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phroyd · 4 years ago

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In Pennsylvania, President Trump and Republicans loyal to him have sought to overturn his defeat by making false claims about widespread voting fraud in Philadelphia.

In Georgia, they have sought to reverse his loss by leveling similar accusations against Atlanta.

In Michigan, Republicans have zeroed in on Detroit, whose elections system the president has falsely portrayed as so flawed that its entire vote should be thrown out.

Lost on no one in those cities is what they have in common: large populations of Black voters.

And there is little ambiguity in the way Mr. Trump and his allies are falsely depicting them as bastions of corruption.

“‘Democrat-led city’ — that’s code for Black,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II, the president of the civil rights group Repairers of the Breach. “They’re coupling ‘city’ and ‘fraud,’ and those two words have been used throughout the years. This is an old playbook being used in the modern time, and people should be aware of that.”

Mr. Trump’s fruitless and pyromaniacal campaign to somehow reverse President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the election rests on the wholesale disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of voters, a disproportionate number of them Black Americans living in the urban centers of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Notably absent from the effort has been any focus on predominantly white suburban areas where the president performed better, but where he lost ground compared with four years ago and arguably lost the election.

The campaign is not Mr. Trump’s alone. He has had help from supporters and allies throughout the country, as well as from the Republican National Committee and its state branches.

And, in a year in which the nation elected its first Black vice president, Senator Kamala Harris of California, the push represents a newly conspicuous phase of a decades-long effort by the Republican Party to expand power through the suppression of voters of color. Those voters have largely remained loyal to the Democrats while Republicans consistently win the white vote.

Over the past several years, that Republicans’ effort has consisted mostly of new state and local election laws that, in the name of combating fraud, have restricted voting in ways that often place a disproportionate burden on Black and Latino voters. Civil rights leaders and Democrats have cited these laws as not-so-subtle efforts at voter suppression, and, in several court cases, judges have agreed.

Mr. Trump has frequently maligned Black leaders and cities. He applauded Black voters who chose not to vote in 2016 even as he has claimed to have done more for Black Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln. And he has not flinched in pursuing what Vanita Gupta, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, called “a return to very blatant Jim Crow tactics — to just try to throw out validly cast ballots and targeting certain cities that are Black-majority.”

Ms. Gupta, who was the chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama, added: “People will say this isn’t the intent, the intent is more partisan. But I think what we are seeing through this election cycle is that in many instances it can appear motivated by partisan politics, but in the end the victims are Black voters.”

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump shared on Twitter his hope that the courts or state lawmakers would throw out the popular vote entirely in states he lost, effectively allowing legislatures to submit their own, pro-Trump slates of electors to the Electoral College.

His lawsuits trying to scuttle the state-by-state certification process that will cement Mr. Biden’s presidency at the Electoral College have failed miserably — including in a stinging dismissal on Saturday by a federal judge in Pennsylvania — and he has put more pressure on local officials to intervene on his behalf.

His effort faces two tests on Monday. Pennsylvania counties are set to submit their certified vote totals. And Michigan’s four-member state canvassing board has its deadline to certify the state’s election results. At least one of its two Republican members has indicated he may not do so because of minor irregularities in Wayne County, which includes Detroit.

State officials and election lawyers say it is highly unlikely that even a failure by the canvassing board to certify would ultimately cost Mr. Biden the state in the Electoral College. But the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the nation’s oldest civil rights law firm, is not taking any chances with the votes from Detroit, with a population that is 79 percent Black.

In a lawsuit it filed against Mr. Trump and his campaign over the weekend, the firm said, “Defendants are openly seeking to disenfranchise Black voters,” adding, “Defendants’ tactics repeat the worst abuses in our nation’s history, as Black Americans were denied a voice in American democracy for most of the first two centuries of the republic.”

The firm said Mr. Trump’s attempt to pressure the Michigan canvassing board and the State Legislature was a violation of the provision against voter intimidation in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

That provision, initially devised to crack down on tactics meant to drive Black and Hispanic voters away from the polls, stipulates that it is illegal “to intimidate, threaten or coerce any person for urging or aiding any person to vote or attempt to vote.” The NAACP Legal Defense Fund is asking the Federal District Court in Washington to order the party to cease its pressure campaign.

“The Voting Rights Act of 1965 flatly prohibits defendants’ efforts to disenfranchise Black people,” the suit reads. “This is a moment that many of us hoped to never face. But here we are, and the law is clear.”

It was the Voting Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson against the wishes of some of his fellow Southern Democrats, that truly started the Republicans on a path to impose limits on voting in the name of fighting election fraud, for which little evidence exists.

The G.O.P. was the original party of civil rights during slavery and afterward. But during the 1960s and beyond it sought to appeal to disaffected, segregationist Democrats through a so-called Southern strategy.

As the percentage of nonwhite voters in the country grew, Democrats began to gain an edge. Republican governors and legislatures enacted a raft of new voting laws, such as requirements that voters at the polls show types of official photo identification that Black and Hispanic people were disproportionately less likely to have.

Mr. Barber said the victory by Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris was all the more remarkable given that it came in the face of those changes in voting laws, showing that “when people have an opportunity to vote, they will clearly vote their interests.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign against the results has focused on moves by state and local officials to make voting easier during the coronavirus pandemic, particularly mail voting.

But the degree to which the president is now pinpointing voters of color for disenfranchisement is striking even by modern Republican standards, especially after he performed better with Black voters this year than he did four years ago.

Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee noted in an interview that Mr. Trump was hyper-focused on his city, which is about 39 percent Black and 19 percent Latino, and not on the predominantly white and Republican-leaning suburbs outside it, which had the same regulations that the Trump campaign was challenging in Milwaukee.

“We are absolutely witnessing in real time an effort to disenfranchise people of color throughout Milwaukee County,” said Mr. Barrett, a Democrat. (The president is also pressing for a recount in Dane County, a predominantly white area of Wisconsin with a considerable college student population.)

In Pennsylvania, Mayor Jim Kenney of Philadelphia, also a Democrat, pointed to the Republican-led General Assembly’s refusal to allow election officials to begin processing absentee ballots early as a direct attack on the vote in his city, which would struggle under the sheer volume of votes while more rural and white counties would have a much easier time processing votes.

“There were efforts right from the very beginning,” Mr. Kenney said.

Perhaps nowhere was the targeting of Black votes more explicit than in Wayne County, Mich., home to Detroit. Though Republicans pressured the Wayne County board of canvassers not to certify the vote, the number of precincts with slightly mismatched data was lower than it was in 2016, when Mr. Trump won the states by a smaller vote margin that was certified unanimously.

In initially resisting the certification of Wayne County’s votes, one of the Republican board members, Monica Palmer, said she was willing to certify every municipality in the county except Detroit, even though some cities, like the largely white Livonia, had worse irregularities. (Ms. Palmer and her fellow Republican on the board, William Hartmann, did vote to certify but have since said they were unfairly pressured into doing so.)

The Republican effort this election cycle, and its focus on disenfranchising so many Black voters, threaten to have a lasting effect on the party, current and former party members said.

“The totality of what Trump is doing and the party is supporting, combined with having the first African-American female vice president — I think it’s difficult to comprehend how much this is going to have an impact,” said Stuart Stevens, a former Republican strategist for Mr. Bush and Mitt Romney who is now an adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project.

Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said, “How do any of the reported candidates for 2024 come back and say, ‘Oh well, we were silent while the president was trying to throw out the votes in Detroit and Milwaukee and Philadelphia, but overlook that, and support the party and support us now’?”

“It makes no sense,” he added, “for getting support in the Black community going forward.”

Phroyd

#gop #election2020 #disenfranchisement #racism

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verrucktzer · 4 years ago

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Democrat party switch lie / myth

Historical face punch courtesy GOP-TEA-PUB TUMBLR. Tumblr keeps taking this fact bomb down. Spread it.

June 17, 1854The Republican Party is officially founded as an abolitionist party to slavery in the United States.

October 13, 1858 During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) said, “If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of the negro. For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. I believe this Government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races.”. Douglas became the Democrat Party’s 1860 presidential nominee.

April 16, 1862 President Lincoln signed the bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. In Congress, almost every Republicanvoted for yes and most Democrats voted no.

July 17, 1862 Over unanimous Democrat opposition, the Republican Congress passed The Confiscation Actstating that slaves of the Confederacy “shall be forever free”.

April 8, 1864 The 13th Amendment banning slavery passed the U.S. Senate with 100% Republican support, 63% Democrat opposition.

January 31, 1865 The 13th Amendment banning slavery passed the U.S. House with unanimous Republican supportand intense Democrat opposition.

November 22, 1865

Republicans denounced the Democrat legislature of Mississippi for enacting the “black codes”which institutionalized racial discrimination.

February 5, 1866

U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens(R-PA) introduced legislation (successfully opposed by Democrat President Andrew Johnson) to implement “40 acres and a mule” relief by distributing land to former slaves.

March 27, 1866

Democrat President Andrew Johnson vetoes of law granting voting rights to blacks.

May 10, 1866

The U.S. House passed the Republicans’ 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the laws to all citizens. 100% of Democrats vote no.

June 8, 1866

The U.S. Senate passed the Republicans’ 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the law to all citizens. 94% of Republicans vote yes and 100% of Democrats vote no.

March 27, 1866

Democrat President Andrew Johnson vetoes of law granting voting rightsto blacks in the District of Columbia.

July 16, 1866 The Republican Congress overrode Democrat President Andrew Johnson’s vetoof legislation protecting the voting rights of blacks.

March 30, 1868 Republicans begin the impeachment trialof Democrat President Andrew Johnson who declared, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government of white men.”

September 12, 1868 Civil rights activist

Tunis Campbell

and 24 other blacks in the Georgia Senate (all Republicans) were expelled by the Democrat majority and would later be reinstated by the Republican Congress.

October 7, 1868 Republicans denounced Democrat Party’s national campaign theme: “This is a white man’s country: Let white men rule.”

October 22, 1868 While campaigning for re-election, Republican U.S. Rep. James Hinds (R-AR) was assassinated by Democrat terrorists who organized as the Ku Klux Klan. Hinds was the first sitting congressman to be murdered while in office.

December 10, 1869 Republican Gov. John Campbell of the Wyoming Territory signed the FIRST-in-nation law granting women the right to vote and hold public office.

February 3, 1870 After passing the House with 98% Republican support and 97% Democrat opposition, Republicans’ 15th Amendmentwas ratified, granting the vote to ALL Americans regardless of race.

February 25, 1870 Hiram Rhodes Revels(R-MS) becomes the first black to be seated in the United States Senate.

May 31, 1870 President U.S. Grant signed the Republicans’Enforcement Act providing stiff penalties for depriving any American’s civil rights.

June 22, 1870 Ohio Rep. Williams Lawrence created the U.S. Department of Justice to safeguard the civil rights of blacks against Democrats in the South.

September 6, 1870

Women votedin Wyoming in first election after women’s suffrage signed into law by Republican Gov. John Campbell.

February 1, 1871

Rep. Jefferson Franklin Long (R-GA) became the first black to speakon the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

February 28, 1871

The Republican Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1871providing federal protection for black voters.

April 20, 1871

The Republican Congress enacted the Ku Klux Klan Act, outlawing Democrat Party-affiliated terrorist groups which oppressed blacks and all those who supported them.

October 10, 1871

Following warnings by Philadelphia Democrats against black voting, Republican civil rights activist Octavius Cattowas murdered by a Democrat Party operative. His military funeral was attended by thousands.

October 18, 1871

After violence against Republicans in South Carolina, President Ulysses Grant deployed U.S. troopsto combat Democrat Ku Klux Klan terrorists.

November 18, 1872

Susan B. Anthonywas arrested for voting after boasting to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she voted for “Well, I have gone and done it — positively voted the straight Republican ticket.”January 17, 1874

Armed Democrats seized the Texas state government, ending Republican efforts to racially integrate.

September 14, 1874

Democrat white supremacists seized the Louisiana statehouse in attempt to overthrow the racially-integrated administration of Republican Governor William Kellogg. Twenty-seven were killed.

March 1, 1875

The Civil Rights Act of 1875, guaranteeing access to public accommodations without regard to race, was signed by Republican President U.S. Grant and passed with 92% Republican support over 100% Democrat opposition.

January 10, 1878

U.S. Senator Aaron Sargent (R-CA) introduced the Susan B. Anthony amendment for women’s suffrage. The Democrat-controlled Senate defeated it four times before the election of a Republican House and Senate that guaranteed its approval in 1919.

February 8, 1894

The Democrat Congress and Democrat President Grover Cleveland joined to repeal the Republicans’ Enforcement Actwhich had enabled blacks to vote.

January 15, 1901

Republican Booker T. Washingtonprotested the Alabama Democrat Party’s refusal to permit voting by blacks.

May 29, 1902

Virginia Democrats implemented a new state constitution condemned by Republicans as illegal, reducing black voter registrationby almost 90%.

February 12, 1909

On the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, black Republicans and women’s suffragists Ida Wells and Mary Terrellco-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

May 21, 1919

The Republican House passed a constitutional amendmentgranting women the vote with 85% of Republicans and only 54% of Democrats in favor. In the Senate 80% of Republicans voted yes and almost half of Democrats voted no.

August 18, 1920

The Republican-authored 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote became part of the Constitution. Twenty-six of the 36 states needed to ratify had Republican-controlled legislatures.

January 26, 1922

The House passed a bill authored by U.S. Rep. Leonidas Dyer(R-MO) making lynching a federal crime. Senate Democrats blocked it by filibuster.

June 2, 1924

Republican President Calvin Coolidgesigned a bill passed by the Republican Congress granting U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans.

October 3, 1924

Republicans denounced three-time Democrat presidential nominee William Jennings Bryanfor defending the Ku Klux Klan at the 1924 Democratic National Convention.

June 12, 1929

First Lady Lou Hoover invited the wife of black Rep. Oscar De Priest(R-IL) to tea at the White House, sparking protests by Democrats across the country.

August 17, 1937

Republicans organized opposition to former Ku Klux Klansman and Democrat U.S. Senator Hugo Black who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by FDR. Black’s Klan backgroundwas hidden until after confirmation.

June 24, 1940

The Republican Party platform called for the integration of the Armed Forces. For the balance of his terms in office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt(D) refused to order it.

August 8, 1945

Republicans condemned Harry Truman’s surprise use of the atomic bomb in Japan. It began two days after the Hiroshima bombing when former Republican President Herbert Hooverwrote that “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”

May 17, 1954

Earl Warren, California’s three-term Republican Governor and 1948 Republican vice presidential nominee, was nominated to be Chief Justice delivered the landmark decision “Brown v. Board of Education”.

November 25, 1955

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administrationbanned racial segregation of interstate bus travel.

March 12, 1956

Ninety-seven Democrats in Congress condemned the Supreme Court’s “Brown v. Board of Education” decision and pledged (Southern Manifesto)to continue segregation.

June 5, 1956

Republican federal judge Frank Johnson ruled in favorof the Rosa Parks decision striking down the “blacks in the back of the bus” law.

November 6, 1956

African-American civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathyvoted for Republican Dwight Eisenhower for President.

September 9, 1957

President Eisenhower signed the Republican Party’s 1957 Civil Rights Act.

September 24, 1957

Sparking criticism from Democrats such as Senators John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, President Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to Little Rock, AR to force Democrat Governor Orval Faubusto integrate their public schools.

May 6, 1960

President Eisenhower signed the Republicans’ Civil Rights Act of 1960, overcoming a 125-hour, ’round-the-clock filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats.

May 2, 1963

Republicans condemned Bull Connor, the Democrat “Commissioner of Public Safety” in Birmingham, AL for arresting over 2,000 black schoolchildrenmarching for their civil rights.

September 29, 1963

Gov. George Wallace (D-AL) defied an order by U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson(appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower) to integrate Tuskegee High School.

June 9, 1964

Republicans condemned the 14-hour filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Actby U.S. Senator and former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd (D-WV), who served in the Senate until his death in 2010.

June 10, 1964

Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) criticized the Democrat filibuster against 1964 Civil Rights Act and called on Democrats to stop opposing racial equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced and approved by a majority of Republicans in the Senate. The Act was opposed by most southern Democrat senators, several of whom were proud segregationists — one of them being Al Gore Sr. (D). President Lyndon B. Johnson relied on Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader from Illinois, to get the Act passed.

August 4, 1965

Senate Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) overcame Democrat attempts to block 1965 Voting Rights Act. Ninety-four percent of Republicans voted for the landmark civil rights legislation while 27% of Democrats opposed. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, abolishing literacy tests and other measures devised by Democrats to prevent blacks from voting, was signed into law. A higher percentage of Republicans voted in favor.

February 19, 1976

President Gerald Ford formally rescinded President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s notorious Executive Order 9066authorizing the internment of over 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII.

September 15, 1981

President Ronald Reagan established the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universitiesto increase black participation in federal education programs.

June 29, 1982

President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extensionof the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

August 10, 1988

President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, compensating Japanese-Americans for the deprivation of their civil rights and property during the World War II internment ordered by FDR.

November 21, 1991

President George H. W. Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991to strengthen federal civil rights legislation.

August 20, 1996

A bill authored by U.S. Rep. Susan Molinari (R-NY) to prohibit racial discrimination in adoptions, part of Republicans’ “Contract With America”, became law.

July 2, 2010

Clinton says Byrd joined KKK to help him get elected

Just a “fleeting association”. Nothing to see here.

Only a willing fool (and there quite a lot out there) would accept and recite the nonsensical that one bright, sunny day Democrats and Republicans just up and decided to “switch” political positions and cite the “Southern Strategy” as the uniform knee-jerk retort. Even today, it never takes long for a Democrat to play the race card purely for political advantage.Thanks to the Democrat Party, blacks have the distinction of being the only group in the United States whose history is a work-in-progress.

The idea that “the Dixiecrats joined the Republicans” is not quite true, as you note. But because of Strom Thurmond it is accepted as a fact. What happened is that the **next** generation (post 1965) of white southern politicians — Newt, Trent Lott, Ashcroft, Cochran, Alexander, etc — joined the GOP.So it was really a passing of the torch as the old segregationists retired and were replaced by new young GOP guys. One particularly galling aspect to generalizations about “segregationists became GOP” is that the new GOP South was INTEGRATED for crying out loud, they accepted the Civil Rights revolution. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter led a group of what would become “New” Democrats like Clinton and Al Gore.

