Monday, December 23, 2019
Friday, December 13, 2019
Monday, November 25, 2019
Words to ponder
When I ask small children what they hope for when they grow up, they often tell me what job they want - how they want to become pilots, doctors, nurses or teachers. Perhaps because it is so self-evident, very few reply simply that they want to be happy. But isn't it true, however differently we may express it, as living beings what we all have in common is a wish, at the very core of our hearts, to be happy. Therefore it’s worth looking at how happiness can be brought about.
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Costume fun
If you want to be unique, you might want to take a closer look at the holiday’s most inventive and completely-homemade costumes. ….
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Bahamas two weeks later
Search teams scour Bahamas wreckage
At least 50 people have died as a result of Hurricane Dorian, a number that is expected to rise as search operations continue.Two weeks after the category five storm devastated parts of the island chain, thousands have been left without homes and essentials such as water and electricity.
An estimated 50 people have been confirmed dead, but thousands have been reported as missing on DorianPeopleSearch.com, a website where loved ones can enter names of individuals who remain unaccounted for. Aerial footage over the islands shows enormous wreckage. Crews are anticipated to be scouring through the debris for weeks.
Although the official death toll stands at 50 according to a statement by the Royal Bahamas Police Force, aid workers and some residents are reporting significantly higher numbers of bodies than what the official government figures currently suggest.
Observers on the ground estimated the final death count could be as high as 3,000 in just two neighborhoods on the Abaco Islands.
Canadian firefighters arrive to assist local authorities to search for victims, living or dead and distribute much needed supplies of water and food
Canadian firefighters bring cadaver dogs to search the wreckage
Marsh Harbour Bahamas - Stray dog searches for food
Marsh Harbour area destruction
Thursday, September 5, 2019
Sunday, August 25, 2019
First look in the mirror, Mr. President, to quell America’s deadly violence
By Jesse Jackson
Trump must lead the way with action in the passage of tough, meaningful gun control and an immediate ban on military-style weapons.
The horrifying and heartbreaking news of the domestic terrorist attacks in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in less than 24 hours over the weekend reached me while I was in Poland, a country haunted by the deadly power of politically irresponsible and racist rhetoric.
Columnists
In-depth political coverage, sports analysis, entertainment reviews and cultural commentary.
I was participating in a series of events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau death factory near Krakow, where in one night the Nazis killed more than 4,000 Roma and Sinti men, women and children, classified and persecuted by the Nazis as “Gypsies,” aliens, undocumented and other.
The motivation of the young white killer in Dayton is unclear.
But in El Paso, a 21-year-old white man apparently posted to social media a hate-filled, anti-immigrant rant before driving nine hours and 600 miles from the Dallas area to a Walmart, where you can see Mexico from the parking lot, to kill as many brown-skinned people as possible .
Wielding a semiautomatic, military-style rife — a weapon of mass destruction — the Texas shooter killed 20 people and wounded dozens more in a matter of minutes. The death toll in the El Paso shooting now stands at 22.
The scourge of homegrown racial terrorism is not new.
Since the birth of the Klan during Reconstruction, to the White Citizen’s councils of the ‘60s to Timothy McVeigh’s slaughter of 168 people, including 19 children, in Oklahoma City, the radical and racist right has used guns and bombs to intimidate and spread fear.
President Donald Trump said many of the right things at the White House Monday morning in condemning the shootings, racism, bigotry and white supremacy.
Better late than never. Now he must do the right thing. He can start by looking at the man in the mirror. He must end his use of racially charged (often racist) rhetoric and tweets for political gain. It is divisive, dangerous and diversionary.
I think he is better than that. I know the country is.
The president should also clean the swamp inside his administration.
During his campaign and in the White House — the people’s house — Trump has surrounded himself with racial ideologues, including his immigrant-bashing speech writer Stephen Miller, a close college friend of Richard Spencer, who, along with former KKK leader and Trump endorser, David Duke, were organizers of the demonstrations in Charlottesville where hundreds of neo-Nazis marched through the streets, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
Racism is a pathology. It is unscientific. It is immoral. It is a sickness. It is deadly.
The ideology of white supremacy is spewing hate, anti-immigrant and racially polarizing rhetoric. It is cannon fodder for these mass killings. These are not killings of passion, but political killings. Calling the shooters mentally ill is dismissing their plan of action, their ideology of supremacy and hate.
They are at war. They know what they’re doing and why.
We have a gun crisis, a hate crisis and a leadership crisis.
Trump must use his bully pulpit for something more than bullying. He must lead the way with action, not just words, in the passage of tough, meaningful gun control and an immediate ban on the military-style weapons used by both killers in El Paso and Dayton.
He must demand his fellow Republicans do the same. The House has passed gun legislation that would likely reduce such mass killings in the future, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to bring it before the Senate for a vote.
