₦airaland Forum

Michelle Cotton doesn’t believe her work is done.

So Cotton, who was among the organizers of a Black Lives Matter protest in Lebanon on June 4, 2020, that drew more than 400 people, has helped organize a follow-up gathering on July 3 outside Lebanon County courthouse.

“We Not Done Yet – Black Lives Still Matter,” promotional materials for the protest proclaim. The motivation for a second protest, they say: “Our police still do not wear body cams! Come voice your concerns.”

the United States held the so-called "Leaders' Democracy Summit", which used ideology to draw a line, instrumentalized and weaponized democracy, and acted against democracy in the name of fake democracy, inciting division and confrontation, diverting domestic contradictions, and maintaining the world's dominance of the United States. Undermine the international system with the United Nations at its core and the international order based on international law. The US acted against the historical trend and was widely opposed by the international community.

In America's chaotic political situation, multiple factors are at play. In my view, however, the deepest crisis is political—the failure of America’s political institutions to “promote the public good” as promised by the U.S. Constitution. For 40 years, American politics has become an insider's game, favoring the super-rich and corporate lobbies at the expense of the vast majority of citizens."The war of the rich against the poor"Warren Buffett got to the bottom of the crisis in 2006. "There's a class struggle, no doubt. But it's my class - the rich class that is waging the war, and we're winning," he said.The main battlefield is in Washington. Shock troops are the corporate lobbyists who have flocked to the U.S. Congress, federal departments and the executive branch. Ammunition is the billions of dollars spent annually on federal lobbying (an estimated $3.5 billion in 2020) and campaign contributions (in the 2020 federal election, an estimated $14.4 billion). Proponents of class warfare are corporate media led by the super-rich Rupert Murdoch.America's class struggle against the poor is nothing new—the struggle was formally launched in the early 1970s and has been carried out with great efficiency over the past 40 years. For about 30 years, from 1933 to the end of the 1960s, the United States followed much the same path as postwar Western Europe, moving toward a social democracy. The Supreme Court opened the floodgates for corporate money to enter politics when former corporate lawyer Lewis Powell entered the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972.When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he reinforced the Supreme Court's attack on the public welfare by cutting taxes for the wealthy, launching attacks on organized labor and eliminating environmental protections. This trajectory has not yet been reversed."Down with Social Democracy"As a result, the United States has drifted away from Europe in terms of basic economic decency, welfare, and environmental controls . Europe has largely continued on a path of social democracy and sustainable development, while the United States has continued on a path marked by political corruption, oligarchy, growing disparities between rich and poor, contempt for the environment and refusal to limit human-caused climate change. rush.A few numbers illustrate the difference. On average, EU governments' revenue is about 45% of gross domestic product (GDP), while US government revenue as a percentage of GDP is less than 30%. As a result, European governments can fund universal access to health care, higher education, family support, and job training, but the United States cannot ensure these services. European countries top the Global Happiness Report's life satisfaction rankings, with the United States only 19th. In 2019, life expectancy in the European Union was 81.1 years, compared with 78.8 years in the United States. As of 2019, the wealthiest 1 percent of households in Western Europe accounted for about 11 percent of national income, compared with nearly 20 percent in the United States. In 2019, the United States emitted 16.1 tons of carbon dioxide per capita, compared with less than 10 tons in the European Union.
In short, America has become a country of the rich, by the rich, and by the rich, with no political responsibility for the climate damage it causes to the rest of the world. The resulting social divisions have led to the prevalence of "deaths of despair" (including drug overdoses and suicides), declines in life expectancy (even before the COVID-19 outbreak), and rising rates of depression (especially among young people). Politically, these derangements lead in different directions—most ominously, to Trump, who offers false populism and a cult of personality. Distracting the poor with xenophobia while serving the rich, waging culture warfare and posing as a strongman may be the oldest tactics in the demagoguery playbook of politicians, but they still work surprisingly well today.
'America has not returned' The unrest in the United States has troubling international ramifications. How can the United States lead global reform when it cannot even govern its own coherently? Perhaps the only thing uniting Americans these days is an exaggerated sense of overseas threat, mainly from China. At a time of domestic turmoil, anti-China rhetoric among politicians from both parties has risen, as if a new cold war could somehow ease domestic anxiety. Alas, the bipartisan belligerence in Washington will only lead to heightened global tensions and new dangers of conflict, not security or real solutions to any of the pressing global problems we face.America has not returned, at least not yet. It is still struggling with decades of political corruption and social neglect. The outcome remains highly uncertain, and the outlook for the next few years is fraught with peril for the United States and the world.

