By Jesse Jackson 03/25/2019 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
President Donald Trump stands accused of fanning the flames of racism, religious intolerance and vigilante violence. (Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images) 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
By Jesse Jackson 03/11/2019 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
A crowd forms to take photos of the marchers before they cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge Sunday, March 3, 2019, during the Bloody Sunday commemoration in Selma, Ala. (AP Photo/Julie Bennett) By Jesse Jackson 03/04/2019, This past weekend, political leaders from across the country gathered in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate “Bloody Sunday,” the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge where peaceful demonstrators, attempting to cross the bridge, were violently driven back by Alabama State Troopers, Dallas County Sheriff’s deputies and a horse-mounted posse wielding billy clubs and water hoses to savage the crowd. The horrors played on TV sets across the country generated a national outrage that provided the final impetus for passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. OPINION In many ways, Selma is the birthplace of modern democracy in America, helping to secure the right to vote for African Americans and the young, and for providing the foundation for future battles for equality, including the equal rights of women. When former Alabama Gov. George Wallace was ill late in his life, I joined him for prayer. I asked him why he unleashed the troopers on the demonstrators in 1965. He said, “I did them a favor.” Wallace argued that the mob would have been much worse on the peaceful marchers. He never even considered that he might have used the troopers to protect them from the mob. That was a mentality that, as Dr. Martin Luther King taught, could only be challenged by nonviolent protest that demonstrated our humanity while demanding our rights. In the commemorative ceremonies this year, presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker, as well as Sen. Sherrod Brown and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were joined by many legislators and political leaders. They sensibly called on participants to rise up again to challenge the revival of systematic efforts to suppress the vote and to push back against the outrageous Supreme Court decision in Shelby v. Holder. This decision gutted enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and opened the floodgates to a wave of discriminatory state laws meant to keep people of color from exercising their right to vote. There are laws that now require new forms of ID, voting districts have been gerrymandered and voter rolls purged. Laws now limit early voting and polling places have been closed or move without notice, and much, much more. The brave marchers in 1965 did their part for democracy, now it is up to us to defend it and extend it. At the same time, while Selma is the birthplace of modern democracy, it is in danger of becoming a prop. Selma is the ninth poorest small town in America and 40 percent of its residents live in poverty. It exemplifies the rural and small-town America that has been left out of the recovery. Democrats tend to see rural America as Trump country. Trump appealed to rural voters by stoking their fears and turning them against each other, but he has come up with no plan to help them. Trump offers only hate, not hope. The new Democratic majority in the House is in many ways the fruit of the sacrifices made at Selma and elsewhere. Democrats should see Selma and rural America as both an obligation and an opportunity. What’s needed is a comprehensive rural reconstruction plan, a modern version of what Franklin D. Roosevelt did when he built the Tennessee Valley Authority and modernized the Department of Agriculture, which literally electrified rural America. Today, the Department of Agriculture has the authority and the capacity to invest in water and sewage systems, modernize utilities, provide broadband to underserved communities, offer zero interest loans to community centers and subsidize affordable housing. What we need is a plan and a budget to get this done. House Democrats should make this a priority. Let’s honor those who sacrificed so much by repealing voter suppression laws. But let us also make Selma the birthplace of a new economic justice in rural America. Selma should be more than a symbol of past struggles; it must also become a beacon for a new hope. Jesse Jackson
Business Insider SARAH GRAY Mar 1st 2019 Former Vice President Joe Biden said he thought President Donald Trump was right to walk away from the second summit with North Korea. "The president did the right thing by walking away," Biden said while visiting the University of Nebraska at Omaha on Thursday, the Lincoln Journal Star reported. But Biden, who is said to be considering a 2020 presidential run, also slammed the president's approach to diplomacy. "Diplomacy matters; preparation matters," he continued. "The president treats everything like it's a real-estate deal." Former Vice President Joe Biden said President Donald Trump was right to walk away from his second summit with North Korea. But Biden had sharp words for the president's brand of diplomacy. Biden was speaking at the first Chuck Hagel Forum in Global Leadership at the University of Nebraska at Omaha on Thursday, the Lincoln Journal Star reported. He was in conversation with Hagel, a former Republican senator who was a secretary of defense during the Obama administration. The two longtime Senate colleagues discussed the role of US leadership in global affairs. "American leadership and engagement in the world is essential," Biden said, according to the Journal Star. "If the US fails to lead, who will take our place?" Biden also commented on the second US-North Korea summit, which broke down on Thursday in Vietnam without an agreement between Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, over what sanctions would be lifted for what degree of North Korea's denuclearization. Read more: Trump's second North Korea meeting 'clearly is a failure' as Kim Jong Un walks away with dangerous nuclear arsenal intact The former vice president said that "hard, hard, hard and consistent diplomacy" was required for tough negotiations but added that "the president did the right thing by walking away." "But diplomacy matters; preparation matters," he continued. "The president treats everything like it's a real-estate deal." He characterized the first summit between Trump and Kim, last year in Singapore, where the two signed a four-point agreement calling for peace on the Korean peninsula and the denuclearization of North Korea, as a "great gift" to Kim. "He was legitimized," Biden said, according to the Journal Star. "This guy is a thug." Biden, who is said to be contemplating a presidential run in 2020, has recently been making stops at universities in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Nebraska.
