#defund University of Chicago

[vollesroah]

Reblog

Gee, if only Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg had made a blockbuster movie about how this was a bad idea.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Hi covidsafehotties!

Do you know of any official nonprofits that are doing good work for Covid? Obviously you personally are doing a LOT, but i mention official because my company will donate to registered nonprofits, especially if we volunteer with them - and i don't know of and can't find any.

Do you know of any organizations that would fit the bill?

Honestly im open to anything even vaguely Covid related if you can't think of things more closely related.

I'm not sure how many registered covid-specific non-profits are out there, but most of the ones I know are incredibly localized like specific mask blocs and Chicago's Clean Air Club. There's a distinct lack of organization in a lot of covid response measures since Biden's administration decided to defund covid response measures at large. It's mostly a lot of people like me giving their time, energy, and know-how to do what the government should be doing.

The University of Pennsylvania's Center for High Impact Philanthropy has a list that seems fairly up-to-date that may help you in your research. https://www.impact.upenn.edu/covid-19/nonprofits-to-give-to/

[reasoningdaily]

After Black Lives Matter - CEDRIC G.JOHNSON

THIS BOOK IS A FREE DOWNLOAD FROM THE BLACK TRUEBRARY CLICK THE TITLE TO DOWNLOAD

Contemporary policing reflects the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of regulating the excluded and oppressed The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way we think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little in the way of substantive reforms? After Black Lives Matter argues that the failure to leave an institutional residue was not simply due to the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing: socio-economic inequality. For Johnson, the anti-capitalist and downwardly redistributive politics expressed by different Black Lives Matter elements has too often been drowned out in the flood of black wealth creation, fetishism of Jim Crow black entrepreneurship, corporate diversity initiatives, and a quixotic reparations demand. None of these political tendencies addresses the fundamental problem underlying mass incarceration. That is the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of regulating the excluded and oppressed. Johnson sees the way forward in building popular democratic power to advance public works and public goods.  Rather than abolishing police, After Black Lives Matter argues for abolishing the conditions of alienation and exploitation contemporary policing exists to manage.

Review

"A virtuoso performance! Weighing the successes and limitations of Black Lives Matter, Johnson concludes that identity-based mobilization—confusing what people look like with what they need—cannot substitute for majoritarian political coalition-building." —Barbara J. Fields, Columbia University "A brilliant scholar who is first and foremost concerned with equality and justice. It’s those very commitments that lead him, in After Black Lives Matter, to question today’s antiracism and its nostrums." —Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto "Essential reading for those weary of platitude-driven texts on race and criminal justice and in the market for an empirically grounded political analysis that points to practicable solutions to one of the biggest problems of our day." —Touré F. Reed, author of Toward Freedom "A provocative and expansive critique from the left of the loose collection of protest actions, organizations, and ideological movements-whether prison abolition or calls to defund the police-that make up what we now call Black Lives Matter...After Black Lives Matter should be commended both for the clarity of its message and the bravery of its convictions." —Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker

About the Author

Cedric Johnson is professor of African American Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His book, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics was named the 2008 W.E.B. DuBois Outstanding Book of the Year by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.  Johnson is the editor of The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism and the Remaking of New Orleans. His 2017 Catalyst essay, “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: Anti-policing Struggles and the Limits of Black Power,” was awarded the 2018 Daniel Singer Millenium Prize. Johnson’s writings have appeared in Nonsite, Jacobin, New Political Science, New Labor Forum, Perspectives on Politics, Historical Materialism, and Journal of Developing Societies. In 2008, Johnson was named the Jon Garlock Labor Educator of the Year by the Rochester Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO. He previously served on the representative assembly for UIC United Faculty Local 6456.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Given the sheer scale, magnitude and diversity of 2020’s resurgent Black Lives Matter protests, many pundits, scholars and activists celebrated the George Floyd rebellion as an historic watershed, one where the possibility of real reform came into view. For too  many, however, the euphoria of the moment suspended any criti- cal analysis of what it all meant. This is a deeper problem on the�� US left—the tendency to read protests as always prefigurative rather than contingent, and as a manifestation of real power rather than a reflection of potential. Such wish-fulfillment think- ing, however, forgets that mass mobilization is not the same as  organized power, and that mass mobilization is much easier now with the endless opportunities for expressing discontent provided by social media, online petitions, memes and vlogging.

The scale of protests can be misleading, and their actual effectiveness, regardless of their size, is dependent on historical conjunctures, such as the balance of political forces, the organized power and  capacity of opposition and the clarity of objectives among activists. Throughout the opening decades of this century, ever larger  protests have proved incapable of consolidating in a manner that might effectively oppose ruling-class prerogatives. In recent memory, we have witnessed successive mass protests—turn-of the-century demonstrations against global capitalism, protests against the Bush administration’s so-called War on Terror, Occupy Wall Street encampments, anti-eviction campaigns, the March for Our Lives following the Parkland High School mass shooting, protests against police violence and ICE deportations, among others—but these have done little to depose capitalist class power and the advancing neoliberal project.

If anything, the hegemony of finance capital, the war-making powers of the national security state, the criminalization of immigration, the power of the gun lobby and the unaccountability of police are as entrenched as ever. THIS BOOK IS A FREE DOWNLOAD FROM THE BLACK TRUEBRARY

[radicalurbanista]

3.16.21. Evanston, IL

Police respond to an anti-police protest outside the president's mansion with ~75 riot officers. Gear included less-than-lethal munitions are at least two K-9 units. Student protestors were armed with umbrellas and megaphones and were not destroying any property.

The NIPAS is a police coalition among suburban Chicago municipalities that were present with local police as well. The abolitionist group "NU Community Not Cops" has demanded defunding of the university's private police force. The university has expressed displeasure with NIPAS's previous responses but has not made any commitment to defunding their private police force. NIPAS made no attacks this night.

Previous protest

[jones-friend]

Gonna rant bc its some straight up horseshit what the federal govt is doing with higher ed during the pandemic rn.

For scale, the pandemic hit and many schools were understandably unprepared. However, in the months after it showed which schools could adapt and which schools floundered. The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) decided way back around May they’d be fully online for fall and have been gearing all their resources for that. The school I work at still doesn’t have their plan together.

ICE released in the past week that international students studying here need to be attending an in person course or get deported. Its so blatantly anti-immigrant, for a big school like UIC that’s going to be hard to turn on a dime and provide in-person coursework because the federal govt, who has said so many times we’re sitting this out and its up to the states to handle the pandemic, is now making a very late mandate.

