One of the ways to increase turnout is to increase the choices, so people feel they have real alternatives. The importance is that now we have candidates like Rick and myself who have a different vision about how to govern, and who are campaigning directly on an end to police brutality, an end to the use of deadly force, and an end to mass incarceration. We’re not just saying this: we have worked for it, and believe that now we’ve done it in the streets, we want to do it in office. We carry all of the feelings, every slogan we’ve shouted, every protest we’ve planned, we carry all of that with us into office. So we depend on people to vote, to make sure we can start to make the things we all need a reality. We need to have more political power, because the lives of our people are at stake. My life is at stake, and we just need more leaders, we need more people in office to shape the agenda.
Nikil Saval and Rick Krajewski, longtime organizers with Reclaim Philadelphia, are candidates for statewide office in Pennsylvania’s primary elections on Tuesday, June 2. Once elected, they pledge to fight for a slate of progressive policies that include a $15 minimum wage, decarceration, a Green New Deal, robust funding for public schools, housing reforms and a continuum of care. Saval is running for State Senate (First District, South Philadelphia), and Krajewski for the Pennsylvania House (188th District, West Philadelphia).
We write you as fellow veterans and service members with full knowledge of what’s at stake as many of you are being asked to mobilize against civilians in your own country. As your neighbors fill the streets demanding the justice this country promised them, your command is undoubtedly telling you that you’re being activated in service to your community. And yet, it is your community members who fill the streets, while your Commander in Chief tweets about using you to murder people over something as insignificant as property damage. A moral choice lies before you. As veterans who have faced similar tests of conscience, only to realize too late that we chose wrong, we cannot stress enough the impact this decision will have on the rest of your life. We all took an oath to defend the country from enemies foreign and domestic. Are Black protesters the enemy of this country? =Today you have to decide whether you are loyal to the values you swore to uphold or to the commanders who would order you to turn on your neighbors for demanding justice. You cannot be loyal to both.
When you tell people they won’t be held accountable for their actions, it almost always ends badly. That’s what’s happened with our police and our social media, two institutional pillars of personal and political society in America today. Removing those dual immunities could dramatically change—for the better—the lives of millions of Americans. For police, the doctrine of “qualified immunity” first took hold in 1967 in the Supreme Court case Pierson v. Ray, when it was used “to shield white police officers from a lawsuit they faced for enforcing segregation,” as the Princetonian editorial board wrote recently. The Supreme Court concluded that the police largely had immunity from being sued because the arrests were made in “good faith.” (The Supreme Court also said in Pierson v. Ray that those officers were not expected to predict that the Supreme Court would decide in the 1965 case of Thomas v. Mississippi that whites-only areas were unconstitutional.) The Reagan Revolution brought a huge expansion of the doctrine when, in 1982, the Supreme Court in Harlow v. Fitzgerald redefined and expanded the immunity granted to any government employee, in a case involving former members of the Nixon administration. Holding companies like Twitter and Facebook to the same liability standards that every newspaper or radio and TV station in America today faces will not end their business model or wipe out their profitability. Similarly, holding police to the standards of responsibility and decency they faced at law (although often unenforced) prior to 1982 won’t end policing or wipe out their ability to keep our communities safe. But both will go a long way toward improving Americans’ quality of life and saving our republic.
Rich Carmona spent decades upgrading his 1970s ranch home in Midland, Michigan. He lovingly installed new flooring and doors and remodeled the bathrooms. After finishing the kitchen 18 months ago, he finally had the house the way he liked it. Then the 96-year-old Edenville Dam failed amid heavy rains May 19, unleashing a torrent of water that drowned roads, swept some houses off of their foundations and left others, including Carmona’s, in ruins. If America maintained its infrastructure with the same care Carmona did his home, this never would have happened. However, U.S. leaders long failed to invest in the nation’s roads, bridges and dams, turning them into crumbling hazards that put Americans’ lives and dreams at risk. Four years ago, Donald Trump pledged a $1 trillion national infrastructure program. But he failed to deliver any rebuilding campaign at all. Americans still drive over decrepit bridges and raise their families in the shadows of aging dams. Now, as the country struggles to rebound economically from the COVID-19 pandemic, an infrastructure campaign is more essential than ever.
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