#do they know there are anti child labor laws in most likely all the countries they race in?

[sportsallover]

I need to meet the Quickstep assistant who decided to label the riders’ clothes. I have questions.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:

I remember the feeling of hands inside me. Pulling, tugging, moving things aside. My emergency c-section wasn’t painful, but that feeling of being invaded was somehow worse than physical hurt. For years, the thought of the surgery would send me into a PTSD panic, my knees literally buckling and vomit coming up the back of my throat. In my memory, my arms are tied down while I’m being cut—but I know that’s not true. It’s just my brain’s way of making the powerlessness of the moment seem tangible. 

Because I was so early in my pregnancy, just 28 weeks along, doctors had to cut me both horizontally and vertically, making it life-threatening for me to have a vaginal birth in the future and increasing my risk for uterine rupture. I didn’t know it then, but I would never have another child.  So when I see anti-abortion groups blithely suggesting that women with life-threatening pregnancies should be forced into c-sections rather than easier, safer, and less traumatic abortions—it feels personal. Because I chose my medical nightmare; it was necessary to save both my life and my daughter’s. I can’t imagine the horror of going through such a thing unnecessarily, or at 16 weeks pregnant instead of 28. What if my tied-down arms weren’t a post-traumatic illusion, but a legal reality?

For nearly a year, I’ve been tracking this growing strategy: Some of the most powerful anti-abortion organizations in the country are using carefully-worded legislation and seemingly-credible clinical recommendations to codify medical atrocities—pushing doctors to force pregnant women into unnecessary labor and c-sections, even before fetal viability and sometimes even when a fetus has died. Why would anyone do such a thing? The answer is as simple as it is awful: Anti-abortion groups and lawmakers want to prove that abortion is never necessary to save a person’s life. The problem is that they know pregnancy can be deadly, especially in the United States. Rather than admit abortion can be life-saving, their solution is to force doctors to end deadly pregnancies in any other way—even if it means torturing women in the process. 

Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists are so desperate to divorce abortion from health care, they’d prefer to see us dead than allow critically ill women to get care they disagree with.  I mean that literally. This is how they kill us. With the sly shifting of medical standards and surreptitiously-placed legislative language. Because while these people are cruel, they’re certainly not stupid. Anti-abortion extremists know the only way to normalize medical torture is to move quietly and slowly.  After all, dystopias aren’t created in a day. They’re built, law by law and talking point by talking point, through medical regulations, bureaucracy, and fear. From a Supreme Court ruling in Idaho to timid guidance from hospital administrators in Louisiana—anti-abortion groups don’t need to own up to their grim vision when they have others embedding the nightmare bit by bit. 

That’s not to say they haven’t been busy themselves. Using extremist groups with credible-sounding names—like American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs or the Charlotte Lozier Institute—the anti-abortion movement has carefully disguised radical calls to hurt women as simple scientific recommendations. They’ve inserted the nonsense term ‘maternal fetal separation’ into legislation, court cases and conservative talking points, removing ‘abortion’ in an attempt to further the lie that the procedure is never necessary. They've published papers and trotted out ‘experts’ who claim it’s “medically standard” to force women into c-sections or vaginal labor when their lives are at risk. Again, even when it’s too early for a fetus to survive.

Anti-abortion legislators have done their job too, passing laws that allow their state to define what conditions are life-threatening during pregnancy and the best course of action for doctors. They’ve written mandates that emergency terminations be performed in a way that “provides the best opportunity for the unborn child to survive.” If states must be forced to save women’s lives, it appears, they’ll make sure we suffer greatly for the trouble.  It’s not a coincidence that reports coming out of anti-abortion states show a sharp rise in c-sections. With their license and freedom on the line, doctors and hospitals are falling in line. One Texas OBGYN who was directed to give a septic patient a hysterotomy told researchers, “The morbidity is going to be insane.”

To people who value fetuses above women, that’s a price they’re willing to pay. Indeed, all of this cruelty starts to make morbid sense when you understand that the broader anti-abortion goal goes beyond forced c-sections or redefining medical standards. They are trying to make Americans numb to women suffering and dying during pregnancy. They’re treating it as unpreventable—natural, even—so that voters don’t bat an eye when the maternal mortality numbers skyrocket. 

Jessica Valenti reports on the rise of c-sections post-Roe and dishonest efforts to divorce abortion from healthcare by anti-abortion zealots in her Abortion, Every Day blog.

[gaykarstaagforever]

This is one of those articles that pisses me off because it amplifies and legitimizes what is, in reality, one fucking stupid shithead being a piece of trash on Twitter.

The New Hampshire "wing" of the Libertarian party is basically one guy, Jeremy Kauffman, who is a racist anti-government cryptobro maybe 3 people agree with about anything. He keeps running for office and failing, and every time that happens he goes on the "official" Twitter account of the NHLP (which he runs, because, again, by this point, the NHLP is almost literally just him) and yells about how he only lost because the media is out to destroy him, and the national libertarian party are in fact secret gay communists who can't handle how PURE and REAL he is. I'm not exaggerating. He's been doing this since at least 2020.

Most libertarians are anti-regulation and may get into some lite Sovereign Citizen crap. Kauffman is basically an anarchist who wants people like him to all move to New Hampshire so they can help him seize the state and declare it "free."

Free to do what? Well, let him run crypto scams, which is another thing he does that he keeps getting in trouble for.

His Twitter activity is a mix of him lashing out at his many perceived enemies, and teenaged edgelord shit from like 2001, because he knows Corporate Media will continue to report on it because it's from an "official" state branch of a political party. He has previously said child labor laws should be abolished because making kids do manual labor is "good" for them, and that any reporters he doesn't like should be imprisioned or exiled from the country. He got into a huge fight with the other New Hampshire libertarians over this, because they are sick of him embarrassing them. But for whatever reason they can't dislodge him from claiming to hold the party banner.

He's also been either pro-Trump or calling MAGA people socialists, depending on what fight he's in the middle of with whoever this week.

NONE of this is in this shit ABC News article. I had to research this. And I'm not getting paid to inform people.

New Hampshire libertarians aren't calling for violence against Harris. One known-asshole is being a troll on Twitter. That's all this is.

...I mean libertarians suck, and most of them are only that because they're rich white guys who want to be able to break any laws they don't like and bully people without consequences. But they're not all Jeremy Kauffman, and he shouldn't be allowed to represent them. They hate him, too.

[cartoonfangirl1218]

If Bombshells ever returned, maybe to explore the aftereffects of the war. Here are some superheroines and supervillainesses that could join the fight into the new era. The Cold War.

Jesse Quick; Jesse would totally join the families providing their homes to the displaced Jews of Europe while at the same time protecting her city from all sorts of crime. But her storyline might come with learning that in her need to help everyone and solving everyone's problems since she has the technology and the privlege, well... kinda appears as a white savior. At least to Lisa Snart which brings me to... 

Golden Glider: Well I think we can all guess that Lisa has a Jewish-like last name and while her big bro, Captain Cold, Leonard was working with the Nazis, I am so arguing that he was just conveinately converting in order to save his skin and his sister's. Anyway with her brother in jail and Europe in shambles after the war, Lisa can travel to America with other displaced Jews. Some families were kind enough to "foster" these peoples which is where Jesse comes in. Well Lisa isn't the type to accept the "pity" and dislikes how priviliged a life, Jesse leads. Then comes a whole new yet classic Flash vs the Rogues rivalry.  

Nyssa ah Gul: How can we forget another misplaced Jew. Well not Jew but Ra ah Gul's other daughter, Nyssa, whose entire adopted family died in the concentration camps while Ra was off whatevering with the Lazerus Pit. But since Ra's long gone from the picture, I suppose Nyssa will have to seek answers from Talia about why she didn't try to help her or contact her after finding out they were sisters. 

Mya: Meanwhile after WWII, India is revving up for a revolution after being used and abused by the British Empire in a war they didn't even want to be in. And after being in the war, STILL treated like second class citizens. That's why Myra, prodigy of Shiva is up to lead a revolution for her people.

Gypsy: Let’s not forget about all the other groups that Nazis were prejudiced against. Cynthia Reynolds or "Gypsy" as the SS slurred against her and her Romanian family. But with Europe's landscape in disarray, Cynthia can use her earth-bending powers to help and educate people that she is more than the fortune telling, pick pocketing stereotype that the world believes.

Volcana: Now I know we didn't really get into Italy's part in WWII, but someone with volcano powers would totally be working in Italy, specifically Pompeii. The one issue is that, like in her origin story, she was working for Mussolini against her will and the Italian still wants their "super weapon" under lock and key in case of WWIII. 

Thorn: Meanwhile the late 40s-early 50s is totally not a time to be woman with a mental illness. Especially when the "understanding" doctors try to lobtomize you. So Roselyn Forrest's double personality disorder is a big problem in her life. Especially since her second personality is a scythe weilding maniac and her uncle wants to put her in an institution. Added to the fact that she is still suffering under Irish discrimination. Hopefully the Batgirls can help, not only change child labor laws, but views on mental illness too.  Giganta: A gorilla turned into a girl. Why shouldn't that be an experiment by the crazy Americans or Russians in a way to beat each other as the world superpower. Well technically the Russians wanted to send a gorilla into space and beat the Americans, but they thought a woman astronaut (or as they called cosmonaut) would make them look better. (All true look up Valentina , first woman in space). But besides being part of the space race, Giganta can bring spotlight to Africa where she was born, and which is being divided by the major world powers for exploitation. 

Crimson Fox: Constance D' Amis, French heiress would be part of the small army of woman workers during the YALTA conferance trying to get their say into how to rebuild Europe for the benefit of all. Who knows, maybe she even talked to Selina Delgatti. Hey French heiresses and Italian heiresses must know each other. Plus she expels hormones that can make anyone under her thrall which leads me to...

Queen Bee: Another pheromone expelling woman. A villainess though. Africa wasn't the only one being exploited and colonized. The former Ottoman Empire was being exploited for its oil and Lebenon is taken over by the French (Basically ample reason for Constance to go to Lebenon and fight Queen Bee). And the former queen is certainly not above going to the Russians to fight the US/Europe to get her country back. Or just team up with Lex Luthor to take down Supergirl and get her country back. I just imagine Lex and --- to be like an evil Mr.Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet okay. All suave, witty banter. It makes sense in my head.

Catherine Colbert: A bit like Lois Lane, Catherine is an everygirl. Well if the everygirl was a daughter of an dimplomat and had her sights on making a name for herself in NASA and trying to avoid the pressures of mysgonistic men that woman aren't fit for government. Being told that she is too emotional and should stay in the kicthen, Catherine rebelled by becoming a stone faced, cutting ice queen in the diplomacy track and also a horrible cook. Artemis and Cheshire: I'm taking a bit from the YJ story in that Artemis and Cheshire are half-french, half-Vietnamese. Since their abusive father was loyal to the Nazis, he disowned them and cast off their Vietnamese mother in Japanese concentration camps. While Artemis made it to America and tried to stay on the good ol American democratic way (while fighting petty looters in the streets of Gotham as one does), Cheshire went to Vietnam where she works as an assasin, for the communists and the non-communists. It doesn't matter to her as long as she gets paid. But times are changing in Vietnam as the fights about communism between the North Vietnamese and South escalate. 

Lady Blackhawk: Zinda Blake, hero of WWII and the Blackhawk brigade comes home to nothing. No money. No pension. No respect. Life as a veteran has no perks since no one has money to pay in Europe. Plus she'd still be trying to adjust to civilian life after nonstop combat and the inevitable PTSD while the Germany she loved is split into two. Hopefully Rudi and Helen will help to keep her in a safe place until she can get back on her feet.  Miss Martian: While I don't know whose in Harley, Ivy and Viktoria's circus, I feel like Miss Martian would find a safe haven there. While she did not experience the WWII, she did experience a similar prejudice and genocide on Mars being a white martian so I bet she can help with reprations. Or just join Starfire on the fire squad...wait nevermind. Fire is Martian weakness. Well at least have her and Starfire being alien girlfriends exploring the strange Earth world together.

