A View From The Left-WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

Generally speaking, the concept of “the war at home” has been used metaphorically.  Perhaps not for long.  Increasingly, the violent methods of repression employed by the US and its allies abroad are being deployed at home. At Occupy, Ferguson, Oakland – and now especially at Standing Rock -- US citizens are now getting a taste of what is faced regularly by democracy campaigners in US-allied Arab states and by Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories. See this video showing explosive tear gas grenades used against Standing Rock protesters, made by Defense Technology Corp or Casper, Wyoming, which – along with other firms like Combined Tactical Systems of Jamestown. PA, supplies both US police and the instruments of oppression abroad.  Scary.

VIDEO: Standing Rock, N.Dakota

Cairo, Egypt

Oakland, California

Another Made in USA “less-lethal” weapon kills in Palestine

The recent killing of Jawaher Abu Rahmah in Bil’in – and the death or injury of many others — by Israeli tear gas munitions imported from the US has spotlighted the collaboration of American companies in the lethal suppression of unarmed protests in the West Bank.  However, another US-made “less lethal” weapon has also caused many deaths and injuries, but has received less attention.  Live fire “crowd control” rounds attributed to .22 caliber sniper rifles, made by Sturm, Ruger Co. in Newport, NH, have been responsible for at least six – and possibly more — deaths and scores of injuries during the past couple of years.  More

(see also here for my personal experience with tear gas in Palestine!)

THE IRON HEEL AT HOME

The nation’s ever more militarized police departments are loaded up with an array of so-called “nonlethal crowd-control technologies” designed to abolish the right of public assembly.  The terrible tools include things like the “Long Range Acoustic Device” (LRAD) – a sonic cannon that can cause total hearing loss for protesters who refuse to disperse at authorities’ command. Drones are now routinely deployed against protestors inside the U.S…  The current leading hot-spot for militarized police-state repression is southeastern North Dakota, where militarized local, county, and state police and National Guard units have attacked Native American water- and climate-protectors and others resisting the eco-cidal Dakota Access Pipeline…  Advanced military technologies have been on display and deployed throughout the ongoing repression: automatic rifles, MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles), Humvees, armored police trucks, tear gas, mace, pepper spray, flash-bang (concussion) grenades, smoke grenades, Tasers, bean bag rounds, rubber bullets, and more.   More

‘The Washington Post’ Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist

On November 24, The Washington Post published what at first glance looked to be a deeply troubling report on the far-reaching, insidious influence of the Kremlin on the American media. The Post’s national technology reporter Craig Timberg writes that “a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of…helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.”  According to Timberg, a group which goes by the moniker PropOrNot, a “nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds” has identified “more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.” … The group’s intentions are clear. They are “calling for formal investigations by the US government” of these Web sites because they think “the American people have the right to know when foreign governments are trying to mess with them.” What is more, they “strongly suspect that some of the individuals involved have violated the Espionage Act, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, and other related laws, but determining that is up to the FBI and the DOJ.”

That the Post would rely on the “findings” of a shoddy, anonymous blacklist that seeks to stifle dissent on Russia policy is deeply troubling.  More

Growing Far-Right Nationalistic Movements Are Dangerously Anti-Muslim — and Pro-Israel

The specter of a growing far-right nationalism anywhere, but particularly in Central Europe, immediately — and for good and obvious reasons — raises fears of an anti-Semitism revival. But at least thus far, the leaders of most of these nationalistic parties — increasingly inspired and fueled by one another’s success — have showcased dangerous animosity toward Muslims, accompanied by strong policy support for Israel and a rhetorical repudiation of anti-Semitism.  Whether from cynical tactical considerations or actual conviction, the most successful leaders of this emerging movement — while unrestrained with their reckless anti-Muslim fearmongering — not only repudiate anti-Semitism in words but are incorporating steadfast support for Israel as part of their policy agenda. And in many cases, the Israeli government — which itself exhibits many of the same far-right attributes as these movements — is expressing support in return… In the wake of the Bannon controversy, The Forward’s Naomi Zeveloff examined this increasingly common dynamic, arguing that “Breitbart News isn’t the only place where anti-Semitism and Zionism go hand in hand. Anti-Semitic attitudes abound in Poland, for example, even as Poland has a strong diplomatic relationship with Israel.” Some Israel defenders are willing to make common cause with potential or even clear-cut anti-Semites if they are also — for geopolitical, religious, or political reasons — pro-Israel.  More

Anti-Muslim Activist Katharine Gorka Named to Homeland Security Transition Team

Katharine Gorka, a controversial national security analyst who specializes in discussing the threat posed by Muslims to the United States, has complained bitterly that the Department of Homeland Security trains its agents — falsely, in her opinion — that Islam is a “religion of peace.” Now, Gorka will have a chance to help Donald Trump remake the department. On Tuesday, she was selected by Trump to be part of the DHS “landing team” that will meet with Obama’s DHS officials to manage the handoff to new leadership.  Gorka, the president of a think tank called the Council on Global Security and the president of Threat Knowledge Group, a consulting firm, is a well-known figure among anti-Muslim campaigners.   More

