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DNC Live Watch Party
The Tight Rope is going live at the Democratic National Convention Thursday, Aug 20th from 9-11pm ET!
Tune in to hear Howie Hawkins, Angela Walker, Zephyr Teachout, and other's speeches along with expert commentary and insights from Dr. West and Professor Rose.
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Thank you to The Real News Network for helping produce this special event.
“That tight rope, it gets slippery at times, but we stay on it. We keep on moving.” - Cornel West
from David Sirota's TMI newsletter
[...]
Democratic officials decided to turn this year’s convention into a promotional platform for Republican icons who attacked unions, laid off thousands of workers, promoted climate denial, endangered 9/11 survivors and lied us into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
I’m also not glum just because the Democrats’ presidential standard-bearer is often an uninspiring mishmash of incoherent here’s-the-deal colloquialisms that mean nothing.
I think the despair is deeper — and has something to do with the now-yawning gap between social expectation and reality.
Right now, if you are following politics at all, you are asked to feel chipper and energized. We are expected — no, required — to conjure 2008-level enthusiasm during this even darker time than the financial crisis, all so that we can move into a new, glorious moment of Hope™.
Enthusiasm, though, comes from the assumption that the the process is authentic and that what we’re told by our leaders is real. But that feeling has waned, because there is no pretense. For all the high-minded rhetoric, everyone on all sides of this situation — and I mean literally everyone — knows that Democratic politics today is more about brand and pantomime than about power and legislative action. You may not say it out loud, you may not like thinking about it — but I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, because somewhere deep down in there, everyone senses the fraudulence at hand.
This is a moment of apolitical crises — that is, crises that aren’t just manufactured by and confined to the political soundstage, but instead life-and-death, out-here-in-the-real-world emergencies in the realms of money, biology and ecology. We’re facing an economic and environmental collapse in the midst of a lethal pandemic. And we’re going through this cataclysm with a legislative branch controlled by right-wing senators, a court system that rubber stamps corporate demands and an authoritarian president whose major crisis-management experience was firing people on The Apprentice.
And yet, in the middle of this five-alarm garbage fire, we’re asked to white-knuckle it and feign excitement for an opposition party machine run by insiders, lobbyists and careerists who keep letting us know that they think campaign promises are distinct from policy. In so many ways, they keep telling us over and again that the most we can hope for is, in the words of the nominee himself, that “nothing would fundamentally change.”
There has certainly been a lot of inspiring talk about the health care emergency and the climate crisis and oligarchy, but the party platform says it all.
During a recession that has resulted in millions losing health insurance, Medicare for All is nowhere to be found in the platform. During climate-intensified wildfires, inland hurricanes and — yes, really — fire tornados, the platform’s section on ending fossil fuel subsidies was removed. The lobbyists who run the DNC also killed an initiative to reduce the influence of corporate money on the party. Meanwhile, Joe Biden himself rolled out a whole package of legislative promises, and then told his Wall Street donors that, in fact, changing corporate behavior is “not going to require legislation” and he won’t be proposing any. Please clap.
Brent Welder @BrentWelderToday as a @BernieSanders nominee on the @DNC Rules Committee I proposed an anti-corruption amendment to ban corporate PAC money to the DNC, and to ban corp lobbyists from serving on the DNC. The Biden camp recruited a corp lobbyist on the Rules Cmte to speak against it, then...
July 30th 20202,373 Retweets9,439 Likes
The worst part is that dispassionately recounting any of these facts obviously proves you love Trump and Putin — at least that’s what you’ll be told if you dare even whisper this. In our tribalized politics, war is peace, freedom is slavery and dissent is disloyalty. Failure to match the rah-rah spirit of the Blue Team, refusal to get psyched for the charade, asking questions about inconvenient facts — it all means you must be on the Red Team and are being paid in rubles, comrade.
As an electoral strategy, this kind of vote shaming and dissent suppression doesn’t have a winning track record. It is both immoral and bad politics. There must be a better strategy — and for the love of god, with polls now tightening, the world needs the Democrats to find one fast, because another Trump term is unthinkable.
