Organizations are not benevolent—especially organizations that have benevolent in their name—except to their own members. Even when they are formed with the purported primary intention of doing good works, the good works are secondary to the core function of furthering the literal fortunes of members. If any individual, or group of individual was truly interested in doing good, they would do so quietly, with no fanfare. Their promotion budget wouldn’t be small, it wouldn’t exist.

Yes. I’m a cynic in the modern–everyone has a hidden agenda—sense.

Ralph Nader is far less cynical than me, which just shows how outrageously my own cynicism must be, and he does find the occasional good association.

But not often. Nader, in Professional Societies: Corporate Service, or Public Services for You!

They call themselves non-profit professional societies, but they often act as enabling trade associations for the companies and businesspeople who fund them. At their worst, they serve their paymasters and remain in the shadows, avoiding publicity and visibility. When guided by their better angels, professional societies can be authoritative tribunes for a more healthy and safe society.

I am referring to the organizations that stand for their respective professions–automotive, electrical, chemical and mechanical engineers; Continue Reading »

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a…
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
…shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

—The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed by the Congress on 31 January 1865, and ratified by the states on 6 December 1865.

I first watched Ava DuVernay’s 13th nearly two years ago. Much has happened since then that has been bad and much has happened that has been good.

Yesterday we got a bit of the good when ABC canceled the television show of an overt racist. Good on them.

Another bit of good news was that Karim Powell, a Black, New York City police officer, arrested by two white New York City police officers, is suing the city for $5 million. (I guess we can add #beingbluewhileblack to the list.)

One more bit of good news cam eyesterday wiht *$s’s afternoon shutdown of 8,000+ stores so that employees could sit for an all-hands anti-bias training

All the bad news is plastered elsewhere.

This morning I revisited 13th and also watched Oprah Winfrey’s interview of DuVernay.

I was surprised when I learned that the 13th Amendment was not Duvernay’s initial focus and Right off the top she teaches a lesson that I wish all my students could internalize when she tells Oprah:

As I was trying to explain what was happening now, it became unreasonable and incomplete to try and tell the story of now without telling the story of the past. You can’t do that. That’s how we find ourselves in this present day. People always as me now, “What do we do now? How are we gonna handle this now, if you disagree with the current administration or the incoming administration?” And my answer is you have to look to the past. It’s not as if this hasn’t happened before.

To paraphrase George Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to be played by it.

A common trope among law-and-order aficionados is that plea bargains are bad. Guilty people should be tried and given the maximum sentence. And I don’t disagree with that. Guilty people should be found guilty in a jury trial, but prosecutors don’t want that to happen because their cases are so weak that they know that a jury would return a verdict of not guilty.

Instead, prosecutors threaten innocent people with a plea bargain that, according to one of people interviewed for the documentary, is a choice between plead guilty and do three years or go to trial and risk getting 30 years.

That’s not justice, that terrorism.

But it works. Ninety-seven percent of those people who are locked up have plea-bargained.

Ninety-seven percent of people currently incarcerated, never had a trial.

As Oprah says, “that is staggering.”

Why is that number so high? Because, as Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, says, “if everyone had a trial the system would fall apart.” He adds, “Money, not culpability, shapes the outcome of most trials.”

And none of this is happenstance. None of this is fate or karma. Nothing is willy-nilly and the American Legislative Exchange Council—a term paper mill for hyper pro-business legislation— bears most of the blame. In response to a Oprah’s question as to what might have surprised her in conducting the interviews, Ava responds:

The piece of the puzzle that really startled me, that I knew nothing about going in—really, nothing about—was ALEC. That was a full investigation. It took me and my great editor and friend Spencer Averick down a rabbit hole for about six months. Trying to learn it thoroughly enough to share it.

Of her experience of learning about ALEC, Ava says:I couldn’t even believe it was real. I couldn’t believe that there’s a shadowy group that’s been around for decades, of folks who influence and literally craft our laws, who are not elected, who are not our lawmakers, that theyt pull our strings. They’re puppeteers for our lawmakers. We’re like sheep. It’s scarey, it’s dangerous, it startling, it was stunning to me.