Rocket: Again, haven't had the joy of reading the final vol of Bombshells United so I don't know exactly what Bumblebee has been up to nor the racism she had probably experienced. But Raquel would be in a similar boat. An African American teen in an unjust pre-Civil Rights movement society with the added difficulties of teen mom hood. I really want some spotlight on her whether she joins the Batgirls or strike out on her own or helps Icon just like in the comics.

Mercy Graves: Alongside Lex wherever he is, I want a similar debut to what Mercy did in JL. Mercy takes over LexCorps during Luthor's absence, absolutely crushes it and makes it more of a success than Luthor ever did because she is not obsessed with the Kryptonian heroes. Maybe she even teams up with Waller? Who knows? Or even have two heads, Mercy Graves and Lena Luthor, making millions and making plans, evil or no, always ending on top.

Silver Banshee: A woman whose screams causes people to age. How they could NOT use her in a war, I do not know. But I picture Siobhan's arc going something like after her family dies in battle or something or other, she taps into her genetic banshee powers. Fueled with grief/cynicsm/vengeance she travels around the Iron Curtain, causing death since death is a mercy compared to living in destitute misery.

Plastique and Roxy Rocket: One is a Canadian explosives expert, another just really, really loves rockets. Both would be very useful on either side of the Cold War. They're traditionally illanesses so I could see them as double agents like Cheshire, working for whoever pays the most for their time.

Roulette: Roulette’s big thing is gambling on illegal cage fighting activities. Well lets up the ante by having her big gamble being stoking US/Russian tensions. After all the longer the war goes on, the more she gets paid for her information on the other side, her contacts for weapons, her spies etc. She'd be rolling in dough, and loving it even when under threat of nuclear destruction.

Fire and Ice: No idea how the heck they would fit in to a post WWII world. But let's suppose they want to escape Brazil and Antartica respectively to be able to help out in the aftermath after doing nothing during the war. Jessica Cruz and Aresia vs Star Sapphire Meanwhile with Hal Jordan out of the picture, let's have the infamous Green Lantern vs Star Sapphire rivalry again.

Lady Shiva: Street fighter, assassin, mother of the future Batwoman, Cassandra Cain. Lady Shiva must be part of the Cold War. She is bit of a anti-hero so I doubt anyone would know where her loyalties truly lie, but she'd be on the side of whoever her daughter wishes to protect.

Cassandra Cain: The new Black Bat, continue Katy Kane's work, and the Batgirl's work, and all the work that needs to be done after WWII. She's the new heroine.

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

From The Warsaw Ghetto- To The Gaza Strip

(Palestinians versus Israel)

By Stephen Jay Morris

May 14, 2021

©Scientific Morality

The bifurcation of metaphysical morality boils down to good and evil.  This is intended for the simple minded who can’t comprehend the complexities of political science.  In the Old Testament, King Solomon is a hero. Two women come to him, each claiming a newborn baby is theirs. King Solomon took a sword and threatened to split the baby in two so as to equally award half of the child to each alleged mother. One of the women, intent on saving her child’s life, surrendered the baby to the other.  Thus, the real mother was revealed and King Solomon awarded the child to her.

We could use that ancient Solomonic wisdom in the Mideast right now!   The only people who give a damn about the plight of the Palestinian people are the international Left, while the supporters of Israel are American Imperialists, “End of Days” Evangelical Christians, and a handful of Conservative American Jews and Orthodox Jews.  Most Jews in the USA are Reformed Jews and Secular Jews.  American Jews consider themselves, simply, American and many marry outside of their religion.  American Secular Jews have no Jewish identity, which satisfies a lot politically conservative Jews.  This is a curious contradiction.

I always thought that Judeo morality was absolute.  How can you have one foot in Israel and another in America?  Is America the greatest country in the world, or is Israel?  Religious dogma dictates that you cannot serve two masters.  Can the Rabbis in a Yeshiva solve this dilemma?  Rabbis arguing about text in the Torah is how Polemics got started.

There is this notion that Jews are all monolithic and all the same.  The revisionist Zionists infer that they speak for the Jewish people.  They don’t!  They tell non-Jewish Right wingers that Anti-Zionism is the same as Anti-Antisemitism.  WRONG!!!!!  Take the case of the ultra Orthodox Jewish sect, Neturei - Karta.  They believe that the Jewish nation of Israel violates Jewish Law and Prophecy.  This sect is against Israel.  What do the rest of the Zionists think of this sect?  They don’t.  They simply ignore it. Are these Jews are self-hating?  Are they Uncle Jake's?  What is an Uncle Jake?  A Jewish version of an Uncle Tom.

Then there is the Jewish Left, and the secular Jewish Left. These secular Jews would never disclose that they are Jewish.  I knew a guy for years who never told me he was Jewish.  Then there are the Jewish Left groups like Hashomer Hatzair, or even the former political party in Israel, the Labor Party.  The Jewish Left in Israel has been suppressed.  They have been taken over by the Likud Party and a coalition of Jewish religious Right groups.  They are financed by Right wing Christians in the USA.  If you’d like to learn about the history of the Jewish Left, click here: The first Zionists were socialists > Sapardanis Kostas

The same problem exists with the Palestinians.  The first group that represented them was the The PLO – Palestinian Liberation Organization, who were Marxist revolutionaries.  Following them, the Islamic religious Right took over.  That was Hamas.  What kills me about Right wing propaganda is how they like to mislabel their enemies; ie: “Islamic Fascists are Leftists.” Holy shit turds!  Leftists? They are absolutely not!

So, what would be a Solomonic solution be to all this? The Palestinians should kick Hamas out and create a secular Leftist revolutionary group.  The Left wing Israelis should destroy the Jewish Right and have a peace treaty and planning conference with Palestinians.  Other then this, I agree with my Anarchist comrades: Have a “No State Solution.”  Fuck it, man!  As a Jew, I can say this shit.

Addendum: Today is May 17, 2021. Israel is bombing the Gaza Strip. It is said that the first casualty of war is the truth. I say the first fatalities of war are women and children.  What is happening in Israel now reminds me of the Vietnam War during the late 60’s and early 70’s.   Innocent women and children, along with elderly Vietnamese, were bombed by the American Air Force, while U.S. ground troops burned down their straw huts.  The women and children were always accused of being in cahoots with the Vietcong, the communist guerrillas of the jungle.

The same lie that I heard back then is now coming from the Right wing government of Israel.  They say that the Islamic guerrilla group, Hamas, is using innocent civilians for human shields.  So the Palestinian women and children have to be sacrificed in order to protect Israel? Excuse me?  Protect? What’s the matter—are Israel’s nuclear bombs at the bomb clinic undergoing repairs?  Maybe the Iron Dome is out of order?  Hamas versus nuclear Israel is, by no measure, a fair match.  When the Polish Jews rose up in World War II, they were in the same position, fighting the invading Nazi army in the Warsaw Ghetto.  Just like the Gaza Strip, no one could leave or enter the occupied city.  Of course, the Nazis called the Jewish resistance, “Terrorists.”

I think Benjamin Netanyahu should be charged with war crimes.  I also think that the Likud Party should be outlawed.  I don’t care if 71% of the Israeli voting population supports Donald Trump.  Shame on all you people! I realize that the Israeli Left is outnumbered, however, if you were true to your convictions, you would protest your government.  The mainstream media will not cover your protest, but social media will.  

All my life, the subject of Israel would come and go. I remember the Six Day War in Israel, back in 1967.  At my junior high school, I saw a Jewish and a Black student debating. The Black Civil Rights movement was supporting the Palestinians at the time.  The Jewish kid wore a Yarmulke, so he was a target of hostilities towards Israel.

When I was 13 years old, I didn’t know better and I supported Israel.   I am older now, so—no dice!  Just because I am Jewish, it doesn’t mean that I am obligated to be a supporter, especially when the Israeli government is corrupt.  This war is morally wrong and should be stopped!

[route22ny]

“The moral crisis of poverty amid vast wealth is inseparable from the injustice of systemic racism, ecological devastation, and our militarized war economy.”       by Rev. Dr. William Barber II,  March 30, 2020.  (complete text below)

***

The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet millions of American families have had to set up crowdfunding sites to try to raise money for their loved ones’ medical bills. Millions more can buy unleaded gasoline for their car, but they can’t get unleaded water in their homes. Almost half of America’s workers—whether in Appalachia or Alabama, California or Carolina—work for less than a living wage. And as school buildings in poor communities crumble for lack of investment, America’s billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than the poorest half of households.

This moral crisis is coming to a head as the coronavirus pandemic lays bare America’s deep injustices. While the virus itself does not discriminate, it is the poor and disenfranchised who will experience the most suffering and death. They’re the ones who are least likely to have health care or paid sick leave, and the most likely to lose work hours. And though children appear less vulnerable to the virus than adults, America’s nearly forty million poor and low-income children are at serious risk of losing access to food, shelter, education, and housing in the economic fallout from the pandemic.

The underlying disease, in other words, is poverty, which was killing nearly 700 of us every day in the world’s wealthiest country, long before anyone had heard of COVID-19.

The moral crisis of poverty amid vast wealth is inseparable from the injustice of systemic racism, ecological devastation, and our militarized war economy. It is only a minority rule sustained by voter suppression and gerrymandering that subverts the will of the people. To redeem the soul of America—and survive a pandemic—we must have a moral fusion movement that cuts across race, gender, class, and cultural divides.

The United States has always been a nation at odds with its professed aspirations of equality and justice for all—from the genocide of original inhabitants to slavery to military aggression abroad. But there have been periods in our history when courageous social movements have made significant advances. We must learn from those who’ve gone before us as we strive to build a movement that can tackle today’s injustices—and help all of us survive.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, African Americans who had just escaped slavery joined with white allies to form coalitions that won control of nearly every southern legislature. These Reconstruction-era political alliances enacted new constitutions that advanced moral agendas, including, for the first time, the right to public education.

During the Great Depression, farmers, workers, veterans, and others rose up to demand bold government action to ease the pain of the economic crisis on ordinary Americans. This led to New Deal policies, programs, and public works projects that we still benefit from today, such as Social Security and basic labor protections.

Pushed by these movements, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt even called in 1944 for an economic bill of rights, declaring: “We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.”

During what I like to call the “Second Reconstruction” over the following decades, a coalition of blacks and progressive whites began dismantling the racist Jim Crow laws and won key legislative victories, including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act.

With each period of advancement has come a formidable backlash. This is how we find ourselves today, in the year 2020, with levels of economic inequality as severe as during the original Gilded Age a century ago. Since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby decision, Americans have had fewer voting rights protections than we did fifty-five years ago, while thanks to the earlier Citizens United ruling, corporations can invest unlimited sums of money to influence elections.

In response to fair tax reforms, the wealthy have used their economic clout to slash their IRS bills, cutting the top marginal income tax rate from more than 90 percent in the 1950s to 37 percent today. In response to the hard-fought wins of the labor movement, corporate lobbyists have rammed through one anti-worker law after another, slashing the share of U.S. workers protected by unions nearly in half, from 20.1 percent in 1983 to just 10.5 percent in 2018.

Decades after Depression-era reforms, Wall Street fought successfully to deregulate the financial system, paving the way for the 2008 financial crash that caused millions to lose their homes and livelihoods. And the ultra-rich and big corporations have also managed to dominate our campaign finance system, making it easier for them to buy off politicians who commit to rigging the rules against the poor and the environment, and to suppress voting rights, making it harder for the poor to fight back.

Our military budgets continue to rise, now grabbing more than fifty-three cents of every discretionary federal dollar to pay for wars abroad and pushing our ability to pay for health care for all, for a Green New Deal, for jobs and education, and infrastructure, further and further away.

In short, the official measure of poverty doesn’t begin to touch the depth and breadth of economic hardship in the world’s wealthiest nation, where 40 percent of us can’t afford a $400 emergency.

The wars that those military budgets fund continue to escalate. They don’t make us safer, and they’ve led to the deaths of thousands of poor people in Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and beyond, as well as the displacement of millions of refugees, the destruction of water sources, and the contamination of the environments of whole countries.

The only ones who benefit are the millionaire CEOs of military companies, who are getting richer every year on the more than $350 billion—half the military budget—that goes directly to their corporations. In the meantime 23,000 low-ranking troops earn so little that they and their families qualify for food stamps.