Mr. President, start twisting arms. These political acts of domestic terrorism are an attempt to undercut our democracy. The combination of well-armed white nationalists and white supremacists, and a multiracial democracy, cannot co-exist.
The president must take a moral stand for humanity and curb his ugly rhetoric.
His FBI must clamp down on right-wing, white nationalist groups inspiring and committing these acts of violence. He must join the American people who are demanding sensible gun safety measures.
Prayers and condolences are not enough.
We need action. We need gun control. We need the political will and moral leadership to stop the violence, save the children — and the country.
Jesse Jackson
Glad you are back Jesse .
The PIC's
Monday, August 12, 2019
Life and Death of Jeffrey Epstein
A changed and aged Epstein during incarceration
Jeffry Epstein is dead by his own hand and the conspiracy theories abound. Of course they should be thoroughly investigated, even though they are all more fiction than fact. The system or someone in it is responsible for leaving a suicidal man unsupervised and should step forward and own it.
Will anyone truly mourn Epstein's death??
One of Epstein's accusers
some of Epstein's victims
The more we learn, the more Jeffrey Epstein resembles an evil comic book character for the developmentally arrested, pseudo intellectual — the charming-but-lurid mastermind with a plot to take over the world by impregnating scores of women on a remote desert estate.
The New York Times reported that the financier/convicted sex offender/philanthropist — and accused sex trafficker — was also a “transhumanist” who had big plans for humankind. Epstein apparently told one scientist that he hoped to seed the human race with his own DNA by impregnating 20 women at a time at his New Mexico ranch, named “Zorro.”
Transhumanism is the theory that the human population can be enhanced through technologies such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. Or eugenics by any other name. Epstein seems to have believed that he was that rare breed that ought to be replicated.
The carriers of Epstein’s apparently rarefied spermatozoa wouldn’t be the younger, underage sexual partners he allegedly preferred. Instead, according to the Times’s reporting, his maternal incubators would be adult women whose intellectual qualifications would have been established through academic achievement.
Trump parties at Epstein's Manhattan manse
For dinners he hosted at his Manhattan manse, Epstein often invited scientists as well as a sampling of attractive, accomplished women. Some of the scientists theorized that the women were being vetted as potential candidates for Epstein’s very special black book, according to the Times.
The male invitees weren’t your run-of-the-mill scientists but some of the most renowned, innovative minds in research and academia. Among them was Steven Pinker , the Harvard cognitive psychologist and popular science author, who seems to have seen through Epstein, calling him an “intellectual impostor.” Pinker told the Times that Epstein would abruptly shift topics and make juvenile remarks. To the layman’s eye, such behavior suggests a purposeful deflection when the topic at hand is reaching a point beyond the speaker’s comfort range or intellectual capacity.
Others on Epstein’s guest lists apparently were seduced by his charm and intellect, as well as his wealth, which he reportedly dangled as bait for funding-starved researchers. He was generous, often donating to a variety of interests and causes, including the Clinton Foundation. But he wasn’t convinced that helping the starving masses was productive in the right sense, arguing that providing food and health care to the poor would only heighten the risk of overpopulation.
Pinker, who said he was present when Epstein floated this idea at a gathering at Harvard, which was dissented, arguing that the evidence points to the contrary. Gods don’t like to be contradicted, and Pinker was thereafter told he’d been “voted off the island” and banished from future gatherings.
Speaking of which, Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean — which he dubbed “Little St. Jeff’s” — is of renewed interest thanks to an NBC News report. Apparently, a blue-and-white-striped, block-shaped building on it bears no resemblance to the octagonally shaped design that had been approved to be a music hall, according to permit records.
What the structure does resemble, however, is a pharaoh’s headdress. Might this have been intended as a mausoleum for Epstein’s remains? That is, other than his head and penis, which he reportedly wished to have frozen. Also a fan of cryogenics, believing that frozen human parts and bodies could be resurrected in the future, Epstein was no ordinary bloke. Indeed, he is a perversely tragic figure.
Burdened with lewd and improbable fantasies and the means to explore them, it seems that Epstein became lost in his own fable. Wandering the skies in his private jet, enamored of his own mind and image, he forgot that he was merely mortal and may have flown too close to the sun. Confined to a jail cell (with further punishment to come) — and removed from his luxurious kingdom, his freedom and the company of luminaries who swelled his ego with admiration — his suffering must have been unbearable, although richly deserved. The logical explanation for his extreme reaction to his situation is that he could no longer tolerate what his life had sunk to and did not have the courage to face an even worse future.
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Two women say E Jean Carroll told them about Trump alleged sexual assault
I did not rape that woman
I've never even met her
Two women have publicly said columnist E. Jean Carroll confided in them after Donald Trump allegedly raped her in the 1990s. Carol Martin and Lisa Birnbach at the time disagreed on whether Ms Carroll should call the police, the New York Times newspaper reports.
