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welcome to reality trivia
reality is the state of things as they actually exist
feb 23, 2020
Real News Today
*NPR’s attempted takedown of Bernie Sanders wasn’t just biased — it was driven by startlingly poor research(Worthless Media)
*BLOOMBERG: “I PAID BROADS LIKE THEY WERE AS GOOD AT THEIR JOBS AS MEN”
(Funnies)
*DNC: “We’re Not Taking Any Sides Except Against Candidates We Don’t Want You To Want”(FUNNIES)
*LAW STUDENTS ARE REFUSING JOB OFFERS FROM ELITE FIRM UNTIL IT DROPS EXXONMOBIL
(Capitalism)
*141 suing over Zantac cancer concerns likely to be just the beginning
(Corporate Criminals)
*Environmentalist in Klobuchar’s Home State Says She’s “Owned by Big Agriculture”
(Candidates)
*Facing Undeniable Reality of Climate Change, Deniers Now Argue It’s Not That Bad
(Environment)
*OKLAHOMA TO FINALLY TEACH HISTORY OF 1921 TULSA RACE MASSACRE AS PART OF SCHOOL CURRICULUM(Education)
(for previous day's articles see "what's inside" below)
comment/tweet of the day
lex: if you ever wondered why the dnc is so anti sanders and warren read the following:
1. Failing Upward: Corporate Lobbyists Run the Democratic Party
The line between donors and party officials is increasingly blurry
2. Corporate Lobbyists Make Gains With Democrats and Republicans
The Clinton campaign appointed two former lobbyists to the DNC Unity Commission, Charlie Baker of the Dewey Square Group and Jeff Berman, a former lobbyist for the Keystone XL pipeline and the...
3. Democratic Party Set Up One-on-One Meetings for Lobbyists ...
The entities on the Finance Council that sent lobbyists to the August event combined to give nearly $2.5 million to the DLCC in the first half of 2019, according to tax records consulted by Sludge. The DLCC is a Democratic Party organization that works to elect state-level Democrats.
4. DNC Defends Appointment Of Corporate Democrats To 2020 ...
5. Dems seek lobbyist cash to fund Milwaukee convention ...
Dems seek lobbyist cash to fund Milwaukee convention. Party representatives are meeting with lobbyists about funding the $70 million event as candidates swear off corporate-connected dollars.
so while you are listening to all the anti sanders & warren bullshit on msnbc and elsewhere, consider who is controlling the dnc and owns corporate media.
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lex: trump, according to realclear politics, is rising in popularity. how stupid are the american voters?
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lex: how does the mayor of a city with a large black population support a racist? a sellout: Washington DC mayor No Democrat is perfect, so consider Bloomberg
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🐱NancyNoCo 🌊
@NancyNoCo24
Trump Has Sabotaged America's Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic
The WH reduced $15B in national health spending & cut the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the $30M Complex Crises Fund was eliminated. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-response/
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White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney caught on tape saying US is ‘desperate’
February 23, 2020
By Cody Fenwick, AlterNet - raw story
White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was caught on tape admitting that, despite President Donald Trump’s policy preferences, the United States is “desperate” for more immigrants, according to a recording obtained by the Washington Post.
He further undermined the administration’s claims of its economic prowess, admitting that immigration is necessary for sustained economic growth.
“We are desperate — desperate — for more people,” Mulvaney said, according to the post, stressing that it should be legal. “We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we’ve had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants.”
These claims are not really contentious from an economic perspective, but they run counter to dominant narratives in the Trump administration. The president himself has repeatedly talked about immigration as a substantial burden on the country, rather than a benefit, and his administration has acted accordingly to reduce the number of immigrants coming in. Trump and his defenders have also cheered his economic stewardship of the country — on highly dubious grounds — and even predicted 5 or 6 percent growth, which hasn’t come to pass and was never even in the realm of possibility. They’ve argued that the GOP tax cuts and Trump’s deregulatory agenda have reinvigorated American economic growth, but the reality is far less impressive than the rhetoric.
While some critics of immigration insist that Trump and his allies are only opposed to illegal immigration, the policy choices tell a different story. Trump has, for instance, dramatically slashed the number of refugees the United States accepts, a form of legal immigration, and tried to restrict access to legal asylum-seeking processes.
Forbes writer Stuart Anderson argued that the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule, which seeks to limit immigration from people who might need government services, could have a massive negative economic effect.
“Admitting fewer immigrants generally means less economic growth, since labor force growth is an important element of economic growth,” he wrote. “It is economic growth that improves the standard of living in a nation.
Using the public charge rule to reduce legal immigration means lower long-term economic growth may be Donald Trump’s most lasting legacy.”
And the data indicates that Trump’s policies are having the expected negative effect on immigration rates. In a separate piece, Anderson found that between 2016 and 2018, legal immigration to the United States fell by 7 percent.
Before Trump’s election in 2016, it was clear Mulvaney was not on board with the Republican nominee’s agenda and disliked him personally.
“Yes, I am supporting Donald Trump, but I’m doing so despite the fact that I think he’s a terrible human being,” Mulvaney said.
In 2015, he was critical of Trump’s remarks about immigration specifically.
“The fence doesn’t solve the problem,” Mulvaney said, as CNN reported. “Is it necessary to have one, sure? Would it help? Sure. But to just say build the darn fence and have that be the end of an immigration discussion is absurd and almost childish for someone running for president to take that simplistic of [a] view.”
He further undermined the administration’s claims of its economic prowess, admitting that immigration is necessary for sustained economic growth.
“We are desperate — desperate — for more people,” Mulvaney said, according to the post, stressing that it should be legal. “We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we’ve had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants.”
These claims are not really contentious from an economic perspective, but they run counter to dominant narratives in the Trump administration. The president himself has repeatedly talked about immigration as a substantial burden on the country, rather than a benefit, and his administration has acted accordingly to reduce the number of immigrants coming in. Trump and his defenders have also cheered his economic stewardship of the country — on highly dubious grounds — and even predicted 5 or 6 percent growth, which hasn’t come to pass and was never even in the realm of possibility. They’ve argued that the GOP tax cuts and Trump’s deregulatory agenda have reinvigorated American economic growth, but the reality is far less impressive than the rhetoric.
While some critics of immigration insist that Trump and his allies are only opposed to illegal immigration, the policy choices tell a different story. Trump has, for instance, dramatically slashed the number of refugees the United States accepts, a form of legal immigration, and tried to restrict access to legal asylum-seeking processes.
Forbes writer Stuart Anderson argued that the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule, which seeks to limit immigration from people who might need government services, could have a massive negative economic effect.
“Admitting fewer immigrants generally means less economic growth, since labor force growth is an important element of economic growth,” he wrote. “It is economic growth that improves the standard of living in a nation.
Using the public charge rule to reduce legal immigration means lower long-term economic growth may be Donald Trump’s most lasting legacy.”
And the data indicates that Trump’s policies are having the expected negative effect on immigration rates. In a separate piece, Anderson found that between 2016 and 2018, legal immigration to the United States fell by 7 percent.
Before Trump’s election in 2016, it was clear Mulvaney was not on board with the Republican nominee’s agenda and disliked him personally.
“Yes, I am supporting Donald Trump, but I’m doing so despite the fact that I think he’s a terrible human being,” Mulvaney said.
In 2015, he was critical of Trump’s remarks about immigration specifically.
“The fence doesn’t solve the problem,” Mulvaney said, as CNN reported. “Is it necessary to have one, sure? Would it help? Sure. But to just say build the darn fence and have that be the end of an immigration discussion is absurd and almost childish for someone running for president to take that simplistic of [a] view.”
Multiple studies show Medicare for All would be cheaper than public option pushed by moderates
Yale and Harvard researchers: Medicare for All reduces costs, while public option makes health care more expensive
IGOR DERYSH - salon
FEBRUARY 22, 2020 11:00AM (UTC)
Two new studies found that the Medicare for All plan proposed by candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., would cost less than the public option proposed by former Vice President Joe Biden and other moderates in the Democratic primary.
Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg have repeatedly argued that the Medicare for All proposal would be too expensive. They have instead proposed a public option or "Medicare for all who want it," which they argue would be more fiscally sound.
"Sanders' 'Medicare for All' plan "would cost more than the entire federal budget that we spend now," Biden claimed during a debate earlier this month, which PolitiFact rated as false.
Biden has repeatedly demanded to know how Sanders plans to pay for the proposal. Sanders has repeatedly said it would be paid for by tax increases that would cost far less than the premiums, deductibles, copayments and other costs that Americans already pay. The United States spends more than $10,000 per year for every man, woman and child's health care, far more than any other nation.
Biden is right that Sanders' plan would add trillions to the federal budget. A widely-shared study funded by a think tank backed by the Koch brothers estimated that the plan would cost $32 trillion over the next decade. But the Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the country would spend more than $34 trillion under the current profit-driven system.
Two new studies further showed that the Medicare for All plan is not only cheaper than the status quo but also costs less than the public option moderates have claimed is more fiscally sound.
A study published in The Lancet this month by researchers at Yale University, the University of Florida and the University of Maryland estimated that Medicare for All would save $450 billion per year — about $2,400 in annual savings per year per family — and would prevent more than 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year.
"Our study is actually conservative because it doesn't factor in the lives saved among underinsured Americans—which includes anyone who nominally has insurance but has postponed or foregone care because they couldn't afford the copays and deductibles," Yale researcher Alison Galvani told Newsweek.
Medicare for All would allow the government to negotiate prices for care, as most Western nations with single-payer systems already do, and reduce overhead costs.
Biden and Buttigieg's proposals would actually increase costs, Galvani said.
"Without the savings to overhead, pharmaceutical costs, hospital/clinical fees, and fraud detection, 'Medicare for all who want it' could annually cost $175 billion dollars more than status quo," Galvani told Newsweek. "That's over $600 billion more than Medicare for all."
Another study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine by researchers at Harvard University, Hunter College and the University of Ottawa similarly estimated that switching to a single-payer system like Medicare for All could save up to $600 billion per year on administrative costs alone.
The study found that the average American pays $2,597 per year on administrative costs — overhead for insurers and hospitals, salaries, huge executive compensation packages and growing profits — while Canadians pay $551 per year.
Though Canada had costs similar to the United States and worse health outcomes before it adopted its single-payer system in 1962, Canada now has better health outcomes than the United States and only spends 17% of its health care spending on administrative costs, compared to 34% in the U.S.
