labourlist--2019-10-14--“Nothing more than fool’s gold” – Corbyn on the Queen’s Speech

Below is the full text of Jeremy Corbyn’s response to the Queen’s Speech.  Mr Speaker, this year marks the anniversary the 70th anniversary of the 1949 Parliament Act, which asserted the primacy of this House over the House of Lords. And in this anniversary year the House has acquitted itself well in proving its worth. It is also the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Representation of the People Act, which extended the vote for anyone over the age of 18 years.  As we meet today, we should commit to strengthening our democracy and the vital role of this democratic House in holding to account the Executive. By tradition, at the beginning of each parliamentary session we commemorate the Members of the House we have lost in the last year.  Earlier this year we lost Paul Flynn – a fiercely independent, passionate, kind and principled member. I remember him reading out in this House the names of those who died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars which he had opposed. He briefly served in my Shadow Cabinet, and I think the whole House was enlivened by his performances.  He joked that he was there as part of a job creation scheme for octogenerians. He wasn’t. He was there because he was an excellent orator, campaigner and member of this House, as well as being an excellent representative of the people of Newport West, the constituency he served for 32 years.  Mr Speaker, today’s proposer and seconder of the Loyal Address share a route into this place: both were local councillors prior to entering this House. And I pay tribute all those who put themselves forward to represent local communities as councillors, because without them our local democracy would be worse off.  I was a little surprised to see that the Honourable member for North East Derbyshire had been asked by the Prime Minister to propose the motion today, given they’ve not always enjoyed the best of relationships.  As we know, the Prime Minister has earned a reputation for enjoying life to the fullest. During his time as London Mayor I understand he became incandescent on learning that the Honourable Member – at that time a Westminster councillor – intended introducing a ‘night-life tax’.  Thankfully, he was able to reassure the Prime Minister that the night-life tax only applied to car parking charges, and not other activities. Although on reflection, he may well have missed a revenue earning opportunity.  I suspect it’s no coincidence the Honourable Member for North East Derbyshire has shown great independence of thought as a politician as he grew up in Chesterfield during the 1980s – a cradle of political dissent.  Today, the Honourable member is again in danger of finding himself upbraided by the Prime Minister. This time as a member of the “nose-ringed, uncooperative crusties”. Indeed, he took his fight against fracking into the lion’s den at the 2018 Tory Party conference and predicted that his party’s support for fracking could see them lose seats.  My late friend Tony Benn – the Honourable Member’s MP growing up – called one of his last diaries ‘Dare to be a Daniel’. I hope the Honourable Member continues to dare.  Researching today’s seconder – the Honourable Member for Truro and Falmouth – I believe I have uncovered a secret Conservative project originating in Merton in the 1980s that led directly to Downing Street three decades later.  Chief of “the Wimbledon Set”, as they became known, was the Right Honourable Member for Maidenhead. By her side stood her loyal lieutenants, the Honourable Members for Wimbledon, for Basingstoke, and of course for Truro and Falmouth.  Today those who are part of the Wimbledon Set are described as competent and professional, which begs the question – how did the Right Honourable Member for Epsom and Ewell sneak into the Wimbledon Set?  Mr Speaker, the House may not know this, but in 2013 the Honourable Member and I found ourselves in political agreement. I was happy to support her EDM to mark the anniversary of the death Emily Davidson and I think it’s worth the House hearing some of EDM 164:  Mr Speaker, while I may be dubious of the company she keeps, the Honourable Member for Truro and Falmouth is more than deserving of the honour of seconding today’s loyal address.  Mr Speaker, there has never been such a farce as a government with a majority of minus 45 and a 100% record of defeat in the Commons setting out a legislative agenda they know cannot be delivered in this parliament.  So Mr Speaker, we may only be just weeks away from the first Queen’s Speech of a Labour government. And in that Queen’s Speech Labour will put forward the most radical and people-focused programme in modern times, a once-in-a-generation chance to rebuild and transform our country. It will let the people decide on Brexit, build an economy that works for all, rebuild public services that support everyone, tackle the climate emergency and reset our global role to one based on peace and human rights.  Mr Speaker, this government has had three and a half years to get Brexit done and they’ve failed. The only legitimate way to sort Brexit now is to let the people decide with the final say. To pass this House, any deal needs to meet the needs of workers and businesses. That means including a new customs union, a close single market relationship and guarantees of workers’ rights, consumer standards and environmental protections.  A Withdrawal Agreement Bill was announced, but we don’t yet know if the government has done a deal. What we are sure of is that this House has legislated against crashing out with No Deal and that the Prime Minister must comply with the law if a deal does not pass this House.  The Queen’s Speech talked about the opportunities that arise from Brexit, but the government’s own figures suggest a Free Trade Agreement approach would cause a near 7% hit to the economy while a no deal crash out would cause a 10% hit. Those seem like opportunities we could live without.  Mr Speaker, for many people the economy is fundamentally weak. Since 2010, there are more workers in poverty, more children in poverty, more pensioners in poverty. There are more families without a home to call their own and more people sleeping rough on our streets. Fewer people can afford to own their own home and wages are still lower than a decade ago. Productivity is falling and the economy contracted last month. At the weekend I was in Hastings where last year food banks distributed 87,453 meals and one in 7 people live in fuel poverty.  There was nothing in this Queen’s Speech to address our stagnant economy. Nothing to address low pay and insecure work. Nothing to reverse rising levels of child poverty or pensioner poverty. So will the Prime Minister match Labour’s commitments to: scrap the benefit freeze, end the benefit cap, ditch the bedroom tax, scrap the two-child limit and the rape clause and end punitive sanctions?  While we welcome the legislation to ensure employers pass on tips to their workers – something the Labour and trade union movement has long campaigned for – the government must go further and I would urge them to listen to the package of measures set out by my hon friend for North West Durham at the TUC this year.  This speech was supposed to herald an end to austerity and a new vision. Instead, it barely begins to unpick the devastating cuts to public services. The NHS suffered the longest funding squeeze in its history, while life expectancy falls and infant mortality rises. Schools have had their budget cuts, class sizes have risen and headteachers are sending begging letters to parents. Police have lost over 20,000 officers while violent crime soars. NHS England has made clear that core treatment targets cannot be met with the funding settlement offered by the government. They cannot be trusted with the NHS.  