Thursday, September 3, 2020
Labor in the Pandemic South
Like the 1930s, nowhere are the political and economic failures of modern-day American capitalism greater than in the U.S. South, where a monolith of Republican governors and legislatures are completely incapable of dealing with the Covid 19 crisis.
September 1, 2020 Joseph B. Atkins PORTSIDE
https://portside.org/2020-09-01/labor-pandemic-south
OXFORD, Miss. - Double-digit unemployment, widespread protests in the street, homeless camps spreading across the nation’s cities, governmental ineptitude embodied in Republican intransigence and a compromised Democratic Party, and a clueless president. Such were the early days of the Great Depression, but sadly it’s also reality in America today.
Change came out of all those troubles back in the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt replaced inept Herbert Hoover in the White House would find himself pushed ever farther to the left by the failure of his first New Deal, the rise of populist Huey Long in Louisiana, and the growth of labor unions in what became the greatest social justice movement of that day. FDR came back with a second New Deal in 1935 that created the Works Progress Administration and Social Security. The Wagner Act that same year made unions a guaranteed right.
Much like the situation in the 1930s, nowhere are the political and economic failures of modern-day American capitalism greater than in the U.S. South, where a monolith of Republican governors and legislatures have proven themselves completely incapable of dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic and the accompanying economic collapse. In Mississippi, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves apes his hero, Donald Trump, in insisting on school openings even as coronavirus cases rise exponentially across the state. He even boasted recently of allowing college football to continue despite other college conferences shutting it down.
Back in the 1930s, Southern political leaders, all of them Democrats then, did their best to keep FDR’s social directives at bay when they affected their most prized constituents’ billfolds. They made sure new labor laws asserting union rights didn’t apply to farm workers. They kept civil rights legislation off the books and black Americans the nation’s lowest paid. They worked with textile and other industries to keep the South the nation’s least unionized, and they made sure that the region stayed what Roosevelt called “the nation’s number one economic problem.”
It still is.
The good news is that signs of a rising labor consciousness in the South are showing up across the region, a topic of discussion at a panel titled “Perspectives on Union Organizing Today” held recently by the United Campus Workers (UCW)/Communications Workers of America (CWA), Local 3565 via Zoom out of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
United Campus Workers win in Tennessee, organize in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas
I am a member of UCW Local 3565 and served as a panelist, and participants were happy when I told them I was going to tell some good news about labor in the South, something never discussed in history courses, whether in high school or college, and rarely from a political podium.
The UCW itself is part of the “good news” with its work in successfully preventing Tennessee’s Republican governor from privatizing most jobs in the state’s universities in 2017. The union has since seen its membership grow across the region, including not only Mississippi but also Louisiana and Georgia.
Operating under government-sanctioned restrictions on public unions, the UCW is a non-traditional union in that it doesn’t have collective bargaining rights on campuses. However, this allowed it to establish itself without campus-wide elections. “Non-traditional” has been a modus operandi in the growth of labor consciousness across the region.
The Southern Workers Assembly fights for striking workers in the meatpacking industry in the Carolinas and beyond
The Southern Workers Assembly has gained momentum as an activist group working with workers in the meatpacking industry, many of them African American and Latino, and the result has been more than 230 strikes and other job actions in the meatpacking industry in the Carolinas and elsewhere in the six months since the pandemic began. According to a recent SWA report, “rural communities that have a meatpacking plant have a COVID-19 infection rate that is 5x higher than those without.” The SWA has sponsored a Safe Jobs Save Lives campaign, and it has aligned itself with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Venceremos in Arkansas pushes for the rights of poultry workers
Venceremos in Arkansas is another non-traditional labor organization that champions the rights of the hard-hit workers in northwest Arkansas’ poultry plants. In April Venceremos (“We conquer”), a workers’ justice organization, led a march to the front door of Tyson corporation’s poultry plant in Springdale, Arkansas, to demand better working and safety conditions as well as hazard pay during the pandemic. By June, after getting the Arkansas government’s stamp of approval of its safety conditions, the company reported that 250 of its workers at the plant had tested positive for COVID-19. Soon some 13 percent of the industry’s workers in northwest Arkansas—many of them immigrants from the Marshall Islands--tested positive. The fight is still on with Venceremos leading the charge for workers’ rights.
Following the led of FLOC in North Carolina and the CWA in Florida
These organizations bring to mind the successes of older labor rights groups like the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in North Carolina and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, both of which forced companies to the bargaining table even though their membership is made up largely of immigrant workers.
Nurses organize in western North Carolina
Nurses in Asheville, North Carolina, have waged a valiant organizing campaign at HCA Health Care’s Mission Hospital in Asheville, once a proud and locally beloved nonprofit hospital before it was purchased by the nation’s largest hospital corporation in 2019. After many unheard complaints about the decline of service at the facility, four nurses led an effort that now promises to be one of the largest organizing campaigns in the state’s history.
They’ve had to fight $400-per-hour union busters, the courts, and the state’s long anti-union history, but they’re looking strong as an election is underway and ballots to be counted on September 16.
The struggle continues in all of these efforts across the South, but the workers who are part of that struggle put the lie to the old trope that you can’t organize the South. They’re doing it, and they’re gaining ground at a time when the nation as a whole is waking up to the bill of goods its political and business leaders have been selling it for way too long.
