I’m beginning to wonder if there is any single person, let alone a President of the United States, that has recieved more mail from Ralph Nader than the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In an age of email and Instant Messaging, I don’t remember the last time I actually took pen to paper, addressed an envelope and licked a stamp.

In two letters below—dated September 10th and 11th—Nader once again takes our president to task for being our outrage and chief. In Letter to President Trump 9.10.19; and Letter to President Trump 9.11.19, Nader writes:

Dear President Trump:

Over the years, millions of dollars’ worth of American flags manufactured in China have been imported to our country and by U.S. firms. These flags come in a standard size and novelty forms composed of various materials. You are imposing tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars on Chinese imports which may increase prices here to consumers.

Have you exempted imports of American flags from these tariffs? If not, why not? The people need an explanation forthwith.

By the way, are you aware that your authority to impose tariffs unilaterally is being challenged in federal district court in New York City as being unconstitutional? The authority to impose tariffs, declares this serious lawsuit brought by prominent counsel, belongs to the Congress under our Constitution.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

and… Continue Reading »

I once had a publisher who was so proud of the lies told by his sales force that he gave an annual award to the biggest whopper told by his sales staff. His philosophy is that if you’re going to lie go big, huge, the more outrageous the better based on the theory that the more grandiose the tale, the less inclined people would be to question the claims.

Clearly, our liar-in-chief learned this lesson well in his various business dealings.

Nader, in Big Business Lies Taught a Watchful Donald Trump, writes:

For avalanche-level lying, deceiving, and misleading, mega-mimic Donald Trump need look no further than the history of the corporate advertising industry and the firms that pay them.

Dissembling is so deeply ingrained in commercial culture that the Federal Trade Commission and the courts don’t challenge exaggerated general claims that they call “puffery.”

Serious corporate deception is a common sales technique. At times it cost consumers more than dollars. It has led to major illness and loss of life.

Take the tobacco industry which used to sell its products in the context of health and facilitating mental concentration. Healthy movie stars and athletes Continue Reading »

My single greatest asset as a writer is my Voice. Even when they begin learning their craft by mimicking another writer—as I did with the likes of Isaac Asimov, Robert H. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury—every writer eventually hears their own voice emerge from the background. Alice McDermott understands.. [See blockquotes BTL: Below The Line.)

Bonus No. 1: Massive Trafalgar Wargame.

We should be able to read the football tea leaves by now. If Steve Litt writes a Plain Dealer piece about the lakefront and its future, as he did recently, you know the people who decide what’s good for us are thinking new football stadium.

Yes, the old (really fairly new) stadium was built in a hurry. And constructed in the absolute wrong place—on the lakefront.

But the Cleveland Browns football team let the fans down. They were expected to not lose. That means win, right? They lost. Dramatically. Embarrassingly, 43-13. We’re we told too many glowing stories about what to expect?

Maybe it is the news media that selling us a story that the team can’t really meet. The Plain Dealer and TV news overflowed with excitement and the fans, of course, ate it up.

This is not a new phenomenon. The news media always plays the role of public relations for sports teams, especially football.

Looking Back to the 1990s and the machinations over the Cleveland Browns and the team’s move to Baltimore, the Plain Dealer in particular went nuts. In February 1996 I wrote:

We are being conned into accepting frivolous entertainment as news and building our public discourse and decisions… on the triviality of sports and entertainment. It allows those who seize and control the resources of the community to go unexamined.

Football took over the PD in those days when the Browns left and were wanted back. It was massive pandering.

The PD isn’t alone in overdoing coverage of sports and especially football. The NFL can count on every facet of the media to be subservient public relations outlets for its hugely profitable business. And do newspapers get heavy advertising for its subservience?

Absolutely not. They give away space.

Recently, Ted Daidiun wrote a column bemoaning the bad language when he took his grandson to a Browns preseason game. He got critical letters from readers.

But he and the letter writers ignored the real threat to the young grandchild.

He was taken at a young age to a spectacle of mass violence. There is little unremitting and deadly violence taking place on the field—not the kind of bonding time with young people.

We don’t pay attention to it because we aren’t often reminded of what is going on in this “game.”

I’d suggest a book from a rabid football fan who questions he feelings.

Steve Almond, despite his love of the game, questions it. I’ll just give one tragedy he reports. A Pittsburgh Steeler lineman, 45 years old, killed himself by drinking anti-freeze. There are many more such stories in Against Football by a guy who loves and has played the ‘game.’

He was one of many sufferings from hits to the head, a common occurrence on the field.
Art Modell, of course, was the Browns owner who took the team to Baltimore. It was relatively unknown until the trial covered below that another Clevelander owned a significant share of the team. He was Robert Gries who sued Modell. The trial revealed why Modell was in so much financial trouble. He had borrowed significant sums at 1 percent over prime and was caught on hefty interest rates.

Why would the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration risk its credibility to make our president look less a moron? Ed Pilkington answered in Wilbur Ross faces calls to resign after report he threatened firings over ‘Sharpiegate.’ writing: …a cabinet member in the Trump admin- istration had threatened to fire politically-appointed staff at the agency…

Bonus No. 1: This Modern World: Asteroid!

Bonus No. 2: ‘The United States is broken as hell’—the division in politics over race and class.

Bottom line, the police are nothing like the actors who portray them because the message is simple: it is better to alive and accused of murder than it is to be dead because the other guy shot first. That is some sick wild west shit. Don’t trust me, watch Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj and listen to what the experts say about our system of Fear-Based Policing in the U.S.