The government’s refusal to guarantee key standards lets down the 4.4 million patients on the waiting lists, all those waiting longer and longer in A&Es and the nearly 34,000 patients who waited over 62 days for cancer treatment last year.  With 40,000 nurse vacancies this is an urgent need to restore the nurse bursary. But if he really wants to defend the NHS he needs to end privatisation so that our NHS is focused on making people better, not people on the make.  A universal service free at the point of use. We don’t want just tinkering around the edges. We want to bin the Health and Social Care Act and truly end privatisation in our NHS. Will he support Labour’s plan to provide free prescriptions to people in England as has been done in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland? And will he back Labour’s commitment to legislate for safe staffing levels in hospitals?  In the last Queen’s Speech, in 2017, it stated “my government will reform mental health legislation and ensure that mental health is prioritised in the National Health Service in England”. Two years on, all we have are the same warm words.  It is a similar story on social care. The 2017 Queen’s Speech promised “my ministers will work to improve social care and will bring forward proposals.” Today we have the same promise after two years of inaction and failure, with 87 people dying every day while they wait for social care.  This Queen’s Speech is shockingly weak on education with no commitments on early years, on colleges or universities. The money announced for schools does not restore the funding lost since 2010.  It is all very well promising extra police but the reason we don’t have enough police is because the Government cut 21,000 police and nearly 7,000 Police Community Support Officers. And if the party opposite want to talk about providing police with protections perhaps they can tell the police why they subjected them – and millions of other public sector workers – to cuts in their pay, pensions and terms and conditions.  I know this government doesn’t have a great record of listening to judges but surely they are aware that judges already have the powers to ensure that the most serious offenders serve more than half of their sentence in jail.  Prisons are severely overcrowded and there are 2,500 fewer prison officers in our prisons today than in 2010. The privatisation of the probation service was a shambolic and costly failure. I hope lessons have been learned and we’ll examine closely any proposals on rehabilitating offenders.  I hope that alongside the tougher sentencing the government will also recognise that too many people are in prison on short sentences for non-violent and non-sexual offences. Our society would be better served by them being subject to community sentencing. And what will he do to address the appallingly low conviction rate for rape and other serious sexual offences?  The dog-whistle rhetoric around foreign offenders, Mr Speaker is a rather ugly mask for the fact that by crashing out of the EU this Government risks losing some of the most effective measures in tackling cross-border crime. The European Arrest Warrant, participation in Eurojust and access to numerous databases.  We will study the detail closely of the government’s proposals on rail reform but it is no good simply changing the way in which Train Operating Companies carry on extracting profit from our fragmented railway system.  Only a Labour government will cap fares and ensure the railway is run for passengers not for profit. And there is nothing in this Queen’s Speech to reverse the devastating cuts to local bus services.  Nine in 10 private blocks with Grenfell-style cladding still haven’t had it replaced. Not a single private block has been made safe since under this Prime Minister. Will he confirm today that he will set a hard deadline for all landlords to replace dangerous cladding; toughen sanctions against block owners that won’t do the work; fund the retrofitting of sprinklers in all high-rise social housing blocks; and restore the budget cuts from the fire service?  And perhaps he can set out what measures there are to address this government’s abject failure on housing that has led to more people sleeping on our streets, more families in hostels and temporary accommodation and fewer people able to buy their own home. Labour will end no fault evictions, tackle the leasehold scandal and kick-start the largest council house building programme for a generation.  The introduction of Pension dashboards is welcome, as is the legislation for CDC pension schemes which will help resolve the Royal Mail dispute.  Sadly, Mr Speaker, these proposals do nothing to address the injustice done to women born in the 1950s. And this Queen’s Speech does nothing to guarantee the free TV license for over-75s.  The government handed our Armed Forces a pay cut for seven years – and cuts to council budgets in England have made it far harder to deliver the Armed Forces Covenant – leaving our veterans, our personnel and their families all worse off.  We will not allow this government to stifle democracy by making it harder for people to vote – there was only one instance of voter personation at the last election. 11 million in this country don’t have a passport or driving licence. There are huge risks in such legislation, which will disproportionately affect working class, ethnic minority and young voters.  Freedom of movement has given opportunities to millions of British people to live, work and retire across Europe. And it has benefited our economy immensely, with EU workers playing a key role in sustaining many UK industries and public services.  No responsible member would vote to rip that up, unless there was a proper plan in place. In the shadow of the Windrush scandal, the Settled Status scheme for EU citizens risks another round of wrongful denial of rights and shameful deportations.  The government says they will be at the forefront of solving the most complex international security issues and global challenges, and yet they are playing precisely no role in stopping the horrors unfolding in Kurdish areas of Northern Syria, ending the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen, or standing up for the rights of the Rohingya, the Uighurs, or the people of Palestine, Kashmir, Ecuador or Hong Kong.  They are continuing to cosy up to Donald Trump and sitting idly by as he wrecks the world’s efforts to tackle climate change and nuclear proliferation. The crisis of our age is the climate emergency, as declared by this House in May, but there is no action announced in this Queen’s Speech.  I pay tribute to the climate school strikers and to Extinction Rebellion. Sadly the government hasn’t listened. The Prime Minister derided them as “nose-ringed crusties”, although I note their number included a former Conservative MEP.  So many people are concerned about bad air quality, the failure to invest in renewable energy, the pollution of our rivers and seas, the loss of biodiversity. Only government has the power and resource to tackle the climate emergency but is missing in inaction. It is Labour that will bring forward a Green New Deal to tackle the climate emergency.  Mr Speaker, this legislative programme is a propaganda exercise that cannot disguise that this government has failed on Brexit for over three years. That they are barely beginning to undo the damage of a decade of cuts to our public services. That it does nothing for people struggling to make ends meet, does nothing to make our world a safer place, or tackle the climate emergency.  The Prime Minister promised that this Queen’s Speech would dazzle us – on closer inspection it turns out to be nothing more than fool’s gold.


