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By Joe Sims
With a nationwide uprising over the public execution of George Floyd, and Trump’s use of military force in D.C.’s Lafayette Square, the country has entered an extremely dangerous period. Institutionalized racist police violence, always present, is now front and center in the COVID-sparked economic crisis.
The pandemic, along with the uprising against racist violence, has raised the stakes dramatically in this regard. Demonstrators, well aware of the danger of infection, after living weeks in COVID lockdown, are literally risking their lives to protest. They have little to lose when their jobs have disappeared and their communities are dying at three to four times the rate of everyone else.
The uprising has created a tipping point. But instead of providing leadership and coming to the rescue with emergency programs and proposals that match the scale of the crisis, conservatives in Congress stall. Unemployment payments, for example, are due to run out in just eight weeks. Senate Republicans, however, refuse to pass the extension contained in the House-approved Heroes Act.
A long, hot summer of hunger, disease, joblessness, and civil unrest is sure to follow unless something is done. But how and what? The answers are being written on the nation’s streets. As Frederick Douglass once observed, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” but “power concedes nothing without demand.” But struggle around what issues, whither, and with whom?
Take the issue of the extreme right danger. Trump has pushed right-wing militias to...
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