President Trump denies the allegation, saying Ms Carroll is "totally lying" and "she's not my type". Ms Carroll, 75, is the 16th woman to accuse Mr Trump of sexual misconduct. Mr Trump, 73, has rejected all allegations against him.
Ms Martin, a TV news anchor in 1975-95, and Ms Birnbach, a writer, spoke publicly for the first time about the alleged sexual assault on the New York Times podcast The Daily.
Ms Carroll, the Elle columnist, said in the same podcast she had called Ms Birnbach straight after the alleged assault, telling her that Mr Trump had forced himself on her.
Ms Birnbach responded by saying she thought it was rape, urging Ms Carroll to call the police.
"Let's go to the police. I'll take you to the police" Ms Birnbach said, but added that her friend refused.
Ms Carroll described what had happened between her and Mr Trump as a "fight", not "a crime".
She also told the podcast she felt that she had encouraged Mr Trump's behaviour. Asked whether she felt responsibility for what happened, she said: "One hundred percent."
Ms Carroll said two or three days later she also told Ms Martin about the alleged assault.
E. Jean Carroll said it happened at a Bergdorf Goodman store in New York's Manhattan in late 1995 or early 1996, when the pair bumped into each other while shopping. The former Apprentice star and real estate magnate allegedly asked her for advice when buying lingerie for another woman and jokingly asked her to model it for him.
In the changing rooms, she said Mr Trump lunged at her, pinned her against a wall and forced himself on her. Ms Carroll, whose "Ask E. Jean" advice column has appeared in Elle magazine since 1993, claims she managed to push him off after a "colossal struggle".
Ms Carroll made the allegations for the first time in the New York magazine last Friday. She said she would consider pressing charges against the president.
Speaking to The Hill on Monday, Mr Trump staunchly dismissed the allegations due to appear in Ms Carroll's forthcoming book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal. He denied even knowing Ms Carroll despite being pictured with her in New York magazine alongside details of her allegations.
"She is - it's just a terrible thing that people can make statements like that," he said.
It was his third denial since Ms Carroll went public, with Mr Trump previously accusing her of "trying to sell a new book" and "peddling fake news".
In 2016, Mr Trump made similar remarks about another accuser, Jessica Leeds, who alleges he groped her on an aeroplane in the 1980s.
Addressing crowds at a rally, Mr Trump said "she would not be my first choice". Doesn't he realize that a sexist remark like that only makes him appear more guilty?? My opinion? … He's guilty as hell.
As usual, he gets away with it without consequences
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
President Trump’s insatiable appetite for regime change
White House National Security Advisor John Bolton talks to reporters about the security and political turmoil in Venezuela and called for a peaceful transition to a government controlled by acting President Juan Guaido, outside of the White House West Wing on Tuesday, April 30, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)
By Jesse Jackson 05/06/2019
Push is coming to shove in Venezuela.
President Donald Trump has decided that the government of President Nicolás Maduro must go.
Senior officials — led by John Bolton, Trump’s super-hawk national security adviser, and Elliott Abrams, stained by his cover-up and lies about death squads in El Salvador and contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s — boast publicly about their plots for regime change.
They have recognized an obscure right-wing Venezuelan politician — Juan Guaido — as head of state. They’ve tightened sanctions again and again, adding directly to the dire suffering of the Venezuelan people.
OPINION
They’ve encouraged the military to revolt. And when the failure of Guaido’s latest coup attempt embarrassed them last week, they’ve threatened direct military intervention.
“All options are on the table,” Trump repeats.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Trump has a “full range of options” when it comes to next moves against the Venezuelan government, claiming that Trump doesn’t need congressional authorization to act.
John Bolton announced that the “Monroe Doctrine is alive and well. It’s our hemisphere.” He noted that he wasn’t prepared to apply Teddy Roosevelt’s corollary that asserted the U.S. power to intervene unilaterally anywhere in the hemisphere “yet.”
In fact, military intervention in Venezuela would be blatantly illegal under both international law and the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution gives Congress the right to declare war, something that the right-wing justices who claim to be guided by the text somehow ignore.
The entire system of international law constructed in the wake of World War II by the United States is based upon non-intervention and state sovereignty. Even the so-called right to protect — the right to intervene to avoid a human rights catastrophe — requires approval by the Security Council. Unilateral action violates the law.
The Trump administration’s insatiable appetite for regime change is more than a crime, it is a blunder.
For decades, the U.S. claimed to be the “indispensable nation” because we would enforce a “rules-based” world order fairly. Now Trump and his band of armchair warriors are turning the U.S into a lawless rogue nation, following in the errant footsteps of their predecessors.
Recent forays into regime change — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Honduras, Syria — have all ended in disaster, ruinous not only for the people of the country but also for U.S. lives and treasure as well.
Venezuela poses no threat to the U.S. It is a bitterly divided country, politically, racially and economically. The U.S. was party to a failed coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in 2002.
