skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Alec Pronk
Paul and his wife were confronted while protests heat up across the country.
Protesters demanding racial justice confronted Republican Senator Rand Paul and his wife as police escorted them back to his hotel after the final night of the Republican National Convention.
The protesters could be heard demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman who was killed by police after carrying out a no-knock warrant on the wrong house. Taylor was killed in Louisville, Kentucky, the state Paul represents in Congress.
Paul characterized the confrontation as being “attacked by an angry mob of over 100”. Paul also thanked the police for “literally saving our lives from a crazed mob.”
Video of the incident does not show any protesters touching Paul or his wife. A police officer who was using a bike to push back protesters fell after protesters pushed back, but he was uninjured in the incident.
Black Lives Matter protesters had gathered during the night to demonstrate for racial justice while the Republican Party made a fireworks show of the final night of its convention. Confrontations between police and protesters turned violent with some participants fighting back against the police.
Protests Get New Wind
Three months since a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, antiracist protests and the Black Lives Matter movement is still in the streets in many US cities. Street activity has been ebbing and flowing with local incidences sparking increased action.
But, recent events in Kenosha, Wisconsin have renewed calls on the left for racial justice. The police shooting of Jacob Blake on Sunday sparked an uprising in the Wisconsin town of about 100,000. According to Blake’s family, he is now handcuffed to his hospital bed as he recovers.
On the third night of unrest in Kenosha, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old militia member killed two protesters and injured another.
A widespread outcry has also led to further high-profile actions in the street and in public life. The NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks did not take the court in their playoff game to protest Blake’s shooting in nearby Kenosha. A league-wide strike followed and captured the attention of the nation with other leagues and stars joining in.
In the streets, Los Angeles, Louisville, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Seattle, and more have seen increased activity in protests and police response.
A group of Milwaukee activists marching to Washington D.C. was shot at in Pennsylvania leaving one protester injured. In Louisville, police arrested 71 protesters demonstrating for justice in the Breonna Taylor case.
Dangers Increasing for Protesters
In the first wave of protests, demonstrators, press, and bystanders fell victim to violence and arrests. A bigger picture is beginning to emerge about different threats to citizens part of the movement.
According to data gathered by Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right, since May 27 protesters have been subject to 64 cases of assault, 38 incidents of vigilantes driving cars into crowds, and nine times shots were fired at protesters.
Protesters are also seeing their rights being stripped away in several states. In Tennessee, the state legislature passed a law that makes camping overnight outside the Capitol a felony.
Protesters across the country are also facing heavy charges for protesting including felony and terrorism charges.
“To say that the power of the state will be wielded in this way against political enemies is incredibly frightening,” Kate Chatfield, policy director at the Justice Collaborative, told The Intercept.
But despite the threats, many protesters are committed to staying in the streets to demand racial justice and a change in the American policing system.
Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner August 28, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/54-million-people-in-the-u-s-may-go-hungry-during-pandemic-can-urban-farms-help/
In the COVID era, growing food locally has become more essential than ever.
When I call Chef Q. Ibraheem to discuss urban farming in her own cooking career, she’s in the middle of placing an order for microgreens from a small farm in Lake Forest, a ritzy suburb just north of downtown Chicago. Now’s a great time for her to chat, actually, because the Chicago-based chef is immersed in what she loves, sourcing ingredients as locally as possible.
“It’s really important we know where our food is coming from,” she says. “I know my farmers by name. I can go to the farms, see how they are growing everything, see it in the soil. It’s always nice to have something within reach and know your produce.” Chef Q runs supper clubs and chef camps throughout Chicagoland, sustaining the local economy by purchasing ingredients from urban gardens and farms within miles of her pop-up experiences.
“As a chef, you realize you have a responsibility to your guests,” she says, and for her, that responsibility means being transparent about ingredients, and even educating diners about what’s on their plates. Growing up spending summers on a farm in Georgia, Chef Q has an innate curiosity about where and how her food is grown, and she recognizes the importance of farms in both urban and rural areas.
Commercial urban agriculture is on the rise, with small-scale farms in New York City like Gotham Greens, which reduces the amount of energy, land use and food waste in tight, underutilized spaces to produce herbs and roughage for the masses. In Austin, Texas, backyard farms and urban gardens sell ingredients to restaurants and markets throughout the region, as do similar projects in Los Angeles. In fact, innovations allowing farmers to grow without soil or natural light expand the potential for food sourcing in urban areas. Urban farming has increased by over 30 percent in the past 30 years, with no indication of slowing down. Urban land could grow fruit and vegetables for 15 percent of the population, research shows.
While the COVID-19 lockdowns have inspired a burst of urban farming as people have been staring to grow their own fruits and vegetables at home, a renewed interest in culinary arts, plus a nostalgia for simpler times in many fast-paced big cities—just look at all the mid-century era diners popping up in Manhattan right before the pandemic—may be accountable for the steady rise in urban farms. More consciousness about the environment, too, may lead small growers to want to reduce transportation emissions and take charge of the use of pesticides and fertilizers in their foods, but there’s another great reason for urban farms to continue growing: Feeding the masses. And with 68 percent of the world’s population expected to live in urban areas by 2050, it’s time to take urban farming seriously as a viable, primary food source.
Despite being the wealthiest nation in the world, the United States had more than 37 million people struggling with hunger in 2018. Since the pandemic, that number is expected to rise to up to 54 million people. And while systemic changes may one day be able to greatly reduce this number, a planting cycle is quicker than an election cycle. Bureaucracy may not immediately solve fair wages, but vegetable seeds may help communities when times are tough.
