Author: Common Dreams

The Moral Universe: Evaluating progress across the arc of MLK’s Dream to America’s reality today

April 4 marked the 53d anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. Over half a century. Has America come any closer to his dream? He would be pleased at some of our progress. Segregation is no longer the law of the land. The Voting Rights Act helped open doors. Dr. King would be pleased that a majority of Americans joined to elect and re-elect an African American president. Georgians just elected a black minister from Dr. King’s own historic church to the U.S. Senate. There are now 60 African American members of Congress, 54 Latino members, 20 Asian American...

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Decision by MLB to relocate the All-Star Game over Georgia’s Jim Crow-style voting law comes at a cost

As Republicans predictably cried foul over Major League Baseball’s April 2 decision to relocate the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta in response to Georgia’s restrictive new voting law, prominent Democrats blamed the GOP for the economic toll the move will take on the Peach State. Voting rights campaigner and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams—a Democrat whose loss some prominent observers have blamed on voter suppression—weighed in on MLB’s decision to deprive their state of an event that generates anywhere from tens of millions of dollars to over $100 million in revenue. Abrams said in a statement that the...

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New documents reveal meatpacking industry fought against implementing minimal COVID-19 safeguards

Documents obtained from the United States Department of Agriculture by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and published on March 4 reveal how leading players in the meatpacking industry, one of the hardest-hit by the coronavirus pandemic, fought the minimal efforts imposed by the Trump administration to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in meat processing plants last spring. As Public Citizen put it, “these docs are utterly damning.” Responding to Public Citizen’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the USDA handed over documents (pdf) showing that: In April 2020, officials in the North American Meat Institute protested USDA’s decision...

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Review of Trump-era coronavirus guidance confirms extensive political manipulation of pandemic response

A top-to-bottom review of Trump-era coronavirus guidance has identified public health recommendations issued under the banner of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that were “not primarily authored” by agency staff or backed by the best existing scientific evidence. Ordered by current CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, the review (pdf) was seen as confirmation of widespread fears that the Trump administration — members of which repeatedly downplayed the severity of the pandemic—manipulated guidance coming out of the nation’s leading public health agency to make it fit with the White House’s views and political objectives. In September, Politico reported that...

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Wave of voter suppression laws reveal the deep roots of Jim Crow ideology in the GOP’s drive to autocracy

“The United States of America has open wounds.” – Deborah Scott Ever since its founding, the United States has been attempting to build a society around those wounds, on the belief that hyped-up language, “all men are created equal,” can paper over deep wrongs. If you put the ideal in writing, you can ignore its absence in real life. Writing for a publication of St. Joseph’s Parish in Wilmington, Deborah Scott noted that, except for Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, “the United States reigns supreme when it comes to legislation and traditions that have undergirded systemic and racially...

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Trumpedemic: America’s death toll and economic loss is a direct result of the sabotaged COVID-19 response

An economy devastated. One in twelve Americans sickened. Millions hospitalized. One half million dead. As we mourn more than 500,000 Americans who have died of COVID-19, we should remember that their deaths were not the inevitable results of a pandemic, not unavoidable acts of God. Most of the dead would likely be alive today—most of the suffering America has endured could have been avoided—but for Donald Trump. In our year of the plague, Trump went from neglect and incompetence to sabotaging the national response, causing massive death. A cynical and self-absorbed man, Trump saw a lethal contagion only an...

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