"Americans spend twice as much per person as Canadians on health care. But instead of buying better care, that extra spending buys us sky-high profits and useless paperwork," lead author Dr. David Himmelstein, who teaches at Harvard and Hunter College, said in a statement. "Before their single-payer reform, Canadians died younger than Americans, and their infant mortality rate was higher than ours. Now Canadians live three years longer and their infant mortality rate is 22% lower than ours. Under Medicare for All, Americans could cut out the red tape and afford a Rolls Royce version of Canada's system."
Himmelstein told Time that the savings in administrative costs alone would be enough to eliminate "all copayments and deductibles" and still "have money left over."
But while Medicare for All would reduce these costs by eliminating private profit-seeking insurers, the public option alternative would add costs while leaving the bloated administrative costs in place.
"Medicare for All could save more than $600 billion each year on bureaucracy, and repurpose that money to cover America's 30 million uninsured and eliminate copayments and deductibles for everyone," said researcher Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, who also teaches at Harvard and Hunter. "Reforms like a public option that leave private insurers in place can't deliver big administrative savings. As a result, public option reform would cost much more and cover much less than Medicare for All."
Other studies have led to similar conclusions. A review of 22 single-payer studies published in PLOS Medicine found that 19 of them "predicted net savings ... in the first year of program operation and 20 ... predicted savings over several years; anticipated growth rates would result in long-term net savings for all plans."
Studies have also widely disputed other claims made by opponents of Medicare for All.
While critics have claimed that the proposal would lead to "rationing" of health care, a recent Federal Reserve survey found that roughly a quarter of "adults skipped necessary medical care in 2018 because they were unable to afford the cost." Millions of Americans have been forced to ration their insulin or avoid calling an ambulance in emergencies due to sky-high costs, including those who have insurance.
Critics also argue that wait times for care are longer in countries with single-payer systems, but a 2017 survey found that wait times have already increased in the United States by 30% since 2014 under the current system.
Critics have claimed that Medicare for All would lead to people abusing the free health care system. But a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in November showed that use did not generally increase in countries that moved to single-payer systems.
All these studies make various assumptions about costs and figures associated with what a single-payer system would look like in America.
"Experts answer those questions differently, which is reflected in their final cost estimates. And though we can't predict the future, we do have plenty of data on what's happening in the American health-care system right now," wrote Washington Post data journalist Christopher Ingraham. "Relative to people in other wealthy nations, Americans are less likely to be in good health and more likely to die of preventable causes.
Our babies and mothers are more likely to die after child birth, and our lives are shorter overall."
But a public option is not the solution, Drs. Himmelstein and Woolhandler wrote in an op-ed at The Nation.
"The case for a public option rests on faulty economic logic and naive assumptions about how private insurance actually works," they wrote. "Tens of millions would remain uninsured or with coverage so skimpy, they still couldn't afford care. ... Moreover, a public option would save little or nothing on hospitals' and doctors' sky-high billing and administrative costs."
"Because a public option would leave the current dysfunctional payment approach in place, it would sacrifice most of the savings available via single-payer reform," they added. "The bottom line is that a public option would either cost much more or deliver much less than single-payer."
Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg have repeatedly argued that the Medicare for All proposal would be too expensive. They have instead proposed a public option or "Medicare for all who want it," which they argue would be more fiscally sound.
"Sanders' 'Medicare for All' plan "would cost more than the entire federal budget that we spend now," Biden claimed during a debate earlier this month, which PolitiFact rated as false.
Biden has repeatedly demanded to know how Sanders plans to pay for the proposal. Sanders has repeatedly said it would be paid for by tax increases that would cost far less than the premiums, deductibles, copayments and other costs that Americans already pay. The United States spends more than $10,000 per year for every man, woman and child's health care, far more than any other nation.
Biden is right that Sanders' plan would add trillions to the federal budget. A widely-shared study funded by a think tank backed by the Koch brothers estimated that the plan would cost $32 trillion over the next decade. But the Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the country would spend more than $34 trillion under the current profit-driven system.
Two new studies further showed that the Medicare for All plan is not only cheaper than the status quo but also costs less than the public option moderates have claimed is more fiscally sound.
A study published in The Lancet this month by researchers at Yale University, the University of Florida and the University of Maryland estimated that Medicare for All would save $450 billion per year — about $2,400 in annual savings per year per family — and would prevent more than 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year.
"Our study is actually conservative because it doesn't factor in the lives saved among underinsured Americans—which includes anyone who nominally has insurance but has postponed or foregone care because they couldn't afford the copays and deductibles," Yale researcher Alison Galvani told Newsweek.
Medicare for All would allow the government to negotiate prices for care, as most Western nations with single-payer systems already do, and reduce overhead costs.
Biden and Buttigieg's proposals would actually increase costs, Galvani said.
"Without the savings to overhead, pharmaceutical costs, hospital/clinical fees, and fraud detection, 'Medicare for all who want it' could annually cost $175 billion dollars more than status quo," Galvani told Newsweek. "That's over $600 billion more than Medicare for all."
Another study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine by researchers at Harvard University, Hunter College and the University of Ottawa similarly estimated that switching to a single-payer system like Medicare for All could save up to $600 billion per year on administrative costs alone.
The study found that the average American pays $2,597 per year on administrative costs — overhead for insurers and hospitals, salaries, huge executive compensation packages and growing profits — while Canadians pay $551 per year.
Though Canada had costs similar to the United States and worse health outcomes before it adopted its single-payer system in 1962, Canada now has better health outcomes than the United States and only spends 17% of its health care spending on administrative costs, compared to 34% in the U.S.
"Americans spend twice as much per person as Canadians on health care. But instead of buying better care, that extra spending buys us sky-high profits and useless paperwork," lead author Dr. David Himmelstein, who teaches at Harvard and Hunter College, said in a statement. "Before their single-payer reform, Canadians died younger than Americans, and their infant mortality rate was higher than ours. Now Canadians live three years longer and their infant mortality rate is 22% lower than ours. Under Medicare for All, Americans could cut out the red tape and afford a Rolls Royce version of Canada's system."
Himmelstein told Time that the savings in administrative costs alone would be enough to eliminate "all copayments and deductibles" and still "have money left over."
But while Medicare for All would reduce these costs by eliminating private profit-seeking insurers, the public option alternative would add costs while leaving the bloated administrative costs in place.
"Medicare for All could save more than $600 billion each year on bureaucracy, and repurpose that money to cover America's 30 million uninsured and eliminate copayments and deductibles for everyone," said researcher Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, who also teaches at Harvard and Hunter. "Reforms like a public option that leave private insurers in place can't deliver big administrative savings. As a result, public option reform would cost much more and cover much less than Medicare for All."
Other studies have led to similar conclusions. A review of 22 single-payer studies published in PLOS Medicine found that 19 of them "predicted net savings ... in the first year of program operation and 20 ... predicted savings over several years; anticipated growth rates would result in long-term net savings for all plans."
Studies have also widely disputed other claims made by opponents of Medicare for All.
While critics have claimed that the proposal would lead to "rationing" of health care, a recent Federal Reserve survey found that roughly a quarter of "adults skipped necessary medical care in 2018 because they were unable to afford the cost." Millions of Americans have been forced to ration their insulin or avoid calling an ambulance in emergencies due to sky-high costs, including those who have insurance.
Critics also argue that wait times for care are longer in countries with single-payer systems, but a 2017 survey found that wait times have already increased in the United States by 30% since 2014 under the current system.
Critics have claimed that Medicare for All would lead to people abusing the free health care system. But a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in November showed that use did not generally increase in countries that moved to single-payer systems.
All these studies make various assumptions about costs and figures associated with what a single-payer system would look like in America.
"Experts answer those questions differently, which is reflected in their final cost estimates. And though we can't predict the future, we do have plenty of data on what's happening in the American health-care system right now," wrote Washington Post data journalist Christopher Ingraham. "Relative to people in other wealthy nations, Americans are less likely to be in good health and more likely to die of preventable causes.
Our babies and mothers are more likely to die after child birth, and our lives are shorter overall."
But a public option is not the solution, Drs. Himmelstein and Woolhandler wrote in an op-ed at The Nation.
"The case for a public option rests on faulty economic logic and naive assumptions about how private insurance actually works," they wrote. "Tens of millions would remain uninsured or with coverage so skimpy, they still couldn't afford care. ... Moreover, a public option would save little or nothing on hospitals' and doctors' sky-high billing and administrative costs."
"Because a public option would leave the current dysfunctional payment approach in place, it would sacrifice most of the savings available via single-payer reform," they added. "The bottom line is that a public option would either cost much more or deliver much less than single-payer."
the truth hurts!!!
High school history lesson compares Trump with Nazis, communists
By - Associated Press - the washington times
Sunday, February 23, 2020
TOWSON, Md. — Republican lawmakers in Maryland are criticizing a history lesson at a public high school near Baltimore that compared President Donald Trump with Nazis and communists.
A slide used in an Advanced Placement history class at Loch Raven High School in Towson shows a picture of Trump above pictures of a Nazi swastika and a flag of the Soviet Union. Two captions read “wants to round up a group of people and build a giant wall” and “oh, THAT is why it sounds so familiar!”
The Baltimore Sun reports that state Del. Kathy Szeliga arranged for copies of the slide and the school system’s response to be sent to her fellow Baltimore County lawmaker. She also posted the image on Facebook.
“It is horrific. It is educational malfeasance,” Szeliga said Friday at a meeting of the county’s delegation.
Baltimore County Councilman Wade Kach called it “a piece of propaganda” that didn’t belong in a classroom.
The school system said the slide was not part of the resources it provides for AP history teachers.
Charles Herndon, a spokesman for Baltimore County schools, said students in advanced high school classes are “discerning, intelligent students who are going to be able to draw their own inferences and draw their own conclusions.”
“The topics being discussed in the class included World Wars and the attempts by some leaders throughout history to limit or prevent migration into certain countries. In isolation and out of context with the lesson, the image could be misunderstood,” the school district said in a statement.
The school system said the issue had become a personnel matter “which will be appropriately addressed by the school administration and is not subject to further clarification.”
A slide used in an Advanced Placement history class at Loch Raven High School in Towson shows a picture of Trump above pictures of a Nazi swastika and a flag of the Soviet Union. Two captions read “wants to round up a group of people and build a giant wall” and “oh, THAT is why it sounds so familiar!”
The Baltimore Sun reports that state Del. Kathy Szeliga arranged for copies of the slide and the school system’s response to be sent to her fellow Baltimore County lawmaker. She also posted the image on Facebook.
“It is horrific. It is educational malfeasance,” Szeliga said Friday at a meeting of the county’s delegation.
