Last Call For Going Postal, Con't

Yesterday we learned that as CEO of a North Carolina logistics firm, Postmaster General Louis Dejoy pressured his workers into donating to Republicans and then reimbursed them with bonuses to cover the cost, a campaign finance felony violation that also apparently included lying to Congress about the exact scheme last month. It was DeJoy's skill at fundraising that got the attention of Trump, and of course he was appointed as the ultimate American logistics firm head as Postmaster General.

Not only is the New York Times confirming the Washington Post's story from over the weekend, but we now find out that one of the major Republicans DeJoy was fundraising for was current NC GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, locked in his own reelection battle with Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major donor to President Trump and fund-raiser for the Republican Party, cultivated an environment at his former company that left employees feeling pressured to make donations to Republican candidates, and rewarded them with bonuses for doing so, according to former employees.

The arrangement was described by three former employees at New Breed Logistics, Mr. DeJoy’s former company, who said that workers would receive bonuses if they donated to candidates he supported, and that it was expected that managers would participate. A fourth employee confirmed that managers at the company were routinely solicited to make donations. The four former employees spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation.

The former employees did not say how explicit Mr. DeJoy was about linking the campaign contributions he was encouraging to the extra compensation, but three of them said it was widely believed that the bonuses were meant to reimburse the political donations, an allegation first reported by The Washington Post. Federal campaign finance law bars straw-donor schemes, in which an individual reimburses someone else to donate to a political campaign in order to skirt contribution limits. But it is legal to encourage employees to make donations, as Mr. DeJoy routinely did.

A review of campaign finance records shows that over a dozen management-level employees at New Breed would routinely donate to the same candidate on the same day, often writing checks for an identical amount of money. One day in October 2014, for example, 20 midlevel and senior officials at the company donated a total of $37,600 to the campaign of Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, who was running to unseat a Democratic incumbent. Each official wrote a check for either $2,600, the maximum allowable donation, or $1,000.

Similar patterns of donations — including to the Republican National Committee and every Republican presidential nominee from President George W. Bush to Mitt Romney — stretch back to 2003, campaign finance records show. Mr. DeJoy’s wife, Dr. Aldona Wos, was the vice chairwoman of Mr. Bush’s North Carolina fund-raising team, and Mr. Bush later appointed her to serve as the ambassador to Estonia. Mr. DeJoy, a Republican megadonor, served as the chief executive of New Breed from 1983 to 2014, until the company was sold to XPO Logistics.

Monty Hagler, a spokesman for Mr. DeJoy, said in a lengthy statement provided to The New York Times that the former New Breed executive “consistently provided family members and employees with various volunteer opportunities to get involved in activities that a family member or employee might feel was important or enjoyable to that individual.”

So now not only does DeJoy have a huge problem on his hands, so does Sen. Tillis.

The other issue is now that there's clearly grounds for legal investigation, and the corrupt Barr Justice Department isn't going to lift a finger, it's up to North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein to take a look.

Any credible allegations of such actions merit investigation by the appropriate state and federal authorities. Beyond this, it would be inappropriate for me as Attorney General to comment on any specific matter at this time. 2/2

— Josh Stein (@JoshStein_) September 6, 2020

So many Trump regime cronies need to be serving prison time for massive corruption, and that starts with getting rid of the people protecting them: Donald Trump, and Bill Barr.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump continues to try to shift the news cycle away from his 200,000 COVID-19 deaths with all new fascist outrages on a near-daily basis, and today is no exception.

President Donald Trump is continuing to wage battle against interpretations of history which he claims are un-American. 

In a Sunday morning tweet, the President said the US Department of Education would investigate whether California schools are using the New York Times' "1619 Project" in public school curriculum. The Pulitzer-Prize winning collection reframes American history around the date of August 1619, when the first slave ship arrived on America's shores. 

"Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded!" he wrote on Twitter, citing a message from an unverified account saying it was being taught in schools there. 

The message came after the President on Friday night banned federal agencies from conducting racial sensitivity training related to "white privilege" and "critical race theory." 

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, instructed heads of federal agencies to dramatically alter racial sensitivity training programs for employees, deeming them "un-American propaganda" in a two-page memo. 

Like that memo, it's unclear the extent of the phenomenon the President is identifying. Some schools have said they will adopt the 1619 Project into their lessons -- though how many isn't known. 

The 1619 Project was launched by the New York Times Magazine last year. After the launch, the Pulitzer Center was named an education partner for the project and announced its education team would develop educational resources and curricula for teachers to use. The 1619 Project curriculum is available online for free through the center. 

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican, has introduced legislation that would prevent schools from teaching the curriculum. The legislation, titled the Saving American History Act of 2020, "would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts. Schools that teach the 1619 Project would also be ineligible for federal professional-development grants." 

The legislation appears unlikely to gain any significant traction in the Senate but stands as a way for Cotton to send a message. 

