“We’re a capitalist society,” is not a get-out-of-jail free card that permits any and all bad acts in the pursuit of profits, but that is precisely how many of those accumulating, growing and preserving wealth see what Robert Reich called Supercapitalism. Of the capitalist economies in the world, ours ranks at or near the bottom of on economic measures of basic humanity.

There is nothing accidental about that reality. As a programmer friend of mine liked to say: That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. American capitalism didn’t get the way it is by accident, the founders built the feature into our constitution with the line:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons—

found in the third paragraph of the second section of the first Article of the United States Constitution. Yes, the provision was deleted in 1865, but essentially kept in place by the particular wording in the 13th Amendment: except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.

The point that Matthew Desmond wishes to make is that Supercapitalism is a direct and intended consequence of American Slavery.

Desmond, writing in American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation. for The New York Times Magazine, begins:

A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”

This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal. But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies, ranging from liberating to exploitative, protective to abusive, democratic to unregulated. When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society”—as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts—what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy. “Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it. In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods; so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions; inequality reigns and poverty spreads. In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (18-65) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Or consider worker rights in different capitalist nations. In Iceland, 90 percent of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. Thirty-four percent of Italian workers are unionized, as are 26 percent of Canadian workers. Only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The O.E.C.D. scores nations along a number of indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements. Scores run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand, 3.7, signaling toothy regulations on temp work. Further down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5) and Japan (1.3). The United States scored 0.3, tied for second to last place with Malaysia. How easy is it to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of 71 nations with a score of 0.5.

Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.

Slavery became that low-road approach because that was where the money was. Desmond continues:

Slavery was undeniably a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. What made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor.

Desmond never uses the word Reparations which is very much in discussion among Americans in the road to the 2020 presidential election, but he does build a compelling case for how every American alive today benefited directly, but disproportionately, from the wealth generated by slavery. He writes:

Nearly two average American lifetimes (79 years) have passed since the end of slavery, only two. It is not surprising that we can still feel the looming presence of this institution, which helped turn a poor, fledgling nation into a financial colossus. The surprising bit has to do with the many eerily specific ways slavery can still be felt in our economic life. “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism,” write the historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. The task now, they argue, is “cataloging the dominant and recessive traits” that have been passed down to us, tracing the unsettling and often unrecognized lines of descent by which America’s national sin is now being visited upon the third and fourth generations.

Recognizing, repenting and paying recompense for that sin, argues Ta-Nehisi Coates and others, is the our American duty.

Don’t you think?

[The New York Times Magazine provided four sidebars (all found at the same URL) to Desmond’s piece that included: The Limits of Banking Regulation, Flat Currency and The Civil War, Cotton and The Global Market by Mehrsa Baradaran; and How Slavery Made Wall Street by Tiya Miles.]

Bonus No. 1: TA-NEHISI COATES ON PEOPLE POWER & HOPE: III…

Bonus No. 2: 400 Years From Slaves Arriving In Virginia.

Bonus No. 3: The Campaign Press: Members of the 10 Percent, Reporting for the One Percent.

When I moved to Cleveland and needed to learn about my adopted city after nearly 10 years as a runagate I read The Plain Dealer, Cleveland Magazine (both of which published one of my pieces) Scene and Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw. I learned more about Cleveland from a single issue of POV than I did from all of the rest combined; until now.

While Roldo is still writing—I published his HOW BADLY WE NEED A NEW CLEVELAND MAYOR yesterday—the pieces don’t come as often anymore. But that’s fine, he’s more than earned his semi-retirement, because another journalist, doing what I once thought of doing, has stepped into Roldo’s, if not shoes, at least footprints.

When I mention a Sam Allard piece on Have Coffee Will Write his hits rival those of Roldo’s pieces here. His long-form journalism this week focuses on the Cleveland’s shame surrounding what was known two years ago as The Q Deal is vintage Sam, so much so that Roldo made a point of ensuring I read it.

Allard, reporting in Two Years After Q Deal Debacle, GCC is still in Retrenchment Mode for Scene, writes:

On Sept. 30, after two years of construction, the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse will open its renovated doors to the public; that is, to members of the public with tickets to the Black Keys. With massive new frontage on Huron Road, an endoskeletal curtain of LED panels, 42,000 square feet of wide-open atrium space and a very weird name, the downtown arena will be, in many visible respects, transformed.

Until recently, the facility where the Cleveland Cavaliers play was known as Quicken Loans Arena, named after owner Dan Gilbert’s Detroit-based mortgage lending company. The costly upgrades of the past two years were financed both with Gilbert’s own cash and a slew of public bonds, the principal and interest on which the city of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County and Destination Cleveland, the region’s tourism bureau, will be paying down every six months until 2034.

Acquiescing to this financial arrangement — what leaders in Northeast Ohio have referred to since late 2016, without a trace of irony, as a “public-private partnership” — was surely one of the most shameful, spineless, heedless acts by local elected officials in recent years. Not only did the city and county happily mortgage portions of their futures to line Gilbert’s pockets, they desecrated basic tenets of democracy in the process.

No accounting of the tenures of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish and Cleveland City Council President Kevin Kelley will be complete without underscoring this odious episode: the one where they sold out their constituents, residents of the second-poorest city in the country, for a billionaire.

Of that last paragraph, much the same can be said for Roldo’s 25 Years Of Cleveland Mayors: Who Really Governs. Allard continues:

Through the first half of 2017, during what were characterized — again, without irony — as “negotiations,” elected leaders’ cowardice and stupidity were challenged, exposed and ridiculed by a powerful grassroots opposition movement.

Led by the Greater Cleveland Congregations, a regional organization of faith groups, the #NotAllIn campaign effectively fought back against the propaganda of the Q Deal. Organizers refused to take for granted the conventional wisdom about the deal’s merits and demanded more money from Dan Gilbert, better stewardship from elected leaders, and a modicum of honesty from the news media.

Hundreds of progressive activists and allies joined the cause. It was the most powerful and well-coordinated organizing campaign Cleveland had seen in decades. The issue, which became shorthand for the city’s “Downtown vs. Neighborhoods” debate, resonated with Clevelanders for obvious reasons. For starters, the vast majority of them weren’t regular, or even irregular, attendees of events at the arena. By the Cavs’ own estimates, Cleveland residents made up only 10 percent of ticket holders at Cavs games, and only 5 percent at concerts and other events.