The Post-Capitalist Hit of the Summer
Ever since COVID-19 collided with the enormous bubble governments have been using to re-float the financial sector since 2008, booming equity markets became compatible with wholesale economic implosion. That became clear on August 12
September 1, 2020 Yanis Varoufakis PROJECT SYNDICATE
https://portside.org/2020-09-01/post-capitalist-hit-summer
On August 12, something extraordinary happened. The news broke that, in the first seven months of 2020, the United Kingdom’s economy had suffered its largest contraction ever (a drop in national income exceeding 20%). The London Stock Exchange reacted with a rise in the FTSE 100 by more than 2%. On the same day, when the United States was beginning to resemble a failed state, not merely a troubled economy, the S&P 500 hit a record high.
To be sure, financial markets have long rewarded misery-enhancing outcomes. Bad news for a firm’s workers—planned layoffs, for example—is often good news for its shareholders. But when the bad news engulfed most workers simultaneously, equity markets always fell, owing to the reasonable expectation that, as the population tightened its belt, all income, and thus average profits and dividends, would be squeezed. The logic of capitalism was not pretty, but it was comprehensible.
Not anymore. There is no capitalist logic to the developments that culminated on August 12. For the first time, a widespread expectation of diminished revenues and profits led to—or at least did not impede—a sustained buying frenzy in London and New York. And this is not because speculators are betting that the UK or the US economies have hit bottom, making this a great time to buy shares.
No, for the first time in history, financiers actually don’t give a damn about the real economy. They can see that COVID-19 has put capitalism in suspended animation. They can see the disappearing profit margins. They can see the tsunami of poverty and its long-term effects on aggregate demand. And they can see how the pandemic is revealing and reinforcing deep pre-existing class and racial divisions.
"For the first time in history, financiers actually don’t give a damn about the real economy. "
Speculators see all this but deem it irrelevant. And they are not wrong. Ever since COVID-19 collided with the enormous bubble governments have been using to re-float the financial sector since 2008, booming equity markets became compatible with wholesale economic implosion. It was a historically significant moment, marking a subtle but discernible transition from capitalism to a peculiar type of post-capitalism.
But let us begin at the beginning.
Before capitalism, debt appeared at the very end of the economic cycle. Under feudalism, production came first. Peasants toiled in the lord’s fields, and distribution followed the harvest, with the sheriff collecting the lord’s share. Part of this share was then monetized when the lord sold it. Only then did debt emerge, when the lord would lend money to borrowers (often including the king).
Capitalism reversed the order. Once labor and land had been commodified, debt was necessary before production even began. Landless capitalists had to borrow to lease land, workers, and machines. The terms of these leases determined income distribution. Only then could production begin, yielding revenues whose residual was the capitalists’ profit. Thus, debt powered capitalism’s early promise. But it was not until the Second Industrial Revolution that capitalism could re-shape the world in its image.
Electromagnetism gave rise to the first networked companies, producing everything from power generation stations and the electricity grid to light bulbs for every room. These companies’ gargantuan funding needs begat the megabank, along with a remarkable capacity to create money out of thin air. The agglomeration of megafirms and megabanks created a Technostructure that usurped markets, democratic institutions, and the mass media, leading first to the Roaring Twenties, and then to the crash of 1929.
From 1933 to 1971, global capitalism was centrally planned under different iterations of the New Deal governance framework, including the war economy and the Bretton Woods system. As that framework was swept away in the mid-1970s, the Technostructure, cloaked in neoliberalism, recovered its powers. A 1920s-like spate of “irrational exuberance” followed, culminating in the 2008 global financial crisis.
To re-float the financial system, central banks channeled waves of dirt-cheap liquidity to the financial sector, in exchange for universal fiscal austerity that limited spending by lower- and middle-income households. Unable to profit from austerity-hit consumers, investors became dependent on central banks’ constant liquidity injections—an addiction with serious side effects for capitalism itself.
Consider the following chain reaction: The European Central Bank extends new liquidity to Deutsche Bank at almost zero interest. To profit from it, Deutsche Bank must lend it on, though not to the “little people” whose diminished circumstances have weakened their repayment ability. So, it lends to, say, Volkswagen, which is already awash with savings because its executives, fearing insufficient demand for new, high-quality electric cars, postponed crucial investments in new technologies and well-paying jobs. Even though Volkswagen’s bosses do not need the extra cash, Deutsche Bank offers them such a low interest rate that they take it and immediately use it to buy Volkswagen shares. Naturally, the share price skyrockets and, with it, the Volkswagen executives’ bonuses (which are linked to the company’s market capitalization).
From 2009 to 2020, such practices helped prize stock prices away from the real economy, resulting in widespread corporate zombification. This was the state capitalism was in when COVID-19 arrived. By hitting consumption and production simultaneously, the pandemic forced governments to replace incomes at a time when the real economy had the least capacity adequately to invest in the generation of non-financial wealth. As a result, central banks were called upon to boost even more magnificently the debt bubble that had already zombified the corporations.
The pandemic has reinforced that which has been undermining the foundation of capitalism since 2008: the link between profit and capital accumulation. The current crisis has revealed a post-capitalist economy in which the markets for real goods and services no longer coordinate economic decision-making, the current Technostructure (comprising Big Tech and Wall Street) manipulates behavior at an industrial scale, and the demos is ostracized from our democracies.
THIS IS THE FULL MEMBERSHIP LIST OF THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT’S SECRETIVE AND POWERFUL COUNCIL FOR NATIONAL POLICY
MAX BLUMENTHALAUGUST 30, 2020
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/08/30/membership-list-powerful-secretive-christian-right-america/
Donald Trump previewed his RNC acceptance address before the influential Council for National Policy. The membership list of this Christian Right cabal was a carefully guarded secret – until now.