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Rep. TULSI GABBARD:

Telling Trump to End US Wars of Intervention

I recently met with President-elect Donald Trump to give voice to the millions of Americans, including my fellow veterans, who desperately want to end our country’s illegal, counterproductive war to overthrow the Syrian government. We had an hour-long, meaningful, back-and-forth discussion about the problems with current US policy in Syria and where to go from here… I conveyed to the president-elect how the post-9/11 neocon agenda of interventionism and regime change has left US foreign policy absurdly disconnected from our actual security interests. Our actions to overthrow secular dictators in Iraq and Libya, and attempts now to do the same in Syria, have resulted in tremendous loss of life, failed nations, and even worse humanitarian crises while strengthening the very terrorist organizations that have declared war on America…  Additionally, escalating this regime-change war by implementing a “no-fly/safe zone” in Syria would not only be ineffective, it would put the United States in direct military confrontation with nuclear-power Russia, require tens of thousands of ground troops and a massive US air presence, and commit us to yet another endless war in the Middle East that does not serve American or Syrian interests.   More

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is a member of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees. She is a combat veteran of two Middle East deployments and currently serves as a Major in the Hawaiʻi Army National Guard. She has been a leading progressive advocate for ending US-led regime change wars of intervention, and has introduced legislation to end the counterproductive regime change war in Syria. She was recently re-elected to serve a third term in the US House of Representatives, where she represents Hawaiʻi’s 2nd Congressional District. She quit the Democratic National Committee to support Bernie Sanders.

A MESSAGE FROM AN ALEPPO SYRIAN

A Syrian friend of mine who lives in Boston wrote this recently:

“I have friends & family in Aleppo, many of them are originally from the western side of Aleppo and some are from the eastern side who preferred to leave their homes and resettled in areas in the west of Aleppo since they did not want to be part of the militerized opposition. Many people from both sides wanted reform in 2011, but once the opposition got militarized, majority of them stepped back as we are peaceful people who wanted change but not through weapons and fighting like what happened.

“Everyday people from both sides of Aleppo are getting killed. People in the western side of Aleppo did not carry weapons, they asked their army & government to protect them. People in the east side of Aleppo(of course not all of them)  chose to carry weapons and they are not bombing only military or government area, they are bombing civilians in Aleppo, schools were their target last week. Please don’t look at the peaceful videos when they call on the whole world to help, they have weapons!! they are shelling civillians in Western Aleppo and they are also forbidding civillians in eastern Aleppo from fleeing because they want them to stay and use them as humanitarian shield and cry over them. Unfortunately, there are innocent civilians in eastern side of Aleppo too. But the United nations have called on the armed people in eastern Aleppo to accept the agreement of going out from Aleppo safely under the UN supervision! Why they don’t accept that?! its a great offer by the Syrian government and UN? If they are worried about their lives, other’s lives and innocent civilians, why don’t they accept the UN offer to move out of Aleppo. After all, they carried weapons and attacked people, would you accept that to happen in your own country?!  … It’s an ugly war and I think all what we can do is to call to stop other countries from sending weapons until this war ends regardless of which side wins. There is no such thing called “moderate rebels” any one who carries a weapon or a knife and kills or slaughter other people is not a “moderate” rebel?”

ANDREW BACEVICH: The Swamp of War

In the immediate wake of 9/11, George W. Bush concocted a fantasy of American soldiers liberating oppressed Afghans and Iraqis and thereby “draining the swamp” that served to incubate anti-Western terrorism.  The results achieved proved beyond disappointing, while the costs exacted in terms of lives and dollars squandered were painful indeed.  Incrementally, with the passage of time, many Americans concluded that perhaps the swamp most in need of attention was not on the far side of the planet but much closer at hand -- right in the imperial city nestled alongside the Potomac River.  To a very considerable extent, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, preferred candidate of the establishment, because he advertised himself as just the guy disgruntled Americans could count on to drain that swamp.  Yet here’s what too few of those Americans appreciate, even today: war created that swamp in the first place.  More

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ISRAEL, PALESTINE . . . and the U.S.

New anti-Semitism legislation may stifle campus activism for Palestinian rights

Increasingly, students on American campuses perceive advocating for justice in Palestine as a moral imperative. The steady growth of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian freedom has been met by a wave legislation aimed at punishing or suppressing our 1st amendment rights to free speech and silencing student activism. The latest of these bills is the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, introduced yesterday by U.S. Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and Tim Scott (R-SC), which redefines anti-Semitism to include criticism of Israel.   More

According to this report, the bill already passed the Senate, a day after it was introduced – perhaps a record speed for Congressional action.  Of the bullet points explaining the resolution by its  Democrat author Bob Casey (PA), three out of four item concern criticism of  Israel, not anti-Semitism as normally understood.