Moreover, this was months after a citywide income tax increase, premised (per Frank Jackson) on the desperate need for additional resources to pay for essential city services. Infrastructure was crumbling; infants were dying; children were being poisoned by lead in their homes; teenagers were attempting or committing suicide at higher rates than in any other city in the country, in many cases to escape the gun violence ravaging their neighborhoods; bus fares were continuing to rise; wages weren’t.

Why on earth, given these realities, would the city devote long-term precious resources to the Q?

Why indeed. To learn the sordid details go, read.

Enjoy…

Bonus No. 1: TA-NEHISI COATES ON PEOPLE POWER & HOPE: II…

Bonus No. 2: I have some important things to tell transgender kids – today, right now, you’re perfect.

American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation…
How white nationalism went mainstream…
Two Years After Q Deal Debacle, GCC is still in Retrenchment Mode…
How Democrats Went From Being the ‘Party of the People’ to the Party of Rich Elites…
Ibram X Kendi on why not being racist is not enough…
Too busy? Distracted by your phone? How to love reading again…
Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review–the truth about language…
What I learned writing about climate change and the US south for a year…
Ta-Nehisi Coates Talks… Writing Fiction, Reparations, and the Legacy of Slavery…
Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1…
Innocence lost: What did you do before the internet…?
How we think about the term ‘enslaved’ matters…

Brent Larkin is wasting no time on alerting us that the next city election REQUIRES the elevation of a new Cleveland Mayor. He couldn’t be righter.

Cleveland and Cuyahoga Count suffer from terrible leadership.

The blip of an attempt to suggest that Mayor Frank Jackson, now in his fourth term as mayor, should try again as broached by a contractor agent signals an alert that maybe Jackson has other ideas than retirement.

That should not stand. Progress requires new blood.

“With the city desperate for new and visionary leadership, it will be an election where voters cannot afford to make a mistake,” he wrote.

Does that mean that the Plain Dealer might inject some reality by editorially speaking forthrightly about candidates in 2021, the next election? It would be a change because the newspaper as the lead public voice hasn’t always been true and forthright.

He suggests the 1989 election as a model for the next election. I agree and it gives me the opportunity to bring back some of the history of that era and mayors in general. Two issues regarding two of the candidates–Bennie Bonanno, who thought he could sit back and wait for the general election, and George Forbes who thought he could run as he had governed as Council President for 16 years. Mike White, backed by the PD, had other ideas.

[NOTE: When you bring up an issue it will appear smaller. Above at right is a sign “Download,” if you click that a sign will appear in the lower left side and if you click it the issue will appear with a symbol (+) that will allow you to enlarge the issue to make it more readable. —Roldo]

In an issue of Point Of Viəw, my newsletter, in September 1989 I issued a warning to Bonanno: “Bonanno Awaits anointment.” He gambled on waiting and lost big.

Forbes made an equally dumb choice. He ran as he had ruled. Bad move.

I couldn’t better describe it as the headline reveals: “Fuck You Campaign,” explain his thrust was as confrontational as his politics over the years: “Fuck you, vote for me.” It didn’t work either.

In a look back in June & July of 1992 a 16-page review of Cleveland Mayors in an issue headlined: “Who Really Governs,” a piece worth copying, I reviewed the mayors from Ralph Locher in the 1960s though to Mike White in the 1990s, subtitled: “25 years of Cleveland Mayors.”

Over on Tim Russo’s blog he believes that the Bernie Express is rolling along just as planned and that there will be no surprises between now and the Iowa caucuses. I’m not so sure. I still like Bernie, but in my ranking he’s third behind Tulsi Gabbard and Elizabeth Warren. Tim doesn’t care for either, but hey, I’ve been way wrong before.

Joseph Robinette Biden remains the front runner in the race to secure the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States in 2020, but the numbers are closing. As of this writing the polls have Biden at 23 percent, Warren at 20 percent, Bernie at 16 percent and Gabbard barely breathing at 2 percent. At this point, the polls are all over the place and don’t really tell us much, but they are what they are.

Matt Taibbi is reading his tea leaves and writing in Bernie Sanders’ Chances Depend on Taking Support from Biden, and Soon for Rolling Stone, ledes with:

Top campaign staffers for Bernie Sanders held a press call Monday, and the message was positive. The senator, they said, is doing well and won the last debate. And polls show, they added, that the country cares about his favored issues, particularly health care.

But that’s not always, his staff noted pointedly to listening reporters, reflected in the coverage.

“It seems like there’s a direct correlation,” said senior advisor Jeff Weaver, who was on the call alongside campaign co-chair and Ohio state senator Nina Turner and pollster Ben Tulchin. “The better [Sanders] does, the less coverage he receives. The worse he does, the more.”

Sanders still can’t walk in a straight line without attracting negative press.

So, sour grapes or is the fix (again) in? Taibbi continues:

A New York Times story this week about Bernie’s trip to the Iowa state fair dinged him for having “power-walked by the Ferris Wheel” and “gobbled a corn dog” during a journey in which he “spoke to almost no one.” [No one? Really? Bullshit! JH] This, reporter Sydney Ember concluded, underscored the peril of a campaign based on ideas rather than “establishing human connections.”

The Times wrote the same story four years ago, when Bernie’s crime was walking down 6th Avenue, “swinging hands with his wife, Jane,” and “talking as little as possible to people.” Observing that Bernie signed the cast of a 9 year-old girl without schmoozing her undecided-voter father, reporter Patrick Healy concluded he was “surprisingly impersonal.” Headline: “Bernie Sanders does not kiss babies. That a problem?”

While Sanders can’t eat a corn dog without taking a hit, frontrunner Joe Biden is testing the limits of editorial slack.

This bullshit went a long way to making Donald John Trump President of the United States in 2016, and if Bill Clinton 3.0—aka Joe Biden—gets the party nod we will have another four years of our dumpster-fire presidency. Is, as Tim suggests, Bernie on course with no icebergs in sight, or does he need to drastically change course and avoid being sunk by the Long Island kingmakers? Taibbi continues:

…the larger issue of what Biden’s politics are, and whether they’re an improvement over the platform that lost to Trump four years ago, recedes. Even Sanders has seemed unsure if he should or shouldn’t throw his trademark vituperation at his old Senate colleague.