President Donald Trump’s appearance in Arlington, Virginia on August 21 before the Council for National Policy (CNP), a hyper-secretive Christian Right powerhouse that helps set the movement’s agenda, offered an hour-long preview of the stem-winding speech he would deliver several nights later on a balcony in front of the White House to the Republican National Convention.
Joined by his acting and still-unconfirmed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, the longtime corporate lobbyist who guided federal troops against anti-racism protesters, the president proclaimed, “China very much wants Joe Biden to win.”
Next, Trump inspired gales of applause by boasting, “I could run in Israel, and I think they set up probably a 98 percent approval rating in Israel… And you know who appreciates it the most are the evangelical Christians.”
The president earned more cheers when he previewed a line he deployed a few nights later at the RNC: “Nobody has done more for the black community or the Hispanic community than we have. Nobody. Nobody. I guess, maybe Lincoln. Questionable.”
Trump’s recent event with the CNP was his second appearance before the group. The first encounter came during an October 2015 CNP forum, as candidate Trump was surging ahead of his Republican primary rivals and emerging as the Christian Right’s foul-mouthed Chosen One.
Several CNP members went on to serve in Trump’s White House, including Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon. But this appearance was different.
This time, in contrast to other Republican presidential hopefuls who had addressed the CNP, the White House videotaped Trump’s speech and proudly disseminated it online. Conspicuously missing from the footage, however, were any clear images of the audibly enthused crowd.
That is because the CNP’s membership is a carefully guarded secret; its meetings are private – off limits to the public and the press – and even the location of the gatherings is carefully protected.
Literature distributed to members at the entrance of meetings instructed attendees not to disclose the names of fellow members and forbade them from distributing the membership list to outsiders in order “to maintain the quality of membership communications.”
The Grayzone obtained the Council for National Policy’s October 2018 membership list and has published it in full at the end of this article. Pages 1-72 show the names and bios of members; 72-87 contain CNP literature, including official policies and guidelines, as well as details about future meetings.
The release of the CNP’s membership list represents the first time in the Trump era that the Christian Right powerhouse has been exposed, and the most recent disclosure since a copy of its 2014 member roll was published.
The CNP’s personnel comprise a blend of conservative movement leaders, industry moneymen, foreign policy hardliners, and culture war activists enforcing right-wing unity at the base of a Republican Party that has cohered around the doctrine of ultra-nationalist Trumpism.
As I documented in my 2009 book, Republican Gomorrah, the Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 with seed money from T. Cullen Davis, a Texas oil billionaire who found his way to Jesus and the Christian Right after a high-priced lawyer secured his acquittal on charges that he hired a hit man to kill his ex-wife and her family, then attempted the job himself, murdering his step-daughter and his ex-wife’s boyfriend while paralyzing an innocent bystander and wounding his ex-wife in the process, according to prosecutors.
When the CNP was first established, one of its founding fathers, the Louisiana ultra-conservative politician Woody Jenkins, vowed to a Newsweek reporter, “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government.”
Under the watch of his protege, Tony Perkins, who also directs the Christian Right policy factory known as the Family Research Council, Jenkins’ pledge was fulfilled. The CNP secured promises from both George W. Bush and Trump to appoint exclusively anti-abortion judges to high courts, and recently helped Trump allies coordinate their response to the Covid-19 pandemic while astroturfing a series of anti-lockdown protests.
The secrecy maintained by the Council for National Policy throughout its decades-long history has been strictly enforced by Perkins, who demanded my ejection from an October 4-6, 2018 conference after learning I was in attendance. I had secured an invitation to the gathering from an anti-war member who no longer belongs to the Council, enabling me to report on a speech that former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley gave to the group, in a feature for Harper’s Magazine.
Perkins recognized me because I had published an article in 2005 reporting his signing of a check for $82,500 to David Duke — the former Ku Klux Klan leader and failed Republican gubernatorial candidate — to purchase Duke’s mailing list on behalf of the senate campaign of his mentor, Woody Jenkins. I had also noted Perkins’ 2001 speech before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white nationalist and neo-Confederate organization that racist mass murderer Dylan Roof partially credited with his radicalization.
Infuriated by my presence in the inner sanctum of Christian Right networking, Perkins and his lieutenants ordered me to immediately exit the Charlotte, North Carolina hotel where the conference took place.
On my way out, I passed by Herman Cain, the former Godfather Pizza CEO and Republican presidential candidate, holding court in the hotel lobby. Cain died this July 30 after contracting Covid-19 at a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Within hours, I was on a flight out of Charlotte with a thick CNP members’ list and a pile of official Council literature in hand – materials that were forbidden for outsiders to view and off-limits to the public until now.
A few notable Council for National Policy members are described below. The full membership list follows.
Shawn Akers – Akers is the vice provost of Liberty University, which is currently reeling from the exposure of the bizarre sexual peccadilloes of its chancellor, Jerry Falwell Jr., and his wife, Becky. Akers’ colleague at the CNP, journalist Warren Cole Smith, recently hammered the board of Liberty University, where his daughter is enrolled, for its failure to hold Falwell accountable over the years. The “trustees failed the school’s students, faculty, administration, and parents,” Smith wrote. “They failed donors and alumni. They failed to hold the one member of the Liberty staff that reports to them to the Biblical standards of leadership, or even to the standards that every member of the Liberty community must live up to.”