The moves follow a pattern by the President of disparaging attempts to process or reckon with the country's fraught racial history. In his convention acceptance speech, the President said "Americans are exhausted, trying to keep up with the latest lists of approved words and phrases, and the ever more restrictive political decrees. Many things have a different name now, and the rules are constantly changing." 

"We want our sons and daughters to know the truth," Trump went on. "America is the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world. Our country wasn't built by cancel culture, speech codes, and crushing conformity. We are not a nation of timid spirits."

America was built, quite literally, by slave labor, and then by indentured servitude for freed slaves and Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and then by poor Irish, Scots, Romani and Italian laborers who formed unions because they were white, and then by unions who were shattered and bloodied by corruption and strikebreaking, and then by machines that replaced the labor.

That's besides the point though, which is that Trump is threatening defunding and censorship made patently illegal by a host of US laws and the Constitution. He can't actually do anything, but he can continue a culture war to anger his followers and motivate them towards hatred in time for the election season as it gets under way for real this week.

All this is a problem, but it's a petty distraction while Trump is proclaiming he is the final arbiter of truth in America, it's a distraction from Trump's chosen path of genocidal neglect from COVID-19 deaths.

Keep that in mind.

Also vote early.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Just a reminder that in the COVID-19 era, the Trump regime still keeps migrant kids in cages and separates them from their parents in order to deport them to an unknown fate.

A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there’s inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.

The bleak portrait emerged Thursday after a legal team interviewed 60 children at the facility near El Paso that has become the latest place where attorneys say young migrants are describing neglect and mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. government.

Data obtained by The Associated Press showed that on Wednesday there were three infants in the station, all with their teen mothers, along with a 1-year-old, two 2-year-olds and a 3-year-old. There are dozens more under 12. Fifteen have the flu, and 10 more are quarantined.

Three girls told attorneys they were trying to take care of the 2-year-old boy, who had wet his pants and had no diaper and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt when the legal team encountered him.

“A Border Patrol agent came in our room with a 2-year-old boy and asked us, ‘Who wants to take care of this little boy?’ Another girl said she would take care of him, but she lost interest after a few hours and so I started taking care of him yesterday,” one of the girls said in an interview with attorneys.

Law professor Warren Binford, who is helping interview the children, said she couldn’t learn anything about the toddler, not even where he’s from or who his family is. He is not speaking.

Binford described that during interviews with children in a conference room at the facility, “little kids are so tired they have been falling asleep on chairs and at the conference table.”

She said an 8-year-old taking care of a very small 4-year-old with matted hair couldn’t convince the little one to take a shower.

“In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention, I have never heard of this level of inhumanity,” said Holly Cooper, who co-directs University of California, Davis’ Immigration Law Clinic and represents detained youth.

This repulsive inhumanity makes grim sense when you remember our federal government is run by a lifelong white supremacist eugenicist who hired other lifelong white supremacist eugenicists in order to dehumanize migrants and immigrants on purpose (committing human rights violations on a massive scale) as a deterrent to end immigration period.

When you remember that this regime believes tens of millions of Americans should be stripped of their citizenship and rights, and be shipped off to who knows where, everything they have done in the last four years clicks into place.

They are hateful on the scale of 1930's Germany and we have one chance to stop them.

StupidiNews, Labor Day Edition!

• Gasoline prices this Labor Day weekend are the lowest in several years, with as much as a third of the country paying less than two dollars per gallon.
• University of Kansas students are demanding the school's campus be closed for COVID-19 health reasons and are planning a strike today to demand remote learning classes.
• Hundreds of California residents were airlifted to safety away from wildfires over the weekend as blazes rip through the state, record heat continues to create dangerous fire conditions.
• India has now passed Brazil for the second highest number of COVID-19 cases as the number of infections top 4.2 million, the US is closing in on 6.3 million and could hit 7.5 million by Oct. 1.
• Researchers are looking at "disordered" rock salts containing lithium ions as a possible new material for use in high-capacity batteries of the future.

Last Call For Going Postal, Con't

According to a major story in the Washington Post today, current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy committed felony campaign finance violations by pressuring his employees at his business in North Carolina to donate hundreds of thousands to his GOP fundraisers, then committing fraud by reimbursing the money back to his employees as year-end bonuses in order to hide the money.

Louis DeJoy’s prolific campaign fundraising, which helped position him as a top Republican power broker in North Carolina and ultimately as head of the U.S. Postal Service, was bolstered for more than a decade by a practice that left many employees feeling pressured to make political contributions to GOP candidates — money DeJoy later reimbursed through bonuses, former employees say.

Five people who worked for DeJoy’s former business, New Breed Logistics, say they were urged by DeJoy’s aides or by the chief executive himself to write checks and attend fundraisers at his 15,000-square-foot gated mansion beside a Greensboro, N.C., country club. There, events for Republicans running for the White House and Congress routinely fetched $100,000 or more apiece.

Two other employees familiar with New Breed’s financial and payroll systems said DeJoy would instruct that bonus payments to staffers be boosted to help defray the cost of their contributions, an arrangement that would be unlawful.

