Colin Kaepernick wins ruling to continue collusion case against NFL

from THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

In a blow to the NFL, an arbitrator has ruled that Colin Kaepernick’s collusion case against the league can proceed because he has produced sufficient evidence that the league and its owners colluded to keep the free-agent quarterback off the field.

The ruling by Stephen Burbank, an arbitrator who was appointed by the league and the NFL Players Association, said Kaepernick’s lawyers had unearthed enough evidence in the past year for the case to proceed to a full hearing. After months of depositions and document searches, the lawyers will be able to question league officials, owners and others in trial-like format.

The decision was revealed by Mark Geragos, Kaepernick’s lawyer.

Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL in October accusing the owners of conspiring to not offer him a new contract because of his decision to protest during the playing of the U.S. national anthem. In August, 2016, Kaepernick was the first player to kneel during the anthem to raise awareness of police brutality and other forms of social injustice.

Dozens of other players ended up joining Kaepernick, creating a schism among fans, sponsors and owners. Last season, U.S. President Donald Trump attacked the league for not penalizing players who did not stand for the anthem. In May, the league tightened its policy to force players to stand for the anthem, instead of just suggesting they stand.



Since he became a free agent in March, 2017, Kaepernick has not been invited to work out for a team nor been offered a new contract. Some team officials have quietly suggested Kaepernick’s best years were behind him, while others said they did not want to sign him to play as a backup. Kaepernick, who is now 30, played six years with the San Francisco 49ers and led them to an appearance in the Super Bowl in his second season.

John Elway, the former Denver Broncos quarterback who is now general manager of the team, muddied the waters further when he told the NFL Network he did not sign Kaepernick because the player had once been offered a contract and turned it down.

Elway, though, did not say he offered Kaepernick a contract in 2016, when he was set to receive US$12-million from the 49ers and months before he first protested. Kaepernick said no because he would have had to take a pay cut to join the Broncos. Elway said he did not sign Kaepernick when he became a free agent the following year even though he might have accepted far less than US$12-million to play in Denver.



Elway did not say explicitly he shunned Kaepernick because he protested during the anthem. But Kaepernick’s lawyers contend the quarterback was still talented enough to play in the NFL and that he was willing to be a backup if needed. The NFL has shunned Kaepernick because of his political views and his decision to protest during the anthem, his legal team has argued.

During discovery, Kaepernick’s lawyers have requested hundreds of pages of documents from the league office and teams. It has also questioned, in closed-door sessions, owners of the Dallas Cowboys, the New England Patriots and several other teams, as well as league officials including commissioner Roger Goodell and Troy Vincent, the executive vice-president of football operations.

If Kaepernick wins his case in a full hearing, he would be eligible to receive the money he might have received if he were signed as a free agent. The damages would be tripled.

Eric Reid, who was one of the first players to protest with Kaepernick when both of them were on the 49ers, has also filed a grievance against the league. Reid became a free agent this off-season and although considered one of the best safeties on the market, has not yet been signed by a team.

NYC’s New Generation of Militant Activists — And The Media Blackout That Has Followed

from Vienna Rye on Medium

Over the past year and a half, New York City has seen the growth of an organized, militant grassroots movement, lead by young activists of color and completely ignored by the mainstream media. Gaining steam a few months after the Ferguson Uprising in 2014, tens of thousands of New Yorkers began taking to the streets to demand justice for Mike Brown and Eric Garner. Now, seventeen months later, a coordinated network has formed, shutting down the streets on a weekly basis in every single borough. If one only listens to the reporting by mainstream media, it would paint a naive, racist depiction of a movement that has seemingly “died down.” However, the reactionary behavior of the establishment and the NYPD, one of the largest police forces in the amerikkkan empire, reveals an entirely different narrative.

Activists on the ground in NYC are facing heavy state repression, including the targeting of organizers’ cell phones during protests, phone surveillance, false arrests, and political trials dragging on for months in the New York City court system. If this movement wasn’t a threat, if our organizing didn’t have a chance at the people’s collective liberation — then why are we flanked every single week by one of the nation’s largest counter-terrorist police units? Why are our communications being monitored and controlled by military grade surveillance technology? Why is the NYPD legal unit prosecuting violation charges, using resources to take summons tickets to lengthy political trials? When put into this context, the state and the establishment admit to a very different fight than they are letting on to the general public.

Groups such as Millions March NYC, Grand Central Crew: NYC Shut It Down, Cop Watch Patrol Unit, Peoples Power Assemblies, ICEFREENYC, Why Accountability, NYers Against Bratton, Justice for Akai Gurley, Afrikans Helping Afrikans, Black Lives Matter NYC, and the Campaign to Shut Down Rikers have organized major mobilizations and direct actions for a year and a half, bringing thousands of protesters to the streets on a consistent basis. These activists are young, radical and militant, with many of the aforementioned groups connected in large and expanding coalitions. Circumventing traditional respectability politics, themes of Fuck the Police are embraced, with organizing taking place on encrypted phone threads, allowing for quick and coordinated responses to push our revolutionary agenda against the racist, capitalist state intent on silencing us. We are young, we are revolutionary, we are absolutely not afraid — and the state wants more than anything to silence our momentum and kill this movement.



