Sunday, September 2, 2018
Russia accuses Ukraine of killing Zakharchenko | Al Jazeera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4Zkco7VYsE
Leader of self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic killed in E. Ukraine blast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqlXx9yZzco
US ready to boost arms supplies to Ukraine naval and air forces, envoy says
Exclusive: Former
ambassador to Nato Kurt Volker tells the Guardian US and Russia still divided
on how to deploy UN peacekeepers to end four-year war
Washington is ready to expand
arms supplies to Ukraine in
order to build up the country’s naval and air defence forces in the face of
continuing Russian support for eastern
separatists, according to the US special envoy for Ukraine.
In an interview with the
Guardian, Kurt Volker said there was still a substantial gap between the US and
Russia over how a United Nations peacekeeping force could be deployed to end
the four-year war, and predicted that Vladimir Putin would wait for
presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine next year
before reconsidering his negotiating position.
However, Volker argued that
time was not on Putin’s side. He insisted pro-western, anti-Russian sentiment
was growing in Ukraine with every passing month. And he made clear that the
Trump administration was “absolutely” prepared to go further in supplying
lethal weaponry to Ukrainian forces than the anti-tank
missiles it delivered in April.
“They are losing soldiers
every week defending their own country,” said Volker, a former US ambassador to
Nato. “And so in that context it’s natural for Ukraine to build up its
military, engage in self-defense, and it’s natural to seek assistance and is
natural that other countries should help them. And of course they need lethal
assistance because they’re being shot at.”
He added: “We can have a
conversation with Ukraine like we would with any other country about what do
they need. I think that there’s going to be some discussion about naval
capability because as you know their navy was basically taken by Russia. And so they need to
rebuild a navy and they have very limited air capability as well. I think we’ll
have to look at air defence.”
In May, Congress approved
$250m in military assistance to Ukraine in 2019, including lethal weaponry.
Congress had voted for military support on a similar scale in the past but was
blocked by the Obama administration, fearful of triggering a matching
escalation from Moscow. The Trump
administration lifted that restraint in December 2017 and then
approved the shipment of Javelin missiles.
“The Javelins are mainly
symbolic and it’s not clear if they would ever be used,” said Aric Toler,
a researcher
at the Atlantic Council. “Support for the Ukrainian navy and air defence
would be a big deal. That would be far more significant.”
Russia continues to arm
separatists in the Donbass region. Drone footagereleased in
August by monitors from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE) showed convoys of lorries crossing the border on a dirt road at night.
US officials believe there are
about 2,000 Russian troops in eastern Ukraine, with most of the fighting being
done by local separatists. The frontlines are frozen and the war has settled
into a low-intensity conflict taking lives each week to add to the estimated
10,500 already killed.
Under an agreement reached in
Minsk more than three years ago, Russia was supposed to withdraw its troops and
Ukraine was to assign special status to Russian-majority districts in the
Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The Ukrainian president, Petro
Poroshenko, has made some moves toward decentralisation but the most critical
legislation has been stalled in parliament and is unlikely to see progress
until next year’s elections. Russia shows no signs of withdrawing.
Volker appeared to make
progress in January with his Russian counterpart, Vladislav Surkov, a Putin
aide. At talks in Dubai, the two discussed a compromise proposal on how a UN
peacekeeping force might function. The suggestion, put forward by the US,
Germany and France, is that peacekeepers initially deploy to the frontline,
where Moscow wants them, and then over time move through the Donbass and
establish a presence on the border with Russia, which is where Kiev and its
western supporters would like the UN blue helmets to be.
In January, Surkov described
the plan as “a
balanced approach”. But there has been no official Russian response. Volker
said he outlined the plan in more detail on paper but the Kremlin appeared less
willing to compromise than it did in January. It is insisting that the
peacekeepers’ mission be restricted to protecting OSCE monitors and that it not
be deployed until the rebel entities, the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s
republics”, are recognised and given special status. Those conditions are
unacceptable to Kiev and Washington.
“Russia wants Ukraine to take
these steps before relinquishing control of the territory,” Volker said. “And
that’s just not feasible. You can’t have elections in a condition where
territory is occupied.”
The Russian foreign minister,
Sergei Lavrov, said last week that Volker and Surkov would meet “soon”. Volker,
however, was sceptical.
