Australia Handles COVID Better Than Crazy America

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9iD_FkykoU&ab_channel=GrahamElwood

Extreme Poverty Skyrocketing - But Why?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h1SCfgUTNg&ab_channel=MomentOfClaritywithLeeCamp

Trump Goes on INSANELY Bigoted Rant Against Ilhan Omar at Campaign Rally

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FILoOQvXfhk&ab_channel=TheHumanistReport

Glen Greenwald Quits, Police SUES Breonna Taylor's BF, Corbyn Gone From Labour

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqOLfSRrlqA&ab_channel=HardLensMedia

We May Have Found a New Organ, Thanks to Cancer Therapy

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVDyPdhj3U&ab_channel=SciShow

Under Trump, Households Making $30 Million Nine Times Less Likely to Face IRS Audit Than Working Poor Making Less Than $25,000

If U.S. police detected murders at the same .03% rate that America's richest families are audited, writes journalist David Cay Johnson, "they would become aware of just five of the 16,214 reported homicides."


Brett Wilkins, staff writer



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/30/under-trump-households-making-30-million-nine-times-less-likely-face-irs-audit




How exactly does President Donald Trump get away with paying such low—or no—taxes?

It's a question many people are asking in the wake of bombshell New York Times reporting showing the president paid just $750 in annual federal income tax in two recent years, and in a stunning new report published Friday, DCReport editor-in-chief David Cay Johnston examined Internal Revenue Service audits of the very richest Americans to find out how people like Trump manage to keep tax collectors at bay.

Johnston looked at 2018 IRS audits of the wealthiest 23,400 U.S. households—their average income was about $30 million—and found that the administration audited just seven of them. Not 7%, but seven households. That's an audit rate of 0.03%.


In contrast, in 2015 under President Barack Obama, the wealthiest Americans were 270 times more likely to be audited than they were in 2018 under Trump. "If American police detected murders at the same rate it would mean that they would become aware of just five of the 16,214 reported homicides that year," writes Johnston.


It doesn't bode well for tax enforcement when the president himself is a known tax cheat, according to Johnston. He writes:





There's no question Trump is a tax cheat because he has done it again and again. He cheated on New York City sales taxes in 1983, for which Mayor Ed Koch said Trump should have served 15 days in jail. He went to extreme, even farcical lengths to evade $3 million of payments he owed in lieu of taxes to New York City.

Trump has been tried twice for civil tax fraud. He lost both times, a story I broke four years ago but you may not know about because America's major news organizations have not reported it except for one passing mention in the wedding announcement section of The New York Times. Two years ago, however, that newspaper did an exhaustive report showing years of calculated gift tax cheating by two generations of Trumps. In recent weeks income tax information that newspaper reported revealed many badges of tax fraud.

So why hasn't Trump been held accountable for his expansive tax cheating? It has to do with who the IRS audits, says Johnston. He notes that the working poor—defined as people earning less than $25,000 annually—were the target of one-third of all IRS audits in 2018, even thought their average income was just $12,600. The audit rate for poor households was 0.28%, or nine times that of the richest households.


"Now add to all this Trump's powers as president," writes Johnston, which include being able to appoint—and fire—the heads of the Treasury Department, IRS, Justice Department, and other important posts."The cold hard truth," writes Johnston, "is that the richest Americans today face a teensy-weensy risk of being detected if they cheat," mostly due to the dizzying complexity and intricacies of their business operations and property holdings.

Over the past 13 months of the Trump administration, the IRS has referred just 231 cases for prosecution. In 2016, Obama's final year in office, there were 2,744 referrals for prosecution—over 1,100% more than Trump during a similar period. Additionally, around 70% of those cases under Trump were dismissed due to "insufficient evidence."

In the end, "the costs of these favor-the-rich policies even when they cheat are borne by the other 99% of taxpayers," writes Johnston.

'This Is Trump's Failure': US Reports Record 90,400+ Covid Cases in Just 24 Hours—Equivalent to One New Infection Every Second

"Another record day of Covid cases. Not because of testing—but because President Trump has given up on controlling the virus and his administration has failed the American people."


Jake Johnson, staff writer



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/30/trumps-failure-us-reports-record-90400-covid-cases-just-24-hours-equivalent-one-new




As President Donald Trump stuck to his falsehood-riddled closing message in the final stretch of the 2020 campaign—the U.S. is "rounding the turn" on the pandemic, the economy is roaring back, and public health measures are politically motivated ploys to harm his reelection chances—the U.S. on Thursday reported a daily record of 90,400-plus new coronavirus infections, the equivalent of more than one case every second.

Coronvirus cases are on the rise in nearly every U.S. state including Florida, where Trump on Thursday held an in-person campaign rally during which he paid lip service to basic precautions, such as wearing a mask and social distancing, as a crowd of his largely maskless supporters stood inches apart from each other.

"You know the bottom line, though? You're going to get better. You're going to get better. If I can get better, anybody can get better. And I got better fast," Trump said, neglecting to mention that he had access to a level of high-quality government healthcare that is unavailable to most Americans after he contracted Covid-19.

The president's remarks came hours before the U.S. reported 90,446 new coronavirus cases and around 1,000 deaths Thursday, bringing the nation's infection total to more than nine million as the death toll surpassed 228,700. Hospitalizations are also trending upward at an alarming rate.

"This is Trump's failure," tweeted Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in response to the staggering new figures.


In its weekly update on the pandemic published Thursday, the Covid Tracking Project pointed out that "unlike the spring and summer outbreaks, the third surge is geographically dispersed, and counts are up in every region of the country. An increase in testing is not sufficient to explain the numbers."




"The country reported a record number of tests at 8.2 million, but case growth (24 percent) far outpaced test growth (9 percent), as we explained earlier this week," the organization noted. "That's also true for the entire month of October: Forty-seven of the 50 states, along with the District of Columbia, have seen cases rise faster than reported tests since October 1."


As the Washington Post reported late Thursday, "coronavirus cases are surging in every competitive state before Election Day, offering irrefutable evidence against President Trump's closing argument that the pandemic is nearly over and restrictions are no longer necessary."

"In the 13 states deemed competitive by the Cook Political Report," the Post noted, "the weekly average of new cases reported daily has jumped 45 percent over the past two weeks, from fewer than 21,000 on October 14 to more than 30,000 on October 28."

With the president and members of his administration continuing to publicly downplay the pandemic and indicate the White House has given up trying to control the spread, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers—whose state has been hit hard by the coronavirus in recent days with more than 200 deaths reported over the past week—said Thursday that "there is no way to sugarcoat it: We are facing an urgent crisis."

"There is an imminent risk to you, your family members, your friends, your neighbors," Evers warned.

Minnesota Democrats Implore Voters to 'Drop Off Your Ballot' in Person After Last-Minute Court Ruling

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon called the court's decision a "tremendous and unnecessary disruption to Minnesota's election, just days before Election Day."


Jake Johnson, staff writer



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/30/minnesota-democrats-implore-voters-drop-your-ballot-person-after-last-minute-court




Minnesota lawmakers and election officials urged voters in their state to avoid the mail and drop off their absentee ballots in person if possible after a panel of federal judges on Thursday issued a last-minute ruling ordering the separation of absentee ballots that arrive after 8:00 pm on November 3 from those received earlier, leaving open the possibility that late-arriving ballots could be invalidated.

"DROP OFF YOUR BALLOT IF YOU HAVEN'T MAILED IT YET," Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted late Thursday, linking to a website designed to help voters find nearby ballot drop-off locations.

In its 2-1 decision just days out from the election, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon's mandate that ballots postmarked by November 3 and received within seven days of Election Day must be counted stands "in direct contradiction to Minnesota election law governing presidential elections."


Simon, a Democrat, said state officials are considering appealing the ruling to the conservative-dominated Supreme Court and implored Minnesota voters to drop their ballots off in person at their local county election office instead of mailing them."There is no pandemic exception to the Constitution," wrote Judges L. Steven Grasz and Bobby Shepherd, respectively appointed by President Donald Trump and former President George W. Bush.

While ruling in favor of the pair of Trump Electoral College electors who brought the case, the appellate judges acknowledged their decision would likely cause "voter confusion" and "election administration issues" and potentially further undermine "public confidence in the election."

"With that said," the judges added, "we conclude the challenges that will stem from this ruling are preferable to a postelection scenario where mail-in votes, received after the statutory deadline, are either intermingled with ballots received on time or invalidated without prior warning."

In her lone dissent, Judge Jane Kelly warned that the court's decision "has the effect of telling voters—who, until now, had been under the impression that they had until November 3 to mail their ballots—that they should have mailed their ballots yesterday (or, more accurately, several days ago)."

