The Democrats’ Debacle: The Path Forward for the Left

Posted on 12/28/2024 by Grant Chassy

 

Image by Mangokeylime, used under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 4.0

Buckle up—it’s happening again. Donald Trump will be president of the United States on January 20, 2025. The next four years will be a constant struggle, as we fight to retain the meager rights and supports we currently possess in this cutthroat society, with all three branches of national government stacked against us.

The Democratic Party has once again demonstrated that “Republican-lite” is an ineffective political project. Aside from the uninspiring, completely lackluster policies emanating from the “at least I’m not Donald Trump” camp, any argument as to electability or political advantage in contrast to authentic leftist policies can be soundly put to bed with the failed Harris campaign.

Continue reading →

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Local Organizers Share Winning Strategies with Weary Residents

Posted on 12/28/2024 by Elizabeth Sotiropoulos

A group of Vote Yes on Question 1 campaigners stands in front of their farmers market booth in October. Photo by the author

As the Champaign-Urbana community considers how we’ll navigate a second Trump presidency, we can learn from the organizing that led to local ballot victories this past November. The massive effort that made these ballot wins possible holds part of the answer to the question many of us are asking: what do we do now?

In Cunningham Township, voters overwhelmingly passed advisory referendum Question One: “Shall the United States federal government and subordinate divisions stop giving military funding to Israel, which currently costs taxpayers $3.8 billion a year, given Israel’s global recognition as an apartheid regime with a track record of human rights violations?”

Continue reading →

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Be Prepared: The Danger to Reproductive Rights is Real

Posted on 12/27/2024 by Julie Laut

We are already facing the consequences of Trump’s first administration. His appointment of three Supreme Court justices established a conservative majority on the bench, a decades-long goal of the anti-abortion movement. When that court voted 6 to 3 to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, they eliminated the federal right to abortion. Trigger laws allowed 13 states to immediately instate bans. And despite the success of some pro-abortion ballot measures, as of today only 15 states protect abortion rights to any degree. The results of these bans have been devastating. Roughly one in five patients nationwide have had to travel out of state to access abortion. Inequities in access to reproductive care have widened. Pregnant people denied emergency medical care have suffered and died. Infant mortality and maternal mortality have increased in ban states.

Things will only get worse. We must assume the Trump/Vance administration will follow the Project 25 playbook, further devastating reproductive rights. Here is a sampling of those recommendations: 1) Target medication abortions with moves against mifepristone, a medication used to end pregnancies. A majority of abortions now utilize this medication, and many people rely on telehealth to access a prescription. The administration could move to require in-person visits to prescribe mifepristone or attempt to reverse its FDA approval altogether. 2) Ban the mailing of medicines and equipment used to perform abortions by enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act. Anti-abortion activists have already begun testing this approach in Texas, and just down the road in Danville. 3) Prohibit federal funds from covering abortion care. This could remove funding from Planned Parenthood, impact people who receive Medicaid and Medicare, and affect millions who get health insurance through the federal government such as military personnel, prisoners, and Peace Corps volunteers. 4) Implement a “gag rule” that would block US money to any domestic or international organizations that “provide abortion services, information, counseling, referrals or advocacy.”

Continue reading →

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Safer For Who?

Posted on 12/26/2024 by Dua Aldasouqi

For many community members, Tuesday night means Champaign City Council (CCC) night. The council chambers are the spot to be! Dozens of diverse community members show up to ask our elected officials to endorse a resolution that includes 1) a call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Lebanon, and 2) a socially responsible investment policy where the city’s money is not invested in countries accused of genocide by the International Court of Justice and entities that profit off of them. Put simply, we are asking to end the city’s complicity in the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide and any future genocides. We are asking the councilmembers to recognize us, and to invest in us and our community. We want to live in a city that takes a firmly anti-genocide stance.

We have been spending evenings at CCC for over half a year without any formal recognition of our demands. We have spent dozens of hours in audience participation educating the council (and the public) while pleading our case with CCC. We come in, we attend the meeting, we listen, we learn, we share our comments, and we leave. Week after week.

Continue reading →

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The Pretrial Fairness Act at One Year: Success but Lots More to Do

Posted on 12/26/2024 by James Kilgore

In September of 2023 a mysterious journalistic force bombarded our county with hysterical pseudo-newspapers under the banner Chambana News. Though they took the form of an advertising sheet from Walmart or Menard’s, they were actually a classic example of disinformation, combined with misinformation. These fake newspapers aimed to instill panic in the public regarding the impending implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA), part of Illinois’s Safe-T-Act, one of the most progressive pieces of criminal justice legislative reform of this century. Chambana News told us that we were about to witness a real-life version of The Purge, with thousands of people being released from jail and swarming into the streets like packs of dogs chasing a truckload of fresh meat.