Bonus No. 1: BREXIT! A few tiny things stand between Remainaggedon and the UK bravely leaving the EU.

Bonus No. 2: Filibuster: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. [Note: if you get to this early enough, you may still be able to watch the full, 34-minute, show.]

Bonus No. 3: A NEW FORMAT FOR HAVE COFFEE WILL WRITE…

At the kick-off for Parma For Bernie I remembered the nail in President James Earl Carter’s coffin delivered by candidate Ronald Wilson Reagan who on 28 October 1980 asked voters: Are you better off than you were four years ago? Did the coal miners get their jobs back? Do our allies respect us even more than before? How much of the tax break did you get? So…?

Bonus No. 1:‘I feel bombarded with to-dos’: the hell of life admin—and how to get on top.

Organized labor, unions, built the middle class and the decline and ultimate destruction of the middle class is presaged by the systematic destruction of that same organized labor by stateless oligarchs hoarding their luxury and wealth. So, what did you do this past Labor Day? Have a cookout? Mow the lawn? Go fishing? March? Scare the shit out of our stateless oligarchs?

What we all should do is attend union events and thank union members for what they’ve done for this country in exactly the same way that we thank veterans for their service. If all you can think is that union members are selfish, spoiled layabouts, then you have another think coming because thousands died to get the 40-hour work week, health insurance and vacations; to demand: Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest. I do, and so, I bet, does Ralph Nader.

Nader, in Chuck Todd, Labor Day, and Getting Serious, writes:

Labor Day has come and gone. To most people it’s a day off and a splash of sales. The symbolism and meaning that inspired this national holiday back in 1894 has long since dissipated. Labor Day parades are affairs of the past, with very few exceptions, and those that still exist are facing dwindling participation—in the era of Donald the corporatist, no less.

Part of this neglect stems from major unions and their large locals. Labor leaders, year after year, miss the opportunity to speak through the local and national media about what’s on their mind regarding the state of workers today. I have urged labor leaders to develop a media strategy for Labor Day, since it is their one big day to give interviews and submit op-eds. Having major events or demonstrations on the needs of working families would invite coverage.

Even the usual excuse that the corporate press is not that interested goes away on Labor Day. The major labor chiefs just don’t take advantage of this yearly opportunity. That is one reason why over the years, raising the minimum wage; adopting card checks for union-desiring workers; pressing for full Medicare for All; and repealing the notorious, anti-union Taft Hartley Act of 1947 have remained at such low visibility.

On the other hand, the editors and reporters are not exactly reaching out for, say, interviews of Richard Trumka, the former coal miner who rose through the ranks and became the head of the AFL-CIO labor federation in Washington, DC. Trumka vs. Trump has a nice ring to it, but someone has to hit the bell.

This Labor Day, The Washington Post and the New York Times had touching stories of workers in various jobs from a human interest point of view. There was little space devoted to labor policies, labor reforms, worker safety, the persistent private pension crisis, and the huge power imbalance in labor/management relations.

NBC’s Meet the Press, anchored by Chuck Todd, is symptomatic of the media’s indifference to showcasing Labor leaders on Labor Day.

Chuck Todd, the quick witted former citizen organizer, has lost control of his show to his corporate masters in New York City. He cannot even stop them from replacing his show entirely on the few Sundays when the NBC profiteers think there are more profits showing a major tennis, golf, or soccer tournament. My repeated complaints about this blackout to NBC chief, Andrew Lack, or to the corporatist chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, have received no reply.

Obviously, Chuck is working in a tough environment for any self-respecting journalist. But this past Sunday, Meet the Press reached a new low from its beginnings under the news-savvy Lawrence Spivak more than 70 years ago. Meet the Press has become a ditto-head to the regular news shows’ saturation coverage. Todd covered Hurricane Dorian and the shootout in Texas, along with whether Joe Biden is too old for the Presidency. Repetitious and dull—he added nothing new for the audience.

The shrinking range of Meet the Press has been going on for some years. It focuses, with other network shows, on questioning politicians or their surrogates—sometimes the same guests on multiple shows—about inconsistencies, gaffes, thoughtless statements, or current political controversies. We don’t need to see yet another round with Trump’s Kellyanne Conway, who plays with Todd’s sharp questions.

The NBC corporate masters tell or signal to Todd who he can invite for his roundtable. He should never have corporatists from the American Enterprise Institute without having people from the Economic Policy Institute, Public Citizen, or Common Cause.

Brit Hume, before he went over to Fox, once told me that the real purpose of the Sunday shows was to let the Washington politicians have their say so they stay off the back of the networks. That was his way of explaining why the questions put to them were not as tough or deep as they could be.

Todd can be a tough questioner, but he is trapped in a cul-de-sac of predictability, trivia, and redundancy that demeans his talents.

Along with the other Sunday morning network news shows, Todd stays away from the all-important civic community—historically and presently the fountainhead for our democratic society. It is hard to name any blessing of America, great or small, that did not start with the work or demands of citizens. Improved civil rights and liberties, safer consumer products, workplace conditions and environments, nuclear arms treaties, and much more began this way. Citizen groups continue as watchdogs, documenting, litigating, lobbying, and pushing the powers that be on behalf of the American people.

In 1966, I was invited on Meet the Press by the legendary Lawrence Spivak to first highlight, on Sunday national TV, what needs to be done about unsafe cars. That helped auto safety action to move faster in Congress. The civic leaders of today are largely shut out from these forums. Civic startups cannot reach larger audiences and shape the politics of the day.