"With the court's injunction in place," Kelly wrote, "fewer eligible Minnesotans will be able to exercise their fundamental right to vote. That, in and of itself, should give us significant pause before granting injunctive relief."




As Reuters explained, "the 8th Circuit sent the case back to a lower court and instructed it to require Minnesota election officials to identify and 'segregate' absentee ballots received after November 3. The litigation is in a preliminarily stage and those ballots would not be counted if a final judgment is entered in the Republicans' favor."

Following the court's ruling, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said voters should "NOT put ballots in the mail any more" and instead drop them off in person to ensure they're received on time.


In a statement late Thursday, Simon denounced the court's dismissal of his deadline extension as "a tremendous and unnecessary disruption to Minnesota's election, just days before Election Day."

"This last-minute change could disenfranchise Minnesotans who were relying on settled rules for the 2020 election—rules that were in place before the August 11 primary and were accepted by all political parties," Simon added. "I won't let any Minnesota voter be silenced. My mission is now to make sure all voters know that a federal court has suddenly changed the rules, and that their ballot needs to be received by Election Day."

The secretary of state's office provided a list of steps voters should take to ensure their ballots are counted:
Voters who have already put their ballot in the mail can track their ballot at http://www.mnvotes.org/track. If their ballot has not yet been received the voter can vote in-person either by absentee, or at their polling place on Election Day.
Voters can deliver their ballots to their county election office by hand (or have someone they trust hand-deliver it for them).
Voters can cast their vote in person with an absentee ballot at their local election office up until November 2, 2020.
Voters can cast their votes in person on Election Day. Use our Pollfinder Tool to find out where to vote.

"The right to vote is fundamental," said Simon. "The court's decision is a step in the direction of restricting the exercise of that right, during a pandemic that has altered everything about our daily lives. But Minnesotans always find a way to vote, and they'll do so again this year. The spirit that has fueled Minnesota's nation-leading voter turnout will continue."

Tillis Pushed Deregulation That Helps His Top Donor, Blackstone Group, Bilk Small Investors

Besides being Tillis’ top campaign donor, Blackstone’s CEO has given $20 million to a super PAC attacking Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham.


Donald Shaw

@donnydonny



https://readsludge.com/2020/10/30/tillis-pushed-deregulation-that-helps-his-top-donor-blackstone-group-bilk-small-investors/




The private equity industry has spent more money on the 2020 elections than ever before, and no politician has benefitted more than North Carolina’s Republican senator Thom Tillis, whose race against Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham, a dead heat, could determine which party controls the upper chamber.

Keeping Republicans in control of the Senate would benefit the industry in many ways, including helping their billionaire executives hold onto lucrative tax breaks, but they also have reason to try and keep Tillis around in particular. Tillis has been a leader in helping to deliver regulatory benefits for the industry, including his repeated efforts to secure a new rule that weakens the position of smaller American investors to the benefit of big corporations and private equity firms.

In 2018, Tillis introduced legislation to direct the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to expand the definition of accredited investors so that private funds can raise money from less-wealthy investors. The accredited investor definition is used to determine who is allowed to participate in investments that are not available to the general public, including offers by private equity firms, hedge funds, and venture funds. For years, accredited investors were required to have a net worth of at least $1 million, but Tillis wanted to expand that to include people with certain educational backgrounds, job experience, and a lower net worth.

The SEC kicked off a rulemaking to expand the definition in December 2019 and finalized it earlier this year after Tillis and a few of his Republican colleagues filed a comment to the agency’s chair, Jay Clayton, asking him to be even more expansive with their changes to the definition. When the SEC voted to change the definition, Tillis put out a statement applauding the effort and saying that he “has led Congressional efforts to amend the definition of accredited investor.”

The definition now allows for holders of entry-level stockbroker’s licenses, “knowledgeable employees” of nonpublic firms, and other new categories of investors to participate in financial offerings like leveraged buyouts and angel funds that are far less transparent than those offered to the general public.

In his letter, Tillis calls the change “a win for the American people,” but financial reform advocates see the SEC’s move as an industry victory that helps giant firms exploit small investors.

“The SEC did the bidding of private equity in particular by enlarging the pool of money from which this industry, which already has trillions on hand, can draw,” said Carter Dougherty, communications director with consumer group Americans for Financial Reform. “The result will surely be that private equity firms will prey on less-informed investors, who will not have the benefit of information available in public securities markets, and will pay higher fees for mediocre returns on their money.”

These investments and fees will benefit billionaire fund managers, several of whom have spent tens of millions of dollars this election cycle to support Tillis and other vulnerable Republicans.

The CEO of private equity behemoth Blackstone Group, Stephen Schwarzman, who is worth $18.1 billion, has donated $20 million since January 2019 to the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.).

Tillis has been the biggest beneficiary of Senate Leadership Fund support this election cycle. The super PAC has spent $47 million on television ads and other communications opposing his opponent Cal Cunningham as of Oct. 30. The group’s ads have attacked Cunningham over flirtatious texts he sent to a woman who is not his wife.

Another top donor to Senate Leadership Fund is Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of investment firm Citadel, which could benefit from an expanded pool of potential investors. Griffin gave the super PAC $25 million this cycle.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Blackstone sent letters to the SEC praising their proposal to expand the accredited investor definition and urging it to go further.

Blackstone Group is also Tillis’ top campaign donor this election cycle, according to a tally by the Center for Responsive Politics, with many of the firm’s executives and employees chipping in the legal maximum of $5,600 for a combined total of $67,611, including Schwarzman, Global Head of Private Equity Joseph Baratta, and Senior Managing Director Prakash Melwani. Securities and investments is Tillis’ top donor industry, with investment firms like Elliot Management, Apollo Global Management, and Capital Group all among his top 20 donors.

The North Carolina Senate race is one of a handful that will determine which party controls the Senate, along with races in Maine, Colorado, and Arizona. Most polls have Tillis trailing his Democratic opponent by a few percentage points, with the race having tightened dramatically in the past two weeks.

Unions Representing Hundreds of Thousands of Workers Prepare for General Strike If Trump Subverts Election Results

"Paired with people in the streets, a strike could help stop a GOP coup."



Julia Conley, staff writer



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/30/unions-representing-hundreds-thousands-workers-prepare-general-strike-if-trump




Dozens of labor unions have resolved to consider a general strike after Nov. 3 should President Donald Trump refuse to accept the results of the election or sabotage the counting of ballots, with organizers calling a work stoppage "the most powerful tool the movement has" to protect democracy.

The 100,000-member Rochester-Genesee Valley Area Labor Federation in New York was the first union federation to adopt a resolution this month stating that it would prepare for and hold “a general strike of all working people, if necessary, to ensure a constitutionally mandated peaceful transition of power as a result of the 2020 presidential elections."

The resolution also stated the federation would lobby other labor organizations including the AFL-CIO, which represents 12.5 million workers, to consider a general strike if the president attempts to subvert the election results.


MLK Labor in Seattle, which represents 150 unions and 100,000 members, approved a resolution last week stating it "will take whatever nonviolent actions are necessary up to and including a general strike to protect our democracy, the Constitution, the law, and our nation’s democratic traditions," and Western Mass Area Labor Federation in Western Massachusetts voted on a similar resolution last Monday. The group passed the resolution as Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results if he loses and after several federal court decisions have sparked fears that hundreds of thousands of voters could be disenfranchised.

"We joined a growing number of labor organizations around the country and passed a resolution making clear that should Donald Trump and his administration attempt to obstruct, subvert, sabotage, overturn or reject a fair and complete count of presidential ballots (essentially a coup against democracy), that the labor movements must respond with nonviolent action to defend the democratic process, the Constitution and an orderly transfer of power that is one of the historic hallmarks of American democracy," the federation wrote on its Facebook page last week.

"The labor movement must be ready to defend our democracy and use our collective power to ensure that every vote is counted," the group added.

The AFL-CIO's executive council has so far only committed to "defend our democratic republic," and President Richard Trumka told labor leaders on Oct. 22 that the labor movement's focus up until Election Day is to get out the vote for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. After the election, Trumka said, the AFL-CIO will determine how it will fight back if Trump or the judicial system moves to stop the counting of votes or otherwise stands in the way of a peaceful transition of power.




Even a work stoppage in certain parts of the country would be historic; the last time a general strike took place in the U.S. was in 1946 when workers in Oakland, Calif. staged a walkout over low wages, forcing all businesses except for grocery stores and pharmacies to shut down for one month.

"What we've seen is people going about our business during the day and conducting mass protests at night, and that's not going to be enough to make this president move," Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, told The Guardian on Friday. "[Trump] will use those protests to further divide the country. We will have to do the one thing that takes all power and control from the government or anyone with corporate interests in keeping this person in office, and that is withholding our labor."