Insufficiently “Pro-Israel”. . .

Resistance Grows to Ellison’s Bid to Lead the D.N.C.

After initially mixing praise and criticism for Mr. Ellison, the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday effectively came out in opposition to his candidacy, citing remarks he made about Israel in a 2010 speech that the anti-discrimination group termed “disqualifying.”  In an audiotape released Thursday of a fund-raiser for his re-election to Congress that year, Mr. Ellison asserted that “United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of seven million people,” an allusion to Israel. Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, excoriated Mr. Ellison for his speech. “His words imply that U.S. foreign policy is based on religiously or national origin-based special interests rather than simply on America’s best interests,” said Mr. Greenblatt, adding that Mr. Ellison’s “words raise the specter of age-old stereotypes about Jewish control of our government, a poisonous myth that may persist in parts of the world where intolerance thrives, but that has no place in open societies like the U.S.”   More

House of Representatives Opposes UN Action on Palestine

The World Jewish Congress, United States (WJC, US), on Wednesday praised the US House of Representatives for passing H. Con. Res. 165, a bipartisan resolution that reaffirms support for direct Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations to ensure a genuine and lasting Middle East peace. 

  Introduced by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) and Ranking Member Eliot Engel (D-NY), the resolution reaffirms long-standing US government opposition to United Nations Security Council (UNSC) attempts to impose a solution which would circumvent United Nations-mandated face to face peace talks.  More

H.Con.Res.165 - Expressing the sense of Congress and reaffirming longstanding United States policy in support of a direct bilaterally negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and opposition to United Nations Security Council resolutions imposing a solution to the conflict. Passed by voice vote, no roll call. Seth Moulton was the only Mass co-sponsor

POST-ELECTION HANGOVER (continued)

POST-ELECTION HANGOVER (continued)

A lot of commentary trivializing the announcement that Trump’s intervention supposedly saved 1000 (mostly union) jobs misses the point of such a gesture, just as they underestimated Trump’s appeal to workers in Rust-belt states which apparently gave him the electoral college margin that allowed him to win.  Trump tells a story --  Trump threatens ‘consequences’ for U.S. firms that relocate offshore --

about saving good-paying US jobs and bashing the elites who have shown little empathy for displaced workers. Liberals or Democrats saying “these jobs are not coming back” may be accurate in general, but it is not a message which offers any hope to displaced workers.  And even if it is true that the Carrier jobs are a drop in the bucket of declining manufacturing employment – or that the tax subsidies offered to Carrier are a public giveaway -- 1000 Indiana union families can now look forward to keeping decent-paying jobs.  And they -- along with the many more who learn about this from the news -- will enthusiastically thank Donald Trump.  Democrats need to give more than lip-service to Labor and actively support organizing – while unions should demand more in return for support.  A decimated labor movement means losing the best organized base for opposing reaction nd supporting the fight against Trumpism.

WILL TRUMP’S PR TRIUMPH AT CARRIER MEAN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S DEMISE?

Post-election pundits are propagating the false equation that “industrial workers” equals “white working class,” and that Clinton’s crushing defeat in the Rust Belt was the result of a white worker revolt against political correctness ― i.e., they’re racists! But America’s industrial workforce reflects the future, not the past. The 1,400 person Carrier workforce in Indianapolis, for example, is fifty percent African-American. Women make up half of the workers on its assembly lines, and ten percent of the employees are Burmese immigrants… Trump's effort to save these jobs contrasts starkly with the failure of the established Democratic Party to do anything at all about such devastating plant closures. President Obama has never used his bully pulpit to mention even one of the thousands of facilities that shifted abroad under his watch. Similarly, Hillary Clinton remained silent about Carrier during her entire campaign, thereby allowing Trump to morph into the champion of the working class… Virtually every article on Carrier opines that Trump's quick fix cannot alter the technological march that surely will displace these blue collar workers. What they are really saying is the corporations have the right and obligation to move wherever and whenever they wish in order to boost profits and "shareholder value." Mainstream economists then assure us that, overall, society is better off due lower-cost imported goods and higher value-added domestic jobs, even if a few workers are sacrificed along the way. But a "few workers" have turned into millions of family members and members of devastated communities who have seen their lives deteriorate. They are heading Trump's way.   More

ROBERT REICH: The Democratic Party Lost Its Soul. It’s Time to Win It Back

You might think this overwhelming drubbing would cause the Democratic party to reorganize itself into a very different party from the one it’s become – which is essentially a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests that make up the bulk of its funding. Don’t bet on it. For one thing, many vested interests don’t want the Democratic party to change. Most of the money it raises ends up in the pockets of political consultants, pollsters, strategists, lawyers, advertising consultants and advertisers themselves, many of whom have become rich off the current arrangement. They naturally want to keep it. For another, the Democratic party apparatus is ingrown and entrenched. Like any old bureaucracy, it only knows how to do what it has done for years.   More