Whats more, it screws over international students and essentially forces them to experience COVID. Either meet in a group physically or be forced onto a plane with many other passengers for hours. And from what I understand, many countries aren’t accepting flights from the US and returning to their home country isn’t realistic, and they’d end up getting stuck in limbo.

On top of that, Tr*mp recently threatened to defund schools that aren’t holding classes in person, in July. What that means is students can’t get loans to go to that school. For non-American peeps american tuition is garbage, my uni is some $30,000 a term and its a small uni. If you lose funding students cannot attend your school and you go under (which that’s its own separate capitalistic horseshit). Again, for big schools like UIC with a lot of logistics to coordinate its not realistic for them to do a 180 and change course in the second week of July, just bc crusty ass boomer Tr*mp wants the appearance of normalcy.

God dammit.

[giftofshewbread]

Created Problems (Prophecy update)

By Daymond Duck   Published on: August 22, 2021

Created problems are piling up in the U.S. as the globalists continue their effort to weaken America and establish a world government by 2030 or sooner.

These are facts, not conspiracy theories.

Oil—The Biden administration deliberately reduced America’s oil production by stopping construction on the Keystone XL Pipeline, halting oil production on federal lands in Louisiana, New Mexico, etc., and this caused the price of oil to soar. Now, Biden wants production increased to bring the price of oil back down, but he doesn’t want U.S. companies and U.S. workers to increase production, get their jobs back, etc.; he wants OPEC and foreign workers to increase production and have those jobs.

Crime—The Defund the Police movement has resulted in police budgets being cut in many cities, thousands of criminals being released from jails, soaring shootings, killings, and thefts; this is by design because globalists want to gain control of the police.

Border—The Biden administration has deliberately destroyed what few immigration laws the U.S. had. This week, Biden’s Homeland Security Sec. visited the U.S./Mexico border and was secretly recorded saying the border crisis is unsustainable (just the opposite of what he is saying in public). About one million immigrants (many with Covid) have come across the border, drug and human trafficking have increased, etc., and there is no effort to stop it (just an effort to hide what they are doing by lying about it.).

Covid—Only U.S. citizens are required to wear masks and be tested. Illegal aliens are not required to be masked or tested, and many are deliberately bussed and flown to other parts of the U.S., especially TX and FLA (at taxpayer expense) in what appears to be an effort to spread Covid, turn TX and FLA from Red to Blue (from Republican to Democrat) and blame unvaccinated citizens for spreading Covid to justify forcing everyone to be vaccinated for the global good or the common good (deceptive phrases meaning world government).

Inflation—Inflation is rising faster than wages are increasing, meaning money is declining in value and buying less and less. There seems to be two reasons: 1) Unending stimulus packages with pork-barrel spending, and 2) Disruption of production due to the deliberate spread of Covid and imposed lockdowns. This is increasing the price of everything (food, clothing, vehicles, rent, mortgages, medicine, etc.; gas is $1 per gallon higher than it was this time last year). It is destroying the U.S. economy and hurting every American, especially the poor.

Critical Race Theory (CRT)—Socialists have increased their power in the Democrat Party, and they are pushing CRT (a new form of segregation) to divide the U.S. They know that a nation divided against itself cannot stand. Why else would they want to re-establish segregation? Note: On Aug. 16, 2021, the Arkansas Attorney Gen. said separating children based on race violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Afghanistan—Biden told America the Afghan military had enough modern weapons and troops to defend itself. Then, we read that Biden sent a letter to the Taliban asking them to hold off taking over the country until we could evacuate our people. Then, we read that most of the major Afghan cities fell in 24 hours. Then, we read that the Afghan capital fell a few hours later. Then, we read that Biden offered the Taliban foreign aid for a promise to not attack the U.S. embassy.

Biden’s hasty exit sends the message that America is not a reliable ally; it dooms thousands of Afghan soldiers to death that helped the U.S.; it dooms Afghan women to second class citizenship, covering their face, etc.; it dooms Afghan girls to forced marriages, no education, etc.; it dooms Afghan boys to brainwashing, very little education, etc.; it dooms Afghan men to beatings, amputation of limbs, etc.; and it dooms the Christians to convert to Islam or be executed. Thousands of Americans were injured or killed in Afghanistan, and Biden squandered everything America accomplished in a matter of hours.

Update One: On Aug. 16, 2021, it was reported that French Pres. Macron was advised to call an emergency meeting of the EU Council because “the security of the world” is in danger. Some EU leaders say an Islamic Caliphate in Afghanistan will be a serious threat to the western world.

Update Two: On Aug. 16, 2021, an editorial in a Chinese-affiliated newspaper declared that war will break out between China and Taiwan, and the U.S. will not help Taiwan. Amir Tsarfati said China, Russia, and Iran are declaring that the post-American world order is over, and he believes that Russia and Iran no longer believe the U.S. will help Israel if they decide to launch an attack.

Update Three: On Aug. 17, 2021, it was reported that China has been emboldened by America’s apparent weakness, and her military is already preparing to practice an attack on Taiwan.

Update Four: On Aug. 17, 2021, it was reported that the Taliban is already sending letters to house churches saying, “We know who you are, and we’re coming for you.” The Antichrist will use beheadings as a terror tactic, and the Taliban does that too.

Here are some of my afterthoughts on Biden’s Afghan debacle.

Biden had a choice. He didn’t have to run. He was advised against it, but he did it anyway.

Biden has led America to defeat in the War on Terror, and his claim to love women and children is nothing more than a campaign slogan that he used to get elected (tell the women and children of Afghanistan that Biden loves them).

The Taliban, Iran and others will declare that Allah has given Islam a major victory over the Great Satan and be encouraged to fight harder (and Biden has just given them weapons worth many millions of dollars). They are surely blaspheming God, His name, and His people.

The success of radical Islam will increase the pressure on Israel and the Arabs to sign a peace treaty.

Israel must realize that she needs to rely on God, not America.

Biden has created a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists, and a borderless world is more dangerous than ever. (The security of the U.S. is threatened by America’s open border, and the Taliban won’t hesitate to cross it.)

It is clearer than ever that the Christian’s hope is the Rapture, not a better, stronger America.

As the world grows darker, the cries for a world leader to solve the world’s problems will grow louder.

