#if you support mass deportation then you support a recession

[ocmomandpopcultureenthusiast]

credit goes to jesscraven101

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

David Rowe

* * * * *

We must build our own media ecosystem

November 19, 2024

Robert B. Hubbell

I was on a Zoom call with a couple of readers on Monday. Both said they had stopped following the news—including my newsletter. I get it. Although there are bright spots that deserve celebration, we are working our way through a period that brings jaw-dropping developments on a daily basis. The appointment process has been particularly difficult. In candor, it is worse than I expected—and I expected a Trump second term to be bad. Very.

Looking away from the news in the short term is understandable. Many of today’s shocking developments will still be in the news cycle weeks or months from now. A temporary “news fast” may not change anything. But the grassroots movement has already begun its resistance and is depending on volunteers like you to add heft and reach to the resistance. Trump received support from only 30% of Americans eligible to vote in 2024. He should not be permitted to reign as an imperial president—much less a dictator. It is “all hands on deck.” Come back as soon as you are able!

This newsletter will examine the status of Trump's nominations—which are focused on implementing two of the three main pillars of his campaign—racism and white supremacy. Those themes were expressed through hostility and dehumanizing language toward immigrants. (“Rapists, murderers, and animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our nation.”) A subtheme of Trump's campaign was exacting revenge on his political opponents. Those campaign themes explain virtually all Trump's nominations to this point.

I highlight the underlying themes not to instill fear or stir anger. Instead, I am describing the stakes—hoping that the information will spur you to action in resisting Trump's nominees. Any single nominee would qualify as one of the worst in US history. As a group, they are an assault on the Constitution and an insult to the American people.

Our representatives in the Senate must reject most of Trump's nominees. Senators must refuse to allow Trump to write the Senate out of the Constitution by using recess appointments to install his initial cabinet selections. Trump has a majority in the Senate. He should submit his nominees for approval to an institution his party controls.

With that background, let’s look at the nominations that are—for the moment—Trump's wish list. Whether he will be able to secure confirmation remains to be seen.

Trump renews vow to use military to round up immigrants for mass deportation

On Monday, Trump endorsed a post by Judicial Watch that claimed Trump will “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to effectuate mass deportations. See NYTimes, Trump Confirms Plans to Use the Military to Assist in Mass Deportations. (Behind a paywall.) Alternatively, see Mother Jones, Trump Confirms Plan to Use Military to Carry Out Mass Deportations.

Per the Times, Trump's top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, previously declared that Trump would construct “holding facilities” (read: concentration camps) to detain immigrants while they await determination of their status:

Stephen Miller, said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.

Under Trump's plan, immigrants awaiting resolution of their cases would remain in hastily constructed “vast holding facilities for years.” (As of 2021, the average time to disposition of a deportation case was 4.5 years; I could not find a more recent statistic.)

Holding millions of immigrants in temporary facilities guarded by the US military is a dark vision of life under a Trump presidency. Trump will face strong headwinds if he continues his quest to deport 10 million immigrants. Even the attempt to do so will inflict grievous injury on the US economy and impose human suffering on an unimaginable scale. We must derail Trump’s proposed appointments to DOD (Pete Hegseth), his “Border Czar” (Tom Homan), and Attorney General (Matt Gaetz).

New revelations against Matt Gaetz

Revelations involving Matt Gaetz continue to appear in the media as lawyers for witnesses in the House ethics investigation speak to the media. See CBS News, Two women told House ethics panel Gaetz sent Venmo payments "for sex" and asked about "party favors," their attorney says.

Per CBS, the attorney for the witnesses said

[O]ne of his clients testified before the House Ethics Committee that she witnessed Gaetz having sex with a 17-year-old girl against a game table at a July 2017 party. Gaetz was sworn into Congress in January 2017, so all of the events the women allege took place while he was a member of the House.

The attorney also said that Gaetz requested “party favors” and “vitamins” from the witnesses, which they understood to be requests for drugs. Finally, the women testified that Gaetz paid them for sex using the PayPal account of Nestor Galban, “a Cuban immigrant who is close to Gaetz and whom Gaetz has referred to as his ‘son.’”

Speaker Mike Johnson has demanded that the House ethics investigation remain secret because . . . well, because it would be damaging to Gaetz. But there are two good reasons to release the report.

First, although Gaetz has resigned from the 118th Congress (which ends its session at 11:59 a.m. on January 3, 2025), he has been elected to the 119th Congress, which begins its session at noon on January 3, 2025. So, the House ethics committee should remain keenly interested in the ethics of a representative-elect to the next session of Congress.

Second, the House is in possession of information that is highly relevant to Gaetz’s qualifications to serve as US Attorney General. The fact that Speaker Mike Johnson is seeking to protect someone alleged to have engaged in child sex trafficking is reprehensible.

Pressure to reject the Gaetz nomination is growing. See Politico, Matt Gaetz feels the heat. You can add to that pressure! See Opportunities for Reader Engagement.

New revelations regarding Department of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth

Fox entertainer Pete Hegseth believes that women should be removed from combat positions in the military. His hostility toward women may be explained by the fact that he entered into a non-disclosure agreement with a woman to prevent her from disclosing her claim that Hegseth sexually assaulted her after a conference in Monterey, California. Se ABC News, Hegseth paid settlement to woman who accused him of sexual assault, lawyer says.

Per ABC, Hegseth’s lawyer claims that the woman who filed the police report was “the aggressor” who took advantage of a defenseless Pete Hegseth. The woman was a staffer at a conservative convention who was “responsible for ensuring that Hegseth made it back to his hotel room at the end of the night.”

At the time that Hegseth allegedly needed a young woman to help him find his hotel room, he was a Major in the National Guard with a Bronze Star for service in a combat zone. If Hegseth can’t find his hotel room without a young woman escorting him, he has no business acting as the Secretary of Defense. At the very least, the Senate must investigate the incident to determine whether Hegseth sexually assaulted the young female staffer.

True to form, Trump says he still backs Hegseth because, you know, allegations of sexual abuse are not disqualifying in the Trump administration. As they say, the tone starts at the top!

Russian media cheers nomination of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence

Former Representative Tulsi Gabbard has exhibited an unholy affinity for Vladimir Putin over the last several years. She defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, blaming the US for “forcing” Russia to defend itself by invading its neighbor. Gabbard has also claimed that Putin invaded Ukraine because the US was allegedly funding biolabs in Ukraine that were developing deadly viruses that could be used in bioweapons.

Not surprisingly, the Russian media has been cheering on Gabbard’s nomination to lead the US intelligence community—which should be grounds for disqualifying her nomination. See NYTimes, How Tulsi Gabbard Became a Favorite of Russia’s State Media. (Behind a paywall.)

Per the NYTimes, Russian media outlets have reported:

“The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper, wrote on Friday in a glowing profile of Ms. Gabbard, noting, positively, that Ukrainians consider her “an agent of the Russian state.” Rossiya-1, a state television channel, called her a Russian “comrade” in Mr. Trump’s emerging cabinet.

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said,

“Nominating Gabbard for director of national intelligence is the way to Putin’s heart, and it tells the world that America under Trump will be the Kremlin’s ally rather than an adversary.”

Sadly, nominating a Putin ally for the top US intelligence post is not the top news story about Trump's proposed cabinet picks. But it is a story that should concern all Americans. Trump was cavalier with US intelligence secrets—negligence that may have compromised US agents and assets across the world. It could be worse with an intelligence chief who wants to see Putin succeed and the US fail.

Trump nominates Project 2025 author to head the FCC

Trump claimed he never heard of Project 2025. For the second time in a week, he has nominated a contributor to Project 2025 to a senior officer position in his administration. On Monday, he nominated existing FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to take over the Chair position on the FCC. See CNN Business, Brendan Carr wrote the FCC chapter in ‘Project 2025.’ Now he’s Trump’s pick for the agency.

Carr is a favorite of Elon Musk even though Carr will seek to remove the protections of Section 230 for tech companies. Section 230 insulates online companies from liability for false and defamatory comments by their users. Musk famously believes in free speech except when it contradicts his worldview.

Under Musk’s ownership, Twitter has directed traffic away from progressive and liberal users while amplifying conservative voices. See WSJ, Exclusive | X Algorithm Feeds Users Political Content—Whether They Want It or Not. (“The majority of the political posts X served the bots were from conservative figures and pro-Trump accounts.”)

Carr has recently made public comments suggesting that NBC could lose its broadcast license for allowing Kamala Harris to appear on an episode of Saturday Night Live before the election. After Trump complained about the appearance on SNL, Carr said the following about NBC’s broadcast license during a Fox interview:

We need to keep every single remedy on the table. One of the remedies the FCC has [against NBC] ultimately, would be license revocation, if we find that it’s egregious

As noted in Politico, Carr has also criticized President Biden’s broadband subsidies for rural areas while “cozying up to satellite broadband executive Elon Musk.” In other words, Carr is criticizing the technology that competes with Musk’s Starlink broadband service. Talk about a conflict of interest!

Because Carr already serves on the FCC, he will not need to go through the confirmation process in the Senate.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[yourreddancer]

en. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), with Republican colleagues including Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Trump's running mate, in June introduced a bill to make E-Verify mandatory across the country. But similar efforts in the past have repeatedly failed to win enough bipartisan support.

And one key reason: There are simply not enough "legal" workers to fill all the jobs a healthy, growing U.S. economy generates. And that's especially so in low-wage industries.

Employers say that requiring E-Verify — without other overhauls to the immigration system, including easier ways to bring in workers — would be devastating.

“I think you would see a general overall collapse in California agriculture and food prices going through the roof if we didn’t have them do the work,” said Don Cameron, general manager at Terranova Ranch, which produces a variety of crops on 9,000 acres in Fresno County.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at Cato, a conservative think tank, says there’s some evidence that large-scale immigration has kept the country out of recession and increased tax revenues, contrary to what Vance has said about undocumented immigrants draining Social Security funds. Most economists agree that new arrivals have been crucial in sustaining high employment by filling many job openings in recent years.

==============

After Trump rounds up the "15 to 20 million" immigrants for mass deportation (highly unlikely) I'm sure the drooling Trump worshipers will be more than happy to sign up to clean hotel bathrooms and pick fruit and veggies in the fields in fealty to their master.

[dsiiiafilm]

13th Quick Notes

Hook - stats Slaves were the core of production in the south - suddenly free - imprisoned as a way of continuing labour post civil war - 13yh amendment - black criminality propaganda - birth of a nation KKK - every image is demeaning and animal like - quite a linear structure for this part - 'an accurate prediction of how race would operate in the future' - life imitates art - kkk burning crosses - a new wave of terrorism - lynching as criminal punishment - immigration to the north as refugees - confronting archival footage

Shift to Jim Crow - permanent second class status - fear of crime is central - civil rights movement -

Very fast paced

Crime increased along with civil right movement - which then got pinned for it - 70s mass incarceration - uses music to give pause - nixon/law and order period crime stands in for race - war on crime/wolf whistling - mass paranoia - good/evil - shift to the war on drugs - drug addiction as crime issue not health issue

Music as pause

Reagan Era - modern war on drugs - using quotes and archival footage to show wealth disparity - economic recession - introduction of crack - mandatory sentencing - much harsher then concaine sentences - directly targeting black communities

Music is fast paced and energetic

Each interviewee is shown in very different environment to build different tone

Always cycling back to graphic of incarceration rates going up

Medio depicts black people as criminals - creates suspicion and paranoia - 'super predators' - public pressure directly influences criminal charges 'jogger cases- racial archetypes make it easier to dehumanise and incarcerate - these archetypes extend far into both white and black communities - bush v Dukakis using a 'black criminal' as campaign strategy 'Willie Horton - bush will be the savior - ide of fear runs through black bodies

Democrats move to the centre - tough on crime democrats - three strikes and you are out - truth in sentence - getting rid of parole - Clinton's policies were more harmful than his predessecors - pacing slows down as we reach closer to the present.

How black leadership was destroyed through assassination, deportation, and criminalization.

Back to civil rights - the panther movement

Fbi makes example of black people who stand up - false representation of leaders

Alec - corporation and politicians creating legislation together - private corrections industry- required to stay filled - thus influencing policy to do so - thus tougher sentences - cca drops out - privatizing bail and parole - using GPS to turn homes into prisons - prison industrial complex is not interested in reform - even phone calls are privatized

All of these corporations are a part of Alec

Prison labour a form of modern slavery

Modern audio clips over historical and modern footage to show the repetition of history - Trump era

Systems of oppression will continue to evolve

Slavery - Jim crow - mass incarceration

The importance of media to mobilize action and confirm experience.

To humanize these people rather than only depict black people as criminals or as victims/bodies

Credit scene shows black people as people - visually supports this idea of humanising rather then stigmatising through media. Also provides a respite from the very confronting imagery throughout the doco.

[popwasabi]

Civilization is coming: “Black Sails” and when rage is justified

(SPOILERS ahead! You’ve been warned...)

There’s a moment late in the first episode of the highly underappreciated series “Black Sails” that hints not only at the troubled past of its lead character Captain Flint but also describes the larger theme of the story.

Flint has gotten himself into trouble. Along with his crewmember Billy “Bones,” in an effort to secure the financing he needs to capture the gold from the Spanish warship known as L’Urca de Lima, his recklessness has gotten Nassau’s governor shot and injured and his plans all but evaporated. Billy feels they are now in too deep and they should not only turn back but perhaps new leadership is needed for Flint’s crew. It is here that Flint reveals a bit where his true ambitions lie.

(Toby Stephens, ladies and gentlemen.)

On the first viewing, Flint ominously declaring the pending arrival of “civilization” to the new world could mean anything from simply the imperialistic tendencies of the British and Spanish empire, to the draconian rulership of the crown or just “taxes” as he makes light mention of in this speech. But as the series progresses, especially in the second season, “civilization” begins to take a darker, more personal meaning.

The story begins to reveal that the dangerous pirates of Nassau are not at least inherently dastardly, although certainly violent, but victims of their various circumstances; a former slave turned prostitute turned keeper of secrets in Max, a neglected daughter becoming the bookkeeper of the pirates with Eleanor Guthrie, another former slave turned ruthless pirate captain in the vicious Charles Vane, and an abused woman turned deadliest pirate on the island Anne Bony, and none more painfully revealing than that of Flint himself.

You see Flint didn’t always go by this name, he used to be a prominent officer in the British navy named James McGraw until he met Thomas Hamilton, a wealthy proprietor tasked with solving the problem of the pirates of Nassau many years prior. Thomas had the radical idea of pardoning the entire island to bring them back into society, to avoid violence and bloodshed, and to better understand the people who would turn to piracy.