Key to these rollbacks: controlling the narrative about who is poor in America and the world. It is in the interest of the greedy and the powerful to perpetuate myths of deservedness—that they deserve their wealth and power because they are smarter and work harder, while the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy and intellectually inferior.

It’s also in their interest to perpetuate the myth that the poverty problem has largely been solved and so we needn’t worry about the rich getting richer—even while our real social safety net is full of gaping holes. This myth has been reinforced by our deeply flawed official measurements of poverty and economic hardship.

The way the U.S. government counts who is poor and who is not, frankly, is a sixty-year-old mess that doesn’t tell us what we need to know. It’s an inflation-adjusted measure of the cost of a basket of food in 1955 relative to household income, adjusted for family size—and it’s still the way we measure poverty today.

But this measure doesn’t account for the costs of housing, child care, or health care, much less twenty-first-century needs like internet access or cell phone service. It doesn’t even track the impacts of anti- poverty programs like Medicaid or the earned income tax credit, obscuring the role they play in reducing poverty.

In short, the official measure of poverty doesn’t begin to touch the depth and breadth of economic hardship in the world’s wealthiest nation, where 40 percent of us can’t afford a $400 emergency.

In a report with the Institute for Policy Studies, the Poor People’s Campaign found that nearly 140 million Americans were poor or low-income—including more than a third of white people, 40 percent of Asian people, approximately 60 percent each of indigenous people and black people, and 64 percent of Latinx people. LGBTQ people are also disproportionately affected.

Further, the very condition of being poor in the United States has been criminalized through a system of racial profiling, cash bail, the myth of the Reagan-era “Welfare Queen,” arrests for things such as laying one’s head on a park bench, passing out food to unsheltered people, and extraordinary fines and fees for misdemeanors such as failing to use a turn signal, and simply walking while black or trans.

We are a nation crying out for security, equity, and justice. We need racial equity. We need good jobs. We need quality public education. We need a strong social safety net. We need health care to be understood as a human right for all of us. We need security for people living with disabilities. We need to be a nation that opens our hearts and neighborhoods to immigrants. We need safe and healthy environments where our children can thrive instead of struggling to survive.

With the coronavirus pandemic bringing our country’s equally urgent poverty crisis into stark relief, we cannot simply wait for change. It must come now.

America is an imperfect nation, but we have made important advancements against interconnected injustices in the past.

We can do it again, and we know how. Now is the time to fight for the heart and soul of this democracy.

***

Rev. Dr. William Barber II is a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A Call for Moral Revival.

Read more by Rev. Dr. William Barber II

Source: https://progressive.org/magazine/real-epidemic-poverty-barber/

Note: the title of this article, and the purpose of this post, is not meant to diminish the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic in any way.

[robert-c]

Traditional Values

This phrase always tempts me to laugh, especially when I see who says it, and hear what they mean by it. I would imagine it included things embodied in say, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution; things about freedom of religion, speech, liberty and justice. The ideals we are still striving to fully implement.

But apparently those most fond of using this phrase mean traditional practices, not values. For example, black people were slaves for almost the first 100 years of this republic and for the next 100 couldn’t use the same water fountains, go to the same schools, etc. as white people. Despite the progress of the last 60 years there is still an enormous difference between people of color and whites in education, income, and incarceration for similar crimes.

Support of “traditional” practice doesn’t stop there. Despite the fairly clear language prohibiting legislation favoring a particular religion they cling to the days when a particularly Christian Protestant view was not only dominant, but influenced law even more than current anti-Choice advocates desire (e.g. Sunday closing laws, “blue laws”, prohibiting the sale of certain items on Sundays [hammers OK, nails NO, and more], prohibitions on birth control, etc.).

And let’s not forget the simple censorship of language and subject matter that to some extent still exists on major public networks; all defended on the basis that these are “offensive” to some people. Well, if there is a right “not to be offended” then my rights have been violated. I am offended by televangelists. I’m offended by racists, and those who “blindly back the blue”. Being a defender of the Constitution I don’t think I have the right to shut them down – but neither do I think they should have the power to shut down anyone else.

Let’s take the mask and gloves off. “Traditional Values” is just code for enforcing a social order and culture that existed 50 to 100 years ago and was always out of step with the best interpretation of ideals in our founding documents. It is language crafted to appeal to a nostalgic image of your youth, or even the fabled youth of your parents. It isn’t about what is fair, just or reasonable.

Self-centeredness is also part of our “traditional values”, so let’s look at that. How in the world does the personal sexual preferences of a waiter or waitress affect their service to someone at the restaurant? Why is it any of their business as long as they get what they have paid for; efficient, friendly service? Why do they care who is in the stall next to then in the public restroom? What’s it to them if their neighbor doesn’t go to church and stays drunk on Sunday? Don’t they believe that God is going to deal with him later? Why do they think it’s their business? Is their God so weak that He needs their help?

Let’s call it like it is – “traditional values” is nothing more than an excuse for trying to dictate to others how they should live in the most personal ways. It is the opposite of everything this country ever stood for. Let’s not let them get away with projecting their ideas as somehow the “real America”. They are nothing more than a group of petty wannabe tyrants masquerading as a persecuted minority. Everything they attempt to claim that the “radical left” will do to personal liberty is exactly what they will do if they get power.

Perhaps their idea of “traditional values” has to do with business. Historically, most of the time that meant little or no regulation. Child labor, manipulation of the stock market, selling “medicines” that were ineffective or even dangerous, work places that were unsafe due to improper handling of hazardous materials, are just a few of the things that businesses used to be able to get away with, traditionally.

There has been more than half a century of myth making and lies to support the idea that the “old ways were the better ways”: that businesses are always good; that regulations are always bad; that we were founded as a “Christian” nation; that people are poor because they are lazy or stupid and don’t deserve any better; that material success means you are smarter, or a better person than others; that people receiving welfare or other charity are lazy cheats; that tolerance of those who disagree is the same as agreeing with them; that “political correctness” is something new and “leftist” (during the segregated south any mention racial equality or criticism of white supremacy could result in violence against you),and more.

We don’t have 50 years to combat these myths, but we may not need it if we call bullshit every time we hear one. I hope that everyone challenges these presumptions when people spout them. I know it won’t be easy, I generally prefer to avoid conflict and controversy in otherwise friendly settings. However, those on the extreme right have never followed these social conventions; they are almost always the first to bring up a controversial political or religious topic to give themselves an excuse to “share their beliefs”. I see now that maintaining a polite silence only encourages them further and gives the impression of a greater agreement with their positions. We don’t have to become the obnoxious initiators of these conversations in every setting, but we shouldn’t sit quietly by.

[arcticdementor]

When I think of the Waverly Diner on 6th Avenue and Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, I am moved by romantic nostalgia. By that I only mean that when I think of the Waverly I feel, in some way, what it was like to be young and in the rush of the conversation. The conversation was everything. It flowed all around us, in the subways and the streets, in the diners and the high-rise apartments, and if you could master it, it could take you anywhere. You could still smoke inside of diners back then and sometimes we spent whole days around an ashtray and a plate of disco fries, getting refills on the coffee. I’m not saying all the arguments were good, but sometimes it was thrilling.

Perhaps that’s a uniquely New York thing, to place so much faith in talking. But it once felt very American, too; the diner-booth yapper animated by argument, one version of the big city fast talker who reflected an aspect of the national character right there alongside the taciturn cowboy, the trapper frontiersman, and the Puritan. American because, if you could think it and you could argue it, then maybe you could be it, too. It was at least possible. And it was democratic in the best sense. You could talk to anyone, butt into any stranger’s conversation, as long as you had something interesting to say.

I don’t know how to argue in America anymore, or whether it’s even worth it. For someone like me, that is a real tragedy and so I would like to understand how this new reality came about.

There are distinct and deep-rooted traditions of rational empiricism and religious sermonizing in American history. But these two modes seem to have become fused together in a new form of argumentation that is validated by elite institutions like the universities, The New York Times, Gracie Mansion, and especially on the new technology platforms where battles over the discourse are now waged. The new mode is argument by commandment: It borrows the form to game the discourse of rational argumentation in order to issue moral commandments. No official doctrine yet exists for this syncretic belief system but its features have been on display in all of the major debates over political morality of the past decade. Marrying the technical nomenclature of rational proof to the soaring eschatology of the sermon, it releases adherents from the normal bounds of reason. The arguer-commander is animated by a vision of secular hell—unremitting racial oppression that never improves despite myths about progress; society as a ceaseless subjection to rape and sexual assault; Trump himself, arriving to inaugurate a Luciferean reign of torture. Those in possession of this vision do not offer the possibility of redemption or transcendence, they come to deliver justice. In possession of justice, the arguer-commander is free at any moment to throw off the cloak of reason and proclaim you a bigot—racist, sexist, transphobe—who must be fired from your job and socially shunned.

Practitioners of the new argument bolster their rationalist veneer with constant appeals to forms of authority that come in equal parts from biology and elite credentialing. Have you noticed how many people, especially online, start their statements by telling you their profession or their identity group: As a privileged white woman; as a doctoral student in applied linguistics; as a progressive Jewish BIPOC paleontologist—and so on? These are military salutes, which are used to establish rank between fellow “az-uhs” while distinguishing them as a class from the civilian population. You must always listen to the experts, the new form of argument insists, and to the science. Anything else would be invalid; science denialism; not rational; immoral.

Because of the way it toggles back and forth between rationalism and religiosity, switching categories by taking recourse to one when the other is questioned, the new form of argument-commandment, rather than invalidating itself or foundering on its own contradictions, becomes, somehow, rhetorically invincible—through the demonstration of power relations that the arguer denies exist, but are plainly manifest in the progress of the argument.

…

Argument itself requires that certain fundamental questions are settled and beyond dispute. In order to argue over whether the sky is blue, we’ll have to agree on what the sky is. The new argumentation has not only vastly expanded the number of subjects that are supposed to be beyond argumentation, it has, by a sleight of hand, reversed the nature of the matters that cannot be questioned. Now, it is precisely the most contentious issues—is biological sex a valid concept? Is racism and abuse so widespread in American law enforcement that we should immediately defund the police?—that must be accepted a priori.

To insist that the conclusion that the arguer wishes to reach, with its implied corollary commandment, must be accepted by his or her opponent as a premise before the argument begins is not the move of a person who has confidence in their truth. It is the opposite of any form of reasoned argument. It is coercive. Except the people who argue this way claim that they cannot possibly be coercive, because you must accept the premise that they don’t have power—even if they are editing The New York Times Magazine, or threatening to get you fired from your job. You say they can’t have it both ways? They say, why not—and then accuse you of opposing the powerless, which, it turns out, is a form of authority that cannot be trumped.

The reason we cannot argue about certain things is because they have already been proven true and the truth they have established is such a significant moral advance—like ending child sacrifice—that to question the rational basis on which the truth rests is to risk eroding a foundation of the moral progress that separates us from encroaching barbarism. If you want to argue about those things, then you are a barbarian—which means that argument with you is impossible, because the only argument that barbarians understand is being put to the sword or sent off to a labor camp.

Do you need me to give you an example of this kind of argument? Not really, because such arguments have become the norm. But here are a few recent examples:

…

Here are the two parts of the argument by commandment. There is the empirical assertion—let’s call it X. And there is the moral claim suggested by, or perhaps even mandated by the evidence of X—let’s call that Y. Empirical evidence shows that there is an epidemic of sexual assault against women, that epidemic requires a drastic corrective, and that corrective enshrines a moral claim and a commandment—American women are sexually victimized, egregiously and without the protections of a justice system that systemically discriminates against them. Therefore it is virtuous to “believe women” and to encode that belief formally in new procedures of law and justice.

Only it turns out the rational argument was wrong. The evidence did not actually show that 1 in 5 women would be sexually assaulted on a college campus, a statistic repeated by President Barack Obama himself to justify “sweeping changes in national policy.”

…

But if you were clueless enough to point out the flaws in rational claim X, even if just to wonder over matters of degree, then wham!—you were whacked in the face with moral claim Y. Evidence X isn’t evidence; it’s window dressing. And if you’re too stupid to understand that, then you’re probably an even worse person than the arguer supposed.