“It’s clear that we have some
significant differences in our perspective,” he said. “I think we’ll do a few more
rounds of talking before deciding whether it’s going to be productive to do
another big meeting.”
Volker was pessimistic that
there would be any substantial progress until after Ukrainian elections next
year.
“There have been some
indications that Russia is probably not going to do much until after those
elections,” he said.
The envoy denied that his
efforts to maintain consistent western pressure on Russia have been undermined
by Donald Trump’s far softer rhetoric, in which the president has repeatedly
expressed his desire to lift sanctions and reportedly
told fellow G7 leaders Crimea was Russian because everybody there
speaks Russian.
“What the president is doing,
it seems, is trying to keep open a channel of dialogue with Putin so that if
there is a chance of resolving the issues we have a vehicle for doing so,”
Volker said. “I think it is actually smart and important.”
The envoy added that he was
confident Trump maintained the US position on Ukraine at his summit with Putin
in Helsinki in July. He argued that time was against Putin in Ukraine as the
war turns its people against Moscow.
“It has alienated the
Ukrainian population, especially the younger generation, [it has] produced a
more western-oriented country than before, with a stronger national identity,”
Volker said.
The Ukrainian presidential
elections remain a wild card, with no clear frontrunner and an electorate
disillusioned by corruption and human
rights abuses.
“The problem is the Ukrainian
government is not doing what they are being urged to do by all their western
partners which is really to deal with their own corruption domestically and
build the rule of law,” said Angela Stent, a former national intelligence
officer on Russia and Eurasia, now a Georgetown University professor.
“As long as the system itself
remains unreformed, there is room for the Russians to make inroads … That is
the other piece of it that only the Ukrainians can do.”
SPACE FORCE: Nukes in Space
‘We Would Be Opening the
Heavens to War’
CounterSpin interview with
Karl Grossman on the weaponization of space
JANINE JACKSON
Janine Jackson: While the
internet treated it largely as a kind of painful joke, corporate news
media reported the
Trump White House’s plans to establish a “Space Force” as the sixth branch of
the US military as almost an inevitability: A Los Angeles Times story slips
from saying the force “would be” responsible for training military personnel to
saying the space command “will centralize planning for space war-fighting.” The
pushback reported is from those concerned about “bureaucracy,” or changes in
the “roles and budgets” of existing military branches. There are details to be
worked out—even such “basic” ones, says a Washington
Post front-pager, as “what uniforms” the space force would use. But
coverage presents potential opposition to the plan, from congressmembers, for
example, more as a “hurdle” than a cause for deeper investigation.
Karl Grossman is a preeminent
resource on the weaponization of space. He’s professor of journalism at State
University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and author of the books Weapons
in Space and The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to
Our Planet, among others. He’s also a longtime associate of FAIR, the media
watch group that brings you this show. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Karl
Grossman.
Karl Grossman: A pleasure
to be with you, Janine.
JJ: We can ask how media
can report the statement, from the bipartisan leaders of the Armed
Services Committee Panel on Strategic Forces, that “beefing up” military
capabilities in space “will result in a safer, stronger America,” with no
thought to whether terrestrial war-making has made America safer or stronger,
but we know that elite media takes place in this sort of la-la land where those
presumptions are premises.
But I want to ask you about
the more specific claim being made, and simply recited in the press, about the
nature of this plan: USA Today says it
“would develop forces to defend satellites from attack and perform other
space-related tasks.” It says the Pentagon’s plan “identifies”—doesn’t allege,
but identifies—Russia and China as “explicitly pursuing space war-fighting
capabilities to neutralize US space capabilities in a time of conflict.” What
are we to make, Karl Grossman, of the idea that creating a space force is a
defensive measure?
KG: What we would be
doing is opening the heavens to war, making space a war zone, and that flies in
the face of the Outer
Space Treaty of 1967, which sets space aside for peaceful purposes, and
precludes the deployment in space, by any nation, of weapons of mass
destruction. And there’s been efforts—I’ve covered them for years now;
mainstream media has not covered these efforts—to broaden the Outer Space
Treaty to preclude not just weapons of mass destruction, but any weaponry
in space, and in that way ensure that it would be space for peace.
