No shortage of news this week, again. What the hell – is there something in the water? We just can’t get through the week without some kind of disaster, and this time it was at least three kinds.
First, another sickening attack in France. Horrendous loss of life, and from what seems obvious, almost completely avoidable. Forgive me, but is this what a state of emergency looks like in France? They know they are being targeted. When you have a mass attendance event like Bastille Day, and a huge crowd on an ocean-side boulevard, you need more than a few cops minding the traffic. Holland is extending the state of emergency, of course (you can see how well it works at keeping them safe) and will probably double down on their attacks in both Syria and Iraq. And the perpetrator? A Tunisian-born French citizen who thought it appropriate not only to kill people at random but to throw millions of French North Africans under the bus as well in the land of Le Pen. Nice freaking work.
Second, this dumb ass election. The corporate media is obsessing over vice presidential picks this week, for some strange reason (guys …. they are going to announce the names in just a few days – re the fuck lax). Clinton and Sanders did their event together, Bernie burning the house down as usual. It’s not a hard argument to make that, whatever else we do politically, we all need to make certain the wrong person out of the two possible presidential winners never reaches the White House. If the only thing you gain is exponentially better Supreme Court appointments, that in itself is enough reason to mark the ballot for Clinton, at least in swing states. A more reactionary court can do enormous amounts of damage – this we have seen.
Third, the aftermath of a rash of police killings and the shooting of the officers in Dallas. This “national conversation” rotates in the same circle over and over again. For chrissake, Philando Castile, the man shot in Minnesota, had been pulled over by the police 50 times. He had been fined over and over again for minor issues, sometimes for driving with a suspended license (suspended because he owed money on said fines), so that he was in hock to the tune of $5,000. This is Ferguson Missouri all over again. And the closer you look, pretty much every town in the country looks like Ferguson. Yes, there is implicit bias in policing in America, and yes, it is an institutional problem that goes beyond individual biases. But that bias is reflective of the broader culture that police departments serve. We cannot hold police accountable without holding ourselves accountable as well. That’s the bottom line.
Jesus … now there’s an attempted coup in Turkey. Not cool.
luv u,
jp
It was a week that started with the obscene bombing in Baghdad, the death toll for which has exceeded 250. As has long been the case, this provoked some small response in American culture because of the magnitude of the crime, but the degree of “hair-on-fire” apoplexy about terrorism has been relatively minimal due to the cultural distance between Iraq and the United States. As these attacks move closer culturally to the U.S., our politicians get more worked up. Forget this export we call “freedom” – that bombing is our gift to the Iraqi people and it just keeps on giving.
Capitalism’s Failure. This is an issue that touches on everyone, young and old, working and unemployed or retired, poor and not-so-poor. The internal contradictions of American and, by extension, global capitalism came to a head in the crash of 2008, and we are still living in the aftermath of that disaster. Yes, the government can point to select data points that indicated a modest level of recovery, but the fact remains that an economic system that has consistently failed the vast majority of the population over the past 30 years has entered into an entirely new phase of failure. Most working Americans are toiling at the only job they can find, earning an inadequate rate of compensation. Our major cities are choked with legions of homeless people. This system is broken; it only serves the top one percent. We need to take a hard look at this, sooner rather than later.