God brought Afghanistan (and Babylon) down in a matter of hours, and He can bring the U.S. down in the blink of an eye if He wants.

The U.S. is led by people that are following Satan or it wouldn’t be supporting a godless world government, godless world religion, abortion, gay marriage, censoring Christian ministries, etc.

Biden raised the gay flag over our embassies, and the Taliban will probably take it down and raise their flag over our embassy.

There are many reasons to believe the lukewarm church needs to wake up, or God will eventually bring our sin-filled nation to its knees.

Here are some more reasons to believe that the Rapture is close.

One, deceit and lying have existed at least since God created Adam and Eve, but it will be common practice at the end of the age.

What could be more deceitful than deliberately spreading Covid-19 and blaming it on the unvaccinated?

Could it be internment camps to deliberately incarcerate the falsely accused unvaccinated?

This writer has seen several reports lately that the CDC is planning to have incarceration camps in every U.S. city.

Several sources have reported that on Aug. 6, 2021, TN Gov. Mike Lee signed an executive order authorizing the National Guard to seize unvaccinated people for incarceration.

Natural News reported that it has information that the CDC has been working with the University of Chicago to develop a plan to call homes in an effort to determine if there are any children between 6 months and 17 years in the home that have not been vaccinated.

The activation of incarceration camps in every U.S. city and perhaps a phone call to every household is very troubling.

It has also been reported that starting this month in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, people will not be allowed into restaurants, theaters, and several other venues without proof of vaccination.

This writer is far from knowledgeable on Covid-19 and the mutations or variants, but this is some of what I have read and the way I understand it:

The Covid-19 virus doesn’t want to be killed by a vaccine, so it tries to stay alive by mutating.

Some medical professionals believe the mutations are developing in and being spread by vaccinated people.

This explains why the world will never reach herd immunity (vaccinate so many people on earth that the spread of Covid-19 is unlikely). For whatever it is worth, about 2/3 of the new Covid cases in Israel are people that have been fully vaccinated.

Here is a repeat from my last week’s article with the addition of one sentence: we are seeing the global development and advancement of technology and policies that many excellent Bible prophecy teachers believe will lead to the Mark of the Beast (forced compliance, loss of one’s job, development of passports or passes, a demand for government databases to track people, a demand to prevent the unvaccinated from entering stores to buy or sell, the spread of anti-Christian rhetoric, etc.). We are seeing a preview of things to come and a warning from our merciful God (that knows what is going to happen before it happens) to be sure we are saved.

Two, concerning earthquakes:

On Aug. 11, 2021, a 7.1 quake struck off the coast of Mindanao, Philippines.

On Aug. 12, 2021, an 8.1 quake struck near the South Sandwich Islands (South Atlantic Ocean).

On Aug. 14, 2021, a 7.2 quake struck Haiti. Three days later, it was reported that 6,900 were injured, 1419 were killed, and 84,585 homes were damaged or destroyed.

On Aug. 14, 2021, a 6.9 quake struck in the Gulf of Alaska.

On Aug. 16, 2021, as Haiti was trying to deal with the 7.2 quake, Tropical Storm Grace was bearing down with strong winds and perhaps as much as 8 inches of rain (up to 15 inches and flooding in some areas).

Three, concerning an increase in frequency and intensity of natural disasters (like birth pains): on Aug. 14, 2021, The Moscow Times reported that Russia’s Pres. Vladimir Putin said the scale of natural disasters (floods, droughts, and forest fires) that have hit Russia this year is “absolutely unprecedented.”

According to the article, “Russian weather officials and environmentalists have linked the increasing intensity of Siberia’s annual fires to climate change.”

More:

On Aug. 15, it was reported that at least 51 people have been killed by floods and mudslides in Turkey.

On Aug. 16, the U.S. announced that the water level in Lake Mead is at the lowest level since the Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s, a water shortage on the Colorado River was declared, and it was announced that there will be water cut-backs in 2022. Farmers and ranchers will cut production.

Four, concerning the Battle of Gog and Magog: on Aug. 13, 2021, Monte Judah (Messianic World Update) said, “It is very clear that the IDF and the government of Israel is planning to attack Iran soon to stop the nuclear weapons program. This is evidenced by the fact that the IDF, the Air Force, has been running long-range bombing training missions with the nation of Greece, and they have been doing in-flight refueling and other things of that type with Benny Gantz, the Defense Minister, announcing and giving warnings to the U.S. and other nations that Israel is going to stop Iran if they continue to do it.”

FYI: Several pastors say they are being inundated with requests for a “Religious Exemption Letter.” Here is a link to a letter that Rock Harbor Church (Rev. Brandon Holthaus) is using, and it can be printed off:

RHC Religious Exemption for Vaccines and PCR Swabs.pdf

Finally, are you Rapture Ready?

If you want to be rapture ready and go to heaven, you must be born again (John 3:3). God loves you, and if you have not done so, sincerely admit that you are a sinner; believe that Jesus is the virgin-born, sinless Son of God who died for the sins of the world, was buried, and raised from the dead; ask Him to forgive your sins, cleanse you, come into your heart and be your Saviour; then tell someone that you have done this.

[arcticdementor]

What fun, what entertainment. And rare: One seldom sees the collapse of a landmark society in a rush of wondrous idiocy. Would I could sell tickets. Don’t look at it as a loss, but as a show, an unwanted but grand amusement.

The coup de grace in our ripening decadence is the current uprising purportedly, though implausibly, over racism. But never mind. The causes don’t matter. The deal is done.

…

You cannot solve a problem without knowing what it is. This we dare not know. Democracies, however approximate, cannot deal with chronically underperforming minorities.

They cannot even try. Anything that might help is politically impossible, and anything politically possible won’t help.

So, after the riots:

Social division will worsen after the riots. Racial hostility from blacks will not decrease because their conditions will not change. The rioters are getting their way now, and rule, but at the price of sowing hatred. At best we will have many decades of ugly rancor. At worst, we are winding the spring for another outburst.

Multiculturalism has not worked, quite apart from race, and will not. White Americans are not one people. The poor communications and bad roads that once allowed them to live almost separately no longer exist. In its writ-large form, trying to force West Virginia to accept the culture of Massachusetts will produce only anger.