None of this is unknown to Chuck Todd. He has allowed his hands to be tied with golden handcuffs. One can almost sense his impatience with his roundtable guests spouting guarded opinions or conventional speculations suited to their current careers. But Chuck is very polite with them and his interviewees. As he has said, if you really go after these guests, they won’t come back next time. But why such a small pool? There are plenty of other fresh, courageous, accurate voices he can invite “next time.” It’s that his corporate bosses won’t let him.

Todd has much more potential than to continue his increasingly trivialized, though sometimes temporarily sensationalized, role as an anchor of a withering show “brought to you by Boeing.” He should request reassignment or resign for more significant journalistic challenges. He really doesn’t need the money anymore.

Ah, need has nothing to do with wealth.

Bonus No. 1: Labor Day with Robert Reich and Pramila Jayapal.

Bonus No. 2: Welcome to the Men’s Rights Activists Seething Divorced Resentful Fathers Support Group.

We may have a real mayoral race next time. We need it.

The recent phony elections produced Frank Jackson. Many would not argue that he is a man who doesn’t seem to work the job.

Those oligarchs who have been running things have not been moved to want change. They’ve been having a party.

But we’re at a point where even the Rulers of Cleveland may not be satisfied.

It’s time to get serious.

We’ve had—with an exception here and there—some 50 and more years of oligarchic rule in Cleveland. It hasn’t worked well, except for a few names Clevelanders recognize: Dick Jacobs, Sam Miller, Al Ratner, the Carneys, and sports team owners and developers.
For those at the lower economic end it has been calamitous.

Those who have been reading my “Looking Back” offerings should realize that what has been fed us via our news media has been more propaganda than news.

So, with 50 years of observing Cleveland, I will take a look at Cleveland leaders and their efforts to maintain control for their purposes.

I offer the headlines of four issues of Point Of Viəw, with links to them, as a sense of how things have been worked for special interest benefits.

[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]

These issues give one a taste for how things have worked and for whom.

The essence of the problem: we have avoided dealing with the corrupt past and its effect on us and our future.

A power game has been played on us by a select elite. Let’s look. The Figgie deal first.

Public hearings turned out to be totally phony. Secrecy produced a sweetheart deal.

Both George Forbes and George Voinovich together arranged, as court documents later showed, for Dick Jacobs to become the major developer of 530 suburban acres of city owned land—considered one of the most valuable pieces of real estate between New York City and Chicago. The land had been acquired by Cleveland’s famed mayor Tom Johnson in the early 1900s.

It was only one of the public-financed gifts to the late Jacobs. The Gateway project, which included a stadium for Jacobs’s Cleveland Indians, have cost Cleveland and Cuyahoga County more than $1 billion.

Jacobs was further endowed with most desirable gifts from Forbes, the powerful city council president, for 16 years.

Voinovich and Forbes further rewarded Jacobs with two massive subsidies in the early 1990s.

One—full tax abatement for 20 years—resulted in what is now the Key building and Marriot Hotel. It also had a $20-million urban grant at ZERO interest, generously not payable for the full 20 years. The pair also added the right to construct an underground garage beneath the city’s Mall A. And, of course, tax abated for 20 years!

The generous twosome followed with similar deal for 20 years with a $20-million, zero interest loan and an abatement for 20 years to build another bank building and hotel on the west side of Public Square.

Occupied buildings were torn down to make way for the new project in early 1990. The real estate market, however, wasn’t viable and the west side of Public Square remains a parking lot nearly 30 years later.

Since Jacobs got this generous treatment other special interests needed attention. Sam Miller & Al Ratner’s Tower City development was similarly rewarded. Several low interest loans at the Tower totaled $23.9 million. And for the Ritz Hotel, a $7.9 million loan and tax abatement worth more than 30 over 15 years.

The Miller-Ratner contingent received a whopping $30.9 million in similar government loans for its Halle Bros. building on Euclid Ave.

It’s Christmas whenever they say so for these Takers. And they take.

Here is a valuable guide to save-the city’s rewarding special private interests.

It is an accounting you will never see in the Plain Dealer or any other news outlet and the reason most people don’t know what is happening in their city, just as its rulers want it.

Or how can we overlook Dick Pogue (and others) manipulation of the city for public financing of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Cleveland schools paid the price for this New York promoted venture that went from $28 million cost to some $92 million cost. It also got free city land and tax revenue diverted from Forest City Tower property taxes via a Tax Incremental Financing, a 1.5 percent cut of the city’s bed tax and income of 3 percent from the hotel bed tax.

It was always amazing how public officials could find revenue sources to reward the area’s richest.

The top business/legal leaders further forced RTA, the low-income transportation necessity, to build a little used Waterfront Line at full cost because Pogue and his ilk wanted it done quickly. RTA could have kept costs to its budget low but business interests want immediate action. RTA could have shed 80 percent of the cost to the federal government but requirements would have meant delay. Special interests wanted no delay. The cost hit $69 million, all RTA funding. And the Waterfront line for two decades runs at a steep loss. RTA also financed a $13-million walkway from Tower City to Gateway, another gift to private interests.

Much of this public money for private interest has been done under Democratic rule.

Democrat public officials pushed the Gateway give-away. Mayor White promised passage of the sin tax would produce annual funds for Cleveland schools. Instead, he and County Commissioner Tim Hagan pushed successfully for a state law that fully exempted the sports facilities. That has likely cost Cleveland schools more than $100 million dollars since early 1990s.