And the two countries that
have been leaders in this effort have been Russia and China. In fact, I have
here a piece from Chinese media, this was just a couple of weeks ago, “China Envoy
Calls for Strengthening Outer Space Covenants and Cooperation.” What Russia
and China—and let me mention, too, our neighbor Canada—have been promoting,
pushing, has been a treaty titled Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space,
the PAROS treaty.
And I’ve been actually to the
United Nations for votes on the PAROS treaty. And one country after another
country votes for it—again, with Russia, China and our neighbor Canada in the
lead. And the one nation, in all the countries of the world, voting against the
PAROS treaty? The United States. And because there’s a consensus process for a
disarmament treaty, the PAROS treaty has gotten nowhere. So what we’d be doing
by creating this Space Force, and seeking, as Trump put it,
“American dominance” in space, is just really asking for Russia and China and
other countries—there will be India and Pakistan, the list will go on—to go up
into space and weaponize space.
JJ: So it’s really turned
on its head; it’s being
presented, in the words, largely, of Mike Pence and other officials, that
it’s “our adversaries,” as it’s put, that have already transformed space into a
war-fighting domain—those are their words—and so, therefore, the US has to get
up there to respond.
KG: I must say, China did
a real stupid thing in the year 2007. It used
one of its missiles to destroy an obsolete Chinese satellite. And the
next year, we did the same thing to one of our satellites, with a missile. And
this is being used by the US as an example of China being keen on
anti-satellite weaponry. In fact, what is was was a very dumb way to eliminate
a satellite, because you’re left with all kind of debris—dumb on the Chinese
part, and dumb for the United States to do the same thing the year after.
But up to now, China and
Russia—and I’ve spoken to officials of both countries, and I’ve been to both
countries; I’ve been on the story for a long time—and they’re very, very
reluctant to violate the intent of the Outer Space Treaty. Also, and they’ve
gone on and on with me about this, they don’t want to waste their national
treasuries; they don’t want to expend—I mean, to put weaponry up in space is an
expensive proposition; it isn’t like acquiring a tank or even a jet fighter;
billions and billions of dollars would be the cost—and they’ve told me that
they just don’t want to waste their money on placing weapons in space. However,
if the US moves up into space with weapons, with this mission to dominate the
Earth below from space, despite the cost, they’ll be up there.
JJ: I’ve read a lot about
satellites, Karl, but a word that I haven’t seen much of in this current round
of coverage is nuclear. But that’s got to be in the story, right?
KG: Absolutely. In moving
up into space, with the Space Force, no doubt the United States will be placing
nuclear power systems in space. That was the architecture of Reagan’s
Star Wars, orbiting battle platforms with nuclear reactors on them
providing the power for hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons;
as Star Wars head general James Abrahamson said, without reactors in orbit,
there would need to be a long, long extension cord that goes down to the
surface of the Earth, bringing up power. Consider the consequences of a
shooting war: Battle platforms are hit, and radioactivity from these nuclear
reactors rains down on Earth.
JJ: You really are not
getting the picture of, not just things going wrong, but things going as they
might be anticipated to go, being, really, a horrific calamity for
human beings. It’s a very tidy image that we’re getting about what war in space
would be like.
KG: This lethal threat
would be above our heads. I did a documentary a number of years ago, entitled,
advisedly, Nukes in Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the
Heavens. And nukes and weapons in space, they go together.
JJ: And I wanted to ask
you about that question of priorities, finally. The Washington Post had
an article headlined
“Potential Winners if a Space Force Flies,” which delivered the no doubt
shocking news that “a group of government contractors sees a chance to profit.”
Hold onto your hat! An analyst tells the Post, “Lockheed Martin, Northrop
Grumman and Harris Corporation may be particularly well positioned to benefit
from Trump’s Space Force.” I found it odd to present military contractors as
sort of savvily responding to policy, as opposed to driving it, but then, to
your point, there was vanishingly little reference in media coverage to who
would not benefit from this allocation of funds, to what would be
lost, to what would be harmed, and so I wanted to underscore that point that
you made, just to say, media didn’t talk about it either.
And then, finally, what do you
see as the role for the public in this, where can people focus in terms of
speaking out on this issue?