A Hill/HarrisX poll from last week had Bernie as the second choice of 27% of Biden voters, with Kamala Harris second at 15%, Beto O’Rourke third, Pete Buttigieg fourth, and Elizabeth Warren fifth at 8%. An April Morning Consult survey likewise had Sanders as the second choice of 31% of Biden voters, again followed by Harris (13%), with Warren third at 10%.

The second choice of most Sanders voters, meanwhile,is Biden, not Warren.

Basically, Biden is taking working-class votes away from Sanders, and Sanders has seemed slow to grasp this.

I hear more conversations about how Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are stealing each other’s votes—they’re not, they appeal to similar, but parallel voters—but this working-class battle seems really white to me. Does this really need to be a fight between Scranton Joe and Brooklyn Bernie? Taibbi concludes:

Biden’s appeal is that he’s a vote for a return to a kind of status quo, which should be a pitch in Bernie’s wheelhouse. Sanders’ campaign is based on the notion that a return even to pre-Trump norms is unsustainable – for the underinsured, for the climate, for union and non-union workers, for customers of banks, for holders of student debt, and so on.

Hillary Clinton, with her defiant “that’s what they offered” response to questions about bank-funded speaking fees, made finding outrage on this front easy for Sanders. The conundrum of “Scranton Joe” is no less real, but it’s been politically more difficult, and Sanders is running out of time to solve it.

So, Tim, is Taibbi missing the point here or does Brooklyn Bernie need to kneecap Scranton Joe?

Bonus No. 1: Sticky Fingers, Sticky Conversations: BBQ and Reproductive Justice. (Reproductive Justice, genius.)

Bonus No. 2: TA-NEHISI COATES ON PEOPLE POWER & HOPE: I…

Ibram X Kendi on why not being racist is not enough…
Too busy? Distracted by your phone? How to love reading again…
Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review–the truth about language…
What I learned writing about climate change and the US south for a year…
Ta-Nehisi Coates Talks… Writing Fiction, Reparations, and the Legacy of Slavery…
Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1…
Innocence lost: What did you do before the internet…?
How we think about the term ‘enslaved’ matters…

Congress is on vacation. Representatives and senators return to work on 9 September to do the people’s work their masters’ bidding. One would hope that they would have already returned to address making our streets safe from White Domestic Terrorists, but that didn’t happen. I expect Senate Republicans are dreaming of killing Obamacare and lowering taxes.

House Democrats are salivating over electing more Democrats in the House and the Senate so, if he doesn’t get voted out in 2020, they might have a shot of removing the president for high crimes and misdemeanors.

I would remind all members of congress of the chant that greeted Ohio Governor Richard Michael DeWine on 4 August in Dayton, Ohio. That is the message everyone needs to deliver to Congress.

Ralph Nader has a suggestion that does involve doing something. How about pointing some fingers at the people responsible for the deaths of 346 passengers and crew of two Boeing 737 Max aircraft. How about putting the accused on the hot seat and demanding that they testify to Congress under oath on who did, or didn’t do, what and when?

Nader, in With the Boeing 737 MAX Grounded, Top Boeing Bosses Must Testify Before Congress Now, writes:

Two Boeing 737 MAX crashes, one in Indonesia last October and one in Ethiopia this past March, took a combined 346 lives. Steady scrutiny by the media reported internal company leaks and gave voice to sidelined ex-Boeing engineers and aerospace safety specialists. These experts have revealed that Boeing’s executives are responsible because they chose to use an unstable structural design and faulty software. These decisions left the flying public, the pilots, the airlines, and the FAA in the dark, to varying degrees.

Yet Congressional Committees, which announced investigations months ago, still have not called on Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO of Boeing, or any member of Boeing’s Board of Directors to testify.

Given the worldwide emergency grounding of all 400 or so MAX aircraft and the peril to crews and airline passengers, why are the Senate and House Committees holding back? House Committee Chairman, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) wants to carefully prepare for such action after the staff goes through the much delayed transmission of documents from Boeing. Meanwhile, Senate Committee Chair Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) deferred to Boeing’s request to put off their testimony before Congress until the Indonesian government puts out its report on the Lion Air disaster, presumably sometime in October.

Meanwhile, just about everybody in the airline industry, the Department of Transportation, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Justice Department (with its criminal probe), the transport unions, the consumer groups such as Flyers Rights, and the flying public are anxious to see top Boeing officials in the witness chair under oath Continue Reading »

[Update @ 1400: The news is ungood. From Damian Carrington Environment editor at The Guardian: Microplastics ‘significantly contaminating the air’, scientists warn.]

Gregory Wetherbee may have stumbled on to the global health crisis of the 21st century. Do you remember, Asbestosis, White Lung disease, caused by inhaling asbestos? Asbestos particles are so dangerous that researchers were never able to establish a minimum acceptable exposure dosage. That meant that a single particle could lead to your death.

If you’ve ever seen workers wearing spacesuits in order to clean old asbestos out of a building, you get the idea of how dangerous that stuff is. Now, what might you think if you knew that every breath you take, regardless where you are on the planet, you are breathing in hundreds (thousands?) of plastic microfibers?

No. Seriously. You should stop and consider that because it’s true.

Maanvi Singh, reporting in It’s raining plastic: microscopic fibers fall from the sky in Rocky Mountains for The Guardian, writes:

Plastic was the furthest thing from Gregory Wetherbee’s mind when he began analyzing rainwater samples collected from the Rocky Mountains. “I guess I expected to see mostly soil and mineral particles,” said the US Geological Survey researcher. Instead, he found multicolored microscopic plastic fibers.

The discovery, published in a recent study titled “It is raining plastic”, raises new questions about the amount of plastic waste permeating the air, water, and soil virtually everywhere on Earth.

“I think the most important result that we can share with the American public is that there’s more plastic out there than meets the eye,” said Wetherbee. “It’s in the rain, it’s in the snow. It’s a part of our environment now.”

Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers, as well as beads and shards. The findings shocked Wetherbee, who had been collecting the samples in order to study nitrogen pollution.

We are literally coating the inside of our lungs with plastic. There are now infants and children in schools who have never breathed air that was not contaminated with these microfibers and particles.