White and Hagan put pressure on social agencies that supposedly serve the needy to endorse the Gateway tax, under the sickening arm-twisting by our so-called civic leaders. Institutions—Inner City Church Council, Catholic Commission, Lutheran Metro Ministry – remained quiet, subservient to the power structure. Similarly, social agencies as the old Federation for Community Planning—the main social planning agency for the area at that time—double-crossed its constituency by hold a press conference with Hagan to support the regressive tax.

The public continues to be compromised by these same forces. The debacle of the city refusing petitions to question the recent Quicken (now Rocket Mortgage Field House) arena. This matter has been examined properly in the Scene.

It’s time the voters took back their city.

Since the end of May I’ve invested three hours each and every morning to writing my next novel: Absent Son. I’ve found that after those hours, I really don’t have a lot of writing energy left, hence the huge gaps in posting. Look for future posts to look like this one; what I used to call my espresso shots. Blockquotes will appear, with little or no narrative, in the comments.

There is a tendency among progressives to dismiss the actions of conservatives by pointing to their lack of intelligence or mental health. Not only is that wrong, but that tack is flat out dangerous because dismissing conservatives in this way provides them with cover and lets progressives off the hook. They know what they’re doing and we’re letting them.

Ralph Nader gets the charade that conservatives—and message master President Donald John Trump—use to distract progressives like a Three-Card Monte grifter hiding the queen.

Nader, in From Trump Tower to Dictatorial Trump Power Over Law, writes:

Donald Trump is “dumb as a rock” (to use his phrase) when it comes to the programs and the policies of the federal government agencies over which he is allegedly presiding. However, when it comes to defending and expanding his own political power, Trump is shameless and profoundly cunning.

Trump turns accurate appraisals of himself into accusations that he levies at others. Earlier this month, he questioned whether Joe Biden “is mentally fit to be president.” Trump regularly turns appraisals of himself into accusations against others.

But Trump has found a way to spread his toxicity beyond his lying tweets. He has carefully developed formidable barricades to shield himself from the gathering storm regarding his countless impeachable offenses and other serious misbehaviors.

Trump’s remarks, decisions, and asides reveal his plans to stay in office. Trump heaps praise and extra funding on the military. In his travels, Trump likewise Continue Reading »

No, we’re not going to war with Iran or Russia or China. (At least not just yet.) I’m concerned with the long-term effects of declaring internal wars on various social ills. Why are we surprised that when we declare war on poverty or drugs or crime or terror the result is too often militarized police forces thinking they are Lt. Howard Hunter in need of a target to SWAT.

Or consider real-life example of presidential candidate Kamala Harris who got into trouble for thinking that the answer to school truancy was threatening parents with fines and jail time. In an interview for New York Magazine, Ta-Nehisi Coates said of Harris:

I don’t want to hear about how she didn’t lock anybody up. The idea of threatening mothers—and in most cases, because of how the families were set up, it was gonna be mothers, minority black and brown mothers—with jail, under the notion that you ultimately want to help them? I find that chilling. That’s really really chilling.

Alex Vitale also goes back to Coates for perspective. More than four years ago, Coates, writing in The Myth of Police Reform for The Atlantic, concluded:

Police officers fight crime. Police officers are neither case-workers, nor teachers, nor mental-health professionals, nor drug counselors. One of the great hallmarks of the past forty years of American domestic policy is a broad disinterest in that difference. The problem of restoring police authority is not really a problem of police authority, but a problem of democratic authority. It is what happens when you decide to solve all your problems with a hammer. To ask, at this late date, why the police seem to have lost their minds is to ask why our hammers are so bad at installing air-conditioners. More it is to ignore the state of the house all around us. A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems. (Emphasis from Vitale.)

Alex Vitale, writing in Let’s Build Up Communities Instead of Pouring Funds Into Police Oversight for Truthout wants to give a different, and better way than declaring war a try. He ledes:

The Baltimore Police Department, like many across the U.S., has been beset with a crisis in public confidence in the wake of both high-profile abuses of force and corruption. A recent report by the team tasked with monitoring a 2016 consent decree between the U.S. Department of Justice and the Baltimore Police Department says the BPD has not done enough to hold officers accountable for such misconduct, leading to calls for more resources and training for the BPD’s internal affairs unit and a beefing up of the Civilian Review Board. Unfortunately, even if implemented, more police oversight and training are unlikely to solve the problem.

I’ve been a police researcher for over 20 years and I’m incredibly pessimistic about the ability of either internal or external oversight and accountability mechanisms to fix policing. The problems are baked into the missions we have given them. When we turn every social problem in poor communities of color over to police to manage, we are going to get violence, unnecessary incarcerations and corruption.

Like Baltimore, and despite the best efforts of our president and former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Cleveland remains under a DOJ consent decree that police forces continue to push hard against. Reporting yesterday in Cleveland Public Safety Director Michael McGrath would lose some power to discipline cops under proposed policy for The Plain Dealer, Eric Heisig wrote:

A new general police order awaiting approval by a federal judge would take away discretion granted to Cleveland Public Safety Director Michael McGrath on whether he had to fire officers who were dishonest on the job.

Under the proposed order, officers who create a false report, give false statements, are untruthful or dishonest will commit a violation. The presumptive penalty is termination.

McGrath, a longtime city official who previously served as police chief, currently enjoys discretion for integrity violations. The current police order for discipline, known as a disciplinary matrix, allows him to impose suspensions anywhere from 13 to 30 days.

He can also demote or fire an officer, but those are considered alternatives.

The proposed tweaks to the police department’s disciplinary matrix were made as part of a reform agreement, known as a consent decree, the city reached with the Justice Department in 2015. Part of the Justice Department’s findings were that officers were often given lenient punishments for serious violations.