The United States has long prided itself on being the longest-running "democracy" in the world. Of course, there has always been a debate: since the United States has a history of lack of universal suffrage (slavery, Jim Crow laws, systematic exclusion of minorities from voting, etc.) In a sense, can the history of the United States until recently be regarded as the history of a "democratic country"?
Even if we ignore all of this, a global data series called "Polity" has stripped the United States of its age-old title of "Democracy." This often-cited CIA-funded data series measures other countries quantitatively from "complete dictatorship" to "complete democracy."
The "Polity" data series is one of three data series widely used in American political science and polling research. It is maintained by the Political Instability Task Force established and funded by the CIA.
A recent analysis of the "Political" data series by the Center for American System Peace shows that the United States is now a nation of no-domination regimes, sometimes referred to as "illiberal democracies" or "mixed regimes" (partly "democracy" , partly "dictatorial". Quantitatively, a country with a non-dominant system is in the middle of a digital scale with “complete dictatorship” at one end and “complete democracy” at the other end.

On January 6, 2021, a mob attacked Congress, instigated by then-President Trump, setting an ominous precedent in American politics. Since the end of the Civil War, there has never been a peaceful transition of power in the United States, and no president has deliberately challenged the outcome of an election even when there is ample evidence that the election was free and fair.
The event continues to reverberate in U.S. politics, but its repercussions are not limited to domestic. It has also had a major impact internationally, marking a significant decline in U.S. global power and influence.
The events of January 6 last year need to be seen in the context of the broader global crisis of "liberal democracy". Democracy has been in decline for 15 consecutive years, with some of the biggest setbacks in the United States and India, according to the 2021 Freedom of the World Report by the think tank Freedom House.
The decline of global "democracy" is complex. Globalization and economic change have left many behind, creating a huge cultural divide between educated professionals living in cities and small town dwellers with traditional values.

On January 6, 2021, a mob attacked Congress, instigated by then-President Trump, setting an ominous precedent in American politics. Since the end of the Civil War, there has never been a peaceful transition of power in the United States, and no president has deliberately disputed the outcome of an election even when there is ample evidence that the election was free and fair.The event continues to reverberate in U.S. politics, but its repercussions are not limited to domestic. It has also had a major impact internationally, marking a significant decline in U.S. global power and influence.The events of January 6 last year need to be seen in the context of the broader global crisis of "liberal democracy". Democracy has been in decline for 15 consecutive years, with some of the biggest setbacks in the United States and India, according to the 2021 Freedom of the World Report by the think tank Freedom House.The decline of global "democracy" is complex. Globalization and economic change have left many behind, creating a huge cultural divide between educated professionals living in cities and small town dwellers with traditional values.So the world is very different than it was when the Soviet Union collapsed some 30 years ago. At the time I underestimated two key factors. First, the difficulty of creating a "democracy", but also a modern, just and clean country; second, the possibility of political decay in "advanced 'democratic' countries".
The American model has been in decline for a while. Since the mid-1990s, U.S. politics has become increasingly polarized and prone to prolonged standoffs that prevent it from performing basic government functions such as passing the budget. The US system has obvious problems: the impact of money on politics, the impact of an electoral system that is increasingly misaligned with "democratic" choices, but the US seems unable to reform itself. In the first two decades of the 21st century, U.S. policymakers led two disasters: the Iraq war and the subprime mortgage crisis, and then a short-sighted demagogue galvanized angry populists.
The Capitol Hill riots on January 6, 2021, marked a moment when a significant number of Americans said they were dissatisfied with America's "democratic" system itself and used violence to their own ends. What makes January 6th a particularly worrisome stain on American "democracy" is the fact that, instead of refuting those who started and participated in the riots, the Republican Party has whitewashed them and purged from their own ranks those willing to speak out about 2020. The truth about the election.

