#Launch Credit Union
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talkoftitusville · 5 months ago
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Launch Credit Union and Community Credit Union of Florida Plan to Merge
In a move set to reshape the financial landscape of Brevard and Volusia counties, Launch Credit Union and Community Credit Union of Florida have announced their intention to merge.
In a move set to reshape the financial landscape of Brevard and Volusia counties, Launch Credit Union and Community Credit Union of Florida have announced their intention to merge. This strategic alliance, pending regulatory and membership approvals, aims to create a unified financial powerhouse with combined assets exceeding $2.7 billion. Both credit unions have deep roots in the…
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livwritesstuff · 7 months ago
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for @steddie-week day 3 | long (and a little bit of mutual pining but the kind when they're literally dating which i think is even more pathetic)
tags: modern day, famous au, actor!steve, rockstar!eddie
Eddie stayed longer than he should have. 
He was supposed to leave Chicago with the rest of the band yesterday after their show at Credit Union 1 – opening night for a year-long national tour.
Eddie didn’t leave yesterday though. Instead, he insisted on spending one last night with Steve, one last morning pretending like they would actually get up and go to that breakfast spot they like even though they both knew they’d be spending the time wrapped up together in their bed, in the home they share, refusing to disentangle themselves until they had no other choice.
No other choice meant Eddie waited so long to leave that he ended up on a flight which would get him into Ohio with barely enough time to make it to the venue in Cincinnati before showtime (and he was missing soundcheck completely – sorta shot himself in the foot with that one, in Steve's opinion, though he won’t be caught complaining).
He won’t be caught doing anything – not publicly, anyway.
Steve and Eddie’s relationship is kind of in the halfway-stage between secret and private, where Steve posts vague, faceless photos of the two of them every now and then but still deflects questions about his romantic life during interviews because – look. He and Eddie are both at weird high-points in their careers at the moment, and that means there’s a lot of eyes on them whether they like it or not. Steve had a public relationship turn sour years ago and there is no way in hell he’s letting it happen again.
Not with Eddie. Not when it counts.
There are speculations, obviously (and after Steve dropped Eddie off at O'Hare, he posted a photo of the Kiss n’ Fly sign to his IG story with the caption i hate this place :( – mostly for his own amusement at the specific way his notifications implode afterward), and they’ll probably get around to an official hard-launch someday, but for now Steve likes that they’re keeping things to themselves, especially when they don’t get to make that choice with much else.
Steve gets a just landed text from Eddie a few hours after he boarded his plane.
(Steve knew. He’d been tracking the flight).
Before he could respond, Eddie added, miss you so fn much
i miss you too, Steve texted back, and before either of them could wallow in it too much, he sent, gonna make it on time?
probably, Eddie answered. Then, getting ready in the car lol
He goes quiet after that (the getting ready, presumably), which is fine.
Steve gets it.
He’s busy too. It’s why he’s not following along on Eddie’s tour like some glorified groupie, and it’s not like the distance is anything new. On the contrary, it’s been an element of their relationship since they met at an awards show after-party four years ago. It’s more that this time around, they were supposed to only have four-and-a-half weeks together before Steve headed off on a press tour for the movie he filmed last year, but then that got pushed out a bit further, and so that four-and-a-half weeks together turned into a glorious nine, the longest Steve and Eddie’s calendars had ever been aligned without some serious planning beforehand.
He just got used to it, Steve supposes.
He got used to having Eddie around all the time, under his fingertips, under his skin. He got used to saying goodnight in person, in their bed together instead of over phone lines, got used to waking up in Eddie's arms and hearing sweet nothings whispered in his ear rather than reading the texts Eddie would leave for him to wake up to when they were apart.
He'll adjust just like he always does, and the worst part will be over tomorrow morning – that moment right between sleep and wake when Steve will realize Eddie isn’t in their bed with him.
Like it or not, the distance is their normal and they make it work (except it’s not even making it work, because it’s not like that. Any situation, any set of circumstances will work without question because it’s Eddie).
The start time for the Cincinnati show comes and goes. A few minutes into the opening act and while Steve is mindlessly flitting between Instagram and TikTok waiting for the algorithm to fill his feed with clips from the concert (ones of Eddie, preferably), his screen lights up with a call.
“Hey,” he says the second he slams his thumb on the green accept button.
“Hey,” Eddie replied, his tone nothing short of grim.
“You geared up for the show?” Steve asked.
“No,” Eddie answered, “I’m quitting.”
Steve rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, okay.”
“I need you to come tuck my pockets in,” Eddie said, and it’s a goddamn wonder Steve didn’t break down then and there, because Eddie always managed to tug his pants on in a way that made the front pockets stick out just a bit, and throughout their years together Steve had gotten into the habit of tucking them back in for him, squeezing Eddie’s hips a little when he was done and pulling him in for a kiss.
“Yeah,” Steve manages a wet laugh, “I – fuck, man, I wish I was there to tuck them in for you.”
“I want you here so bad, Steve," Eddie says, "I really, really miss you."
“I miss you too,” Steve nodded, even though miss isn't a big enough word for the homesick feeling in his chest, “Only a week until the Indy show though. And I’m coming with you for the Michigan one after.”
“Yeah,” Eddie replied, and if he sounded a little morose about it, Steve was right there with him. Sure, it’s a comfort knowing he’ll be seeing Eddie again so soon, but when those two days are over…yeah, it’s gonna be a long goddamn while until next time, because Eddie will be playing the Midwest while Steve’s press tour is mostly on the East Coast this time around, and after that he heads up into Vancouver to shoot a period drama mini-series while Eddie plays the southern half of the US, and then…well, Steve could keep going. They’re both taking a short break for the holidays, but that and the rare weekend one of them can fly out to the other is about it for the foreseeable future.
Which, yeah, Steve loves acting, loves that he gets to make a whole career out of it, and he knows that Eddie feels the same way about his music, but…the love he has for Eddie definitely edges out the rest of it – enough that he feels the distance between him like a dull, ever-present ache whenever they’re apart.
Eddie only ends their call when his manager practically has to yank the phone out of his hand and shove him onstage, and then Steve settles back into bed, back into scrolling mindlessly on his phone waiting for his finely-tuned algorithms to do their jobs.
Sure enough, it takes less than thirty minutes for Steve’s FYP to start showing him TikToks from Eddie’s show, and amidst all the hair and leather and silver chains and chunky rings and eyeliner and manic energy, Steve sees something else, something that has the hurt of missing Eddie increasing ten-fold, something that has him seriously considering taking an ax to all his contracts and his career and his livelihood and getting on the next plane to Cincinnati.
Eddie left his pockets untucked.
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dandelionsresilience · 2 months ago
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Dandelion News - November 8-14
Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles!
1. Agrivoltaics for sustainable food, energy and water management in East Africa
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“[… C]ertain crops […] thrived under the partial shade provided by solar panels. The shade also helped to reduce water loss through evaporation, leading to more efficient water usage. Additionally, rainwater harvested from the panels could be used to supplement irrigation needs.”
2. The world’s largest wildlife crossing is now standing in California
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“The structure crosses a 10-lane freeway and has been built to help protect all sorts of wildlife[….] And it’s not just for fauna: some 5,000 plants grown from seed collected within a five-mile radius have been nurtured in two specially created nurseries. The bridge will be topped with wildflowers, shrubs and native grasses that will also benefit insect populations.”
3. Judge rules the military must cover gender-affirming surgery for members' dependents
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“[Judge] Torresen found that [gender-affirming] surgery is indeed medically necessary and that the Defense Department had not shown that any important governmental interest was advanced by denying the coverage.”
4. Social Media Can Boost Caracal Conservation
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“The team found that searches on the species doubled after the project [using “social media to educate about the caracal”] launched. […] ”The research demonstrates how a public interest in urban ecology and the global phenomenon of ‘cats on the internet’… can be harnessed to leverage conservation action.””
5. US Labor Board Bans Captive Audience Meetings to Ensure 'Truly Free' Worker Choice
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“[T]he National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday ruled that employers cannot force workers to attend anti-union speeches. [… W]orkers will no longer have to take part in so-called "captive audience meetings," which employers often use as a union-busting tool and a form of coercion.”
6. Study links grazing with plant phenology and abundance
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“In general, plants where caribou or muskoxen were present experienced earlier green-up and greater abundance later in the growing season. “We're used to thinking of the timing of plant availability as impacting the productivity of grazing animals, but not the reverse," Post said.”
7. Frog populations once decimated by disease mount a major comeback
“"These results provide a rare example of how reintroduction of resistant individuals can allow the landscape-scale recovery of disease-impacted species, and have broad implications for amphibians and many other taxa that are threatened with extinction by novel pathogens."”
8. California Announces Special Session To Protect Trans People
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“Newsom’s directive is clear: safeguard reproductive healthcare, support immigrants, and shield LGBTQ+ people from what is viewed as existential threats to civil rights and democratic norms. […] California has a unique opportunity to set the blueprint for other states in resisting a Trump administration[….]”