As labor leaders across the country are considering a work stoppage, advocacy groups are preparing a growing number of direct actions to demand that election officials protect the results of the election. Led by Indivisible and Stand Up America, the Protect the Results coalition is so far planning at least 435 demonstrations across the country, up from 375 on Tuesday.

"If Trump declares victory prematurely or tries to undermine the results of the election, the American people must be ready to rise up and protect the results," wrote Leah Greenberg of Indivisible and Sean Eldridge of Stand Up America at Talking Points Memo on Friday.

"With a combined membership in the tens of millions, the Protect the Results coalition continues to build a national activist network that could mobilize quickly to demand that election officials, the Electoral College and Congress honor the accurate, final vote count," they added. "By mobilizing across the country, our groups hope to ensure that any corrupt political pressure from Trump is met with far greater pressure from the American people to follow the rules and preserve our democracy."

A work stoppage combined with rallies at government buildings and other public places starting on Nov. 4, should the president sabotage a free and fair election, "could help stop a GOP coup," said organizers.


"Spread the word. Contact your union," tweeted Protect the Results NYC. "And if you haven't, commit to taking the streets."

'Truly Sociopathic Behavior': After Mother Beaten by Philly Cops, Fraternal Order of Police Use Photo of Terrified Toddler as Propaganda

"The underlying story of Philadelphia police conduct is shocking enough, but the added layer of intentional lies and deception... is unbelievable."


Julia Conley, staff writer



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/30/truly-sociopathic-behavior-after-mother-beaten-philly-cops-fraternal-order-police




The conduct of Philadelphia police officers and the nation's largest law enforcement association this week amounted to what one journalist called "an extraordinary mix of police violence and disinformation," after it was revealed Friday that officers beat a young mother who had accidentally driven into a protest and then snatched her toddler from the car and later used his image in pro-police propaganda.

Along with several posts urging voters to support President Donald Trump, the Fraternal Order of Police on Thursday night posted a photo of a toddler who the union falsely claimed had been found by Philadelphia police "wandering around barefoot" amid the "lawlessness" of the fourth night of demonstrations over the killing of Walter Wallace, Jr.

But the union soon deleted the post after being confronted by the Philadelphia Inquirer and lawyers for the two-year-old boy's mother, Rickia Young, said the officers forcibly removed the toddler from his mother's vehicle after smashing the car's windows and violently arresting Young after she accidentally drove into an area where protesters were being confronted by lines of riot police.

The reality of what the photo shows, tweeted HuffPost reporter Ryan J. Reilly, offers "a tremendously valuable lesson in why you always need to treat initial police narratives with intense skepticism."



According to attorneys Riley H. Ross III and Kevin Mincey, Young attempted to turn around immediately after she turned down a street where police were clashing with protesters Thursday night, while her son and teenage nephew were in the car with her.

While she was trying to make a three-point turn as directed by officers, the police suddenly surrounded her SUV, smashing Young's windows while the toddler sat in the back seat. The police violently dragged Young out of the car, beat her with batons, and then threw her to the ground.

A nearby resident, Aapril Rice caught the police violence on video:


While Young was left with a bloodied head and badly bruised left side from the police attack and was detained and separated from her son for hours, a female police officer was photographed holding the toddler in what was later used for what Ross called "propaganda."

"Using this kid in a way to say, 'This kid was in danger and the police were only there to save him,' when the police actually caused the danger," Ross told the Washington Post. "That little boy is terrified because of what the police did."

The child was also hurt during the attack and was taken to Children's Hospital to be treated for a head injury after being reunited with his mother. According to the Post, the family still has not been able to locate the SUV or their belongings, including the toddler's hearing aids, which were inside.

Observers on social media expressed shock at the story, with filmmaker Peter Ramsey tweeting that accounts like that of Young and her child are evidence of a police force that is "begging to be defunded."




"This is state sanctioned terror," tweeted Vox journalist Kainaz Amaria.

In Bid to Beat 'Public Health and Economic Crises,' Senate Dems Urge Utilities to Suspend Shutoffs During Pandemic

"Minority and low-income families who have disproportionately borne the brunt of the current economic crisis are particularly at risk."


Brett Wilkins, staff writer



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/30/bid-beat-public-health-and-economic-crises-senate-dems-urge-utilities-suspend




Voicing support for "legislation that would impose a federal moratorium on all utility shutoffs" during the coronavirus pandemic, a group of Senate Democrats on Friday sent a letter to 21 of the nation's largest utility and telecommunications companies urging them to voluntarily stop terminating services for the duration of the crisis.

"Because of the economic devastation wrought by the pandemic, millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet and are at risk for having their electricity, water, and broadband services terminated," the letter (pdf)—which was led by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.)—said.


The lawmakers noted that nearly 179 million Americans—"a staggering number of people"—are at risk of electricity shutoffs, and that "minority and low-income families who have disproportionately borne the brunt of the current economic crisis are particularly at risk" for service cancellation or interruption. "In order to effectively address the concurrent public health and economic crises, the families you serve must have uninterrupted access to these essential public services," the senators asserted.

Furthermore, "shutoff moratoriums have expired (or were never implemented) in 33 states, and seven more states have moratoriums that will expire next month."


"Every day more people in our communities become at risk for losing access to the water they need to wash their hands or the electricity they need to keep the lights on," the senators wrote.

The letter also called the internet "an essential public service"—especially "as millions of children are forced to learn remotely" during the pandemic—and warned that "without a moratorium on electricity and broadband disconnections, many more children, in particular those in minority, low-income, and rural communities, are at risk of falling behind."

In addition to Brown and Merkley, the letter was signed by six other Democratic senators: Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Edward Markey (Mass.), Tina Smith (Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Ron Wyden (Ore.), and Chris Van Hollen (Md.). Bernie Sanders (Vt.), an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, is also a signatory.

Earlier this week, over 120 advocacy organizations sent a letter to Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, urging him to declare a national moratorium on water shutoffs—echoing a similar message from Reps. Harley Rouda (D-Calif.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) earlier this month.

'Banking for the People': Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez Unveil Bill to Foster Creation of Public Banks Across US

"It's time for an option that works for the people and not solely privatized profits."


Jessica Corbett, staff writer



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/30/banking-people-tlaib-and-ocasio-cortez-unveil-bill-foster-creation-public-banks




"It's long past time to open doors for people who have been systematically shut out and provide a better option for those grappling with the costs of simply trying to participate in an economy they have every right to—but has been rigged against them."

That's according to Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and a handful of other progressives in Congress introduced legislation on Friday they say "would provide a much-needed financial lifeline to states and municipalities, as well as unbanked and underbanked residents, that have been left in dire straits by the Covid-19 pandemic."

Specifically, as a joint statement from the congresswomen explains, the Public Banking Act (pdf) would enable "the creation of state and locally administered public banks by establishing the Public Bank Grant program administered by the secretary of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board which would provide grants for the formation, chartering, and capitalization of public banks."

"We spent $30 trillion in the global crisis from 2007-2009 propping up financial institutions that held the country hostage for their reckless behavior. Only $8 trillion dollars has been committed thus far in the Covid-19 pandemic," Tlaib noted. "These banks have been, are, and will continue to depend on the public dollar. It is time for this relationship to be reciprocated and have the banks work for the people and not solely privatized profits wreaking havoc on communities of color."


In addition to allowing the Treasury secretary and the Fed's board to give grants to public banks for "bank formation, capitalization, developing financial market infrastructure, supporter operations, covering unexpected losses, and more without the requirement to provide matching funds," the bill:
Allows the Federal Reserve to charter and grant membership to public banks, and in conjunction with the appropriate federal agencies, establish a separate regulatory scheme with respect to these.
Establishes public banking incubator program to provide technical assistance to public member banks to develop technologies, practices, and data that promote public welfare.
Establishes new liquidity and credit facilities at the Federal Reserve to provide direct federal support to state and local public banks and their communities;
Prohibits investment in fossil fuel projects.

Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez argue that public banks not only would benefit city and state governments and aspiring entrepreneurs due to lower interest rates and fees, but also could result in broader community benefits by, for example, funding public infrastructure projects. Ocasio-Cortez called their legislation "monumental."

"Public banks are uniquely able to address the economic inequality and structural racism exacerbated by the banking industry's discriminatory policies and predatory practices," she said. "The creation of public banks will also facilitate the use of public resources to construct a myriad of public goods including affordable housing and local renewable energy projects. Public banks empower states and municipalities to establish new channels of public investment to help solve systemic crises."


The other half of the Squad—Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—and Reps. Jesús G. "Chuy" García (D-Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Al Green (D-Texas), Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) are backing the bill, as are 29 outside groups.

