#Jewish American families confront a generational divide over Israel | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

newstfionline · 1 year ago

Text

Thursday, December 7, 2023

Math Scores Dropped Globally, but the U.S. Still Trails Other Countries (NYT) The math performance of U.S. teenagers has sharply declined since 2018, with scores lower than 20 years ago, and with American students continuing to trail global competitors, according to the results of a key international exam released on Tuesday. In the first comparable global results since the coronavirus pandemic, 15-year-olds in the United States scored below students in similar industrialized democracies like the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany, and well behind students in the highest-performing countries such as Singapore, South Korea and Estonia—continuing an underperformance in math that predated the pandemic. The bleak math results were offset by a stronger performance in reading and science, where the United States scored above average internationally. About 66 percent of U.S. students performed at least at a basic level in math, compared with about 80 percent in reading and science, according to the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA.

Jewish American Families Confront a Generational Divide Over Israel (NYT) Gen Z and young Millennials often see Israel as an occupying power oppressing Palestinians—a shock to their parents and grandparents, who tend to see it as an essential haven fighting for survival. The ideological rift is a clash between an older generation of American Jews, who believe Israel has a right to defend itself and that its very survival is at stake, and a younger generation more likely to view Israel as a great military power and an occupying force. That’s not the case in every family, of course. Many Jewish college students have been vocal and firm in defending Israel; plenty of Jewish Americans in the Boomer generation have criticized Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Many American Jews are united in a fear of rising antisemitism, and last month, tens of thousands of them attended the March for Israel in Washington, D.C. Yet some Jewish families are grappling with internal divisions, in the heart of a holiday season that is forcing difficult conversations.

Peru’s Top Court Orders Fujimori Released From Prison (NYT) Peru’s top court on Tuesday ordered former President Alberto Fujimori released from prison, where he is serving a 25-year sentence for human rights violations, defying an order by an international court that the South American country keep him behind bars. The court, Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal, voted 3 to 1 to reaffirm its decision to instate a presidential pardon granted to Mr. Fujimori in 2017; the Inter-American Court of Human Rights had found the pardon violated the rights of his victims. Mr. Fujimori’s lawyer told reporters that the former president would most likely be released from prison on Wednesday. In its ruling, the Constitutional Tribunal said that if the international court believed that Peru was violating its international obligations, it should take the matter to the Organization of American States, the regional body that the Inter-American Court is part of. The decision was the latest development in the roller coaster surrounding Mr. Fujimori’s incarceration, and it came amid a surge in political scandals in the country of 33 million people.

After 50 Years, a Danish Commune Is Shaken From Its Utopian Dream (NYT) On an unseasonably sunny Saturday this fall, Freetown Christiania, a semiautonomous commune spread across 74 acres in the heart of Copenhagen, Denmark, crackled with life. A man wove through the crowds on his bicycle, selling freshly made sushi rolls; street-market stalls were bursting with colorful clothing, tapestries and glass bongs; and at the center of it all, men illegally hawked cannabis from wooden stalls lining an area known as Pusher Street. Founded in 1971 by squatters on an abandoned military base, Christiania was devised as a post-’60s anarchistic utopia, where people could live outside of Denmark’s market economy, free to build their houses where and how they wanted, to sell marijuana for a living, and to live as they pleased as long as they didn’t harm their neighbors. Denmark’s government oscillated between attempting, without much success, to bring the community to heel or turning a blind eye as Christianites flouted property laws and drug laws. But now, after 50 years, with worsening gang violence and fresh attempts by the government to normalize the commune, some residents see their dream of an alternative society fading.

How a Hacker Helped Cocaine Traffickers Infiltrate Europe’s Biggest Ports (OCCRP) Europe’s commercial ports are top entry points for cocaine flooding in at record rates. The work of a Dutch hacker, who was hired by drug traffickers to penetrate port IT networks, reveals how this type of smuggling has become easier than ever. Court records and other documents obtained by reporters reveal how a man in the Netherlands hacked IT systems at the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp and sold valuable data to aid cocaine traffickers. With access to the ports’ container management systems, the hacker was able to recommend which shipping containers would be the best targets for hiding contraband. The hacker also used his access to key data about shipping containers to help smugglers pick up their goods on the receiving end. The sheer quantity of shipping containers handled by Europe’s main ports offers ample opportunities for drug traffickers to exploit—of the 98 million containers that passed through in 2021, only two percent are estimated to have undergone inspection.

The West has sanctioned Russia’s rich. But is that really punishing Putin and helping Ukraine? (AP) Sitting on a terrace in Verona as the bells toll at a nearby medieval church, Igor Makarov sips coffee as he describes his life as a billionaire under Western sanctions. Most of his fortune earned doing business in Russia and the former Soviet Union is frozen, and his plans to develop his energy businesses are currently shelved. His yacht is seized and his two private jets are grounded, so he flew commercial from Cyprus to Italy on budget carrier EasyJet. “I ask the question, what is the meaning of these sanctions against me? What do they achieve? They don’t help Ukraine,” Makarov said in a rare interview, blinking in the Italian sunshine. Western governments have sanctioned scores of billionaires in order to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin, choke off financial support for his war and turn them against him. They wanted the tycoons to “feel the consequences” of doing business with Putin unless they show “a change in behavior,” said Peter Stano, the European Commission’s Foreign Affairs spokesperson. Some of the wealthy businessmen are now fighting back in court, calling the sanctions process opaque, illegal and unfair. While sanctions have made life difficult for the tycoons, “it’s not in the short term benefiting Ukraine,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus.

Australia’s long-term refugee prisons (Washington Post) Reeta Arulruban put in a video call to her son, Dixtan. Today they were making kesari—a sweet, spicy semolina dish. For a moment, they forgot their situation: A mom on the outside. A son locked up by the country he chose as his refuge. Dixtan, now 26, held up the saucepan to show her the finished dish. “Yummy,” he declared. That September afternoon marked 12 years since Arulruban arrived in Australia, fleeing persecution on a crowded boat. And four years since Dixtan was put in immigration detention here. Australia has one of the strictest regimes for undocumented migrants in the world. Similar conversations are happening across Europe. In Italy, the far-right government is increasing powers to detain and deport migrants. But in a landmark ruling this week, the High Court ruled that Australia’s practice of indefinite immigration detention is unlawful when there is “no real prospect of removal from Australia becoming practicable in the reasonably foreseeable future.” It is unclear what it means for Dixtan, who is still hoping the government will review decisions to reject his asylum claim. Australia’s migration laws had allowed the government to indefinitely detain a noncitizen who does not hold a visa—including those who lawyers say have legitimate claims of asylum. Housing a person in immigration detention costs upward of $250,000 a year. But the cost of appearing “soft” on border control has helped topple governments here, and the hard-line system is rarely questioned.

Generation after generation, Israeli prison marks a rite of passage for Palestinian boys (AP) For all Palestinian parents, Marwan Tamimi said, there comes a moment they realize they’re powerless to protect their children. For the 48-year-old father of three, it came in June, when Israeli forces fired a large rubber bullet that struck the head of his eldest son, Wisam, as he watched a raid unfold from his grandmother’s rooftop with his family. A week later, Marwan said, soldiers came for the 17-year-old, dragging him out of bed with a fractured skull as his mother cried. Wisam was later charged with a range of offenses he denied—throwing stones, possessing weapons, placing an explosive device and causing bodily harm. He was sent to Israel’s Ofer Prison. Last Saturday, after six months behind bars, he returned home with 38 other Palestinians in exchange for Israeli hostages released from Hamas captivity in Gaza—part of a temporary cease-fire in the war that started after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. Wisam’s homecoming last week touched every home in the village of Nabi Saleh, where prison is a grim rite of passage for Palestinian boys. The United Nations estimates 750,000 Palestinians have been arrested since Israel captured the territory in the 1967 Mideast war. Palestinian activists and human rights watchdogs say Israel’s mass detentions seek to sow fear among the youngest, breaking communities that continue to defy Israeli military rule, now in its 57th year.

War Intensifies in Southern Gaza, Where Civilians Say No Place Is Safe (NYT/Reuters) Israeli soldiers pushed into the heart of the largest city in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, Israel and Hamas said, amid some of the most intense bombing and ground combat of the war, and growing concerns that there is almost nowhere left for desperate civilians to flee. The Israeli offensive drove deep into the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis, which was home to more than 200,000 people before the war, but swelled during the conflict with people who heeded an earlier Israeli order to evacuate all of the northern enclave. Heavy bombardment was heard on Tuesday from inside Nasser Hospital, the city’s largest, where many Palestinians had sought shelter and were sleeping in hallways. Video from the hospital showed that it was packed with people. The World Health Organization warned that the humanitarian crisis for Gazans was “getting worse by the hour,” after some of “the heaviest Israeli shelling in the enclave” since Oct. 7. U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk said on Wednesday that his colleagues have described the war zone as “apocalyptic,” with heightened risks of “atrocity crimes.” Turk’s warning follows a new report by Amnesty International on Tuesday that details evidence of the Israeli military using U.S.-made weapons in strikes that killed dozens of Palestinian civilians.

Israeli rage at United Nations comes as Gaza aid hits crucial moment (Washington Post) Relations between Israel and the United Nations have hit a new low point after almost two months of war. The international organization, vital for providing aid to Palestinians for decades, said last week that Israel had refused to grant a visa to a top humanitarian official. Israeli officials have repeated their calls for U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to resign, while an allegation that a U.N. staff member helped hold Israeli hostages has led to further furor. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees denied the claim. This breakdown in relations comes at a crucial time, just as the United Nations is called on to do more to aid civilians in Gaza as warfare resumes. While often portrayed as ineffectual because of the geopolitical disputes between its member states at the General Assembly and the Security Council, the institution of the U.N. plays an irreplaceable role on the ground with its staff at considerable risk. Israel and the U.N. have rarely enjoyed a good relationship throughout history, but the scale of the divide at present may be a new nadir.

#headlines #news

0 notes

everetterice · 1 year ago

Text

0 notes

whiskeygonzo · 1 year ago

Text

Jewish American Families Confront a Generational Divide Over Israel-Hamas War - The New York Times

#check out

0 notes

michaelgabrill · 1 year ago

Text

#NewYorkTimes #NYT

0 notes

antonio-velardo · 1 year ago

Text

Antonio Velardo shares: Jewish American Families Confront a Generational Divide Over Israel by Emma Goldberg and Marc Tracy

By Emma Goldberg and Marc Tracy Gen Z and young Millennials often see Israel as an occupying power oppressing Palestinians — a shock to their parents and grandparents, who tend to see it as an essential haven fighting for survival. Published: December 5, 2023 at 12:50PM from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/BD4QLxf via IFTTT

View On WordPress

#antonio velardo #IFTTT #NYT

0 notes

weyassinebentalb · 4 years ago

Text

Gaza Conflict Stokes 'Identity Crisis' for Young American Jews

Dan Kleinman does not know quite how to feel.

As a child in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere, the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got bad, he said.

It was a refuge in his mind when white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or kids in college grabbed his shirt, mimicking a “South Park” episode to steal his “Jew gold.”

But his feelings have grown muddier as he has gotten older, especially now as he watches violence unfold in Israel and Gaza. His moral compass tells him to help the Palestinians, but he cannot shake an ingrained paranoia every time he hears someone make anti-Israel statements.

“It is an identity crisis,” Kleinman, 33, said. “Very small in comparison to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is still something very strange and weird.”

As the violence escalates in the Middle East, turmoil of a different kind is growing across the Atlantic. Many young American Jews are confronting the region’s long-standing strife in a very different context, with very different pressures, from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

The Israel of their lifetime has been powerful, no longer appearing to some to be under constant existential threat. The violence comes after a year when mass protests across the United States have changed how many Americans see issues of racial and social justice. The pro-Palestinian position has become more common, with prominent progressive members of Congress offering impassioned speeches in defense of the Palestinians on the House floor. At the same time, reports of anti-Semitism are rising across the country.

Divides between some American Jews and Israel’s right-wing government have been growing for more than a decade, but under the Trump administration those fractures that many hoped would heal became a crevasse. Politics in Israel have also remained fraught, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-tenured government forged allegiances with Washington. For young people who came of age during the Trump years, political polarization over the issue only deepened.