…

Censorship will intensify, not just of communications and office chitchat but of books. Tom Sawyer will be pulled from bookshelves or—Amazon being the continental shelf—or bowderlized to remove the Nigger Jim and Injun Joe The Nigger of the Narcissus may survive because none of the blacks and few of the whites will ever have heard of Conrad. At least for the foreseeable future, firings for anything imaginably redolent of racism–saying “All lives matter,” for example–will be snatched at in a mixture of passive aggression and schadenfreude to result in firings. This is unlikely to have a happy ending.

Schooling: Watching great universities become sandboxes for unpleasantly righteous dimwitted brats galls, or does if one lets it. I don’t. Most of the protesters seem recently to have erupted from the drains of an educational system that has been in sharp decline for decades They, including the intelligent among them, appear historically not just ignorant but carefully misinformed, culturally pathetic, and intellectually laughable. (For example, a protestress interviewed by a British reporter as to what she thought of Churchill said she couldn’t really say because she hadn’t met him. How many in BLM can spell “Confederacy”? A statue of Ulysses Grant was pulled down in the belief that he was a Confederate general. May God preserve us.)

The, uh, redaction of culture will not stop with books. Classical music is too white, the sciences too white, mathematics a tool of oppression (meaning that blacks cannot understand it) and so on. We have created a nation of pampered and imbecile peasants.

…

The most—I dare not say “entertaining” for fear of lynching, but, well, perhaps “interesting” reforms will be those of the police, whether abolition, defunding to shift money to youth outreach and rehab (which don’t work) or replacement of police by warm and caring adults, will result in increased crime. We need not concern ourselves with whether and to what extent the police have been culpable in which cases. The changes will come anyway.

An intriguing question is what the nonviolent, non-racist, warm and fuzzy pseudopolice will do when they encounter violent criminals. Counsel them on social justice? I would love to watch.

…

Many cities are routinely out of control, with seven hundred homicides in Chicago and three hundred in Baltimore every year. Increasingly criminals are released without bail and small crimes, such as evading subway fares, are ignored when committed by minorities. The hordes of derelicts grow, the New York subways become a homeless shelter. These are not problems seen in civilized countries. Which America no longer is, to the astonishment and amusement of the world.

Perhaps this was to be expected. The American practice of choosing its leaders every two, four, or six years by popularity contest worked, after a fashion anyway, in a sprawling continental country in which government had very little local influence. In a world far more complex, with little ability to plan when those in charge change with paralyzing rapidity, and everything intensely regulated by people unfamiliar with problems, results are poor. America’s competition with large countries having intelligently authoritarian and stable governance will prove a losing proposition proposition. The inevitable decline in standard of living, already well underwater, will promote unrest. Here we go again.

…

Think of it as the Cultural Revolution by suburban hobbyists. There are the same raging untermenschen, the same desire to destroy anything they do not know, or cannot understand, or be bothered to learn.

As a philosophic emollient one may reflect that all empires and civilizations must end, and ours is. America will remain as a place, a military bastion, a large if declining economic force. It will never again be, even by the low standards of humanity in such things, a relatively free and vigorous society. The world will not again credit its charades of moral leadership. The rot, the tens of thousands of derelict people living on the sidewalks, the looting and fire setting, the censorship, are now visible to the entire earth. Oh well. It was a good thing while it lasted.

[jyleshay]

April, 2021 - A fun and catchy title

April was a month in which I found some reasons to be hopeful. I was able to get vaccinated, the president is pushing for changes around infrastructure, the environment, and child care, and Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder. No longer a hope to "get back to normal", but a hope to get past the old normal and find a way to better.

The event that stands out to me the most from April was watching the verdict to Derek Chauvin's trial. The outcome was never a certainty throughout the trial, and when the verdict was delivered I felt a huge sense of relief to see that justice was served. I also felt despair; if it is so hard to get justice for a crime as well documented as it was egregious, how are we going to realize it for less clear situations. The answer is with effort. There is nothing simple about the massive systems at play in America, and there is nothing easy about changing them. I don't adhere to the call to defund the police, but the police systems in the US need to feel the pressure to change and that does include their finances. We have to maintain the effort to bring forth that change, in how we communicate, how we protest, and how we vote.

The movie The Trial of the Chicago Seven, which is my film pick for the month, is particularly apropos to these ideas around change and pressure. I highly recommend watching it, not just because it's really well done, but also to compare the past year to the events of the movie and realize we're living in a continuous timeline with the America of our past and of that film.

There was also a really interesting story during April about a Super League in Europe where the richest teams tried to create their own elite tournament that nobody else could play in but themselves. It got protested down by the fans and players but I wouldn't be surprised if the rich club owners try to do it again, but next time, sneakier.

What I read:

I've read some really good books this year, but this month's was my favorite so far. Exhalation - by Ted Chiang is a collection of science fiction short stories that blew me away with their elegance and depth. Not only does the author tell stories with science fiction concepts such as time travel, artificial intelligence, and parallel universes, he uses those concepts to approach deeper meaning around humanity and our nature, free will, love, death, and meaning. This is a very thoughtful book that does what great science fiction is supposed to do; become a mirror in which we can view our own universe in a new light. 10/10, will read again.

Favorite Movie: The Trial of the Chicago Seven

Favorite Series: The Expanse, Season 5

Favorite Podcast: The Social Dilemma - Intelligence Squared

Honorable Mentions:

Monkey Mind Pong - Neuralink on YouTube

Malibu Broken - Jessie Frye, Ollie Wride

The Super League That Wasn't - The Daily

If you read all of this, thank you, you're amazing. Good luck in May!

[carolinesiede]

Reflecting on 2020

The strangest thing about 2020 was how familiar much of it felt: Working from home, extended periods of isolation, weeks and months blending together. To a much lesser degree, those are things I experience each year as a freelancer. And while I suspect it will take awhile before the full extent of the trauma we’ve all lived through this year fully sets in, right now I’m mostly focused on gratitude. I’m grateful for the health of my loved ones. Grateful I already had a work-from-home routine to maintain during the pandemic. And grateful that I was able to quarantine with my family for much of the year—which had its challenges but also its rewards too.

In my 2019 year-end post I wrote about feeling like my career was finally on an upward trajectory after several years of plateauing. This year obviously offered some new wrinkles in that regard. I made significantly less money and felt familiar fears about how sustainable this career actually is. But having less work also gave me more time to focus on the actual craft of writing. I feel like I reached a new level in terms of voice, clarity, and the ability to self-edit. I'm the sort of person who constantly (arguably, obsessively) strives to be better, and it’s rewarding to feel like that hard work is finally slowly starting to pay off.