The new disciplinary matrix comes after several examples illustrated that officers who committed integrity-related violations remain on the job. The union that represented those officers and most others opposes the change.

Of course they do.

Vitale, in agreement with Coates’ statement want to stop using hammers and give experts with other tools a chance. He concludes:

Instead of imagining that police are the only or even best-suited tool for managing violence problems, we could look to new modalities of community empowerment to break the cycle of violence. Baltimore already has some of the tools they need, but they are underfunded by the city and undermined by aggressive policing.

For example, Restorative Response Baltimore works with young people, in schools and in the community, to get to the root of community conflicts that can escalate to violence. The group uses structured dialogue and restorative justice practices to allow communities to resolve their problems without the threat of violence and incarceration. The newly formed Safe Streets Baltimore is utilizing public health and “credible messenger” strategies to reduce neighborhood violence. The program hires adults from the community with a history of street involvement to work with young people at risk of violence as either victims or offenders. They provide trauma counseling, perform street mediation and try to steer young people into pro-social activities. A review of a similar initiative in 2014 showed very positive results, as has a recent study of similar programs in New York City.

No particular program can overcome hundreds of years of discrimination and inequality at the heart of so many of the problems that plague Baltimore and so much of the U.S. We must also look to build up resources like education, housing and social services in the communities where violence is most pervasive. Lawrence Brown, associate professor in the School of Community Health and Policy at Morgan State University, calls on Baltimore city officials to undertake a reparations program that would channel 10 percent of the city’s budget into those communities most hard hit by formal discrimination, such as segregation laws and redlining practices. These funds could go to build affordable housing and schools, provide employment, and give families the kinds of support services they need to lead more stable and productive lives. According to Brown, “The Baltimore reparations package would function as actually changing our city budget, because right now, we spend more on city police than we do on health, housing, arts, parks, community development, workforce development, and civil rights combined. That’s changing from an apartheid budget to a freedom budget.”

We can’t produce healthy and stable communities by relying solely on police, no matter how much training and oversight they receive. Policing is an inherently coercive and violent tool.

As I am infamous for suggesting. We build our communities with our conversations. When we allow others to speak for us, the message can get tragically garbled.

Bonus No. 1: Bernie Sanders on his plan for journalism.

Yesterday Bernie Sanders delivered a major, possibly the major, policy speech of his campaign; presenting a vision that very well could become the pillar of his presidency: a sweeping Green New Deal that will transform the United States, preserve our economy, fuel economic growth and restore our standing among the free nations of the world.

Bernie began the announcement of his Green New Deal with a brief statement in the devastated community of Paradise, California (unfortunately the video locks at 3:18) and followed that with a Climate Crisis Town Hall gathering in the nearby community of Chico, California. You should watch the video in full and—believe me, this is important—read, unfiltered, the full document.

For now, here are a few of the broad strokes:

As president, Bernie Sanders will launch the decade of the Green New Deal, a ten-year, nationwide mobilization centered around justice and equity during which climate change will be factored into virtually every area of policy, from immigration to trade to foreign policy and beyond. This plan outlines some of the most significant goals we have set and steps we will take during this mobilization, including:

—Reaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by 2050 at latest—consistent with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change goals—by expanding the existing federal Power Marketing Administrations to build new solar, wind, and geothermal energy sources.

—Ending unemployment by creating 20 million jobs needed to solve the climate crisis. These jobs will be good paying, union jobs with strong benefits and safety standards in steel and auto manufacturing, construction, energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms, and renewable power plants. We will also create millions of jobs in sustainable agriculture, engineering, a reimagined and expanded Civilian Conservation Corp, and preserving our public lands.

—Directly invest an historic $16.3 trillion public investment toward these efforts, in line with the mobilization of resources made during the New Deal and WWII, but with an explicit choice to include black, indigenous and other minority communities who were systematically excluded in the past.

—A just transition for workers. This plan will prioritize the fossil fuel workers who have powered our economy for more than a century and who have too often been neglected by corporations and politicians. We will guarantee five years of a worker’s current salary, housing assistance, job training, health care, pension support, and priority job placement for any displaced worker, as well as early retirement support for those who choose it or can no longer work.

—Declaring climate change a national emergency. We must take action to ensure a habitable planet for ourselves, for our children, and for our grandchildren. We will do whatever it takes to defeat the threat of climate change.

—Saving American families money by weatherizing homes and lowering energy bills, building affordable and high-quality, modern public transportation, providing grants and trade-in programs for families and small businesses to purchase high-efficiency electric vehicles, and rebuilding our inefficient and crumbling infrastructure, including deploying universal, affordable high-speed internet.

—Supporting small family farms by investing in ecologically regenerative and sustainable agriculture. This plan will transform our agricultural system to fight climate change, provide sustainable, local foods, and break the corporate stranglehold on farmers and ranchers.

—Justice for frontline communities–especially under-resourced groups, communities of color, Native Americans, people with disabilities, children and the elderly—to recover from, and prepare for, the climate impacts, including through a $40 billion Climate Justice Resiliency Fund. And providing those frontline and fenceline communities a just transition including real jobs, resilient infrastructure, economic development.

—Commit to reducing emissions throughout the world, including providing $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund, rejoining the Paris Agreement, and reasserting the United States’ leadership in the global fight against climate change.

—Meeting and exceeding our fair share of global emissions reductions. The United States has for over a century spewed carbon pollution emissions into the atmosphere in order to gain economic standing in the world. Therefore, we have an outsized obligation to help less industrialized nations meet their targets while improving quality of life. We will reduce domestic emissions by at least 71 percent by 2030 and reduce emissions among less industrialized nations by 36 percent by 2030 — the total equivalent of reducing our domestic emissions by 161 percent.