lewrockwell--2019-11-08--The Imperial Propaganda Machine: Notes From the Edge of the Narrative Matrix

It’s important to avoid fake news, Russian media or conspiracy theorists. We must only trust those reputable news outlets who tell us that neoliberalism is working fine, that US foreign policy is perfectly sane, and that protests are only happening in Hong Kong and nowhere else.  The difference between state media and western media is that in state media the government controls what information the public is given about what’s going on in the world in order to prevent political dissent, whereas in western media this is instead done by billionaires.  Any attempt to understand the world which fails to take into account the fact that extremely powerful people are pouring massive amounts of money and resources into manipulating your understanding of the world will necessarily result in a distorted worldview.  Whenever news media reports unsubstantiated assertions from anonymous sources in government agencies, just mentally insert “Here is something the government told us to tell you:” into the beginning of the report, because that’s all they’re doing.  Russia and China haven’t become any more of a threat to you than they were three years ago, yet you think about them many times more often than you did back then. That’s propaganda at work, FYI. Woke: A Field Guide Fo... Caitlin Johnstone Best Price: $22.98 Buy New $23.56  All the establishment loyalists you argue with are ever really saying is, “No! The TV would NEVER lie to me!”  Sometimes all I can do is stare in awe at the power and efficiency of the imperial propaganda machine. When I first started this gig in 2016 Assange had way more support, from Berners, Greens, Trumpers, all across the spectrum. Now a large amount of that support has been eroded. For Trumpers Assange is being extradited for his own good to bring down the Deep State. For liberals he’s a Russian asset. For leftists he’s a rapist and fascist enabler. There’s a narrative for everyone, no matter where you are on the political spectrum. It’s really impressive.  I love alternative media, but we’re fucking idiots sometimes. You never see MSM doing our job for us, but we do their job for them all the time by attacking other alternative media figures, circulating CIA/CNN narratives about targeted nations and targeted individuals, etc. The only reason to ever do mainstream media’s work for them is if you’re looking for a job in MSM. If you actually want to participate in alternative media it’s your job to make things harder for establishment narrative managers, not easier. They get paid enough to do their own work.  Dominant power structures are corrupt beyond the possibility of salvation and humanity is driving itself toward miriad cataclysmic disasters all at once, yet many are more worried about those who share their basic ideology but have slightly different opinions. This is stupid.  There’s no separation between the personal struggle to free yourself from untruth and the collective struggle to free the world from untruth, in the same way there’s no separation between an antibody attacking an individual pathogen and the entire body recovering from a sickness.  Anyone who wants Silicon Valley oligarchs to censor the flow of information in any way is a drooling idiot.  MSM’s official position appears to be that there is no ideological difference whatsoever between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, other than the fact that you have permission to elect Warren but not Sanders. Apart from that, though, they’re exactly the same.  There’s a difference between Democrats and Republicans, in the sense that there’s a difference between the jab and the cross in boxing. The jab is often used to set up the more damaging cross, but they’re both wielded by the same boxer, and they’re both punching you in the face.  The “feud” between mainstream Republican pundits and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fits perfectly within the Overton window of establishment-approved debate, and can therefore be safely ignored.  Remember when voters in 2016 were like “can we please have even one major candidate who doesn’t have something seriously wrong with them?”, and the entire US political system was all “LOL nope,” and then nobody burned that system to the ground and flushed it down the toilet? Good times.  War is the worst thing in the world. It’s worse than economic injustice. It’s worse than the war on drugs. It’s worse than racism, xenophobia, homophobia and sexism. Those things are bad. War is worse. The priorities of leftists and progressives should reflect this, as should the priorities of anyone who claims to care about their fellow humans.  Trump: I am ending wars!   Neocons/liberal hawks: Oh no it sure is bad and horrible that this isolationist president is ending all the wars!   Wars: [continue completely unabated]  Imagine someone coming up to you with a money jar saying “Excuse me, we’re raising funds to build another military base in Somalia, would you care to make a donation?” No one would ever knowingly put money toward such an endeavor. Yet taxpayers do this unwittingly all the time.  Nobody comes out of the womb demanding to go to war. Left unmolested it would never occur to a normal human brain that strangers on the other side of the planet need to have explosives dropped on them by overpriced airplanes. The problem isn’t democracy, it’s propaganda.  Back when the wealthy had less wealth and ordinary citizens could support a family on a single income, the rich had a concept called “noblesse oblige” meaning their status came with obligations to society. Now the wealth gap is much greater, and the rich feel no obligation to anyone.  Less contempt for imaginary “Putin apologists”, more contempt for actual billionaire apologists. No Place to Hide: Edwa... Glenn Greenwald Best Price: $2.00 Buy New $6.78  The narrative that Gabbard is preparing a third party run is revealing, in that there’s zero evidence for it whatsoever yet they keep bringing it up. It’s literally just something pundits started saying in an authoritative tone of voice, and it was magically transformed into accepted orthodoxy. It’s a great illustration of how effective the establishment narrative managers are; they can create the illusion of a fact out of thin air just by saying something over and over again in an assertive tone.  Here’s a crazy thought: If “the troops” are constantly feeling the need to commit suicide after doing what they’ve been ordered to do while deployed, maybe what they’re doing over there isn’t so great and noble after all.  It sure is cute how we’ve known for years that the US and its allies armed actual, literal terrorists in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, yet the only Syria controversy we’re ever allowed to acknowledge is whether there are an adequate number of US troops there.  I’m still tripping on how we’ve been fed all these wildly different narratives about why the US needs a military presence in Syria, from humanitarianism to Kurds to ISIS to Iran to Russia to chemical weapons to oil, yet this isn’t immediately extremely suspicious to everyone. I mean, if some guy was constantly calling me up and giving me a whole range of wildly different reasons why he needs my bank account number, I’d immediately assume that what he actually wants is my bank account number, you know?  So many of spiritual-type people’s highest values would work fine in a world without sociopaths. Forgiveness, humility, trust, seeing people’s basic innocence, etc, they work fine until you run into a manipulator with no empathy. In this world they require much more nuanced use.  Things are getting stranger and stranger. Things getting stranger and stranger is what it looks like when long-fixed patterns begin to dissolve. For a species that has been on a trajectory toward self-destruction, patterns dissolving can only be a good thing. We’ll win this.  Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.