TRUMP PRESIDENCY COULD KILL LABOR UNIONS

As Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin—states that once were the stronghold of the nation’s industrial union movement—dropped into Donald Trump’s column on election night, one longtime union staff member told me that Trump’s victory was “an extinction-level event for American labor.”  He may be right.  A half-century ago, more than a third of those Rust Belt workers were unionized, and their unions had the clout to win them a decent wage, benefits, and pensions. Their unions also had the power to turn out the vote. They did—for Democrats. White workers who belonged to unions voted Democratic at a rate 20 percent higher than their non-union counterparts, and there were enough such workers to make a difference on Election Day…  The most devastating blow to unions may come from the Supreme Court, once a Trump-appointed conservative wins confirmation to the seat that the late Justice Antonin Scalia occupied. It was only Scalia’s death that kept the court from ruling in the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association  case that public employee unions no longer have the right to collect partial dues payments from the nonmembers they represent in disputes with employers and for whom they bargain contracts.   More

Was 11/8 a New 9/11? 
The Election That Changed Everything and Could Prove History’s Deal-Breaker

37 years after the first Afghan intervention and 15 years after the second one, in the wake of an American election, blowback from the war on terror -- its generals, its mindset, its manias, its urge to militarize everything -- has come home in a significant way. In fact, we just held what may someday be seen as our first 9/11-style election…  As with 9/11, a long, blowback-ridden history preceded 11/8 and Donald Trump’s triumph… Think of Donald Trump’s election, then, as the victory of the suicide bomber the white working class dispatched to the Oval Office to, as people now say politely, “shake things up.” … Whatever Americans may have ushered in with the events of 11/8, one thing is increasingly certain about the country that Donald Trump will govern.  Forget Vladimir Putin and his rickety petro-state: the most dangerous nation on the planet will now be ours… It’s not a pretty picture.  And yet it’s just a lead-in to what, undoubtedly, should be considered the ultimate question in Donald Trump’s America: With both the CIA’s coup-making and the military’s regime-change traditions in mind, could the United States also overthrow a planet?  More

The System IS Rigged!—The Electoral College and the 2016 Election

Donald Trump was right: the system is rigged! But it is rigged for the Republicans, not the Democrats, for conservatives, not progressives. And the result is the election of an extreme racist, misogynist authoritarian who may change the course of U.S. and even world history.

Belatedly we learn that Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump by more than two million votes, yet Trump still won the Electoral College. The public burst into an uproar in 2000 when Gore beat Bush by 550,000 votes but lost the Electoral vote. This time the public, the Clinton campaign and the press are quiet… In fact the Electoral College system was created by slaveholders, and remains undemocratic and racist, and biased to the Republicans. Obama showed that the system can be overcome and even turned to our advantage, but the Clinton and Gore losses show it is an uphill climb… The pro-Republican bias of the Electoral College derives from two main dynamics: it overweights the impact of mostly conservative voters in small population states and it negates entirely the mostly progressive votes of nearly half of African American voters, more than half of Native American voters and a major swath of Latino voters.   More

How the electoral college gerrymanders the presidential vote

The principle of “one person, one vote” doesn't really apply to electoral politics. The winner-take-all system means that votes in some states are quite literally more valuable to presidential candidates than votes in other states. This is why the candidates tend to spend all of their time in a small handful of battlegrounds. The electoral map, in other words, is something of an organic gerrymander — the results it produces owe a lot to the way the boundaries are drawn. The difference between this electoral “gerrymander” and a true gerrymander comes down to intent: the border between Illinois and Wisconsin was not created in 1818 with the intent of electing Donald Trump 200 years later, for instance. But as Hayes frames it, electoral college results are highly sensitive, or “unstable,” to small shifts in state and county boundaries. Contrast this to an election by national popular vote: In that case, you could move boundaries around all you want without changing the outcome.  More

