WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
It’s Russia! Russia! Russia! 24-7, especially from the Democratic Party and Liberal establishment. But even if all the charges of Russian electoral interference are true (doubtful) there is absolutely no evidence that it had any meaningful impact on the result. $100,000 in alleged Facebook ads in a multi-billion dollar electoral campaign? The US State Department bragged about spending $5 billion to influence the politics of Ukraine alone. Meanwhile, the establishment remains nearly mute on the issue of voter suppression, the need to reform the blatantly undemocratic character of our Electoral College system which has chosen at least two presidents lately over the candidates who actually won the popular vote – and the fact that the Democratic Party offers fewer and fewer policies to motivate its supposed base to come out and vote. Just this week the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party mounted a purge of Bernie Sanders supporters from national Party posts. Upholding the system is clearly more urgent for these Democrats than actually winning elections.
Democratic Party Chair Purges Dissenters in Surprise Shake-Up
In a move that exacerbated the vast intra-party rift exposed during last year’s presidential primary between Hillary Clinton andBernie Sanders, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez has stripped a number of longtime party officials of their “at-large” delegate status or leadership positions, while appointing a slate of 75 new members that include Clinton campaign veterans, lobbyists, and neophytes. Perez revealed his picks this week, ahead of the D.N.C.’s first meeting since he was elected chairman. Upon perusing it, progressive party members were incensed to find that he had demoted a number of veteran delegates who’d backed either Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in his bid for party chairman against Perez, or Sanders in 2016. More
Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump
Clinton’s stunning loss in Wisconsin was blamed on her failure to campaign in the state, and the depressed turnout was attributed to a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate. “Perhaps the biggest drags on voter turnout in Milwaukee, as in the rest of the country, were the candidates themselves,” Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times wrote in a post-election dispatch that typified this line of analysis. “To some, it was like having to choose between broccoli and liver.” The impact of Wisconsin’s voter ID law received almost no attention. When it did, it was often dismissive… Wisconsin’s turnout dropped 3.3 percent. If Wisconsin had seen the same turnout increase as states whose laws stayed the same, “we estimate that over 200,000 more voters would have voted in Wisconsin in 2016,” the study said. More
We say black lives matter. The FBI says that makes us a security threat.
This past summer, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, which investigates terrorist threats from groups such as al-Qaeda, invented a brand new label and a brand new threat. In an intelligence assessment written in August but first disclosed by Foreign Policy last week, the FBI designated a new group of domestic terrorists: “Black Identity Extremists,” or BIEs. The report broadly categorizes black activists as threats to national security… Designating protesters as terrorists makes clear that the Trump administration thinks the government bears no responsibility to end deadly police violence and other state abuses of power against everyday Americans. It suggests that simply demanding the right to live free of police profiling and violence and to have equitable access to food, health care and education can land you on an FBI watchlist. More
ARROYO RETURNS TO PROBATE OFFICE
Court’s report finds employees worked to undermine his admin.
Suffolk County Register of Probate Félix D. Arroyo is back at work after an investigation found he was undermined by longtime court staff who bristled at his efforts to diversify his office and better serve its largely non-English speaking clientele. Arroyo was suspended in February by Massachusetts Trial Court administrators, who alleged Arroyo mismanaged the office. Trial Court administrators tapped former Trial Court Judge Anthony Nesi to conduct the investigation. While Nesi issued the report in April, the Trial Court has not made the report public. The Boston Globe obtained a copy of the report and quoted from it Monday. According to the Globe report, Nesi concluded that staff showed a lack of respect for Arroyo based on his ethnicity as a Puerto Rican and his lack of knowledge of the Probate Court. More
See under events, below, for a fundraiser event to help defray Arroyo’s legal expenses.
“TAX REFORM” LIES: A Scorecard
Modern conservatives have been lying about taxes pretty much from the beginning of their movement. Made-up sob stories about family farms broken up to pay inheritance taxes, magical claims about self-financing tax cuts, and so on go all the way back to the 1970s. But the selling of tax cuts under Trump has taken things to a whole new level, both in terms of the brazenness of the lies and their sheer number. Both the depth and the breadth of the dishonesty make it hard even for those of us who do this for a living to keep track. More
THE TAX DEBATE WE NEED
Progressive taxation curbs the power of the wealthy — and that's exactly why the Right hates it. The current tax debate is the mutant great-great-grandchild of the right-wing tax politics that overtook the country in the 1970s… The focus all along has been on cutting effective tax rates on capital through loopholes allowing companies to circumvent the corporate tax system (most prominently, the use of international tax havens); tax shelters to shield capital gains from tax; and vastly curtailed tax burdens on both dividends and estates. And it wasn’t just the Right pushing these moves… The larger point is that this decades-long assault on progressive taxes has a logic to it: the Right wants to destroy progressive taxation because it works. More
TRUMP TACKLES THE NFL:
Racism and Violence as Decoys
With his usual skill, he then reshaped that sizzling package into yet another set of presidential pep rallies for his own fans, that much-invoked “base.” In the process, he also helped highlight the Jock Spring that had stirred last year when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the anthem. Though it seemed to fade after the initial blast of publicity, it was revitalized last month when the president labeled any football player who knelt or sat or stayed in the locker room during the playing of the pre-game anthem a “son of a bitch,” the same term he used last year to describe the killer in the Orlando nightclub massacre… It took the rest of the season, but another link between 1968 and 2016 became apparent: Kaepernick would be shoved out of the game and left a jobless hero to some (and an ungrateful turncoat to others). By season’s end, he had become a free agent and Trump, of course, had become president. In a move that could only please the new president, the NFL owners apparently colluded in informally banning Kaepernick from the game. More
Kaepernick files grievance against NFL, citing collusion
Free-agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL, accusing the 32 owners of collusion, his legal team announced on Sunday… ”If the NFL (as well as all professional sports leagues) is to remain a meritocracy, then principled and peaceful political protests -- which the owners themselves made great theater imitating weeks ago -- should not be punished and athletes should not be denied employment based on partisan political provocation by the Executive Branch of our government. Such a precedent threatens all patriotic Americans and harkens back to our darkest days as a nation. Protecting all athletes from such collusive conduct is what compelled Mr. Kaepernick to file his grievance. “Colin Kaepernick’s goal has always been, and remains, to simply be treated fairly by the league he performed at the highest level for and to return to the football playing field.” More
The Third Man in the Iconic 1968 Olympic Protest
As NFL protests continue to be debated, both in and out of the league, the legacy of sports activism has by nature, also taken center stage. It's a history that, in balance, disproves the often-stated belief that players should just stick to their day jobs, that politics have no place on our fields or courts… One of those stories, is the tale of the white man, Australian runner Peter Norman, who won silver at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and stood on the podium as Americans John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their black-gloved fists in the air in support of African-American rights and dignity. For many, Norman was seen as simply a bystander, or "the white guy" in the photo. A largely insignificant figure in one of the Olympics' most iconic moments. But as Smith and Carlos held their fists up high to highlight the racism and segregation that marked life as a black person in America, Norman stood in quiet solidarity. Hard to see in the photo is a small badge he wore that read: "Olympic Project for Human Rights," an American organization started the year before to protest global racial injustice… While the narrative around the emblematic photo has often left out Norman, Australia certainly did not forget his actions. Four years later and in 1972, Norman was not part of his country's Olympic sprinter team in Munich, "despite having run qualifying times for the 200 meters thirteen times and the 100 meters five times More
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