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Tuesday is always my busy day, but because the Board of Supervisors had no meeting this week, I was able to do enjoyable things. A welcome change.

It started with an outdoor socially distanced visit with someone I love at Brentwood skilled care facility. Brentwood has gone out of its way to make limited visiting safe for everyone. It helps the residents who have been suffering by not having regular visits with family members. Meeting in a large tent outside felt like a clandestine exchange of espionage information. I brought a giant bag of leftover Halloween candy for the residents and staff to share. Better them than us.

I met a friend for lunch at From the Hearths sidewalk cafe. Black and Bleu Salad for both of us. Yum. While walking back to the car, I ran into another friend and we caught up, not having seen each other for months. He didnt even know I had a column tsk tsk.

While we were chatting, three very friendly women approached us and said, Thank you for wearing a mask. You have just won $50. They were from the United Way and are walking around Redding, Red Bluff and Chico handing out $50 gift cards to people wearing masks. Score.

I went grocery shopping and was home in time to watch the early election returns with a nice martini. Congratulations to John Leach for winning the District 5 supervisor seat. He has promised to listen to the citizens. Wont that be nice?

And now for something you will rarely read in this column. Thank you, Code Enforcement. Yep, I am thanking the people whose prime directive for the past five years has been to violate the Fourth Amendment rights of its citizens by conducting warrantless searches of their private curtilages.

Apparently someone called and complained about a property in Manton Im not sure what the issue was, but it was probably too much junk in the yard or people living in RVs, goddess forbid. When they came up the hill to serve an abatement notice to the hapless residents, a hard working local gal asked why they were always up here handing out citations, but never offering to help the economically and often physically challenged populace in our town?

She must have struck a nerve, because Officer Clint Weston offered to bring up a couple huge dumpsters, leave them at a central location, and people could clean up their places and CE would haul it away. He also offered to tow away old cars. And none of it would cost people a dime.

This is precisely the kind of thing Code Enforcement should be spending its $848,000 a year on. As of this writing there were at least nine cars ready to be towed and the dumpster for metal appeared to be almost full. Thank you, Officer Weston and everybody over at CE and Environmental Health. Maybe this is the start of a beautiful new relationship.

A little caveat about my column from last week. I had written on Thursday about the COVID-infectious person who had been in a bar for several hours. My deadline is Friday morning and I dutifully sent the column off to the editor.

I had learned about the incident at the supervisors meeting on Tuesday morning and was under the impression that the person was in the bar, which turned out to be The Roundup, the weekend prior to Tuesdays meeting, Oct. 23-25. That would have meant the person, who did not cooperate with contact tracing, had only been exposing people for a few days.

What a rude awakening Saturday morning when everyone read that the COVID Drink-along had occurred the weekend before, Oct. 16-18. Whose decision was it to withhold information about this potential super-spreader event for 10-14 days? Anyone with a basic understanding of exponential math can figure out a boatload of people were exposed because of it.

Since the infected person wasnt cooperating with contact tracing, you can be sure he wasnt telling his buddies or anyone he ran into at Walmart. And without knowing it, those people could have spread it and so on and so on.

Releasing the name of the person would violate his HIPAA rights and nobody wants that, but the name of the bar should have been well publicized immediately so other patrons could get tested and isolate themselves. Shame on you, Public Health.

The office of the County Counsel sent me the information I had requested about the almost half million dollars spent yearly on investigating welfare fraud. Social Services receives federal, state and local funding which they give to the district attorneys office to catch welfare cheats. The program is mandatory and necessary, but are we getting our moneys worth?

The total dollar amount of fraud overpayments identified in investigations in 2019 was $125,304. However, part of that total was later found not to be fraud. I couldnt figure out how much, but it appears that 33 people who were prosecuted were not disqualified from receiving payments while one person was. Some people were disqualified in administrative hearings after being investigated by the DAs office, and there is no way to know how many were disqualified by Social Services employees before they received payments. Certainly more than the DAs office found.

Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and say they saved $125,000 by spending almost four times that amount, is that a good plan?

But Liz, says the Straw Man, most of that money comes from the state and federal government, not county coffers. Right, but its still our tax dollars. Waste is waste. This program was started during the previous DAs tenure, so maybe its time to take a look at it.

Maybe well know who will occupy the White House for the next four years by the time you read this. Patience and martinis will get us through. Ill be drinking the good stuff thanks to United Way.