A View From The Left-POST-ELECTION HANGOVER (continued) http://cdnph.upi.com/sv/b/i/UPI-1141480475305/2016/1/14804803973215/Trump-Carrier-to-announce-deal-to-keep-1000-jobs-in-Indiana.jpgA lot of commentary trivializing the announcement that Trump’s intervention supposedly saved 1000 (mostly union) jobs misses the point of such a gesture, just as they underestimated Trump’s appeal to workers in Rust-belt states which apparently gave him the electoral college margin that allowed him to win. Trump tells a story -- Trump threatens ‘consequences’ for U.S. firms that relocate offshore -- about saving good-paying US jobs and bashing the elites who have shown little empathy for displaced workers. Liberals or Democrats saying “these jobs are not coming back” may be accurate in general, but it is not a message which offers any hope to displaced workers. And even if it is true that the Carrier jobs are a drop in the bucket of declining manufacturing employment – or that the tax subsidies offered to Carrier are a public giveaway -- 1000 Indiana union families can now look forward to keeping decent-paying jobs. And they -- along with the many more who learn about this from the news -- will enthusiastically thank Donald Trump. Democrats need to give more than lip-service to Labor and actively support organizing – while unions should demand more in return for support. A decimated labor movement means losing the best organized base for opposing reaction nd supporting the fight against Trumpism. WILL TRUMP’S PR TRIUMPH AT CARRIER MEAN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S DEMISE? Post-election pundits are propagating the false equation that “industrial workers” equals “white working class,” and that Clinton’s crushing defeat in the Rust Belt was the result of a white worker revolt against political correctness ― i.e., they’re racists! But America’s industrial workforce reflects the future, not the past. The 1,400 person Carrier workforce in Indianapolis, for example, is fifty percent African-American. Women make up half of the workers on its assembly lines, and ten percent of the employees are Burmese immigrants… Trump's effort to save these jobs contrasts starkly with the failure of the established Democratic Party to do anything at all about such devastating plant closures. President Obama has never used his bully pulpit to mention even one of the thousands of facilities that shifted abroad under his watch. Similarly, Hillary Clinton remained silent about Carrier during her entire campaign, thereby allowing Trump to morph into the champion of the working class… Virtually every article on Carrier opines that Trump's quick fix cannot alter the technological march that surely will displace these blue collar workers. What they are really saying is the corporations have the right and obligation to move wherever and whenever they wish in order to boost profits and "shareholder value." Mainstream economists then assure us that, overall, society is better off due lower-cost imported goods and higher value-added domestic jobs, even if a few workers are sacrificed along the way. But a "few workers" have turned into millions of family members and members of devastated communities who have seen their lives deteriorate. They are heading Trump's way. More ROBERT REICH: The Democratic Party Lost Its Soul. It’s Time to Win It Back You might think this overwhelming drubbing would cause the Democratic party to reorganize itself into a very different party from the one it’s become – which is essentially a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests that make up the bulk of its funding. Don’t bet on it. For one thing, many vested interests don’t want the Democratic party to change. Most of the money it raises ends up in the pockets of political consultants, pollsters, strategists, lawyers, advertising consultants and advertisers themselves, many of whom have become rich off the current arrangement. They naturally want to keep it. For another, the Democratic party apparatus is ingrown and entrenched. Like any old bureaucracy, it only knows how to do what it has done for years. More TRUMP PRESIDENCY COULD KILL LABOR UNIONS As Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin—states that once were the stronghold of the nation’s industrial union movement—dropped into Donald Trump’s column on election night, one longtime union staff member told me that Trump’s victory was “an extinction-level event for American labor.” He may be right. A half-century ago, more than a third of those Rust Belt workers were unionized, and their unions had the clout to win them a decent wage, benefits, and pensions. Their unions also had the power to turn out the vote. They did—for Democrats. White workers who belonged to unions voted Democratic at a rate 20 percent higher than their non-union counterparts, and there were enough such workers to make a difference on Election Day… The most devastating blow to unions may come from the Supreme Court, once a Trump-appointed conservative wins confirmation to the seat that the late Justice Antonin Scalia occupied. It was only Scalia’s death that kept the court from ruling in the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case that public employee unions no longer have the right to collect partial dues payments from the nonmembers they represent in disputes with employers and for whom they bargain contracts. More Was 11/8 a New 9/11? The Election That Changed Everything and Could Prove History’s Deal-Breaker 37 years after the first Afghan intervention and 15 years after the second one, in the wake of an American election, blowback from the war on terror -- its generals, its mindset, its manias, its urge to militarize everything -- has come home in a significant way. In fact, we just held what may someday be seen as our first 9/11-style election… As with 9/11, a long, blowback-ridden history preceded 11/8 and Donald Trump’s triumph… Think of Donald Trump’s election, then, as the victory of the suicide bomber the white working class dispatched to the Oval Office to, as people now say politely, “shake things up.” … Whatever Americans may have ushered in with the events of 11/8, one thing is increasingly certain about the country that Donald Trump will govern. Forget Vladimir Putin and his rickety petro-state: the most dangerous nation on the planet will now be ours… It’s not a pretty picture. And yet it’s just a lead-in to what, undoubtedly, should be considered the ultimate question in Donald Trump’s America: With both the CIA’s coup-making and the military’s regime-change traditions in mind, could the United States also overthrow a planet? More The System IS Rigged!—The Electoral College and the 2016 Election Donald Trump was right: the system is rigged! But it is rigged for the Republicans, not the Democrats, for conservatives, not progressives. And the result is the election of an extreme racist, misogynist authoritarian who may change the course of U.S. and even world history. Belatedly we learn that Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump by more than two million votes, yet Trump still won the Electoral College. The public burst into an uproar in 2000 when Gore beat Bush by 550,000 votes but lost the Electoral vote. This time the public, the Clinton campaign and the press are quiet… In fact the Electoral College system was created by slaveholders, and remains undemocratic and racist, and biased to the Republicans. Obama showed that the system can be overcome and even turned to our advantage, but the Clinton and Gore losses show it is an uphill climb… The pro-Republican bias of the Electoral College derives from two main dynamics: it overweights the impact of mostly conservative voters in small population states and it negates entirely the mostly progressive votes of nearly half of African American voters, more than half of Native American voters and a major swath of Latino voters. More http://www.truthdig.com/images/made/images/cartoonuploads/cbe161127c_363_244.jpgHow the electoral college gerrymanders the presidential vote The principle of “one person, one vote” doesn't really apply to electoral politics. The winner-take-all system means that votes in some states are quite literally more valuable to presidential candidates than votes in other states. This is why the candidates tend to spend all of their time in a small handful of battlegrounds. The electoral map, in other words, is something of an organic gerrymander — the results it produces owe a lot to the way the boundaries are drawn. The difference between this electoral “gerrymander” and a true gerrymander comes down to intent: the border between Illinois and Wisconsin was not created in 1818 with the intent of electing Donald Trump 200 years later, for instance. But as Hayes frames it, electoral college results are highly sensitive, or “unstable,” to small shifts in state and county boundaries. Contrast this to an election by national popular vote: In that case, you could move boundaries around all you want without changing the outcome. More

