#they are a passive party and that has allowed the republicans to mobilize over the last 60 years

[soldierandawar]

the most embarassing thing about the democratic Party isn’t their lack of strategy it’s their lack of commitment to the fight.

[thirdswordblog]

SPECTACLE AT THE CAPITOL: WHO STANDS TO GAIN?

"There is a Latin tag cui prodest? meaning ‘who stands to gain?’ When it is not immediately apparent which political or social groups, forces or alignments advocate certain proposals, measures, etc., one should always ask: ‘Who stands to gain?’

It is not important who directly advocates a particular policy, since under the present noble system of capitalism any money-bag can always ‘hire’, buy or enlist any number of lawyers, writers and even parliamentary deputies, professors, parsons and the like to defend any views. We live in an age of commerce, when the bourgeoisie have no scruples about trading in honour or conscience. There are also simpletons who out of stupidity or by force of habit defend views prevalent in certain bourgeois circles."

(V.I. Lenin - Who Stands to Gain, 1913)

The theatrical spectacle on January 6th, in which a group of Trump supporters entered (and were apparently allowed to enter) the Capitol building, is now condemned almost unanimously by imperialist and reactionary states and media all over the world as a “coup attempt” by “terrorists” and “extremists”. In the larger perspective, this incident is one more glaring example before the world of the deep, desperate crisis of bourgeois so-called “Western Democracy”. To understand the more short-term, domestic political significance of this circus however, we need to follow Lenin’s example and ask “who stands to gain?” In fact, no one has more to gain from this incident than the U.S. imperialist monopolist bourgeoisie and the new Biden administration that it has appointed to represent it.

The objective situation is this: the U.S. ruling class is facing a developing revolutionary situation. The working class and the people are mobilizing in the streets - with more and more militancy - against repression and racism and for their daily demands. The crisis of bourgeois democracy is becoming more and more acute as the fraudulent parliamentary system loses its legitimacy in the eyes of the masses. Facing this sharpening class struggle, the ruling class is taking measures, intensifying its counterrevolutionary repression; more militarization of the police, more surveillance, censorship etc.; but it cannot rely solely on repressive measures. At minimum, it needs to make sure that it has at least the passive support of a significant part of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois “middle classes”, mainly the intellectuals; the journalists, the political leaders, the academics, i.e. those who are tasked with the education (indoctrination) of the masses and act as a “buffer” between the ruling class and the proletariat. While the ruling exploiters continue to abandon the principles of their own dying bourgeois democracy and move towards more and more open dictatorship, they still need to maintain the illusion of democratic “freedom”.

As representatives of the U.S. ruling class, the Republican and the Democratic Parties both have the job of carrying out these reactionary tasks: to repress and contain all revolutionary tendencies and to manipulate and mobilize different groups of masses to support this process and give legitimacy to the system. Like the fascist projects of the past, they both use real and often justified demands of the people, mainly the petty bourgeoisie, to foment “protest movements” that in reality serve to defend the interests of the monopolist bourgeoisie. While Trump’s method is to rely mainly on the rural and small-town petty bourgeoisie and their mistrust of the federal state and big monopolies, Biden and the Democrats rely mainly on the urban intellectual petty bourgeoisie, including the revisionist “left” and its connections within the protest movements and the Black and Latino communities. The Trump faction uses old-fashioned chauvinism and open racism; the Biden faction uses bourgeois so-called “anti-racism” and bourgeois feminism to divert the just struggles against the racist and patriarchal system. In both cases the purpose is to draw attention away from the class struggle and to prevent that the people’s struggles become a united revolutionary struggle led by the proletariat.

We can already see the results of the so-called “coup attempt”: all kinds of reactionaries, liberals and revisionist “leftists” now come together to defend “our democracy” against the “right-wing mob”. To question the legitimacy of the elections is now to be associated with white supremacist “crazies” and “rednecks”. “Insurrection” is to be equated with fascism. Liberals and revisionists take on the task of creating public opinion in support of more counterrevolutionary measures to protect government institutions from “violent mobs”, to “reject violence” and disarm the masses. Just like in Europe, fascist and racist groups are used not only as shock troops against the working people, but also as an excuse to take measures against “extremists” in general (aiming mainly at the communists). It is no coincidence that the bourgeois media now refer to the Trump supporters as “totalitarian”, a term invented by the reaction for this exact purpose.

So, “who stands to gain?” It seems clear that Trump and his people are on their way out; they didn’t gain the trust of the dominant factions of the ruling class to carry out its reactionary tasks. Instead, their last desperate spectacle serves as a perfect political tool to legitimize the new administration and establish its image as a liberal, almost “leftist” government so it can carry out the continuing process of reactionarization, intensified exploitation of the working class, repression of the people’s struggles and the imperialist wars of plunder and genocide abroad. For the communists and revolutionaries, the task is to lead and develop the people’s struggles, to reject and unmask the whole fraudulent electoral circus and the new Biden government, to unite all the classes of the people under proletarian leadership. The objective conditions are at hand; what is needed is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist militarized Communist Party, reconstituted for its main task of preparing, initiating and developing the people’s war.

[saramerg---old]

Tactical Anger and Its Power: Words and Actions in the Age of ACT UP

submitted essay for my Youth in Revolt course in the Global Liberal Studies program at NYU in Spring 2018

The 1988 photo shows only the jacket-clad torso of a young man. Careful letters surrounding the upended pink triangle on his back read, “If I Die of AIDS, Forget Burial, Just Drop My Body on the Steps of the FDA.” In context we know that the jacket and its wearer were part of a protest by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). The man in the photo, artist David Wojnarowicz, died less than four years later of the disease he was protesting. Today the photo is historic, used in remembrances of the AIDS epidemic and referenced by high schoolers in their new fight against gun control. The CDC reports that between 1981 and 1992 over 200,000 people in the United States were infected with the disease. Within those years, the CDC places the percentage of those killed by AIDS at about 89 percent. A slew of activist groups arose out of this urgency, working to push the US government to address the epidemic. While certainly not the first, ACT UP is perhaps the most well-known.

This essay seeks to examine how meaningful, focused anger was used as a positive force by ACT UP members during the peak years of their activism. Michel Foucault and Jack Halberstam’s approaches to power and its structure in society are particularly crucial for understanding ACT UP’s radical, anti-capitalist approach in their fight against the violent ignorance of the federal government and the incorrect narrative of the disease perpetuated by the news media. In addition to repositioning the connotation of AIDS as a solely gay male disease, ACT UP used their anger and grief to turn loss into activism and force the United States government to acknowledge and act on the epidemic.

