#the vast majority of Americans are against it's policies. and that includes the vast majority of republicans!

[potatoesarecheese]

Look at me actually using my education for something. I actually want to talk about this a little bit.

I am not a Republican. I think it's pretty clear that, when I have to choose, I'm choosing the Democrats. So, I can't really speak for Republicans, but this is a comment from @the-psudo (the comment was too long to screen shot) that got my brain thinking:

"I'm also a registered Republican who is voting for Harris. I think it's important to be a registered Republican so I can vote against MAGA radicals in my state's closed primaries as well as in the general election. I even got elected to be the GOP Vice Chair of my local precinct, a job where I'm expected to coordinate local Republican opinion with local party leaders and representatives. For example, I voted for Nikki Haley in the primaries, and now most of her campaign officials have endorsed Harris. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/25/nikki-haley-backers-endorse-harris-trump.html When I admitted I was going to vote for Nikki Haley in the local caucus, there was an audible gasp of surprise from the caucus-attending Republicans. They were strangely conflicted between wanting more younger people (ie, not retired yet; I'm 43) involved in local politics, but also not wanting me to have any real authority as a delegate to vote on their behalf. One attendee talked to me for a long time afterward, telling me how ashamed she was of how I was treated and how MAGA had harmed the party. #RepublicansForHarris - We're out there, and we're not alone."

--

Forgive me if some of the details are wrong, this is just based on what I can remember from a discussion in my AmGov class a couple days ago, but, the party very specifically DID NOT want him running. They did not endorse him. And the many registered Republicans didn't want him either. He was still able to run simply because the party wasn't able to stop him.

A lot of Republicans have since shifted to align with Trump and his beliefs, but they didn't START like that, and many of them STILL HAVEN'T.

Trump is not Republican, he's just using their flag to get on the ballot. I believe this was the same thing with Hillary Clinton not being a Democrat.

MAGA is not the Republican Party. And it's definitely not the original "traditional" approach to what it means to be conservative. In fact, I'd argue that it's not even about politics. It's about Trump. It's about supporting him.

They would vote for Trump, regardless of his party. They would agree with him, regardless of his policies. He got this loud group of angry people to rally behind him, and got them to do something about their anger.

He got them to vote, and that's why he won- not because he was a good politician, and not because he was a good Republican.

Trump is a poor man's idea of a rich man. Trump is the weak man's idea of a strong man. Trump is a dumb mans's idea of a smart man.

And Trump has no place in politics.

My state is ruby red. Last week, I put up a Harris-Walz sign in my front yard up close to the porch. Every couple days, as I got braver, I moved it a few feet closer to the street where the visibility is better. Two days ago, my sign achieved its curbside position with maximum visibility.

Yesterday, I was out digging in my front yard (I'm rewilding my lawn) and a truck pulled over. A 62-year-old woman gets out, thanks me for my sign, and admits how scared she is to put up her own Democratic lawn sign. She's a registered Republican who hasn't voted for Republicans in more than a decade. We talked for half an hour and I just texted her about the VP Debate watch party this Tuesday.

Things learned:

Not all registered Republicans are actually Republicans.

Boomers and Gen X age voters are changing their minds.

Having a yard sign makes a difference.

Even ruby red states are more purple than you might think.

[heritageposts]

Harris has been a staunch supporter of Israel for years. In 2017 she addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference and reminded attendees that the first resolution she co-sponsored as a senator was aimed at combating “anti-Israel bias” at the United Nations. “Let me be clear about what I believe. I stand with Israel because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations,” she told the crowd. In 2018 she gave an off-the-record speech to the organization, but eventually released her comments. In that speech she claimed that she raised money for the Jewish National Fund as a Girl Scout. “Having grown up in the Bay area, I fondly remember those Jewish National Fund boxes that we would use to collect donations to plant trees for Israel,” she told the audience. “Years later, when I visited Israel for the first time, I saw the fruits of that effort and the Israeli ingenuity that has truly made a desert bloom.”

For those unfamiliar with the Jewish National Fund (JNF), they're a Zionist organization that has been instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

See Stop the JNF for more information on their history, the way they operate, and their decades-long campaign of greenwashing (i.e. destroying native plants, crops, and agriculture under the banner of 'making the desert bloom').

Continuing, the Mondoweiss article goes:

“The vast majority of people understand the importance of the State of Israel,” she added later. “Both in terms of its history and its present in terms of being a source of inspiration on so many issues, which I hope we will talk about, and also what it means in terms of the values of the United States and those values that are shared values with Israel, and the importance of fighting to make sure that we protect and respect a friend, one of the best friends we could possibly have.” While running for President in 2019, Harris was praised by the lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) for running to the right of Obama on the Iran deal. On the campaign trail Harris told Kat Wellman, a voter affiliated with DMFI, that she would reenter the agreement but “strengthen it” by “extending the sunset provisions, including ballistic missile testing, and also increasing oversight.” “I was very impressed with her. I thought she gave an excellent speech, she gave a very detailed, responsive answer to my question,” Wellman told a local paper after the exchange. “I’m pro-Israel, so I was I was very concerned and all about making sure we limit nuclear missiles in any country that could possibly destroy us all. I thought her answer was very good.” Harris has condemned the BDS movement and claimed that is “based on the mistaken assumption that Israel is solely to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” However, she voted against an anti-BDS bill in 2019 citing First Amendment concerns.

For the full article, which includes Kamala's response to Israel post Al-Aqsa Flood, see Mondoweiss (July 22, 2024)

[reasonsforhope]

"Legislative momentum against PFAS has surged this year, as at least 11 states enacted laws to restrict the use of “forever chemicals” in everyday consumer products or professional firefighting foam.

The legislation includes bans on PFAS in apparel, cleaning products, cookware, and cosmetic and menstrual products. Meanwhile, lawmakers in some states also passed measures that require industries to pay for testing or cleanup; order companies to disclose the use of PFAS in their products; and mandate or encourage the development of PFAS alternatives, according to Safer States, an alliance of environmental health groups focused on toxic chemicals.

In total this year, at least 16 states adopted 22 PFAS-related measures, according to the group. Since 2007, 30 states have approved 155 PFAS policies, the vast majority of them in the past five years.

The thousands of chemicals categorized as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, do not naturally break down and are found in the blood of 97% of Americans. Some PFAS compounds can harm the immune system, increase cancer risks and decrease fertility...

Earlier this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released new standards limiting PFAS in drinking water. Water systems have five years to comply with the rules. Even before the EPA action, 11 states had set their own limits on PFAS in drinking water, starting with New Jersey in 2018.

Water utilities and chemical manufacturers are challenging the new EPA standards. But states also are heading to the courthouse: So far, 30 states have sued PFAS manufacturers or key users for contaminating water supplies and other natural resources, according to Safer States...

Sarah Doll, national director of Safer States, said one reason states have been so successful in enacting PFAS limits is that more companies are willing to stop using the chemicals.

“When California restricted PFAS in textiles, all of a sudden you saw companies like REI saying, ‘We can, we’re going to do that. We’re going to move to alternatives,’” Doll said.

In Vermont, state lawmakers in April unanimously approved a measure banning the manufacture and sale of PFAS in cosmetics, menstrual products, incontinence products, artificial turf, textiles and cookware.

“The same as everyone else, like Democrats, we want to make sure that we remove PFAS and get it out of products as soon as we can,” said Vermont Republican state Rep. Michael Marcotte, who said his district includes cosmetics manufacturer Rozelle Cosmetics, in Westfield.

Democratic state Sen. Virginia Lyons, the chief sponsor of the Vermont bill, said it is particularly important to get PFAS out of products that are essential to consumers.

“There are some consumer products where you can say, ‘I don’t need to buy that, because I don’t want PFAS,’” Lyons said. “But it’s really tough to say that [about] a menstrual product.”

California’s latest PFAS measure, which Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed last month, specifically bans the use of PFAS in menstrual products. Democratic Assemblymember Diane Papan, the author of the bill, said it was particularly strong because it covers both intentional and unintentional uses of PFAS, so “manufacturers will have to really be careful about what comes in their supply chain.”

While more states enact laws focused on specific products, Maine is preparing to implement the world’s first PFAS ban covering all consumer goods. The Maine law, which is scheduled to take effect in 2030, will include exceptions for “essential” products for which PFAS-free alternatives do not exist. Washington state has also taken a sweeping approach by giving regulators strict timelines to ban PFAS in many product categories.

[komsomolka]

The Ukrainian state is US/Western controlled and, in its alliance and arming, is effectively NATO-like. Washington, according to coup-happy Victoria Nuland in 2014, pumped some $5 billion into Ukraine since the Western-intelligence induced “Orange” revolution in 2004; an additional $15-$18 billion in arms, loans, and grants (from the US and EU) were poured into Ukraine since the 2013-2014 CIA-backed, far-right enforced regime change of the democratically elected Ukrainian government and until before the war began.

With on-the-ground CIA direction, power in Ukraine was consolidated among a small sociopolitical base of venal Russophobes, political pluralism representing genuinely alternative visions to the essentially nationalist, ultranationalist, pro-NATO parties disbanded. The Ukraine army, neo-fascist death squads, and small, Nazi-throwback extreme right-wing parties, celebrated by the new leaders and incorporated into the Ukrainian state, went on a repression spree, a terror campaign, to crush protests and dissent against those who were unhappy with what transpired and to erase all things Russian, including an eight-year shelling and sniping war on civilians designed to create terror and ethnic cleansing in eastern Donbass. This was not a democracy but a monopoly on power to consolidate a vociferously, fanatically anti-Russian state.

Ukraine is (or now, was) merely a platform for a Western proxy war against Russia, a forward operations base, a front line state, its “foreign policy” directed by the American proconsul, its institutions “advised” by American/Western intelligence functionaries and embassy officials, whose job since 2014 was to ensure continuing aggravation and antagonism in Donbass to elicit, in fact, a Russian response justifying long-prepared sanctions, escalation and pretext for “confronting” Russia. [...]