“Louis was a national fundraiser for the Republican Party. He asked employees for money. We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses,” said David Young, DeJoy’s longtime director of human resources, who had access to payroll records at New Breed from the late 1990s to 2013 and is now retired. “When we got our bonuses, let’s just say they were bigger, they exceeded expectations — and that covered the tax and everything else.”

Another former employee with knowledge of the process described a similar series of events, saying DeJoy orchestrated additional compensation for employees who had made political contributions, instructing managers to award bonuses to specific individuals.

“He would ask employees to make contributions at the same time that he would say, ‘I’ll get it back to you down the road,’ ” said the former employee, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution from DeJoy.

In response to a series of detailed questions from The Washington Post, Monty Hagler, a spokesman for DeJoy, said the former New Breed chief executive was not aware that any employees had felt pressured to make donations.

After repeatedly being asked, Hagler did not directly address the assertions that DeJoy reimbursed workers for making contributions, pointing to a statement in which he said DeJoy “believes that he has always followed campaign fundraising laws and regulations.”

Hagler said DeJoy “sought and received legal advice” from a former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission “to ensure that he, New Breed Logistics and any person affiliated with New Breed fully complied with any and all laws. Mr. DeJoy believes that all campaign fundraising laws and regulations should be complied with in all respects.”

It's easy enough to follow the money here, and in DeJoy's House hearing just a few weeks ago on his wrecking the USPS on Trump's orders, he was asked about these allegations by Tennessee Democrat Jim Cooper of Nashville.

Cooper: (01:30:53)
Mr. DeJoy, here’s what your so-called reforms have done to my district in 70 days. A lady named Elena Roser paid $5 on July 22nd to send a certified letter to the Nashville, Tennessee social security office. The distance is 20 miles. The letter took 12 days to arrive. Just this morning, excellent reporting from Nashville’s Channel Five TV proves that Nashville’s mail trucks are being forced to leave on schedule even when completely empty. Imagine it: 53 foot trucks forced to travel hundreds of miles, completely empty, due to your so-called reforms. Here are the truck records. That’s not efficiency. That’s insanity. For anyone thinking of voting absentee, the effect of your policies is to unilaterally move up election day from November 3rd to something like October 27th. And if you force more empty trucks on the highway, you will be able to single-handedly move up election day even earlier.

Cooper: (01:32:06)
According to NPR, already 550,000 primary ballots, absentee ballots, were rejected in just 30 states, and one of the main reasons was late delivery. How dare you disenfranchise so many voters when you told the Senate committee just last week that you had a sacred duty to protect election mail. You know that it’s a felony for a postal service officer or employee to delay delivery of mail. A postal employee can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for delaying the mail. But somehow you can delay all the mail and get away with it? They can be prosecuted, but you can’t, even if your actions are a million times worse? Mr. DeJoy, do you have a duty to obey US law like every other American?

DeJoy: (01:32:58)
I do, sir.

Cooper: (01:33:00)
Well, previous postmasters general have been punished for much smaller conflicts of interests than yours. In 1997, the 70th postmaster general Marvin Runyon from Tennessee had to pay $27,000 because of a $350,000 conflict of interest. If your $30 million conflict of interest, a hundred times larger than Mr. Runyon’s, were treated like your predecessors, you would have to pay a $2.7 million fine and probably be ousted from being postmaster general. So Mr. DeJoy, are you above the law that applies to other postmasters general?

DeJoy: (01:33:45)
I don’t agree with the premise. I’m in full compliance with all ethical requirements that I need to have. And there’s an OIG investigation, and I welcome the result of that report.

Cooper: (01:33:59)
Well, Mr. DeJoy, as a mega donor for the Trump campaign, you were picked along with Michael Cohen and Elliott Broidy, two men who have already pled guilty to felonies, to be the three deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. Did you pay back several of your top executives for contributing to Trump’s campaign by bonusing or rewarding them?

DeJoy: (01:34:25)
That’s an outrageous claim, sir, and I resent it.

Cooper: (01:34:29)
I’m just asking a question.

DeJoy: (01:34:30)
The answer is no.

Cooper: (01:34:32)
So you did not bonus or reward any of your executives-

DeJoy: (01:34:36)
No. No.

Cooper: (01:34:36)
Or anyone that you solicited for a contribution to the Trump campaign?

DeJoy: (01:34:39)
No, sir.

So on top of the finance violations and the fraud, he straight up lied to Congress under oath.

In any other administration, DeJoy would be made to resign over this and would lawyer up to face the numerous federal investigations that would almost certainly result in prison time and a hefty fine. We know this because a fundraiser for Al Gore was convicted in March 2000 over an extremely similar scheme.

Maria Hsia, a longtime political fund-raiser for Vice President Al Gore, was convicted today of all five felony counts against her for her role in arranging more than $100,000 in illegal donations to the Democratic Party and its candidates in 1996.