There weren’t many Republicans in the South prior to 1964, but that doesn’t mean the birth of the southern GOP was tied to “white racism.” That said, I am sure there were and are white racist southern GOP. No one would deny that. But it was the southern Democrats who were the party of slavery and, later, segregation. It was George Wallace, not John Tower, who stood in the southern schoolhouse door to block desegregation! The vast majority of Congressional GOP voted FOR the Civil Rights of 1964-65. The vast majority of those opposed to those acts were southern Democrats. Southern Democrats led to infamous filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.The confusion arises from GOP Barry Goldwater’s vote against the ’64 act. He had voted in favor or all earlier bills and had led the integration of the Arizona Air National Guard, but he didn’t like the “private property” aspects of the ’64 law. In other words, Goldwater believed people’s private businesses and private clubs were subject only to market forces, not government mandates (“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”) His vote against the Civil Rights Act was because of that one provision was, to my mind, a principled mistake.This stance is what won Goldwater the South in 1964, and no doubt many racists voted for Goldwater in the mistaken belief that he opposed Negro Civil Rights. But Goldwater was not a racist; he was a libertarian who favored both civil rights and property rights.Switch to 1968.Richard Nixon was also a proponent of Civil Rights; it was a CA colleague who urged Ike to appoint Warren to the Supreme Court; he was a supporter of Brown v. Board, and favored sending troops to integrate Little Rock High). Nixon saw he could develop a “Southern strategy” based on Goldwater’s inroads. He did, but Independent Democrat George Wallace carried most of the deep south in 68. By 1972, however, Wallace was shot and paralyzed, and Nixon began to tilt the south to the GOP. The old guard Democrats began to fade away while a new generation of Southern politicians became Republicans. True, Strom Thurmond switched to GOP, but most of the old timers (Fulbright, Gore, Wallace, Byrd etc etc) retired as Dems.Why did a new generation white Southerners join the GOP? Not because they thought Republicans were racists who would return the South to segregation, but because the GOP was a “local government, small government” party in the old Jeffersonian tradition. Southerners wanted less government and the GOP was their natural home.Jimmy Carter, a Civil Rights Democrat, briefly returned some states to the Democrat fold, but in 1980, Goldwater’s heir, Ronald Reagan, sealed this deal for the GOP. The new “Solid South” was solid GOP.BUT, and we must stress this: the new southern Republicans were *integrationist* Republicans who accepted the Civil Rights revolution and full integration while retaining their love of Jeffersonian limited government principles.

Oh wait, princess, I am not done yet.

Where Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner, Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the U.S. government and had the pro-Klan film “Birth of a Nation” screened in his White House.

Wilson and FDR carried all 11 states of the Old Confederacy all six times they ran, when Southern blacks had no vote. Disfranchised black folks did not seem to bother these greatest of liberal icons.

As vice president, FDR chose “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas who played a major role in imposing a poll tax to keep blacks from voting.

Among FDR’s Supreme Court appointments was Hugo Black, a Klansman who claimed FDR knew this when he named him in 1937 and that FDR told him that “some of his best friends” in Georgia were Klansmen.

Black’s great achievement as a lawyer was in winning acquittal of a man who shot to death the Catholic priest who had presided over his daughter’s marriage to a Puerto Rican.

In 1941, FDR named South Carolina Sen. “Jimmy” Byrnes to the Supreme Court. Byrnes had led filibusters in 1935 and 1938 that killed anti-lynching bills, arguing that lynching was necessary “to hold in check the Negro in the South.”

FDR refused to back the 1938 anti-lynching law.

“This is a white man’s country and will always remain a white man’s country,” said Jimmy. Harry Truman, who paid $10 to join the Klan, then quit, named Byrnes Secretary of State, putting him first in line of succession to the presidency, as Harry then had no V.P.

During the civil rights struggles of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Gov. Orval Faubus used the National Guard to keep black students out of Little Rock High. Gov. Ross Barnett refused to let James Meredith into Ole Miss. Gov. George Wallace stood in the door at the University of Alabama, to block two black students from entering.

All three governors were Democrats. All acted in accord with the “Dixie Manifesto” of 1956, which was signed by 19 senators, all Democrats, and 80 Democratic congressmen.

Among the signers of the manifesto, which called for massive resistance to the Brown decision desegregating public schools, was the vice presidential nominee on Adlai’s Stevenson’s ticket in 1952, Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama.

Though crushed by Eisenhower, Adlai swept the Deep South, winning both Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas.

Do you suppose those Southerners thought Adlai would be tougher than Ike on Stalin? Or did they think Adlai would maintain the unholy alliance of Southern segregationists and Northern liberals that enabled Democrats to rule from 1932 to 1952?

The Democratic Party was the party of slavery, secession and segregation, of “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman and the KKK. “Bull” Connor, who turned the dogs loose on black demonstrators in Birmingham, was the Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama.

And Nixon?

In 1956, as vice president, Nixon went to Harlem to declare, “America can’t afford the cost of segregation.” The following year, Nixon got a personal letter from Dr. King thanking him for helping to persuade the Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Nixon supported the civil rights acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968.

In the 1966 campaign, as related in my new book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority,” out July 8, Nixon blasted Dixiecrats “seeking to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.”

Nixon called out segregationist candidates in ‘66 and called on LBJ, Hubert Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy to join him in repudiating them. None did. Hubert, an arm around Lester Maddox, called him a “good Democrat.” And so were they all – good Democrats.

While Adlai chose Sparkman, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew, the first governor south of the Mason Dixon Line to enact an open-housing law.

In Nixon’s presidency, the civil rights enforcement budget rose 800 percent. Record numbers of blacks were appointed to federal office. An Office of Minority Business Enterprise was created. SBA loans to minorities soared 1,000 percent. Aid to black colleges doubled.

Nixon won the South not because he agreed with them on civil rights – he never did – but because he shared the patriotic values of the South and its antipathy to liberal hypocrisy.

When Johnson left office, 10 percent of Southern schools were desegregated.

When Nixon left, the figure was 70 percent. Richard Nixon desegregated the Southern schools, something you won’t learn in today’s public schools.

Not done there yet, snowflake.

1964:George Romney, Republican civil rights activist. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century.

Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century.

Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless.

Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there.

That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic Party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican Party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century.

There is no radical break in the Republicans’ civil-rights history: From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Supporting civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.

The depth of Johnson’s prior opposition to civil-rights reform must be digested in some detail to be properly appreciated.

In the House, he did not represent a particularly segregationist constituency (it “made up for being less intensely segregationist than the rest of the South by being more intensely anti-Communist,” as the New York Times put it), but Johnson was practically antebellum in his views.

Never mind civil rights or voting rights: In Congress, Johnson had consistently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect black Americans from lynching.

As a leader in the Senate, Johnson did his best to cripple the Civil Rights Act of 1957; not having votes sufficient to stop it, he managed to reduce it to an act of mere symbolism by excising the enforcement provisions before sending it to the desk of President Eisenhower.

Johnson’s Democratic colleague Strom Thurmond nonetheless went to the trouble of staging the longest filibuster in history up to that point, speaking for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill.

The reformers came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the deficiencies of the 1957 act, and Johnson’s Senate Democrats again staged a record-setting filibuster.

In both cases, the “master of the Senate” petitioned the northeastern Kennedy liberals to credit him for having seen to the law’s passage while at the same time boasting to southern Democrats that he had taken the teeth out of the legislation.

Johnson would later explain his thinking thus: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us, since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this — we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo.

Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment.

Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment.

Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

Dwight Eisenhower as a general began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman as president formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Woodrow Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.)

Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic Party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.

Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.

President Johnson was nothing if not shrewd, and he knew something that very few popular political commentators appreciate today: The Democrats began losing the “solid South” in the late 1930s — at the same time as they were picking up votes from northern blacks.

The Civil War and the sting of Reconstruction had indeed produced a political monopoly for southern Democrats that lasted for decades, but the New Deal had been polarizing. It was very popular in much of the country, including much of the South — Johnson owed his election to the House to his New Deal platform and Roosevelt connections — but there was a conservative backlash against it, and that backlash eventually drove New Deal critics to the Republican Party.

Likewise, adherents of the isolationist tendency in American politics, which is never very far from the surface, looked askance at what Bob Dole would later famously call “Democrat wars” (a factor that would become especially relevant when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson committed the United States to a very divisive war in Vietnam).

The tiniest cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear with the backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of 1937.

Republicans would pick up 81 House seats in the 1938 election, with West Virginia’s all-Democrat delegation ceasing to be so with the acquisition of its first Republican.

Kentucky elected a Republican House member in 1934, as did Missouri, while Tennessee’s first Republican House member, elected in 1918, was joined by another in 1932.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican Party, though marginal, began to take hold in the South — but not very quickly: Dixie would not send its first Republican to the Senate until 1961, with Texas’s election of John Tower.

At the same time, Republicans went through a long dry spell on civil-rights progress.

Many of them believed, wrongly, that the issue had been more or less resolved by the constitutional amendments that had been enacted to ensure the full citizenship of black Americans after the Civil War, and that the enduring marginalization of black citizens, particularly in the Democratic states, was a problem that would be healed by time, economic development, and organic social change rather than through a second political confrontation between North and South.

As late as 1964, the Republican platform argued that “the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”

The conventional Republican wisdom of the day held that the South was backward because it was poor rather than poor because it was backward.

And their strongest piece of evidence for that belief was that Republican support in the South was not among poor whites or the old elites — the two groups that tended to hold the most retrograde beliefs on race.

Instead, it was among the emerging southern middle class.

This fact was recently documented by professors Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Harvard University Press, 2006).

Which is to say: The Republican rise in the South was contemporaneous with the decline of race as the most important political question and tracked the rise of middle-class voters moved mainly by economic considerations and anti-Communism.

The South had been in effect a Third World country within the United States, and that changed with the post-war economic boom.

As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class.

This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats.

This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.” The mythmakers would have you believe that it was the opposite: that your white-hooded hillbilly trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest otherwise.

There is no question that Republicans in the 1960s and thereafter hoped to pick up the angry populists who had delivered several states to Wallace.

That was Patrick J. Buchanan’s portfolio in the Nixon campaign.

But in the main they did not do so by appeal to racial resentment, direct or indirect.

The conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination of Barry Goldwater, a western libertarian who had never been strongly identified with racial issues one way or the other, but who was a principled critic of the 1964 act and its extension of federal power.

Goldwater had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts but believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were unconstitutional, based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert Bork.

But far from extending a welcoming hand to southern segregationists, he named as his running mate a New York representative, William E. Miller, who had been the co-author of Republican civil-rights legislation in the 1950s.

The Republican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen: It spoke of the Johnson administration’s failure to help further the “just aspirations of the minority groups” and blasted the president for his refusal “to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed, particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens.”

Other planks in the platform included: “improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times; such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex.”

And Goldwater’s fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform demanding “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Some dog whistle.

Of course there were racists in the Republican Party. There were racists in the Democratic Party. The case of Johnson is well documented, while Nixon had his fantastical panoply of racial obsessions, touching blacks, Jews, Italians (“Don’t have their heads screwed on”), Irish (“They get mean when they drink”), and the Ivy League WASPs he hated so passionately (“Did one of those dirty bastards ever invite me to his f***ing men’s club or goddamn country club? Not once”).

But the legislative record, the evolution of the electorate, the party platforms, the keynote speeches — none of them suggests a party-wide Republican about-face on civil rights.

Neither does the history of the black vote.

While Republican affiliation was beginning to grow in the South in the late 1930s, the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the North, among whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular.

By 1940, Democrats for the first time won a majority of black votes in the North. This development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who crafted his Great Society with the goal of exploiting widespread dependency for the benefit of the Democratic Party.

Unlike the New Deal, a flawed program that at least had the excuse of relying upon ideas that were at the time largely untested and enacted in the face of a worldwide economic emergency, Johnson’s Great Society was pure politics.

Johnson’s War on Poverty was declared at a time when poverty had been declining for decades, and the first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment rate was less than 5 percent.

Congressional Republicans had long supported a program to assist the indigent elderly, but the Democrats insisted that the program cover all of the elderly — even though they were, then as now, the most affluent demographic, with 85 percent of them in households of above-average wealth.

Democrats such as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze argued that the Great Society would end “dependency” among the elderly and the poor, but the programs were transparently designed merely to transfer dependency from private and local sources of support to federal agencies created and overseen by Johnson and his political heirs.

In the context of the rest of his program, Johnson’s unexpected civil-rights conversion looks less like an attempt to empower blacks and more like an attempt to make clients of them.

If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue.

Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties.

Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats.

It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South — but not that slow.

Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of civil-rights Republicans.

One of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas’s John Dowdy.

Dowdy was a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964 reforms.

He declared the reforms “would set up a despot in the attorney general’s office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his will and his oppressive action would be brought to bear upon citizens, just as Hitler’s minions coerced and subjugated the German people.

Dowdy went on: “I would say this — I believe this would be agreed to by most people: that, if we had a Hitler in the United States, the first thing he would want would be a bill of this nature.” (Who says political rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?)

Dowdy was thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican with a very respectable record on civil rights, a little-known figure by the name of George H. W. Bush.

It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a majority of the southern congressional delegation — and they had hardly spent the Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of Jim Crow.

It was not the Civil War but the Cold War that shaped midcentury partisan politics.

Eisenhower warned the country against the “military-industrial complex,” but in truth Ike’s ascent had represented the decisive victory of the interventionist, hawkish wing of the Republican Party over what remained of the America First/Charles Lindbergh/Robert Taft tendency.

The Republican Party had long been staunchly anti-Communist, but the post-war era saw that anti-Communism energized and looking for monsters to slay, both abroad — in the form of the Soviet Union and its satellites — and at home, in the form of the growing welfare state, the “creeping socialism” conservatives dreaded.

By the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the liveliest current in U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic anti-Communism — especially conservatives’ rhetoric connecting international socialism abroad with the welfare state at home — left the Left with nowhere to go but the Democratic Party. Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the Democratic Party was not his alone.

The schizophrenic presidential election of that year set the stage for the subsequent transformation of southern politics: Segregationist Democrat George Wallace, running as an independent, made a last stand in the old Confederacy but carried only five states.

Republican Richard Nixon, who had helped shepherd the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress, counted a number of Confederate states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) among the 32 he carried.

Democrat Hubert Humphrey was reduced to a northern fringe plus Texas.

Mindful of the long-term realignment already under way in the South, Johnson informed Democrats worried about losing it after the 1964 act that “those states may be lost anyway.”

Subsequent presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won a 49-state sweep in 1972, and, with the exception of the post-Watergate election of 1976, Republicans in the following presidential elections would more or less occupy the South like Sherman.

Bill Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states in his two contests, and Barack Obama had some success in the post-southern South, notably Virginia and Florida.

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with several factors: The rise of the southern middle class, The increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, The Vietnam controversy, The rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and The incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party.

Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican Party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism. However, this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing. Johnson informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.

So don’t ever go there again, ya little douche canoe. You have no idea what you are talking about, know nothing of actual history and you certainly have no business perpetuating the lie and myth that the parties magically switched. You could never be more wrong than you are….here that sound? That is called a <<mic drop>>. Game, set, match. So go back to your drug induced coma of whatever drug you are on and go watch Twilight again…this arena is not where the ill-informed play.

#Politics #Party Switch #Republicans #History #Democrat

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thiswaycomessomethingwicked · 5 years ago

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@dykeofwellington

#he’s no better than any other politician

#and is indeed actively worse than quite a few

#politics

#us politics I am curious as to why you think he’s actively worse than someone like Steyer, or Tulsi Gabbard, or simply in general. Why do you feel he’s actively worse than the rest? I would also love to know who you think is the best choice out of the lot? and you’re reasoning behind that?

Hey for some reason I can’t reblog the post where you asked the above about Bernie. I’m going to give a very brief rundown of thoughts.

First, let’s clear up some rather broad, assumptions made:

am curious as to why you think he’s actively worse than someone like Steyer, or Tulsi Gabbard, or simply in general. / Why do you feel he’s actively worse than the rest?

I never said any politician’s name. Just a general indication that he’s worse than a few. I think it’s interesting you assumed I meant those two and not that he’s worse than, let’s say, Julian Castro.

I clearly said “no better than any other politician” which puts him on equal footing with Warren etc. so this assumption: Why do you feel he’s actively worse than the rest? is unwarranted.

What I was saying was basically - no better than e.g. Warren and worse than quite a few e.g. Castro, Clinton (I know, come fight me leftists who drank the almost 30 years of GOP koolaid on her) etc.

A quick rundown of issues I have with Bernie include, but are not limited to:

Inability to deal with sexual harassment in his campaign in a meaningful way (he apologized and such, but there’s not to my eyes been a significant change)

General sexism in his campaign as well as sexism displayed by followers. He’s just got a sexism issue overall.

Lack of meaningful, recent civil rights record

Unwilling to coalition build with colleagues in government (a profoundly necessary skill if you want to get anything done as president). Basically, he’s not a team player. We need team players. Team players is how DC works. (e.g. “Ms. Clinton, pointing out that Mr. Obama had to fight tooth-and-nail even for relatively centrist solutions such as the Affordable Care Act, draws the lesson that the next president must have a strong sense of practicality and realism; big rallies cannot wish away the complex politics of Congress. Mr. Sanders, by contrast, claims that Mr. Obama had insufficient revolutionary zeal.” Sanders’ view is not helpful nor realistic.)

Lack of passing meaningful policy/legislation in his 25 years as senator which indicates an overall inability to solve issues within the existing system as well as a manifestation of the above mentioned inability to coalition build. While many senators propose many bills and pass few (that’s kind of par for the course) Sanders’ are particularly lack lustre. Of the seven enacted of which he was primary sponsor, three were designations (S. 885, H.J.Res. 231, S. 893) and one was a national park boundary movement (H.R. 1353).

Bernie Sanders was the primary sponsor of seven bills that were enacted:

S. 885 (113th): A bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 35 Park Street in Danville, Vermont, as the “Thaddeus Stevens Post Office”.

S. 2782 (113th): A bill to amend title 36, United States Code, to improve the Federal charter for the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, and for other purposes

S. 893 (113th): Veterans’ Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act of 2013H.R. 5245 (109th): To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 1 Marble Street in Fair Haven, Vermont, as the “Matthew Lyon Post Office Building”.

H.J.Res. 129 (104th): Granting the consent of Congress to the Vermont-New Hampshire Interstate Public Water Supply Compact.

H.R. 1353 (102nd): Entitled the “Taconic Mountains Protection Act of 1991”.

H.J.Res. 132 (102nd): To designate March 4, 1991, as “Vermont Bicentennial Day”.

Medicare for All: it’s an incredibly complicated thing to implement and I’m personally not convinced Sanders’ plan is the right approach, nor that it would pass congress when introduced.

Weak stance on gun control and relationship with the NRA

Tendency to shout over and shut people down, especially those asking questions he doesn’t want to answer

His lack of attempting to control his supporters - their misogyny and racism - are indicative of the kind of person running the campaign. These things rot from top down.