The interview ends with closing sequence from 13th featuring Donald John Trump talking about The Good Old Days. where he makes crystal clear about when America was last great and what specific era he wants the country to return to so that he can Make America Great Again.

Instead of ‘nigga’ they use the word ‘criminal’ —Common.

We are all human at the kitchen table.

Seriously, she goosesteps…

While progressives are working toward a blue tsunami in November, a variety of activist groups are fighting to marginalize, shut down and, yes, convert the (mostly) white men in the Alt-Right Wrong movement.

David Smith, reporting in After Charlottesville: how a slew of lawsuits pin down the far right for The Guardian, writes:

Last week, at a courthouse a short distance away [from where Heather Heyer was murdered], lawyers sought to persuade a federal judge that organisers of the far-right rally should be held accountable.

The case, which could leave prominent white nationalists such as Richard Spencer facing ruin, exemplifies a broader legal offensive aimed at throwing sand into the gears of the “alt-right” movement. Nine months after the show of strength in Charlottesville, there are signs that the effort is working as hate groups haemorrhage cash, are banished from social media platforms and turn on each other in vicious turf wars.

“The legal strategy is to send them into disarray, send them scrambling and hold each one of them to account,” said David Dinielli, the deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), noting a groundswell among lawyers, victims and advocacy groups. “The bottom line is all of these traditional legal theories are tools to make people answer for their conduct, bring them out of the shadows, expose them for what they are and ultimately show they have less power than they think.”

The election of Donald Trump in November 2016 was seen as a catalyst for the empowerment of white nationalism. Days later, a few blocks from the White House, an exultant Spencer shouted “Hail Trump!” and led supporters in Nazi salutes. Steve Bannon, who previously boasted his Breitbart News website was “the platform for the alt-right”, was installed as White House chief strategist. Hardliner Stephen Miller also took a senior role.

Several people interviewed by Smith make the very valid point that this is a short-term strategy and that unless solutions that get at the roots of the hate are found, the battle will be endless. Tony McAleer founder of Life After Hate and a self-described former, offers a long-term way into the light. Jason Wilson, reporting in Life after white supremacy: the former neo-fascist now working to fight hate for The Guardian, writes:

Tony McAleer has a word for people who have left violent extremist movements. He calls them “formers”.

McAleer is a former himself. In the 1980s, he was deeply involved in the neo-Nazi group White Aryan Resistance and was involved in anti-immigrant activism, Holocaust denial and street violence. In the 1990s, he attracted increasing notoriety through a series of publicity stunts and by running a white supremacist phone line.

And for the past 20 years, he has undergone the long, sometimes painful process of leaving it all behind.

He sees the pathway from “current” to “former” as a difficult and lonely one, laden with snares. It is one that he and his colleagues at Life After Hate – all of whom are former extremists – try their best to help shepherd others along. The group, which is a virtual organization with a network of members throughout North America, collaborates on research into deradicalization and runs a support network for those who, like them, have made the decision to leave violent extremism behind.

This multi-pronged approach makes the most sense.

Now, if we could only find a Stetson Kennedy for the 21st century.

I think I first began to think about charitable giving when I watched the annual Jerry Lewis Memorial Day Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy as a child.

Charity, to my young Boy Scout mind, was a good thing. As the years progressed, however, I thought more about how money is raised and redistributed and how there was no certainty in the number or size of the financial gifts that might be distributed to the deserving. That last word, the deserving, was problematic.

Who got to decide?

Clearly, the person, or organization, with the money. No one could tell anyone—outside of taxes, of course—where your money was going to go.

Were the dollars collected each year by Lewis well spent? Probably. Are telethons, depending upon emotional appeals the best way to solve medical problems? Probably not.

Still, Lewis collected donations, he busted his hump and cajoled and entertained and asked for every penny, at no financial profit to himself.

His last telethon as host was in 2010—MDA canceled the telethons in 2015—but what Lewis did was very different from our current class of billionaires who purport to give their own money.