KG: Just a quick mention
of a very important piece, in regards to mainstream media, I was so happy to
see it, in the Los Angeles Times, this is just a couple of days ago,
the headline,
“Trump Backed ‘Space Force’”—in quotes—“After Months of Lobbying by Officials
With Ties to the Aerospace Industry.” And listeners can Google that;
it’s very, very detailed, talks about
a small group of current and
former government officials, some with deep financial ties to the aerospace
industry, who see creation of the sixth military service as a surefire way to
hike Pentagon spending on satellite and other space systems.
So on this issue, we can at
this point, there’s been enough documentation, to include the “follow the
money” precept.
As to what people can do, we
have to rise from the grassroots. An excellent organization, that I would
recommend that people connect with, is the Global Network Against Weapons and
Nuclear Power in Space. Its website is Space4Peace.org,
and among other things, the Global Network will be doing, October 6–13 this
year, they’re going to—all over the world, this is going to be
happening—protests and other actions in a Space for Peace week. So from the
grassroots, people—certainly in this country, and all over the world—need to
stand up and to stop this madness, to keep space for peace.
JJ: We’ve been speaking
with Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State University of New
York/College at Old Westbury. You can find his recent article, “Turning
Space Into a War Zone,” on CounterPunch. Karl Grossman, thank you so
much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
KG: A pleasure, Janine.
Capitalism Is Beyond Saving, and America Is Living Proof
Policies that fail in the same
way over and over are not failing. Someone is lying about their intent. The
drug war didn’t fail to stem the flow of banned narcotics and to stop epidemic
abuse and addiction; it succeeded at building a vast carceral and surveillance
apparatus targeted at people of color as a successor to Jim Crow.
The war in Iraq didn’t fail to
bring democracy to the Middle East; it smashed an intransigent sometimes-ally
in the region, and deliberately weakened and destabilized a group of countries
whose control of, and access to, immense oil reserves was of strategic American
interest.
The “end of welfare as we know
it” didn’t fail to instill in the nation’s poor a middle-class sense of
responsibility; it entrenched a draconian regime of means-testing and a
Kafkaesque bureaucracy for access to even meager social benefits for a rapidly
shrinking middle class.
It’s not that “Capitalism
isn’t working,” as Noah Smith recently
argued in Bloomberg. It’s that it’s working all too well.
Real wage growth has been
nonexistent in the United States for more than 30 years. But as America enters
the 10th year of the recovery—and the longest bull market in modern
history—there are nervous murmurs, even among capitalism’s most reliable
defenders, that some of its most basic mechanisms might be broken. The gains of
the recovery have accrued absurdly, extravagantly to a tiny sliver of the
world’s superrich. A small portion of that has trickled down to the
professional classes—the lawyers and money managers, art buyers and decorators,
consultants and “starchitects”—who work for them. For the declining middle and
the growing bottom: nothing.
This is not how the economists
told us it was supposed to work. Productivity is at record highs; profits are
good; the unemployment rate is nearing a meager 4 percent. There are widely
reported labor
shortages in key industries. Recent tax cuts infused even more cash into
corporate coffers. Individually and collectively, these factors are supposed to
exert upward pressure on wages. It should be a workers’ market.
But wages remain flat, and
companies have used their latest bounty for stock buybacks, a transparent form
of market manipulation that was illegal until the Reagan-era SEC began to chip
away at the edifice of New Deal market reforms. The power of labor continues to
wane; the Supreme Court’s Janus
v. AFSCME decision, while ostensibly limited to public sector unions,
signaled in certain terms the willingness of the court’s conservative
majority—five guys who have never held a real job—to effectively overturn the
entire National Labor Relations Act if given the opportunity. The justices, who
imagine working at Wendy’s is like getting hired as an associate at Hogan &
Hartson after a couple of federal clerkships, reason that every employee can
simply negotiate for the best possible deal with every employer.
To those for whom capitalism
cannot fail but can only be failed, the answers lie at the margins. Neoliberal
doctrine forecloses any hope of large-scale change; present circumstances
always prevent future possibilities. Instead, as Smith writes, “there are some
simpler, humbler changes that state governments can begin taking right away,
without waiting for labor-friendly politicians to take control of the White
House and Congress.”
These changes involve banning
noncompete agreements, through which companies forbid employees from going to
work for competitors, and more assiduously policing industry wage-fixing.