Not to put too fine of a point on the problem, but we could fix global climate chaos and all waste away from the plastic in our lungs. Fuck. Singh continues:

A major contributor is trash, said Sherri Mason, a microplastics researcher and sustainability coordinator at Penn State Behrend. More than 90% of plastic waste is not recycled, and as it slowly degrades it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces. “Plastic fibers also break off your clothes every time you wash them,” Mason said, and plastic particles are byproducts of a variety of industrial processes.

It’s impossible to trace the tiny pieces back to their sources, Mason said, but almost anything that’s made of plastic could be shedding particles into the atmosphere. “And then those particles get incorporated into water droplets when it rains,” she added, then wash into rivers, lakes, bays and oceans and filter into groundwater sources.

What breathing, and ingesting, all that plastic is doing to us is not yet known. And plastics are so ubiquitous, that we may never know.

Though scientists have been studying plastic pollution in the ocean for more than a decade, they can only account for 1% of it. Researchers know even less about the amount of plastic in freshwater and in the air, said Stefan Krause at the University of Birmingham. “We haven’t really started quantifying it,” he said.

Another unknown is whether it would be theoretically possible to flush all plastic out of the natural world, and how long that might take. “Even if we waved a magic wand and stopped using plastic, it’s unclear how long plastic would continue to circulate through our rivers waters systems,” he said. “Based on what we do know about plastic found in deep sources of groundwater, and accumulated in rivers, I would guess centuries.”

Animals and humans consume microplastics via water and food, and we likely breathe in micro- and nanoplastic particles in the air, though scientists have yet to understand the health effects. Microplastics can also attract and attach to heavy metals like mercury and other hazardous chemicals, as well as toxic bacteria. “Plastic particles from furniture and carpets could contain flame retardants that are toxic to humans,” Krause said.

Species genocide by plastic is not a noble way to go out.

Brenda has the best solution—see Panel No. 4—I’ve ever heard.

Bonus No. 1: EVERYONE EVERYWHERE IS IN TRANSIT TO TOO…

2020 assessment, summer 2019; Bernie right on schedule…
Ibram X. Kendi on… Why Internalized Racism Is the Real Black-on-Black Crime…
The gun “debate” needs to go decidedly Marxist…
Ibram X Kendi on why not being racist is not enough…
Bernie Sanders’ Chances Depend on Taking Support from Biden, and Soon…
Richest CLE donors favor Biden, Buttigieg, Warren…
Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review–the truth about language…
What I learned writing about climate change and the US south for a year…
Ta-Nehisi Coates Talks… Writing Fiction, Reparations, and the Legacy of Slavery…
Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1…
Innocence lost: What did you do before the internet?

[Update @ 0921: I just opened my emails for the morning to discover that, as Tim Russo writes in American media firing both barrels at That Jew, Gabbard is not the only candidate being bernied by the left wing of the PWPB party.]

Stacey Abrams is officially not running for president in 2020. Instead she’ll run Fair Fight 2020. Since I’ve knocked Kamala Harris out of my consideration, that leaves Tulsi Gabbard, a non-African American woman of color whose progressive view and record I fully support at the top of my list of candidates to unseat the president. She is a force to contend with.

The left wing of the Pro-War, Pro-Business party—formerly known as the Democratic Party—is not happy with Gabbard. Her criticism of Senator Kamala Harri’s record as a prosecutor pissed the PWPB party off. The machine seeks to protect its darlings by repeating the 2016 Stop Bernie strategy—spewing rumors and innuendos—and discredit Gabbard. She ain’t having it.

Matt Taibbi, reporting in Who’s Afraid of Tulsi Gabbard? for Rolling Stone, writes:

“It just shows,” says Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, “that launching a smear campaign is the only response to the truth.”

Gabbard, 38, burst into headlines after a July 31 Democratic Party presidential debate, when she went after California Senator Kamala Harris’s record as Attorney General of the State of California. The “smear campaign” refers to the bizarre avalanche of negative press that ensued, as reporters seemed to circle wagons around a Harris, a party favorite.

The Gabbard-Harris exchange was brief but revealing, as a window into a schism in the Democratic Party. Harris was elected Attorney General of California in 2010. She frequently sought moderate or even conservative positions on issues like criminal sentencing, drug enforcement, and prison labor. These stances were standard among Democrats back when being “tough on crime” was considered an essential component of the “electability” argument.

The Democratic electorate has changed, becoming especially concerned about mass incarceration. However, the party has not quite caught up. Gabbard exposed these divisions in the July 31 event, when she said:

“She put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana, and then laughed about it when asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”

The Detroit crowd cheered all the way through Gabbard’s next point, about Harris’ blocking the introduction of DNA evidence in a murder case. The applause unnerved Harris, who looked like someone dented her car. She’d been at 20 points in a July 2 Quinnipiac poll; after a multi-week slide that culminated with Gabbard’s attack, Harris was at 7 percent, a “distant fourth” behind Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders.

Having wounded a presumptive frontrunner backed by nearly $25 million in campaign funds, Gabbard instantly became the subject of a slew of negative leaks, tweets, and press reports. Many of these continued the appalling recent Democratic Party tradition of denouncing anything it doesn’t like as treasonous aid to foreign enemies.

But I, and Taibbi, think that Gabbard knows her history. Taibbi continues:

The campaign against Gabbard is part of another remarkable shift in the Democratic Party. Barack Obama’s star began to rise as a presidential candidate 12 years ago, in 2007, when asked in a debate if he’d be willing to meet with Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.

Obama said he would, that “it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them.” He added: “The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of [the Bush] administration — is ridiculous.” He went on to cite, as Gabbard has done, the example of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, who both met with Soviet leaders.

It is true that Hillary Clinton pushed back against Obama’s position in that debate, calling it “irresponsible,” but the moment was a key in endearing Obama to liberal voters who were tired of Bush’s gunboat lunacy. The episode also helped define one of the more meaningful policy differences between Clinton and Obama. But the progressive position that meeting with dictators and/or adversaries is not only defensible but desirable no longer has any representation in major America media.

Gabbard’s position approach to war and intervention may be different from Obama’s (and especially different from president Obama, as opposed to candidate Obama), but it’s not as has been represented in most press accounts, some of which have bordered on the insane.

