterpunched with their own images of modern women and men, which they widely disseminated in journalism, photography, literature and the arts. Drawing on the tradition of agitation epitomized by the black Reconstruction Congressmen, such as John Mercer Langston, and former abolitionists, such as the inimitable Douglass, the children of Reconstruction would lay the foundation for the civil rights revolution to come in the 20th century.
But what also seems clear to me today is that it was in that period that white-supremacist ideology, especially as it was transmuted into powerful new forms of media, poisoned the American imagination in ways that have long outlasted its origin. You might say that anti-black racism once helped fuel an economic system, and that black crude was pumped and freighted around the world. Now, more than a century and a half since the end of slavery in the U.S., it drifts like a toxic oil slick as the supertanker lists into the sea.
When Dylann Roof murdered the Reverend Clementa Pinckney and the eight other innocents in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015, he didn't need to have read any of this history; it had, unfortunately, long become part of our country's cultural DNA and, it seems, imprinted on his own. It is important that we both celebrate the triumphs of African Americans following the Civil War and explain how the forces of white supremacy did their best to undermine those triumphs—then and in all the years since, through to the present.
READ MORE AT :http://time.com/5562869/reconstruction-history/
A.D.O.S 101 A historical primer of the anti-African roots of the ADOS movement
Blogs & Articles Featured
Corporations Boycotted North Carolina over the Bathroom Bill, When Will They Stand Against Racial Injustice?
By Elliot Booker	— 3 years ago
David Love September 23, 2016
As the events unfold in Charlotte in the aftermath of the murder of Keith Scott — another Black man by police — questions arise as to what it will take to bring about real change in the realm of racial justice in North Carolina, and the role that corporate America will take.
As part of the so-called "new" South, with a large corporate presence and urban professional transplants from the North, the state wants to have it both ways. President Obama won North Carolina in the 2008 election, and a city such as Charlotte represents growth, progress and diversity, as The Washington Post reported, with "buttoned-up business (a banking center, an airline and retail hub), a multicultural melting pot and a farm-to-table haven."
And yet, the state has elected a Republican-led, white supremacist state government, with a governor and a legislature that has sought the wholesale deprivation of Black voting rights, leading to the NAACP-led Moral Mondays movement.
Then there is the so-called "bathroom bill" known as HB2, which challenges a Charlotte city ordinance regarding gender-neutral bathrooms. And while the legislation has been known as an anti-LGBT law, it also eviscerated local ordinances, making it illegal for localities to expand the protections of state laws governing minimum wage standards, job discrimination and public accommodations, as the Charlotte Observer noted.
So while North Carolina had positioned itself as more cosmopolitan, progressive and tolerant than its neighbor bordering to its South — South Carolina, which had been embroiled in a Confederate flag debate of late — the state has paid a price with HB2.
According to Facing South, while state officials wish to downplay its impact, a corporate boycott of North Carolina has led to losses in the tens of millions of dollars. Over 200 companies and organizations have expressed their opposition to HB2, and they are taking their business out of the Tar Heel state. For example, PayPal canceled its planned $3.5 million complex, Deutsche Bank placed a corporate expansion on hold, and the NBA will take its All-Star Game elsewhere. The purpose of this and other boycotts, Facing South noted, is "to raise the economic and political costs of doing business as usual, to the point that decision-makers — whether lawmakers or corporate CEOs — are forced to change course."
But what will it take for corporate America to respond to the calls for racial justice, in the midst of police violence against Black people? If they can take a stand against HB2, certainly these companies can demand that local and state governments do more and enact reforms if they want the dollars to continue flowing.
With a high-profile police killing and a continued effort at Black voter suppression — despite a Supreme Court decision rejecting North Carolina's voter ID law and other voter restrictions — the time seems perfect for corporations to use their political muscle to benefit Black folks. White reactionary lawmakers believe they can get away with disrespecting African-Americans. For example, U.S. Rep. Robert Pittenger, who represents parts of Charlotte and its suburbs, said Blacks are protesting in Charlotte because "they hate white people because white people are successful and they're not," as NBC News reported.
And in some cases, with blood on their hands through their role in profiting from slavery, these North Carolina-based companies have a debt to pay Black people. For example, Bank of America admitted its ties to slavery, as two of its predecessor banks had dealings with the slave trade, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Further, a third predecessor accepted slaves as collateral on loans, as Your Black World Today reported. Two companies that were incorporated into Wachovia — now owned by Wells Fargo — owned slaves and accepted them as collateral on loans or mortgages. And the founder of R.J. Reynolds, Richard Joshua Reynolds, came from a large slave-owning family of tobacco farmers. These companies can, at a minimum, support a boycott in North Carolina and a movement around racial justice, and provide support to the descendants of enslaved people in the form of employment, scholarships and community programs.