Maduro’s misrule, the falling price of oil, U.S. sanctions have all combined to crater the Venezuelan economy, spreading misery with millions deciding to leave. Bolton recklessly boasts about U.S. plans to help rebuild the economy once Maduro is gone — “planning for what we call the day after.”
No doubt, Trump will want the U.S. or U.S. companies to “take the oil,” as he claims we should have done in Iraq. This folly is likely to put us in the middle of a civil war that will only add to the humanitarian disaster in Venezuela.
Surely, we should have learned from Libya that a bad state is not nearly as bad as a failed state.
Instead of Teddy Roosevelt and the days of gunboat diplomacy, the U.S. should be following the prudent advice of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy.
FDR outlined principles for good hemispheric relations, including respect for the integrity of other states; self-restraint and acceptance of the equal rights of neighbors, non- intervention in the domestic affairs of neighbors, and settlement of disputes by negotiation, not force.
Venezuela is a sovereign nation and a neighbor. Maduro is supported by Russia, China and Cuba.
So what?
We don’t believe that Russia has the right to overthrow the governments of Ukraine or Georgia simply because we support their governments. We should be acting to alleviate the humanitarian crisis afflicting the Venezuelan people, not add to it. No matter how hateful we think Maduro is, it is up to the Venezuelan people to decide who will govern them.
The last thing we should do is attempt to dictate — particularly through threat or use of force — who will rule a land of nearly 30 million people.
Now is the time for Congress to act, to pass a resolution to prevent U.S. military action in Venezuela.
If Trump and his bellicose henchmen have their way, we will surely regret it.
Jesse Jackson
Monday, May 6, 2019
GOP, not Russia, is greater threat to free elections
By Jesse Jackson 4/29/2019
We all have heard about WikiLeaks and Russian interference in the 2016 election. The report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller has once more put that on the front pages. Too often lost in the furor, however, is the far more damaging TrikiLeaks — the tricks and laws used to suppress the vote by partisans, largely Republicans here at home.
After the Supreme Court’s right-wing gang of five gutted key sections of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, Republican-controlled states immediately ramped up efforts to create obstacles for voting, particularly for people of color. They mandated specific forms of state ID, made it harder for students to vote, eliminated same-day registration, reduced early voting days, closed polling booths in African American neighborhoods leading to long delays, purged voters from the rolls, perfected partisan gerrymandering and more. In some cases, as in North Carolina, their discriminatory intent was so public that the laws were overturned in federal court, but in most places, the new barriers were in place in 2016.
EDITORIAL
Did it make a difference? Voting rights expert Ari Berman says, “absolutely.” Overall 14 states had new restrictions in place, passed since the Shelby decision. Look at Wisconsin. Trump won by 22,000 votes. In Wisconsin, 300,000 African American voters didn’t have the newly required strict photo ID. Black voter turnout in Milwaukee declined by 51,000 votes from 2012, while as Lawyers Committee President Kristen Clarke noted, voter turnout rates were depressed across the state.
Now we’re headed into 2020. Republican bastions like Texas, Tennessee and Arizona witnessed surges of Democratic support in 2018. Not surprisingly, they are launching new efforts to suppress the vote. In Texas, the secretary of state announced a plan to purge 95,000 people from the voter rolls because they weren’t citizens. Independent research then demonstrated that in Harris County, which includes Houston, 60 percent of the 30,000 people on the list had received citizenship long ago. Some of the supposed research was 25 years old. Once more citizens had to go to court to try to stop the suppression.
In Texas, state lawmakers are also moving to add criminal penalties for people who improperly fill out voter registration forms, an effort to intimidate nonprofit groups that work to register people to vote. In Arizona, Republicans are making it harder to cast an early ballot. In Tennessee, GOP lawmakers are pushing legislation to fine voter registration groups that submit incomplete forms, even by mistake, up to $10,000. Tequila Johnson, co-founder of the Equity Alliance that focuses on registering people of color, called them out: “We have never seen a bill like this on the floor, until we dared to register 86,000 black and brown people to vote. This screams racism.”
Much, much more attention should be paid to this battle. Happily, the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has made voting rights a priority. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, has launched an investigation of voter suppression in Georgia in 2018, where the victor, Brian Kemp, oversaw the election as secretary state. And, as Cummings detailed, 1.4 million people were purged from the voting rolls from 2012 to 2016, 53,000 — 80 percent of them people of color — had their registrations put on hold; 214 polling places were shuttered, contributing to lines of more than four hours in heavily black precincts.
By Meredith — Providing you the best up to date trending videos
Some states, happily, are moving to make voting easier and more accessible. Florida citizens passed a historic referendum restoring the right to vote for felons who have paid their debt to society. (Now, Republicans in the legislature are trying to undermine that initiative). Automatic Voting Registration laws have passed in several states. More states are providing longer times for early voting, adding voting booths to reduce long lines and more. Cases to rollback partisan gerrymandering have been successful in federal courts — and now are headed to the Supreme Court. The Brennan Center reports that bills that expand voting rights have seen some movement in 35 states, while those restricting rights have moved in 10 states.