C

A lot of commentary trivializing the announcement that Trump’s intervention supposedly saved 1000 (mostly union) jobs misses the point of such a gesture, just as they underestimated Trump’s appeal to workers in Rust-belt states which apparently gave him the electoral college margin that allowed him to win.  Trump tells a story --  Trump threatens ‘consequences’ for U.S. firms that relocate offshore --

about saving good-paying US jobs and bashing the elites who have shown little empathy for displaced workers. Liberals or Democrats saying “these jobs are not coming back” may be accurate in general, but it is not a message which offers any hope to displaced workers.  And even if it is true that the Carrier jobs are a drop in the bucket of declining manufacturing employment – or that the tax subsidies offered to Carrier are a public giveaway -- 1000 Indiana union families can now look forward to keeping decent-paying jobs.  And they -- along with the many more who learn about this from the news -- will enthusiastically thank Donald Trump.  Democrats need to give more than lip-service to Labor and actively support organizing – while unions should demand more in return for support.  A decimated labor movement means losing the best organized base for opposing reaction nd supporting the fight against Trumpism.

WILL TRUMP’S PR TRIUMPH AT CARRIER MEAN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S DEMISE?

Post-election pundits are propagating the false equation that “industrial workers” equals “white working class,” and that Clinton’s crushing defeat in the Rust Belt was the result of a white worker revolt against political correctness ― i.e., they’re racists! But America’s industrial workforce reflects the future, not the past. The 1,400 person Carrier workforce in Indianapolis, for example, is fifty percent African-American. Women make up half of the workers on its assembly lines, and ten percent of the employees are Burmese immigrants… Trump's effort to save these jobs contrasts starkly with the failure of the established Democratic Party to do anything at all about such devastating plant closures. President Obama has never used his bully pulpit to mention even one of the thousands of facilities that shifted abroad under his watch. Similarly, Hillary Clinton remained silent about Carrier during her entire campaign, thereby allowing Trump to morph into the champion of the working class… Virtually every article on Carrier opines that Trump's quick fix cannot alter the technological march that surely will displace these blue collar workers. What they are really saying is the corporations have the right and obligation to move wherever and whenever they wish in order to boost profits and "shareholder value." Mainstream economists then assure us that, overall, society is better off due lower-cost imported goods and higher value-added domestic jobs, even if a few workers are sacrificed along the way. But a "few workers" have turned into millions of family members and members of devastated communities who have seen their lives deteriorate. They are heading Trump's way.   More

ROBERT REICH: The Democratic Party Lost Its Soul. It’s Time to Win It Back

You might think this overwhelming drubbing would cause the Democratic party to reorganize itself into a very different party from the one it’s become – which is essentially a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests that make up the bulk of its funding. Don’t bet on it. For one thing, many vested interests don’t want the Democratic party to change. Most of the money it raises ends up in the pockets of political consultants, pollsters, strategists, lawyers, advertising consultants and advertisers themselves, many of whom have become rich off the current arrangement. They naturally want to keep it. For another, the Democratic party apparatus is ingrown and entrenched. Like any old bureaucracy, it only knows how to do what it has done for years.   More

TRUMP PRESIDENCY COULD KILL LABOR UNIONS

As Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin—states that once were the stronghold of the nation’s industrial union movement—dropped into Donald Trump’s column on election night, one longtime union staff member told me that Trump’s victory was “an extinction-level event for American labor.”  He may be right.  A half-century ago, more than a third of those Rust Belt workers were unionized, and their unions had the clout to win them a decent wage, benefits, and pensions. Their unions also had the power to turn out the vote. They did—for Democrats. White workers who belonged to unions voted Democratic at a rate 20 percent higher than their non-union counterparts, and there were enough such workers to make a difference on Election Day…  The most devastating blow to unions may come from the Supreme Court, once a Trump-appointed conservative wins confirmation to the seat that the late Justice Antonin Scalia occupied. It was only Scalia’s death that kept the court from ruling in the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association  case that public employee unions no longer have the right to collect partial dues payments from the nonmembers they represent in disputes with employers and for whom they bargain contracts.   More