The first organized ACT UP protests began in March of 1987 on Wall Street in New York City “the financial center of the world, to protest the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies.” The organization, which had formed just weeks earlier made enough of a statement to gain attention from The New York Times and the FDA. The act of civil disobedience meant arrests for seventeen members.

From the beginning, ACT UP established itself in direct opposition to the capitalistic principles of the pharmaceutical industry. In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam juxtaposes the “heteronormative” and “subordinate, queer, or counter-hegemonic” concepts of success. He argues that the heteronormative construction of success values “capital accumulation,” while the queer, or non-dominant construction is associated with failure because of its focus on “non-conformity, anti-capitalist practices, [and] non-reproductive lifestyles.” Media coverage of the disease – and the activists fighting it – focused primarily on the idea that AIDS was a disease that solely affected gay men. The headline for the New York Times coverage of the Wall Street protest read, “Homosexuals Arrested at AIDS Drug Protest.” In their outreach, however, ACT UP worked to correct the narrative and raise awareness about the facts of the disease.

The Women’s Committee within ACT UP distributed information that specifically addressed the existence of the disease within the Lesbian community in addition to continuing to provide key information about the epidemic as a whole. One flyer, titled “AIDS: A Lesbian Issue?” breaks down the ways that women can contract AIDS. The document uses inclusive language, such as the continued use of the “we” pronoun. Furthermore, the document disrupts the notion of “gold star lesbianism” and refrains from shaming IV drug users.  One section of the document reads, “We have to take talking about sex and our sexual history out of the closet. We have to trust and support each other enough to talk about sex and safer sex. Lesbians are at risk because we have sex.” The document asks its readers to get involved, citing statistics about AIDS deaths and drawing attention to the disproportional affect the disease has on people of color. This document, and a similar one aimed at readers of Cosmopolitan, both express dissatisfaction at mainstream coverage of AIDS and encourage involvement from women readers.

These women-specific flyers also highlight the disparity of AIDS research, citing the lack of “official statistics” and the perpetuation of violence against those in the queer community. This specific ACT UP campaign seeks to raise awareness within a broader group. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault writes that “there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case.” The Women’s Committee of ACT UP modified their tactics when their target audience broadened. They pinpoint specifically why AIDS is also a women’s issue and call for involvement to “protect ourselves against violence” and “fight for our relationships, for our community and civil rights, for control over our bodies, our health, our sexuality, our lives.” The expansion of outreach focused on the vulnerabilities of a specific, at-risk group that had the power to mobilize and join forces with those already participating in the movement.

This focus on restructuring the narrative also required a careful approach to media outreach. Internal documents distributed to ACT UP members show the groups targeted approach to interviews, both in paper and on television. Ann Northrop, a journalist and activist, created a document called “How to Manipulate the News Media.” The numbered list gives members precise advice on how to handle being interviewed about the cause. This particular pamphlet does not delve into facts about the cause but rather focuses specifically on how knowledgeable activists can best serve ACT UP by becoming critically thinking spokespeople.

While the title is eye-catching and seems intent on provocation, the actual contents of the document are straightforward and realistic. The first point of the document, “Listen Before You Talk,” urges members to note the way control works in media coverage. “The most important thing you can do is control the editorial point of view of the whole story. To do this, you must interview the interviewer.” Later the document acknowledges that journalists think that interviewees “are crazy,” because they “understand how little control the interviewee has, and how exploitative the whole process is. So reporters start out with some basic contempt for the people they interview.”  

Michel Foucault writes extensively about power relations, arguing that “there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives.” The news media document demonstrates ACT UP’s clear cognizance of the roles at play, even in a relationship as seemingly simple as journalist and subject. Northrop is clear that the journalist (and to a greater extent the media company) maintains power over the spokesperson. However, the stakes for which the journalist plays are comparably lower than those members of ACT UP intending to speak out and educate. The document aims to earn “good” press for ACT UP in the form of a uniform, polite approach. Additionally, Northrop’s prior experience as a journalist mean that her tips come from “inside” of the trade. The power dynamics at play here are not simply hierarchical. Foucault writes against the notion of “strictly relational character” in power relationships. Instead, he argues that they “[depend] on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle.”

In this case, ACT UP showed a clear regard for the value of media publicity. However, as previously discussed, much of the media distributed about the nature of AIDS, at-risk populations, and activist work was incorrect. Northrop’s document shows the group’s clear intent; ACT UP’s “manipulation” of the news media was really a push toward fair, factual coverage and another step toward finding proper treatment and care for those with the disease.

Another crucial aspect of ACT UP was the vocal nature of their protests. These “actions” perhaps best display the way ACT UP activists targeted their anger toward tangible political change. In demonstrations, the group often used the now iconic chant “ACT UP, Fight Back, Fight Aids!” The shorter phrase, “fight back” was used in a number of other chants. In this primary chant, the word fight has a double meaning: one in reference to how bodies tackle illness and the other perhaps more aggressively to the violence committed by the passivity of the government.

ACT UP expressed their disdain for government officials and their ignorance and intolerance about AIDS in several ways. The vocal, public, and often visceral nature of ACT UP protests gained greater attention and in turn allowed AIDS activists to make demands about their cause. The first protest on Wall Street specifically targeted the FDA and President Reagan. The list of demands called for immediate release of potentially lifesaving drugs, while simultaneously scolding Reagan and the pharmaceutical industry. “Curb your greed!” one demand reads. The end of the list declares, “President Regan, nobody is in charge!” While this protest was focused on two main subjects, ACT UP did not limit their criticism to a specific party or industry. Lists of chants and poster slogans delineate between “general,” “Democrat,” and “Republican.”

Protestors did not steer clear of AIDS deaths, instead emphasizing the rising death toll through poster art and chants. A chant against Reagan declared, “Reagan, Reagan you can’t hide! We all know its genocide!” Similarly, a print poster depicted skulls lining the way up to the front of the White House. The messages directed specifically at Democrats are less visceral; posters aimed at Democrats like Dukakis and Gore carry messages like “We vote too!” and “We are watching you!” Another poster bears the message “Our vote is a weapon we are prepared to use.” These messages establish ACT UP as important demographics within the voting population. Rather than succumb to the “dominant logics of power and discipline,” these political statements serve as assertions of control within the paradigm of heteronormativity that Halberstam sets forth.