Baltimore County Councilman Wade Kach called it “a piece of propaganda” that didn’t belong in a classroom.
The school system said the slide was not part of the resources it provides for AP history teachers.
Charles Herndon, a spokesman for Baltimore County schools, said students in advanced high school classes are “discerning, intelligent students who are going to be able to draw their own inferences and draw their own conclusions.”
“The topics being discussed in the class included World Wars and the attempts by some leaders throughout history to limit or prevent migration into certain countries. In isolation and out of context with the lesson, the image could be misunderstood,” the school district said in a statement.
The school system said the issue had become a personnel matter “which will be appropriately addressed by the school administration and is not subject to further clarification.”
NEGOTIATING with a fool!!!
‘America First’ vs ‘Make in India’ as Modi hosts Trump
February 23, 2020
By Agence France-Presse
Trade ties between the United States and India have long been problematic but under “America First” President Donald Trump and “Make in India” Prime Minister Narendra Modi, they have worsened.
While eclipsed by his trade war with China, Trump’s tussle with India, and New Delhi’s prickly reaction, has made a major pact unlikely during the American president’s visit to the world’s fifth-largest economy from Monday.
“They’ve been hitting us very, very hard for many, many years,” Trump said of India ahead of the 36-hour trip to Ahmedabad, Agra and New Delhi accompanied by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and others.
Here, AFP looks at the main issues of contention between the two countries on trade, which hit almost $145 billion in 2018, with the US deficit of $25 billion — much to Trump’s annoyance:
India has long had a penchant for protectionism. Its import tariffs are among the world’s highest. Under Modi, facing slowing growth, accelerating inflation and a widening budget deficit, this hasn’t changed.
Under pressure from farmers and fearing yet more cheap Chinese imports, Modi in November baulked at joining the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a trade pact including Asia’s main economies and China.
In recent months, Modi’s government has hiked duties on US imports, including on $600 million worth of Californian almonds as well as apples, steel and chemicals coming into Asia’s third-largest economy.
In its recent budget, the right-wing government raised tariffs on items such as shoes, children’s tricycles and furniture, irking Washington which cancelled a visit by trade envoy Robert Lighthizer, reports said.
Plans to force foreign firms to store Indian consumers’ data locally have also irked US businesses, as have e-commerce regulations hitting firms like Amazon and Walmart.
Modi’s “Make in India” drive is aimed at getting foreign companies to manufacture in the South Asian country and so reduce imports — mirroring Trump’s “America First” mantra.
New Delhi’s actions “have made the protectionism concerns in India even greater”, a senior US official said ahead of Trump’s arrival.
However, many of India’s recent moves have been in response to actions by the Trump administration, starting with its 2018 decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium from India and other countries.
India is the world’s third-largest steelmaker, and its exports of steel products have tumbled 46 percent according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Exporters of mechanical and electrical machinery and auto parts have also suffered.
Last year, Trump added to the pain by suspending India’s privileges under the decades-old US Generalized System of Preferences programme that had allowed it to ship $6 billion in goods duty-free.
The US wants to sell more medical devices like stents to India while US dairy farmers — a key voter base for Trump ahead of his re-election push in November — want greater access for their products.
India says it is worried American cows have been fed bovine extracts — a no-no in a country where most Hindus believe the animals are sacred. Modi relies heavily on support from his farmers too.
United by mistrust of China, Trump’s visit will see deals in defence and other areas, including potentially the supply of six nuclear reactors, the fruit of a landmark atomic accord in 2008.
The visit will be big on optics, with Modi and Trump appearing at a rally at the world’s largest cricket stadium and the US president and First Lady Melania watching the sunset at the Taj Mahal.
But the main “deliverable” that both strongmen want is a big trade deal, and in its absence they might instead strike a smaller agreement, according to press reports.
This could include India lowering duties on large-engine Harley-Davidson motorcycles — long a bugbear of Trump — and farm products like alfalfa hay and pecans, according to Bloomberg News.
“We would not like to rush into a deal, as the issues involved are complicated and there are many decisions which actually could affect or impact the lives of millions of people on the ground,” cautioned an Indian government spokesman.
While eclipsed by his trade war with China, Trump’s tussle with India, and New Delhi’s prickly reaction, has made a major pact unlikely during the American president’s visit to the world’s fifth-largest economy from Monday.
“They’ve been hitting us very, very hard for many, many years,” Trump said of India ahead of the 36-hour trip to Ahmedabad, Agra and New Delhi accompanied by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and others.
Here, AFP looks at the main issues of contention between the two countries on trade, which hit almost $145 billion in 2018, with the US deficit of $25 billion — much to Trump’s annoyance:
India has long had a penchant for protectionism. Its import tariffs are among the world’s highest. Under Modi, facing slowing growth, accelerating inflation and a widening budget deficit, this hasn’t changed.
Under pressure from farmers and fearing yet more cheap Chinese imports, Modi in November baulked at joining the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a trade pact including Asia’s main economies and China.
In recent months, Modi’s government has hiked duties on US imports, including on $600 million worth of Californian almonds as well as apples, steel and chemicals coming into Asia’s third-largest economy.
In its recent budget, the right-wing government raised tariffs on items such as shoes, children’s tricycles and furniture, irking Washington which cancelled a visit by trade envoy Robert Lighthizer, reports said.
Plans to force foreign firms to store Indian consumers’ data locally have also irked US businesses, as have e-commerce regulations hitting firms like Amazon and Walmart.
Modi’s “Make in India” drive is aimed at getting foreign companies to manufacture in the South Asian country and so reduce imports — mirroring Trump’s “America First” mantra.
New Delhi’s actions “have made the protectionism concerns in India even greater”, a senior US official said ahead of Trump’s arrival.
However, many of India’s recent moves have been in response to actions by the Trump administration, starting with its 2018 decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium from India and other countries.
India is the world’s third-largest steelmaker, and its exports of steel products have tumbled 46 percent according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Exporters of mechanical and electrical machinery and auto parts have also suffered.
Last year, Trump added to the pain by suspending India’s privileges under the decades-old US Generalized System of Preferences programme that had allowed it to ship $6 billion in goods duty-free.
The US wants to sell more medical devices like stents to India while US dairy farmers — a key voter base for Trump ahead of his re-election push in November — want greater access for their products.
India says it is worried American cows have been fed bovine extracts — a no-no in a country where most Hindus believe the animals are sacred. Modi relies heavily on support from his farmers too.
United by mistrust of China, Trump’s visit will see deals in defence and other areas, including potentially the supply of six nuclear reactors, the fruit of a landmark atomic accord in 2008.
The visit will be big on optics, with Modi and Trump appearing at a rally at the world’s largest cricket stadium and the US president and First Lady Melania watching the sunset at the Taj Mahal.
But the main “deliverable” that both strongmen want is a big trade deal, and in its absence they might instead strike a smaller agreement, according to press reports.
This could include India lowering duties on large-engine Harley-Davidson motorcycles — long a bugbear of Trump — and farm products like alfalfa hay and pecans, according to Bloomberg News.
“We would not like to rush into a deal, as the issues involved are complicated and there are many decisions which actually could affect or impact the lives of millions of people on the ground,” cautioned an Indian government spokesman.
The Lie of Health Care ‘Choice’
Jim Hightower | smirking chimp
February 22, 2020 - 6:08am
Lyndon Johnson had a saying about special interests trying to get his support to pass some blatantly self-serving legislation: “They can’t make chicken salad out of chicken (bleep)!”
Yet chicken (bleep) is all that the corporate health complex has to work with as it frantically tries to defend its current system of mass malpractice. After all, as most Americans have learned the hard way, profiteering insurance giants, Big Pharma, and hospital chains grossly overcharge us while constantly trying to shortchange — or outright deny — care to millions of our families.
So, unable to win public support on their own merit, the corporatists and their hired political hacks are going all out to continue their gouging and keep control of America’s dysfunctional system. They’re now running a multimillion-dollar PR and lobbying campaign of lies to trash and kill all reforms that would deliver quality, comprehensive care to everyone, at far less cost than they can deliver.
Masquerading as a “Partnership for America’s Health Care Future,” the profiteers warn ominously that such reforms as Medicare for All or a public option for health insurance would take away people’s “choice” and our “control” over health care.
Hello: we presently have no choice or control.
Our “care” is managed by a handful of insurance, drug, and hospital monopolists whose primary objective is not improving our health, but feathering their own cushy nests. And the undeniable, ugly truth is that they can only continue ripping us off by killing real reform.
That’s one reason the American Medical Association and others are dropping out of the Partnership’s political front. Honest health care practitioners no longer believe it’s in their best interest — or the public’s — to be part of its chicken (bleep) PR campaign.
Yet chicken (bleep) is all that the corporate health complex has to work with as it frantically tries to defend its current system of mass malpractice. After all, as most Americans have learned the hard way, profiteering insurance giants, Big Pharma, and hospital chains grossly overcharge us while constantly trying to shortchange — or outright deny — care to millions of our families.
So, unable to win public support on their own merit, the corporatists and their hired political hacks are going all out to continue their gouging and keep control of America’s dysfunctional system. They’re now running a multimillion-dollar PR and lobbying campaign of lies to trash and kill all reforms that would deliver quality, comprehensive care to everyone, at far less cost than they can deliver.
Masquerading as a “Partnership for America’s Health Care Future,” the profiteers warn ominously that such reforms as Medicare for All or a public option for health insurance would take away people’s “choice” and our “control” over health care.
Hello: we presently have no choice or control.
Our “care” is managed by a handful of insurance, drug, and hospital monopolists whose primary objective is not improving our health, but feathering their own cushy nests. And the undeniable, ugly truth is that they can only continue ripping us off by killing real reform.
That’s one reason the American Medical Association and others are dropping out of the Partnership’s political front. Honest health care practitioners no longer believe it’s in their best interest — or the public’s — to be part of its chicken (bleep) PR campaign.
The ‘nurtured insanity’ of a fundamentalist upbringing
Frank Schaeffer / Religion Dispatches - alternet
February 22, 2020
There is a great exodus taking place in Christian circles. Can it be called a loss of faith? I don’t think so. It is rather a loss of confidence in everything at once. Christianity has always been about “the Word,” but these days, words don’t seem to matter. They’ve lost their power to describe and convince in the face of horrible deeds, from climate-change denial to the persecution of trans people to the wholesale abandonment of Christ’s teachings in favor of abusive meanness. The hard-right white evangelical voter gave us Trump. The church sat silent as industrial oligarchs ruined the earth.