Jerry Boykin – Boykin is best known as the US Delta Force general who led the disastrous peacekeeping mission to Somalia depicted in the book and blockbuster film “Black Hawk Down.” During the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, he declared that his god “was bigger” than that of the Muslim warlords he battled in Somalia, and that Muslims hated America because they worshiped Satan. Boykin current serves as executive vice president for Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council in Washington.
Elsa Prince Broekhuizen – The Michigan-based mother of Blackwater mercenary corporation founder and Trump Inc. consigliere Erik Prince and his sister, Trump secretary of education and school privatization advocate Betsy Devos. Prince Broekhuizen has plowed her family’s auto parts fortune into various anti-gay initiatives over the years.
Stuart Epperson – The co-founder and president of the right-wing evangelical broadcaster Salem Media, which is tied with CBS News as the fifth-largest radio broadcaster in the US. Epperson’s stations play host to right-wing personalities like Michele Malkin, Sebastian Gorka, Hugh Hewitt, and Dennis Prager.
Mike Farris – A lawyer and homeschooling advocate, Farris founded Patrick Henry College as a training ground for Christian Right cadres seeking jobs in Washington’s halls of power. Vice President Mike Pence addressed Farris’s Alliance Defending Freedom in 2019, praising the group for guiding the Trump administration’s agenda.
Tom Fitton – The president of the right-wing legal advocacy group Judicial Watch, which has battled Covid-19 lockdown policies, sued climate scientists, and helped guide Trump’s messaging against the Democrats’ Russiagate onslaught.
Frank Gaffney – The Center for Security Policy founder is a foreign policy militarist who emerged from neoconservative circles to become a leading voice of anti-Muslim conspiracism while clamoring for US military action against Iran and Syria. Gaffney has claimed that Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was a Muslim Brotherhood agent, warned that that American Muslims were engaged in a “stealth jihad” to place the country under the control of Sharia, and helped influence Trump’s so-called Muslim ban.
Donna Rice-Hughes – Famous for bringing down former Democratic Senator Gary Hart’s presidential campaign after a possible set-up, when tabloids published photographs of her perched on the candidate’s lap while carousing on his yacht, Rice-Hughes (formerly known only by her birth name, Rice) came to Jesus and founded the anti-pornography group, Enough is Enough! Today, she markets herself as a “progressive leader” and expert on “preventing the exploitation of children online.”
Jon Lenczowski – Founder of the Institute for World Politics, a Washington-based training institute for hardline interventionists, Lenczowski takes a leading role in setting the CNP’s foreign policy agenda. In recent months, he has been particularly focused on reinforcing the Trump administration’s new cold war narrative against China.
Herman Pirchner – The founding President of the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), Pichner served on Trump’s foreign policy transition team in 2016. The Grayzone reported Pirchner’s role in hosting Andriy Parubiy, a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist politician who co-founded the far-right Social National Party, for a series of Capitol Hill meetings. Researcher Moss Robeson has documented Pirchner’s activity as a key liaison between the Washington foreign policy establishment and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists.
Virginia “Ginni” Thomas – The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas was part of the Groundswell network that compiled lists of “disloyal” Trump administration officials to be fired. Her involvement with the CNP is an extension of a long history of ethical entanglements that prompted 74 House Democrats to issue a letter demanding Clarence Thomas recuse himself from ruling on the national healthcare overhaul, which she lobbied against.
Council for National Policy… by Max Blumenthal
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/08/30/membership-list-powerful-secretive-christian-right-america/
Donald Trump previewed his RNC acceptance address before the influential Council for National Policy. The membership list of this Christian Right cabal was a carefully guarded secret – until now.
President Donald Trump’s appearance in Arlington, Virginia on August 21 before the Council for National Policy (CNP), a hyper-secretive Christian Right powerhouse that helps set the movement’s agenda, offered an hour-long preview of the stem-winding speech he would deliver several nights later on a balcony in front of the White House to the Republican National Convention.
Joined by his acting and still-unconfirmed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, the longtime corporate lobbyist who guided federal troops against anti-racism protesters, the president proclaimed, “China very much wants Joe Biden to win.”
Next, Trump inspired gales of applause by boasting, “I could run in Israel, and I think they set up probably a 98 percent approval rating in Israel… And you know who appreciates it the most are the evangelical Christians.”
The president earned more cheers when he previewed a line he deployed a few nights later at the RNC: “Nobody has done more for the black community or the Hispanic community than we have. Nobody. Nobody. I guess, maybe Lincoln. Questionable.”
Trump’s recent event with the CNP was his second appearance before the group. The first encounter came during an October 2015 CNP forum, as candidate Trump was surging ahead of his Republican primary rivals and emerging as the Christian Right’s foul-mouthed Chosen One.
Several CNP members went on to serve in Trump’s White House, including Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon. But this appearance was different.
This time, in contrast to other Republican presidential hopefuls who had addressed the CNP, the White House videotaped Trump’s speech and proudly disseminated it online. Conspicuously missing from the footage, however, were any clear images of the audibly enthused crowd.
That is because the CNP’s membership is a carefully guarded secret; its meetings are private – off limits to the public and the press – and even the location of the gatherings is carefully protected.
Literature distributed to members at the entrance of meetings instructed attendees not to disclose the names of fellow members and forbade them from distributing the membership list to outsiders in order “to maintain the quality of membership communications.”
The Grayzone obtained the Council for National Policy’s October 2018 membership list and has published it in full at the end of this article. Pages 1-72 show the names and bios of members; 72-87 contain CNP literature, including official policies and guidelines, as well as details about future meetings.