Of that amount, $55,000 was contributed to the Democratic National Committee in connection with the vice president's much-criticized visit to a Buddhist temple in the Los Angeles area. The event, at the Hsi Lai Temple in the community of Hacienda Heights, has shadowed Mr. Gore throughout the current political season, with a variety of his opponents referring to it in efforts to remind the public of the Clinton-Gore organization's fund-raising embarrassments.

As her federal jurors filed in today, Ms. Hsia (pronounced shaw), a 48-year-old Taiwan-born American citizen who works as an immigration counselor in Los Angeles, consulted a Chinese fortune-telling book to try to divine her fate. She then sat impassively as the jury delivered its verdicts for what the government had described as her masterminding an evasion of election laws by disguising the true source of campaign contributions.

The five counts against Ms. Hsia, who did not testify at her three-week-long trial, charged her with causing finance officials of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic campaigns to file false contribution statements with the Federal Election Commission. Although conviction on these counts can mean a years-long prison sentence, federal sentencing guidelines make it more likely that she will serve only a brief term, if any.

In the case of the Buddhist temple, Justice Department prosecutors charged that Ms. Hsia had arranged for nuns and monks there to write checks to make it appear that they were the donors to the Democratic National Committee. In reality, they were only ''straw donors,'' reimbursed by the temple itself, which, as a religious, tax-exempt institution, is prohibited from making political donations.

In other cases, the $1,000 limit on contributions to presidential campaigns was evaded by wealthy Chinese-Americans who testified at the trial that Ms. Hsia had helped them find straw donors for contributions to the Clinton-Gore re-election committee.

This is pretty much exactly what DeJoy is accused of doing. In the Trump regime, DeJoy will get kudos, will keep his job, won't be investigated at all, and would be pardoned anyway if he was actually convicted.

The Trump regime is intrinsically corrupt.

The Country Could Go Even More Viral

As the US is now coming up on 200,000 COVID-19 deaths with no end in sight and a Trump regime that could not care less about the death toll other than to blame Joe Biden for it somehow, the medical community is sounding the alarm that flu season could bring another 200,000 deaths by the end of 2020.

The global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic could triple by year’s end, with an additional 1.9 million deaths, while a fall wave of infections could drive fatalities in the United States to 410,000, according to a new forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

The estimate reinforces warnings by many experts that cooler, drier weather and increased time spent indoors could boost viral transmission in the Northern Hemisphere surge this fall and winter — something typically seen with other respiratory viruses.

The institute’s forecasts were influential earlier in the pandemic in guiding policies developed by the White House coronavirus task force, but they have been criticized by some experts as projecting further into the future than can be done reliably.

The U.S. death toll from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, now stands at 183,000, according to health data analyzed by The Washington Post. The IHME model projects that under the most likely scenario, 410,451 people in the United States will have died by Jan. 1.

The best-case scenario is 288,381 deaths and worst-case is 620,029, that model forecasts.
The scenarios pivot on human behavior and public policy. The best-case scenario would result from near-universal mask-wearing and the maintenance of social distancing and government mandates limiting the size of indoor gatherings. The worst-case scenario assumes that people and their communities stop taking precautions.

“It’s easy given the summer lull to think the epidemic is going away,” Christopher Murray, director of IHME, said Friday on a conference call. But there are “bleak times ahead in the Northern Hemisphere winter, and unfortunately we are not collectively doing everything we can to learn from the last five months.”

I'd actually dispute that last paragraph: the Trump regime has already learned the only applicable lesson from the last five months, and the lesson is "America becoming a white fascist ethnostate has already been worth the cost of 200,000 lives".

The fact that Trump still has a real shot at victory is precisely because of tens of millions of voters who are 100% okay with the last four years as long as Black and brown America is relegated to second-class citizenship, beneath even the poorest, least-educated, least-powerful white Trump supporter.

And the fact of the matter is when the electorate is still 70% white, and the population is far more so  in battleground states like Wisconsin (87%), Michigan (80%), Pennsylvania (82%) and Florida (78%), it's up to white voters in mostly white states to decide the presidency and it always has been.

We got lucky with Obama because white voters figured he was one of the "good ones". In 2014, that ended permanently with Trayvon Martin and Obama's support for Black Lives Matter.  It helped cost Hillary the election, with nearly six percent of voters choosing a third party.

Remember, your Trump-supporting friends are okay with this.

Those of us who are left have to try to save ourselves.

And another 200,000 of us aren't going to be saved, frankly.

Sunday Long Read: It's Still About Suppression

In Harper's Bazaar, Grammy award-winning musical artist, activist and Atlanta native Janelle Monáe interviews Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on her book, voter suppression and how Black America can overcome it in this week's Sunday Long Read.

JANELLE MONÁE: In your book Our Time Is Now, you write about what you call the New American Majority—the people of color, young people, moderates and progressives, who galvanized behind you and your race for governor of Georgia in 2018. You believe these folks are a key force in the upcoming federal elections. In the time between when you wrote the book and when it was published in June, we saw our country gripped by this pandemic. We’re all in the middle of Covid-19 right now, and we’re in a reckoning with racial justice and the stark and tragic effects of inequality. How do you feel this New American Majority has evolved or changed over the past six months?