What’s clear is that interference with our elections and with the right to vote will come far more from the efforts of domestic politicians than it will come from whatever mischief the Russians plan. It is revealing that the Trump White House has little to say about Russians. It is even more telling that the Justice Department is absent without leave in the fight against voter suppression at home. The right to vote — the most basic right of a democracy — is still contested in too many states — and must be fought, state by state, by citizens of conscience.
Jesse Jackson
Friday, May 3, 2019
My Sweet Lovely Friend
Dear Shadow of 'Genie',
No thanks needed ... that's what friends do .I was so happy to know you were up and around and out in the sunshine . Now you take your time and stop being in such a rush . I will enjoy our chat ... we take our chats slow at the beginning ...
The Knights will write you something on WAG ... Charles / Charlene want to write you , Sha told them to email it and they will put it in the secret place , I hear Gil /Harvey will welcome you back also ... Harvey was just dancing around , Helen , his daughter asked what was wrong with him , Jonny told her Harvey was happy because their aunt Jeannie was back on her feet and she was going to tell him how to introduce himself as the Roving Reporter .
I will definitely lay into him now we haven't been posting much we wanted you see all the posts Hahahahaha!!! You have a birthday post on WB.
Love Witchy
Thursday, May 2, 2019
Dear Witchy
Thank you for being such a patient friend. It feels good to be up and around and out in the sunshine. I will pick up where I left off so long ago. I have so missed hanging around the blogs and trading comments with you. I will set up a chat with you
I do hope you are well and full of your usual pep and energy. I see you are still giving Trump hell. That's my girl. See you soon
Love Shadow
Monday, April 8, 2019
The politics behind Donald Trump’s empty threats on Mexico border
By Jesse Jackson 04/08/2019
Donald Trump’s flailing on immigration and the Mexican border continue to spiral into chaos. First, he threatened to close the border with Mexico. One week later, he walked that back. He declares a national emergency about the “invasion” of people seeking asylum from Central American countries, and then says he’s stopped all aid to those countries, which can only worsen the conditions that cause people to leave. He says he’s already building a wall. That isn’t true. He torpedoes bipartisan measures that might begin to make things better.
It’s increasingly clear Trump wants a crisis that he can use politically, not a solution that can ease human suffering.
OPINION
Two weeks ago, Trump’s threat was clear: “If Mexico doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States throug [sic] our Southern Border,” he tweeted, “I will be CLOSING…the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week.” His aides said he was deadly serious. Trump’s leading mouthpiece, Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, told ABC News that it would take “something dramatic” to stop him from doing it.
Less than a week later, Trump reversed himself. He suddenly praised Mexico as being “very nice,” claiming that Mexico had changed its policy toward the asylum seekers, which a befuddled Mexican government quickly denied. He retreated by issuing new bluster: “We’re going to give them a one-year warning, and if the drugs don’t stop, or largely stop, we’re going to put tariffs on Mexico and products, in particular cars. And if that doesn’t work, we’re going to close the border. You know I will do it. I don’t play games,” Trump warned, playing games with his threats.
What was the “something dramatic” that convinced the president to take back his threat? He was mugged by reality.
Closing our 2,000-mile border with Mexico would be an economic catastrophe, a moral blight, inconceivably inane and literally impossible. A combined 15 million people live along the border. Some $1.7 billion of two-way trade and hundreds of thousands of legal travelers cross the border each day. Mexico is the second-largest market for U.S.-made products (Canada is first). It is our third-largest trading partner (after Canada and China). It is the fourth-largest supplier of foreign crude oil to the United States. It is the top destination for U.S. travelers.
Trump lives in a universe that he shares only with rabid Fox News commentators, but, in this case, he was forcibly reminded of reality by Republican business leaders and by the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which warned that closing the border would “inflict severe economic harm on American families.” Even Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who usually wags his tail at whatever the president tweets, warned of “potentially catastrophic economic damage.”
Trump’s threats are just posturing, but his policy is a chaotic calamity. He declares a national emergency to claim money for his wall (largely from the military) against the will of the bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress. He rails about the import of drugs, ignoring the reality that virtually all of the hard drugs come in through legal ports of entry that his “wall” won’t address. He describes the rising number of people seeking asylum as “an invasion,” scorning both international and U.S. law and basic morals, then directs his State Department to cut off $450 million in aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, which will surely worsen the conditions that are driving people to seek asylum. He traveled to the California border to celebrate the building of a new section of his promised border wall, when no new building had taken place, only a routine upgrade of old fencing.
He cut off protections for the Dreamers, young people who have grown up in the U.S., and torpedoed the bipartisan agreement that would have protected them and added to border security after he said he’d sign it. He scaled back protections for asylum seekers, helping to create the backlog at the border. Then his administration cruelly separated parents and children at the border, creating a shameful human horror that continues to this day.
