https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6u5xPJaW2s
Monday, August 31, 2020
In These Times (Rural) links to articles
Michael Markus, known as Rattler, had mixed emotions when he heard that a federal judge had ordered the Dakota Access Pipeline to stop pumping oil because it had been built unlawfully. "This would heal," Markus wrote to Rural America In These Times. At the same time, he wrote, "It's hard not to be heartbroken." Markus sent the message from Sandstone federal prison in Minnesota, where he's serving a three-year sentence for trying to stop the pipeline from being built in the first place. Olive Bias, member of the NoDAPL Political Prisoner Support Committee, put it this way: "People have got to recognize that people are still putting their bodies on the line in prison to stop this pipeline."
Thanks for reading,
Joseph Bullington
Rural America In These Times
joseph@inthesetimes.com
'People Are Still Putting Their Bodies on the Line to Stop this Pipeline'
A court found that the Dakota Access Pipeline was built unlawfully. People are still in prison for opposing it.
BY JOSEPH BULLINGTON
The Pandemic Is Exposing the Rotten Core of Our Industrial Food System
While industrial farms have been thrown into chaos, local food has proved a more resilient model.
BY JOSEPH BULLINGTON
Agricultural Workers Lose Millions of Dollars Each Year to Wage Theft
It's against labor laws, but that hasn't stopped employers from withholding more than $65 million in worker wages over the last two decades.
BY PRAMOD ACHARYA
Will Bayer Get the Drift on Dicamba?
The agrochemical giant was ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for crop damage from its potent herbicide. But it's not done trying to sell the stuff.
BY DAVE DICKEY
Species Are Relocating Because of Climate Change. Should They Be Considered Invasive?
"The goal in this crazy warming world is to keep everything alive. But it may not be in the same place."
BY JENNY MORBER
Sorry Sonny: National Forests Are Not Crops
Secretary of Agriculture Perdue has prioritized logging, mining, drilling and grazing on the National Forests.
BY ADAM RISSIEN
Very fine people
One week ago, Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the Kenosha, Wisconsin, police department, fired at least seven shots at the back of a Black man named Jacob Blake as he opened his car door, leaving the 29-year-old father of five probably paralyzed from the waist down.
After protests erupted, self-appointed armed militia or vigilante-type individuals rushed to Kenosha, including Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old who traveled there and then, appearing on the streets with an AR-15 assault rifle, killed two people and wounded a third.
This is pure gold for a president without a plan, a party without a platform, and a cult without a purpose other than the abject worship of Donald Trump.
To be re-elected Trump knows he has to distract the nation from the coronavirus pandemic that he has flagrantly failed to control – leaving more than 180,000 Americans dead, tens of millions jobless and at least 30 million reportedly hungry.
So he’s counting on the reliable Republican dog-whistle. “Your vote,” Trump said in his speech closing the Republican convention Thursday night, “will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists, agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens.”
“We will have law and order on the streets of this country,” Vice President Mike Pence declared the previous evening, warning “you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”
Neither Trump nor Pence mentioned the real threats to law and order in America today, such as gun-toting agitators like Rittenhouse, who, perhaps not coincidentally, occupied a front-row seat at a Trump rally in Des Moines in January.
Pence lamented the death of federal officer Dave Patrick Underwood, “shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California,” earlier this year, implying he was killed by protesters. In fact, Underwood was shot and killed by an adherent of the boogaloo boys, an online extremist movement that’s trying to ignite a race war.
Such groups have found encouragement in a president who sees “very fine people” supporting white supremacy.
The threat also comes from conspiracy theorists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the recently nominated Republican candidate for Georgia’s 14th congressional district and promoter of QAnon, whose adherents believe Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. Trump has praised Greene as a “future Republican star” and claimed that QAnon followers “love our country.”
And from people like Mary Ann Mendoza, a member of Trump’s campaign advisory board, who was scheduled to speak at the Republican convention until she retweeted an antisemitic rant about a supposed Jewish plan to enslave the world’s peoples and steal their land.