ACT UP did not stop at artistic depictions of AIDS’ death toll. The group also staged “political funerals,” including putting ashes of AIDS victims on the lawn of the White House and bringing the open coffin of Mark Lowe Fisher to the headquarters of the Republican National Committee in New York in 1992. Prior to his death, Fisher wrote about his wish for such a funeral:

Death takes place behind closed doors and is removed from reality, from the living. I want to show the reality of my death, to display my body in public… I want my death to be as strong a statement as my life continues to be. I want my own funeral to be fierce and defiant, to make the public statement that my death from AIDS is a form of political assassination. We are taking this action out of love and rage.

Fisher and his fellow activists were aware of – and fully intended – the shock factor in political funerals. His funeral was one death in hundreds of thousands in the United States alone from AIDS. The mobilization of grief in ACT UP protests, in combination with the group’s ability to create tactical approaches to change policy and raise awareness propelled the movement forward. Political funerals also subvert the idea of death as failure or finality. Halberstam writes that “capitalist logic casts the homosexuals as inauthentic and unreal, as incapable of proper love.” The political funerals, as Fisher described, are out in fact out of love – and rage. The authentic, heartfelt, and brutal emotion behind actions as intense as political funerals only serve to underscore the group’s dedication to their loved ones and community and their fight for legitimacy.

ACT UP’s protests were rooted in grief and anger, as well as an urgent desire to restructure the narrative around AIDS. In their oral history project, ACT UP members describe forming the group to “turn anger, fear, grief into action.” The group used their own emotions constructively, and worked to shift the dynamics of power present in both the federal government and news media.  The movement sought to reshape conversation around the disease, raise awareness within the LGBT community and outside, and secure treatment. The devastating trauma of the AIDS epidemic and the memory of the federal government’s neglect remain, but so do groups like ACT UP. The group’s mobilization turned desperation into real, effective change that is still visible in activist work done today.

1 “Political Funerals.” ACT UP New York, 1995

2 ”HIV and AIDS --- United States, 1981--2000.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

3 “ACT UP Capsule History.” ACT UP New York.

4 “ACT UP Capsule History.” ACT UP New York.

5 Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011 (182).

6 A term used to describe a lesbian who has never had sex with a man; This document and the group in particular work to fight the transphobic and otherwise shaming nature of this term and association.

7 “Method.” The History of Sexuality, by Michel Foucault, Crane Library at the University of British Columbia, 2009 (514).

8 Northrop, Ann. How to Manipulate the News Media. How to Manipulate the News Media, ACT UP .

9 Foucault 514.

10 Foucault 515.

11 Halberstam 181.

12 “Political Funerals.”

13 Halberstam 185.

14 “The Tactics of Early Act UP.” ACT UP, ACT UP New York.

Works Cited

ACT UP Capsule History.” ACT UP New York.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.

“HIV and AIDS --- United States, 1981--2000.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "AIDS is a primary issue. Demand a national plan on AIDS." New York Public Library Digital Collections.

“Method.” The History of Sexuality, by Michel Foucault, Crane Library at the University of British Columbia, 2009.

Northrop, Ann. How to Manipulate the News Media. How to Manipulate the News Media, ACT UP.

“Political Funerals.” ACT UP New York, 1995.

“The Tactics of Early Act UP.” ACT UP,  ACT UP New York.

[thisdaynews]

Decoding the Wild Card of the 2020 Election

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/decoding-the-wild-card-of-the-2020-election/

Decoding the Wild Card of the 2020 Election

PHILADELPHIA—The Rev. Sonya Riggins-Furlow, a 63-year-old pastor at Butler Memorial Baptist Church, is worrying a lot about turnout these days. Not in her pews but at the polls.

Voting trends in the Grays Ferry neighborhood, a majority African American area undergoing gentrification, make her fear that Election Day 2008 —when people were lined up around the block to get into polling sites—might have been an aberration and that when it matters most this November, few will show up. She saw what happened in 2016, when the same voting locations were eerily quiet. Her parishioners and neighbors were registered, she says, but didn’t cast their ballot because they lacked enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate.

“My parents, they were coming out of that generation of the ’60s and the civil rights movement and you voted,” she says. “Now people just don’t get it. They look at it like the have other things to do, like grocery shopping or sending the kids off to school. But elections don’t happen every day!”

Riggins-Furlow’s sense of a fickle, distracted citizenry touches on one of the biggest mysteries of United States electoral politics: Why nearly half of the nation’s eligible voters almost never exercise that fundamental right. The sheer size of the group—approximately 92 million eligible voters—makesit a potential wild card in the 2020 presidential election. That is if the political world understood what keeps them away from the polls, and, more importantly, what might lure them in the first place.

On Wednesday, the Knight Foundation released the results of “The 100 Million Project,” the largest survey of chronic nonvoters in history, and the most robust attempt ever to answer some of the questions that have long bedeviled political scientists. More than 13,000 people were polled across the country, with special emphasis on 10 battleground states, followed by in-depth focus-group conversations with thousands of them. They were asked about their political preferences, media diets, social networks, income levels, general life satisfaction, and about their demographic characteristics and social connectivity, their reasons for not voting, and their assessments of electoral and political institutions. The result is the most comprehensive survey of the politically disengaged to date, with lessons political consultants, candidates and civic educators won’t want to miss.

“There’s a lot of conventional wisdom as to why somebody would not vote, but nobody has really gone to these citizens and asked them why they don’t vote,” says Sam Gill, chief program officer at the Knight Foundation, which decided to undertake the study last winter. “It’s the story of this huge portion of the population that consistently sits this out.”

In the broadest terms, the study found the average chronic nonvoter is a married, nonreligious white woman between 56 and 73 who works full time but makes less than $50,000 a year. She is most likely to identify as a moderate, lean toward the Democratic Party, get her news from television and to have a very unfavorable impression of both political parties and President Donald Trump. She has a 77 percent chance of being registered to vote and says she doesn’t because she doesn’t like the candidates but claims to be certain she will vote in November. But the study’s real lesson is that averages are deceiving, concealing more than they reveal.

Nonvoters are an eclecticfaction with distinctive blocs that support Democrats and Republicans—but don’t show up to cast their ballots—and an even larger group that is alienated from a political system it finds bewildering, corrupt, irrelevant or some combination thereof. These blocs are so large that when a campaign is able to motivate even a portion of one, it can swing an election, which may have been what allowed Trump to bust through the “blue wall” in the Great Lakes region in 2016 and Barack Obama to flip North Carolina, Virginia, Florida and Indiana in 2008. What these blocs do in November could well decide the 2020 presidential election.