Both would be fine reforms,
but neither would have much effect on the labor share of gross domestic
product. They are minor symptoms of the capitalist disease. Capitalism isn’t
broken; it’s working precisely as it’s supposed to: generating surpluses and
giving all of them to a small ownership class. The New Deal and postwar
prosperity, which barely lasted until 1980, represent historic outliers—the one
significant period in which growth at the top was somewhat constrained and a
relatively large share of wealth went to the middle. It was possible only
through massive government intervention and redistribution, combined with a
powerful labor sector backed by that same federal government. It took the
collective power of entire societies to briefly restrain capitalism, which,
left to its own devices, will do what it has always done: make the already very
rich infinitely richer. Capitalism is “working” just fine.
What we are seeing,
I suspect, is an acceleration of a broader social transformation that’s been
occurring for some time. Rome, the saying goes, wasn’t built in a day, but
neither did it fall in one, either. Changes to societies as large and complex
as theirs or ours occur subtly and over years—if not decades. Those workers who
do remain in the workforce increasingly depend on work and work alone for all
their benefits. The companies for which most people work are like the Roman
villas that gradually became central nodes of a manorial society as the
imperial metropole retreated through a series of self-inflicted wars and crises
of governance.
One moment you’re working for
some kind of money wage in a fully monetized economy; the next you’re living
in a company town, buying your groceries with scrip, and you can’t
leave without your boss’ permission.
In America today, supposedly
the most prosperous society ever to exist on earth, nearly a third of families
report experiencing economic hardship. Sixty percent—60 percent!—say they could
not cover an unexpected expense of $1,000, and nearly 40 percent have less than
$500 in savings. People with good insurance get
billed $100,000 for having a heart attack. People commute
four hours a day because they can’t afford to live in the cities where
they work.
The barbarians aren’t at the
gates. They’re already here in the boardrooms; they’ve been here all along.
HAPPY LABOR DAY! THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A MIDDLE CLASS WITHOUT STRONG UNIONS
THE ENTIRE REPUBLICAN PARTY and
the ruling heights of the Democratic Party loathe unions. Yet they also claim
they want to build a strong U.S. middle class.
This makes no sense. Wanting
to build a middle class while hating unions is like wanting to build a house
while hating hammers.
Sure, maybe hammers — like
every tool humans have ever invented — aren’t 100 percent perfect. Maybe when
you use a hammer you sometimes hit your thumb. But if you hate hammers and
spend most of your time trying to destroy them, you’re never, ever going to
build a house.
Likewise, no country on earth
has ever created a strong middle class without strong unions. If you genuinely
want the U.S. to have a strong middle class again, that means you want lots of
people in lots of unions.
The bad news, of course, is
that the U.S. is going in exactly the opposite direction. Union membership has
collapsed in the past 40 years, falling from
24 percent to 11 percent. And even those numbers conceal the uglier
reality that union membership is now 35 percent in the public sector
but just 6.7 percent in the private sector. That private sector percentage is
now lower than it’s been in over 100
years.
Not coincidentally, wealth
inequality – which fell tremendously during the decades after World War II when
the U.S. was most heavily unionized – has soared
back to the levels seen 100 years ago.
The reason for this is
straightforward. During the decades after World War II, wages went up hand in
hand with productivity. Since the mid-1970s, as union membership has declined,
that’s largely stopped happening. Instead, most of the increased wealth from
productivity gains has been seized by the people at the top.
Even conservative
calculations show that if wages had gone up in step with
productivity, families with the median household income of around $52,000 per
year would now be making about 25 percent more, or $65,000. Alternately, if we
could take the increased productivity in time off, regular families could keep
making $52,000 per year but only work four-fifths as much – e.g., people
working 40 hours a week could work just 32 hours for the same pay.
So more and better unions
would almost certainly translate directly into higher pay and better benefits
for everyone, including
people not in unions.
However, the effects of unions
in building a middle class go far beyond that, in a myriad of ways.
For instance, the degree to
which a country has created high-quality, universal health care is generally
correlated with the strength of organized labor in that country. Canada’s
single payer system was born in one province, Saskatchewan, and survived to
spread to the rest of the country thanks
to Saskatchewan’s unions. Now Canadians live longer than Americans even as
their health care system is far cheaper than ours.
U.S. unions were also key
allies for other social movements, such as the civil rights movement in
the 1950s and 1960s. Today, people generally say Martin Luther King, Jr.
delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington – but in fact
it was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and it was largely
organized by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Among the other speakers was Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto
Workers.