The Russian offensive, therefore, occurred for a much more ominous reason than the Ukrainian state terrorism visited upon eastern Donbass: the US/West’s wordless wish is no less than demoralizing, weakening, bankrupting, and territorially fragmenting the Russian Federation, controlling its markets and resources, indebting its people and rendering them dependent on US-dominated financial institutions, and bringing Russia under American dependency.

A pivotal principle of American hegemony is to obstruct and destroy friendly, normal ties, much less integration, between Russia and Europe, Germany being the fulcrum.

More simply, the strategic US/CIA goal is to ensnare Russia in a protracted war, deplete it, damage it, regime-change it, install a supine leader—all as a prelude to the big fantasy: bringing down China.

The multifaceted war on Russia has been ongoing since at least the late 1990s, but really, it never stopped with the Soviet state’s disappearance. This veiled hostility and aggression certainly existed when Boris Yeltsin was in power (a good vassal according to Washington, this silly and funny man that made Bill Clinton laugh) but took off around 2005, after Washington understood that Vladimir Putin was putting Russia on an independent course, reversing the conditions overseen under the preceding, deplorable Yeltsin era, including steep economic, social, military, and developmental decline and the immiseration of the vast majority of the population, looting oligarchs, and economic “liberalization” designed in Washington. [...]

Russia has literally allowed itself to be cornered since 2014, though it needed time to achieve a conventional and nuclear deterrent. It’s not hard to see reality: Russia is given no quarter, no voice, its real concerns and grievances dismissed, its leader demonized, its marginalization doggedly pursued at every level of international and bilateral social and cultural interactions. No appeal to reason, to international law, to security, to evidence will do for the West, no amount of patient legal argument, explanation of Russian concerns, appeals, professional warnings, consummate diplomacy and transparency of Russian interests made an impression. Instead, the Western response was and is always to double down. [...]

Finance capitalism, the system of speculative bubbles, derivatives, debt, declining standards of living, and hyperinflation, is ruining Western economies, states and societies, destroying the middle classes. The US cannot tolerate Eurasian integration and China’s Belt and Road Initiative, determined to stop any alternative development model to hyper-capitalism enriching the few, cannibalizing the many; that reduces the US to one of a handful of important multipolar players.

Washington’s grave mismanagement of international relations, its self-defeating policies, has actually weakened genuine American interests and national security and the well-being and safety of the American people, a phenomenon that cannot be naively attributed to Democrats or Republicans, this or that president. Instead, the war-state is deeply embedded in the American political economy, in factions such as the “intelligence community,” the military-industrial complex, influential establishment neo-cons, and liberal interventionists, all living in a world of yesterday.

We are rushing headlong into extremely dangerous times in which facts are a threat to the state narrative and any dissent or differing opinion is treachery. Fascism does not come from below, always from the top.

[mariacallous]

A number of major centrist and liberal American Jewish groups say they oppose the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in Gaza.

The statements by some of the largest Jewish organizations in the country, made in response to press inquiries, come as Israel has reportedly cleared out portions of northern Gaza, and as far-right Israeli government ministers have called for resettling the Palestinian enclave. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have also repeatedly called for Israel to encourage Palestinians to leave Gaza, drawing condemnation from the Biden administration.

For several American Jewish groups — including some that have vocally defended Israel’s prosecution of its war in Gaza against Hamas — the idea of Israeli settlements in Gaza is a non-starter. Groups opposed to the idea include the Jewish Federations of North America, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Also opposed are bodies representing the Reform and Conservative movements, which together can claim to represent the majority of American Jews. 

“The land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, indigenous to both Jews and Arabs, cannot be the exclusive domain of one people, but must be shared,” Jason Isaacson, AJC’s chief policy and political affairs officer, said. “Like the vast majority of Israelis, AJC believes that the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in Gaza, or a program of displacing Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, would be contrary to Israel’s interests.” 

Israel evacuated its Gaza settlements in 2005, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly ruled out the idea of reestablishing them after the war. But while most Israelis oppose the idea, more than a third — including 42% of Israeli Jews — support it, according to a recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute. That includes nearly 60% of Israeli Jewish right-wingers, the current government’s voter base. 

“Ideas like settlement in Gaza are welcome, we need to remember that in the end that’s the biggest punishment for what they did to us on Oct. 7,” Ben-Gvir said in an interview on Israeli radio this month, referencing the Hamas attack that launched the war. 

He said he discusses encouraging Palestinian emigration from Gaza frequently in government meetings, and said, “I’m starting to see a certain openness to the topic” on Netanyahu’s part. “I hope the prime minister will understand in the end that this is the way,” he added.

Those sentiments have faced criticism in Israel, including from former officials who were once partners with Netanyahu and have since broken with him. 

Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israeli military chief who served as Netanyahu’s defense minister a decade ago, said recently, “The road they’re taking us down is one of occupation, annexation, ethnic cleansing. Look at the north of the strip — transfer, call it what you want, in order to establish Jewish settlement there. That’s the idea.”

Carole Nuriel, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Israel office, condemned proposals to permanently displace Palestinians in Gaza and reestablish Jewish settlements there. 

“We are deeply troubled by statements from Israeli government ministers and activists advocating for the emigration or ‘population thinning’ of Palestinians in Gaza,” Nuriel said in a statement. “These views reflect an inhumane approach, tarnish Israel’s reputation, and are fundamentally immoral.” 

Discussion of the issue recently attracted attention at a Jewish Federations of North America conference, where a senior executive joked in a closed-door meeting about owning property in Gaza, drawing blowback from a number of attendees. 

In response to an inquiry, a spokesperson for JFNA said the group’s position on Gaza resettlement “has not changed,” pointing to the group’s own policy page, which supports a two-state solution “where Israel lives in peace with a demilitarized Palestinian state” — an outcome that would preclude Israeli occupation and settlement of Gaza. 

Support for a two-state solution is widespread, though not universal, among centrist U.S. Jewish groups, though condemnations of Israeli West Bank settlement from their desks are rarer. Polls show that most Israelis oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state, as does the Israeli government. 

In its statement on Gaza settlement, however, the Union for Reform Judaism noted that it opposes West Bank settlement expansion as well. 

“Just as we have been steadfast in our opposition to continued settlement expansion, we are adamantly opposed to the horrendous and dangerous plan by right-wing members of the current Israeli government to resettle Gaza,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, URJ’s president. He added that settlement of Gaza would make Israel “less secure” by diverting its military, and would also displace Palestinians. 

The Rabbinical Assembly, which represents clergy from the Conservative movement, also said it “opposes any plan for Jewish settlement in Gaza,” which CEO Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal said “would be a significant step backward” for other stated goals in the region, including the release of hostages still being held by Hamas, as well as any eventual Palestinian state.

AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, did not directly address settlement in Gaza in response to an inquiry about it. 

“Our focus remains on ensuring that America continues to stand with Israel as it fights a just war against aggression from Iran and the regime’s terrorist proxies on Israel’s borders and across the Middle East,” the group’s spokesman Marshall Wittmann told JTA in a statement.

By contrast, the liberal Israel lobby J Street said it was vocally opposed to any Gaza resettlement project, and voiced concern about Israel “being dragged into the abyss by extremists.”

Gaza resettlement, said J Street Vice President Adina Vogel-Ayalon, would “not only cross a red line for the majority of American Jews and for J Street, but for most Israelis and many former military and political leaders. This should be a red line for any pro-Israel group representing American Jews.”

Representatives for the Orthodox Union and the Rabbinical Council of America, major American Orthodox groups, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella group that supports Israel and whose members span political ideologies.

Some American Jews, though, support resettling Gaza, including Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America, which has long supported Israeli settlements. 

“We truly support Jews who want to return to their homes in Gaza or live in Gaza. If 2 million Arabs can live in Israel, why can’t Jews live in Gaza?” Klein said. “And the Israeli government should help facilitate that.”

The statements came as some of the same groups opposed to resettling Gaza harshly criticized a new report from the human rights NGO Amnesty International this week that accuses Israel of genocide. The report also calls on the international community to “oppose any attempts by Israel to establish a permanent military presence in Gaza, alter its borders and demographic make-up or shrink its territory,” among a litany of charges against Israel.

Israel has rejected the genocide accusation, saying that it takes extensive measures to limit harm to civilians, an argument the AJC and other supporters echoed. 

“Israel’s many actions in Gaza that are clearly intended to allow it to fight Hamas while limiting incidental harm to civilians should make it clear to all that its forces act with no such intent,” the group said.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Horsey

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 7, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 08, 2024

Two big stories today that together reveal a broader landscape.

The first is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics today released another blockbuster jobs report. The country added 272,000 jobs in May, far higher than the 180,000 jobs economists predicted. A widespread range of sectors added new jobs, including health care, government, leisure and hospitality, and professional, scientific, and technical services. Wages are also up. Over the past year, average hourly earnings have grown 4.1%, higher than the rate of inflation, which was 3.4% over the same period. 

The unemployment rate ticked up from 3.9% to 4%. This is not a significant change, but it does break the 27-month streak of unemployment below that number. 

The second big story is that Justice Clarence Thomas amended a financial filing from 2019, acknowledging that he should have reported two free vacations he accepted from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow. While in the past he said he did not need to disclose such gifts, in today’s filing he claimed he had “inadvertently omitted” the trips on earlier reports. ProPublica broke the story of these and other gifts from Crow, including several more trips than Thomas has so far acknowledged. 

Fix The Court, a nonprofit advocacy group that seeks to reform the federal courts, estimates that Thomas has accepted more than $4 million in gifts over the last 20 years. As economic analyst Steven Rattner pointed out, that’s 5.6 times more than the other 16 justices on the court in those years combined.

These two news items illustrate a larger story about the United States in this moment. 

The Biden administration has quite deliberately overturned the supply-side economics that came into ascendancy in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan took office and that remained dominant until 2021, when Biden entered the White House. Adherents of that ideology rejected the idea that the government should invest in the “demand side” of the economy—workers and other ordinary Americans—to develop the economy, as it had done since 1933. 

Instead, they maintained that the best way to nurture the economy was to support the “supply side”: those at the top. Cutting business regulations and slashing taxes would create prosperity, they said, by concentrating wealth in the hands of individuals who would invest in the economy more efficiently than they could if the government interfered in their choices. That smart investment would dramatically expand the economy, supporters argued, and everyone would do better. 