In addition to devoting my quarantine time to mastering a favorite curry recipe, getting really into the Enneagram, finally learning to French braid hair, and rewatching all of New Girl, I also had some really cool opportunities scattered throughout the year. I interviewed John Barrowman about his surprise return to Doctor Who, which felt like a real milestone for me. I also contributed to the Los Angeles Times’ list of TV shows to binge-watch during quarantine, which appeared both online and in print. And thanks to everything going virtual this year, I was able to attend a press panel for the fifth season of This Is Us, which is the sort of thing I’m not usually able to do as a Chicago-based critic. 

My career is always a juggling act between film and TV, and this year made me appreciate how valuable it is to be able to move seamlessly between both worlds. I took on new TV assignments covering the first season of Stargirl and the second season of The Umbrella Academy, both of which were a blast to write about. And while I didn’t watch quite as many films as I did in my insane catch-up year last year, I did fill in some more major blindspots. I also contributed to The A.V. Club’s list of the best films of 2000 and shared my own ballot over on Letterboxd. Oh, and I set up a Letterboxd this year too!

Elsewhere, I made my debut on Bustle and The Takeout, and ended the year with a Polygon article about “Kind Movies” that pretty much sums up my entire ethos on storytelling. I was also named a Top Critic by Rotten Tomatoes, which was a real honor. But the pride and joy of my career remains my rom-com column, When Romance Met Comedy. I devoted a whopping 49,000 words to analyzing 25 different romantic comedies this year. And I’m really pleased with how the column has grown and with the positive feedback I’ve received.

I have to admit, I sometimes worry that year-end highlight reels like this one can make my life seem easy or glamorous in a way that doesn’t reflect what it’s like to actually live through it. I'm tremendously lucky to get to do what I do, but I also struggle a lot—both with the logistics of this career and with bigger questions about what value it brings to the world. My goal is to approach 2021 with a greater sense of intentionality. I want to be more thoughtful in my career choices, more purposeful in how I use social media, and more active in my activism and politics. I’d also like to do 20 push-ups a day everyday for the whole year, but we’ll see how long that resolution actually lasts.

Finally, on a sadder note, one other defining experience of the year was the loss of my dear internet friend Seb Patrick, who I’ve known for years through the Cinematic Universe podcast. Seb created a wonderfully positive nerd space online, and was a big part of my early quarantine experience thanks to the Avengers watchalongs I did with the CU gang in the spring. I’m so grateful for all the fun pop culture chats we got to have throughout the years, several of which are linked below. Seb is tremendously missed, and there’s a fund for his family here.

As we head into 2021, I’ll leave you with wishes for a Happy New Year and a roundup of all the major writing and podcasts I did in 2020. If you enjoyed my work, you can support me on Kofi or PayPal. Or you can just share some of your favorite pieces with your friends! That really means a lot.

My 15 favorite films of 2020

My 15 favorite TV shows of 2020

Op-eds, Features, and Interviews

Women Pioneered The Film Industry 100 Years Ago. Why Aren’t We Talking About Them? [Bustle]

2020 is the year of the Kind Movie — and it couldn’t have come at a better time [Polygon]

Make a grocery store game plan for stress-free shopping [The Takeout]

What’s Going On: A primer on the call to defund the police [Medium]

Doctor Who’s John Barrowman on the return of Captain Jack Harkness [The A.V. Club]

Episodic TV Coverage

Doctor Who S12

This Is Us S4 and S5

Supergirl S5

Stargirl S1

The Umbrella Academy S2

The Crown S4

NBC’s Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch Musical!

When Romance Met Comedy

Is The Ugly Truth the worst romantic comedy ever made?

Working Girl’s message is timeless, even if the hair and the shoulder pads aren’t

You’ve Got Mail and the power of the written (well, typed) word

Love & Basketball was a romantic slam dunk

How did My Big Fat Greek Wedding make so much money?

America eased into the ’60s with the bedroom comedies of Doris Day and Rock Hudson

I can’t stop watching Made Of Honor

Notting Hill brought two rom-com titans together

It’s time to rediscover one of Denzel Washington’s loveliest and most under-seen romances

Something’s Gotta Give is the ultimate quarantine rom-com

20 years ago, But I’m A Cheerleader reclaimed camp for queer women

On its 60th anniversary, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment looks like an indictment of toxic masculinity

The Wedding Planner made rom-com stars out of Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey

After 25 years, Clueless is still our cleverest Jane Austen adaptation

William Shakespeare invented every romantic comedy trope we love today

Edward Norton made his directorial debut by walking a priest, a rabbi, and a Dharma into a Y2K rom-com

The forgotten 1970s romantic comedy that raged against our broken, racist system

His Girl Friday redefined the screwball comedy at 240 words per minute

Before Wonder Woman soared into theaters, the hacky My Super Ex-Girlfriend plummeted to Earth

Dirty Dancing spoke its conscience with its hips

The rise of Practical Magic as a spooky season classic

In a dire decade for the genre, Queen Latifah became a new kind of rom-com star

Years before Elsa and Anna, Tangled reinvigorated the Disney princess tradition

Palm Springs is the definitive 2020 rom-com

Celebrate Christmas with the subversive 1940s rom-com that turned gender roles on their head

The A.V. Club Film & TV Reviews

Netflix’s To All The Boys sequel charms, though not quite as much as the original

The Photograph only occasionally snaps into focus

Jane Austen's Emma gets an oddball, sumptuous, and smart new adaptation

Pete Davidson delivers small-time charms in Big Time Adolescence

Council Of Dads crams a season of schmaltzy storytelling into its premiere

In Belgravia, Downton Abbey’s creator emulates Dickens to limited success

Netflix’s Love Wedding Repeat adds some cringe to the rom-com

Netflix takes another shot at Cyrano de Bergerac with queer love triangle The Half Of It

We Are Freestyle Love Supreme is a feel-good origin story for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first troupe

Sara Bareilles’ melodic Apple TV+ series Little Voice is still finding itself

Netflix’s sexist rom-com sensation gets a minor upgrade in The Kissing Booth 2

With Howard, Disney+ movingly honors the lyricist who gave the Little Mermaid her voice