Christianity is improbable. When its cultural presence fades, be that through the Roman Catholic sex-abuse meltdown or because of the Trumping of white evangelicalism, all that’s left is disillusionment. Presuppositional theology—the sort of “apologetics” my late father Francis Schaeffer dealt in—only works if you accept the possibility that some of “this” (i.e., the entire claim of “historical” Christianity) might be true. Fewer and fewer people do these days, outside of the initiated and indoctrinated. The grim “witness” of how Christians have behaved and voted is too heavy a blow for faith in magical thinking to survive.
The Empty the Pews anthology marks a historic moment as a group of younger writers and scholars have come together to record what is happening (and has happened) to their inner lives of faith. What ties these essays together is one idea: history needs record keepers. Bluntly: as the aging, Fox News-loving “alternative facts” crowd dies out, what’s left? Contributors to Empty the Pews and the millions they represent are one answer.
There are some big differences between these contributors and me. They represent a generational shift. Most, though not all, are Gen Xers and Millennials to whom I’m the “old guy.” And none of them had anything like my kind of nepotistic celebrity within evangelicaldom. That said, I find solidarity herein, the solidarity of survivors.
Many people who grew up in evangelical homes will understand me when I say that remembering my own evangelical upbringing seems like an odd and bad dream. Throughout my early childhood, we Schaeffers were busy littering train seats, café tables, and assorted telephone booths all over Europe with luridly illustrated little pamphlets “in the local language, in case someone is led to read it,” as Dad said. They had titles such as “What Must I Do to Be Saved?” and “Is There a Heaven and Hell?” and “Where Will I Spend Eternity?” Sometimes, as our train roared through Italian or Swiss towns, Dad would fling handfuls of tracts from the window at astonished passersby. The lesson I learned from all this was that there was “us” (the saved) and “them” (the lost). This set in motion the us-and-them way of thinking that, transposed decades later to politics, cast Democrats as “the lost,” deserving of hell, and us Republicans as saved and favored by God—no matter how far our actions strayed from anything remotely Christlike.
How do you unscramble this level of broken-brain toxicity? To read Empty the Pews is one good answer. The writers here are exposing the Christian right as a toxic farce. Since I was for a time a leader in that netherworld, and since I’ve been a bit of a pioneer in speaking out about leaving it, I welcome this book of essays. It heralds the arrival of the next wave of questioners I helped unleash by asking some questions of myself through my novels, nonfiction books, and media appearances.
A large part of what Empty the Pews does is capture a generational exodus from toxic Christianity from the perspective of (for the most part) former believers. What is the usefulness of the essays? They are a record of dissent! They are a record of heartbreak! They are a record of hope based on lives lived, not unattainable magical fixes! They are also a therapeutic reaching out to those (like me) whose neural pathways have been damaged by what has to be called nurtured insanity.
During a different period of religious madness, in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, Anne Hutchinson was an “unauthorized” Bible teacher in a dissident church group who, in the words of the Boston monument honoring her, was a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” She was also a student of the Bible, which she interpreted by the light of what she termed her own “divine inspiration.” In other words, like the writers in Empty the Pews, she came to believe that in order to remain a sane and decent being, she had to pick and choose what she believed from her tradition. Let’s hope a better fate awaits these essayists—Hutchinson was banished from the colony for her stand.
Hutchinson seems to have concluded that religious believers should worship God, not the books about God. Another way to state her case is that God does not reveal himself, herself, or themselves through books but rather through what she called the “prophetical office” of the heart, like that which is revealed in the essays compiled for Empty the Pews.
Our hearts connect to a truth larger than ourselves: love of others in the context of community. That is the value of the anthology’s written windows into lovely souls changing before our eyes. They provide the place and time for the inner liturgies through which we may unite with these writers heart-to-heart, in order to seek out those truths that even our best words cannot describe.
Christianity is improbable. When its cultural presence fades, be that through the Roman Catholic sex-abuse meltdown or because of the Trumping of white evangelicalism, all that’s left is disillusionment. Presuppositional theology—the sort of “apologetics” my late father Francis Schaeffer dealt in—only works if you accept the possibility that some of “this” (i.e., the entire claim of “historical” Christianity) might be true. Fewer and fewer people do these days, outside of the initiated and indoctrinated. The grim “witness” of how Christians have behaved and voted is too heavy a blow for faith in magical thinking to survive.
The Empty the Pews anthology marks a historic moment as a group of younger writers and scholars have come together to record what is happening (and has happened) to their inner lives of faith. What ties these essays together is one idea: history needs record keepers. Bluntly: as the aging, Fox News-loving “alternative facts” crowd dies out, what’s left? Contributors to Empty the Pews and the millions they represent are one answer.
There are some big differences between these contributors and me. They represent a generational shift. Most, though not all, are Gen Xers and Millennials to whom I’m the “old guy.” And none of them had anything like my kind of nepotistic celebrity within evangelicaldom. That said, I find solidarity herein, the solidarity of survivors.
Many people who grew up in evangelical homes will understand me when I say that remembering my own evangelical upbringing seems like an odd and bad dream. Throughout my early childhood, we Schaeffers were busy littering train seats, café tables, and assorted telephone booths all over Europe with luridly illustrated little pamphlets “in the local language, in case someone is led to read it,” as Dad said. They had titles such as “What Must I Do to Be Saved?” and “Is There a Heaven and Hell?” and “Where Will I Spend Eternity?” Sometimes, as our train roared through Italian or Swiss towns, Dad would fling handfuls of tracts from the window at astonished passersby. The lesson I learned from all this was that there was “us” (the saved) and “them” (the lost). This set in motion the us-and-them way of thinking that, transposed decades later to politics, cast Democrats as “the lost,” deserving of hell, and us Republicans as saved and favored by God—no matter how far our actions strayed from anything remotely Christlike.
How do you unscramble this level of broken-brain toxicity? To read Empty the Pews is one good answer. The writers here are exposing the Christian right as a toxic farce. Since I was for a time a leader in that netherworld, and since I’ve been a bit of a pioneer in speaking out about leaving it, I welcome this book of essays. It heralds the arrival of the next wave of questioners I helped unleash by asking some questions of myself through my novels, nonfiction books, and media appearances.
A large part of what Empty the Pews does is capture a generational exodus from toxic Christianity from the perspective of (for the most part) former believers. What is the usefulness of the essays? They are a record of dissent! They are a record of heartbreak! They are a record of hope based on lives lived, not unattainable magical fixes! They are also a therapeutic reaching out to those (like me) whose neural pathways have been damaged by what has to be called nurtured insanity.
During a different period of religious madness, in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, Anne Hutchinson was an “unauthorized” Bible teacher in a dissident church group who, in the words of the Boston monument honoring her, was a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” She was also a student of the Bible, which she interpreted by the light of what she termed her own “divine inspiration.” In other words, like the writers in Empty the Pews, she came to believe that in order to remain a sane and decent being, she had to pick and choose what she believed from her tradition. Let’s hope a better fate awaits these essayists—Hutchinson was banished from the colony for her stand.
Hutchinson seems to have concluded that religious believers should worship God, not the books about God. Another way to state her case is that God does not reveal himself, herself, or themselves through books but rather through what she called the “prophetical office” of the heart, like that which is revealed in the essays compiled for Empty the Pews.
Our hearts connect to a truth larger than ourselves: love of others in the context of community. That is the value of the anthology’s written windows into lovely souls changing before our eyes. They provide the place and time for the inner liturgies through which we may unite with these writers heart-to-heart, in order to seek out those truths that even our best words cannot describe.
Bites from Real News
*2/23/2020*
*Decoding the Christian paradox: Evangelical historian explains how right-wingers ignore Jesus to support a corrupt and greedy president
Why are white evangelical Christians so overwhelmingly supportive of Donald Trump? While some have tried to present it as a riddle with no evident solution, the answer is quite simple: Donald Trump does the bidding of the Christian right. He has advanced its policies in a war against secular society, women’s freedom, LGBTQ rights, multiracial democracy and the U.S. Constitution.
*POLICE, PROSECUTORS, AND REPUBLICANS ARE LOOKING TO UNDO A CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM IN NEW YORK
“EVEN IF WE’RE TACTICAL AND WE TIPTOE, IT’S COMING ANYWAY. THE BACKLASH IS COMING ANYWAY.”
*'America's Dairyland' Wisconsin farmers see bleak future
Collapsing prices, the rise of mega farms in warmer states and fluctuations in demand have led to a spate of bankruptcies
*trump's bitch following orders: Donald Trump National security adviser disputes intelligence claims of Russian election meddling
*Nevada caucuses Bernie Sanders wins resounding victory
Senator solidifies status as national frontrunner as trailing centrists remain divided
*The Fate of the Planet Rests on Dethroning the IMF and World Bank A Global Green New Deal could herald a new era of international cooperation to curb the climate crisis.
*RACIAL JUSTICE: State Supreme Courts See Progress on Diversity but Still Fall Short
In July 2019, the Brennan Center released State Supreme Court Diversity, a report detailing the vast racial, ethnic, and gender disparities on state high courts across the country.
*When Your Doctor Is Also a Lobbyist: Inside the War Over Surprise Medical Bills
As surprise medical billing has emerged as a hot-button issue for voters, doctors, hospitals and insurers have been lobbying to protect their own money flows. All that lobbying meant nothing got passed last year.
*rand, a hypocrite /fraud: Clinical psychologist explains how Ayn Rand helped turn the US into a selfish and greedy nation
*trump and the evangelicals
Trump and the Christians: Evangelical historian John Fea on decoding the great paradox
Historian and author of "Believe Me" on his struggle to reach the embattled evangelicals who oppose Trump
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
*TurboTax Is Still Tricking Customers With Tax Prep Ads That Misuse the Word “Free” Intuit has amped up its misleading digital advertising in the wake of a new IRS agreement that bars tax prep companies from burying the agency’s Free File program.
*How TurboTax Tricks You Into Paying To File Your Taxes
Come along as we try to file our taxes for free on TurboTax!
White Guys Get Pardons, Black Folks Get a Super Bowl Commercial
Trump has been making overtures to African-American voters on criminal justice. But it turns out that’s just on TV.
Kali Holloway - daily beast
Feb. 22, 2020 1:00PM ET
You can tell a lot about a president by how he uses his pardon powers. In the case of Donald Trump—whose presidency has been defined by cosa nostra levels of revenge, corruption, and demands of loyalty—the power of the pardon mostly lies in its use as a way to reward friends and allies, while sticking it to critics and enemies. Trump’s clemency grants Wednesday to Rod Blagojevich, Michael Milken, and the others were another exercise in ego tripping and muscle flexing, a tacit admission that greedy Wall Street cheats, political grifters, and tax evaders are his kind of people.