What I like most about Gabbard is that she speaks from experiences that most of the other candidates can’t even pretend to understand. Taibbi explains:

Gabbard’s actual views follow logically from her experience as a soldier in the Middle East, and as a native of a state that went through a remarkable nuclear scare a year ago.

She’s not an isolationist. She’s simply opposed to bombing the crap out of, and occupying, foreign countries for no apparent positive strategic objective, beyond enriching contractors.

She is like many soldiers (and embedded reporters for that matter) who returned disillusioned from the Middle Eastern theater. Of concern: the extreme loss of life among both Americans and resident populations, and the outrageous profiteering amid abuse of foreign contract workers who are used to staff and service American bases.

All of this is the lead-in to what Taibbi describes as:

a long-ranging interview with myself and my co-host Katie Halper, for a new Rolling Stone-produced podcast, Gabbard spoke about her political evolution, Iraq, the 2018 nuclear scare in Hawaii, her decision to run for president, the confrontation with Harris, and the state of both the media and the Democratic Party.

The full podcast and video are not yet posted—I’ll be watching for that and add both links when they become available—but Taibbi did provide excerpts.

Here are just three. Enjoy.

On her experiences in her first deployment in Iraq with a field medical unit of the Hawaii National Guard, and how they started to change her mind about the war:

We were lied to, and… we were betrayed…. This really wasn’t about going after Al-Qaeda. This wasn’t about fulfilling that mission of protecting the American people at all. It was a regime change war that was launched under the guise of national security, under the guise of humanitarianism, and, “Look at all these atrocities that this brutal dictator has done to his own people,” and done really for the benefit of corporate interests and oil.

On her conclusions about the efficacy of foreign interventions:

We look at terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS. They have been born out of these wars, and have been strengthened because of these wars and interventions. So it’s made us less safe, as a country. It has come at a tremendous cost to both our service members and their families…

It’s come at a tremendous cost to the American people, with the $6-plus trillion that’s been spent since 9/11 alone. Families in Flint, Michigan right now, who are still being told, “Sorry, there’s just not enough money to make sure you’ve got clean water…” We’re still spending $4 billion a month in Afghanistan.

On Democrats who say they’ve seen the light about Iraq:

If you look at a lot of politicians now, it’s easy and popular to say, “Oh, of course the Iraq War was wrong. Of course,” now that we’re almost 20 years later from launching that war.

But what about today? Where’s your courage today to stand up against the regime change efforts in Syria, and in other countries, frankly, that are happening right now?

Those are just three reasons why today, I think that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is the best candidate for president in 2020.

Bonus No. 1: DECENCY DEMANDS WE DISCUSS REPARATIONS…

Bonus No. 2: It’s a global death sentence to keep eating like this: dinnertime at the Foreclaws.

Bonus No. 3: Gun Talk with your host, The Glib Sociopath.

Bonus No. 4: The last brick in the wall.

Of the 10,000-plus lies the man occupying the oval office has told since declaring his candidacy for our highest office more than four years ago was when he promised coal miners in West Virginia and Kentucky that he would bring coal jobs back. In the past two-and-half years, coal jobs have continued their steady decline. Candidate Donald John Trump lied.

That last sentence has been said and written so many times by so many people that we are numb to the fact that he has become a walking punch line to the joke: How do you know when the president is lying? Answer: His lips—or in President Trump’s case, his thumbs—move.

His shitstorm of lies, however, are no joke. Real people in real communities (not reality show actors) are suffering and President Trump just keep doing his crooked best to make their lives worse.

Michael Sainato, writing ‘Coal is over’: the miners rooting for the Green New Deal for The Guardian, provides the details. He ledes:

Set in a wooded valley between the Tug Fork river and the Mate creek, Matewan, West Virginia was the site of the 1920 Matewan Massacre, a shoot-out between pro-union coal miners and coal company agents that left 10 people dead and triggered one of the most brutal fights over the future of the coal industry in US history.

The coal industry in Appalachia is dying–something that people there know better than anyone. Some in this region are pinning their hopes on alternative solutions, including rising Democratic star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.

“Coal is over. Forget coal,” said Jimmy Simpkins, who worked as a coal miner in the area for 29 years. “It can never be back to what it was in our heyday. It can’t happen. That coal is not there to mine.”

Those alternatives which would provide real hope, are precisely what is being blocked by the real Trump supporters: the 1 percent. Sainato continues:

Carl Shoupe, a retired coal miner in Harlan County, Kentucky, who worked as a union organizer for 14 years, said people in Appalachia need to start moving away from relying solely on the coal industry as an economic resource for the region.

“What we’ve been doing is trying to transition into the 21st century and get on past coal,” he said.

Those transition efforts are still being impeded by the coal industry, as Shoupe says the majority of property in the area is still owned by coal companies and they have denied his efforts to develop solar panel fields.

The Green New Deal, a resolution proposed by Cortez, calls on the federal government to transform the United States’ energy infrastructure and economy to deal with the climate crisis. The resolution includes a call to create millions of high-wage union jobs through a federal jobs guarantee and a just transition for vulnerable communities.

Republicans–and Fox News–have slammed the proposal. “It’ll kill millions of jobs. It’ll crush the dreams of the poorest Americans and disproportionately harm minority communities,” the US president said last month.

You know what I’m going to write next. I don’t want to but the words have to be said, so I’ll let Carl state the obvious: They [President Trump, Republicans and Fox News] have bushwhacked this Green New Deal, told all kinds of lies. For different people in different parts of the country, it means different things.

Other Coal miners are stepping up to call bullshit on the president.

Stanley Sturgill, a coal miner for 41 years in Harlan County, Kentucky, explained the Green New Deal would open the door for elected officials to use the plan to render solutions needed in their own communities.

“If it was called the Red New Deal, it would be approved by now,” said Sturgill. “What you’re doing with the Green New Deal is you’re opening the door to infringe on the Republicans’ money and that’s what they’re afraid of. Republicans laugh and say you can’t pay for it. But if you tax everybody what they should be taxed, and I’m talking about the wealthy, there wouldn’t be a problem.”

Sturgill cited the coal companies that receive billions of dollars in annual government subsidies and tax breaks, while hiring expensive lawyers to fight paying black lung benefits to coal miners. “I fought seven years before I got my black lung benefits, and they were hoping I died before getting paid,” added Sturgill.