Liz Merry has been half of Merry Standish Comedy for 30 years and is a former downtown Red Bluff business owner. She now has a home-based business and is locked and loaded in Manton. She can be reached atlizmerry58@gmail.com.

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Election day in and around Red Bluff - Red Bluff Daily News

BRUSSELS Polands right-wing government has delayed implementation of a court ruling that would impose a near-total ban on abortions after two weeks of the largest protests the country has experienced since the 1989 collapse of communism.

The country already had one of Europes most restrictive abortion laws before its Constitutional Tribunal ruled on Oct. 22 that terminating pregnancies for fetal abnormalities one of three justifications for legal abortions and virtually the only type performed in the country violated the Constitution.

On Tuesday, the government indefinitely delayed the publication of the courts ruling, which prevents it from going into legal force, in an apparent response to the protests. For the change to take effect under ordinary procedures, the government would have had to publish the ruling in a government journal by Nov. 2.

The government could still publish the decision at any time, as it has done with other controversial rulings, even though legal experts say that would violate the Constitution.

A discussion is ongoing, said Michal Dworczyk, the head of the prime ministers office. In this situation, which is difficult and causes a lot of emotions, it is good to give ourselves a bit of time for dialogue and for working out a new position.

Ewa Letowska, a law professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences and a former judge at the Constitutional Tribunal, the countrys highest court, said the governments delay was illegal.

The publication of the tribunals rulings is mandatory, she said. Although there were objections to the ruling, some of them legitimate, delaying the publication is unconstitutional.

Before the Constitutional Tribunals decision, Poland allowed terminations of pregnancies in three instances: in cases of fetal abnormalities, a threat to a womans health, and incest or rape.

In practice, most legal abortions 1,074 of 1,100 performed in the country last year resulted from fetal abnormalities. Yet those abortions represent only a small fraction of those obtained by Polish women, who seek terminations abroad or undergo risky illegal procedures.

The courts Oct. 22 ruling ignited a furor on the streets of Poland. Ignoring Covid-19 restrictions amid skyrocketing new coronavirus cases, hundreds of thousands turned out, holding banners that read I wish I could abort my government and This is war.

The demonstrations across the predominantly Roman Catholic country also reflected a broader anger at the governing party over the erosion of democracy and other grievances, including its handling of the pandemic.

Critics accuse the government of circumventing Parliament to introduce the effective ban on abortion. They say the tribunal is under the thumb of the governing party, which appointed 14 out of 15 of its judges.

The government, led by the Law and Justice party, has also been accused by experts and the European Union of taking control of the judiciary. The courts president, Julia Przylebska, is a long-term friend of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the partys chairman and Polands most important politician.

Some protesters disrupted church services and confronted priests, challenging the Catholic Church, which holds a special place in Polands society after supporting the struggle against communism. The church is a close ally of the governing party.

Last week Mr. Kaczynski called on his conservative supporters to defend Poland, defend patriotism and defend Polish churches, remarks that could be construed as encouraging them to clash with protesters.

This is the only way we can win this war, he said.

Although the demonstrations have been largely peaceful, far-right activists, mainly young men dressed in black and armed with pepper spray and flares, occasionally confronted protesters violently.

In response to the social unrest, President Andrzej Duda submitted a proposal of changes to Parliament that would slightly ease the restrictions that the court supported by allowing the abortion of fetuses with lethal abnormalities. It would still ban abortions in case of other conditions such as Down syndrome.

There is very little institutional support in Poland for families with disabled children, leaving parents to fend for themselves once the child is born.

With polls showing drops in support both for the governing party and Mr. Duda since the protests began, a session of Parliament that was supposed to consider the presidents proposal on Wednesday has been postponed to mid-November. A lawmaker from the governing party said the session had been postponed because of the pandemic.

Barbara Nowacka, an opposition lawmaker, said the government had postponed the parliament session in the face of the public outcry.

They got scared by the protests, she wrote on Twitter.

Analysts say the presidents proposal has slim chances of getting sufficient backing from lawmakers, since it does not satisfy the demands of either side of the debate.

Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting from Warsaw.