mcclatchydc--2019-12-10--Congress holds first hearing on Haiti in 20 years amid political instability

Minutes after House Democrats announced articles of impeachment on President Donald Trump on Tuesday, Rep. Frederica Wilson entered a meeting room in Washington and asked a group of Haitian activists about efforts to impeach their embattled president, Jovenel Moïse.  “We live in the United States and we have corruption ... right in our White House just like you have corruption with your president,” said Wilson, D-Miami Gardens. “What has happened to the impeachment process in Haiti?”  Emmanuela Douyon, an economist and activist with Petrochallenger and Nou Pap Dòmi anti-corruption grassroots movement, laid out a scenario that makes the allegations against Trump look minuscule in comparison.  “They voted against [impeachment],” Douyon said of the Lower House of Deputies in the Haitian Parliament that is controlled by the executive. “Parliament members received money for their vote. There is a corrupt Parliament where the majority allies with the president and they are taking money from the president and their party to vote when he needed their support.”  This was the same legislative body that jettisoned the prime minister in March, leaving Haiti without a legitimate government since.  The House Foreign Affairs Committee held its first hearing on Haiti in 20 years amid ongoing political instability and widespread anti-government protests calling for Moïse to step down. Wilson, who is not a member of the committee but represents one of the largest Haitian communities in the United States, said she pressured the committee to hold the hearing.  “We have basically put Haiti on the back burner for too long,” Wilson said. “There’s apathy in the United States, there’s apathy in Haiti. Now, we have to put Haiti in the conversation of this committee. I am the genesis of this committee hearing because I said you got to have a hearing on Haiti.”  Wilson also organized a roundtable on Haiti with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in October, where prominent Haitian-American leaders said the U.S. should stop meddling in Haiti and Moïse should go.  While subcommittee hearings in Congress usually draw one or two lawmakers, Tuesday’s hearing was attended by three Republicans and 11 Democrats. Four Democrats, Reps. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Wilson attended the hearing and asked questions even though they are not members of the Foreign Affairs Committee, which is rare.  The lawmakers searched for a solution to the crisis, which deepened after last year’s ill-timed fuel hike in July, and in mid-September led to a countrywide lockdown that lasted for 12 weeks. Schools, businesses, banks and the court system were all shuttered. Businesses went bankrupt, and a hunger crisis ensued with roads still closed in some parts of the country.  Waters, in particular, harshly criticized U.S. policy toward Haiti, arguing that Moïse is among a list of current and past government officials implicated in a corruption report on how $2 billion in savings from Venezuela’s Petrocaribe oil program was stolen, instead of invested to help the country’s poor after the devastating 2010 earthquake.  The U.S., she said, “is holding up” Moïse’s government.  “Our position in supporting this president is not a good position,” Waters said. “It is a failed position.”  The five witnesses and audience, which included dozens of Haitian activists, agreed.  There also was no representative of the Haitian government there to defend Moïse, who has dismissed corruption allegations and repeatedly said he is not resigning. Moïse has proposed the creation of a unity government but the opposition has rejected all calls to dialogue and negotiate on the formation of a new government.  Pierre Esperance, the executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Network, said Moïse uses armed gangs to combat political dissent. Esperance said the government’s actions have led to the deaths of 187 protesters since July 2018, with 42 of them shot execution-style. Additionally, 44 police officers and two journalists were killed this year.  “These armed gangs bolster the political interests of their protectors by attacking the population, especially in neighborhoods known as strongholds of political opposition that support anti-government demonstrations,” Esperance said. “Armed gangs, with the protection of government authorities, have carried out five massacres over the course of President Moïse’s administration.”  One of those massacres happened in the La Saline neighborhood in November 2018. Several members of Congress wanted to know if anyone, including two individuals appointed to their posts by Moïse, had been prosecuted. None has, Esperance answered.  He also told committee members, when asked about perceptions of the U.S. in Haiti, that the embassy had until earlier this year given unconditional support to Moïse, and most recently had used pressure tactics against government opponents by canceling some of their visas.  Esperance said the U.S. and other international actors need to give resources to bolster Haiti’s police force and judiciary to strengthen the rule of law. He said international efforts that focus exclusively on administering elections or giving out food won’t help Haiti in the long run, a critique of U.S. foreign aid efforts in the country.  “This obsession with the electoral process, one man, one vote elections, has created a cottage industry of bogus parties that come up and that attract not the most civic-minded people to come and run,” said Leonie Hermantin, a Haitian American community activist who splits her time between Miami and Port-au-Prince. “The idea that you have elections and that is proof democracy is healthy in Haiti, is not really accurate.”  Daniel Erikson, a former special adviser for Latin America under Vice President Joe Biden, said the State Department should form a comprehensive strategy for helping Haiti get out of its current crisis, which also includes a deepening economic malaise, by working with international partners like Canada, the European Union and the Organization of American States.  “If the U.S. does not lead, no one else will step up to take our place,” Erickson said. “I believe the time is right to choose new approaches. As we turn to 2020...Haiti must be a more central role on the U.S. foreign policy agenda.”  Erikson also said the U.S. should ensure that any foreign aid does not end up in the hands of Haiti’s newly remounted army or paramilitary groups and that Temporary Protected Status, a program that allows Haitians in the U.S. to temporarily live and work without the potential for deportation, should be extended past its 2021 end date.  “What Haiti really needs is a functioning Haitian national police and judicial system,” Erikson said.  He and all of the other speakers agreed that the solution is not the return of the United Nations’ blue-helmet peacekeeping force that recently ended its mission after 15 years.  Officials from the State Department and USAID were not present at Tuesday’s hearing, and Wilson said she wants more hearings where Trump administration officials can explain how they plan to get international cooperation for stabilizing Haiti.  “We need to get the State Department here so they can get international buy-in to what’s happening in Haiti,” Wilson said. “We can no longer pretend that Haiti does not exist and that Haiti is not in crisis. Haiti is in crisis. Haiti is just a couple of hundred miles from the U.S. border, specifically Florida.”