But like everything he does, Trump’s clemency grants are also a reflection of his racial outlook and his fundamental belief that some folks—wealthy white men whose white-collar crimes are in line with his own—are both above the law and beyond reproach.
It’s no secret that racism informs every Trumpian policy including criminal justice, but just lately, in the lead up November’s election, the administration has offered attempts at superficial denials. Just weeks ago, the Trump campaign aired a multimillion dollar Super Bowl commercial featuring Alice Johnson, a grandmother whose life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense was commuted by Trump after more than two decades served.
The money shot in that ad was its closing shot, when Johnson tearfully thanked Trump by name. At the same time, the president has attempted to recast himself as a criminal justice reformer, trumpeting his signing of the 2018 First Step Act, a bill aimed at lowering recidivism rates and reducing sentences for nonviolent drug crimes.
But these were mere gestures, or more specifically, sleights of hand meant to distract from the racism that drives Trump’s approach to all things. While Johnson’s gratitude to Trump is understandable, the commutation of her sentence was granted only because Kim Kardashian’s richness, whiteness, and celebrity hold sway with Trump. And while the president has made much of the First Step Act being passed, its passage was part of Trump (and the GOP’s) unilateral race war against Barack Obama. The bill sat on Mitch McConnell’s desk for the last two years of Obama’s term; he then decided to let it pass just to give Trump the chance to take bragging rights over his black predecessor.
But even as Trump consistently has used his criminal justice reforms as a bone tossed to potential black voters, his administration has dedicated itself to turning back the clock on criminal justice reform. When Trump promised back in 2016 to “maintain law and order at the highest level,” he was describing an America that would be made great again by even more harshly criminalizing, prosecuting, and punishing black and brown people.
For starters, the First Step Act has largely been about the illusory optics of criminal reform, given short shrift in funding as the Department of Justice works diligently to re-imprison the same people the initiative freed. Similarly, Trump’s DOJ has been fighting tooth and nail to bring back federal executions after a 16-year halt, a plan that has only been thwarted, so far at least, by a federal court.
The administration backed off its plan to ramp up background checks for applicants to federal jobs after bipartisan blowback made it a possible political liability. And in his endless quest to undo every Obama legislative success, Trump’s DOJ once again began contracting with for-profit prisons for federal inmates.
While doing all this, it’s worth noting, Trump has overseen a 62 percent decline in penalties from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and more than 70 percent fall-off in corporate penalties from DOJ criminal prosecutions.
There are also Trump’s own words on criminal justice. When this president disingenuously criticized Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg for resurfaced audio praising the use of racist “stop-and-frisk” policing, numerous outlets quickly assembled receipts—tweets, mostly—demonstrating Trump’s vocal support for the policy dating back nearly a decade.
Just days ago, Trump lauded the use of the death penalty against drug dealers, citing China as inspiration. More than three decades and five exonerations after calling for the execution of the five black and Latinx teens falsely accused of rape in the Central Park 5 case, Trump recently suggesting he still didn’t think it was such a bad idea. He has also joked that police brutality is cool, and called Chicago—a town he employs as shorthand for black criminality—”embarrassing to us as a nation.”
By “us,” he means white people, though being of the law abiding sort isn’t necessarily a requirement. Trump believes that there are white guys like him—and Roger Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone—whose only offense is the endless acquisition of greed and money by any means.
On the other hand, there are “those people,” who by dint of race or class, deserve the full wrath of the law and its most punitive remedies. If Donald Trump were in any way truly committed to addressing the inequities of the criminal justice system with his pardons—of which he’s given precious few compared to predecessors, leaving 13,000 inmates in limbo—he’d actually focus on more people serving time for drug crimes and wrongfully convicted folks.
But this president is, fundamentally, actually opposed to righting the wrongs of criminal injustice or tackling the racism that taints this system. As the self-described “chief law enforcement officer of the country,” Trump believes the job brings with it a special mandate: policing poor folks, black folks, and brown folks so that we are always reminded that there is no justice for us.
But like everything he does, Trump’s clemency grants are also a reflection of his racial outlook and his fundamental belief that some folks—wealthy white men whose white-collar crimes are in line with his own—are both above the law and beyond reproach.
It’s no secret that racism informs every Trumpian policy including criminal justice, but just lately, in the lead up November’s election, the administration has offered attempts at superficial denials. Just weeks ago, the Trump campaign aired a multimillion dollar Super Bowl commercial featuring Alice Johnson, a grandmother whose life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense was commuted by Trump after more than two decades served.
The money shot in that ad was its closing shot, when Johnson tearfully thanked Trump by name. At the same time, the president has attempted to recast himself as a criminal justice reformer, trumpeting his signing of the 2018 First Step Act, a bill aimed at lowering recidivism rates and reducing sentences for nonviolent drug crimes.
But these were mere gestures, or more specifically, sleights of hand meant to distract from the racism that drives Trump’s approach to all things. While Johnson’s gratitude to Trump is understandable, the commutation of her sentence was granted only because Kim Kardashian’s richness, whiteness, and celebrity hold sway with Trump. And while the president has made much of the First Step Act being passed, its passage was part of Trump (and the GOP’s) unilateral race war against Barack Obama. The bill sat on Mitch McConnell’s desk for the last two years of Obama’s term; he then decided to let it pass just to give Trump the chance to take bragging rights over his black predecessor.
But even as Trump consistently has used his criminal justice reforms as a bone tossed to potential black voters, his administration has dedicated itself to turning back the clock on criminal justice reform. When Trump promised back in 2016 to “maintain law and order at the highest level,” he was describing an America that would be made great again by even more harshly criminalizing, prosecuting, and punishing black and brown people.
For starters, the First Step Act has largely been about the illusory optics of criminal reform, given short shrift in funding as the Department of Justice works diligently to re-imprison the same people the initiative freed. Similarly, Trump’s DOJ has been fighting tooth and nail to bring back federal executions after a 16-year halt, a plan that has only been thwarted, so far at least, by a federal court.
The administration backed off its plan to ramp up background checks for applicants to federal jobs after bipartisan blowback made it a possible political liability. And in his endless quest to undo every Obama legislative success, Trump’s DOJ once again began contracting with for-profit prisons for federal inmates.
While doing all this, it’s worth noting, Trump has overseen a 62 percent decline in penalties from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and more than 70 percent fall-off in corporate penalties from DOJ criminal prosecutions.
There are also Trump’s own words on criminal justice. When this president disingenuously criticized Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg for resurfaced audio praising the use of racist “stop-and-frisk” policing, numerous outlets quickly assembled receipts—tweets, mostly—demonstrating Trump’s vocal support for the policy dating back nearly a decade.
Just days ago, Trump lauded the use of the death penalty against drug dealers, citing China as inspiration. More than three decades and five exonerations after calling for the execution of the five black and Latinx teens falsely accused of rape in the Central Park 5 case, Trump recently suggesting he still didn’t think it was such a bad idea. He has also joked that police brutality is cool, and called Chicago—a town he employs as shorthand for black criminality—”embarrassing to us as a nation.”
By “us,” he means white people, though being of the law abiding sort isn’t necessarily a requirement. Trump believes that there are white guys like him—and Roger Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone—whose only offense is the endless acquisition of greed and money by any means.
On the other hand, there are “those people,” who by dint of race or class, deserve the full wrath of the law and its most punitive remedies. If Donald Trump were in any way truly committed to addressing the inequities of the criminal justice system with his pardons—of which he’s given precious few compared to predecessors, leaving 13,000 inmates in limbo—he’d actually focus on more people serving time for drug crimes and wrongfully convicted folks.
But this president is, fundamentally, actually opposed to righting the wrongs of criminal injustice or tackling the racism that taints this system. As the self-described “chief law enforcement officer of the country,” Trump believes the job brings with it a special mandate: policing poor folks, black folks, and brown folks so that we are always reminded that there is no justice for us.
Noam Chomsky: "The Democrats abandoned the working class decades ago"
In an interview with Wallace Shawn, Noam Chomsky explains how elitism and atomization have created political rifts
NOAM CHOMSKY - WALLACE SHAWN - salon
FEBRUARY 22, 2020 7:00PM (UTC)
The following transcript is excerpted from their conversation, which can be read in full in the just-released book "Internationalism or Extinction," edited by Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar and Paul Shannon.
WALLACE SHAWN: Many of the people who do know about the consequences of nuclear war and climate change are quite well-educated people who are resented by a lot of people. Do you have any thoughts on how, I mean there is a class difference that Trump supporters who laugh at the idea of global warming and climate change have a built-in resentment toward people who've been well educated and who may be better off economically. How do we reach them?
NOAM CHOMSKY: That's serious. That is a very interesting phenomenon; it has to be dealt with sensitively and with understanding. As I mentioned, 40% of the population say it can't be a problem because of the Second Coming. Now that's a deep cultural problem in the United States. People who know something about US history should all... we should all understand it.
It's very important to realize that this country was a cultural backwater until World War II. [Until then,] if you wanted to study physics, you went to Germany. You wanted to become a writer, an artist, you went to Paris. There were exceptions of course but it was overwhelmingly true, and it was true even though the United States was far and away the richest, most powerful country in the world and had been for a long time. [There are] all kinds of historical reasons for that: it's a very insular country. There aren't many countries where you can travel 3,000 miles and be in about the same place where you left, not running into any different culture or language or anything like that. Protected by oceans, we keep away from those bad guys, enormous internal resources which nobody else had. There were a lot of waves of immigrants that became integrated and so on, so there are a lot of reasons for it, but it's there and you can't ignore it. You can't ignore it, and there is no point railing about atheism. These are issues that have to be understood, and it has to be understood that the churches really mean something to people, plenty of people, including the Trump supporters.
These are people who have just been cast aside, nobody does anything for them. The Democrats abandoned the working class decades ago. Republicans may take a populist line, but they are much more opposed to working people than even the Democrats in policies. Working-class males are — we are supposed to call them "middle class" in the United States, the phrase "working class" is a four-letter word here — but working-class males who are supporting Trump are actually supporting policies which are going to devastate them. Just take a look at the economic policies, the fiscal policies and others. But it's true that they are cast aside, and their values are being attacked. Their values are in many ways culturally traditional and pre-modern in the Western sense, but they are being attacked. One of the few refuges they have is the church. They are the church in a traditional community so you can't just laugh at it, it's serious. It has to be dealt with.