Fortunately, time passes, and disinformation and misinformation are often proven false when their dire predictions fail to materialize. Now, just over a year into the implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act, cash bond has disappeared. The vast majority of people who have been arrested are released almost immediately, as the act mandates. Instead of chaos, mayhem, and violence it has produced much of what it guaranteed: fewer people in jail, no one going into debt over repaying court bonds, and a fairer process of adjudication of cases. This is a remarkable success, but it is not without controversy from surprising quarters—the liberal Democrats of the County Board. Continue reading →

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Hide and Seek with Public Safety

Posted on 12/23/2024 by Chris Evans

On the Illinois Public Media’s Dialogue radio program from September 12, 2024, Urbana Police Chief Larry D. Boone said, “My philosophy is you hide nothing from the public. The days of that type of policing are gone by the way of the dodo bird.”

As we try to solve the recent problem of citizens’ reports of crime being initially disregarded by the Urbana Police Department, it’s critical we understand what happens during the initial intake of a report. The public has been given four different stories about the intake process related to an August 6 call to the Urbana Police Department (UPD) front desk to report an attempted child abduction. It was only after citizens expressed frustration on social media with the lack of police response that the police followed up on the initial report and made an arrest. Subsequent requests for information on the call intake procedure have not been satisfactorily answered.

Continue reading →

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The Negro/Black Cultural, History, and Art Museum of Urbana

Posted on 12/23/2024 by Mrs. Marilynn Dean Cleveland

Mrs. Cleveland and volunteers have been working to prepare the first exhibit for the Museum at the Urbana Champaign Independent Media Center

I would like to see this museum established here in our town of Urbana for the purpose of educating our people, especially our Black children: to teach them about our history and what Black people have contributed to this country, the harsh realities of slavery, and the barbaric treatment they faced just for having Negro faces. (The word “Negro” is part of our history, not something to hide from, and this museum is about facing our truth.)

The museum would have artifacts that have cultural and historical meaning. Painting, drawing, and other forms of art; stories from persons who are 65, 75, 80, or 100, depicting the Black struggles from “birth to death.” Stories about the Black slaves’ darkness, about their suffering, their despair—branded as three-fifths of a human. The Black slaves’ darkness casts a shadow over America up to today because of the ill-favored brutality that was used to dominate and control other human beings.

Continue reading →

Posted in African American history, African American women, African American Women in Champaign-Urbana, African Americans, African Americans, Arts, Local Arts, Racism, Remembering, Section, Voices, Women | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on The Negro/Black Cultural, History, and Art Museum of Urbana

ADM’s Carbon Sequestration Leaks Demonstrate Why We Need to Protect the Mahomet Aquifer

Posted on 12/23/2024 by Lan and Pam Richart

Map from US EPA

How the Story Broke 

On September 13, 2024, E&E News by Politico broke a shocking story about an underground carbon dioxide (CO2) leak six months earlier at Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM)’s much-lauded carbon capture and storage facility in Decatur, IL. After only seven years, a corroded pipe had allowed high pressure CO2 to move above the shale cap rock intended to contain it forever. Digging deeper, we learned there were problems with this monitoring well years before. The problems were not revealed to the public and the well continued to operate.

The monitoring gauges on Monitoring Well #2 were experiencing intermittent electrical shorts as early as September, 2020, less than three years after injection of CO2 began. By January, 2022, the gauges had fully failed. Later that year, ADM discovered the well had leaked 307 metric tons of CO2 into the Ironton-Galesville formation above the confining zone. Its reports to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) showed the company intended to take “temporary measures to isolate the CO2 leakage,” which included plugging the well with cement.

Continue reading →

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Winter Issue Back Cover

Posted on 12/23/2024 by Public i

Belden and the Public i were regulars at demonstrations for most any just cause

The Public i editorial collective mourns the passing of our dear colleague and friend Belden Fields. A full appreciation will appear in our next issue.

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October Issue Front Cover

Posted on 10/18/2024 by Public i

LOCAL POLICING AT A CROSSROADS

Police at spring Gaza encampment on the UIUC campus.
Photo by Farrah Anderson, Invisible Institute/IPM
Newsroom, used with permission

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Interview: Policing and the Urbana Budget

Posted on 10/18/2024 by Cope Cumpston

This interview was aired on WEFT Champaign 90.1 FM on the “Catch the Beat” program on July 3, 2024. It has been edited for style, clarity, and space.

Cope Cumpston: I’m pleased to welcome three guests for the show, Urbana residents who have been active on issues around allocating money for policing and programs for the 2025 Urbana city budget which was just voted on last week. There was an impressive amount of organizing for community input and discussion about contentious issues in the budget, and my guests were all right in the middle of the action. Miriam Larson is the executive director of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, which has been at the center of providing information and forums around these issues. Jane McClintock is a longtime Urbana resident and currently serves on the board of the IMC and on the Champaign County American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) steering committee. And Sana Saboowala is active in the CU Muslim Action Committee. I’m delighted to have you here with such a current and pressing issue, because it took a lot to get that budget passed. How did you get involved in organizing and advocating to oppose the police budget? Why is it important to you to pay attention to the Urbana city budget and police?