—Making massive investments in research and development. We will invest in public research to drastically reduce the cost of energy storage, electric vehicles, and make our plastic more sustainable through advanced chemistry.

—Expanding the climate justice movement. We will do this by coming together in a truly inclusive movement that prioritizes young people, workers, indigenous peoples, communities of color, and other historically marginalized groups to take on the fossil fuel industry and other polluters to push this over the finish line and lead the globe in solving the climate crisis.

—Investing in conservation and public lands to heal our soils, forests, and prairie lands. We will reauthorize and expand the Civilian Conservation Corps and fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Corps to provide good paying jobs building green infrastructure.

—This plan will pay for itself over 15 years. Experts have scored the plan and its economic effects. We will pay for the massive investment we need to reverse the climate crisis by: (a.) Making the fossil fuel industry pay for their pollution, through litigation, fees, and taxes, and eliminating federal fossil fuel subsidies; (b.) Generating revenue from the wholesale of energy produced by the regional Power Marketing Authorities. Revenues will be collected from 2023-2035, and after 2035 electricity will be virtually free, aside from operations and maintenance costs; (c.) Scaling back military spending on maintaining global oil dependence; (d.) Collecting new income tax revenue from the 20 million new jobs created by the plan; (e.) Reduced need for federal and state safety net spending due to the creation of millions of good-paying, unionized jobs; and (f.) Making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share.

If we can carry him through the primary circus and see him elected President of The United States. (This is the point that Tim Russo says, I told you so—and he did, politely.) I’m retired now and don’t have the money to donate like I did in 2015/16, but I’ve already sent what will be, I’m sure, the first of many more $27 donations to Bernie’s cause. Not to put too fine of a point on all this, but I have to say I hear the late Carrie Frances Fisher’s voice in this moment.

Bonus No. 1: Pell is in jail where he belongs, and culture warriors let fly their rage at the fall of their creature.

So, this a more twisted tale than usual. In a nutshell: former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich bragged that he could choose the next Illinois senator when Sen.Barack Hussein Obama became President Barack Hussein Obama. That’s it. No bribes, no power exchanges. The Governor of Illionios bragged that he had a power granted him by his state’s constitution.

And now, for some gawd awful reason, President Donald John Trump wants to pardon Blagojevich and Trump’s aides seem to oppose the move? I’m at sixes and sevens. I’ll let Ralph Nader try to untangle this mess.

Nader, in Statement on Ex-Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, writes:

President Trump declared his likely intention to commute the staggering 14 year sentence ex-Illinois Governor, Rod Blagojevich is serving for playing politics with a pending Senatorial choice to fill president-elect Obama’s seat. Blagojevich never received a bribe or kickback for his wire-tapped boastfulness about his power to choose the next Senator. Nine state Governors convicted of much more serious, criminal charges served jail terms much shorter than the time Blagojevich has already served–seven and a half years. Prominent people are calling on Trump to resist advisers urging him to retract. Trump does and says many wrong things and almost never reverses. Now, when he is ready to do something right about prosecutorial abuse and a “hanging judge,” he is wobbling and showing weakness. Sad. (See: Rod Blagojevich Fact Sheet)

Nader thinks that Blagojevich got a raw deal and, Trump, ever willing to do the right thing overturn any and all actions by his predecessor, wants to commute Blagoveich’s sentence? Have I got that right? I need a drink.

[Update @ 1658–Annddd, the feckin’ DNC runs for cover…]

Neither Bernie Sanders nor I are likely to see the year 2050, but like the old farmer planting olive trees from which he won’t live long enough to harvest any fruit, Bernie is working today so that our children’s children’s children might have a future. Later today, in Paradise, California, Bernie intends to reveal his ambitious plan for dealing with the crisis of our Climate Chaos.

Unlike the tentative and measured plans of his competitors to be the next President of the United States, Bernie is following in the footsteps of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and proposing bold steps that have a chance to ensure that we have a 2050 and our world lives to see the 22nd century.

Emily Holden and Lauren Gambino, reporting in Sanders to unveil $16tn climate plan, far more aggressive than rivals’ proposals for The Guardian, write:

Bernie Sanders has laid out an ambitious 10-year, $16.3tn national mobilization to avert climate catastrophe, warning that the US risks losing $34.5tn in economic productivity by the end of the century if it does not respond with the urgency the threat demands.

The Vermont senator has long spoken of the climate crisis as a existential danger to the US and the world, and he has previously endorsed a Green New Deal, which he put forward with the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Sanders will formally unveil his proposal on Thursday during a campaign visit to Paradise, California, a town that was destroyed in 2018 by one of the deadliest wildfires in US history. After the tour, the senator will hold a climate change town hall in Chico, California.

If none of his competitors go full-on solution, the way Bernie seems to be prepared to announce today, I am prepared—and this will make Tim Russo very happy—to immediately cut my list possible candidates to one: Bernie.

Look for everyone even remotely tied to the carbon extraction industry to immediately turn up the noise machine promising doom and gloom—they’re coming to take away your monster trucks!—if Bernie is ever allowed anywhere near the oval office.

We won’t know all the details until after the Paradise speech this afternoon, but Holden and Gambino have some of the broad strokes.

In a summary of Sanders’ plan, his campaign compares the scale of the challenges the US is facing to the 1940s, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt “within three short years restructured the entire economy in order to win the war and defeat fascism”. The Green New Deal draws its name from Roosevelt’s New Deal economic programs that helped lead the nation out of the Great Depression.