Organizations supporting the measure include the California Public Banking Alliance (CBPA), Take on Wall Street, Americans for Financial Reform, Beneficial State Foundation, Communications Workers of America, Friends of the Earth, Food & Water Action, Americans for Financial Reform, California Reinvestment Coalition, Center for Popular Democracy, Community Change, Farm Aid, Institute for Policy Studies, Jobs With Justice, NJ Citizen Action, Oil Change International, Oil Change International, People's Action, Strong Economy for All, UNITE HERE, Working Families Party, Democracy Collaborative, ACRE, and Public Citizen.


Climate Justice Alliance policy coordinator Anthony Rogers-Wright expressed excitement that "our values regarding the need for a rapid Fossil Fuel phaseout" are represented in the bill, highlighting evidence that economically, "Big Oil is in big trouble and the people don't want the money they keep in their banks utilized to bailout or finance an industry that's killing people and planet."

Take on Wall Street campaign director Porter McConnell explained that her group supports the Public Banking Act "because public banks can create jobs and boost the local economy, save cities and states money, and lend counter-cyclically to blunt the impact of Wall Street booms and busts."

"As we learned recently from the Paycheck Protection Program, when you pay big Wall Street banks to provide public goods, they inevitably reward themselves and their friends at the expense of white, Black, and brown working families," McConnell said, referencing the business loan program established in March by Congress' last Covid-19 relief measure. "We deserve a financial system for working families, not the big banks."

Experts Warn Trump HHS 'Endangering People' by Covering Up Key Covid-19 Hospitalization Data

"We're now in the third wave, and I think our only way out is really open, transparent, and actionable information."

Jake Johnson, staff writer





https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/30/experts-warn-trump-hhs-endangering-people-covering-key-covid-19-hospitalization-data




As surging coronavirus hospitalizations across the U.S. push already-strained medical facilities to the brink of full capacity, internal documents obtained by NPR show that the Trump administration is withholding from the public critical hospital data that experts say would be extremely useful in helping communities prepare for, track, and overcome Covid-19 outbreaks.

NPR reported Friday that the documents—which are based on hospital data collected and analyzed daily by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—"highlight trends in hospitalizations and pinpoint cities nearing full hospital capacity and facilities under stress. They paint a granular picture of the strain on hospitals across the country that could help local citizens decide when to take extra precautions against Covid-19."


Dated October 27, the most recent internal report obtained by NPR shows that around 24% of the nation's hospitals—including facilities in major cities like Atlanta and Minneapolis—are utilizing more than 80% of their intensive care unit capacity and names specific hospitals that are over 95% capacity. The document also shows an uptick in ventilator usage over the past month as coronavirus infections continue to rise at a record-shattering rate."The documents show that detailed information hospitals report to HHS every day is reviewed and analyzed—but circulation seems to be limited to a few dozen government staffers from HHS and its agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health," NPR noted. "Only one member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Adm. Brett Giroir, appears to receive the documents directly."

Experts said the detailed local data currently only circulated among a small group of Trump administration officials would, if made widely available, play a significant role in better informing Americans and health officials about nearby hotspots and encouraging greater safety precautions.

"The neighborhood data, the county data, and metro-area data can be really helpful for people to say, 'Whoa, they're not kidding, this is right here,'" Lisa Lee, former chief science officer for public health surveillance at the CDC, told NPR. "It can help public health prevention folks get their messages across and get people to change their behavior."

While some state officials are able to access HHS reports for their own state, the inability to view broader regional data leaves them without potentially crucial information.

"Hospitals in Tennessee serve patients who are from Arkansas and Mississippi and Kentucky and Georgia and vice versa, and so we're a little bit blind to what's going on there," said Melissa McPheeters, adjunct research professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. "When we see hospitals that are particularly near those state borders having increases, one of the things we can't tell is: Is that because hospitals in an adjacent state are full? What's going on there? And that could be a really important piece of the picture."






Ryan Panchadsaram, co-founder of the website Covid Exit Strategy and a former data official in the Obama administration, said the decision to keep the detailed hospitalization data out of public view is "reckless," particularly in the face of soaring coronavirus cases and hospitalizations nationwide.

"It's endangering people," Panchadsaram told NPR. "We're now in the third wave, and I think our only way out is really open, transparent, and actionable information."

In a tweet Friday, Panchadsaram wrote that "there's a mismatch: the rigorous work that's happening internally by the rank and file at HHS/CDC/USDS [United States Digital Service] and what is being shared externally by the administration."

According to publicly available data analyzed by the Covid Tracking Project, more than 46,000 people in the U.S. are currently hospitalized due to the coronavirus as of Thursday, which saw a daily record of 90,400-plus new cases.

"Approaching the eve of the election, President Trump has downplayed the steep rise in cases, attributing much of it to increased testing," the New York Times noted earlier this week. "But the number of people hospitalized for the virus tells a different story, climbing an estimated 46 percent from a month ago and raising fears about the capacity of regional healthcare systems to respond to overwhelming demand."

Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and visiting professor of health policy and management at George Washington University's Milken School of Public Health, tweeted Friday that the HHS hospitalization data "needs to be available to the public."

"It is critical to hospital surge planning and guiding local and state policies," said Wen.

As Covid-19 Infections Skyrocket, House Report Slams Trump's Pandemic Response as Among "Worst Failures of Leadership" in U.S. History

"This report exhaustively documents what has long been clear: the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus crisis has been a tragic failure."

Kenny Stancil, staff writer





https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/30/covid-19-infections-skyrocket-house-report-slams-trumps-pandemic-response-among




One day after the United States reported a record high of more than 90,400 Covid-19 cases in a 24-hour period—equivalent to one new infection every second—the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis on Friday denounced President Donald Trump's disastrous response to the pandemic, describing it as one of the "worst failures of leadership" in the country's history.

In a new report (pdf) entitled Inefficient, Ineffective, and Inequitable, the panel detailed how the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus crisis has caused a public health catastrophe, failed to alleviate the ongoing economic hardships endured by millions of U.S. households, and prioritized Wall Street recovery over Main Street relief.

"The virus is a global scourge," said the report, "but it has been an American fiasco, killing more people in the U.S. than in any other country."


The subcommittee's most recent publication compiled and summarized key findings from dozens of investigations it has conducted since being established on April 23.

"This report exhaustively documents what has long been clear," said subcommittee Chairman James Clyburn (D-S.C.) in a statement released Friday. "The Trump administration's response to the coronavirus crisis has been a tragic failure."

According to the analysis, Trump's "decision to mislead the public about the severity of the crisis, his failure to listen to scientists about how to keep Americans healthy, and his refusal to implement a coordinated national plan to stop the coronavirus have all contributed to devastating results: more than 227,000 Americans dead, more than 8.8 million Americans infected, and a dangerous virus that continues to spread out of control nine months after it reached our nation's shores."

In addition, the report noted that the White House failed to protect millions of economically distressed households experiencing material deprivation and financial freefall.

Instead of extending enhanced unemployment insurance benefits and providing housing relief, for instance, the Trump aministration "exacerbated and extended an economic collapse of historic proportions, with tens of millions of Americans losing their jobs and at least six million Americans falling into poverty."




To the extent that the Trump administration did respond to the economic crisis, the report noted that it intervened in ways that "benefited larger companies and wealthy Americans, while leaving behind many disadvantaged communities and struggling small businesses."

The report pointed to the Federal Reserve's practice of purchasing corporate debt while leaving workers out to dry. It also stated that the Trump administration's "implementation of relief programs passed by Congress has... been marred by fraud, waste, and abuse."

Trump "has refused to do what is necessary to control the virus and mitigate its economic damage," said Clyburn.

"While we cannot bring back the nearly 230,000 Americans we have lost to this disease, I hope that this report will serve as a wake-up call to make the improvements needed to prevent further unnecessary deaths and deprivation that will occur if the response continues on its current course," he added.

To that end, the subcommittee made several recommendations:
The administration must create and implement a coordinated national plan to defeat the coronavirus, save American lives, and revive our economy;
A coordinated national plan must be guided by the best available science, not political expediency;
Americans need the Senate to pass and the president to sign comprehensive relief legislation to tackle the virus and support workers, families, and communities; and
Economic relief legislation must be implemented in a manner consistent with Congress's intent to target assistance to the most vulnerable Americans rather than wealthy corporations.

These recommendations contrast sharply with recent stances taken by the White House. As Accountable.US president Kyle Herring said Friday, the Trump administration appears "to have thrown their hands up in surrender, ramping up rhetoric around 'herd immunity' and publicly announcing that they 'are not going to control the virus.'"

"As cases surge," Herring added, "the Trump administration should be doubling down on resources to ensure communities have the support they need."

Failing to do so "is an abdication of responsibility to the American people on a massive scale," he said.