But how is the question.

The study confirms that nonvoters as a whole are fairly reflective of the broader electorate in terms of political preferences. If they were to all vote in November, 33 percent say they would support Democrats, 30 percent Republicans and 18 percent a third-party candidate. More surprisingly perhaps, and potentially more consequential for November, these numbers gently tilt in the opposite direction in many battleground states, with nonvoters choosing Trump over the as-yet-undetermined Democratic nominee 36%-28% in Pennsylvania, 34%-25% in Arizona and 30%-29% in New Hampshire. Wisconsin and Michigan mirror the national average, favoring the Democrat 33%-31% and 32%-31%, respectively, while in Georgia the margin is 34%-29%. This data challenges many long-standing assumptions of political experts.

“On the political left, there’s this feeling that if all nonvoters voted it would benefit them, but the majority of the academic literature that has tried to assess this has found this isn’t the case,” says Eitan Hersh, an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and one of the two principal academic advisers of the Knight survey. “But what if you increased it by 20 or 30 percent, then who would vote? Who is closest on the cusp of voting? That’s a very different theoretical electorate than either the status quo or universal turnout.”

The Knight study reinforces prior research that suggests nonvoters—defined as eligible adults 25 or older who have voted in no more than one federal election since 2008—are clustered into distinctive camps with disparate political leanings and levels of interest in participating. It suggests that both major parties have considerable opportunities to motivate sympathetic nonvoters, while a large chunk of the politically disengaged will likely remain hesitant to participate for reasons close observers say are not entirely irrational.

“There are these plugged-in groups [of nonvoters] who by and large resemble voters more than they do this much more disconnected group,” says Evette Alexander, Knight’s director of learning and impact strategy. “The likelihood of mobilizing people drops off quite sharply when you move between them.”

In Philadelphia, civic leaders like Riggins-Furlow, the pastor, know they live in a battleground state that could decide a historic election but that getting people to participate in it won’t be easy.

“People want to complain, but they don’t want to do anything,” says Riggins-Furlow, who runs food pantries and empowerment seminars when she’s not in the pulpit. “I preach this from the pulpit: One of the things you can do is register and vote. Don’t complain to me and say, ‘Our vote doesn’t matter.’ Because come on, now. It does.”

But the Knight study reinforces academic research that indicates voting is a social behavior and that any effort to mobilize a significant number of chronic nonvoters will require complex, long-term interventions and a more nuanced understanding of this poorly understood portion of our electorate.

For much of U.S. history,elections were determined not by who turned out to vote but by who was allowed to do so at all. Turnout in presidential elections sometimes exceeded 80 percent in the mid-19th century, but women, men between 18 and 21, and most African- and Native-Americans—the overwhelming majority of adults—were barred from participating. Black men gained the right to vote in 1870 but were effectively driven from the polls across the South in a campaign of terror led by the Ku Klux Klan, the celebration of which launched the first Hollywood blockbuster,The Birth of a Nation. Women joined the rolls in 1920 and increasing numbers of black and Hispanic people after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in voting.

But something surprising happened after the pool of voters expanded. The enactment of the 26th Amendment, which extended the franchise to young people in 1971, was soon followed by a fall in turnout. The proportion of the electorate to cast ballots fell by about 10 percentage points between 1968 and 1998 to just over 51 percent in presidential contests and under 40 percent in the midterms. It’s risen a bit since, but more than 40 percent of the U.S. electorate still sits out the process, roughly twice the proportion of Sweden, Denmark, South Korea or New Zealand, none of which has mandatory voting. One of the biggest questions in American politics has become why so many people have checked out.

Over the years, scholars have found nonvoters fall into camps with very different political inclinations and reasons for not participating.

More in Common, a nonpartisan organization that aims to develop new strategies to reduce polarization in Western democracies, partnered with YouGov on a survey of 8,000 Americans to understand their underlying values and core beliefs, revealing seven “Hidden Tribes” they say provide a much more accurate and revealing framework for understanding the country than slicing and dicing the electorate using conventional markers like age, gender, race and partisan affiliations.

Like other scholars, their research identified a substantial cohort of would-be Democratic voters who rarely participate in the political process. These “passive liberals” are weakly engaged but progressive on most issues when they are, isolated from “the system” and fatalistic about how it will affect their lives, and far more likely to be African American and to feel the world is becoming more dangerous. They constitute 15 percent of the voting age population.

“They’re younger, more urban, more female, more black and Hispanic on average and have a clear orientation toward the Democratic Party,” says Stephen Hawkins, More in Common’s director of research. “But they feel disaffected and cynical toward the system so they are less inclined to vote as a whole.”

This group closely mirrors one of two camps that Ibram X. Kendi, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, has called the “other swing voters,” the ones who chose not between voting for the Democrats or the Republicans but rather between Democrat and not voting at all. “There are two kinds of nonvoters, the person who is a ‘nonvoter’ as an identity and the person who often chooses not to vote after they did vote in a specific election but consider themselves voters and who might think voting is absolutely crucial,” he notes.

These “passive liberals” stand in stark contrast to a larger mass of nonvoters who are far more profoundly disengaged from and disinterested in politics. More in Common calls this tribe the “Politically Disengaged,” a group comprising 26 percent of Americans, who are almost invisible in local politics and community life. As a group, they’re much poorer and less educated than the average American and much more likely to say that “being white” is important to being an American—20 percent, rather than 11 percent—to say people of other religions are morally inferior and to say that a “strong leader willing to break the rules” is needed to fix America,57 percent to 45. They are much more eclectic of a group than More in Common’s other “tribes,” like Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives.

“When we would put members of these other ‘tribes’ in a room, you would immediately see what they have in common,” Hawkins says. But the disengaged were very different. “The disengaged would look like a Greyhound bus station. There are right racists and black inner-city, low-income folks,and Hispanics who were relatively new to the country. Doing focus groups with this cohort was difficult because there would be hostilities due to the lack of commonality. It was actually pretty intense.”

The Knight data ratified many of the previous findings and in some important ways expanded on them.

Researchers, for example, detected “passive liberals” as well—people who usually don’t vote but are generally aligned with Democrats when they do—though they further divided them into a liberal and moderate camp, together comprising 41 percent of nonvoters, or about 17 percent of the eligible electorate. The moderates are a bit younger, more educated and less likely to follow political news but report almost the same 2020 political preferences as the liberals, who break 59 percent to 16 percent for Democrats, with 16 percent for a third party.