How powerfully his ego influences his actions, especially in 2016 when it took Obama hauling him into the white house before he finally stepped down and stopped running

That whole Russia murkiness

His continued view that the primaries are rigged when they aren’t, he just lost, is actively harmful

He has, or has benefited from, super PACs (he has some direct PAC contributions, but it’s not a large amount. Most of his benefits from PACs come in other forms than direct contributions).

So, this is not something I particularly care about overall, because running for president is expensive (which is a Problem), and it’s a current reality to campaign financing. But he made such a big deal out of it I take vindictive pleasure in him having them/benefitting from them because I can now corner Luke Savage at a mutual friend’s annual Christmas party and tell him to shove it up his arse.

Support of Gabbard who is a bit of a Russian plant (not to mention a terrible candidate overall)

He is old, he is white, he is straight, he is cis, he is male - we have the most diverse range of potential nominees and if we think he’s the Answer or Saviour there’s a lot of unpacking of internalized stuff that needs to happen.

A personal thing, but I really, really dislike his shoutiness. He reminds me of every socialist bro who has shouted down women and other marginalized people at parties I’ve been to (I know quite a few Jacobin/Socialist hacks e.g. aforementioned Luke Savage who uses the Sanders Certified approach If You Shout Enough They Can’t Get A Word In Therefore You Win to conversations and debates) and it leaves my skin crawling.

No policy to address the needs and interests of First Nations/Native Americans including living standards, water access, education, treaty rights, any sort of reconciliation and addressing the issue of colonialism and genocide etc. (I think Castro is the only one with anything addressing Native American needs)

Breach of Clinton’s campaign voter data. Super. Shady.

Ultimately, I’m not an idealist because idealism doesn’t make for good policy. While I dislike the term leftist because it invokes, to my mind, the blind, unthinking frothing wrath of Bernie Bros(tm), I do have leftist goals.

However, I am practical about the approach, which will almost always be incremental. It’s like building a house: you lay foundations before you start on the walls, roof and insulation. Bernie wants an instant house to appear out of no where. That’s not how life nor government, works.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t push to improve things and make for a better world, a more just society. But the reality is: we have a system we must work within and so we need people who can do that effectively. That said, we can and should try to improve the system on the way, as well. But burning it down and starting from scratch is a pipe dream. Best lay it to the side and fight for things that can actually improve lives today. In the here and now.

in the end, I don’t like Bernie Sanders because he is an old, shouty white man driven by ego who is crude, mean, and isn’t a real democrat. I think we can do better.

My current list of choices for the Democratic nominee (which is open to change. It will depend on how debates play out and further policy details put forward by candidates):

Julian Castro (I like his platform the most; he has experience in DC from the Obama administration; knows how to be a team player; he’s young, intelligent and well spoken; has that “presidential” look that many voters like to see, which you know. Makes sense. Mostly I like his platform and everything I’ve heard and read about him has been positive. He also runs a (mostly) positive campaign! Unlike Some Old White Shouty Men. I can go on.)

Kamala Harris (She has a good platform with sound policy plans; she has grit and stamina needed to run against Trump; She runs a positive campaign - even using her funding to support other democrats currently primarying republicans/are just up for general re-election; she’s a senator so has experience and allies in DC with whom she can coalition build; she’s a team player; she will give us a good shot in Florida and N. Carolina; she has strong support from Black Americans who are the base of the democratic party; as DA she fought against prop 22 and prop 8 [yes, she’s not perfect as DA or AG but point to someone with a perfect track record. I’ll wait. I’m not here for perfection or purity politics, I’m here for someone who can win and will implement descent policy while in power], she pioneered one of the first open data initiative to expose racism in the legal system, lol she’s not a millionaire unlike Some Old White Shouty Man - which is neither here nor there for me personally, because again I’m realistic, just a refreshing thing. I can go on.)

Elizabeth Warren (I’m rather luke-warm on her but she’s better than the other options.)

My ideal ticket, currently, is: Harris/Castro.

Again - this is open to change. And, at the end of the day, I will vote for the democratic nominee in 2020 no matter what because we can’t have another four years of Trump.

#politics #us politics #i have voiced spicy opinions about Sanders I am prepared for the potential fallout

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jae-bummer · 7 years ago

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My Idol 2: Part Twenty Six

My Idol

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My Idol is a South Korean competitive reality dating game show. It currently airs on Wednesday nights on Jae-bummer’s blog. First broadcast in 2016, the show offers the opportunity for a lucky fan to go on seven blind dates with seven idols. The idol plans the date with the show throwing in specific missions to complete during the day. At the end of the initial dates, the show opens up an audience vote to decide what three idols will move on to the second date.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 -

Part 10 - Part 11 - Part 12 - Part 13 - Part 14 - Part 15 - Part 16 - Part 17 -

Part 18 - Part 19 - Part 20 - Part 21 - Part 22 - Part 23 - Part 24 - Part 25 -

Part 26 - Part 27

Jay gave a small nod before letting a gentle smile fill his lips. Rubbing his coarse thumb over your cheek a final time, he took a noticeable step backwards. You both had mics interwoven within your clothing, causing the audience to remain deadly silent as they hung onto every word. Your tongue felt heavy in your mouth as it had seemingly forgotten how to cooperate with your vocal chords and every biological process it took to enact speaking. Watching him carefully, he turned to the host before surprisingly giving her a bow.

“I’m sorry,” he said weakly before shaking his head. “But I’m not the guy.”

“Wait, what?” the host croaked, furrowing her brows. “What do you mean you aren’t the guy? You literally are the guy. You’re name is printed-”

“I know what the card says,” he whispered. “But I don’t think y’all know what the card means.”

“It means you move on to the next round,” Wonho said quietly. “What else could it mean?”

“It means I move on,” Jay nodded, turning grimly to the group of men still seated. “And two of ya’ll don’t.”

“Isn’t that the point of this?” Johnny asked. “We get voted off. We all know that.”

“But it doesn’t mean it should happen,” Jay sighed. “So I came into this season with a thought. I could sabotage this whole thing. I can do My Idol dirty like it did me the first time around. I could be grandiose and impossible and an asshole, but where would that get me? Yeah, I’d be petty, but I’d be satisfied. I could make Y/N fall for me and leave her standing there at the end. I could meet the expectations everyone had for me…

…but then, I met Y/N. I saw the disgust she had in her eyes when she first saw me…and I wanted to change that. I wanted to show her…and the world, that I was more than shitty editing and a fuck boy attitude. And I guess this is my way of finally bringing it to an end.”

Jay took a deep breath before he turned to you, his forehead wrinkled and eyes serious. “The day we spent together was…impressive. By the end of our date…you saw me for me, and I can’t tell you how that made me feel. But…I also know how much you care about these other fools…”

He spun around with a mischievous grin. “And I mean that in an endearing way.”

“I do,” you squeaked, glancing around his shoulder as well. Calm and collected Yongguk, always there to remind you it’s okay to be unbalanced and to hold on to him to remain steady. Kind and gentle Wonho, his feelings so passionate and dreams so big. Romantic and gentlemanly Johnny, willing to give you time to figure things out, and figure yourself out. He was right. You cared so deeply for each man on that stage that it made you dizzy, but you still didn’t know exactly what he was trying to get at.

“So normally when people go to the next round,” the host hissed. “They hug Y/N and sit back down.”

“I’m not sitting back down,” Jay continued. “I took time away from them that wasn’t meant for me. I know in the first season when I was sent home, my chest ached, I felt so empty. I can only imagine how it is when you lose someone and have no say…so…thinking logically here, I have had the least amount of time with you, so your feelings are stronger for these three guys than they are for me.”

Your lips began to form around an argument, nothing but unintelligible gasping able to actually emerge.

“And that’s okay,” he said quickly. “I expect it. It’s a simple truth. I’ll admit, in the first season, I was competitive and I was jealous, but not anymore. You’re a good girl, and you deserve something equally as good…and baby, that ain’t me.”

“But…but your name is on the card,” the host repeated dumbly.

“This time, I’m gunna roll out when I say,” Jay said quietly. He reached forward and intertwined his fingers with yours before giving them a gentle squeeze. “I can’t fall in love again…so call me a coward. Call me a waste of time.” He tilted your wrist, glancing fondly down at your tattoo. “But this wasn’t a waste of time. And neither are you. So fall for a man you already see yourself in love with, Y/N. And I’m okay that it’s not me.”

His words hit you with enough strength to leave you dazed. You blinked slowly, incapable of really being able to realize the power behind his decision. It showed more care and thought than you had ever expected from someone on this show.

“Thank you,” you managed, looking directly into his eyes.

“You’re welcome,” he grinned, squeezing your hand again before letting it go. He turned toward the final three contestants and gave a small salute. “Good luck, boys!”

All three men looked up in surprise, hardly able to rip their eyes away from Jay’s retreating figure.

“Um…” the host trailed, looking cautiously around the stage as you plopped back into your seat. You shook your head as you stared toward the stage, unsure of what really had just happened. “So…uh…John…Johnny, how do you feel?”

“What?” he croaked, glancing around the room with a shocked expression. “Did he just…did he just nope out of the situation?”

“It seems that way,” the host continued, attempting to regain her composure. “Jay Park will be considered eliminated and will not continue to the final round of My Idol.”

“Oh-okay,” Johnny stuttered, the look never leaving his face. “I guess I feel…I guess I feel confused?”

“Why confused?” the host asked.

“I don’t know how anyone could leave,” he said, shaking his head. His eyes were distant as he was lost in thought. “I had such amazing experiences with Y/N…even if I was the last one to enter the competition…how could you…?”

“It gives one of us another chance,” Wonho nodded in disbelief as well. “It was selfless for him to do that for Y/N. He wanted her to have more of a say.”

“How does she have a say though? Korea votes,” Johnny hummed.

“He knew she wanted one of us more,” Wonho sighed. “He knew he didn’t have that spark with her yet…and like he said…that’s okay.”

“So now she gets to choose between two of us,” Yongguk nodded. “Two men she would have picked herself if she had the chance…well…hopefully.”

“That’s an interesting perspective,” the host nodded. “Y/N, if you had the chance, would you rather have picked who moved onward in the previous rounds instead of the viewers picking?”

You took a deep breath, still lost in Jay’s decision. Looking up slowly, you attempted to find Yoongi’s comforting and familiar face in the crowd, but were instead met with the bright house lights of the studio. Glancing toward the group of men you normally found solace in instead, you began to shake your head slowly.

“Honestly,” you breathed. “I don’t know if I would? It’s a complicated position to be in…when you learn about so many people and start forming a bond. In the initial stages, it’s almost impossible to choose…and you don’t want to hurt any one’s feelings.”

“But you’ll have to hurt someone’s feelings in the end,” the host confirmed. “You’ll have to pick between the final two.”

“I understand that,” you nodded. “But I don’t aim for mass amounts of collateral damage. I want the decisions I make to leave a small footprint here. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but hurting one person is better than hurting six on my own.”

“So you don’t want to be responsible for the pain?” the host continued.

“Does anyone?” you croaked. “I know pain is a part of life, but no one wants to be the one inflicting it. I’m not a purveyor of hurt feelings.”

“Do you think it’s selfish to not take some credit for those voted off?” she asked, shifting in her chair. You could feel your face grow hotter with each question. Where was Jay when you needed him?

“Hey,” Wonho chirped, seemingly reading your thoughts. His eyes grew wide as everyone’s attention turned to him, causing a blush to fill his cheeks. “Aren’t uh…aren’t we all kind of selfish here?”

“I’d prefer one of these guys to be voted off instead of me,” Johnny nodded. “Does that make me selfish?”

“Falling in love should be the most selfish act of your life,” Yongguk chimed. “We aren’t perfect, and neither is all of this.”

“Well, Y/N,” the host nodded, attempting to keep her face pleasant. “Why don’t we let you be a little selfish. Please read the first man to actually continue on to the final round…unless one of you would like to give up now?”

Each man grimaced with her words as a red envelope was rushed to the stage. The production assistant plopped it into your lap before running off again and out of sight.

With trembling fingers you lifted the familiar piece of paper and rotated it in your hands. You found your fingers easily sliding beneath the lip of the envelope, disconnecting the thin glue. Treating it as if you were ripping off a bandaid, you pulled the thick card stock free, and flipped the paper over in your hand.

Swallowing hard, your eyes read over the simply printed, black text.

“Bang Yongguk.”

“You’re supposed to build it up!” the host gasped, pulling the card from your hands. “The next idol to continue is...Bang Yongguk!”

Your eyes lifted from your empty hands and to the stools the remaining three men sat on. Yongguk’s gummy smile appeared as he ran his palms down his jeans. Pulling himself to a standing position, he shuffled across the stage, a surprised expression filling his face.

“Me?” his deep voice bellowed. His eyes had disappeared into slits as they took the impact of his smile.

“You!” you nodded with a chuckle. He took both of your hands in his before helping you stand and wrapping you in his arms. Pressing his face into your hair, his laugh radiated through you, causing your skin to become decorated with goosebumps.

You buried your face into the crook of his neck and sighed. You weren’t exactly sure what name you had wanted to see on that card, but you were happy to see his. The more time you spent with him, the more you felt the urge to know everything you possibly could.

“I feel like my chest is going to explode,” he whispered, leaning back to get a better view of your face. “I’m so happy.”

“Me too,” you nodded, sliding from his grasp. “Next time.”

“Next time,” he nodded, taking a few steps back and finding the way back to his seat.

“Yongguk, how do you feel?” the host asked, a smile radiating from her as well.

“Beside myself,” he hummed with a confident smile. “I can hardly handle the emotions I’m feeling.”

“Well, why don’t we give another one of you that feeling?” the host continued. “With Jay now excusing himself from the competition, that means one of the two of you will now continue on in his spot. How do you feel about being given yet another chance, Wonho?”

“I’m grateful,” Wonho nodded. “I’m not sure if this is the outcome Y/N had wanted, but I’m happy to have a 50% chance at moving to the weekend dates.”

“What about you Johnny?”

“I still don’t really understand how he could just...leave,” Johnny hummed, shaking his head. “But I’ll definitely take every opportunity if it means advancing further and getting to spend more time with Y/N.”

“Y/N,” the host said quietly, flipping the newly surfaced red envelope in her hands. “Would you like to do the honors?”

“Absolutely not,” you grumbled, shivering at the simple thought of it. “Plus you said it yourself, I didn’t build it up enough.”

“I’m sure you were just nervous,” the host chuckled. “Speaking of nerves, how are you feeling now that you’re one choice away from the final round?”

“A little nauseous,” you nodded. “So the quicker we do this the better.”

“Right,” the host nodded. “Quickly. So, I’ll ask our live studio audience. How many of you are here to see Wonho move forward?”

A formidable amount of fans began to scream from the crowd, accumulating a mass of noise you hadn’t heard yet in the live voting special. You glanced to Wonho who lifted his eyebrows in surprise before he let out a hearty giggle. He clapped along as well until the crowd fizzled into a low hum once again.

“And how many of you are here to see Johnny move forward?”

Just as it had before, the crowd seemed to be set ablaze with voices. Audience members began stamping their feet and screeching, showing their allegiance to their favorite idol, even when he was on the search to find love.

“With that being said,” the host continued. “I think we’re pretty evenly divided in this studio, so why don’t we get to it?”

You nodded, hardly capable of swallowing. Your mouth had never been so dry as you attempted to lick your lips. Knowing the inevitable, you prepared yourself for the simultaneous sucker punch to your gut and soaring feeling in your chest. When the final idol was announced, you were always faced with a difficult reaction. While you were happy for the man who was able to continue on, you were heartbroken for the ones left behind. Especially in this situation, you couldn’t dare dream of a life without either Johnny or Wonho. Each man had made such a distinct impression on you, you knew that in the end, you would end up a sobbing mess.

Watching with anxious eyes, the host ripped at the final envelope you would ever see on My Idol.

“And the second man to move on...

to the final round...

is....

....

Shin Hoseok, otherwise known as Monsta X’s Wonho.”

#jay park #wonho #bang yongguk #johnny seo #my idol #monsta x #aomg #bap #nct #nct 127 #min yoongi #yoongi #suga #bts #bangtan boys #dean #jae park #mark #mark tuan #day6 #got7

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kingofthenorth49 · 4 years ago

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Enemy of the State

I woke up on November 4th allegedly an enemy of the people.

Now I didn’t do anything differently than I did on the 3rd, but that morning when I awoke I knew things were going to get weird based on what I was seeing in the media.

Now keep in mind I haven’t any trust in the mainstream media. Zero. None. Zilch. They have eroded that trust over the last decade or so for me, to the point I realize they are no longer news outlets, but rather 24 hour a day propaganda machines.

By now, many of you reading likely thought “Conspiracy theorist” or his tin foil hat is on too tight again. Didn’t you.

You don’t have to answer, I know that’s exactly what 50% of you are thinking as you read this. That’s how you have been programmed to think over the past 20 years, you are part of a cult you didn’t realize you had joined. Think about it. As North American’s (and I have to use that term because sitting here in Canada today my reference group is so enthralled with US politics they aren’t even watching what is going on in their own country) we are equally divided in our thinking.

And that is exactly what they want. A society divided is easier to conquer, and right now we are ripe for the picking. The last bastion against Marxism is fighting a death match I never believed I’d get to see during my short stint on this planet.

While the Coronavirus is real, the plandemic is not. It’s manufactured. I’m not talking about the virus, that’s beyond the edges of my aluminum chapeaux, I’m talking about the world’s approach to managing it. It’s all part of a plan to convert the world over to a One World Government.

Fear is the greatest motivator know to the human species and beyond. A field mouse being stalked by a hawk is acutely aware of everything going on around him as he literally runs for his life. Every action and reaction is measured against the knowledge that one wrong move and he becomes the object of desire of a stronger power. It’s the fight or flight response that has kept species alive for millions of years.

We’ve just had our fight response beaten out of us by those who wish to possess us, or rather possess the output of our labor.

Power is the drug of the greedy. Just look around you to see it. You only need look at the likes of Nancy Pelosi to see it. It’s for thee, but not for me. I say that a lot because I see it a lot. I see our elected officials set two levels of standards as they rule. One set of standards is for us, the working class, and the other set of standards are for them, the ruling class. Nancy’s trip to the beauty salon is one example that comes to mind. Let’s break it down for the people in the back.

For those who don’t know Nancy, she’s the 80+ year old speaker of the house, and one of the most powerful democrats in the United States. Nancy’s been in Washington a long time, she knows where the bodies are literally buried. She’s powerful, wealthy, and doesn’t give a rats-ass about you. She’s all about Nancy. So in the middle of this plandemic, Nancy needs to get her hair done for her next ice cream photo op and even though beauty salon’s are ordered closed under public health order, Nancy’s staff arrange for a salon to open to touch up the speakers locks.