This plan has the potential to make millennials worthy of the legacy of the women and men who came out of the Great Depression and defeat fascism; they could be our next greatest generation. Holden and Gambino continue:

Sanders follows several other Democratic candidates in releasing a specific proposal for limiting the pollution from cars, power plants and other human activities that are heating the planet. Yet his proposal is much more aggressive than other candidates’–and far beyond what Barack Obama aimed to achieve during his presidency.

His goal is to eliminate US carbon emissions by 2050, a target laid out by scientists with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He says he would create millions of jobs and rally the world’s leaders to join forces in the fight against climate change.

Sanders’ plan would reach for 100% renewable power for both electricity and transportation, the top two contributors to climate change in the US, by 2030 – aiming for complete decarbonization by 2050. He says he would expand public ownership of power companies and make electricity “virtually free” by 2035.

By comparison, Joe Biden, the former vice-president and currently the top-polling Democratic candidate, has proposed spending $1.7tn to neutralize the country’s carbon emissions by 2050. Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced a $2tn “green manufacturing plan” that would invest in renewable industries and create a National Institutes of Clean Energy.

And while Biden and other candidates have pledged to make the US carbon neutral by 2050, they stop short of aiming for complete decarbonization. Carbon neutrality could allow some emissions, as long as they are offset by pollution cuts elsewhere.

Neo-liberal, centrist half-measures like Biden’s just won’t do.

Bonus No. 1: Full Frontal Rewind: Gun Control.

Bonus No. 2: Is Patriotism Possible?

Bonus No. 3: The National Rhetoric Association Pushes An Extreme Interpretation Of The First Amendment.

Bonus No. 4: New ‘must read’ book about Trump has 1 needless flaw.

Bonus No. 5: Some ‘sinister tactics’ those brave protesters in Queensland could have used but also didn’t.

Now I have a second friend* who has written a screen play: Tim Russo. In our Friday-morning salons, Tim has talked of little else but his fascination with the events of 2 July 1863 on Cemetery Ridge near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the exploits of a nearly forgotten regiment of mostly immigrants designated the 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry.

Tim has written extensively in the past four months or so about the 1st Minnesota as the screenplay began to take form. He started his blog posts on 24 April with #TCMthoughts–Gettysburg (1993) forgets 1st Minnesota. He writes:

…[M]y chief criticism of the film is its depiction of the second day, July 2, 1863, which entirely focuses on the 20th Maine’s heroic saving of the Union flank on Little Round Top, as if nothing else occurred on July 2. Jeff Daniels certainly deserved an Oscar for his portrayal of the 20th Maine’s colonel, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Daniels towers over this film, as the 20th Maine did over Little Round Top. The impression is left that Chamberlain in that perilous hour literally saved the existence of the United States, which is not much of an exaggeration, given the circumstances on the battlefield and the wider war itself.

The theory goes, had the Union’s extreme flank failed on Little Round Top, where the 20th Maine was last in line, the entire federal line would have been rolled up, Lee would have won the battle, and the Confederacy would exist today, the United States destroyed as a country. Likely true. However, hours after the 20th Maine held, Lee’s echelon attack continued rolling northward against the union line, even penetrating it…very briefly. That briefness was thanks to the First Minnesota.

Just a couple hours after the 20th Maine saved Little Round Top, just a a bit northward along the Union’s tenuous line on Cemetery Ridge, Lee’s army was routing Dan Sickles’ corps in the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard. Having disobeyed orders to remain on the ridge, Sickles marched his men out into a trap on lower ground. Surrounded, Sickles’ corps was cut to ribbons and in complete confused terrified retreat, unable to be rallied, running right past the First Minnesota, which had been stationed atop Cemetery Ridge to protect a lone battery, just in case.

The “just in case” happened.

General Winfield Scott Hancock rushed up on horseback as Lee’s echelon attack rolled toward the ridge. The remains of Sickles corps rushed by Hancock in panic. Frantically searching for enough men to buy 10 minutes time for men rushing up the back of the ridge to hold it, Hancock came upon the 262 men of the First Minnesota, which had been sitting there, watching Sickles corps march out, set itself down, then hurry right on back. The First Minnesota had been contemplating their own impending finest hour, for 2 hours.

“What regiment is this?” Hancock shouted to Colonel William Colvill.

“First Minnesota, sir!” Colvill shouted back.

Hancock pointed at the approaching Confederate brigade down the ridge. “Colonel do you see those colors?”

“Yes, sir.” Colvill replied.

“Then take them.” Hancock ordered.

Within seconds, the First Minnesota rose as one, fixed bayonets, and ran down Cemetery Ridge into a force outnumbering them 5-1. Many did not even make it the first step. Men fell headlong the entire 300 yard race down the ridge, then plunged into the Confederates with such a force, Confederate Brigadier General Cadmus M. Wilcox opposite them thought he had met a far larger force than his own brigade…

Following that initial post, Tim wrote At their High Water Mark, Confederates turned tail & ran like scared rabbits on 4 May; Pickett’s Charge green lighted by a Confederate gone mad in real time; Ambrose Wright on 5 May; First spin campaign of the Lost Cause erupted instantly after Gettysburg on 18 May; The invention of the Confederacy’s fraudulent “High Water Mark” monument had Union help on 23 May; Capital showed its hand as the Confederacy collapsed on 27 May; August Willich’s speech to his POW reception in Cincinnati May 20, 1863 on 6 June; The Lost Cause’s Money Maps on 25 June; and The First Minnesota’s newspaper on 1 July.