One of the great political mysteries for me is how, in all of the pain and suffering and degradation present in the coal fields, how the holy fuck does Senator Addison Mitchell McConnell continue to get reëlected? (That could change in 2020 because Moscow Mitch as serious competition coming from Amy McGrath: an Marine Corp with combat experience flying 89 combat missions in an F/A-18 over Iraq and Afghanistan. (Moscow Mitch, like his handler in the Oval Office, used a medical excuse to avoid service.) The coal miners in Eastern Kentucky certainly are happy with McConnell. Sainato continues:

Thousands of coal miners are currently at risk of losing their pensions. The Coal Miners’ Pension fund is estimated to become insolvent by 2022 as many of the companies that were paying into the fund have filed for bankruptcy. The Black Lung Disability Trust Fund that was founded to provide benefits to coal miners with black lung disease – a progressive disease that eventually suffocates sufferers – is also severely underfunded.

On 23 July 2019about 150 coal miners and their widows visited Washington DC to appeal Congress to pass legislation ensuring these benefits are properly funded. Several retired coal miners who made the trip were unhappy with the response from Republicans, especially Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

“McConnell came in, never did sit down and said ‘I thank you for being here. I know you’re concerned about your taxes on black lung, I just want you to know we’re going to take care of it,’ and out the door. I said: ‘no he didn’t!’ We drove ten hours to sit with our representatives and talk to them and that’s all we get,” said George Massey, who worked as a coal miner in Benham, Kentucky for 23 years and has served on the town’s council for 19 years.

“They look at us like we’re something under their shoes. They couldn’t care less about coal miners in south-east Kentucky,” Massey added.

A truer statement—a concept the president is not familiar with—could not be said.

Bonus No. 1: Fentanyl And The Opioid Epidemic.

Bonus No. 2: Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov.

What I learned writing about climate change and the US south for a year…
Ta-Nehisi Coates Talks… Writing Fiction, Reparations, and the Legacy of Slavery…
Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1…
Innocence lost: What did you do before the internet?

Jesmyn Ward’s introduction to her interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates—The Beautiful Power of Ta-Nehisi Coates—gave me pause. She was, to my eye, too deferential, too starstruck. She gushed and fretted and her editor didn’t stop her. She writes: …even though he looks at me with kindness, I’m nervous. And, I called him “Mr. Coates,” wary of disrespecting him….

Granted, this was to be a friendly interview, Ward has no intent of going all 60 Minutes on Coates, but she sounds like a high school journalist interviewing her teen idol. In her third paragraph she writes:

There are so many reasons for self-doubt. Coates is a formidable writer and thinker. After his virtuosic memoir The Beautiful Struggle was released in 2008, he found an audience who was solidly impressed not only by the quality of his writing, which careened along and rose and fell like a song, but also by his intellectual prowess, his curiosity, his ranging mind. The book revolves around what it meant for Coates to grow up Black in Baltimore in the ’80s and is heavily informed by his father, who worked as a librarian at Howard University, and whose life was driven by the desire to equip his children with the tools they would need to survive in America—perhaps in a quest to figure that out for himself. Coates’s father started his own press, which sought out and published works by writers of the African diaspora.

But then, this is the man of whom Toni Morrison wrote:

I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between The World And Me, like Coates’ journey, is visceral, eloquent and beautifully redemptive. And it’s examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.

If a Nobel Laureate can write that about Coates, well, I need to shut up and cut Ward some slack. She begins with place, specifically the place where she and Coates speak (and he writes), and how his breakout book—Between The World And Me—changed everything. She writes:

Coates grew up in a home and a world where consciousness in thought and deed was the ultimate reflection of what it means to be a human being, where books and papers surrounded him and reflected him. He sought other stories in comic books and novels. Baltimore in the ’80s demanded a different education of him, one where he was bored by teachers, fell asleep in class, walked through the streets assessing the landscape and the people incessantly, wary and aware that at any moment, at any time, he could be jumped and beaten for any number of imagined offenses by boys who looked like him. That world trained Coates to navigate violence with his body and his mind, pressured his inner self to become the man he is today, a man with a baby face and easy bearing whose looks belie the weapon within, a self honed to a scythe’s sharpness.

He brandished that weapon in 2015’s Between the World and Me, an epistolary revelation to his son on what it means to live and die as a Black person in America. The book did something Coates hadn’t expected: It rose to the top of the best seller lists, and all hell broke loose. He won the National Book Award for nonfiction, and damn near every cable show, every magazine, every reader was hungry for his insight. Now a huge readership knew Coates for what his longtime editor Chris Jackson describes as “a poetic style drawing from hip-hop, black nationalist rhetoric, comic books, and wrestling—a language that was declarative and galvanizing, that had a kind of swag and strut, that named its own world unapologetically,” one centered on love and fear. “Everything that makes him such a powerful and seemingly unique—he would dispute that characterization—voice,” says Jackson, “was there from the beginning.”

After Between the World and Me, though, fame elbowed her way into his life like a belligerent drunk: loud, imperious, and blind to her sloppy need. The café we are meeting at, where Coates walked to work and sat for hours in his corner, drafting and rewriting his articles, his books, for years, was no longer the dim safe haven it had always been, especially in the literary bubble of New York. After Between the World and Me came out, he says, “I would look on Twitter, and people would tweet I was here, and then people would come up to me. I would run into people and they used to say, ‘I hear you write here.’ ” So he stopped coming to this dim pastry shop so often.

As our conversation properly begins with my first question, which is why he chose this café as his office, I learn that Coates has his own reasons for self-doubt and self-consciousness. I learn that I’m not the only one who is nervous today, because after writing dozens of lauded articles and three book-length works of creative nonfiction, Coates has written a novel, a wondrous, unpredictable novel set in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia called The Water Dancer; it follows an enslaved man named Hiram as he attempts to find his way to freedom. But it is not straightforward and cutting like his nonfiction, where he wields his mind to devastating effect. In The Water Dancer, amid love and covetousness and tenderness and brutality, Hiram wields magic. He has an ability called Conduction (capitalized throughout the book), wherein he can bend, fold, time and space. This is a proper novel, an abrupt departure from what overbearing, messy fame demands of Coates. And because of that, he is nervous too.