As James gets to know him more and his revolutionary philosophies of empathy and enlightenment the two unexpectedly fall in love and thus seal the fates of both their downfalls from “civilized” society.

With England unwilling to see any other way to end the pirates without exterminating all of them and looking to exploit weaknesses in Thomas to Parliament, he is outed and imprisoned. James along with Thomas’s wife Miranda, who lives in a polyamorous relationship between the two, are persona non-grata-ed and the two flee to Nassau to finish what Thomas started in an act of rebellion.

(This is seriously one of the most heart-wrenching, tragic reveals I have ever seen on TV. I totally knew it was coming at the time and I was still not prepared for how it was delivered.)

There are few things as personal as love and “Black Sails” uses this to show how far society can go to villainize people. Flint wasn’t born a monster, and he is not one for loving Thomas; he is a monster because “civilization” wanted him to be one.

As our own civilization enters a timeline that may promise great change, people who have been othered and victimized by society are finding themselves grappling with their pain and grief in the same way as Flint. People have tried peaceful reconciliation and conformity into society to avoid violence throughout history despite the labels they have been given for no other crime than being who they are, but civilization’s need for a monster always brings people down no matter how hard they try to do it the “right way.”

(Tell me if you see a justice system in this picture that looks interested in listening...)

Native Americans tried playing by the white man’s rules when America began moving west. Compromising over and over again and yet they were killed and still killed and neglected today for it.

African Americans tried becoming rich like their white counterparts in places like “Black Wallstreet” in Tulsa, Oklahoma  and were still bombed and massacred for it.

Asian and Latin Americans immigrated here to flee war and death largely caused by white imperialist countries, to survive and work jobs white Americans would not. Both are othered as foreigners, face violence from the state, and are deported everyday.

Poor working-class Americans try fruitlessly to keep their head above water as they become mired in debt, fighting a pandemic on slave wages essentially, all while our government cuts wealthy companies a fat paycheck annually with our own tax dollars. And anyone who fights back finds themselves without an income and health insurance during a recession and a pandemic.

And the LGBTQ+ community ask for the dignity to be left alone and treated normally but not only are they harassed for it but they are beaten, tortured, and killed for being different.

(Remember, Stonewall was a riot.)

Flint, himself, tries one last time, toward the end of season two, to peacefully resolve his vendetta with England and save Nassau from a war with them but instead finds himself facing the gallows anyways by the Charlestown government.

As they read out his charges, many of them real heinous things he did but also many that were fabricated, Flint stops them from proceeding any further and delivers a final act of defiance to the court.

“I have one regret,” he begins to the court of high society folks who are only interested in seeing him punished before the masses. “I regret ever coming to this place with the assumption that a reconciliation could be found. That reason could be a bridge between us. Everyone is a monster to someone. Since you are so convinced that I am yours, I will be it.”

It is at this point in the story that Flint, perhaps like other revolutionaries of the past, recognize that the system doesn’t want to reason with him, that these people aren’t looking to understand or empathize with him or even try for that matter. They wanted a monster, they made one in him, so he decides there that “civilization” as he had noted in the series first episode is not worth reconciling with and certainly not worthy of forgiveness.

And Flint spends the rest of the series in bloody war with them.

(From season 3. Again Toby Stephens, ladies and gentlemen)

“Black Sails” is about queerness, race, social politics, and the way conformity by force is used against it. It’s about the rage that boils underneath many of us as we are wronged over and over again by society, while being exploited to no end, and what happens when someone finally says “enough.”

Anyone who has experienced what it is like to be othered can find something deeply personal with the anger that Flint carries around with him in each scene of this series. We feel his pain of rejection by society, his grief for feeling ashamed of himself when he and the audience know he shouldn’t.

It's what makes the eventual reveal of his relationship with Thomas so cathartic, as we see the rage-filled guard of Flint drop as he reads Thomas’s words left for him in a book they both loved and shared.

(Again, I cannot emphasize enough how much of a gut-punch this reveal was watching this...)

"Know no shame” is so important to growth of this character and the message of this story. Civilization and those who wish to keep the status quo want those who do not fall in line with their authority and judgments to feel shame for who they are. They not only want monsters, they want you to feel like one and the reason Thomas line speaks so much to both Flint and the audience is that it reminds us there is no shame in who we are.

The country we live in is a powder keg right now experiencing the same rage that Flint feels and more specifically how he felt at the end of season 2. Though this country’s racist attitudes and subjugation of the vulnerable hardly started with this presidency it cannot be argued that it has brought all that hatred in our government and the people who support those views painfully to the surface. When people peacefully protest, peacefully assemble, and peacefully try to cast their vote and are still met with resistance, still met with hatred and violence, people have to start to wonder if operating within the system’s rules can actually affect change.

A lot has been made about the way protesters may have violently lashed out over the past three weeks, with media talking heads and privileged elites asking unironically why they couldn’t do things peacefully but more has been done as result of the rising tension than the previous 50 years combined. You can tell people to “#vote” all you want but it doesn’t change the fact that people have been trying that for decades and people are still getting quite literally killed for it.

(Again, I gotta ask, who is this protecting? Who is this serving?)

If there’s one takeaway I hope a viewer gets from “Black Sails” is that revolution, no matter how serious you are about it, should never be off the table when confronting systemic inequality. A racist, sexist, classist, and/or, in the case of Flint, homophobic power structure does not concede their power if you play to their convenience and when people are being put down, beaten, and often killed for showing their anger at this, calling for “law and order” becomes a slap in the face to the victims.

A government or system that treats you unjustly doesn’t deserve peace.

I’ll say it again.

A government or system that treats you unjustly doesn’t deserve peace.

No one wants it to get this far, I definitely don’t, and certainly not every peaceful mean has been exhausted yet in this fight perhaps but this country was literally founded on violent rebellion after being slighted all the same by out of balance power structures. I’m not advocating for violence or to take up arms against the state right now BUT no one should ever rule it out when the social contract keeps being broken and broken and broken again by those in charge who clearly don’t want to listen.

A government should always feel the threat of an uprising if it keeps wronging its people.

(See my blog post about “Do the Right Thing” if you need help understanding this quote.)

As the more fiery weeks of the protests seem to be in the rearview mirror and we find less activity and calls to action on our social media timelines, I want to remind you all to not let up with whatever you are choosing to do to help and keep fighting back out there. The people who stand to benefit from having angst of the general public leave and dissipate from our collective consciousness want us to forget how angry we are, they want us to feel fatigued and disinterested in continuing the push forward because “this is how they win” as Flint would say.

(Again, Toby Fucking Stephens, everyone.)

We have so much more power than we realize, just look at how much got done just by everyone uniting behind one marginalized group finally over the past three weeks. When we realize we are fighting essentially in the same battle for respect and dignity, justice in our society can be achieved. It can be done, and maybe just maybe we can finally change the world. Afterall who else has been as close to achieving it as we are right now?

Fight for your dignity and respect and stand in solidarity with others in their own fights as well, and always remember “know no shame.”

Raise the colors and Happy Pride, everyone! (credit: Luluxa on Tumblr)

[pmmdj]

"You can debate the optics of Speaker Pelosi tearing up President Trump's speech last night, but I believe it represents something bigger that pundits aren't realizing: the majority of American public realizing they no longer have a say in their own government.

"The majority of Americans voted for a Democrat for President. A Republican became president, and is likely to remain so in 2020, when again most people will likely vote for a Democrat and get a Republican.

"A wide majority of Americans vote for Democrats to represent them in the Senate. Instead, the Senate is more or less permanently controlled by Republicans.

"The Senate is so rigged that Democrats may never control it ever again.

"Most Americans want better health care, higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, functional public schools, and a path to citizenship for Dreamers. They will instead be given the opposite, including mass deportations of Dreamers, by a government they didn't vote for.

"Most Americans support same sex marriage and access to abortion, and oppose a religious based right to discriminate. Instead, Republicans they didn't vote for representing a minority have installed judges that will do the opposite of all these.

"Most Americans support the Civil RIghts Act and the Voting Rights Act. Instead, we have Republicans and Republican installed judges tearing them down, and even talking about bringing back Jim Crow era literacy tests.

"Most Americans find racism and blatant sexism abhorrent. Yet, last night, we watched a man known primarily for these sins be given the highest civilian award in the nation, equivalent to the medal of honor for service members.

"We live in a country that gets less white and Christian every day being increasingly run by white Christian extremists who want to end the separation of Church and state, and to pour federal dollars into schools and hospitals that refuse to serve 'sinners'.

"Most Americans live in states so heavily gerrymandered that even if the majority of them voted for Democrats, it would not change who controlled their state legislatures. Most Republican legislators have absolutely zero need or interest in listening to blue constituents.

"The GOP has made it clear that there is basically nothing the President can do that will get him removed from office, including rigging elections and soliciting foreign interference. This was far worse than Watergate, but nothing happened.

"But here's the kicker: because of the electoral college, gerrymendering, voter suppression, court packing, non-proportional representation, and uneven distribution of minorities throughout the US, there isn't a God Damned thing people can do about it.

"You can see the public slowly succumbing to apathy as the never ending stream of awful just gets worse and worse, like the slowly boiled frogs that we are. One would assume this will go on indefinitely until we're as numb as Russians in winter.

"But I suspect a reckoning is likely to be at hand. You see, Millennials and Gen Z both are worse off than their parents. All the wealth has accreted at the top, they have no savings, and cost of living is through the roof.

"When the next recession hits, it's going to be bad. We have no mechanisms to cushion the blow left. Deficits are already high, interest rates low. And it's likely going to hit during Trump's second term. The worst will fall on these generations, and POCs.

"The same people the GOP has been telling to **** off for years. The people they like to call lazy moochers and welfare queens. When people run out of both hope and food simultaneously, and the government has made it clear they don't care... it gets dicey very quickly. I cannot predict how it turns out or what will happen, but I can say that the GOP is creating the conditions for very bad things to happen when the inevitable finally comes around.

"So when Pelosi tore up that speech, it wasn't just pettiness. It was an expression of powerlessness and frustration that is absolutely going to boil over eventually at the grassroots level under an oppressive, non-representative, government."

-Brynn Tannehill (original here, thread unrolled here)

[progressiveparty]

Bigger Than Bernie: The Other Progressive Challengers Taking On the Democratic Establishment (via Christopher Hass)

Our Progressive Candidates

Our endorsed candidates are running for office representing progressive values. Fighting for progressive ideas, for the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, ending mass incarceration and deportation. It’s time to empower the voice of a new generation of Progressives who represent the people. A new generation of Progressives who will fight for solutions that match the need of the many.

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

BERNIE SANDERS OFFICIAL ENDORSEMENTS

UNITED STATES SENATE

Maggie Toulouse Oliver U.S. SENATE – NEW MEXICO

OFFICIAL ENDORSEMENTS

UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Rashida Tlaib U.S. HOUSE – MICHIGAN (MI-13)

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ U.S. HOUSE – NEW YORK (NY-14)

PRAMILA JAYAPAL, U.S. HOUSE – WASHINGTON (WA-07)

ILHAN OMAR U.S. HOUSE – MINNESOTA (MN-05)

RO KHANNA U.S. HOUSE – CALIFORNIA (CA-17)

Joaquin Vazquez U.S. HOUSE – California (CA-53)

Marie Newman U.S. HOUSE – ILLINOIS (IL-03)

OFFICIAL ENDORSEMENTS

UNITED STATES LOCAL GOVERNMENT

CANDIDATES CLICK HERE   Can not find your progressive candidate?

Year 2020 – Recognize a Progressive – Nominate a Candidate:

The Other Progressive Challengers Taking On the Democratic Establishment

By Christopher Hass “Today,” Bernie Sanders booms in his monotone shout, “we begin a political revolution to transform our country—economically, politically, socially and environmentally.” He marks each beat with his right hand, as if conducting with an invisible baton. Behind him, a lone seagull flaps its wings as it flies across Lake Champlain. The crowd of 5,000 that has come to Burlington, Vt., on a sunny afternoon in May to witness Sanders�� official campaign announcement breaks into a cheer. At the time, it was easy to dismiss talk of revolution as the rallying cry of a 74-year-old democratic socialist who clings too dearly to memories of the 1960s. Eleven months and more than six million votes later, Sanders’ call for revolution is harder to ignore. But what, exactly, would this political revolution look like? It’s not hard to imagine Sanders marching in the streets with the masses—he’s walked plenty of picket lines, most recently alongside Verizon workers in New York City last October—but that’s not the revolution he’s calling for. For Sanders, political revolution means shifting control of American politics away from corporate interests, convincing non-voters to go to the polls and attracting white working-class voters back to the Democratic Party, all while moving the party left enough to embrace democratic socialist policies. A political revolution of that kind is going to require two things: a wave of candidates committed to a bold set of progressive ideas and a mass of voters with the political will to elect them. There’s evidence both of these are already here.

