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50 House Democrats signed a letter to President Biden in March urging a significantly reduced Pentagon budget.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Minnesota, where former police officer Derek Chauvin pleaded guilty Wednesday to a...

Democratic socialist India Walton’s groundbreaking victory in the mayoral primary of Buffalo, New York, was destined to earn the ire of the local powers that be. Longtime Democratic fixture and top ally of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Byron Brown, was caught off guard and ousted in a startling upheaval, and Walton will now run unopposed by any Republican candidate in November.

Senate Budget chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) sharply criticized the country’s abnormally large defense budget and the “fraud” and “misconduct” of defense contractors in a hearing on Pentagon spending on Wednesday. The Pentagon has a budget of a whopping $740 billion this year. That makes up more than half of the discretionary spending authorized by Congress. This figure would be a lot on its own, but, as Sanders pointed out in the hearing, the Department of Defense is often wasteful in its spending and often racks up cost overruns despite a staggeringly large budget.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: As we move on to what’s happening in Congress today, this is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War...

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Here in New York at a vigil...

Mexico City, Mexico — Singing songs of revolution and chanting slogans in support of the Cuban Revolution, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City on Saturday, July 17, in an expression of solidarity with the Cuban people and their right to self-determination. The jubilant demonstration, organized by both Mexicans and Cubans, came as Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel grapples with a destabilization effort by right-wing opponents and U.S. politicians seeking to topple his government. “We believe that solidarity is the essence of humanity,” Francisco Rojas from Va por Cuba Mexico, one of the organizations that organized the demonstration together with Association of Cuban Residents in Mexico and the Mexican Movement in Solidarity with Cuba, told Truthout. A concerted misinformation campaign has been put into action by opponents of the Cuban Revolution after genuine protests broke out in Cuba earlier this month, with people taking to the streets in various cities to express their discontent with the government over real issues such as food shortages and electricity blackouts.

In July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted a large bloom of harmful algae would coat western Lake Eerie this year.NOAA In early July, a bloom of toxic blue-green algae forced...

Prisons & Policing Jailers Tortured and Murdered Marvin Scott III, Family Says After Viewing Video Politics & Elections A New Wave of Jim Crow Laws Is Here. Here’s What You Need to Know. Politics & Elections Facebook Board Announces Trump Remains Banned. Trump Starts His Own “Platform.” Immigration Biden’s U-Turn on Refugees Aligns With Voter Support for Pro-Immigrant Policies Economy & Labor Amazon Is Dictating Personal Hygiene, Nail Length of Contract Drivers Politics & Elections Judge Says DOJ Memo on Barr’s Decision Not to Charge Trump Must Be Released As the nation grapples with fighting for racial justice and against police-perpetrated murders of Black Americans, Republicans have evidently found a different cause worth fighting for: making racist, seemingly unprompted defenses of slavery. On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said that he doesn’t believe that 1619, the year that enslaved Africans first arrived in the U.S., is an important date in history. People have “exotic notions” about important points in U.S. history, and 1619 isn’t one of them, McConnell said. “I just simply don’t think [racism is] part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about,” McConnell continued, speaking at the University of Louisville. McConnell has gone on a tirade against The New York Times’s 1619 Project about slavery in the U.S. and Democrats’ anti-racism agenda — though anti-anti-racism, as commentators have pointed out, is simply just racism. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who headed the 1619 Project on slavery that has Republicans up in arms, spoke on CNN about McConnell’s comments. “This is not about the facts of history — it’s about trying to prohibit the teaching of ideas they don’t like,” she said. Indeed, many Republicans have long embraced racism but have been emboldened by former President Donald Trump’s style of being openly and brazenly so — to the point that some political journalists have noted that the GOP wants to be called racist so that they can play the victim and claim to be silenced by anti-racists. Perhaps that’s why Tennessee Republican State Rep. Justin Lafferty on Tuesday suggested that the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted enslaved people as less than one whole person in population counts, was actually a good thing because it helped to end slavery. But it didn’t; it only further “sanctioned slavery more decidedly than any previous action,” as historian Staughton Lynd writes. Or maybe it’s why Colorado Republican State Rep. Ron Hanks also defended the Three-Fifths Compromise last month, saying that it “was not impugning anybody’s humanity” to count an enslaved person as less than one human being. Republicans evidently don’t believe that it was just some elements of slavery that were positive, however; Louisiana Republican State Rep. Ray Garofalo Jr. last week said that schools should teach “the good” of slavery alongside the bad. “If you are having a discussion on whatever the case may be, on slavery, then you can talk about everything dealing with slavery: the good, the bad, the ugly,” Garofalo said. There is, of course, no “good” to slavery, and it’s abhorrently racist to suggest as such. Garofalo later retracted his statement, but only after Democrats circulated a video of him speaking on the “good” of slavery that now has nearly a million views. Regardless of the GOP’s intentions, it’s no coincidence that they are raging an attack on anti-racism just as rallies and protests for Black lives have swept the country. Though the GOP’s overt defenses of slavery all happened in recent weeks, the right has been waging racist attacks prominently in the past year. For months, the right has been railing against critical race theory — scholarly work with the goal of dismantling oppression and white supremacy — despite lacking a clear understanding of what it is. They are claiming that racism has been eradicated in the U.S. even as Black Americans face death at the hands of the state simply for walking down the street or while sleeping in their homes. It’s evidently not enough for the GOP that racism is alive and well in the U.S. — the party seems to be operating on a mandate to enshrine racism in the nation forever — and normalizing defenses of slavery appear to be part of that strategy. Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

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