Clearly the threat also comes from hotheaded, often racist police officers who fire bullets into the backs of Black men and women or kneel on their necks so they can’t breathe. Needless to say, there was little mention at the Republican convention of Jacob Blake, and none of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor.
And the threat comes from Trump’s own lackeys who have brazenly broken laws to help him attain and keep power. Since Trump promised he would only hire “the best people,” 14 Trump aides, donors and advisers have been indicted or imprisoned.
Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani – who ranted at the Republican convention about rioting and looting in cities with Democratic mayors – has repeatedly met with the pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach, whom American intelligence has determined is “spreading claims about corruption … to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party.”
In addition, federal prosecutors are investigating Giuliani’s business dealings in Ukraine with two men arrested in an alleged campaign finance scheme.
Trump’s new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, who had been a major Trump campaign donor before taking over the post office, is being sued by six states and the District of Columbia for allegedly seeking to “undermine” the postal service as millions of Americans plan to vote by mail during the pandemic.
Not to forget the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who spoke to the Republican convention while on an official trip to the Middle East, in apparent violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits officials of the executive branch other than the president and vice-president from engaging in partisan politics.
You want the real threat to American law and order? It’s found in these Trump enablers and bottom-dwellers. They are the inevitable excrescence of Trump’s above-the-law, race-baiting, me-first presidency. It is from the likes of them that the rest of America is in serious need of protection.
Sunday, August 30, 2020
'I Blame Mitch McConnell the Most. At Least Pelosi Was Trying': Anger at GOP Over Economic Pain Grows
"The White House continues to disregard the needs of the American people as the coronavirus crisis devastates lives and livelihoods."
by
Jake Johnson, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/28/i-blame-mitch-mcconnell-most-least-pelosi-was-trying-anger-gop-over-economic-pain
With jobless Americans growing increasingly desperate and furious at congressional Republicans for skipping town for summer recess without approving Covid-19 relief, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday ripped the Trump White House for "abandoning" tens of millions of workers and children after her brief conversation with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows yielded zero progress.
The call represented the latest failed attempt to jumpstart relief negotiations that collapsed earlier this month after White House negotiators refused to budge from their trillion-dollar price ceiling and opposition to the $600-per-week federal unemployment supplement, which officially expired on July 31."This conversation made clear that the White House continues to disregard the needs of the American people as the coronavirus crisis devastates lives and livelihoods," the California Democrat said in a statement after speaking with Meadows, an ultra-conservative former congressman, by phone for less than half an hour Thursday afternoon.
The House and Senate aren't expected to return to Washington, D.C. until after Labor Day, allowing another rent due date to pass without approving relief for the 40 million Americans facing possible eviction.
"The administration's continued failure to acknowledge the funding levels that experts, scientists, and the American people know is needed leaves our nation at a tragic impasse," said Pelosi. "Over 100 days after House Democrats passed the Heroes Act, another 4.4 million Americans have becomes sick and over 90,000 have died. Yet, Republicans continue to turn their backs on the American people."
In her statement, Pelosi proceeded to slam the White House and GOP for:
Abandoning healthcare workers, teachers and other frontline workers by rejecting our call for robust support for state, local, tribal, and territorial governments and saying that they should just go bankrupt;
Abandoning teachers and children and their families by bullying many schools into reopening before it is safe to do so, which creates new vectors for the virus to spread;
Abandoning the 14 million hungry children in America by ignoring the priority of food insecurity, offering just $250,000 when experts estimate that tens of billions are needed;
Abandoning families, workers and small businesses by offering a grossly insufficient $16 billion for testing and tracing, when scientists say that at least $75 billion is needed to crush the virus and safely reopen schools and the economy, and not supporting OSHA protections for workers;
Abandoning working families by providing nothing for rental assistance, when millions are at risk of eviction and homelessness; and
Abandoning voters and our democracy by refusing to agree to the funding needed to ensure that no one has to choose between their health and their vote this November.