Because—think about it—who else but a fervent, drooling misogynist, or a rape apologist, or a real live rapist, namely someone both ideologically and emotionally invested in actively disbelieving women, would be so interested in picking apart the evidence that supported such an obviously virtuous and necessary claim—especially now, at a moment when people are literally dying? What basis would anyone have to question X aside from the desire to violate the moral value of Y?

…

The organs of reason and expertise have one by one, pledged their cultish loyalty to this new faith. A group of doctors wrote an article in Scientific American explaining why the mentioning or reading of the results of George Floyd’s autopsy was a racist act. Public health officials across the country, who had in May condemned public demonstrations in the strongest terms, now fully endorse the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd. In a petition signed by some 1,200 health officials, they declare that it is incumbent on others in the profession to offer “unwavering support” to the current protesters as a matter of both moral and medical hygiene. They all together elide the difference between empirical claim and moral commandment by declaring that, “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.” And so, the merger of pseudorationalist discourse with the new American religion of anti-racism is completed.

America’s elite institutions now routinely make statements and use language that empirically is false. Indeed, they have taken the making, propagation, and enforcement of such language as their central mission. Because these statements are false, they make solutions to the real problems that are being gestured at impossible—while turning people who may want to actually address those problems into evil rape apologists and racists.

What we are witnessing, in the rapidly transforming norms around race, sex, and gender, is not an argument at all but a revolution in moral sentiment. In all revolutions, the new thing struggling to be born makes use of the old system in order to overthrow it. At present, institutions like the university, the press, and the medical profession preserve the appearance of reason, empiricism, and argument while altering, through edict and coercion, the meaning of essential terms in the moral lexicon, like fairness, equality, friendship, and love. That the effort wins so much support speaks to the deep contradictions and corruption of American meritocratic institutions, and of the liberal individualist moral regime it seeks to replace.

[anestheticx]

▪️First of all fuck anyone, yes anyone, who thinks abortion should be illegal. Your religious bullshit opinions are literally impending on my healthcare and you have zero right to do so. That’s between my doctor and I. Don’t believe in abortion? Those are your BELIEFS. I’m not a Christian and we don’t share the same beliefs, we never will. Not everyone is Christian. If Christians want to take a religious stand, let’s look at another religion. Jewish religion says life does not start till a fetus takes their first breath. If the life of a mother is put in danger for a pregnancy, that is possible murder. Why are Christians taking away freedom of religion for Jews?

▪️Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one. You are not my medical professional. You do not own others. So. Why do people medically require #ABORTION? Birth control fails. Mine failed. I had an ectopic pregnancy due to my IUD failing. I didn’t even want the IUD but my insurer refused to cover the birth control that worked for me for 10 years due to some bullshit law. It happens all the time. So it goes, I had to get the ectopic removed or I would bleed to death. In many of these new ridiculous anti-choice laws they’re claiming I would be a murderer. Ectopic pregnancies cannot be “replanted” and I don’t regret saving my life.

▪️Rape, incest and assault happens unfortunately, and I’m not normalizing this because I think we should guillotine those guilty of these crimes but currently in this culture it happens. A lot 🤬.‪ We let rapists off the hook for attacking women, this culture makes excuses for them. They assault adults and children, and now certain states are going to punish those victims by forcibly making them give birth to their rapists child? They even give the rapists rights to the child - WHEN THE RAPIST SHOULD BE IN FUCKING JAIL. What in the ever loving fuck is wrong with this country? Oh! It’s a misogynistic cesspool.

▪️Forced birth is abhorrent and medieval in concept. Parenthood should be consensual. Sex is not consent to pregnancy. We have the medical technology to attempt to control when we want to become parents. This technology isn’t fool proof, but it’s available because people are going to continue to have sex (hopefully consensually). You can have “religious views” about it all you want. People will have sex. Not only is this not a Christofascist nation (let’s hope) and not everyone shares your religion but SEX IS GOING TO HAPPEN. That being sad, people don’t have sex souly to make a family. ITS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE.

▪️If a fetus is a “person” at 6 months, if a zygote is a person and if life begins at conception then male masterbation is genocide. Upon pregnancy one should be able to insure the “person” and collect if anything happens to it. Blowjobs are cannibalism. Ultrasounds are child pornography. You can’t deport a pregnant person upon pregnancy because they’re carrying a US citizen. Male vasectomies should be mandatory since they’re reversible and will prevent homicide. Viagra and Cialis are the two most dangerous drugs on the market. Men must start paying child support immediately. Fathers of aborted fetuses need to be arrested as accessories to murder.

▪️If a heartbeat defines personhood, and defines who matters, then why don’t undocumented immigrants have more rights? Undocumented immigrants have heartbeats. People killed by police had heartbeats. School children that were shot had heartbeats. Uninsured people with medical issues have heartbeats. Pregnant people who have cancer and need chemo to survive, but can’t get chemo due to being pregnant and require an abortion have heartbeats. Women who want abortions have heartbeats. It’s obviously not about the heartbeat because Forced birthers don’t give a shit about any of these issues. It’s not about life. It’s about control.

▪️Pro life people don’t want people getting abortions yet they want to criminalize birth control? That’s exactly what’s in the legislation in Ohio, Georgia, Alabama, etc....This is why pro life agendas are always about controlling women, they always involve this kind of bullshit. It’s NEVER about healthcare or “life” for them, their agendas are anti sex and pro forced birth and it’s painfully obvious.

▪️A fetus does not have more bodily autonomy than the pregnant person. Outlawing abortion doesn’t end abortion, it only results in “back alley” procedures that end up killing adults. Pro-Life opinions are based off of misogynistic garbage. Even if you ban abortions, abortion procedures don’t go away. Why do you think it was legalized? Banning it only results in adults dying from botched back alley procedures. “Pro-lifers” don’t care. I don’t have the right to tell men what to do physically with their bodies. I also wouldn’t know what would be best for them personally. “Oh Joe, don’t get that vasectomy! It’s not God’s plan! You’re ending millions of potential lives” 😑🙄

▪️I also hate people who reluctantly say they’re okay wth abortions but stipulate “not late term abortions!” NEWS FLASH: Nobody spends eight months being pregnant and then wakes up one day like “nah nvm let’s end this.” People getting late term abortions WANTED the baby. They picked out baby outfits, they made a list of names. They’re getting an abortion at eight months because of a medical emergency and they HAVE TO. Late term abortions occur because the baby is dying, dead or killing them. Forcing people to endure natural birth and labor in these situations is not only ignorant and cruel but deadly.

▪️Forcing anyone into parenthood is cruel and ignorant also, but late term abortions have so much false information surrounding them. You're not improving health care when you defund Planned Parenthood and deny millions of women their provider of health care. You’re not improving healthcare when you deny the fact that people will seek out and receive abortions no matter what. The women, and the people in general, of America deserve better than others, who care nothing for their autonomy or their personal choices, or their health, deciding the future of their health care.

▪️AGAIN let me make this clear that banning abortion does not reduce abortion rates at all. When you create an environment that makes abortion services either unaffordable or unobtainable under suitable medical professionals, people still find ways to get them. When you outlaw, or diminish abortion services, the only thing you accomplish is putting pregnant adults at risk of serious harm. You help nothing. Parenthood should be consensual, and a choice. You cannot make parental decisions for other human beings. Adult human beings are not incubators. Abortion does not go away simply because you make it unsafe.

❤️ALSO I got an abortion and I DONT REGRET it at all. I’m not ashamed of it either. I became pregnant and I absolutely didn’t want a fucking kid. It was 110% the right choice for me. You don’t know how that feels and you don’t get to make those choices for others. Die mad. #ProChoice #AbortionIsHealthcare

[the-lincyclopedia]

Okay, a lot of you aren’t going to like this, but hear me out before you respond, please. I’ll give you the TLDR up front:

tl;dr: Economists and sociologists mean significantly different things by the word “capitalism,” and it’s possible to have different feelings about one system than you have about the other.

As an economics major and as someone in, well, this particular corner of Tumblr, I’ve heard a lot of really conflicting messages about capitalism in the past several years, and it took me a really long time to figure out that some of the mismatch in opinions is due to a mismatch in definitions. In case anyone else is in a similar position or is just curious about my take, here’s what I’ve figured out:

The number one feature of the capitalism economists talk about is perfect competition. My best econ teacher liked to explain perfect competition by comparing it to a really giant farmers’ market. Here are some of the necessary components of perfect competition: 1.) There are low barriers to entry. This means it’s easy to enter the market on all fronts--there’s not much red tape, equipment is cheap, whatever loans might be necessary are easy to get, and it doesn’t take a lot of specialized education to get into the industry. If you think that sounds nothing like most industries in the modern US, you’re right--and that’s part of my point. 2.) There are many sellers, none of which has significant power over the market. Again, this doesn’t sound anything like most industries in the modern US. 3.) There is no product differentiation. There’s no branding, and each seller is selling an identical product. Once again, this is very different from the reality we see today in the US.

So, what happens under this theoretical capitalism full of perfect competition? Sellers who can make products more cheaply can sell their products more cheaply without taking a loss. Since price is the only difference between products, everyone wants to buy the cheaper product. Sellers with higher costs go out of business--and can quickly enter other industries, because, again, barriers to entry are low.

In this system, good ideas and hard work are rewarded. If you revolutionize a production process or simply work faster than others in the industry, you’ll have lower costs per unit product. You’ll pass along the savings to consumers, who will flock to you because your products are cheaper. You’ll get ahead.

Of course, I have serious questions about what happens in this system to people who, for instance because of a disability, simply can’t be productive in any existing industry. I also have serious questions about what happens to people, for instance children, who have no choice but to depend on someone who can’t or won’t be productive. I’m not certain these questions can be answered--and, if they can’t be, that’s a serious strike against theoretical capitalism--but I’m not 100% sure there aren’t answers to these questions, either.

I hope it’s clear by now that we’re not remotely close to living under the system that economists call capitalism. Barriers to entry are high in many industries. Monopolies exist. So do branding and other forms of product differentiation. However, I’d like to point out how we could get closer to theoretical capitalism, if we so desired.

First, we’d need to strengthen and enforce antitrust laws. Many politicians who claim to like capitalism have distanced themselves from antitrust laws on the reasoning that breaking up monopolies is anti-business and interferes with the market. But when economists talk about competition and markets, they mean markets with perfect competition, which by definition must be regulated to prevent monopolies.

Second, we’d need to strengthen the education system. It’s impossible to have perfect competition in the labor market because people are always going to have different strengths and weaknesses. But we can come the closest to perfect competition in the labor market when every child has equal access to an excellent education. I’m not an education expert, but I have zero faith this can be done without strong public schools. Whether they’re the only answer or part of a network of public, private, and charter schools that together serve everyone, I’m not going to get into. But every child must have access to an excellent education, and that is a value fully consistent with theoretical capitalism. Moreover, a very similar argument could be made about health care.

It’s because of arguments like the ones I’ve laid out in the previous two paragraphs that I can’t fully hate the capitalism I came to know through six years of econ classes in high school and college. It’s also because of this kind of reasoning that Finnish author Anu Partanen can argue in The Nordic Theory of Everything that Finland is not socialist; it’s capitalist, but it has found a form of capitalism both more humane and more efficient than the American kind.

As is obvious and as I’ve already said, the current American economic system is not what economists would call capitalism. However, sociologists call America a capitalist country all the time. This isn’t because they’re unaware of the components of perfect competition; it’s because they’re working with a different definition. I’ve never studied sociology, but from what exposure I have to the field, it seems sociologists define capitalism as a system where money talks and the bottom line is of utmost importance. This system, to be sure, supports and encourages monopolies--in addition to abusive labor practices and neglect of those who can’t or won’t be “productive” in the economic sense.

People in sociology and the humanities often dislike capitalism, to put it mildly. And I think this is morally right. I have little love for a system that values people only for their productive capacity and listens to money more than it listens to people. I’m just not convinced that this is true capitalism. Here, I’m privileging the definition my discipline (economics) brings to the table over the definition brought by others, and I recognize that.