Either way, the constant, incessant demand to be happy about fraudulence — the insistence that we put on a smile and insinuate that the New Deal is on the ballot — is shamefully dishonest. It helps make the whole process into exactly what Ohio Sen. Nina Turner described: “It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of shit in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still shit.”
This is demoralizing for obvious reasons, but to feel demoralized is to feel like you’re crazy and alone — because it requires you to deviate from the norm of blissful and willful ignorance. It requires you to pay attention and reject a culture that tries to turn you into a goldfish, forgetting your entire world every 15 minutes.
To be demoralized at this political moment is to remember that for all the great progressive oratory during the convention, the Democratic presidential ticket is the guy who wrote the crime bill, spearheaded the bankruptcy bill and worked with Republicans to authorize the Iraq War -- and, oh yeah, a runningmate who blocked her law enforcement staff from prosecuting Steve Mnuchin.
To be demoralized is to feel momentarily uplifted by Michelle Obama’s inspiring convention speech deriding our “greed is good” culture from her Martha’s Vineyard castle — and to then remember that the Obama administration knowingly fortified that culture when it protected the Wall Street firms that destroyed millions of lives during the financial crisis.
To be demoralized is to make the mistake I made during my family break — to sit along the shore of Lake Michigan and for some reason reject a mindless beach novel and instead read Ron Suskind’s old book Confidence Men. That tome meticulous recounts Obama and Biden promising real health care reform during the 2008 campaign, and then steamrolling a public option -- and dishonestly pretending they never even pushed such a modest reform in the first place (they did). The book reads like a cautionary tale of what could come during the next Democratic presidency — especially if you believe the signals already coming from Capitol Hill.
David Sirota @davidsirotaA reminder from @RonSuskind’s book: Dems used their congressional majorities to kill the popular public option & replace it with the unpopular individual mandate in a bill expanding the power of the insurance industry — and then Dems immediately got destroyed in the 2010 election 
August 13th 202071 Retweets150 Likes
To be demoralized, in other words, is to remember -- and that’s not what Democrats do in America.
Minds are wiped and Iraq War architects become Resistance heroes and Democratic convention speakers. Memories are scrubbed and Wall Street thieves become Democratic economic gurus and treasury secretaries. Amnesia takes hold and the Democratic governor of Mount Covid becomes a pandemic mancrush. Democrats lose a presidential campaign to Donald Trump by defending the Washington establishment — and now four years later they are running the same Washington valor campaign again, telling themselves they’re too legit to quit, baby.
Our society is not interested in recollection and learning from the past. We are immersed in short-attention-span media and propaganda that doesn’t want us to remember, and therefore goes out of its way to omit mention of historical context.
Indeed, this is part of why it’s almost sad that podcasts like Slow Burn seem like such wonderful aberrations -- they are fascinating because they resurface lost history, but it shouldn’t be such a fascinating novelty because political history should never be lost in the first place. Memory is the last defense against repeating catastrophes — but we choose to live in the memory hole.
On the long drive back from Michigan, I listened to some of those lost-history podcasts, and their themes mixed with my recent reading of Confidence Men. That first morning back home, I laid in bed scrolling the news with that feeling of dread, wondering whether we have forgotten the most important history of all: the history of how authoritarianism rises.
We’ve seen this parable over and over again - elite-run, neoliberal governments are democratically elected and then do not economically deliver for the vast majority of the population, creating popular frustration and the political space for a right-wing strongman to seize power.
This is the taboo tale tying together the Obama and Trump eras. Though oversimplified, the broad strokes are clear: A populist campaign won the election, before an elite-run administration capitulated to corporate power, sowing frustration and disillusionment, which helped a demagogue peddling racism and sexism successfully vault himself into the presidency.
We’ve been lucky that Trump is so narcissistic, clumsy and inept -- in many cases, his own idiocy has inhibited his ability to make things even worse than they are.
However, if our goldfish culture means we omit inconvenient facts and no longer allow ourselves to remember that journey from Obama to Trump, then what is to prevent us from repeating the journey again?
If we forget how bad the old “normal” was and just have to go back to a Wall Street-run White House championing incrementalism in the face of existential crises, what is to stop another Trump from emerging afterwards?
