The United States of America has spent much of its modern history ignoring the most important problems it must solve to be able to move forward as a contemporary democracy. A country that attempted to correct the horror of slavery after the Civil War and experienced a strong Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, stopped short of  eradicating racism. While some Western European countries kept trying to consolidate an environment with more equity in politics and economic rights with an understanding of the role of regional alliances, the US insisted on a political and economical model that increased the breach between the rich and poor. US society in general didn’t address the structural failures of a system that embraces several levels and kinds of segregation among the components of society.

It seems that a storm arrived in the context of an inoperant fascist government and it just became bigger with the pandemic and the explosion of civil rebellion towards a problem that has been ignored and even denied for too long -- racism and inequity.

Sunday, July 26, 2020, 7:00 - 8:00 PM.
During the pandemic, the lack of investment in public health infrastructure, including health care for all, has had deadly consequences for tens of thousands of people. The $22.42 billion the U.S. will be spending this year to upgrade its first-strike nuclear arsenal could pay for 624 million corona virus tests, 747, 633 covid-19 hospital stays, or 6.6 BILLION N95 masks. This has to change. Our lives and security depend on it.  More information and registration here. 

Ohio’s biggest-ever bribery case is rocking America’s reactor industry ... and the fall election.

Full details of the shocking arrest of Ohio’s powerful Speaker of the House are still unfolding.

But on Monday, the FBI charged Larry Householder and four associates with taking $60 million (that’s NOT a typo) in bribes from “Company A,” suspected to be the Akron-based nuke utility FirstEnergy. The company has not been formally named as the source of the bribe, but FE’s stock has since plummetted.

Householder is suspected of buying votes for the widely hated $1.5 billion bailout of two decrepit nuke reactors on Lake Erie. Donald Trump lobbied at least five legislators to support the cash giveaway. Ohio’s moderate Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has asked Householder to resign. 

Without the bailout, Perry and Davis-Besse would already be dead in the rising tsunami of US reactor shutdowns. 

This isn’t free unsolicited advice on your new name, because (1) you’ve pretended to ask everyone for input, and (2) if you name your team the Washington Warriors next year, as I’m guessing you would have done by now if not for some legal dispute, I’ll be happy to sell you the URL washingtonwarriorssuck.com for a donation of .00001% of the U.S. military budget to the people of Yemen.

So, here’s my non-free and fully solicited advice: don’t be a moral imbecile. Name your team for something positive. Don’t name it something else cruel and offensive just because nobody’s objected yet.

Do you remember when they had to rename the Washington Bullets, not because they cared that bullets were being used to murder people all over the world, but because the city of Washington, D.C., had become famous for its high level of shootings?

Here’s a quietly unsettling moment from the current cries for change churning across the nation:

A teenage girl is at a grocery store in the small town of Marion, Virginia. Her brother, Travon Brown, age 17, had recently become both beloved and hated — the center of controversy — in the town, because he had organized a protest against racism in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This was one of thousands of such protests across the country, but the majority-white town was nonetheless riled up over this affront, according to the Washington Post, which took a long, deep look at events there.