Urban Farming as a Social Practice
In her work, Chef Q has helped turn empty lots and abandoned buildings into urban farms, which allows neighbors to “take ownership in their communities” and also become educated consumers. In neighborhoods where the fancy grocery store is referred to as “Whole Paycheck,” Chef Q has seen seed exchanges help folks start growing new produce, and regain agency over their food budgets and eating habits. Programs like the Chicago Food Policy Summit, a free annual event on Chicago’s South Side, help popularize urban farming and education and help provide Chicagoans with grants to start growing their own food. Though gentrification may bring relief to previously dubbed food deserts—neighborhoods without a nearby source of fresh food—the slew of problems attached to gentrification, including higher costs of living, can easily make these new, more nutritious food options completely unaffordable to residents of the neighborhood.
As seen in smaller cities, urban farming may be the key for cities to be less reliant on rural areas, and also help achieve food security. As Dr. Miguel Altieri, professor of agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley, has shown, diversified gardens in urban areas can yield a large range of produce and efficiently feed nearby residents.
Of course, land in cities is often at a premium, with many people living in little space. Shifting public land use to incorporate food growth and getting creative with rooftops, basements and unused buildings can seriously change the way cities consume fresh ingredients.
In fact, renewed efforts by the conservation organization World Wildlife Fund to boost indoor farming may revolutionize some sources of produce, particularly in cities. Repurposing unused indoor space, such as warehouses, can create direct sources of ingredients for restaurants or community supported agriculture for neighbors. Indoor farming, while potentially more expensive, also allows urbanites from all walks of life to connect to the food system, repurpose food waste into compost and expand knowledge on growing food. Greenhouses like Gotham Greens’ rooftop spaces can supplement indoor and outdoor spaces, adding even more potential healthy food to local ecosystems.
Urban Gardening With Neighbors in Mind
When she’s not hosting pop-up dinners with culinarily curious Chicagoans, Chef Q volunteers with Foster Street Urban Agriculture, a nonprofit garden that aims to help end food insecurity in Evanston, the Chicago suburb home to Northwestern University. In the garden, Chef Q teaches kids how to water, plant, weed and grow produce. She’ll notice a multigenerational interest: “Once kids taste zucchini, it’s over,” she jokes, of little ones bringing in parents and grandparents to learn to cook with more fresh produce. “They’ll start [the program] eating hot Cheetos, and they’re eating something green and leafy and won’t go back.”
Kids also just love being able to eat something that comes out of the ground and will take their passion back home, growing tomatoes in their windowsills or trying other small gardening projects in spaces available to them near home. Harvests from Foster Street are donated to food pantries and also sold at a local farmers market, where kids learn community-based entrepreneurial skills.
“Everyone eats, it’s a common denominator,” she says. “When food is on the table, people will have conversations.”
Now, in the wake of COVID-19, urban farms have become more essential than ever. Chef Q has partnered with farms that would otherwise throw away produce without their major restaurant and hotel clients, to redistribute food to Chicagoans in need. She’s noticed a spike in the price of fresh food, thanks in part to the expensive early May crops—peas, leeks and spinach. “It’s been imperative,” she says, of feeding the community with a local bounty of eggplant, microgreens, cheese and more farm-to-fork provisions.
Chef Q emphasizes that urban gardens still have to grow food to feed communities. Across the nation, we’ve seen victory gardens pop up in yards of homebound upper-middle-class Americans, planted with hope, thriftiness and a creative outlet in mind. But for those who don’t have yards or ample space, shared urban gardens can still serve a local population. When people don’t have money, growing food is a solution to provide nutrition, and perhaps even income. And it starts with advocacy, volunteers and outreach. “Plant something in the windowsill,” Chef Q suggests, as an entryway into small-scale gardening. “It’s essential. We can’t stop.”
https://citizentruth.org/decades-later-americas-meddling-in-colombia-is-still-costing-lives/
From the drug war to Plan Colombia to support for right-wing paramilitary groups, decades of US interference in Colombia has caused so much instability that to this day, the country is still reeling from it.
(By: Alan Macleod, Mintpress News) On a warm Tuesday morning earlier this month in Llano Verde, an eastern suburb of the city of Cali, five Afro-Colombian children decided to leave their homes to take advantage of the fine weather to spend some time outside. They would never return. Only a few hours later, they were found dead; their bodies burned, cut to pieces with machetes and riddled with bullets, dumped in public for all to see.
The residents of Llano Verde are no strangers to violence; the majority of them are refugees, displaced from the fighting in Colombia’s civil war. The local press reported that the boys, Luis Fernando Montaño, Josmar Jean Paul Cruz Perlaza, Álvaro Jose Caicedo Silva, Jair Andrés Cortes Castro, and Leider Cárdenas Hurtado, were members of the vibrant local art scene and had gone to fly kites — such an innocent activity in a land of the guilty.
A violent history
The incident has shocked the people of Cali, but not surprised them. Last week alone there were five massacres across the country. Cali is not even the most recent one; on Tuesday, the bodies of three young men were found on a roadside in Ocaña, a city near the Venezuelan border. That was the country’s 46th massacre in 2020 to date, according to local human rights group Indepez, who notes that 185 people have been killed this year — more than one person per day.
“Every massacre is a message,” said Manuel Rozental, a physician and longtime activist living in Cauca, in the country’s southwest. “Young, indigenous, Afro-Colombians are being murdered en masse in different regions of the country…The massacres are methodic, systematic. It is a job being done as planned,” he told MintPress.
James Jordan, the National Co-Coordinator of the Alliance for Global Justice, appeared to agree, stating that:
We have been watching with alarm as enemies of peace in Colombia have continued to escalate threats and assaults against human rights defenders, social movement leaders, and ex-insurgents participating in the peace process. Also targeted have been their family members, including, in some cases, children and even infants. As always, the most affected by political violence are rural farming, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities.”