By Alex Daugherty

adaugherty@mcclatchydc.com


mercurynews--2019-01-16--An 87-year-olds obituary said Trump hastened her death A local paper wouldnt run it

An 87-year-old’s obituary said Trump ‘hastened’ her death. A local paper wouldn’t run it.

**By Meagan Flynn | The Washington Post**  Frances Irene Finley Williams felt the same way about dress codes at funerals as she felt about politics: strongly.  So when she died just before Thanksgiving at the age of 87, her family thought they would make politics a part of her obituary too. It was only natural, said her daughter, Cathy Duff. Williams and her 92-year-old husband, Bruce, were the kind of couple who woke up with the Louisville Courier-Journal and USA Today and went to bed switching channels between CNN and the local news. She was a bridge-playing, churchgoing, Elvis Presley- and Willie Nelson-loving political junkie who “did not take gladly to fools,” a “very, very spirited woman” who sometimes said that her frustration about President Donald Trump was killing her – “contributing to her decline,” as Duff put it.  She didn’t seem to be joking, Duff said in an interview with The Washington Post.  So at the end of her mother’s obituary, just after the part about Williams’s passion for making family photo albums, Duff added this sentence: “Her passing was hastened by her continued frustration with the Trump administration.”  “I just felt like, along with everything else that was in there, that was a vital part of her personality and something she expressed with me over the last few months – just like she expressed she felt strongly about a dress code for funerals,” Duffy told The Post. “So I felt it was important to put it in there. We never gave it any more thought than that.”  At least not until the Courier-Journal declined to publish it: They would have to remove the Trump quip, they were told, or their $1,684 obituary wouldn’t run at all. Duff and her brother, Art Williams, were shocked. “We didn’t understand it,” Duff said.  Now, more than two weeks after Williams’ memorial services, the Courier- Journal and Gannett, the paper’s owner, are apologizing following backlash on social media, which circulated after Duff’s brother made their ordeal public earlier this month. It was a “mistake” to refuse to publish the political sentence, Laurie Bolle, the director of sales for Gannett’s West Group, told the Courier-Journal in a column titled, “[Obit blaming Trump for hastening woman’s death should have been published](https://www.courier- journal.com/story/news/local/joseph-gerth/2019/01/15/louisville-woman-blames- trump-for-hastened-death-in-obituary/2551456002/).”  “Mrs. Williams’ obituary should have published as it was presented to our obits team and as requested by the family,” Richard A. Green, the Courier- Journal’s editor, told the columnist. “In this political climate we now find ourselves, partisanship should have no role in deciding what gets included in an obituary that captures a loved one’s life – especially one as amazing as what Mrs. Williams led. I’m certain she is missed greatly by those who loved her. We send the family our deepest condolences and apologies.”  Duff said she first learned their obit was rejected when she got a phone call from her brother on Dec. 24. The Cremation Society of Kentucky, which had been handling Williams’s obit, had received an email from a Gannett employee out of Wisconsin, who said the obit had been rejected because it contained “negative content.”  “Per our policy, we are not able to publish the obituary as is due to the negative content within the obituary text,” said the email, which was provided to The Post. “You are more than welcome to remove the negative content so we may move forward with publishing if you wish.”  Duff said she and her brother were too busy grieving and preparing for the services ― at which no one wore jeans or tennis shoes, as Williams requested – to argue about the Trump line. And so they simply agreed to remove it. On Jan. 5, however, they decided to make their displeasure known publicly. Art Williams wrote on Facebook:  “I was, and still am, dumbfounded, surprised, but most of all disappointed and aghast that a once historically courageous American newspaper that exists by reason of freedom of speech would so trivially move to abate the free speech that it seems, when convenient, to hypocritically champion. And over a relatively innocuous sentence. … My mom would have been offended.”  The comments on Duff and Williams’s Facebook pages poured in.  “That’s disgraceful!” one woman wrote. “[Courier-Journal] decision makers should be ashamed and take a long leave of absence to discern what their jobs really are. Have we left the truth in the gutter completely?”  “I am surprised they wouldn’t run that,” another woman said. “People who knew her would have understood and probably gotten a kick out of seeing it.”  Williams said in another post Jan. 13 that he and his father were waiting for an apology.  Duff said it came Tuesday. She said Green called her father, Bruce, to apologize and inform him that the Courier-Journal would run the obituary in full. Green could not be immediately reached late Tuesday to confirm.  It’s far from the first time that obituaries have become a vessel for political dissent.  Obituaries invoking Trump or, alternatively, Hillary Clinton, particularly blossomed during the 2016 presidential campaign, as the dead implored the living to vote for their favored candidates.  “Jeffrey would ask that in lieu of flowers, please do not vote for Donald Trump,” the chiropractor Jeffrey Cohen’s obituary read in the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette.  “His only regret is NOT being able to vote against Hillary Clinton in the next presidential election,” said one for E. Karl Kmentt in the Akron Beacon Journal.  Others, according to their family, just said forget it.  “Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the age of 68,” began Noland’s Richmond Times- Dispatch obit.  Duff said her intent with the line that the Trump administration had “hastened” her mother’s death was not necessarily meant to be funny, but to encapsulate the exasperation her mom truly felt.  Her mother had been suffering from coronary artery disease, and so Duff moved to Louisville a year ago to help her father care for her. During the last year of her life, Duff said, she tried to pick at her mom’s brain to figure out why she seemed much more invested in politics than anyone else she knew. She told her daughter it was perhaps because she grew up in the Great Depression, experiencing and witnessing poverty that she felt could have been prevented, and also because her husband was a World War II veteran. A member of Daughters of the American Revolution, she was in love with the country, Duff said, and so she cared a great deal about who was in charge of it.  “She just always, and consistently, kept saying, why don’t people see what’s going on?” Duff said. “She would shake her head and say, ‘I can’t believe the country has come to this.'”  She would have hated to know about what Duff described as political censorship in her own obituary – but she might have been happy too, Duff said.  “It’s getting people talking about something that was really important to her,” she said.