Writing an editorial in NBC News, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II — president of the North Carolina NAACP and founder of the Moral Mondays movement — summed it up best when he called the riots in Charlotte "the predictable response of human beings who are drowning in systemic injustice." It is not about Black people hating the police, he noted, but rather people of all races "rising up against systems of injustice that shield officers who kill but leave millions defenseless."
Declaring that "it's the ballot or the riot," Rev. Barber wrote that as hopeless as things may seem, we know what needs to be done to change the conditions that led to Keith Scott's death.
"Right here in North Carolina, we have seen how people impacted by unjust policies can come together in coalitions across color and lift up a moral agenda that embraces the good of the whole," he said. "This kind of coalition movement building is not easy, and we cannot win the change we need in a single election. But every step forward in this nation's history has come from movements like this one."
Report: Black men, boys shot most by Chicago police
CHICAGO (AP)
Every five days, on average, a Chicago police officer fired a gun at someone.
In 435 shootings over a recent six-year span, officers killed 92 people and wounded 170 others.
While a few of those incidents captured widespread attention, they occurred with such brutal regularity — and with scant information provided by police — that most have escaped public scrutiny.
Now, after months of struggles with Chicago police to get information through the Freedom of Information Act, the Chicago Tribune has compiled an unprecedented database of details of every time police fired a weapon from 2010 through 2015.
Analysis of that data revealed startling patterns about the officers who fired and the people they shot at.
Among the findings:
•At least 2,623 bullets were fired by police in 435 shootings. In 235 of those incidents, officers struck at least one person; in another 200 shootings, officers missed entirely.
•About four out of every five people shot by police were African-American males.
•About half of the officers involved in shootings were African-American or Hispanic.
•The officers who fired weren't rookies but, on average, had almost a decade of experience.
•Of the 520 officers who fired their weapons, more than 60 of them did so in more than one incident.
•The number of shootings by police — hits and misses — declined over the six years, from more than 100 in 2011 to 44 in 2015.
The analysis comes at a time when police in Chicago and throughout the country face heightened scrutiny after several controversial police shootings, often of minorities, have been captured on video and gone viral.
The Tribune's study encompasses high-profile cases such as the McDonald scandal as well as scores of incidents that were not caught on video and received little or no attention. It begins on New Year's Day 2010 with a teen shot in the stomach while handcuffed to a security fence in the Park Manor neighborhood. It ends six years later, on the day after Christmas 2015, when an officer wounded an armed suspect on the Far South Side.
For years, examining the full scale of the problem in Chicago was impossible because the city refused to release most details about police-involved shootings. Before the release last year of the video of Laquan McDonald's killing brought pressure for transparency, the only information made public in the hours after a shooting came in comments from a police union spokesman at the scene and perhaps a short statement from the Police Department. As investigations dragged on for months or years, the details remained hidden.
The data on officer shootings were released to the Tribune only after a seven-month battle with the city over its failure to fulfill public records requests. The department finally produced the data in July after the Tribune threatened to sue. Reporters then spent weeks comparing the data with information that was gathered earlier this year from the city's police oversight agency as well as with other records, including autopsies and court records.
To be sure, policing the city's most dangerous streets can be harrowing. Nearly 6,000 illegal guns have been seized in the city so far this year — a staggering amount of firepower that far outpaces other big cities. The dangers were on display in graphic detail earlier this month when the department released dramatic dashboard-camera video of officers being shot at while pursuing a carjacking suspect in their squad cars on the South Side. One officer suffered a graze wound to his face.
"As a police officer, you don't wait for the shot to come in your direction," Dean Angelo Sr., president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, told the Tribune recently about the database findings. "You might not get a chance to return fire."
But for many of those who live in the largely African-American communities where police most often open fire, the narrative of self-defense seems like a familiar script.
At a recent rally protesting police shootings, Charles Jenkins, a 61-year-old community activist who has spent his entire life on the city's West Side, said he believes race plays a role in how authorities investigate shootings by police.
"It's easier to believe, because they're black, that an officer was in fear of their life and get(s) off," he said
Those shot by Chicago police ranged in age from early teens to the elderly, the records show. The youngest, Dejuan Curry, was 14 when he was wounded in the leg in August 2015 after police said he refused to drop a weapon he held in his hand as he ran. A federal lawsuit is pending against Victor Razo, the officer who allegedly fired the shots. The Tribune's records show that Razo was involved in two other shootings between 2010 and 2015.