9. When ‘OK, Boomer’ Means ‘Let’s Go Protest’
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“Youth activists across the country recognize the efforts of their eco-minded predecessors and welcome them as mentors, role models, and collaborators in their battle against the climate crisis. […] “The idea that Boomers don’t care, he said, is “just misinformation.””
10. How Aussie Waste Warriors are Redirecting Excess Food to Those in Need
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“A growing movement is working to reduce perfectly good food going to waste by redirecting it to homes and charities. [… C]haritable organisations [… are] transforming fresh produce that would otherwise have gone to waste into millions of cooked, nutritious meals for people in need each year.”
November 1-7 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)
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reasonsforhope · 1 year ago
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"Seven federal agencies are partnering to implement President Biden’s American Climate Corps, announcing this week they would work together to recruit 20,000 young Americans and fulfill the administration's vision for the new program. 
The goals spelled out in the memorandum of understanding include comprehensively tackling climate change, creating partnerships throughout various levels of government and the private sector, building a diverse corps and serving all American communities.
The agencies—which included the departments of Commerce, Interior, Agriculture, Labor and Energy, as well the Environmental Protection Agency and AmeriCorps—also vowed to ensure a “range of compensation and benefits” that open the positions up to a wider array of individuals and to create pathways to “high-quality employment.”  
Leaders from each of the seven agencies will form an executive committee for the Climate Corps, which Biden established in September, that will coordinate efforts with an accompanying working group. They will create the standards for ACC programs, set compensation guidelines and minimum terms of service, develop recruitment strategies, launch a centralized website and establish performance goals and objectives. The ACC groups will, beginning in January, hold listening sessions with potential applicants, labor unions, state and local governments, educational institutions and other stakeholders. 
The working group will also review all federal statutes and hiring authorities to remove any barriers to onboarding for the corps and standardize the practices across all participating agencies. Benefits for corps members will include housing, transportation, health care, child care, educational credit, scholarships and student loan forgiveness, stipends and non-financial services.
As part of the goal of the ACC, agencies will develop the corps so they can transition to “high-quality, family-sustaining careers with mobility potential” in the federal or other sectors. AmeriCorps CEO Michael Smith said the initiative would prepare young people for “good-paying union jobs.” 
Within three weeks of rolling out the ACC, EPA said more than 40,000 people—mostly in the 18-35 age range—expressed interest in joining the corps. The administration set an ambitious goal for getting the program underway, aiming to establish the corps’ first cohort in the summer of 2024. 
The corps members will work in roles related to ecosystem restoration and conservation, reforestation, waterway protection, recycling, energy conservation, clean energy deployment, disaster preparedness and recovery, fire resilience, resilient recreation infrastructure, research and outreach. The administration will look to ensure 40% of the climate-related investments flow to disadvantaged communities as part of its Justice40 initiative.  
EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the MOU would allow the ACC to “work across the federal family” to push public projects focused on environmental justice and clean energy. 
“The Climate Corps represents a significant step forward in engaging and nurturing young leaders who are passionate about climate action, furthering our journey towards a sustainable and equitable future,” Regan said. 
The ACC’s executive committee will hold its first meeting within the next 30 days. It will draw support from a new climate hub within AmeriCorps, as well as any staffing the agency heads designate."
-via Government Executive, December 20, 2023
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This news comes with your regularly scheduled reminder that WE GOT THE AMERICAN CLIMATE CORPS ESTABLISHED LAST YEAR and basically no one know about/remembers it!!! Also if you want more info about the Climate Corps, inc. how to join, you can sign up to get updates here.
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yourreddancer · 2 months ago
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Heather Cox Richardson 11.15.24
One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 
In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.
It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.
The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 
A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 
But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 
Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition.
In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.
After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”
The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 
When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.
Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 
In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 
When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 
After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.
When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 
During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.
But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 
There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.
In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”
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contemplatingoutlander · 4 months ago
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The House GOP is a circus. The chaos has one source.
Republicans spent two years sabotaging the U.S. House. Another two years would be ruinous.
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Dana Milbank does a masterful job of describing just how dysfunctional the House GOP members have been in the past two years.
This is a gift🎁link for the entire article. Below are some highlights:
The Lord works in mysterious ways. Six weeks after his improbable rise from obscurity to speaker of the House in late 2023, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson decided to break bread with a group of Christian nationalists. [...] “I’ll tell you a secret, since media is not here,” Johnson teased the group, unaware that his hosts were streaming video of the event. Johnson informed his audience that God “had been speaking to me” about becoming speaker, communicating “very specifically,” in fact, waking him at night and giving him “plans and procedures.” [...] Today, Johnson’s run looks anything but heaven-sent. In the first 18 months of this Congress, only 70 laws were enacted. Calculations by political scientist Tobin Grant, who tracks congressional output over time, put this Congress on course to be the do-nothingest since 1859-1861 — when the Union was dissolving. But Johnson’s House isn’t merely unproductive; it is positively lunatic. Republicans have filled their committee hearings and their bills with white nationalist attacks on racial diversity and immigrants, attempts to ban abortion and to expand access to the sort of guns used in mass shootings, incessant harassment of LGBTQ Americans, and even routine potshots at the U.S. military. They insulted each other’s private parts, accused each other of sexual and financial crimes, and scuffled with each other in the Capitol basement. They screamed “Bullshit!” at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address. They stood up for the Confederacy and used their official powers to spread conspiracy theories about the “Deep State.” Some even lent credence to the idea that there has been a century-old Deep State coverup of space aliens, with possible involvement by Mussolini and the Vatican.
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The above article was adapted from Dana Milbank's (2024) book: Fools on the HILL: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House.
[See more below the cut.]
And this is on top of the well-known pratfalls: The 15-ballot marathon to elect a speaker, the 22-day shutdown of the House to find another speaker, the routine threats of government shutdowns and a near-default on the federal debt that hurt the nation’s credit rating. They devoted 18 months to a failed attempt to impeach Biden, which produced nothing but Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly displaying posters of Hunter Biden engaging in sex acts. One “whistleblower” defected to Russia, another worked with Russian intelligence and is under indictment for fabricating his claims, and still another is on the lam, evading charges of being a Chinese agent. As soon as Biden withdrew his candidacy, they promptly forgot their probe of Biden’s “corruption” and rushed to launch a new series of investigations into Kamala Harris (over her record on border security) and Tim Walz (over his military service and “cozy relationship” with China). After a number of failed attempts, they did impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (the first such action against a Cabinet officer since 1876) without identifying any high crimes or misdemeanors he had committed; the Senate dismissed the articles without a trial. House Republicans created a “weaponization committee” under the excitable Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), but it was panned even by right-wing commentators when it produced little more than a list of conspiracy theories from the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. They lapsed repeatedly into fits of censure resolutions, contempt citations and other pointless acts of vengeance. In all of its history, the House had voted to censure one of its own members only seven times; in the two weeks after Johnson became speaker, members of the House tried to censure each other eight times. [...] In lieu of consequential legislating, they passed bills such as the Refrigerator Freedom Act, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act. On the House floor, the Republican majority suffered one failure after another, even on routine procedural votes. Seven times (and counting), House Republicans voted down their own leaders’ routine attempts to begin floor debates — something that hadn’t happened once in the previous 20 years.
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usafphantom2 · 5 months ago
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The Story Of The Soviet Pilot Who Defected To Japan With A Secretive MiG-25 Foxbat
September 6, 2016 Military Aviation, Military History, Russia, Troubled Areas
Image credit: Alex Beltyukov
OTD in 1976, Viktor Belenko, “stole” a MiG-25 and landed in Japan.
The then Lieutenant Belenko was a pilot with the 513th Fighter Regiment, 11th Air Army, based in Chuguyevka, Primorsky Krai, in the east of the country. When he brought his MiG-25 “Foxbat” to Hakodate he gave the Western intelligence officers the opportunity to give a first close look at one of the most secretive airplanes of those years: a supersonic interceptor featuring a powerful radar, four air-to-air missiles and a top speed above Mach 3.
In order to assist the American experts in evaluating the aircraft, Belenko brought with him the pilot’s manual for the MiG-25 “Foxbat”, expecting to assist American pilots in evaluating and testing the aircraft. Even if the Japanese government didn’t originally give full access to the plane, the Americans were later invited to examine the aircraft extensively: the MiG was dismantled for such purpose and later returned to the Soviet Union.
In his “MiG pilot” book (1983) John Barron claims that Viktor Belenko’s defection was completely voluntary and was the result of Belenko’s distrust on communist regime.
The MiG was delivered to Japan without the missiles, which were to be introduced in the Belenko’s training later on. The mission was launched earlier than initially planned, because the KGB was about to stop Viktor Ivanovich Belenko from defection.
Although pilot defections during the Cold War were not a rarity, what made Belenko’s defection unique was the fact that the MiG-25 was largely unknown in the West. This is the main point to bear in mind when thinking about Belenko and, unfortunately, this fact is often forgotten.
The ideological background for the events which took place in 1976 is deeply rooted in the beginnings of the post-war period. As the Cold War was in progress there were many incidents and crises which closely led to a confrontation between the two superpowers. One of these events was Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy flight on of May 1, 1960.