Healthcare Must No Longer Be A Privilege

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTGIpoKYmkg&ab_channel=SenatorBernieSanders

Rational Live! | Election Just Days Away; News + Chats | Oct 30th, 2020

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcnHzxjt3IA&ab_channel=TheRationalNational

Ted Cruz Starting To Throw Trump Under The Bus

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxwlnBiXtcw&ab_channel=SecularTalk

What's Gonna Happen Tuesday?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MhyQasAP4E&ab_channel=MomentOfClaritywithLeeCamp

This Election Is About More Than Defeating Trump

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S6uXGY6Wmk&ab_channel=BernieSanders

Trump's Broken Promises - #PromiseToVote

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGFSNjxEW6k&ab_channel=act.tv

Battle Hymn of the Republic - Modified for Relevance

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eR0ckpJ3bk&ab_channel=ParodyProject

Vote Him Away #2 (The Liar Tweets Tonight)"

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlZg-dObruo&ab_channel=RoyZimmerman

The Birth of an Extraordinary Modern Progressive Movement

The past four years have birthed a progressive movement so extraordinary it just might survive the forces that threaten its extinction.




October 29, 2020 Rebecca Traister THE CUT




https://portside.org/2020-10-29/birth-extraordinary-modern-progressive-movement




The story of an awakening must begin with how many had been permitted to sleep in the first place.

I often think back to a Saturday Night Live episode from October 2016, which aired after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Lin-Manuel Miranda was the guest host, and in the cold open, he directed a line from his fanatically beloved musical Hamilton at a photo of Donald Trump, declaring with ferocity, “You’re never gonna be president now.”

You could feel viewers, Hamilton fans, Democrats, those who for whatever reasons could still afford to believe in norms or justice, laugh with the giddy conviction that a man who grabbed women against their will could never be president, perhaps forgetting that grabbing women against their will had been a habit of presidents all the way back to the characters depicted in … Hamilton. It would be less than four weeks before those who had felt the confidence that misogyny and racism were disqualifying in the United States had that layer of assurance stripped from them.

But even after the election, the fantasies of salvation and order persisted: Someone powerful — Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush (suddenly looking good by comparison, which should have been a big warning sign), Hamilton itself (remember when the theater audience booed Mike Pence?), Jill Stein (she took all the money, folks!), patriotic Republicans, the Senate, the military, capable advisers who would keep him in check — someone was going to fix this, right?

I was not someone who had believed Donald Trump was never gonna be president; I had spent a long time fearing his victory and the punitive force of the party he was leading to power. And yet, with shame, I vividly recall being assured, in those early months of 2017, by someone who claimed to know, that both Obamas were on it, that they were “talking to people” about what to do. Rationally, I understood it to be fanfiction — wasn’t the fantasy of Obama as savior part of how we got here? — yet the desire to believe that someone with institutional power and a moral compass and a brain was in a position to protect the nation was so strong that, against my will, something like relief briefly washed over me.

Part of that feeling came from an inglorious but sharp desire to abdicate responsibility, to not be alert and vigilant and scared, to retreat to some comforting state of confidence that, even in the face of a long history that suggested otherwise, the people would be ably stewarded through the worst of what might be coming. The desire to sleep is strong.

Four years later, any notion of salvation feels pulled from a fairy tale. The Obamas would not save anyone; Robert Mueller did not save anyone; Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Lewis are dead, and when they were alive, they weren’t capable of saving anyone either. There were no noble Republicans and too few ferocious Democrats. The fantasy that there are bulwarks in place — individuals or institutions — has been correctly obliterated, leaving little barrier between America’s people and an awareness of their vulnerability to a plunderous ruling class.

This has been the terrible gift of these years. Trump himself is nowhere near the beginning nor the end of the horror, but his reign was a blaring alarm for millions; all the bright lights turned on, the covers ripped off. Those who had been privileged enough to snuggle warm and dumb beneath the blankets of an imagined postfeminist, post-civil-rights, post-Obergefell, post-Obama Camelot found themselves suddenly exposed: cold, shivering, and wide-eyed with fear and realization that the system they’d been taught responds to the will of the people was in fact designed to be able to suppress it.

For millions, the awakening was sudden, bracing, and extremely rude.
Through one lens, the shock of the past few years has been a right wing getting ever less apologetic about its commitment to authoritarian, anti-democratic minority rule. Trump and his party have surely broken some long-standing American norms and institutions, let others corrode, and encouraged the ones that were left to function as they were built to: keeping power in the hands of the few.

But through another lens, what has actually undergone a startling change has been America’s people, their thinking about the Republic, and, in some cases, their places and responsibilities within it. Some significant portion of the population has been roused to protest — or at least awareness — at a scale that has been seen rarely in our past and that has historically had the power to bring social and political change so eruptive and transformative that those in power will do anything to quell it.

On the first full day of the Trump administration, the U.S. saw the largest one-day protest in its history. The Women’s March — with its pink hats and furiously clever signs and overwhelmingly white vibe and head-spinning roster of speakers, from Madonna to Angela Davis — drew more than 4 million into the streets in the U.S.; nearly 200 more demonstrations occurred across all seven continents.

It’s not that the event marked the revivification of American protest culture or progressive organizing: That story started long before Trump gave his chilling inaugural address to a sparse but newly empowered crowd of brutish acolytes. There had been the Seattle WTO protests in the late ’90s and antiwar demonstrations of the Bush administration. The birth of Black Lives Matter and the Occupy movement, the Fight for Fifteen, Standing Rock, the Climate March of 2014, SlutWalks, Bree Newsome scaling the flagpole to pull down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, and the Say Her Name campaign to acknowledge black female victims of police violence; Colin Kaepernick knelt during the playing of the national anthem in the same year that Bernie Sanders’s failed primary campaign against Hillary Clinton took on the dimensions of a left-wing social movement … all of that happened during the Obama administration.

But the spirit of unrest bloomed explosively in the Trump years, in regions and minds long arid of political — let alone progressive — engagement. And the strains of dissent wound round one another in intricate, uneasy ways. The white originators of the Women’s March itself had been pushed by a group of co-chairs who came from other, more deeply rooted protest movements to go further with the event’s stated aims, to proclaim that a “women’s movement” must also by definition be a movement for Black and Indigenous and Palestinian lives, for climate action and in opposition to economic inequality.

And so when, about a week after that first big eruption, Trump issued a travel ban on visitors coming from predominantly Muslim countries, many people new to public displays of fury were quicker than they might otherwise have been to rush to the airports to raise their voices in protest, joining lawyers who had set up shop on the floor trying to help those detained.

In those early months, there were so many protests every weekend, all over the place, for reasons that were ambient but loosely tied together. For a brief time, it was weirdly easy to discern how connected it all was: From a ten-day span in late January and early February 2017, my phone shows pictures of crowds in pussy hats shouting “Immigrants are welcome here” at an anti-ban protest in Washington Square Park, and again at Battery Park (“Muslim rights are human rights”) and at a Yemeni bodega strike in Brooklyn (“Fight ignorance, not immigrants”), and then at a protest winding its way through the streets of Philadelphia, with placards spelling BLACK LIVES MATTER pasted in the windows of an office building in Center City and a man holding a sign that reads THIS JAWN IS YOUR JAWN, THIS JAWN IS MY JAWN.

Later that month, during the confirmation hearing of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions to be Trump’s attorney general, Elizabeth Warren would attempt to read a letter written by Coretta Scott King objecting to Sessions’s 1986 nomination to the federal bench. She was stopped by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose reasoning would give form to an Etsy-ready battle cry: “She was warned, she was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Then the protests got specific. In March, women dressed as handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel showed up at the Texas Senate building to protest a ban on second-term abortions (a measure that has since been defeated, though not because of the handmaids). And in Washington, D.C., as Congress considered overturning the Affordable Care Act, crowds clogged the halls of the Senate and flooded the phones, pressuring senators until the repeal measure failed and seeding in protesters the notion that action could produce real victories.

But in August 2017, white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us” at a Unite the Right rally, and anti-fascist protesters fought them in the streets. Twenty-year-old DeAndre Harris was beaten in a parking garage by members of the right-wing extremist group League of the South, and 32-year-old counterprotester Heather Heyer was run over by a car and killed, and the starker risks of direct action were made horribly clear.

The capacious fury spread and took new and astonishing forms. In fall 2017, the Me Too movement surged in the wake of New York Times and New Yorker reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s serial predation, revelations that surely landed more powerfully given that an admitted groper was in the White House. Stories of sexual harassment and assault spilled out with tidal force, powerfully reshaping the dominant understanding of how the systems that cover for abuse create an unjust professional sphere. Some powerful people — mostly powerful men — lost jobs in Hollywood and the Senate and the media. The stories reverberated for restaurant and hotel employees and flight attendants and on the Ford factory floor; for months, each story seemed to make room for more stories, compelling more people to come forward.