The release of the CNP’s membership list represents the first time in the Trump era that the Christian Right powerhouse has been exposed, and the most recent disclosure since a copy of its 2014 member roll was published.
The CNP’s personnel comprise a blend of conservative movement leaders, industry moneymen, foreign policy hardliners, and culture war activists enforcing right-wing unity at the base of a Republican Party that has cohered around the doctrine of ultra-nationalist Trumpism.
As I documented in my 2009 book, Republican Gomorrah, the Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 with seed money from T. Cullen Davis, a Texas oil billionaire who found his way to Jesus and the Christian Right after a high-priced lawyer secured his acquittal on charges that he hired a hit man to kill his ex-wife and her family, then attempted the job himself, murdering his step-daughter and his ex-wife’s boyfriend while paralyzing an innocent bystander and wounding his ex-wife in the process, according to prosecutors.
When the CNP was first established, one of its founding fathers, the Louisiana ultra-conservative politician Woody Jenkins, vowed to a Newsweek reporter, “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government.”
Under the watch of his protege, Tony Perkins, who also directs the Christian Right policy factory known as the Family Research Council, Jenkins’ pledge was fulfilled. The CNP secured promises from both George W. Bush and Trump to appoint exclusively anti-abortion judges to high courts, and recently helped Trump allies coordinate their response to the Covid-19 pandemic while astroturfing a series of anti-lockdown protests.
The secrecy maintained by the Council for National Policy throughout its decades-long history has been strictly enforced by Perkins, who demanded my ejection from an October 4-6, 2018 conference after learning I was in attendance. I had secured an invitation to the gathering from an anti-war member who no longer belongs to the Council, enabling me to report on a speech that former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley gave to the group, in a feature for Harper’s Magazine.
Perkins recognized me because I had published an article in 2005 reporting his signing of a check for $82,500 to David Duke — the former Ku Klux Klan leader and failed Republican gubernatorial candidate — to purchase Duke’s mailing list on behalf of the senate campaign of his mentor, Woody Jenkins. I had also noted Perkins’ 2001 speech before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white nationalist and neo-Confederate organization that racist mass murderer Dylan Roof partially credited with his radicalization.
Infuriated by my presence in the inner sanctum of Christian Right networking, Perkins and his lieutenants ordered me to immediately exit the Charlotte, North Carolina hotel where the conference took place.
On my way out, I passed by Herman Cain, the former Godfather Pizza CEO and Republican presidential candidate, holding court in the hotel lobby. Cain died this July 30 after contracting Covid-19 at a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Within hours, I was on a flight out of Charlotte with a thick CNP members’ list and a pile of official Council literature in hand – materials that were forbidden for outsiders to view and off-limits to the public until now.
A few notable Council for National Policy members are described below. The full membership list follows.
Shawn Akers – Akers is the vice provost of Liberty University, which is currently reeling from the exposure of the bizarre sexual peccadilloes of its chancellor, Jerry Falwell Jr., and his wife, Becky. Akers’ colleague at the CNP, journalist Warren Cole Smith, recently hammered the board of Liberty University, where his daughter is enrolled, for its failure to hold Falwell accountable over the years. The “trustees failed the school’s students, faculty, administration, and parents,” Smith wrote. “They failed donors and alumni. They failed to hold the one member of the Liberty staff that reports to them to the Biblical standards of leadership, or even to the standards that every member of the Liberty community must live up to.”
Jerry Boykin – Boykin is best known as the US Delta Force general who led the disastrous peacekeeping mission to Somalia depicted in the book and blockbuster film “Black Hawk Down.” During the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, he declared that his god “was bigger” than that of the Muslim warlords he battled in Somalia, and that Muslims hated America because they worshiped Satan. Boykin current serves as executive vice president for Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council in Washington.
Elsa Prince Broekhuizen – The Michigan-based mother of Blackwater mercenary corporation founder and Trump Inc. consigliere Erik Prince and his sister, Trump secretary of education and school privatization advocate Betsy Devos. Prince Broekhuizen has plowed her family’s auto parts fortune into various anti-gay initiatives over the years.
Stuart Epperson – The co-founder and president of the right-wing evangelical broadcaster Salem Media, which is tied with CBS News as the fifth-largest radio broadcaster in the US. Epperson’s stations play host to right-wing personalities like Michele Malkin, Sebastian Gorka, Hugh Hewitt, and Dennis Prager.
Mike Farris – A lawyer and homeschooling advocate, Farris founded Patrick Henry College as a training ground for Christian Right cadres seeking jobs in Washington’s halls of power. Vice President Mike Pence addressed Farris’s Alliance Defending Freedom in 2019, praising the group for guiding the Trump administration’s agenda.
Tom Fitton – The president of the right-wing legal advocacy group Judicial Watch, which has battled Covid-19 lockdown policies, sued climate scientists, and helped guide Trump’s messaging against the Democrats’ Russiagate onslaught.
Frank Gaffney – The Center for Security Policy founder is a foreign policy militarist who emerged from neoconservative circles to become a leading voice of anti-Muslim conspiracism while clamoring for US military action against Iran and Syria. Gaffney has claimed that Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was a Muslim Brotherhood agent, warned that that American Muslims were engaged in a “stealth jihad” to place the country under the control of Sharia, and helped influence Trump’s so-called Muslim ban.
Donna Rice-Hughes – Famous for bringing down former Democratic Senator Gary Hart’s presidential campaign after a possible set-up, when tabloids published photographs of her perched on the candidate’s lap while carousing on his yacht, Rice-Hughes (formerly known only by her birth name, Rice) came to Jesus and founded the anti-pornography group, Enough is Enough! Today, she markets herself as a “progressive leader” and expert on “preventing the exploitation of children online.”