The Broken Hearts Gallery tries to find catharsis in heartbreak

Netflix’s ghostly musical series Julie And The Phantoms hits some charming tween high notes

After We Collided slides toward R-rated camp—but not far enough

Holidate is a bawdy start to Netflix’s holiday rom-com slate

Kristen Stewart celebrates the Happiest Season in a pioneering queer Christmas rom-com

Isla Fisher gets her own Enchanted in the Disney Plus fairy tale Godmothered

Podcast Appearances

Debating Doctor Who: “Orphan 55”

It Pod To Be You: The Wedding Singer

Reality Bomb: Defending Doctor Who’s “Closing Time”

The Televerse: Spotlight on Doctor Who Season 12

You Should See The Other Guy: The Ugly Truth

Only Stupid Answers: Stargirl’s season finale

Motherfoclóir: Ireland and the Hollywood Rom-Com

Called in to Nerdette’s Clueless retrospective episode

Cinematic Universe Appearances

Cinematic Universe: Superman IV: The Quest For Peace

Cinematic Universe: Birds of Prey

Cinematic Universe: Infinity War watchalong

Cinematic Universe: Endgame watchalong

Cinematic Universe: Terminator 2

Cinematic Universe: Josie and the Pussycats

Cinematic Universe: The Cuppies 2020 (Cuppies of Cuppies)

And here are similar year-end wrap-ups I did in 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.

[good--bye--binary]

Since her election in 2019, #LoriLIEFoot has spent over $2 billion on the Chicago Police Department. Lori’s campaign promises to reopen schools and mental health clinics have gone unfulfilled and unheard, leaving Black and Brown communities under resourced and overpoliced.

According to defundchicagopolice.com, the CPD’s budget has increased every single year since 2012. Under Lori’s first year of leadership, it increased by at least $121,504,351.

We demand #LoriLIEFoot and City Council defund the Chicago Police Department and invest in the things that actually make our communities safer: quality housing for all, universal health care, community-based mental health services, income support, safe living wage employment, education and youth programming.

Join us TODAY at Wrightwood and Kimball to demand Lori Lightfoot #DefundCPD and defend Black lives. 5pm.

Take digital action at bit.ly/happybdaylori.

image by Cori Lin (@cori.lin.art)

#HappyBdayLori #DefundCPD #DefundorResign #58candles

[afriqveens]

Press Release

Press Release A Virtual Discussion On Policing Data, and Transparency-

October 1stAn awesome group of panelist put together by the board of UCFTP otherwise known as cops off campus on twitter, run by an assembly on California’s university campus is hosting a viirtual discussion on October 1st. This panel will feature Alicia Hurtado, Carenotcops, Damon Jones, Harris School of Public policy , Invisible Institute Trina Reynolds-Tyler, MAira Khwaja and will be moderated by the University of Chicago department of Sociology. On Thursday, October 1st- this discussion will be centered on the ongoing efforts to defund Uchicago police. There will also be talk about police field stop & data, as well sharing ongoing efforts to hold police accountable. The overarching themes will be centered around community,safety, and information about the university of Chicago police department. Cops of Campus is an organization that promotes awareness about policing in America’s universities. They host a number of events year round teaching about diversity issues, support in college communities and more.This event can be streamed live at 6pm central time.. and you can register online here at this link. Bitly.com/UPDDATA

[omgokiguess]

And there are people protesting right now to defund the university of Chicago police department..... that they should defund that private police department and somehow put that money to helping minority communities.... and I'm sorry but that makes me so angry..... that university has done so much for the black community and I'm sorry but it's a dangerous neighborhood and they're just trying to keep people safe. I mean fuck during a graduation ceremony while I was parked legally somebody quickly stole the calibrator off my car. DURING GRADUATION. they knew how to do it. They ran in and just took it off as fast as possible. I had to call my dad and he listened to my engine start loudly during a top 3 school in the nation graduation ceremony... I left the keys in the car for him, went to Barrington (1.5 hours), we drove back together and each drove a car.... AND THEY WANT TO DEFUND THE POLICE????

Look I hate the police, the police have fucked me in the ass so hard SO HARD but I would never vote to defund them. Never. Despite everything that's happened I want the police around.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Will you get robbed this year? How would you rate your chances?

Over 10 years, from 1994 to 2004, the national Survey of Economic Expectations asked respondents to do just that. People estimated their risks for a whole host of bad-news life events — robbery, burglary, job loss and losing their health insurance. But the survey didn’t just ask respondents to rate their chances: It also asked whether those things had actually happened to them in the last year.

And that combination of questions revealed something important about American fear: We are terrible at estimating our risk of crime — much worse than we are at guessing the danger of other bad things. Across that decade, respondents put their chance of being robbed in the coming year at about 15 percent. Looking back, the actual rate of robbery was 1.2 percent. In contrast, when asked to rate their risk of upcoming job loss, people guessed it was about 14.5 percent — much closer to the actual job loss rate of 12.9 percent.

In other words, we feel the risk of crime more acutely. We are certain crime is rising when it isn’t; convinced our risk of victimization is higher than it actually is. And in a summer when the president is sending federal agents to crack down on crime in major cities and local politicians are arguing over the risks of defunding the police, that disconnect matters. In an age of anxiety, crime may be one of our most misleading fears.

Take the crime rate. In 2019, according to a survey conducted by Gallup, about 64 percent of Americans believed that there was more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago. It’s a belief we’ve consistently held for decades now, but as you can see in the chart below, we’ve been, just as consistently, very wrong.

Crime rates do fluctuate from year to year. In 2020, for example, murder has been up but other crimes are in decline so that the crime rate, overall, is down. And the trend line for violent crime over the last 30 years has been down, not up. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the rate of violent crimes per 1,000 Americans age 12 and older plummeted from 80 in 1993 to just 23 in 2018. The country has gotten much, much safer, but, somehow, Americans don’t seem to feel that on a knee-jerk, emotional level.

“The biggest challenge really, and we’re seeing this as a society across the board right now, is that even though our organizations, our businesses, our government entities are becoming more data driven, we as human beings are not,” said Meghan Hollis, a research scholar at the Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship.

That’s not to say that Americans are completely clueless about crime. When we spoke to John Gramlich, a senior writer with the Pew Research Center and one of the people who has been tracking and writing about this disconnect for years, he was quick to clarify that Pew didn’t like to frame Americans’ apparent inability to register their own increased safety as a product of being uninformed or misinformed. The reality, he told us, is that the nature of data collection makes it hard for the public to really assess crime rates and for experts to assess what the public knows or feels about crime rates.