Many Jews in America remain unreservedly supportive of Israel and its government. Still, the events of recent weeks have left some families struggling to navigate both the crisis abroad and the wide-ranging response from American Jews at home. What is at stake is not just geopolitical, but deeply personal. Fractures are intensifying along lines of age, observance and partisan affiliation.

In suburban Livingston, New Jersey, Meara Ashtivker, 38, has been afraid for her father-in-law in Israel, who has a disability and is not able to rush to the stairwell to shelter when he hears the air-raid sirens. She is also scared as she sees people in her progressive circles suddenly seem anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, she said.

Ashtivker, whose husband is Israeli, said she loved and supported Israel, even when she did not always agree with the government and its actions.

“It’s really hard being an American Jew right now,” she said. “It is exhausting and scary.”

Some young, liberal Jewish activists have found common cause with Black Lives Matter, which explicitly advocates for Palestinian liberation, concerning others who see that allegiance as anti-Semitic.

The recent turmoil is the first major outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza for which Aviva Davis, who graduated this spring from Brandeis University, has been “socially conscious.”

“I’m on a search for the truth, but what’s the truth when everyone has a different way of looking at things?” Davis said.

Alyssa Rubin, 26, who volunteers in Boston with IfNotNow, a network of Jewish activists who want to end Jewish American support for Israeli occupation, has found protesting for the Palestinian cause to be its own form of religious observance.

She said she and her 89-year-old grandfather ultimately both want the same thing, Jewish safety. But “he is really entrenched in this narrative that the only way we can be safe is by having a country,” she said, while her generation has seen that “the inequality has become more exacerbated.”

In the protest movements last summer, “a whole new wave of people were really primed to see the connection and understand racism more explicitly,” she said, “understanding the ways racism plays out here, and then looking at Israel/Palestine and realizing it is the exact same system.”

But that comparison is exactly what worries many other American Jews, who say the history of white American slaveholders is not the correct frame for viewing the Israeli government or the global Jewish experience of oppression.

At Temple Concord, a Reform synagogue in Syracuse, New York, teenager after teenager started calling Rabbi Daniel Fellman last week, wondering how to process seeing Black Lives Matter activists they marched with last summer attack Israel as “an apartheid state.”

“The reaction today is different because of what has occurred with the past year, year and a half, here,” Fellman said. “As a Jewish community, we are looking at it through slightly different eyes.”

Nearby at Sha’arei Torah Orthodox Congregation of Syracuse, teenagers were reflecting on their visits to Israel and on their family in the region.

“They see it as Hamas being a terrorist organization that is shooting missiles onto civilian areas,” Rabbi Evan Shore said. “They can’t understand why the world seems to be supporting terrorism over Israel.”

In Colorado, a high school senior at Denver Jewish Day School said he was frustrated at the lack of nuance in the public conversation. When his social media apps filled with pro-Palestinian memes last week, slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Zionism is a call for an apartheid state,” he deactivated his accounts.

“The conversation is so unproductive, and so aggressive, that it really stresses you out,” Jonas Rosenthal, 18, said. “I don’t think that using that message is helpful for convincing the Israelis to stop bombing Gaza.”

Compared with their elders, younger American Jews are overrepresented on the ends of the religious affiliation spectrum: a higher share are secular, and a higher share are Orthodox.

Ari Hart, 39, an Orthodox rabbi in Skokie, Illinois, has accepted the fact that his Zionism makes him unwelcome in some activist spaces where he would otherwise be comfortable. College students in his congregation are awakening to that same tension, he said. “You go to a college campus and want to get involved in anti-racism or social justice work, but if you support the state of Israel, you’re the problem,” he said.

Hart sees increasing skepticism in liberal Jewish circles over Israel’s right to exist. “This is a generation who are very moved and inspired by social justice causes and want to be on the right side of justice,” Hart said. “But they’re falling into overly simplistic narratives, and narratives driven by true enemies of the Jewish people.”

Overall, younger American Jews are less attached to Israel than older generations: About half of Jewish adults under 30 describe themselves as emotionally connected to Israel, compared with about two-thirds of Jews over age 64, according to a major survey published last week by the Pew Research Center.

And though the U.S. Jewish population is 92% white, with all other races combined accounting for 8%, among Jews ages 18 to 29 that rises to 15%.

In Los Angeles, Rachel Sumekh, 29, a first-generation Iranian American Jew, sees complicated layers in the story of her own Persian family. Her mother escaped Iran on the back of a camel, traveling by night until she got to Pakistan, where she was taken in as a refugee. She then found asylum in Israel. She believes Israel has a right to self-determination, but she also found it “horrifying” to hear an Israeli ambassador suggest other Arab countries should take in Palestinians.

“That is what happened to my people and created this intergenerational trauma of losing our homeland because of hatred,” she said.

The entire situation feels too volatile and dangerous for many people to even want to discuss, especially publicly.

Violence against Jews is increasingly close to home. Last year the third-highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States were recorded since the Anti-Defamation League began cataloging them in 1979, according to a report released by the civil rights group last month. The ADL recorded more than 1,200 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment in 2020, a 10% increase from the previous year. In Los Angeles, the police are investigating a sprawling attack on sidewalk diners at a sushi restaurant Tuesday as an anti-Semitic hate crime.

Outside Cleveland, Jennifer Kaplan, 39, who grew up in a modern Orthodox family and who considers herself a centrist Democrat and a Zionist, remembered studying abroad at Hebrew University in 2002, and being in the cafeteria minutes before it was bombed. Now she wondered how the Trump era had affected her inclination to see the humanity in others, and she wished her young children were a bit older so she could talk with them about what is happening.

“I want them to understand that this is a really complicated situation, and they should question things,” she said. “I want them to understand that this isn’t just a, I don’t know, I guess, utopia of Jewish religion.”

Esther Katz, the performing arts director at the Jewish Community Center in Omaha, Nebraska, has spent significant time in Israel. She also attended Black Lives Matter protests in Omaha last summer and has signs supporting the movement in the windows of her home.

She has watched with a sense of betrayal as some of her allies in that movement have posted online about their apparently unequivocal support for the Palestinians, and compared Israel to Nazi Germany. “I’ve had some really tough conversations,” said Katz, a Conservative Jew. “They’re not seeing the facts, they’re just reading the propaganda.”

Her three children, who range in age from 7 to 13, are now wary of a country that is for Katz one of the most important places in the world. “They’re like, ‘I don’t understand why anyone would want to live in Israel, or even visit,’” she said. “That breaks my heart.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

source https://www.techno-90.com/2021/05/gaza-conflict-stokes-identity-crisis.html

3 notes · View notes

theculturedmarxist · 5 years ago

Link

By Barry Grey

26 September 2019

On Monday night, the New York Metropolitan Opera opened its 2019-2020 season with a new production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. This production has a particular distinction in that it is the first ever based on a critically researched and authoritative performance edition of Gershwin’s score, the product of 20 years of work led by musicologist Wayne Shirley, who is currently at the University of Michigan’s Gershwin Initiative.

There is no doubt that the poignant love story of the crippled beggar Porgy and the beautiful but abused and addicted Bess, and the suffering and struggle of the African American working class community of Charleston’s Catfish Row, is among the world’s most beloved operas and Gershwin’s masterpiece.

Yet the fact that the current production is the first in 29 years to be staged by the country’s most prestigious opera house is indicative of the trials and tribulations that have confronted the work since it premiered on Broadway in October 1935. These have come not from the broad public, which has embraced the opera (and many of its numbers) since its inception, thrilled by its glorious and complex music and moved by its deeply democratic ethos, but from within certain more privileged constituencies—the American classical music establishment, academia, sections of the black professional upper-middle class, including certain African American artists, composers, writers and actors.

Gershwin, the prolific composer—along with his lyricist brother Ira—of hit Broadway musicals and dozens of memorable songs that have become part of the Great American Songbook, rejected the artificial separation of popular music from “serious” or “classical” music. He wrote concert classics that incorporated elements of jazz such as Rhapsody in Blue, the Concerto in F and An American in Paris, which have become part of the symphonic repertoire the world over. He called his Porgy a “folk opera” and deliberately had it debut on Broadway in order to appeal to a broader audience. But what he wrote was a musically dense and dramatically powerful opera in the full sense of the word.

One example of the dismissal of Porgy by much of the American music establishment was a savage review of a production at the New York City Opera written in March of 1965 by the then-music critic of the New York Times Harold C. Schonberg. He wrote:

“Porgy and Bess”—Gershwin, you know—seems to have taken root as an American classic, and everybody accepts it as a kind of masterpiece. It turned up last night as given by the New York City Opera Company. All I can say is that it is a wonder that anybody can take it seriously.

It is not a good opera, it is not a good anything, though it has a half-dozen or so pretty tunes in it: and in light of recent developments it is embarrassing. “Porgy and Bess” contains as many stereotypes in its way as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

In more recent decades, with the domination of racial and identity politics on the campuses and within what passes for the American intelligentsia, its promotion by the Democratic Party and elevation as an ideological bulwark of bourgeois rule, the opera has been repeatedly accused of denigrating and exploiting black people. It is, according to the terminology of African American Studies departments and a well-funded industry that—with the aid of pseudo-left organizations—churns out racialist propaganda, a prime example of “cultural appropriation.”

We will deal with the retrograde concept of “cultural appropriation” further on. First let us examine how this racialist approach to Porgy and Bess is reflected in the media reception to the new Met production.

The table was set, so to speak, by the New York Times, which led its Sunday arts section with a full-page photo of the two leads, Eric Owens and Angel Blue, and the headline “The Complex History and Uneasy Present of ‘Porgy and Bess.’”

Taking pains to raise the standard racialist arguments against the opera and its composer, while simultaneously acknowledging the greatness of the work, the author, Michael Cooper, wrote:

More urgently, is “Porgy” a sensitive portrayal of the lives and struggles of a segregated African-American community in Charleston, SC? (Maya Angelou, who as a young dancer performed in a touring production that brought it to the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1955, later praised it as “great art” and “a human truth.”)

Or does it perpetuate degrading stereotypes about black people, told in wince-inducing dialect? (Harry Belafonte turned down an offer to star in the film version because he found it “racially demeaning.”)

Is it a triumph of melting-pot American art, teaming up George and Ira Gershwin (the sons of Russian Jewish immigrants) with DuBose Heyward (the scion of a prominent white South Carolina family) and his Ohio-born wife, Dorothy, to tell a uniquely African-American story? Or is it cultural appropriation?...

Or is the answer to all these questions yes?

The first wave of reviews published Tuesday (the WSWS will publish its own review of the Met production at a later date) have generally been highly favorable. All of the reviewers, however, feel obliged to qualify their enthusiasm for the performance by cataloging the opera’s supposed “baggage,” viewed from the standpoint of race. It seems they allow themselves to be moved by the piece only reluctantly, and sense its humanity and truth despite themselves.

George Grella, for example, writes in New York Classical Review:

Since its debut, Porgy and Bess has been consistently hectored by two questions: is it an opera and is it some combination of condescension and racial exploitation (lately termed cultural appropriation)?

The debut of a new production of Porgy and Bess, which opened the season at the Metropolitan Opera Monday night, could leave no objective listener with any doubt as to the answer to the first question. And based on the excited responses from the audience during the performance, and the rapturous applause and shouts at the end—from the kind of patron mix one sees in everyday life in New York City but rarely in a classical music venue—the work has gone quite a ways toward settling the latter in a heartening and beneficent way.

There are charges of stereotyping and caricature of the inhabitants of Catfish Row, but the real problem of the opera, the irredeemable original sin of Porgy and Bess that every reviewer is duty-bound to raise, is the fact that its creators were white. (Even worse, three of the four—George and Ira Gershwin and Dubose Heyward—were men.)

Thus, the Washington Post ’s Anne Midgette writes: “Like so many operas, ‘Porgy’ is dated: written by white men and rife with stereotypes of its time.”

Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times writes: “But ever since its premiere in 1935, the work has divided opinion, and the debate lingers. … ‘Porgy’ was created, after all, by white people. … That ‘Porgy and Bess’ is a portrait of a black community by white artists may limit the work.”

Justin Davidson of Vulture.com notes: “True, the only depiction of African-American life that makes it to the opera stage with any regularity was written by three white guys.”