But it also found a similar, though smaller, conservative cohort—about 17 percent of nonvoters—who closely follow news, distrust “the media,” and are overwhelmingly white (79 percent), male (60 percent) and supportive of Trump (84 percent). Of all nonvoters, Knight found these to be the wealthiest and the most likely to be retired, married and own their own home. “This profile is the most interested in voting in 2020,” the study’s authors write. This group—call it “passive conservatives”—is subsumed in the politically disengaged group in the More in Common framework.

This cohort is of enormous consequence in Pennsylvania, where it likely helped flipped the state red in 2016.

“Donald Trump has grabbed a hold of so many people in the state and brought them into the process,” says Charlie O’Neill, deputy executive director of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania. “We had record turnout in 2016 and, anecdotally, we heard stories all the time about folks saying, ‘I wasn’t really involved in the process and then this Donald Trump guy came along and he speaks to me, and I’m going to vote for him.’”

Again, paralleling More in Common’s data and Kendi’s research, the Knight study distinguished a huge “disconnected” group with characteristics that put it in sharp contrast with other more politically aware nonvoters. Its members report paying little attention to the news; low levels of civic engagement; little interest in politics; and, in aggregate, mixed partisan preferences—when they have any at all. “The disconnected are less informed, intentionally not informed, or not interested in consuming news and one might say they’re turned off from politics,” says Alexander of the Knight Foundation.

Highlighting the complexity of nonvoters, Knight was able to further parse this disconnected group into three distinct subdivisions, each with its own characteristics. The foundation found an “indifferent” group—17 percent of nonvoters—whose members may be registered but don’t pay attention to current affairs and don’t feel they know enough about the issues or candidates to vote. When asked, they say they’d vote Republican over Democrat 34 percent to 29 percent, with 21 percent voting third party. Another 17 percent are “unattached apoliticals” who are adamant about not participating—“anti-political on purpose,” Alexander says—and tend to be young, unmarried with low incomes and education levels. The remaining 8.4 percent of nonvoters fall into a distressed cluster with the lowest employment, education and income indices, which is also 65 percent female. Asked who they would vote for in 2020, 80 percent of them simply say they don’t know. “These are people who are on the edge, really removed from power structures,” Alexander says, and, like the apoliticals, would be very difficult for civic or political campaigners to mobilize.

Chris Arnade, a bond trader-turned-documentary photographer, has spent much of the past decade documenting the lives of America’s underclass, which he pulled together in his illustrated bookDignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. He has traveled 400,000 miles in a minivan, mostly to towns and neighborhoods outsiders avoid, meeting people in McDonald’s restaurants that he says have become the social hub of many distressed communities. Almost all the people he has met, he says, are chronic nonvoters.

“These are people who are generally below the poverty line, with a lot of job turnover and family disruption, whose lives are busy living paycheck to paycheck,” he says. “You don’t really have a lot of time to watch the news or to vote, and the paperwork necessary to vote is annoying.”

“It’s justified cynicism,” he says, an entirely rational distrust of participating. “When they have engaged with the system, it kind of screwed them over. You go to the DMV to get your driver’s license and you find out you have an old speeding ticket you can’t pay. You get hurt and go to the hospital and you get a really big bill. You vote and your name will be in a file somewhere and you’re called up for jury duty. Every interaction brings hardship.”

For much of the 20th century,political scientists imagined citizens decided to vote as a private, individual calculus of self-interest. Each person supposedly considered the candidates and his or her positions and weighed the potential costs and benefits that might accrue if one or the other won and placed it against the time and energy of voting.

If someone chose not to vote, it was either because he or she didn’t want to put in the time to make an educated choice or because registering to vote or casting a ballot was too inconvenient. These assumptions helped lead political campaigns to scale back on door-to-door outreach in the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and rely instead on direct mail and television advertising, while reformers promoted more convenient registration and ballot casting methods. While the reforms probably helped some voters, the percentage of people who turned out for presidential elections fell from the low 60s to the mid-to-low 50 before sinking to 51.7 percent of eligible voters in 1996, the worst level since 1924.

Research had also shown clear links between education, income and voting: the more you had of the first two, the more you did the latter. And yet turnout fell in the second half of the 20th century even as the electorate’s education level and living standards had grown. What gives?

Turns out voting is a social phenomenon, according to Meredith Rolfe of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Some people vote no matter what, but other people vote because the people around them are voting,” she says. “If you see somebody contributing money to a musician on a sidewalk, you are something like 80 percent more likely to contribute too.” If you are part of a large, loose knit network of friends, family, co-workers or parishioners who are engaged and people ask if you’ve gone to vote and the election is part of everyday chatter, you’re far more likely to vote than if you are not.

Rolfe argues that education and income levels aren’t the driving forces but rather proxies for the presence of these kinds of social networks. In one North Carolina community she studied, low-income black neighborhoods that had such networks in the form of active churches, social clubs, certain restaurants and barbershops delivered turnout rates comparable to the city’s highest-income precincts. “That’s also why college students have low turnout,” she adds, “they’re not attached to the community, so the races aren’t salient to them.”

The biggest reason turnout has increased in the 21st century—it hit 61.6 percent of eligible voters in 2008 and 60.1 in 2016—appears to be that campaigns have returned to knocking on doors and connecting with voters as individuals. “This tells us that some of the reasons that people weren’t voting was because they weren’t being asked to vote,” says Indiana University political scientist Bernard Fraga. “Campaigns’ job is to convince people their vote matters and that they are part of something.”

The Knight study was designed to test this idea, and it stands up. Nonvoters are less likely to volunteer in their community, attend weekly church services or have recently collaborated with others to solve a local problem. They’re less likely to have been asked to vote and far less likely to have been asked by a campaigner.

“People who feel a part of things are more likely to participate in politics,” says Yanna Krupnikov, a political scientist at Stony Brook University who helped design the study. Further, 76 percent of nonvoters also told Knight the voting process is easy in their state, with 46 percent saying it is “very easy,” suggesting this was not a key factor in their decision to not participate.

Journalists will take some comfort from the study, which reveals their work is a staple for voters. But nonvoters generally don’t feel any such obligation to stay informed. Like voters, the majority of them see bias in the media, but they are less likely to seek out more information to compensate, instead retreating from the welter of competing viewpoints.