Even the concept of a “crime rate” is messy. When we talk about crime rates in the context of an article like this one, what we’re actually discussing is the number of crimes, in a set of particular categories, that get reported to the police and, from there, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation — or results from a government survey about whether people have experienced crime. These stats document murder, rape, robbery and assault, among others, as well as several property crimes, including burglary, theft, car theft, and arson. That covers a lot of ground, and it gives us a pretty good idea what the crime rate truly looks like — enough that experts feel comfortable saying things like “Hey, look, the crime rate has been going down for 30 years.”

But those statistics don’t tell the whole story, and that matters in ways that become important when you’re trying to understand the difference between how people feel and what the data say. Not all crimes are reported to the police. Sexual assault, in particular, is notoriously underreported. And there are plenty of crimes we don’t really track well in data — like vandalism, drug use and sales, or public intoxication — which can affect how safe people feel in their neighborhoods, even if the crimes aren’t serious.

Wesley Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University, spent much of the 1990s attending neighborhood-level public meetings around Chicago and documenting the issues that residents told police were problems they wanted solved. Some of these issues weren’t even, strictly speaking, crimes, at all. In 17 percent of the meetings, residents asked police to do something about litter. Loud music or other noise-related problems were discussed in 19 percent of the meetings. Residents complained about abandoned cars more often than they complained about gang problems. Skogan thinks about these factors as measurements of social disorder, and has found evidence that these things affect how safe people feel. If violent crimes are down, but there’s still a good deal of social disorder in an area, people’s responses to a survey might reflect how they feel about litter more than how they feel about a reduced murder rate.

The way the polls are worded also don’t help. “The polling tends to be pretty generic,” said Lisa L. Miller, a political scientist at Rutgers University who studies crime and punishment, which makes it hard to capture the difference between how Americans think about murder and litter when it comes to how safe they feel. More importantly, she said, questions like “Do you think crime has gone up or down?” is not the same thing as measuring fear. “When people are genuinely worried about crime and really fearful, it tends to be in relation to violent crime. That’s the thing I’ve found really drives public pressure for the government to do something,” she said.

This whole thing is further complicated because crime is extremely localized — and estimates about the national crime rate are, well, not.

“All the homicides in Chicago occur in about 8 percent of the city’s census tracts,” Skogan said. For almost everybody, he said, that means “the crime you hear about is crime somewhere else.” And that matters because research suggests people are a lot better at estimating the crime rate in their own backyard than they are at estimating what it’s like across town, or across the country.

Finally, there’s the question of race, which permeates and complicates everything surrounding crime. It’s not just trash and loitering that make people perceive a neighborhood as more dangerous regardless of the crime rate. When Lincoln Quillian, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, analyzed data from three surveys of crime and safety in cities across America, he found that people perceive their neighborhood as more dangerous — regardless of the actual crime rate — if more young Black men live there. That was true for both Black and white respondents of the surveys, but in some cities the effect was significantly more pronounced in white people.

This is all a long-winded way of saying the situation is messy on many levels, but it remains true that people’s personal fear of being victims of crimes and their perceptions of national crime rates are far from accurate.

So why do Americans still think crime is high?

Turns out, the local news may be responsible for convincing Americans that violent crime is more common than it really is. Researchers have consistently found that “if it bleeds, it leads” is a pretty accurate descriptor of the coverage that local television broadcasters and newspapers focus on. For years, rarer crimes like murders received a lot more airtime than more common crimes like physical assault. And that hasn’t changed as the crime rate has fallen.

Understandably, seeing stories about violent atrocities on the news every night seems to make people afraid that the same thing could happen to them. According to one study conducted in California, consumption of local television news significantly increased people’s perceptions of risk and fear of crime. “The news is not going to report on things that are going really well very often,” Hollis said. “It’s not like ‘Hey Austin, Texas doesn’t have a whole lot of crime and that’s our news for the day!'” Stories about gun violence grab attention, so you get more stories about rare, but serious, crimes. “You can have people perceiving areas of cities as much more violent than they actually are because that’s what they see in the news,” she said. “It really amplifies that view of criminal activity beyond what it really is.”

There’s a significant amount of evidence, too, that reporting on crime can prop up harmful stereotypes: Studies have found that local news media disproportionately portray Black people as perpetrators of crime, and white people as victims.

There’s also plenty of fodder for this kind of coverage because even though crime has fallen a lot over the past few decades, the U.S. is still a pretty violent country, at least compared to other developed nations. “Violence remains an American problem,” Miller said. “Just think about mass shootings. So in that sense it’s not irrational for people to be somewhat fearful of violence.”

But often, those fears can be blown out of proportion — not just by wall-to-wall murder coverage on the news, but also by politicians who bring up the crime rate in press conferences and interviews. President Trump is far from the first president to paint a dark vision of crime in American cities, but he is singularly obsessed with the topic, especially now. According to a HuffPost analysis, the vast majority of the ads his campaign aired in the month of July dealt in some way with public safety. In one ad, an elderly woman is robbed as text flashes across the screen reading, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

And a recent study suggests that Trump’s words could have an effect. Researchers found that news coverage and political rhetoric — as measured by mentions of crime in presidential State of the Union speeches — were significant indicators of whether Americans thought crime was a pressing issue facing the country. The actual crime rate was not. A HuffPost poll conducted from July 22 to 24 found something similar: Only 10 percent of Americans correctly believe that crime has fallen over the past decade, while 57 percent think crime has increased.

Some Americans may be more receptive to tough-on-crime rhetoric than others, of course. Republicans are generally more apt to say that crime is a serious problem facing the country than Democrats. And although Pew analysis of polling data doesn’t uncover big racial differences in perceptions of crime, white and Black Americans likely think about crime very differently because criminal justice has become so inextricably tied to race.

Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies race and justice, told us that Black people’s views on criminal justice are complex, in part because they’re likelier than other demographic groups to actually live in high-crime neighborhoods and to be victims of crime. In other research, he’s found that some Black people have also internalized negative stereotypes about who commits crime, and may be more likely to embrace punitive solutions as a result. Those perceptions and experiences are hard to capture in public opinion data, but they can do a lot to shape what Black people mean when they tell a pollster that they think crime is a serious issue facing the country. And that’s important, because as the past few decades have shown, Black people are also much likelier to be mistreated by police, experience incarceration or grapple with the challenges of a criminal record.