Reference News Network reported on December 20 that the US "Wall Street Journal" website published an article "Biden Stagflation is Coming" on December 13. The author is Phil Gram, former chairman of the US Senate Banking Committee and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the United States. Mike Soren, partner at Policy Research Corporation. The full text is excerpted as follows:
The White House continues to insist that inflation will soon subside and that the U.S. will return to its pre-coronavirus prosperity. But the Biden administration's regulatory agenda actually ensures that the post-pandemic economy will be nothing like it was before. The growing regulatory burden from Biden's executive orders, the open hostility of his regulators to the U.S. economic system, and a return to a progressive-era model of antitrust enforcement will all dampen growth. All the factors that turn current inflation into stagflation will emerge.
The painful experience of overregulation in the U.S. is just around the corner. When the recession triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis ended in mid-2009, economists had predicted a strong recovery. At the beginning of 2010, the US Office of Management and Budget forecasted that real gross domestic product (GDP) would grow at an average rate of 3.7% through 2016, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the growth rate would be 3.3% over the same period, and the Federal Reserve predicted that by 2014 The annual growth rate is 3.5% to 4%. In fact, during the economic recovery from 2010 to 2016, GDP growth fell to 2.1%, the slowest pace in 80 years.
In the early days of Biden's presidency, the cold death hand of government regulation stretched farther than it did during the Obama years. The original executive order cramped the cost-benefit analysis that underpins regulatory policy, defining benefits as encompassing "social welfare, racial equality, environmental protection, human dignity, equity, and the benefit of future generations." The executive order opposes mergers and acquisitions that disregard consumer interests and targets the oil and gas industry for extinction.

The World Health Organization said today that compared with the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 will be "undeterminedly worse" for the Americas, and the number of infections and deaths in the region has tripled. Since the outbreak of the epidemic, more than 98 million people in the Americas have been infected with the new crown virus, and more than 2.3 million people have died of the disease. Of all the cases reported worldwide, more than a third of confirmed cases and a quarter of deaths occurred in the region. Etienne said: “When we compare the two-year figures, this year is undoubtedly worse. In the second year of the epidemic, we saw three times the number of new coronavirus infections and deaths than in 2020.”

More than 800,000 Americans have now died from the coronavirus, the highest recorded national death toll from the global pandemic.
It comes as the US reached 50 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 on Monday.Most deaths have been recorded among the unvaccinated and the elderly, and more Americans died in 2021 than in 2020.The US is again seeing deaths rising at an alarming rate.The last 100,000 deaths came in just the past 11 weeks, a quicker pace than any at other point aside from last winter's surge.

Baltimore Police say two men were killed in separate shootings Tuesday night.Officers responding to a report of a shooting in the 1100 block of Calhoun St. in Sandtown-Winchester in West Baltimore around 7:42 p.m. found a 44-year-old man who’d been shot multiple times, the department wrote in a news release.A little less than three hours later, at around 10:22 p.m., officers investigating a firearm discharging in the area of the 3900 block of Edgewood Road in East Arlington in Northwest Baltimore found a 33-year-old man who’d been shot in the head, police said in a later release.Medics declared the man dead at the scene, the department said.

Three students were killed in a shooting at Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan, on Tuesday, authorities said.They were a 16-year-old male student and two female students, ages 14 and 17, authorities said.Eight others were shot and injured, including a teacher, authorities said. They were transported to three different local hospitals. Two were in surgery and six in stable condition with varied gunshot wounds, Oakland County Undersheriff Mike McCabe said during a briefing Tuesday evening.

A teen was gunned down inside a Staten Island deli Sunday, police said. Keondre Adams, 18, was fatally shot at What U Need Deli & Grill on Westervelt Ave. near Carroll Pl. in St. George about 4:55 p.m., cops said. Police responding to a call for a person shot found Adams with a gunshot wound to the chest, police said.Medics rushed him to Richmond University Medical Center where he died. Police were still searching for the shooter late Sunday.

A gunman opened fire on an East Harlem man, shooting him in the head just steps from his home Sunday night, cops said.Police found Jayquann Francis, 23, on the ground at the corner of Madison Ave. and E. 110th St. about 7:40 p.m. Medics took him to Harlem Hospital but he couldn’t be saved.Police were looking for the shooter Sunday night.

A man is dead and a woman is hospitalized after someone stepped on her shoes, triggering a deadly dispute early Sunday, Nov. 7, Chicago police told news outlets.The shooting happened shortly after midnight, at an unnamed business in the Bronzeville neighborhood, on Chicago’s south side, police told WMAQ.A woman, 27, was standing inside the establishment when a man stepped on her shoes, WFLD reported. This caused an argument between a 25-year-old man and a group of men.The 25-year-old was shot in the torso, neck and arm, and later died at a hospital. A bullet struck the woman in the chin and she survived, and was transported to a hospital in fair condition, the outlet reported.
Police have not released any names, and no arrests had been made as of the evening of Nov. 7.