The government, led by President Ivan Duque, blamed leftist rebel groups for the killings, particularly the FARC. The majority of the latest massacres have indeed occurred in rural areas controlled by the rebels until the historic 2016 peace accords, where the FARC agreed to demobilize and enter the political arena instead. Yet the experts MintPress spoke to were skeptical of Duque’s claims. “Who in Colombia, after the FARC dismantled has the capacity to locate, threaten and murder social leaders and now proceed with massacres with such precision? The answer is obvious, there has to be military intelligence involved,” said Rozental. Certainly, throughout Colombia’s recent history, the majority of atrocities have been carried out by government-linked paramilitaries, who have enjoyed virtually free rein to impose their will on the country.
Duque visited Cali on Saturday, and ordered national police chief General Oscar Atehortua to take charge of the investigation, and instructed his forces to be “relentless” in their pursuit of justice, aggressive language which worried many he was trying to calm. At the same time, he has attempted to downplay the recent upsurge in violence, describing the massacres as merely “collective homicides.” Today, the government announced it had arrested two suspects, although their affiliations, let alone their guilt, are still unclear at this point.
Professor Mario A. Murillo of Hofstra University, author of “Colombia and the United States: War, Terrorism and Destabilization,” was profoundly agnostic about the perpetrators of the violence, but believes the broader situation stems from failures in government. “The recent wave of massacres hitting predominantly rural communities in Colombia, at first glance, appears to be part of a random lawlessness which authorities are deliberately finding difficulty in attributing responsibility to, but is actually the direct result of the failures of the current government to fully implement the 2016 peace agreement signed with FARC rebels by the previous administration,” he said.
The bottom line is if President Duque had not taken the lead from the right-wing base of his Democratic Center Party in dismantling every important provision of the peace accord — from land reform to justice for the victims of the decades-long war, from sustainable rural development, to guarantees for social movements and demobilized guerillas in a post-conflict Colombia — the country would not be reliving this kind of terror, reminiscent of the horrors of the late 1990s and early 2000s.”
Don’t vote for Petro
Ivan Duque came to power in 2018 in a hotly contested and highly questionable election that pitted him against former leftist guerilla Gustavo Petro. This was the first time that the left appeared to have a shot at power since the assassination of President Jorge Gaitan in 1948, an event that sparked decades of civil war. Right-wing paramilitary death squads sprung into action, announcing generalized death threats against those who attempted to vote for Petro. Petro himself narrowly survived an assassination attempt in the run-up to the election. Some of his supporters were less lucky. American human rights lawyer Daniel Kovalik, an election observer, said he was mistaken for a voter and offered money to vote for Duque. There were over 1,000 official electoral fraud complaints. Jordan explained to MintPress his experiences with the questionable vote
During the Summer of 2018, we took an election observation team to Colombia. That election season was, historically, the first in which former insurgents from the FARC participated as a legal political party after laying down arms. It was also marked by organized threats and assaults by paramilitary actors against left and center-left campaigns, and against various popular movements. And it was marked by massive electoral fraud and irregularities, some of which our teams witnessed directly.”
Plan Colombia
Duque is the protege of the strongly conservative president Alvaro Uribe, who ruled the country between 2002 and 2010. Uribe worked closely with the United States government to implement the Bush administration’s “Plan Colombia,” a massive push to militarize the drug war, leading to huge death and destruction in the nation’s countryside and resulting in widespread social dislocation and upheaval. However, many observers saw Washington’s move as a veiled attempt to ply a favored government with weapons so they could defeat Colombia’s leftist rebels once and for all. Of note is that Uribe himself was named as an important player in the narco-trafficking trade in a 1991 U.S. government document.
Largely unknown outside the country, Colombia’s civil war, which began in 1964 and has never fully stopped, has caused massive social upheaval, including some 7.4 million currently displaced people, according to the United Nations. By comparison, the conflict in Syria generated 6.2 million displacements. Afro-Colombians were particularly hard hit.
Uribe also oversaw a years-long series of extrajudicial murders and massacres that resulted in over 10,000 deaths. Dubbed the “False Positives Scandal,” government forces would murder anyone they wished, later claiming their victims were members of the FARC. This allowed Uribe to impose his rule on the country, intimidating opponents into silence. Colombia became, according to Amnesty International, the “most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist,” with more unionist murders occurring inside the country than in all others combined.
Even today, right-wing paramilitaries linked to the government have been using the COVID-19 lockdown to go after activists, with more than 100 murdered in the first half of 2020 alone. “Our enemies are still killing us and it’s not difficult for them during the pandemic because we are all at home, complying with the mandatory quarantine which means nobody can move,” one Afro-Colombian activist wrote for Amnesty. “Being at home 24 hours a day is a death sentence because the gunmen know where to find us.”
Rozental was of the opinion that drugs, violence and the state were all fundamentally intertwined in Colombia, telling MintPress,
The relationship with drug trafficking and cartels…no-one can ignore or deny the evidence and the knowledge of the fact that the Colombian state, at the highest level, the Armed Forces, the judicial system and the congress are all involved in drug trafficking mafias and the business of drug trafficking. The personification of this is Alvaro Uribe.”
Yet this is largely ignored in the West, with corporate media often presenting the country as an emerging democracy, and Uribe as a beloved statesman, with some even describing him as the “savior” of a nation and a “beacon of hope” for the world.
Uribe’s past may have finally caught up to him, however, as the former president was charged and placed under house arrest earlier this month for allegedly attempting to bribe a witness in a case involving members of a paramilitary group. He also stands accused of being a founding member of a right-wing death squad. He faces up to eight years in prison if convicted. Could it be the man who was once considered untouchable is about to feel the wrath of the state he helped build?
Murillo believed that there could be a connection between his arrest and the explosion of violence in the past few weeks, saying:
It is most likely not a coincidence that this current wave of massacres, which were part of daily life in Colombia when Duque’s benefactor, former President Alvaro Uribe, took the reigns of power in 2002, are occurring just as Uribe sits through house arrest, facing justice for his involvement in witness tampering and paramilitary activity. Are they designed as a distraction? Or worse yet, retribution for Uribe’s detention? Unfortunately, in Colombia, we will most likely never get to the bottom of it.”