Now as someone who cut their own hair for almost 3 months, I can understand the desire to have the professionals take care of things, but at the same time as a leader I understand the need to lead with integrity and not set a double standard. Nancy, not so much. Somehow a video gets released showing Nancy waltzing thought the salon between the shampoo and color, not only in direct contravention of the law shutting down these services, but sans face mask.

Now a little lapse in safety decorum amongst co-conspirators could be overlooked had it not been that Nancy had just days before been on the news berating the President for not wearing a mask and selfishly endangering the lives of others’. It was carried by every network for days.

Get it yet? It’s for thee, not for me. A double standard isn’t a double standard if your in power. They feel they are above the rest of us. But it gets worse.

When the mainstream media is forced to pick up the story a day later, the response from the Pelosi people is that Nancy was set up by the salon owner.

Are you fucking kidding me? This is how the 3rd most powerful leader in the United States responded to being caught in the act violating the very laws she enacted? The worst part of all of this was most of you all accepted it because it fit the narrative you’ve been programmed to accept. Be honest with yourself. You simply accepted that Nancy was the victim in this situation because Trump.

This is but one example of this type of entitlement. The Governor if Michigan’s husband got caught going boating during a lockdown. Prime Minster Trudeau got caught breaching ethics rules twice, and is under investigation for two more. No other sitting Prime Minister in the history of Canada has ever been chastised for lacking ethics except for the current returning resident of 22 Sussex Drive. They destroyed all the evidence of the WE scandal and it never really even made the news.

I’ll make you a bet right now, that if I refuse to pay my taxes this year, I’ll not collect $200 and I’ll go directly to jail. If you’ve ever stood before a judge accused of a crime, it’s the most sober humbling moment of your life. Our problem is getting them in front of one.

Am I making sense yet?

Hillary had a private email server. She deleted 30,000+ emails as Secretary of State. Her and her husband Bill made hundreds of millions of dollars as public officials. Bill raped a woman in Arkansas and paid her off with $400,000.00. But there’s no one holding them to account.

Barrack Obama and Eric Holder ran fast and furious. They put guns into the hands of drug cartels that eventually wound up back in the USA used to kill innocent Americans. Over a billion dollars in cash on pallets was flown to Iran in the middle of the night. But there were no scandals in his White House. Are you fucking kidding me? He used the intelligence community to spy on Trump’s campaign for Gawd’s sake, Richard Nixon had to resign as President for doing the same thing, does no one remember Watergate?

Jesus people, when will you wake the fuck up and realize you are being manipulated by those in positions of power. What is it going to take for people to stop accepting this type of behavior from those they entrust with the public purse and our freedoms.

I read The Rise of the 3rd Reich last year. It was a very sobering read to see how the Nazi party rose to power and committed atrocities against their fellow humans in the name of a better planet. I’ve seen images of the holocaust that sadden me to the very core of my being. I have always wondered how humans could treat each other like that, to strip people of their dignity, their world possessions, their families, and finally their very existence. And for what. For one persons hatred of another race. One person was able through persuasion to convince an entire population of a country to hate a group of people because they were different. They worked hard. They ran shops and factories. They worshipped together, they built strong communities. They gave back to their country and made is better. But because those in power despised them, they created hate against them and let the people turn on their fellow countrymen.

You all know the rest of the story.

Or at least I hope you do, because if you don’t, its going to happen again because it’s already happening the exact same way it did in the 1920’s in Germany. If you don’t believe me, read the book. Read the history of one example of how mankind is one of the ugliest species on the planet. Read about how they divided the country and made people hate the Jews. Hitler blamed the loss of the war, the economic downfall of Germany and the bad decisions of the Weimar Republic on Jewish capitalism. Does this sound familiar? It should.

Churchill said “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. Now while he didn’t invent that quote, he certainly had reason to use it. As the one person who stood up against Hitler (Thank Gawd he did) he understood completely the threat to humanity that existed in the ideology of the Nazi party.

Fuck we are stupid. That all happened in our generational life time. Our grandparents fought in that war. Our communities lost thousands of good men and women to the effort to combat the rise of Marxism and hate and protect the world against the likes of Hilter, Stalin, and Lenin.

Yet here we are.

I woke up on November 4th to hear people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling for a “Truth and Accountability commission” to ensure Trump and his supporters are held to account. The talking heads were spitting vitrol and hate against 72 Million Americans who voted for Trump. On example, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin tweeted that morning, “Any R now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite’ society. We have a list.”

We have a list? Seriously?

Hitler had a list too.

While Trump should have had a filter between him and his twitter feed, the man did nothing to rise to the level of a dictator who had women stripped naked and shot in front of their children, before they were shot next. Are you kidding me? Are people really that stupid?

I lived in the USA during Trump’s four years. I also lived there during Obama’s eight. By any measurable metric Trump’s four years brought more prosperity to the average American than Obama’s double term, and even if you take the economy out of the equation, Trump still made life better through his approach to governance. He got three noble prize nominations for crying out loud

But no one sees that.

But this isn’t about Trump, it’s about us.

We are failing as citizens to hold our leaders to account, and when you fail to check power, well, you get what you deserve. Our leaders, both elected and self-appointed (Think Zuckerberg, Gates) are running amok and have contempt for we the people. I believe in the next 6 months those in power are going to use the pandemic as a tool to move their agenda forward and attempt to go full Marxism around the globe under the guise of a One World Government. We are already seeing our own governments in Canada moving towards that end, the death of Freedom of Speech is just one indicator. Don’t believe me? Prime Minister Trudeau recently told the country “Freedom of expression is not without limits. We do not have the right, for example, to shout ‘fire’ in a movie theatre crowded with people.”

Well dumbass, actually we do, or at least we did. The cornerstone of any free person is the right to say what ever he/she/(Insert your preferred pronoun here) wants. If you cannot say whatever you want, you are oppressed. It’s just that fucking simple. He was wrong, but he wasn’t apologetic about being wrong. He thinks he is right, and his ideology supports that, which is the ideology of the left. You can say whatever you want as long as it agrees with our ideology, otherwise we will cancel you. We will public shame you. Call you racist, a bigot, etc until you shut up.

This is where we are today, a society afraid to speak up in fear they will be cancelled, ridiculed, or shamed. This is right where they want us, in fear, alone, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Wear your mask, stay home, be a good citizen. Make sure you keep an eye on your neighbor to ensure they are being good citizen’s too. After all, we are all in this together, at least until we aren’t.

Maybe I’m wrong, and I hope I am. Maybe AOC really meant those lists were to send out holiday cards thanking all those 72,000,000 American’s for doing their civic duty by voting for the person they best perceive to leader their collective ideals, to further democracy and make their country the best it can be.

It’s just too bad they picked the wrong horse.

Or did they. Will we ever know for sure? I doubt it.

In the end, a polite society who are open to freedom of speech, even if it flies in the face of our beliefs is critical to a progressive society. If we suppress thought, fail to encourage debate, and dismiss the ideas of differing opinions we will fail as a society, and when a democratic society fails, tyranny rises.

When tyranny rises, the cost to humanity is great. We cannot afford this journey again.

Anyway, I need to go spend some time with my dog. I’m pretty sure he’s a liberal, but I love him just the same. I feel the same way about my liberal friends, they just don’t drool on me as much.

Enjoy the day, but think about what you are willing to accept from our governments. If we remain quiet we have no one to blame but ourselves. Sometimes yelling fire means things are actually burning.

#trudeaumustgo Agenda21 maga plandemic

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jbaquerot · 7 years ago

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Big data, as its proponents have been saying for nearly a decade now, can bring big benefits: advertisements focused on what you actually want to buy, smart cars that can help you avoid collisions or call for an ambulance if you happen to get in one anyway, wearable or implantable devices that can monitor your health and notify your doctor if something is going wrong.

It can also lead to big privacy problems. By now it is glaringly obvious that when people generate thousands of data points every day — where they go, who they communicate with, what they read and write, what they buy, what they eat, what they watch, how much they exercise, how much they sleep and more — they are vulnerable to exposure in ways unimaginable a generation ago.

It is just as obvious that such detailed information, in the hands of marketers, financial institutions, employers and government, can affect everything from relationships to getting a job, and from qualifying for a loan to even getting on a plane. While there have been multiple expressions of concern from privacy advocates and government, there has been little action to improve privacy protections in the online, always connected world.

It was more than five years ago that the Obama administration published a blueprint for what it termed a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights (CPBR), in February 2012. That document declared that, “the consumer privacy data framework in the U.S. is, in fact, strong … (but it) lacks two elements: A clear statement of basic privacy principles that apply to the commercial world, and a sustained commitment of all stakeholders to address consumer data privacy issues as they arise from advances in technologies and business models.”

Three years later, in February 2015, that blueprint became proposed legislation by the same name, but it was immediately attacked, both by industry groups, who says it would impose “burdensome” regulations, and by privacy advocates, who says it was riddled with loopholes. It never made it to a vote.

The CPBR declaration that the, “consumer privacy data framework in the U.S. is, in fact, strong …” ironically came about a year before revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the U.S. government was, in fact, spying on its citizens.

Beyond that, government hasn’t been able to agree on other privacy initiatives. The so-called broadband privacy rules issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just before the 2016 election, which would have limited data collection by Internet service providers (ISPs), were repealed by Congress in March, before they took effect.

Susan Grant, director of consumer protection and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), called it “a terrible setback,” and says it would allow ISPs, “to spy on their customers and sell their data without consent.” Others, however, have argued that putting limits on ISPs would still leave other online giants like Google free to collect and sell the data they collect, and consumers would see few, if any, benefits.

Given all that, it should be no surprise that experts say privacy risks are even more intense, and the challenges to protect privacy have become even more complicated. Organizations like the CFA, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), along with individual advocates like Rebecca Herold, CEO of The Privacy Professor, have enumerated multiple ways that big data analytics, and resulting automated decision-making, can invade the personal privacy of individuals. They include:

1. Discrimination

EPIC declared more than three years ago, in comments to the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy that, “The use of predictive analytics by the public and private sector … can now be used by the government and companies to make determinations about our ability to fly, to obtain a job, a clearance or a credit card. The use of our associations in predictive analytics to make decisions that have a negative impact on individuals directly inhibits freedom of association.”

Since then, things have gotten worse, privacy advocates say. While discrimination is illegal, automated decision-making makes it more difficult to prove. “Big data algorithms have matured significantly over the past several years, along with the increasing flood of data from the nascent internet of things, and the ability to analyze these data using variants of artificial intelligence." says Edward McNicholas, global co-leader of the Privacy, Data Security, and Information Law Practice at Sidley Austin LLP. “But despite this technological growth, the legal protections have not advanced materially.”

“I think the discussion around big data has moved beyond mere accusations of discrimination to larger concerns about automated decision-making,” says Joseph Jerome, policy counsel at the CDT, who noted that it has been used, “to direct calls at call service centers, evaluate and fire teachers, and even predict recidivism.”

Herold has been saying for years that big data analytics can make discrimination essentially “automated,” and therefore more difficult to detect or prove. She says that is true, “in more ways than ever” today. “Big data analytics coupled with internet of things (IoT) data will be — and has already been — able to identify health problems and genetic details of individuals that those individuals didn’t even know themselves,” she says.

McNicholas believes, “the most significant risk is that it is used to conceal discrimination based on illicit criteria, and to justify the disparate impact of decisions on vulnerable populations.”

2. An embarrassment of breaches

By now, after catastrophic data breaches at multiple retailers like Target and Home Depot, restaurant chains like P.F. Chang’s, online marketplaces like eBay, the federal Office of Personnel Management that exposed the personal information of 22 million current and former federal employees, universities, and online services giants like Yahoo, public awareness about credit card fraud and identity theft is probably at an all-time high.

Unfortunately, the risks remain just as high, especially given the reality that billions of IoT devices in everything from household appliances to cars, remain rampantly insecure, as encryption and security guru Bruce Schneier, CTO at IBM Resilient, frequently observes in his personal blog.

3. Goodbye anonymity

It is increasingly difficult to do much of anything in modern life, “without having your identity associated with it,” Herold says. She says even de-identified data does not necessarily remove privacy risks. “The standards used even just a year or two ago are no longer sufficient. Organizations that want to anonymize data to then use it for other purposes are going to find it increasingly difficult. “It will soon become almost impossible to effectively anonymize data in a way that the associated individuals cannot be re-identified,” she says.

Besides being vulnerable to breaches, IoT device are a massive data collection engine of users’ most personal information. “Individuals are paying for smart devices, and the manufacturers can change their privacy terms at a moment's notice,” Jerome says. “It's one thing to tell a user to stop using a web service; it's another to tell them to unplug their smart TV or disconnect their connected car.”

4. Government exemptions

According to EPIC, “Americans are in more government databases than ever,” including that of the FBI, which collects personally identifiable information (PII) including name, any aliases, race, sex, date and place of birth, Social Security number, passport and driver’s license numbers, address, telephone numbers, photographs, fingerprints, financial information like bank accounts, and employment and business information.

Yet, “incredibly, the agency has exempted itself from Privacy Act (of 1974) requirements that the FBI maintain only, ‘accurate, relevant, timely and complete’ personal records,” along with other safeguards of that information required by the Privacy Act, EPIC says. The NSA also opened a storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, in 2014 that is reportedly capable of storing 12 zettabytes of data — a single zettabyte is the amount of information it would take 750 billion DVDs to store.

While there have been assurances, including from former President Obama, that government is “not listening to your phone calls or reading your emails,” that obviously ducks the question of whether government is storing them.

5. Your data gets brokered

Numerous companies collect and sell consumer data that are used to profile individuals, without much control or limits. There was the famous case of companies beginning to market products to a pregnant woman before she had told others in her family, thanks to automated decision-making. The same can be true of things like sexual orientation or an illness like cancer.

“Since 2014, data brokers have been having a field day in selling all the data they can scoop up from anywhere they can find it on the internet. And there are few — none explicit that I know of — legal protections for involved individuals,” Herold says. “This practice is going to increase, unfettered, until privacy laws restricting such use are enacted. There is also little or no accountability or even guarantees that the information is accurate.

Where do we go from here?

Those are not the only risks, and there is no way to eliminate them. But there are ways to limit them. One, according to Jerome, is to use big data analytics for good — to expose problems. “In many respects, big data is helping us make better, fairer decisions,” he says, noting that it can be, “a powerful tool to empower users and to fight discrimination. More data can be used to show where something is being done in a discriminatory way. Traditionally, one of the biggest problems in uncovering discrimination is a lack of data,” he says.

There is general agreement among advocates that Congress needs to pass a version of the CPBR, which called for consumer rights to include:

Individual control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it.

Transparency, or easily understandable and accessible information about privacy and security practices.

The collection, use and disclosure of personal data to be done in ways that are consistent with the context in which consumers provide the data.

Security and responsible handling of personal data.

Access to their personal data in usable formats, with the power to correct errors.

Reasonable limits on the personal data that companies collect and retain.

McNicholas says that “transparency” should include an overhaul of “privacy policies,” which are so dense and filled with legalese that almost nobody reads them. “Telling consumers to read privacy policies and exercise opt-out rights seems to be a solution better suited to last century,” he says. “Consumer privacy must shift to consumer-centric, where consumers have real control over their information."

Jerome agrees. “I certainly don't think we can expect consumers to read privacy policies. That's madness. What we should expect are better and more controls. It's a good thing that users can review and delete their Echo recordings. It's great that Twitter allows users to toggle all sorts of personalization and see who has targeted them,” he says. “But ultimately, if individuals aren't given more options over collection and sharing, we're going to have serious issues about our personal autonomy.”

Given the contentious atmosphere in Congress, there is little chance of something resembling the CPBR being passed anytime soon. That doesn’t mean consumers are defenseless, however. What can they do?

Jerome says even if users don’t read an entire policy, they should, “still take a moment before clicking ‘OK’ to consider why and with whom they're sharing their information. A recent study suggested that individuals would give up sensitive information about themselves in exchange for homemade cookies.”

Herold offers several other individual measures to lower your privacy risks:

Quit sharing so much on social media. “If you only have a few people you want to see photos or videos, then send directly to them instead of posting where many can access them,” she says.

Don’t provide information to businesses or other organizations that are not necessary for the purposes for which you’re doing business with them. Unless they really need your address and phone number, don’t give it to them.

Use an anonymous browser, like Hotspot Shield or Tor (The Onion Router) when visiting sites that might yield information that could cause people to draw inaccurate conclusions about you.

Ask others not to share information online about you without your knowledge. “It may feel awkward, but you need to do it,” she says, adding that the hard truth is that consumers need to protect themselves because nobody else will be doing it for them.

Regarding legislation, she says she has not heard about any other drafts of the CPBR in the works, “and I quite frankly do not expect to see anything in the next four years that will improve consumer privacy; Indeed, I expect to see government protections deteriorate. “I hope I am wrong,” she says.

#big data #data privacy

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uni-tierra-califas · 8 years ago

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UT Califas demo ateneo, 4-22-17, 2.00-5.00 p.m.

Comrades: We will convene the Democracy Ateneo this coming Saturday on April 22 in San Jose at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) from 2.00-5.00 p.m. to resume our scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below and raised by the current conjuncture we find ourselves.

The conceits of Western Democracies are everywhere exposed. From Donald Trump's electoral "victory," to the current election battle underway in France and the most recent political drama unfolding in Turkey, the claims developed nations make about democracy ring hollow —a political din produced by the rattling taking place in their own echo chambers. Still, power is believed to be in the hands of the "informed citizen." But, that power, the power of the vote in a formal, representative democracy, in reality can do little. Can any group of organized voters stop the U.S. military industrial complex from expanding, from using its massive arsenal on countries already ravaged by wars, from keeping the entire globe on a constant war footing? In fact, as the EZLN has named early on, this is the Fourth World War. It is everywhere at once. And in many places it is carried out in the name of democracy.