The very fact that the race, gender or nationality of the artist is today uncritically presented as a central issue in evaluating a work testifies to the degeneration of bourgeois thought in general and the terrible damage inflicted over many years by identity and racial politics. The use of such criteria in past periods was associated with the political right, which employed them to promote anti-democratic and racist agendas.

While today the attack on Porgy and Bess on grounds of the “whiteness” of its creators is cloaked in the supposedly “left” trappings of Democratic Party politics and post-modernist (that is, anti-Marxist) criticism, the earlier practitioners of such an approach were more frank in giving vent to its ugly sources and implications.

Reviewing the premiere of Porgy and Bess in 1935, the prominent American composer and music critic Virgil Thomson wrote:

The material is straight from the melting pot. At best it is a piquant but highly unsavory stirring-up together of Israel, Africa and the Gaelic Isles. … [Gershwin’s] lack of understanding of all the major problems of form, of continuity, and of serious or direct musical expression is not surprising in view of the impurity of his musical sources. … I do not like fake folklore, nor fidgety accompaniments, nor bittersweet harmony, nor six-part choruses, nor gefilte fish orchestration.

Most critics and professors who attack the opera for the “whiteness” of its authors are not anti-Semites, but, whether they like it or not, there is an objective link between their approach and that of Richard Wagner, one of the pioneers of anti-Semitism in the field of music. In 1850, he authored the infamous tract “Das Judentum in der Musik” (“Jewishness and Music”), in which he denounced Jewish composers in general and Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer in particular.

A racial approach to art has a definite logic. It leads in the end to abominations such as the Nazis' Aryan art, with its book burning and banning of Jewish- and black-infected “degenerate art.”

It is a historical fact that the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who fled tsarist persecution composed an opera that expressed in a powerful and beautiful way both the poverty and oppression of blacks in the segregated South and their nobility of spirit and burning desire for genuine freedom and equality. What is so strange or problematic about that?

George Gershwin was a genius and without doubt the greatest American composer of his time. That is an important factor to reckon with. There were and are many talented black composers—Duke Ellington and William Grant Still, to name just two—who produced great music, but none has to date produced a musical piece about the black experience in America that compares to Porgy. Unfortunately, in the attacks on the opera by some black artists—initially including Ellington, although the great jazz composer later changed his opinion—there was an element of jealousy. The same applies to composers of the academy who dismissed Gershwin’s work as technically deficient and low-brow.

How many jazz greats have performed and improvised on Gershwin tunes, including his opera? Miles Davis produced an entire album based on it. The list includes Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday and many more. It also includes country and pop artists such as Willie Nelson and Brian Wilson.

More than 80 years after its premiere, history itself has demonstrated the universality of Porgy and Bess. It is about black people, but, more fundamentally, it is about the human condition. Its basic themes are universal. It is a love story. It is a story about oppression, community, struggle, loss and the will to fight.

Do not songs such as “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing” and the exquisite love duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” express the most profound and universal of human aspirations and emotions? Those who attack the opera for its “whiteness” generally avoid discussing the music.

Nor can there be any doubt that Gershwin’s own background, in the context of the convulsive social and political conditions of the Depression 1930s—the spread of fascism in Europe, revolutionary upheavals internationally and mass struggles of the American working class, and the approach of the Second World War—played a significant role in inspiring him to write Porgy.

During the summer of 1934, Gershwin stayed on Folly Beach, located on a barrier island near Charleston, South Carolina, collecting material and ideas for his opera and visiting revival meetings of the Gullah blacks who lived on adjacent James Island. He wrote to a friend: “We sit out at night gazing at the stars, smoking our pipes. The three of us, Harry [Botkin], Paul [Mueller] and myself discuss our two favorite subjects, Hitler’s Germany and God’s women.”

Dubose Heyward, who spent part of the summer with Gershwin on Folly Beach, published an article in 1935 in Stage magazine in which he described Gershwin’s interaction with the people who became the prototypes for the characters of his opera. “To George it was more like a homecoming than an exploration,” he wrote. “The quality in him which had produced the Rhapsody in Blue in the most sophisticated city in America, found its counterpart in the impulse behind the music and bodily rhythms of the simple Negro peasant of the South.

“The Gullah Negro prides himself on what he calls ‘shouting.’ This is a complicated rhythmic pattern beaten out by feet and hands as an accompaniment to the spirituals, and is indubitably an African survival. I shall never forget the night when at a Negro meeting on a remote sea-island, George started ‘shouting’ with them. And eventually, to their huge delight stole the show from their champion ‘shouter.’ I think that he is probably the only white man in America who could have done it.”

Gershwin himself was not overtly political, at least in his public life, but his sympathies and associations were with the liberal and socialist left. He penned Broadway shows of a broadly anti-war and socially dissident character, such as Strike Up the Band, Of Thee I Sing and Let ’Em Eat Cake. The impact of the Russian Revolution, only 18 years prior to the debut of Porgy, contributed to the generally optimistic and democratic impulse behind his music. The sister of Ira Gershwin’s wife Leonore, Rose Strunsky, translated Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution into English.

The singers who worked closely with Gershwin on Porgy, including the original Porgy and Bess, Todd Duncan and Anne Brown, spoke with affection of their interactions with the composer, insisting he never evinced the slightest prejudice or condescension. They were always among the most ardent defenders of the opera.

The Gershwins insisted that the singing roles go only to black performers, in part because they wanted to break down the exclusion of African American artists from the concert hall and because they did not want the opera to be performed in blackface.

As for the element of caricature in Porgy and Bess, what opera does not have caricatures? The vengeful dwarf in Rigoletto, the seductive gypsy in Carmen, the tubercular seamstress in La Boheme, the rascally but clever servant in The Marriage of Figaro. One could go on and on. The issue is: Do the inhabitants of Catfish Row transcend their “types” and express genuine humanity? The opera’s audiences all over the world have answered in the affirmative.

And what of the charge of “cultural appropriation?” Could there be a more banal, reactionary and anti-artistic concept? What is art, if not the interaction of multiple influences of many origins, conditioned by social and historical development and distilled in the creative imagination of the artist to produce works that have universal significance?

Should we denounce Shakespeare, a male, for inventing Ophelia? Should we reject Verdi for writing operas about Egyptians? Should we ban blacks from playing white characters? What about that racist Mark Twain who had the impertinence to create the escaped slave Jim?

The balkanization of art is the end of art.

Here is how Gershwin, who aspired to create a genuine American idiom, described his own development. In an article titled “Jazz is the Voice of the American Soul,” published in 1926, he wrote:

Old music and new music, forgotten melodies and the craze of the moment, bits of opera, Russian folk songs, Spanish ballads, chansons, ragtime ditties combined in a mighty chorus in my inner ear. And through and over it all I heard, faint at first, loud at last, the soul of this great America of ours.

And what is the voice of the American soul? It is jazz developed out of ragtime, jazz that is the plantation song improved and transformed into finer, bigger harmonies. …

I do not assert that the American soul is Negroid. But it is a combination that includes the wail, the whine, and the exultant note of the old “mammy” songs of the South. It is black and white. It is all colors and all souls unified in the great melting pot of the world. …

But to be true music it must repeat the thoughts and aspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans. My time is today.

#wsws #porgy and bess #opera #american opera #gershwin #george gershwin #wagner #broadway #broadway musicals #identity politics #racism #racialism #cultural appropriation #gullah

2 notes · View notes

berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

Photo

THE GUARDIAN

There is a global struggle taking place of enormous consequence. Nothing less than the future of the planet – economically, socially and environmentally – is at stake.

At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, when the world’s top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 99%, we are seeing the rise of a new authoritarian axis.

While these regimes may differ in some respects, they share key attributes: hostility toward democratic norms, antagonism toward a free press, intolerance toward ethnic and religious minorities, and a belief that government should benefit their own selfish financial interests. These leaders are also deeply connected to a network of multi-billionaire oligarchs who see the world as their economic plaything.

Those of us who believe in democracy, who believe that a government must be accountable to its people, must understand the scope of this challenge if we are to effectively confront it.

It should be clear by now that Donald Trump and the rightwing movement that supports him is not a phenomenon unique to the United States. All around the world, in Europe, in Russia, in the Middle East, in Asia and elsewhere we are seeing movements led by demagogues who exploit people’s fears, prejudices and grievances to achieve and hold on to power.

This trend certainly did not begin with Trump, but there’s no question that authoritarian leaders around the world have drawn inspiration from the fact that the leader of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy seems to delight in shattering democratic norms.

Three years ago, who would have imagined that the United States would stay neutral between Canada, our democratic neighbor and second largest trading partner, and Saudi Arabia, a monarchic, client state that treats women as third-class citizens? It’s also hard to imagine that Israel’s Netanyahu government would have moved to pass the recent “nation state law”, which essentially codifies the second-class status of Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, if Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t know Trump would have his back.

All of this is not exactly a secret. As the US continues to grow further and further apart from our longtime democratic allies, the US ambassador to Germany recently made clear the Trump administration’s support for rightwing extremist parties across Europe.

In addition to Trump’s hostility toward democratic institutions we have a billionaire president who, in an unprecedented way, has blatantly embedded his own economic interests and those of his cronies into the policies of government.

Other authoritarian states are much farther along this kleptocratic process. In Russia, it is impossible to tell where the decisions of government end and the interests of Vladimir Putin and his circle of oligarchs begin. They operate as one unit. Similarly, in Saudi Arabia, there is no debate about separation because the natural resources of the state, valued at trillions of dollars, belong to the Saudi royal family. In Hungary, far-right authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán is openly allied with Putin in Russia. In China, an inner circle led by Xi Jinping has steadily consolidated power, clamping down on domestic political freedom while it aggressively promotes a version of authoritarian capitalism abroad.

We must understand that these authoritarians are part of a common front. They are in close contact with each other, share tactics and, as in the case of European and American rightwing movements, even share some of the same funders. The Mercer family, for example, supporters of the infamous Cambridge Analytica, have been key backers of Trump and of Breitbart News, which operates in Europe, the United States and Israel to advance the same anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda. Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson gives generously to rightwing causes in both the United States and Israel, promoting a shared agenda of intolerance and illiberalism in both countries.

The truth is, however, that to effectively oppose rightwing authoritarianism, we cannot simply go back to the failed status quo of the last several decades. Today in the United States, and in many other parts of the world, people are working longer hours for stagnating wages, and worry that their children will have a lower standard of living than they do.

Our job is to fight for a future in which new technology and innovation works to benefit all people, not just a few. It is not acceptable that the top 1% of the world’s population owns half the planet’s wealth, while the bottom 70% of the working age population accounts for just 2.7% of global wealth.

Together governments of the world must come together to end the absurdity of the rich and multinational corporations stashing over $21tn in offshore bank accounts to avoid paying their fair share of taxes and then demanding that their respective governments impose an austerity agenda on their working families.

It is not acceptable that the fossil fuel industry continues to make huge profits while their carbon emissions destroy the planet for our children and grandchildren.

It is not acceptable that a handful of multinational media giants, owned by a small number of billionaires, largely control the flow of information on the planet.

It is not acceptable that trade policies that benefit large multinational corporations and encourage a race to the bottom hurt working people throughout the world as they are written out of public view.

It is not acceptable that, with the cold war long behind us, countries around the world spend over $1tn a year on weapons of destruction, while millions of children die of easily treatable diseases.

In order to effectively combat the rise of the international authoritarian axis, we need an international progressive movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power.

Such a movement must be willing to think creatively and boldly about the world that we would like to see. While the authoritarian axis is committed to tearing down a post-second world war global order that they see as limiting their access to power and wealth, it is not enough for us to simply defend that order as it exists now.

We must look honestly at how that order has failed to deliver on many of its promises, and how authoritarians have adeptly exploited those failures in order to build support for their agenda. We must take the opportunity to reconceptualize a genuinely progressive global order based on human solidarity, an order that recognizes that every person on this planet shares a common humanity, that we all want our children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent jobs, drink clean water, breathe clean air and live in peace.

Our job is to reach out to those in every corner of the world who share these values, and who are fighting for a better world.

In a time of exploding wealth and technology, we have the potential to create a decent life for all people. Our job is to build on our common humanity and do everything that we can to oppose all of the forces, whether unaccountable government power or unaccountable corporate power, who try to divide us up and set us against each other. We know that those forces work together across borders. We must do the same.