But supply-side economics never produced the results its supporters promised. What it did do was move money out of the hands of ordinary Americans into the hands of the very wealthy. Economists estimate that between 1981 and 2021, more than $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

In order to keep that system in place, Republicans worked to make it extraordinarily difficult for Congress to pass laws making the government do anything, even when the vast majority of Americans wanted it to. With the rise of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to the position of Senate majority leader in 2007, they weaponized the filibuster so any measure that went against their policies would need 60 votes in order to get through the Senate, and in 2010 they worked to take over state legislatures so that they could gerrymander state congressional districts so severely that Republicans would hold far more seats than they had earned from voters. 

With Congress increasingly neutered, the power to make law shifted to the courts, which Republicans since the Reagan administration had been packing with appointees who adhered to their small-government principles. 

Clarence Thomas was a key vote on the Supreme Court. But as ProPublica reported in December 2023, Thomas complained in 2000 to a Republican member of Congress about the low salaries of Supreme Court justices (equivalent to about $300,000 today) and suggested he might resign. The congressman and his friends were desperate to keep Thomas, with his staunchly Republican vote, on the court. In the years after 2000, friends and acquaintances provided Thomas with a steady stream of gifts that supplemented his income, and he stayed in his seat.

But what amounts to bribes has compromised the court. After the news broke that Thomas has now disclosed some of the trips Crow gave him, conservative lawyer George Conway wrote: “It’s long past time for there to be a comprehensive criminal investigation, and congressional investigation, of Justice Thomas and his finances and his taxes. What he has taken, and what he has failed to disclose, is beyond belief, and has been so for quite some time.” A bit less formally, over a chart of the monetary value of the gifts Thomas has accepted, Conway added: “I mean. This. Is. Just. Nuts.”

As the Republican system comes under increasing scrutiny, Biden’s renewal of traditional economic policies is showing those policies to be more successful than the Republicans’ system ever was. If Americans turn against the Republican formula of slashing taxes and deregulating business, those at the top of the economy stand to lose both wealth and control of the nation’s economic system. 

Trump has promised more tax cuts and deregulation if he is reelected, although the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently projected that his plan to extend the 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire in 2025 will add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. In April, at a meeting with 20 oil executives, Trump promised to cut regulations on the fossil fuel industry in exchange for $1 billion in donations, assuring them that the tax breaks he would give them once he was in office would pay for the donation many times over (indeed, an analysis quoted in The Guardian showed his proposed tax cuts would save them $110 billion). On May 23, he joined fossil fuel executives for a fundraiser in Houston.

In the same weeks, Biden’s policies have emphasized using the government to help ordinary people rather than to move wealth upward. 

On May 31 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that it will make its experimental free electronic filing system permanent. It asked all 50 states and the District of Columbia to sign on to the program and to help taxpayers use it. The program’s pilot this year was wildly successful, with more than 140,000 people filing that way. Private tax preparers, whose industry makes billions of dollars a year, oppose the new system. 

The Inflation Reduction Act provided funding for this program and for beefing up the ability of the IRS to audit the wealthiest taxpayers. As Fatima Hussein wrote for the Associated Press, Republicans cut $1.4 billion from these funds last summer and will shift an additional $20 billion from the IRS to other programs over the next two years. 

Today the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued five new reports showing that thanks in part to the administration's outreach efforts about the Affordable Care Act, the rate of Black Americans without health insurance dropped from 20.9% in 2010 to 10.8% in 2022. The same rate among Latinos dropped from 32.7% to 18%. For Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, the rate of uninsured dropped from 16.6% to 6.2%. And for American Indians and Alaska Natives, the rate dropped from 32.4% to 19.9%. More than 45 million people in total are enrolled in coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

President Biden noted the strength of today’s jobs report in a statement, adding: “I will keep fighting to lower costs for families like the ones I grew up with in Scranton.” Republicans “have a different vision,” he said, “one that puts billionaires and special interests first.” He promised: “I will never stop fighting for Scranton—not Park Avenue.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[vomitdodger]

Why is Juneteenth celebrated as the “end of slavery”? Of all the dates to choose, why Juneteenth? Consider the following dates and choices:

Emancipation proclamation:

End of Civil War dates, and the much debated “it was about slavery”:

13th amendment dates:

That’s a lot of dates to choose from. Again…why Juneteenth?

Note that June 19, 1865 falls basically right in the middle of all the above significant dates. So why Juneteenth?

You know why. Same as always. Complete pandering. The worst of which is of course BLM:

Odd that BLM didn’t mention the people who actually did the fighting. People of ALL colors but let’s be honest…the vast VAST majority of the lives lost in the civil war were white.

Washington DC has a proclamation day. Why didn’t it become a national/federal holiday:

The answer as already stated is complete racial pandering. Who made it official? Of course it was Joe “you ain’t black” Bribing Biden in 2021 as a way to wrestle even more political racial control in the wake of the BLM riots:

Do you really think Joe Bribing Biden who has lied about civil rights matches and openly used the dreaded N word throughout his career actually cares about Juneteenth or blacks…or even America? A sampling of his openly racist remarks:

And don’t forget Bribing Biden openly and with great glee eulogized the death of KKK Senator Byrd.

I’m not necessarily against a date in which we collectively celebrate the end of slavery in the US…Chinese, Irish Blacks etc., a day in which we celebrate overcoming the dark nature of humanity. A dark nature that is not unique to America…or whites…or Americans or Europeans, etc.

We as a country, despite all our imperfections, have done more, and faster, than any other country to end slavery.

The problem is such a day would be corrupted by the Marxists into “minimizing the black experience” and resultant BLM outrage. Examples of historical inaccuracies not talked about in all that:

And in the setting of todays open borders…and all the evil repercussions and domino effects of the Joe Bribing Biden policies that intentional adversely affect all Americans including blacks of course, human trafficking, a form of modern day slavery, is at an all time high in the US. Odd the guy who signed off on the Juneteenth Holiday is responsible for such modern day slavery.

Great article:

[posttexasstressdisorder]

The arc of justice finally bends against Big Oil

Sabrina Haake

April 14, 2024 6:15AM ET

An oil refinery blow off stack is seen, Sept. 16, 2008, in Texas City, Texas. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

This article was paid for by Raw Story subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

In an historic ruling that could change the trajectory of a rapidly heating planet, a court of law with binding jurisdiction over most of Europe has ruled that governments can be held liable for inadequate responses to climate change.

The European Court of Human Rights determined that rising temperatures in Switzerland caused direct and tangible health consequences among Swiss citizens, and that governments failing to take adequate steps to mitigate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions could owe damages to people hurt by their inaction.

So what, in practical terms, does this mean for a planet that is literally burning in an increasing number of locations?

Europe could take climate cases in a new direction

The ECHR ruling is unprecedented in several respects, beginning with its reliance on principles of human rights.

The Court ruled that governments failing to do enough to address climate change were violating the European Convention on Human Rights, which holds as its first tenet that, “Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law.” By failing to meet its own climate goals, the court held, the Swiss government impaired citizens’ fundamental rights to life.

The plaintiffs themselves were also unique. In climate cases pending around the world, including in the United States, the vast majority of plaintiffs are young people worried about how they will survive on a sweltering planet with rapidly disappearing habitats and resources.

ALSO READ: 15 worthless things Trump will give you for your money

The ECHR case, in contrast, was brought by elderly plaintiffs, most of whom were women in their 70s who proved that their age and gender make them particularly vulnerable to health risks linked to climate change. Heatwaves, in particular, can be deadly for the elderly as excessive heat triggers a strained cardiovascular response. Cognizant of their own time limitations, these women sued to benefit the next generation. One plaintiff told the BBC, “We know statistically that in 10 years we will be gone. So whatever we do now, we are not doing for ourselves, but for the sake of our children and our children's children.”

Because there is no avenue for appeal, the ECHR ruling will directly influence energy policy throughout the industrialized economies of Europe. Although it falls to Switzerland to comply with the ruling, its precedent is legally binding on all 46 member states, including Germany, the U.K., France and Italy — all fuel-burning heavy hitters.

Climate challenges in the U.S.

The European Court ruled that Switzerland’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions had been “woefully inadequate.” Although the ruling isn’t binding on U.S. courts, the domestic fossil fuel industry will be directly affected by it, since the U.S. has recently become the biggest supplier of crude oil to the European Union.

ALSO READ: Revealed: What government officials privately shared about Trump not disclosing finances

Climate litigants in the U.S. follow a different strategy. State and local governments are now suing fossil fuel companies and the American Petroleum Institute for damages caused by climate change — astronomical damages that inevitably fall to states, cities and towns that can’t afford to pay for them.

These climate cases name private fossil fuel companies as defendants, seeking to hold responsible various for-profit companies, including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell, for increasing carbon dioxide and methane emissions caused by their products.

Big Oil’s campaign of deception

Legal claims and allegations pending in the U.S. focus largely on Big Oil’s deceptive practices. Like the tobacco disinformation cases from the 1990s, these cases allege fraud, nuisance, conspiracy and negligence arising from the industry’s long-standing public disinformation campaigns.

Congress has conducted numerous investigations into Big Oil’s pattern of deception. Despite conclusive evidence that oil executives have long known the causal connection between fossil fuels and climate change, industry executives have consistently lied about it to protect their profits.

Nearly 10 years ago, Democratic members of Congress addressed a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluding that “there was a coordinated campaign of deception” on climate science by ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, Shell, Peabody Energy and other members of the fossil fuel industry.

Tanker drivers working for Shell in Grangemouth, Scotland. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Big Oil’s targeted acts of deception over a decades-long campaign included “forged letters to Congress,” secret funding of allegedly independent but industry-controlled scientists, creating “fake grassroots organizations” to influence policy, and multiple, ongoing, and in-depth “efforts to deliberately manufacture uncertainty about climate science.”

Evidence of the industry’s deceptive practices could be pivotal in cases brought by state and local governments paying a staggering tab for intensifying storms, flooding, crop-destroying droughts, extreme heat events and, for states and towns on major bodies of water, coastal erosion.