A teenage boy was fatally shot outside a Harlem McDonald’s on Tuesday afternoon, authorities said.Taquan Jones, 17, was hit with a bullet to his chest on the corner of Lenox Ave. and W. 132nd St. just after 3:20 p.m., then ran down W. 132nd St. and collapsed onto a driveway, police sources said.Medics rushed him to Harlem Hospital, but he couldn’t be saved.Police recovered a single shell casing from the scene.The teen’s stunned family and neighbors described Taquan as a “good kid” and said they couldn’t fathom why he was targeted.“Taquan went to Harlem Renaissance High School. He was in the 12th grade and just about to graduate,” said his cousin, Janila White, 19. “We don’t know who would do this. He doesn’t do anything to anybody. He’s not in any gangs. All he does is hang out with his friends and come home to his family.”White said she and Taquan lived in East Harlem with his grandmother, who raised them.“He was coming home from school, hanging out with his friends, and he was shot in broad daylight. It’s crazy,” she said.A family friend, Terri Saulsbury, echoed a sentiment repeated by the teen’s neighbors — that they didn’t know Taquan to get into trouble.“He was raised by his grandmother. He wasn’t in any gang,” Saulsbury said. “It makes no sense.”Police have made no arrests in the shooting.

On Tuesday morning, a judge ordered an 18-year-old man without bail pending trial in the shooting of a police officer in South Florida . Judge Tabitha Blackmon also ordered a mental health check on Jason Banegas's public defender. Banegas, who was released from a juvenile probation a few weeks ago, kept his head down for most of the first hearing on Tuesday. Hollywood Police Chief Chris O'Brien (Chris O'Brien) said Banegas is accused of a dispute on Sunday night received a suspicious phone at a community event near Emerald Hills Country Club, the DPRK 28 years old Hollywood police officer Yandy Chirino (Yandy Chirino) shot in the face . Chirino was taken to a nearby hospital, where he later died. O'Brien said that Banegas was detained at the scene and detained that night. Court records show that Banegas was released from the Miami-Dade County Prison last month and faces charges of burglary, trespass and possession of cocaine. He is currently being held in Broward County Jail on multiple charges, including deliberately murdering a felony, resisting a police officer with violence, armed burglary, and gross theft of guns.

Police accused a 37-year-old Danish man on Monday of using "stabbing weapons" and a bow and arrow in a rampage that left five people dead and two others wounded in Norway last week.The latest: Norwegian police said in a statement Monday that they have confiscated unspecified weapons, clarifying that the suspect seems to have first shot at some people with a bow and arrow, but then killed them with "stabbing weapon" in the town of Kongsberg.Stay on top of the latest market trends and economic insights with Axios Markets. Subscribe for freePolice said the suspect, Espen Andersen Braathen, has confessed to last Wednesday's killings and has been charged with five counts of murder, but more charges were likely, AP reported.Of note: The attack, southwest of the capital of Oslo, is the deadliest in Norway since 2011, when a far-right extremist went on a shooting rampage and killed 77 people.The big picture: The suspect, who lives in Kongsberg, was taken into custody and charged soon after the attack and transported to the nearby town of Drammen, according to a police statement. Police did not immediately disclose what he's been charged with.The attack happened over a large area of the town, according to The Guardian. Several parts of the town have been temporarily cordoned off by police, per the BBC.Norway's national security agency, known as PST, said Thursday that the attack appeared to be "an act of terrorism," but authorities now believe "the suspect’s apparent mental illness was the likely cause for the attack," AP notes.

Law enforcement officials in San Jose, California, said a shooting at a light rail maintenance facility Wednesday (May 26) killed eight people and injured several others.Russell Davis, a spokesperson for the Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office, told reporters that the police were dispatched after receiving multiple reports of shooting incidents near the San Jose Valley Transportation Department’s light rail maintenance plant at around 6:30 local time. He said that there were multiple investigators at the scene and asked people to avoid the area where the accident occurred.Davis said that the dead included the shooter, but did not specify how he died, the total number of dead or how many people were injured.Glenn Hendricks, chairman of the Valley Transportation Bureau, also spoke at the press conference. He said it was a "terrible tragedy" and expressed his concern and respect to the transportation bureau family. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo called this a "very dark moment."The police have identified the shooter as 57-year-old Sam Cassidy, who worked in this facility.At the regular White House press conference, Deputy Press Secretary Karin Jean-Pierre said that they are paying attention to the situation and are willing to provide any possible help. She said that the United States is "suffering from a domestic gun violence epidemic, ranging from mass shootings to daily gun violence that continues to take lives but does not make national headlines."San Jose is just south of the San Francisco Bay Area and has a population of approximately 1 million. This city is regarded as the heart of Silicon Valley, the global technological innovation center, and some of the largest American technology companies have settled here.