Years of organizing, including by Fight for Fifteen, were behind the resurgence of the labor movement in some sectors, but Me Too helped fast-food workers, Chicago hotel housekeepers, and Silicon Valley employees draw attention to and amplify longtime complaints about ubiquitous harassment in their industries. In 2018, West Virginia teachers — some who cited either the Women’s March or the Sanders campaign as models for large public actions — kicked off a wave of teachers strikes that would roll, over more than a year, through Kansas, Oklahoma, Virginia, Arizona, Colorado, and California.

Youth activism had been electrified by Occupy and the Sanders campaign, and in March 2018, March for Our Lives, in response to a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead, became the nation’s largest-ever protest against gun violence. That summer, as images of terrified toddlers separated from refugee parents at our southern border made their way to the public, protesters staged more direct actions — interrupting the dinners of administration officials. California Congresswoman Maxine Waters urged them on: “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” When nearly 600 protesters took over the Hart Senate Office Building atrium, chanting “Abolish ICE,” Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren joined them; Representative Pramila Jayapal was among the 575 arrested that day by Capitol Police.

According to the protest historian L. A. Kauffman, it was that month — June 2018 — that the number of arrests for civil disobedience jumped from an average of 120 per month to more than a thousand. The fall would see hundreds more taken into custody as women (and some men) gathered to oppose the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative Federalist Society judge accused by Christine Blasey Ford of having assaulted her when they were teenagers. Protesters filled the halls of Congress and the steps of the Supreme Court, screaming so loudly during the confirmation vote that it had to be paused.

The impulse toward activism and political participation also sowed electoral seeds. In the wake of 2016, record numbers of women ran as first-time candidates, and a record number of them won. The blue wave of 2018 — which saw the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Deb Haaland, Katie Porter, Lauren Underwood, Lucy McBath, Rashida Tlaib, and others driven into politics by fury at economic inequality and racism and sexism and climate denialism and Trump himself — was the biggest Democrats had enjoyed since the Nixon administration.

Some of those candidates had been endorsed by a new youth climate group, the Sunrise Movement, which was building support for a Green New Deal, a far-reaching and urgent congressional resolution calling on the federal government to make drastic changes to reduce carbon emissions, digitize the power grid, and create green jobs. A week after the 2018 midterm elections, Sunrise occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office and, in February 2019, confronted Senator Dianne Feinstein about her lack of support for the measure, a video of which was viewed more than 9 million times. In September 2019, 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg led a massive one-day climate strike that inspired 6 million students to walk out of their school buildings globally and 1,100 different strikes to take place across the U.S.

And then came 2020 — a deadly pandemic, lockdowns, hospitals way above capacity, illness and poverty heaped disproportionately on America’s most vulnerable. As millions found themselves shuttered inside, scared for themselves and their loved ones, glued to their phones, they got a vivid view of violent racism: watching Ahmaud Arbery get shot while jogging, hearing George Floyd call for his mother with a knee on his neck, and reading about 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, roused from her bed by police officers who had entered her apartment in the middle of the night looking for drugs that were not there, being hit by six of their bullets and killed.

Even in the grip of fear and grief, with a full view of pandemic peril and the risk of punitive police response and rhetorical backlash, what made most sense to millions who saw those images and heard those stories was to take their fury to the streets.

Over the course of this past summer, Americans insisted that Black lives matter in 2,275 cities and small towns across this country, many of which had never seen a civil-rights protest before. “We’re experiencing a moral reckoning with racism and systemic injustice that has brought a new coalition of conscience to the streets of our country,” said Kamala Harris in her first address to the nation as Joe Biden’s running mate, while in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer argued that “Trump’s presidency has radicalized millions of white Americans who were previously inclined to dismiss systemic racism as a myth, the racial wealth gap as a product of Black cultural pathology, and discriminatory policing as a matter of a few bad apples.”

In June 2020, police took more than 10,000 mostly peaceful protesters into custody across the United States. While the arrests were symptomatic of so much that the protesters were objecting to, they also changed the way many people understood their civic responsibility and their relationship to the state: Tens of thousands of Americans had their first direct encounters with police. So many other thousands protested publicly for the first time (polling suggests that nearly one in five Americans attended a protest between 2016 and 2018 and that 20 percent of them had never done so before); money poured into bail funds. Parents brought their children to marches. People wore masks and videotaped their fellow protesters being hit and dragged away by cops; they worked on campaigns for the first time, registered voters, volunteered to be poll watchers; they read books about structural inequality and tried to learn what intersectionality meant and had their view of history challenged by the New York Times’ “1619 Project” — a rethinking of the American narrative so potent that members of the Republican Party, including Donald Trump and Senator Tom Cotton, have moved to ban it. And as the country changed, so did public opinion: Polls showed majority approval for the protests — about 67 percent of Americans voiced some support for the BLM movement — a change in weeks that was greater than it had been in the previous two years, indicating that even Americans not in the streets were hearing the cries of those who were. Those levels of approval have shrunk (now about 55 percent of Americans say they approve) but not disappeared three months after the height of the protests and after months of backlash law-and-order messaging.

We have been encouraged to see the Trump years as a period of right-wing radicalization. But it’s hard to discount those who began in the moderate or merely apathetic center who have now considered, and in some cases strongly support, policies including the Green New Deal and Medicare for All; they have read, in mainstream publications, arguments for abolishing the police and prisons. So many Americans who had never before engaged actively — learning about, participating — in civic and political life and movements to expand liberty and justice have now done so.

So while the beginning of this period (the Women’s March) and its bookend (the BLM protests of the summer) may feel a million miles apart in spirit and style, a startlingly durable, historically rare thread has connected them: a continued move toward public acknowledgment of inequality, an energetic critique of the systems that govern us. And, with all that, a shift toward the left (or something like it) and some recognition that we are tasked with acting on behalf of our own civil rights and liberties, are responsible for saving our democracy ourselves. We are wide awake now.

Except it wasn’t all as neat or noble as that.

For one thing, that “wokeness” got weaponized pretty quickly, turned to a slur, a mocking of the very state of consciousness, which was made to look silly, indulgent, feminine, faddish, and stupid. And while that characterization is the quickest weapon of any opponent of a moral crusade, the caricatures pack their punch because they are not entirely pulled from thin air.

The arrival of these crowds of people who suddenly cared, very broadly, about various forms of amorphous inequality was theoretically great, but what were they there to fight for? What were their demands? Why did they keep making signs that said PROTEST IS THE NEW BRUNCH? Were these crowds of angry people prepared to really dig in? For what and for whom and for how long?

A lot about the nature of the fury — much of it directed so specifically at Trump, a man who was cartoonishly terrible and dangerous, sure, but not so wildly different from plenty of people and policies that had foregrounded his rise, suggested that this was not a long-haul investment in change-making, nor that it was tied to deep moral commitments to justice. For many, it was merely a way to channel their dismay — and perhaps their embarrassment at having been caught by surprise at his election — into something that felt good and self-flattering.

Predictably, a lot of this is about white women — the Wine Moms and Resistance™ warriors mocked most viciously by their white leftist sons (sons who perhaps believed that Joe Rogan’s endorsement could be critical to reaching Ohio voters but that their mom’s weekly meetings of door-knockers were hilariously bourgeois).

It is true that foremost among those who shot out of their beds on November 9, 2016, as if someone had put a fire poker to them were America’s moderate, middle-class white women, who were shocked (in a way that plenty of Black and brown Americans would never have been) that someone like Trump could triumph over someone like them. Some of these white women had never been politically conscious before but have since rebuilt their lives around activism and political engagement. Some, easing in via the Women’s March and then electoral politics, have come to an increasingly complex, progressive view of the world and its inequities.

I reported on a group of newly activated white suburban women back in summer 2017, when they were organizing around Jon Ossoff’s special House race in Georgia. Many have remained politically driven since Ossoff’s loss, working for Stacey Abrams’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign and to help Lucy McBath win the House seat that Ossoff had lost a year earlier. Some describe how the Trump years have sharpened both their understanding of an unjust system and how much they’d previously done to uphold it.

“Jon was this young, good-looking white man who felt comfortable to us,” 51-year-old Jenny Peterson told me in November 2019, observing that “that probably made it easier for us to jump in for the first time. But once we were in, we began to realize how much we had to learn.” She recalled how, while knocking on doors for Abrams and McBath, she met a Black elementary-school teacher, just two years older than she, who said, “I never thought I’d see a white lady from Roswell talking to me about voting for two Black women.” Their conversation prompted Peterson to learn about the history of segregation in her own white suburb.