Power’s U-2 took off from USAF Peshawar Air Base in Pakistan for a GRAND SLAM mission, to investigate the Soviet missile and plutonium production plants. Targets were Sverdlovsk, Plesetsk (ICBM sites) and Mayak – a plutonium plant.
The U-2 was a plane designed to fly well above the Soviet air defense Surface to Air Missile systems. Its operational ceiling was out of the range of the Soviet interceptors and missiles but Powers’ flight was expected, all of the units and surface-to-air defenses were put on alert. The MiG pilots were ordered to ram the aircraft if necessary. The U-2 was eventually shot down by an S-75 Dvina missile near Degtayrsk in the Ural region. Because of high g-force Powers had no chance of reaching the airplane’s self-destruction button and had to eject.
What is interesting is the fact that SAM crews did not know that the plane had already been shot down because the MiGs’ IFF transponders were not updated (May 1st is a national holiday), therefore several Soviet aircraft were also shot down by S-75 rockets.
The political consequences of the spy flight were severe.
Shortly after the incident the Americans created a cover up story for Powers’ failure. NASA had announced in a very specific press release that the pilot, having lost consciousness due to the problems with the oxygen equipment, had strayed into the Soviet territory with his autopilot engaged while carrying out a weather flight.
On May 7, Khrushchev announced that Powers had survived the crash and, nine days later, on May 16, 1960, during a Four Powers Paris Summit meeting with Harald MacMillan, Charles de Gaulle and Dwight Eisenhower he called the U-2 incident an act of a “deliberate aggression.”
Eisenhower refused to apologize for the incident, claiming that the U-2 flight was not of aggressive nature, having only a purpose of ensuring US safety. The meeting collapsed. At the time, Eisenhower was a proponent of so-called Open-Sky Policy, according to which both sides would allow for reciprocal reconnaissance flights over their territories. Khrushchev did not agree. Powers was sentenced to 7 years of hard labor in a Gulag, but he was exchanged for a Russian spy Rudolf Abel on the famous Glinecke Bridge in Potsdam, connecting West and East Germany.
Gary Powers incident sparked the development of the American Oxcart programme, with the goal to design the SR-71 spy plane, which in addition to flying high, also flew very fast, out of the range of the Soviet missiles’ operational envelope.
What is more, a D-21 drone reconnaissance system was developed, to be carried by SR-71 as a parasite. The drone would be dropped, fly over the Soviet Union, return over the Pacific and drop the reconnaissance materials on a parachute.
Both these designs led to the development of a Soviet countermeasure – the MiG-25, known in NATO code as the Foxbat.
MiG-25 take off
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The main reason for the importance of Belenko‘s defection cannot be understood without going deeper in the aviation context of the event. The Cold War was the time when both sides used the nuclear armament as a psychological weapon. Therefore ways to deliver warheads were some of the priorities in the development in the field of military industry.
One of the ways to deliver warhead to its target was to use the strategic bomber. The bombers in the US – the B-52s – were subsonic, and could have been easily intercepted by the MiG-21, which was capable of reaching speeds of Mach number up to Mach 2 and altitudes of 60,000 feet.
Problems began to emerge when the B-58 Hustler was designed. This plane was capable of flying with the same level of performance as any MiG-21, which for the Soviet designers meant they had to look for a better countermeasure.
The Strategic Air Command of the United States Air Force at the time was into creating a nuclear-powered bomber of infinite range. The project had been dropped in 1964 when North American aviation announced that it could build a bomber capable of attaining speeds of Mach 3 throughout the entire length of its mission.
Secondly, after the failure of U-2 spy plane, launched the Oxcart program, which lead to the development of Mach 3 strategic reconnaissance aircraft, SR-71.
That put the Moscow designers on alert, and an assignment was given to the design bureaus of MiG (Mikoyan and Gurevich) and Sukhoi to develop a countermeasure.
The surface-to-air missiles were considered insufficient. The aim was to develop a single-seat interceptor capable of attaining extremely high speeds and altitudes.
New problems for the Soviet scientists emerged, such as thermodynamic heating, leading to immense development of the Moscow research institute, TsAGI – transliteration of the Russian abbreviation which stands for Центра́льный аэрогидродинами́ческий институ́т (ЦАГИ) – Central Aero-Hydrodynamic Institute. Mikhail Gurevich was the leader of the MiG-25 project.
According to Discovery Channel’s TV series Wings of the Red Star many Western experts argue that the Foxbat was inspired by the North American Aviation A-5 Vigilante. The design programme for MiG-25 was founded in 1958. The basic design of E-155 which later became MiG-25 was the work of Artion Mikoyan.
The E-155, the prototype of what was to become Foxbat was propelled by two large turbojet engines designed by Tumansky. The prototype itself was designed in the period of 1961-1962.
No aluminum, so popular in the West at the time, was used for construction. Steel and nickel alloys were used instead, with limited use of titanium on leading edges and places where heat loads were expected to be high.
The aircraft had to be light, to that extent that weight was traded for strength. The G-load it could withstand was only 5 g, two times less than other fighters which were designed to fight in close combat.
The maiden flight of E-155 was made by famous MiG test pilot, Alexander Fedotov on May 1, 1964.
The MiG-25’s mission as an interceptor required development of fire control system which would be able to work at the speeds the plane could reach.
The radar on the plane, RP-25 Smerch, designated in the NATO nomenclature as Foxfire, 1,100 pounds in weight, was the largest device of this type at the time. According to Barron, the radar was very powerful (600 kilowatts), as
“[Belenko] also dared not touch the radar switch because the impulses from the MiG-25 radar were so powerful, they could kill a rabbit at a thousand meters. Hence, it was a crime to activate the radar on the ground.”
Its purpose was to burn through any jamming systems known at the time and to provide a stable lock-on allowing the pilot to use the air-to-air missiles that Foxbat was carrying.
Also in May of 1964 the XB-70 aircraft was made a research airplane, and presented to the public in Palmdale, California, after being canceled three times (in 1959, 1960 and in 1961). At same time, the U-2 missions were still a danger, so as the SR-71, US Air Force ultimate Mach 3 spy plane. For these reasons the development of Foxbat was not canceled.
Mikoyan left his design bureau in March 1964 for health reasons. Never had he an opportunity to see the MiG-25 enter service dying in December from the heart attack.
In March 1965 the first public announcements of the plane’s performance were made, which was that it completed 150 kilometers closed circuit flight at the speed of 1,400 miles per hour.
The Foxbat made its first public appearance at the airshow organized in connection with the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution on Jul. 9, 1967 on the Domodedovo airfield. When three MiG-25s appeared in the sky the show announcer referred to them as “Interceptors capable of Mach 3”.
Both the Western experts and Russians were puzzled, as even in the Soviet Russia there was almost no information about the MiG-25 available to the public whatsoever, up until 1972.
Mig-25 side takeoff
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Besides being an interceptor, the Mig-25 was also a high altitude reconnaissance aircraft. It was operated in the conditions of direct radio communication with the ground and was capable of taking photographs of whole United Kingdom within one flight.
The West had an opportunity to see what the aircraft was capable of in a proxy war between Israel and Egypt.
Four MiGs, referred to as X-500, were shipped to Egypt in fall 1971. The Egyptians were forbidden to come close to them, and even though the aircraft had Egyptian markings, they were flown by Soviet pilots and serviced by Soviet crews.
When one of the Israeli F-4 Phantom fighters tried to intercept the MiG reconnaissance aircraft at Mach 2,5, the MiG simply accelerated to Mach 3.2 and disappeared.
The MiG-25 engines were capable of producing 12,500 kG each. The design assumptions of the construction were not to create a good close combat fighter, but to propel it throughout the airspace as fast as possible.
In the late 1960s the USA developed the F-15 which was a fruit of the vague understanding of what MiG-25 was. That understanding was based on the speed and altitude records Foxbat had broken (see below).
The Western experts assumed that it was faster in straight line than expected. They also thought that it was made of lightweight, modern composite materials and that it was powered by modern turbofan engines. It was also believed to have a long-range and good close air combat capabilities.
As a result of that, American engineers designed the ultimate fighter jet, which was very complex, and due to that – quite costly. In the beginning of its existence it broke many of the climb records established earlier by hte Foxbat.
It was late 1972 when F-15 entered service, and it was long until 1976 for the MiG to remain a mystery.
On Sept. 6, 1976, when Viktor Belenko defected taking off from the Sokolovka airbase and landing in Japan, the Western perception of Foxbat changed.
It turned out that the airplane was heavier and simpler in construction than expected, hence it had shorter range. It was far from being a close combat jet with its rugged construction. It also had very poor low-speed capabilities.
As Peter Ustinov of the Wings of the Red Star TV series summarizes: “MiG-25 was indeed an extraordinary machine, but not the one the West had imagined.”
Nevertheless the simplicity of Foxbat could not stop it from breaking many world records, nor could the Americans at the time.
MiG-25 front left
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The prototypes were made lighter and their purpose was to break several records. As it is stated in the classification of FAI (International Aeronautical Federation), Foxbat belonged to the category C1 (III) which specifies jet powered aircraft with unlimited take-off weight.