Bernie Sanders is a US Senator from Vermont

We asked Yanis Varoufakis to comment on Bernie Sanders’ piece. Here is his response:

Bernie Sanders is spot-on. Financiers have long formed an international “brotherhood” to guarantee themselves international bailouts when their paper pyramids crash.

More recently, xenophobic rightwing zealots also formed their very own Nationalist International, turning once proud people against another so that they control their wealth and politics.

It is high time that Democrats from across the world form a Progressive International in the interests of a majority of people on every continent, in every country.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #yanis varoufakis #bernie sanders #the guardian #foreign policy #capitalism #neo fascism #internationalism #trade agreements #trade policy #economic inequality #progressive #progressive movement #democratic socialism #socialism

69 notes · View notes

jacobsvoice · 5 years ago

Text

An Enduring Rift

Amid the rising panic over the spreading coronavirus, I have retreated to the comfortable security of my study at home. Surrounded by books about Israel and Judaism, fascinating antiquities and alluring 19th century lithographs of the Holy Land (acquired during two years of residence in Jerusalem and decades of visits), I do my best to remain calm.

Several days before our local public library suddenly shut down for the duration, I borrowed We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel (2019) by Daniel Gordis, vice president and distinguished fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem. American-born and now an Israeli citizen, Gordis explores the enduring tension between the world’s two largest Jewish communities, between American universalism and Israeli particularism.

The core values between American Jews and Israel, Gordis astutely concludes, are “diametrically opposed.” This first became evident more than a century ago, after Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State appeared. Prominent Reform rabbis insisted, and endlessly reiterated, that Jews comprise a religious community, not a nation. America was their Zion. Anything less could provoke dreaded allegations of dual loyalty against Jews who desperately wanted acceptance as genuine Americans.

After World War I the emerging Zionist movement and the determination of its pioneers to return to their Biblical homeland heightened the concern of prominent American Jewish leaders. With support from the League of Nations for Palestine (on both sides of the Jordan River) as the Jewish national homeland, the already fraught relationship between Reform Jews and Zionist pioneers intensified. America, they insisted, “is our Zion.”

Nor, as Gordis documents, did the uneasiness of Reform Jews diminish over time. For the prominent (and wealthy) among them who found their organizational home in the American Jewish Committee, Zionism was intensely discomforting lest, in the eyes of Gentiles, it be seen as compromising their loyalty to the United States. No one expressed these anxieties more fervently than New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs, a passionate Reform Jew whose newspaper offers unrelenting criticism of Israel for its perceived misdeeds.

Over time – following the Six-Day War that returned Jews to their Biblical homeland and, if briefly, sparked euphoria among American Jews – the two Jewish communities have drifted apart. Gordis understands that American universalism, in conflict with Israeli particularism, became “the new Judaism” for liberal American Jews. Their admiration for Israel faded once Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu became its elected leaders.

Perhaps the schism was inevitable, given what Gordis identifies as “the radically different purposes at the heart of each of the two countries.” The United States welcomed immigrants worldwide (most of the time) while Israel was born “to foster the recovery and renewed flourishing of the Jewish people.” For Israeli Jews this defined Zionism and expressed the purpose of Jewish statehood. But for many American Jews, Gordis astutely observes, “there is something deeply disturbing about the legal and cultural implications of a country being a specifically Jewish country.”

That may help to explain why American Jews of my parents’ generation, born to refugees from Russia, Poland and Rumania, kept their distance from Zionism and Israel, which were never discussed in our family gatherings. But my father tracked family members from Rumania who relocated to Israel, generously providing them with desperately needed financial support. I was more interested in who these strangers were, not where they lived - although Israeli postage stamps on their responsive letters of appreciation intrigued me.

Gordis suggests that Israel “desperately need[s] ongoing substantial interaction with – and learning from - American Jewish life.” And American Jews (with many exceptions, especially among the young) are more comforted than they acknowledge with Israel as their source of Jewish inspiration and, if ever needed, their place of refuge. Both Jewish communities, he understands, are vulnerable, if in different ways. American Jews confront the “challenges of assimilation.” Israelis confront, as they always have, the challenges of survival in an unstable, often hostile, neighborhood.

My own Jewish trajectory, not unlike my generation of assimilated American Jews, carried me from boyhood and young adult indifference to the Jewish state that was born on my twelfth birthday to a momentary spark of curiosity in June 1967 when television broadcasts revealed triumphant Israeli soldiers at the Western Wall.

But it took a chance encounter five years later with a former colleague who had just returned from an Israel trip for “disaffected Jewish academics” to perk my interest. I applied, my qualifications were recognized, and my life was transformed by the experience. Frequent visits followed, including two sabbatical years in Jerusalem that included teaching a seminar on American Jewish history to Tel Aviv University students who were astonished by the rejection of Jewish norms and indifference to Jewish history that was so common among American Jews.

My first trip to Israel had also included a brief visit to Hebron, whose place in Jewish history was then unknown to me. But a glimpse of the Machpelah burial site of the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs at the edge of the virtually deserted Jewish Quarter sparked my curiosity. Return visits eventually included fascinating conversations with founding leaders and devoted residents of the restored Jewish community that had been decimated by rampaging Arabs during the 1929 riots. My Hebron experiences, and the research they inspired, culminated in the first English-language history of the Hebron Jewish community.

Gordis traces, explores and explains “the more central causes of the complex, fraught, love-filled, hate-filled relationship” between American Jews and Zionists” before and since the birth of Israel. The ”rift” between us that is the focus of his illuminating book was, for me, healed decades ago by my own explorations and encounters in the Biblical homeland of my people, the Jewish people.

The “stumbling” relationship that Gordis perceptively scrutinizes (and yearns to heal) may yet result in “the fracture of the Jewish people into two largely disconnected communities.” But even though I will remain in the United States my Jewish heart and soul will always reside in Israel.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (2009) and, most recently, Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel, 1896-2106.

JNS (March 24, 2020)

0 notes

psotu19 · 7 years ago

Text

People's State of the Union Address Tuesday January 30th, 2018 Light Club Lamp Shop Burlington, Vermont

People’s State of the Union Address

Tuesday January 30th, 2018

Light Club Lamp Shop

Burlington, Vermont

Share a story about an experience that gave you insight into the state of our union

Share a story about a time that you felt a sense of belonging, or the opposite, to this nation or your community

Share a story of an experience that gave you hope in the past year

Hi everyone! Honestly, I’m so happy to be here with everybody today on such an important day. [1:56] My name is Devin Alejandro-Wilder. I’ve lived in Burlington for the past six years and attended at a local liberal arts college for four of those six years. I’m a working artist and I was born queer & disabled and i live in an independent co-op in the Old North End with seven other friends, two kitchens and 3 cats. In this past year, I was fortunate enough that my little sister raised the $5,000 needed to get myself a hearing aid, and it’s been extraordinarily helpful. Let me tell you, hearing footsteps and secrets and whispers has been something that I’ve never been able to experience before. [2:47] While the prosthetic that I use has a lot of faults, my friends certainly don’t, because they always help me keep track of it. It’s really small and black, and it’s meant to be invisible I guess, like myself… But, my buddies see me take it off, and they see me put it on, and turn up the volume and turn down the volume, and they never forget. They repeat questions, sentences, jokes, and punchlines and I don’t have to fake laughter so much anymore. I didn’t used to tell people that I had a disability because I firmly believe that we are told that we’re not supposed to tell people this. We’re just supposed to ‘pass’ and ‘make it work’. But when I did get my prosthetic, there was no more hiding what was going on, because people could see it pretty clearly. Even though it’s small and meant to be invisible, there’s nothing invisible about a piece of robotic technology attached to your my skull (especially when you have weird hair like mine). So, I just want to thank them, constantly, for their patience and understanding and seeming infinite kindness, because while I have employers who look at me differently for my disability, my friends don’t and that gives me hope every single day. Thank you [4:09]

[4:32] Hi, I’m Max Engle-Strike. I moved to Burlington in May at age 29 to become a brewer, because Vermont beer is so good. I moved from across the country, which gave me a unique perspective on seeing anti-trump sentiment on all sides of the country. It also gave me an insight into the state of our union, which is that it is extremely scattered, and shattered, and torn and divided, in that not even people who are against Trump can agree on how to be against Trump. The story I want to share is about my brother, with whom I am extremely close but we disagree often, to the extent that we were talking about policies in the United States vs the Russia probe as it came down to letting Jeff Sessions being in place or getting expelled. He was in favor of making sure the Russian investigation was completed, those responsible are punished, and that Trump is held accountable for soliciting, confusing Facebook ads. I was extremely disturbed by the policies that the attorney general was putting in place, bringing back mandatory minimums, recriminalizing marijuana, bringing back racist and divisive rhetoric in a way that hasn’t been seen in decades (for good reason) [6:00]and it really scared me that to him, it’s more important to take down a figurehead than to remember that these policies are affecting thousands of Americans every day. So, in wondering how to proceed in the next three years, let’s not miss the forest for the trees: let’s not focus on just the figurehead, let’s focus on the community and each other [6:25] Sorry, Benny, but I’m not with you on this one. That’s my story.

[6:47] My name is Jane, I’m a graduate student here in Burlington. I’ve been here for six years (I moved here from Boston) and I’m 23 years old. I think that, back in 2016, when everything changed in a really big way, I became very disheartened and sort of felt unempowered about being involved in politics. It wasn’t until really this year that I started looking for pieces of hope and wisdom in my local community, and recognizing that there’s tremendous potential for us to organize in really small ways. Really, the personal is political, the local is global, and so by us meeting here today and actually having these conversations, we are setting an example for people all over the country to do the same thing. [7:45] So, while the conversations that you have with your neighbors or in your classrooms or with your friends and family may feel insignificant, they are part of a greater dialogue, and we really do have the potential to change things. Thank you all for being here.

I’m Hallie Berksengold. I’ve been in Burlington for almost nine years now. [8:28] I’m originally from the New York City area, and it’s actually kind of become a little joke in my identity about how I’m a Vermonter in a group of New Yorkers and a New Yorker in a group of Vermonters, and that dichotomy almost rules how I look at things and approach the world a lot of the time. So, I’ve been up here for a long time (oh, by the way, I’m 26). I grew up in a—I wouldn’t call it a super religious, but relatively, comparatively observant—Jewish household. I was raised not quite as religious as a lot of other New York Jews that I knew (and I know a lot), but we followed every major holiday, and every somewhat-major holiday. When I moved up to Vermont, I initially didn’t find any Jewish communities that really resonated with me, and I tapered off that a bit. [9:58] It’s been interesting because for a long time, that tapering off was kind of accidental, but then it became very intentional as I became way more disillusioned with Israeli politics over the coming years. Looking back on this now, it seemed really silly that I ever really thought this way, but I did, up until about a year ago, felt like I was literally the only Jewish person who was upset about how Palestinians and African Jews were being treated. None of my original Jewish circles that I had grown up with really either seemed to care or seemed to want to confront the hypocrisy between “healing the world”—"Tikkun olam"—and social justice, and yet there was this very glaring problem in our midst. I came across an organization (totally by accident) and this happened a little bit after the election in 2016, and it was totally by accident because by that point I had sworn off of any Jewish spaces, but this was one was one where young adult Jews primarily were coming together to oppose Israeli occupation. And I was floored; I was like “Wow, there’s a whole group of Jews specifically who do this!”. I was definitely really vocal about my opinions up here, because I felt this need to prove to other people who are predominantly not Jewish up here that, “Hey, guess what? Not all Jews support this”. So I went down to New York last year and went to a training and then, pretty shortly after that, we did a major action in D.C. against the American-Israel public affairs committee by shutting down and blockading the front and side doors. I did take appropriate time off work because this hit me in a rather personal way. I remember just locking down with other people and looking out at the giant crowd of all different kinds of people and feeling wildly at peace in that moment, whatever happened later. Thank you. [13:07]