mercurynews--2019-06-27--Facebooks Zuckerberg company evaluating deepfake video policy

Facebook’s Zuckerberg: company ‘evaluating’ deepfake video policy

SAN FRANCISCO  — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company is evaluating how it should handle “deepfake” videos created with artificial intelligence and high-tech tools to yield false but realistic clips.  In an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said it might make sense to treat such videos differently from other misinformation such as false news. Facebook has long held that it should not decide what is and isn’t true, leaving such calls instead to outside fact- checkers.  But Zuckerberg says it’s worth asking whether deepfakes are a “completely different category” from regular false statements. He says developing a policy on these videos is “really important” as AI technology grows more sophisticated.  Facebook, like other social media companies, does not have a specific policy against deepfakes, whose potential threat has emerged only in the last couple of years. Company executives have said in the past that it makes sense to look at them under the broader umbrella of false or misleading information. But Zuckerberg is signaling that this view might be changing, leaving open the possibility that Facebook might ban deepfakes altogether.  Doing so, of course, could get complicated. Satire, art and political dissent could be swept up in any overly broad ban, creating more headaches from Facebook.  Other false videos could still get a pass. For instance, the recent altered video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that made her sound like she was slurring her words does not meet the definition of a deepfake.


mintpressnews--2019-04-17--CIA Docs Shows UK France and West Germany Wanted to Bring Operation Condor To Europe

CIA Docs Shows UK, France and West Germany Wanted to Bring “Operation Condor” To Europe