The records broken by Foxbat were of various nature.
They included: speed record on a 1,000 km circuit by chief MiG test pilot Alexander Fedotov: 2319,12 km/h on Mar. 16, 1965; the Foxbat broke several time-to-height records, for example climbing to 20,000 m in 2 minutes 49,8 seconds. The MiG-25 also set several absolute world records that still stand. Absolute world altitude records with 1,000 kg payload, and without payload: 35,230 m and 36,240 m respectively were also set.
Air-to-air_left_side_view_of_a_Soviet_MiG-25_Foxbat-E_aircraft
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As already explained, the West had almost no knowledge of MiG-25 whatsoever until 1971, and very poor knowledge by September 1976 when Belenko defected.
It was a great surprise, and present for the Western experts when Belenko flew a brand new MiG-25 to a Japanese airfield.
At first the Soviet officers at Sokolovka airbase, where Belenko was stationed, thought that it was navigation systems problem that occurred and lead to the event. The defection, however, was preplanned and premeditated.
Several authors say that Belenko, had been an aviation enthusiast from his earliest childhood.
He received his flight training in order to become a flying instructor and devoted most of his time to learning and perfecting his flying craftsmanship.
He got a job as an instructor in Amarvir Pilot School, flying Sukhoi Su-15 planes, always being a top notch airman. It was in the beginning of the 1970s when he heard about a MiG-25 for the first time.
Almost immediately, wanting to learn about the new plane, he asked for transfer to flight training on Foxbat in 1972. The unit he applied to was Rostov, near Iran, but he was soon moved to the far east, to Sokolovka, the 530th Fighter Regiment.
The permission for transfer given by the commander being an exception in those times was justified with the Belenko’s great interest in the modern air technology. His records were flawless, so he was selected, and he was appointed a party secretary of the squadron.
Belenko’s training program progressed without any trouble. After the individual flights program ended the group flights began. The group flights started at the end of August and were to be conducted for one month.
On Sept. 6, 1976 Belenko walked his child to the kindergarten and went to the base to fly.
The weather conditions were good for flying – the cloudiness was of about 7/10 with the lower cloud surface at 1,500-2,000 meters and upper at 5,000 meters. Take-off was to take place at 12:50.
Soon after the take-off Belenko reported engine problems and separated from the group. He dropped to an altitude of 50 m above the sea, so no problems that usually occur in a low-level flight were present. He was flying low, so the radars could not track him. The direction the plane was going was eastward. Directly towards the Japanese archipelago.
Getting closer to the shore Belenko climbed to 6,700 m, waiting for the reaction of the Japanese air defense.
370 kilometers from the island he was finally spotted by the radars. The Japanese at Chitose airbase scrambled a pair F-4J fighters to intercept him. Knowing that he had been detected he descended again but he soon entered the clouds, experiencing difficulties in navigation.
At 13:52 he spotted an airfield and attempted a landing, but had to abort it and go around because of a Boeing 727 airliner taking off. According to his assessment, the airstrip was a bit shorter from what he had seen on military airfields. He made a long landing, overshooting the runway and rolling about 240 meters beyond the threshold.
After getting out of the cockpit he spotted the name of the airfield. Unfortunately it was not a military base, but civilian Hoktado strip. Nevertheless, Belenko was in Japan, which was his main objective. Just after getting out of the cockpit he made a warning shot and warned the Japanese not to come close to the plane because it was secured with explosives (at the time the Soviet Air Force used to secure the MiG-25 from getting into the Western hands by using explosives and self-destruction system).
He also asked the personnel to cover the aircraft in such a way that the Soviet markings were not visible. Then, he asked to be put in contact with the US Air Force representation. The airfield was closed down for five hours. Belenko asked for a political asylum.
The time between the afternoon of September 6th and 7th was very eventful.
The media showed a large interest in the incident and disseminated the news all across the Western world. Aeroflot sent a delegation, but they were not allowed to see nor to come close to the Foxbat.
Diplomacy was a major problem. In order to justify keeping the pilot and plane on the Japanese territory the authorities accused Belenko of illegal border trespassing.
The plane was moved to a hangar and afterwards was transported to military airbase in Hyakuri, located 80km north from Tokyo. On Sept. 19 a C-5 Galaxy cargo plane was brought from the US in order to transport the MiG-25; eleven experts from Wright-Patterson AFB were brought in order to examine the aircraft.
Also 64 Japanese experts took part in the examination. The aircraft was partially dismantled and transported in escort of F-4J and F-104J fighters.
The examination included infra-red photos of Foxbat with the engines working at full military power. It was essential for western air-to-air missiles designers to know the heat spectrum of the engines, so that they could develop missile guidance systems according to the characteristics of the Foxbat engines.
The diplomatic struggle went on. The official statement of the Japanese was that the plane would be returned to the Soviets but no sooner than Oct. 5, 1976. Due to the fact that samples of materials were taken from the wings the Foxbat could not go back by air.
It was dismantled again and sent back on a container ship in parts, in 13 containers. The Japanese secured the containers so that the Soviet personnel would not do the review of the plane in the daylight.
But the Russian methodology was unknown to the Japanese. The personnel had opened the containers with crowbars and it turned out that some equipment was still in the hands of the West. The Soviets asked the West to pay for the missing aircraft instrumentation and avionics. The Japanese in a reply asked the Russians to pay for transport and formalities.
Belenko’s family was detained and KGB started an investigation. A personal diary in which fuel calculations were carried out was found in Belenko’s flat.
It was also found out that the pilot was in Moscow a week prior to the deception.
All these factors suggested that the incident was a long preplanned operation of the American intelligence as Belenko could have met a US agent in Moscow.
What is more, the Soviet pilot very often used the confidential library of the airbase, more often than other pilots. It was supposed that he might have been taking photos of the MiG-25 manual.
After Belenko arrived he was isolated from the third parties.
He got a political asylum in the USA, where he started working in an aviation company. Afterwards, in many interviews, like in one for Full Context magazine, he said that the main reason behind the defection was to get away from the communism.
He received American citizenship and opened his own company. He got married to an American woman, with whom he had 3 children. According to Barron’s book his family life in USSR was going towards a bitter end – a divorce – so he fled to the US.
After publishing this article we received an email from one of our readers who provided some more behind the scenes details. Here’s what he’s written to us:
Actually, they did, and Russia was totally unaware of it. It was rolled into a hangar, dismantled, and flown to Area 51 by C-5A Galaxy, where it was totally examined, taken apart, reassembled, and flown by Victor Belenko against our first line fighters of the time. It was then disassembled, crated, loaded back onto the C-5, and flown back to Japan, where it was placed on the dock to await a Russian freighter’s pick-up.
We expected to find high tech alloys used for the wings, but the rust through the paint revealed they were steel. Where we expected high tech electronics, we found vacuum tube electronics.
You must remember that Russia builds for durability, and survival under war-time conditions. Just like their AK-47 Automatic rifle…bullet proof, easy to manufacture, and repair under war conditions. Which is easier to construct, and repair during wartime..high tech, or low-tech items? You’ll find the inside of Antanov’s giant aircraft made the same way, especially loading ramps, which are hollow, with an aluminum thin covering and internal ribs, with a reverse dimple texture. Hydraulics actually glass jars !!
Area 51 was the site of many Russian MiG tests, obtained from many different sources. we had a number of pilots versed in, and trained in MiG operations and evaluations.
Yes, Japan DID allow the removal, and testing, by us, of Belenko’s MiG 25..but it was highly secret.
About Jacek Siminski
Standing contributor for TheAviationist. Aviation photojournalist. Co-Founder of DefensePhoto.com. Expert in linguistics, Cold War discourse, Cold War history and policy and media communications.
@TheAviationist.co
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misfitwashere · 5 months ago
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September 9, 2024 
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
SEP 10
Last night, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launched a new section of its website detailing her policy positions. Titling her plans “A New Way Forward,” Harris vows to build the American middle class through an “opportunity economy.” Her vision for the future, she says, “protects our fundamental freedoms, strengthens our democracy, and ensures every person has the opportunity to not just get by, but to get ahead.” 
Harris’s economic plan builds on that of the Biden-Harris administration. This makes sense, since their focus on investing in the middle class has created the strongest economy in the world. Harris is emphasizing the need to bring down household costs of food, medicine, housing, healthcare, and childcare, all issues important to Americans.  
The website provides concrete economic actions she plans to take with a willing Congress. They include expanding the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, investing in more housing, and supporting the PRO Act, which protects the rights of workers to unionize, while continuing the crackdown on business consolidation that kills competition and rolling back the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
The biggest economic shift from the current administration is pegging a new capital gains tax for those earning more than a million dollars a year at 28%, significantly lower than the 39.6% President Joe Biden proposed in his 2025 budget. The plans also call for the first-ever national ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries (37 states already have such laws). 
Aside from strictly economic plans, the policy pages say Harris backs passing the bipartisan immigration bill that Republicans killed on Trump’s orders, protecting reproductive healthcare and restoring Roe v. Wade, and protecting the right to vote and ending partisan gerrymandering through the John Lewis Voting Rights and the Freedom to Vote Acts.