[13:14] My name is Ali, my pronouns are ‘they’ and ‘them’. I’m here from San Francisco—I’m on tour for a show—it’s my second night in Burlington, thanks for welcoming me. I live in San Francisco’s oldest housing cooperative. It was founded in 1957 by a group of beatniks, and we just celebrated our 60th anniversary. I grew up in a very conservative family, predominantly Trump supporters. I’ve been a community organizer and activist for 10+ years, ranging from "lets do nice sweet fundraisers” to really militant direct action, so quite a range there. My story is about the first prompt in the State of the Union: I’d been going to and showing up for racial justice meetings starting in September 2016. In San Francisco, the core organizing group fluctuated between like 10, 15 people, sometimes 20. The Bay Area chapter is a lot bigger, but the San Francisco one was just starting. I like to call Trump “Mussolini Kardashian” because I feel like that’s the best way to describe our fascist reality star, and in the meeting after Mussolini Kardashian was elected, we had like 100+ people there. People were there in this visceral state of panic almost, and it actually really pissed me off. I was so happy to see so many people and see people mobilized. We went around and did this big check-in, and people were so utterly panicked, and the reason it bothered me was this: Under President Obama, there were almost 2 million people deported. The U.S. was at war with eight different countries. The Dakota Access Pipeline all progressed under Obama. Michael Brown was killed under Obama. Kalief Browder hung himself under Obama. All of these things were happening in that era. There’s a way in which Trump’s particular brand of being heinous and viscious and brutal is so in-your-face, but then I look at George W. Bush and I look at the invasion of Iraq, and I look at Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act, and I look at this historical amnesia that makes Trump into this exceptionalized boogey man, when the history of our country is genocide, theft, and slavery. There’s this aspect of the contemporary zeitgeist of panic around his behavior as if it’s different from the rest of America’s history, and I look at this too with some of the campaigns that target and attack the Confederate flag, and I’m like “what about the U.S. flag?!” Like, if we need a symbol of heinous, viscous, barbaric actions, that flag really wins the cake. So there’s this aspect for me of certain types and kinds of panic, and the reality star aspect of it for me is important because it’s this flashy, showy, outlandish in-your-face version, but the quiet and subtle aspects of white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy has been going on and will continue to go on. I feel like there’s a fireworks to the current thing that really is blinding us, in a way, from the history of it all. Thanks. [16:53]

My name is Laurie. I am 56 years old, and I was born and raised in Burlington, Vermont. I’m a Burlington, Vermont native. Well, I’ve got kind of mixed feelings about Donald Trump and his actions. Even during his campaign, I always felt that he’s gonna be contradicting, he’s gonna do a lot of firing, and hiring, and the one’s he’s hiring are not staying in, as far as the Senate is concerned. I’m afraid for our country. What I understand is that he’s got so much money, but he ain’t got no brains to use it, so that’s my perspective. I didn’t want him to be our president. I actually wanted Bernie Sanders to be our president. I figured he was more down to earth with us, and he was the better choice. Anyway, I just really was upset when Donald Trump was elected, and I still to this very day wonder, “why did all these people elect him?” My sense of hope in my community is that we can get Trump out, and get somebody else in who knows how to run the country a lot better than it is right now.

[18:56] My name is Chai Gang. I was born during a depression, and we had people sleeping on our floor every night, and nobody ever said the word homeless. They said, “I can’t find a job". “Homeless" was not a word yet. When I heard Trump talking about how he’s going to get everybody a job, and people voted for him for that reason, I have no respect for those people. I wouldn’t want a man running my country the way he runs this country because he promised me a job. When I was in the Occupy movement, I met a woman who had her mother living with her, and her mother babysat while she went to work. The mother was kicked out of the apartment because she wasn’t on the lease, and the woman lost her job because she didn’t have a babysitter anymore. I met another woman who had her grandfather living with her, and he was in a wheelchair, and he was kicked out because he wasn’t on the lease. So he was homeless. Well, in the old days, no landlord would kick anybody out if the rent was paid and if the place was being taken care of decently. So I’m disgusted and angry, and I feel Trump is supposed to be President, because it’s time for a change, and the change is going to be horrible. What can we hope for? I want to say ‘except that we die’… I don’t want to be here anymore, for what’s coming. And yet, when I think of dying, somebody has to fight. Somebody has to go against what’s coming, so maybe I’m one of them. [21:32]

My name is David. I lived in Burlington and the Williston area for 56 years. I’m 56 years old now. 29 years ago, I started a career as a taxi driver, which I had for 25 years. I was pretty lucky because I did a lot of runs in Burlington, a lot of runs around Vermont, runs into Canada and all over the U.S. It used to be pretty mild conversations about “Yeah, things are going okay, my job is okay" and the longer I continued, the more I saw old problems just kinda got shoved under the rug, and the people that voted for Trump, there’s a lot of these issues that happened before Trump. Trump is just kind of a beacon of what had been going wrong for a very long time. About four years ago, I lost my house, and I lost my job, and so I ended up being homeless. Luckily, about four years ago, and I moved into a housing complex here for seniors and people with disabilities, both learning and other forms. I’ve learned in where I live that all our differences are making us stronger, and I think all this pressure from the top is finally getting to the point where we’re all starting to organize. More in the last year, we’re all starting to understand that we don’t want this anymore. Let’s go back to caring about each other, getting rid of the power and the money. Let us—the residents and the folks with jobs that are merely making a living—let us take over and head in the right direction. Thank you. [24:10]

My name is Jen. I’ am a resident of Burlington for three and a half years. I’m a teacher, a community organizer and an artist, and.. I was the one who said that you wouldn’t not have a story, so I have an opening, we’ll see how it goes: So in 2008, when Obama was elected—it was right after the Bush years, which doesn’t seem quite as terrible anymore—I was at Nectar’s when the election results came in, and I was part of a crowd of hundreds and hundreds of people that literally took to the streets and flocked all over Burlington and celebrated this huge victory. It was the first and maybe the only time I’ve ever been that excited about a presidential election. That being said, shortly after that we went right back to the politics and it was kind of a similar but different national thing was happening in D.C., and a friend of mine was doing a local one, and it was this whole idea that we get hope from people, not from presidents. I was really happy to participate in this visual art event. So when I saw that this was happening, I got really excited because something that I always believe very strongly is that we are the power and we can make change. We are living in—I wouldn’t say an unprecedented time, because it’s happened before (before I was around, I think)—but how I’ve seen it affect my friends and my community in ways that I wasn’t expecting. But particularly, I remember—so, I teach college at CCV and up until this semester my classes have always been on Tuesdays—we were talking about the election, talking about it the whole semester, and so, we talked about it all day, told people “If you’re eligible to vote, go vote”, and I felt like we had covered all the bases about who was eligible and everything. So we left and I felt really, really confident that I was going to come into class the next day and I had already planned out how we would talk about what it meant to have our first female president. So I went out with my friends that night, I went down to Nectar’s and we watched, and we went to the OP and we watched, and then we came here, and I sat right there with my friend. As it was close to midnight, and it became clearer and clearer that things weren’t going in the direction that we thought they were going to go, we started losing words, we started having tears, and we started getting fearful. So, when I decided to do this event, we were brainstorming where to do it, and I thought, “let me call Lee, and see if the Lamp Shop is open”, and he said “Yes!”. For me personally, how really hard it is to have this event with people talking about what’s going on, in the same exact place where I felt like I personally got this initial wound, it’s really important, and to be here with people tonight is super helpful. So, thanks for coming and for listening.

[28:01] Alright, I got one for ya. My name is Luc Arseneau. The first thing about me I guess I tell everybody seems to be—I don’t know how people aren’t bored of it now—I had chronic night terrors since I was a little kid: sleep paralysis, all that shit, for years. I was told to draw them in order to get them to go out, and eventually I did, and eventually I got good at drawing, and then eventually went away. Now I’m a lucid dreamer, and I take those same drawings and I put them up in stories so I can put out something that isn’t taxing on me. So, there you go, there’s a lot of things out there. So, that being said, I got something that I think might be the third one, was it ‘hope’? Yeah, I’ve got ‘hope’ for ya. You can be the judge or whether or not it is, but I’ll leave that up to you. It was the summertime, it must’ve been two years ago maybe, and I was walking across the blue bridge. You know, you might not know but it’s called the blue bridge by anybody who walks across it, it’s railroad tracks. I was going down there, and I live now at the place I was crashing at then, so I had this big backpack, it was my grandfather’s, and I’d used duct taped on the strap on the side to keep it from falling off. So I go down, and I noticed one thing about the bridge was that somebody shot out the streetlights above it again, so I can’t see anything other than, you know, this one lone light, ‘cause the other ones are broken. So I go up to the edge of the bridge and I think I hear a sound, but I don’t stop, because I’m counting the next wooden beam that it takes to get across. I can’t see them, but I know they’re there, so I count them. One, two, three, four, five… and I go across. I hear a sound behind me but I still don’t turn, because I don’t want to break my pace. In the middle of the bridge, I decide to stop, because I hear footsteps. I turn around, and I see a tall figure walking towards me. So I turn forward and go. One thing I didn’t mention is, having night terrors (not that anybody would know) makes you very paranoid, for no logical reason, so you insert logic into it. So I figured, “oh, it’s just a guy going by”. My hand still goes into my pocket, to where my knife is, just there. I hear “hey, boy! Hey man! Hey yo! Slow down, hey hey!” Well, I keep going, and I hear “hey man! Yo yo yo! Stop stop stop!” So I said, “Hey, what dyou want?“ 'cause I’m an idiot. ‘Cause I’m curious. Being curious makes you an idiot. I’m full of idiocy (not as much as our President though, I’ll say that. I’m not curious about what happens there). So I turn around and I say, “Hey man, what dyou want?” and he says “Yo, yo, d’you got a light, man?” I make it clear that my hand’s in my pocket, jingling around the loose change that’s in there and say, “Yeah if all you want is a light”. I realized that for some reason, at that point, I had said something that was very important. I didn’t know why, but I had said something that changed the air. He stops, and he says, “Well yeah, you know”. I realize from the shadow of the light shining past him at me that he’s got his hand in his pocket too. So I said “Yeah, well, yeah, alright I’ve got a light” and I take out some matches, and I give them to him. Then I started talking with him. He was a kid, probably 19 or 18, had a Four Loko, flat brim hat, and we just start to talk. As we start getting into talking, one of the things I notice is that he’s as drunk as I am, he wasn’t certain, he was just trying to light his cigarette. As we’re getting into this conversation I realize he’s not that bad of a guy, and I was like, “I gotta tell you man, I had my hand on my knife in my pocket, ‘cause I thought you were gonna try and mug me” and he’s like, “Yo dude! I didn’t know who you were, I had my hand on my knife too!” And I was like, “Shit, well hey, d’you want some rum?“ ‘Cause it’s 3 in the morning, it’s dark, we’re alone on a bridge, of course I’m gonna, well, you know, who cares… And he goes “No, I’ve got my Four Loko!” and I was like “Oh I’m not touchin’ that”. So we sit down, and we get to talking for about 3 hours, and I learned about his life. He was from Somalia. He got shipped off somewhere else. He was a child soldier for about a year, and then he got free somehow (I don’t know, it was broken English). But one thing he told me, I remember, was talking about how, if you were caught with a beer in his hometown, they cut off one of your hands. I said “Fuck, I’ve heard stories about that, but I never knew…”, and he says “Well, now you know”. So I was like, “Well how nice is it to be in harmony, now, to be in peace?” and he said “What’s harmony, what’s peace?”. And I was like “you know, peace”. I tried to explain to him whats harmony is, and I realized, fuck. That’s the same thing as me asking him, “if all you want’s a light”: yeah, that’s what he asked for. But the thing that we’re not certain about is whether or not we say what we mean, and whether or not somebody understands what we mean when we say it. And that’s all I have to say. [34:08]

[Lee] As an American, I feel like there is enormous potential with the people that I share nationality with to take this country over. Living in Vermont, living in this little tiny city in this little tiny state has enormous influence to take this fucking country over, and the first thing we have to do is take over our city and start leading by this example. By being an example city, people look at Burlington, Vermont already, with 40,000 people, to lead. Because people like Bernie, and people like things that are happening here. Even though people are like “Oh fuck, they’re building a mall, oh fuck, they’re doing this”, it’s still a really fucking awesome city with a small population. Given the size of the population, we have the ability to take it over and rule this small city, to give an example to the state. People look to the State of Vermont for an example, and we can lead the world if we just take it over. I think Bernie should become the governor, and we should just be like— he has so much popularity, he could get sweeping agendas done. Vermont’s a little green splitting wedge pointing its way at Washington, D.C., and I totally believe that the revolution starts in this city, now. [35:36]

[37:20] [Chai Gang] The two fantasies I have are: A hundred people marching down Church Street, and one fantasy is that they’re holding signs that say how they were evicted, or how somebody they knew was evicted; the other fantasy is everybody playing music and singing ‘What’s Going On?’, the Marvin Gaye song. Everything I try to get going never happens, so I’m putting this out there and hoping somebody will make it happen.