Link:
Poland Delays a Near-Total Ban on Abortion - The New York Times

rhodes.edu

To break this deadlock of eternal present of capitalism, new imagination is imperative. Old school communism will not return. The ongoing pandemic has again exposed the crisis, failure and inhumanly cruel face of neoliberal capitalism. Once again it has become clear that this sadistic system is neither ready nor willing to protect the most vulnerable section of the population, writes Raihan Rahman

WHEN Mikhail Gorbachev handed over the nuclear launch codes to Boris Yeltsin and the Soviet flag was lowered for the very last time, history witnessed the dousing of a beacon of dream and optimism that was kindled on 07 November 1917. For decades, it was the October Revolution to which the wretched of the earth looked up for inspiration to dream of a future free from all exploitations and make a utopia of liberation, emancipation and mass-actualisation.

Of course, the Soviet Union and other communist regimes had their own flaws and faults and turned out to be the very monsters they wanted to obliterate (although many of my leftist friends decide to label this allegation as mere western propaganda). The communist bloc could not escape the collapse but as long as they existed, people could still think of an alternative to the oppressing reality of capitalism.

However, since the 90s, as the Soviet Union fell, the emancipatory dream of mass people began to get archived while capitalism has succeeded to establish itself as the only functioning system and has posited neoliberalism as the ubiquitous ideology of this unipolar world. The result is that now we live in a cerebral void where we can no longer envisage an alternative that could resist capitalism and its neoliberal phase.

American theorist and critic Fredrick Jameson once wrote that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Though sounds like a quip, the inherent irony hints at the depth into which the ideological penetration of capitalism has reached and how it conditions our very thinking pattern and the limit of our imagination.

The most possible apocalypse one can imagine today is the ecological one since the furor of the cold-war era nuclear catastrophe is somewhat died out nowadays. Many post-apocalyptic sci-fi Hollywood films have done a great job in presenting convincing and engrossing visuals of ecological dystopias but hardly any visual is found that envisions an alternative to the very system that could one day lead to such catastrophes.

At the beginning of this ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a surge of hope seemed to overwhelm the people on the left. They thought that the virus that did not distinguish between the rich and the poor would inevitably make capitalism suffer, could even make it a relic of history.

Slavoj iek too, the celebrity leftist intellectual recognised the signs of a resurrection of communism, though not the old-school one. He anticipated that this pandemic would exacerbate the dominant modes of politics of todays world incompetent western barbarism and efficient eastern totalitarianism and a highly reformed communism would spring from that ruin, redressing the mistakes of the past.

iek argued that a new normal will evolve where the existing market mechanisms will be transformed and a new kind of government and global organisation will come forth who will control and regulate the economy to replace capitalism.

Even though the conclusive optimism may sound a little bit naive, the premonition that the existing system may take a dystopian turn is not ill-founded. All the signs are scattered all around. A new array of crises will continue to hit capitalism and the periodic ones will keep on resurfacing. But the modern states will stick to bailing out the wealthy class with stimulating packages while the rest will suffer a sharp decline in living standards.

While there is no shortage of optimism on the left, a clear outline of any movement or charged activism to overthrow capitalism is blatantly absent. At the same time, whatever crisis befalls on capitalism or no matter how miserable human lives turn out to be, are people from the working class to the middle class, the 99 per cent who are suffering the most because of capitalism, thinking of any alternative? Are they dreaming of any emancipatory utopia? Or have they already surrendered taking this system for granted as a permanent settlement?

The commonsensical answers to these questions are known to all.

With this inability of thinking any alternative, this helpless surrender is deeply connected to how capitalism within its ideological domain conditions our perception of history and temporality. Fredric Jameson identifies two definitive traits of this attempt of controlling the perception of history and temporality.

The first, capitalism wants to hide its past by erasing all signs of its violence and bloody past. The second, very cleverly it wants to maintain an idea of an eternal present.

In this construction of temporality, there is no space for the future. Jameson terms this stalemate as the eternal virginity of the capitalist present. The motive behind the construction of this historicality and temporality is singular to resist the possibility of any alternative thinking in the public imagination. People can imagine an apocalyptic future but cannot think of any potential change of capitalism and its associated production processes and market logic. As if this system is destined to continue as long as time exists forever and after.

Capitalism is quite successful in this strategy, particularly its neoliberal phase. While maintaining the structural inequality and exploitation, neoliberalism is passing quite an unimpeded and almost resistance-free journey. Moreover, it has succeeded in masking its monstrous face from the public eyes. It shrewdly obscures capitalisms essential reality.