And unions have many
other positive effects, including ones so subtle they never show up in history
books. Here’s one I personally know of:
Dean Baker, co-director of a
Washington, D.C. think tank called the Center for Economic and Policy Research,
or CEPR, is arguably the only economist in the U.S. who both recognized the
danger of the gigantic U.S. housing bubble in the mid-2000s and
warned about it loudly.
But Baker didn’t appear out of
nowhere. His first job in Washington was at the Economic Policy Institute,
which was founded
in 1986 with a five-year funding pledge from eight unions. His
foothold there made it possible for him to eventually co-found CEPR and make
his case on the housing bubble. (I know this about Baker because I
briefly worked for CEPR long ago.)
So the wise use of union
resources played a key role in the eventual creation of some extremely important
knowledge. Baker alone wasn’t able to get the political system to respond
before Wall Street shot the U.S. economy in the stomach – but it’s certainly
possible to imagine a different history, in which stronger unions created
perches for additional economists who cared about reality, and they worked with
stronger unions to organize to stave off our ongoing catastrophe. In other
words, if the U.S. had a stronger labor movement, the whole country could be
perhaps $10
trillion richer.
So enjoy the day off. But if
you’d like to see an American middle class again at some point before you die,
spend some time thinking about how to get more hammers into everybody’s hands.
'What the Political Revolution Is All About': Historic Upset by Progressive Andrew Gillum in Florida
"Tonight, Floridians
joined Andrew in standing up and demanding change in their community. That's
what the political revolution is all about."
Despite being massively
outspent by his centrist
millionaire opponents and lacking support from the Democratic
establishment, progressive Andrew Gillum rode grassroots enthusiasm for his
unabashedly left-wing agenda of Medicare for All and bold criminal justice
reform to a shocking and historic upset victory Tuesday night in Florida's
gubernatorial primary.
"Tonight, we proved
what's possible when people come together and show up to build Florida into a
better state for all," Gillum wrote on
Twitter following his victory, which was celebrated as further evidence that
the progressive movement is gaining momentum nationwide. "I'm truly
honored to represent people across the state as the Democratic nominee—and I
promise to stand up for everyday Floridians and the issues that matter
most."
While Gillum—who is currently
the mayor of Tallahassee—lacked the institutional backing and immense personal
wealth of his Democratic opponents, he overcame this cash deficit with a
massive surge in voter turnout, which was attributed to his unwavering
embrace of popular policies like Medicare for All and raising the minimum wage.
"My opponents have spent,
together, over $90 million in this race. We have spent four [million],"
Gillum told supporters
at an event on Saturday. "Money doesn’t vote. People do."
Gillum also won the support of
nationally prominent progressives like New York congressional candidate
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
In a statement Tuesday
night, Sanders applauded Gillum's "powerful" grassroots campaign,
noting that "he's not just working hard to win an election, he has laid
out a vision for a new course for the state of Florida and our country. No one
person can take on the economic and political elites on their own."
"Tonight, Floridians
joined Andrew in standing up and demanding change in their community," the
Vermont senator added. "That's what the political revolution is all about
and Andrew Gillum is helping to lead it."
In a tweet congratulating
Gillum for his come-from-behind win, Ocasio-Cortez declared that the
"progressive movement is transforming the country."
In November, Gillum—who is
vying to become Florida's first black governor—will face off against Rep. Ron
DeSantis (R-Fla.), a "Trump
acolyte" who has enthusiastically embraced the president's xenophobic
agenda and pro-corporate economic policies.
Implicitly denouncing the
divisive and hate-filled platforms of DeSantis and President Donald Trump,
Gillum declared at
his victory party Tuesday night that his campaign is "going to unite this
state."
"What's going to bring us
together is our common and shared belief that regardless of where you come
from, regardless of what your mother or your father did for their profession,
regardless of what side of the tracks you live on that, that every singly
Floridian ought to have their equal and fair shot at the American dream,"
Gillum said.
Appearing on CNN after
his victory, Gillum acknowledged his belief that Trump is "uniquely
unqualified for the position he holds" and "dangerous" to the
country, but said the thrust of his campaign has been focusing on the
"everyday issues confronting people."
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