Jon Lenczowski – Founder of the Institute for World Politics, a Washington-based training institute for hardline interventionists, Lenczowski takes a leading role in setting the CNP’s foreign policy agenda. In recent months, he has been particularly focused on reinforcing the Trump administration’s new cold war narrative against China.
Herman Pirchner – The founding President of the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), Pichner served on Trump’s foreign policy transition team in 2016. The Grayzone reported Pirchner’s role in hosting Andriy Parubiy, a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist politician who co-founded the far-right Social National Party, for a series of Capitol Hill meetings. Researcher Moss Robeson has documented Pirchner’s activity as a key liaison between the Washington foreign policy establishment and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists.
Virginia “Ginni” Thomas – The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas was part of the Groundswell network that compiled lists of “disloyal” Trump administration officials to be fired. Her involvement with the CNP is an extension of a long history of ethical entanglements that prompted 74 House Democrats to issue a letter demanding Clarence Thomas recuse himself from ruling on the national healthcare overhaul, which she lobbied against.
Council for National Policy… by Max Blumenthal
Study: College Football Is Feudalism
As the GOP demands colleges start the season, new research shows that coaches are getting rich off a system that prohibits athletes from joining a union and being paid for their work.
David Sirota
Sep 2
Donald Trump and his party’s leaders have been simultaneously pushing to shield higher education officials from COVID-related lawsuits, while demanding that schools ignore health warnings and launch the college football season. In calling for a resumption of collegiate sports, Republican lawmakers have depicted themselves as defending the interests of players because, in their words: “These young men need a season.”
New research, however, suggests that it is not the unpaid players who most “need” a season. Instead, those with the real financial stake in reopening are the coaches and university officials who are together making huge money off players who are barred from being paid and joining a union to collectively bargain for compensation. Those prohibitions continue thanks to the same lawmakers now demanding the unpaid players risk their lives returning to the football field to generate the revenues that finance coaches’ multimillion-dollar pay packages.
A new study from researchers at Northwestern University, University of Chicago and University of Michigan found that if Congress permitted Division I college football and basketball players to form a union and collectively bargain for the same revenue share as professional athletes, on average each college “football player would receive $360,000 per year and each basketball player would earn nearly $500,000 per year.”
That amount, the researchers note, “is significantly higher than the current average value of full scholarships these athletes are currently receiving.” Indeed, they find that less than 7 percent of football and basketball revenues go to pay scholarships and living expenses — far less than the revenue share professional athletes get. Of course, in most professional sports leagues, players are represented by unions that collectively bargain with owners.
If you think college athletes revenue-generating activities isn’t “work,” read the findings of the 2014 National Labor Relations Board.
“Players spend 50 to 60 hours per week on their football duties during a one-month training camp prior to the start of the academic year and an additional 40 to 50 hours per week on those duties during the three or four month football season,” the agency wrote. “Not only is this more hours than many undisputed full-time employees work at their jobs, it is also many more hours than the players spend on their studies. In fact, the players do not attend academic classes while in training camp or the first few weeks of the regular season.”
No Pay For Players, Multimillion-Dollar Pay Packages For Coaches
So what happens to the nearly $5 billion of revenue that unpaid college football and basketball players are generating every year? With Congress refusing to pass new laws protecting college athletes’ rights as workers, an ever-larger share of that cash haul is being funneled into huge salaries for college coaches, university officials and athletic facilities.
The Northwestern study notes that as unpaid players have generated bigger and bigger revenues, “coaching salaries have grown substantially along with athletic department budgets.”
“Average salaries of Power 5 football coaching staffs at public schools grew from $4.8 to $9.8 million from 2008 to 2018,” the researchers found. “There have been corresponding increases in spending on non-coaching administrative salaries as well. From 2008 to 2018 these increased from $12.1 to $22.3 million.”
Alabama Republican Senate nominee Tommy Tuberville embodies one iconic example of public universities enriching coaches with revenues generated by unpaid players. Auburn University gave him a $5 million severance payout even though he quit his job. He then received a $2-million-a-year pay package from Texas Tech, which raised his salary while slashing compensation for educators. He then went on to receive a $2.2 million-a-year salary from the University of Cincinnati, whose officials said “it’s a market rate.”
Revenues from players’ unpaid labor has also been used to increase spending on athletic facilities. The Washington Post reported that in 2014, 48 schools in the wealthiest sports conferences “spent $772 million combined on athletic facilities, an 89-percent increase from $408 million spent in 2004.”
The researchers also found that as the revenues generated by unpaid football and basketball players are distributed to other sports programs, “the existing limits on player compensation effectively transfers resources away from students who are more likely to be black and more likely to come from poor neighborhoods towards students who are more likely to be white and come from higher-income neighborhoods.”
Players Demand Rights, Congress Stalls As NCAA Spends On Lobbying
As GOP lawmakers demand a resumption of college sports, players have asked for new legislation that would let them be paid for their work and the right to form a union. But bills have yet to move forward as the NCAA and its allies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a lobbying campaign in Washington.
With legislation stalled, players have tried to take matters into their own hands. Last year, a Villanova player filed a class action lawsuit arguing that in refusing to pay athletes, universities are violating minimum wage laws.
