Commentary & Opinion

Two weeks ago, George Floyd, an African American man, was asphyxiated when a white Minneapolis police officer pinned his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds.  The police officer has now been charged with murder.  Mr. Floyd’s killing, coming on the heels of the recent deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, ignited protests against racism and police tactics that have broadened to include the nation’s political leadership.

Former north country congressman Bill Owens offers his weekly look at world events. 

Like most Americans, I have been heartbroken by the loss of over 110,000 of our fellow citizens to the coronavirus over the past four months. I have also been outraged and anguished by the continued killings of unarmed black people at the hands of police or vigilantes. 

I stumbled upon a Medium post the other day entitled “The Top 10 Signs You’re Really Cut Out to Be a Writer.” It caught my eye and I thought, sure, why not? So what if I’ve been at this thing for 40 years or so. So what if I’ve written and published literally thousands of articles, essays and reviews. So what if I’ve had two books published with a few more on the way. Isn’t it time, I thought to myself, to find out if I am really cut out for this work? How can I be sure I’ve made the right decision? Why not read the article and find out?

George Floyd was murdered, and he deserves justice.

After practicing law, it’s hard to stick to stereotypes about people, whether the police, the looters, whites, presidents or anyone else. Lawyers see the best and the worst, Mother Teresa and Jack the Ripper. The good and bad aren’t predictable.

After a nearly two-month hiatus, state lawmakers returned to Albany last week to conduct legislative business.  Having wrapped up a limited agenda, they are not expected to return for the remainder of the scheduled session.

President Trump continues his elimination of Inspector Generals and effectively the oversight which they deliver.  The latest firing of the Department of State Inspector General raises a whole new set of concerns because Mr. Pompeo is under investigation for arms sales to Saudi Arabia and for utilization of Department of State employees for personal matters.  He is the latest of the President’s cabinet appointees who has been investigated and several have already resigned.  This is an overall pattern of behavior which reflects a complete distain for the rule of law.

I wanted to talk about something else; the health crisis is so serious and depressing. But it’s so serious because Trump has been unwilling to be part of the solution. He tries to double down, deny the science, ignore the tragedy and let everyone who’s not a Trump supporter sink into bankruptcy or perish, while Trump and his buddies play golf, and the people he put in charge of federal agencies use the pandemic as a smokescreen behind which to destroy all the agencies and the states and the services they provide – from schools to fire, police, safety regulation and health services.

On this federal holiday, millions of Americans have been out of work for two months. 

There is an emerging consensus that life after the COVID-19 pandemic – if there ever will be such a thing – will not look exactly like life before the COVID-19 pandemic. Nor should it. And I’m not only referring to changes that will be made in direct response to the spreading of disease, or an enhanced awareness of viral and bacterial transmission and efforts that can, and will, be taken to minimize the spread of disease.

The Trump Administration and some of the companies that run large meat-packing plants are behaving reprehensibly towards their workers. When hot spot outbreaks of COVID-19 began to occur at many meat-packing plants, some of them closed down temporarily. As more and more workers got sick, some started to stay home out of fear for their own health. The result was a decline in production. It got so bad, that farmers – particularly those that raised pigs for slaughter – found no place to sell their maturing products.

Will the coronavirus pandemic take the American election system’s integrity as another casualty?

As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. The fact that Trump has handled the virus badly, stupidly, doesn’t mean that everything out of his mouth is wrong even if he says it for all the wrong reasons and without any understanding of the impact.

The words "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" have long been associated with U.S. Postal Service’s workers.  The Postal Service has its historical roots in the 1775 Second Continental Congress and its first postmaster general was Benjamin Franklin.  It is one of the few government agencies explicitly referred to in the U.S. Constitution.

The reopening of America is a complex calculation, comprised of the need for a recovering economy and a significant health risk.  There has been little clear information about a number of factors that are troubling to me and I hope they may be of at least concern to you.  With 30 million plus people out of work as the enhanced unemployment expires, what will the citizens be able to pay for, obviously, it will be significantly diminished as compared to their recent consumer history.  Will businesses that open have enough customers to survive, or will these business owners deplete their last remaining resources to open and then find that they are in a worse economic position a few weeks into this process?  Given the fact that no state has met the criteria for testing, we will only know the results- more, less cases or the same.  The latter would be an interesting result.  Will the public simply stay away in large numbers, will there be a mix of all of these things occurring simultaneously throughout the country with different outcomes in regions, counties, cities, etc.? 

There are two kinds of people during a pandemic: Those who take the opportunity to read “The Plague” by Albert Camus, and those who don’t. I, like thousands if not millions of others, am in the first category. I’ve always been a fan of Camus, but I had never read “The Plague,” which, for those who don’t know, is a novel about how a handful of residents in the French Algerian city of Oran respond to the bubonic plague. Published in 1947, and wholly a work of imagination – there was neither a plague in Oran in the 20th century nor did Camus ever live through a plague or pandemic -- it garnered Camus the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years later.

When the clock struck eight on the night of Sunday, March 22, our economy was put on “pause.”  In order to try to stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus Governor Andrew Cuomo had no choice but to issue an executive order putting most of the state on lockdown.

On the one hand - skyrocketing unemployment and surging demand for emergency food assistance from Food Banks, pantries and soup kitchens. On the other hand - farms dumping milk, smashing eggs, plowing vegetables into the ground and farms closing. How can this be?

Americans like to say we’re no. 1, we’re the greatest, the world’s only superpower. So this is for the America greatsters. Not if we rest on our laurels, we’re not. Our genes came from all over the world. The science that’s been our glory, had many stages of development off our shores. The world doesn’t sit still waiting for the U.S. to create the next big thing. Several Asian countries have nuclear weapons. Several are challenging our digital developments, invading our privacy and platforms in ways that threaten the utility of what gets designed here.

The Mohawk people, one of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, lived in northern New York near where I live, and many still do. Their leaders had a rule that every decision must be made considering its effects seven generations in the future.