There is a very interesting book that just came out by Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist, who went to a pretty terribly impoverished area in Louisiana and lived there for six years and studied the people sympathetically. This is deep Trump country, and her results are quite interesting. For example, these are people who are being devastated by chemical and other pollution from the petrochemical industry, but they are strongly opposed to the Environmental Protection Agency. When she asks why, they have reasons. They say, "Look, what is the Environmental Protection Agency? It's some guy from the city with a Ph.D. who comes out here and tells me I can't fish but he doesn't go after the petrochemical industries. So, who wants them? I don't want them taking away my job and telling me what I can do and speaking to me with the cultivated accents meanwhile I'm under attack by all this stuff."
These attitudes are serious. They are significant. They deserve respect and not ridicule, and I think they can be addressed. For example, I think that say in the 1930s, I'm old enough to remember, in many ways, it was kind of like now; poverty was much greater. The depression was much worse than the current recession. In fact, it was a much poorer country than it is now.
I was very hopeful. My own family, many of them were unemployed working class; most workers were unemployed, but they were hopeful.
They had a sense that things are going to get better. There were labor actions, the CIO's organizing, there were left political parties, the unions were providing real services: a couple of weeks in the country, educational groups, workers education, ways for people to get together – somehow we'll get out of all this. That's lacking. It has become a very atomized society. People are alone in it: used to be their TV sets, now it's their cell phones or iPhones or whatever. They're very atomized, isolated, makes them feel very vulnerable.
These are the kind of things that can be overcome by organization and activism. My own feeling [is] that the Trump supporters and the Sanders supporters could have been a unified bloc. Proper approaches to the problem take effort, sensitivity, and understanding of the kind for example that Hochschild showed with her sympathetic account of where these people are coming from and why. It's easy, say in the New Yorker, to have a cartoon about Trump and how ridiculous it is, but that's missing the point. Maybe it looks ridiculous, but he is reaching people for reasons and we should be interested in the reasons.
Actually, it's the same story, to turn to something else, with young Muslims in the West who are joining the jihad movements. It's not enough to scream at them; there are reasons. If you look at the circumstances in their lives, you can see the reasons and they can be addressed.[...]
WALLACE SHAWN: Many of the people who do know about the consequences of nuclear war and climate change are quite well-educated people who are resented by a lot of people. Do you have any thoughts on how, I mean there is a class difference that Trump supporters who laugh at the idea of global warming and climate change have a built-in resentment toward people who've been well educated and who may be better off economically. How do we reach them?
NOAM CHOMSKY: That's serious. That is a very interesting phenomenon; it has to be dealt with sensitively and with understanding. As I mentioned, 40% of the population say it can't be a problem because of the Second Coming. Now that's a deep cultural problem in the United States. People who know something about US history should all... we should all understand it.
It's very important to realize that this country was a cultural backwater until World War II. [Until then,] if you wanted to study physics, you went to Germany. You wanted to become a writer, an artist, you went to Paris. There were exceptions of course but it was overwhelmingly true, and it was true even though the United States was far and away the richest, most powerful country in the world and had been for a long time. [There are] all kinds of historical reasons for that: it's a very insular country. There aren't many countries where you can travel 3,000 miles and be in about the same place where you left, not running into any different culture or language or anything like that. Protected by oceans, we keep away from those bad guys, enormous internal resources which nobody else had. There were a lot of waves of immigrants that became integrated and so on, so there are a lot of reasons for it, but it's there and you can't ignore it. You can't ignore it, and there is no point railing about atheism. These are issues that have to be understood, and it has to be understood that the churches really mean something to people, plenty of people, including the Trump supporters.
These are people who have just been cast aside, nobody does anything for them. The Democrats abandoned the working class decades ago. Republicans may take a populist line, but they are much more opposed to working people than even the Democrats in policies. Working-class males are — we are supposed to call them "middle class" in the United States, the phrase "working class" is a four-letter word here — but working-class males who are supporting Trump are actually supporting policies which are going to devastate them. Just take a look at the economic policies, the fiscal policies and others. But it's true that they are cast aside, and their values are being attacked. Their values are in many ways culturally traditional and pre-modern in the Western sense, but they are being attacked. One of the few refuges they have is the church. They are the church in a traditional community so you can't just laugh at it, it's serious. It has to be dealt with.
There is a very interesting book that just came out by Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist, who went to a pretty terribly impoverished area in Louisiana and lived there for six years and studied the people sympathetically. This is deep Trump country, and her results are quite interesting. For example, these are people who are being devastated by chemical and other pollution from the petrochemical industry, but they are strongly opposed to the Environmental Protection Agency. When she asks why, they have reasons. They say, "Look, what is the Environmental Protection Agency? It's some guy from the city with a Ph.D. who comes out here and tells me I can't fish but he doesn't go after the petrochemical industries. So, who wants them? I don't want them taking away my job and telling me what I can do and speaking to me with the cultivated accents meanwhile I'm under attack by all this stuff."
These attitudes are serious. They are significant. They deserve respect and not ridicule, and I think they can be addressed. For example, I think that say in the 1930s, I'm old enough to remember, in many ways, it was kind of like now; poverty was much greater. The depression was much worse than the current recession. In fact, it was a much poorer country than it is now.
I was very hopeful. My own family, many of them were unemployed working class; most workers were unemployed, but they were hopeful.
They had a sense that things are going to get better. There were labor actions, the CIO's organizing, there were left political parties, the unions were providing real services: a couple of weeks in the country, educational groups, workers education, ways for people to get together – somehow we'll get out of all this. That's lacking. It has become a very atomized society. People are alone in it: used to be their TV sets, now it's their cell phones or iPhones or whatever. They're very atomized, isolated, makes them feel very vulnerable.
These are the kind of things that can be overcome by organization and activism. My own feeling [is] that the Trump supporters and the Sanders supporters could have been a unified bloc. Proper approaches to the problem take effort, sensitivity, and understanding of the kind for example that Hochschild showed with her sympathetic account of where these people are coming from and why. It's easy, say in the New Yorker, to have a cartoon about Trump and how ridiculous it is, but that's missing the point. Maybe it looks ridiculous, but he is reaching people for reasons and we should be interested in the reasons.
Actually, it's the same story, to turn to something else, with young Muslims in the West who are joining the jihad movements. It's not enough to scream at them; there are reasons. If you look at the circumstances in their lives, you can see the reasons and they can be addressed.[...]
House Intel Chairman Adam Schiff Fires Back at Trump Over ‘False’ Leak Accusation
Barbie Latza Nadeau - Correspondent-At-Large
Published Feb. 23, 2020 12:08PM ET
DAILY BEAST CHEAT SHEET
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff fired back at President Trump on Sunday after the president denied ever being briefed on information that Russia has been trying to interfere in the upcoming 2020 elections to help Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). “Nobody said it to me at all,” the president said Sunday. “Nobody briefed me about it at all.” Trump then insisted, “They ought to investigate Adam Schiff for leaking that intelligence.” Schiff didn’t mince words, telling the president in a tweet that his “false claims” fooled no one. “Nice deflection, Mr. President,” Schiff said. “You welcomed Russian help in 2016, tried to coerce Ukraine’s help in 2019, and won’t protect our elections in 2020. Now you fired your intel chief for briefing Congress about it.”
Italy Cancels Venice Carnival Celebration Over Coronavirus Outbreak
Barbie Latza Nadeau - Correspondent-At-Large
Updated Feb. 23, 2020 11:46AM ET
daily beast cheat sheet
The head of Italy’s Veneto region has decided to cancel the last two days of its famed Venice Carnival celebrations due to a growing coronavirus outbreak in northern Italy. So far, at least 132 cases have been confirmed and three people have died from the virus. Luca Zaia, the regional governor, said the celebrations already in progress Sunday will carry on as scheduled, but all events will be canceled for Monday and Tuesday, the culmination of the normally festive event. “As of this evening there will be a ban on the Venice Carnival as well as on all events, sporting as well, until March 1 inclusive,” he said.
Taliban Peace Deal Will Be Signed This Month, Says Pompeo
Jamie Ross - Reporter
Updated Feb. 21, 2020 7:17AM ET
DAILY BEAST CHEAT SHEET
The United States and the Taliban have brokered a peace agreement in a major step toward ending the war in Afghanistan, which began in the immediate wake of the September 11 terror attacks nearly 19 years ago. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced early Friday: “After decades of conflict, we have come to an understanding with the Taliban on a significant reduction in violence across Afghanistan. This is an important step on a long road to peace, and I call on all Afghans to seize this opportunity.” A statement released by the State Department said, on the understanding that there’s a successful reduction in violence over the next week, a U.S.-Taliban peace agreement will be formally signed on Feb. 29. The statement described the forthcoming agreement as a “fundamental step to deliver a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire.”
*What's Inside*
feb 20 - feb 22
✔TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PROPOSES ANOTHER SOCIAL SECURITY RULE THAT VIOLATES THE LAW, HURTS THE DISABLED(PAYBACK)
*NEW VIDEO SHOWS BLOOMBERG’S STANCE ON HEALTH CARE: WE HAVE TO DENY THE ELDERLY CARE OR GO ‘BANKRUPT’(CANDIDATES)
*A RACIST JUDGE, AN ALLEGED AFFAIR AND N-WORD LACED TEXT MESSAGES PUT 8 YEARS OF CASES UNDER REVIEW(AMERIKKKANS)
*THE ‘PRO-LIFE SWING VOTER’ SOME MODERATE DEMOCRATS CHASE IS A MYTH
(DEMO POLITICS)
*KRIS KOBACH: ‘BEING AMERICAN MEANS BEING ASSIMILATED’
(RIGHT WING)
*NEW YORK’S SALON WORKERS ARE FIGHTING FOR BETTER CONDITIONS—AND WINNING
(SLAVERY 21ST CENTURY)
*BLOOMBERG’S WAGE THEFT PROBLEM
(CORPORATE CRIMINALS)
*‘DIESELGATE’ RECALL OF MORE MERCEDES VEHICLES ‘LIKELY’
(CORPORATE CRIMINALS)
*‘A TRAVESTY AND A DISGRACE’: TRUMP QUIETLY ISSUES MEMO THAT COULD ABOLISH UNION RIGHTS FOR 750,000 FEDERAL WORKERS(PAYBACK)
✔CALIFORNIA COPS ARE COLLECTING INFO ON MILLIONS OF DRIVERS WHO HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG(GESTAPO USA)
*MACHINE LEARNING USED TO DISCOVER POWERFUL NEW ANTIBIOTIC THAT CAN KILL SOME OF WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS BACTERIA(CURRENTS)
*LEWD TWEETS, THE N-WORD AND JUST PLAIN WEIRDNESS: A WILD-CARD CANDIDATE RATTLES TEXAS EDUCATION BOARD RACES(AMERIKKKANS)
*FOX DISTORTS OBJECTIONS TO BARR OVER ROGER STONE SENTENCING
WORTHLESS MEDIA)
*REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE OBSCURED HOW MUCH IT PAYS ITS CHIEF OF STAFF
(CORRUPTION)
*HEY "FLAG" OFFICERS KELLY, MATTIS AND NOW MCGUIRE...