Republicans have charged that Harris has not offered specifics for her policies, but much of what is now clearly laid out is already in the public record. By the standards of American history, it is a strikingly moderate agenda that reflects the belief that the best way for the government to protect opportunity and nurture the economy is to make sure that the system is fair and that ordinary people have access to opportunity.
The “New Way Forward” in Harris’s plan seems to be less a new set of policies than a rejection of the politics of the past several decades. She and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz appear to be attempting to reshape the political landscape to bring Americans of all parties together to stand against Trump’s MAGA Republicans. The campaign has actively reached out to Republicans, several of whom spoke at the Democratic National Convention. On Saturday, Harris said she was “honored” to have the endorsement of former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and former vice president Dick Cheney, both staunch Republicans. “People are exhausted about the division and the attempt to divide us as Americans,” she said. “We love our country and we have more in common than what separates us.” 
Trump’s website offers slogans rather than policies, so Harris’s website compares her policies to the comparable sections of Project 2025, the playbook for a second Trump term laid out by a number of right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation. Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from Project 2025, but at his rallies, he has offered the policies in it—like firing nonpartisan civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, and abolishing the Department of Education—as his top priorities. 
While Harris focused on policy, as critics have demanded, MAGA Republicans today spread slurs about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, claiming they are eating other people’s pets and local wildlife. Right-wing media figure Benny Johnson, who was one of the six commenters whose paychecks at now-disbanded Tenet Media were paid by Russia, was one of those pushing the false stories. So was X owner Elon Musk. 
The story was debunked almost immediately by the Springfield police, but Republican politicians ran with it. The X account for Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee ran it; so did Texas senator Ted Cruz, who shared an image with two kittens saying: “PLEASE VOTE FOR TRUMP SO IMMIGRANTS DON’T EAT US.” And the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, posted: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.” (The Haitians in Springfield are in the U.S. legally.)
Perhaps most significantly, Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who is challenging Democratic Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, pushed the story. That Senate seat is crucial to the Republican attempt to take control of the Senate, and Moreno has just launched a $25 million ad campaign against Brown, accusing him of giving undocumented immigrants taxpayer-funded benefits. Today’s disinformation was well timed for that ad campaign. 
The Justice Department today announced  charges against two leaders of the white supremacist Terrorgram Collective, an international terrorist group that operates on the platform Telegram. Dallas Humber of California and Matthew Allison of Idaho have been charged with “soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.” They “solicited murders and hate crimes based on the race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, and gender identity of others,” U.S. Attorney Phillip Talbert said. They had a hit list of federal, state, and local officials, as well as corporate leaders, and they encouraged attacks on government infrastructure, including energy facilities. Their plan was to create a race war. 
“Hate crimes fueled by bigotry and white supremacy, and amplified by the weaponization of digital messaging platforms, are on the rise and have no place in our society,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said.
Congress is back in session today and must fund the government before October 1 or face a government shutdown. Although Congress negotiated spending levels for 2024 and 2025 back in June 2023, the House has been unable to pass appropriations bills because MAGA extremists either refuse to accept those levels or insist on inserting culture war poison pills into the bills. 
Now, Trump has demanded that a continuing resolution to fund the government must include a measure requiring proof of citizenship to vote. Since it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in elections for president or members of Congress and there is no evidence it is anything but vanishingly rare, the measure actually seems designed to suppress voting. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) went along and put the measure in the bill. He also designed for the measure to last until next March, making the budget so late a new president could write it, but also blowing through a January 1 deadline set in the June 2023 bill to require automatic cuts to spending.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote to his colleagues: “House Democrats have made it clear that we will find bipartisan common ground on any issue with our Republican colleagues wherever possible, while pushing back against MAGA extremism.” Jeffries called the Republican bill “unserious and unacceptable.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told House and Senate leaders that the cuts required by law if Congress pushes the budget into March would drastically affect the military. “The repercussions of Congress failing to pass regular appropriations legislation for the first half of [fiscal] 2025 would be devastating to our readiness and ability to execute the National Defense Strategy,” Austin wrote.
Meanwhile, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is back to his old trick of blocking a military promotion, this time of Lieutenant General Ronald Clark, one of Austin’s top aides. Tuberville says he placed the hold because he has concerns that Clark did not alert Biden when Austin had surgery. Biden has nominated Clark to become the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Pacific, a position currently held by General Charles A. Flynn, younger brother of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor who resigned after news broke that he had hidden conversations with Russian operatives. 
Today, ten retired senior military officials endorsed Harris, saying she “is the best—and only—presidential candidate in this race who is fit to serve as our commander-in-chief…. Frankly stated, Donald Trump is a danger to our national security and our democracy. His own former National Security Advisors, Defense Secretaries, and Chiefs of Staff have said so.”
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ptseti · 6 months ago
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IBRAHIM TRAORÉ EXPOSES U.S. DESTRUCTION OF USSR
Ibrahim Traoré continues to expose imperialism at every opportunity. During his 11 July address to the nation, the 36-year-old president used the US destruction of the Soviet Union as an example to warn his people to be cautious in the face of the imperialist system.
As he pointed out, the United States deployed multiple tactics during the 20th century’s Cold War, from economic destabilisation initiatives to backing the Afghan mujahideen in a war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. This group would eventually form the basis of the Taliban that returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021, almost 20 years after the US launched an invasion claiming the group was behind the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US.
President Ronald Reagan also set up the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which some opposition forces called the ‘Star Wars Program,’ to serve as a space-based missile defence program. Ultimately, the totality of these and other tactics led to the Soviet Union’s dissolution and the Western capitalist takeover of Russia’s economy in the 1990s.
What lessons do you think Africans can learn from this history? Let us know in the comments.
Video credit: Faso7 TV (@faso7tv on YT, @faso7_bf on X and IG, @faso7bf on TikTok)
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meli-writes · 3 months ago
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'we will not wait around for someone else to build the future for us'
hey so yesterday my union launched our manifesto and voted to reveal our membership numbers (1500+ and across the entire uk games industry)!
i just do discord admin (make it bearable to use lol) and data entry, but everyone else has put in incredible work making this. seeing this union build up strength over the last 5 years has been awesome, and i'm excited for how the next 5 are gonna go.
some extracts if you don't wanna click on the link:
The manifesto, which can be viewed here, outlines the IWGB Game Workers' mission, core values, and planned campaigns. Its five core values are stated as democracy, solidarity and care, taking action, education, and equality and justice. And its campaigns are listed as follows:
- Union recognition: Have all members recognized by their employers - Working hours and overtime: End reliance on overtime and crunch culture, obtain either a 4-day work week or 6-hour workdays without salary reductions, end "presenteeism", and guaranteed mental health days - Compensation: Mandate annual pay increases, improve baseline pay, obtain studio profit sharing, end the gender pay gap, equal parental leave, residuals or royalties, and improved pension - Accountability and transparency: Holding C-suite executives accountable for mergers, acquisitions, and redundancies, salary transparency, open book accounting, and publicly available diversity and representation statistics - Job security: Better protections against firing and redundancy, better communication in the event of redundancy, better redundancy pay packages, AI regulations, one-month minimum notice periods, end abuse of fixed-term contracts, and forcing entry-level jobs to have entry-level job requirements. - Equity and inclusion: Accessible working options, improved support for disability, neurodiversity, LGBTQ+, and mental health, enforcement of policies for handling misconduct, guidelines for inclusive language, removing barriers for workers coming from lower income brackets, more inclusive hiring process, compulsory DEI best practice training - Training and education: Improved professional development support, and mandatory sexual misconduct and antitrust training for C-suite and management - Contractual terms: Removing unreasonable non-compete and non-disparagement clauses, guaranteed ownership of personal side projects, guaranteed credits
the complete manifesto has gotten even more going on tho, with our mission and core values. so if you're a game worker, or you wanna know what the people who make the games you love need, then check it out <3
im not gonna make like direct refs to what i do IRL that often but like ye, this is my union and where i put my political energy ✨
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scotianostra · 9 days ago
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On 14th January 2016, the Scottish screenwriter, television producer and journalist Robert Banks Stewart died.
Many Doctor Who fans will remember Robert fondly as the creator of the Zygons.
Edinburgh-born Robert Stewart left school at age fifteen and parlayed his skill into a series of newspaper jobs. His career was interrupted by his National Service, during which he was part of Field Marshal Montgomery's staff. Stewart also began writing plays, and worked for the BBC as a radio commentator for Scottish football matches. He finally left the newspaper industry to serve as a foreign correspondent for Illustrated magazine, prompting a move to London. Stewart was twice married and twice divorced; his first wife bore a daughter, while he had three sons with his second wife, Helen.
When his job with Illustrated came to an end in the late Fifties, Stewart joined the Rank Organisation, initially as a story editor on Interpol Calling. He was soon providing scripts for the programme as well, and he began writing prolifically on shows like Danger Man, Ghost Squad and The Saint, as well as several editions of The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre. Stewart's first commission for the BBC came on a 1962 episode of Dr Finlay's Casebook. It was at this stage that he adopted “Robert Banks Stewart” as his professional name, in order to distinguish him from similarly-named writers; Banks was his mother's maiden name. He was also approached to develop ideas for Doctor Who during its formative stages in 1963, though nothing came of this.
