June 30, 2020

Mandatory College Football Practices at Time of Pandemic are Nuts 
By Jesse Jackson

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The NCAA has just ruled that mandatory football practices can begin in July, anticipating a full season of college football.

This is nuts. The pandemic isn’t going away; it’s surging in more than 29 states, with seven reporting new records for cases in a day. States that opened early without adequate safeguards — Texas, Florida, Arizona — now face a spread of the pandemic that may soon exhaust the supply of hospital beds. Deaths are now over 125,000. Increasing numbers of young people are contracting the disease, presumably because of the lack of social distancing, the scorn for masks that has accompanied the reopening in many states — and, of course, in the White House itself. 

The experience of Texas and Florida and Arizona in reopening suggests that it may not even be safe to reopen college campuses with thousands of students gathering together in dorms, classes, parties and bars, much less begin practices on a football field. In the so-called “voluntary workouts” that some schools began in June, dozens of players have already tested positive. UNLV suspending on-campus workouts when four athletes tested positive for the virus.

Texas Tech reports 23 players have tested positive; Clemson reports 37 football players and 47 cases in all among athletes. And now the NCAA says it’s time to open mandatory workouts. Football is a physical contact sport. The coronavirus is transmittable through respiratory droplets. If an infected athlete wipes his nose or mouth between plays, or takes out his mouth guard, he has the virus on his hands that will be in repeated contact with other players.

Does anyone doubt that the virus will spread like wildfire once mandatory camps and contact drills begin? To discount this reality, we hear a lot of gibberish. The athletes will be tested regularly, we’re told, and isolated, traced and quarantined if they have the disease. How regularly? Well, daily would be optimal — that is what wealthy professional teams are talking about doing — but few if any universities can afford that.

So some will test weekly; some only if an athlete exhibits symptoms, even though young people are often asymptomatic. No wonder Ohio State University is forcing players and their parents to sign an “acknowledgment of risk waiver.” 

The university is prepared to risk the lives of the players, but not open itself up to liability. Don’t worry, we’re told, “college athletes in general are a young, healthy population in relation to the general public. They are usually well-equipped to fight off the infection physically unscathed.” Usually. But we’re learning that even those who survive the virus are often scarred with weak lungs, or bad hearts. 

The watchword, we’re told, is “flexibility.” Second- and third-string players have to be ready to step in at any time. “This scenario,” one doctor wrote, would be analogous to spraining an ankle or pulling a hamstring during warmups and suddenly needing to sit out the next one to three games.” No, a sprained ankle does not put a life at risk. A pulled hamstring is painful, but not as lasting as a damaged lung or weakened heart. Sprained ankles and pulled hamstrings aren’t contagious. We’re not talking about “flexibility,” we’re talking about irresponsibility. 

Many of the football players in Division One schools come from low-income families. Many depend on their scholarship to pay for their schooling. Now they are asked to risk their lives for their sport. I believe that this college football season should be postponed. It can’t be played in a “bubble,” as Dr. Anthony Fauci suggests. And we’ve already got vivid proof of how vulnerable the players are to the virus. But if the NCAA and the universities are intent on playing despite the risk — driven no doubt by the billions of dollars at risk if the season is called off — they should at the very minimum give the players and their parents a real choice. Every player should be given the choice of whether to play or not, with their scholarship sustained no matter what decision they make.

Every player and their families should be guaranteed free health care if they contract the virus. No player should be extorted to put his or her life at risk in order to get the education that they have earned. In this time of Black Lives Matter protests, the lives of these young athletes — black, white, brown and yellow, male and female, must matter. If the NCAA isn’t responsible enough to suspend the season, it should at the very least require that every athlete be given a choice on whether to take the risk, without losing the scholarship that has been promised to them.

June 30, 2020

One of the Cops Who Murdered Breonna Taylor is Fired

Breonna Taylor

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The Louisville Metro Police Department Tuesday fired Brett Hankison, one of three officers involved in the March 13 murder of Breonna Taylor during a raid of her apartment.

Former Louisville cop Brett HankisonLouisville Mayor Greg Fischer and Police Chief Robert J. Schroeder wrote in a termination letter to Hankison, a detective, stating that he violated rules and regulations andthe department’s use of force policy.

“I find your conduct a shock to the conscience. I am alarmed and stunned you used deadly force in this fashion. You have never been trained by the Louisville Metro Police Department to use deadly force in this fashion. Your actions have brought discredit upon yourself and the department,” Schroeder wrote, adding that Hankison’s conduct “demands his termination, effective immediately.”

