Global

On June 12, 2020, Matt Taibbi published a rather confrontational article entitled “The American Press is Destroying Itself.” In it, he laments that “the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres, who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.” Taibbi cites a litany of recent “newsroom revolts,” which signal, in his mind, an editorial crisis of political correctness, where journalists have been beaten into submission by the new leftist brigade of groupthink.

To be sure, Taibbi’s concerns are not entirely misplaced. Anyone who’s spent a day on Twitter knows it poses a uniquely high reputational cost for publishing anything even mildly controversial. But Taibbi talks in existential terms. He presents a grand narrative in which the left is cannibalizing itself, supplanting “traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance” and “free inquiry” with “shaming, threats, and intimidation” of those who deviate from the accepted view.

The new film, The Vow From Hiroshima, tells the story of Setsuko Thurlow who was a school girl in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the first nuclear bomb. She was pulled out of a building in which 27 of her classmates burned to death. She witnessed the gruesome injuries and agonizing suffering and indecent mass burial of many loved ones, acquaintances, and strangers.

Setsuko was from a well-off family and says she had to work at overcoming her prejudices against the poor, yet she overcame an amazing number of things. Her school was a Christian school, and she credits as influence on her life the advice of a teacher to engage in activism as the way to be Christian. That a predominantly Christian nation had just destroyed her predominantly non-Christian city didn’t matter. That Westerners had done it didn’t matter either. She fell in love with a Canadian man who lived and worked in Japan.

The U.S. Congress has 100 Senators and 435 House Members. Out of the full 535, there are 20 thus far who have made themselves sponsor or cosponsor of a resolution to do what is most badly needed, move major amounts of money out of wars and war preparations and into human and environmental needs.

There are members of both houses who have arranged for there to be votes in the coming weeks on moving a mere 10% of the Pentagon budget to useful things. One way in which we can help them grasp how powerfully we demand yes votes on this is to start celebrating the 20 who have put a more serious proposal on the table. These are the 20 to thank and support and further encourage:

New documents obtained by Axios and Public Citizen suggest that the National Institute of Health (NIH) owns half the key patent for Moderna’s controversial

Change. Now.

I get that, and understand the symbolism of packed heat. A gun says: We mean business. But that symbolism stops as soon as the trigger is pulled. What the armed protesters could wind up with is a bitter present-day civil war and the blood-stained illusion of change.

The country — and the world — have been in the midst of a social uprising for the past month and a half, ignited by the brutal police killing of George Floyd. The global protests against structural racism have been racially diverse and, for the most part (and except for the police) unarmed. But that’s shifting. Armed black protesters have begun making their presence known. So have armed white counterprotesters.

The Kateri Peace Conference, which has been held in upstate New York for 22 years, will be held online this year, allowing anyone in the world who can get online to attend and hear from and speak with such wonderful U.S. peace activists — (Hey, World, did you know the U.S. had peace activists?) — as Steve Breyman, John Amidon, Maureen Beillargeon Aumand, Medea Benjamin, Kristin Christman, Lawrence Davidson, Stephen Downs, James Jennings, Kathy Kelly, Jim Merkel, Ed Kinane, Nick Mottern, Rev. Felicia Parazaider, Bill Quigley, David Swanson, Ann Wright, and Chris Antal.

Yes, my name is in that list. No, I am not suggesting that I am wonderful. But I have had the privilege to speak at the Kateri Peace Conference in-person in 2012 and 2014, and was scheduled to be there again in 2020 until the Trumpandemic changed everyone’s routines.

Efforts to scrub the CHOP continue and protesters continue to get arrested.

Ever since the CHOP became the Seattle Police's Autonomous Zone or SPAZ, protesters have continued to protest at Broadway and Pine. Some have learned the body cameras of police are either off or out of battery, causing outrage within crowds, including taxpayers objecting to paying for cameras not being used. Homeless persons have maintained their ground at Broadway and Pine, resting there after losing their tent homes and most property to the sweeping of CHOP.

For days now, at least 2/3 of officers have been observed not wearing masks despite both local and state law, much to the annoyance of protesters demanding to know why police enforce laws when they don't follow laws.

The visceral reaction to the murder of George Floyd unleashed deep personal reflection about racism, social justice, and fairness, and launched a powerful, broad based social movement.

The pursuit of justice, fairness, and the shape of our common futures encompasses but also transcends the questions of racism and raises questions about the nature of our civilization.

In this way, the Covid-19 pandemic is understood to fall disproportionally upon people of color, on the poor, on the millions imprisoned in the American gulag, upon undocumented migrants and their families, on residents of nursing homes and longterm care facilities. A substantial portion of our population is placed at risk by their everyday lives.

There is a clear convergence in our minds and in our politics that failures of justice and fairness are driven by root inequalities and inequities created and maintained by our social, economic and political system that are experienced and understood in terms of failures of social and ecological justice.