The eldest victim, Hazel Jones-Huff, 92, was wounded when off-duty Officer Courtney Hill opened fire during a quarrel between neighbors, killing Jones-Huff's 86-year-old husband. Jones-Huff was charged with battery for allegedly going after the officer with a broom, but a judge later acquitted her of all counts.
The records show the shootings in which a civilian was injured or killed were concentrated in a handful of high-crime police districts, all with largely African-American populations.
Leading the list was the Gresham District, which had 30 police shootings in which someone was injured or killed in the six-year span. Next were two other South Side districts — Englewood with 27 and Grand Crossing with 18. The Calumet and Harrison districts on the West Side each had 17, according to the records.
By contrast, the Jefferson Park and Near North districts, which have majority-white populations, each had four police shootings over the six years. The Town Hall District, which includes part of Lincoln Park, Wrigleyville, the rest of Lakeview, Lincoln Square and part of Uptown, had none, the data show.
The officers who shot
From the data, the Tribune was able to identify the race of 300 of the 324 officers who opened fire in shootings that resulted in injuries or death.
Although white officers make up a larger portion of the police force, they don't shoot citizens at a higher rate. Hispanic officers, meanwhile, make up only 19 percent of Chicago's police force but fired in 26 percent of officer-involved shootings.
A little more than half of the officers who fired shots at people were minorities — 84 Hispanics (28 percent) and 69 blacks (23 percent). White officers made up 45 percent of the total — 136 officers in all. The other officers were listed as Asian/Pacific Islander.
The officers also tended to be experienced, not rookies who suddenly found themselves in over their heads. The records show officers who have shot at citizens had an average of about nine years on the job.
Not surprisingly, 87 percent of the police officers who fired their guns in fatal or nonfatal shootings were on duty, the analysis found. Yet that meant 31 shootings involved off-duty officers who wounded or killed people.
Over the six-year period, 520 officers fired a gun at a citizen. The force generally has about 12,000 members. But the Tribune found that 64 of them were involved in at least two separate shootings.
Several of the repeat shooters have been featured in Tribune stories in recent years. At least two of them, Marco Proano and Gildardo Sierra, have been the targets of criminal investigations by the FBI, although no charges have been filed against either.
Proano, who remains on the force on paid desk duty, killed a teenager during a struggle outside a South Side dance party in 2011, then was captured two years later on dashboard camera video cocking his gun sideways and firing into a car full of teens as it drove away, wounding two. Sierra was profiled in the Tribune in 2011 after he was involved in three shootings, two of them fatal, during a six-month span. Sierra resigned from the department last year.
In the past, the Independent Police Review Authority has not tracked officers involved in multiple shootings if the shootings were deemed justified.
Guglielmi, the police spokesman, said the department is now developing an early intervention system to identify and mentor officers who may be at risk, including officers who were recently involved in a shooting or other high-stress situation. The system "will not be designed to be punitive" but will function more as a "risk management" plan to get to an officer's issues before they manifest on the street, he said.
Officers who have fired their weapons in multiple incidents also avoided public scrutiny in part because the police union contract bars the department from identifying officers after a shooting. In most cases, no information about the officers involved was ever made public unless a lawsuit was filed — and even then the city typically fought in court to keep records sealed.
Meanwhile, the Independent Police Review Authority's investigations of officer-involved shootings often included testimony and reports from other officers who backed up one another's accounts — a "code of silence" that has been criticized for years.
In all but a handful of shootings that IPRA investigated over the six-year span, the agency ruled the officers were justified in their use of deadly force.
The Tribune's analysis showed that Chicago police are the only witnesses listed in most of the shootings, with civilian witnesses identified in just 83 of the incidents.
Alexa Van Brunt, an attorney with Northwestern University's Roderick MacArthur Justice Center, said it's often challenging to prove misconduct or a cover-up when it comes to an officer's word against that of a civilian.
"We don't have video evidence often," Van Brunt said. "And if you have police officers lying on reports, that becomes the official record."
'He put me in that position'
No officer has fired at citizens more during the time period examined by the Tribune than Tracey Williams, an African-American tactical officer with nearly a decade on the job.
Over five years, Williams fired her gun five different times in various neighborhoods throughout the city — from North Lawndale to Fuller Park, the Tribune analysis shows.
Each time, she fired at a black male. The targets ranged in age from 17 to 45. One died, one survived with a gunshot to the leg and three others were not hit.