The Knight study found 73 percent of voters seek out news and information, compared with only 56 percent of nonvoters, many of whom say they “mostly bump into news” or hear about it from others. Families that get and discuss news regularly are more likely to raise children who vote, while focus groups ofnonvoters said their own dearth of knowledge was a major disincentive to voting. “Not voting,” one Las Vegas man told them, “is better than an uneducated vote.”

The bad news, experts say, is that if you don’t seek out news, there are dwindling opportunities to bump into it by accident. “There was a time when everybody watched the same four channels and when the news came on, you watched it or turned off the TV,” says Kathleen Searles, who researches political communication at Louisiana State University. “Now if you don’t like the news—and the disengaged don’t—you can watch myriad things instead.” Newspaper boxes are also vanishing from the streets, but disinterested citizens may still be glimpsing their headlines as the scroll through their Facebook feeds. Seventy-seven percent of nonvoters told Knight’s pollsters they encountered political news at least once a day via social media.

Angela Legasti, a 54-year old from Orange County, California, who participated in the Knight study and last voted in 2012, said the sheer quantity of information out there now is making it hard to be informed. “With the internet age, it’s hard to tell what’s the truth, and even on television during the election season, there’s one commercial after another and they go back and forth contradicting each other completely,” she says. “Unless you want to make it your life’s mission to sort it all out, it’s really hard to get a good opinion.”

Legasti is not alone. Forty-eight percent of nonvoters told Knight the increase in information is making it harder to determine what’s true or important, and only 36 percent thought it had made it easier. For voters this ratio is actually even worse, 53 percent to 39 percent.

“We’re in this weird time right now where evidence doesn’t matter, where the right wing media echo chamber ensures their audience never saw the impeachment evidence and many nonvoters have given up trying to follow it,” says Rachel Bitecofer of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University. “Democrats are especially prone to this mistake that everybody knows everything and is following the news, and it’s a terrible strategic mistake.”

If the decision to vote is socialand shaped by the expectations of those around you, voting law reforms may not have as much effect on turnout as their proponents might hope. State “motor voter” laws, which automatically register people when they get or update their driver’s licenses, provide no social component at all, limiting their effectiveness, suggests Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “What benefit you see is probably because once you are on the rolls you are visible to canvassers and campaigns, making it possible for them to reach out to you,” he says. “Registering people to vote is not a silver bullet.”

Building or enlisting informal social networkscan bethough, as Arnade saw traveling the forgotten areas of the nation during the 2016 election cycle.

“You could see that Trump had gotten all these people who had never voted before and made them really feel like part of the process,” he recalls. “If you’re the only person you know who’s voting, you’re not going to do it, but at the Trump rallies there was this forum where they were welcomed in and he didn’t sneer at them or ask anything of them, and they felt like a member of something.”

A charismatic candidate like Trump or Obama can jolt one segment of the electorate off the sidelines. But to make a more universal and lasting impact on voting tendencies, the smart money may be in building civic education, knowledge and expectations in secondary schools.

In Pennsylvania, the state chapter of the League of Women Voters, the Philadelphia-based good government group Committee of Seventy, and a wide range of public, private and parochial schools have formed partnerships to bring more engaging, hands-on and group-oriented civics exercises to the classroom. “If you can turn an 18-year-old on to voting, that person becomes a voter for life,” says David Thornburgh,the Committee of Seventy’s president and CEO and son of former Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh. “That’s a game the campaigns don’t play because it’s a long-term payoff, not a short-term one.”

These initiatives have created punchy, concise YouTube videos demystifying the voting process; software to let students draw their own state congressional districts (with instant calculations of their demographic and political characteristics); mock elections using the state’s actual touch-screen voting machines; and an “election ambassadors” program for high school students to train and serve as volunteer poll workers, giving them an intimate knowledge of how to vote months or years before they’re old enough to do it for real. Because students are doing these activities together, the knowledge and interest in politics is likely to infiltrate their peer networks.

That’s how it appears to be playing out at Philadelphia’s J.R. Masterman School, an elite public high school that has embraced many of these initiatives. “I thought it would be taboo not to vote,” says senior Amanda Duckworth, who turned 18 prior to November’s local elections and says she doesn’t know anyone in her peer group who was of age and didn’t cast a ballot. Classmate Alex Tat, who turned 18 in January, is already registered to vote, even though he says his parents are nonvoters, as are two older siblings who didn’t attend Masterman. “I don’t think they follow up on politics that much,” he says, “while I had exposure to all this new stuff at Masterman and learned more outside of class because I’m interested now.”

That’s the essential dynamic, says Abby Kiesa, director of impact at Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. “By the time young people reach 18, they’ve already received many messages from many sources about whether their voice matters or is welcomed,” she says. “You need to create frameworks to grow voters and engaged citizens. It’s all a civic socialization process.”

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[tortuga-aak]

China and the US are moving closer to a trade war

Many policymakers in the US capital today say carrots are useless when it comes to dealing with China. Republicans and Democrats now are wielding sticks.

China's activities in the US are worrying many American policymakers, who believe that Chinese investments are giving Beijing a strategic foreign policy advantage.

This tension could lead to more overt, widespread hostilities on the economic front. 

US President Donald Trump’s mantra before and since his tour of Asia earlier this month touted the need for countries to accept each other’s unique characteristics to ensure prosperity for the world’s great civilisations.

The message of harmony might have offset discord caused by Trump’s harsh criticism of multilateral trade and investment deals during the trip. When it comes to civilization, however, the course in Washington appears set for a clash rather than cooperation and mutual respect.

Amid a push by lawmakers to apply greater scrutiny to Chinese investments in the US, multiple investigations launched by Trump’s administration targeting China threatened to destabilize Sino-US close economic and cultural ties, which have underpinned prosperity for the Asia-Pacific region for decades, trade officials and analysts interviewed by the South China Morning Post said.

At one time, a “Washington consensus” had assumed closer economic integration with China would encourage Beijing to open its markets and provide greater opportunities for foreign companies. That agreement has now changed. Many policymakers in the US capital today say carrots are useless when it comes to dealing with China.

Republicans and Democrats now are wielding sticks.

But He Yafei, China’s former vice-minister of foreign affairs, said US lawmakers “should listen to all segments of the American people, not just the defence department”.

“We understand there are some strategic concerns about China, but we should not be hijacked by this extreme thinking,” He said.

The former diplomat was referring to a recently declassified US defence department study that mobilized lawmakers on both sides of the aisle with its assertion that China’s investment activity in the US “will directly enable key means of foreign military advantage”.