Chief Schroeder had announced June 19th that he planned to fire Hankison.

Taylor , a 26-year EMT technician who wanted to become a nurse, was shot eight times by Hankison during the raid that began at 12:40 a.m. Her bleeding bullet riddled body was found in the apartment’s hallway.

Schroeder said Hankison wildly fired a total of 10 shots, endangering Taylor’s neighbors who lived in the apartment next door. He also fired through a covered patio door.

Hankison, Sgt. John Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, used a no-knock warrant to batter down the door to Taylor’s apartment.

Kenneth Walker, her boyfriend, who was spending the night with Taylor, believed like Taylor, burglars were breaking into the apartment. Walker, a registered gun owner, fired his pistol wounding Mattingly in the leg. Initially Walker was charged with a crime, but the charge was later dropped.

The police raided Taylor’s apartment because they claimed they were looking for drugs. No drugs were found. Neither Taylor nor Walker have a history of illegal drug use.
All three cops were placed on administrative leave. Though Hankison has been fired none of the cops have been charged with Taylor’s murder.

June 30, 2020

D.C. Statehood is a Racial Justice Issue for the Entire Nation
By Ben Jealous

Ben Jealous

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The District of Columbia is the one spot where there is no government for the people, of the people and by the people,” the great abolitionist and D.C. resident Frederick Douglass once wrote. More than a century later, the 705,000 residents of Washington, D.C.—nearly half of them Black—are still denied the full citizenship that every American deserves. They have no vote in a Congress that can override decisions by voters and elected officials about local priorities and tax dollars. Rectifying this injustice should be a top priority for every American who is committed to advancing racial justice and voting rights.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said—wrongly and ridiculously—that righting this wrong would be “full-bore socialism.” On Friday, the House of Representatives rebuked McConnell’s farcical reasoning by voting to make the District of Columbia the 51st state.

The House vote was a historic step toward resolving this glaring injustice. Achieving the final result will require removing McConnell and President Donald Trump from their current posts. The need to do so could not be more urgent.

Denying D.C. statehood has devastating real-world consequences. The coronavirus pandemic is having an especially deadly impact on Black and Latino people in D.C. and elsewhere. Yet Senate Republicans refused to treat D.C. the same way it treated the states in relief legislation. That cost District residents $750 million in relief funds, even though D.C.’s caseload was higher than 19 states’.

This denial of COVID-19 relief funds is just the latest harm imposed on D.C. by members of Congress who have been happy to treat D.C. as their fiefdom, from interfering with public health officials’ response to the AIDS crisis to blocking implementation of a voter-approved referendum to legalize the use of marijuana.

There is no doubt that both historically and today, opposition to extending democracy to our nation’s capital has been grounded in racism and the desire to maintain racist structures of power.

And there is no doubt that denying citizens of the nation’s capital representation in the national legislature—something no other free country does—undermines our self-image as leaders of the free world and our credibility as a beacon of democracy on the international stage.

Civil rights leaders and other advocates for statehood, including Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond, D.C.’s nonvoting delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton, and the activists at DC Vote, have been making the case for statehood for decades.

The case is clear. D.C. has more residents than either Wyoming or Vermont, and nearly as many as Alaska. D.C. residents contribute more federal taxes than those of 22 states, and more per capita than any state. There is no principled justification for continuing to treat the people of Washington, D.C. as second-class citizens.

Many of the systemic problems Americans are grappling with do not have simple solutions. But this one does. All it will take is for the Senate to pass and the president to sign the legislation that just passed in Congress.

What is standing in the way is the same ruthless Republican desire to maintain power that brings us racial and political gerrymandering and voter suppression. The illegitimate entrenchment of power in the hands of right-wing politicians undermines democracy. It harms Americans everywhere, not just in D.C., by making it harder to adopt policies that protect American lives and communities. That is why D.C. statehood must be part of the agenda of the broader movement to advance racial equity and a healthy democracy.

For now, D.C. statehood legislation is sure to join the growing pile of common-good measures passed by the House that die in Mitch McConnell’s graveyard. That should intensify our resolve to mobilize voters and overcome every undemocratic tactic Republicans will deploy to suppress the vote between now and November.

Ben Jealous is president of People For the American Way and People For the American Way Foundation; former president of the NAACP