STACEY ABRAMS: The full title of the book is Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America, and I think that there has been nothing in our recent memory that has crystallized that subtitle more than the last six months. We are in a pitched battle driven by a public-health crisis, an economic collapse, and a reckoning with structural racism and systemic inequities, and the battle is not simply against those things. It is understanding that this New American Majority, because of how many of us there are and because of the proof points of our capacity, we have to know we’ve got the power to influence what happens next. We have to know we have a purpose, which has been revealed by what the pandemic has shown us about what is happening to Black and brown communities that are being decimated by Covid-19 and the economic inequities that are not only being visited upon our country writ large but upon those essential workers, who, by law or by practice, don’t have the ability to take care of themselves and have to stand on those front lines. And then a fair America—we have the right to demand equal justice under the law. We have the right to believe that Ahmaud Arbery should not have been murdered in the streets and that Rayshard Brooks should not have been killed by police. I wrote this book in 2019. I finished it up the first few days of 2020. I had no idea this is what was to come. But what I’ve learned from my parents and my grandparents and from the long sweep of history is that we have been waiting for this moment where our desires can be met with our capacity. That is this moment, and the New American Majority is how we do it.

JM: At one point in your book, you recount protesting emblems of the Confederacy while you were in college at Spelman [in Atlanta] in the early 1990s. I saw video footage of you burning the Confederate flag [at the time, the Georgia state flag contained a Confederate battle emblem]. How does it feel, 28 years later, to watch as names are finally being taken off buildings, flags are being burned, people are removing statues by themselves, and paintings depicting Confederate figures are coming down slowly but surely? Why do you think it took so long?

SA: In 2018, when I had the temerity to say that I did not believe in the public veneration of traitors to our country, which is what the Confederacy was, or that I didn’t believe that Stone Mountain should be a state monument—that we should have again a reckoning—I was vilified for it. And when I burned the Confederate flag, I had a permit for it, but when we burned that flag, it was because I grew up in Mississippi in the shadows of Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis, where I watched people celebrate a man who tried to keep my people enslaved. And that’s just wrong. So I am grateful that we’re having this moment. But again, it goes back to this inflection point, this demographic change. The New American Majority is not simply a title—it’s a capacity issue. There are enough of us now who have known this for years, but our voices have come together as a chorus and we’re loud enough to be heard. I think that’s why we’re seeing this action. But I don’t want to dismiss the fact that we had people like Bree Newsome, who scaled that pole and took down that flag. [In 2015, Newsome was arrested after removing a Confederate flag on the grounds of the South Carolina State House.] Even though people were trying to give [then Governor] Nikki Haley credit in South Carolina, it was Bree Newsome who risked her freedom to do that. So we have had people who’ve been fighting this battle. But I think for the first time people believe that the battle can be won.

JM: Let’s talk about voter suppression. You’ve described voter suppression as a means of denying people “the most profound currency of citizenship: power.” What does American power look like to you today? And what should it represent?

SA: In a democracy, our ability to select those who speak for us comes from the right to vote. That’s what we have to remember. We live in a representative democracy. We don’t ask everyone to vote on everything. We say, “Pick some folks and let them focus on it so you can go about your life.” But if you can’t choose representation that sees you, that hears you, and that speaks for you, then the democratic part doesn’t really work. So my mission has been to ensure that the representation part meets the democracy part. We have a president who does not want democracy to work. He is a wannabe authoritarian populist who believes that his edicts should be law, that his incompetence should be unchallenged, and that accountability is for others. We have this responsibility to fight back against voter suppression because suppression is all about maintaining power for a small cadre of folks who have been afraid of sharing it from the beginning of our country. This is a nation built on voter suppression. When we started, white men who owned land could vote. If you were Black, you were a slave. If you were a woman, you were supposed to be silent. If you were Native American, you were invisible. Then in 1790 we decided to shut the gates and say no one else can come in. So we’ve spent 230 years trying to reclaim the promise that was in our Declaration of Independence, this promise of equality. But we can only reclaim it if we have the power of the vote. I know it can sound like a slogan or a really pale solution to all of these challenges, but in a democracy, you can’t give up the power you have trying to get the power you want.

JM: In many ways, it seems like we’re in a moment that is demanding change. How do we take advantage of that opportunity to actually bring about change?

SA: One thing I’ve always loved about your music is that you’re a truth-teller, and I think that’s got to be the approach we take to leverage this moment: We’ve got to tell the truth about what’s happening and tell the truth about how we fix it. I become frustrated when I hear people, in response to protesters in the streets, saying, “Just go vote,” because that’s not the only answer. I was a protester in the streets, and I protested at the ballot box—my parents raised me to understand you have to do both. They were activists because they knew that was the only way they would get the right to vote. And once they had the right to vote, they took us with them to vote and to protest because they wanted us to understand that it’s not enough to say what you want—you’ve got to demand that it be made true. So we have to be willing to stop simplifying this by pretending that we can elect a savior who will change the world or change the country. It won’t happen. We can elect people, who, if we hold them accountable, can make progress. But we’ve got to connect the dots.