Peter Bloom, writing in the long-read The trouble with charitable billionaires for The Guardian, explores the CEO Society practicing philanthrocapitalism:

In February 2017, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in the headlines for his charitable activities. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by the tech billionaire and his wife, Priscilla Chan, handed out over $3m in grants to aid the housing crisis in the Silicon Valley area. David Plouffe, the Initiative’s president of policy and advocacy, stated that the grants were intended to “support those working to help families in immediate crisis while supporting research into new ideas to find a long-term solution–a two-step strategy that will guide much of our policy and advocacy work moving forward.”

Zuckerberg’s apparent generosity, it would seem, is a small contribution to a large problem that was created by the success of the industry he is involved in. In one sense, the housing grants (equivalent to the price of just one-and-a-half average Menlo Park homes) are trying to put a sticking plaster on a problem that Facebook and other Bay Area corporations aided and abetted. It would appear that Zuckerberg was redirecting a fraction of the spoils of neoliberal tech capitalism, in the name of generosity, to try to address the problems of wealth inequality created by a social and economic system that allowed those spoils to accrue in the first place.

It is easy to think of Zuckerberg as some kind of CEO hero–a once regular kid whose genius made him one of the richest men in the world, and who decided to use that wealth for the benefit of others. The image he projects is of altruism untainted by self-interest. A quick scratch of the surface reveals that the structure of Zuckerberg’s charity enterprise is informed by much more than good-hearted altruism. Even while many have applauded Zuckerberg for his generosity, the nature of this apparent charity was openly questioned from the outset.

The wording of Zuckerberg’s 2015 letter could easily have been interpreted as meaning that he was intending to donate $45bn to charity. As investigative reporter Jesse Eisinger reported at the time, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative through which this giving was to be funnelled is not a not-for-profit charitable foundation, but a limited liability company. This legal status has significant practical implications, especially when it comes to tax. As a company, the Initiative can do much more than charitable activity: its legal status gives it rights to invest in other companies, and to make political donations. Effectively the company does not restrict Zuckerberg’s decision-making as to what he wants to do with his money; he is very much the boss. Moreover, as Eisinger described it, Zuckerberg’s bold move yielded a huge return on investment in terms of public relations for Facebook, even though it appeared that he simply “moved money from one pocket to the other” while being “likely never to pay any taxes on it.”.

According to historian Mikkel Thorup:

Philanthrocapitalism rests on the claim that “capitalist mechanisms are superior to all others (especially the state) when it comes to not only creating economic but also human progress, and that the market and market actors are or should be made the prime creators of the good society.”

From where I stand, any ism that includes capitalism cannot be a good idea, but you should read the rest of Bloom’s excellent piece and see how you think.

When I earned my crow and became the newest petty officer in my division on board the USS Bainbridge CGN 25, I also became the supply petty officer for G Division. I served in that role for a year and the job was one that I enjoyed. I made sure that the missile houses and armory had all the maintenance supplies they needed and stayed on top of spare parts for repairs.

I didn’t have a budget per se—that was the responsibility of the weapons’s officer—but I did see what costs were. I saw my share of $500 rolls of duct tape (bright red and designated nuclear weapon’s tape) and other really, really expensive items.

Those items, however, paled before the unaudited expenses of our global military budget.

Ralph Nader, writing in Audit the Outlaw Military Budget Draining America’s Necessities, explains:

Top military, diplomatic, and political leaders have exposed, warned of, and condemned our runaway, unaudited military budgets for decades, to no avail. (For many examples, see America’s War Machine: Vested Interests, Endless Conflicts by James McCartney, with Molly Sinclair McCartney.) They usually come to the same desperate conclusion: that only organized citizens back in their Congressional Districts can make Congress stop this spending spree. Only us, Americans!

From 1953, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his “Cross of Iron” speech before the Convention of Newspaper Editors, to full-length addresses by President Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, the warnings about unrestrained military spending have not been addressed. The military budget—now at about a trillion dollars when you add up all costs—is spiraling out of control and draining Continue Reading »

Boycotts are a tricky proposition, particularly if you don’t regularly hand money over to the company that is the target of the boycott.