Regardless of what’s driving fear of crime, though, the fact that it is so out of whack with reality can make it really hard to change people’s minds or reform the criminal justice system. It’s not that an out-of-proportion fear of crime automatically leads people to support more punitive policies — right now, for instance, Americans are mostly not in favor of more money for policing. But these misperceptions can make it harder for reforms to gain traction, particularly if politicians with a big national platform — like Trump — are talking about out-of-control crime at every turn.

It’s not hard, for instance, to imagine that kind of rhetoric being used as a wedge against efforts to restructure local funding for the police. Especially considering that in the past, a fear of crime has been used politically as a reason to oppose criminal justice reforms like reducing incarceration or changing the bail bond system — even though research suggests those reforms don’t increase crime in the long term.

The history of “law and order” campaigns is riddled with dog whistles, and Trump’s recent rhetoric about sending federal agents to combat crime in cities like Chicago arguably falls into this category, according to Justin Pickett, a criminologist at the University of Albany who studies attitudes toward crime and justice. Talking about the dangers of crime, he said, can turn into a cover for racist attitudes.

None of this has made us safer. And ironically, fear of crime can actually lead to other behaviors that put us at greater risk, like buying and carrying guns. If anxiety about crime keeps Americans from embracing different ways of thinking about criminal justice, that may be doing more harm than good, too. For instance, there’s no real evidence that putting more people behind bars contributed to the decrease in crime or that imprisoning fewer people will raise crime. Instead, a mountain of research points in the opposite direction to problems and inequalities linked to mass incarceration.

The trouble is that fear about crime isn’t rational, and it’s hard to convince people to think differently about a problem that they don’t experience on a day-to-day basis anyway. “You can tell Americans that the crime rate is lower today than it was in the 1990s, but it won’t feel real to them,” said Kevin Wozniak, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “That is, unless politicians stop drumming up the crime rate and people stop hearing about murder every night on the local news.”

And that seems unlikely to happen in 2020.

[radicalurbanista]

8.15.20. Chicago

Protesters begin peaceful demonstrations to defund CPD, cancel the ICE citizens academy (an ICE program to militarize citizens against suspected immigrants), re-allocate funds towards community centers and e-learning, and have universities cut ties with ICE. Local police respond with tear gas and batons before the sun even sets.

[ltruong20ahsgov-blog]

Political Interest Groups, and PACs Assessment

1. National interest group:                                                                                         a. Demand Universal Healthcare (DUH)                                                               b. The mission of Demand Universal Healthcare is to advance the cause of establishing a universal, single-payer, equitable, publicly-funded national Healthcare for all system in the United States.                                                          c. DUH wants to provide a social media platforms on which to engage people in discussion, debate, and investigation of healthcare and other related social justice issues. DUH encourages vigorous participation in the political process, including non-violent protest and voting. The group endorses and is working to elect progressive legislators who support single-payer legislation. They form alliances and partnerships with other single-payer and social justice groups and individuals to support each other in our effort. This is all to end their problem of being the only major country that doesn't provide healthcare to its people as a right.                                                                                                  d. Demand Universal Healthcare endorses Bernie Sanders as on the home page they have multiple ads for Sanders. This is because Sanders wants a universal healthcare for all Americans.                                                                   e. The group was founded in Chicago, Illinois. They have toured 14 states and 33 cities in three years. In 2014 they had a talk in Oakland's New Parkway Theater. Their are no current local meetings right now.                                          f.  If you wanted to volunteer for this group you could become a fundraiser, event planner, or a computer helper. Their is a donate button which will help them endorse politicians and create tours.                                                            g. Despite being a small group they are doing what they can and not giving up. Their tours rely a lot on donations and if they do not get enough at during the talk they have to return home as their tours rely on donations.

State Interest Group

a. Health Access California

b. They hope to unite consumer, community, labor, progressive, and health care organizations working to advance the goal of quality affordable health care for all Californians. The want affordable and cost effective universal coverage, regardless of immigration status, age, disability, income, or other factors.

c. Health Access California plans to educate, enroll and engage consumers, and have public campaigns to defend the affordable health care act nationally. They defend the integrity of core federal health programs, Medicaid, Medicare, and ACA, and fend off political attacks, privatization, defunding, and other problems. The group plans to improve the benefits of “Obamacare” in both public programs and private coverage, including affordable vision and dental options. 

d. Health Access has a long history of sponsoring and supporting legislation in Sacramento. They have successfully advocated for many health care reforms that benefit California’s consumers. One of the legislation they are advocating for now is, SB 260, which would help consumers keep health insurance coverage and avoid coverage gaps when they undergo different life events that cause them to lose health coverage.

e.  The main location is in Sacramento, CA, and there are no there local meetings I could attend.

f. People who want to help can join a advocacy or policy group, call legislators, or share a story of a way a person has benefited from Medi-Cal coverage.

g. Identify additional developments you find interesting from the website/group.

3. Both seem to be about providing national healthcare and improving medicare and making it nation wide. However, Health Access California is reaching more people and is more successful. This is because they are focused mainly on California and passing federal legislation not national like Demand Universal Healthcare. They both target the same audience but Health Access California has more supporters.

·      

4.       Choose one PAC or Super PAC that pertains to your civic action issue. Include:

a.     UnitedHealth Group

b.      UnitedHealth Group Incorporated is an American for-profit managed health care company based in Minnetonka, Minnesota. It offers health care products and insurance services. It is the largest healthcare company in the world by revenue.

c.    They have a total receipt of $1,562,519 and have spent $1,634,000. The cash on hand right now is currently $869,283.

d.     So far in the 2020 election they have spent $246 k on republicans and $170 k on democrats. 

e.       Most of the donors are health care services so this tells me that this PAC is for healthcare companies.

[usasharenews]

U of C students rally to defund campus police after man shot while allegedly in mental health crisis

U of C students rally to defund campus police after man shot while allegedly in mental health crisis

CHICAGO (WLS) — A group of University of Chicago students have been rallying on campus, calling for the university to defund campus police. The protest came after a police-involved shooting last month. SEE ALSO | University of Chicago shooting: Man critically wounded in shootout with officer charged Students said the man shot, Rhysheen Wilson, was experiencing a mental health crisis, but the…