The mendacity that pervades democratic systems is no where laid more bare than when the world discovers that the state of one of the most powerful Western Democracies targets a family, a family guilty of nothing more than being ethnic Mexican and refusing to recognize the artificial borders that divide the continent. In this particular instance, a mother has turned a Denver church into a sanctuary for her and her children to be together and to be safe. She is determined to prevent the state from using her and others like her to send a message, instilling fear in the the over eleven million Spanish-speaking members of the U.S. economy who, although undocumented, are vital to its operation. When the state, according to Anselm Jappe, no longer serves capital it necessarily falls back on its primary purview, namely repression. "In times of crisis the State transforms itself into what it has historically been since its beginning: an armed gang." (see, A. Jappe, "Violence, What Use is It") Whose interest does it really serve to hunt down a mother and terrorize her brood, forcing them to flee, hide, and finally, fight back. Although many families have gone underground, a few like Jeanette Vizguerra have organized themselves through their networks to oppose any efforts to remove them from the country and to break up their families. (see, Democracy Now, "'I Am Her Voice': Meet the 10-Year-Old Boy Helping His Mom Take Refuge from Deportation in a Church") These families are connected to the families trying to find stable land as they flee Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Côte d'Ivoire, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan... Not long ago Douglas Lummis alerted us about the inherent limits of political systems that claim to be "democracies." Lummis' critique of democracy also reclaims it —what democracy really means, an unencumbered authentic democracy that is the expression of people's power. However, he also warns us that any reclaiming of democracy must not wait for it. In other words, democracy, or radical democracy, does not require political education or revolution, that is a vanguard or leaders to direct the people. It only needs to be exercised —taken up by everyone in any given moment in the situation they find themselves locally. However, "any democratic movement that accepts the basic conditions of competition and work in the capitalist economy as unalterable, and seeks only to make things 'a bit more pleasant,' has conceded defeat from the beginning." (see, D. Lummis, Radical Democracy)

Lummis' criticism remains potent and his admonishment necessary: Western Democracies and their ilk are indeed corrupted and have little to do with people power. Yet he overlooks a critical fact: these democracies are better understood as racial democracies. The entanglement of democracy and capital has hardly been by accident and in every way from their beginnings were dependent on the principal institutions of racial inequality, namely colonialism and slavery and, much later, apartheid. The braiding of capital and "democracy" within colonial and settler colonial societies can be mapped, for example, in the legislative acts, or Black Codes, that dehumanized Africans and later their descendants converting them into property and ultimately denying them any rights as workers, citizens, and so on. (see, A. Mbembe, The Critique of Black Reason) These Black Codes were also forged with every intention to control the Indigenous populations of the Americas, first as labor and later to be attacked and confined to reservations so that the land and resources beneath them was accessible for extractivist design. The union between capital and democracy extends in the U.S. to the ethnic Mexican population after the U.S.-Mexican War (War of American Aggression) resulted in the U.S. absconding with a third of Mexico's patrimony. The longstanding legislative enactments that codified racial and gender difference when the Spanish, and later English and French, arrived to the New World to the present are only part of the story. In the current context, it is no secret that this conjuncture has made more visible capitalism's production of a disposable subject. But, not all subjects are disposable in this final phase of capitalism. It might be more accurate to assert that there are at least two kinds of subjects in the current moment: disposable and digitized. By digitized we mean a body that is totally plugged into a digital biotech world, the 2.0 world of debt, finance, and apps that colonize all aspects of our everyday lives, increasingly drawn to high tech cultural playgrounds like San Francisco, Barcelona, and Tel Aviv. (see, P. Gelderloos, "Precarity in Paradise: The Barcelona Model")

It should be of little surprise to practically no one that, as the Black Panthers used to say back in the day and Robin Spencer reminds us today, the avaricious businessman, demagogic politician, and racist violent cop are together the core of a fascist state. (see, Spencer, "The Black Panther Party and Black Anti-Fascism in the United States") It is no wonder that the kabuki theater of American politics unfolds with everyone playing their part, including a newly empowered fascist network of white supremacists and their ilk insisting on their right to exercise free speech as in the recent "Trump rally" convened by Gavin McInnes of Vice magazine and other fascist groups in Berkeley. (see, Democracy Now, "White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis & Right-Wing Militia Members Clash with Antifa Protesters in Berkeley;" S. Bauer, "I Went Behind the Front Lines With the Far-Right Agitators Who Invaded Berkeley")

An authentic crisis is one, Ivan Illich insists, "that is, the occasion for a choice —only if at the moment it strikes the necessary social demands can [it] be effectively expressed." However, in engaging the crisis that is essentially already upon us, "if we are to anticipate its effects, we must investigate how sudden change can bring about the emergence into power of previously submerged groups." "It is not calamity as such," explains Illich, "that creates these groups; it is much less calamity that brings about their emergence; but calamity weakens the prevailing powers which have excluded the submerged from participation in the social process." Who are these "submerged groups" that are increasingly more visible in the current moment? They are communities of struggle who are not consumed by "political myths" and who are not duped by "the current industrial illusion." They are everyday people that claim the vernacular and are prepared to transform the crisis or calamity or catastrophe into a moment to exercise a convivial alternative. They, we, are folks committed to a "conscious use of disciplined procedure that recognizes the legitimacy of conflicting interests, the historical precedent out of which the conflict arose, and the necessity of abiding by the decision of peers." "The preparation of such groups," declares Illich, "is the key task of new politics at the present moment." (see, I. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, pp. 105-106.) Illich's counterfoil research, or what those of us who are apart of Universidad de la Tierra Califas call convivial research and insurgent learning, seeks to recognize each other across submerged groups; activate submerged groups where they have become somewhat dormant; and link with those that have begun to surface. Among these activated networks that are more than networks, some of the most resilient fibers are those connected to and emanating from the EZLN and the growing Zapatista community that surrounds them. This week ends the Zapatistas' most recent initiative, a global campaign titled Faced with the Walls of Capital: Resistance, Solidarity, and Support for Below and to the Left. With this as with previous spaces, the Zapatistas continue to accumulate struggle, creating the opportunity for communities of struggle to converge while learning from one another how to advance a multifaceted effort of resistance against capitalism and at the same moment to continue to collectively construct alternatives. Migrants on the move defying borders are one of those submerged groups as are the mothers and their families who work to dismantle police violence. It includes all the pirates of the quilombos of the peripheries and the pirates who risk the undercommons appropriating resources, subverting practices, and dismantling the structures of dominant institutions. All those who attempt to live unmediated lives by the forces of the state and capital, but also by the abstractions that organize and sustain capitalism as a system.

Jappe warns that capitalism is not in one of what has been a long line of cyclical crises, but rather what we are experiencing is a definitive crisis brought on by capitalism's fundamental, internal contradiction —it is no longer able to produce surplus value through the exploitation of labor. If capital is in its final death throe then how do we extricate ourselves from abstract labor and the commodity form both of which are key mechanisms and conditions of capitalist command, whether it be articulated through labor, commodity, or more recently in the neoliberal era through debt. How do we get beyond the violent excess of class struggle? How do we do we grow into something else, that outgrows race and patriarchy until they whither away? "One cannot escape from the structural constraints of the system by democratizing access to its functions," explains Jappe. (see, A. Jappe, "Credit unto Death") "In the new theory of commodity fetishism... the crux of the problem resides in the 'subject-form' common to all those who live in commodity society, although this does not mean that this form is the same for all subjects." According to Jappe, "the subject is the substrate, the agent, the bearer that the fetishistic system of valorization of value requires in order to assure production and consumption." (see, A. Jappe, "Princesse de Cleves Today") What news ways of being human can we imagine and become together?

South Bay Bay Crew NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url <https://lists.resist.ca/cgibn /mailman/listinfo/unitierracal ifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous ateneo announcements and summaries please check out UT Califas web page. Additional information on the ateneo in general can be found at <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org /ateneo>. Find us on tumblr at <http://uni-tierra-califas.tum blr.com> and twitter @UTCalifas. Please note we have altered the schedule of the Democracy Ateneo so that it falls on the fourth Saturday of every even month from 2.00 to 5.00 p.m. -- Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy

http://ggg.vostan.net/ccra/#1_______________________________________________ UnitierraCalifas [email protected]

#unitierra califas #UTC Democracy Ateneo #Jappe #Lummis #EZLN #Illich

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quantum-displacement · 8 years ago

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Trumps Cabinet

Secretary of State

Rex Tillerson (Oil Tycoon)

He broke the law by illegally doing deals with State Sponsors of Terrorism.

He broke the law by illegally doing $50 million dollars worth of deals with Iran and selling their military "chemicals" while they were under sanctions.

He bragged about being a personal friend of Putin and estimates put that he has spent more time with Putin then any other American citizen.

He lied under oath to Congress when asked about him lobbying against Russian Sanctions.

He was sued for anti-gay discrimination.

He was Director of a Russian Oil Firm in the Bahamas that helped companies use offshore tax haven loopholes to avoid paying taxes.

When the threat of rising sea levels due to climate change were brought up his response was, "We'll adapt to that."

He is being sued for ignoring environmental regulations.

He was fined after he ignored safety regulations and that resulted in 2 people being killed and another 13 injured.

He refused to agree that Saudi Arabia violates human rights or Putin has committed war crimes.

He has been investigated for fraud.

He was personally mentioned in court documents where at least 14 different witnesses have testified private military security forces employed by Exxon Mobil working in Indonesia had engaged in serious human rights abuses, including murder, torture, sexual violence, kidnapping, battery, assault, rape, arbitrary arrest, detention and false imprisonment. Instead of denying these things occurred his lawyers have argued he shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of employees even though he directly was involved in the management.

Secretary of the Treasury:

Steven Mnuchin (Worked for Goldman Sachs)

He has been accused of racism by enacting company policies to refuse to give loans to minorities and giving Latinos higher mortgage rates than whites.

If you were a Latino who didn't pay your morgue to Steven Mnuchin's bank you are 20% more likely to be foreclosed on than if you are white and in the same situation.

The bank he headed broke the law numerous times with unethical and illegal foreclosure practices. Such as trying to evict an elderly couple who had already paid them $525,000 in mortgages for a house that was only worth $200,000.

He has been sued dozens of times and settled or was found guilty in multi-million dollar lawsuits on several separate occasions.

He has been forced to testify and received subpoenas from the Department of Housing and Urban Development multiple times during government investigations against him.

He tried to take a 90 year old woman's house because a clerical error made it seem like her payment was 27 cents short.

Secretary of Defense:

James Mattis (Former General)

He says it's fun to shoot people.

He's been implicated in committing war crimes.

After his own soldiers were hit by friendly fire he refused to send rescue and left them to die.

He is on the board of executives of a medical company currently going through bankruptcy after they committed fraud and misrepresented their products.

Attorney General:

Jeff Sessions (Alabama Senator)

He said he supported The K.K.K until he learned they smoked pot.

He admitting to making racist jokes during the investigation of two Klansman whom had kidnapped, beaten, tortured, slit the throat and murdered a young black man in 1981 before hanging his body in a tree at a local park in Mobile, Alabama.

He called an attorney a "race traitor" for defending a black client in a voting rights case.

He was considered by the Reagan administration to racist to be a Judge 30 years ago.

He called the ACLU and the NAACP "un-american" and "communist" for forcing civil rights down Americas throat.

He used racial slurs to address black co-workers. And told one Black Attorney, "You best be careful how you talk to white folks, boy."

He referred to the only black commissioner in Mobile Alabama as "the n*gger"

Dozens of former co-workers allege he is a racist and when asked about racist comments he has refused to give a straight answer.

Q: "Did you refer to him as the N-Word? Yes or no?"

A: "I am not the Jeff Sessions my detractors have tried to create."

He tried to fight against the passage of the violence against women act and fought against laws to make spousal rape a crime.

He said if a person is gay it should automatically disqualify them from getting a job as a judge.

He attempted to pass laws that would defund any school that allowed gay student groups or clubs such as the Gay-Straight Alliances. "An organization that professes to be comprised of homosexuals and/or lesbians must not receive state funding or use state-supported facilities to foster or promote those illegal, and sexually deviate activities that break the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws."

He voted in favor of laws that would make it legal for the U.S military to perform torture.

He supports seizing peoples homes without due process.

He has received a 0% rating from The Human Rights Campaign.

Secretary of Interior

Ryan Zinke (Former Congressman)

When he was in the military he was caught in a pattern of fraud.

He used techniques thought up by Stephen Colbert as a joke as part of a campaign money scheme to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

He repeatedly voted in support of logging, drilling, and mining on federally protected land.

He tried to make it legal for hunters to be able to hunt endangered species.

He fought to give federal park land to a coal company who donated $160,000 to his campaign.

Secretary of Agriculture

Sonny Perdue (Former Georgia Governor)

His solution to a drought was to organize a group to go outside the capital building and pray for rain.

He cheated on his property taxes by avoiding to include any mention of his vacation homes to the IRS.

He appointed people to government position in exchange for them selling him land for a cheaper price on at least two separate occasions.

He snuck a bizarre measure into a state law bill about State Safety Regulations that said people don't have to pay property taxes if they buy properties in other states. This saved him $100,000 in property taxes.

He moved all of his money to Florida so he wouldn't have to pay state taxes in Georgia.

He diverted $4.3 million dollars that was supposed to go into building a reservoir into buying massive amounts of land for himself.

Even far right websites managed to create a 22 incident long, 3 year timeline just of scandals involving Perdue either unethically buying or stealing land. Or Perdue trying to use his political power to find bizarre ways to not pay taxes.

Secretary of Commerce

Wilbur Ross (Billionaire coal mine owner, his nickname is "the king of bankruptcy")

He was fined $2.3 million dollars by the SEC for swindling over 10 million in unnecessary fees out of investors.

He killed a dozen miners by knowing violating safety regulations that he was warned would lead to deaths.

He once bailed Trump out of bankruptcy.

Secretary of Labor:

Andrew Puzder (CEO of Carl’s Jr)

He had been accused of beating his wife, medical records prove it was long term and the police were called on atleast two separate occasions.

When asked about the domestic violence charges in court while his wife was trying to get a restraining order he gave bizarrely worded excuses.

Instead of saying:

"Yes I shoved her to the ground so she couldn't call 911."

He said:

"I didn't shove her, I grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her back I don't know if her foot caught or what happened.”

A year before this incident when he was in court again and asked to describe what happen when he was driving drunk, crashed his car and then punched his wife.

Instead of saying:

"I don't remember what happen that night, I did have a minor accident but it wasn't because of my wife it was because I was driving drunk."

He said:

"I recall no such incident. I do recall going up on a curb but it had nothing to do with my reaction to Lisa. I think it had to do with the liquid refreshment we had with our dinner more than anything else."

At the time of these Domestic Violence allegations he was chair of an anti-abortion task force created by the Governor of Missouri.

When asked if he would resign he said:

"This is a personal matter and has nothing to do with issues I'm speaking out on. The fact that I was appointed to the task force, I don't think is relevant to these issues. This is what normally happens in a divorce case. You're blowing it way out of proportion."

He later was forced to resign from the state run Anti-Abortion task force...

Neighbors called the police on another occasion when he started breaking furniture and plates.

The U.S. Department of Labor found that more than half of his restaurants were committing wage violations.

He was sued and found guilty for discriminating against the physically disabled.

He was sued and found guilty for refusing to pay employees overtime.

He was sued and found guilty for refusing to pay employees overtime again. This time he was forced to pay $9 million dollar.

He was sued and found guilty for refusing to follow safety regulations.

He was sued and found guilty in a class action lawsuit for refusing to compensate employees for work expenses.

He was sued and found guilty for allowing sexual harassment to continue.

He has been accused of racial discrimination.

His company is one of the highest ranked in the country in terms of employees reporting gender discrimination or harassment.

He hired Illegal Immigrants and paid them below minimum wage.

He is against there being a minimum wage.

He argues overtime pay shouldn't exist.

He blames poor people for being in poverty while he earns more money every day than employees at his fast food restaurant earn in an entire year.

He wants to replace employees with machines.

Secretary of Homeland Security:

John F. Kelly (Former General)

He doesn't believe women should be allowed be in the military.

He argues Guantanamo Bay, "Isn't as bad as it seems."

He supports Trump building a wall because Terrorists might sneak in through the Mexican boarder, aided by illegal immigrants.

He lied and said Narcoterrorism have killed 500,000 Americans since 9/11.

Secretary of Energy:

Rick Perry (Former Texas Governor)

He was indicted on Felony Abuse of Power charges.

He promised to abolish the Department of Energy before being picked to lead it.

He allowed the execution of a man later proven to be innocent and stalled the investigation to clear the mans name until after he was executed. Then fired all the people who warned him the man was innocent from the start.

He carries a semi-automatic handgun while jogging, “because he is afraid of snakes.” and for the past several years has bragged during interviews he used it to kill a coyote with a single shot. Though everytime he retold the story there were more inconsistencies.

He has told blacks that racism doesn't exist anymore while at the same time having owned for 33 years a hunting camp named simply, N*ggerhead.

He made sexist comments against the former Governor and then argued against a woman who said she was insulted by them by arguing she wasn't really offended.

He said income inequality isn't a problem because there are poor people in the bible.

He proposed a plan to lower taxes on the rich and raise taxes on the poor to compensate, when a New York Time reporter brought up how this would create massive levels of income inequality his response was, "I don’t care about that."

He gave a lengthy speech about how Atheists deserve hell and will go there when they die, and how they have to much power in society.

A whistle blower discovered that state juvenile detention facilities had employed sex offenders and had been covering up complaints of abuse in what may of been the largest child sex abuse ring in U.S history, the whistle blower contacted Governor Perry and spoke to him numerous times but Perry refused to do anything about it. Three years later in 2007 the FBI determined that at least 750 girls age 10-17 had been sexually abused by guards and several high ranking administrators who either covered up the abuse or participated in it were arrested. Many of these administrators were personally appointed by Perry himself.

He said the BP Oil spill had nothing to do with poor safety regulations and was actually caused by god.

In college he got a D in a class titled, "Meats."

He vetoed a bill saying the state can't execute the mentally ill.

He has threatened that Texas can secede from the United States more than once.

He said drugs were the cause of the Charleston Church shooting not racism.

He compares being gay to alcoholism.

He suggested Immigrants trying to cross the boarder should be drone striked to keep them from getting in.

He signed an executive order making it so all girls over the age of 12 had to receive a vaccination against sexually transmitted diseases. Then it was revealed his chief of staff was an executive for the company that made the vaccine.

He threatened the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and accused him of treason.

Secretary of Education:

Betsy DeVos (Billionaire private education advocate )

She wants creationism taught in public schools.

Her family made their fortune through a literal pyramid scheme.

She wants to get rid of Child Labor Laws.

She owes millions of dollars in government fines for election fraud.

She lied during Senate Hearings.

She illegally omitted anti-union donations on disclosure forum.

She wants to use American Schools to "Build Gods Kingdom."

She hired a Felon to run her school lobbying group.

She thinks schools should be armed in order to protect themselves against bears.

White House chief strategist:

Steve Bannon (CEO of Breitbart News)

He was arrested for three counts of domestic violence in the 90s.

The charges were dropped after him and his attorney threatened his ex-wife into fleeing the state.

He choked his ex-wife and smashed her phone so she couldn't call 911.

He was accused of sexual harassment by female co-workers. “Saftey Regulations? I’m going to ram those Safety Regulations down her fucking throat,”

“There are some unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement, the women that should lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England.” ― Bannon during interview when asked about women in government

He was outraged when he found out that Jews were allowed at his daughters school and complained to them over it.

He helped promote the white supremacist novel The Camp of the Saints which depicts non-white immigrants as barbaric invaders whoes goals for moving to Europe and America is to bring forth the downfall of civilization.