(COMMENTARY)
✔NO TOLERANCE’: UNION URGES DCCC TO CUT OFF SUPPORT TO DEMS WHO VOTED AGAINST PRO-LABOR BILL(SELLOUTS)
*TRUMP HAS NOW SHIFTED $1.9 MILLION FROM CAMPAIGN DONORS TO HIS BUSINESS
(TRUMP)
*THE SLAVE TRADE USED TO BE LEGAL. LET’S NOT GLORIFY THE LAW.
(COMMENTARY)
*THE US GRANTED FREE TUITION BEFORE, AND IT CAN DO IT AGAIN
(EDUCATION)
*NEW TRUMP DISABILITY RULE TARGETS NON-ENGLISH SPEAKERS
(COLONIES)
*AM I PLANKTON? WHY OLDER WOMEN FEEL THEY'RE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE FOOD CHAIN
(REAL PEOPLE)
*DEAR NEVER TRUMPERS. I REALLY APPRECIATE THAT YOU HATE TRUMP AS MUCH AS US. HOWEVER...(GOP POLITICS)
*late news of interest*
justice in america!!!
Texas woman sentenced to eight years for illegal voting paroled, faces deportation
Gus Garcia-Roberts, USA TODAY
February 22, 2020
In 2017, Rosa Maria Ortega's eight-year prison sentence for illegal voting in Texas made her an unwitting poster child of an alleged voter fraud epidemic that dominated headlines and a newly-elected president's tweets-- despite no evidence that it existed.
Last December, with the country's attention elsewhere, Ortega was granted parole after serving a little more than nine months. She now faces a more permanent punishment: The 40-year-old mother of four teenagers, who first came to the USA as a baby and lived here legally with a green card, is the target of deportation proceedings to her native country of Mexico.
After being paroled, Ortega spent nearly two more months in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). She was freed on bond by an immigration judge last month. The U.S. Department of Justice office that handles immigration proceedings did not respond to a request Thursday for information on her case, including when she is due to appear in court.
Efforts to reach Ortega and members of her family were unsuccessful, and her former lawyers said they have also lost contact with her.
Professor Jean Reisz of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law said a person in Ortega's position may remain in the USA for months or even years because of a court backlog but ultimately has steep odds at avoiding deportation. Federal law states: "Any alien who has voted in violation of any Federal, State, or local constitutional provision, statute, ordinance, or regulation is deportable."
"There are very limited applications for relief, and a felony criminal conviction would bar you from a lot of relief," Reisz said. "And once you have that conviction, there's no way to get rid of it unless its vacated by a criminal judge or you are pardoned by the governor or the president."
Ortega will likely not hold out hope for those pardons, considering that Texas public officials have made a practice of severely punishing the sort of voting crimes that elsewhere are treated as minor infractions. The policy is in line with the stated beliefs of President Donald Trump, who asserted that widespread voter fraud cost him votes in the 2016 election.
The ballots that led to Ortega's imprisonment were actually cast for Republicans. In 2012, Ortega voted for presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the general election, and in 2014, she voted for Texas attorney general candidate Ken Paxton, who won – and prosecuted her for illegal voting.
Dallas-based attorney Clark Birdsall, who represented Ortega at trial, learned from a reporter about her parole and pending deportation. He asserted that her imprisonment and deportation was the result of "a totally inappropriate prosecution and a totally inappropriate sentence."
"In my opinion, they just used an elephant gun on a gnat," Birdsall said.
Representatives for Paxton did not respond to messages seeking comment on Ortega's parole or pending deportation. Paxton previously boasted that Ortega's prosecution proved that his office "will hold those accountable who falsely claim eligibility and purposely subvert the election process in Texas."
A spokesperson for Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson, who jointly prosecuted Ortega, declined to comment on her parole status, saying "that decision is within the purview" of the Texas corrections system.
Birdsall blamed Wilson for thwarting a plea agreement three years ago that would have dismissed the charges against Ortega and potentially saved her from deportation if she met conditions that included speaking to lawmakers about the dangers of election loopholes.
Birdsall shared an email from January 2017 that suggests Assistant Attorney General Jonathan White, who represented Paxton's office, tentatively agreed to such a deal.
"I think her story has the potential of coming across very well in the current climate and putting her in a positive light that might help secure her immigration status more than anything we can do on paper," White wrote.
Birdsall said he next learned that Wilson objected to the deal, resulting in Ortega going to trial and receiving the lengthy prison sentence.
"She didn't just say no, she said, 'Hell no,' " Birdsall said of Wilson. " 'It's not going to be dismissed, we’re going to trial, see you Monday.' "
Wilson's spokesperson, Samantha Jordan, said Birdsall's account was "not correct."
Jordan and White pointed out that Ortega had previously turned down a plea offer of two years of probation, when she had a different defense attorney, but neither would address the later potential agreement referenced in the email.
Jordan emphasized that the sentence was the decision of the trial's jurors, who could have sentenced Ortega to up to 20 years. "At trial, we did not ask for prison time," the spokesperson said in an email, "and made sure the jurors were aware she was probation eligible."
Before the jurors decided Ortega's sentence, a prosecutor portrayed her as representative of a potential illegal voting invasion.
"You came back with the right verdict. ... If you’d come back with a not guilty, can you imagine the floodgates that would be open to illegal voting in this county?” the prosecutor said.
Birdsall said it appears prosecutors are attempting to distance themselves from the sentence they secured with such rhetoric. "It's like an arsonist turning their back on a fire and saying, 'We don't know how that happened,' " Birdsall said.
Birdsall characterized Ortega as a poorly educated woman who, as a lawful permanent resident all of her adult life, was unaware that she was not permitted to vote. Her indictment in November 2015 followed a series of actions she revealed to elections officials and law enforcement investigators.
After moving from Dallas to neighboring Tarrant County in late 2014, she attempted to register to vote but indicated on her application that she was not an American citizen. When her application was rejected, she called election administrators and was told that the reason for the rejection was that she had checked the "no" box for citizenship. Ortega explained that she had been able to vote in Dallas County and resubmitted her voter registration, this time indicating she was a citizen.
Several months later, Ortega was visited on her front porch by two investigators from Paxton's office. They secretly recorded Ortega as she said she checked the box indicating she was a citizen because she had previously encountered no trouble voting in Dallas County.
It was Ortega's poor luck that she had just confessed to illegal voting in a state where elected officials made examples of those they deemed contributors to voter fraud.
Paxton has tweeted about a "VOTER FRAUD ALERT" in which Texas officials claimed to have pinpointed tens of thousands of noncitizen voters and vowed to investigate them all, a probe that didn't occur. His office frequently generates news releases announcing the arrests of those involved in an "organized voter fraud ring" or an "organized illegal voter scheme." Paxton said that in 2018, his Election Fraud Unit “prosecuted 33 defendants for a total of 97 election fraud violations.”
His office, in coordination with Wilson's, was behind another harsh prison sentence concerning voter fraud. In 2018, Crystal Mason was sentenced to five years in prison in Tarrant County for casting a provisional ballot despite having been convicted of a felony. Mason claimed she did not know she wasn't allowed to vote, and she is appealing the conviction.
The voter fraud claims of Paxton and like-minded Texas officials have caught Trump's attention. In January 2019, the president tweeted about an army of noncitizen voters in Texas, calling it "just the tip of the iceberg."
Ortega's attorneys decried her prosecution as an effort to bolster those claims and scare away Hispanics and other people of color from voting. "Her prosecution was a coordinated effort by Attorney General Paxton to suppress minority voters," said another former attorney, Domingo Garcia said. "The clear intent was to intimidate them into thinking, 'If I vote, I might get in trouble like that lady.' "
The elected law enforcement officials involved in Ortega's prosecution seized on her actions as evidence that widespread voter fraud did exist. "People insist this kind of thing doesn't happen, but its happening right here at home," Wilson said in a news release touting Ortega's indictment.
Ortega was convicted and sentenced by a jury in February 2017 after a two-day trial. She remained out of prison while appealing the case. A higher court upheld the original conviction in late 2018.
According to a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Ortega was incarcerated starting in Feb. 27, 2019, at two women's facilities, the Lucile Plane State Jail and the William P. Hobby Unit. A parole panel voted to release her Dec. 2, but she was held in ICE custody until being granted bond Jan. 21.
It's not known whether she hired an immigration attorney to handle her deportation case. Her former attorneys said they have been unable to contact her or her family members, and they said they don't know whether Ortega was reunited with her four teenage children.
Birdsall described the looming deportation as by itself a disproportionate penalty for Ortega's crimes.
"She will have to peck and claw her way in a country she doesn't know much, if anything, about," Birdsall said. "My goodness, that's more than enough punishment."
Last December, with the country's attention elsewhere, Ortega was granted parole after serving a little more than nine months. She now faces a more permanent punishment: The 40-year-old mother of four teenagers, who first came to the USA as a baby and lived here legally with a green card, is the target of deportation proceedings to her native country of Mexico.
After being paroled, Ortega spent nearly two more months in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). She was freed on bond by an immigration judge last month. The U.S. Department of Justice office that handles immigration proceedings did not respond to a request Thursday for information on her case, including when she is due to appear in court.
Efforts to reach Ortega and members of her family were unsuccessful, and her former lawyers said they have also lost contact with her.
Professor Jean Reisz of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law said a person in Ortega's position may remain in the USA for months or even years because of a court backlog but ultimately has steep odds at avoiding deportation. Federal law states: "Any alien who has voted in violation of any Federal, State, or local constitutional provision, statute, ordinance, or regulation is deportable."
"There are very limited applications for relief, and a felony criminal conviction would bar you from a lot of relief," Reisz said. "And once you have that conviction, there's no way to get rid of it unless its vacated by a criminal judge or you are pardoned by the governor or the president."