“There I was, Linda Lollipop on the doorstep, finding out how, two miles from my elementary school, the body of the last Black man officially considered to have been lynched in Fulton County was found in a creek. I’d thought of myself as so aware, but there was all this I was clueless about because the system had been set up so that I wouldn’t learn it. And so that by the time I did, I’d be so entrenched in keeping what I felt was mine that I wouldn’t question it.”

One of the transformative aspects of this period has been that, by participating in protest or activism, in challenging white patriarchal power structures rather than simply supporting and profiting from them, some of these women have gotten a glimmer of what it might be like not to be middle class and white: “I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve looked at so many faces and seen zero empathy,” one white woman told BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen this summer about participating in a Black Lives Matter protest that drew violent opposition from a biker gang in Bethel, Ohio. “There was just no recognition that they were speaking to other human beings … And it was so bizarre to have a guy in a Confederate bandanna tell me that I better watch where I go, because he’s going to take me to his truck and tear me apart.”

What these white women were experiencing for the first time — the dysphoria of exclusion, alienation, and threat even when they are at home — is familiar to millions of Americans. The growth of movements doesn’t always, or perhaps doesn’t often, stem from altruism, compassion, an impulse toward solidarity, or a keen moral compass; a lot of it is born of self-interest, the realization that it might just be your body on the line.

But for all the white women who have been genuinely and deeply altered in these past four years, there are legions whose only reaction has been to Trump’s vulgarity and not to any of the pre-Trump inequity, along with plenty of others who appear to be in it for the likes, the retweets, the expensive T-shirts.

Is it possible for protest culture to expand too exponentially? Of course, that’s a part of the criticism of many who look askance at the Resistance™ and subscribe to a more puritanical take on activism — that its power stems from clarity of purpose. They point to how much support for BLM has receded since the summer, most notably among white people, how interest in strong gun-control legislation has faded since March for Our Lives, how many eventually grew numb to the horror of child separation. If performance of solidarity is a feel-good patch for people whose commitments are more shallowly rooted, their presence may be as much of a hindrance — an aberration that permits the fantasy of success where no progress has actually been made — as a help.

And yes, a lot of this has been cosplay. For many, gestures (like the empty black squares on Instagram) have stood in for action. Plenty of comfortable people, white people — previously somnambulant, now throwing their fists in the air — don’t really want that much to change, let alone want to commit to doing any actual work; they just want the photo of themselves throwing their fists in the air.

But if movements must be mass in order to make a transformative impact — and there is plenty of evidence that that is true — that mass will need to include the hypocrites and fair-weather friends and grifters and performance artists, too; human beings are messy, and if you want a movement of the people, there’s no getting around … people. Isn’t one of the goals of progressive activism to shift public opinion so thoroughly, to make certain unjust hierarchies so intolerable, so socially unacceptable, that even nonprogressive people, for nonprogressive reasons, feel they must bend to those moral standards? It would be great if people did the right things for the right reasons; short of that, it would be preferable that they did the right things for bad reasons.

I go back and forth about whether it’s possible to genuinely feel hope about this period when I look at the country on a precipice. But it’s the uneasiness of these questions — the seesawing of optimism and pessimism, the internal contradictions and often painful untangling of intentions between those who are now very loosely affiliated with progressive protest — that are, to me, the surest sign that something real has happened to the American consciousness in these past few years. It’s because this process has been so fraught, because paying unwavering attention has been so unpleasant, because staying engaged as our shortcomings are laid bare is hard, because it took bearing witness to brutality past and present to create this spasm of resistance — and yet, so many are still looking directly at it — that I believe we are experiencing our last shot at a Great Awakening.

There is a writhing mass of contradiction and imperfection and disappointment before us. These complexities don’t expose cracks in revolutionary movements; they strengthen them. Inter-left factional fights are not out of line with the history of the movements we were taught to regard as righteous: the women’s movements that emerged out of Black women’s thinking and then were reconfigured around the perspectives and priorities of a white middle class; a civil-rights movement in which women, queer folks, and gender nonconformists were consciously sidelined; a gay-rights movement that erased Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Stormé DeLarverie to foreground the heroics of white cis men; a labor-movement history that is so often told as being about coal miners and teamsters and too rarely acknowledges the propulsive efforts of young female mill workers in Lowell, Black washerwomen in Atlanta, and flight attendants today.

That this is the maddening history of progressive movements does not mean that we should resign ourselves to hypocrisy and internal inconsistency as some sort of twisted inheritance; rather, that one of the most hopeful things about this period is that we have not yet walked away from this knottiness because it is too hard, nor have we accepted it as part of the cost of doing business. In these years, the hypocrisies and inconsistencies have been loudly and insistently called out — starting with the whiteness of the Women’s March; through to this summer, when critic Zoé Samudzi noted that the “Wall of Moms” in Portland, Oregon, who placed their bodies between police and protesters and sang “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” as a lullaby, were using an “affective power” reliant on “white women’s innocence” and the sanctity of white motherhood as its driving force; and into the fall, when Eloquent Rage author Brittney Cooper critiqued prominent Black men like Ice Cube, who were voicing support for Trump, for being “enamored with the kind of masculinity that Trump performs … which is to say they wanna be patriarchs or male dominant in the way that White men are.”

Aspects of this process keep getting referred to as a “reckoning” because it’s a lot easier to say reckoning than it is to say “having all your biases laid out on a table and correctly picked over because it’s time we addressed this shit head-on.” But a feminist movement will be stronger for having been forced to wrestle with the movement away from a carceral system. Activists will be forced to think harder and with more nuance about advocating for the imprisonment of the officers who killed Breonna Taylor, because they are doing so in the midst of a movement that is also questioning the very existence of policing and incarceration practices. None of this is clean or easily digestible, nor should it feel good — alliances can fall apart and descend into angry recrimination. But they don’t have to.

“Argument isn’t an obstacle to the work of historians,” the historian Nicholas Guyatt recently wrote in the New York Times about the raging fights over publication of its “1619 Project,” “it is the work of historians.” It is also the work of activists, as many of those activists have long known. It was in 1983 that Audre Lorde wrote that would-be allies facing their mutual anger “without rejection, without immobility, without silence and without guilt, is in itself a heretical and generative idea. For it assumes that we come together as equals on a common basis to analyze the differences and to change the distortions that history has created around them. It is these distortions that separate us. And what we must ask ourselves is: Who benefits from all this?”

Abusive power structures are built to impede reform and reimagination, in part by ensuring that those who might want to bring them down are also implicated within them. Only drastically incomplete movements could neatly pull at discrete threads of inequity without also pulling up a whole gnarled root system of oppression and complicity. This is it, what so many have just woken up to: an entire system designed to resist uprooting.

And in this, the presidency of Donald Trump has been enormously useful. As a grotesque embodiment of an outrageously powerful tradition, he is a walking showcase of the ways in which so many oppressive interests — capitalism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia — are inextricably intertwined. And at least some of the millions of people who have been persuaded that they shoulder some responsibility for removing him have come to see that they also bear some responsibility to act against the forces he has shown them clearly for the first time.

Trouble is, this potential inflection point, the kind that perhaps happens once a century, in which a critical mass of people are awake to inequity and have been convinced that they bear some responsibility for making the nation better, is happening as the state structures designed to suppress the masses have grown terrifyingly stronger. While the majority has been opening its mind — perhaps, in fact, because the masses are coming to consciousness — the minority has been extending its power to override that majority.

Trump lost the popular vote, but won the presidency thanks to the Electoral College, an institution originally designed to suppress majority opinion and keep power in the hands of those voting for white-supremacist interests. In four years in the White House, he has appointed a quarter of the federal bench — thanks to a Senate that confirmed those judges and also successfully blocked more than a hundred judicial appointments made by Barack Obama, a president who was popularly elected twice.

This month, Trump got to appoint his third justice, delivering a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court that will shape law for a generation. Barrett will be confirmed by the Senate, a body that has become ever more representative of minority white power over a diverse majority. Her confirmation alongside Roberts and Kavanaugh will mean that one-third of the Court will be composed of justices who worked on the legal team that helped Trump’s Republican predecessor in the White House, George W. Bush, win the presidency via the Electoral College and a Supreme Court decision. Bush, in turn, nominated Roberts to the Court; he is now chief justice. So presidents chosen by a minority of Americans will have shaped the future of Americans’ rights to vote, unionize, gain access to health care, and prioritize the survival of the planet over the profits of corporations by empowering judges who helped them override democracy — and can be counted on in the future to do the same.

A majority of Americans believed Trump should be removed from office, but the Senate — which does not include representation for Washington, D.C., with a population larger than Vermont’s and Wyoming’s, or for Puerto Rico, home to more Americans than at least 21 other states — voted to keep him there. A majority of Americans didn’t want Kavanaugh confirmed to the Court, yet there he sits; a majority didn’t want Trump to nominate RBG’s successor before the election, but here comes Barrett and her commitment to a chillingly conservative jurisprudence.