The latter part of the Sixties saw Stewart write for everything from The Avengers to Adam Adamant Lives! to Callan. He was a script editor on Armchair Theatre, and earned his first credit as a producer on Intrigue. At the end of the decade, he travelled to Australia to produce and write for Riptide, until issues with the local labour unions prompted him to return to the UK.
In the early Seventies, Stewart wrote for shows like Jason King, Arthur Of The Britons, The Legend Of Robin Hood and Sutherland's Law, while script editing Harriet's Back In Town and Van Der Valk. In the middle of the decade, he developed three serials for Doctor Who, all featuring Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor. Stewart invented the Zygons for Terror Of The Zygons- set in his native Scotland -- and then the Krynoids for The Seeds Of Doom. He had written most of the storyline for “The Foe From The Future” when Thames Television hired him to script edit Rooms and Armchair Thriller
The producer of Doctor Who during Stewart's time on the show was Philip Hinchcliffe, who subsequently moved to Target. When Hinchcliffe was preparing to leave the police drama, he suggested that Stewart take over, only for Target to be cancelled altogether. Instead, Stewart created two very popular series in a similar vein: first Shoestring, starring Trevor Eve, and then Bergerac with John Nettles. After an unhappy spell in the mid-Eighties as the executive producer of drama for London Weekend Television, Stewart returned to the BBC to produce Lovejoy and develop Call Me Mister. He rounded off the decade as the producer of Hannay and Storyboard.
The Nineties began with Stewart producing another hit, as he helped to launch Catherine Zeta-Jones' career with The Darling Buds Of May. He went on to produce another of his own creations, Moon And Son, before working on McCallum for Philip Hinchcliffe, who was now the Controller of Drama for Scottish Television. Stewart's final scriptwriting credit was for My Uncle Silas at the start of the new millennium. Although he was keen to continue working in television, Stewart was frustrated to find his age a barrier in securing work. Instead, he adapted an unsuccessful television pitch into a novel: The Hurricane's Tail was released by Kaleidoscope Publishing in 2012. Stewart followed it with his 2015 autobiography, To Put You In The Picture, from Miwk Publishing.
Robert Banks Stewart succumbed to cancer just three months later, on this day in 2016 hw was 84.
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deadpresidents · 9 months ago
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"Graphic art was powerless before a face that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line and contour, light and shade, sparkle of the eye and curve of the lip, in the long gamut of expression from grave to gay, and back again from the rollicking jollity of laughter to that far-away look." -- John G. Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln's private secretary
•••
To borrow one of his most famous oratorical devices, it was ten score and 15 years ago that Abraham Lincoln entered life and began one of America's most unlikely and extraordinary journeys, and 159 years since that journey ended because of an assassin's bullet. To us, Lincoln will always be a statue; a painting; a bust on Mount Rushmore; a monument on the Washington Mall; a solid, stoic, staid symbol staring back at us from a dull, green five-dollar bill, a rusty-looking penny, or a black-and-white photograph. Yet, he was one of us -- a human just as colorful as any American that has ever existed, and through his rise and his triumph, he told us a story that Republicans claim as the standard for their party, that Democrats claim as the inspiration for their party, and that Independents of all backgrounds do not dare to turn away from.
Lincoln's story is so extraordinary that we don't even think of him as a member of our species. He's on a higher level. He's almost mythological. A legend. We see his face like we envision the face of God. The halo surrounding him almost downplays the fact that he lived the same way we live. He needed oxygen and water and food. We all have sensitivities about how we are perceived by others, and Lincoln was no different. To many of his contemporaries, he was a freakishly tall, gangly, ugly man. During his life, people called him a "baboon" and "a barbarian." The man that Lincoln placed in command of all Union troops, General George B. McClellan, referred to the President as "the original gorilla." They made fun of his high-pitched, nasally voice. They made fun of his country accent -- the way that he pronounced "chair as "cheer" and said "hain't" instead of "haven't." They laughed at his careless clothing choices, and snickered at the fact that he never combed his hair. When he delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863, one Pennsylvania newspaper wrote, "We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them, and they shall be no more repeated or thought of."
In Lincoln's lifetime, more people probably rolled their eyes instead of listened intently when he launched into yet another backwoods joke or funny anecdote that he couldn't stop repeating. He had family problems. His mother died when he was very young, and he had lifelong daddy issues. His borderline crazy wife was domineering, emotionally (and allegedly physically) abusive, and his young children ran roughshod over the White House. He had no real close friends and experienced devastating heartbreak -- including a love that was lost and the deaths of two of his young children. He was simultaneously considered inexperienced and weak, heavy-handed and harsh.
"Honest Abe" was the cleverest, sharpest, and most vicious politician of his time. The gentle and joking country politician destroyed his enemies, threatened his opponents, and steamrolled his rivals. This beacon of liberty and protector of freedom bypassed the Constitution and suspended Habeas Corpus. Abraham Lincoln began his Presidency intending to save the Union in whichever way possible -- even if it meant allowing slavery to continue. The "peculiar institution" was abhorrent to his beliefs, but an acceptable sacrifice if the result was the Union's survival. Until he finally reached a point where he recognized that the sacrifices being made during the Civil War were exactly the kind of bloody price that needed to paid to cleanse the nation of its original sin of slavery.
Like many, if not all, of our greatest leaders, Abraham Lincoln was a man full of paradoxes. Beneath the solemn visage that was Lincoln's complex face was a cheerful, jovial, informal man who loved nothing more than a good joke or a witty story. Yet, further beneath that genial layer was also a dark, depressed man who lost the love of his life when he was young, seriously considered suicide on numerous occasions, felt unsatisfied with his accomplishments and about his qualifications, and faced the death of his favorite child while he wrestled with the biggest crisis that this country has ever faced.
Lincoln may have have been our nation's greatest orator, perhaps even America's greatest pure writer. His writing -- and not just his speeches, but his private letters and messages to Congress -- is memorable and poetic. If the Civil War was a symphony, his words were the lyrics to its beautifully terrible music. When the war was going badly, he used his words to simultaneously challenge his generals, assuage the public, and exert his control over the many crises his country faced. When the war was going well, his words were soothing, inspirational, and a bridge to the South that invited capitulation without humiliation. Lincoln's words were the words of a writer who spent all of his life studying the English language, yet Lincoln was largely self-educated by the light of a candle in a dark, damp log cabin.
We will never know why it was Abraham Lincoln -- a virtually unknown frontier lawyer who had served just one term in Congress a decade before he even ran for the Presidency -- who was destined to lead the United States through the Civil War, but can we even imagine another person equipped to do so? Like a shooting star, Lincoln appeared and against all odds, he saved the Union. Then, when the war ended, he disappeared again. Not a day earlier or a day later, either -- on literally the first day that he truly felt that the Civil War had ended, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, arguably the last casualty of the Civil War.
So, the next time you think that all hope is lost or that you've failed at something or that you are "only human," think or Abraham Lincoln, who overcame a lifetime of obstacles and challenges and failures to save the Union that he loved and believed in and became a legend and hero to the world today. Remember that we are "only human," but so was Abraham Lincoln. You could be a lot worse off than being "only human."
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The rocking chair that President Lincoln was sitting in when he was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, now on display at the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan.
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sepdet · 16 days ago
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Dark Brandon's Green Chess Game... a Play in Four Acts
(1) April 2024: Trump bankrolls his presidential campaign via Big Oil...
(2) Not So Fast, Asshole...
Trump may not realize what he's up against.
Quillian said the White House takes the threat of repealing Biden’s climate bill “very seriously."
“We take them at their word that they want to repeal this,” Quillian said. “Our job is to make sure that these investments land and then they stick.”
— The biggest winners of Biden’s green climate policies? Republicans (CNN, June 2024)
Unions might also have a thing or two to say about Trump's plans, if only they notice...
Biden slipping in labor protections when people weren't looking again.
(3) Green Brandon: "Fuck You"
TL;DR: Tax cuts, loans and incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act encouraged companies to build or launch 585 new clean energy projects, resulting in over 300,000 jobs.
Most of this investment went to Republican districts which tend to have more land and old manufacturing/energy plants that could be converted.
Republicans all voted AGAINST the IRA and vowed to repeal it, but will now have a hard time doing so, since, as with the ACA, their constituents stand to lose if they do.
(4) Parting Shots...
Here's a December 2024 summary of manyFederal green power and carbon-reduction programs I haven't heard of, apart from the USPS EVs people mocked. Maybe Trump won't gut all of these:
Epilogue
At the same time Trump was vowing to Big Oil CEOs he'd do their bidding for billion dollar bribes, the US Congress finished this investigation and released its findings.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how much Big Oil invests in colleges and universities to control and promote the research, "experts" and messaging they want to amplify (or stifle). Remember: FOLLOW THE MONEY.