Progressives are fired up here for a victory against big money. —Jamie Raskin read the full interview In These Times spoke to U.S. House and Senate challengers across the country who are very much a part of this wave. They are all outsiders to varying degrees, and all of them are running against the Democratic establishment in its various forms—from corporate donors and super PACs to the head of the Democratic National Committee herself. These challengers range from first-time candidates to experienced lawmakers, from community organizers to law professors. Each is balancing the individual concerns of the voters they seek to represent alongside the larger mood of the nation. None of them is running because of Bernie Sanders, but they clearly benefit from the enthusiasm and sense of progressive possibility his campaign has created. It would be a mistake to call them “Sanders Democrats” (and it’s unlikely Sanders himself would want anything to do with the term). Some have endorsed Sanders, others remain neutral or even back Hillary Clinton. But they are coalescing around a set of progressive policies familiar to anyone who has heard Sanders speak, including single-payer healthcare, free college tuition, a $15 minimum wage and breaking up the big banks. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic platform more at odds with Bill Clinton’s centrist Third Way of the 1990s. More importantly, these positions increasingly reflect the popular will. Even after the brutal battles over Obamacare, polls show that more than half of Americans support moving to a single-payer healthcare system. Fifty-eight percent want to break up the big banks. Sixty-three percent support raising the minimum wage to $15. And Americans are nearly united in agreement (78 percent) that Citizens United should be overturned. What’s striking about recent polling, though, is not the support for these progressive policies (many have enjoyed widespread approval for a while), but the openness to new, radical ideas—especially among young voters. In a January YouGov poll, people under 30 rated socialism more favorably than capitalism. On the eve of the Iowa caucus, when asked how they describe themselves, 43 percent of Democratic caucusgoers chose “socialist.” Take a moment to let that sink in. This is what happens when you have a generation of young people whose central experiences with capitalism have been two recessions, a financial crisis, crushing college debt, flat wages and soaring income inequality. For young people, the devil they don’t know is looking better and better than the devil they do—and that sentiment is fueling insurgent challengers. Many of these candidates continually emphasize the need to purge U.S. politics of corporate money, starting with the Democratic Party. “It’s easy for candidates to say they’re for overturning Citizens United, but it’s really meaningless when they’re also taking so much corporate and dark money that they’ll never follow through,” says Tim Canova, who is running for Congress in Florida’s 23rd congressional district. “The Democratic Party has lost its way. It has gone corporate and Wall Street on so many issues that it has unfortunately turned its back on its own grassroots base.” And it’s more than a matter of principle: Many of these candidates believe that voters are fed up with how the corporate capture of the party has pulled it to the right. “The Democratic Party has been Lucy with the football and the voters have been Charlie Brown,” says Tom Fiegen, a candidate for Senate in Iowa. “Democrats have pulled the football away too many times, so the voters say, ‘Nope, I am not going to be tricked again. I am not going to have you lie to me and tell me you’re on my side, and then when I send you to D.C., you vote for the TPP or you vote for the Keystone Pipeline.’ ” Nowhere is this trust gap felt more keenly than among young voters. Sanders has won the support of young people like few politicians before. In each of the 27 states that held primaries or caucuses in February or March, he won the youth vote, often by more than 50 points. In his home state of Vermont, he defeated Hillary Clinton among voters under 29 by an overwhelming 95 percent to 5 percent. Tom Fiegen saw how this played out in Iowa. “In the conventions I went to,” he says, “there was probably 30 to 40 years difference in age between Bernie supporters in one half of the room and Hillary supporters in the other half of the room.” Fiegen himself has endorsed Sanders, and you can hear in his voice the same passion that has animated so many young people: “We are idealists. … We want a better world. We think we can achieve it. We’re willing to basically throw our bodies in front of the bus to do that.”

The number one lesson that everyone can learn from Bernie Sanders, and that I’ve tried to emulate, is: Tell the truth. —Tom Fiegen The challengers:

Tim Canova (FL)

Donna Edwards (MD)

Tom Fiegen (IA)

Lucy Flores (NV)

Alan Grayson (FL)

Eric Kingson (NY)

Pramila Jayapal (WA)

Susannah Randolph (FL)

Joseline Peña-Melnyk (MD)

Jamie Raskin (MD) It would be a mistake to overlook the fact that this year’s election is playing out in a moment when protest movements have interjected themselves into the national conversation in a way we haven’t seen in a long time. Black Lives Matter, Fight for 15, the climate movement and more have demonstrated the value of setting uncompromising demands and pushing the boundaries of what is politically possible. It’s no surprise then that some of these progressive challengers come directly out of protest movements. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state senator running for the 7th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, has a long history of activism and advocacy in Seattle. She founded the post-9/11 immigrant rights group Hate Free Zone (now OneAmerica), which has held massive voter registration drives. “The only reason I got into politics was because I believed it was another platform for organizing,” she says, “and that’s what I want to do with my congressional campaign. We’ve brought in thousands of leaders, young people and people of color and women who never saw themselves as part of democracy.” Joseline Peña-Melnyk, who is running for Congress in Maryland’s 4th District, says: “These movements give me hope for the future of our democracy. They show that the spirit that gave rise to the civil rights movement is still alive as people take up causes that matter and challenge the status quo.” Donna Edwards, a co-founder of the National Network to End Domestic Violence now running for Maryland’s open Senate seat, agrees. “I’ve always believed in outside movements,” she says. “Government doesn’t move effectively and elected officials don’t move effectively unless they have a big push from the outside.” Candidates like Debbie Medina, a democratic socialist running for state Senate in New York’s 18th District, are happy to be that push. As she told The Nation, “This election is just another rent strike.” Sanders himself is arguably the biggest protest candidate of them all. But a funny thing is happening: Many of the protest candidates are winning. By the middle of April, Sanders had won 16 states, as well as the Democrats abroad primary. Donna Edwards has led by as much as 6 points. Polls show Lucy Flores, a Sanders supporter running for Congress in Nevada, leading by 20 points. In Maryland’s 8th congressional district, Jamie Raskin’s two closest opponents are busy arguing over who’s in second place. For any new president to enact a progressive agenda, they’re going to need a new Congress. The establishment, however, is not going quietly. In Florida, where Tim Canova is challenging Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her congressional seat, news got out in March that the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) had denied Canova’s campaign access to the party’s voter file. His supporters created an uproar; the file is crucial to any campaign’s get-out-the-vote efforts. The FDP eventually backed down in order to avoid, in the words of the state party executive director, the “appearance of favoritism,” but the policy remains in place for all other Democratic primary challengers in Florida. And not just Florida—Democratic challengers in other states are routinely denied access to this data or charged extra for it. “The DNC and state Democratic parties must stop favoring incumbents over insurgents in Democratic primaries,” Canova says. “We need to recruit activists committed to our progressive agenda to run for office, and that includes challenging incumbent Democrats.” Given that these candidates want to rid the party of corporate influence, it’s no surprise that many are going head-to-head with big money. In Maryland, Jamie Raskin’s two biggest challengers in the Democratic primary are a wine mogul named David Trone, who has already spent more than $5 million of his fortune on the race, and Kathleen Matthews, who once oversaw the Marriott political action committee and is now herself the recipient of more lobbyist money than any Democrat running for the House in 2016. “My major opponents here have no real history of involvement in Democratic Party politics,” Raskin says. “They are creatures of the big money politics that have overtaken our country.” He’s won the endorsement of both liberal groups and a number of Democratic state lawmakers, and—borrowing a page from Sanders’ playbook—has relied on a surge of small-dollar donations to remain competitive. “Progressives are fired up here for a victory against big money,” Raskin says. In Nevada, Lucy Flores faces a multi-millionaire, Susie Lee, who has loaned her own campaign $150,000. But as Jeb Bush will tell you, money alone only gets you so far, especially in a year when voters seem more interested in authenticity. “The number one lesson that everyone can learn from Bernie Sanders,” Tom Fiegen says, “and that I’ve tried to emulate is: Tell the truth.” Donna Edwards put it this way: “We should not run away from who we are as Democrats and the values that we share. … We lose elections because our voters stay home.” For a President Sanders or a President Clinton to be successful, they’re going to need voters to come out not just in November, but in 2018, 2020, and beyond. For any president to enact a progressive agenda, they’re going to need a new Congress, made up of people like Donna Edwards, Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal and others. When Barack Obama first ran for president, he spoke frequently about how his election was not about him, but us. He may have meant it, but it was hard to shake the feeling that at that moment in American history, it was in fact very much about him and the qualities he possessed. Today, when Sanders uses the same language, you believe him—if for no other reason than it’s hard to imagine a wild-haired septuagenarian in a baggy suit as the catalyst for a popular movement. Clearly, something deeper is going on. For the most part, Sanders himself has remained focused on his own election fight with Hillary Clinton. He has avoided talk of the future. But in a recent interview with Cenk Uygur of the “Young Turks,” Sanders let his guard down for a minute, saying, “We need, win or lose for me, a political revolution which starts electing people who are accountable to the working families of this country.” There it was—“electing people,” plural, not a single president. That’s what revolution looks like. These challengers are also carrying the flag of the political revolution sparked by Bernie Sanders. This Piece Originally Appeared in Christopher Hass Read the full article

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory in New York City in June added fuel to the fire that Bernie Sanders started in 2016: a resurgence of interest in democratic socialism. And there is no strand of left politics that provokes more confusion than democratic socialism.

All of a sudden, it seems everybody wants to know what democratic socialism is. Here’s what you need to know.

For a Better World

Some commentators have tried to invent differences between the kind of society “democratic socialists” fight for and the kind envisioned by so-called “traditional socialists.” On MSNBC, Stephanie Ruhle confidently declared that democratic socialists make “no call for communal ownership of production.”

According to Ruhle, the excitement around the emerging socialist movement is much ado about nothing: democratic socialists want good things like free college and public libraries — and that’s pretty much it.

While we definitely support good library systems, democratic socialists’ vision of a better society and how to achieve it goes much further.

The world we live in now is called a democracy; the United States is the wealthiest country in all of human history, and we all learn about how important of an American value “freedom” is. But the United States today is defined not by freedom and abundance, but exploitation and oppression.

A tiny number of rich and powerful families lives off of the profits they make from trashing the environment and underpaying, overworking, and cheating the vast majority of society — the working class. They get richer precisely because the poor and working class get poorer.

This capitalist class turns workplaces into mini-authoritarian regimes, where bosses have the power to harass and abuse workers. And they protect their power in all corners of society by fanning the flames of racial, national, and gender conflict and prejudice in order to divide working people and stop us from organizing.

Democratic socialists want to end all of that.

Like many progressives, we want to build a world where everyone has a right to food, healthcare, a good home, an enriching education, and a union job that pays well. We think this kind of economic security is necessary for people to live rich and creative lives — and to be truly free.

We want to guarantee all of this while stopping climate change and building an economy that’s ecologically sustainable. We want to build a world without war, where people in other countries are free from the fear of US military intervention and economic exploitation. And we want to end mass incarceration and police brutality, gender violence, intolerance towards queer people, job and housing discrimination, deportations, and all other forms of oppression.

Unlike many progressives however, we’ve come to the conclusion that to build this better world it’s going to take a lot more work than winning an election and passing incremental reforms.

What We’re Up Against

The democracy we live in falls far short of what we’re taught to believe it should be. In our society, normal people — when they’re not organized — have next to no power.

Instead, power is determined by what political scientist Thomas Ferguson calls the “golden rule”: those with the gold rule. Capitalists use their wealth to buy politicians from both parties and their lobbying power to kill progressive legislation that threatens their profits.

And even if we could elect a well-meaning government that could withstand the pressure of lobbyists, chances are they would eventually cave under the capitalists’ trump card: a capital strike. To oppose new social programs and redistribution, the capitalist class can, as a last resort, withhold their investments and provoke a recession, undermining the social support of a progressive government.

This reflects another key problem under capitalism: not only do capitalists exploit workers on the job and hoard all the wealth they steal from us, but they have the power to determine whether or not we have jobs and thus the ability to provide for ourselves. If capitalists don’t like our democratic demands to, say, stop polluting the planet or pay workers a living wage, they can simply pull their investments and move their jobs to another state or country — and we have little recourse to stop them.

In rare instances — usually following massive wars and economic crises — progressive governments have been able to win victories. The Scandinavian countries are what we call “social democracies,” societies with robust social safety nets and labor movements that check the worst tendencies of capitalism and limit the power of the wealthy in key ways.

(Continue Reading)

[riverdamien]

Voting is A Renewable Resource

In Our Flawed Democracy, Voting Is a Renewable Resource

By Adam Russell Taylor

 September18, 2020

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“With less than 50 days until the last day to vote in this election, we are entering into the final sprint of what feels like the most consequential election certainly in my lifetime. Sojourners has long warned of the danger of narrow, single-issue voting, advocating instead that Christians should vote all of their values across a broad range of issues. But as Rev. Jim Wallis argued so well last week, we believe that racism is the central religious issue in the upcoming election. Of course, even referring to racism as “an issue” feels inappropriate because the pernicious and pervasive impacts of racism collide with every issue at stake in this election. That is why, between now and the final day of voting on Nov. 3, we will examine in greater depth a range of key issues through the lens of race. We hope and pray that this motivates you to vote up and down the ballot — from local school board races to district attorneys to congressional candidates and, of course, president of the United States.

While applying our faith and biblical principles to political choices can be both messy and challenging, what should unite us as Christians is who we prioritize when we enter the voting booth. From God’s requirement to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God” (Micah 6:8), to Jesus’ overriding ethic to care for those in need and to liberate the oppressed (Matthew 25 and Luke 4), the gospel is crystal clear that our first order priority as Christians is to protect and uplift people in the most vulnerable circumstances and most marginal places. This standard applies to how we live and to how we participate in public life, including how we vote. In every election, we must identify and carry with us the modern-day widows, orphans, immigrant people, and the disinherited. We must ask how candidates for every public office will defend and prioritize them while advancing the common good.

The moral responsibility of voting

In a democracy, even in one that is as flawed as our own, voting is an imperative for faithful citizenship and Christian discipleship. It is both a weapon for how we combat injustice and a renewable resource for how we restrain evil and advance the common good. Voting is also about accountability. As civil rights leader Cesar Chavez once said, “The day will come when the politicians do the right thing by our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism.”

Abdicating this civic right and religious responsibility dishonors those who fought so hard for it and jeopardizes our very future. For those of you who are disillusioned with your choices, remember that a non-vote is actually a vote for the status quo. We are always faced with imperfect choices, and the kingdom of God is never squarely on the ballot. But we must use our spiritual discernment and prudential judgment to choose candidates who we believe most share our values, embrace our priorities, and will be best able to implement policies that prioritize those in need.

Faithful voting reflects a combination of our understanding of the candidate’s positions on important issues, your sense of their character, and their history of accomplishments. Voting can’t be reduced to a purely transactional exercise based on self-interest. Integrity and truth-telling, empathy and compassion, courage and conviction — these traits matter. So do experience and accomplishments, either in or out of office, because they provide a window into what a candidate will likely do if elected.

When we say the upcoming election is the most consequential election in our lifetime, it is not hyperbole or political spin, but a reflection of the perilous nature the crises that our communities, our nation, and our world face — the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism, the ongoing crisis of climate change, the deep erosion in public trust and alarming levels of polarization, and staggering levels of inequality and poverty. We must resist an “us versus them” politics and embrace a broader “we,” committing to advance the common good. Groundbreaking polling and research by More in Common finds that a majority of Americans, which they refer to as “the exhausted majority,” are fed up with America’s deep polarization and yearn for politicians who are solutions-oriented, reject incivility and zero-sum politics, and emphasize the ways in which we have more in common than what divides us.

Sojourners’ mission rests on three core pillars: economic and racial justice, life and peace, and environmental stewardship. We hope that these pillars can provide a practical roadmap in the midst of this contentious election. First and foremost, as it relates to faithful citizenship, that means whether all citizens will have the opportunity to vote in a free, fair, and safe election is of central concern. As we've written over the years, it is an assault on the imago dei, the image of God in each and every one of us, to attempt to suppress even one person's vote. In this time of pandemic that has already claimed nearly 200,000 lives in the United States, we should be making it easier to vote safely, not harder.

