LA Progressive

What is it about white men, especially older white men, finding it so hard to surrender the spotlight, pass the torch, and stand down?

Joe Biden did the right thing. Finally. But it took Nancy Pelosi's hammer and tongs—and the eventual capitulation of his consiglieri, Ricchetti and Donilon, to get him to do it.

Biden is hardly alone. A 78-year-old egomaniacal Donald Trump can't get out of the way, either. Bernie Sanders turns 83 next month. Chuck Grassley turns 91 in September. The entire U.S. Senate amounts to a mostly male geriatric society. When powerful women (e.g., Dianne Feinstein) hold on for too long, I always think that for these women, it's a kind of revenge for having had to dwell in the patriarchal wilderness for far too many of their prime career years.

To read more click here:

https://www.laprogressive.com/election-and-campaigns/white-men-clinging-to-power

The American Ballet Theatre (ABT) honored my uncle, Leopold Allen at two events in New York City.

ABT said, "As we come to the end of Pride Month, we want to pay tribute to a member of our community who made way for a more inclusive world in ballet and beyond.
A legend, a light, a trailblazer—✨Leopold Allen✨, ABT’s first resident Hair and Makeup Supervisor, was a fixture in the Company for over 10 years, working closely with many ABT icons including Susan Jaffe, Alessandra Ferri, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. An artist of the highest caliber, Leopold always filled the room with laughter and made everyone in his chair feel ready to take the stage. In 1989, Leopold sadly lost his life to AIDS.

Now that President Biden has voluntarily chosen to drop out of the presidential race and has also endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. The game has changed.

Almost immediately upon hearing the news, close to 45,000 Black women participated in a call that helped raise a record $81 million for the Harris campaign in less than 24 hours. All of this new energy could attract a bunch of new voters.

Every year, approximately 4 million Americans reach the voting age. This means that approximately 16 million people will have the opportunity to vote in the presidential election for the first time in November.

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Law Professor Daria Roithmayr has spent her career trying to understand the unyielding persistence of racism in the United States. She found a clue when she discovered, by happenstance, a book that discussed how Microsoft established dominance by not playing by the rules, what followed for Roithmayr was deep research that resulted in her book, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in What Advantage.

To read the entire article, go to:

https://www.laprogressive.com/progressive-issues/intractable-nature-of-racism-explained

The LA Progressive chats with Andrea Mazzarino, co-founder of Brown University's Costs of War Project.

In a piece written by Mazzarino and published by the LA Progressive, Mazzarino makes the case that war-induced hunger and insufficient medical care indirectly kills more civilians than direct violence. She says that many war stories end with hunger wreaking havoc on large portions of a population causing significant loss of life.

Andrea Mazzarino, the co-editor of the book War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, makes that case that armed conflict disrupts food supplies as warring factions divert resources to arms production and their militaries while destroying the kinds of infrastructure that enable societies to feed themselves. Governments, too, sometimes use starvation as a weapon of war. 

Andrea Mazzarino's articles can be found here: https://www.laprogressive.com/author/andrea-mazzarino

Dick Price and Sharon Kyle are the founders of LA Progressive

The Supreme Court chief justice’s decision on Trump’s immunity puts the myth of his institutionalism out of its misery, once and for all.

Roberts’ opinion will have more dire consequences, as it “invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.”

Is undecipherable political language and a complicated electoral process destroying democracy? Some might argue that these complexities are unavoidable, but the more cynical among us suspect this is by design.

Every four years, the airwaves across the United States are bombarded with election lingo. We're flooded with a language that disappears the day after the general election. Words like primary election, ballot box, electoral college, instant runoff, caucus, Super Tuesday, superdelegate, precinct, and dozens more roll off the tongues of pundits as if everybody is fluent in this language. The truth is, most of us aren't as familiar with the lingo as perhaps we ought to be.

So, the LA Progressive is going to provide a regular column, defining and explaining many of these terms. This piece will focus on the national presidential election and these terms: primary election; caucus; democratic convention; delegate; and superdelegate.

https://www.laprogressive.com

Guantanamo Bay prison is still operational. And YES, the United States is still imprisoning post-9/11 suspects who have been there for decades.

The former UN Special Rapporteur, Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, sat down with me to talk about something most of us had no idea was still an issue: there are still prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay, even though more than half of them have been told that they can leave.

Fionnuala concluded her term as UN Special Rapporteur last year. In that role, she had the unenviable responsibility of observing the operations at Guantanamo Bay prison. Her final official duty as the United Nations Special Rapporteur was to generate a report of her findings. 

To read the full report go to: https://www.laprogressive.com/human-rights/un-special-rapporteur-fionnuala-n%C3%AD-aol%C3%A1in

Actor and human rights advocate Mike Farrell spent time with the LA Progressive discussing the death penalty.

Mike has devoted his life to overturning the death penalty.
While not the founder, Mike has been the president of Death Penalty Focus since the early 1990s. According to Farrell, the organization was founded simply because, at the time, California was in a situation where the United States Supreme Court had ruled that the death penalty violated the 8th Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

For more information, go to:
Mike Farrell on the Death Penalty

Black Democratic politicians who flip parties after they are elected by Democrats and later join the MAGA Republicans are betraying their voters in a cynical, power-hungry and hazardous game of bait-and-switch. These dangerous political games come at an equally hazardous time for Black people, precisely when the Republican Party is the most racist and hostile it has ever been to Black lives and aspirations.