The effort to revive Covid-19 relief talks comes as the U.S. economic recovery is showing signs of faltering and millions of unemployed workers are worried about meeting basic needs in the absence of enhanced unemployment benefits, housing assistance, and additional nutrition aid. Late last month, nearly 30 million Americans reported not having enough food to eat.
Shawn Gabriel, a single father of two in Ohio, slammed members of Congress for failing to come to an agreement in an interview with the Washington Post.
"Most of them are rich. They don't struggle. They get paid," said Gabriel. "I blame Mitch McConnell the most. At least [Pelosi] was trying four months ago."
Earlier this month, after Congress and White House negotiators failed to strike a stimulus deal, President Donald Trump signed several legally dubious directives purportedly aimed at providing rapid relief by extending the federal unemployment benefit boost at $300 per week—half the previous level—and staving off evictions.
"When I figured out that executive order wasn't going to mean squat for me, I cried," Stephanie Hightower, an out-of-work home caregiver in Indiana, told the Post. Because Hightower is currently receiving just $75 per week in state unemployment benefits, she does not qualify for the $300 federal supplement.But as of Friday, just five states—Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Tennessee—have begun paying out benefits under Trump's makeshift unemployment program, which deliberately leaves out the poorest Americans by denying relief to those currently receiving less than $100 per week in state unemployment aid.
Hightower said she supported Trump in the 2016 election but is now undecided.
In a blog post Thursday after the U.S. Labor Department reported that 1.4 million more Americans filed unemployment claims last week, Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute wrote that Trump's unemployment directive "is doing more harm than good" and urged Congress to urgently revive the $600-per-week supplement.
"The extra $600 was supporting a huge amount of spending by people who now have to make drastic cuts," Shierholz wrote. "The spending made possible by the $600 was supporting 5.1 million jobs. Cutting that $600 means cutting those jobs."
Kyle Herrig, president of watchdog group Accountable.US, said in a statement Thursday that "millions more Americans are teetering on the edge of poverty and facing real danger of hunger, eviction, and crippling debt—yet Trump's Senate allies want to keep playing a dangerous game of chicken with the economy."
"The best they can muster from their vacation homes," Herrig added, "is half-hearted half-measures that will simply not meet families' needs during a worsening health crisis and recession."
Democrats Must Demolish Trump’s Delusional Law-Breaking Dystopia
"The Democrats are not matching Trump’s own or his party's propaganda."
by
Ralph Nader
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/29/democrats-must-demolish-trumps-delusional-law-breaking-dystopia
Donald Trump continually breaks multiple laws. Yet the serial lawbreaking, lying Trump is playing the “law and order” card against street protestors reacting to fatal cases of police brutality. Armed pro-Trump provocateurs are attending civic protests and generating casualties and property damage, as was the case recently in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump uses such mayhem to attack Joe Biden and his hyped “radical leftists.” This is grotesque, but then that is how corrupt, dangerous, devious Donald operates when cornered by falling polls, and growing opposition from leading retired military leaders and national intelligence officials. Trump’s attack on the U.S. Postal Service is also producing a nationwide backlash and even red-state conservatives are troubled by delays in deliveries of medicine and Social Security checks.
Devious Donald has a practice of doing exactly what he mostly falsely accuses his opponents of doing. It is puzzling, though not surprising, that the Democrats have not repeatedly restated the highlights from corrupt Donald’s rap sheet. Shining a spotlight on Trump, with specific indictments, would demonstrate that his actions suspend law and order in favor of dictates.
Every day Trump is committing crimes and civil violations of federal law. Every day Trump is violating the Constitution with serious impeachable offenses (December 18, 2019, Congressional Record H-12197). Do the Democrats think that the American people do not care about the rule of law and observing the Constitution that are the bulwarks against destructive dictatorial power by an ego-obsessed delusional wannabe monarch?