A racial and economic reckoning

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic hangs over the entire 2020 election like a thick and unrelenting fog. By the time of Election Day, the nation will be approaching a staggering 250,000 deaths from the virus. We need leaders who can provide bold, science-driven direction to combat the virus, care for those in the most vulnerable conditions, and foster an economic recovery that leads to a radically more just and equitable new normal. We need leaders committed to calling forth our sense of communal responsibility to protect ourselves and our neighbors by wearing masks and practicing social distancing for as long as is deemed necessary. We also need leaders who understand our moral responsibilities and practical interdependence with the rest of the world, which requires global leadership in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Alarmingly, due to the pandemic and global recession, the World Bank estimates that 40-60 million additional people will fall into extreme poverty in 2020 and the Gates Foundation estimates that the pandemic has set back global health and the Sustainable Development Goal agenda by 25 years.

In the midst of our nation's ongoing and long overdue racial reckoning, we should support leaders who understand how centuries of structural racism affect every facet of our economy and society — and who have concrete plans to redress these injustices. The pandemic of racial police violence and systemic racism will require elected officials who are committed to more than simply cosmetic or incremental reforms to policing and criminal justice. We need leaders who are willing and able to ensure equal justice under the law applies to Black lives and who support both bold reforms and real transformation.

To give just one example, it's important to understand the influence wielded by district attorneys, sheriffs, judges, mayors, and members of town and city councils to control how public safety and policing are conducted in our communities. We should be keenly attentive to the impact candidates and ballot initiatives are likely to have on the protection of Black lives specifically.

Of course, issues of racial equity stretch far beyond policing and criminal justice and into education, employment, health care, and so much more. There is an integral connection between racism and poverty that should inform how we think about economic justice, which in turn should heavily influence how we vote. We should scrutinize policies and policy makers to ensure that the solutions they propose to the immediate economic crisis most benefit those who have the least, rather than exacerbating the existing inequalities that were already getting worse before COVID-19. The 2,000 verses in the Bible proclaiming God's justice for the poor and the oppressed demand to be taken seriously by Christians when they step into the voting booth. The exercise of this civic duty cannot be divorced from the tangible impacts officeholders and their policies have on the advancement of racial and economic justice or the furthering of injustice and oppression. And we must elect leaders who will end inhumane detention, reverse mass deportations, and are determined to finally pass bold, just, and effective reforms that provide a permanent solution — and do not discriminate against Black, Indigenous, and people of color — for DACAmented people and enabling over 11 million undocumented men, women and children to pursue a path to citizenship.

How we do life together

We believe that Christians are called to support and protect the life and essential dignity of all of God's children through every stage of life, no exceptions. That means the lives of children separated from their parents at the border, regardless of citizenship, are worth no less than lives in the womb. Abortion is so often used as a political wedge; instead, we can support leaders who are committed to working together to dramatically reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies through common ground solutions, such as increasing access to health care, ensuring access to affordable child care, and enhancing reproductive health. Protecting life means opposing capital punishment and supporting active peacemaking to prevent armed conflict. It means taking weapons of war off of our streets and keeping them away from our schools. It means supporting gender equity and justice and supporting policies that end domestic and sexual violence.

It’s important to note again that people of color are affected by each and every one of these threats to life and peace disproportionately, both in the United States and around the world.

Protecting the future

When we vote, we are making decisions ranging from which member of the town council supports initiatives to ensure clean drinking water for people in low-income housing to which candidate supports international treaties to combat climate change. It also means examining candidates and policies to determine who will protect the land and water rights of Indigenous people from multinational corporations. The stain and sin of racism are very much present in these issues as well, as we see egregious examples of environmental racism from contaminated water in Flint to lead paint in Baltimore. We're seeing increasingly dire consequences of our changing climate already; science tells us the worst impacts are still ahead of us — and we are running out of time to avoid catastrophe. That’s why we must support politicians who offer bold leadership to combat climate change and advance environmental justice.

Just before the 2016 election, Congressman John Lewis said, “the right to vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool or instrument in a democratic society.” We must all not only utilize this powerful tool, we must use it wisely so that together we elect leaders capable of and committed to advancing liberty and justice for all and transforming our nation’s broken politics.”

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     One of my favorite stories comes from Hindu Scripture. There are two knights of differing opinions and each day they awake, eat breakfast, and spend the day fighting’s, with all of their strength. When one loses they lay down their swords, sit down, laughing, and fellowship together. They agree to disagree, and are friends.

A friend and I were recently talking about our view on medical marijuana and she told me, “I do not agree with your position, but I love you any way.” I have friends and supporters of all political persuasions, races, creeds, religious and ethnic groups, and what ties us together is our love of one another, and our love of the street youth we serve. We agree to disagree. Win or lose we are always friends. We talk to each other, we fight with each other, but at the end of the day we sit down, eat together, laugh and play together. For all that truly matters are our love of one another. In this world full of storms, all we have is each other.

     We are all children of one God, let us agree to disagree, and care for each other, be there for each other, and bring healing and peace to our nation and world. Deo Gratias! Thanks be to God!

Father River Damien Sims, sfw,D.Min.,D.S.T.

P.O. Box 642656

San Francisco, CA 94164

www.temenos.org

(Sorry for three blogs but we felt the timing of each was important.)

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[crimethinc]

Not Your Grandfather’s Antifascism: Anti-Fascism Has Arrived. Here’s Where It Needs to Go.

Following the clashes in Charlottesville and the massive anti-fascist demonstrations afterwards in Durham, Boston, and the Bay Area, the struggle against fascism has arrived in the consciousness of the general public. Tens of thousands of people are realizing that the fight against fascism didn’t end in 1945—that today, as increasingly authoritarian governments collude with ascendant fascist movements, this battle is more pressing than ever.

It’s worth taking a moment to review what anti-fascists have accomplished since Trump was elected. Despite harassment and attacks from fascists and law enforcement, what was initially a few hundred people without financial resources or sponsors has grown into the foundation for a massive social movement. On April 15, fascists rampaged through Berkeley, recording video footage of themselves beating people to use for recruiting purposes. On Sunday, August 27, the same fascists attempted to hold another rally in Berkeley. In response to the murder of Heather Heyer during a fascist rally in Charlottesville two weeks prior, thousands of people converged to make the fascist demonstration impossible.

Imagine if the “Unite the Right” rally had taken place without resistance, and a thousand white supremacists had been able to march around Charlottesville unopposed. In that scenario, emboldened fascists could have presented themselves as a legitimate part of political spectrum, while preparing the way for more murders like the ones in Charleston and Portland. In that case, the government with Trump at the helm would be able to present itself as the only possible solution to fascist violence, and the general public would be forced to seek assistance from the very authorities that are already implementing most of the white supremacist agenda. We should be grateful that long before Charlottesville, forward-thinking anti-fascists were doing the thankless work of monitoring fascists and mobilizing against them.

But now that the struggle against fascism has arrived on a massive scale, it’s time to come to grips with the limitations the movement faces today. Every victory generates new challenges. Let’s explore the obstacles that the anti-fascist movement will have to overcome to succeed in creating a world free of authoritarianism.

Not your grandfather’s anti-fascism.

Corporate Media Back the Fascists

The Washington Post titled their coverage of Sunday’s demonstration “Black-clad antifa members attack peaceful right-wing demonstrators in Berkeley.” It is not surprising when Fox News publishes barefaced propaganda describing the organizer of far-right demonstrations that have included at least one fascist murderer as a “prayer activist,” but it is more unsettling to see fascist talking points parroted by supposedly liberal outlets.

Scaremongering from the corporate media.

The image at the top of the Washington Post article shows a right-wing demonstrator apparently being shoved by an anti-fascist with a shield. Yet several videos show the same far-right demonstrator pepper-spraying anti-fascist demonstrators without provocation and then pepper-spraying people at random immediately before the photo was taken. If you look close, the attacker is wearing a shirt that celebrates Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet for murdering dissidents by dropping them out of helicopters. If you look closer, you can see that the anti-fascist in the picture has a stick, but is choosing not to use it, instead simply using a shield to block the fascist with the pepper-spray from carrying out further attacks. In fact, the Washington Post chose to use a photo in which the assailant’s right hand is not visible, so readers would not see the pepper spray he holds in it.

Take a closer look.

When the Washington Post portray such fascists as “peaceful,” suggesting that they are victims even as they attack people and glorify mass murder, this gives them legitimacy, securing space for them to recruit and to promote and organize further attacks. Why would liberal media outlets do this?

Journalists often determine the substance of their story in advance, and it appears that media outlets across the spectrum had determined in advance to report the anti-fascist demonstration in Berkeley as an expression of violent excess even before it happened. In the event, the demonstration was largely peaceful; even the worst clashes were considerably less violent than the fighting on April 15. Despite this, corporate media outlets that had ignored April 15 altogether devoted considerable space to a few isolated incidents in which anti-fascists scuffled with fascists or other Trump supporters.

The intention was clearly to impose a limit on the amount of popular legitimacy anti-fascists would be permitted to accrue after the events in Charlottesville. Two weeks of positive coverage of anti-fascists, during which various members of the clergy came forward to praise their efforts, were deemed to be too much. Heather Heyer’s murder had taken corporate media by surprise, interrupting their conventional narratives and proving that the threat anti-fascists had supposedly been blowing out of proportion was all to real. It took corporate editors two weeks to regain control of the discourse. As soon as they did, they reimposed their old stereotypes as if Heather had never been killed.

This should put an end to any illusions we might have had that corporate media could side with anti-fascists. Outlets like the Washington Post aspire to position themselves against both Trump and his adversaries in the streets—to occupy what some call “the extreme center.” They are gambling that the current polarization of society is temporary, that they can be the beneficiaries of disillusionment with both sides.

Anti-fascists have to strategize about how to organize and legitimize our efforts to the general public without the benefit of positive media coverage. This is no easy task. At the minimum, it will demand our own grassroots media, at the same time that this media is under systematic assault from right-wing trolls.

This challenge is symptomatic of the larger phenomenon of polarization, which is worth examining separately.

The Swinging Pendulum of Polarization

US society has been splintering and polarizing for years now, since the recession of 2008 if not before. The movement against police and white supremacy that burst onto the national stage in Ferguson in 2014 as Black Lives Matter generated a far-right backlash, which inspired a resurgence of anti-fascist organizing. In response, fascists gave angry liberals and anti-fascists a central place in their strategy, seeking to provoke them into reactive behavior that could be used to further mobilize the right-wing base. Milo Yiannopoulos used this strategy until it blew up in his face last February, when a black bloc of hundreds shut down his event in Berkeley.

Various fascist and fascist-friendly organizers also used this approach, baiting leftists and anti-fascists with a series of “free speech” rallies in Berkeley, Portland, and elsewhere around the country that won the nascent fascist movement notoriety and momentum. This movement appeared fully formed for the first time in Charlottesville—but the shockwaves of that debut drew many more people into the movement against fascism, changing the balance of power once again. The “free speech” rallies scheduled afterwards in Boston and the Bay Area were total washouts for the fascists.

In each of these cases, when the pendulum of polarization swung to one side, the opposing side was able to use the specter of that victory to draw more sympathizers into action. With the media narrative coming out about Berkeley, the pendulum has again swung away from anti-fascists to benefit the right-wing reaction.

So long as this pattern persists, every anti-fascist victory will produce an even greater threat from the far-right and the government. To break out of the pattern, anti-fascists have to figure out how to strike blows without equipping fascists to cash in on the resulting fear among right-wingers, or else to find a way to draw in large swathes of the population more rapidly than their competition on the right. We can offer a few hypotheses about how to accomplish this.

Anti-fascists in Dallas, Texas.

The Myth of Symmetry

The allegation that fascists and anti-fascists are equally bad has been advanced most famously by Donald Trump himself in his response to the events in Charlottesville. He suggested that the problem was an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides,” refusing to say a word about the fascists who murdered Heather Heyer. This should tell us something about those who describe fascists and anti-fascists as symmetrical.

To equate those who fight for freedom and equality with those who want an autocratic state to enforce hierarchies is to reserve all legitimacy for the state alone—which is itself an autocratic position. It means celebrating the legalism of passive spectators over the heroes who fought the rise of dictatorships in Italy, Germany, Spain, Chile, Greece, and a hundred other nations. It means congratulating those who keep their hands clean while their neighbors are rounded up and imprisoned, deported, or killed.

We have to become adept at spelling out the ethical differences between fascism and anti-fascism, and all the justifications for forms of direct action that can actually be effective in this struggle. We need allies from many different walks of life who can help us make this case to the public at large.

Unfortunately, we can’t count on everyone on the Left to behave responsibly. In “How ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right,’” the same Chris Hedges who assisted the state in dividing and repressing the Occupy movement reappears to perform the same service in relation to the movements against fascism and the Trump administration.

The irony of a war journalist perennially accusing others of being driven by a lust for adrenaline should not be lost on anyone. It is worse still that Hedges, as a journalist, arrogates himself the right to pass judgment on the events in Charlottesville from a distance rather than deferring to people like Cornel West who were actually there putting their bodies on the line. But the true irony here is that Hedges purports to be warning against precisely the problem that he himself is creating. “By brawling in the streets,” Hedges alleges, “antifa allows the corporate state… to use the false argument of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all anti-capitalists.” Actually, it is Hedges who is equipping the state to do this, by attributing “the same lust for violence” to anti-fascists that he believes motivates fascists. He could just as easily use his soapbox to debunk this moral equivalency, but he lacks the moral courage—he simply cannot resist performing the same kind of “self-advertisement for moral purity” that he accuses others of.

In 2012, when the authorities needed a narrative with which to isolate the ungovernable elements of the Occupy movement, Hedges provided that narrative, and the FBI subsequently parroted it verbatim in their efforts to justify a series of entrapment cases. Now Hedges is providing Trump’s government exactly the same service, equipping them to declare “antifa” a terrorist organization, as many on the far right have already been demanding. Already, the mayor of Berkeley is calling for “antifa” to be designated as a gang—imagine if everyone who opposes the rise of fascism is classified as a gang member, or a terrorist!

Hedges needs to understand that it is not anti-fascists gaining ground that brings about fascist attacks and government crackdowns. If anti-fascists were not gaining power in the streets, fascists would still be taking advantage of the despair and resentment of poor whites, and the government would still be developing more means of repression—there would simply be no social movement to protect us from them. It is fundamentally paranoid, disempowering, and ahistorical to understand these developments as the result of anti-fascist activity. On the contrary, it is imperative that we build the capacity to act effectively in the streets before the fascists outstrip us and the government is able to centralize enough power to establish tyranny once and for all.

