Global

At a time when superhero and other action flicks explode and careen across our screens, with its decidedly indie sensibility, Max Walker-Silverman’s little gem A Love Song goes against the blockbuster grain. It is as gentle as Marvel Universe flicks are violent. With its simple, naturalistic style tinged by sly humor, A Love Song is a motion picture paean to the human condition, filled with yearning, grief, loss and the quest for meaningful (if not necessarily long-lasting) connection and love.

In a blog entry, reflecting on the G20 Foreign Ministers' meeting in Bali, Indonesia, on 7-8 July, the High Representative of the European Union, Josep Borrell, seems to have accepted the painful truth that the West is losing what he termed "the global battle of narratives".

"The global battle of narratives is in full swing and, for now, we are not winning," Borrell admitted. The solution: "As the EU, we have to engage further to refute Russian lies and war propaganda," the EU's top diplomat added.

Borrell's piece is a testimony to the very erroneous logic that led to the so-called 'battle of narratives' to be lost in the first place.

You may find this shocking, but a little over a decade ago I spent a weekend learning how to shoot a handgun — under the auspices of the NRA. I wound up earning myself an NRA “personal protection in the home” certificate.

For years I have pondered writing about this weekend, but never found quite the right context for doing so. But the recent decision of the Supreme Court in the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen — declaring that the possession of pistols in public is a constitutional right — has pulled that weekend up from my memory (as well as from the pages of the journal entry I made afterwards, on May 2, 2011).

The ruling, as Karrie Jacobs has written, intensifies the danger we all face simply by being out in public, noting that in its wake “our sense of security in crowded places may be more permanently damaged than it was by the pandemic.

She adds: “It advances a perception of the United States as a dystopian nation where day-to-day survival depends on being armed.”

We hear from BRIAN STEINBERG about Michigan’s amazing statewide referenda to win a Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing a woman’s right to control her body, and to make it easier for ordinary citizens to exercise their democratic rights. 

 An astonishing 750,000+ signatures have been gathered, guaranteeing a sea change in Michigan politics that should be matched throughout the country if the progressive movement was actually awake.

JOEL SEGAL, WILLIE FLEMING, RAY MCCLENDON and ROBERT WILSON then fill us in on the all-important grassroots/relational organizing in North Carolina and Georgia, two states that would swing the entire nation.

Florida’s JIM LANGFORD joins Oregon’s LAWRENCE TAYLOR & SHERRY HEALY to update the Progressive Democrats of America’s work to democratize the Democratic Party.

TATANKA BRICCA then updates us on California’s campaign for a Green New Deal and the desperate attempt to get the horrendous Diablo Canyon shut before it unleashes an apocalyptic cloud killing millions of people and permanently destroying the American ecology and economy.

The collapse of the short-lived Israeli government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid validates the argument that the political crisis in Israel was not entirely instigated and sustained by former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Even if a purportedly centrist or even leftist prime minister finds himself at the helm of the government, outcomes will not change when the Knesset—in fact, most of the country—is governed by a militaristic, chauvinistic, and colonial mindset.

Bennett's coalition government consisted of eight parties, welding together arguably one of the oddest coalitions in the tumultuous history of Israeli politics. The mishmash cabinet included far right and right groups like Yamina, Yisrael Beiteinu and New Hope, along with centrist Yesh Atid and Blue and White, leftist Meretz and even an Arab party, the United Arab List (Ra'am). The coalition also had representatives from the Labor Party, once the dominant Israeli political camp, now almost completely irrelevant.

The G7 summit in Elmau, Germany, June 26-28, and the NATO summit in Madrid, Spain, two days later, were practically useless in terms of providing actual solutions to ongoing global crises – the war in Ukraine, the looming famines, climate change and more. But the two events were important, nonetheless, as they provide a stark example of the impotence of the West, amid the rapidly changing global dynamics.

As he begins to campaign for the White House, Gov. Gavin Newsom is toying with extending operations at two of the world’s most dangerous atomic reactors, sited at the aptly named Diablo Canyon, nine miles west of San Luis Obispo.

The coastal nukes are surrounded by a dozen earthquake faults, just 45 miles from the San Andreas, whose eruption could send an apocalyptic radioactive cloud into Los Angeles County, just 180 miles downwind. Potential human casualties could far exceed ten millon. The economic and ecological devastation would be incalculable.

Newsom’s emergence as a potential atomic triggerman has been tortured and tragic. Long marketed as an environmentalist, Newsom has fiercely criticized the state’s largest utility, for good reason.

Since 2000, Pacific Gas & Electric has twice fled to bankruptcy.

In 2010, PG&E’S under maintained gas lines caused a San Bruno explosion that killed eight people while burning 19 homes. Its grid mismanagement ignited huge fires that devastated northern California forests while killing more than 80 people, incinerating the entire town of Paradise (which Trump famously mis-labelled “Pleasure”).

#101 Gree-Gree

We start the GREE-GREE gathering #101 with a remarkable report from DEEPA DRIVER on the torturous treatment of JULIAN ASSANGE. Reporting from London, Deepa gives us a brilliant history of Wikileaks and its astounding impact on the world of internet journalism. She also fills us in on the horrific treatment being criminally imposed on its founder and the courageous willingness to bust official secrecy that he represents.

Is an insurrection percolating in the MAGA universe? A civil war?

One thing I notice as I read the growing warnings that this is the case is the assumption that suddenly the USA has become a divided nation, a splintered democracy, when, in point of fact, it has always been deeply – and for much of its history, good God, legally – divided.

Indeed, Jim Crow America was the prime model for a certain would-be European dictator.

You may have heard of Adolf Hitler. In Mein Kampf, the biography he wrote before he came to power, he “praises America,” according to Alex Ross, writing in the New Yorker, “as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship,”

WASHINGTON -
Declaring that “President Biden has been neither bold nor inspiring” and “his prospects for winning re-election appear to be bleak,” the national activist organization RootsAction announced today that it will launch a campaign to prevent his renomination.

With an email list of 1.2 million current supporters in the United States, RootsAction issued a statement saying it is committed to nationwide organizing to prevent Biden from being the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee for president. This is the first time that a large national organization has announced such plans.

“In 2024 the United States will face the dual imperatives of preventing a Republican takeover of the White House and advancing a truly progressive agenda,” RootsAction said in a statement. With so much at stake, renominating Biden “would be a tragic mistake.” The statement concluded: “A president is not his party’s king, and he has no automatic right to renomination. Joe Biden should not seek it. If he does, he will have a fight on his hands.”

The full RootsAction statement announcing the #DontRunJoe campaign is posted at DontRunJoe.org.