Ortega will likely not hold out hope for those pardons, considering that Texas public officials have made a practice of severely punishing the sort of voting crimes that elsewhere are treated as minor infractions. The policy is in line with the stated beliefs of President Donald Trump, who asserted that widespread voter fraud cost him votes in the 2016 election.
The ballots that led to Ortega's imprisonment were actually cast for Republicans. In 2012, Ortega voted for presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the general election, and in 2014, she voted for Texas attorney general candidate Ken Paxton, who won – and prosecuted her for illegal voting.
Dallas-based attorney Clark Birdsall, who represented Ortega at trial, learned from a reporter about her parole and pending deportation. He asserted that her imprisonment and deportation was the result of "a totally inappropriate prosecution and a totally inappropriate sentence."
"In my opinion, they just used an elephant gun on a gnat," Birdsall said.
Representatives for Paxton did not respond to messages seeking comment on Ortega's parole or pending deportation. Paxton previously boasted that Ortega's prosecution proved that his office "will hold those accountable who falsely claim eligibility and purposely subvert the election process in Texas."
A spokesperson for Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson, who jointly prosecuted Ortega, declined to comment on her parole status, saying "that decision is within the purview" of the Texas corrections system.
Birdsall blamed Wilson for thwarting a plea agreement three years ago that would have dismissed the charges against Ortega and potentially saved her from deportation if she met conditions that included speaking to lawmakers about the dangers of election loopholes.
Birdsall shared an email from January 2017 that suggests Assistant Attorney General Jonathan White, who represented Paxton's office, tentatively agreed to such a deal.
"I think her story has the potential of coming across very well in the current climate and putting her in a positive light that might help secure her immigration status more than anything we can do on paper," White wrote.
Birdsall said he next learned that Wilson objected to the deal, resulting in Ortega going to trial and receiving the lengthy prison sentence.
"She didn't just say no, she said, 'Hell no,' " Birdsall said of Wilson. " 'It's not going to be dismissed, we’re going to trial, see you Monday.' "
Wilson's spokesperson, Samantha Jordan, said Birdsall's account was "not correct."
Jordan and White pointed out that Ortega had previously turned down a plea offer of two years of probation, when she had a different defense attorney, but neither would address the later potential agreement referenced in the email.
Jordan emphasized that the sentence was the decision of the trial's jurors, who could have sentenced Ortega to up to 20 years. "At trial, we did not ask for prison time," the spokesperson said in an email, "and made sure the jurors were aware she was probation eligible."
Before the jurors decided Ortega's sentence, a prosecutor portrayed her as representative of a potential illegal voting invasion.
"You came back with the right verdict. ... If you’d come back with a not guilty, can you imagine the floodgates that would be open to illegal voting in this county?” the prosecutor said.
Birdsall said it appears prosecutors are attempting to distance themselves from the sentence they secured with such rhetoric. "It's like an arsonist turning their back on a fire and saying, 'We don't know how that happened,' " Birdsall said.
Birdsall characterized Ortega as a poorly educated woman who, as a lawful permanent resident all of her adult life, was unaware that she was not permitted to vote. Her indictment in November 2015 followed a series of actions she revealed to elections officials and law enforcement investigators.
After moving from Dallas to neighboring Tarrant County in late 2014, she attempted to register to vote but indicated on her application that she was not an American citizen. When her application was rejected, she called election administrators and was told that the reason for the rejection was that she had checked the "no" box for citizenship. Ortega explained that she had been able to vote in Dallas County and resubmitted her voter registration, this time indicating she was a citizen.
Several months later, Ortega was visited on her front porch by two investigators from Paxton's office. They secretly recorded Ortega as she said she checked the box indicating she was a citizen because she had previously encountered no trouble voting in Dallas County.
It was Ortega's poor luck that she had just confessed to illegal voting in a state where elected officials made examples of those they deemed contributors to voter fraud.
Paxton has tweeted about a "VOTER FRAUD ALERT" in which Texas officials claimed to have pinpointed tens of thousands of noncitizen voters and vowed to investigate them all, a probe that didn't occur. His office frequently generates news releases announcing the arrests of those involved in an "organized voter fraud ring" or an "organized illegal voter scheme." Paxton said that in 2018, his Election Fraud Unit “prosecuted 33 defendants for a total of 97 election fraud violations.”
His office, in coordination with Wilson's, was behind another harsh prison sentence concerning voter fraud. In 2018, Crystal Mason was sentenced to five years in prison in Tarrant County for casting a provisional ballot despite having been convicted of a felony. Mason claimed she did not know she wasn't allowed to vote, and she is appealing the conviction.
The voter fraud claims of Paxton and like-minded Texas officials have caught Trump's attention. In January 2019, the president tweeted about an army of noncitizen voters in Texas, calling it "just the tip of the iceberg."
Ortega's attorneys decried her prosecution as an effort to bolster those claims and scare away Hispanics and other people of color from voting. "Her prosecution was a coordinated effort by Attorney General Paxton to suppress minority voters," said another former attorney, Domingo Garcia said. "The clear intent was to intimidate them into thinking, 'If I vote, I might get in trouble like that lady.' "
The elected law enforcement officials involved in Ortega's prosecution seized on her actions as evidence that widespread voter fraud did exist. "People insist this kind of thing doesn't happen, but its happening right here at home," Wilson said in a news release touting Ortega's indictment.
Ortega was convicted and sentenced by a jury in February 2017 after a two-day trial. She remained out of prison while appealing the case. A higher court upheld the original conviction in late 2018.
According to a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Ortega was incarcerated starting in Feb. 27, 2019, at two women's facilities, the Lucile Plane State Jail and the William P. Hobby Unit. A parole panel voted to release her Dec. 2, but she was held in ICE custody until being granted bond Jan. 21.
It's not known whether she hired an immigration attorney to handle her deportation case. Her former attorneys said they have been unable to contact her or her family members, and they said they don't know whether Ortega was reunited with her four teenage children.
Birdsall described the looming deportation as by itself a disproportionate penalty for Ortega's crimes.
"She will have to peck and claw her way in a country she doesn't know much, if anything, about," Birdsall said. "My goodness, that's more than enough punishment."
Black Syracuse University Students Stage Sit-In Protest Against Racism at the School
By Kia Morgan Smith - atlanta black star
February 21, 2020
Black Students at Syracuse University said officials refuse to hear their demands to address racism on campus. They have been engaged in a sit-in for days several days.
(Photo: @Zellieimani/Twitter)
The students demands have been met with promises of retribution by school leadership, who announced that all students participating in the sit-in protest are violating the school’s disruption policy and will receive interim suspensions.
“Though the university continues to support peaceful demonstration and the free and respectful exchange of ideas, university leaders are enforcing established policies that help maintain an environment that fosters sensitivity, understanding and respect for all 22,000 students in our community, as well as our faculty, staff and visitors,” a statement from John Liu, interim vice chancellor and provost, said.
The group, made of mostly Black students, argue that school officials have turned a blind eye to incidents of hate and racism, including one that occurred in Day Hall on Nov. 6, 2019, where the N-word and other racial slurs were written on mirrors of bathrooms on the fourth and sixth floors.
They also are demanding that Syracuse own up to a history of what they consider to be “white supremacy” and said it still exists.
On Tuesday, #NotAgainSU shared a statement on social media saying, “The administration has not appropriately addressed the 25+ hate crimes that have occurred on campus since November 2019, and they have not addressed student protesters in any way that is reflective of a commitment to equal safety and support.”
According to another statement, the university disagrees and says that some of the students are keeping them from having constructive conversations, saying the “continued unwillingness by some to engage constructively, along with changing demands, challenge our collective forward progress.”
The school contends they have tried to negotiate a change of venue to have students protest overnight at the library. The #NotAgainSU group says it defeats their purpose to protest at the Bird Library which is open 24 hours a day.
They also said officials have been unwilling to hear them out where their complaints are concerned.
“Change does not come to campus unless occupation like this happens,” the organizer said. “A protest is an active disruption. That’s intentional — we knew what we were doing.”
The protest has caught attention on social media with many people blasting the school administrators for being insensitive to the students’ needs.
d.prevalent
@destheM3ss
Imagine being on a campus where administration would rather threaten students with suspension than focus on finding the perpetrators of several hate crimes...tragic #NotAgainSU
Currently there is a Change.org petition demanding that the 30 suspended students be reinstated. The student plan to stay at the sit-in until their needs are met and a GoFundMe has been set up to help them. Syracuse Chancellor Kent Syverud said in his winter address last month that $5.6 million has been earmarked for addressing issues of diversity and inclusion.
“Though the university continues to support peaceful demonstration and the free and respectful exchange of ideas, university leaders are enforcing established policies that help maintain an environment that fosters sensitivity, understanding and respect for all 22,000 students in our community, as well as our faculty, staff and visitors,” a statement from John Liu, interim vice chancellor and provost, said.
The group, made of mostly Black students, argue that school officials have turned a blind eye to incidents of hate and racism, including one that occurred in Day Hall on Nov. 6, 2019, where the N-word and other racial slurs were written on mirrors of bathrooms on the fourth and sixth floors.
They also are demanding that Syracuse own up to a history of what they consider to be “white supremacy” and said it still exists.
On Tuesday, #NotAgainSU shared a statement on social media saying, “The administration has not appropriately addressed the 25+ hate crimes that have occurred on campus since November 2019, and they have not addressed student protesters in any way that is reflective of a commitment to equal safety and support.”
According to another statement, the university disagrees and says that some of the students are keeping them from having constructive conversations, saying the “continued unwillingness by some to engage constructively, along with changing demands, challenge our collective forward progress.”
The school contends they have tried to negotiate a change of venue to have students protest overnight at the library. The #NotAgainSU group says it defeats their purpose to protest at the Bird Library which is open 24 hours a day.
They also said officials have been unwilling to hear them out where their complaints are concerned.
“Change does not come to campus unless occupation like this happens,” the organizer said. “A protest is an active disruption. That’s intentional — we knew what we were doing.”
The protest has caught attention on social media with many people blasting the school administrators for being insensitive to the students’ needs.
d.prevalent
@destheM3ss
Imagine being on a campus where administration would rather threaten students with suspension than focus on finding the perpetrators of several hate crimes...tragic #NotAgainSU
Currently there is a Change.org petition demanding that the 30 suspended students be reinstated. The student plan to stay at the sit-in until their needs are met and a GoFundMe has been set up to help them. Syracuse Chancellor Kent Syverud said in his winter address last month that $5.6 million has been earmarked for addressing issues of diversity and inclusion.