Friendship and strength for us all [David]

[38:20] Reset, ready… hope? Yeah, there’s hope, totally. Hope. [Jen]

Vehemence, precognition, adverse, and doubting doubts [Luc]

Invincible, in the sense that we break social, economic, racial, physical barriers, 'cause these are things that hold us together, instead of things that keep us apart. So I really hope that this movement breaks generations and bodies and spirits. I think there’s a lot more that we have in common than in difference, so, that’s cool. [Devin] [39:33]

Confusion and kinship [Max]

[40:24] [Phinn] Your story kind of resonated a little more, 'cause I do a lot of photography in my spare time, and it often leads me into very desolate places where I’m completely alone and not expecting to see other people. So basically, there’s this abandoned Cold War era radar base in eastern Vermont. It’s on the top of a mountain, it’s in the middle of nowhere, and it’s a place that I go to kind of be alone, ‘cause there’s no one around, and there’s no one up there, ever. A few months ago, I decided to go up there in the winter time. As I was walking up, I spotted someone ahead of me on the trail up. You know, I was a little hesitant, seeing this guy walking in front of me, but I just kept walking. I was walking significantly faster than him, so I eventually caught up. As I got closer, I could see he was holding onto something in front of him that looked like a gun, and so I got a little bit.. hesitant. As I got closer, I realized it definitely was a gun: he was walking with a gun on a hip and a rifle slung across his chest. So I was a little scared to be walking in the middle of the woods with no cell service past someone with a gun. I had no idea why he would also be up here, you know, out in the middle of nowhere. But, as I got closer—and I had a knife too on my chest and I had a knife on my side—I kind of just slid my hand down along my side as I walked past him, because I was just not sure what was gonna happen. As I walked past, I kind of turned and said “Hello”. He said it back, and then he asked me what I was doing up there. I explained I was taking pictures and he was like, “Oh, well I’m just going target shooting”. We began to talk, and I learned that his name was George and he had grown up in the area, and he was simply this guy going out for a hike, but I had had this heightened sense of urgency of there being any kind of issue with this person, because of an uncertainty of people. Something that I generally hadn’t been feeling, but it was because of the state of the environment that we were in. And now with the state of our country, there’s a little more uncertainty of other people, something I really haven’t felt before and hadn’t felt in Vermont especially, as a generally safe place, somewhere I’ve never really felt unsafe. But it was this moment of second-guessing this person, who also was just out there exploring this place. So I think that was something that really resonated with me, this kind of uncertainty. [43:22]

[Phinn] Hope is a good one. It’s very wonderful to see everyone from a range of ages and occupations. The wide range is just very good to see. I really appreciate not seeing just a really select group of people talking.

[Jane] Apprehension, and excitement. And gratitude!

[Hallie] Improvisation, and connections, and empathy.

[Ali] Pessimism, cynicism, and optimism.

[Laurie] I am hopeful and I’m positive (or at least I try to stay positive!)

[Chai] I’m happy to be here.

#PSOTU2018 #belonging #hope #activism #community #submission #vermont

0 notes

everettwilkinson · 7 years ago

Text

MATTIS on NEW AFGHANISTAN strategy — SNEAK PEEK: REMNICK on Trump — BANNON to WaPo: ‘No administration in history has been so divided’ — ELISE STEFANIK's wedding

BULLETIN — NYT’S MICHAEL GORDON in Amman, Jordan: “Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said that President Trump, who had been accused by lawmakers of dragging his feet on Afghanistan, had settled on a new strategy after a ‘rigorous’ review.

“‘The president has made a decision,’ Mr. Mattis told reporters on an overnight flight that arrived in Amman … on Sunday. ‘I am very comfortable that the strategic process was sufficiently rigorous.’ Mr. Mattis received the authority in June to send nearly 4,000 troops to Afghanistan so that the United States military could expand its efforts to advise Afghan forces and support them with American artillery and air power. But Mr. Mattis had refrained from building up the American force there until the Trump administration settled on a broader strategy. Mr. Mattis declined to say what steps the president had ordered, including troop levels. He added that Mr. Trump wanted to announce the details to the American people, and that the president was expected to do so in coming days. …

Story Continued Below

“The decision to send troops is just one component of a strategy that is also expected to outline ways to pressure Pakistan to shut down the sanctuaries that the Taliban and other extremist groups have maintained on its territory. ‘It is a South Asia strategy; it not just an Afghanistan strategy,’ Mr. Mattis said.” http://nyti.ms/2x2TxKm

Good Sunday morning. SNEAK PEEK — DAVID REMNICK in the New Yorker, coming out tomorrow: “Early last November, just before Election Day, Barack Obama was driven through the crisp late-night gloom of the outskirts of Charlotte, as he barnstormed North Carolina on behalf of Hillary Clinton. … During his speech in Charlotte that night, Obama warned that no one really changes in the Presidency; rather, the office ‘magnifies’ who you already are. So if you ‘accept the support of Klan sympathizers before you’re President, or you’re kind of slow in disowning it, saying, ‘Well, I don’t know,’ then that’s how you’ll be as President.’” http://bit.ly/2ihQqes … A look inside the magazine http://bit.ly/2vPCKvX

— WORTH NOTING: Obama has not publicly responded to Trump’s comments post-Charlottesville except to post a tweet quoting Nelson Mandela.

MARK LANDLER and MAGGIE HABERMAN: “With Bannon’s Ouster, Question Remains Whether His Agenda Will Be Erased, Too” http://nyti.ms/2x2QKRw

— JOSH DAWSEY and MATT NUSSBAUM: “The departures from Trump’s White House have come at a dizzying pace in recent weeks: multiple communications directors, the chief of staff and the press secretary have all left, along with top aides on the national security council and a number of CEOs from influential business councils. But none of the departures are likely to change the dynamics as much as that of the polarizing Bannon, whose ouster on Friday could alienate conservatives, hearten some who feared his brand of populism-nationalism, and dial down the fights inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

‘“Bannon is the intellectual heart and soul of the Trump movement,’ said Mark Corallo, a prominent GOP operative who served briefly as the spokesperson for Trump’s private legal team. ‘He was the think tank. He’s the idea generator. … He was the guy who was the most thoughtful about how to enact the agenda, how to build a coalition.’” http://politi.co/2vdOox4

**SUBSCRIBE to Playbook: http://politi.co/2lQswbh

BREITBART’S LEAD STORY — “Report: Powerful GOP Donor Sheldon Adelson Supports Campaign to Oust McMaster” http://bit.ly/2vPDzET

— BANNON SPEAKS to Bob Costa and John Wagner, who reported from Bedminster: “‘If the Republican Party on Capitol Hill gets behind the president on his plans and not theirs, it will all be sweetness and light, be one big happy family,’ Bannon said. … ‘No administration in history has been so divided among itself about the direction about where it should go,’ Bannon said, adding that Trump’s base is frustrated by a congressional agenda that has dovetailed more with traditional Republican priorities than the agenda Trump championed.” http://wapo.st/2wepaDo

–“Breitbart bullish on Bannon return, promises ‘aggressive expansion,’” by Cristiano Lima: “Breitbart News is riding high amid its reunion with executive chairman Steve Bannon. … ‘I think we definitely are planning on stepping up our game,’ Breitbart News Washington editor Matthew Boyle said during the outlet’s weekly SiriusXM show on Saturday. ‘[W]e’re planning a lot of aggressive expansion and much more aggressive reporting than we’ve already been doing … We’ve been a pirate ship without a captain for a year … We’re thrilled to have our captain back.” http://politi.co/2xfu5AT

THERE WE GO! — DAILY MAIL SAYS IVANKA AND JARED PUSHED BANNON OUT: “How Jewish convert Ivanka got ‘Bannon the Barbarian’ to go: Trump’s daughter ‘helped to force out’ aide blamed over President’s failure to condemn neo-Nazi rally … Chief strategist Bannon, 63, helped orchestrate the President’s election victory … But many blamed him for Trump’s failure last week to condemn neo-Nazis … ‘Pushed out’ by daughter Ivanka and her husband because of his far-Right views”: http://dailym.ai/2v3rp8p

— FRONT PAGE OF THE BALTIMORE SUN: “Jared Kushner’s firm seeks arrest of Maryland tenants to collect debt,” by Doug Donovan: “The real estate company owned by Jared Kushner, son-in-law and top adviser to President Donald Trump, has been the most aggressive in Maryland in using a controversial debt-collection tactic: getting judges to order the arrest of people who owe his company money. Since 2013, the first full year in which the Kushner Cos. operated in Maryland, corporate entities affiliated with the firm’s 17 apartment complexes in the state have sought the civil arrest of 105 former tenants for failing to appear in court to face allegations of unpaid debt, The Baltimore Sun has found.” http://bsun.md/2weo36H

— TIMES OF ISRAEL: “Abbas says Trump administration ‘in chaos’”: “‘Each time they reiterate their commitment to a two-state solution and the stop to settlement building, Abbas says. ‘I urge them to tell Netanyahu that, but they are deterred.’ ‘I don’t even know how they are dealing with us, because his entire administration is in chaos,’ he adds.” http://bit.ly/2uVkvWM

MNUCHIN RESPONDS TO CRITICS IN HIS YALE CLASS — via Zach Warmbrodt: “I don’t believe the allegations against the president are accurate. I believe that having highly talented men and women in our country surrounding the president in his administration should be reassuring to you and all the American people.” Mnuchin’s full statement http://bit.ly/2v3Q0tY

****** A message from the Coalition for Affordable Prescription Drugs (CAPD): If you know only one fact about rising drug costs, know this one: drug makers set prices for prescription drugs. To help manage nearly double-digit price increases, employers, unions and government programs use PBMs to negotiate lower net prices to help curb costs for employers and patients. Learn more at affordableprescriptiondrugs.org ******

NEW POLL — “Trump’s Job Rating Is Below 40 Percent in Three Key Midwest States,” by NBC’s Mark Murray: “President Donald Trump’s job-approval rating in the three states that helped propel him to the White House – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – stands below 40 percent, according to a trio of NBC News/Marist polls of these key states in the Midwest. In addition, Democrats enjoy double-digit leads in Michigan and Pennsylvania on the question of which party voters prefer to control Congress after the 2018 midterms, and they hold an 8-point advantage in Wisconsin.

“And in all three states, more than six-in-10 voters say Trump’s conduct as president has embarrassed them, versus just a quarter who have said it’s made them proud. These three NBC/Marist polls were conducted Aug. 13-17 – after the August 12 unrest and violence in Charlottesville, Va., as well as in the midst of President Trump’s multiple responses to that unrest and violence.” http://nbcnews.to/2v3zs58

ABOUT YESTERDAY … — BOSTON GLOBE FRONT PAGE: “MAKING A STAND AGAINST RACISM … Resolute and ready, they marched … Rally by tens of thousands is peaceful but pointed” — A1 pdf http://bit.ly/2ve082I

— “‘Free speech’ rally speakers, little heard, end event quickly,” by the Boston Globe’s Beth Healy: “By 12:45 p.m., only 45 minutes into their official program, organizers of the Boston Free Speech rally ended the event and were escorted by police out of the park, to chants of ‘Go home, Nazis’ from the crowd. A Facebook post for the event listed 14 speakers and was scheduled to last for two hours.” http://bit.ly/2fX8NEr

— @realDonaldTrump: “Great job by all law enforcement officers and Boston Mayor @Marty_Walsh. Our great country has been divided for decades. Sometimes you need protest in order to heal, & we will heal, & be stronger than ever before! I want to applaud the many protesters in Boston who are speaking out against bigotry and hate. Our country will soon come together as one!”