Now that the mechanisms are nearly all in place, well oiled and humming along efficiently, the roar of the public is growing louder, and those at the controls are getting more open in their aims and no longer need to dress up their project, which is exerting minority control and doing away with even the window dressing of a democracy.

“Democracy isn’t the objective,” Senator Mike Lee tweeted in early October. “Liberty, peace and prospefity [sic] are.” Lee is not alone in his recent open disdain for democracy. “Our Founding Fathers hated democracy,” said Washington GOP gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp, a small-town police chief, the week before Lee’s remarks. “Because democracy is mob rule. When the majority rules, the minority is trampled on.” This lays it bare. The language of “mob rule” is what authoritarians use to cast themselves as victims of a roused populace: “Mob justice” is what critics called Me Too; it’s how the right has long referred to the Movement for Black Lives; Trump called those who protested Kavanaugh’s confirmation “an angry mob.” Lee’s formulation is an old trick, the casting of the oppressors as the oppressed.

Tension around whether to leave questions of governance and justice to an American majority is long-standing and extends back to the founding. But in a grotesquely stratified nation, the real worry is about whether to put the protections or rights of an oppressed minority to an empowered majority; it was this dynamic that, for example, led to the failure of some gay-marriage referendums before the tide of public opinion shifted. But protections for the marginalized are not what Lee and Culp are defending, as much as they may be straining to make it sound that way. Instead, they are explicitly arguing against the ability of the governed to select their representation and implicitly arguing for the unchecked authority of a political regime. What does any of this have to do with the awakening to protest and civic activism? It’s how it gets beaten back, made ineffectual. It is also what produced it, to some degree. The question is: Who will win?

When I was in high school, there was an afternoon on which I was leaning slightly on the trunk of a friend’s parent’s car, talking with the friend. All of a sudden, the car started moving backward; I realized in slow motion that I was being run over. I began screaming, my friend began screaming. The car just kept coming. It lasted only a couple of seconds, but I have never forgotten what it felt like to have that metal rolling into my body, the realization that there was nothing I could do to stop it, that my own muscle was unequal to the job, and that there was a good chance that all the yelling in the world wouldn’t be able to halt this car’s slow reverse.

The metaphor is surely infelicitous, given that it was a car that hit and killed Heather Heyer, that police cars were used in cities and towns all through this country this summer to literally run through barricades and protesters. But this is what it means to empower state institutions to simply run through people and their protestations. This is a Kentucky police department that simply doesn’t impose repercussions on officers for murdering Breonna Taylor; it’s a Trump Justice Department that steps in to defend the president against rape charges; it’s a governor and Trump-appointed judges in Florida who can just overturn the will of voters by imposing a poll tax on former felons whom Floridians had overwhelmingly elected to reenfranchise in 2018. At every turn, there is a tool available to those holding power to stop the people from exerting any of their own.

So here we are: In the same period that Americans have been snapped to consciousness at a level larger than any we’ve seen in 60 years, what they have awakened to is a nightmare: the sounds of children screaming at the border; men gasping that they cannot breathe; women revealing that “there were mass hysterectomies” and that what remains “indelible on the hippocampus is the laughter” and making deathbed wishes for a nation, destined to be ignored.

But the nightmare hasn’t just been the ghoulish viscera of suffering. It has also been the closing of escape hatches, diminishing paths to resistance. The awakened and panicked and furious populace may suddenly be running as fast as it can through corridors it has been taught are the paths to progress — voting, organizing, unionizing, bringing lawsuits, registering voters, marching, giving money, educating themselves — but the hallways are collapsing.

It is surely self-regarding and myopic to think today’s situation is more dire, or has a clock on it ticking any more loudly, than it was for previous generations of Americans who, awake to structurally supported violence and inhumanity, fought for better and produced victories, incomplete and temporary, but victories nonetheless. But as the ice caps break apart and so many of our states burn and flood, it’s hard not to ask, with hope and desperation: What — if anything — will we make of our latest, and perhaps last, chance at social revolution?

The good news is that the minority power, the institutions, the right wing, would not be calcifying around authoritarian rule so brazenly if they didn’t understand the genuine disadvantages of being on the wrong side of public opinion. They see an opposition populace — if not yet an organized opposition party — that is finding new ways to fight them.

The uprisings of the past few years have already succeeded in putting a new generation of combative Democrats in office: The Squad and Katie Porter and Marie Newman and Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush are in a position to materially alter their party at a federal level, to lead it, and to bolster the efforts of already pugilistic, energetic Democrats, including Warren, Sanders, Jayapal, and Barbara Lee. Meanwhile, candidates and organizations have taken advantage of the recent interest in electoral politics to push more Americans’ attention toward their state legislatures and local government. “Five years ago, if you’d mentioned that Cobb County sheriff to me, I would have been like, ‘There’s a sheriff?’ ” one white woman outside Atlanta told me in 2019. “Now I can tell you his name and who’s running against him” and that at least seven people have died in his custody since 2018.

There are also new economic tools on hand: Sanders broke records during the primary with small-dollar donations; in the month that he announced Harris as his running mate, Biden did too. In the two weeks after Ginsburg’s death, ActBlue raised half a billion dollars, and Jaime Harrison, a Democratic challenger to Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, broke a quarterly record for any Senate candidate, raising $57 million with an average donation of $37, a haul that shows Democrats’ changing relationship to fund-raising not only against a party long funded by billionaires but also to non-presidential campaigns. If, as Citizens United assured us, money is speech, then Democrats are hollering. In October, McConnell complained to lobbyists about his party’s Senate candidates being swamped by small-dollar donations.

Money hasn’t just flowed to the Democratic Party: During this summer’s protests, the civil-rights-advocacy organization Color of Change quadrupled its membership from 1.7 million to 7 million and received hundreds of thousands of individual donations. Bail funds around the country received more than $90 million in the first two weeks of June. Even some of the left’s billionaires have redirected their financial energies; longtime Democratic Party donor Susan Sandler announced in September that she was donating $200 million to racial-justice organizations. “When our government, corporate, and other societal institutions are responsive to — and frankly, fearful of — the people who must bear the brunt of inequality and injustice, then better priorities, practices, and policies follow,” she wrote.

If Democrats win, there is a blueprint, being vocally presented by activists, of what can be done to break the right’s stranglehold on power: passage of a Voting Rights Act; the overturning of Citizens United; statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico; the end of the judicial filibuster; and court reform not simply on a federal level but at the State Supreme Court level. There are even more road maps: Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, free college and paid family leave and subsidized day care and a wealth tax and prison abolition. Some of these ideas may still be considered radical, but they nonetheless have entered the mainstream lexicon.

And of course there are past models for the unlikely victories of people over the mechanisms built to keep them powerless. Enslaved Americans won liberation despite the legal and political erasure of their very humanity; poor immigrant workers extracted protections and concessions from corporate behemoths; those barred from participating in democracy via the franchise have, by waging a battle that lasted centuries and continues today, gained their ballots.

But what these models also suggest is that there will be enormous suffering, sacrifice, and loss ahead. A fight to keep moving forward in the face of institutional obstruction will be arduous, discomfiting; it will take an extremely long time. And that’s not the kind of reality that is going to easily compete with brunch for millions longing to simply return to “normal.”

This is just one of the reasons to fear that Trump and the Republican Party will win in 2020 — with or without the help of the Supreme Court. Yes, because this outcome would offer the right further unchecked power over people and the planet. But also because if enough people believe the problem was Trump — and not the interconnected inequities he embodied and exposed, not the authoritarian, right-wing power grab he made so visible and unadorned — and if the effort to defeat him fails, too many will think their exertions were for naught, rather than understanding them as a crucial early stage in organizing.

But there is a twinned risk: the risk of winning on Election Day. Because if Trump is defeated, if the Senate goes to Democrats, the temptation for too many will be to curl back up and return to slumber.

Coalitions have fallen throughout this country’s history, both after crushing defeats and in the wake of terribly incomplete victories. Activists have treated first-step wins — the Roe decision or the election of a Black president — as glorious endpoints rather than as the beginnings that they are. It is so easy to forget that, as Florynce Kennedy observed, “Freedom is like taking a bath; you’ve got to keep doing it every day,” and that when the fight is for something as fragile as liberty and dignity for the structurally oppressed, there will always be forces strategizing to strip it away again as soon as possible.

And so perhaps the grimmest read of what has happened in these past four years paradoxically offers the greatest hope for an engaged populace going forward: that the results of this right-wing project may be so calamitous, so disastrous for so many millions — a 6-3 Court; corporations given free rein to drill us into destruction; rising seas and raging fires and rampaging plagues — that returning to unconsciousness is simply not going to be possible.