The only investigation to capture public attention involved the Dec. 4, 2010, killing of Ontario Billups in the South Side's Gresham neighborhood.
Billups, 30, was sitting in an idling minivan with two friends in the 8100 block of South Ashland Avenue when Williams and her partner pulled up in an unmarked Chevrolet Tahoe, according to IPRA records.
In a statement she later gave to investigators, Williams said the car looked suspicious so she shined a spotlight into the van and ordered the occupants to show their hands. She was running up to the passenger side of the vehicle with her gun drawn when she said she saw Billups with a "dark object" in his hand.
"He turns," Williams said. "As he's turning towards me quickly his hand is coming out quickly with this dark object. I immediately fire a shot."
Billups was shot once in the chest and died. The dark object turned out to be a bag of marijuana. Even though Billups was unarmed, Williams defended her use of force in her interview with IPRA investigators.
"His actions led to my actions," she said. "He put me in that position."
Meanwhile, Williams remained on the street. In one six-month period, from July 2012 to January 2013, the officer fired her gun in three separate incidents but missed. The next year, she wounded an armed 17-year-old boy in the leg. A review of that incident is pending, though most of the records have been sealed by IPRA and the Police Department because the boy was a minor.
In November, the city agreed to pay $500,000 to settle an excessive force lawsuit brought by Billups' family. That brought the total cost to $643,000 for taxpayers to settle four lawsuits related to Williams since 2010, court records show.
The Tribune's analysis found that most of the officers involved in multiple shootings over the six years were involved in two each.
Holding a socket wrench
The data compiled by the Tribune show how police calls turned into confrontations — ranging from seemingly benign calls such as trespass or drinking in the public way to extremely dangerous situations such as hostage standoffs or gang shootings.
Police released information about why officers were initially at the scene in 185 shootings over the six-year period. About a third of the incidents — 63 in total — began with officers responding to a report of shots fired or a person with a gun, according to the data. Fifteen shootings happened after police responded to a report of a robbery.
At least 40 shootings began with a traffic or street stop, either because of an alleged violation or after officers stopped and questioned a group congregated in public. In more than a third of the stops, officers gave chase on foot, pursuing suspects through residential backyards, alleys or over fences before opening fire, the data show.
In statements issued by police after the shootings, six of every 10 cited a suspect either pointing a gun or shooting at police as the reason officers opened fire. But of the 74 autopsy reports reviewed by the Tribune, at least 11 showed the shooting victims had been struck only in their back, buttocks or back of the head. The data show police also shot people who wielded other types of weapons, including knives — such as in the McDonald case — but also tire irons, screwdrivers, baseball bats and crowbars. In some cases, the gun police thought they saw turned out to be something else entirely — a wrench or a watch, a cellphone box or wallet.
Georgia Utendhal comforts one of her granddaughters, whose 16-year-old brother was fatally shot by a Chicago police officer in the 8700 block of South Morgan Street in Chicago on July 5, 2014.
The Gantt Report: Homie The Black Political Clown
By: Lucius Gantt
African Americans can't wait to get to the polls to cast their ballots in the 2016 United States elections.
One Presidential candidate is "Heckle" and the other one is "Jeckle". One candidate is Tweedlee Dee" and The other one is "Tweedlee Dum".
It doesn't matter who is running for the nation's highest office, most Black voters will do as they are told. They will be given a list, or slate, and instructed to vote for candidates that political exploiters want them to vote for!
Call me a hater if you want to but if you hate the truth I don't give a damn!
First of all, you have a Constitutional right to vote for whomever you want to and, yes, you should exercise that right but I pray that you will vote smart.
I pray that you will put your voter support behind candidates that support you., stand up for you, speak out for you, be accessible to you, listen to you, be responsive to you and care about you!
And, don't give me any crap about voting for the "Black" candidates!
Most Black politicians today are completely worthless and of no use to Black people.
You tell me, who are the candidates that look like you that will fight for the governmental policies and programs that you want? When Congress persons, legislators, commissioners and councilmen vote to appropriate, or divide up, tax dollars to special interest groups, corporate cronies, favored ethnic groups, desired sex and gender groups, who are the Black elect officials that will say "there are more Black people that are suffering, and more Black communities struggling than anybody else why does government give Black people, Black businesses and Black schools and other Black institutions the least government money"?
know you don't like for me to write like this but it is true!
You think you are going to the polls to vote strong Black men and women but, in many cases, you stepping into the voting booth to cast ballots for dummies and puppets!
You're not voting for the best representation that we can get, you are voting for Negroes who are willing to be controlled by the Democratic or Republican Parties!