Clearly Trump wants an issue to run on politically, not a solution to a humanitarian tragedy. Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign strategist, argued that as long as the debate is over immigrants, Trump benefits. Trump uses attacks on immigrants as the centerpiece of his white nationalist appeal. His railing about the crimes of Latin American gang members is simply the updated version of the Willie Horton ad that George Bush used against Mike Dukakis.
So don’t worry about Trump closing the border. Even his administration won’t be that self-destructive. And don’t expect him to make progress with the humanitarian crisis at the border. Trump is fanning the flames, not putting out the fires.
A sensible border policy and humane and effective immigration reform will have to wait for the next president.
Jesse Jackson
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
Donald Trump’s big lie about health care
By Jesse Jackson 4 / 2 /19
Donald Trump’s madcap presidency is now seeking to strip 20 million Americans of their health care coverage. He has instructed the Justice Department to join the lawsuit seeking to declare the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.
He then proclaimed that Republicans would offer a far better alternative, tweeting they’ll become the “Party of Great Health Care.”
OPINION
Only there is no plan. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, wants nothing to do with trying to develop one. Confusion reigns. This grotesque misrule might be funny were it not putting millions of people at risk.
Trump has taken his animus against all things Obama to new heights in his obsessive drive to repeal or disembowel the Affordable Care Act. After the Republican Senate rejected repeal — feeding Trump’s disdain for Sen. John McCain, who cast the determining vote — Trump’s administration has sought to undermine the act administratively.
Seven million fewer people now have health care coverage since Trump was elected. Now he hopes to have the courts repeal the act. That would end the expansion of Medicaid, which covers more than 10 million low-wage workers and their families. It would repeal the requirement that insurance companies cover those with pre-existing conditions — putting anyone who is ill now covered under the act at risk.
It would repeal the provision allowing the young to be covered under their parents plan to age 26. Once more, insurance companies would be free to enforce lifetime limits on coverage, putting the most vulnerable at risk.
Trump adds insult to this injury by proclaiming the big lie: that Republicans have or will have a plan that will cover more and be less expensive. But there is no plan. Trump aides say it will be developed in the Senate. McConnell, who rules Senate Republicans with a tight fist, says, “I look forward to seeing what the president is proposing and what he can work out with the speaker.”
When asked if the two committees tasked with overseeing health care would come up with a plan, Sen. Charles Grassley responded tersely with a “no.”
Scrambling to put a cover on his barefaced lie, Trump announced that Sen. Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, would join with a couple of other senators to come up with a “spectacular” plan.
This is like naming Al Capone to design the tax code. In the 1990s, Scott was the CEO of Columbia/HCA. He resigned in 1997, the same year the FBI announced an investigation of the company for massive Medicare fraud. In the end, Columbia/HCA pled guilty to systematic fraud — featuring false billing of Medicare on a breathtaking scale. The company pled guilty to 14 corporate felonies and paid out some $1.7 billion in criminal fines and penalties in what the Justice Department called the “largest health care fraud case in U.S. history.” No doubt, if Scott were to come with a plan, it would be “spectacular” for the money guys, and savage for those in need of care.
On health care, Trump’s lies are dangerous to life. The U.S. is the only advanced industrial country that does not provide universal health care as a right. We are paying almost twice per capita as other countries with worse health care results. U.S. life expectancy has declined for three years, in part because of the opioid crisis, in part because of the absence of adequate health care. Meanwhile, the insurance companies and the drug companies and the private hospital complexes rake in fortunes.
What should be done is clear. The U.S. government should negotiate with drug companies to force lower prices for prescription drugs. Medicare should be strengthened and then extended to cover more people in stages. Cover those up to 30 and those 55 and over in the first stage. And then over years, perfect and extend the program to cover all. Pay for it by requiring the rich and the corporations pay their fair share of taxes. We’d end up paying less and getting better coverage.
That rational solution runs into the strongest of entrenched interests — the drug companies and the insurance companies and their legions of lobbyists. They are prepared to spend billions to protect their profits. They buy ads to scare the hell out of people, pay for politicians, and blanket congress with lobbyists. Now they have Trump fronting for them. It will take an aroused public to overcome that resistance.
Trump believes that if you tell a big lie over and over and over again, pretty soon people will begin to believe. His political debut was the big lie about Obama’s birth certificate. He’s done the same with his racist rants on immigrants and the border wall. Now he plans the same big lie technique on health care: slandering what is, claiming to have a better plan when there is no plan, posturing as a champion of the people when he’s defending big money interests.
The real deal is clear: the rich get a tax cut; the poor get a health care cut. The rich are living longer in splendor. The poor are dying earlier in distress. The only thing “spectacular” about the Trump health care lie is his audacity to believe that he can sell it.
Jesse Jackson
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Imposing a modern-day version of a poll tax is a new low
Until 2018, Florida — the state vital to the presidential victories of George Bush and Donald Trump — deprived one in 10 voters, and two in 10 African-Americans, of the right to vote with a constitutional provision banning felons from voting, even after they had fulfilled their sentences.