Miriam Larson: I got involved because of Jane and others who really got me to start thinking about what could we do to educate ourselves about both the city budget and the police budget. For me the biggest hook is around the budget, and really thinking about what are our priorities, what do we want to use city funds on? I wasn’t interested personally in prioritizing police, and in the big picture, I wanted to see us invest in other things like community services. So that got me interested in organizing a forum back in December, and that’s one of my starting points. Continue reading →

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Invest in Humanity, Not Handguns: Reject the Public Safety Sales Tax

Posted on 10/18/2024 by Grant Chassy

 Champaign County government placed a question on this November’s general election ballot requesting a tax increase. The so-called public safety sales tax, a proposal that would double the current 0.25-percent sales tax levied on purchases in the county, would generate revenue exclusively to fund law enforcement and criminal justice–related services, such as the sheriff and state’s attorney’s offices.

The county executive proposed this tax, a majority of county board members supported it, and now the voters will determine its fate. So, what does this thing do? Is this good public policy for Champaign County? Continue reading →

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Urbana Activists Want More Police Oversight, but Local Laws Hold the Civilian Review Board Hostage

Posted on 10/18/2024 by Farrah Anderson and Sam Stecklow of Invisible Institute

Ricardo Diaz, the most recent chair of the Civilian Police Review Board, who stepped down in May. Photo by Farrah Anderson, Invisible Institute/Illinois Public Media

This story was originally published by Invisible Institute and IPM Newsroom on July 8. A full version of this article can be found on ipmnewsroom.org and publici.ucimc.org.

Ricardo Diaz joined the Urbana Civilian Police Review Board (CPRB) in 2011, hoping to bring change to policing. Now, Diaz says the board’s power is sharply curtailed.

The CPRB operates on an uncommon model. Complaints about Urbana Police Department (UPD) are first investigated by UPD. Once the investigation is complete, the chief decides on next steps. If the complainant decides to appeal that decision, only then does the CPRB start a review. “That’s the step most people don’t take,” Diaz said. “They are not going to question the chief.” The overwhelming majority of people who file complaints against the police don’t appeal the decisions—severely limiting civilian oversight over the police.

At his last meeting on May 29, Diaz said Urbana residents want the CPRB to be able to do more actual oversight of police. Continue reading →

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Mob Action Charges Against Activists for Pro-Palestinian Encampment at UIUC

Posted on 10/18/2024 by Brian Dolinar

An over-armed officer, displaying chemical spray among other tools of repression, at the UIUC Gaza encampment. This threatening posture is reflected in the felony charges raised against a number of protesters. Photo by Farrah Anderson, Invisible Institute/Illinois Public Media; used with permission

As students are returning to university campuses, we are seeing signs of continued support for Palestinians who are enduring an onslaught by Israeli military forces. Here at the University of Illinois, the first week of classes students chalked “DIVEST” on the front columns of Foellinger Auditorium, only for it to be washed off shortly after.

We are also seeing a backlash against the wave of pro-Palestinian student activism that took place last spring. At the U of I, we had our own encampment set up in solidarity with Gaza that lasted almost two weeks. Across the country, from the University of California to the University of Pennsylvania, administrators are now banning encampments on campuses. The UIUC administration has set up its own “I-Team” to discuss First Amendment issues—or decide how free is free speech? Continue reading →

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The Gaza Protests and Grassroot Challenges to US Foreign Policy

Posted on 10/18/2024 by Janice Jayes

In 1986 the City Council declared Urbana a Sanctuary City, joining hundreds of other cities in dissenting from US policy. News-Gazette clipping from the archives of Rev. Tom Royer

Letters to the editor, teach-ins, motions for divestment, campus protests, city resolutions . . . These expressions of citizen concern are not unique to the ongoing war on Gaza and are entirely appropriate to a democracy. Local communities have the right and responsibility to debate foreign policy at the local level, and these debates have played a significant role in changing public perception of and support for US policies abroad for decades.

Public Actions Prompt Public Debate

C-U has a long history of using public events to prompt public debate on issues. Anti–Vietnam War protests, Sanctuary declarations to protest US policies in Central America, and poster contests to raise awareness of nuclear proliferation are just a few of the previous campaigns designed to raise awareness and pressure elected representatives to address public concerns on foreign policies.