I preordered The Water Dancer as soon as the novel became available and I have no doubt that my first reading will be in one sitting. (Who’s gushing now?)

The balance of Ward’s interview is, of course, worthy of Vanity Fair, and any reader’s time.

Enjoy.

Bonus No. 1:

Bonus No. 2: ‘There’s no death in dying’: Baltimore artist honors Toni Morrison with mural.

Bonus No. 3: A Reminder to Our Government That White Supremacist Violence is Terrorism.

Bonus No. 4: Just Another Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week of Gun Violence.

Bonus No. 5: Why Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks fiction can save America.

Bonus No. 6: Fighting fascism could get you classified as a terrorist – but the Raccoons of the Resistance are here.

What I learned writing about climate change and the US south for a year…
Ta-Nehisi Coates Talks… Writing Fiction, Reparations, and the Legacy of Slavery…
Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1…
Innocence lost: What did you do before the internet?

As a veteran with a service-connected injury, I enjoy the support of the Veterans Administration’s healthcare system. They take very good care of me, and that includes medications at little, or no, cost. All Americans should have it so good. No. Seriously. All Americans should enjoy the quality of care afforded all veterans with service-injuries.

I add that last because the for-profit, corporate Health-Care industry likes to blow smoke up the public’s collective asses by talking about veterans getting poor care. What they don’t tell you is that there is, wrongly in my opinion, a two tier system at the VA. If you are, as I am, a veteran with a service-connected injury, you get top care. If however, you a veteran with no service-connected injuries, then, you may still get care, but you go to the end of the line and have to wait for us in the upper tier to go first. That’s flat out wrong, but we, American taxpayers are unwilling to pay for all veterans, regardless of injury or time in service, to get the same quality of care. (I also think that with the advent of the all-volunteer service, the American public began to care less about those of us who served because we volunteered and knew what we were getting into. That’s also bullshit but meat for another blog post.)

Americans are getting fucked by the profit motive and we know it. This is one of the reasons that the medicare-for-all idea is gaining such strong traction leading into the 2020 elections. Ralph Nader has a few ideas how we need to change just one aspect of our present system: how we pay for medications.

Nader, in Big Pharma: Gouges, Casualties, and the Congressional Remedy!, writes:

The Congress can overturn the abuses of Big Pharma and its “pay or die,” subsidized business model for its drugs.

Big Pharma’s trail of greed, power, and cruelty gets worse every year. Its products and practices take hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S. from over-prescriptions, lethal combinations of prescriptions, ineffective or contaminated drugs, and dangerous side-effects.

The biggest drug dealers in the U.S. operate legally. Their names are emblazoned in ads and promotions everywhere. Who hasn’t heard of Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, and Novartis? Big Pharma revenues and profits have skyrocketed. In 2017, the U.S. consumers spent $333.4 billion on prescription drugs.

There are no price controls on drugs in the U.S. as there are in most countries in the world. Senator Bernie Sanders just took a bus tour to a Canadian pharmacy Continue Reading »

Stories like Sam Allard’s sordid tale of Pastor Tom Randall seem as common as that of mass shootings in America. So common that they have lost their power and the guilty must find some solace in knowing that their transgressions no longer engage and enrage the general population. After all, if their own congregation doesn’t care, why should the rest of us?

I grew up in a community that had all the main Christian denominations—and many of the not-so-main—represented. People went to church on Sunday mornings, at a minimum, and many attended ancillary events on Wednesdays for bible study, on Thursdays for choir practice and Sunday afternoons for prayer, discussion and auxiliary group meetings. The question was not, do you go to church? but rather where do you go to church? And because your church was such a vital part of who you were, you didn’t air your dirty laundry in public.

Until, of course, somebody crosses the line, somebody spills the beans and the whole shameful enterprise explodes.

A week ago Scene published Allard’s A Hudson Megachurch, a Beloved Pastor and the International Sex Abuse Scandal They’ve Tried To Hide. On Monday, Allard followed with Christ Community Chapel Releases Abuse Report, Pastor Tom Randall Forced to Resign over Fake Emails.. Forcing Tom Randall to resign over fake emails is like telling Al Capone he has to leave Chicago because he didn’t pay his taxes. But that’s how this bullshit inevitably seems to work. Allard ledes:

Pastor Tom Randall, the subject of a Scene investigative story last week, has resigned from Christ Community Chapel, a nondenominational Christian church based in Hudson.

A 27-page report produced by former FBI agent and current CCC member Suzanne Lewis-Johnson revealed that during her review of sexual abuse allegations at Sankey Samaritan Orphanage, the children’s home Randall founded in the Philippines, she discovered Randall had falsified an email corroborating his version of events. (This finding was consistent with the Truth Seeker blog, which has covered the Sankey case and reported on July 27 [Is missionary Tom Randall ghostwriting under his supporters’ names?] that Randall appeared to be “ghostwriting” under his supporters’ names.)

Once Randall’s email falsification was discovered by CCC leadership, the church’s “elders” — its board of directors, essentially — asked that Randall tender his resignation on June 3 for his “clear violation of pastoral ethics.”

Randall has not been on staff at CCC, in other words, for two months, (a fact that CCC did not share with Scene during our reporting.) [See not airing dirty laundry above, JH] On July 15, when Scene told CCC that we were working on a story about the case and requested an interview with Joe Coffey and Tom Randall, CCC’s Executive Director of Operations, Stacey DiNardo, told Scene that “it would be most productive to address you meeting with Joe and/or Tom after they learn the outcome of the review.” More than a month after his supposed resignation date, there was no indication that Randall was no longer on staff.

All religion is, at its core, a scam—there is no there there—an we should not be surprised when grifters are attracted to the ultimate grift (think Joseph Smith and his magic golden tablets). Certainly there are sincere, honest people involved (I think of my paternal grandmother and my brother in this sense), but when those honest people speak up, attempt to unveil the nakedness—sometimes literally—of the emperors, they get crushed.
Allard concludes with one such case, CCC member Sarah Kingler. Allard continues:

Several of the local advocates who have been sounding the alarm about the Sankey case attended the meeting Sunday and sat in the front row. One of them, Sarah Klingler, said on Twitter that they were “not impressed, in fact disgusted,” with Coffey’s remarks.