I'm a big fan of Stacey's politics and of Janelle's music.  It's excellent to see two Black women discuss politics like this and I find myself agreeing with the entire conversation, particularly Abrams's observations on white America putting the onus on Obama to be the savior in 2008.

When Obama responded with "We all have work ahead of us", something Black America was used to hearing and doing, but white America was not -- they thought merely electing Obama would "fix things" and they were off the hook for the results and it was Black America's responsibility now -- that's when white America turned on Obama and the Democrats in three straight federal elections. It was only because Mitt Romney was a terrible candidate and that Obama's charisma and the recovery was strong enough that he won in 2014 but Democrats across the country were wiped out in the backlash, leading to Trump.

That wasn't Black America's fault.  We didn't elect Trump. But it apparently falls upon us to save the country from him now.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Labor Day weekend this year means 100 days of protest since Memorial Day weekend and George Floyd's murder at the knee of police changed America, and it looks more and more like this time it will be different and remain so.

After 100 days of dissent in Washington, the boundaries between cities, states and even countries have dissolved as protesters from Hong Kong to Portland to D.C. swap tactics, share strategies and ping from one demonstration to the next.

The protests after the police killing of George Floyd have developed a language and shared culture as daily demonstrations become a fact of life in cities across the country. Enraged by the backdrop of police violence and racial inequality that plays out in graphic videos depicting police brutality against Black citizens, protesters have developed new means of resistance experts say may change protests in America forever.

Marches have grown more confrontational — cornering politicians in their homes and heckling strangers as they go about their lives. Protesters have embraced mobility and taken to participating in demonstrations far from their hometowns. Some fly, some drive — some have walked for days.

Online tutorials about crafting homemade shields to protect against rubber bullets and stinging pepper ball pellets using plywood, foam pool noodles, trash can lids and other household wares have spread like wildfire.

What were once considered obvious markers of troublemakers looking to break things have become muddled as demonstrators scramble to protect themselves from rubber bullets and chemical irritants police use to disperse crowds.

Influenced at first by the longevity and intensity of pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, then by the evolving tactics of protesters in American streets, experts say the mainstreaming of ideas and tactics once considered radical reflects a political sea change spurred by a youth-led uprising.

“This is bringing people into a different way of being,” said Mark Bray, a Rutgers University historian and former organizer of the Occupy Wall Street movement. “Things are happening now at a profound level.”

While the nation’s capital braces for protests in the days and weeks ahead, months of unrelenting demonstrations, mass arrests and standoffs with police have changed D.C. protesters in ways big and small: Their tools, their tactics and their tolerance for behavior once decried as antithetical to peaceful protest have shifted.

On recent nights, as smoke and explosions ripped through the night air and police advanced on a line of demonstrators while shouting, “Move back,” it became clear that the flash bangs just don’t work like they used to.

Longtime demonstrators in D.C. have stopped sprinting for cover. They kick sparking canisters back toward police, walk steadily away from the rapid pop of rubber bullets and strap on respirators and gas masks when the threat of tear gas hangs in the air.

The protests have also given first-time demonstrators an up-close look at munitions, controversial crowd control tactics like “kettling” — when police surround a group of demonstrators and arrest them en masse — and the use of chemicals that make people cough, gag, cry and burn.

But images captured at these events also serve a tactical purpose: With every video of a protester disarming a tear-gas canister or volleying a smoking stun grenade back at law enforcement, demonstrators are learning skills that may have otherwise taken months to acquire on their own.

America is now in this for the long haul.  This time really is different. At the minimum these protests are going to continue through January's inauguration, and should it be a Trump second term, all bets are off how long they go.

Let's hope that it becomes a Biden administration world party in January instead.

Black Lives Still Matter.

A Dozen Reasons To Be Happy

It's occurred to me that ZVTS turned twelve last month and it blew right by me.

 

2020 has been a hell of a year, but we're still here, thanks to all of you guys.

In all sincerity, especially this year, thank you all for being here still.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The running mate's role is to say the things the presidential candidate can't say but should, and Kamala Harris is doing a stellar job on that front for Joe Biden, saying this week that she wouldn't trust a Trump COVID-19 vaccine before the election, and that nobody should.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris said that President Donald Trump's word alone on any potential coronavirus vaccine is not enough. 

Asked by CNN's Dana Bash in a clip released Saturday whether she would get a vaccine that was approved and distributed before the election, Harris replied, "Well, I think that's going to be an issue for all of us." 

"I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about," she continued in the clip from an exclusive interview airing Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" at 9 a.m. ET. "I will not take his word for it." 

CNN reported Thursday that Trump has pressured administration health officials to accelerate the vaccine's development in an effort to convince voters of an impending end to the pandemic threatening his reelection. A number of sources familiar with the internal workings told CNN the responsibility feels immense and the environment is akin to that of a pressure cooker. 