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louisupdates · 2 years ago
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FITFWT23: TOUR RECAP MASTERPOST
FASHION RECAP: NORTH AMERICA, EUROPE (Top Ten)
LITHOGRAPHS and PORTRAITS
OUTRO SONGS
IQ 123: Tour promo and production interviews
TOUR TECHNICAL SPECS [TPI MAGAZINE]
GROUP PHOTOS NA
Louis’ care for his fans
NORTH AMERICA
26 May - Mohegan Sun Arena, UNCASVILLE, CT
27 May - Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion, GILFORD, NH
29 May - Place Bell, LAVAL QC
30 May - Budweiser Stage, TORONTO ON
1 Jun - Blossom Music Center, CUYAHOGA FALLS, OH
2 Jun - Michigan Lottery Amphitheater, STERLING HEIGHTS, MI
FITFWT23: WEEK 1
3 Jun - The Icon Festival Stage, CINCINNATI, OH
6 Jun - Kemba Live! Outdoor, COLUMBUS, OH
7 Jun - TCU Amphitheater at White River State Park, INDIANAPOLIS, IN
9 Jun - Saint Louis Music Park, ST. LOUIS, MO
PORTRAITS, 1st set [10.6.2023]
IG stories and selfies [10.6.2023]
10 Jun - Starlight Theatre, KANSAS CITY, MO
13 Jun - BMO Pavilion, MILWAUKEE, WI
15 Jun - Huntington Bank Pavilion, CHICAGO, IL
16 Jun - The Armory, MINNEAPOLIS, MN
17 Jun - Harrah’s Stir Cove, COUNCIL BLUFFS, IA
19 Jun - Denny Sanford Premiere Center, SIOUX FALLS, SD
21 Jun - Red Rocks Amphitheatre, MORRISON, CO: CANCELLED 😪
24 Jun - Wamu Theater, SEATTLE, WA
26 Jun - Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Center, VANCOUVER BC
27 Jun - McMenamins Edgefield Concerts, TROUTDALE, OR
29 Jun - The Greek Theatre, BERKELEY, CA
PORTRAITS, 2nd set [29.6.2023]
PORTRAITS posted 30.6 [x]
30 Jun - Louis Instagram recap
30 Jun - The Hollywood Bowl, LOS ANGELES, CA
1 Jul - The Chelsea at the Cosmopolitan, LAS VEGAS, NV
3 Jul - Arizona Financial Theatre, PHOENIX, AZ
6 Jul - The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory, IRVING, TX
7 Jul - Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park, AUSTIN, TX
8 Jul - The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, THE WOODLANDS, TX
PORTRAITS, 3rd set [9.7.2023]
9 Jul: Louis Instagram recap
10 Jul RTL Radio Interviews
11 Jul - St. Augustine Amphitheatre, ST. AUGUSTINE, FL
13 Jul - Hard Rock Live at Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood, HOLLYWOOD, FL
14 Jul - Yuengling Center, TAMPA, FL
15 Jul - Cadence Bank Amphitheatre at Chastain Park, ATLANTA, GA
18 Jul - Ascend Amphitheater, NASHVILLE, TN
19 Jul - Charlotte Metro Credit Union Amphitheatre, CHARLOTTE, NC
21 Jul - Red Hat Amphitheater, RALEIGH, NC
22 Jul - Merriweather Post Pavilion, COLUMBIA, MD
PORTRAITS, 4th set [23.7.2023]
24 Jul - MGM Music Hall at Fenway, BOSTON1, MA
25 Jul - MGM Music Hall at Fenway, BOSTON2, MA
27 Jul - TD Pavilion at the Mann, PHILADELPHIA, PA
28 Jul - Stone Pony Summer Stage, ASBURY PARK, NJ
29 Jul - Forrest Hills Stadium, NEW YORK, NY
PORTRAITS, 5th set [31.7.2023]
North America FAN EDIT
AUGUST 2023 GAP 1 recap
AWAY FROM HOME FESTIVAL
19 Aug - Parco Bussoladomani, LIDO DI CAMAIORE, Italy
AUGUST 2023 GAP 2 recap (including the 28 launch)
EUROPE
29 Aug - Barclays Arena, HAMBURG
31 Aug - Royal Arena, COPENHAGEN
1 Sep - Spektrum, OSLO [Bigger Than Me anniversary content]
PORTRAITS, 6th set [2.9.2023]
2 Sep - Hovet, STOCKHOLM
4 Sep - Ice Hall, HELSINKI
DORK MAGAZINE PHOTOS 2022 w/ links
5 Sep - Saku Arena, TALLINN
7 Sep - Arena Riga, RIGA
PORTRAITS, 7th set [8.9.2023]
8 Sep - Zalgiris Arena, KAUNAS
10 Sep - Tauron Arena, KRAKOW
11 Sep - Atlas Arena, ŁÓDŹ
13 Sep - Wiener Stadhalle D, VIENNA
14 Sep - Stozice Arena, LJUBLJANA
15 Sep - Budapest Arena, BUDAPEST
PORTRAITS, 8th set [16.9.2023]
17 Sep - Arenele Romane, BUCHAREST
18 Sep - Arena Armeets, SOFIA
20 Sep - Plateia Nerou, ATHENS w/ links to AOTV announcements
SEPTEMBER 2023 GAP recap
1 Oct - Bilbao Arena Miribilla, BILBAO (VIZCAYA)
3 Oct - Altice Arena, LISBON
5 Oct - Wizink Center, MADRID
6 Oct - Palau Sant Jordi, BARCELONA
PORTRAITS, 9th set [7.10]
8 Oct - Pala Alpitur, TURIN
9 Oct - Unipol Arena, BOLOGNA
11 Oct - Rockhal, ESCH-SUR-ALZETTE
12 Oct - Sportspaleis, ANTWERP
14 Oct - Accor Arena, PARIS
15 Oct - Ziggo Dome, AMSTERDAM
17 Oct - Lanxess Arena, COLOGNE
19 Oct - O2 Arena, PRAGUE
20 Oct - Mercedes Benz Arena, BERLIN
PORTRAITS, 10th set [21.10]
22 Oct - Olympiahalle, MUNICH
23 Oct - Hallenstadion, ZURICH
FITFWT23: LATAM promo begins [28.10]
Twitter spree: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 Hall Of Fame, [31.10]
IGTV [1.11]: transcript, gifs [x] [x] [x] [x] [x]
8 Nov - 3Arena, DUBLIN
10 Nov - Utilita Arena, SHEFFIELD
11 Nov - AO Arena, MANCHESTER
12 Nov - Ovo Hydro, GLASGOW
14 Nov - Brighton Center, BRIGHTON
15 Nov - International Arena, CARDIFF
17 Nov - The O2, LONDON
18 Nov - Resorts World Arena, BIRMINGHAM
FITFWT23 has come to an end!
ROLLING STONE UK 2023 AWARDS
23 Nov - Camden Roundhouse, LONDON
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militantinremission · 6 months ago
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The Freedman's Bank Forum: The Art of Disenfranchisement
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Kamala Harris has hit the Campaign Trail & named Gov. Tim Walz as her Running Mate, but she has yet to give a Press Conference or Mainstream Media Interview. She STILL hasn't offered any Policy Initiatives on her Campaign Website. This has lead some in The New Black Media to look at her Policy Offerings as VP. Sabrina Salvati of Sabby Sabs & Phil Scott of The Afrikan Diaspora Channel both looked at Kamala Harris' 2023 Speech at the Freedman's Bank Forum- for ideas of what a 'Harris- Walz Administration' may look like. In her Speech, Kamala gave a history of The Freedman's Bureau 'Freedman's Bank', Created in 1865. She spoke on why a Specific Bank for the Formerly Enslaved was necessary. She also talked about the Farms, Homes, & Businesses that Freedmen were able to purchase & build through Loans from Freedmen's Bank.
Unfortunately, 9Yrs after its inception, Freedman's Bank was Closed; due to mismanagement, & outright theft of Funds by Congressmen overseeing Bank Operations. Over 61,000 Depositors lost their Funds- estimated at over $3M (over $50M in today's Economy). Kamala sounded like she understood the plight of American Descendants Of Chattel Slavery & Our specific need for resources, but she shifted her narrative fairly quickly. She started by shifting a Black Specific Issue, to an 'All Lives Matter' Issue. Kamala transformed the necessity of a Freedman's Bank to jumpstart Reconstruction, into a need for EVERYONE to have access to (Freedmen) Resources. She starts by mentioning 'Minorities' & 'Marginalized Communities', but goes on to include Latinx, Native American, Asian, & Rural Communities in the Freedman's Bank Story.
