This article first appears on Socialistworker.org

On December 7, the Columbus Police Department (CPD) murdered yet another Black person: 16-year-old Julius Ervin Tate Jr.

An undercover SWAT team arranged for one of its agents, posing as a potential buyer, to meet Tate to for a sale of merchandise for cash that had been arranged online. Columbus police are carrying out a series of such sting operations involving buy, sell and trade transactions, in which they anticipate an armed robbery to occur.

Police claim Tate pulled a gun on the agent to rob him, prompting another officer, Eric Richard, to shoot Tate, according to CPD spokesperson Chantal Boxill. The CPD also claims Tate’s gun was recovered at the scene.

On March 7 at 3:15 PM, 25 members of the Ohio State University community including undergraduate and graduate students, staff , and alumni entered Bricker Hall and began a sit-in outside of President Drake’s office to demand OSU end its business relationship with the fast food giant Wendy’s. The sit-in is the latest escalation of the years-long, student-led “Boot the Braids” campaign to remove Wendy’s from campus during which students have fasted, and marched, in protest of the fact that Wendy’s refuses to protect farmworker human rights by joining the CIW’s Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program.

Some people are attached to the idea that the Democratic National Committee will “rig” the presidential nomination against Bernie Sanders. The meme encourages the belief that the Bernie 2020 campaign is futile because of powerful corporate Democrats. But such fatalism should be discarded.

As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Of course top Democratic Party officials don’t intend to give up control. It has to be taken from them. And the conditions for doing that are now more favorable than ever.

The effects of mobilized demands for change in the Democratic presidential nominating process have been major -- not out of the goodness of any power broker’s heart, but because progressives have organized effectively during the last two years.

U.S. military spending eight years ago was at $1.2 trillion per year, when one added in the nukes in the Energy Department, the Homeland Security Department, the CIA, interest on debt, veterans’ care, etc.

Yemen:

How the House voted, Feb. 13, 2019, 248-177, to end it: roll call.