Who benefits?
So who is responsible for the upsurge of massacres? Is it the FARC, as the government alleges? Or were right-wing paramilitaries to blame? Or perhaps one of the myriads of narco-trafficking groups operating in the region? Or a combination of many factors? If history is any judge, we will probably never get a definitive answer. Colombia is a country of so much beauty and so little justice.
For Rozental, even asking that question can be unhelpful. Instead, he says, we must simply “recognize who the beneficiaries are.” Then it becomes easier to understand. “The intention is to consolidate an articulation between transnational corporate financial and extractive interests with drug trafficking mafias,” he said, noting that marijuana grown in his home department of Cauca and bought for $3-$5 is sold in the U.S. for $5,000. Cocaine production is a similar story, with the area under coca cultivation more than tripling between 2013 and 2018, according to the U.N.
There is a massive transfer of wealth flowing north with drug trafficking, and the entire violent mafia-type organizations that produce and transform, open spaces for extractive transnational interests, for geo-political initiatives and for the displacement and destruction of social movements and organizations that generate alternatives from below. One needs a different mindset to look at what is happening here. The massacres are means to ends. Victims call upon the government for help, which provides the pretext for militarization, which has in every case led to more drug trafficking and more violence,” Rozental told MintPress.
The American connection
For Jordan, the actions of the United States government have also played a part in the surge in violence, telling us that the Trump administration has leaned on Duque to abandon his government’s commitment to rural communities and its crop substitution policy, which allowed poor farmers the opportunity to make an honest living, rather than growing illicit crops. Instead, as they did during Plan Colombia, the U.S. government has favored empowering the military to intervene and to eradicate crops around the country, efforts that have strengthened their hand and emboldened paramilitaries to act like all rural farmers are mortal enemies engaged in criminal activity. Jordan also alleges that Trump has “eagerly pushed” Colombia to abandon its truth and reconciliation program and the rehabilitation of former guerilla fighters back into polite society. To understand the situation fully, he said, “we have to look beyond Colombia, toward the US and NATO Empire.”
Colombia, of course, has for nearly 200 years been considered by those in Washington to be America’s “backyard,” with the nation proving to be among the U.S.’s most loyal allies in the hemisphere. Even during the wave of left-wing governments that came to power in Latin America during the 2000s and 2010s, Colombia held firm, being a vital American foothold on the continent, from which it continued to destabilize neighboring states like Venezuela.
The U.S. has always been deeply involved in the drug trade. Investigative journalist Gary Webb detailed how, during the 1980s, the CIA helped flood America’s black communities with crack cocaine, allowing the far-right Nicaraguan Contra death squads to profit from the practice, aiding them in their fight to overthrow the leftist Sandinistas. Webb was found with two bullets in his head in 2004. Officials ruled it a suicide, although some remain skeptical. To this day, Webb is still despised in elite journalist circles; corporate media outlets having worked overtime to contain the story and stop his reporting going mainstream. Today, some of the Iran-Contra squad is back in the White House, with Elliott Abrams appointed special advisor to Trump on Venezuela and Iran. In 1991 Abrams pleaded guilty to lying to congress about how, behind the scenes, his associates were selling arms to Iran to fund their regime change project in Nicaragua.
Ultimately, as long as Americans continue to pay top dollar for illicit drugs, Colombians will continue to pay in blood. The identities of most of the country’s killers remains a mystery, but the violent context in which the massacres are happening is not.
Daniel Davis August 28, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/nba-to-use-arenas-for-polling-places-in-deal-to-end-strike/
“We’re human, we have real feelings and I’m glad that we got a chance to get in a room and talk with one another and not just cross paths and say good luck in your game today.”
When the Milwaukee Bucks decided they wouldn’t play their playoff game against the Orlando Magic on Wednesday, the basketball players tipped the first domino in a larger movement. While eight professional sports teams had already agreed to covert arenas to voting “super centers,” the NBA strike forced the league to accelerate and augment those plans. On Friday, the NBA announced it will use arenas for polling places and create a social justice commission to put its weight behind a reignited Black Lives Matter movement.
The deal, reached Thursday, is the result of a meeting between the National Basketball Association, team officials, and the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), NPR reported.
“We had a candid, impassioned, and productive conversation yesterday between NBA players, coaches, and team governors regrind next step to further our collective efforts and actions in support of social justice and racial equality,” a joint NBA–NBPA statement read.
Conditions of the arrangement include the immediate creation of a social justice coalition with representation from all parities. The panel will focus on current hot-button issues such as police reform efforts and expanded voting.
The NBA will also help facilitate advertisement opportunities during the remainder of the playoffs “to promoting greater civic engagement” in elections at all levels of government.
Franchises Join The Cause
Finally, the league also agreed to use arenas for polling places during the Nov. 3 general election. In return, the NBPA decided player would end their strike for the playoffs to resume on Saturday.
Venues that are franchise-owned will be subjected to the new polling center plans, which will essentially turn them into super centers — a polling location that is available to all voters of a particular area, negating the requirement that they vote at specific locations, Politico reported. Previously, the Washington Wizards, Milwaukee Bucks, Indiana Pacers and Los Angeles Clippers agreed to serve as polling places.
Teams from other sports had also decided to open their doors to the democratic process: the Pittsburgh Steelers (NFL), Newark-based New Jersey Devils (NHL), Washington Capitals (NHL), and Boston Red Sox (MLB).
“This is exactly the kind of public-private type partnership that the voting process has always needed,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Colorado elections official who now leads the National Vote at Home Institute. “We’ve always needed the support, and I think the pandemic has energized it.”