The Democratic Party, for instance, is Willie Tyler and you are voting for Lester. The Republican Party is Buffalo Bob and you're voting for Howdy Doody!
You think The Gantt Report is crazy? Prove it!
Who is running for office in 2016 that will represent you today like Black people were represented in the past by Adam Clayton Powell, or Maynard Jackson, or Shirley Chisholm or Harold Washington or even Florida's Carrie Meeks or Betty Holzendorf?
I knew Meeks and Holzendorf and the candidates of today are not them.
I've written it a thousand times but if you forgot it, let me repeat it. If Black political candidates believe that Black business are inferior, Black people are unimportant, Black issues are OK to ignore during the political campaign, they will feel the same way after you elect them!
A Black guy running for a seat in the Florida Legislature called me and asked me to give him some money for his campaign. I asked him to name the Black vendors, political professionals and Black owned media outlets he would spend money with and he told me ALL Black people working on his campaign would be volunteers so he could save his money for white media, white consultants and white vendors.
I hung up the phone on his pitiful ass!
Any Black voter or Black citizen that would give their support to any candidate, Black or white, that thinks all Blacks are worthless is not only a political fool they are a traitor to their race!
Black people have to control the politics in Black communities, Black districts and in Black precincts.
When political parties control Black candidates and tell them what to do, what to say, what to vote for and who they should hire, the Black voters and the Black people will continue to be exploited and oppressed.
If you are interested in politics, start grooming our young people. Teach Black youth how to campaign and generate votes. Teach Black boys and girls how to be strong, proud and politically intelligent Black men and women.
The only Black political clown I'll support is "Homie the Clown" because if Homie ran for office, Homie wouldn't play that "I want to be controlled" stuff!
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186,853 loyal readers!
©2019 Copyright Time For Awakening Media


We think SEED will become a standard resource for people working in corporate law and corporate governance.
The NYU Pollack Center for Law & Business and Cornerstone Research announce the launch of the Securities Enforcement Empirical Database (SEED), located at seed.law.nyu.edu. SEED tracks and records information for U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement actions against public companies. With data on SEC actions filed since October 1, 2009, SEED offers unprecedented insight into multiyear trends and priorities in federal securities enforcement.
The SEC's announcement last week of its enforcement actions for fiscal year 2015 highlights the role of administrative proceedings. Of the 675 SEC actions in 2015 that did not involve delinquent filings, 168 (or about 25%) were follow-on administrative proceedings involving individual bars. The SEC did not identify how many of the 507 independent actions for violations of the federal securities laws were filed as administrative proceedings. Research by SEED finds that the SEC filed 75% of its actions against public companies in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2015 as administrative proceedings (see chart).
Student fellows from the Pollack Center gather enforcement documents from the SEC website, regularly updating SEED's information on new enforcement action filings and settlements.
A portion of Securities Enforcement Empirical Database (SEED) is available to the general public, and a more extensive version will be available for academic scholars. There is no charge for access to either version of the database. For information about academic access to SEED, please contact law.seed@nyu.edu.


Jack always wakes in the middle of a crime scene…Jack WhoAmI keeps awakening into different realities, into a different life, with no memory of who he is, who he was, how he got there, or why here's there in the first place. All he knows, he always wakes in the middle of a crime scene, conspiracy, or some apocalyptic events. Jack must piece together what new life he was woken up to with the clues around him. Before he can fit all the piece together, he is usually being hunted by some powerful convert shadow organization. As usual, somehow Jack is right in the middle of action, holding the key to everything, he just doesn't know it yet.


text:
Rev. Ted E. Huffman
The Adventures of Edward Bear
History we don't want to repeat
I think that one of the reasons that many of us in the United Church of Christ have a heightened sensitivity towards the dangers of Christian fundamentalism is that the history of our church includes a fair amount of fundamentalism. In fact, sometimes I look at some of the newer fundamentalist Christian groups in our area and think to myself, "Yup, been there. Done that." Among the predecessor denominations of the United Church of Christ is the Congregational Church, which traces its roots back to the Pilgrims and Puritans that arrived on the shores of New England. Prominent among those settlements was the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Massachusetts was established by the Puritans in 1629. They wanted to purify the church of England, however after years of persecution they opted to found a new colony and start fresh. Unlike the Pilgrims who wanted complete separation from England and who were, for the most part not well-educated, the Puritans were, for the most part educated and their enterprise was successful because of organization and planning. The Pilgrim Plymouth Colony struggled. Massachusetts Bay was successful earlier and soon experienced a population explosion that ended up it its absorbing Plymouth. John Winthrop is often credited as the founder of Massachusetts Bay Colony. He served as Governor four different times and was a strong and successful Colonial pioneer.