When asked by Bash whether she thought that public health experts and scientists would get the last word on the efficacy of a vaccine, Harris predicted that they will not. 

"If past is prologue that they will not, they'll be muzzled, they'll be suppressed, they will be sidelined," Harris said. "Because he's looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days and he's grasping to get whatever he can to pretend he has been a leader on this issue when he is not."

Harris is 100% right. This regime, and in particular this leader, have lied about even the smallest things. There is no reason why anyone should trust that they will have a working ,safe, effective vaccine by Election Day.  It's garbage and it's 100% dangerous to think otherwise.

Harris recommends taking Dr. Fauci's word instead.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said he would get a Covid-19 vaccination once a vaccine proves to be safe and effective and becomes available. 

"I will look at the data and I would assume -- and I'm pretty sure it's going to be the case -- that a vaccine would not be approved for the American public unless it was indeed both safe and effective," Fauci told CNN's Jim Sciutto on Thursday. "If that's the case Jim, I would not hesitate for a moment to take the vaccine myself and recommend it for my family." 

When asked by Bash in the interview airing Sunday if she feels more comfortable hearing those assurances from someone like Fauci, Harris said the nation's top infectious disease expert has for years "put the public health of the American people as the highest priority in terms of his work, and his reputation and his priority." 

Yes. I trust Dr. Fauci," Harris continued.

Fauci is the expert. Not Trump.

And even then, I'd want independent verification because I don't trust Trump not to manipulate Fauci.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Dear Leader has decreed that federal government will no longer engage in racial sensitivity training because the notion that any white people need to look at America from a point of view other than whiteness is "un-American".

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has reportedly directed federal agencies to cancel employee racial sensitivity training that may be "divisive" and "un-American," according to multiple reports.

A memo obtained by The Washington Post and first reported by RealClear Politics instructs federal agencies to cancel contracts that teach employees America is an "inherently racist or evil country."

In the memo, OMB Director Russell Vought says President Trump specifically instructed him to cut millions in taxpayer dollars used on contracts with racial sensitivity training. The memo notes training sessions that discuss "white privilege" or "critical race theory," and orders all contracts that can be legally canceled to be ended.

“The President has directed me to ensure that federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions,” the memo reads.
The Post reports it's not clear what training programs the memo is referring to, but notes Fox News recently shared a critical report of Obama-era diversity and inclusion efforts.

The memo insists that "the President, and his Administration, are fully committed to the fair and equal treatment of all individuals in the United States.”

Systemic racism simply doesn't exist, says the white supremacist regime. Because we say it doesn't exist. So we're getting rid of anything that might try to correct it, because it doesn't exist.

And of course, Ku Klux Klangerine saw WOKE GOVERNMENT TRAINING on FOX News and pulled the plug. Racism can't exist, otherwise, well, Trump would be the Racist-in-Chief.

Republicans want to eradicate Black America.  Try living with that every day of your life, knowing that your federal government wants you gone, that knowing the fact your ancestors being treated as chattel and that there are still systems in place to collectively punish us 150 years later are "propaganda".

They despise us to the core while bleating about the "fair treatment of all Americans".

We have to vote them out. I won't survive another four years of Trump. A lot of Black folks won't. We'll be annihilated. And it's all a "culture war" game to them.

Donald Trump is a eugenicist.  The sick, the disabled, the elderly, the frail, the Black and the brown are all subhuman garbage to be eradicated from pure White America, and Trump is turning that into United States government policy.

We're targets.

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

I wonder how quickly this DHS draft report on Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem™ being the number one terrorism threat in the US right now gets buried by the Chad Wolf.

White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States, according to a draft report from the Department of Homeland Security.
Two later draft versions of the same document — all of which were reviewed by POLITICO — describe the threat from white supremacists in slightly different language. But all three drafts describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups.

“Foreign terrorist organizations will continue to call for Homeland attacks but probably will remain constrained in their ability to direct such plots over the next year,” all three documents say.

Russia “probably will be the primary covert foreign influence actor and purveyor of disinformation and misinformation in the Homeland,” the documents also say.

Former acting DHS Sec. Kevin McAleenan last year directed the department to start producing annual homeland threat assessments. POLITICO reviewed three drafts of this year’s report — titled DHS’s State of the Homeland Threat Assessment 2020 — all of which were produced in August. Ben Wittes, the editor in chief of the national security site Lawfare, obtained the documents and shared them with POLITICO. The first such assessment has not been released publicly, and a DHS spokesperson declined to comment on “allegedly leaked documents,” and on when the document will be made public.

None of the drafts POLITICO reviewed referred to a threat from Antifa, the loose cohort of militant left-leaning agitators who senior Trump administration officials have described as domestic terrorists. Two of the drafts refer to extremists trying to exploit the “social grievances” driving lawful protests.

The cut-off date for information analyzed in the earliest draft is August 3, 2020, while the cut-off date for the next two is August 27.

John Cohen, who oversaw DHS’s counterterrorism portfolio from 2011 to 2014, said the drafts’ conclusion isn’t surprising.