I prefer buycotts. What’s a buycott you might well ask. A buycott is a type of protest aimed at a company or country with dubious ethical standards in which consumers buy the products of another company or country.

Back in October of 2005, I started my THE LITTLE WALMART TOOTHPASTE BUYCOTT…. Today, I’m starting a new one: The Little Any Pizza But Pizza Hut Buycott.

Let me say this upfront. I like Pizza Hut pizza, particularly the thin and crispy pizza. I’m going to forgo that pleasure because back in February the National Football League replaced Papa John’s with Pizza Hut as their official pizza sponsor and I want to slam the NFL for their racist decision to ban on-field protests by (mostly) African American players.

Pizza Hut has lots of competition. Just here in North Royalton, Ohio (the 44133 zipcode), in addition to Pizza Hut we have Zeppe’s and Papa John’s, Fire Truck, Angie’s, Augie’s, Antonio’s, Tony Maloney’s and my local favorite Angie’s. No one here will need to deprive themselves of pizza, but they can deprive the Pizza Hut and, by proxy, the NFL, by buycotting the chain.

If you think a buycott is a good idea, Please let Pizza Hut corporate know. Send them an email and copy a bunch of your friends. Let the world know that you’re buycotting Pizza Hut because you think that free speech is a good idea by posting the email to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whichever social media account you have.

Here’s what I wrote:

Good morning,

I really like Pizza Hut pizza. A lot. I’m particularly fond of your thin ’n (sic) crispy style.

Sadly, for the foreseeable future I’ll be buying my pizza from one of the other eight local and national shops in my small community of North Royalton, Ohio.

I’m doing so because I am strongly opposed to the National Football League’s decision to squelch free speech by players. By exiling to the locker room any players who wish to take a knee during the playing of our national anthem in protest of the rampant police murders of unarmed African Americans, the NFL has taken a step too far.

As the NFL’s official pizza, Pizza Hut is the first target of my buycott.

Last evening I posted my first call for others to join this buycott and I will continue to do so until two actions occur: first, Pizza Hut publicly announces that it supports the players and opposes the NFL’s decision and second, the NFL rescinds their decision.

I look forward to your response.

Jeff Hess
North Royalton, Ohio

What I suspect will happen is—as Kara Brown suggests—that the player’s union will tell the owners to put their exile where the sun don’t shine and the protests will continue. This is, of course, a strategic move on the part of the owners. They know full well that the union won’t tolerate this nonsense but they will have tried and will be able to blame that damned union for the failure.

We ought not to let them get away with such a subterfuge.

Please write your own email or letter if you think the buycott is a good idea.

I continue to be in awe of the kids, the young women and men who have rejected hopes and prayers; the voting class of 2018 who have rejected the idea that money is free speech and who believe that their lives are more important than anyone’s Second Amendment right to own a semi-automatic firearm; real patriots who believe that the USA is more important than the NRA.

We are on the precipice of a Summer of Rage.

The Associated Press, reporting in Parkland students stage supermarket ‘die-ins’ to protest chain’s NRA link, has the story:

Survivors of the Parkland school shooting lay down in “die-ins” at two local Publix supermarkets Friday to protest the chain’s support for a gubernatorial candidate aligned with the National Rifle Association, as the company announced a suspension of political contributions.

The students from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school shouted “USA, not NRA!” and caused brief delays at the checkout as customers navigated carts around them on the floor. Pro-NRA counter-protesters also showed up at one store, and two men almost came to blows before police intervened.

“A lot of people don’t support who Publix is supporting,” said Haylee Shepherd, a 15-year-old sophomore at Stoneman Douglas, who joined 13 fellow protesters on the floor for about 10 minutes at one of the stores. “It’s going to reflect on them as a brand and people shopping there.”

Publix has been criticized by the students for supporting the agriculture commissioner and gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam, a Republican who has called himself a “proud NRA sellout”. The activists have called for a boycott of the supermarket.

Publix announced earlier this week that it would “re-evaluate” its donations amid the outcry. In another statement Friday, a company spokeswoman, Maria Brous, said the chain would halt its contributions for now as it continues that re-evaluation.