Prior to that, the National Labor Relations Board in 2015 overturned a ruling by one of its regional directors and refused to recognize Northwestern University players as employees entitled to the right to collectively bargain.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 refused to hear a case to resolve allegations that the NCAA is illegally refusing to compensate players for the lucrative commercial use of their names, images and likenesses.
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
Fifty-six-year-old Tennessee resident evicted from her home after contracting COVID-19
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/31/evic-a31.html
By Patrick Smith
31 August 2020
In early August, 56-year-old Memphis-area resident Leslie Nelson’s belongings were thrown out into her yard. A resident of the nearby Memphis suburb of Raleigh, Nelson was still recovering from COVID-19 and was also suffering from epilepsy at the time of her eviction.
Leslie was evicted because of her inability to pay her mother-in-law’s medical bills. Her mother-in-law was the technical owner of the property where she was living. She had passed away several years ago and the house was left to her and her partner. She didn’t know the bills existed.
“I offered to pay,” Leslie told the Commercial Appeal, Memphis’ local newspaper, referring to when a process server showed up to collect on the unknown debt, “but he didn't even give me a warning. He just sent movers over here and they showed up with police officers.” A GoFundMe pageset up to help Nelson get back in her home has raised nearly $15,000.
According to friends, Nelson is currently “navigating the court system and has a temporary residence.” The public opposition to her eviction “was able to get her the resources she needs to fight back.”
Nelson contracted COVID-19 when she went to a friend’s house on June 11. A few days later she started feeling sick. Her health deteriorated and she felt sicker than she had ever felt before. She called an ambulance and was hospitalized for a few days and was put on oxygen. Methodist North Hospital released her when she was starting to feel better. But she became ill again when the process server showed up.
According to the Commercial Appeal, she suffered from “an epilepsy-induced seizure” on the day of her eviction. In one of the videos that were taken, she was heard to say to a police officer, “I have COVID-19 and it’s hard to even think!”
There have been over 26,000 COVID-19 cases in Memphis and 369 deaths according to the City of Memphis website. As with other parts of the country, testing is only being offered to “those who are symptomatic, contacts of confirmed cases, or who work in the healthcare field,” the website notes.
Furthermore, Shelby County Health Department Director Dr. Alisa Haushalter will not release COVID-19 cases reported at schools. The county has falsely declared its primary concern is that it does not want “to breach the privacy of any child and create issues of stigma.”
According to Nelson’s friends, those who kicked her out had no concern for her health or where she was going to go. Police officers stood watch to enforce the removal. Hunter Demster, an area resident and activist that arrived on the scene to assist Nelson, said in an interview with the Commercial Appeal, “A dozen people have showed up, dedicating their time, potentially putting themselves in harm’s way of COVID to do the right thing.”
Demster also spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about the incident that developed at Nelson’s home and the looming eviction crisis in the city triggered by the pandemic. “Leslie called me. She was crying and terrified! I simply said, I’m already on my way and I’ll do what I can. She said she was very relieved to know she wouldn’t be alone.”
He continued: “We have over 9,000 evictions coming up. This will devastate this city. [It] caught me off guard when the first one I heard about hit so close to home. Memphis is the poorest or second poorest city in the country for decades. It’s no surprise that we are facing so many. Under-resourced, under-funded and forgotten.”
Memphis has an overall poverty rate of 27.8 percent and a child poverty rate of 44.9 percent. These statistics put Memphis in second place overall in poverty as of 2019, based on data taken from the University of Memphis (UofM). According to UofM, “Memphis is not ‘number 1’ in poverty in 2019, in either overall or child poverty. However, this is not cause for optimism, as Memphis is in worse shape than a year ago.”
“Memphis is the logistics-distribution hub of the world, dependent upon low wage workers and warehouse workers,” Demster explained. “The oligarchs here do everything in their power to criminalize the activist and concerned citizens who fight for the working class. Hence the federal lawsuits and police surveillance and sending federal troops here to silence us.”
Another acquaintance of Nelson’s who had received word of the eviction-in-progress over social media told the WSWS: “When I got there, there was a group of movers throwing all of her belongings onto the lawn. Leslie told me she had recently gotten out of the hospital and the process servers showed up at her house with no warning and told her she was being evicted.”
“Regardless of any moratorium on evictions, landlords are finding loopholes like in Leslie’s case,” the acquaintance said. “And if not that, then they’re not making necessary repairs to keep homes livable. Predatory landlords are predatory no matter what kind of protections are in place.”
With the ending of the $600 extension of unemployment aid last month and as state moratorium on evictions expire there will be incomprehensible suffering inflicted on the working population in Memphis and beyond. In the United States, one in five adults in rental housing reported that they were behind on rent in a Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey conducted in early July. That includes 12.5 million adults who had not paid rent and another 1.3 million whose rent had been deferred.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s CEO, Diane Yentel, recently noted, “The 40 million U.S. households projected for eviction by year’s end — and the lack of legislative action to prevent them — is [like] nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“I know of several people who are being taken to court as soon as next week whose landlords are trying to evict them,” an activist in Memphis told the WSWS. “I know of four immuno-compromised, unemployed roommates whose landlords have refused to repair the hot water heater, leaks in the roof, etc. The landlord is trying to evict them next week even though they have nowhere to go. Everyday I hear more stories like that, and it’s only getting worse.”
The callous treatment of working people such as Leslie Nelson is an expression of the malign neglect of the ruling capitalist class. Billionaires have received an endless flow of cash in order to boost their financial balance sheets and boost Wall Street to record highs while working people seeking to stay in their home are treated with abuse and contempt.
