Building on the success of the New Deal, FDR added Wallace, initially his agriculture secretary, as vice president in 1940, dumping segregationist Democrat John Nance Garner. Roosevelt felt that Wallace could succeed him and ultimately continue on the work of the New Deal. More importantly, FDR needed Wallace’s energy and vision to help make the case to the American public to back the war effort.
As vice president, Wallace spent the war years touring the U.S. with a vigor that the wheelchair-bound FDR couldn’t, arguing that in order to truly win the war against fascism abroad, the United States must take on racism, sexism, and economic inequality at home, or risk the rise of a new “American fascism.”
The Manhattan district attorney’s office suggested on Monday that it had been investigating President Trump and his company for possible bank and insurance fraud, a significantly broader inquiry than the prosecutors have acknowledged in the past.
The suggestion by the office of the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., came in a new federal court filing arguing that Mr. Trump’s accountants should have to comply with a grand jury subpoena seeking eight years of his personal and corporate tax returns. Mr. Trump has asked a judge to declare the subpoena invalid.
The vast majority of the American police state remains firmly within the public sector. But this does not mean the criminal justice buildup has nothing to do with capitalism. At its heart, the new American repression is very much about the restoration and maintenance of ruling class power.
American society and economy have from the start evolved through forms of racialized violence, but criminal justice was not always so politically central. For the better part of a century after the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the national incarceration rate hovered at around 100 to 110 per 100,000. But then, in the early 1970s, the incarceration rate began a precipitous and continual climb upward.
Dr. Christine Montross says in the U.S., people with serious mental illnesses are far more likely to be incarcerated than to be treated in a psychiatric hospital. Montross studied systemic change in the Norwegian prison system, and what the U.S. might learn from it. Her new book is ‘Waiting for an Echo.’
This is a very interesting and though provoking half hour. I heard it live on NPR and ended up listening to the whole episode. Some counties – namely Sweeden are doing better and so should we.
One night halfway through a graveyard shift at the hospital, orderly John Moon watched as two young men burst through the doors. They were working desperately to save a dying patient. Maybe today he wouldn’t bat an eye at this scene, but in 1970 nothing about it made sense. The two men weren’t doctors, and they weren’t nurses. And their strange uniforms weren’t hospital issued. Moon was witnessing the birth of a new profession—one that would go on to change the face of emergency medicine. The two men were some of the worlds first paramedics, and, like Moon, they were Black. This is the story of Freedom House Ambulance Service of Pittsburgh. They were the first paramedics and they changed the way we think about emergency medicine.
Did you ever think about who took people to the hospital back in the 1950s before ambulances? It turns out that EMTs are a relatively new invention that came out of the African American community where people who were injured didn’t want to be taken to the hospital in a paddy wagon on a cot.
Researchers say police should not be using tear gas or pepper spray against protesters: They make people cough droplets and damage the airways in ways that will make people sicker from COVID-19.