It is a bit of a simplification, but the colonies of Rhode Island and Connecticut both grew out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The area around modern-day Boston and Salem grew out of the efforts of Puritan and Pilgrim colonists.
The end of the 17th century was a time of unrest throughout the New England colonies. As the leaders of the church began to impose more and more theological imperatives on the colonists, England was reasserting control over the colonial government. In Boston Cotton Mather was doing daily battle with the devil, whom he believed was at work everywhere. He was convinced that the devil was aided by witches. His account of Goody Glover, the witch of Boston was widely circulated. The Rev. Samuel Parris of Salem certainly read Mather's work.
In 1692 accusations of witchcraft and possession began to arise in Salem Village. In May of that year the constable was dispatched to arrest Wilmot "Mammy" Redd of Marblehead for having "committed sundry acts of witchcraft on the bodies of Mary Wolcott and Mercy Lewis and others in Salem Village to their great hurt."
Mammy Redd was the wife of a poor fisherman and sometimes worker in the boatyards. She was old and disagreeable. By the time she was in here seventies her quarrels with a neighbor and disputes involving her butter business had inspired rumors that she was a witch. Her daughter had been married to Rev. George Burroughs, who had been identified as the "ringleader" of the witches.
After her arrest on May 28, she was taken to Salem for a preliminary examination in the home of Nathan Ingersoll on May 31. The "affected girls" whom she had never before met, promptly fell into fits. When asked what she thought ailed them, Redd said, "I cannot tell." Urged to give an opinion, she replied, "My opinion is they are in a sad condition."
She was indicted as a witch and four months later tried in Salem Town. She as not granted defense counsel. Testifying against here were Ambrose Gale, Charity Pitman and Sarah Doddy. Doddy claimed that she was unable to defecate for a month, which caused her stomach to swell and inflicted great pain.
Wilmot Redd refused to confess to being a witch. No one from Marblehead came forward at the trial to speak on her behalf. She was convicted and hanged on September 22, 1692. Seven others were executed with her. Her body was not claimed. She was probably buried in an unmarked grave her her home because the law would not allow her to be buried in consecrated ground.
The witch hysteria in New England was short lived. It suddenly ended when the wife of Massachusetts Governor William Phipps was accused. Phipps reacted swiftly in defense of his wife. The frenzy ended. Common sense returned. The bubble had been burst. An awareness of the horror of what they had done began to sink in. There were public apologies and attempts to make amends.
Time moved on. The pond near where her small house once stood now bears her name. Redd's Pond is about the only sign of the memory of the times. On October 31, 2001, Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift signed a bill pardoning Wilmot Redd along with four other victims who had been executed for witchcraft.
Mammy Redd was the only resident of Marblehead executed for witchcraft, but her story is chilling nonetheless. Fervent preaching led to a kind of mass hysteria that ended in violence and innocent victims.
Some of us are touchy about fundamentalism because we can remember where it led our forebears.
Thoughts of Mammy Redd came to my mind recently as I read an article in Wooden Boat Magazine about a re-created Herreschoff steam launch that was built at Redd's Pond Boatworks. Building boats is still practiced at Redd's Pond and traditional wooden construction and restoration is an art practiced by the craftsmen at Redd's Pond Boatworks.
At the boatworks, they have managed to keep alive the traditions of earlier centuries without preserving the mistakes of the past. They pass on their skills of traditional boatbuilding with an innovative summer school experience where students gain hands on experience covering a range of boatbuilding skills from reading a table of offsets through the final coat of pain and the launch of the boat. Each year the class constructs one boat which is sold for the cost of the materials. In the winter they construct some of the best wooden sleds and toboggans out of ash and oak slats. Their convertible sled/wagon is a classic.
Every picture of that red and white barn at the edge of the pond, however, is also a reminder that the history that unfolds at that place contains stories of violence and horror. It is a history that we must never forget.
Seriously, we never want to do that again.
Copyright (c) 2018 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!
Because I journal daily and each entry is an essay, there is a significant amount of data that builds up in my journal each year. In ordrer to facilitate searches and to make journal pages load more quickly, I am dividing my Journal into years. This new organization means that finding journal entries from previous years is a bit of a challenge. You should find the links you need in the list below.
Journal, 2017
Sept - December 2016
Jan - Sept 2016
2007- Nov 2011
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Joanne Davies of East Coast Music teaches piano to children and adults using the Simply Music teaching method.