Since last fall local groups have pursued a similar variety of strategies to prompt public debate. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, local actors joined national efforts to put faces and names to the hostages kidnapped and held by Hamas by posting “Kidnapped” signs throughout the community. But as the casualties of the Israeli response in Gaza mounted, other groups sought to bring attention to the Palestinian victims as well. The Champaign-Urbana Jews for Ceasefire (CUJC) and the CU Muslim Action Committee (CUMAC) have been two of the most active groups working to raise awareness of the suffering in Gaza and bring attention to federal government and institutional support for the war in Gaza. Together the two groups have organized marches through C-U, teach-ins, and office visits with local representatives in order to keep the issue before the public. Continue reading →

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Assange, Press Freedom, and the Story from Down Under

Posted on 10/18/2024 by Paul Mueth

The Julian Assange case is incredibly multifaceted, extending over many years.The root of course is the need for transparency regarding the actions of the powerful. The World War I–era Espionage Act is a major impediment to an open and just society.

Starting even earlier than the last decade’s events is necessary, however. It’s an interesting irony that one of the grievances that informed Australians have against the CIA and the US national security state has to do with electoral interference. It doesn’t start with rigging elections in the US manner, though disinformation and campaign finance malfeasance do figure in this case.

The late, great John Pilger outlines in a short essay the mechanism of this undermining of democracy in Australia, as deployed by the CIA and British MI6 in 1975. It involves the legacy of the Commonwealth, where the Governor-General was entitled to prorogue the parliament. “Prorogue” is an almost medieval term for dissolving the parliament. This caused then–Prime Minister Gough Whitlam to have to run again; resources were marshaled to defeat him successfully. Continue reading →

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A Surprise from the French Left in the 2024 Legislative Elections

Posted on 10/18/2024 by Belden Fields

French leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Photo by Thomas Bresson, used under Creative Commons License CC BY 4.0

Many French people were very anxious prior to the second round of their July, 2024 legislative elections. Unlike the American two-party system, in the French multiparty system a candidate needs 50 percent or more of the vote to be seated in the first round. If no candidate gets that, there is a second, runoff round in which the candidate with the majority is seated in the National Assembly (the lower but more powerful legislative house than the Senate).

Elections for the European Parliament (EP) were held in June of this year, shortly before the July elections for the French National Assembly. The candidates presented by the French far-right party in that election did exceedingly well, as did far rightists from other European countries. This French party was formerly called the National Front. Many of the founders were fascists who had supported the Vichy government installed by the Nazis during World War II. It was led for many years after the war by a racist and Holocaust-minimizing man named Jean-Marie Le Pen. Realizing that his fascism and racism were putting off the French electorate in the present era, his daughter, Marine Le Pen, expelled her father from the leadership of the party, and then from the party itself. She took it over and tried to give it a more acceptable image. But it is strongly anti-immigrant and has continued to harbor people of her father’s ilk within it. Continue reading →

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Reflections on Bangladesh’s Recent Revolution: International Students’ Perspective

Posted on 10/17/2024 by Tahsina Alam et al.

Protest organized by Bangladeshis at West Side Park, Champaign on August 3. Photo by G’son Biswas, used with permission

What began as a student-led protest demanding quota reform in the allocation of Bangladesh’s government jobs rapidly transformed into a revolutionary movement that dismantled an autocratic regime in just two months. As Bangladeshi citizens studying in the United States, we witnessed these historic events unfold from afar, providing us with a unique blend of distance and immediacy. The recent revolution in Bangladesh is both a deeply personal and profoundly significant occurrence for us, resonating on intellectual and emotional levels. This uprising, marked by widespread protests and a clamor for democratic reforms, highlights the resilience and determination of our fellow Bangladeshis.

The Seeds of Discontent Continue reading →

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October Issue Back Cover

Posted on 10/17/2024 by Public i

FRIDAY FORUM + CONVERSATION CAFÉ

Fall 2024 Series

Please join the University YMCA and Diversity & Social Justice Education for our Fall 2024 Friday Forum + Conversation Café series. We will hear from community leaders tackling our most pressing public concerns through an unwavering pursuit of social justice. We are excited to focus the fall series towards Democracy.

All presentations are open to the public and free on Fridays at 12 PM in Latzer Hall at the University YMCA.

An audio recording of each program can be heard the following Wednesday at 6-7 pm on WEFT 90.1 FM community radio.

10/18 – Jeremy Hobson, “The Middle” Podcast

10/25 – Rev. Terrance Thomas, Bethel AME Church, and Pastor Michael Crosby, First             Mennonite Church of C-U – Understanding White Christian Nationalism

11/1 – Steve Schwinn, University of Illinois Chicago College of Law – The Supreme Court          and Democracy

11/8 – Ilana Redstone, University of Illinois Sociology – The Certainty Trap: Democracy’s        Existential Threat

11/15 – Provost John Coleman, University of Illinois – Election 2024 on Campus and                 Across the Country

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Summer Issue Front Cover

Posted on 07/29/2024 by Public i

UIUC JOINS NATIONWIDE MOVEMENT FOR PALESTINIANS

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