The National Rifle Association—and the manufacturers of guns who pour cash into the lobbyist group—have no shame, and lets be fair, neither do the men in women in charge of Publix; but when your political contributions are dragged out into the sunlight, and your donors, your customers have options that allow them to not spend money and fill your coffers, fear can be a powerful inducement to at least act like you’re ashamed of your shameful actions.

David Hogg is absolutely correct.

I’m an atheist, but I got here by reading a lot of religious writings—wandering and wondering—before coming to my decision.

So, while I can’t quote a lot of what I’ve read, a few jots and tittles have stuck with me. One such is from Matthew 6:6 in the Christian bible:

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

That works, if you’re trying to figure out how you feel about a thought or act, but not when dealing with First Amendment issues.

The National Football League doesn’t understand that. Greg Cote, writing in NFL’s new solution to national anthem controversy? Hide the problem and it goes away for the Miami Herald, does:

The NFL’s solution to its uncomfortable truth? Hide it. Put it in the shadows so maybe folks forget it’s still there.

The league and commissioner Roger Goodell cannot win on this ongoing national anthem controversy, a mess that is not solved or erased just because the compromise of a new leaguewide policy came out of Wednesday’s league meetings in Atlanta.. The new stance was unanimously approved by owners, meaning the Dolphins’ Stephen Ross fell in line

There will be no unanimity, though, in how the new policy is received. Clearly, it is a victory for those angered or put off by the sight of players kneeling in protest during the anthem. It is a defeat for those kneeling.

The new policy in effect for this coming season will require players who are on the field to stand during the anthem, and give those who wish not to stand the right to remain in the locker room.

President George Walker Bush did not create the policy of Free Speech Zones as a way to marginalize and hide away free speech back in 2004, but he did greatly expand the tool. (To be fair, President Barack Hussein Obama signed legislation to expand the anti-free speech tool in 2012.)

Clearly, the corporatists at the NFL want to make locker rooms into free speech zones.

That must not stand. Cote continues:

It’s like, if we are all gathered at the supper table and bowing our heads for grace, Uncle Ed the atheist is free to not participate — as long as he leaves the table and waits in another room, unseen, while we pray.

Henceforth, if players kneel or sit during the anthem while on the field, their teams will be subject to a league fine and the players to a team fine. The NFL considered also imposing on offending teams a 15-yard penalty but thought better of it.

The NFL just placed a Band-Aid on its problem, makeup that fails to cover the scar.

He understates the problem there. We’re dealing with an open, bleeding wound; not a scar. Damon Young, commenting in The NFL Is an Internet Troll for The Root, writes:

It is near the end of May, a month after the draft and months before training camp, and an NFL-related story is the sports world’s biggest one. In a bizarre attempt to appease the people who pretended to be so offended by the anthem-related protests that they pretended to boycott the NFL—a population that includes our president—the NFL decided to craft a shitty and self-immolating answer to a question no one was asking.

If they had decided to do and say nothing—like, literally nothing—then a few players would have still protested, a few fans would have still rained Budweiser-scented boos on the field and a few fans would have continued to boycott in solidarity with the players, but that would have been that. Instead, they decided to do a thing that is forcing people to react. Releasing their new anthem policy in the dead of fucking May is like getting into an argument about socks with a guy at the bar, agreeing to disagree and then, three hours later, adding, “And that’s why yo’ mama a bitch!”

Of course, the NFL’s craven need to kowtow to the lowest common denominator definitely matters here. But the league also possesses an equally ugly compulsion to always be a thing that people are talking about and reacting to. It’s the same congelation of narcissism and sociopathy owned by (again) our president and at least several of the people who will appear in the comments attached to this post. The organization as a whole functions and thrives as a well-oiled troll.

Young doesn’t want to just boycott the NFL, he wants to shut the NFL down.