Was 11/8 a New 9/11? 
The Election That Changed Everything and Could Prove History’s Deal-Breaker

37 years after the first Afghan intervention and 15 years after the second one, in the wake of an American election, blowback from the war on terror -- its generals, its mindset, its manias, its urge to militarize everything -- has come home in a significant way. In fact, we just held what may someday be seen as our first 9/11-style election…  As with 9/11, a long, blowback-ridden history preceded 11/8 and Donald Trump’s triumph… Think of Donald Trump’s election, then, as the victory of the suicide bomber the white working class dispatched to the Oval Office to, as people now say politely, “shake things up.” … Whatever Americans may have ushered in with the events of 11/8, one thing is increasingly certain about the country that Donald Trump will govern.  Forget Vladimir Putin and his rickety petro-state: the most dangerous nation on the planet will now be ours… It’s not a pretty picture.  And yet it’s just a lead-in to what, undoubtedly, should be considered the ultimate question in Donald Trump’s America: With both the CIA’s coup-making and the military’s regime-change traditions in mind, could the United States also overthrow a planet?  More

The System IS Rigged!—The Electoral College and the 2016 Election

Donald Trump was right: the system is rigged! But it is rigged for the Republicans, not the Democrats, for conservatives, not progressives. And the result is the election of an extreme racist, misogynist authoritarian who may change the course of U.S. and even world history.

Belatedly we learn that Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump by more than two million votes, yet Trump still won the Electoral College. The public burst into an uproar in 2000 when Gore beat Bush by 550,000 votes but lost the Electoral vote. This time the public, the Clinton campaign and the press are quiet… In fact the Electoral College system was created by slaveholders, and remains undemocratic and racist, and biased to the Republicans. Obama showed that the system can be overcome and even turned to our advantage, but the Clinton and Gore losses show it is an uphill climb… The pro-Republican bias of the Electoral College derives from two main dynamics: it overweights the impact of mostly conservative voters in small population states and it negates entirely the mostly progressive votes of nearly half of African American voters, more than half of Native American voters and a major swath of Latino voters.   More

How the electoral college gerrymanders the presidential vote

The principle of “one person, one vote” doesn't really apply to electoral politics. The winner-take-all system means that votes in some states are quite literally more valuable to presidential candidates than votes in other states. This is why the candidates tend to spend all of their time in a small handful of battlegrounds. The electoral map, in other words, is something of an organic gerrymander — the results it produces owe a lot to the way the boundaries are drawn. The difference between this electoral “gerrymander” and a true gerrymander comes down to intent: the border between Illinois and Wisconsin was not created in 1818 with the intent of electing Donald Trump 200 years later, for instance. But as Hayes frames it, electoral college results are highly sensitive, or “unstable,” to small shifts in state and county boundaries. Contrast this to an election by national popular vote: In that case, you could move boundaries around all you want without changing the outcome.  More

* * * * BOSTON ANTI-DISPLACEMENT HOUSING CAMPAIGN

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BOSTON ANTI-DISPLACEMENT HOUSING CAMPAIGN

“We continue meeting with City officials, including the Mayor, about Plan JP/Rox and we are waiting to hear their new proposals. But as we near a possible vote on December 15, we need your support to sign up to take action! We will be holding a MEETING FOR SUPPORTERS -- please tell us when you are available!

We are also kicking off a long-overdue grassroots fundraising campaign for our work. Please donate and help us reach our goal of $20,000! (More details in a future email.)”

SAVE THE DATE

Thursday, December 15 –

POSSIBLE VOTE on JP/Roxbury Housing Plan (sign up online): 3:30 pm-5:30 pm.
City Hall, 9th Floor. We continue to work hard to negotiate on a strong version of the plan. Even if we reach agreement, we want to make sure we have a strong presence at the BPDA (Boston Planning and Development Agency) vote to make clear the importance of protecting our neighborhood and city's diversity, real affordable housing, and racial justice!

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Calls to City Council Needed to Support “Just Cause Eviction”

We all feel the moment of this 'time and place' and know all to well that the need to ACT is NOW. That's why we are preparing our members for a long December 'City Council Watch for JCE' and continue our pressure to demand that Boston Protect Tenants and Residents and PASS Just Cause Eviction now. 