‘We’re All Hurt’
LeBon James, who previously expressed his outrage following the alleged police shooting of Jacob Blake, 29, in Kenosha, Wis., is leading a separate effort to help voting efforts, NBC News reported. Alongside fellow athletes, LeBron created More Than a Vote, an organization to enlist young volunteers to man voting locations.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, America is facing a worker shortage. As a result, longer lines and closed polling centers disproportionally affected minority communities.
“We’re all hurt, we’re all tired of just seeing the same thing over and over again and everybody just expects us to be OK just because we get paid great money,” said NBPA President Chris Paul, point guard for the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Associated Press reported. “We’re human, we have real feelings and I’m glad that we got a chance to get in a room and talk with one another and not just cross paths and say good luck in your game today.”
Local Governments Overwhelmingly Control Polling Locations
President Donald Trump, who criticizes efforts to expand vote-by mail on a nearly daily basis, has yet to comment on the agreement between the league and players union. Although his campaign team may consider legal options to block NBA teams from creating super centers, the power rests solely with the states and territories.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, “State laws govern where polling places can be located, and some states are more directive than others. In Arizona’s presidential preference primaries, for example, the number of polling places is based on the number of active registered voters in a county. In contrast, some states, such as Florida and Minnesota, simply require one polling place per precinct.”
An overwhelming majority of states and territories rely on city and county officials to designate polling locations. Only the state-level governments of American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and South Carolina have the power to determine voting places.
Some governments have deadlines for choosing polling places. In the event that the deadline has passed, NBA arenas will be configured for other voting activities such as registration and ballot receiving boards, CNBC reported.
Sonali Kolhatkar August 29, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/why-trump-commands-so-much-loyalty-from-his-base/
The last four years have been deeply traumatizing to millions of Americans as we have watched our nation in the stranglehold of a maniacal, dictatorial and compulsively deceptive president. But it is worth examining the relationship that President Donald Trump has with his voters in order to understand why he won the 2016 election and why he continues to command such fervent loyalty a few months ahead of the next election. Willing to overlook his lies, improprieties, and corruption, Trump’s voters have a transactional relationship with the president that is practical, powerful, and surprisingly instructional to the rest of us.
While a majority of Americans might be stunned and horrified by Trump’s casual racism, unscientific claims, sexist attacks and more, his rambling rhetoric matters little to his base, and perhaps Trump voters don’t even bother trying to make sense of his words. To them, it matters what he does and how loyal he is to them. Trump’s reelection campaign website is literally called “Promises Kept.” Although several of his claims of promises are not true, the point is that he touts decisive action and convinces his supporters that he has fulfilled his pledges to them. He works for them and they know it. They are willing to overlook the ugliness that accompanies his rule. It is a practical and effective approach to transforming America into the country they want.
Trump’s presidency has meant very clear-cut things to specific (but overlapping) communities, movements, and demographics. He offers his anti-abortion supporters a radical transformation of the judiciary from lifetime federal judgeships to Supreme Court seats. To his anti-immigrant base, he has shown he is willing to go to any lengths to keep out migrants and refugees, going as far as separating children from parents and even deporting them into the hands of their abusers. To racist suburban white people, he is making good on a promise to keep Black and Brown people out of their neighborhoods. To law enforcement, their families, and supporters, he has promised to uphold police autonomy and immunity from prosecution. And on and on.
Examined through the lens of such far-reaching promises that Trump has either kept his word on or aggressively pursued, it is no wonder that enough Americans are supporting him so as to make the election competitive. Trump has shown his base that he is willing to go as far as it takes to please them, including violating norms, pushing the boundaries of laws, and even breaking them. Such fealty is rare in a politician, let alone in a president.
Trump offers his base clear-cut policies while his campaign hopes that voters look past his character flaws. In contrast, the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden offers his voters few specific policies or sweeping changes, and his campaign hopes the Democratic Party base focuses mostly on his character, personality, and words and connects with him on a personal level. The Washington Post summarized that the Democratic National Convention (DNC)’s “big message,” is that, “Biden is a good guy”—not that Biden made specific bold promises to the party’s base to fundamentally transform America.
During his DNC speech, Biden’s words offered a salve for the nation’s frayed nerves. He repeatedly touted his presidency as offering light over darkness and representing unity over division. He promised us that, “Character is on the ballot. Compassion is on the ballot.” And while he made some specific promises such as strengthening the Affordable Care Act, improving public education, and so on, there were very few bold and transformational plans.
In past years, we have been told that there are only so many things that a president can do to carry out real change. Even if politicians run on big, bold platforms—think of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign—once in office, they tone down their rhetoric and pull back on their sweeping promises. As president, Obama curbed his own ambition and was eventually met with Republican intransigence in Congress. Aside from a handful of legislative victories and executive orders, he fit his ambitions into bite-sized pieces. Then along came Trump, showing Americans who were disillusioned by this view of political leadership that it was possible to get very close to all the things they wanted if they had a president willing to fight tooth and nail for them.
Even if Congress has not capitulated to many of Trump’s wildest demands, he has often found ways to achieve success. For example, on the issue of immigration, Trump backed a bill in the early part of his presidency to dramatically cut family-based migration and some employment visas. Although it went nowhere in Congress, when the coronavirus pandemic hit this year, the Trump administration saw an opportunity and pushed through many aspects of that bill via executive order. Even if the restrictions are temporary, it is an achievement he can tout to his anti-immigrant base.
Similarly, on the judiciary, many who back Trump do so because the stakes are so high they are willing to overlook everything else. Former Bush-era lawyer John Yoo was quoted as saying that he knew Republicans, “who would normally be utterly turned off by a guy like Trump,” and yet they backed him “because of [the] appointment to Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s vacancy.” Their loyalty to Trump was rewarded with the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, a man who one right-wing newspaper said has, “exceeded… conservatives’ expectations.”