My personal opinion is that true capitalism has never actually been tried--and it certainly is not being practiced here in the US at present. I wonder why people often have trouble believing this, even when they believe that true socialism or true communism is not properly represented by Soviet Russia or modern-day China. I suspect that there’s a certain amount of believing in other definitions going on here, but I also think that there might be an element of confirmation bias. I think plenty of people want to hate capitalism, and that’s easy to do, especially when you don’t take the time to understand what economists are talking about when they use the term.

Do I want true capitalism? I’m not sure. If true capitalism is determined to value people only for their economic output, then I want no part of it. If, on the other hand, true capitalism is to be found in Finland, then it might be worth supporting. Either way, I hope I’ve demonstrated that it is possible to hate what sociologists call capitalism without hating what economists call capitalism, and that there are at least a few potential benefits to having an economy that follows the economic definition of capitalism.

One last thing I should note: real economists--people who have PhDs in the field and run central banks--are aware that America is not operating under theoretical capitalism. They have lots of sophisticated models for what’s actually going on in the economy today. They’re certainly not always right, but I don’t want your takeaway from this to be that economists are clueless and haven’t noticed that the American economy is full of monopolies and branding and all of that.

[aimmyarrowshigh]

Four years ago I married my high school sweetheart. We gathered under a chuppah of cherry blossoms, twinkle lights, and kente cloth in our adopted home of Washington, D.C., and became a family. We were madly in love and full of hope for our future. When we consecrated ourselves to each other, we also became a symbol of America. A type of America you either fight for or fight against: a black Jewish family.

We are the most American family I know. What could be more American than a Thanksgiving table laden with jollof rice and kosher turkey? We are a mixed-race melting pot, a Jewish African Norman Rockwell painting, boating on Cape Cod and drinking beer in Milwaukee and road tripping the California coast. We are a happy story of children and grandchildren of immigrants flourishing. We are the American dream, the cover of the brochure. There are people who make a point of vigorously shaking our hands, of knocking over other people to greet us at synagogues, of welcoming us with comical cheerfulness. We are a stock photo, a campaign ad. Sometimes, I literally catch myself posing. We make them happy and they want to be our friends. We are the America they want to believe in. I don’t mind, because I want to believe in it too.

That was the picture we had at the time. To some, we were a dream. To others, a nightmare. But we would soon discover that some people thought what makes America great is white people.

When I got pregnant, I cried tears of joy. I told my family I was three weeks along at Passover and they screamed. I passed on wine and chopped liver and my cousins whispered and smiled knowingly. I was glowing. My belly grew and something strange happened. I started writing. With every kick and every ultrasound I lost the ability to be quiet. To be a stock photo of smiling American multiculturalism. I lost my capacity to stomach inequity when I learned I was having a daughter. I wanted her to have more than me and to demand more for herself. I began to demand things for her I never would have asked for myself. It was my first act of motherhood. I kicked up trouble, demanding movements for justice make way for my kid. My husband worried and made blueberry pancakes—the only thing I was willing to eat at the time.

At a work event, a favorite colleague saw me and ran over to rub my belly and squeal. She cooed over ultrasounds and asked my due date and showed me pictures of her grandkids. Then she asked me if I understood what it means to have a black child in America. Was I prepared? I nodded yes. I had read bell hooks and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kimberlé Crenshaw and Chocolate Hair Vanilla Care and the Curly Hair Bible. I had watched all 14 episodes of Eyes on the Prize. I had studied for the exam and expected a good grade. She nodded with approval and said, “You’ll have to be her advocate. You’ll have to fight for her every day. But you’ll be good at it, I think. Just don’t ever forget, you are not a mama to a white child.”

On Election Day, 2016, I was eight months pregnant. Boxes of paintings and books sat at our feet, as we were still settling into our first house. I was too pregnant and exhausted to get up the stairs, so we watched election results from the sofa bed. I fell asleep and woke up to each new state being called for one side or the other. My husband was afraid I would get so upset at the results that I would go into labor. I breathed deeply and steeled myself. The baby kicked happily.

The next day, I went to work at 6:00 a.m. and started making plans. I listened to Hamilton. “I am ready to fight,” I told myself. “Breathe deep—don’t go into labor.” I stopped in the coffee shop next to my office. People were crying. It was pouring in Washington and it was hard to see where people’s tears ended and the rain began. I rubbed my belly and told my daughter it would be OK. It had to be.

A few weeks later, nine months pregnant, I was informed I was listed on a neo-Nazi website as one of many “Jews who someone should shut up.” My husband was terrified. He insisted we take a day off work to determine if there was any credible physical threat to me or his child. I was mostly amused, as George Soros and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were also on the list. Thanks for the career boost, Nazis! But my husband did not laugh. We had a long talk with the Southern Poverty Law Center and they assured us there is no immediate danger. My husband installed an alarm system anyway.

Not long after, our daughter was born happy and healthy. She slept through Inauguration Day as I paced anxiously around the house. Our neighbors were braced for riots that never came and one advised me to get off the streets with my daughter. It felt just like it did when MLK died, she warned. When my husband finally got home from work, I cried and buried my face in his chest. “It’s hormones,” I lied. In the morning I dressed my daughter up in pink footie pajamas and a pink hat and posted a picture of her on Facebook with the caption Nasty Woman in Training. I wondered if one day she’d be disappointed to find out I didn’t go to the Women’s March. But I also wondered why the march leadership refused to include families like mine in their anti-oppression statement. Now that I could look my baby in the eye, I found that my inability to be quiet only grew.

Then, that August, we changed from being a happy multicultural family to being a terrified one. It happened slowly and then all at once. The anti-Semitic graffiti by our synagogue, the nooses hung on D.C. campuses, our friends running from their JCCs clutching their pregnant bellies and their babies. Then the rally in Charlottesville changed everything. I watched people march against our existence as my baby slept in my lap. They were young people. I stared at her little face, all tuckered out from crawling through the yard in the August heat. Who could hate her? I realized that who we are had become something to worry over, an issue to be handled, no longer something to celebrate.

People called me up to tell me they planned on confronting Nazis at a rally in Boston. They wanted to stand up for families like mine. They wanted to be good friends. I begged them to stay home, and open their wallets or their laptops instead. I said, “Stay away from the Nazis with the guns.”

What did it all mean? When your personal life is political, and your family identity makes people angry, you never know who will push you in front of a train and who will drive the train. So I never shut up. My colleagues call me brave. The truth is, it’s not bravery that drives me, it’s the terror of first-time parenthood coupled with the terror of raising a black child in America and the lingering taste of the Holocaust on my Jewish tongue. I am not brave, just very loud. The loudness makes me feel safe because I know evil grows in silence.

Every day there are new questions: What does it mean to raise a black Jewish daughter in the age of Trump? How do we keep her safe? Am I making her less safe or more safe by raising my voice? How do we give her a Judaism that will embrace and love her? What if all the Jewish summer camps have no black girls? What if American feminism continues to betray her? Where should we live, and how will it inform her identity and self-esteem? How will I teach her about slavery, about the Holocaust, about the Klan? I used to think I’d tell her a story with a happy ending—an imperfect country on the right path. A black president Mama campaigned for. Baby pictures on Hillary Clinton’s inauguration day in a Run Like a Girl onesie.

Now I am losing faith that it’s still possible. I threw the onesie in the trash. We scour the internet for books with black Jewish kids. We read to her all the time.

Whether you see us as a brochure for American multiculturalism or as a threat, we inspire opinions. People have takes on us. We are something to be celebrated or something to be afraid of or something to be angry about. We are never just a family, until we are alone, in our own home, surrounded by stuffed animals and trucks and pink hair bows and books and so much love. My baby is loud, just like her mother.

The day neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, was the day I stopped recognizing the path America was on. We were never a perfect place: I’d been in a driving-while-black incident with my husband and I had had a swastika drawn on my synagogue as a child. But before Charlottesville I believed we were on the path to justice and I believed in the American dream and I naively dove into a life more perilous than the one I was born into by becoming the sole inhabitant of white privilege in my home. Despite it all, I would dive all over again. I love my family.

This coming Aug. 12, white supremacists will march again. As plans currently stand, they will march just a few miles from our home in Washington, D.C. They will celebrate their macabre anniversary. They will march against our lives. They will march for death. We will not walk beside them. We won’t dignify them with our presence. We will take our daughter swimming in our neighborhood pool and feed her extra treats and hold her so close. We will have an escape route planned and a go-bag in our car. We will be a family.

[emma-of-canada]

Name: Queen Emma (Tremblay) Age: Twenty Hometown: Ottowa, Canada

“I don’t have friends. I don’t have family. I have myself and my country. That is all I need.”

Emma’s path to royalty was filled with hardships and loss. Her parents died in a car accident when she was only a toddler. Her grandfather, the widowed King of Canada raised her until his own death when she was only thirteen. The idea of a thirteen year old girl running any country, let alone a large, powerful wealthy country like Canada was alarming. Her uncle stepped in as King regent, ruling Canada until his mysterious disappearance on her sixteenth birthday.

Her coronation happened a week later where she took her proper place as Queen of Canada. Known affectionately by her people as the “Child Queen”, Emma has grown into her position and is known as a strong and steadfast leader. She has kept most of her grandfather’s policies in place, contributing more socially liberal policies and creating programs to assist those in her country. 

She’s quite proud of her reign. In a room, she tends to be silent and her age and stature tends to make her an underestimated force. She knows now that she needs Europe and the United States now more then ever, now that Roman’s reign has ended. She cares for little else other then ensuring Canada comes out on top.

Canada: The Canada of the past is almost unrecognizable compared to the Canada of today. When the Tremblay family took over as a monarchy, Canada became a more restrictive, more stealthy and more underhanded country. In the early millennium, they took Venezuela in as a Canadian territory and since then, the small country has flourished. Canada has becoming the leading exporter of oil, having helped Venezuela tap into their oil reserves and using them for profit. 

Unlike the majority of the world, Canada has always avoided taking an anti-pirate stance. They are one of the only countries that does not kill pirates, instead sentencing them to labor camps and oils rigs. Somehow these pirates always end up back on the seas and Canada refuses to answer for it, staying silent on the subject. Saying they do not want to be associated with killing. Many families of pirates have taken refuge in both Venezuela and Canada to avoid the world’s strict piracy laws. Islands off the coast of Venezuela have become pirate havens.

Canada and Roman Tulach have a long history of working together. Emma’s grandfather considered himself a close associate of Roman., at one time allowing Roman to fly under the Canada flag inexchange for money and information. Emma continued the relationship after his death, up until the murder of Roman. Those in the outside world are unaware of the relationship but some have always been suspicious. That including with their sudden building of a weapons arsenal, sanctions and tarriffs were placed on Canada in an effort to hurt them and slow down their processes. In reality, this forced Canada to work and rely on Roman Tulach even more.

When royals began to go missing, Emma made the decision to shut down both Canada and Venezuela’s borders to protect herself and her people. A oil shortage began and the world is still recovering from the past year without sufficient oil. Despite closing down their country, Canada thrived, thanks mostly to Roman Tulach who organized and transported oil to private buyers for triple the price. 

Now that the royals have been returned back to their countries, Canada is in a peculiar position. Without the pirates, they cannot sell their oil and other exports to private companies without being taxed. As a result of the oil shortage, the sanctions on Canada have been lifted but there is talk about replacing them back at the Summit. Emma needs to find a way to convince the world that she’s on their side and convince the pirates to continue working.

[antoine-roquentin]

Paul Sliker: Michael, Argentina recently agreed to a $50 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. That’s the largest ever in IMF history. It is supposed to run for 36 months. Argentina began talks with the IMF last month, after three central bank rate hikes. Despite pushing borrowing costs above 40%, this failed to stop the fall in the peso, which has now fallen by 25% against the US dollar this year.

This agreement brings back a dark history for most Argentinians regarding the IMF’s role there during their devastating economic crisis in 2001-2002. The IMF imposed severe austerity measures, as usual. That’s its basic anti-labor policy, so Argentina’s decision to return to the IMF has triggered huge national protests over the past few weeks.

Despite this being the biggest loan in IMF history, we don’t really hear anything about it in the US media, except for the typical brief reporting in the financial press. There’s no real political or economic analysis of this especially on the Left, which one would think would be more sympathetic to the Global South, as well as countering IMF austerity philosophy.