Kamala went on to describe one of her Final Acts as a U.S. Senator. This was an Initiative that she helped to set up w/ the help of [Secretary of The Treasury] Janet Yellen, [Senators] Mark Warner, Chuck Schumer, & Corey Booker, plus Rep. Maxine Waters. The Initiative, was a plan to invest $12B in Community Institutions for 'Overlooked & Underserved Communities'... My 1st question is: How many of THOSE INSTITUTIONS are Owned & Operated by Indigenous Black Americans? I only know of ONE in My Community, & David Rockefeller has been invested in them for nearly 30Yrs... Harris says that currently, $8B has been disbursed to 162 'Community Lenders' Nationwide, & gave examples of how the Funds are being disbursed:
Native American Bank lent a Tribe $10M to fund an Opioid Addiction Treatment Facility on Tribal Lands in N. Dakota
Carver Bank, in Ga. loaned $500K to 'Black Owned Companies' to help them develop Low Income Housing
Hope Credit Union, in Ms. gave a $10K Loan to a 'Black & Woman Owned' Coffee Business to expand
Aid to Immigrant Communities, including some Asian Communities
Aid to 'Rural Communities'
Maybe it's just Me, but I find it curious how the Freedman's Bank Legacy is being 'repackaged'. Under Kamala Harris, a SPECIFIC INSTITUTION meant for American Descendants Of Chattel Slavery, is being usurped to advance EVERYONE; except the Blackfolk it was designed to help. The numbers don't lie. Native American Tribes get Billions a Year in 'Set Asides' & they don't pay Taxes, but Kamala thinks they should also collect $10M meant for Black American interests? Then she brags about Black Businesses that only received 5% of what Native Americans collected from a measure that was supposed to be for Blackfolk. Apparently, Kamala wasn't lying when she said that she wasn't going to do ANYTHING that would only benefit Black Americans.
Like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris talks to Black Audiences about Equity, but only offers Black Americans a small share of what Everyone Else gets. In 2022, The Biden-Harris Administration & Janet Yellen launched the Economic Opportunity Coalition, along w/ 20 Private Sector Leaders. The Goal was to provide & invest Billions in Capital to Community Lenders for 'Minority Owned Businesses'. To date, this Coalition has currently committed over $1.2B to Community Lenders in 'Minority & World Communities'. From what I saw, Puerto Rico & Guam represented 9 of the 13 Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs) awarded Funding. Of the 218 Organizations receiving Technical Awards, 56 were 'MDIs' & 38 were Organizations based in Puerto Rico. True to Form, the Biden- Harris Administration blurs the lines on what a 'Black Owned' Business is; Indigenous Blackfolk, Afro Caribbeans, & Afrikan Immigrants have been lumped into the 'Afrikan American' demographic. Is this Coalition keeping track of how many Freedmen (Male & Female) are receiving Awards?
Kamala's Speech at the 'Freedmen's Bank Forum' completely ignored the Descendants of the Freedmen Community, & Our History of adversity. Despite her disregard of Us, she says this Initiative was created to 'Realize the Vision of Freedmen's Bank'. I see This as a blatant Disenfranchisement of the Black Community that Freedmen's Bank was Chartered to serve. On top of her disingenuous empathy for Black Americans, She has the audacity to call this act of Economic Racism- 'Economic Justice'; & she does it w/ a straight face. I thank Sabrina Salvati & Phil Scott for uncovering this particular Policy Measure. Kamala Harris' lack of Policy on her Campaign Website tells Me that she doesn't want Us to know her Plan for the next 4Yrs. She has been called a Leftist & 'the most Progressive Senator in Congress', but her Policies are as Moderate as Joe Biden's.
I fully understand that the Economic Opportunity Coalition (EOC) isn't Freedmen's Bank. If it was presented as a Measure that stood on its own merit, I probably wouldn't have much to say about it. If we're being honest, it falls in line w/ many other Policies of the Biden-Harris Administration. The Fact that Kamala Harris used the Freedmen's Bank Forum to push this Measure, is mean spirited & an insult to Our Ancestors. There's a Legion of Blackfolk & Afrikan Americans trying to certify Kamala's 'Blackness', but she has yet to affirm their claim. She had a chance to refute Donald Trump's assertion, but only offered more rhetoric. The Truth is, SHE'S NOT BLACK! Kamala's Record shows that she spent her Professional Career disenfranchising Us. As District Attorney, she targeted Blackfolk for Arrest on petty Quality of Life Crimes. As Attorney General & as a U.S. Senator, Kamala supported decriminalization of Illegal Border Crossings & the surge of Illegal Immigrants into Black Communities throughout California.
The Black Population in San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, & Berkeley has dropped by 50% on her Watch. Kamala vacated over 1,000 Criminal Charges against OneWest Bank, George Soros, & Steve Mnuchin- for 'Foreclosure Violations' that cost Hundreds of Black Californians their Homes. Her action allowed Soros to sell OneWest for Billions, while Mnuchin moved on to become Secretary of The Treasury. At the Same Time, she kept Black Inmates imprisoned past their Release Date & denied others Parole; citing the need to maintain a Prison Labor Force (i.e. Convict Leasing). Black Women are siding w/ her, but Harris abandoned the Mitrice Richardson Case after winning her Senate Seat. Kamala also had a hand in stripping the Estate of Nina Simone away from her Surviving Family & awarding All Rights to Sony Music Entertainment. We're supposed to certify this Woman as 'Black', but she has a Legacy of Anti-Black (Aryan) behavior. Her latest act of disenfranchisement is actually Par for The Course.
Some question why Kamala Harris is getting so much heat from Black America? The Short Answer is- She rides on the Coattail of The Black Experience, but does NOTHING for Us Culturally, Socially, or Politically. What's her Black Agenda again? At This Point, We really can't blame Kamala for being consistent. We need to look at the Blackfolk & Afrikan Americans trying to shame us into Falling in Line w/ her Agenda; whatever THAT is...
-We have House Cleaning to do.
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Alissa Wilkinson at Vox:
The Hollywood writers strike marked its one-month anniversary on Friday, with no signs of slowing down. While other guilds in the industry are still on the job — except when they’re blocked by picket lines — the writers may soon get company on those picket lines.
Two other major entertainment guilds, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA), also entered the summer with looming contract expiration dates. Both groups’ agreements with AMPTP, the trade association that represents the industry’s film and TV production companies, end on June 30. A lot could happen between now and then, but the situation is looking dicey.
All of that means that come July 1, the studios may be facing a double or even triple strike, in effect shutting Hollywood down completely.
The DGA rarely strikes — the last time was in 1987 — and its leadership has not called for a strike authorization vote. But its relations with the AMPTP have been trickier than usual. Negotiations began on May 10, with demands that in part mirror the WGA’s concerns. The main sticking point is wage and residual increases that keep in step with rising costs of living. In particular, lower residuals for shows on streaming services, where the lion’s share of entertainment now lives, have wreaked havoc for many people in the industry, drastically reducing compensation and making it increasingly difficult to just pay the bills.
In the past, the DGA has sometimes managed to make an agreement with AMPTP ahead of the start of bargaining, effectively setting a pattern for the WGA and SAG-AFTRA to follow in their own demands. Last November, the DGA sent a “pre-negotiation” offer to the AMPTP, seeking resolution ahead of bargaining. The AMPTP reportedly rejected the DGA’s proposal, meaning both parties came to the bargaining table without an arrangement.
The situation seemed to intensify due to an unforced error. On May 23, Warner Bros. Discovery launched Max, its newly rebranded streaming platform, which had previously been named HBO Max. Eagle-eyed observers noticed that in listed credits, the platform lumped writers, directors, producers, and so on into one category labeled “creators.” Aside from the queasy implications that the greatest works of cinema and television were just “content,” the choice on the company’s part ran afoul of hard-fought contract regulations regarding credits for artists.
It was a weird choice, and one that set blood boiling in Hollywood. The presidents of the WGA and the DGA issued a rare joint statement, with DGA president Lesli Linka Glatter noting that “The devaluation of the individual contributions of artists is a disturbing trend and the DGA will not stand for it. We intend on taking the strongest possible actions, in solidarity with the WGA, to ensure every artist receives the individual credit they deserve.”
By the end of the day, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it would modify how credits were listed on the platform in compliance with its preexisting contract agreement with the unions. Yet the strong language indicated that the DGA was ready to play hardball.
Meanwhile, members of SAG-AFTRA have been vocally supportive of the WGA. This is no shock, since on top of the same issue of residuals and wages, the union — which includes, in addition to film and TV actors, people who work in radio, singers, voice actors, influencers, models, and other media professionals — is concerned about the existential threat posed by AI and other technologies. Even before the WGA’s strike began, SAG-AFTRA issued statements regarding how the use of AI could eliminate or greatly reduce work for its members.
Members of SAG-AFTRA have shown up on picket lines to support the writers, and the star power posed by some of its most prominent members helps bring attention to the WGA’s strike. It’s also an effort to remind the studios that when their own negotiations begin, they’re ready for a fight. Underlining that implicit statement, the leadership of SAG-AFTRA unanimously agreed to ask its membership for a strike authorization vote, which concludes this coming Monday, June 5. That’s a move designed to signal solidarity to the AMPTP ahead of negotiations.
[...]
Here’s what’s most significant about all of this: All three unions have never gone on strike at the same time, in the history of Hollywood. The fact that this scenario is possible, even likely, emphasizes how extraordinary this moment is in the entertainment business. 
Hollywood could be on the verge of a triple strike that could effectively shut down everything completely. The WGA strike is ongoing, but the SAG-AFTRA and/or the Directors Guild could also launch their own strikes.
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