All that said, we also need to avoid offering our enemies on the Left and Right alike the opportunity to present us as a mirror image of our fascist adversaries. Let’s explore some ways we can go about this.

Identity and Containment

On one hand, it has been extremely useful for people in the US to learn from anti-fascist movements in other parts of the world. At the same time, the wholesale uncritical introduction of European models has created problems, chief of which is the containment of the struggle against fascism within a discrete identity, “antifa.” It has been a tremendous boon to the far right that they can describe anti-fascists without having to spell out the entire word “fascist”—it helps them to avoid the question of why anyone would oppose resisting fascism.

In German, abbreviations are common: national socialist becomes Nazi, anti-fascist becomes antifa. But in English, especially to those not familiar with the history of German anti-fascist struggles, the word antifa can appear alien and off-putting. At its worst, the German antifa movement has tended towards subcultural insularity; this is the last thing we need in the US, locked in a massive struggle with fascists and the government itself—a struggle we can only hope to win if ever-wider segments of the population are drawn into our side of the barricades.

Identity is fundamentally about distinguishing oneself from others. Anti-fascism, however, is for everybody. We should be careful not to insulate it within a particular demographic with a specific dress code and lingo. This is paramount because the far right are scrambling to depict antifa as a monolithic, hostile, alien organization. Our task is not just to build a network of groups, but to create an anti-fascist momentum that will spread contagiously throughout society at large, along with the critiques and tactics necessary for this fight. Specific antifa groups and the cultural cache of “antifa” itself can be useful in that project, as can black bloc tactics, provided we evaluate them as tools for achieving particular objectives rather than expressions of identity or belonging.

One of countless European solidarity demonstrations in memory of Heather Heyer, who was murdered in Charlottesville.

The Tendency to Militarize

As the conflict between fascists and anti-fascists intensifies, we are seeing more and more guns in the streets. Some people who were in Charlottesville reported that it was good that there were guns on both sides: it discouraged fascists from escalating physical conflicts past a certain point. Others report that most of the anti-fascists openly bearing arms were located some distance from the clashes. Some people who were in Ferguson at the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement say that without the treat of gunfire from the locals, the police would never have permitted the demonstrations happen. Others who experienced the trauma of having their loved ones shot before them counsel that the consequences of bringing guns into street conflict are weightier than most people can imagine.

Participants in the Syrian revolution report that for the first several months, the revolt created an open space of debate and possibility in which many people of different walks of life participated. Later, after the conflict escalated, power among the rebels accrued in the hands of religious fundamentalists, as they were the only ones who were able to consistently acquire military supplies—and from that point on, the horizon of liberation and transformation was closed. Sometimes, such escalation is inescapable, even if it closes the door to future possibilities; in any case, it is better to prepare for it now than to be suddenly caught flatfooted. But if our goal is to carry out a revolution rather than to fight in a civil war, we should not hurry the process of escalation—we should drag it out as long as we can. Most of the social changes we want to see cannot be brought about by guns.

Likewise, we should not imagine that coercive force can solve everything, nor permit fascists and state repression to put us so on edge that we see enemies everywhere we look and begin to attack people when it is not strategic. In the words of an elder anti-fascist veteran from Germany, fascist violence aims to exterminate, while anti-fascist violence aims to educate. We should not hurry to put fascist martyrs in the ground next to Heather Heyer. We must never risk coming across as bullies. It must always be clear that we are here to protect the public at large, not to assert our own authority or masculinity. When we are compelled to use coercive force, we must make sure that the ways we do so don’t centralize power or legitimacy within our own movement.

Antif-fascists in Berkeley on Sunday behind a banner reading “Avenge Charlottesville / Defend your community.”

The Language of Terrorism

In the wake of Heather Heyer’s murder, signs appeared at vigils and rallies reading “White Supremacy is Terrorism.” While it is understandable that people wish to condemn her murder in the strongest possible terms, it is dangerous to use the language of terrorism to do so.

The framework of terrorism is constructed by the state to define who has the right to employ violence and who doesn’t. When we denounce white supremacists as terrorists, we mimic the verbiage of Senator Cory Gardner, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Paul Ryan, Republican Speaker of the House.

Terrorist is used to designate those who are beyond the state’s control and cannot be brought into political alignment with the state. This explains why Heather’s murderer has not been charged with terrorism, while many anarchists who did not so much as scratch someone have received terrorism charges over the past decade and a half.

Using the rhetoric of the state reinforces frameworks and narratives that the authorities will ultimately use against us. This is dangerous to our movements and constitutes a betrayal of comrades engaged in struggles we’re often aligned with. Palestinians are labeled terrorists to delegitimize their struggle against the Israeli state. Like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, the YPG and YPJ in Rojava have been labeled terrorists. The language and ideology of the “war on terror” were carefully introduced into US political discourse in order to prepare the ground for the catastrophic invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The word terrorism comes to us from the Jacobin government’s brutal and merciless rule in France in the 1790’s—the term was invented to describe their “reign of terror” during which thousands were executed. Even though the word was coined for the Jacobins and that they wore it proudly as a badge, some historians today argue that the Jacobins weren’t terrorists because they were a state entity with legitimate power. This should give us a sense of the extent to which the discourse of terrorism serves to give the state carte blanche while delegitimizing all who stand against it.

There Is No Good Authoritarianism

Sunday’s far-right rally in Berkeley was promoted under the slogan “No to Marxism in America.” As with the far-right “March against Sharia,” there is no danger of the United States coming under a Marxist government any time soon. Like all totalitarians, fascists desperately need enemies even more oppressive than themselves to point to in order to convince people to join their ranks. There is an ominous symmetry between groups like ISIS and Western fascists, some of whom openly fantasize about a “White Sharia.” This explains their obsession with authoritarian Marxism.

In fact, the fiercest opposition to contemporary fascist organizing has not come from authoritarian Marxists, but from anarchists who oppose state power itself. This is inconvenient for many fascists in the US, who still need to present themselves as enemies of “big government” in order to appeal to US Libertarians and traditional conservatives.

If fascists are eager to paint all their domestic opponents with the broad brush of Marxism, we should not hasten to assist them. Yes, authoritarian Marxists have historically played a role in the fight against fascism, but they have hardly played it honorably. They began by betraying and undermining other social movements as early as 1871. If Stalin hadn’t sabotaged anti-fascist participants in the Spanish Civil War and other movements around Europe and then concluded a pact with Hitler, the Second World War would have unfolded much differently, and it might not have taken decades afterwards for grassroots liberation movements to recover.

If both fascism and authoritarian Marxism are experiencing a resurgence today, this is partly because the Millennial generation grew up after the fall of the Berlin Wall and too young to have grandfathers who fought in the Second World War. For many in the United States, totalitarianism is abstract, something to joke about on the internet. Some young people on the Left see the hammer and sickle the way many young right-wingers see the swastika: as a provocative meme rather than a blood-drenched symbol of oppression. Yet Stalin, too, carried out ethnic cleansing, as have many other authoritarian Marxist regimes.

One cannot consistently oppose fascism without opposing all forms of authoritarian government. This is not to say that rank-and-file members of authoritarian communist organizations can never be comrades in this struggle. Many of them are sincere people with the best of intentions—and clearly we need all the comrades we can get when we are facing down Nazis with guns. The point is that anti-fascists should oppose the leadership of authoritarian Marxist parties for many of the same reasons that we oppose fascists and other authoritarians. If you care about a member of an organization like the Bolshevik Party, you can express that care by making sure that his organization never comes to power—for if history is any guide, he will be the next up against the wall after you.

We must make it clear to the general public that we do not intend to impose a new dictatorship, but only to open and preserve spaces of freedom. There is no statist solution for tyranny.

Martyrdom

Unfortunately, Heather Heyer is not the first person to be taken from us by fascist violence, and she will not be the last. In addition to being wary of the discourse of terrorism and the tendency to militarize our struggles, we should wary of the discourse of martyrdom and tendency to celebrate death in battle. We need to find ways to remember people above all for who they were, for what their lives gave to the world, not for how they died or what their deaths meant to the struggle. We should not begin to regard ourselves or each other as playing pieces to be exchanged for strategic gains.

We live in a society in which aging and death are concealed from most of us. If this struggle continues to intensify, more and more of us will be forced to learn what it is like to spend hard weeks in the hospital, to meet at funerals as well as outside jails and courtrooms. We should approach this as another opportunity to come to know ourselves and each other better, to recognize what is beautiful and worthwhile in life—the things for which we are fighting in the first place. We should not subordinate ourselves to the struggle, but recognize it as one of the ways that life pours forth abundantly within us.

Cutting to the Roots

The vast majority of the anti-fascist struggle does not take place in street confrontations. It takes place in how we raise our children; it takes place in the hard conversations at workplaces and family dinners; it takes place in the ways we relate to our neighbors, the ways we understand togetherness and belonging. To triumph, we have to make it possible for people of all genders and ethnicities and religions to work together to survive the ordeals of capitalism; we have to create movements that can offer everybody more than the fascists ever could.

Ultimately, a thoroughgoing anti-fascist movement should not focus on targeting fascist groups that so marginal as to stick out from the rest of the political spectrum, but the infrastructure through which any authoritarian program will be enacted. That is to say, it should focus on the state itself. If we simply fight defensive battles, the fascists will eventually gain the initiative. We should take the experiences of fighting together that we can experience in anti-fascist struggle as use those as points of departure to work together to solve all of the problems that we have. This is the way to take the offensive and move on to confronting the fundamental sources of oppression.

Some believe that life will go back to normal soon enough, and fascism and anti-fascism will once more be things of the past. But we fear that we have yet to see how far these conflicts will go, and that we have to invest ourselves in confronting them head on. The only way out is through. Double or nothing.

[bcaffey]

Visual Journal 2

Over the course of its history, the United States has committed various acts of human rights violations. Three that we have explored are the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Mexican Repatriation (or depatriation), and the Japanese “Internment” of World War 2. As an aside, and I have stated this elsewhere, but I think it is worth reiterating, but I am a firm believer that the use of the word interment is misleading and lets the United States off the hook for what they’ve done. Prisoners are interred, the Japanese individuals (who had no legal path to citizenship but would probably had become Americans had given the chance) and Japanese Americans did not commit any crimes. They were placed in camps solely based on their heritage. The term for a camp that is used to house people of a shared ethnicity, religion, sexuality or other identity is called a Concentration Camp. I have seen a lot of blow back on using this term for all sorts of reasons, but that is what those camps were, and that is what the camps currently at our southern boarder are. Anyway, back to topic. These three events listed all follow a very similar pattern. There is some sort of issue, typically economic but not always. The government decides it is easier to scape goat a marginalized group than deal with the issue at hand. In response the government does something that violates the human rights of that marginalized group and vilifies that group in the process.  I have made a handy infographic to detail it further. Let’s break these events down.

 After the Chinese Opium wars, China was dealing with a great deal of economic hardship. Around the same time, the California Gold Rush began, and there was a greater need for labor, so many Chinese emigrated to the United States. At the same time the Transcontinental Railroad began construction, and the need for labor increased. However, as the Gold Rush ended and the railroad finished, California found itself having issues with employment. This is stage one, followed by the government deciding that the main source of the issue was the population of Chinese laborers, which is stage two. Over many years California made many attempts to stop Chinese from emigrating, and eventually were successful, as well as making any person leaving the United States, if they wanted to bring their family back to the United States for example, required permission to reentry, stage three. There is also the secret stage, which is sort of an extension of stage two, which is the public turning on the marginalized group. In the case of the Chinese Exclusion Act, people would refuse to hire Chinese people who already lived in the States, as well as violence against Chinese people, such as the Rock Springs and Hells Canyon massacres, of 1885 and 1887 respectively. Beyond the Chinese who suffered and died due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, the American Economy suffered as well, due to either the jobs that were vacated were menial labor jobs nobody wanted, that the Chinese were being underpaid so no one would take those jobs, the employees would be paid less than they wanted or the employers had to start paying more than they had been. Everyway you look at it, the economy suffered.

The Mexican Repatriation beginnings are very interesting, in that many of the Mexican Americans did not emigrate to America, they lived on that land, but the land changed ownership after the Mexican-American war. There were also many Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United State due to need for cheap labor and some who were fleeing the Mexican Revolution. This time the inciting incident was the Stock Market crash of the 1920s that led to the Great depression. This time the government blamed the Mexican and Mexican American laborers for the lack of jobs for the “real” Americans, rather than punish the business owners that caused the market to crash in the first place. Mexicans were an obvious target for this crisis for a few reasons. The primary is that it is an easy narrative to spin that these people who are working for less than the average laborer are cause the issues is not a hard sell. People want to believe that someone they can easily bully is to blame, and not some megalith like the government or a corporation. The only reason they were the obvious choice is that deporting Mexicans and Mexican Americans would be cheaper and easier than any other minority group, since they are just a boarder away. No boat trips required. The American government started the Mexican Repatriation, or more accurately in many cases, the depatriation. Repatriation implies that the government is giving these people a new home, a new country, but what was really happening, for many of these individuals who are American, is that they were being stripped of their homes, having their citizenship denied, and sent to a country they’ve never been to, a place they don’t really belong. Similarly, this caused unfounded hate to be put on those who remained, and similarly, had a negative impact on the health of the American economy.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, which brought America into World War 2, the west coast was declared a military exclusion zone, and required any person of Japanese descent to relocate. In this example we see that the inciting incident isn’t an economic issue, but a military one. The narrative that was used to justify this act was the fear that these people whose parents or grandparents came from Japan would, but many of whom had never been themselves or had any ties to Japan, would assist Japan in the war. There was also a lot of support for this act that was economic. Despite mostly being Americans, these Japanese were seen as invaders, taking work and business away from “real” Americans; real meaning white in this case, so an excuse to get rid of them, take their homes and business from them, seemed like a bonus to many. In this case the people being affected were being detained without due process, put into camps where they lived and worked and were not allowed to leave. Over a thousand people died in these camps. They were asked to denounce their loyalty to Japan, which, for the Issei, or Japanese people who were not citizens of the United States, would leave they people with no homeland. They had to choose between that or being separated from their families and being deported. Many of the men where also asked to join the army to fight in the war, they would go to Europe to fight and many died, while their families are sitting in concentration camps with no rights or freedoms. This also happened to many of the Mexican Americans who were Repatriated to Mexico. When World War 2 hit, they were asked to join the army, and according to the video we watched, all of them did. Again, these men being asked to fight and die for a country that threw them out, took their land and freedom and tossed them aside. Like in both of the previous cases, even once they were let out of the camps, the negative impact on the lives of the Japanese would continue, with them being denied jobs and land, and those who were not citizens, still no access to a way to get their citizenship.