Before we get into the current massive deal with the IMF – you are one of the world’s leading experts on IMF and World Bank loans. When you were at Chase Manhattan Bank’s economic research department, your role was a balance of payments specialist, and your task was to establish the payment capacity of Argentina, Brazil and Chile. To give people a general understanding of the historical context leading up to what’s going on today, can you give us some history about the last Argentine economic crisis in the early 2000s, and the IMF’s role at that time?

Michael Hudson: The reason there is so little discussion of Argentine or other Third World debt problems is that hardly anybody studies balance of payments (BOP) any more. There’s no course in balance-of-payments accounting or even in National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) at any U.S. university. The right-wing Chicago School propagandists keep claiming that if a country’s currency is depreciating, it must be because its prices are going up. But that gets the line of causality inside out. For debtor countries such as Argentina or other Latin American countries, the balance of payments has little to do with domestic prices, domestic wage rates or domestic cost of production. The balance-of payments – and hence, the exchange rate – is swamped by debt service.

Debt service is paid on what’s called Capital Account. Politically, government debt denominated in dollars is run into by these countries to cover their trade deficit that results from structural factors, such as their agreement not to grow their own food but to rely on U.S. grain exports, and to let U.S. investments in their countries avoid paying taxes. These are structural factors, not wage and price factors.

Argentina is the poster child for countries that have totally screwed up their economy. Their predatory right-wing oligarchy has managed to steer their country from the most prosperous in the world in the late 19th century to one of the the poorest and most debt-strapped countries. This is a political problem. But the oligarchy blames labor and says that it has to be paid even less.

In 1990, I helped organize the first Third World bond fund. It was issued by Scudder, Stevens & Clark. At that time in 1989-1990 Argentina was paying 45% per year on dollar bonds. Brazil was paying the same. Now just imagine: 45% a year. That doubles your money in two years! No country can possibly pay that for long. But it was clear that the Argentine dictatorship – bolstered by a US-backed assassination program against labor leaders, land reformers and left-wing professors – would continue paying for at least five years. So that was the fund’s time frame.

Despite these high interest rates, we weren’t able to sell the bond fund to any American or any Europeans. But Merrill Lynch, which underwrote the bond fund, sold all its shares in Latin America. The fund was organized and the Dutch West Indies, so it was an offshore fund. Americans (including myself) were not allowed to buy it.

So who did buy it? The bond buyers turned out to be the wealthiest families in Brazil and in Argentina. I think I’ve discussed this before on your show. Argentina’s foreign debt was owned almost entirely by the domestic Argentine oligarchy – the very richest class. They moved their money out of domestic currency into dollars, buying dollar bonds because they knew that they were going to authorize the high interest being paid – to themselves, masquerading as “Yankee dollars”.

This is the oligarchy that followed the 1973 US-Chilean military coup that assassinated Allende and installed Pinochet. The US mounted a mass assassination and terrorism campaign throughout Latin America. In Argentina it was called the Dirty War. The Americans came in and applied the Chicago School economic principle that you can only have a free market if you’re willing to assassinate labor leaders, land reformers and university professors. Tens of thousands of Argentine reformers were tortured and killed to put the oligarchy in power and slash taxes on high incomes. Their tax laws make Donald Trump look like a moderate. And like most financial elites, they took the money and ran, putting their takings offshore in Argentina dollar bonds. Politically they denounced Yankee bondholders for forcing huge debt payments at 45% a year driving the currency down, but the wealthiest families themselves were the “Yankees” who were actually collecting. The real American Yankees simply didn’t trust the Argentines!

When Scudder went around and talked to US investors in 1990, they said that the Argentinian politicians are crooks, and were not going to invest in a kleptocracy whose intention was to cheat us just like they cheat their own people!

Now, fast forward to 2001. The IMF came in and followed US Defense Dept. and State Department directions to support the oligarchy and its terrorists. The CIA feared that otherwise Argentina might have a democracy as the wave of “free market” assassinations had died down.

The IMF staff saw that it was obvious that Argentina was unable to take on any more debt. Nonetheless, they lent Argentina enough money so that the wealthiest Argentines could have a high enough exchange rate for the Argentine peso to take their money out of the country and move into dollars. It was a huge subsidy for capital flight out of Argentina into dollar-denominated Argentine debt to the IMF and other bondholders.

Any realistic balance-of-payments analysis would show that Argentina can’t pay off this foreign debt. The IMF staff knew that the money was being stolen offshore. It’s as if they lent to Ukraine. That wasn’t a bug, that was a feature. The IMF staff got so upset – downright disgusted with its corrupt anti-labor, pro-bondholder leadership – that for the next decade, the IMF motto was “no more Argentinas.”

Already in 1965 at Chase Manhattan I had done an analysis of Argentina’s balance of payments and hence its ability to pay debt service. My job was to calculate how much foreign currency Argentina could afford to borrow? First, I calculated their export capacity and their import needs. They’d agreed to buy from America and to become dependent. I found that Argentina already was paying all the debt service that it could, so it couldn’t afford to borrow any more. For almost half a century the country had been limping along.

The IMF staff must have made a similar analysis, but its US-appointed board overruled its internal economic staff. It’s as if they operate out of a subbasement in the Pentagon and do whatever they’re told. So the IMF lent the money to support the oligarchy and its capital flight. This was basically what the US/IMF also did in Russia.

When Argentina issued foreign dollar bonds, it signed an agreement whose language was ambiguous, saying that it to treat everybody with parity. As you know, my book Killing the Host has a chapter on Argentina’s foreign debt. The vast majority of bondholders agreed to write down this debt to an amount that realistically could be paid. But a few years ago an almost senile American judge ruled in favor of the hedge funds, saying “parity” meant payment in full, not subject to the agreed-upon writedown. Judge Griesa said that a debt is a debt, even though the majority of Argentines had written it down. So the vulture funds cleaned up.

The result today is that Argentina is as strapped as Puerto Rico, Greece or the Ukraine. It can’t possibly pay its foreign debts, so bondholders are dumping its bonds and the currency is plunging. The reason is not because it’s importing more, and certainly not because its wages are high. They’re very low, because as I said, the police state assassinated the main labor union leaders.

The IMF sets terms on its loans: You cannot give labor unions power, and you have to privatize your industry (that is, sell it off to US and other foreign investors). You have to put the class war back in business with a vengeance. That’s how we got to the situation were the IMF lent enough money so that any wealthy Argentine families can convert their pesos into dollars. This capital flight leaves the economy empty and strapped. That’s the IMF’s “free market” philosophy.

The situation is going to get worse in the coming months, not only for Argentina but for other Latin American countries. The main problem is that in the United States, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates. It’s worried that there’s full employment, and its job is to keep wages low. The Fed thinks that the way to lower wages in the United States is to raise interest rates to deter new investment and employment, except at minimum wages or “gig” rates.

Raising interest rates for the US economy means that the dollar’s exchange rate will rise against foreign currencies. It’s going to take many more pesos or other third world currencies to service their dollar debt. That means foreign countries are suddenly going to owe more for their foreign currency debt. That’s another reason why private capital is being moved out of Europe, Latin America and Asia into the dollar. Investors can make more money securely by buying U.S. government bonds than they can any other way, because the international financial system is looking very shaky right now.

That’s why we have an inverted yield curve in the United States: short term rates are higher than long-term rates, because “savers” (a.k.a. the One Percent here and abroad) are parking their money in liquid U.S. Treasury IOUs.

If the Federal Reserve actually goes ahead with its policy of raising interest rates, this will force defaults on the part of countries that owe their foreign debts in dollars, because the hard currency is becoming more expensive relative to the soft currency of debtor countries.

Paul Sliker: As you mentioned earlier, it’s just amazing that for the IMF, the term “never again another Argentina” became its motto many years ago, and was actually cited by the European Desk economists who walked out when the IMF made its awful loan to Greece. The IMF acknowledged that Argentina’s debt was not payable. So to be a bit more clear about what you think is going to happen this time around with this massive $50 billion loan agreement, is it simply going to bail out speculators in Argentine bonds?

Michael Hudson: Not only speculators, but the domestic oligarchy of bondholders, landowners and corporate owners. The wealthy Argentinans who deal with foreign banks want to keep their money offshore, in currencies other than the peso. They realize that the game is over and that it’s time to take the money and run.

Paul Sliker: Just to be really clear here in comparison to the 2001-2002 situation, what is this going to do specifically to the Argentinian people as a whole this time around?

Michael Hudson: The same thing that it’s done to the Greek people and the Puerto Rican people. Many will try to emigrate. Some will commit suicide. Lifespans will shorten.

The standard scenario is what happened to Russia under neoliberalism in the 1990s. There is little the Argentine people can do, because the President essentially works for the U.S. commercial banking system and has let the IMF put pressure on Argentina. He has stopped the domestic subsidies for gasoline and the price of oil and gas to domestic producers. Basically he’s taking away social subsidies in general.  It’s a classic neoliberal austerity program.

Argentina is following the Donald Trump program of balancing the budget by cutting back its social programs. So the reason that Argentina should be interesting to your audience is that it looks like the future of the U.S. What is happening to Argentina is what Donald Trump – and before him, President Obama – want to do to the U.S. economy.

Paul Sliker: That’s the question I was just going to ask you. As we’re closing this conversation out, Michael, maybe you can expand on that. I think some people generally know that the central theme of Latin America for decades is that U.S. economic and foreign policy deploys the IMF and World Bank to back creditors, foreign investment, and privatization. But why exactly should people care here in the U.S.? I know you started to explain that. But dig a little deeper for us there.

Michael Hudson: What really is at issue is whether all debts should be paid, or not? I think that there should be an international rule that no country should be obliged to pay its debts to the wealthy One Percent, especially to a creditor class that prefers to hold its domestic wealth offshore in foreign currencies. No country should be obliged to pay its bondholders if the price of paying means austerity, unemployment, shrinking population, emigration, rising suicide rates, abolition of public health standards, and selloffs of the public domain to monopolists. To make matters even worse, the privatizations demanded by the IMF and World Bank, for instance, will sharply raise the prices for what had been public services, transportation, water and sewer, communications, and telephones.

There should be principle that the domestic people should come before foreigners. But the guiding principle of the IMF, World Bank, and the United States is the opposite: namely, that no nation should put its own interests first. Instead, every nation is told to put the interests of international creditors first, even when the cost is impoverishment, dependency, mass poverty and deindustrialization. This is what globalization really means today. It’s an international imposition of class war by the creditor One Percent against labor and the indebted 99 Percent and their governments.

The madness of this was spelled out over 2000 years ago. In Book I of Plato’s Republic you have Socrates arguing against the idea that all debts should be paid. He asks, what if you borrow a weapon from a crazy person, and he asks for it back. Should you give him a weapon if he’s likely to hurt people?

This applies to creditors in general: Should you pay off debts if the creditors are going to use their money to impoverish society and reduce people to debt dependency? That’s what the Republic is all about. We’re still dealing today twenty four hundred years later with the same issue.

The issue is: what should come first: the people’s welfare, or that of creditors?

Paul Sliker: Everyone will be able to learn soon about the history of debt and ancient economic civilizations in Michael’s upcoming book slated for release later this summer. The book is called “…and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption, From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year.”

[kshlomo]

This is everything I know about Kamala Harris.