Simply Music is a revolutionary piano teaching method based on "learn by doing" for fun & great results. For ALL AGE GROUPS – kids (from 4 years), teens, adults and seniors.
I'm amazed at how fabulous and fun my experience at ecoastmusic has been.
I am 75 yrs young now 2016,and started playing the piano 18 months ago and can now play 40 pieces of music, enrolling with East Coast Music's teacher Joanne has helped me to accomplish my long held dream and overcome my envy of anyone who could play the piano, because now with learning to play the piano it has given me a new purpose in life. When I was 12 yrs old I had the opportunity to learn to play the piano but at the time was more interested in art and sport, was good at art but useless at sport, a good spectator though, so really should have listened to my father then, so my advice to anyone is take on board all opportunities offered you will never know what you are good at until you try. So don't put off until tomorrow what can be done today.
Wish we had found East Coast Music years ago!
Our daughter currently has private singing lessons with Heidi Enchelmaier, she is a wonderful teacher that understands the right way to engage with her students to bring out the best in their vocals. We have seen a dramatic improvement with our daughter's ability and confidence. We can highly recommend Heidi. We only wished that we had found East Coast Music years ago!
After almost 40 lessons of "Simply Music" with Joanne I have noticed that 2 features of my piano playing have improved. The first is my skill with and understanding of various types of music from accompaniment to solo pieces and the second is my level of confidence and my ability to tackle new and challenging pieces. Joanne has been extremely patient with me as an adult learner and I am continuing to enjoy every minute of every lesson.
Holly has been learning the Simply Music piano method for 18mths. I have found her teacher Joanne to have a lovely, pleasant teaching manner. I like the way she encourages Holly to enjoy the music and have some fun as well as teaching her to play piano. Her progress is fast enough to motivate her to keep practising (most of the time). It's a totally different experience from the usual way of learning to play the piano.
After just a couple of weeks with the Simply Music program my daughter was confidently playing her first two songs. She was so excited by her achievement that it gave her the motivation and eagerness to learn more. Week after week, she is adding to her repertoire of songs and has also broadened her skills in composing and improvising too. I've been astonished by her progression over a short duration and would highly recommend the Simply Music program to those who would like to see their children gain and flourish a love for music.
My daughter, Ella (7 years) has experienced some learning difficulties in the school classroom and I was quite skeptical when she wanted to take on keyboard lessons . I was extremely fortunate to find Joanne and the Simply Music program. Ella has had only 14 lessons and already has a repertoire of 6 songs including contemporary, classical, blues and accompaniment styles. I am truly amazed with her commitment, enjoyment and success within the program. Thanks for bringing music into our family Jo!
It's always lots of fun!
Makayla, 8 years, says about her Simply Music piano lessons.... " It's always lots of fun and I look forward to playing with Jo every week, I just wish the lessons were longer!"
Singing lessons with Shaun are a lot of fun. I have seen great improvement in my technique, confidence and ability and I thoroughly enjoy them.
My son Liam is in his second year of receiving singing lessons from Shaun Kohlman at East Coast Music. Through their shared passion for musical theatre, Liam has benefited greatly from his lessons. Not only has his singing steadily improved, he has received guidance and support for auditions and performances. As Shaun is a currently performing himself, he is a role model for Liam. I strongly recommend Shaun as a teacher.
Shaun Kohlman is a truly talented and gifted teacher who is absolutely passionate his craft. He relates so well to his students and brings out the best in them all. My son's vocals have improved so much and his self-confidence has soared, thanks to Shaun.


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The Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupe thunders into Singapore
With 639hp and a price tag of S$751,888 with COE, the AMG GT 4-door 63 S is the brawniest and car to wear the three-pointed star in Singapore
Photos: Jonathan Lim and Mercedes-Benz
Just a month after premiering in Southeast Asia, the Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupe has gone on sale here.
Two variants are available, starting with the "base" model GT 53 (the silver car) which is priced at S$556,888. The headline-grabber though, is the GT 63 S (the blue car), which costs S$751,888. Both prices are before options and inclusive of Certificate of Entitlement.
We've already delved deep into the car's technical details at its regional launch at Sepang Circuit in Malaysia, which you can check out at the link below.
READ MORE: An in-depth look at the Mercedes-AMG GT-4-Door
For now though, here's a brief recap of the AMG GT 4-Door's main highlights:
It may look like an AMG GT, but it's unrelated
Despite the dramatic styling, the GT 4-Door actually shares more in common with the E-Class and CLS, using the same platform. This explains the GT 4-Door's size and bulk; at 5,054mm long and 1,953mm wide, and weighing comfortably upwards of two tonnes, it's both larger and heftier than both its platform siblings.