Neoliberal ideology has established itself as the social commonsense and collective wisdom which are being assimilated and reproduced in everyday life. Competition has become the representing trait of human relations and citizens have turned out as mere consumers. The senseless pursuit of money and the monetisation of every personal and social relation has been normalised in the society.

However, this neoliberal logic is not being consciously perceived in the public imagination, not being captured patently. Its anonymous ubiquity and pervasive penetration in every sphere of life have made it hard to recognise it as an ideology. Keeping itself in shadowy anonymity, it has planted the belief there is no alternative deep inside peoples mind. Columnist George Monbiot rightly says, Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of power.

But what is the way out? The assault of neoliberalism remains strong and unanswerable in the absence of any dynamic left opposition. Besides it is not enough to oppose a system, a coherent and viable alternative must be devised and proposed which will gain public support and bring people together.

To break this deadlock of eternal present of capitalism, new imagination is imperative. Old school communism will not return. That communism is now synonymous with authoritarianism and the accusation is not unfair. The iron fist ruling of the iron curtain countries has made people skeptical about it. The return of that kind of communism would be staged as a farce just as Marx joked about the repetition of history.

French philosopher Alain Badiou calls for new fiction, a fresh imagination. Recently demised anarchist author and activist David Graeber used to emphasise new imagination for a radically emancipatory world. Badiou thinks that the greatest crisis of todays world is that there is no great fiction supporting a great belief.

The ongoing pandemic has again exposed the crisis, failure and inhumanly cruel face of neoliberal capitalism. Once again it has become clear that this sadistic system is neither ready nor willing to protect the most vulnerable section of the population. Rather the fact that they are vulnerable itself is the structural consequence of this system.

The system that creates and maintains structural inequality and unequal power relations is never a successful system, let alone an ideal one. Thats why an alternative must be imagined. The 99 per cent must break the existing temporality of the eternal present and think of a possible future where neoliberal capitalism will truly become a historical relic.

Raihan Rahman is a young writer and critic.

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Is there really no alternative? - newagebd.net

Thirty-five years have passed since the beginning of Mikhail Gorbachev disastrous Perestroika policy which led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, almost half of the Russian people believe that life would be better if Perestroika had never happened.

According to a poll conducted by Levada Center, 47% of Russians acknowledge that life in the country was better before Gorbachev's destructive reform plan, with just 39% disagreeing. A 14% of the participants found "difficult to answer".

In the question "Why do you think the situation was better before Perestroika?", the answers were: 65% said because the "country was strong and united", 55% because "there was order in the country", 43% because the "relations between people were better" and 38% because "people were confident about the future".

Almost two-thirds (61%) of the people over 55 years of age, who were adults when the reforms began in 1985, agree that life was better before.

In another poll, also conducted by Levada Center last September, showed that almost half of Russians (49%) regard the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the most shameful and upsetting event of the past.

No matter how intense the anti-communist propaganda becomes, the people of Russia never forget the extraordinary achievements of socialism and the glorious past of the Soviet Union which is in sharp contrast with today's capitalist barbarity.

IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM

More here:
Nostalgia for Socialism: Most Russians say that life would be better if Perestroika had never happened - In Defense of Communism

A very engaging television series that has been appearing on CNN in recent weeks is "First Ladies." It is focused on some iconic presidential wives, blending interviews, news reports, and rare archival film footage to present Michelle Obama, Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, and Eleanor Rooseveltso far. The two final episodes will feature Lady Bird Johnson and Hilary Clinton. (All of these Sunday night programs will be subsequently available on demand, via cable/satellite and CNN apps.)

Although these six first ladies all played distinctive roles, the one who clearly stands out as a national and international figure is Eleanor Roosevelt. Born into a wealthy family in 1884, she lost her mother and father in the early 1890s and later attended a private finishing school in England. She married her distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1905, and his political career prompted her to be active for civic and political purposes, too. Aside from being the longest-serving first ladysince FDR served four terms as presidentshe was also an acclaimed diplomat and a crusader for many causes.

As the "First Ladies" program devoted to her revealed, one of her causes was civil rights for African-Americans. Her productive efforts for that purpose prompted the Ku Klux Klan to offer $25,000 to anyone who would kill her, but the heroic female leader persisted.