This strongly transactional relationship between Trump and his voters works both ways. The president’s base does not care that his motivations are based in self-dealing and that he will do what it takes to preserve political and personal power, or that he is busy enriching himself and his friends in the process. They don’t care if he lies, vilifies the media, and attacks women and people of color on Twitter. Those are details that matter little in their day-to-day lives. All that matters is that Trump has made promises in line with their desires and will go to any lengths to fulfill them. Trump’s racism, sexism, deception, and corruption are part of his charm to some segments of his base. To the rest who continue to stick by him, they are simply not deal breakers. They may weigh the good against the bad and decide it is worth it to have a president whose persona and rhetoric are embarrassing but who delivers the goods. A new poll found that “90 percent of Republicans approve of the job he’s doing and 91 percent say they would choose him over Biden.”
Meanwhile, what does the Democratic Party say to its supporters? Postpone your demands for Medicare for All, for defunding the police, and for a Green New Deal until after this election. But left-leaning voters are given such lectures every four years, as if their hopes for sweeping policy changes are a mirage of water on a hot and dusty road. The farther the thirsty masses walk toward the water, the farther away it moves, and so it remains persistently out of reach. It’s no wonder Biden struggles with an “enthusiasm gap.”
Among Latinos, a group that has been vilified by Trump repeatedly since his last campaign, one might expect strong support for Biden. But one commentator pointed out that simply claiming support for the reinstatement of the popular DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is not enough. Writing in the New York Times, immigrant justice activist Cristina Jiménez Moreta explained that, “Access to affordable health care was a top issue for Latinx voters who sided with Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. Mr. Biden has refused to endorse Medicare for All—a popular solution to our nation’s health care catastrophe that would serve all people.”
During the Republican National Convention, Trump and his allies repeatedly cast Biden and the Democrats as “socialist,” in spite of the fact that the party establishment has rejected popular government-led economic, environmental and social plans. No matter what Biden does or says to prove that he eschews socialism, Trump’s campaign will paint him as a radical socialist, and it will continue to make a compact with Trump’s base to fulfill specific promises.
It is possible and perhaps likely that Biden will win based on many new polls that paint a favorable outcome for the Democrat. And indeed, for the future of the nation and especially women, immigrants, and people of color, it is imperative that Biden beats Trump. But if he does cinch the presidency, it will be in spite of his choice to offer character over concrete policies, not because of it.
Alice Schultz August 29, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/sexism-sexual-harassment-and-rape-allegations-at-fox-news-can-the-boys-club-at-fox-survive-feminism/
by Juliet Hillbrand, for Peace Data
(re-publishing permitted)
On July 20th, a complaint was filed through the New York Federal Court, alleging sexual misconduct against the leading Fox News hosts. The hosts with alleged charges include Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Howard Kurtz, Gianno Caldwelll, and rape allegations against Ed Henry.
Fox also canceled The Bill O’Reilly’s show in 2017 and terminated his contract after his 21-year career at Fox, due to a plethora of sexual harassment allegations against him.
As the harassment-positive culture seems not only permissible at Fox, but embraced, Fox News is falling under a lot of scrutiny and public heat for their pre-Victorian mentality to gender roles.
Not only do women not feel safe in the Fox news workplace, they also must submit themselves to the patriarchal behavior of a male-controlled media tyranny. With Fox male colleagues creating countless moments documented on film where they degrade their female co-hosts in cringe-worthy confidence, these comments are nothing more than a psychological technique to assert male dominance.
Ask yourself if this is the empowering workplace in which women should feel grateful for a seat at the table?
You can view a six-minute video here of compiled footage showing Fox hosts, “repeatedly belittle, insult, harass, and objectify women — including women Fox anchors themselves.”
It leaves one wondering in a state of antipathy – ‘If this is the behavior they conduct on-film, what is going on behind-the-scenes?’
July 2020 Submission of New Rape Case
Jennifer Eckhart, a female Fox News team reporter since January 2013, accused Ed Henry, a Fox Business Producer, of raping her, handcuffing her, and leaving her with bloody wrists. Eckhardt filed a report as of June 25th, 2020 for misconduct that was stated as being from years ago.
The complaint and investigators write:
“In reality, Fox News knew that Mr. Henry had engaged in sexual misconduct as far back as early 2017… At that time, when Fox News was conducting a company-wide investigation into issues of sexual harassment, multiple women came forward to complain that Mr. Henry had engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct towards them.“
Fox responded to Jennifer Eckhart and Cathy Areu’s statements against Bill O Reilly and Tucker Carlson explicitly stating that they found these claims to be “false, patently frivolous and utterly devoid of all merit.”
Eckhart describes of her experience with the top-rated news show:
“It is widely documented in the public record that Fox News has not only cultivated and fostered sexual harassment and misconduct but has consistently accepted and rewarded it.”
Eckhart’s representing law firm, Wigdor LLP, claims:
“What this lawsuit reveals is that today’s Fox News is the same old Fox News…
We expect Fox News to claim – as it almost always does – that an ‘independent’ investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing.”
Fox responded by claiming it was an issue to be handled by Ms. Eckhardt ‘directly’ with Ed Henry, essentially asking for their precious Fox name to be left out of the public spectacle. Mr. Henry’s employment was terminated on July 1st of 2020, but Fox claims that this ‘swift action,’ was their final contribution of justice to this matter.
This ‘swift action’ as they call it was not as lightning fast as you may imagine.
Fox has been well-aware of his inappropriate behavior for years – And has done nothing.
The only reason that Henry was terminated now is because Ms. Eckhardt went public. The general public’s knowledge of this incited action from Fox; however, without this public knowledge, it is clear that no action would have been taken to stop Henry.
The Sexist Boys Club of Fox News
Fox and Bill O’Reilly paid about $13-million to settle sexual abuse charges in 2017. But ask the victim, Juliet Huddy, what she has lost in the process; her name, career, reputation… What is the appropriate price to attach to the loss of these intimate values?