Only a mass socialist movement of the working class, basing itself upon the social needs of the population, can stop the money-mad campaign to force workers back to work in unsafe conditions while leaving millions destitute in the face of COVID-19.
31 August 2020
In early August, 56-year-old Memphis-area resident Leslie Nelson’s belongings were thrown out into her yard. A resident of the nearby Memphis suburb of Raleigh, Nelson was still recovering from COVID-19 and was also suffering from epilepsy at the time of her eviction.
Leslie was evicted because of her inability to pay her mother-in-law’s medical bills. Her mother-in-law was the technical owner of the property where she was living. She had passed away several years ago and the house was left to her and her partner. She didn’t know the bills existed.
“I offered to pay,” Leslie told the Commercial Appeal, Memphis’ local newspaper, referring to when a process server showed up to collect on the unknown debt, “but he didn't even give me a warning. He just sent movers over here and they showed up with police officers.” A GoFundMe pageset up to help Nelson get back in her home has raised nearly $15,000.
According to friends, Nelson is currently “navigating the court system and has a temporary residence.” The public opposition to her eviction “was able to get her the resources she needs to fight back.”
Nelson contracted COVID-19 when she went to a friend’s house on June 11. A few days later she started feeling sick. Her health deteriorated and she felt sicker than she had ever felt before. She called an ambulance and was hospitalized for a few days and was put on oxygen. Methodist North Hospital released her when she was starting to feel better. But she became ill again when the process server showed up.
According to the Commercial Appeal, she suffered from “an epilepsy-induced seizure” on the day of her eviction. In one of the videos that were taken, she was heard to say to a police officer, “I have COVID-19 and it’s hard to even think!”
There have been over 26,000 COVID-19 cases in Memphis and 369 deaths according to the City of Memphis website. As with other parts of the country, testing is only being offered to “those who are symptomatic, contacts of confirmed cases, or who work in the healthcare field,” the website notes.
Furthermore, Shelby County Health Department Director Dr. Alisa Haushalter will not release COVID-19 cases reported at schools. The county has falsely declared its primary concern is that it does not want “to breach the privacy of any child and create issues of stigma.”
According to Nelson’s friends, those who kicked her out had no concern for her health or where she was going to go. Police officers stood watch to enforce the removal. Hunter Demster, an area resident and activist that arrived on the scene to assist Nelson, said in an interview with the Commercial Appeal, “A dozen people have showed up, dedicating their time, potentially putting themselves in harm’s way of COVID to do the right thing.”
Demster also spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about the incident that developed at Nelson’s home and the looming eviction crisis in the city triggered by the pandemic. “Leslie called me. She was crying and terrified! I simply said, I’m already on my way and I’ll do what I can. She said she was very relieved to know she wouldn’t be alone.”
He continued: “We have over 9,000 evictions coming up. This will devastate this city. [It] caught me off guard when the first one I heard about hit so close to home. Memphis is the poorest or second poorest city in the country for decades. It’s no surprise that we are facing so many. Under-resourced, under-funded and forgotten.”
Memphis has an overall poverty rate of 27.8 percent and a child poverty rate of 44.9 percent. These statistics put Memphis in second place overall in poverty as of 2019, based on data taken from the University of Memphis (UofM). According to UofM, “Memphis is not ‘number 1’ in poverty in 2019, in either overall or child poverty. However, this is not cause for optimism, as Memphis is in worse shape than a year ago.”
“Memphis is the logistics-distribution hub of the world, dependent upon low wage workers and warehouse workers,” Demster explained. “The oligarchs here do everything in their power to criminalize the activist and concerned citizens who fight for the working class. Hence the federal lawsuits and police surveillance and sending federal troops here to silence us.”
Another acquaintance of Nelson’s who had received word of the eviction-in-progress over social media told the WSWS: “When I got there, there was a group of movers throwing all of her belongings onto the lawn. Leslie told me she had recently gotten out of the hospital and the process servers showed up at her house with no warning and told her she was being evicted.”
“Regardless of any moratorium on evictions, landlords are finding loopholes like in Leslie’s case,” the acquaintance said. “And if not that, then they’re not making necessary repairs to keep homes livable. Predatory landlords are predatory no matter what kind of protections are in place.”
With the ending of the $600 extension of unemployment aid last month and as state moratorium on evictions expire there will be incomprehensible suffering inflicted on the working population in Memphis and beyond. In the United States, one in five adults in rental housing reported that they were behind on rent in a Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey conducted in early July. That includes 12.5 million adults who had not paid rent and another 1.3 million whose rent had been deferred.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s CEO, Diane Yentel, recently noted, “The 40 million U.S. households projected for eviction by year’s end — and the lack of legislative action to prevent them — is [like] nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“I know of several people who are being taken to court as soon as next week whose landlords are trying to evict them,” an activist in Memphis told the WSWS. “I know of four immuno-compromised, unemployed roommates whose landlords have refused to repair the hot water heater, leaks in the roof, etc. The landlord is trying to evict them next week even though they have nowhere to go. Everyday I hear more stories like that, and it’s only getting worse.”
The callous treatment of working people such as Leslie Nelson is an expression of the malign neglect of the ruling capitalist class. Billionaires have received an endless flow of cash in order to boost their financial balance sheets and boost Wall Street to record highs while working people seeking to stay in their home are treated with abuse and contempt.
Only a mass socialist movement of the working class, basing itself upon the social needs of the population, can stop the money-mad campaign to force workers back to work in unsafe conditions while leaving millions destitute in the face of COVID-19.
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