He was a member of a Facebook group that produced racist rants and death threats against President Obama.

He complained about there being to many Asian CEOs.

National Security Adviser:

Michael Flynn (Disgraced former General)

He says Islam is Cancer and it's irrational for people not to be afraid of Muslims.

He ordered female Defense Intelligence Agency employees to "dress sexy" and wear short skirts and makeup.

He was fired from the Military for trying to demand too much power and authority. Though he says the reason was, "political correctness."

Leaked Bush Administration emails show he show he had extreme anger issues, refused to follow orders, went against policy and became, "physcially abusive with staff."

He wants to bring back torture.

He retweeted anti-semetic Tweets.

He is a Board Member for what The Southern Poverty Law Center considers the largest Anti-Muslim Hate Group in America.

His son and top adviser is famous for posting online Conspiracy Theories and racist memes.

Leaked 2010 memo reveals he shared Top Secret Information without permission.

He facilitated the murder of civilians in Afghanistan.

Domestic Policy Adviser

Ken Blackwell (Former Ohio Secretary of State)

He says, "Gays can be reformed, just like arsonists."

He works for an anti-gay hate group who wants gays deported.

He advised Trump to change the laws so youth Homeless shelters could legally refuse to help gay and transgender youth.

He believes mass shooting are caused by America's lack of morality which stems from the country allowing gays to exist.

He wrote an article saying Mosques don't have a right to exist in New York City.

He was accused of rigging the 2004 election in Ohio for George Bush. After he was called to testify in legal hearings by Congress he just refused to show up.

During his term he had 18 major lawsuits.

He accidentally published a list of 1.2 million Social Security numbers of Ohio citizens.

He fought tooth and nail to move too electronic touch screen voting machines instead of paper ballots, after it was discovered the machines had a backdoor software "glitch" it was revealed that Blackwell owned the company that made the voting machines.

A group of 31 pastors contacted the IRS alleging that a number of Churches in the state had been secretly funding Blackwell which violates laws prohibiting charity groups involvement in political campaigns

Blackwell sent an email claiming he had never heard of any of the churches that he was accused of getting illegal donations from. But after media outlets traced the I.P address of the email it was revealed he sent the email inside of the church that he was claiming he had never heard of in the email he was sending from their building...

Click here to vote who you think is the worst pick.

#Trump #Hillary #Imwithher #nevertrump #never trump #fuck trump #fucktrump #Donald Trump #Mike Pence #Pence #Hillary Clinton #blm #blacklivesmatter #stay woke #woke

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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How the baby boomers broke America

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-the-baby-boomers-broke-america/

How the baby boomers broke America

The offering includes outliers like Pete Buttigieg, the millennial South Bend, Ind. mayor running openly on generational change. But the most likely outcome as it stands now is that the nation will yet again ask a baby boomer to fix what the baby boom broke. And it’s a lot to fix.

“We have Social Security. We have the national debt. We have what’s called ‘deferred maintenance’ in infrastructure. And of course we have the climate,” Bruce Gibney, author of “A Generation of Sociopaths,” said in the first episode of “Baby Bust,” the new POLITICO Money podcast series on the political and financial legacy of the baby boom generation. “I think the main impediment right now is the death grip the boomers have had over the political system.”

What went wrong

That death grip could hold at least another four and perhaps eight years in the White House.

Gibney and other critics of the baby boom generation argue that the huge cohort that came of age in the prosperous years after World War II spent much of their time in power cutting their own taxes, ensuring that giant entitlement programs are protected — at least for themselves — and doing little to protect the environment or invest in American infrastructure or address the mounting student loan crisis.

It wasn’t entirely their fault, students of the generation say. Boomers just grew up at a time when everything was fairly awesome and people assumed they would stay that way.

The baby boomers “grew up in an era when there was something close to full employment almost all the time. Wages were going up with productivity, and productivity was going up very fast. Incomes were growing at the rate of 2 percent a year, something that we haven’t seen since,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and himself a boomer. “The baby boom happened to get older at the same time that America adopted an economic model that was actually pretty counter-productive, which did not actually produce rising wages and incomes for people at a very good clip, that enhanced inequality.”

A bipartisan generational critique

The first boomer president, Bill Clinton, did raise taxes in the early 1990s and briefly created government surpluses after all the charts and warnings and televised lectures from Ross Perot. But he also suffered an ugly impeachment over personal misbehavior and efforts to cover it up.

And progressives blame him for expanding the penal state, cutting capital gains taxes for the rich and engaging in petty personal feuds with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich — another boomer — leading to government shutdowns and the dawn of the kind of scorched earth, Forever War politics that now dominate Washington.

President George W. Bush, far from addressing government funding problems, engaged in a short-lived movement to privatize Social Security and added an expensive prescription drug program to Medicare whose main beneficiary was older Americans. His presidency was then largely consumed by the massive and costly post-9/11 war on terror, leaving concerns about climate, entitlements and infrastructure spending aside.

Barack Obama — technically a late-era boomer but more Gen X by personal temperament — attempted to strike a “grand bargain” with tea party-led Republicans and then-House Speaker John Boehner to address long-term entitlement sustainability and spending issues along with significant tax hikes.

But it all fell apart when progressives balked at entitlement overhauls and Republicans at tax hikes. The brief bipartisan moment when it seemed like some real change might happen vanished as quickly as it appeared.

The rise of Trump

Following Obama — whom many Gen Xers claim as one of their own — boomers helped elect another boomer, Donald Trump, partly on his promises to restore manufacturing greatness while also not touching any entitlements for those at or nearing retirement.

Trump essentially junked the entire approach of the tea party movement in favor of far greater spending on the military — along with Democratic priorities to secure the Pentagon money — and signed a $2 trillion tax cut that slashed rates for corporations and rich people with a little thrown in for everyone else. Under Trump’s watch, the annual deficit has grown close to $1 trillion and the national debt to over $22 trillion.

The GOP has essentially returned to the ethos of former vice president Dick Cheney — that deficits don’t matter — after they spent the Obama presidency threatening shutdowns and debt defaults over out-of-control spending. Critics of Trump’s fiscal approach argue the tax cut was the last gasp of the baby boom attempting to direct money to itself.

“The tax cut that was passed [in 2017] is the best example,” said author and attorney Steven Brill, also a baby boomer. “Most of the money the corporations have saved through that tax cut have gone to buybacks of stocks, which make the shareholders richer.”

Trump also pledged to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement aimed at sharply reducing emissions and rolled back many environmental regulations of the Obama White House.

Through all of this, presidents and Congresses of both parties, largely governed by baby boomers, did little to address what engineers suggest are nearly $5 trillion in infrastructure updates needed in the U.S. as rising powers like China pour massive resources into such projects. Calling every week “infrastructure week” has become a running joke in political circles.

Baby boomers in power, according to their critics, have done a fairly good job of ensuring that Social Security and Medicare will be protected for those at or near retirement — including tens of millions of boomers — but much less to ensure they will be fully funded for later retirees including Gen X, millennials and Gen Z.

Social Security and Medicare might not be going broke. But the outlook isn’t great.

“As long as people are working there will be at least money coming into Social Security,” said Nancy Altman, chair of the board of directors of the Pension Rights Center. “Even if Congress did nothing whatsoever, people would get three-quarters of their scheduled benefits, which is not good enough, but it isn’t nothing.”

Boomers defended

Many baby boomers defend the generation’s contributions, citing advances in gender equality, the protest movement against the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement (even though most landmark civil and voting rights laws were passed when the median boomer was around 12 years old).

Some also argue that it’s not fair to look at political failures through a purely generational lens, arguing that plenty of boomers (including Warren and Sanders) have long argued for more forward-thinking, less self-interested policies but failed to win enough power to enact them. And they say there is still a legacy the baby boom can leave to Gen X, millennials and Gen Z as those generations finally take over political power.

“Typical Xer, you’re saying, ‘Yeah, they gave us diet foods and yoga,’” said Neil Howe, managing director of demography at Hedgeye and a leading theorist on generational cycles. “I think boomers gave younger generations a language of communitarianism and whole-ism that they are going to use when it comes time to bind this country back together again.”

The boomer Democrats

The current crop of Democratic candidates is dominated by boomers and near-boomers including Biden, Warren and Sanders who are one, two and three in nearly every national and state poll. Biden has largely based his campaign around taking another shot at the Obama approach that sought to address major structural problems like climate change, entitlements and debt through coalition-building, both domestically and in international accords like the Paris treaty and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a giant trade deal meant in part to counter China’s rise as a global economic and military power.

Obama’s biggest legacy, the Affordable Care Act, was more of an incremental approach to driving down costs and making care more accessible. Biden has defended the law but is struggling to beat back challenges from the left that what is needed is not incrementalism but radical change including wealth taxes, “Medicare for All,” student loan forgiveness and free college. Entire industries, including big tech and Wall Street, need to be busted up and reformed, according to the Warren and Sanders view of the world.

For progressives and economists who believe deficits and debt really don’t matter at all, this is a welcome change in political direction. And Warren and Sanders both have widespread support from many younger voters.

But Warren has now found herself in something of a political quagmire as she promises to explain how she would pay for government-funded health care for all with estimates of the cost at around $3 trillion a year without boosting taxes on the middle class.

The millennial Democrat

Into all this comes Buttigieg, running as a millennial alternative to all the older candidates as well as more of a centrist who wants to take on structural problems left by the boomers but not in ways that send deficits and debt into the stratosphere.

“You have a different sense of urgency around these issues if you’re expecting in your lifetime to be dealing with them personally,” Buttigieg said on the podcast. “So by 2054, when I get to the current age of the current president, the shape of the world then, both environmentally, economically and beyond, that’s not a theoretical question; it’s a personal one that I have to prepare for just as a human being.”

Buttigieg added that, “There’s just no way we can get very far into the next few decades on this tax policy without a fiscal time bomb going off.”

And as for the baby boom legacy? “I think a lot of wrong decisions get made out of just a kind of political or moral laziness that says that certain consequences, because they’re going to hit down the road, aren’t consequences for the politicians who are dealing with them, especially politicians who work one election cycle at a time,” Buttigieg said.

What about Gen X?

Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1980, may never find themselves with a president to call their own, even if they lay claim to Obama, who was born in 1961. But that doesn’t mean the generation won’t have a significant role to play in future elections and political debates that increasingly pit baby boomers bent on protecting their investments and entitlements against millennials and members of Gen Z seeking to significantly alter the structure of taxation and federal benefits.

The role may wind up being quintessential Gen X, attempting to referee between much bigger generations to find some kind of compromise where everyone can win.

“I guess we’re going to have to choose, in some of these presidential elections, if it pits a baby boomer against a millennial with very different ideas, and I think there is significant political weight to Gen X and how those decisions are ultimately made, right?” said Amy Walter, a Gen Xer and national editor of the Cook Political Report.

“Like, we’re not meaningless in terms of which way we go in the coming presidential elections of the next four, eight, 12 — even longer than that. There is some significant political importance to how Gen X decides on a lot of these things.”

#America #broke #Foreign #Politics

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jetcolor3-blog · 5 years ago

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The view from D.C.

While much of the buzz around the National Association of Realtors’ Legislative Meetings revolved around the fact that President Donald Trump would be the first sitting president to accept the organization’s invitation to address members in their annual pilgrimage to the nation’s capital since George W. Bush in 2006, there’s plenty of news to uncover in this five-day conference.

Setting priorities

Every year at the event, colloquially known as Midyear, NAR sends members and local government affairs directors to meet with their representatives on the Hill to lobby for change, usually with a list of talking points that are important on a national level. This year, three topics topped the list of legislative priorities: flood insurance, opportunity zones and fair housing.

While NAR is most concerned with extending the National Flood Insurance Program’s reauthorization so that transactions aren’t delayed or canceled in flood zones when it expires on May 31, the group is also seeking a longer-term solution and reforms to strengthen the solvency of the program overall.

There were a number of delays in finalizing the rules around Opportunity Zones, an investment incentive created as part of the 2017 tax reform bill, not the least of which was a historic government shutdown. While the Treasury Department released the first detailed look into regulations around the new program last month, they’re still not finalized. And yet, if people who are interested in realizing the benefits of this program haven’t invested by the end of 2019, they are not going to get the full set of benefits, at least under current rules. NAR is requesting an extension of this deadline to account for the delays.

The organization also instructed members to ask their representatives in Congress to support H.R. 5, a bill that passed a full House vote during the conference and is designed to extend Fair Housing rights to the LGBTQ community. The association noted that it’s been ten years since it amended its code of ethics to require members offer equal service regardless of sexual orientation and would like to see federal laws follow suit.

A local flair

Of course, Chicagoland real estate professionals were on hand to speak their minds about these issues and many others. Michelle Mills Clement, CEO of the Chicago Association of Realtors, said she was humbled by the efforts of members who made the trip to Washington. “Our Realtors made every moment count. They met with policymakers, sought counsel from NAR representatives, asked tough questions and strengthened talking points,” she said. “These are the people who are helping to uphold Chicago as the world-class city that it is.”

As a federal political coordinator, Dream Town Realty’s Nykea Pippion McGriff is one of 535 association liaisons acting to connect members of Congress with the Realtor community. In addition to meeting with Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) at Midyear, McGriff is also expected to offer issue updates to the longtime congressman of the state’s first district on a quarterly basis. While it may sound difficult to get the ears of politicians on the national level, McGriff said Realtors come prepared with anecdotes about how policies are impacting homeowners and real estate transactions: “Legislators are happy to meet with us. They are happy that we have specific stories to share that help them tie legislative items to the constituent realities.”

Aside from the national priorities, McGriff said one pressing issue for Chicagoland real estate professionals is the conversation about state and local tax, or SALT, deductions. “It was brought up in almost every meeting I attended. We made sure our legislators know that the current structure does not work for the people of Illinois,” she said.

The future of the FHFA

One much-anticipated meeting at Midyear was with newly appointed Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mark Calabria. Many have been nervous about Calabria’s criticism of the government’s role in housing finance, especially since the administration announced plans to end conservatorship of government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Calabria told Midyear attendees that his intention is to “level the playing field to where all large financial institutions have similar capital.” This will ensure the GSEs “have a good business model because they have good management and good execution — not because they have lower standards than everyone else,” he said.

Calabria also assured the group that he has no plans to change loan limits during his tenure at FHFA and underlined support for the 30-year mortgage, an institutional lending tool of which he has been critical in the past.

The session gave NAR an opportunity to highlight its housing finance reform plan, which proposes transitioning Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into private, shareholder-owned utilities that would continue to purchase, guarantee and securitize single-family and multifamily mortgage loans.

Associations and health insurance

Executives with NAR and a number of local Realtor associations met with White House officials to advocate for the expansion of Association Healthcare Plans. Earlier this month, NAR sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr requesting the Justice Department better secure national access to AHPs, clear up misconceptions about how they’re applied and defend the Department of Labor’s authority in the matter.

Currently a patchwork of AHP eligibility exists across the country. Some states are enacting local legislation, issuing guidance on the matter or simply conforming with the new Department of Labor rule, but others have conflicting laws or guidance, or are part of a lawsuit to overturn the rule, currently in circuit court. In Illinois, many are allowed to participate in fully insured AHPs and large group plans. This means that Illinois will continue to conform to the Department of Labor regulations until the 2020 open enrollment period. As long as the regulations are upheld by the circuit court, Illinois will continue to follow them, but if they’re overturned by the circuit court, Illinois will either have to stop allowing AHPs or enact statewide legislation to permit such coverage.

What’s keeping NAR lawyers up at night

In a legal briefing for members, Lesley Muchow, NAR vice president and deputy general counsel, told attendees about a number of court happenings that may bear on the business of real estate professionals. She noted a 177 percent increase in litigation around the accessibility of websites under the Americans With Disabilities Act from 2017 to 2018, for example. The Department of Justice has issued a number of consent decrees that make it clear businesses must comply with the government’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Muchow suggested Realtors, associations and multiple listing service providers have their sites audited and inquire with vendors about making any necessary updates to avoid being sued.

Also, wire fraud is still a vexing problem for the legal and real estate communities. “From 2015 to 2017, there was a 1,100 percent rise in the number of victims in the real estate industry and an almost 2,200 percent rise in reported monetary loss. The monetary loss in the real estate industry is reported by the FBI to be the largest,” Muchow told attendees. She noted that a case in Kansas last year resulted in a listing broker being found to be 85 percent liable for a buyer’s losses from a wire fraud scam, and having to pay a judgment of $167,129. Quick action is essential in these cases; if reported within 24 hours, “there is some chance the financial institution and the FBI will be able to work together and stop the wire and recover the funds,” Muchow said.

Source: https://chicagoagentmagazine.com/2019/05/22/the-view-from-d-c/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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newssplashy · 6 years ago

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"It's been quite a ride," McCain wrote in his memoir.

Republican Sen. John McCain, 81, has died after a long battle with brain cancer.

The Arizona senator was diagnosed with an aggressive form of glioblastoma and began treatment for the disease in July 2017.

McCain appeared to be undeterred for several months after his diagnosis was made public.

He was seen back at work on Capitol Hill last fall and weighed in on major legislative policies, including the annual defense authorization bill and efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

"I don't mean to be repetitious, but to my Democrat friends and some of my Republican friends: I'm coming back," McCain said during a Facebook Live event in August last year.

McCain made headlines upon his return — including when he dramatically voted no on the Republican version of a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

His career as a public servant spanned decades of honorable service, and despite some challenges along the way, McCain established himself as a key figurehead of the Republican Party. Few lawmakers on Capitol Hill will match the legacy he leaves behind.

Here's a look back at John McCain's incredible life:

McCain graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1958 and served as a pilot.

Early in his career in naval aviation, McCain's flying ability and judgment were questioned after he crashed three planes. His commanders were said to have sarcastically called him "Ace McCain" because of his record.

"John was what you called a push-the-envelope guy," Sam Hawkins, who flew in McCain's squadron in the 1960s, told the Los Angeles Times. "There are some naval aviators who are on the cautious side. They don't get out on the edges, but the edges are where you get the maximum out of yourself and out of your plane. That's where John operated."

On October 26, 1967, during the Vietnam War, McCain was flying over Hanoi when a surface-to-air missile hit his plane's wing, forcing him to eject.

"Some North Vietnamese swam out and pulled me to the side of the lake and immediately started stripping me, which is their standard procedure," McCain wrote in USA Today.

"Of course, this being in the center of town, a huge crowd of people gathered, and they were all hollering and screaming and cursing and spitting and kicking at me."

McCain broke both of his arms and his right knee. He had lost consciousness until he hit the water after ejecting from the plane.

McCain was held as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) for five and a half years. He was subjected to torture and solitary confinement in a Vietnamese prison nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton."

