Film review: The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

Last Friday, Netflix released the film The Trial of the Chicago 7 and I immediately watched it. For those who are not familiar with the true events that it depicts, this was the infamous trial held in Chicago in 1969 in which eight people (yes, eight initially but it got reduced to seven midway) were accused of conspiracy and inciting riots during the 1968 Democratic Party convention in that city in August 1968. (You can read about the event here.)

That convention was a shambles. Due to the intense opposition to the Vietnam war, president Lyndon Johnson had decided not to seek re-election and the party establishment had decided to force through vice-president Hubert Humphrey as the nominee although he was widely seen as complicit in prosecuting the unpopular war. It was also the year in which Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert K. Kennedy had been murdered, the latter just three days after he had won the California Democratic primary, dashing the hopes that Humphrey would not get the nomination. There were riots all over the country.
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Sadly, this satirical prediction made may well come true

Observers have been warning that given the unprecedented nature of this year’s election with the large numbers of people voting using mail-in ballots instead of in person on election day, previous methods of projecting results are no longer valid and should not be used even if that means the results will not be known until days later instead of on election night.

The media are on course aware of this problem but as this piece from The Onion suggests, they may not be able to withstand the pressure to call the result if they think that another network might be on the verge of doing so. In the media business where ratings is everything, the desire to be first can, sadly, overpower the desire to be right.
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We should not normalize this election

It seems clear that the TV network NBC’s decision on Wednesday to schedule a Trump town hall on Thursday at the same time as the previously scheduled town hall that Joe Biden was having on ABC (which itself was a replacement for the debate that Trump refused to take part in) was due to them caving in to the demand by Trump that it be at the same time. Trump must have been sure that he would get higher ratings than Biden and thus could gloat about it because for him, ratings are everything. But that strategy proved to be a bust because not only was his performance panned, what must have really stung was that the Biden show got better ratings than the Trump show.
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How the CDC was subverted by Trump

ProPublica has another explosive report, this time about how the Centers for Disease Control, once highly admired all around the world for the skill and expertise of its scientists in dealing with global health problems, has become a shadow of its former self, with career scientists dismayed at how the Trump administration has undermined and belittled its efforts. The feckless leadership of Robert Redfield, a Trump appointee, has been ineffective in defending its institutional honor. ProPublica bases its article on internal emails and reports and interviews with CDC officials.
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The nice people at the IRS

It is popular in the US to bash the Internal Revenue Service. Part of the reason is the spreading of the right wing and libertarian propaganda that paying taxes is a form of theft by the government that is taking money away that rightly belongs to the people, ignoring the obvious fact that the government needs money to provide the services that we all enjoy. The oligarchs have fueled this dislike of the IRS to advance their own nefarious agenda, which is to gut the IRS staff so that they cannot fully audit the various frauds that wealthy people engage in to avoid paying taxes.
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Imagine, a country that likes its leaders trusting science

From a story that I read today.

Jacinda Ardern will govern New Zealand for a second term after the Labour party secured a historic landslide victory in the general election, attracting so many votes it could become the first party in decades to be able to govern alone.

Ardern’s deft handling of the Covid-19 outbreak and resolute belief in science and experts was credited with earning the trust of New Zealanders, who cast early votes in record numbers, giving her party more votes than at any other election in the past five decades. [My italics-MS]
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Voting, American style

Early voting has begun in the US. It is estimated that about 18 million people have already voted, about ten times the number at this point in the election cycle in 2016. Given that the total number of people who voted in 2016 was around 137 million, that means that 13% of ballots have already been cast and we could well be on the way to having about a third to half the people voting before election day. In those parts of the country that do not allow mail-in voting for anyone who requests it, we are seeing extremely long lines at polling locations.
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Why, yes, Trump is someone’s crazy uncle

Yesterday both Joe Biden and Donald Trump held separate town hall meetings in lieu of the cancelled debate that Trump withdraw from because he did not like the virtual format. I did not watch either event but here is a brief review of both.

One thing that stood out for me in the reports I read was when the NBC moderator Savannah Guthrie took Trump to task for re-tweeting a crazy conspiracy theory involving bin Laden.


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An alternative approach to police misconduct

We have seen how in the US, the police in some cases get away with literally murder, often because they have powerful unions that fight to protect their members even when they commit the most egregious of acts, and sometimes because local prosecutors and city leadership are unwilling to take the actions needed to deter such behavior.

But policing in the US is a local matter and not all jurisdictions take such a lax approach. Take for example, the city of Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio where I lived for 30 yers before moving last year to California. It is an integrated community that is about one third African American. When the debate between Biden and Trump was held in September, Cleveland called upon the police in neighboring communities to assist in providing security and during the event, a police officer in a black Shaker Heights police van was caught on camera giving the finger to Black Lives Matter protestors as he drove by.

If you slow the video down, you can see him in the black van doing it at the 8-second mark, immediately followed by a woman shouting “Hey!”

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