“Why would you think survivors would want to come to your support groups?” She said. “You haven’t proven yourself safe.”

In a statement provided to Scene, Klingler said that while many important details were published in the internal review by Suzanne Lewis-Johnson, its scope was by no means wide enough.

“She shared critical details about Toto and Jake, as well as Tom Randall himself,” she wrote, “but the leadership was not held accountable in this report.”

Silly Sarah, they never are.

Bonus No. 1: PISSING ON THE LIGHTS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT…

What I learned writing about climate change and the US south for a year…
Ta-Nehisi Coates Talks… Writing Fiction, Reparations, and the Legacy of Slavery…
Covering The Threat Of White Supremacy…
El Paso Gunman’s Fear of a Migrant “Invasion” Echoes Donald Trump and Fox News…
Christ Community Chapel Releases Abuse Report, Pastor Randall Forced to Resign…
Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1…
A Hudson Megachurch, a Beloved Pastor and the International Sex Abuse Scandal…
Innocence lost: What did you do before the internet?

White domestic terrorists—inspired and encouraged by President Donald John Trump—are killing innocent Americans in their twisted and pathetic desire to be noticed—our remedy is not to silence our president, rather we have a two-pronged solution: first, speak truth to power, constantly; and second, vote him—and the Republican majority in the Sentate—out.

I hold to our First Amendment the way some hold to the second (although I think I’m more justified) and I am not willing to censor our presidents reckless, fascist, racist and self-serving rants—he does want to be reëlected next year—on immigrants who don’t have orange skin.

Possibly the best-known language from any Supreme Court of the United States ruling comes from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who, in Schenck v. United States, wrote:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. […] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

I think Justice Holmes got it wrong. The First Amendment does protect such speech and if someone is hurt, or injures another because they didn’t check for smoke before fleeing, well that’s on them. (And yes, I know that I’m in an extreme minority here, but you should check Lyle Denniston’s opinion.)

Like Edgar Maddison Welch barging into Comet Ping Pong, so too did Patrick Crusius, because he believed the lies, storm a Walmart expecting to be a hero. Both men were made fools of by white men clinging to their eroding privilege. President Trump has every constitutional right to lie to Americans, especially those who elected him, and we are obligated to call-out those lies, loudly and often.

That’s how democracy, and our Constitution, work.

With all of that as preamble, Robert Mackey, writing in El Paso Gunman’s Fear of a Migrant “Invasion” Echoes Donald Trump and Fox News. for The Intercept, draws very straight and very short lines between President Trump and Crusius. He begins:

The white supremacist who killed at least 22 people in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday appears to have been driven by a racist conspiracy theory — that the United States is under “invasion” by migrants and asylum-seekers from Central America — which has been repeated again and again on Fox News broadcasts and amplified by that network’s most powerful viewer, President Donald Trump.

As the former Obama administration official Brandon Friedman pointed out, it is hard to read even the first page of the suspected gunman’s manifesto, about the supposed “Hispanic invasion” he aimed to repel, without hearing echoes of the toxic rhetoric Trump absorbs from Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson and then passes on at rallies and in tweets.

Yes, it is hard to read, but the First Amendment must protect the most vile objectionable speech imaginable or it means nothing. The First Amendment does not protect us from objectionable speech, but rather demands that we object to that which we find objectionable in a clear and decisive voice and let the free market of ideas decide which path our society will travel.

That is tough to hear and even tougher to act upon. Those who remain silent in the manner of Edmund Burke’s good men have only themselves to blame for the evil in their midst.

Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Ann Warren was spot on when she tweeted:

We need to call it out: Fox News is a hate-for-profit machine that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists.

Change, both good and bad, does not happen in an armchair, it happens in the streets.

Bonus No. 1: APPREHENSIVE? CALL THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU…

El Paso Gunman’s Fear of a Migrant “Invasion” Echoes Donald Trump and Fox News…
Christ Community Chapel Releases Abuse Report, Pastor Randall Forced to Resign…
Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1…
The Psychiatrist Who Believed People Could Tell the Future…
A Hudson Megachurch, a Beloved Pastor and the International Sex Abuse Scandal…
Innocence lost: What did you do before the internet?

I had a totally different topic picked out for this morning, but then driving to the library I had to pull over to listen (and call) to WCPN’s Sound Of Ideas with Mike McIntyre. This morning’s topic was the shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. Of course, I joined the conversation. Senator Sherrod Brown was on during the first segment,

I agree with and applaud two vital points that Sen. Brown made. First, he called on Senate Majority Leader Addison Mitchel McConnell to recall the senate back from recess to address the ongoing threat of white terrorism killing our citizens. Second, Sen Brown called for the reënactment of the assault weapons ban that was allowed to lapse in 2004. While they are both much needed, I called in to the show to say that the assault weapon ban falls far short because there are a many other semi-automatic, .223 caliber rifles available for purchase that do not qualify as assault weapons.

What we need, I said, was for there to be strict observance of the full language of the second amendment to our constitution, particularly the first four words: A Well Regulated Militia… No one, I said, who is not an active member of a well regulated—not well led or well trained, but well regulated—militia ought to be allowed to own a semi-automatic firearm of any type. No one’s second amendment rights would be violated by such a requirement.

Any private citizen’s right to own a revolver, bolt, lever or pump action long gun would not be hindered and thus those concerned with hunting, personal safety, defending their home would be perfectly able to do so. Gun collectors and target shooting enthusiasts could also be easily accommodated with gun ranges and off-premises gun safes and proper permitting.

We can have a long discussion on what would constitute a well regulated militia, but the key word there is regulated. From my reading, I understand regulated to point to control by some, non-federal civilian authority elected by the affected citizens at the state, or possibly local, level.

The founders knew what they were doing when they wrote the second amendment and there were no problems until gun manufacturers, facing dwindling sales and profits, enlisted the National Rifle Association to literally weaponize the second amendment to boost those sales and profits.

We must not allow our president to affix the current state of affairs as the new normal.

Bonus No. 1: PEOPLE OUGHT NOT TO BE DYING ON OUR WATCH…

Bonus No. 2: John Oliver on gun violence in El Paso and Dayton Stun Country.

Bonus No. 3: Governments don’t fix homelessness because THEY DON’T WANT TO.