Then he went quiet, clearly pounding the keyboard to make the fever visions work and today, he announced: So I wrote a movie. Tim writes:

Been a rough (really rough) year here at the bottom of late stage capitalism’s barrel. When things get rough, I write more. Being a canary in a coal mine, one tends to chirp louder the filthier the air, even though no one ever, ever hears you die before the mine collapses. Thus, fear not dear readers! I shall chirp on, and have been chirping all summer! (in standard Hollywood script format–Courier 12pt.)

Tim should definitely send copies of the screenplay to Anthony and Joe Russo, especially if he can convince either Jessie Ventura, Al Frankin or maybe Garrison Keillor to play Colvill.

*The first was Richard Montanari.

Bonus No. 1: Ohio just got a shade redder…

Bonus No. 2: March for Our Lives unveils sweeping gun reform agenda: ‘The time is now.’

In the deck below the headline on one of Matt Taibbi’s pieces, a copy editor wrote: America is the first country to ever elect a Mad King, and the way things are going, we may be dumb enough to do it twice. Mad kings are nothing new—see George III, Ludwig of Bavaria and, of course, Aerys II Targaryen—but the concept of electing a mad king president?

That’s a horse of a different color. Taibbi, writing in Trump 2020: Be Very Afraid for Rolling Stone, believes that if we did such a mad thing once, we can do it again. So, who really mad here? President Donald John Trump or the Americans who elected himl? Taibbi ledes from the city only 60 minutes south of Dayton along I-75, where pigs fly, our very own Cincinnati, Ohio:

The Queen City’s many bridges are sealed off, its sky is dirty with helicopters, and seemingly every cop for 100 miles is patrolling Pete Rose Way along the Ohio River. A crowd of 20,000 or more stands in punishing heat, waiting to enter U.S. Bank Arena. The evil rumor buzzing down the line of MAGA hats is that not everyone will get in to see Donald Trump.

“Can we just get in for a minute?” complains a boy of about 10 to his mother. There are a lot of kids here.

Donald Trump doesn’t visit Middle America. He descends upon it. His rallies are awesome spectacles. Gawkers come down from the hills. If NASA traveled the country holding showings of the first captured alien life-form, the turnout would be similar. The pope driving monster trucks might get this much attention.

Almost everyone in line is wearing 45 merch. Trump is the most T-shirtable president in history, and it’s not even close. Trumpinator tees are big (“2020: I’LL BE BACK”), but you’ll also see Trump as Rambo (complete with headband, ammo belt, and phallic rocket-launcher), Trump as the Punisher (a Trump pompadour atop the famous skull), even Trump as Superman (pulling his suit open to reveal a giant T).

Slogans include “Trump 2020: Grab ’em by the Pussy Again!” and the ubiquitous “Trump 2020: Fuck Your Feelings.”

One merch hawker—an African American man with a visor, wraparound sunglasses, and spiked, dyed-white hair—is snaking through the crowd, pushing a T-shirt: “Donald Fuckin’ Trump.” On the back, the shirt reads “Bitch I’m the President!” “Five bucks for hats, 10 for tees!” he yells. “ ‘Bitch, I’m the president!’ ‘Make America great again!’ ”

“Four more years!” someone in the crowd yells back, to cheers.

Two and a half years into his presidency, Trump has already staked a claim to a role in history usually reserved for hereditary monarchs at the end of a line of inbreeding. Historians will list him somewhere between Vlad the Impaler and France’s Charles VI, who thought his buttocks were made of glass.

Much of America loves its Mad King, whose works are regularly on display. Russians under Ivan the Terrible used to watch dogs being hurled over the Kremlin walls when the tsar’s mood was bad. Americans have grown used to late-night insults tweeted at nuclear powers from the White House bedroom.

This is our country in 2019 and we have no one to blame but ourselves. For those people who shake their heads in disbelief that anyone in their right mind could vote for Trump, Taibbi has this to say:

The most common remark you hear from Trump voters is that he’s “relatable” and isn’t “phony.” Blue-state audiences tempted to howl at this should try to understand this phenomenon, because it speaks to a legitimate problem Democrats have.

The average American likes meat, sports, money, porn, cars, cartoons, and shopping. Less popular: socialism, privilege-checking, and the world ending in 10 years. Ironically, perhaps because of Trump, Democratic Party rhetoric in 2020 is relentlessly negative about the American experience. Every speech is a horror story about synagogue massacres or people dying without insulin or atrocities at the border. Republicans who used to complain about liberals “apologizing for America” were being silly, but 2020 Democrats sound like escapees from the Killing Fields.

Ronald Reagan once took working-class voters away from Democrats by offering permission to be proud of the flag. Trump offers permission to occupy the statistical American mean: out of shape, suffering from gas, poorly read, anti-intellectual, treasuring things above meaning, and hiding an awful credit history.

Trump in this way is more all-American than Mark Spitz, Liberace, Oprah, Audie Murphy, and Marilyn Monroe. He’s a monument to the consumption economy. He represents fake boobs, the short con, the tall tale, gas guzzlers, and a hundred other American traditions.

This is why the endless chronicling of Trump’s lies does little to dent his popularity. Trump’s voters don’t need to read PolitiFact to see what Trump’s about. They see it in his waistline. Few politicians in history have revealed what they are to voters more than Trump. Christ, we even know what the man’s penis looks like

Yep. That pretty much nails it and at this point, I’m not even sure another great recession can save the Democratic Party.

Bonus No. 1: BAD BOYS, BAD BOYS WHATCHA GONNA DO…

“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…