Earlier today, I read a piece from the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah suggesting that a total cancellation of the league isn’t just right but inevitable. I’ve been searching—not just today but for a couple of years now—for a hole in that argument. But besides the dozen or so new black millionaires it produces every year and whichever emotional and/or nostalgic attachments we might have to it, I can’t think of a compelling reason that the NFL should even still exist, while I can list several reasons it shouldn’t.

The NFL provides no inherent social good that can’t be replicated elsewhere; it literally threatens (and shortens) the lives of its participants; and it conjures opportunities to remind us—and “us” is “anyone who isn’t a straight white male”—that it gives no shits about us. Calling it an internet troll might actually be too kind. It’s a fucking cigarette.

Billionaire owners begin to whine in 5… 4… 3…

Hundreds of thousands of young men and women came to Washington DC on 14 April to protest the slaughter of their friends by a nation that seemed to value the rights of a handful of people to own semi-automatic firearms over their right to actually live long enough to enjoy the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness declared to among their inalienable rights at our nation’s birth in 1776.

As many like to declare, freedom isn’t free and the no one can afford to allow others to do the heavy lifting; they are declaring for a second Freedom Summer.

Many have bent to pick up the burden, to forgo the pleasures of being young, in order to fight for that which moneyed corporate interests would deny them. From among all the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida who were not murdered on 14 February, two stand out: Emma González and David Hogg.

When many in the voting class of 2018 are thinking about college, Hogg has a bigger agenda.

Lois Beckett, reporting in Parkland survivor David Hogg aims to ‘create the NRA–except for the opposite issues’ for The Guardian, explains:

In the past three months, David Hogg has helped organize a protest march that mobilized hundreds of thousands of people around the world. He and his younger sister have written a book about the birth of a new, youth-led gun control movement after the school shooting at their high school in Parkland, Florida. And when a Fox News host mocked him for not getting into college, the 18-year-old sparked an advertiser boycott of her show.

But the real impact of Hogg and his fellow Parkland students’ activism will depend almost entirely on what happens in November’s midterm elections – whether he and other teenage gun violence prevention activists can deliver on their vow to get National Rifle Association-backed candidates voted out of office.

That’s why Hogg is looking at voter data in places like Republican congresswoman Mia Love’s district in Utah.

“The youth voter turnout rate is around 6%. Six!” Hogg said in an interview with the Guardian on Monday in New York, where he was accepting an award for his advocacy. Love, he said, had received about $63,000 from the NRA. “If we can double the turnout rate, we could probably change the election, and get someone that’s not supported by the NRA elected,” Hogg said. His full goal: for youth turnout in Utah to be “80%. At least.”

Hogg wasn’t necessarily going to be focusing on Love’s district, he said. “It’s just a case example.”

Over the summer, Hogg and other March for Our Lives organizers will be working on what they hope will be “the largest voter registration push for youth ever in American history”. Rather than heading to college after he graduates from high school later this spring, he said: “I’m going to be working on a candidate basis over the fall in key congressional districts.”

Hogg understands how the corporations profiting from the sale of semi-automatic firearms use the National Rifle Association to protect their wealth. The Voting Class of 2018 can play that game too. Beckett continues:

A poll earlier this spring found that nearly a quarter of respondents believed that the Parkland students were “being manipulated by outside groups” rather than advocating for issues they really believe in. In a wide-ranging interview on Monday at Manhattan’s University Club, Hogg spoke for 40 minutes without a single adviser or strategist hovering nearby. He jumped quickly from issue to issue, touching on summer campaign trail goals, a protest in Washington he’s hoping to organize against the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and the non-partisan behavioral interventions that prevent gun violence, like the Cure Violence model, that he believes both Democratic and Republican politicians ignore.

“If you look into it,” he said, “what we need to create is the NRA–except for the opposite issues.”

What I fear is that Hogg risks, in a very real way, the fate of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. What the trolls have failed to do online, some corporatist tool will plot to fulfill.

Such loathsome action failed in 1964. We must ensure a greater failure in 2018.