The most obvious current day correlation to these human rights violations is what is happening at our southern boarder at this very moment. We are in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. One of the side effects of the age we live in however, is that the inciting incident is much more nebulous. There is an economic aspect to it. America recently went through a recession, and while it has somewhat recovered on a macro scale, many individuals are still feeling the fallout of it. But on top of that there is just general fear mongering by corporations and politicians. Lies and false information being broadcast on a wider scale than ever before, which is allowing for the masses to be manipulated into allowing these human rights violations. Beyond those reasons though, there is the even scarier notion that many white Americans do not see the people being illegally incarcerated at the boarder as people. They see them as monsters or animals that need to be caged and controlled. We are knee deep in one of these situations that history is going to look unfavorably on, and as a citizen of this country I find it distressing that I am as complicit as the average German citizen was to the holocaust. Maybe more so because I am fully aware of what is happening. I speak out against Trump and his administration every chance I get but I feel like I am shouting into the wind, that it’s not going to matter. The 2020 election has me scared, and I am trying to be optimistic about the outcome, but it feels so rigged. If Trump wins in 2020, I feel like what is happening at the southern border is just the beginning.

[thisdaynews]

POLITICO Playbook: Trump’s two worlds

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/politico-playbook-trumps-two-worlds/

POLITICO Playbook: Trump’s two worlds

PRESIDENTDONALD TRUMPwill officially launch his 2020 campaign in Orlando tonight. He does so amid signs of unease in his own camp about his electoral prospects, despite what any other president would be touting as an enviable record. There are two ways to view the political climate in Trump’s Washington:

— THE PRO-TRUMP WORLD:As the president and his allies see it, a second term should be his for the taking. After all, the economy is solid — inflation is low and growth is chugging along, despite some warning signs. The United States has not entered any new wars on Trump’s watch, and America is even speaking to old adversaries. His base is with him, and tonight’s rally in Florida will draw tens of thousands of people in a critical part of a crucial 2020 state. Despite withering pressure from investigations on the Hill, at DOJ and in New York, Republicans are not abandoning the president.

— THE ANTI-TRUMP WORLD:Trump’s foes are just as certain he’s got a losing record. Trade wars with Mexico and China are hurting farmers in the Midwest and pushing up prices for everyone else. A surge of migrants from Central America has swamped the border. The United States could be dragged into a war with Iran at any moment, and talks with North Korea have stalled. Internal Trump polling shows the president trailing in key battleground states, with numbers so bad Trump fired some of his campaign’s pollsters. He’s losing to almost every single Democratic candidate. Impeachment looms on the horizon, and should that happen, some Republicans could begin abandoning him to save themselves.

AND YET,here’s the thing about Donald Trump: After he shocked the world in 2016, nobody dares predict which of the above narratives will prevail in 2020. Democrats could easily nominate a weak challenger. And unlike last time, he now has his party behind him and the trappings of incumbency on his side. With the election 16 months away, anyone who can say for sure that he’s doomed — or destined to return — is either clairvoyant … or smoking something.

THE MAIN EVENT … ORLANDO SENTINEL: “Trump supporters line up 42 hours early for Orlando campaign rally at Amway Center,”by Caroline Glenn and David Harris: “With tents, sleeping bags and coolers of water in tow, Donald Trump supporters began lining up early Monday for Tuesday’s campaign rally in Orlando, nearly two full days before the event. …

“The line had grown to about 50 as of 3 p.m. By 9:30 p.m.,the line ballooned to about 250, with people snaked around to Central Boulevard. Around the same Trump tweeted there were ‘thousands of people already lined up.’” Orlando Sentinel

Good Tuesday morning.

MOOD MUSIC …via WaPo’s Damian Paletta and Heather Long: “Trump has threatened to escalate trade conflicts with China, Mexico, the European Union and Japan, spooking business leaders and leading some to pull back investment. Similarly, budget and debt-ceiling talks with congressional leaders from both parties have sputtered, raising the possibility of another government shutdown in October.

“The uncertainty — and a cooling global economy — led JPMorgan Chaseon Monday to predict that there was a 45 percent chance the U.S. economy would enter a recession in the next year, up from 20 percent at the beginning of 2018.” WaPo

PETER BAKER SETS THE TABLEonNYT A12:“As President Trump kicks off his campaign for a second term on Tuesday with an eardrum-pounding, packed-to-the-rafters rally in Florida, no one doubts that he is the dominant force in the arena today, the one defining the national conversation as no president has done in generations.

“But the coming election is shaping up as a test— not just of the man but of his country. Was Mr. Trump’s victory the last time around a historical fluke or a genuine reflection of America in the modern age? Will the populist surge that lifted him to the White House run its course or will it further transform a nation and its capital in ways that will outlast his presidency? What kind of country do Americans really want at this point?

“Whatever voters thought about Mr. Trump in 2016,they have now had more than enough time to take their measure of him, and their judgment arguably will say more about the mood of the world’s last superpower than whatever roll-the-dice decision may have been made last time. Mr. Trump promised to blow up the system; voters will decide if more disruption is still needed.” NYT

WAPO’S NICK MIROFFandMARIA SACHETTI: “Trump vows mass immigration arrests, removals of ‘millions of illegal aliens’ starting next week”:“President Trump said in a tweet Monday night that U.S. immigration agents are planning to make mass arrests starting ‘next week,’ an apparent reference to a plan in preparation for months that aims to round up thousands of migrant parents and children in a blitz operation across major U.S. cities.

“‘Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millionsof illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,’ Trump wrote, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ‘They will be removed as fast as they come in.’

“Large-scale ICE enforcement operations are typicallykept secret to avoid tipping off targets. In 2018, Trump and other senior officials threatened the mayor of Oakland, Calif., with criminal prosecution for alerting city residents that immigration raids were in the works. … U.S. officials with knowledge of the preparations have said in recent days that the operation was not imminent, and ICE officials said late Monday night that they were not aware that the president planned to divulge their enforcement plans on Twitter.” WaPo

— REALITY CHECK:There’s no way ICE can deport “millions” of people in the near term. In fiscal year 2012, its peak, the agency deported 409,849 individuals. In FY 2017, the first for which we have partial data under Trump, that number was 226,119. And, as NBC’s Julia Ainsley explains, “[I]nterior removals have been down across the country for a simple reason: ICE is running out of space due to the influx of immigrants coming across the border.”

ON THE OTHER SIDE … BIDEN POOL REPORT,from WSJ’s Ken Thomas at 9:56 p.m.: “Prior to Mr. Biden’s arrival, around 6 p.m., about two dozen climate change demonstrators gathered outside the Upper East Side home of Jim Chanos, the president and founder of Kynikos Associates, a prominent short-selling investment firm. …

“The pool was escorted to the dining room of Mr. Chanos’penthouse apartment, where guests mingled, sipped wine and chatted at an adjoining outdoor terrace. Artwork lined the walls of the apartment. … He said he appreciated the donors for ‘writing a check to allow me to compete. And you are putting me in a position to be able to compete nationally.’”

NUGGET OF NEWS:Biden said he had 360,000 donors who have given an average of $55. That comes to $19.8 million in contributions for his campaign.

BTW … REPUBLICANS FOR BIDEN? …“Guests spotted by the pool included: Former Sen. Al D’Amato, R-N.Y.; Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.; Former Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, who served as a VA undersecretary for health during the Obama administration and as VA secretary for President Trump until 2018; billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis; Robert Wolf, founder of 32 Advisors and a top fundraiser for President Obama’s campaigns; Michael Kempner, CEO of MWWPR and a prominent Democratic fundraiser and numerous other attendees.”

A ZINGER FROM ELIZABETH WARREN (@ewarren)at 10:28 p.m.: “I don’t spend time at fancy fundraisers. Instead, I spend my time meeting voters and thanking grassroots donors who chip in what they can. Donate $3 to my campaign, and you might just get a call from me to thank you!”

LINE OF THE DAY … BURGESS EVERETTandHEATHER CAYGLE:“The [DNC] chairman is the face of presidential debate rules that will allow a meditation guru to take the stage next week while a red state Western governor watches on TV. Against that backdrop, a collection of Democratic lawmakers are still aggravated with [DNC chair Tom] Perez after he yielded to the party’s base last year and agreed to dilute their power as superdelegates — a problem Perez is still trying to defuse in private meetings with Democrats.” POLITICO

COMING ATTRACTIONS:TheSENATE FINANCE COMMITTEEhas this hearing today:“The President’s 2019 Trade Policy Agenda and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.”U.S. Trade Rep. Robert Lighthizer will testify at 10:15 a.m. in 215 Dirksen.

IMPEACHMENT WATCH — FRESHMAN REP. KATIE PORTER(D-Calif.) came out for impeachment in a video she posted online. People will make a lot of this, considering she beat Mimi Walters in an R+3 seat. …

… BUT KEEP THIS IN MIND:Just two Democrats in Republican seats have called for impeachment proceedings. The other is Rep. Tom Malinowski, a former Obama State Department official who represents New Jersey’s 7th District.

FOR YOUR RADAR — “Pentagon sending 1,000 more troops as tensions with Iran grow,”by Bryan Bender: “The Pentagon is dispatching an additional 1,000 troops to the Middle East in response to recent attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman that the United States blames on Iran.

“‘The recent Iranian attacks validate the reliable,credible intelligence we have received on hostile behavior by Iranian forces and their proxy groups that threaten United States personnel and interests across the region,’ acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan said in a statement announcing the deployment. The additional forces are ‘for defensive purposes to address air, naval, and ground-based threats in the Middle East,’ the statement added.” POLITICO

— “Pentagon claims new photos show Iran responsible for tanker attacks,”by Wesley Morgan

THE BIG PICTURE — NAHAL TOOSI: “Iran tests Trump’s desire to actually strike a new deal”:“President Donald Trump is at a make-or-break moment with Iran. Tehran said Monday it will soon take steps that likely violate the 2015 nuclear deal Trump himself abandoned, an announcement that came just days after the U.S. accused the Islamist-led country of sabotaging international oil tankers. The Pentagon announced Monday that it is sending 1,000 more troops to the Middle East for ‘defensive purposes.’ In Europe, meanwhile, leaders are starting to acknowledge that they may have to walk away from the nuclear agreement or devise a new one.

“The confluence of events will test Trump’s weak appetitefor military action, his ability to rally allies he has frequently snubbed and his seriousness about actually striking the better deal with the Iranians that he once promised. Along the way, Trump must win over officials well-aware of his history of misstatements and uneasy about relying on U.S. intelligence when a potential new Middle East war could result.” POLITICO

KUSHNER SPLATS EGG ON TRUMP’S FACE ON THE WORLD STAGE,via Barak Ravid in Axios:“White House will not invite Israeli officials to Bahrain conference”:“The White House has decided not to invite the Israeli Minister of Finance Moshe Kahlon or other Israeli government officials to the Bahrain conference in Manama on June 25, where it plans to launch the economic part of the Trump administration’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, U.S. officials told me.

“Why it matters:This is a major setback for the White House’s vision for the much-anticipated Bahrain conference, which will now take place without Israeli or Palestinian officials.” Axios

THE JUICE …

— IN 2018,Texas GOP Rep.KENNY MARCHANTwon reelection by 3 percentage points — his closest margin in 14 years in Congress. Marchant’s district, which is north of Dallas and Fort Worth, is shifting, strategists in both parties say, and Democrats are newly competitive.KIM OLSON,a veteran, is running against Marchant in 2020, attempting to meld her military background with an anti-Trump message.OLSONcloses out her video — which is primarily about her military service — saying she is running because “this president is attacking everything we’ve fought for over the years.”

OLSONlost a 2018 statewide race for agriculture commissioner by 5 points, so she’s a practiced candidate. But 2020 is a presidential year, and Marchant won by nearly 17 points in 2016. This seat could be one to watch.Video

— WASHINGTON INC.: DOUG THORNELL, OREN SHURandEMILY CAMPBELLwill be the new heads ofSKDKNICKERBOCKER’Spolitical consulting department. The trio will lead an expansion of the firm’s political advertising work.

TRUMP’S TUESDAY —The president and first lady Melania Trump will leave the White House at 3:50 p.m. en route to Orlando. Trump will speak at a 2020 reception at 7:30 p.m. and campaign kickoff event at the Amway Center at 8 p.m. Afterward, they will leave for Miami to spend the night in Doral, Fla.

KNOWING KELLY KNIGHT CRAFT — “Trump’s U.N. nominee was ‘absent’ ambassador,”by Lauren Gardner: “President Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations – current U.S. ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft – was frequently absent from her post in Ottawa, raising questions about her level of engagement with the job, according to officials in both the United States and Canada.

“State Department officials acknowledge her frequent travelsoutside of Canada, but said many of the trips were related to the new North American trade deal. Her absences from her official post are likely to be an issue in her confirmation hearing, which is now scheduled for Wednesday.

“Federal Aviation Administration recordsobtained under the Freedom of Information Act by POLITICO show that a private jet registered to Craft’s husband and used by the ambassador made 128 flights between the United States and Canada during a 15-month span of her tenure in Ottawa, the equivalent of a roundtrip once a week.

“Some of the trips correspond with dates of events Craft attendedin her home state of Kentucky – such as the Kentucky Derby and a media interview at a University of Kentucky basketball center named for her husband Joe Craft, a coal billionaire – but neither she nor he, through their spokespeople, would confirm how many of the flights involved her travel.” POLITICO

THE INVESTIGATIONS …“Paul Manafort Seemed Headed to Rikers. Then the Justice Department Intervened,”by NYT’s William Rashbaum and Katie Benner: “[L]ast week, Manhattan prosecutors were surprised to receive a letter from the second-highest law enforcement official in the country inquiring about Mr. Manafort’s case. The letter, from Jeffrey A. Rosen, Attorney General William P. Barr’s new top deputy, indicated that he was monitoring where Mr. Manafort would be held in New York.

“And then, on Monday, federal prison officials weighed in,telling the Manhattan district attorney’s office that Mr. Manafort, 70, would not be going to Rikers.