… AND IN CHICAGO: “7 shot, 1 fatally, in West Pullman attack among 33 shot in 13 hours,” by the Chicago Tribune’s Elva Malagon and Denease Williams-Harris. http://trib.in/2v32Zfp

WHAT OTTAWA WANTS YOU TO READ — “The Trump Unit: Inside Canada’s PMO squad to save NAFTA,” by the National Post’s Alexander Panetta: “The Canadian government has created an election-style nerve centre to handle White House-related challenges and officials who describe its operations say it has about eight regular staff: two former trade officials, two senior PMO officials, an ambassador, a writer, a cabinet minister, and it’s run by a young staffer with a reputation for staying cool while smothering political fires.

“The most blistering inferno it’s preparing to confront is a scenario where the president threatens NAFTA. Everybody involved anticipates the threat level from Trump will rise with the heat of negotiations. A well-connected Washington lobbyist milling about last week’s talks said a Trump pullout threat is virtually assured: ‘Almost 100 per cent.’ Trade lawyer Dan Ujczo said it’s a logical play for the president: ‘The threat of withdrawal is his key negotiating leverage.’” http://bit.ly/2wlnOad

GREAT STORY — ANNIE KARNI on NEWT GINGRICH: “Newt Gingrich goes to spouse school”: “Last week, Newt Gingrich sat in a classroom surrounded by 11 women and one other man, furiously jotting notes. In the weeklong intensive, where classes ran from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. with only a short cafeteria lunch break in between, the former House Speaker and onetime presidential candidate received a crash course in a new role: invisible spouse. When he moves to Rome with his third wife, Callista Gingrich, to become husband of the Ambassador to the Holy See, the ubiquitous Fox News talking head, will have no official diplomatic role abroad, beyond being generally presentable and essentially not heard from.

“It will be a challenge for an outspoken sometimes-booster, sometimes-critic of the Trump administration, who said he does not plan to terminate his contract with Fox News. But like former President Bill Clinton during his wife’s two bids for the presidency, Gingrich will be taking on the secondary role of booster after a public life spent demanding the limelight. Aware that this new, less celebrated, role will take some getting used to, Gingrich eagerly enrolled himself in what he referred to, excitedly, as ‘spouse school.’

“The program, run by the State Department and hosted on the Arlington campus of the Foreign Service Institute, was started in the 1950s, when it was referred to simply as the ‘Wives Seminar.’ Over the years, a State Department official said, it ‘has evolved into a variety of training and orientation programs for foreign affairs family members.’ Today, topics include: ‘expectations and personal goals for your time overseas,’ ‘post morale,’ ‘the official residence,’ ‘navigating a public diplomacy role,’ ‘legal issues and ethics,’ as well as ‘stress management.’” http://politi.co/2x2pnHl

WHAT AMERICA IS READING … — THE BIRMINGHAM (ALA.) NEWS: “With Jones, Democrats dreaming big again: ‘Mount Rushmore of political upsets’” http://bit.ly/2iguP5O … ARIZONA REPUBLIC: “Sign of respect for the eclipse: Navajos won’t be watching ‘sacred communication’ between sun and moon” http://bit.ly/2x3k8XK … CHARLOTTE OBSERVER: “HERITAGE OR ‘SHAMEFUL HISTORY’?: Gastonia’s Confederate monument, one of dozens standing quietly on N.C. public property, inspires loyalty even as people question its message” http://bit.ly/2vPqZ8F … JANESVILLE (WIS.) GAZETTE: “Now available: One-fourth of business space vacant in downtown Janesville.” http://bit.ly/2wtHAjd

— RARE: INDIANAPOLIS STAR FULL FRONT PAGE EDITORIAL: “LET’S STAND AGAINST HATE. TOGETHER” http://bit.ly/2vPTuTS

REMEMBERING ARTHUR FINKELSTEIN – NYT’s Sam Roberts: “Finkelstein, a reclusive political Svengali who revolutionized campaign polling and financing and helped elect a bevy of conservative candidates, including President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, died on Friday night in Ipswich, Mass., where he lived. He was 72. … Mr. Finkelstein was among the first political strategists in the late 1970s to grasp the potential of a United States Supreme Court ruling that allowed putatively independent political committees to spend money on behalf of individual candidates and causes. … He also pioneered sophisticated demographic analyses of primary voters and methodical exit polling, and of using a marketing strategy, called microtargeting, to identify specific groups of potential supporters of a candidate regardless of their party affiliation.” http://nyti.ms/2xfq2En … Statement by his family http://bit.ly/2ihkjeR … National Review profile http://bit.ly/2we3uqY

— AP: “Comedian, civil rights activist Dick Gregory dies,” by Daisy Nguyen: “Dick Gregory, the comedian and activist and who broke racial barriers in the 1960s and used his humor to spread messages of social justice and nutritional health, has died. He was 84. Gregory died late Saturday in Washington, D.C. after being hospitalized for about a week, his son Christian Gregory told The Associated Press. He had suffered a severe bacterial infection. As one of the first black standup comedians to find success with white audiences, in the early 1960s, Gregory rose from an impoverished childhood in St. Louis to win a college track scholarship and become a celebrated satirist who deftly commented upon racial divisions at the dawn of the civil rights movement.” http://bit.ly/2fWy16a

SUNDAY BEST — JAKE TAPPER talks to OHIO GOV. JOHN KASICH on CNN’s “STATE OF THE UNION”: TAPPER: “If everything continues like it has been, does a Republican need to step forward to challenge President Trump in three years?” KASICH: “Well, Jake, as you said, I don’t have any plans to do anything like that. I’m rooting for him to get it together. We all are. We’re only like seven months into this presidency. … What we have to start thinking about, all of us, not just the president, but down where we live, in the neighborhoods, in the communities, we’ve gotta build a stronger America. Look, why am I on this show. You asked me to come on.

“I’m trying to have a responsible voice. To call things out when they need to be called out, but also to support my country. So what I hope is going to happen … I hope we’re going to have stability, the president is going to learn from these episodes and we’re going to do better. That’s what I hope is going to happen. We’ll have to wait and see.”

— FOX NEWS SUNDAY: “Trump ally blast congressional leaders,” by Kyle Cheney: “A top ally of President Donald Trump offered hints Sunday of a coming war on Republican leaders in Congress, a battle presaged by the return of former chief strategist Steve Bannon to Breitbart News.

“‘There’s a lack of leadership on one side of Pennsylvania Avenue,’ said David Bossie, a former Trump campaign adviser, appearing on ‘Fox News Sunday.’ Bossie, who said he’s spoken to Bannon ‘many times’ in recent days, said Bannon’s departure from the administration will help the administration at ‘leaning into Congress.’ He repeatedly decried a ‘failure of leadership in the House and Senate.’ ‘Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have to step up,’ Bossie said, adding, ‘The House and Senate leadership has not bought into the president’s agenda fully.’” http://politi.co/2vdLlF0

— SEN. TIM KAINE talks to JOHN DICKERSON on CBS’S “FACE THE NATION” about Robert E. Lee’s statue in the Capitol: “Every state gets two statues to put in Statuary Hall or throughout the capital. Just using Virginia as an example. The state gets to choose two people to represent the entire scope of the state’s history. Virginia obviously chose George Washington, the father of the country. But the second choice that was made in 1909, and has never been changed, is Robert E. Lee.

“I think as you look at the scope of Virginia history here in 2017, and if you want there to be two people to really stand for who Virginia is, why wouldn’t you think about Pocahontas who, had she not saved John Smith’s life, we wouldn’t even be here possibly? Why wouldn’t you think about a Barbara Johns, who led a school walkout in Prince Edward County that ultimately became part of the Brown versus Board, desegregation decision? Why wouldn’t you think about Governor Wilder, the grandson of a slave, a decorated Korean War combat veteran, who became the first elected African-American government in the history of the country? I think from 2017 looking backward, I think Virginia could probably do better in the two people that we choose to stand for us in Statuary Hall. And I think a number of the other states can do better as well.”

— SIREN: @facethenation: Sen. Scott: “‘As we look to the future it’s going to be be very difficult for POTUS to lead. His moral authority remains compromised.'”

PHOTO DU JOUR: Protesters face off with riot police escorting conservative activists following a march in Boston on Aug. 20 against a planned ‘Free Speech Rally’ just one week after the violent ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Virginia. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

JAKE’S TIP OF THE DAY — WEAR THESE SHOES (Allbirds are kind of great) — NYT Style: “To Fit Into Silicon Valley, Wear These Wool Shoes,” by Nellie Bowles. http://nyti.ms/2vdNIaQ

DEPT. OF TAX REFORM IS HARD — “Left warns Democrats in tax reform fight,” by Elana Schor: “Liberal activists who hounded the GOP throughout its failed Obamacare repeal bid are gearing up to hit any Democrat who strays from the fold on tax cuts for the wealthy — including some of the party’s most politically vulnerable incumbents. Democrats were spared the sight of their progressive base battling centrists on Obamacare, which proved a uniquely unifying issue for both wings of the party. But there’s no guarantee that taxes will be another kumbaya moment for Democratic leaders, who have long struggled to contain tensions between red-state lawmakers facing tough reelections and a grassroots emboldened by resistance to President Donald Trump’s agenda. …

“Liberal groups are vowing to fight the GOP tax bill as hard as they battled Obamacare repeal. They’re expecting Democrats to stand together against any legislation that cuts taxes for the rich, even if it also trims tax bills for others. And they’re prepared to unleash their energized grassroots on any lawmaker who doesn’t get on board.” http://politi.co/2wlrl8H

IMPORTANT — THE HILL’S BEN KAMISAR: “The Republican National Committee expanded its massive fundraising lead over the Democratic National Committee in July as the Democrats posted their worst July haul in a decade. The DNC raised just $3.8 million in July, compared to the $10.2 million raised by the RNC in the same month. While the GOP has no debt, the DNC added slightly to its debt in July, which now sits at $3.4 million.” http://bit.ly/2uUsZxC

THE OPPOSITION — “Amateur sleuths hunt for Trump bombshells,” by Darren Samuelsohn: “Nearly 3,000 miles from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Washington offices, another investigation into President Donald Trump is underway. This one unfolds in the public libraries and coffee shops of San Francisco, where a self-employed 40-year-old named Geoff Andersen has worked since November for 16 hours a day, seven days a week, burning through nearly $45,000 in personal savings and donations from friends and family in pursuit of hidden truths about Trump’s rise to power. … Andersen is not alone in his largely solitary quest. Countless amateur sleuths are on the case, from a short-order cook in Belfast whose research was recently cited by the Daily Beast to a Florida art teacher who tells POLITICO he is applying his pattern-recognition skills to Trump’s sprawling business empire.

“Undaunted by a lack of subpoena power or search warrants, and the government’s vast legal and technical expertise, countless people like these are poring through Trump’s personal and business records, as well as overlooked 2016 campaign clues. They share their findings through email, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and even tips to reporters and the FBI. Most labor in obscurity, but all are motivated by the lottery-like odds of a discovery that has eluded journalists and prosecutors but which just might bring down a president.” http://politi.co/2fW575P

****** A message from the Coalition for Affordable Prescription Drugs (CAPD): Pharmacy benefit managers negotiate the lowest net price for prescriptions on behalf of employers and other health care purchasers; however, the list price – the important starting point for those negotiations — continues to rise, at a rate of nearly ten percent in 2016 alone. Increased competition, faster reviews of generics and biosimilars and ending anti-competitive practices can also bring down the cost of medications for patients. Learn more at affordableprescriptiondrugs.org ******

VALLEY READ — KARA SWISHER: “Jeff Immelt has emerged as the front-runner to become Uber’s CEO”: “While the tension on the board of the car-hailing company remains high — due of late to an ugly lawsuit that one of its major investors, Benchmark, is waging against its ousted co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick — sources said that a majority of the board is coalescing around the experienced Immelt.