She is part Jamaican:

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/kamala-harriss-father-is-slamming-her-for-making-a-travesty-of-her-jamaican-heritage/

And part Brahmin:

https://www.thequint.com/news/world/kamala-harris-united-states-2020-elections-candidate-scrutinised-on-social-media

Neither parent was a naturalized citizen at the time of her birth:

https://www.newsweek.com/some-questions-kamala-harris-about-eligibility-opinion-1524483

The only constant about her is change:

https://kreately.in/kamala-harris-a-woman-of-flip-flops-can-she-lead-america-as-a-vice-president/

On police shootings:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/may/23/kamala-harris/did-kamala-harris-flip-flop-independent-probes-pol/

Health insurance:

https://www.businessinsider.com/kamala-harris-flip-flops-on-private-health-insurance-ban-2019-5

Marijuana:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kamala-harris-flip-flops-microscope-running-mate

while listening to Tupac and Snoop Dogg:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/us/politics/kamala-harris-snoop-tupac.html

Human trafficking and many more:

https://americarisingpac.org/kamala-harris-long-history-of-flip-flops/

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/08/factchecking-sen-kamala-harris/

(a perfect match for biden:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=share&v=lSUPfnYdXFU )

As a former call girl who slept her way to the top:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/willie_brown_admits_it_kamala_harris_slept_her_way_to_the_top.html

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/williesworld/article/Willie-Brown-Kamala-Harris-should-say-no-to-vice-15468145.php

She refused to legalize sex workers like in other first world countries which would provide them with rights, protection, health care, etc.:

https://www.sfweekly.com/news/lap-victory/

While she seemingly condemns Biden's victimization of women and children:

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/437107-harris-i-believe-biden-accusers

she flip flops again and now supports pedophilia as Biden's VP:

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/kamala-harris-san-francisco-catholic-church-child-abuse/

Not a single priest pedophile was prosecuted:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7125993/Kamala-Harris-buried-investigation-predator-priests-victims-say.html

In reality, she is part and parcel of mass incarceration started by Biden's 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act:

https://theappeal.org/kamala-harris-criminal-justice-record-killed-her-presidential-run/

https://inthesetimes.com/article/kamala-harris-criminal-justice-reform-mass-incarceration-progress

Keeping in line with her family history of enslaving people (sc., Hamilton Brown - an Irishman like Trump - owned 210 slaves and when they were emancipated in 1833, he purchased 306 Irish slaves totalling just a hundred shy of Thomas Jefferson's record)

[For reference, George Washington owned 123 slaves and they were emancipated on January 1st, 1801]:

https://mobile.twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1293530588486537219?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1293530588486537219%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fdjhjmedia.com%2Fkari%2Fthe-names-of-african-slaves-allegedly-owned-by-kamala-harris-family-published%2F

http://www.jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Members/slavereg.htm

she also used slave labor:

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1061004553

In practice, she opposes the principles of the BLM movement:

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-prosecuting-kamala-harris-20200703-dutcgewwtbd5fls5e54rjzhxvq-story.html

She withheld evidence in death row cases with black people:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article233375207.html

yet refused to seek the death penalty for a cop killer:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/How-an-SF-cop-killing-case-could-haunt-Kamala-13558890.php

And wants to take away the 2nd amendment:

https://bearingarms.com/cam-e/2020/08/11/kamala-harris-right-to-own-a-gun/

And as far as people of color go:

https://youtu.be/tDx3aY62HB4

Including locking up single mothers because their children were late for school:

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5c995789e4b0f7bfa1b57d2e

"I do not believe you're a racist," but then she criticized Biden's past opposition to policies around school desegregation via bussing:

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/6/27/21121007/kamala-harris-challenges-biden-on-school-desegregation-it-cannot-be-an-intellectual-debate

and now she's his bonhomie, to the chagrin of Jill:

https://politicaldog101.com/2020/06/remember-that-harris-attack-on-biden-at-that-debate/

Despite her latest lover being a Jewish lawyer who defends crooked businesses, her stance on Jews too is troubling:

https://zoa.org/2020/08/10441024-zoa-to-k-harris-reverse-your-troubling-positions-on-iran-omar-israels-sovereign-rights/

As well as Catholics:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/anti-catholic-bigotry-is-alive-in-the-us-senate/2019/01/17/e0ad0a14-1a8f-11e9-8813-cb9dec761e73_story.html

And she's against lgbtq/ trans:

https://www.out.com/news-opinion/2019/2/04/kamala-harris-lgbtq-trans-prison

She refused to intervene when Hispanics were being abused:

https://freebeacon.com/politics/kamala-harris-accused-of-letting-company-exploiting-latinos-off-the-hook/

for money and political favors:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-did-kamala-harris-let-herbalife-off-the-hook_n_5c8fab16e4b03e83bdc39a37

Yet released undocumented immigrants (instead of maybe helping to obtain citizenship), endangering the community:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/D-A-s-office-let-illegal-immigrants-go-3226767.php

as part of another failed program:

https://abc7news.com/archive/6878510/

Who doesn't care about small businesses :

https://www.city-journal.org/kamala-harris-silicon-valley

Or unborn babies (T4), even preemies:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kamala-harriss-abortion-absolutism/

And lastly, this is what techies say about her:

https://m.slashdot.org/story/374473

In all, she has had a full illiberal career as a cop D. A. / A. G. :

https://reason.com/2019/06/03/kamala-harris-is-a-cop-who-wants-to-be-president/

Including prosecuting "quality of life" crimes (who calls the cops on panhandlers?):

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/23/18184192/kamala-harris-president-campaign-criminal-justice-record

With a low conviction rate for serious crimes:

https://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/a-lack-of-conviction/Content?oid=2177022

Including not prosecuting the foreclosure king:

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5980d18ee4b09d231a518205

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/22/kamala-harris-attorney-general-california-housing-053716

But fighting to pay compensation for the wrongly convicted:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-14/kamala-harris-offices-fought-payments-to-wrongly-convicted

With a checkered history of misconduct:

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-prosecuting-kamala-harris-20200703-dutcgewwtbd5fls5e54rjzhxvq-story.html

The city Ethics Commission fined Harris $34,000 for breaching a spending cap she promised to honor, and her campaign manager was caught impersonating a volunteer for a rival in a bungled attempt to gain inside information.

This includes bribery and extortion in the medical community:

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/kamala-harris-blocked-hospital-rescue-to-help-seiu-wall-street-journal-editorial-board

Which may explain why her campaign fell apart:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/29/us/politics/kamala-harris-2020.html

In addition to losing support from progressives:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kamala-harris-wont-satisfy-progressives-11597188311

She has zero foreign policy experience and no economic gravitas. And she doesn’t pass the qualifications test for vice president.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/kamala-harris-vp-choice-biden-brad-blakeman

https://emorywheel.com/kamala-harris-record-disqualifies-her-for-u-s-vice-president/

Further reading:

https://yarmolinets.com/портрет-кандидата-в-вице-президенты/?fbclid=IwAR2HEiHz0GOqKJc86Pq91DOVUSYxvBKtEoYFzeVWKyFxJSI2MQ00POeisAc

https://books.google.com/books/about/Profiles_in_Corruption.html?id=U0-rDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button

Here's a short list of all the other candidates for veep (either everyone was apparently an affirmative action hire or Biden wants more women to sniff):

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/10-women-biden-list-potential-vice-presidents-200413141510646.html

I tried to cite news articles from all over the spectrum to obtain the most amount of opinions from across the board so that one can make an accurate assessment based on all the facts and tweets presented.

Am I missing any demographics?

[loudlytransparenttrash]

12 Wacky Things The Left Mistakes For Oppression

1. Black men are disproportionately being incarcerated

Maybe that’s because black men are disproportionately committing the most crime and murder? Despite making up just 13 percent of the population, blacks have been committing 52 percent of homicides in the United States for 30 years. In the other categories of violent crime such as rape, robbery and aggravated assault, blacks consistently committed a staggering disproportion of the total (40 percent while making up just 13 percent of the population) in 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010. The murder rate among blacks is similar to the rates in some of the most violent third-world nations. No other racial or ethnic group comes close. Note that for 20 to 24-year-olds, the murder rate committed by blacks (109.4/100,000) is 17 times higher than the rate for whites (6.4/100,000). Among 15 to 19-year-olds, it is over 20 times higher. The average for all ages is 13 times higher. The media have relentlessly fanned the flames of racial hatred while engaging in a systematic pattern of misinformation and blatant suppression of facts surrounding the perpetrators and victims of crime. As a result, so-called “criminal justice reform” is now being proposed to release a ton of black criminals from prisons, supposedly to “make amends” for the unjust “mass incarceration” of black men. The vast majority of blacks in prison are there because of violent crime and mostly against black people. Ordinary black people cannot afford to go along with the liberal agenda that calls for undermining police authority over black criminals, they are still criminals regardless of their skin color. That agenda only makes for more black crime victims. The black incarceration rate isn’t racism, it is simply a sad but accurate reflection of the horrific black crime rate. It’s your own fault.

2. Some women don’t have high paying jobs

These young women either have taken woke intersectional feminist genderqueer majors which resembles less of a qualification in anything useful and more of a retarded child’s participation certificate. Or they have actually chosen happiness and personal fulfilment over frantically comparing their wage slips to every man they meet. Despite the fact that young women flock to these pointless and low paying courses, young women are still earning more than young men after graduating. Girls are getting better grades from kindergarten to university, they are being accepted into college more, they are being handed grants and scholarships simply for being women, they take home 57 percent of university degrees and they are dominating in many STEM fields plus they are twice as likely to be hired. If there is a biased structure in play favoring one gender over another, women are not on the losing end. The problem we have is once women are hired, they usually lack the motivation, competitiveness and win-at-all-cost mindset it takes to rise up the corporate ladder. Women also tend to work less hours, they don’t want to do overtime, they don’t want to take their work home with them and if the job involves danger, difficulty or physical labor, regardless if it offers high wages, they will turn it down. Feminists only reference the highest paying males of Fortune 500 companies as evidence of their “oppression” but these men are examples of working 90 hour weeks and not having a life away from work and making the worst partners and parents imaginable. If you don’t want a family, you don’t want to study a real major, and you don’t want to work hard but you still want to blame “the patriarchy” when you are broke and miserable, it’s your own fault. 

3. Islamophobia

Islamophobia is not a real thing, it’s just a term pushed by Islamists in order to export Islamic blasphemy laws to the West. This word is nothing more than a thought-terminating tool conceived in the bowels of the Muslim Brotherhood for the purpose of silencing critics. Every religion, ideology or idea is allowed to be subjected to criticism without turning those critics into people suffering from a phobia - except for Islam. Islamophobia is classic political correctness. You don’t have to deal with the substance of arguments against the oppression and human rights atrocities celebrated under this barbaric seventh-century ideology or the fundamentals within the Quran and Hadiths which are the driving force behind Islamic extremism, all you have to do is label critics a cluster of “Islamophobes” and the argument is over. As this lie prevails, we become infinitely more vulnerable to Islamic terrorism and sickening Islamic practices because we are afraid to talk about them and it prevents us from being honest about the danger we are faced with. People have become too scared to report radicalization, police have become too scared to investigate mass Muslim rape gangs grooming and abusing young girls, women have become too scared to report their rape when it’s committed by a migrant. All because we don’t want to be “Islamophobic.” It requires that no one speak ill of Islam or say anything that might put a frown upon a Muslim, if so then we are accused of spreading hate and being responsible for radicalizing and pushing these Muslims to terrorism but in reality it’s to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws onto the West, easing us into getting used to Sharia law. Ten years ago we could never have imagined British citizens being sent to prison for writing a criticism of Islam on a personal social media account but today it is illegal blasphemy and we are now being arrested for it. Brushing off Islam’s primitive religious fundamentals and pretending they are harmless and cute all because the majority of those who believe in them aren’t white is not progressive, it is not being tolerant, it is being submissive and dumb. If you believe your backwards religion is beyond criticism and your beliefs can’t hold up to basic scrutiny, it’s your own fault.  

4. Immigrants are being deported 

No. Illegal immigrants are being deported. I know the left have popularized the crazy idea that once somebody illegally breaks into our home, they are to be rewarded with citizenship, protection and handouts but that’s not how immigration works, this is not the immigration you say our country was built on and you know it. This country was built on legal immigration, and the ones who made it through learned the language and assimilated while bringing a ton of jobs with them. Legal immigrants are as safe from ICE as the President so let’s stop pretending that every immigrant is living in fear. I read children of Italian immigrants from the 60′s are “scared” of being deported - give me a break and learn the difference between legal and illegal, fucking morons. When you break the law, you do not get rewarded, that is not progressivism, that is stupidity. Today’s scenario is 15 million illegals ridiculing those who played by the rules. Illegal immigrants should have no expectations that their lives here should be the same as those who are legal citizens. These people are here illegally, they are aliens, they are not “dreamers.” By lumping together illegal and legal immigrants, the “let them all stay” folks are vigorously trying to muddy the water so the actual issue, illegal immigration, gets lost in the process. Though people are waking up and are finally putting border security before caring about being called bigots. If you cheat the system, sneak into a country illegally and you get caught and your ass is sent back, it’s your own fault. 