If the 2009 capitulations of a new Democratic president, his party and liberal groups in Washington become the 2021 capitulations of a new Democratic president, today’s party and liberal groups, then what is to prevent 2024 from ending up like 2016, only with President Tom Cotton?
I probably should’ve read a pulp novel during my time off because I don’t want these questions haunting my mind. I’d prefer that innocent, moronically naive hope I felt standing with tens of thousands of others when Obama visited Denver at the very end of the 2008 campaign.
But now here in the middle of the country, with the sun blocked out by wildfire ash, with people losing jobs and health care, with schools closed, with a Democratic governor refusing to halt evictions -- I can’t find that feeling. It’s gone.
That doesn’t mean I don’t know what to do when I get my ballot. I know I’ll have to deliver it to a drop box rather than by mail if I want to make sure it gets there on time. And I know to vote the Democratic ticket because I live in a swing state and I know that fascism’s bid for reelection must be defeated.
But I also know that the threat of fascism isn’t going away after November, so don’t ask me to be excited or feel happy.
[...]
You're invited to join us for a Prospect virtual event...
Monday, August 24, Noon Eastern
Over two decades (and more than three thousand pages), Rick Perlstein has published definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in American politics: Before the Storm (2002), Nixonland (2008), and The Invisible Bridge (2014). Now, the saga's final installment, Reaganland — covering the years from Jimmy Carter's election to his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan — has been released.
Perlstein's body of work explains the nation's journey from rejecting Barry Goldwater as a dangerous ideologue to embracing Reagan, who had much the same agenda. New Right organization and a pallid Democratic Party at war with itself led to this outcome, and the result helped produce the world we live in now.
On the first day of the Republican National Convention, Perlstein joins Prospect executive editor David Dayen for a one-hour discussion about the lessons of the 1970s and the rise of the conservative movement, as well as where it finds itself today.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
Advance registration is limited! However, the session will be live-streamed on YouTube, and a recording will be posted after the event. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing a personal link to join.
There can no longer be any doubt: Donald Trump is trying to engineer a coup by preventing millions of Americans from voting, undermining public confidence in our democracy, and stealing the 2020 election.
He openly admitted on Fox News that he is blocking funding for the U.S. Postal Service to prevent people from voting by mail. He has crippled the institutions capable of holding him accountable, attacking journalism as "fake news" and packing the judiciary with political hacks.
And he has said over and over again that he has no intention of accepting the results of any election that doesn't declare him the winner.
These are the words and actions of an authoritarian attacking the foundations of democracy to keep himself in power.
But there is a way to stop him: When Trump's attacks on democracy are accurately reported and called out as dangerous threats, he's been forced to walk them back.
After the U.S. Postal Service was caught removing truckloads of street-corner mailboxes in states all over the country last week, Trump's political hack of a postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, was forced to back down due to the outcry. That's the strategy that can stop Trump's anti-democratic tactics: document them, report them, and ignite a firestorm of protest. But it won't be cheap or easy.
That's why Common Dreams is launching an emergency pre-election Summer Fundraising Drive to make sure we have the funding we need to defend the integrity of our elections and call out every last attack on our ability to conduct free and fair elections. The corporate media is unwilling or incapable of holding Trump accountable and safeguarding our democracy. But we will.
This is our most crucial fundraising drive in years. Maybe ever. Whatever you can afford helps, whether that's $5, $25, or $100. As a nonprofit, independent news outlet, we refuse all corporate advertising and rely instead on many small donations from readers that add up and power our cutting edge news-gathering organization.
Please donate today to help Common Dreams meet our pre-election Summer Fundraising Campaign goal of $80,000 by September 1.
DONATE NOW
With thanks,
Kimberly Monaghan
Board Chair
for the whole Common Dreams news team
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Adri Nieuwhof Rights and Accountability 18 August 2020
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/adri-nieuwhof/israel-lobbyists-force-dutch-government-suspend-funding-farmers-organization
Pro-Israel groups have been campaigning to undermine a large Palestinian agricultural development organization by accusing it of “funding terror.”