Major solidarity marches with Baltimore, Cleveland, Charleston, Ferguson, Minneapolis, Texas and San Francisco have shut down the streets with thousands of people, often organized in less than 36 hours. #PeoplesMonday has shut down the streets across all 5 boroughs every single Monday for over a year. Solidarity ties have strengthened between Black liberation and Palestinian liberation groups, building the groundwork for what could grow into an international proletarian struggle. Direct actions have targeted and disrupted Mayor de Blasio, Bronx DA Robert Johnson, DOC Commissioner Ponte, Donald Trump, and numerous local city government and jail officials. A newly formed grassroots coalition, The Campaign to Shut Down Rikers, has built momentum to shutter NYC’s most notorious jail complex, with coffins delivered to Mayor de Blasio at City Hall and to the home of Bronx DA Robert Johnson for Kalief Browder. Just this past November, DOC Commissioner Ponte was disrupted at a Board of Corrections Hearing, and the proposed harmful reforms were revoked shortly after. Justice for Akai Gurley and family organizing has led to the first conviction of an NYPD officer in 10 years. Typically there are multiple arrests every single week of lead organizers fighting back in the streets, and numerous trial dates and civil litigations are currently taking place.

The mainstream media has ignored all of the above for almost a year and a half. This is certainly not an accident — rather it is a strong indication to the extent of the fear on the side of the establishment. All we have as activists to fight back are our voices and our bodies. When we are then subsequently being silenced in the media and locked up by the counter-terrorist NYPD police unit — evidently, both our voices and our bodies are considered a high threat by those maintaining the status quo. To put it simply, clearly we are a threat of becoming free.

As state repression and racial tensions continue escalating locally and nationally, the stakes are too high for the media to exist as a deceptive “neutral” apparatus. Protesters today are being arrested for “walking on the sidewalk”, while demanding justice for a black man who was killed standing on the sidewalk. This is the amerikkka we are in today, and this was the amerikkka we were in 400 years ago when our country was built on the genocide of Indigenous people and enslavement of Black people. It is time to make the tough decisions, publish the uncomfortable truths, and make the radical choice of oppression or liberation. There is an active genocide happening in our backyard and all over the world of people of color and poor people. The united states of amerikkka has become one of the largest open air slave camps in the history of mankind, with over 2 million people in cages and 7 million under correctional control, backed by its imperialist allies waging exploitive wars and massacres abroad. The only ecological system that sustains us with life, the Earth itself, is imminently collapsing under the white supremacist, capitalist, hetero-patriarchy. The civilization built by the west, built by the white man — is now threatening the very survival of humanity, and with it, all forms of life on the planet. It is long past the time to face the truth. If we are to survive, the distinctions have to be made, the sides have to be chosen, and the fight has to be picked up immediately. Otherwise, only history will live to tell the truth, and the blood will be on your hands.

Which narrative will our civilization survive to tell?

The next time someone says ‘all lives matter,’ (in response to #BlackLivesMatter) show them these 5 paragraphs

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from Fusion:

Earlier this week, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley got booed when, speaking at the Netroots Nation conference, he responded to a group of #BlackLivesMatter activists by telling them that “all lives matter.” He was later forced to apologize.

O’Malley isn’t the first person to fail to understand why “all lives matter” is a tone-deaf rallying cry for a national politician in 2015. Hillary Clinton did the same thing earlier this year, though she has since corrected herself. And lots of white people have expressed confusion about why it’s controversial to broaden the #BlackLivesMatter movement to include people of all races.

The best explanation we’ve seen so far comes from Reddit, of all places. Earlier this week, in an “Explain Like I’m 5″ thread, user GeekAesthete explained, clearly and succinctly, why changing #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter is an act of erasure that makes lots of people cringe.

GeekAesthete explains:

Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don’t get any. So you say “I should get my fair share.” And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, “everyone should get their fair share.” Now, that’s a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad’s smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn’t solve the problem that you still haven’t gotten any!

The problem is that the statement “I should get my fair share” had an implicit “too” at the end: “I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else.” But your dad’s response treated your statement as though you meant “only I should get my fair share”, which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that “everyone should get their fair share,” while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.

That’s the situation of the “black lives matter” movement. Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society.

The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn’t work that way. You see the film Nightcrawler? You know the part where Renee Russo tells Jake Gyllenhal that she doesn’t want footage of a black or latino person dying, she wants news stories about affluent white people being killed? That’s not made up out of whole cloth — there is a news bias toward stories that the majority of the audience (who are white) can identify with. So when a young black man gets killed (prior to the recent police shootings), it’s generally not considered “news”, while a middle-aged white woman being killed is treated as news. And to a large degree, that is accurate — young black men are killed in significantly disproportionate numbers, which is why we don’t treat it as anything new. But the result is that, societally, we don’t pay as much attention to certain people’s deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don’t treat all lives as though they matter equally.

Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase “black lives matter” also has an implicit “too” at the end: it’s saying that black lives should also matter. But responding to this by saying “all lives matter” is willfully going back to ignoring the problem. It’s a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it means “only black lives matter,” when that is obviously not the case. And so saying “all lives matter” as a direct response to “black lives matter” is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.

Yep, there you go. Bookmark it, print it out, give it to your friends.

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thanks, Insideplaya