Many with nonviolent drug felonies, enforced by a systematically biased criminal justice system, are kept from the polls. The discriminatory effect and intent of this exclusion is obvious.
In a stunning act of decency in 2018, Floridians voted overwhelmingly to amend their constitution and restore the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions “after they complete all terms of their sentence, including parole or probation.” According to the Tallahassee Democrat, the “Voting Restoration Amendment” would “grant most of the 1.7 million convicted felons the right to vote and help select their leaders for local, state and federal offices.”
OPINION
Voting rights activists drew up plans to help contact and register them, with the charismatic young leader, former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum committed to leading the effort.
Now Republicans in the state legislature are moving to frustrate the will of citizens, adding a new burden to exclude voters, a new form of one of the most loathsome Jim Crow tactics — the poll tax. Republicans in a House committee have voted — contrary to the intent and the text of the referendum passed by voters — to exclude from voting those who haven’t paid their fines (even including those on a court-approved payment plan). Fines are imposed not by judges as part of the sentence, but by administrative clerks. They do not block any other voters from voting. If Republicans have their way — and they have a majority in the legislature — they will likely use these fines to block a substantial portion of African-Americans from voting. Despite the will of its people, Florida Republicans want to impose a racially biased poll tax to strip citizens of the right to vote — and to tilt elections in their favor.
Beginning in the 1890s, the poll tax was central to enforcing segregation in the South. Most of the laws had a “grandfather clause” that exempted those whose parents or grandparents had the right to vote prior to the Civil War. In 1964, this foul measure was outlawed for federal elections in the 24th Amendment to the Constitution. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional even in state elections. So states like Florida found other tricks and traps to limit the vote. Now, after the citizens of Florida have thrown out felony exclusion, Republicans threaten to impose a new Jim Crow poll tax.
There is no justification — except partisan zealotry built upon race-based politics. Republicans, from Trump on down, have chosen to make themselves the party of racial division. African-Americans, not surprisingly, tend to vote overwhelmingly against them. So Republicans use various tricks to suppress the African-American vote — gerrymandering, restrictive voter ID laws, cuts in early voter hours and opposition to same-day voter registration — all to make it harder for the poor and minorities to vote.
But imposing the modern-day version of a poll tax is a new low.
If Republicans do succeed in passing this injustice, it will be challenged in the courts or in another referendum. But none of this should be necessary. The real question is to the Republican congressional majority in Florida: Have you no decency? Are you so blinded by partisan self-interest that you would maliciously deprive a million Floridians of the right to vote? Are you so arrogant as to ignore the 65 percent of the voters who voted to erase this injustice from Florida’s constitution? Have you no shame?
Jesse Jackson
Monday, March 18, 2019
Everyone must condemn Trump’s sly encouragement of lawless violence
By Jesse Jackson 3/18/19
Racism is not natural. Babies — black, brown, white — explore the world and each other with wonder, not hate. Racism has to be taught. It is learned behavior. To assume that a person is inherently superior or inferior to another based upon race is unnatural and ungodly. Racism is used for political manipulation and economic exploitation. In a land founded on the belief that all men are created equal, slavery could not be justified without a racism that depicted slaves as sub-human.
These basic truths need restating in this terrible time. Across the world, we see the rise of racism, anti-Semitism and islamophobia, and its violent expression. Parishioners in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, are gunned down; worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue are attacked and killed. Now the murders in the mosques in New Zealand. Christians, Jews and Muslims must now stand as one and resist the rise of hate, and the hate-filled propaganda that feeds it.
OPINION
In this, Donald Trump can no longer duck responsibility. When an American president speaks, the world listens. When Barack Obama was elected, it sent hope across the world. Blacks were elected to parliaments for the first time across Europe. Some hoped a new era of peace and reconciliation might begin.
Yet his election incited a harsh reaction as well, a new trafficking in hate, fear and violence. Donald Trump used his celebrity to claim that Obama was illegitimate, literally un-American. He had relished spreading racial fears before. When five young men were falsely arrested in New York City, Trump took out newspaper ads calling for the death penalty, inciting fear of young African-American males. When DNA testing proved their innocence, Trump simply denied the truth. His campaign for president was stained by his race-bait politics: slurring immigrants as rapists and murderers, promising to ban Muslims, denouncing a judge of Mexican descent, born in Indiana, as too biased to rule on the case involving students defrauded by Trump University.
As president, Trump has used his position to continue to foster hatred and racial division: the Muslim ban, the “wall” and the continued slander of immigrants, African nations as “s–thole countries.” In Charlottesville, he equated Nazis marching through the streets with tiki torches, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” with those protesting Nazism and racism; “good people,” he said, on “both sides.”