“This draft document seems to be consistent with earlier intelligence reports from DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement sources: that the most significant terror-related threat facing the US today comes from violent extremists who are motivated by white supremacy and other far-right ideological causes,” he said.

Wittes, meanwhile, said the change in language on white supremacist terrorism is significant.

“It diminishes the prominence of white supremacy relative to other domestic violent extremism, and, without being inaccurate, puts it in a basket along with other violent activity that may be more palatable for the administration to acknowledge,” he said.

The drafts explicitly name white supremacist groups as both the most common and the most lethal domestic terrorism threat in the US right now, noting that 2019 was the deadliest year for DVEs, what the drafts call "domestic violent extremists", since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

One of the big reasons why both Kirstjen Nielsen and Kevin McAleenan both were booted from DHS is that they actually listened to intelligence on white supremacist terrorist groups.

And Trump didn't like it, so out they went.  Chad Wolf on the other hand is playing ball, telling Tucker Carlson that Black Lives Matter "leaders" are soon to be rounded up by the Barr "Justice" Department.

White supremacists?  Hell, they are the Justice Department.

The Return Of The Revenge Of The Son Of Shutdown Countdown, Again

Government shutdown happens on September 30, and even in a Presidential election year, the Trump regime may still be incompetent enough to hand Joe Biden a guaranteed victory.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have tentatively agreed to use a short-term spending bill to avoid a government shutdown at the end of September, according to Capitol Hill aides.

The agreement on government funding comes even as the White House and top Democratic officials have been unable to reach a compromise on a new Covid relief package. Pelosi and Mnuchin spoke for more than 30 minutes earlier this week but remain hundreds of billions of dollars apart on additional stimulus efforts to help the slumping U.S. economy.

Yet separating the issue of government funding from coronavirus relief talks removes at least one nightmare scenario from the political landscape two months before Election Day — a stalemate on more economic stimulus coupled with federal agencies shut down and vital services halted in the middle of a pandemic.

“House Democrats are for a clean continuing resolution," Drew Hammill, deputy chief of staff for Pelosi, said in a statement.

Mnuchin may be confident, but I smell trouble in the Senate.

There is no consensus for how long the stopgap would extend government funding past Sept. 30, Hill aides said. House and Senate Democratic leaders haven't formally discussed the issue yet, although a mid-December deadline would be the traditional practice during an election year.

The Senate returns to session next week, while the House is not back from its summer recess until midmonth. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other top Senate Republicans are trying to gather support for a narrow coronavirus relief package that can get at least 51 GOP votes. Democrats will oppose the plan, so it's unlikely to get the 60 votes needed to advance.

The new Senate Republican proposal — costing as much as $1 trillion — is expected to include $300 in weekly federal unemployment benefits through the end of December, another round of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses, $105 billion for education, and liability protections for companies, schools and health care providers amid the pandemic, according to a draft proposal. The bill would also provide billions to the U.S. Postal Service by converting an existing loan into a grant. The House has passed legislation calling for $25 billion in new funding for the Postal Service, but the White House has supported only $10 billion.

This territory is ripe for a Rand Paul special, or maybe even a Lindsey Graham special if the polls are any indication.  I just don't see a continuing resolution pass without something going wrong thanks to the Senate GOP, Mitch's election and Trump's both be damned.

And hey, Trump could just blow everything up himself.

Might want to pull up a chair for this one.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump continues to be caught in situations where the controversial and awful things that he has done are actually indicators of far worse behavior in private, and the leaks are starting to become a flood.

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.

Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice has interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

There was no precedent in American politics for the expression of this sort of contempt, but the performatively patriotic Trump did no damage to his candidacy by attacking McCain in this manner. Nor did he set his campaign back by attacking the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral. (These sources, and others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. The White House did not return earlier calls for comment, but Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, emailed me this statement shortly after this story was posted: “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in fact.”)

Except of course that Trump's seething hatred for John McCain was very public and caught on camera. He feels the same way about our military today. The injured and the dead? Nobody "wants to see that" Trump said.

Never forget that Trump divides the world into two groups: people who praise him, and losers.

Dead veterans can't praise Trump, so they are losers.

Class dismissed.

StupidiNews!

• US Marshals have killed the suspect wanted in the Portland shooting death of a right-wing Trump supporter last week after the suspect admitted to the crime in a VICE interview Thursday.
• Donald Trump campaigned on the rising stock markets at a rally in Pennsylvania as the Dow plunged 800 points Thursday on fears of more COVID-19 related weakness in the economy.
• Indiana University at Bloomington is reporting an "alarming" spike in new COVID-19 cases in sorority and fraternity houses, with the infection rate in some Greek houses exceeding 50%.
• Russia is accusing Germany of hiding medical information as a Berlin hospital continues to care for comatose Russian opposition leader Alexy Navalny, flown to Germany after collapsing from poison.
• Attorney General Bill Barr wants an antitrust case against Google filed this month, Dems are accusing Barr of pressuring attorneys who say they need more time to build the case.