1.      CALL: YOUR CITY COUNCILOR DEMAND TO PASS JUST CAUSE EVICTION

2.      TESTIFY: HELP US IDENTIFY PEOPLE: expected hearing to come soon

1.      WHO CAN TESTIFY IN PUBLIC HEARING ON JCE

2.      WHO CAN TALK TO MEDIA ABOUT THE NEED FOR JCE NOW

3.      WHO CAN TALK DIRECTLY WITH OUR CITY COUNCIL VISIT TEAM

We can't wait for the 'Biggest' corporate landlord in the country to take office and eliminate and displace our communities.  Make the calls today! Boston residents: Call Boston City Councilors Michelle Wu and Michael Flaherty, and your own City Councilor in support of filing and passing Just-Cause Eviction legislation in the Boston City Council.

Here's the info you need: http://bit.ly/2fmkKkN

Let us know you're in this: https://goo.gl/kP7KPj

‘ALARMING GROWTH OF HOUSING INSECURITY’ IN BOSTON AREA

Despite a strong economy and booming population growth, high costs of living and low rates of housing production in Greater Boston are disproportionately impacting those already living in poverty, according to a Boston Foundation report released Tuesday.  The 2016 “Greater Boston Housing Report Card” highlights an “alarming growth of housing insecurity and homelessness among families with children.” Coupled with soaring rents and stagnant wages, vulnerable populations are likely to continue feeling the brunt of the housing boom… Particularly dire, the report notes, is the increase in people living in poverty. While the official Boston poverty rate is 10.6 percent, the cost of living brings the adjusted poverty rate to 16.2 percent, accounting for about 163,00 residents.   More

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NEW BOSTON RESIDENTS JOBS POLICY

Becky writes:

We just got word tonight that a City Council Hearing has been scheduled for 2pm Thursday, December 8, on the new strengthened and enforceable "Boston Residents Jobs Policy"  which the Boston Jobs Coalition has been working with Marty Walsh for two years to be reworked with better numbers and serious enforceability provisions.  Chuck Turner has been leading this effort, with a lot of cooperation from Walsh, once the city's lawyers found ways to write the enforcement provisions that wouldn't expose the city to lawsuits, and that the jobs coalition was able to show that there were enough construction workers of color locally to meet the higher numbers. A couple of days ago the Mayor announced that he was introducing the new law to City Council and hoping to get it passed soon.  The numbers he announced were:  percentages of workers on construction projects over a certain square footage (50,000?):

51% must be Boston residents
40% must be people of color
12% must be women.

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Saturday, December 3

THE NEXT FOUR YEARS:

Building Our Movements in Dangerous Times

@ 9:00 am - 5:00 pm Simmons College, Paresky Conference Center, 300 the Fenway + Google Map

The Paresky Conference Center is fully reserved. We are now taking reservations for seats in an overflow room. Please register ASAP to ensure a seat! Conference Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016 9:00 am - 5:00 pm Simmons College 300 the Fenway, Boston Paresky Conference Center Keynote Address Bob Wing Social and racial justice organizer; Founder of Color Lines and War Times; Co-author of "Organizing on Shifting Terrain" Issues Panel Paul Robeson Ford Racial and social justice Union Baptist Church, Cambridge Elena Letona Economic justice Neighbor…Find out more »

DPPer Hayat Imam is leading a workshop at 3:15pm:

“COUNTERING ISLAMOPHOBIA: Organizing as a Unified Force” 

The appalling surge of hate crimes since the Trump win requires that we give a strong, coordinated response. We must commit to “power up” in whatever field we find ourselves, so we can become a collective force to reckon with. Our goal is that this workshop will be a crucible for forging ideas and creative actions against all forms of violence and racism, including Islamophobia. We have found that changing attitudes is not always enough, we need to think of ways to make institutional changes. We’ll focus on two approaches for impacting fundamental institutions in our society: increasing civic engagement, and educating ourselves to take power in local government; and building a solid network of advocates and allies to tackle racism, wars that create refugees and suffering, and the rights of vulnerable communities, using settings such as Schools and City Councils.

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From “South of the Border” in Milton. . .

Louis Pierro of Milton for Peace writes (in part):

“I also want to thank you for the Cracking the Codes event that DPP hosted on Nov 2.  It was inspiring…   I would like to encourage you to join us for two events, and to ask others at DPP to do so also on our behalf. So I am asking you and others to​  join us for our next standout and ​also to attend  our next steering committee meeting where we will work to gain consensus about which issues we will focus on and how we will go about it.  The stand out is December 7^th from 7:00 – 8:00 a.m.  at Peace Island under the big copper beach tree on Blue Hills Parkway at the junction of Truman Highway, Blue Hills Ave and Eliot Street;  just a block from Mattapan Square.  We will have signage for everyone expressing a number of messages including peace and social action issues; and addressing the racism and xenophobia that is now rampant. The next Milton for Peace steering committee meeting will be Wednesday January 11^th at 7:30 p.m. at my house - 105 Fuller’s Lane in Milton (red house near the end of Fuller’s Lane). All are welcome.  Please come and share your concerns and ideas for moving forward.  Please invite your family and friends to join all of us at both the standout and the meeting.  Please let me know who might be attending.”