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In that “the show must go on” spirit, live theater is returning to Los Angeles’ stages. On what used to be its adjoining parking lot, The Fountain Theatre has built an impressive Outdoor Stage, an open air, socially distanced 99-seater. So, to reverse Joni Mitchell’s admonishment in “Big Yellow Taxi”: “They paved a parking lot, And put up a playhouse.” Along with the excitement of seeing old familiar faces who’d survived the plague year-plus, your humble scribe looked forward to reviewing his first play, in person, in about 15 months.

"Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person." -- Anonymous

The infamous decision of the NeoConservative, pro-corporate, US Supreme Court in their infamous “Citizens United” decision in 2010 has further strengthened the already powerful and over-privileged status of the corruptible, purely profit-mitivated, multinational corporations that control most everything in the United States. The 5-4 decision has made into law the absurd notion that corporations deserve the same rights as individual human citizens.

Cleveland has been spiraling downward. It’s one of the poorest cities in the country, beset by worsening violent crime, poverty and decaying infrastructure. Now, 42 years after the end of his first term as mayor, Dennis Kucinich is ready for his second.

Kucinich won a race for mayor of Cleveland at age 31 and promptly infuriated the power structure, which could not accept his insistence that the city’s electric utility should remain under public control. Mayor Kucinich challenged and mocked the greed and anti-democratic zeal of the banks that drove the city into bankruptcy when he refused to accede to the corrupt demands that the Municipal Light Plant be sold off. After defeating a recall campaign in 1978, he lost a bid for re-election the next year -- but left an enduring legacy.

On May 25, famous American actor, Mark Ruffalo, tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza.

 “I have reflected and wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’,” Ruffalo wrote, adding, “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify anti-Semitism, here and abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”

 But were Ruffalo’s earlier assessments, indeed, “not accurate, inflammatory and disrespectful”? And does equating Israel’s war on besieged, impoverished Gaza with genocide fit into the classification of ‘hyperbole’?

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is as much American as he is Israeli. While other Israeli leaders have made their strong relationship with Washington a cornerstone in their politics, Netanyahu’s political style was essentially American from the start. 

Netanyahu spent many of his formative years in the United States. He lived in Philadelphia as a child, graduated from Cheltenham High School and earned a degree in Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. He then opted to live in the US, not Israel, when he joined the Boston Consulting Group.

“The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie.”

I offer these words of Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose 2019 essay is part of the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” to the Heritage Foundation and the horde of Republican politicians currently trying to update the look and feel of American racism (a.k.a., “the lie”), to make it, you know, respectable and politically correct, so that it fits seamlessly into the mores of the 21st century.

Ballots to restructure along professional/democratic lines from the New Day Pacifica movement began being distributed June 7, 2021. 

If the Pacifica Network does not remake itself into something workable, its relevance and survival are doubtful.  

With its treasured history and powerful broadcast signals in America’s biggest media markets, the Pacifica Network should be a core electronic flagship for America’s vital pro-democracy movements.  

Instead:

* FOE Pacifica has chased away all but a tiny, tenuous audience;

* It’s in a deep financial abyss;

* Its management, and many of its most crucial meetings, are profoundly dysfunctional; 

* Its recent KPFK-Los Angeles fundraiser was a major disaster, portending even deeper disarray;

* For years FOE Pacifica has failed to produce a passable audit, costing the network millions; 

No matter what happens at Wednesday's summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin in Geneva, a grim reality is that Democratic Party leaders have already hobbled its potential to move the world away from the worsening dangers of nuclear war. After nearly five years of straining to depict Donald Trump as some kind of Russian agent—a depiction that squandered vast quantities of messaging without electoral benefits—most Democrats in Congress are now locked into a modern Cold War mentality that endangers human survival.

In early May of 2021, the Department of Justice released 10 pages of their FBI file on former Nirvana singer-songwriter Kurt Cobain. Since the rock icon’s death in 1994, mainstream media has mostly repeated police statements that Cobain killed himself with a shotgun. FBI statements and a mass of accumulated evidence suggest that they purposely avoided looking into the radical activist musician’s death due to U.S. intelligence involvement.

Cobain’s Radical Left Politics

One of the reasons the FBI may have had for participating in and/or covering up Kurt Cobain’s murder is their history of targeting political leftists. In 1971, activists broke into an FBI office and revealed its Counter-Intelligence Program (Cointelpro), which started in the 1950s and targeted anti-war and Civil Rights activists.

We are led to believe that history is being made in Israel following the formation of an ideologically diverse government coalition which, for the first time, includes an Arab party, Ra’am, or the United Arab List.

If we are to accept this logic, the leader of Ra’am, Mansour Abbas, is a mover and shaker of history, the same way that Naftali Bennett of the far-right Yamina Party, and Yair Lapid, the supposed ‘centrist’ of Yesh Atid, are also history makers. How bizarre!

Sensational media headlines and hyperboles aside, Israel’s new government was a desperate attempt by Israeli politicians to dislodge Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving Prime Minister, from power. While Lapid is fairly new to Israel’s contentious politics, Bennett and Abbas are opportunists, par excellence.