With males trying to make Fox News a ‘boys only club,’ it conjures up the memory of a fitting quote from Bella Abzug, who fiercely writes, “the test of whether or not you can hold a job should not be in the arrangement of your chromosomes.”
As the conservative-latent tone of bravado leads the messaging strategy for this news panel, there is little hope in removing the insecurity-rich baseline by which Fox operates. By taking women down a peg, they bring themselves up a peg. They sexually harass to assert additional power over women that silently whispers as they metaphorically puff out their chests in an ape-like fashion, ‘what are you gonna do about it?’
Women at Fox are left between a lose-lose situation and catch 22. If they report the sexual misconduct of their male colleagues, they face the outcomes of:
Losing their reputation, credibility, and quite possibly their job or future any ability to be employed within the world of broadcasting.
Or B.) Remaining dutifully silent and taking the abuse as a requirement of the job.
How Fox News Males Assert Dominance
Reverting back to the 1700s, Fox news is psychologically setting us back centuries with the discriminatory bounds of an age that favored the role of male dominance, as well as the preceding expectation of female submissiveness.
Saying comments like, “the only thing hotter than Brenda’s outfit today,” the Fox male news anchors are known for over-sexualizing their female costars with crudely-offensive remarks.
As men witness women’s expanding rights to formal education, voting rights, and co-hosting with them on Fox News – their patriarchal instincts kick in and whisper, ‘she’s a subversive threat to my masculinity! Take her down a notch!’
This insecure mentality is nothing new.
Kings took hundreds of wives in Egypt, women’s voices were kept out of literature for centuries, and these same themes are translated into the modern media outlet of today’s age.
There is also an established Fox-rule that female anchors are not allowed to wear trousers, quite literallyremoving a woman’s ability to ‘wear the pants’ in the workplace!
When women are not allowed to even dress themselves, or claim power of their basic human expression, (departing from their historical responsibility of damsel-in-distress) – How are they expected to be taken seriously? Would you respect someone that cannot even demand the right to choose their own clothing?
Not the mention, When Caroline Heldman, a Senior Research Advisor for Gender in Media, visited the Bill O’ Reilly Show, she describes:
“[Bill O’Reilly] called me ‘hysterical’ and I said, ‘That’s a sexist term. And he cut this entire part out—he ran the segment and cut it out! I called him out on it, and he said, ‘I would call a guy hysterical.’ And I said, ‘No you wouldn’t, it’s a gendered term. The term doesn’t have meaning unless you apply it to a woman. You can’t apply it to a man. It is a gendered term.”
The Female’s Role at Fox News
Sexism is rooted in the teeny-tiny DNA strands of Fox News.
Women should stand there, look pretty, and spin a story. Stay quiet, be submissive, do not have too many opinions, smile pretty at the CEO, laugh at his bad jokes, and then you’ll get your paycheck. Maybe.
Hannah Groch Begley, a Journalist, Researcher, and feminist that speaks out against Fox News through her platform at Media Matters, states:
“You’re there as eye candy and to be scoffed at. That is your role on Fox if you’re a woman.”
This frame of mentality is found in every ripple of the Fox-News-Culture.
Often a female costar (in news, cinema, etc.) is hired as the reflection of a masculine-power. Basically, she is there to make him look even more strong and manly. Even in literature, a female protagonist was devised as a very intentional juxtaposition, used skillfully by male authors as an accentuation of the male’s heroism, best viewed against the coquettish helplessness of the fair maiden.
This is the case for the typical female hired by Fox: blonde-haired, blue-eyed, model-type. (Note: This is not to disregard any of these women’s talent or intellects based solely on the premise that they are blonde and attractive. It is solely to point out that Fox has a certain ‘look’ that they typecast as their female lead.
Fox typically hires a blonde that is smart, sweet, and smiles even when she is cut-off or spoken over by her male counterpart. If she’s too strong, then she’s too ‘sassy’ and ‘difficult’ for Fox news (two words that are consequently never used to describe a man).
As female news anchors at Fox are pigeonholed by being gentle and ladylike, Fox ensures that their masculine agenda remains in the driver’s seat.
Ultimately, this sets a disturbing precedence for all competing news outlets, and an established fallacy of male supremacy as a ‘norm’ for our media industry.
If the whistleblowers are not speaking up, who will?
Gretchen Carlson and The ‘Me-Too Movement’
In 2016, the ‘Me Too Movement’ of women courageously speaking out against those that had sexually harassed or abused them, Bill O’Reilly was one of many men to be blacklisted.
This social movement that expanded through the Twitter hashtag of #MeToo, sparked bravery throughout Hollywood as women spoke out against sexual misconduct of male directors, news reporters, casting directors, and other prominent male figures within the industry.
Along with Bill, we took down the sleazy-scum-of-the-earths, including but not limited to: Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, and a few other key-players at 21st Century Fox.
In this piece titled ‘How #MeToo Has Awoken Women Around the World,’ it was discovered that:
“Analyses of the movement often point to the prevalence of sexual violence, which has been estimated by the World Health Organization to affect one-third of all women worldwide.
‘A 2017 poll by ABC News and The Washington Post found that “54% of American women report receiving ‘unwanted and inappropriate’ sexual advances with 95% saying that such behavior usually goes unpunished. Others state that #MeToo underscores the need for men to intervene when they witness demeaning behavior.”
Gretchen Carlson, an American Journalist, named in Time Magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People, made sexual harassment claims against deceased Fox News Founder, Roger Ailes. Ailes faced countless sexual harassment allegations before his death in 2017, so his name can be added to the top of the list as ‘the original bad-seed of Fox News.’
Carlson writes of her post-Fox news career transition:
“I want my voice back. I want it back for me, and for all those silenced by forced arbitration and NDAs.
‘This week, former Fox News contributor Julie Roginsky and I launched a new nonprofit organization called Lift Our Voices to advocate an end to the harmful practice of mandatory NDAs, confidentiality provisions and forced arbitration clauses that have prevented employees from publicly discussing and disclosing toxic workplace conditions, including sexual harassment and assault.