In the meantime, the fossil fuel industry continues to profit outrageously from extracting, distributing and marketing dangerous products known to increase Earth’s already feverish temperature: March was the 10th month in a row to set a new monthly global heat record, both on land and in the oceans, as global reliance on coal — the dirtiest fossil fuel of all — continues to climb.

Landmark climate cases in Montana, Hawaii

The ECHR decision was the first to rule that governments are obligated under human rights laws to address climate change, but it won’t be the last. Cases pending in Montana and Hawaii also allege damages from unmet climate obligations by their respective state governments.

Last August, 16 young plaintiffs scored an unprecedented victory in Montana. They argued that the state violated a state constitutional provision that guarantees Montana citizens a healthy environment, and Judge Kathy Seeley agreed. She ruled that permitting coal, oil and gas production worsened the climate crisis, in violation of the “healthy environment” guarantees found in the Montana constitution.

In result, state regulators issuing permits for fossil fuel developments must now consider the effects of greenhouse gas emissions as part of their overall analysis of whether to grant or deny the permit. After the state appealed the maverick ruling, Montana’s Supreme Court, in a 5-2 decision, denied the governor’s request to block the ruling pending appeal.

In Hawaii, another pending climate case involves 14 youths. Plaintiffs in Hawaii allege that the state’s transportation department, by funding highway projects that increase fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, violated a constitutional duty to protect the environment.

A protestor holds a 'Polluters Pay Up' sign outside the Phillips 66 Los Angeles Refinery Wilmington Plant on Nov. 28, 2022, in Wilmington, Calif. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

After the state challenged plaintiffs’ standing, claiming they could not show particularized harm because climate damages are already “baked in,” the judge ruled that climate damages to plaintiffs “are not hypothetical,” and allowed the case to proceed.

When the state asked Hawaii’s legislators for more than $2 million to hire outside counsel to fight the case, one state legislator told Hawaii Public Radio that instead of “spending the millions of dollars we’re spending on some hotshot law firm,” Hawaii should apply that money toward emissions reductions instead.

The case was scheduled for trial this summer, but in February, the fossil fuel defendants petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that federal law precludes damages claims against them.

Take heart, then take action

Climate activists should be uplifted and encouraged by the ECHR decision, particularly as its effects begin to ripple through the fossil fuel industry, industrialized economies and reluctant courts.

It won’t change the prognosis or the immediate future — today’s youth throughout the world will still live through the worst effects of climate destruction, even though they had nothing to do with the policies that caused it.

It’s the same lament heard from emerging economies in Asia and Africa. Struggling countries and coastal populations who had nothing to do with industrialization over the past 150 years are now paying the steepest price through their own rapidly disappearing habitats.

Thousands of school students join protesters in a Climate strike rally on September 20, 2019, in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Mark Evans/Getty Images)

But one major, outcome-determinative difference between these two rightfully aggrieved populations remains: the right to vote.

As enraging as it is for young Americans to hear oil-financed politicians deny climate change (“Drill baby, drill!”), we could fund the transition to clean energy — including an upgraded, nationwide grid of sufficient capacity — if every young adult simply voted.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Molly Redden at HuffPost:

A group at the center of conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo’s network funneled $750,000 to an influential new lobbying operation that pushes anti-LGBTQ+ legislation around the country, new tax records show. Do No Harm presents itself as a grassroots association of doctors against gender-affirming care and diversity efforts in the medical profession. The group, which was founded in 2022, does not disclose its donors. But newly disclosed tax filings provided to HuffPost by Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog, show that the Concord Fund, the funding arm of Leo’s network, donated $750,000 in 2022 to Do No Harm Action, the group’s official lobbying effort. Do No Harm also received more than $1.4 million from a nonprofit, the Project on Fair Representation, run by conservative activist Edward Blum, new records show. Blum, a conservative activist who helped engineer two Supreme Court cases that struck down affirmative action and major sections of the Voting Rights Act, is now a Do No Harm board member.

HuffPost previously revealed that Do No Harm received $1 million in seed funding from Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge fund CEO, and his wife, Suzy Edelman, who has said she considers “transgenderism” “a fiction designed to destroy.” Leo is best known as the kingpin of a decades-long effort to pack the federal judiciary with conservative judges. As the leader of the Federalist Society, Leo assembled a vast and secretive network of wealthy donors and nonprofits to amplify the power of the conservative legal movement, culminating in Leo handpicking the list of former President Donald Trump’s potential nominees to the Supreme Court. While some of his efforts are highly public, others, like the funding of Do No Harm, occur with little fanfare. The medley of conservative groups channeling money to Do No Harm underscores the growing belief on the right that attacking trans rights is “a political winner.”

[...] After Trump left office, Leo vastly expanded his efforts to target a wide spectrum of conservative policy goals and hobby horses. Powered in part by the largest known political donation in U.S. history — a $1.6 billion gift from a reclusive electronics mogul named Barre Seid — Leo’s network is now fueling political attacks on issues including abortion access, voting rights and critical race theory. Since 2022, the Concord Fund has received at least $55 million from the nonprofit that houses Seid’s gift, the Marble Trust. Do No Harm’s goals dovetail neatly with Leo’s expanded mission. The group has helped pay for activists and expert witnesses to travel the country, testifying in favor of bans on gender-affirming care for minors. On top of fighting to restrict transgender care, Do No Harm is suing Louisiana and Montana over modest efforts to diversify their state medical boards and trying to dismantle a Pfizer fellowship designed to put more Black, Latino and Native American medical professionals in leadership positions.

Concord Fund, the funding arm of right-wing megadonor Leonard Leo, is funding anti-trans and anti-DEI extremist group Do No Harm to push bans on gender-affirming healthcare for trans youths (and adults in some cases) and diversity initiatives in the medical profession.

[phoenixyfriend]

International Taxes

Ko-Fi prompt from Ethan:

All I know about tariffs is that they're special taxes for international trade but people talk about them all the time. Please help explain

So we are going to talk about three things here:

Tariffs

VAT

Customs/Duties

I'll be using the US for most of my examples, because that's what I know best... and also because it's a very convenient example for the way VAT works on an international level.

Tariffs

You are correct that tariffs are special taxes for international trade. These are essentially fees that are applied to products being shipped in and out of a country in order to promote domestic product or impact a foreign one.

A common example is US steel. The United States has a fairly robust steel industry, and the government promotes that industry domestically by applying tariffs to imports. Back in 2018, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on steel imports and 10% on aluminum (something that the WTO said was illegal, but that's not relevant right now). The steel tariff had previously been a range of 8-30%, implemented by Bush in 2002. Prior to that, the steel tariff had generally been under 1%.

In applying that tariff, the federal government prioritized domestic purchasing. If domestic product is nominally $90 for one unit, and foreign product is $80, then it is cheaper and more appealing to buy from a foreign producer. With a 25% tariff, the foreign product is now functionally $100 per unit, making it more appealing to buy domestically. While the actual cost of the tax is born by the producing country, in the case of import tariffs, the result is the raising of costs when selling internationally.

Tariffs are also applied to specific countries. Once again using a Trump example, a $50 billion tariff was applied against China in 2018. This had negative impacts on the economy, as it led to worries of a trade war; China did retaliate by applying tariffs directly to specific products from the US, including wine and pork.

High tariffs theoretically lead to an increase in domestic trade, but they also lead to higher rates of smuggling. They are also a form protectionist policy, which was at its height in the 19th century for the US.

VAT - Value Added Tax

If you look up VAT, you get a lot of explanations that talk about how it is a tax that is levied against the consumer on the basis of the cumulative value of the product, and generally things are confusingly worded, so I'll save you some time:

It's sales tax.

If you are American like me, that's all it is. It's a different name for sales tax.

You get something for $8 at the store, but the final cost is $8.42? Those 42 cents are the VAT.

What does that have to do with international trade? Isn't that a domestic thing?

Well, yes and no. We'll start by comparing the US to most European countries.

See, the US has a different application of VAT than a lot of other places. In the US, sales tax is added at the very end of a purchase for the vast majority of places. This is because there is no federal sales tax. Instead, taxes are set by the state, county, and city governments. Take a look at this map of New York, and you'll see how much sales tax varies by just a few miles.

Given how much a pricing can vary from one town to the next, large corporations generate a greater profit by listing prices in their pre-tax form, and then adding that tax at the end. The consumer knows that there will be a higher price at the counter than is listed, because the standard in the US is to not include that tax. So your Arizona Iced Tea will be a $1 in Portland and $1 in Queens County, matching that promise on the can... but you'll still be paying $1 in Portland and $1.09 in Queens, because only one of those areas has sales tax, despite both being in the same country.

This works out for the retailer, because the consumer does not blame them for raising prices across county lines, if there is a sales tax hike. The thought of "it's cheaper ten miles down the road, I'll get to it later," followed by never getting to it and thus never making a purchase, is rarer, because the listed price is still the same. It also means having to print or design fewer price tags; imagine having to manually change every price in a supermarket magazine! Every coupon needs to have its price changed by a few cents, to account for tax!

...or you can just print the same magazine with the same prices and write "plus tax" after the listed cost.

All this to say, Americans are used to adding sales tax at the end, and knowing that the price they see is not the price they'll pay.

Other countries Do Not Do This.

I mean, some do. But we're talking about the ones that don't, which includes the entirety of the EU, India, some of Japan, and the country I actually have extensive experience with: Serbia.

I am currently in Serbia, which means I'm in a country with a sales tax/VAT that is higher than I'm used to (20% on most goods, 8% on essentials). In every store I've been to, the tax is included in the listed price. If it says 87 rsd on a carton of milk, I will be paying 87 rsd at checkout. The baseline price is 80 rsd, and then there's the 8% tax, and the final price is 86.4, which gets rounded up to the 87 that is listed on the tag.

If you aren't accustomed to thinking about VAT like in the US, online shopping can be... a trial.

If I purchase something from, say, Canada, and have it mailed to the US, I am given the sales tax as part of the purchasing process. It will format the receipt as the product plus sales tax. This is familiar to me.