UK Lawyers for Israel, UKLFI, and Dutch pro-Israel lobby group Center for Information and Documentation Israel, CIDI, have both been calling on the Dutch government to end funding to the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, UAWC.
On 9 July, Sigrid Kaag, the Dutch minister of international trade and development, gave in to the pressure and suspended UAWC’s funding pending the outcome of an external review.
Pressure on Dutch government
In May, last year, UKLFI sent a letter to the Dutch representative in Ramallah with information about UAWC’s supposed links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP.
UKLFI repeated the accusations in a letter sent to Minister Kaag in June this year, citing NGO Monitor as its major source of information.
NGO Monitor has close ties to Israel’s political and military establishments.
CIDI joined UKLFI’s attack on UAWC by bringing the issue to the attention of lawmakers. As a result, the nationalist, right wing PVV party and Christian parties SGP and CU asked the ministry if it was prepared to end Dutch funding of UAWC.
The UAWC was established in 1986 to support Palestinian farmers in the occupied West Bank and Gaza who suffer from Israel’s policies of theft of land and water.
The union describes itself as independent, with no political or religious affiliation to any party or political organization.
It was set up to help Palestinian farmers reclaim and rehabilitate their land, in part to support farmers themselves and in part to prevent the Israeli confiscation of land for settlement expansion.
UAWC also develops projects to cultivate land and maintain an infrastructure of agricultural roads and water resources. It supports projects in the fishing and livestock sector.
The Netherlands has financed UAWC projects since 2013. All donations are subjected to a strict reporting, monitoring and evaluation system.
Arrest of UAWC staff
On 25 September last year, Israeli forces arrested Samer Arbeed, an employee of the union.
Arbeed’s arrest was connected to an explosion near the Jewish settlement of Dolev that killed Israeli teen Rina Shnerb and injured her father and brother.
Interrogators from Israel’s domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet “used exceptional ways to investigate” Arbeed under the “ticking time-bomb” procedure. After two days of questioning, Arbeed was admitted to hospital in critical condition.
On 3 October, UAWC informed the Dutch ministry that an employee had been taken into custody on suspicion of involvement in the Dolev attack. A second employee was arrested a few weeks later in relation to the same attack.
The Netherlands Representative Office in Ramallah entered into dialogue with UAWC to obtain further information about the arrests.
UAWC informed the representative office that it had again reminded the staff of the ban on active membership of political organizations, including the PFLP. The union also terminated the contracts of the two employees.
The Dutch ministry then clarified its position in its response to UKLFI’s 18 June, 2020 letter.
“UAWC is not listed as a terrorist organization by the EU or UN, nor are its board members listed as members of a terrorist group. Previous international screening and the Netherlands’ own oversight of UAWC did not reveal any ties between UAWC and organizations on any international terrorism list.”
Minister Kaag, however, told parliament that she wants to act with caution and therefore decided to commission an external investigation into the possible links between PFLP and UAWC.
In the meantime, she said, she suspended UAWC’s funding pending the outcome of the review. Other donors, according to the minister herself, did not see any grounds to take similar measures.
Undermining Palestinian groups
The attack on UAWC is in line with an Israeli government strategy to undermine Palestinian organizations.
Last year, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy published a report, Terrorists in Suits: The Ties Between NGOs promoting BDS and Terrorist Organizations.
The report effectively sets out to smear Palestinian organizations who defend the rights of the Palestinian people. And its impact on organizations listed in the report has been dramatic.
Thus, Mahmoud Nawajaa, national coordinator of the Palestinian Boycott National Committee (BNC) was recently detained, taken from his home in the middle of the night in front of his children.
He has only just been released after over three weeks. The military has issued no charges.
Not so lucky is Khalida Jarrar, board member of Addameer prisoner rights organization and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Jarrar was arrested in October 2019. She remains in administrative detention – without charge or trial – today.
UKLFI has smeared Defense for Children International – Palestine, but had to retract its allegations that DCIP provides “financial or material support to any terrorist organization” after legal action.
And human rights group Al-Haq has been smeared and attacked for many years.