Remember how we used to feel about Dow Chemical and Napalm…

At school, we had Raytheon representatives come to our school and talk about jobs, and tech. And at the end of the presentation, kids were allowed to ask questions. These questions were all very cute and twee, stuff about computers, and robots. When I raised my hand, I asked him: At the start of your presentation, you gave a list of countries who have bought your products. Since you seem comfortable enough with selling to Saudi Arabia to brag about it to a room of high school students, I must ask: do you have any concerns with your products being used to commit war crimes? The representative, visibly caught off guard, said that the US Government technically approves all transactions. To which I responded, that neither answers my question, nor inspires confidence. —comment from Connor Walters.

So, Stefan Halper is no newbie to the world of campaign spying and there are some really good ass-covering reasons why the administration really didn’t want Halper’s name out there as the mole inside presidential campaign of Donald John Trump.

Glenn Greenwald, writing in The FBI Informant Who Monitored the Trump Campaign, Stefan Halper, Oversaw a CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential Election for The Intercept, begins:

An extremely strange episode that has engulfed official Washington over the last two weeks came to a truly bizarre conclusion on Friday night. And it revolves around a long-time, highly sketchy CIA operative, Stefan Halper.

Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.

Oops.

I remember 1980. That was the only year that I ever cast a second vote for a presidential candidate. Ronald Wilson Reagan, of course, had an excellent reasons to have a spy inside the Carter campaign. He (or more likely his handlers) knew that an October surprise regarding the Iranian hostage crisis would sink the actor’s bid for the White House. Greenwald continues.

Halper’s history is quite troubling, particularly his central role in the scandal in the 1980 election. Equally troubling are the DOJ and FBI’s highly inflammatory and, at best, misleading claims that they made to try to prevent Halper’s identity from being reported.

To begin with, it’s obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor the Trump campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that 1980 Presidential election spying campaign.

It was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter did this scandal emerge. It was leaked by right-wing officials inside the Reagan administration who wanted to undermine officials they regarded as too moderate, including then White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who was a Bush loyalist.

The NYT in 1983 said the Reagan campaign spying operation “involved a number of retired Central Intelligence Agency officials and was highly secretive.” The article, by then-NYT reporter Leslie Gelb, added that its “sources identified Stefan A. Halper, a campaign aide involved in providing 24-hour news updates and policy ideas to the traveling Reagan party, as the person in charge.” Halper, now 73, had also worked with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Alexander Haig as part of the Nixon administration.

And:

In contrast to the picture purposely painted by the DOJ and its allies that this informant was some of sort super-secret, high-level, covert intelligence asset, the NYT described him as what he actually is: “the informant is well known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years.”

The question must be asked, however, who decided to put Halper in side the Trump campaign and what was his function?

Greenwald, in this story at least, does not provide the specifics beyond that Halper was working for the FBI and that his job was to gather information for what we know call the Russia investigation.

I have a complicated relationship with food—food as sustenance, food as medicine, food as distraction—but I’ve not thought before so much about food as politics. Yeah, I know about the whole politicians on the campaign trail munching on the ethnic food of the day, but what David Chang is talking about is different.

This weekend I’m re-reading Jan Chozen Bays’ Mindful Eating, but I’m also going to start watching Chang’s Ugly Delicious.

President Donald John Trump is like the society matron who thinks the solution to homelessness for people to just stay in their summerhouse. The levels of callousness boggle the mind and kicking out the medical support beams to please the base is going to make people sick and cost human lives.

Ralph Nader, writing in Trump: Making America Dread Again, explains:

Donald Trump is a well-known, self-described germaphobe. Unfortunately, he is not concerned about other Americans’ exposure to germs and disease. With leading infectious disease scientists from the Centers for Disease Control to the University of Minnesota warning about a global influenza pandemic (“not if, when”), Trump’s warmongering madman, John Bolton, has closed down a seasoned two-man global health security team.

The Washington Post reported last week about “the abrupt departure of Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, a respected scientist from the National Security Council,” who was “the top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic.”

At the time of Admiral Ziemer’s expulsion, a new Ebola outbreak in the Congo had just been reported.

Trump’s flagrant disregard for the safety of the American people has been punctuated by the proposed elimination of the budget reserved for containing an Continue Reading »