To someone from the EU who does not purchase internationally (specifically from the US, Canada, or other countries that don't include sales tax in the sticker price), this tax can often come as a surprise.

And, finally, in some cases... the will be paid at the very end, at the point of pickup, along with customs. I recently purchased something from an English creator that was manufactured in Germany and then shipped to Serbia. I anticipated that I had paid the VAT for Serbia when purchasing the product. It was instead added at the point of purchase, as Serbia is neither in the EU nor in a trade agreement with the relevant countries that would allow for me to pay the VAT online, I had to pay the 20% in addition to customs when picking up the package from the postal office.

Despite not being a tariff or customs/duty payment, VAT can have a direct impact on international purchasing.

Customs/Duties

Customs and duties are taxes applied to products based on those product characteristics.

There is overlap with tariffs. As a consumer, you are... not going to be very affected by the difference between customs and tariffs.

Customs are like VAT, in that they are paid by the consumer rather than by the manufacturer.

You can think of tariffs as a fee that a manufacturer pays to sell something internationally (though that cost is often passed on to the consumer), and customs as a fee paid by a consumer to receive that good.

Hope this helps!

(And if anyone here is more familiar with the subject than I am, please feel free to add on or correct me! I'm generally pretty good about international policy, but I'm not an expert, and this subject can be a complicated one.)

(Prompt me on ko-fi!)

[dragoneyes618]

When asymmetrical warfare is discussed, the focus is usually what happens on the battlefield. So, for instance, when the Viet Cong snuck out of the jungle to attack Americans or when Hamas terrorists leave their tunnels to shoot at Israeli troops or hide their weapons while they pretend to be innocent civilians, the battlefield is the subject of unequal or asymmetric warfare. But I want to discuss some other aspects of the asymmetries – the inequalities – in the current Gaza/Hamas war against Israel. These asymmetries are essential parts of the situation and culture of each combatant and so they appear off the battlefield rather than on it.

First, there is a striking asymmetry in numbers of people aligned with each side. There are only approximately seventeen million Jews in the world today and only one Jewish majority country. There are about six-and-a-half to seven million Jews in the U.S., about seven to seven-and-a-half million in Israel, and the rest are scattered around the world, with the largest concentrations of Jews being in France, the English-speaking countries, and then in smaller pockets throughout the world, including Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere. There are, however, approximately four hundred million Arabs in the world and approximately two billion (with a B) Muslims in the world, and fifty-two Muslim majority countries.

Those numbers matter not only regarding the ability of Israel to raise the money and troops to fight in its defense, but also because Israel’s enemies do not ever have to work hard to obtain a majority in the United Nations and to vote along religious-ethnic lines. Add to the Muslim countries in the United Nations the Russian and Chinese allies and puppets like Tajikistan and Khazakstan, and the “post-colonial” sewers that fester under ideologies of hatred of Western civilization, hatred of democracy, and hatred of Israel’s ally, the U.S. – countries like Myanmar, South Africa, Nicaragua, Malawi, and Chad. When Israel-haters and Jew-haters say that the whole world hates Israel, they are partly correct because most of the world lives under nasty regimes that have no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion, no free press, and no fair and free elections. The pressure of that asymmetry of numbers is always upon us.

Besides the asymmetry between Israel and much of the rest of the world because Israel is a liberal democracy, with its many freedoms, the contrast becomes even more stark with Gaza/Hamas. Even while at war, Israeli politicians are squabbling and posturing, Israeli newspapers are attacking the government’s policies and conduct of the war, reporters are exposing flaws in governmental operations, and people are “leaking” news to reporters so that there is a vast array of negative information, as well as positive information, about the Israeli leadership even during the war. In Israel even now there are public demonstrations against certain government policies. Contrast that with Gaza/Hamas which is a theocratic dictatorship run by an armed group that took power in 2006 and has never held another election. Because it is a dictatorship, there is no opposition party to challenge Hamas or to point to its flaws. Because Gaza/Hamas is a dictatorship, there are no newspapers whose editorial stance is to challenge the government’s policies or to advocate that the government take better care of its citizens. Because it is a dictatorship, there are no public discussions of policy, no demonstrations, no public admissions that mistakes have been made, no acknowledgement that the Gaza/Hamas government has ever done anything wrong.

Hamas does not have to respond or explain why they use the population of Gaza as they do because no one questions Hamas. When Israel makes a mistake or does something untoward, it is on the front page of every newspaper in the world. When Hamas shoots its own civilians, rapes, tortures, or murders a hostage in a tunnel, or steals money or other international aid intended for the population, it is a secret. While all of Israel’s imperfections are exposed, very few of Hamas’ are.

There is also an asymmetry in the conception of time that the combatants have. Because Israel is a democracy, its leaders have to respond to the public and respond to them at relatively frequent intervals. Politicians in democratic countries are usually focused on the next election in a year, or two or three. That conception of time as being related to the next election tends to make for short-range planning and pleasing the electorate now. That may be as much a problem for Israel’s most important ally, the United States, as it is for Israel. In a theocratic dictatorship with no elections, such as Hamas and such as Hamas’ major ally, Iran, which bars most opposition candidates from running for office, satisfying voters is simply not an issue. Hamas and Iran plan for the long term, free from any concern about what the citizens want.

Israel largely has to finance its own wars, although it does receive significant aid from the United States. That financing largely comes from internal taxation and some import duties. Israelis pay income taxes and a high “value-added tax” (VAT) to defend our country and provide necessary services such as schools and medical care. That is significantly different than Hamas/Gaza, which finances its war with money from Iran, Qatar, UNRWA, Syria, and Russia. Iran’s interest, like Hamas’, is in destroying Israel and killing all the Jews. Qatar largely shares that interest. Russia wants to embarrass the United States and have more influence in the Arab world. UNRWA, besides giving fake “refugee” status to third- and fourth-generation descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948, 1967, and at other times, teaches hatred of Jews and of Israel in its schools, gives “day jobs” to Hamas operatives and their family members so that Hamas does not have to pay their operatives a living wage, and provides schools and clinics which also sometimes double as Hamas weapons storage facilities, command centers, barracks, and entrances to the Hamas tunnels. By providing these schools and clinics, UNRWA relieves Hamas of what would ordinarily be the governmental responsibility of building and operating schools and clinics for Gazans. The “international community” thereby frees Hamas from having to pay for ordinary government services and allows Hamas to spend more on making war on Israel.

Last, and perhaps most important of all the asymmetries between the combatants, is their ideologies. Israel wants to live in peace and security inside her current borders. If Israel had that result, it would be the end of the almost constant warfare that Israel has suffered these last seventy-six years. Hamas, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Houthis, and other governments and quasi-governments want to kill all the Jews in the Middle East or, at least, expel all the Jews from the Middle East. They are not interested in peace. They will, at times, consider a truce or a ceasefire for strategic reasons, but not real, lasting peace. Different authorities in the field give different reasons for Arab and Muslim hatred of Jews and the little Jewish state (which Arabs and others try to disguise as “anti-Zionism”). One authority argues that because of their different value system, most Arabs do not believe in living together with other groups in peace and harmony but rather they believe that a group must either dominate or be dominated, oppress or be oppressed. They believe that Israel has dominated and oppressed but that they can right that wrong.

Another authority has contended that in Muslim doctrine, land has a character and that once it is conquered by Muslims, as Israel was in the seventh century, it always retains the character of Muslim land. Other thinkers in the field urge the simple religious explanation for the Arab hatred of Jews and unwillingness to live in peace with us: that Muslims believe that they have received the final word and prophecy as revealed by Mohammed and that we Jews have come to Israel, humiliated them in war, built a nation far more prosperous than any of theirs (at least until the extraction of large amounts of oil in some Arab countries), and have openly and explicitly rejected their prophet and their god. The one thing that is clear is that it is not about “Palestine,” a little corner of the world smaller than many American counties.

Despite those asymmetries between the combatants, there is one more that matters – an asymmetry that weighs very heavily in Israel’s favor. In all the polls and surveys of “happiness” by country, Israel consistently ranks as having a very happy population, much more so than any Arab or Muslim country. It is surely not because of material prosperity that Israelis feel this way. Most Israelis care about the land, about each other, about the fate of the Jewish people, and about Jewish tradition. I suspect that even many secular Israelis, deep in the recesses of their thoughts, no matter their outward protestations, believe that a benevolent G-d watches over the world and over us. What else could explain the happiness of a people constantly under threat, woefully outgunned and outnumbered in a hostile world?

So we will go on as well as we can. We have always faced asymmetries like these throughout our history. We have always been a comparatively small people, a people who had to make our way in a hostile world, a people who had to struggle to survive. We have gotten through these crises before, even if it has been painful to do so. We will get through this one also. Am Yisrael Chai.

[smolpinklady]

The women that voted for Trump are thinking it won't happen to them. They won't have the health care they need when the time comes now. Imagine voting against yourself. You have no idea how many people say, "I'll keep the baby, abortion doesn't matter to me" where I work. Education has gone downhill. I'm so tired dude

I could go on about this but because Donald Trump represents the “Christian” vote, people who are FOR him will vote for him with blinders on. They only want to see and hear what they want to see and hear.

He does not support the Constitution, he wants POWER. He does not want the 30 something counts of felony charges hovering over him, he wants to avert himself from his detrimental mistakes.

He has stated in his god awful hateful rallies that he wants to initiate MASS DEPORTATIONS.

He has said vile things about women, including his own daughter.

The House and the Senate already have Republican majority. I’m terrified that they are going to work in HIS favor.

What’s crazy is majority of America is middle to lower class families. People who support him are so delusional in the way they think, they think that Trump is going to make the “economy” great, and helping Americans with lower gas prices and groceries.

When in reality his plan is to PROPOSE TARIFF POLICIES that will ultimately RAISE PRICES FOR YOU AND I

Americans are superficial pieces of shit.

The other day I saw a clip of that fuck ass Cheeto saying, “the key to not being depressed is working your ass off.” This is coming from a MAN who has been GIVEN opportunities and a substantial amount of MONEY on a silver platter. At A YOUNG AGE.