“Instead, he will await his trial at a federal lockup in Manhattan or at the Pennsylvania federal prisonwhere he is serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence for wide-ranging financial schemes, according to people with knowledge of the matter.” NYT

IMMIGRATION FILES … WAPO’S MARIA SACCHETTIinCiudad Juárez, Mexico:“‘The American Dream has turned into hell’: In test of a deterrent, Juarez scrambles before U.S. dumps thousands of migrants”:“This gritty, industrial city on the banks of the murky Rio Grande is bracing for the Trump administration to dump thousands of migrants from Central America and other lands here under a new agreement to curb mass migration to the United States. But frantic Mexican officials say they likely cannot handle the rapid influx, as they are desperate for more shelter space, food and supplies.

“With days to prepare, a top state officialsaid he expects a fivefold increase in the number of migrants who will be sent to Juarez as a result of the expansion of the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols. The program, which is under court challenge, sends migrants who are seeking refuge in the United States back across the border into Mexico to await their asylum hearings.

“More than 200 migrants were sent backto Juarez on Thursday, double the previous day, and officials expect as many as 500 migrants each day will be returned from El Paso to Juarez in coming weeks.”

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION — “Number of workplace safety inspectors fall under Trump,”by Rebecca Rainey: “Despite assurances from Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta that he will boost the number of OSHA compliance officers this fiscal year, new data shows the number of inspectors has declined. According to statistics that POLITICO obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the number of compliance safety and health officers tasked with conducting workplace inspections at the agency had fallen in April to 870. That’s down from the 875 safety inspectors that OSHA reported in January.” POLITICO

WHAT ERIC GREITENS IS READING … “Former FBI agent who investigated Greitens indicted for perjury, evidence tampering,”by the Kansas City Star’s Crystal Thomas and Bryan Lowry: “The former FBI agent chosen by the St. Louis City prosecutor to investigate former Gov. Eric Greitens has been indicted on six counts of perjury and one count of tampering with physical evidence, according to documents unsealed Monday in St. Louis City Circuit Court.

“William Don Tisaby, 66, a private investigator,was hired by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner to assist in a probe following allegations that Greitens took a partially nude photograph of a woman without her consent while they were having an affair in 2015. The woman was allegedly bound and blindfolded when the photo was taken, and she says he threatened to release it if she ever spoke about the affair.

“Gardner charged Greitens with invasion of privacy.But the charge was dropped when Greitens’ defense team accused Tisaby of perjury and said it planned to call Gardner at trial as a witness. …

“In the court documents made public Monday,[St. Louis Circuit Court judge Gerard] Carmody accuses Tisaby, 66, of lying multiple times during a deposition and concealing notes from Greitens’ legal team.” Kansas City Star

MEGATREND:“Africa is projected to overtake Asia in births by 2060, and will account for half of all babies being born in the world by the year 2100,” via Pew Research Center’s Tony Flores

MEDIAWATCH — Jeet Heeris joining The Nation as national affairs correspondent andJane McAleveyas strikes correspondent, covering the labor movement. This is D.D. Guttenplan’s first week as new editor at The Nation.Jeet’s first piece

PER CALIFORNIA PLAYBOOK: “SPOTTED:Polish president President Andrzej Duda dining at John’s Grill in San Francisco on Sunday – with an entourage of 30 security officers in tow. Sources said the President – on a Western swing that also included a trip to Nevada — dined on raw oysters and a porterhouse steak, downed with Anchor Steam beer.”

TRANSITIONS — NSC DEPARTURE LOUNGE:The White House’s top Russia hand,Fiona Hill,is leaving the administration at the end of August, per the NYT’s Peter Baker. She’ll be replaced by NSC arms control specialistTim Morrison,according to Baker, indicating Trump’s possible focus on replacing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty.

… Amy Daceywill be the inaugural executive director of AU’s Sine Institute of Policy and Politics. She is the former CEO of the DNC and former exec director of EMILY’s List. …Jeb Fainhas started as Trump war room communications director at American Bridge. He most recently was comms director for House Majority PAC.

SPOTTEDat USGLC’s State Leaders Summit on Monday: HHS Secretary Alex Azar, Rick Santorum, Jennifer Granholm, Dan Glickman, Norm Coleman, Steve Hadley, Jane Harman, Nancy Lindborg, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Nagata, Melanne Verveer, Frank Sesno, Barbara Stephenson, Sarah Thorn, Leyla Santiago, Jonathan Capehart, Selina Jackson, Jenifer Healy and Liz Schrayer.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD — Justin Barasky,a senior adviser at the DSCC and a Sherrod Brown and Priorities USA alum, andLauren Durham,former campaign manager for Kathleen Clyde’s campaign for secretary of state in Ohio, welcomed Henry Scott Barasky.Pic…Another pic

BIRTHWEEK (was yesterday):Spectator USA Life & Arts Editor Dominic Green turned 49 (hat tip: Matt McDonald) …(was Friday):NPR’s Tom Gjelten turned 71

BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Fred Barbash,legal affairs writer for The Washington Post.A trend he thinks deserves more attention:“Sleep deprivation, often purposeful, especially in Washington. It saps our brains, causes accidents, turns young people into cranky old people and makes old people even older. It also severely reduces male reproductive capacity. Seriously. It’s a threat to the species.”Playbook Plus Q&A

BIRTHDAYS:Dina Powell … Niall Stanage, WH columnist at The Hill, is 45 … Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.) is 68 … Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) is 7-0 … Nick Johnston, editor at Axios, is 42 … Millie Harmon Meyers (h/ts Ben Chang) … Megan Mitchell … bipartisan Senate alumni birthday: former Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is 82 and former Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) is 69 … David Drucker is 48 … Geri M. Joseph is 96 … Reed Cordish is 45 … Scooter Braun is 38 … Ajashu Thomas … David Wood … Kate Knudson … POLITICO’s Claire Okrongly and Shannon Rafferty … Jim Stinson (h/t Jon Conradi) … Chris Allen … Bob Scutari … WNYC’s Charlie Herman … author Joanne Lipman, former EIC of USA Today … The Atlantic’s Rachel Alben (h/t Michael Falcone) … Bulgarian President Rumen Radev is 56 …

… John McCarthy,COS for Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) … Clare Bresnahan (h/t Jill Bader) … POLITICO Europe’s Blanca Esteban Renedo is 31 … Heather Louise Finch … CNN’s DJ Judd, who is moving to Iowa in two weeks, is 29 (h/t Betsy Klein) … Kevin Landrigan … Sophia Templin … Christopher Byrd … Will Kinzel, VP at MillerCoors … Jennifer Carignan … BuzzFeed’s Mary Ann Georgantopoulos … Bert Gomez … Tom Readmond … Michael Van Der Galien … Jeremy Bronson … Meryl Governski … Craig Reed … Shubha Kamala Prasad … Narric Rome … Jason Kello … Daniel Epstein is 35 … Max Stahl is 32 … Lisa Barron … Ron Rosenblith (h/t Jon Haber) … Dick Mark … AJ Goodman (h/t Teresa Vilmain)

Anna Palmer @apalmerdc

Jake Sherman @JakeSherman

Daniel Lippman @dlippman

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[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/03/22/washington-post-questions-linger-over-whether-labor-nominee-alexander-acosta-will-stand-up-for-workers-20/

Washington Post: Questions linger over whether labor nominee Alexander Acosta will stand up for workers

President Trump nominated former U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta to lead the Labor Department. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)

When President Trump announced that his new pick for labor secretary would be Alexander Acosta, a conservative law school dean with a deep background in public service, some career staffers at the Labor Department, Democrats and workers advocates breathed a sigh of relief.

The former U.S. attorney had served on the National Labor Relations Board, which made him familiar with labor laws and put him in stark contrast with Trump’s first choice: Andrew Puzder, a vocal fast-food chief executive who opposed substantially raising the minimum wage and rules that would expand eligibility for overtime pay.

But as Acosta’s Wednesday confirmation hearing approaches, some labor groups say questions remain about how much the more reserved dean — who “plays it close to the vest,” as one friend and colleague put it — will do to protect workers.

“Things were a lot clearer with Mr. Puzder,” said Kendall Fells, a national organizing director of the Fight for $15, a group that advocates for a higher minimum wage. “Workers have a list of questions they want to ask Mr. Acosta.”

[Five things you should know about Alexander Acosta, Trump’s new pick for labor secretary]

Fells and other worker advocates say they want to know how Acosta, 48, would protect immigrant workers from deportation or retaliation, citing the Trump administration’s tough stance on immigration.

Others say they wonder whether Acosta would provide a voice for workers at a time when Republicans and business groups are trying to unravel some of the protections finalized under the Obama administration.

They want to know where Acosta stands, for example, on some of the Labor Department policies that have been in limbo since the election. Those include a rule that would expand the number of workers who qualify for overtime pay and a regulation that would require brokers working with retirement savers to put their clients’ interests first.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a letter to Acosta this week that she’s concerned he “will simply fall in line with President Trump’s anti-worker statements and policies, which would be disastrous for the millions of American workers who rely on the Department of Labor’s enforcement of labor law.”

Warren, other Democrats and some consumer advocates say their concerns about his potential leadership style are illustrated in one of the issues he faced while heading the civil rights division of the Justice Department. An investigation from the Office of the Inspector General found that Acosta, who was the assistant attorney general of the division from 2003 to 2005, “did not take sufficient action” to supervise a former senior division official who was “inappropriately” hiring mostly conservative attorneys for the department.

“It took years for the civil rights division to be rebuilt and for it to return to its core focus of enforcing civil rights in an objective matter,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and an attorney at the civil rights division during Acosta’s tenure. “At the end of the day, this was all conduct that played out under Mr. Acosta’s watch.”

Acosta did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.

But some friends and colleagues in his home town of Miami say that while Acosta is a private person, he is a fair leader who respects others’ views, even when they are different from his own. Ediberto Roman, one of the founding faculty members of the law school at Florida International University where Acosta is the dean, said Acosta has always been supportive of his work advocating for the rights of minorities, including undocumented immigrants. Roman said that in speeches and events, Acosta is more likely to emphasize the accomplishments of his students and colleagues than he is to tout his own work.

“He’s a straight-laced, honest guy who will do everything he can to do right by people,” he said.

Acosta advocated for the civil rights of Muslim Americans several times throughout his time at the civil rights division and at the law school. In 2004, for instance, he intervened with the Justice Department to help defend an 11-year-old girl in Oklahoma who was suing her school district for requiring her to remove her hijab on the grounds that it violated the school’s dress code. The school district settled with the Justice Department and adjusted its dress code.

Acosta, who is Cuban American, would fill one of the last major openings for Trump’s Cabinet and would be the only Hispanic member, if confirmed. The Labor Department has lacked a top leader for two months in part because of Puzder’s multiple hearing delays and his eventual withdrawal from the running after he lost of the support of several Republicans who were concerned about his record, including the revelation that he once hired an undocumented worker in his home.

After earning his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard, Acosta established his career in Washington by working as an associate at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis and as an adjunct professor for George Mason University’s law school. Acosta also clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., back when Alito was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.

He returned to Miami in 2005 as a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida and led several high-profile cases, including the fraud and conspiracy charges against Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the prosecution of accused terrorist Jose Padilla and the case against Colombian drug cartel members Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela. In 2009 he joined the law school.

Acosta became the chairman of the board of directors for U.S. Century Bank, a Hispanic-owned community bank based in South Florida, in 2013. The bank was struggling then with mortgage loans that soured after the Great Recession, but Acosta helped turn the bank around by securing a capitalization deal that helped the bank stay in business and remain an independent community bank, said Ken Thomas a bank consultant in South Florida.

“You’ve got a good person, who is smart … listens to the pros and cons and then makes a decision,” Thomas said.

Read more:

Trump administration calls the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional in filing

In his first budget, Trump to struggling seniors: You’ll be on your own

Why the Fed rate hike won’t help savers any time soon

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[topinforma]

New Post has been published on Mortgage News

New Post has been published on http://bit.ly/2nQ8UkF

Questions linger over whether labor nominee Alexander Acosta will stand up for workers

President Trump nominated former U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta to lead the Labor Department. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)

When President Trump announced that his new pick for labor secretary would be Alexander Acosta, a conservative law school dean with a deep background in public service, some career staffers at the Labor Department, Democrats and workers advocates breathed a sigh of relief.

The former U.S. attorney had served on the National Labor Relations Board, which made him familiar with labor laws and put him in stark contrast with Trump’s first choice: Andrew Puzder, a vocal fast-food chief executive who opposed substantially raising the minimum wage and rules that would expand eligibility for overtime pay.

But as Acosta’s Wednesday confirmation hearing approaches, some labor groups say questions remain about how much the more reserved dean — who “plays it close to the vest,” as one friend and colleague put it — will do to protect workers.

“Things were a lot clearer with Mr. Puzder,” said Kendall Fells, a national organizing director of the Fight for $15, a group that advocates for a higher minimum wage. “Workers have a list of questions they want to ask Mr. Acosta.”

[Five things you should know about Alexander Acosta, Trump’s new pick for labor secretary]

Fells and other worker advocates say they want to know how Acosta, 48, would protect immigrant workers from deportation or retaliation, citing the Trump administration’s tough stance on immigration.

Others say they wonder whether Acosta would provide a voice for workers at a time when Republicans and business groups are trying to unravel some of the protections finalized under the Obama administration.

They want to know where Acosta stands, for example, on some of the Labor Department policies that have been in limbo since the election. Those include a rule that would expand the number of workers who qualify for overtime pay and a regulation that would require brokers working with retirement savers to put their clients’ interests first.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a letter to Acosta this week thatshe’s concerned he “will simply fall in line with President Trump’s anti-worker statements and policies, which would be disastrous for the millions of American workers who rely on the Department of Labor’s enforcement of labor law.”

Warren, other Democrats and some consumer advocates say their concerns about his potential leadership style are illustrated in one of the issues he faced while heading the civil rights division of the Justice Department. An investigation from the Office of the Inspector General found that Acosta, who was the assistant attorney general of the division from 2003 to 2005, “did not take sufficient action” to supervise a former senior division official who was “inappropriately” hiring mostly conservative attorneys for the department.

“It took years for the civil rights division to be rebuilt and for it to return to its core focus of enforcing civil rights in an objective matter,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and an attorney at the civil rights division during Acosta’s tenure. “At the end of the day, this was all conduct that played out under Mr. Acosta’s watch.”

Acosta did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.

But some friends and colleagues in his home town of Miami say that while Acosta is a private person, he is a fair leader who respects others’ views, even when they are different from his own. Ediberto Roman, one of the founding faculty members of the law school at Florida International University where Acosta is the dean, said Acosta has always been supportive of his work advocating for the rights of minorities, including undocumented immigrants. Roman said that in speeches and events, Acosta is more likely to emphasize the accomplishments of his students and colleagues than he is to tout his own work.

