Author: Common Dreams

When we divest resources from law enforcement we can finally invest them in community services

Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division released a damning report on the Ferguson, Missouri police department. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the city’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” the report summary concluded, “contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing” and practices that “both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias” against African Americans. The details were so devastating that they led to resignations from Ferguson’s police chief and city manager. Ferguson’s top court clerk and two officers who were found to have shared racist emails also resigned. Ferguson was...

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Pandemic Capitalism: Searching for an alternative to the cruel absurdity of status quo politics

The United States leads the world in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. It is also among the global frontrunners for organized political idiocy, as President Trump’s deadly incompetence in managing the crisis has left many Americans in despair, their hopes for the future uncertain if not on life support. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported 1,504,830 total cases and 90,340 deaths from COVID-19 as of May 19. While state case reports vary, further waves of disease are likely unless vigilant public health measures, including greatly expanded testing, contact tracing, and quarantining, are in place. For Trump and his right-wing...

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Killing Our Humanity: A 12 step guide for how not to make a pandemic worse

To assist those wanting a more simple accounting of how President Donald Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Public Citizen recently released a fresh list of a dozen specific ways the president’s decisions and public pronouncements served to speed up the spread of the deadly virus. The consumer rights group noted that while the death toll readies to pass the 100,000 person threshold in the United States, “the chaotic and incompetent response” of Trump—from his failure to prepare the nation for such a calamity in the first place to his repeated assault on scientific understanding and undermining the warnings...

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We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them

In response to the ideological cataclysm resulting from the coronavirus, the race has begun to replace a dying Neoliberalism. Three lines of thinking are emerging to fill that void. One is that the emergency necessitates extraordinary measures, but the basic structure of production and consumption is sound, and the problem lies only in determining the moment when things can return to “normal.” This is the dominant opinion among political and business elites. Representative of this outlook is the infamous Goldman Sachs-sponsored teleconference involving scores of stock market players in mid-March of this year, which concluded that “there is no...

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Black vs. White: Why authorities clash with black protesters while overlooking White Supremacists

Photo courtesy of Jenny Salita and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 The establishment, of systematic racism, in everything from school resegregation to residential segregation to employment discrimination, needs to be addressed through a second generation of civil rights legislation. My social media feeds have been full of comparisons between the treatment by police of Reopener mobs, some of whom invaded the Michigan state house while fully armed with assault weapons, and the treatment of protesters in Minneapolis regarding the killing of George Floyd by a policemen who kept his knee on his neck. Why does the Far Right all...

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The first 100 days: Study shows delay of nationwide lockdown contributed to massive death toll

As U.S. states move to reopen their economies and loosen restrictions put in place to stem the spread of COVID-19, new modeling released Thursday shows a majority of the U.S. deaths thus far from the coronavirus could have been prevented had social distancing policies been implemented more quickly. The epidemiological modeling (pdf) from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health researchers looked at the virus’s national spread through May 3, 2020, at which point deaths had passed 65,000. The researchers found nearly 62% of reported infections—703,000 cases—and 55% of deaths — over 35,000 people — could have been avoided...

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