As a "Western Courier" article pointed out on April 27, 1960, a week before her scheduled talk at Morgan Gym, "Always interested in social and political matters, she helped organize a nation-wide organization of Democratic women," and she was very active in her husbands campaigns for the presidency, too. Beyond that, she was a groundbreaking woman in many ways: "She was the first wife of a president of the United States to maintain a career of her own, the first to hold regular press conferences, and the first to travel by plane."

After FDRs death in 1945, she also served as an influential, much-celebrated U. S. delegate to the United Nations, for seven years. In fact, during 1946 she was elected President of the U. N.s Commission on Human Rights, and in that role, she supervised the drafting of a major world statement, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Later, she chaired President Kennedys Commission on the Status of Women, working to expand roles for women in the workplace and make other contributions to female equality. It is not surprising that an organization with female leadership, the Western Community Forum, led by Betty Mulder and strongly supported by the American Association of University Women, sponsored her visit to Macomb.

Mrs. Roosevelt was then 75 years old, and everyone regarded her as a remarkable national and international leader. At the lecture event, Mrs. Mulder introduced her to the huge crowd as "the worlds best-known and most respected living woman."

Prompted by the Cold War with Russia, which had developed after World War II and had been causing great national concern, she had titled her lecture "Is America Facing World Leadership?" Mrs. Roosevelt was striving to make sure that Americans were focused intensely upon combatting Russias influence on many other nations.

The "Macomb Journal" article about her lecture indicated that at the outset of her program she briefly stated the problem facing the United States: "Two strong ideasthe democratic idea and the communist ideaare struggling for the uncommitted peoples of the world." And she asserted that, unfortunately, "the Soviet Union has often gained success through thought control, iron discipline, police state methods, and rule by fear." So, she declared that if Americans dont effectively deal with the Russian threat on a variety of global fronts, especially in Africa, Asia, and South America, "We may wake up and find that Russia has won over the majority of the peoples of the world."

Naturally, Mrs. Roosevelt was relying upon the international awareness that she had acquired during her years of service in the United Nations. Among other things, she had personal experience with the Russian premier, Nikita Khrushchev, and she reported that, in his view, communism will eventually prevail: "He will tell you that we are wasting our time [promoting democracy]," because "the future is communism."

Her program about the Cold War and its international impact generated a number of questions, "concerning Fidel Castro, the South American attitude toward the U. S., the effectiveness of Christian missionaries, and the recognition of Red China," but she was pleased to address them. And when it was all over, the audience gave a very appreciative response.

As with so many other places that she had spoken, her overall purpose at Western was to motivate college students and others to focus on the international threat posed by the Soviet Union, for she was concerned that America didnt have enough people committed to awareness of, and resistance to, the impact of communism in various countries. So, the answer to the question in her talk title, about America facing up to world leadership, was that more should definitely be done, if the U. S. was to effectively combat its chief enemy on a global scale.

After speaking to the capacity crowd in Morgan Gym, Mrs. Roosevelt sat in a chair and shook hands with over 100 people who lined up to greet the remarkable, and inspiring, former First Lady. A female reporter for the "Western Courier," who witnessed her long interaction with audience members, said in an article that appeared several days later that she asked the famous woman "how on earth she managed to remain so pleasant and sweet, after meeting so many people when she must have been so very tired." Mrs. Roosevelt replied, after patting her hand lightly, "I dont often get tired when Im around people who are interested," and the audience at WIU was "so very attentive and very good."

So, the local program delivered by the most admired woman in the world was a success in her view, and the whole event also reminds us that Eleanor Roosevelt was an amazing example of what a purpose-driven, hard-working senior citizen can accomplish. She continued to speak widely, and promote her social and political causes, until heart problems limited her activities in 1962, and she died in November of that year, at age 78. Various statues and other memorials now celebrate her life.

Local residents should be proud that Mrs. Roosevelts purposeful visit, to urge global response to Russia during the tense and troubling Cold War, is part of Macombs heritage. But in general, she was an inspiring, progressive leader, and as the U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, said to the audience at her funeral, "What other single human being has touched and transformed the existence of so many?" So, her presence in our town was also a reminder that human greatness, which she exemplified, is based on commitment to humanity.

Writer and speaker John Hallwas is a columnist for the "McDonough County Voice." Research assistance was provided by WIU archivist Kathy Nichols.

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The greatest First Lady and her visit to Macomb - McDonough Voice