SANTIAGO, CHILE — A recently declassified CIA document has revealed that members of the intelligence agencies of France, the United Kingdom and West Germany discussed how to establish “an anti-subversive organization similar to [the CIA’s Operation] Condor” in their own countries. Described by the CIA as “a cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion,” Operation Condor was a campaign of state terrorism originally planned by the CIA that targeted leftists, suspected leftists and their “sympathizers” and resulted in the forced disappearances, torture and brutal murders of an estimated 60,000 people, as well as the political imprisonment of around half a million people. Around half of the estimated murders occurred in Argentina.  The document, released last Friday as part of a release of newly declassified U.S. government documents related to the U.S.-backed military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, states that:  The representatives from the three countries then stated that they felt that pooling “their intelligence resources in a cooperative organization such as Condor” would be an important way of combating the “subversive threat.” Notably, England at the time was already involved in an international “intelligence sharing” program known as ECHELON, a program between the “Five Eyes” intelligence pact between the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand that continues in a different form today.  The document, which was written in 1978, came two years after Operation Condor targeted left-wing Latin American exiles living in Europe. Several other documents in the recent release discuss a decision made by Condor member countries in May 1976 to train and send a military unit to “conduct physical attacks” against left-wing Latin American exiles and their supporters in France, in what was codenamed “Teseo.” Several Condor countries, aside from Brazil and Bolivia, were eager to participate and the training of the “Teseo” unit did occur, though the CIA was apparently unaware whether the unit was actually sent to France.  European interest in bringing home a state-sponsored terror campaign may seem shocking, given Europe’s publicly stated concerns at the time regarding Condor member countries’ mind-boggling human rights abuses and state-sponsored murders. But it will hardly surprise those who have studied Operation Condor, as the operation itself was a Western invention that was imposed on Latin America through a series of military coups, which again were backed by Western governments.  Operation Condor officially began in 1975, though CIA documents in this recent release suggest that the inter-country intelligence-sharing aspect had likely begun a year earlier in 1974. The countries involved — Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Bolivia — were all backed and supported by the U.S., which was also incidentally the largest weapons dealer to these government over this same time frame. During the latter portion of Operation Condor, one of the recently declassified documents claims that Israel took over key roles played by the U.S. in Operation Condor, including the “training of local personnel and sales of certain types of advanced military equipment,” despite the many innocent Jews murdered by several of the Condor dictatorships.  Several of the Condor countries had seen their military dictatorships installed with U.S. government involvement, as was the case in Chile and Brazil, with the U.S. government suspected in other coups that preceded Operation Condor by only a few years, such as the 1971 coup in Bolivia and the 1973 coup in Uruguay. After the 1976 coup in Argentina — Argentina’s sixth and final coup of the 20th century — it too joined Operation Condor.  The U.S. provided planning, training, funding and arms for Operation Condor, and European nations also provided a significant number of weapons. France — one of the countries interested in creating a Condor-style program for Europe — was noted in one of the recently declassified documents for its “excellent prospects for sales of jet aircraft and air defense systems” to Condor dictatorships; while West Germany, another country interested in a European Condor, “should be able to market missiles, ground force equipment and submarines.”  U.S. and European intelligence agencies were well aware of what Condor dictatorships were doing with those weapons, as indicated by past and recent document releases that detail horrific descriptions of the torture and murder of those suspected of being left-wing and those suspected of sympathizing with the left, as well as those who opposed the neoliberal economic policies imposed by all of the U.S.-backed Condor dictatorships.  Some of the more infamous tactics used by Condor nations had also been inspired by past European and U.S. war crimes. This includes the “death flights,” where victims were drugged, bound and placed in plastic body bags, and/or had their stomachs cut open before being thrown out of a plane or helicopter over the ocean. This tactic was said to have been inspired by the actions of French armed forces during the Algerian war and, according to the 2003 documentary The Death Squads: The French School, French intelligence had taught these and other methods to Argentine military officials during the dictatorship.  Notably, much of the recent coverage of Operation Condor and the CIA releases has sought to whitewash the program’s horrific legacy, with The Guardian describing Operation Condor as “a secret programme in which the dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador conspired to kidnap and assassinate members of leftwing guerrilla groups in each other’s territories.” This, of course, implies that those targeted were guerilla members and thus combatants.  However, many — and one could convincingly argue the majority — of those killed, tortured and imprisoned were not members of guerilla groups, as there are thousands of documented cases of college students, musicians, writers, journalists, priests and nuns, pregnant women, teachers, indigenous leaders, union members and others who were subject to the extreme prejudice of Operation Condor despite not being combatants in any capacity. The Guardian also dramatically downplayed the program’s death toll, claiming that “the conspiracy led to the deaths of at least 100 people in Argentina,” while the actual figure is around 30,000. The Guardian also failed to mention the intimate role of the U.S. and other Western nations in facilitating and arming the program.  Such poor reporting is offensive to those who lost their lives and to their families, many of which have never stopped looking for their lost loved ones. Many of those families, such as Argentina’s “Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo,” have spent the last several decades looking for the estimated 500 children and babies separated from their disappeared and murdered parents and given to dictatorship-supporting families.  In a clear testament to how the effects of Operation Condor are still felt today, one of those babies — now over 40 years old — was identified on April 9 and is set to be reunited with her father, who survived the dictatorship and has spent the last several decades looking for his lost daughter. The mother was kidnapped while pregnant, allowed to give birth to the baby and killed immediately afterwards.  The very idea that European countries wanted to bring such a horrific terror campaign to their continent to target “subversives” should serve as a cautionary tale to Europeans who trust their government’s professed interest in promoting democracy and human rights, all while exporting terror overseas.  Top photo | Former Argentina’s president Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla, left, talks with Paraguay’s dictator Gen. Alfredo Stroessner. Videla, led the military dictatorship and the so-called Dirty War against political dissents between1976-83, more than 12,000 people died or disappeared, the vast majority have never been found or identified. Eduardo Di Baia | AP  Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.


mintpressnews--2019-10-09--Strip Searches and Worse: Heba al-Labadi Among Palestinians Tortured in Israeli Prisons