Upon learning that McCain's father was an admiral in the Navy, who would eventually command all US forces in the Pacific, NVA forces provided medical care to McCain. Doctors performed surgery on his leg, according to McCain, but made incorrect incisions on one side and cut all the ligaments.

McCain would spend the rest of his life walking with a noticeable limp.

McCain was released on March 14, 1973.

The North Vietnamese Army had previously offered McCain his freedom, but he refused, thinking that it would bring shame and demoralize his fellow POWs.

Carol, McCain's first wife, raised three children while he was gone, and was reportedly recovering from a devastating car crash that left her impaired for months.

McCain made several trips back to Vietnam to bridge relations with the US.

McCain would eventually retire from the Navy in 1981 as a captain. His awards include a Silver Star and a Distinguished Flying Cross.

"I have watched men suffer the anguish of imprisonment, defy appalling human cruelty ... break for a moment, then recover inhuman strength to defy their enemies once more," McCain said to the Naval Academy's graduating class in 1993. "All these things and more, I have seen. And so will you. My time is slipping by. Yours is fast approaching. You will know where your duty lies. You will know."

Source: Stars and Stripes

Some areas of the prison where McCain was held were converted into a museum, dedicated to the historic link between his service and the Vietnam War.

Source: Reuters

During a visit to the infamous prison, McCain said he could not forgive the jailers who mistreated and killed fellow POWs.

Source: Reuters

McCain married Cindy Hensley in 1980 and had a daughter, two sons, and adopted another daughter from Bangladesh.

Source: Los Angeles Times

After serving as a Navy liaison in the Senate, McCain took the leap into politics and was elected to serve Arizona's 1st Congressional District from 1982 to 1984.

McCain's political opponents criticized him early on, pointing to what they called his lack of connection to Arizona. He eventually hit back during a debate:

"Listen, pal. I spent 22 years in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."

"Looking back, I think the race was effectively over right then," McCain recalled in his autobiography. "But I didn't know that then. I was just mad and had taken a swing."

Source: New York Times, AZ Central

After his two terms in the House, McCain sought Arizona's Senate seat and won a landslide victory in 1986.

As a senator, McCain was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He would eventually become the chairman of the committee, weighing in on a variety of matters involving the US military, such as funding and mission scope.

Source: AZ Central

Sen. McCain hit a bump in the road in 1989.

McCain was one of the "Keating Five" — five senators accused of trying to persuade federal regulators to ease up on Charles Keating, a major campaign donor who became financially compromised during the 1980s savings-and-loan crisis.

McCain, who emerged relatively unscathed after the Senate Ethics Committee's investigation, was found to have exercised "poor judgment." While the other four senators retired in the 1990s, McCain soldiered on.

"Despite my recovery, the Keating Five experience was not one that I have walked away from as easily as I have other bad times," McCain said in his memoir.

"Twelve years after its conclusion, I still wince thinking about it and find that if I do not repress the memory, its recollection still provokes a vague but real feeling that I had lost something very important, something that was sacrificed in the pursuit of gratifying ambitions, my own and others."

Following the scandal, McCain soon earned the moniker of "Maverick," a term his colleagues from both sides of the political aisle gave him as he advocated for campaign finance reform and sought to end government waste.

In the 1990s, McCain took on special-interest groups like the tobacco industry, and pushed for raising cigarette taxes to pay for anti-smoking campaigns. But McCain's anti-tobacco bill ultimately fell short after the tobacco industry launched a $40 million PR effort of its own.

"The losers are the children of America," McCain said.

Regardless of the outcome for some of his ambitious reforms, McCain's was easily reelected in 1992 and 1998.

Source: AZ Central

McCain would soon became a household name in politics. He set his sights higher and announced in 1999 that he would run for president in the 2000 election.

After losing several states in the primaries to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, McCain withdrew from the race and endorsed Bush.

One of McCain's crowning achievements in the Senate was the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002.

McCain, along with Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold of Winsonsin, helped enact the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, one of the first major amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act.

The legislation was designed to regulate financing for political organizations and curb the influx of soft money.

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, McCain supported the US-led coalition war in Afghanistan.

McCain explained his support for Operation Enduring Freedom in a Wall Street Journal opinion column published in October 2001.

"There is no avoiding the war we are in today, any more than we could have avoided world war after our fleet was bombed at Pearl Harbor," McCain wrote. "America is under attack by a depraved, malevolent force that opposes our every interest and hates every value we hold dear."

"War is a miserable business. Let's get on with it."

McCain also supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and claimed Saddam Hussein was "turning Iraq into a weapons assembly line for al-Qaida's network."

Although McCain continued to voice his support for US military options in Iraq, McCain later admitted it was a mistake.

"The principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam had [weapons of mass destruction], was wrong," McCain wrote in his memoir.

"The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can't be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it."

Source: USA Today

McCain announced his second presidential bid for the 2008 election.

McCain gracefully spars with then-Sen. Barack Obama.

McCain secured the Republican nomination in the primaries and faced off against then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois in the general election.

As McCain trailed behind polls, Obama's critics sought to discredit him by promoting false theories about his heritage and religion. During a campaign rally in 2008, one of McCain's supporters explained why she said she did not trust Obama.

"I have read about him, and he's not, he's not — he's an Arab," the woman said, incorrectly.

McCain quickly grabbed the microphone, shook his head and set the record straight.

"No ma'am," McCain said, calling Obama "a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that's what this campaign is all about."

McCain selects Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate.

McCain later said he regretted the decision and wished he selected Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic senator from Connecticut, and his longtime friend, as his running mate.

"It was sound advice that I could reason for myself," McCain said in his memoir. "But my gut told me to ignore it and I wish I had."

McCain concedes to Obama in November 2008: "This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight."

On November 5, 2008, McCain formally conceded the election and congratulated President-elect Obama on his victory.

"A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Senator Barack Obama to congratulate him," McCain said. "To congratulate him on being elected the next president of the country that we both love."

"This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight," McCain added.

"I've always believed that America offers opportunities to all who have the industry and will to seize it. Senator Obama believes that, too."

As the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain provided legislative oversight of the military and became a leading voice on veterans issues.

But as the chairman of the legislative body of military affairs, McCain also had to account for the military's failures.

For the most part, McCain maintained friendly ties with other lawmakers, regardless of their political party.

In July 2017, McCain announced he was diagnosed with brain cancer.

McCain received broad support for his recovery from both sides of the political aisle.

"I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support - unfortunately for my sparring partners in Congress, I'll be back soon, so stand-by!" McCain said on Twitter.

McCain feuded with President Donald Trump.

Prior to making a move to politics, real-estate tycoon Donald Trump threw jabs at McCain by throwing cold water on his military service.

Trump said the former naval aviator "was captured," and expressed doubt on whether he should be hailed as a hero.

"He's not a war hero," Trump said at a leadership summit in 2015. "He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."

"I think John McCain's done very little for the veterans," Trump later said. "I'm very disappointed in John McCain."

Trump would continue to echo the remarks throughout his presidency.

McCain remained critical of Trump's presidency and did not shy from letting his feelings known. On Trump's controversial performance at his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in July, McCain described it as "one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory."

McCain also denounced Trump's repeated attacks on the press: "Trump continues his unrelenting attacks on the integrity of American journalists and news outlets," McCain wrote in an op-ed. "This has provided cover for repressive regimes to follow suit."

The decisive healthcare vote.

A few weeks after being diagnosed with brain cancer, McCain returned to the Senate floor and cast his stunning "no" vote and scuttled Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's healthcare bill on a 51-49 vote.

"Watch the show," McCain said to reporters as he walked into the chamber before the vote.

The Republican-led "skinny repeal" would have repealed major portions of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law, and McCain's vote was crucial in derailing that effort.

McCain's vote has been a source of ire from Trump, who frequently disparages McCain's decision in his numerous campaign rallies.

McCain also had a gruff, but affectionate relationship with journalists.

McCain discontinues his brain cancer treatment.

On August 24, McCain announced he would discontinue his cancer treatment.

"In the year since, John has surpassed expectations for his survival," McCain's family said in a statement. "But the progress of disease and the inexorable advance of age render their verdict. With his usual strength of will, he has now chosen to discontinue medical treatment."

In a passage from his memoir, which was published in May, McCain writes:

"I don't know how much longer I'll be here. Maybe I'll have another five years. Maybe, with the advances in oncology, they'll find new treatments for my cancer that will extend my life. Maybe I'll be gone before you read this. My predicament is, well, rather unpredictable."

"I have some things I'd like to take care of first, some work that needs finishing, and some people I need to see. And I want to talk to my fellow Americans a little more if I may."

"It's been quite a ride."

"It's been quite a ride," McCain continued in his memoir. "I made a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my times."

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nancydhooper · 6 years ago

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California May Make Abortion Pill Available at All Public University Student Health Centers

A bill in the California legislature would expand abortion access, as much of the rest of the country is restricting it.

California, the nation’s most populous state and a national leader in protecting and advancing reproductive health, could become the first to ensure that medication abortion is available to college students in public universities.

State Senator Connie M. Leyva has authored SB320 — a groundbreaking bill in California that would require that the abortion pill, a safe and effective method to end a pregnancy, be offered at student health centers in every University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) campus in the state. The law would lift barriers currently faced by students who struggle to travel off-campus to obtain an abortion, which results in unnecessary hardship and delay. The bill passed the California Senate last year; the California Assembly will vote on it by the end of this month.

California’s effort to improve access to abortion care is a bright point in a national landscape that has seen access to abortion decrease significantly. In just the first six months of 2018, 11 states enacted 22 new medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion. West Virginia and Oregon will have anti-abortion measures on the ballot this November. Numerous other states are considering anti-abortion restrictions and if the Senate confirms Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, the court may not uphold the right to abortion.

Jessica R., a UC student, struggled with paying for care and dealing with the complexities of insurance plans when she needed an abortion. She had to go off-campus to an unfamiliar provider for two separate appointments, which took take time away from class, work, and other responsibilities. Jessica’s grades slipped as she tried to navigate the obstacles to getting an abortion. Such financial, logistical, and emotional tolls are completely unnecessary.

Every month, around 500 students at the UC and CSU campuses seek the abortion pill at off-site health care facilities. On average, a student seeking abortion in California will have to wait one week for the next available appointment at the facility closest to their campus — and that’s assuming they can make it to the appointment. More than half of all students in UC and CSU universities are low-income and over two-thirds of UC students and one-third of CSU students do not have a car, making cost and transportation critical barriers for many. Students of color, low-income students, first-generation college students, and students who are already parents or supporting their families are particularly harmed by barriers to accessing comprehensive reproductive care.

Student health centers already provide a range of reproductive health services, including testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy tests, pregnancy options counseling, and contraception. It just makes sense that the abortion pill — safe, effective, and simple to provide — should be among the services offered.

Research shows that student health centers are well equipped to offer the abortion pill, and private funders have come forward to pay the costs of implementation and training.

In addition, students and allies from across the state have built a groundswell of support for SB320. Six in 10 Californians support providing the full range of reproductive health care, including the abortion pill. That support includes majorities of every age bracket. A broad coalition has formed, comprised of dozens of groups including Women’s Foundation of California, Women’s Policy Institute, ACCESS Women’s Health Justice, ACT for Women and Girls, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Nurses Association’s California chapter, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, as well as medical, reproductive health, and community groups from every part of the state. The Los Angeles Times editorial board came out in support of the measure as well, calling it a “sensible and smart addition to the healthcare services.”

The future of abortion rights in the U.S. may be uncertain, but California has a chance to lead the nation in expanding access. SB320 is a testament to California’s spirit of innovation, the ingenuity of young people, and a commitment to a better future. It sets a new standard for campus care that the rest of the nation should follow.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/blog/reproductive-freedom/abortion/california-may-make-abortion-pill-available-all-public-university via http://www.rssmix.com/

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itswingedcollectoranchorfan · 7 years ago

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Big Money Rules

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ILR/Cornell University Press, 259 pp., $29.95

Jill Freedman/Steven Kasher GalleryThe Poor People’s Campaign, Washington, D.C., spring 1968; photograph by Jill Freedman from her book Resurrection City, 1968, just published by Damiani. An exhibition of her work is on view at the Steven Kasher Gallery, New York City, through December 22, 2017.

I grew up in the 1950s, an era when many believed that our society would inevitably progress toward ever greater economic equality. Desperate poverty would recede, it was assumed, as new federal programs addressed the needs of those at the very bottom of the ladder and as economic growth created new jobs. The average CEO at the time earned only twenty times as much as the average worker, and during the Eisenhower administration the marginal tax rate for the highest earners was 91 percent. Today, the goal of equality appears to be receding. The top marginal tax rate is only 39 percent, far below what it was during the Eisenhower years, and most Republicans would like to lower it even more. Employers now make 271 times as much as the average worker, and half the children in American schools are officially classified by the federal government as low-income and eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Union membership peaked in the mid-1950s and has declined ever since; the largest unions today are in the public sector and only about 7 percent of private sector workers belong to a union.

Despite these alarming developments, however, politicians who support the deregulation of business and champion pro-employer legislation—from state legislators to members of Congress—have a firm electoral foothold in most states. During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Trump promised to support basic government services like Medicare and pledged to bring back jobs that had been outsourced to other nations. However, once he was president, Trump endorsed health care bills that would have left millions of low- and lower-middle-income Americans without health insurance, and his insistence on reducing corporate tax rates suggests his determination to act in the interest of wealthy elites.

Two recent books—Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Gordon Lafer’s The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time—seek to explain several puzzling aspects of American politics today. Why do people of modest means who depend on government-funded health care and Social Security or other supplements to their income continue to vote for candidates who promise to privatize or get rid of those very programs? Why do people who are poor vote for politicians who promise to cut corporate taxes?

Both books follow in the path of Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016), which documented an astonishing effort by the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and other billionaires to purchase politicians in support of such goals as the elimination of welfare programs and the privatization of health care and education. Lafer’s describes how in recent years those goals have been achieved in state after state. MacLean’s book—which set off a heated dispute among historians and economists when it appeared in June—aims to describe their historical, theoretical, and academic underpinnings.

At the center of Democracy in Chains is the work of the Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan, who died in 2013. Buchanan is associated with the doctrine of economic libertarianism: he is widely credited as one of the founding fathers of the “public choice” model of economics, which argues that bureaucrats and public officials serve their own interests as much as or more than the public interest, and he was the leading figure in the Virginia School of economic thought. He trained many economists who came to share his libertarian views, and his acolytes have protested MacLean’s view that he had “a formative role” in the evolution of an antidemocratic “strand of the radical right.”

MacLean discovered Buchanan by chance. About a decade ago, she began researching a book about Virginia’s decision to issue state vouchers that would allow white students to attend all-white schools, avoiding compliance with the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. While studying the writings of the voucher advocate Milton Friedman, she came across Buchanan’s name. She started reading his work and visited a disorganized archive of his writings and papers at the Fairfax, Virginia, campus of George Mason University, where she found materials scattered in boxes and file cabinets. In uncatalogued stacks of papers she came across personal correspondence between Buchanan and the billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch.

What she pieced together, she writes, was a plan “to train a new generation of thinkers to push back against Brown and the changes in constitutional thought and federal policy that had enabled it.” This was indeed a bold project: most mainstream economists in the postwar era had long accepted Keynesian doctrines that affirmed the power of the federal government to regulate the economy and protect the rights of workers to organize in unions. Buchanan’s rejection of governmental actions that he thought infringed on individual liberty and his defense of states’ rights gave intellectual ammunition to those who opposed both Keynesian economics and federal interventions in the states to enforce desegregation.

In 1956 Buchanan founded a research-and-design center at the University of Virginia to combat what he called “the powerful grip that collectivist ideology already had on the minds of intellectuals” and the “increasing role of government in economic and social life.” Three years later, as the state of Virginia sought a way to avoid racial integration in schools, Buchanan and a colleague proposed using tax-funded vouchers to avoid compliance with the Brown decision. This would destroy public education and preserve racial segregation, since white children could use publicly funded vouchers to attend all-white schools.

During his years at UVA, Buchanan collaborated with such “old-fashioned libertarians” as Frank Knight of the University of Chicago, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and other partisans of the Austrian School who railed against socialism and championed the virtues of individual self-reliance and economic liberty. In 1969, after a brief and unhappy stint at UCLA, he took his center—now called the Center for Study of Public Choice—with him to Virginia Tech. Thirteen years later he brought it to George Mason University, where it remains today.

GMU had been founded in 1957 in a shopping mall in suburban Washington as a two-year college. Buchanan was its prize catch. When he was hired in 1982, he came with a team of colleagues and graduate assistants and attracted what the school’s senior vice-president later called “literally millions of dollars” in funding from corporate-friendly political interests, such as Charles Koch and the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts. The economics department and the law school of GMU were devoted to advancing his ideas.

By the mid-1980s, MacLean argues, the center had become a channel through which scholars were funneled into “the far-flung and purportedly separate, yet intricately connected, institutions funded by the Koch brothers and their now large network of fellow wealthy donors,” notably the Cato Institute (whose founding seminar Buchanan attended) and the Heritage Foundation (which gave him a welcoming reception when he arrived at GMU). Stephen Moore, the research director for Ronald Reagan’s Commission on Privatization who later served on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, was one of GMU’s early master’s degree recipients. Three of Buchanan’s first doctoral students at the school went on to work in the Reagan administration, which made the reduction of federal authority one of its primary goals.

In MacLean’s account, Buchanan was responding to the threats that democratic institutions posed to the preservation of wealth in America. Early American democracy had limited this threat by confining the franchise to white male property owners. But as voting rights were extended, the nation’s elites had to reckon with the growing power of formerly disenfranchised voters, who could be expected to support ever more expensive government programs to benefit themselves and ever more extensive ways to redistribute wealth. MacLean asserts that Buchanan supplied his benefactors with arguments to persuade the American public to go along with policies that protect wealth and eschew federal programs reliant on progressive taxation.

If everyone is motivated by self-interest, he argued, government can’t be trusted to do what it promises. Indeed, it cannot be trusted at all. Bureaucrats can be expected to protect their turf, not the public interest. Every politician, Buchanan wrote, “can be viewed as proposing and attempting to enact a combination of expenditure programs and financing schemes that will secure him the support of a majority of the electorate.” For Buchanan, this was reason enough to endorse economic liberty, freedom from taxes, and privatization of public services, such as schools, Social Security, and Medicare. In MacLean’s view, those proposals promised a return to

the kind of political economy that prevailed in America at the opening of the twentieth century, when the mass disenfranchisement of voters and the legal treatment of labor unions as illegitimate enabled large corporations and wealthy individuals to dominate Congress and most state governments alike, and to feel secure that the nation’s courts would not interfere with their reign.

