Op-Ed

As restrictive anti-abortion state laws head to the six anti-choice fanatics on the Court, the Trump Cult’s simultaneous attack on anti-virus vaccination grows ever-more stunning in its hypocrisy.

In short: they claim official mandates for masks and vaccinations in places where they could spread the virus violate their personal freedoms. As “anti-government” activists, they claim such mandates invade their sacred bodies.

And at the same time, they also demand that women who want to control their own reproductive lives must be denied.

So let’s try to get this straight:

These “pro-liberty” anti-government fanatics portray masks meant to stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic as a dictatorial plot to curtail their freedoms. One lunatic congresswoman says masks are the equivalent of the yellow star forced on Jews by the Nazis. Others proudly resist demands by local governments that likely spreaders take steps to weaken the pandemic. This, they say, is an invasion of their civil liberties.

For Derek Chauvin, nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds have turned into twenty-two and a half years — the prison sentence he recently received for the murder of George Floyd.

Chauvin famously knelt on George Floyd’s neck last year, as he lay handcuffed and helpless, for those nine-plus minutes, while three colleagues stood by, indifferent to the murder so obviously underway . . . police administering the death sentence to a man accused of trying to use a counterfeit $20 bill at a nearby convenience store. Unfortunately for the smirking Chauvin, his crime was caught on cellphone video and shocked much of the nation and the world. And a year later, something almost unprecedented happened: A police officer was held accountable for killing a black man.

But is this “justice” or is it simply bureaucracy? George Floyd is still dead. His young daughter remains robbed of her father; his loved ones, his family, still have a terrifying void in their lives. And the racist social structure in which Chauvin acted, though now under intense scrutiny, remains intact. People continue to needlessly suffer and die at the hands of our militarized police.

When former US President Barack Obama used an old cliché to denigrate his political opponent, the late US Senator, John McCain, he triggered a political controversy lasting several days. 

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’?

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; 

“The president reiterated his firm support for Israel’s right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attack,” The Guardian has informed us, as conflict flares once more in the Middle East. But, oh the humanity! Good guy Joe also “encouraged Israel to make every effort to ensure the protection of innocent civilians.”

Bombs and missiles are one thing, but the United States and its allies have learned how to soften their effect with public relations. So yes, shoot missiles into Gaza — it’s the only way to be safe, apparently — but “make every effort” to shrug your shoulders and bleed regret that more than 200 Palestinians, including 61 children, have died, as of a few days ago, in this effort to punish terrorists and keep Israel safe.

It’s the job of progressive advocates and activists to tell inconvenient truths, without sugarcoating or cheerleading. To effectively confront the enormous problems facing our country and world, progressives need to soberly assess everything -- good, bad and mixed.

Yet last week, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, made headlines when she graded President Biden’s job performance. “I give him an ‘A’ so far,” Jayapal said in an otherwise well-grounded interview with the Washington Post. She conferred the top grade on Biden even though, as she noted, “that doesn’t mean that I agree with him on every single thing.”

America is not a racist country,” Republican senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said in his party’s official response to President Biden’s address to the nation on April 28. There are reasons that should have been a laugh line: Biden did not say America was a “racist country,” the Black senator was rebutting the president’s call for racial justice across all ethnicities, and the reality is that America was founded as a country in which owning and selling Black people was justified and legalized on the basis of the racist doctrine that they were part of an inferior race. Scott didn’t get a laugh. He wasn’t trying to be funny. He was being intellectually dishonest and uttering a coded racist call to the white supremacist cohort of the Republican party that he is tolerant of their different, racist point of view. That’s where denial takes you, into crazy-land. That’s where partisanship takes you, invoking unreality to pander to polarization.

Basically, Derek Chauvin was convicted of enforcing the status quo. Because his behavior was caught on video — his knee on George Floyd’s neck, oh my God, choking him to death — and looked so disturbing to most of the public, official American “justice” had to take some sort of action.

He became a scapegoat.