“Washington has been struggling for a long time about what is the best way to get China to adapt and change, what would work and what would also preserve the system, the global trading system that we have,” Scott Kennedy, director of the Project on Chinese Business and Political Economy at the Washington-based think tank Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said.

“Trump is less risk averse than all of his predecessors,” Kennedy said. “The logic of the president [when negotiating with US companies operating in China] is that, ‘Yes, maybe you’ll lose some sliver of that current piece of cake that you have access to, but if you want to expand the size of the cake then you might potentially have access to China or elsewhere, then you have to be willing to put this current slice at risk’.”

AP ImagesProposed changes to the way the US government reviews foreign investment gained more urgency owing to the defence department’s study, a 49-page document called “China’s Technology Transfer Strategy: How Chinese Investments in Emerging Technology Enable a Strategic Competitor to Access the Crown Jewels of US Innovation”.

The report, initially circulated among US lawmakers a few weeks after Trump took office in late January, addressed the government’s concerns about China at a very high level, even suggesting there was potential for a civilizational clash that Trump, in Asia, said countries could avoid if they played by mutually agreed-upon rules.

The Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act, co-authored by Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, a Republican, and Dianne Feinstein, a senior Democrat, has broad support in Congress. If enacted, the legislation would expand foreign investment review procedures overseen by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is chaired by the treasury secretary and seeks input from the departments of defence and homeland security.

Significant changes to the CFIUS review process include giving it authority to review all “non-passive” investments by foreign entities and suspend pending transactions and impose new conditions, retroactively, on completed transactions. CFIUS now only reviews transactions in which a foreign party wants a controlling interest in a US company and makes recommendations to the president on the national security threat posed by a proposed transaction.

New requirements in the bill “have the practical effect of subjecting many Chinese acquisitions to mandatory review”, according to an analysis by US law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, which represents companies facing CFIUS reviews.

“The proposed [Cornyn-Feinstein] bill would constitute the most significant change in the last 10 years to US review of foreign investment and merits close attention, especially in the current environment where there is an increasing degree of protectionist rhetoric,” according to a memo by Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, another law firm representing foreign companies investing in the US.

While CFIUS is designed to halt the transfer to US adversaries of advanced “dual-use” technologies – those that can be adapted for military use – lawmakers are calling for the process to cover transactions that would give Chinese companies control over large pools of personally identifiable data. Such data, analysts and other observers warn, could make government officials and active members of the US military vulnerable to blackmail or offers to engage in espionage.

The concern over access to data partly explains the delay in US government approval for Ant Financial’s US$1.2 billion takeover of US money transfer service MoneyGram. The buyer has been trying to secure the approval since April.

Many analysts and policymakers have pointed out that MoneyGram would not be allowed, under China’s laws, to acquire Ant Financial, further pushing the effort to crack down on Chinese investments in the US.

“We are not commenting on the CFIUS process, but we are continuing to work with the various regulatory agencies and remain focused on closing the transaction by the end of the year,” Ant Financial said in September. The company is a financial affiliate of Alibaba Group, which also owns the South China Morning Post.

Other threats to the US-Chinaeconomic relationship include an investigation under section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974 into Chinese regulations that force US companies operating in China to transfer technology and intellectual property rights to local business partners.

The investigation could lead to unilateral US trade remedy actions such as tariffs meant to compensate the US for losses American companies have sustained from Beijing’s trade regulations or a dispute settlement process within the World Trade Organisation.

“The outstanding question is, after the investigation concludes, if there are adverse findings, how our government handles these findings, whether they go forward with consultations to resolve the problem, or go with [a] dispute settlement in the WTO, or take unilateral actions like sanctions against China,” said Anna Ashton, director of business advisory services at the Washington-based US-China Business Council.

“If the government were to take unilateral actions, then there will be a risk that we will be out of compliance of our international obligations,” she said. “Then we will be starting a trade war, perhaps.”

REUTERS/Hyungwon KangIn addition to CFIUS legislation and the section 301 investigation, the US Commerce Department since March has been looking into the impact on national security of imports of steel and aluminum, an initiative aimed at imports from China more than any other country.

Commenting on these investigations in July, Trump said of China: “They’re dumping steel and destroying our steel industry. They’ve been doing it for decades, and I’m stopping it. It’ll stop … There are two ways: quotas and tariffs. Maybe I’ll do both.”

Since Trump returned to Washington, there’s been no official effort on the part of China to defuse the concerns behind Cornyn and Feinstein’s bill or the government investigations.

“I don’t think there are so many projects Chinese are investing in here related to national security,” Li Bin, who heads the economic affairs section of China’s embassy in Washington, said. “In the past there were a few cases but not many.

“Recommendations by the US Congress to strengthen the CFIUS examinations or assessments of Chinese investments, they are not very constructive.”

The counselor for economic affairs urged Chinese enterprises and CFIUS to engage more often in discussions that would reveal more “about the nature” of a project and its intentions. “Communication is very important,” Li said, adding that he is not aware of any effort so far to open such dialogue.

Spokesmen for the US chapter of the China General Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 1,500 mainland Chinese enterprises operating in the country, said they could not find any CGCC members to comment on possible changes to CFIUS or other potential trade action by the US against China.

“The Chinese don’t want to be seen as directly lobbying on American legislation,” CSIS’s Scott Kennedy said. “They also know that the course of legislation is never straightforward and that there is a vigorous debate within the United States. If they are seen as overly poking their fingers into this, they could get burned.”

Still, China has many options when it comes to retaliation, and analysts expect Beijing to use them.

“If there’s trade tension, US companies will face certain risks on a number of grounds, including anti-monopoly laws, anticorruption laws and consumer protection laws,” Sherman Chu, a DLA Piper lawyer who advises companies undergoing CFIUS reviews, said. “Authorities in China have more discretion over how they go about interpreting the rules than they do in the US.

“China’s leaders have said that many international rules were set by other countries when China was weak and had little input. So it’s not a surprise that China hasn’t always been willing to live up to the spirit of these rules,” Chu said.

“There’s a risk of miscalculation resulting in a trade war, and the real question is whether the Trump and Xi administrations will be adroit enough to avoid it.”

Not all of Washington’s “China hands” agree that it is in the US’ interests to ratchet up trade action against Beijing.

“The impression I have is there are still unresolved disagreements within the Trump administration of how to deal with these [bilateral trade-friction] questions,” J Stapleton Roy, US ambassador to China under former presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, said.

Roy, who was born in China and raised there during the second world war and the communist revolution, is founding director emeritus of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, a Washington think tank.