Yesterday’s acceptance speech to the Republican Party by Trump turned the White House into a federal crime scene. The Hatch Act states that having federal employees enable, with federal property, the political campaigns of the President is a criminal violation with serious jail time. Why? Because Congress did not want the power of the federal government to be used to further an incumbent’s political objectives against challengers. When Trump ordered Treasury Department staff to place his signature on the memo line of millions of relief checks, that was also a criminal violation of the Hatch Act. Attorney General William Barr, a Trump toady, is not about to prosecute. Barr refuses to respond to demands that he investigate this and other Trump administration violations of law.
But lawless Donald has gotten away with more serious violations such as seizing, unconstitutionally and illegally, the Congressional power of the purse and the power to tax in our Constitution. Trump moves money for purposes, not approved by Congress, from one agency to another, as for building the wall, thereby violating the Anti-Deficiency Act, which carries a criminal penalty.
Trump has defied over 100 Congressional subpoenas and more formal demands for his subordinates to testify. These are first-class impeachable offenses. The Founding Fathers provided Congress with the power to compel the disclosure of information that is critical to all other Congressional authorities.
President Richard Nixon was on the way, in 1974, to being impeached and convicted in the Senate, during the Watergate scandal, for defying just one subpoena and one count of obstruction of justice. Trump obstructs justice, the processes of law enforcement, all the time, as documented in part by the Mueller Report.
Trump talks about supporting law enforcement on the streets, while inciting his supporters to violence, yet he fires and intimidates prosecutors and Inspectors General who investigate or expose violations of law by Trump and his Trumpsters. Both his current government and personal businesses, as well as his previous ongoing personal business and taxation entanglements are under investigation by federal and state prosecutors.
The list goes on. Trump unlawfully nullifies statutory mandates by executive orders. His failure to enforce environmental, health, worker safety, and consumer protection laws is a direct violation of federal laws and the Constitution. He is dismantling these protections, driving out civil servants and scientists, and abandoning law and order for corporate crooks by defunding the corporate crime police.
Trump’s outlaw regime brags about destroying controls on pesticides (especially harmful to children), coal ash, and other sickening emissions that will attack the health of all Americans. Trump and his henchman also recently shredded controls on the release of methane, a global warming gas many times worse than carbon dioxide.
Why don’t the Democrats use what even the Wall Street Journal has regularly exposed about Trump’s riddance of law and order to allow runaway big businesses to cheat, pollute and overcharge people, as well as to defraud the federal government big time with procurement rackets? Trump is pushing for 20 million Americans to lose their health insurance, with no substitute proposal, and weakening nursing home safety regulations – in the middle of a giant pandemic!
One answer may be that the Democrats have done some similar things when in power, especially in the area of unauthorized wars and mass surveillance of the people. However, Trump sinks to utterly unprecedented levels of outlawry and openly embraces the monarchical boast that “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The daily tweeting, lying King, the man who boasted about abusing women, and behaving as a sexual predator, is a ruler who brings out the worst from this country. Trump deliberately divides America and stokes conflict and disruption. Trump is a reality denier and chaotic bungler who is aiding and abetting the climate crisis and preventing scientists and public health managers from controlling Covid-19, the cause of the worst global pandemic in our lifetimes. He is also blocking relief for a crashing economy and still escapes accountability.
The Democrats are not matching Trump’s own or his Party’s propaganda. In 2004, author, and former prominent Republican political analyst Kevin Phillips, argued that the Democrats go for the capillaries while the GOP goes for the jugular. By not going full force against dictator Trump, the Democrats are not overwhelmingly countering the most criminally, unconstitutionally culpable, vulnerable, and dislikable president in US history. With just over two months until the November 3rd election, a strong, independent, civic drive to oppose and vote out Trump/Pence is required. Standing on the sidelines hoping that the Democrats will retire the failed gambling czar didn’t work in 2016 and it won’t work in 2020 either.
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