If god forbid I experience an accidental pregnancy by a man who I’m dating, and I don’t find out until six weeks or later, in the state of Florida I would have to go through the pregnancy, unless I go out of my way to travel to another state (and I don’t have the means to do that)

I am not suggesting that I would be irresponsible about having sex, I’m only bringing up a hypothetical scenario (abortion is not a form of birth control, but it IS still a human right to decide what I want to do with my body and the pregnancy)

People don’t read. People would rather remain uneducated and believe in some sort of fantasy of a lower cost of living (WHICH KAMALA HARRIS WANTED TO HELP MIDDLE CLASS FAMILIES WITH)

This outcome has began to change my perspective on people, even more so.

The vast majority of Americans would rather have a homophobic, sexist, racist, criminal, and egotistical old white man run office over an educated and qualified BLACK WOMAN.

That speaks volumes about people.

If there’s a sign to remain abstinent from sex, this is reason enough.

[printedword]

Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track. One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them. [...] Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, falsely saying that he knew nothing about it and had “no idea who is behind it.” In fact, he flew on a private jet with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025. And in a 2022 speech at a Heritage Foundation event, Trump said, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” A review of the training videos shows that 29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration or on his 2024 reelection campaign. The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation two weeks ago of Paul Dans, the leader of the 2025 project, and they are referenced on the project’s website. The Heritage Foundation said in a statement at the time of Dans’ resignation that it would end Project 2025’s policy-related work, but that its “collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue.” The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos cited in this story did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign who features in one of the videos, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.” Project 2025’s 887-page “Mandate for Leadership” document lays out a vast array of policy and governance proposals, including eliminating the Department of Education, slashing Medicaid, reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be more easily fired and replaced, giving the president greater power to control the DOJ and further restricting abortion access.

[beardedmrbean]

(RNS) — With only a couple of months in office, newly elected state Sen. Aisha Wahab introduced a historic bill that could make California the first state to outlaw caste-based discrimination in the United States. 

Wahab’s measure has garnered global attention, adding caste — an ancient system of social hierarchy determined by birth — as a protected category in the state’s anti-discrimination laws. Caste discrimination is “a social justice and civil rights issue,” she has said.

Hundreds on Tuesday (April 25) provided testimony for and against this bill as it passed through the Senate’s Judiciary Committee. The bill, known as SB 403, now heads to the Appropriations Committee. 

People of South Asian descent, particularly Dalits who are at the lowest strata of the caste system, say the bill is crucial to protect them from discrimination in housing, education and tech sectors. Among the organizations supporting the measure are Hindus for Caste Equity and the Sikh Coalition, which noted that Sikhs know “firsthand the pain and trauma that comes with being repeatedly targeted by hate and discrimination.”

It has also spurred pushback, from groups such as the Hindu American Foundation and the Coalition of Hindus of North America, who say the bill targets Hindus and Indian Americans who are commonly associated with the caste system. The organizations have submitted letters of opposition, saying Wahab’s measure “seeks to codify” negative stereotypes and stigmas that Hindus and Indian Americans face. Critics also say current laws in place offer protections to any kind of discrimination, including caste.

Wahab, the first Muslim and Afghan American elected to the state Legislature, said she’s been the target of Islamophobic threats and has received social media messages calling for her death after introducing the bill. She said members of her staff have been bullied and followed to their vehicles.

Within a day of introducing the bill, “we saw the extent of the hatred,” Wahab told Religion News Service in a recent interview. “We are being vilified,” she said.

As she continues to push for her measure, Wahab is considering whether to be fitted for a bulletproof vest. Though hesitant at first, Wahab said, “It’s getting to that level.”

“Because we struck a nerve, we also know that we identified the problem,” Wahab said.

Wahab’s proposal comes on the heels of Seattle adding caste to its existing anti-discrimination policies, becoming the first city in the U.S. to do so. In January 2022, the California State University system — the largest public university system in the U.S. — passed a resolution adding caste as a category of discrimination.

The university system’s decision came after a 2018 study — conducted by the anti-caste advocacy organization Equality Labs — found that of 1,500 participants who were surveyed, 25% of those identifying as Dalit reported experiencing verbal or physical assault based on their caste. One in 3 Dalit students reported discrimination in educational settings. Critics of the report have raised concerns that the study was not based on a representative sample.

In contrast, a 2020 survey of Indian Americans by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found 5% of respondents reported encountering discrimination due to their caste identity, though only 1% of Hindu respondents who identified with a caste identified as Dalit. The vast majority — 83% — of Hindu respondents who identified with a caste identified as General or upper caste. Additionally, most Hindus surveyed did not identify with a caste at all (53%). The study urges some caution around these findings, citing small sample sizes and the sensitive nature of questions around caste.

Meanwhile, the United Nations in 2016 reported that at least 250 million people worldwide still face caste discrimination in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Pacific regions, as well as in various diaspora communities, according to The Associated Press. Caste systems are found among Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Muslims and Sikhs.

As California becomes more diverse, Wahab said, “the deeper and further our laws have to be to protect all people.” Caste discrimination remains taboo and out of the mainstream, Wahab said. 

Wahab said she has ensured her measure does not reference any specific religion or a single particular group, but she noted, “We have to be honest that when we talk about specific discrimination, it does happen to a specific group.” Her bill states that “while caste systems are strongly associated with South Asia, similar systems exist in regions including, but not limited to, South America, Asia, and Africa.”

“Caste discrimination is also found across communities of religious practice,” according to the bill.

But to Pushpita Prasad, a board member of the Coalition of Hindus of North America, “this bill targets Hindu Americans” simply by using the word “caste.”

“Caste is associated with Hinduism in the West,” she said.

The Coalition of Hindus of North America is also critical of Equality Labs, one of the sponsors of the bill, and its report, in which a section details how South Asians identify each other’s caste. Identifiers include skin color, noting that “Caste-oppressed peoples are perceived to be darker in skin color than ‘upper’ Caste people from the same region.” Other identifiers include family and social affiliations and food preferences, the latter noting that “many vegetarians are ‘upper’ Castes.”

According to Prasad, skin color “is a completely baseless allegation, and one that they have made up … because it has allowed them to tap into the guilt that lives in the U.S.”

“It would be impossible for anybody to judge their place in the social economic hierarchical structure, either now or through history, based on just skin color,” she added.

To Shreena Gandhi, an assistant professor of religious studies at Michigan State University, seeing Hindu groups say that “this could subject us to more discrimination,” shows her that they know caste discrimination is a problem.

Gandhi is part of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective that examines how “far-right Hindu nationalist agendas seep into the everyday discourses of North American Hinduism.” It’s what the collective refers to as “Hindu fragility.”

Gandhi said caste discrimination is not just about Hinduism. “It’s a form of oppression that transcends any one religion,” she said.

“We have to confront this legacy of oppression. That’s why as someone who has caste status, I’m for this bill. It’s not about me … It’s about justice,” Gandhi added. 

Wahab said she has met with multiple groups opposing her measure but acknowledged it’s likely that they may not come to a place of mutual agreement. Groups against her measure say Wahab has not granted them the same access as she has for those who support her bill. 

Even so, Wahab said, “you could also be fundamentally in disagreement with somebody” and still “have respect for them.”

Growing up in the foster care system, Wahab said, she learned to be “sensitive to how other cultures, other languages, other groups, other religions are discussed.”

Wahab and her sister grew up going to a Pentecostal church with the family they were placed with. She remembers celebrating Easter and Christmas, as well as attending Bible study and Sunday school. “I learned a lot. … It was a big part of that family,” she said.

They were eventually adopted by an Afghan and Muslim family. When it comes to religion, “we’re more cultural,” she said. “I identify largely as an Afghan American. I’m very proud of my background and heritage and culture.”

Wahab doesn’t wear a hijab and acknowledges there are expectations “to fit this mold of being either Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish, or whatever the case is,” but she said, “We show up differently, we have different experiences.”

Wahab, who previously served as a council member for the city of Hayward in the Bay Area, said she entered the Legislature intending to tackle the issue of caste.

Wahab has told reporters she’s witnessed this kind of discrimination living in Northern California, where the state in 2020 sued Cisco Systems, alleging a Dalit employee faced caste discrimination when Hindu supervisors cut him out of meetings and failed to promote him.

In another case, a wealthy Berkeley landlord went to prison for sex trafficking young women from India, some who were Dalit.

Wahab recalled meeting a group of people who were in tears, saying that her bill allowed them “to be seen as human.”

“That was profound,” she said.

To Wahab, these stories make it worth it.

She said she’s proud of her bill because it’s ensuring “there’s a level playing field for all people in a certain community.”

“This is standing on the right side of humanity, and the fact that the caste system is over 2,000 years old, and it hasn’t been touched in this critical way, of course it upsets people,” Wahab said. “I think people know that we’re doing the right thing.”

[xtruss]

Analysis: What Israel Can Teach the U.S. About Confronting a Constitutional Crisis

Sometimes you not only need to vote—you also need to vote with your feet.

— By Aaron David Miller and Daniel Miller | Foreign Policy | March 18, 2023

A protester waves an Israeli flag during a massive protest against the government's judicial overhaul plan on March 11 in Tel Aviv, Israel (Illegally Occupied Palestine). Amir Levy/Getty Images

Over the past four months, in an extraordinary display of national resolve and resistance, millions of Israelis have rallied in the streets to protest their government’s efforts to revolutionize the judiciary. Because Israel does not have a written constitution or bicameral parliament, these so-called reforms, if enacted, would eviscerate an independent judiciary, remove the one check and balance standing in the way of unbridled government power, and fundamentally undermine Israel’s democratic system.

In a recent conversation with the author, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak noted that the behavior of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government during the current crisis evoked thoughts of the U.S. Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

Can the United States learn anything from Israel in its own efforts to stop democratic backsliding and combat a future constitutional crisis in the event, for example, that a president seeks to hold on to power, overturn the results of a free and fair election, and threaten the very essence of constitutional government?

At first glance, the sheer size of the United States and fundamental differences between the two countries’ political cultures and governance systems might appear to render comparisons moot, if not irrelevant. But a closer look reveals important takeaways from Israel’s situation that are worth considering. If Israelis succeed in checking this judicial juggernaut, and even if they don’t, there are lessons for Americans should U.S. liberal democracy be seriously threatened.