5. Women live in a “rape culture”

Feminists describe our society as a “rape culture” where violence against women is so normal, it’s invisible. Films, magazines, fashion, books, music, humor, even kids toys according to the feminist activists cooperate in conveying the message that women are there to be used, abused and exploited. Recently, rape culture theory has migrated from the lonely corners of the feminist sphere into the mainstream. Obama’s admin asserted that we need to combat campus rape by changing “a culture of passivity and tolerance in this country, which too often allows this type of violence to persist.” Tolerance for rape? Really? The 1 in 5 myth is just that. A myth. It comes from this 2007 Campus Sexual Assault study. In the study itself, the researchers make it clear that the research consisted of students from just two universities. There are over 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S and the research was confined to just two of them. It was a basic online survey that took 15 minutes to complete, it was anonymous, no one’s claims were verified and any affirmative answer to questions such as “have you ever had sex while intoxicated” was marked as rape. Even the study authors have since come out and explicitly stated that it is “inappropriate” to use their survey to make the claim that 1 in 5 women are being raped. Even the nation’s largest and most influential anti-sexual violence organization rejects the idea that culture as opposed to the actions of individuals is responsible for rape. RAINN urged Obama’s White House to “remain focused on the true cause of the problem” and explained “In the last few years, there has been an unfortunate trend towards blaming “rape culture” for the extensive problem of sexual violence on campus. It is important not to lose sight of a simple fact: Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions of a small percentage of the community to commit a violent crime.” RAINN is especially critical of the idea that we need to focus on teaching boys not to rape, the hallmark of feminist activism. “No one would deny that we should teach boys to respect women. But by and large this is already happening. By the time men reach college, most students have been exposed to 18 years of prevention messages, in one form or another. The vast majority of men absorb these messages and view rape as the horrific crime that it is. So efforts to address rape need to focus on the very small portion of the population that has proven itself immune to years of prevention messages. They should not vilify the average guy.”

6. Nobody wants to have sex with trans people

These “transphobic” people aren’t gay. I’m sorry to break it to you but we know the difference between a woman and a guy in a wig and we know the difference between a man and a girl with a buzzcut. Mutilating what’s between your legs makes no difference either. No amount of repeating ‘it’s all just a silly social construct’ will change biological facts and the nature of human attraction. We all support your right to live your life in any way you please but you cannot expect everyone to just go along with what’s inside your head especially when it comes to preferring who we want to have sex with, because uh you know, that should always be our choice. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to feel that you are in the wrong body but this does not mean that people should feel obligated to have sex with the gender that you “feel” when all they see is the gender you are. You are not being discriminated against, people should be allowed to be as picky as they want when it comes to who’s dick they let inside of them. To be discriminated against, one needs to be denied something without a valid reason and it seems like having a cock hanging between your legs when a straight guy is expecting pussy is a whole lot of reason to not to have sex with you. Do we call gay men misogynists for not having sex with women? Do we call lesbians man-hatin… forget that one. I get it, you’re desperate for love, you’re desperate for affection, aren’t we all? But manipulating and shaming people into having sex with you is pretty fucked up. It’s not your fault that you suffer from dysphoria but if you believe it makes you entitled to shame people into having sex with you, it’s your own fault. 

7. Women can’t walk alone at night without feeling scared

Name one person apart from maybe Thor who isn’t vulnerable to violent crime if they walk home alone at two in the morning. Men make up the large majority of all victims of violent crime, everything from threats to robbery, assault and murder so if anyone should feel afraid of walking alone at night, it’s guys. Except men aren’t being told the responsibility for their own safety falls to everyone else but themselves. The responsibility does not fall onto every man to keep you safe from your own actions, the responsibility remains with you and your decision to be stupid enough to put yourself in such a vulnerable situation. If a white man walks around at night alone and he gets robbed by a black person, would we say it’s every black person’s job to make sure it never happens again to another white person? Would we tell black children not to grow up to be robbers? So why do feminists insist on ‘reprogramming’ young boys and ‘rewiring their brains’ to teach them a crime they already know is wrong is wrong? Feminists instruct women to be scared and suspicious of every man that looks at them or they cross paths with but the idea that scary boogeymen are jumping out from behind bushes to rape women as they walk to their cars is a myth. Almost all rapes are committed by someone known to the victim so being scared and suspicious of random males on the street is an irrational and sexist paranoia perpetuated by feminism’s false rape statistics and anti-male campaigning. If you want to walk home alone late at night dressed like a slut, drunk and lacking all self-awareness, it’s your own fault. 

8. Black people are shot by police officers

Let’s be clear, by far more whites are shot by police than blacks. Although I don’t pick and choose when to consider demographics so it’s true, black people are more likely to be shot but for the same reasons black people are more likely to be incarcerated, this comes directly back to the black crime rates we talked about earlier. When you commit the most crime, you are going to have the most confrontations with police and thanks to black culture’s anti-police and thug mentality, most young black people don’t know how to properly react to the police which is a recipe for disaster. Police don’t patrol black neighborhoods for the fun of it, they go where the most crime happens and the astronomical black crime rate warrants such police presence. In almost every case Black Lives Matter have rioted over, their martyr has either been armed, attacking the officer, ignoring demands or resisting arrest. Hands up don’t shoot is a myth. What’s also a myth is the idea that white police officers have declared open season on black innocents. How many white cops have been responsible for shooting a BLM darling? Practically none. Black and Hispanic police officers are more likely to fire a gun at blacks than white officers, these are facts. Police are also more likely to be killed by blacks than to kill unarmed blacks. In 2013 alone, 49,851 officers were assaulted with firearms, knives and other weapons. On average, 150 police officers have been killed in the line of duty every year. These include being shot, stabbed, strangled or beaten. Of the several hundred officers feloniously killed in the past decade, 46 percent of the perpetrators were black, despite them representing only 13 percent of the population. Do we call this a black war against the police? Blacks are 18.5 times more likely to shoot and kill a police officer than an unarmed black person being shot by an officer himself. If anyone’s life is consistently in danger, it’s the cops. If you commit crime, you attack a cop or you resist arrest, it’s your own fault.

9. The Pink Tax 

Feminists say that they’re being discriminated against for being women because products advertised to women are sometimes more expensive than products advertised to men, even though they’re exactly the same product. So, if they’re exactly the same, then why the fuck aren’t you buying the cheaper option? These “pink” products and services are only more expensive because companies know women are the only ones gullible enough to pay for a pink razor with a naked goddess on it and believe it’s better than the boring cheap brown razor alternative next to it that men will buy. The same thing applies for health foods, they’re usually priced higher because they know creepy vegan people and health fanatics are dumb enough to fork out cash for sundried pumpkin seeds and cabbage juice. The same thing applies with make up and beauty products, you slap a label on them that tells us it hasn’t been tested on a pig and people are willing to pay triple the price. The same thing happens with sports team merchandise and clothing and footwear, men’s versions are usually more expensive than women’s because they know men are dumb enough to pay whatever it costs to wear their favorite team’s gear around. Women are not exclusive to this targeting, if you’re dumb enough to pay for the more expensive option then sellers will remain smart enough to continue to charge you for it. An even more ludicrous tantrum feminists are having is about women having to pay more for certain services. They complain how mistreated they are because women get charged more to get a hair cut, even though on average women have more fucking hair to wash, cut and dry and men aren’t exactly lining up to get highlights, curls and extensions now are they. Listen ladies, it’s not rocket science, it’s simple business that keeps our economy as one of the strongest in the world. As I said, if you’re dumb enough to pay for it then it’s your own fault.

10. Transgender suicides

People who become so convinced they are something they’re not and resort to mutilating their genitals and hormonal development to make what’s inside their minds a reality have mental health issues? Who’d thunk!? Again, this is what happens when we pretend this is normal behavior and go along with it, we pump them with drugs and cut their tits off instead of actually helping them deal with their mental disorder in a humane and responsible manner. If someone came to a doctor and asked him to cut off a perfectly healthy arm because it just felt “wrong” for the arm to be there, should the doctor do it? This isn’t an idle question because this does happen with a mental illness called Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). People who have it feel as if they’re not supposed to have a certain body part, like an arm or leg. Doctors won’t remove a healthy body part, so some of these poor deluded people crush, mangle, burn, or otherwise deliberately destroy their own arms or legs in order to get a surgeon to slice them off. This raises a question: Are surgeons who refuse to remove healthy limbs from people with BIID doing them a service because they’re mentally ill or are they denying them their civil rights? Is BIID going to be the next mental disorder we are shamed into normalizing and accepting? When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic, 70%-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Imagine removing your genitals and realizing that it didn’t make any difference or worse yet, that it was a HUGE MISTAKE. Nobody wants to talk about the suicide and depression of trans people once they have realized it was all a mistake. Nobody is denying that transgendered people face a high risk of suicide, but it’s not because people aren’t using the correct pronouns, it’s because they are suffering from a mental disorder so for as long as we enable their suicide and depression by hacking their bodies and filling them with drugs instead of providing real and effective help, it’s your own fault.

11. Blacks still waiting for slavery reparations 

Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African Americans and most people around the world including white people. Only 6 percent of African slaves were taken to North America, most slave imports were overwhelmingly taken to South America and the Caribbean. In 1830 there were almost 4000 black people who owned around 13 thousand black slaves. Are reparations to be paid by the descendants of Africans, South Americans and Arabs too? Or are we just going to keep pretending whites are to blame for slavery? Only a tiny fraction of whites owned a tiny fraction of the slaves so expecting every white person 200 years later to provide a black guy with a free sandwich or gift him a job for being black makes zero sense. The claim for reparations is premised on the false assumption that only whites have benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well. Black buying power is expected to reach $1.2 trillion this year, and $1.4 trillion by 2020. That is so much combined spending power that it would make black America one of the largest economies in the world in terms of gross domestic product, the size of Mexico based on world bank data. Black people earning $75,000 or more per year are growing faster in size and influence than whites in all income groups above $60,000. American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of up to fifty times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which their ancestors originated. Is it time to check that little thing called privilege? No evidence-based attempt has been made to prove that living individuals have been adversely affected by a slave system that was ended over 150 years ago. But there is plenty of evidence that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than any lingering after-effects of a system that was abolished 150 years before most of Black Lives Matter members were even born. Reparations were meant as payments to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese Americans and African American victims of racial experiments in Tuskegee, or racial outrages in Rosewood and Oklahoma City. But in each case, the recipients of reparations were the immediate family or direct victims of injury caused by injustice. It’s never been about giving free shit to black people a century or two later and neither should it ever be. That’s just trying to rip off the system and it’s your own fault. 

12. Black people are held back by white privilege 

White privilege has become one of the favorite arguments of BLM and pandering guilt-riddled liberals who like to make excuses for the fact that black Americans struggle to keep up. The concept of white privilege is also a favorite weapon for those who make their living stirring up racial discord by saying that to be anything but white in America is to be handicapped by default. For those who wish to exploit an entire demographic of people for political benefit, the idea of white privilege has great appeal. However, there are a number of problems with the fundamental premise of white privilege. One factor that tends to undermine the premise of white privilege is that poor whites face every one of the same challenges that poor blacks and poor people of all races face, it would be easier to make a case for wealth privilege in America than white privilege. If that’s the case, white people still wouldn’t be the privileged group as all socio-economic indicators show Asian Americans come out far on top. This being the case, all Americans would do well to consider why it is that Asian Americans as a group do so much better on basic socio-economic indicators than white, black, and Hispanic Americans. There may be something worth learning from such an exercise. What Asian Americans have proven is that privilege in America is based not on race but on merit. People of any race can succeed in America if they emulate the approach of Asian Americans: take education seriously, develop a positive work ethic, obey the rules, respect the laws, and stay together as families. There is no escaping the fact that education and family structure play huge roles in determining the success or failure of various racial and ethnic groups. This plays a greater role in the difference between white and black success than automatically throwing a blanket over the entire white race. There are many issues within the black community that need to be fixed by themselves, acknowledging these issues is the first step as we all too often want to ignore them and expect whites to make the change. You cannot lack education, work ethic, family structure and respect for law and then go on to expect equal success and opportunity, it’s not plausible and it’s your own fault.