All of these groups featured in the Terrorists in Suits report which relies “on outdated and unsubstantiated allegations,” according to al-Haq and is “premised on racist caricatures, attempting to paint Palestinian civil society organizations as essentially suspicious and violent, in order to discredit and defund them.”
In 2016, then minister Bert Koenders refused to give in to the pressure to cease funding Palestinian groups whom NGO Monitor had accused of supporting the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Rather than allow herself to be bullied, Minister Kaag should follow the example of her predecessor.
Tomorrow at Noon: KNOCKING ON THE DOOR of the LRSD ADMIN BLDG
Thursday Aug 20 12pm
Join us at the LRSD Administration Bldg at 810 W. Markham. One by one we will knock on the door to deliver the message to administrators that we need SAFE, EQUITABLE SCHOOL. Opening in-person schooling at this moment before schools can ensure SAFETY and EQUITY will result in MASS MURDER in and put everyone in our communities at risk.
We will gather at 11:30. Parking is available across the street in the chain fenced lot or in front of the LRSD Administration building.
We will practice 6ft distancing, wearing masks and using hand sanitizer.
RSVP HERE:
https://www.facebook.com/events/685359738716015/
--
"This isn't just an attack against the fabric of our democracy: it's a personal attack against each and every American citizen."
by
Jake Johnson, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/18/mail-voters-and-candidates-sue-block-unconstitutional-assault-postal-service-trump
A group of voters from several states and candidates for public office in New York filed a federal lawsuit Monday against President Donald Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy alleging that the pair's ongoing assault on the U.S. Postal Service unlawfully threatens Americans' right to vote amid the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
Among the plaintiffs in the suit is Mondaire Jones, a progressive activist and attorney who won the Democratic primary for New York's 17th congressional district in June running on Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and tuition-free public college. In a series of tweets Monday, Jones wrote that "we've all watched in horror this week as Trump and DeJoy have been sabotaging the USPS: postal boxes ripped out, overtime halted, mail sorting machines destroyed."
Filed in the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit (pdf) decries as "unconstitutional" efforts by Trump and DeJoy to "ensure USPS cannot reliably deliver election mail." The legal action comes as Democratic lawmakers in both chambers of the U.S. Congress are moving ahead with legislative action to end the Trump administration's sabotage of Postal Service operations."Let's be real, we know why Trump is doing this: he's deliberately sabotaging the USPS to make it harder to vote by mail in the General Election. We know because he told us," Jones added. "This isn't just an attack against the fabric of our democracy: it's a personal attack against each and every American citizen. We need to take steps to make it easier to vote, not harder."
"While President Trump himself is holding up necessary funding for the Post Office," the lawsuit says, "a flurry of steps taken by DeJoy all but guarantee that thousands upon thousands (if not millions) of ballots will simply not reach their destinations on time, will likely lack postmarks that are required by state law, and that the volume of election mail that is coming may be delayed for weeks."
As the Associated Press reported, "Besides candidates for political office, plaintiffs included individuals who say they must vote by mail because they fear traveling or because they worry about contracting the coronavirus."
"Those individuals included a Chicago resident who recently underwent a bone marrow transplant, a digital colorist for film and television who votes in California, an 85-year old Suffolk County, New York, voter at an assisted living facility, and Mary Winton Green, a 97-year old retired philanthropist and Cook County, Illinois voter who first voted in 1944," according to AP.
The lawsuit seeks an injunction requiring Trump and DeJoy—a major Republican donor to the president—to "take all steps necessary and sufficient to ensure that the USPS is adequately funded so that it can... deliver all election mail (1) consistently with past practice, (2) in a manner that ensures absentee and other mail ballots are treated equal to in-person ballots, and (3) with sufficient staffing and overtime to handle a record level of mail voting."
The lawsuit also demands that the court "unwind the harm already caused by Defendants' actions and policies and... mitigate any harms that may flow from already accomplished harms."
"Like the existence of the USPS, our right to vote is enshrined in the Constitution," said Jones. "Trump does not have the authority to undermine our constitutional rights. That's why we've filed for an injunction to right this wrong before the General Election."