The biggest takeaway from what has been happening in Israel has to do with the size, tactics, and endurance of the protests themselves. For months, the world has watched Israelis engage in sustained, massive, nonviolent protests and civil disobedience in cities and towns across the country, drawing participants from nearly all sectors of society.

The scale, scope, and composition of these demonstrations are unprecedented in the country’s history. Hundreds of thousands regularly attend the protests, which are largely grassroots demonstrations, locally organized with former officials and intellectuals recruited to speak. On April 1, close to 450,000 Israelis took to the streets. That is close to 5 percent of the population, roughly equivalent to 17 million Americans. A recent poll showed that 20 percent of all Israelis have protested at one time or another against the judicial coup.

Given the vast disparity in size, replicating this kind of sustained protest movement is no easy matter. As a point of comparison, the Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21, 2017, drew between 1 and 1.6 percent of the U.S. population. But that doesn’t mean this is impossible. Indeed, the Black Lives Matter protests that took place in the United States in the summer of 2020 were largely spontaneous and may have included as many as 26 million—and perhaps more—protesters in total.

Size is critical, but so is the character of demonstrations. The essential element is nonviolence. As Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan have demonstrated in studying civil resistance movements that occurred between 1900-2006, using nonviolent tactics—which can include protests, boycotts, and civil disobedience—enhances a movement’s domestic and international legitimacy, increases its bargaining power, and lessens the government’s efforts to delegitimize it. Although the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests were peaceful (despite the false or misleading media and government claims to the contrary), there were acts of violence, looting, and rioting. Any future protest movement in the United States must shun this kind of destructive behavior.

The Israeli movement’s endurance and persistence has also been an asset. The struggle for democracy is not a 100-yard dash—as demonstrated in other countries, such as Serbia. In Israel’s case, the perception that the so-called judicial reform wasn’t just some technical adjustment to the political system, but rather a fundamental threat to Israelis’ way of life, sustained the protests. The profound anger and mistrust toward the Netanyahu government further catalyzed Israelis from virtually all sectors of society to turn out in the streets.

A second essential part of the response to the judicial legislation in Israel has been the active participation of military reservists who have signed petitions, participated in protests, and boycotted their formal and volunteer reserve duty. These reservists play a critical role in both intelligence and air force operations that are key to the current security challenges Israel faces.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is the most respected institution in the country. In fact, what led Netanyahu to pause the judicial legislation was the surge of protests that followed his (since rescinded) decision to fire Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Gallant had publicly called for a halt to the judicial overhaul, arguing that it was jeopardizing Israel’s security. Adding to the pressure, a host of former IDF chiefs of staff, commanders, and former directors of Mossad have publicly opposed the judicial legislation. And even active, lower-level Mossad employees have been given permission to participate in the protests.

Such actions by former and current government officials are precisely what is needed to imbue the protests with additional legitimacy and to amplify the seriousness of the moment. Active members of IDF units have not refused to serve, and we’re not recommending that active U.S. military units join the protests. Indeed, given the U.S. tradition of the subordination of military to civilian authority, uniformed military would be hard-pressed to intervene in a political crisis.

Still, before the November 2020 election, when then-U.S. President Donald Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power pending the results, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley issued a public statement that the military had no role in an election and would “obey the lawful orders of our civilian leadership.” And senior military officials might well publicly remind the U.S. military—as the Joint Chiefs of Staff did in the wake of the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021—that their mission is to defend the U.S. Constitution.

At the same time, civil servants from throughout the federal government should consider joining the protests and have their organizational representatives (the American Foreign Service Association at the Department of State, for example), issue statements in support. These employees need not resign, at least at first, but they should make clear their nonpartisan opposition to efforts to undermine the rule of law and constitutional norms. The nonpartisan nature of these actions would be reinforced if they involved not just federal employees in Washington, but also the much larger workforce throughout the country. Furthermore, calls to protest could also involve state employees, particularly if the constitutional crisis stemmed from state action.

Third is the importance of strikes. The Histadrut—Israel’s largest trade union, with an estimated 800,000 members—called for a general strike that followed more limited strikes in the preceding months. That decision shut down departures from Ben Gurion Airport. Israel’s research universities and medical facilities (all public hospitals and community clinics) also called to strike, in addition to the closing of banks, businesses, and restaurants (including the ever-popular McDonald’s).

These tactics worked in Israel because, along with other measures (such as closing highways through acts of civil disobedience), they communicated to government ministers and Knesset members that unless they reassessed the situation, the country would shut down, with grave economic and political consequences. The tech sector had already begun to express major concerns that judicial reform as envisioned by the Netanyahu government could turn Israel’s image as a start-up nation into one of a shut-down nation, raising risks that foreign investment might be curtailed and Israeli entrepreneurs might decide to move out of the country.

To be sure, the same tactics could not be so easily deployed in the United States. First, 25 percent of Israeli workers are in a union, compared to 10 percent in the United States. Second, shutting down a country the size of the United States would simply be impossible (although such a strategy might have more success in a small enough state). Additionally, it is unclear if such strikes would help or hurt the opposition politically, particularly in light of the fact that COVID-19 school closures and other lockdown measures were fraught. But strikes should be explored and studied as possible tools. In the summer of 2020, tens of thousands of U.S. workers participated in a “Strike for Black Lives.”

Furthermore, taking a page from the sports strikes in the wake of the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, there are more creative measures to explore in place of or in conjunction with traditional worker strikes. Sports leagues at both the college and professional level might suspend games until the crisis was resolved. If individual leagues were unwilling to participate, their stars could—and many likely would. What better way to cause a sustained, nationwide conversation about a specific topic that punctures all information bubbles than by forcing the cancellation of college football games, or the NBA playoffs, the World Series, or even the Super Bowl? In recent years, sports figures have increasingly become involved in politics, including ones from places you might not expect.

Similar strategies could be considered in the realm of Hollywood, the music industry, and other areas where Americans have a shared cultural appreciation and imbue their idols with the recognition and respect once enjoyed by political leaders. To avoid the appearance that these measures were partisan or political, these actions would need buy-in from actors, singers, entertainers, and writers from across the political spectrum, including from those who have always stayed above the political fray or who belong to the opposing political parties.

Fourth is the importance of respected political leaders, both current and former, joining the response to a severe political crisis. In Israel, former prime ministers have participated in the protest movement, including Barak and Ehud Olmert, as well as foreign and justice ministers such as Tzipi Livni. Former U.S. presidents have generally avoided this kind of participation, but in a severe crisis one can imagine former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as well as other former senior officials from across the political spectrum, speaking out and participating in demonstrations.

Leadership extends beyond mere symbolism. Israeli opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid made calls for a general strike, among other involvement by elected officials. Similar kinds of bipartisan leadership from those in the U.S. House and Senate would be important to amplify the message of the protests and provide legitimacy. And of course, if the constitutional crisis originated from Congress itself, elected representatives could use their authority to shut it down. In this case, the protesters and other stakeholders, such as businesses, should view their opposition as a way to lobby Congress, including by promising to withhold financial backing to any member who participates in the unconstitutional scheme. There were similar actions in the wake of Jan. 6.

It would also be imperative for leaders to come from outside government, including from media organizations that represent a broad spectrum of U.S. politics. Given the United States’ problem with misinformation, this would be essential to accurately portray what was happening on the ground, including dispelling any untruths—for example, the notions that the protests had turned violent or that they were simply partisan reflections of one political party or another.

Finally, perhaps the most important lesson of all is to look for ways to motivate the public with an inclusive national response that transcends party and partisan affiliation. The reason the Israeli protests have been so effective is that even in a society rent by so many divisions, Israelis have gone into the streets because they believe deeply that their very way of life—the character of their society, and the image they have of Israel as an open, tolerant, and democratic polity with all its weaknesses, including and especially the Israeli occupation—is fundamentally threatened. As journalist Gal Beckerman has written, Israeli protesters have wrapped themselves in their flag—the most visible symbol of the protests. And this is something, according to Beckerman, that Americans should take to heart.

It is important to emphasize, though, that most Palestinians—including both those who are Israeli citizens (roughly 2 million out of a total population of 9.7 million) and those under Israel’s occupation and control—see the protests as an effort to protect Israeli Jewish democracy, not a movement to extend equal rights or statehood to them. Arab political parties in Israel have backed the protests, but the majority of Palestinian citizens of Israel, even while they have a great deal to lose should the judicial legislation pass, feel the demonstrations don’t address their needs, including equal rights and rising crime.

But without holding the line against a government whose objectives include de facto if not de jure annexation of the West Bank, continued second-class citizenship for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and enabling violence against Palestinians—as seen in the settler rampages through the West Bank town of Huwara—there will be no chance for peace, an end of the occupation, or statehood for the Palestinians.

And while we remain gloomy about any chance in the near term for an equitable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this protest movement has imbued Israel with a new energy and dynamism. It has created a focus on democracy, rights, and equality that hasn’t been seen in years and that could, under the right leadership, drive home the message that the preservation of Israel as a Jewish democratic state depends on ending the Israeli occupation and extending equal rights not just in principle but in practice to Palestinian citizens of Israel. One can at least hope so.

For the United States, the greatest challenge would be finding a way to wrap a movement in the U.S. flag and identify a broader set of unifying purposes that creates the biggest tent under which millions of Americans could rally. In today’s perniciously partisan environment, this would be hard—some might say impossible. To quote the historian Henry Adams, politics in the United States has become a “systematic organization of hatreds.” Without a written constitution, Israelis have turned to their Declaration of Independence as a source of inspiration, even as a set of principles for a future constitution. Perhaps the United States could do the same, turning to the basic founding principles that have shaped the country’s self-government.

The United States is perhaps the only nation in history founded on an idea: self-government in the interest of securing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Fundamentally, no matter the differences between Americans, what makes the United States special is its ability to self- correct, reinvent itself, and make progress toward guaranteeing opportunity, equality, and dignity for all. A truly national protest movement must be grounded in this dream and the aspiration of making it more accessible to everyone. We are hopeful and inspired by the younger generations in the United States today—by their commitment to making the country a better place for all Americans, and by how they would rise to meet the challenge if the United States were truly tested.