This is the next phase in the #MeToo movement, and it is one that needs to gain traction if we truly want to change the culture for better.”
She calls on Fox News to release her, and all females, from the subjugation of choosing between basic human safety rights and one’s job. The two should not be mutually exclusive. She writes that Fox should ‘do what’s right,’ and ‘take this step today, for the sake of all women, in every workplace.”
Similar Allegations Against Donald Trump and Joe Biden
To expand upon America’s indisputable issue with placing accountability on males in a position of power, Joe Biden has eight allegations of sexual harassment and touching, while President Donald Trump has a whopping twenty-five cases of Sexual Misconduct against him.
With over thirty cases of sexual harassment between the two of them – How many undocumented situations do you think are being left unreported?
Although many of the cases against Donald Trump date back to his pre-presidential era, there are also very recent cases such as the 2019 June report from Jean Carroll, who claimed that Donald Trump, ‘forced his penis insight of her in a dressing room.’
The typical statement response regarding these accusations is Trump self-proclaiming that people are just ‘trying to make the president look bad.’
With this breed of response being acceptable in today’s political culture, how many women want to remain silent because it would have cost them their job, name, freedom to work, etc.? How many women had to swallow this mistreatment in the name of just surviving the system of this dog-eat-dog world? How many women are still remaining silent for the sake of keeping their job and means of income?
Regarding our verdict on these claims against two of the most powerful men in politics, our point is not to make claims against these men; our point is to report on them, publicize them, and encourage the further investigation of these claims.
If they are innocent, that is wonderful news.
But our hope is that, regardless, it is properly investigated.
Without basic investigative expectations being an obvious, clear-cut, and reasonable follow-up to claims of this scale, there is little hope for women at Fox Century News, or under any dominion of conservative overlords.
The Future for Fox and These Sexual Harassment Cases
To note on a few of these sexual harassment claims, there is little action to report on. Bill O’Reilly was terminated, the founder of Fox news passed away in old age, and Tucker Carlson has resigned as of July 11th, 2020.
Executives at Fox all fear that ‘they’re next’ on the chopping block, appropriately shrinking under the fear of their karmic-justice being served like yesterday’s cold supper.
Stay tuned for updates on these rapidly-evolving cases and the nearly half-dozen Fox News Employees that are counting the minutes until their employment is terminated.
One thing that has been made clear – Fox News will defend their male progenies until the bitter end.
We’re assured that no real action will be taken from the inside while Fox suckles these little baby-boys and lets them get away with whatever they want, (tantrums, touching, misreporting, whatever they please in this smorgasbord of unruly behavior!)
The outcome to these allegations and claims will heavily depend on whose lawyers are better, how far Fox will take this, how much they care about their public appearance, and how impactful the social pressure from the public is.
The hope here is not that Fox will want to change. Fox has had decades of opportunities to evolve; They have repeatedly proven that they do not want to change.
The only hope here is that the public forces them to change.
If the public fights back loud enough, Fox will not be able to continue these blatant concrete-ceilings that are keeping female professionals blocked from transgressional ascension, promotions without a transactional basis of exchanged ‘favors,’ and other related violations of basic safety rights in the workplace.
Why These Crimes Should Never Be Silenced
In a modern gender revolution that would make Mary Wollstonecraft proud, women are growing tired of being damsels for the sake of mediocre news reporting.
It is one thing to say a man is more important or valuable than a woman, (which is obviously wrong since women make all the men), but it is an entirely different things to say that because of this power struggle – a woman deserves to be raped, harmed, and degraded traumatically against their will, simply because they are not strong enough to compete physically.
This becomes a gender war that goes far beyond the merits of basic entitlements and encroaches on a fundamental rights to feel safe within your own professional domain and protected by your employer.
No matter how rich, famous, influential, or powerful the offender is – silence is never the appropriate response to injustice.
When crimes are swept under the rug that:
Dehumanize women
Subjectify women to life-long trauma
And infringe on a female’s fundamental human rights of safety in the workplace –
There is something deeply flawed, sick, and wrong with our system.
By reporting on these injustices, we hope to bring these issues into the sunlight, where they can breathe in the open air and be seen in all of their heavy truthfulness. Although matters such as this are hard to look at, they cannot be ignored. Ignoring them allows them to stay in the dark shadows, where change simply cannot exist.
If you have a case to report, stand in your power, and support other women by supporting yourself. As the inspirational poet Maya Angelou writes, “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.”
As of August 2020 and short years since its inception, the #MeToo movement is in full-heat, collectively declaring to the patriarchal hierarchy of this nation – “Times up!” Are you ready to answer the call?
Today at 4 pm ET / 1 pm PT, thousands of people from all walks of life will gather to discuss the state of the nation and forming a major new party in America!
Due to overwhelming demand, The People's Convention will be a half-day event: 4 - 9:30 pm ET. Read our press release below for much more on the program and new speakers, including Gov. Jesse Ventura.
At the conclusion of the convention, we will hold a historic vote: “Do we commit to forming a major new political party free of corporate money and influence in 2021?”
Download the People's Party App for free from our Convention website and get ready to cast your vote. Watch the Convention on our YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and on The Jimmy Dore Show channel. Míralo en español aquí.
For every Black and Brown life taken by systemic racism, for every loved one who died because they couldn't afford treatment, for every child who has to ration food, for every young person who couldn't afford college, for every family whose home was set ablaze by a burning planet, today is about YOU. Today working people take the driver's seat in this country. Today we say we are renegotiating this social contract and we are not taking no for an answer. Today one world ends and another begins.
See you at the Convention!
Nick Brana
National Coordinator
Movement for a People's Party
Cast your vote on the People's Party App
Donate to finish the political revolution in a major new people's party