Its performance is explosive
There's precious little that will be able to keep up with a GT 63 S 4-Door Coupe. It's the most powerful four-door Mercedes ever made; the outputs of the familiar AMG 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 have been bumped up to 639hp and monstrous 900Nm of torque, and will demolish the century sprint in an almost physics-warping 3.2 seconds. That's as quick as a lightweight, track-focused Porsche GT3 RS. Top speed is 315km/h.
The GT 53 is no slouch either. It's the second Mercedes in Singapore to utilise the company's new M256 six-cylinder engine, which we first experienced in the CLS 53. It's a mild hybrid drivetrain that pairs a 435hp 3.0-litre turbocharged straight-six with an integrated starter-alternator in between the engine and transmission that provides up to 22hp and 250Nm of electric assistance. This one will do 0-100km/h in 4.5 seconds and top out at 285km/h.
There's 12 screens in the interior
Nope, that's not a typo. Like the rest of the Mercedes range, the GT 4-Door features the same Widescreen Cockpit layout, with twin 12.3-inch displays being the centrepiece of the dashboard.
Additionally, there are two AMG switches on the steering wheel, as well as eight display buttons on the centre console – all with their own individual TFT displays -to configure the car's drive mode and multitude of dynamic parameters.
It's plenty spacious in the back
This may be the closest anyone's ever come to a four-door supercar, but that doesn't mean the GT 4-Door suffers compromises to practicality. The car comes default with a three-seat bench in the rear, where legroom and headroom are more than adequate even for six-footers.
The rear seats also fold down in a 40:20:40 ratio, to expand the boot space from an already reasonable 456-litres to 1324-litres, with the loading of bulky items made easier by the wide-opening rear hatch (although the extremely high load lip would present its own problems).
Available as a S$13,400 option is a "High-Class" rear seat package, which features two individual rear seats and an integrated console between them, which can be used to control the infotainment, various interior functions, and accessing the car's dynamic data via an AMG menu.
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Jon Lim
CarBuyer's latest addition is its fourth historical Jonathan. Old-fashioned in all but body, he thinks car design peaked in the '90s. He also strongly believes any car can be a race car if you have a sufficient lack of self-preservation, which explains why he nearly flipped a Chinese van while racing it.


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So You've Shared a Link? This Is How Long It Will Stay Relevant
Say you found a great article on the Internet. Which network should you share it on?
Dino Grandoni
Say you found a great article on the Internet. Say it's this slideshow of a kitten befriending a baby otter. You want to share it online--you know your friends and followers in the various social network you're a part of will love it. But which network should you share it on?
This week, URL shortening site Bit.ly crunched the numbers from their database, offering insight into how long a link stays relevant when shared through various media. For their analysis, they coined a metric called "half life," borrowing a term from physics. It's the amount of time a link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after its peak. For example, the half life for that baby animal article, which was originally shared by Stylist magazine on Facebook, was 70 minutes, meaning that the link received about half the click it will ever get within the first hour of its posting.
Bit.ly analysis click data for a thousand popular links shortened through their website and found remarkable consistency in how long bitly stay relevant on various sites. The company's blog summarizes the results in the chart below. The half life of a Twitter link is the shortest, at two hours and 48 minutes, yet Twitter links tend to garner the most traffic. Links shared on Facebook have on average a half life 24 minutes longer. Similarly, "direct links--those shared through email or instant messaging--have an only slightly longer half life of three hours and 24 minutes. The three types of links share the same basic distribution, reaching their peak number of clicks shortly after being posted and gradually tapering off in clicks from there.
Links shared on YouTube, though, are an exception. They set relevant for significantly longer than links on other sites, with a half life of nearly seven and a half hours. The aggregate average half life of a Bit.ly link is 3 hours.
So which social network gets the most proverbial bang for the buck? As bitly's Hilary Mason told Mashable, it's Twitter.
"You could say that Twitter is the best way to post something if you want people to see it quickly," Mason says. "But one platform isn't necessarily better than another. We're just showing that the platforms have different dynamics."
Bit.ly concluded the content behind the link is much stronger determinant of how many clicks it will receive and for how long it will be clicked. The Washington Post's breaking news story that a 5.8 magnitude earthquake hit the East Coast, for example, had an order of magnitude more clicks per minute than that baby animal post, but also, given how quickly the story was developing, had a significantly shorter half life of five minutes.