“That could certainly change, said sources, and there are two other executives who are also still being considered, neither of whom is a woman, as some had hoped. Sources said a vote of Uber’s directors is likely to happen within the next two weeks, which does not have to be unanimous, although most directors are hoping it will be. In any case, Immelt has pulled ahead, said several sources. One of Immelt’s earliest and strongest supporters on the board is Arianna Huffington, said sources, but he is also the top choice of several directors. Others still undecided — including Benchmark, which has weakened its status because of the lawsuit and ensuing publicity — have become convinced that Uber needs to hire someone who can quickly deal with a number of pressing and problematic issues and consider Immelt fully capable of handling that well.” http://bit.ly/2vPtw2O

MEDIAWATCH — “Jersey Gov. Chris Christie no longer a candidate to replace Mike Francesa at WFAN,” by N.Y. Daily News’ Bob Raissman: “Scratch Chris Christie off the list of candidates to replace Mike (Sports Pope) Francesa when he leaves WFAN (if he actually does) in December. FAN sources said the suits searching for Francesa’s replacement have informed the New Jersey Governor his Gasbag services will not be needed.” http://nydn.us/2vUASAc

BONUS GREAT WEEKEND READS, curated by Daniel Lippman, filing from Nantucket:

–“After The Flame,” by Wayne Drehs and Mariana Lajolo in ESPN the Magazine: “The 2016 Summer Games were supposed to bring Rio and Brazil to new financial and athletic heights. What’s left behind? A city and country shrouded by corruption, debt and broken promises.” http://es.pn/2vGuvCn

–“A Brief History of Traveling With Cats,” by Jackie Mansky in Smithsonian: “Fierce felines of history sailed the world, survived Europe’s crusade against them and made it all the way to Memedom.” http://bit.ly/2uTzyfG

–“Bangalore, before the dystopia,” by Harish C Menon in Quartz – per The Browser’s description: “Bangalore has gone from Garden City to Garbage City in 30 years. Renowned as the tech hub of India, producing 10% of India’s GDP, the city is ‘a disaster in slow motion’. Population and area have tripled with little in the way of planning or infrastructure. Green spaces and watercourses have been concreted over. Quality of life has fallen to the lowest of all Indian cities. Residents ‘grapple with self-combusting foaming toxic lakes”. By 2025 Bangalore ‘will be simply uninhabitable.” http://bit.ly/2v4ADAs

–“‘Y’all Sent Me to Washington at an Interesting Time,’” by The Atlantic’s Molly Ball: “A freshman Republican lawmaker [Jim Banks] tries to stay on the right side of his constituents—and his principles—deep in Trump Country.” http://theatln.tc/2v4ruZ0

–“What the Heck Is Guam? A Guide for the Perplexed,” by Shannon Togawa Mercer in Lawfare: “It sits almost 1,500 miles south of Japan and around 2,100 miles from North Korea. … According to historians, Guam was discovered and populated by Austronesian peoples around 4,000 years ago. Guam got a jump on contact with Europeans when Ferdinand Magellan stumbled upon Guam in 1521.” http://bit.ly/2wjhGOQ

–“The partition goes on: A Pakistani perspective,” by Mohammed Hanif on Al-Jazeera: “Like many Pakistanis I saw my first Indians in London and was surprised that they were a bit like us. Most Indians and Pakistanis have the same reaction when they meet. It seems as if they are brought up to believe that a community of ferals lives across the border. The most we know about each other is from moving images from films and songs, and a bit from books.” http://es.pn/2vGuvCn

–“James Baldwin’s Istanbul,” by Suzy Hansen in PublicBooks: “Baldwin was delighted by the Turkish custom of holding hands — even men could be openly affectionate. It was easier to be gay in Istanbul than in America, and easier to be black … [The city was] a place anyone could go to live and feel free.” http://bit.ly/2fO2Vxi

–“What should you do when two ISIS suspects are interrogated right before your eyes?” by Anthony Loyd in the New Statesman: “I felt intrigued but uncomfortable, watching it all unfold, the bound and kneeling men waiting for the whip or worse. I knew that if I left the room both prisoners would get thrashed for sure, and likely tortured. If I stayed, they might get thrashed anyway, in front of me, which might have implied my acquiescence. But I also wanted to know what would happen. It was awkward either way.” http://bit.ly/2fNROEt

–“The Fight of His Life,” by Brian Castner in Esquire: “Afghan Army Captain Noorullah Aminyar was once a valuable ally to the American military. But after a failed defection attempt and three years in detention, his asylum claim now rests on the argument that the U.S. has lost its longest war.” http://bit.ly/2wdhWQi (h/t Longreads.com)

–“Mr. Nice Guy,” by Wired’s Nicholas Thompson: “Instagram’s Kevin Systrom wants to clean up the &#%$@! Internet.” http://bit.ly/2wdqlU0

–“My Life Lessons in Rust Belt Racism,” by Kim Kingsley on Medium: http://bit.ly/2xfTcU0

–“The White Lies of Craft Culture,” by Lauren Michele Jackson in Eater: “How the world of small batch, single origin, and totally artisanal erases the people of color who made it possible.” http://bit.ly/2fUeLG

SPOTTED: Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) at Cisco Brewery on Friday on Nantucket … John King on an American Airlines flight from DCA to Nantucket on Saturday morning.

WEEKEND WEDDINGS — “Elise Stefanik, Matthew Manda” — N.Y. Times: “Ms. Stefanik, 33, is a United States congresswoman, representing the 21st District of New York. She is a Republican serving on the House Armed Services Committee; the Committee on Education and the Workforce; and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Elected in 2014 at age 30, she is the youngest woman elected to Congress in United States history. Previously she served in the Office of the Chief of Staff in the White House under President George W. Bush. She graduated from Harvard. …

“Mr. Manda, 34, is the marketing and communications director in Alexandria, Va., for the Media Group of America, which owns and operates the media outlet Independent Journal Review. Previously he was the communications director for Representative Kevin Yoder, Republican of Kansas, and as the political director for 2010 campaign for Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas. The groom graduated from the University of Kansas. … The couple met through mutual friends in January 2012 at a party hosted by the bride in Washington.” With pic http://nyti.ms/2wlkegi

— Pool report: “At the Hall of Springs in Saratoga State Park, guests noshed on Baby lamb chops, a raw bar pork belly sliders, potato pancakes, antipasti in honor of the bride’s Italian roots, a Cannoli bar and a gelato bar. The Bride and groom had a choreographed dance to ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.’ The father and daughter dance was to Hamilton’s ‘Dear Theodosia.’” Pics http://bit.ly/2x2Paix … http://bit.ly/2fWc3Qv

SPOTTED: Russ Schriefer and Nina Easton, Lenny and Amelia Chassé Alcivar, Ryan Coyne, Joel and Laura Cox Kaplan, Anita and Tim McBride, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Reps. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), Will Hurd (R-Texas), Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), Mimi Walters (R-Calif.), David Young (R-Idaho), John Katko (R-N.Y.), Susan Brooks (R-Ind.) and Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), New York State Assemblyman Dan Stec, NY State Conservative Party Chair Mike Long, Megan and Tyler Foote, Phil Musser, Mike Leavitt, Tom and Corinne Hoare, Lindley and Dustin Sherer, Aly and Graham Wheeler, Ali and Stuart Siciliano, and Anthony Katie Pileggi.

— Jonathan Nabavi, vice president of public policy and government affairs at the NFL, and Catherine Hansen, who works on congressional relations at Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, were married Saturday in Bar Harbor. NYT announcement with pic http://nyti.ms/2vdRW2h … Wedding pic http://bit.ly/2xfxkIj SPOTTED: Andrew Kovalcin, Rebecca and Matt Haller, Bradley Hayes, Adriana Brizuela and Chris Gindlesperger, Nicole Gustafson, Ali Tulbah and Alana Nolan, Sergio Rodriguera, Allison O’Brien, Nat and Melissa Sillin, Dan Finucane and Danielle Bruccheri and Sean Fairchild.

ENGAGED — Andrea Saul, who works on communications at Facebook and was national press secretary for Romney 2012, got engaged on Saturday to David Nosbusch, who works in business development at Box and is a Harvard Business School grad. He proposed on the 18th green at 3 Creek Ranch in Jackson Hole, with friends and family nearby. They met through mutual friends watching college football at NorthStar Cafe in San Francisco.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD – Krista Zuzenak, co-founder of mKz Inc and member of Team Pelosi, and Brian Zuzenak, partner at Moxie Media and member of Team McAuliffe, “welcomed their 3rd roommate Isabelle Emma on [Friday]. Isabelle weighed 7 pounds 4 ounces and despite many bets that Baby Z was a boy she surprised and melted the hearts of her parents, family and friends. The couple fell in love across departments at the DCCC and can’t wait to introduce her to the entire Pelosi/McAuliffe Family.” Pic http://bit.ly/2uVun37

BIRTHDAYS: Fox News’s Fin Gomez, celebrating in Iceland running a half marathon … Lea Berman … Chuck Campion, chairman and co-founder of Dewey Square Group (hat tips: Rick Ahearn) … Jenny Backus … Amb. Michael Froman, a distinguished fellow at CFR and former USTR, is 55 (h/t Andrew Bates) … Brad Fingeroot … Politico’s Doug Palmer … Scott Rothrock, CTO at advanced-manufacturing company Xometry and a Politico alum … BPI birthday twins: partner Ben LaBolt and COO Ann Marie Habershaw (h/ts Jen Nedeau and Addie Whisenant) … Al Roker is 63 … former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is 82 … former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine) is 84 … Targeted Victory co-founder Zac Moffatt … Connie Chung … Rae-Lynn Ziegler, director of social media and outreach for the Washington Free Beacon (h/t Anton Vuljaj) … Rachel Thomas, who works on external relations, gov’t and regulatory affairs at IBM … Susan Aspey … Kendell (Coletti) Mountain … Gina Keeney, partner at Lawler, Metzger, Keeney & Logan and a FCC alum (h/t Jon Haber) … Brianna McCullough … Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) is 56 (h/t Josh Brown) … Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) is 51 … Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) is 55. He’s celebrating by grilling burgers with his family at home and his three dogs. … former Rep. Ruben Hinojosa (D-Tex.) is 77 … Tarrah Cooper, managing director at Mercury … Matt Shapanka is 3-0 … Morgan Murtaugh … Jody Serrano (h/t Amy Sisk) … Alice Frost Richardson …

… CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy … Jim Hock, adviser at PSP Capital and former Commerce COS … Meghan Grant … Madeline Shepherd, associate director of federal policy at Council for a Strong America (h/t Rachel Wein) … Gordon Neal … Hayley Herrin (Peterson), senior correspondent at Business Insider … Patrick Drahi is 54 … Matthew Gould is 46 … David Ryan Adelman is 36 (h/ts Jewish Insider) … Pat Collier IV, policy director at JB Pritzker for Governor … Jeff Morehouse is 37 … Angelica Alatorre … Nicholas Himebaugh … Kenny Swab … Jordan Kittleson … Shannon Travis … Linnea Dyer Hegarty … Katie Peters, comms director for Americans for Responsible Solutions … Casey Badmington … Eleni Roumel … Steve Pfrang … Shannon Harris … Ari Goldberg, VP of comms at First Focus, is 44 … Faryar Shirzad … Jen Brown … Lona Valmoro … Bob Hudek … Ryan O’Keefe (h/ts Teresa Vilmain)

****** A message from the Coalition for Affordable Prescription Drugs (CAPD): The high prices that drug makers set for prescription drugs can put financial strain on patients, employers, unions and others who provide health care coverage to more than 50 percent of Americans. Pharmacy benefit managers negotiate the lowest net price for prescriptions on behalf of employers, unions and government programs. But, as list prices – the starting point for those negotiations — continue their nearly double-digit increases, the effects ripple throughout the system. The key to ensuring greater access and affordability lies in fostering greater competition. Facilitating faster reviews of generics and biosimilars, identifying off-patent drugs with little or no generic competition, and ending anti-competitive practices that keep safe, effective alternatives out of the market are also key to abating rising drug costs for patients. Learn more at affordableprescriptiondrugs.org ******

SUBSCRIBE to the Playbook family: POLITICO Playbook http://politi.co/1M75UbX … New York Playbook http://politi.co/1ON8bqW … Florida Playbook http://politi.co/1OypFe9 … New Jersey Playbook http://politi.co/1HLKltF … Massachusetts Playbook http://politi.co/1Nhtq5v … Illinois Playbook http://politi.co/1N7u5sb … California Playbook http://politi.co/2bLvcPl … Brussels Playbook http://politi.co/1FZeLcw … All our political and policy tipsheets http://politi.co/1M75UbX

Original Source link

from CapitalistHQ.com https://capitalisthq.com/mattis-on-new-afghanistan-strategy-sneak-peek-remnick-on-trump-bannon-to-wapo-no-administration-in-history-has-been-so-divided-elise-stefaniks-wedding/

#TrumpNews #CapitalistHQ.com

0 notes