“He’s a straight-laced, honest guy who will do everything he can to do right by people,” he said.

Acosta advocated for the civil rights of Muslim Americans several times throughout his time at the civil rights division and at the law school. In 2004, for instance, he intervened with the Justice Department to help defend an 11-year-old girl in Oklahoma who was suing her school district for requiring her to remove her hijab on the grounds that it violated the school’s dress code. The school district settled with the Justice Department and adjusted its dress code.

Acosta, who is Cuban American, would fill one of the last major openings for Trump’s Cabinet and would be the only Hispanic member, if confirmed. The Labor Department has lacked a top leader for two months in part because of Puzder’s multiple hearing delays and his eventual withdrawal from the running after he lost of the support of several Republicans who were concerned about his record, including the revelation that he once hired an undocumented worker in his home.

After earning his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard, Acosta established his career in Washington by working as an associate at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis and as an adjunct professor for George Mason University’s law school. Acosta also clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., back when Alito was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.

He returned to Miami in 2005 as a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida and led several high-profile cases, including the fraud and conspiracy charges against Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the prosecution of accused terrorist Jose Padilla and the case against Colombian drug cartel members Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela. In 2009 he joined the law school.

Acosta became the chairman of the board of directors for U.S. Century Bank, a Hispanic-owned community bank based in South Florida, in 2013. The bank was struggling then with mortgage loans that soured after the Great Recession, but Acosta helped turn the bank around by securing a capitalization deal that helped the bank stay in business and remain an independent community bank, said Ken Thomas a bank consultant in South Florida.

“You’ve got a good person, who is smart … listens to the pros and cons and then makes a decision,” Thomas said.

Read more:

Trump administration calls the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional in filing

In his first budget, Trump to struggling seniors: You’ll be on your own

Why the Fed rate hike won’t help savers any time soon

[rmildner46]

OK, let’s take a deep breath.

These past few days our TV screens have been filled with images of angry voters confronting and even shouting down Republican members of Congress in town halls around the country. Many Republican elected officials have dismissed the sessions as being populated by leftist agitators and professional demonstrators.  Trump’s Press Secretary, Sean Spicer called them “astro turf” operations as opposed to grass roots and predicted that they would have no impact on the administration and Republican legislators.  Crowd shots of many of these meetings would appear to contradict this premise and in fact they have the reminiscent feel of Tea Party outrage experienced by Democrats in the summer of 2009, and similarly dismissed at the time.  Of course the Tea Party went on to have a significant impact on our national scene while the subsequent liberal oriented Occupy Wall Street movement went nowhere.  Is this a one-time phenomenon that allows dissatisfied liberals to vent and feel better about themselves or is this the beginning of an influential movement? The answer lies in a comparison with the Tea Party.

The Tea Party grew out of middle class anger at the economic meltdown of 2007-8.  Millions of hard working Americans watched jobs disappear, retirement savings evaporate and years’ worth of home equity dissolve before their eyes.  Then at the end of 2008 and into the Obama administration steps were taken to save the very financial institutions that were at the heart of the crisis and in the eyes of many, its cause.  Millions looked on in anger as, after a massive financial bailout, business seemed to go on as before for most of the executives who in the eyes of many had precipitated the crisis.  The grass roots portion of the Tea Party grew out of these frustrations and was anti-incumbent and not initially anti Democrat in focus.  It was a “big tent” movement with few litmus tests and no real orthodoxy.  You just had to be “mad as hell at our government.”  However, by the summer of 2009 the movement had been quietly taken over by a national infrastructure funded in large part by the Koch brothers and associated right wing donors.  This organization provided at least $11 million to support the formation of local chapters and regional and even national meetings.  At this point the movement turned Republican and other traditional issues like God and guns entered the mix.  It also coincided with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which was quickly derided as “Obamacare” and just as quickly became the second pillar of protest.

During the summer of 2009 Democratic legislators were flayed alive by crowds shouting then down at town halls, focusing on three primary issues: the financial bailout, the ballooning deficit and Obamacare.  None of these issues could be explained in a sound bite, and the optics of the meetings was terrible for the Democrats.  The ACA ran over 2000 pages and quite frankly none of the legislators had actually read it. Even if they had, the mechanism it embraced could not be explained in a sentence or two, or even a paragraph.  It could not be defended against the false charges levelled against it (remember “death panels”?).  Similarly, how do you explain the complexities of our financial system or Keynesian economics to an unruly crowd of people angry because they don’t have a job or lost their savings?  The result is history.  The Republican Party fueled by Tea Party anger went on to sweep the 2010 elections at both a state and national level and meanwhile the Tea Party turned the Republican Party away from its conservative roots toward a movement of angry nationalism that embraced Donald Trump.  This Republican Party bears no resemblance to the party that elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, but it has the advantage of having broad popular support on many issues.

So, in light of this, let’s all take a deep breath and consider the situation.  To succeed the current protest movement must do three things: (1) focus on no more than 2-3 core issues that can gain broad support and avoid all other litmus tests; (2) prove that it has the staying power to remain focused through the 2018 by-elections; and (3) find funding.

The movement already has a potent first issue.  After six full years of implementation the ACA has proven to be more popular in practice than in preview.  The 20 million or so people who have gained coverage along with their friends and families will not now let it go without a fight.  The Republicans have promised to repeal and replace it with a program that is better.  Now they have to deliver and anything they propose will be vulnerable to the same sound bite criticisms that plagued Obamacare.  Trumpcare better be good! Problem is that it will be subject to the same difficult tradeoffs that any healthcare reform will be.  Our healthcare delivery system is fatally flawed and any reform will produce winners and losers.  A focus on the losers is a potent political weapon for any party out of power.  The town hall held by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas provided the movement with a perfect sound bite.  A woman stood up and asked Cotton about the new plan and Cotton assured her that it would include “adequate access to healthcare services for everyone”. In response the woman said to him “I want what you have”.  The perfect demand.  What the second (or third pillar) is, is less clear than what it is not.  It is not gay or transgender rights, it is not dealing with illegal immigrants, black lives matter, voter suppression, or equal pay or access to abortion or even the environment at this point.  As worthy as these issues are, they do not generally cross party lines, the way access to health care now does.  Viable issues must meet two criteria: they must enjoy broad support and they must be reducible to a sound bite.  There are two current candidates:  Trump’s Russia connection and Trump’s taxes.  Both of these issues cross party lines and will fester if not addressed.  The beauty of the taxes issue is that it is not likely to go away because for some reason Trump cannot release his tax returns.  The Russia issue could dissipate if a thorough investigation reveals no untoward ties.  On the other hand, the Republican led tax “reform” along with proposals to change Social Security and/or Medicare could be the gifts that keep on giving.

Elections are determined more by who votes than how people vote, because demographic groups are virtually programmed to vote in a predictable way.  Trump won because groups programmed to support him turned out en masse while the groups who supported Obama twice didn’t show up at the polls this time in the same numbers.  Problem is that Democrats as a group don’t generally show up at by-elections in large enough quantities.  So the question is, can the current enthusiastic opposition sustain itself for another year and a half.  It did during the 2006 by-election during the Bush administration when the Democrats won a majority of the House, Senate, governorships and state legislatures in a sweeping victory.  Now the task is more difficult because the Republican sweep in 2010 allowed them to redistrict and create more safe Republican seats.  And in the Senate, 25 Democrat Senators or up for election and only 9 Republican.  But a Democratic victory in the 2018 election will be vital to sustaining the movement through the next presidential election cycle.

The key to sustainability may well lie in funding.  As previously mentioned, the Tea Party fell into a funding infrastructure that was already in place as it emerged.  This resistance movement (as yet unnamed) must create one.  Unlike the few large contributors that funded the Tea Party, this movement could turn to the grass roots money machine that funded the Bernie Sanders campaign.  If these millions of small contributors could become energized by a sharply focused movement concentrating not necessarily on the central issues of his campaign, but on resistance to the Trump administration, it could find the funding source it so desperately needs to sustain itself.

Meanwhile the Trump administration faces strong headwinds.  The first 30 days has been memorable largely for the sense of internal chaos it presents. The rollout of the travel ban was a total disaster and the visuals of the deportations that will follow the change in policy toward illegal immigrants will be a public relations nightmare as the media focuses on the inevitable heartbreak. The coal mines are not coming back.  Nor are the low value added jobs that moved to Mexico. The unemployment rate stands at 4.6% and stands a better chance of going up than down.  The Fed will be raising rates.  The Obama administration had positive job growth for 82 consecutive months and that cannot be sustained.  Given the length of the current economic expansion a recession is highly probable during the next four years.  Trump will find that he can only blame the “mess I inherited” for so long before he owns it.  The table is set for the success of a focused, sustained and adequately funded resistance.  Take a deep breath.  Focus yourself.  Prepare for the long haul.  And open your wallet.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: I fear that many of us are hating Donald Trump for the wrong reasons. Multitudes are being swayed by mainstream media-inspired demonization of the new US president, based on selective assumptions and half-truths. US mainstream media, which rarely deviates from supporting the American government’s conduct, however reckless, is now presenting Trump as if an aberration of otherwise egalitarian, sensible, and peace-loving US policies at home and abroad. Trump may be described with all the demeaning terminology that one’s livid imagination can muster: evil, wicked, tyrannical, misogynist, war-mongering, rich buffoon, ‘insulting our allies’, infatuating with ‘dictators’, etc. But do not miss the point. If you chant in the street: ‘I am with her’, with reference to the defeated Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, it means that you are entirely missing the point. To reminisce about the days of Barack Obama, his oratory skills, clean diplomacy and model, ‘relatable’ family, means that you have bought into the mass deception, the intellectual demagoguery, stifling group-think that pushed us to these extremes in the first place. And, within this context, ‘missing the point’, can be quite dangerous, even deadly. It is interesting how the lives of Yemenis suddenly matter, referring to the US military botched a raid late last month against an alleged al-Qaeda stronghold in that country, killing mostly civilians. A beautiful 8-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki, was killed in the operation – planned under the Obama administration, but approved by Trump. Many chose to ignore that Nawar’s 16-year-old brother – both US citizens – was killed by the US military under Obama, a few years earlier. Yemen has been a target in the US so-called ‘war on terror’ for many years. Many civilians have been killed, their deaths only being questioned by human rights groups, seldom mainstream media. Yemen is one of the seven Muslim-majority countries whose citizens are now being barred from entering the US by the ban. The emotional mass response by hundreds of thousands of protesters rejecting such an abhorrent decision is heartening but also puzzling. The US military, under Obama, has shied away from leading major wars but instigated, instead, numerous smaller conflicts. “The whole concept of war has changed under Obama,” ‘LA Times’ quoted a Middle East expert. Obama “got the country out of ‘war,’ at least as we used to see it,” Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said. “We’re now wrapped up in all these different conflicts, at a low level and with no end in sight.” From a numerical context, the Obama administration has dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone. Countries that were bombed included Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia, five of the seven countries whose citizens are now denied entry by Trump. The harm that Obama has done to devastate some of the poorest, war-torn countries on earth by far exceeds what Trump has done so far. Iraq and Libya were not always poor. Their oil, natural gas and other strategic reasoning made them targets for US wars, under four different administrations prior to Trump’s infamous arrival. Libya was the richest in Africa, and relatively stable until Hillary Clinton decided otherwise. Clinton was Secretary of State during Obama’s first term in office. In 2011, she craved for war. A ‘New York Times’ report citing 50 top US officials, left no doubt that Clinton was the ‘catalyst’ in the decision to go to war. Former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, furious about her support for a ‘broader mission’ in Libya, told Obama and Clinton that his army was already engaged in enough wars. “Can I finish the two wars I’m already in before you guys go looking for a third one?” Gates had reportedly said. Now, we are being led to believe that the war enthusiasts of the past are peacemakers, because Trump’s antics are simply too much to bear. The hypocrisy of it all should be obvious, but some insist on ignoring it. Party tribalism and gender politics aside, Trump is a mere extension and a natural progression of previous US administrations’ agendas that launched avoidable, unjust wars, embedded fear, fanned the flames of Islamophobia, hate for immigrants, etc. There is hardly a single bad deed that Trump has carried – or intends to carry out – that does not have roots in another policy championed by previous administrations. Trump’s intention to build a wall at the US-Mexico border is the brainchild of President Bill Clinton. In fact, when Clinton proposed the wall and a crackdown on illegal immigrants in his 1995 State of the Union address, the Democrats gave him a standing ovation. As for Muslims, they have been an easy target for at least 20 years. Muslims were mainly the target of the ‘Secret Evidence law’ in 1996, and ‘suspected’ Muslims were either jailed indefinitely or deported without their lawyers being informed of their charges. It was then called the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, later expanded to give immigration authorities the right to deport even green card holding permanent residents. Few protested the undemocratic, no due-process law – and the media barely covered it – as most of those held were Palestinian activists, intellectuals and university professors. The 1996 Act morphed into the Patriot Act, following the attacks of September 11, 2001. The new Act undermined the very US Constitution, giving the government unprecedented domestic authority to arrest, detain people, and spy on whoever they wished, with no legal consequences. The Obama administration had no qualms using and abusing such undemocratic, unconstitutional powers. But where were the millions protesting ‘fascism’, as they are doing now? Was Obama simply too elegant and articulate to be called ‘fascist’, although he engendered the same domestic policy outlook as Trump? Trump is extremely wealthy, but if one is to examine the US wealth inequality gap under Obama, one perceives some uncomfortable truth. While the rich got richer under Obama, “inequality in America (grew) even at the top,” reports Inequality.org. In fact, the gap between the rich and the super-rich continued to expand, barely phased out by the Great Recession of 2008. In 2014, a Mother Jones headline summed up the tragic story of unfair distribution of wealth in America: “The Richest 0.1 Percent is About to Control More Wealth than the Bottom 90 Percent.” Therefore, Trump is but merely one profiteer from an economy driven by real-estate gamblers and financial chancers. The truth is, today’s political conflict in the US is not a clash over ‘values’, but an elites vs. elites war, par excellence. It is also a war of brands. Obama has spent eight years reversing George W. Bush’s bad brand. Yet, Obama has done so without reversing any of Bush’s disreputable deeds. On the contrary, he has redefined and expanded war, advanced the nuclear arms race and destabilized more countries. Trump is also a brand, an unpromising one. The product – whether military aggressions, racism, islamophobia, anti-immigration policies, economic inequality, etc. – remains unchanged. And that is the uncomfortable truth. http://clubof.info/