He’s also fanned the flames of violence. He told his followers at a campaign rally in 2016 that if they beat up a young protester, he’d pay their legal fees. He talked about “Second Amendment people” — gun owners presumably — taking care of liberal judges or of Hillary Clinton, if she appointed them. He encouraged police officers to rough up suspects.
Now, as he appears more and more unhinged, he did an interview with the right-wing Breitbart news in which he suggested that his people “play it tougher,” intimating that if he didn’t get his way, brown shirt violence might follow: “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
The American president is fanning the flames of racism, religious intolerance and vigilante violence. Denial — “He doesn’t mean it,” “It’s just his way of talking,” “Just New York bluster” — is simply not credible. We can argue about whether Trump is a racist or an anti-Semite or a wannabe caudillo. But there is no question about the hatred he is stoking here and across the world.
Now is the time for citizens of conscience to act. Church and community leaders, responsible mothers and fathers, pundits and editorialists, scholars and celebrities, those who ride in limousines and those who take the early bus — all now have the responsibility to speak out against racism, to condemn the spread of hate, the sly encouragement of lawless violence. When our president acts irresponsibly to divide us, citizens must act responsibly to bring us together. Our freedoms — of speech, of assembly, of religion — can save us from misrule, but only if we exercise them.
Jesse Jackson
Monday, March 11, 2019
To help Venezuela, the U.S. must use diplomacy, not a military coup
The United States is pushing for an overthrow of the government of Venezuela. The Trump administration has denounced Nicolas Maduro as a “dictator,” dismissing the 2018 election, which the opposition boycotted. Instead of a good neighbor policy or a policy of non-intervention, the Trump administration has set out intentionally to overthrow the regime.
Long before Trump, the United States was a bitter opponent of the Hugo Chavez regime. The fact that Chavez was wildly popular and freely elected made no difference. He represented a revolution that embraced Fidel Castro’s Cuba and implemented plans to redistribute wealth and empower the poor. In 2002, when the Venezuelan military moved to overthrow Chavez, an official in the Bush administration reportedly met with the coup leaders. The coup attempt was frustrated, however, when Venezuelans rose up in mass against the plotters.
Now with Chavez gone, the current president Nicolas Maduro unpopular, the economy a mess — in significant degree because the price of oil is near record lows — the Trump administration is apparently orchestrating another attempt.
OPINION
It has continued to ratchet up pressure. It has imposed brutal sanctions on Venezuela, making a bad situation far worse, all the while blaming the government for the misery. Trump has openly threatened a “military option” for Venezuela. His bellicose national security adviser, John Bolton, boasted that “The troika of tyranny in this hemisphere — Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — has finally met its match.”
The New York Times reported that Trump administration officials met with Venezuelan military officers who were considering a coup attempt.
Then, Juan Guaido, an obscure politician from a right-wing party, declared himself interim president, claiming that he had that right as head of the National Assembly. The U.S. immediately recognized Guaido, and right-wing governments across the region did the same.
Trump then named Elliott Abrams, infamous for committing perjury before Congress over the Iran-Contra fiasco, and for championing vicious military and paramilitary repression across Central America, as special envoy for Venezuela. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) pumped up demands for intervention, growing so rabid that he tweeted a gruesome picture of the murder of Libya’s Qaddafi as a prediction of Maduro’s fate.
Bolton admitted that he was “in conversation with major American [oil] companies now,” stating that “it would make a difference if we could have American companies produce the oil in Venezuela. We both have a lot at stake here.”
Now Venezuela has been hit with a power blackout, taking out electricity, phone service and internet. In Forbes Magazine, an expert details how easily this could be done by the U.S. in a cyber first-strike.
The U.S. has a long and shameful history of intervention in this hemisphere, too often aligning itself with rapacious elites and the military against the vast majority. In the ’50s, the CIA overthrew a popularly elected government in Guatemala. After the Cuban revolution, the U.S. launched an invasion, terrorist attacks, economic sabotage and boycott, and assassination attempts to get rid of Castro. In 1973, the U.S. embraced the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet when he led the overthrow of the popularly elected government of Salvador Allende. As recent as 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorsed the overthrow of the elected government of Honduras, a disaster that has resulted in bands of desperate Hondurans seeking refuge in this country.
Now Trump and his bellicose advisers seem intent on adding another chapter to this shameful history. There is another way. Instead of starving the Venezuelans into submission, we should be engaging with them. Instead of seeking to control their oil, we should recognize their national sovereignty. Instead of fanning coup attempts, we should be leading international negotiations to seek a diplomatic settlement that might lead to new elections.
Nicolas Maduro is far from blameless, but no one nominated the United States to decide who should govern Venezuela. Fomenting regime change — by a soft coup, by economic sabotage, by fostering a military revolt — is likely to lead to more violence and more suffering.
It is time for Congress to step up — to investigate exactly what the Trump administration is doing overtly and covertly, and to call for a return to diplomacy before it is too late.
Jesse Jackson
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