Of course, the best way to avoid illiberal backsliding, let alone a constitutional crisis, is to vote for candidates who respect the rule of law, abide by the Constitution, and adhere to democratic norms and standards. Once authoritarians entrench themselves in power, they can use their authority to remain there. But sometimes you not only need to vote—you also need to vote with your feet.

Some of this may seem naive and Panglossian. But the fight for U.S. democracy has always mixed the pragmatic and the aspirational. What has happened in Israel these many months has shown the power that people possess to safeguard their democracy when threatened. It’s not an easy conversation to have. But it’s worth having now because the stakes are so very high, and sadly, the dangers to the United States’ own democratic system are all too real.

— Aaron David Miller is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former U.S. State Department Middle East analyst and negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations. He is the author of The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.

— Daniel Miller is a Lawyer and Activist. Since 2016, he has engaged in various forms of Pro-democracy work and has written for the Washington Post, CNN, Daily Beast, and New York Daily News on democracy issues.

[mariacallous]

If anyone believes that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is “just bluster,” they are deluding themselves. Trump usually says exactly what he wants to achieve and then fights with hammer and tongs to make it happen. Nowhere has this been truer than with immigration.

From the day that he started his political journey in June 2015, going after immigrants—“rapists” who are “bringing crime,” as he stressed on the infamous escalator in Trump Tower—has been his signature theme. Throughout the 2024 election, Trump continued to emphasize this issue. In February, he went so far as to pressure House Republicans into killing a bipartisan border deal that would have given the GOP almost everything that the party has been asking for, just so that he could have an issue to run on.

During his campaign against outgoing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump dramatically escalated his rhetoric. He promised militarized roundups of migrant workers and a massive deportation program. All of these policy promises were sold through dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at both documented and undocumented immigrants, most famously with unfounded stories of Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.

Immigration continued to poll extremely well for Republicans through Election Day. Exit polls have suggested that the problem was on the mind of voters when they cast their ballot. Voters blamed Biden for having eased Trump-era restrictions in 2021, resulting in a substantial influx of people across the border.

Two of the earliest appointments in Trump’s new administration confirm how integral the issue will remain. Former speechwriter and advisor Stephen Miller, one of the architects of Trump’s first-term immigration program—including the travel ban on people coming from certain Muslim-majority countries—will serve as his deputy chief of staff. The “border czar” will be Tom Homan, the former acting leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Over the next four years, we should expect the anti-immigration rhetoric and policies to ratchet up dramatically. Fighting immigration is not only an issue that Trump has come to care deeply about, but it also serves a hugely important political purpose, as the singular theme unifying his coalition and placing Democrats on the defense.

For former President Ronald Reagan, anti-communism served a similar purpose.

When Reagan defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980, he brought to Washington a vast and somewhat unwieldy conservative coalition that had taken form during the 1970s.

The coalition was not easy to hold together. Many of the factions within the movement did not have much in common and were frequently at odds. There were evangelical Christians, fiscal conservatives, neoconservative Democrats, Wall Street and Big Business deregulators, and traditional hawkish Republicans.

Always the savvy politician, Reagan understood that he alone was not enough to keep his supporters on the same page. So, besides charisma, the president deployed thematic rhetoric to unite them all.

One major rallying point was lower taxation. Reagan argued that income taxes embodied the intrusive nature of the federal government and undercut the ability of the national economy to grow. In 1981, Reagan pushed through Congress a massive supply-side tax cut that benefited corporations and wealthier Americans.

More important than taxation, though, was anti-communism. Reagan had spent much of his time as a conservative railing against the threat that the Soviet Union posed to the stability of democracy and a nuclear-free world. Reagan had risen to national prominence in the 1970s by railing against then-Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (both fellow Republicans) as well as Carter (a Democrat) for practicing the policy of “detente”—the easing of relations—as all three administrations negotiated arms agreements with the communists and accepted steep cuts in defense spending (even though Carter actually increased defense spending in the final year of his presidency).

Washington’s political establishment, Reagan argued, had failed to stand up to the “evil” threat that the United States faced and was allowing tyranny to prevail.

“America’s defense strength is at its lowest ebb in a generation,” Reagan warned in his speech accepting the presidential nomination at the 1980 Republican National Convention, “while the Soviet Union is vastly outspending us in both strategic and conventional arms.”

Anti-communism was an issue that every faction of his coalition could support. After all, during the Cold War, fighting communists had become as American as apple pie. Although evangelical Christians fighting abortion had little in common with corporate executives seeking rollbacks of workplace regulations, reinvigorating the war against communism was an objective that everyone could get behind. Anti-communism also provided Reagan with an emotional and moral rallying cry that that the president could use to scare and inspire voters all with a single sentence.

One of the most successful ads from Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign against Democrat Walter Mondale—which ended in the last major election landslide (Reagan won with 525 Electoral College votes and 58.8 percent of the popular vote)—was called “Bear.” Viewers watched as a big bear slowly walked around the woods. The narrator intoned: “There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear?”

Simultaneously, anti-communism put Democrats on the defense. Whereas Democrats could fight supply-side economics as a boon to the rich, they were leery about appearing weak on defense, a charge for which they had suffered since the presidential election of 1972, when Sen. George McGovern suffered a devastating defeat to Nixon after a campaign in which his national security credentials were questioned.

On Capitol Hill in the first half of the 1980s, Democrats struggled as Reagan and his Republican minions—such as Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich—railed against their opponents for ignoring the dangers that the Soviets were creating in Central America and Africa. On the floor of the House, Republicans questioned whether Democrats even cared about the nation’s security and insinuated that they were more loyal to the socialist allies of the Soviets than they were to the United States. Democrats fractured over controversial measures to provide military and economic assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras in their effort to bring down the Sandinista government.

Frustrated with the shellacking that Democrats suffered in 1984, more elected Democrats formed centrist organizations such as the Democratic Leadership Council and the Democratic Policy Commission—including figures such as Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia and Biden, then a senator representing Delaware—that endorsed investments in new weapons systems such as the stealth bomber and avoided talk of a nuclear freeze.

The council, according to the political scientist Dan Wirls in his book Buildup: The Politics of Defense in the Reagan Era, focused on criticizing planning and rationale rather than spending more on defense. And in its 71-page founding document, released in 1986, the commission proclaimed: “Democrats harbor no illusions about the Soviet Union. Theirs is a totalitarian society that remains an empire in the classical sense.” They sought, according to New York Times journalist E.J. Dionne Jr., “to create a new image of the party …  that includes strikingly tough criticism of the Soviet Union.” There were a greater number of Democrats such as Colorado Sen. Gary Hart publicly acknowledging that the party had spent too much time saying what kind of force they were against rather than “when and where do we use military force.”

By the end of Reagan’s first term—with its military buildup, the cutoff of negotiations with the Soviets, and a series of dangerous incidents involving the superpowers in 1983, such as when the Soviets shot down at South Korean airplane and killed all 269 people on board, including a conservative U.S. congressman—many Americans feared the real possibility of nuclear Armageddon.

He was not just bluster, Americans learned. A 1983 ABC movie called The Day After depicted the brutal effects of a fictional nuclear attack on a small town in Kansas and traumatized the nation.

The film, Reagan admitted in his diary, was “very effective and left me greatly depressed.”

Trump has and will continue to turn to immigration for similar political effect. In 2024, the issue helps to hold serve as the glue for his disparate coalition of evangelical Christians, climate change denialists, business and financial interests, podcast bros, and working-class rural Americans.

He has also placed Democrats on the electoral ropes. Almost nobody in the opposition today seems to be talking about a path to citizenship anymore. Even Harris spent much of her campaign hammering away at the fact that Trump helped to kill the stringent border control bill.

Much of the election postmortem has focused on ways in which Democrats ignored the severity of the problem.

“Many Democrats have been in denial about immigration,” observed David Leonhardt of the New York Times.

Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric is dangerous in different ways than Reagan’s anti-communist message was. By the 1980s—when the kind of intense McCarthyism of the 1950s, which had destroyed the lives of many alleged to be communists, was not as prevalent of a force—the greatest danger was the risk of triggering a war. Trump’s rhetoric, which is stripped of any of the optimism that Reagan always made central, targets specific people who live and work within many U.S. communities.

The only slim hope for those who don’t agree with Trump’s immigration agenda is to remember how Reagan’s presidency ended. When a new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, emerged within the Soviet Union in 1985, the fever finally broke. Gorbachev had good personal rapport with Reagan and sought to spend political capital to improve relations with the United States, Reagan and Gorbachev participated in several major summits, the third of which culminated with one of the most famed anti-communists signing the historic Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, dismantling a class of nuclear weapons and strengthening verification processes.

If there was a voice within the Democratic Party who could recreate this role within the partisan fault lines of Capitol Hill, then maybe that person could create the opportunity for some kind of breakthrough on an immigration deal. The possibility of the Reagan-Gorbachev exchange was just as fanciful in his first term.

The ideal scenario today would be some kind of deal that brought back some sort of limited path to citizenship as well, with Trump playing the role that the red-baiting Nixon played by opening relations with China. One recent model could be the criminal justice reform legislation that members of both parties joined forces to pass in 2018.

But at this point, the odds remain slim. The intensity of Republican partisanship within the White House would make it difficult—some think impossible—for the president to ever see a Democratic leader in this light. As Max Boot noted in his recent biography of the president-elect, Trump lacks the pragmatic streak that was an essential part of Reagan’s character.

As a result, the odds are not good for a breakthrough being around the corner but, rather, for the new administration to escalate the threatening rhetoric and move to implement policies that deport, restrict, and intimidate immigrant communities. Given that Trump won with anti-immigration front and center, even as he increased his strength in Latino communities, the president will conclude that this path is a winning one, politically.

By 1984, millions of Americans were terrified about what Reagan’s policies were doing to the safety of the world. In a few years, many immigrants might be feeling the same way about their communities, as will the native populations of those who still believe that immigration has been a vital element of what makes America great.