“If we take unilateral actions against China, China will retaliate with unilateral actions against us,” Roy said. “Where is the net benefit? Who gains from that?”

Speaking at a lunch at the New York-based China Institute last week, vice-minister He addressed the geostrategic concerns around China’s new ranking among global powers.

“China wants to invest much more in the United States, but we’ve met quite strong political resistance,” He said. “I can understand the strategic anxiety on the part of the US about China’s growth. We are ready to move from prosperity to become a powerful nation, one of the global powers.

“For the US to feel anxious about China is understandable, but we should not let that anxiety take over, to become the sole guideline for foreign policy.”

Additional reporting by Zhenhua Lu

NOW WATCH: What happens to your brain and body if you use Adderall recreationally

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[studentofrhetoric-blog]

Sunday, March 5th, 2017

International News:

--- "The United States sees no indications so far that North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile in its latest launch, U.S. officials told Reuters on Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing U.S. assessment. The North Korean launch, which involved up to four projectiles, came days after the reclusive state promised retaliation over U.S.-South Korea military drills it sees as a preparation for war."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-usa-icbm-idUSKBN16D0AE?il=0

--- "The total number of civilians displaced from Mosul has risen sharply over the past days and exceeded 200,000 on Sunday, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The displaced are fleeing the fighting between U.S.-backed Iraqi forces and Islamic State militants who have controlled the northern Iraqi city since 2014. The IOM's Mosul Displacement Tracking Matrix showed the total number of people displaced form Mosul since the start of the offensive on Islamic State in the city in October exceeding 206,000 on Sunday, versus 164,000 on Feb. 26. International aid agencies have expressed concern over the past few days that camps to accommodate displaced people are approaching full capacity."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-displaced-idUSKBN16C0LT?il=0

--- "More than 40,000 people have been displaced in the last week from the Iraqi city of Mosul, where U.S.-backed forces launched a fresh push towards the Islamic State-held old city center on Sunday and closed in on the main government complex. The pace of displacement has accelerated in recent days as fighting approaches the most densely populated parts of western Mosul, and aid agencies have expressed concern that camps to accommodate people fleeing the city are almost full. The International Organization for Migration's Mosul Displacement Tracking Matrix showed the number of people uprooted since the start of the offensive in October exceeded 206,000 on Sunday, up from 164,000 on Feb. 26. That number may still rise sharply. The United Nations last month warned that more than 400,00 people, more than half the remaining population in western Mosul, could be displaced."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-iraq-mosul-idUSKBN16C0A2?il=0

Domestic News:

--- "The former top U.S. intelligence official rejected President Donald Trump's accusation that his predecessor, Barack Obama, wiretapped him even as the White House on Sunday urged Congress to investigate Trump's allegation. The New York Times reported on Sunday that FBI Director James Comey asked the Justice Department this weekend to reject Trump's wiretapping claim because it was false and must be corrected, but the department had not done so. The report cited senior U.S. officials. The White House asked Congress, controlled by Trump's fellow Republicans, to examine whether the Obama administration abused its investigative authority during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, as part of an ongoing congressional probe into Russia's influence on the election. Trump on Saturday alleged, without offering supporting evidence, that Obama ordered a wiretap of the phones at Trump's campaign headquarters in Trump Tower in New York. "There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate or against his campaign," former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who left his post at the end of Obama's term in office in January, said on NBC's "Meet the Press.""

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-idUSKBN16C0MG?il=0

--- "The U.S. Marine Corps is looking into the suspected distribution of nude photographs of female members of the service among military personnel and veterans via a social media network that promotes sexual violence, the Marine Corps Times said on Sunday. A Marine Corps spokesman told the independent newspaper specializing on the Corps that military officials are uncertain how many military personnel could be involved. Officials from the Marine Corps Naval Criminal Investigative Service were not immediately available for comment. The paper published an internal Marine Corps communications document with talking points about the issue, describing the social media network as a closed Facebook group with about 30,000 members. The network solicited nude photos of female service members, some of whom had their name, rank and duty station listed, it said."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-marines-idUSKBN16C0WE

--- "Muslim students visiting an Oklahoma lawmaker's office in the state capitol were required to fill out a form that asked if they beat their wives and other questions that offended them, an Islamic advocacy group said. The two-page form from Republican state Representative John Bennett's office, which was shared by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), also asked whether they believed an adherent to Islam should be punished for leaving the faith and if Muslims should rule over non-Muslims. A staff member at Bennett's handed the form to Muslim students who visited his office on Thursday seeking to meet with him, said Adam Soltani, the executive director of the Oklahoma chapter of CAIR. It was presented as a requirement before they could meet Bennett, Soltani said."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-muslims-oklahoma-idUSKBN16C0WT

--- "The 39-year-old Sikh man was working on his car in his driveway in Kent, Wash., just south of Seattle, when a man walked up wearing a mask and holding a gun. According to a report in the Seattle Times, there was an altercation, and the gunman — a stocky, 6-foot-tall white man wearing a mask over the bottom part of his face — said “Go back to your own country” and pulled the trigger. Authorities are investigating the shooting as a suspected hate crime, the newspaper reported. The victim, whose name hasn’t been released, was shot in the arm at about 8 p.m. Friday and suffered injuries that are not life-threatening, the newspaper reported. The man who shot him is still on the loose. Kent Police have reached out to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies for help."

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/03/04/go-back-to-your-own-country-sikh-man-shot-in-his-driveway-in-suspected-hate-crime/?utm_term=.f214c8e479f2

--- "WASHINGTON — Saying their patience is at an end, conservative activist groups backed by the billionaire Koch brothers and other powerful interests on the right are mobilizing to pressure Republicans to fulfill their promise to swiftly repeal the Affordable Care Act. Their message is blunt and unforgiving, with the goal of reawakening some of the most extensive conservative grass-roots networks in the country. It is a reminder that even as Republicans control both the White House and Congress for the first time in a decade, the party’s activist wing remains restless and will not go along passively for the sake of party unity. With angry constituents storming town hall-style meetings across the country and demanding that Congress not repeal the law, these new campaigns are a sign of a growing concern on the right that lawmakers might buckle to the pressure. “We’ve been patient this year, but it is past time to act and to act decisively,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, which is coordinating the push with other groups across the Kochs’ political network. “Our network has spent more money, more time and more years fighting Obamacare than anything else. And now with the finish line in sight, we cannot allow some folks to pull up and give up.”"

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/us/politics/koch-brothers-affordable-care-act.html?_r=0