Charles Koch well understood the power of academic experts, and he directed millions of dollars toward developing what are now called “thought leaders” to defend his self-interested political and economic vision. Buchanan was one of those academics. Koch bypassed Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys,” MacLean writes, because “they sought ‘to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.’” Instead, in the early 1970s, he funded the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, designed to advocate for what MacLean summarizes as “the end of public education, Social Security, Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, minimum wage laws, prohibitions against child labor, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, prosecution for drug use or voluntary prostitution—and, in time, the end of taxes and government regulations of any kind.” Koch also funded the libertarian Reason Foundation, which advocated for privatizing all government functions. Another Koch-backed organization, the Liberty Fund, hired Buchanan to run summer conferences for young social scientists.

Buchanan’s challenge was to develop a strategy that would enlist the public’s support for the ideas he shared with Charles Koch. This challenge was especially daunting in the case of Social Security. Overwhelming majorities of Americans supported Social Security because it ensured that they would not be impoverished in their old age. In an influential 1983 paper, Buchanan marveled that there was “no widespread support for basic structural reform” of Social Security “among any membership group” in the American political constituency—“among the old or the young, the black, the brown, or the white, the female or the male, the rich or the poor, the Frost Belt or the Sun Belt.” Pinochet’s Chile—which Buchanan visited for a week in May 1980 to give what MacLean calls “in-person guidance” to the regime’s minister of finance, Sergio de Castro—had privatized its social security system, and libertarians hoped to do the same in the United States. We now know that the privatization of social security in Chile was a disaster for many, but the libertarians were unshakable in their enthusiasm for market solutions and ignored the risks.

Buchanan laid out the strategy needed to divide the political coalition that supported Social Security. The first step was to insist that Social Security was not viable, that it was a “Ponzi scheme.” If “people can be led to think that they personally have no legitimate claim against the system on retirement,” he wrote in a paper for the Cato Institute, it will “make abandonment of the system look more attractive.” Then those currently receiving benefits must be reassured that nothing will change for them. “Their benefits,” as MacLean puts it, “would not be cut.” Taxpayers, in turn, would have to be promised, as Buchanan says, “that the burden of bailing out would not be allowed to fall disproportionately on the particular generation that would pay taxes immediately after the institutional reform takes place.” Cultivating these expectations would not only make taxpayers more ready to abandon the system; it would also build resentment among those who expect never to get payments comparable to those receiving the initial bailout.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/ReduxPresident Trump with charter and private school students at the White House, May 2017

After they announce the insolvency of Social Security, Buchanan argued, the system’s critics should “propose increases in the retirement age and increases in payroll taxes,” which would, MacLean writes, “irritate recipients at all income levels, but particularly those who are just on the wrong side of the cutoff and now would have to pay more and work longer.” Calls for protecting Social Security with progressive taxation formulas would emphasize the redistributive character of the program and isolate progressives. “To the extent that participants come to perceive the system as a complex transfer scheme between current income classes instead of strictly between generations,” Buchanan predicted, “the ‘insurance contract’ image will become tarnished” and its public support will be compromised.

Critics of MacLean claim she overstates her case because Buchanan was merely presenting both sides of the issue. But it is indisputable that Cato and other Koch-funded policy centers favor privatization of government programs like Social Security and public education. The genius of their strategy was in describing their efforts to change government programs as “reforms,” when in fact they were intended from the outset to result in their destruction. This rebranding depended on think tanks amply funded by Charles Koch, his like-minded brother David, and other ideologically friendly sponsors. Charles Koch funded the James Buchanan Center at GMU with a gift of $10 million. The libertarian philosophy funded by Koch and developed by Buchanan has close affinities with the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus of the Republican Party, which oppose federal spending on almost anything other than the military and has placed its members at the highest levels of the Trump administration, including Vice President Mike Pence and Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

MacLean’s argument that Buchanan knowingly engineered a strategy for the wealthy to preserve their hold on American democracy has prompted intense resistance. She has been repeatedly attacked on libertarian blogs, historical websites, and even in The Washington Post. The attacks are sometimes personal: Steve Horwitz, a libertarian economist who called MacLean’s book “a travesty of historical scholarship,” earned his degrees at GMU, where Buchanan was one of his professors. Most of her prominent critics—Michael Munger, David Bernstein, Steven Hayward, David Boaz—are libertarians; some receive funding from the Koch brothers. They accuse her of unjustly berating a legitimate area of economic inquiry and overstating the evidence against Buchanan in support of her position. Other critics have come from the political center. The political scientists Henry Farrell and Steven Teles, for instance, have argued that MacLean overstates the extent to which Buchanan and his supporters were “implementing a single master plan with fiendish efficiency.” MacLean has replied to her critics that her book demonstrates that Buchanan was part of a much larger movement.

MacLean’s reputation will no doubt survive. She has written a carefully documented book about issues that matter to the future of our democracy and established the close and sympathetic connections between Buchanan and his far-right financial patrons. However fierce they might be, her critics have been unable to refute the central message of her important book: that the ongoing abandonment of progressive taxation and the social benefits it gives most people is undergirded by a libertarian economic movement funded by wealthy corporate benefactors. The dismantling of basic government functions by the Trump administration, such as Betsy DeVos’s efforts to privatize public education, shows the continuing influence of Buchanan’s libertarian ideas.

Gordon Lafer’s The One Percent Solution is a worthy companion to Democracy in Chains. Lafer does not write about Buchanan and the Virginia School, but he meticulously demonstrates how the Koch brothers and the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010 have influenced elections and public policy in the states. He opens his book with a revealing anecdote about Bill Haslam, the Republican governor of Tennessee. In 2015 Haslam wanted to expand his state’s Medicaid program to include some 200,000 low-income residents who had no health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. He had just been reelected with 70 percent of the vote. Republicans, who controlled both branches of the state legislature, approved of Haslam’s plan. The public liked the idea. But then the Koch brothers’ advocacy group Americans for Prosperity sent field organizers into the state to fight the expansion, ran television ads against it, and denounced it as “a vote for Obamacare.” The Medicaid expansion proposal was defeated by the legislature.

Lafer reviews bills passed in the fifty state legislatures since the Citizens United decision removed limits on corporate spending in political campaigns. He identifies corporate influences on state-level decision-making and finds that those same policies provided a template for corporate lobbying in Congress. His most striking discovery is the “sheer similarity of the legislation—nearly identical bills introduced in cookie- cutter fashion in states across the country.” What Lafer documents is a coherent strategic agenda on the part of such business lobbies as the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Business to reshape the nation’s economy, society, and politics—state by state.

The many goals of this agenda can be summed up in a few words: lower taxes, privatization of public services, and deregulation of business. The lobbies Lafer studies oppose public employee unions, which keep public sector wages high and provide a source of funding for the Democratic Party. The tobacco industry opposes anti-smoking legislation. The fossil fuel industry wants to eliminate state laws that restrict fracking, coal mining, and carbon dioxide emissions. The soft-drink industry opposes taxes on sugary beverages. The private prison industry advocates policies that increase the population of for-profit prisons, such as the detention of undocumented immigrants and the restriction of parole eligibility. Industry lobbyists oppose paid sick leave, workplace safety regulations, and minimum wage laws. They support “right to work” laws that undermine unions. They oppose teachers’ unions and support the privatization of education through charter schools and vouchers.

These are not sporadic efforts to affect state policy. There is an organization that coordinates the efforts of industry lobbyists and turns their interests into legislation. It is a secretive group formed in 1973 called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It is sponsored by scores of major corporations, which each pay a fee of $25,000 (or more) to be members. Lafer lists the group’s current and past corporate members, including Alcoa, Amazon, Amoco, Amway, AT&T, Boeing, BP, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Corrections Corporation of America, CVS, Dell, Dupont, Exxon Mobil, Facebook, General Electric, General Motors, Google, Home Depot, IBM, Koch Industries, McDonald’s, Merck, Microsoft, Sony, the US Chamber of Commerce, Verizon, Visa, and Walmart. In addition to these corporations, two thousand state legislators are members of ALEC—collectively one quarter of all state legislators in the nation. They include state senate presidents and house speakers.

ALEC writes policy reports and drafts legislation designed to carry out its members’ goals.* It claims, Lafer writes, “to introduce eight hundred to one thousand bills each year in the fifty state legislatures, with 20 percent becoming law.” The “exchange” that ALEC promotes is

between corporate donors and state legislators. The corporations pay ALEC’s expenses and contribute to legislators’ campaigns; in return, legislators carry the corporate agenda into their statehouses…. In the first decade of this century, ALEC’s leading corporate backers contributed more than $370 million to state elections, and over one hundred laws each year based on ALEC’s model bills were enacted.

The keynote speaker at ALEC’s lavish annual conference in Denver earlier this year was Betsy DeVos, who used the occasion to belittle public schools and unions and to tout the virtues of school choice. She quoted Margaret Thatcher that “there is no such thing” as “society,” only individual men and women and families. This position supports a vision of America in which the country’s citizens express themselves individually as consumers rather than collectively as, for example, voting majorities or empowered unions. When they fall victim to fires, hurricanes, or earthquakes—or, for that matter, when the economy collapses—these individual men and women and families can expect to be on their own.

Lafer contends that ALEC and its compatriots are engineering what he calls “a revolution of falling expectations.” They have cynically played on the resentments of many citizens, purposefully deepening antagonism toward government programs that benefit unspecified “others.” Many people are losing their economic security while others are getting government handouts. Why should others get pensions? Why should others get health insurance? Why should others have job protections? Why should unions protect their members? “We are the only generation in American history to be left worse off than the last one,” reads a post from the Kochs’ advocacy group Generation Opportunity urging young people in Michigan to vote down a ballot proposal to raise the state’s sales tax. “We are paying more for college tuition, for a Social Security system and a Medicare system we won’t get to use, $18 trillion in national debt and now an Obamacare system—all that steals from our generation’s paychecks.”

It is ironic that this fraudulently populist message, encouraging resentment of government programs, was funded by billionaires who were, Lafer writes, “willing to spend previously unthinkable sums on politics.” The Citizens United decision allowed a tiny percentage of the population, the richest, to direct vast amounts of money into political campaigns to promote privatization, discredit unions, and divert attention from the dramatic growth of income inequality. “For the first time ever,” Lafer writes, “in 2012 more than half of all income in America went to the richest 10 percent of the population.”

This concentration of wealth has produced a new generation of megadonors: “More than 60 percent of all personal campaign contributions in 2012 came from less than 0.5 percent of the population.” In 2010, Republicans swept state legislatures and governorships; they used their resulting advantage to gerrymander seats and attack the voting rights of minorities. Even state and local school board elections became the target of big donors, like the anti-union Walton family, the richest family in America, who poured millions into state and local contests to promote charter schools, more than 90 percent of which are non-union.

ALEC and likeminded organizations are particularly interested in discrediting labor unions. Lafer gives much attention to understanding why this is. Corporations want to eliminate unions to cut costs. Republicans resist them because they provide money and volunteers for Democrats. Getting rid of them also reduces employee health care costs and pensions. But, Lafer argues, the greatest threat posed by unions is that their very existence raises the expectations of those who are not in unions. When they function well, unions have the power to raise wages, reduce working hours, and demand better working conditions. Stifling this power and making every worker an at-will employee lowers the expectations of the nonunionized workforce.

Quite simply, Lafer argues, labor unions are the only political bodies that can impede the efforts of ALEC’s members

to roll back minimum-wage, prevailing-wage, and living-wage laws; to eliminate entitlements to overtime or sick leave; to scale back regulation of occupational safety; to make it harder for employees to sue over race or sex discrimination or even to recover back wages they are legally owed; and to replace adult employees with teenagers and guest workers.

In education, technology corporations are using their influence to replace teachers with computers as a cost-saving device, a move opposed by parents and teachers’ unions. Corporations, libertarians, and right-wing politicians pursue these goals even in states where unions are weak or nonexistent. The rise of the “gig economy,” in which every employee is a self-employed contractor with no collective bargaining rights, advances this trend, empowering big employers who put a monopolistic downward pressure on labor costs.

Reading these two books together is not a happy experience. They give reason to fear for the future. But they also remind us why it is important to join with others and take action. An informed public is a powerful public. The best counterweight to the influence of big money on politics is the ballot. When you see the strategy that libertarians, billionaire donors, and corporations have devised, you understand why low voter turnout is their ally and why high voter turnout is the only way to save our democracy.

摘要: 索引目录&&传送门：总体来说设计模式分为三大类：创建型模式（5种）：单例模式、工厂方法模式、抽象工厂模式、建造者模式、原型模式结构型模式（7种）：适配器模式、装饰者模式、代理模式、外观模式、桥接模式、组合模式、享元模式行为型模式（11种）：策略模式、模板方法模式、观察者模式、迭代器模式、责任阅读全文

posted @ 2017-08-18 16:01 _Json 阅读(486) 评论(3) 编辑

摘要: 1、马士兵J2SE基础录屏视频珍藏版链接：https://pan.baidu.com/s/1eRMJqkq 密码：qa66 2、spring视频教程链接：https://pan.baidu.com/s/1kV3S9t9 密码：cxke 3、springMvc视频教程链接：https://pa阅读全文

posted @ 2017-12-07 16:39 _Json 阅读(71) 评论(0) 编辑

posted @ 2017-08-18 16:01 _Json 阅读(486) 评论(3) 编辑

摘要: 定义和用法 DATE_FORMAT() 函数用于以不同的格式显示日期/时间数据。语法 date 参数是合法的日期。format 规定日期/时间的输出格式。阅读全文

posted @ 2017-08-18 14:12 _Json 阅读(36) 评论(0) 编辑

摘要: 前言：访问者模式拆分访问者模式基础篇：http://www.cnblogs.com/JsonShare/p/7380772.html 访问者模式扩展篇 - 分派的概念： http://www.cnblogs.com/JsonShare/p/7381705.html 1、分派的概念变量被声明时的阅读全文

posted @ 2017-08-18 09:24 _Json 阅读(290) 评论(0) 编辑

摘要: 前言：访问者模式拆分访问者模式基础篇：http://www.cnblogs.com/JsonShare/p/7380772.html 访问者模式扩展篇 - 分派的概念： http://www.cnblogs.com/JsonShare/p/7381705.html 1、简介定义：表示一个作用于阅读全文

posted @ 2017-08-18 09:17 _Json 阅读(302) 评论(0) 编辑

摘要: 1、简介定义：给定一个语言，定义它的文法表示，并定义一个解释器，这个解释器使用该标识来解释语言中的句子。主要解决：对于一些固定文法构建一个解释句子的解释器。本质：分离实现，解释执行。Interpreter模式其实就是一种简单的语法解释器构架。英文：Interpreter 类型：行为型 2、类阅读全文

posted @ 2017-08-16 11:56 _Json 阅读(377) 评论(3) 编辑

摘要: 1、简介定义：避免请求发送者与接收者耦合在一起，让多个对象都有可能接收请求，将这些对象连接成一条链，并且沿着这条链传递请求，直到有对象处理它为止。主要解决：职责链上的处理者负责处理请求，客户只需要将请求发送到职责链上即可，无须关心请求的处理细节和请求的传递，所以职责链将请求的发送者和请求的处理者阅读全文

posted @ 2017-08-15 13:28 _Json 阅读(388) 评论(2) 编辑

摘要: 1、简介定义：运用共享技术有效地支持大量细粒度的对象。主要解决：在有大量对象时，有可能会造成内存溢出，我们把其中共同的部分抽象出来，如果有相同的业务请求，直接返回在内存中已有的对象，避免重新创建。本质：分离与共享（分离的是对象状态中变与不变的部分，共享的是对象中不变的部分）。核心：享元工厂类阅读全文

posted @ 2017-08-10 14:37 _Json 阅读(343) 评论(1) 编辑

摘要: 1、简介定义：用原型实例指定创建对象的种类，并且通过拷贝这些原型来创建新的对象。功能：①是通过克隆来创建新的对象实例；②是为克隆出来的新的对象实例复制原型实例属性的值。本质：通过克隆来创建新的对象实例。英文：Prototype 类型：创建型 2、类图及组成（引）类图：组成： Protot阅读全文

posted @ 2017-08-08 09:36 _Json 阅读(393) 评论(0) 编辑

摘要: 1、简介定义：在不破坏封装性的前提下，捕获一个对象的内部状态，并在该对象之外保存这个状态。这样就可以将该对象恢复到原先保存的状态。解释：也就是说，不破坏源数据的情况下，将源数据进行一次或者多次的备份。本质：保存和恢复内部状态。英文：Memento 类型：行为型 2、类图及组成（白箱实现与黑箱阅读全文

posted @ 2017-08-04 12:15 _Json 阅读(400) 评论(0) 编辑

摘要: 1、简介定义：定义对象间的一种一对多的依赖关系，当一个对象的状态发生改变时，所有依赖于它的对象都得到通知并被自动更新。主要解决：当一个对象（目标对象）的状态发生改变，如何让所有的依赖对象（观察者对象）都将得到通知。本质：触发联动英文：Observer 类型：行为型 2、类图及组成（引）类图阅读全文

posted @ 2017-08-02 11:42 _Json 阅读(533) 评论(1) 编辑

摘要: //过滤一个结果的空记录添加，过滤空搜索默认保存10条记录，自己可修改 function setHistoryItems(keyword) { keyword = keyword.replace("/^\s+|\s+$/g",""); let { historyIndexSearchItems } = localStorage; if (historyIndexSea...阅读全文

posted @ 2017-07-31 21:53 _Json 阅读(61) 评论(0) 编辑

摘要: 1、简介别名：调停者模式定义：用一个中介对象来封装一系列的对象交互，中介者使各对象不需要显示地相互引用。从而使其耦合松散，而且可以独立地改变它们之间的交互。主要解决：对象与对象之间存在大量的关联关系，这样势必会导致系统的结构变得很复杂，同时若一个对象发生改变，我们也需要跟踪与之相关联的对象，同阅读全文

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摘要: 1、简介定义：允许对象在内部状态改变时改变它的行为, 对象看起来好像修改了它的类。主要解决：对象的行为依赖于它的状态（属性），并且可以根据它的状态改变而改变它的相关行为。本质：根据状态来分离和选择行为。英文：state 类型：行为型 2、问题引入大家都在玩王者农药，这里就以王者农药的英雄为阅读全文

posted @ 2017-07-28 09:33 _Json 阅读(439) 评论(2) 编辑

摘要: 1、简介定义：允许你将对象组合成树形结构来表现"整体-部分"层次结构。组合能让客户以一致的方法处理个别对象以及组合对象。主要解决：它在我们树型结构的问题中，模糊了简单元素和复杂元素的概念，客户程序可以向处理简单元素一样来处理复杂元素，从而使得客户程序与复杂元素的内部结构解耦。英文：Compo阅读全文

posted @ 2017-07-26 15:00 _Json 阅读(283) 评论(0) 编辑

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