On August 20, Heba Ahmed al-Labadi fell into the dark hole of the Israeli legal system, joining 413 Palestinian prisoners who are currently held in so-called administrative detention.  On September 26, Heba and seven other prisoners declared a hunger strike to protest their unlawful detention and horrific conditions in Israeli prisons. Among the prisoners is Ahmed Ghannam, 42, from the village of Dura, near Hebron, who launched his hunger strike on July 14.  Administrative detention is Israel’s go-to legal proceeding when it simply wants to mute the voices of Palestinian political activists, but lacks any concrete evidence that can be presented in an open, military court.                 Not that Israel’s military courts are an example of fairness and transparency. Indeed, when it comes to Palestinians, the entire Israeli judicial system is skewed. But administrative detention is a whole new level of injustice.  The current practice of administrative detention dates back to the 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations issued by the colonial British authorities in Palestine to quell Palestinian political dissent. Israel amended the regulations in 1979, renaming them to the Israeli Law on Authority in States of Emergency. The revised law was used to indefinitely incarcerate thousands of Palestinian political activists during the Palestinian Uprising of 1987. On any given day, there are hundreds of Palestinians who are held under the unlawful practice.  The procedure denies the detainees any due process and fails to produce an iota of evidence to as why the prisoner – who is often subjected to severe and relentless torture – is being held in the first place.  Heba, a Jordanian citizen, was detained at the al-Karameh crossing (Allenby Bridge) on her way from Jordan to the West Bank to attend a wedding in the Palestinian city of Nablus.  According to the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network Samidoun, Heba was first held at the Israeli intelligence detention center in Petah Tikva, where she was physically abused and tortured.  Torture in Israel was permissible for many years. In 1999, the Israeli Supreme Court banned torture. However, in 2019, the court explicitly clarified that “interrogational torture is lawful in certain circumstances in Israel’s legal system”. Either way, little has changed in practice before or after the Israeli court’s “clarification”.  Of the dozens of Palestinian and Arab prisoners I interviewed in recent months for a soon-to-be-published volume on the history of the Palestinian prison experience, every single one of them underwent a prolonged process of torture during the initial interrogation, that often extended for months. If their experiences differed, it was only in the extent and duration of the torture. This applies to administrative detainees as much as it applies to so-called “security prisoners”.  Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Bis, a Palestinian woman from the Jablaiya refugee camp in Gaza, told me about the years she was held in Israeli jails. “I was tortured for years inside the Ramleh prison’s infamous ‘cell nine’, a torture chamber they designated for people like me,” she said.  Heba is now lost in that very system, one that has no remorse and faces no accountability, neither in Israel itself nor to international institutions whose duty is to challenge this kind of flagrant violation of humanitarian laws.  While Israel’s mistreatment of all Palestinian prisoners applies equally regardless of faction, ideology or age, the gender of the prisoner matters insofar as the type of torture or humiliation used. Many of the female prisoners I spoke with explained how the type of mistreatment they experienced in Israeli prisons seemed often to involve sexual degradation and abuse. One involves having female prisoners strip naked before Israeli male interrogators and remaining in that position during the entire duration of the torturous interrogation, that may last hours.  Khadija Khweis, from the town of Al-Tour, adjacent to the Old City of Occupied East Jerusalem, was imprisoned by Israel 18 times, for a period ranging from several days to several weeks. She told me that “on the first day of my arrival at the prison, the guards stripped me completely naked”.  Heba and all Palestinian prisoners experience humiliation and abuse on a daily basis. Their stories should not be reduced to an occasional news item or a social media post but should become the raison d’être of all solidarity efforts aimed at exposing Israel, its fraudulent judicial system and kangaroo courts.  The struggle of Palestinian prisoners epitomizes the struggle of all Palestinians. Their imprisonment is a stark representation of the collective imprisonment of the Palestinian people – those living under occupation and apartheid in the West Bank and those under occupation and siege in Gaza.  Israel should be held accountable for all of this. Rights groups and the international community should pressure Israel to release Heba al-Labadi and all of her comrades, unlawfully held in Israeli prisons.  Feature photo | A photo of Heba al-Labadi from her Twitter profile  Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. His last book is ‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’ (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’ (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.


motherjones--2019-03-28--How Q-Anon Hijacked the White House Petition Site to Push the Next Pizzagate

Visitors seeking the most popular entries on the White House’s official online petition site will come across topics that fall within the natural political discourse, like government ethics, abortion, and net neutrality. But it takes just a few clicks to find some startling appeals, including one calling on the president to deploy troops to Los Angeles’s Getty Museum of Art:        “We demand that our Marine Corp be called to OCCUPY THE GETTY, access the elevator to the bunker, and immediately free our children and return them to the surface. Do not allow these monsters to use underground bunkers, under the pretense of ‘continuity of Government’, to rape and eat our children in honor of their Satanic beliefs.”       If the allegation seems like the kind of harebrained theory known to circulate in social media conspiracy circles, that’s because it is. But thanks to a coordinated campaign by followers of the so-called “Q-Anon” movement, a group of conspiracists who analyze anonymous posts from someone claiming to be a high government official calling himself “Q,” it now also appears in the searchable index of the “We The People” petition site hosted by the Trump administration. The site features several other conspiracy-related petitions echoing—and spreading—ideas prominent in Q-Anon, as shared by believers on YouTube groups and on Facebook.  While the Getty petition has only just topped 1,100 signatures, according to metrics from BuzzSumo, the petition itself has ricocheted around social media, receiving over 1,600 likes and shares on Facebook in less than a month. YouTube videos about the petition have over 6,000 cumulative views. This is the ninth time a petition to invade the Getty has been introduced by the same person, and it’s likely, as with the ones that came before, it will fail to meet the threshold of 100,000 signatures that the Obama administration, which launched the site, set to trigger some form of White House. But the social reach of the petition demonstrates the platform’s potential to be weaponized by fringe actors seeking to legitimize their causes by associating them with an official government website. (A Getty museum spokesperson declined to comment on the conspiracy theory, citing “security concerns.”)       It’s not just Q-Anon that uses the site to bolster conspiracy theories. Other popular petitions have called for the White House to intervene in vaccination requirements for children; one, which reached over 70,000 signatures before its voting period expired, promoted Children’s Health Defense, which propagates medically dubious research about the purported health risks of vaccinations. In the fall, the security company New Knowledge issued a report to the Senate intelligence committee revealing that the Internet Research Agency, a Russian disinformation workshop, not only shared but created Whitehouse.gov petitions on topics including gun laws and banning Hillary Clinton from running for president.  Trolling of the White House petition website didn’t begin in the Trump-era. Almost immediately after the project’s 2011 rollout, the platform became a playground for pranksters’ petitions pleading for President Obama to build a Death Star, or designate a Nicolas Cage movie as the official film of the United States. The zaniest, including one demanding the deportation of popstar Justin Bieber, were met with a polite rebuff from the administration. It also emerged as a place to express political dissent; after Obama’s 2012 re-election, the site was filled with calls for secession and birther conspiracy theorists.  According to Travis View, a Q-Anon researcher, the Q movement’s appropriation of White House petitions traces back to an alleged post by “Q” on the online forum 8chan in August of 2018 that shared a link to a petition calling for the federal government to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization.  As reported by Politico, the petition was first posted a year earlier by a “well-known pro-Trump troll” following conflict between Antifa and white supremacists during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. (The same troll made a similar attempt to get Black Lives Matter categorized as a terrorist group in 2016. After the petition topped 100,000 signatures, the Obama White House responded by saying it was not involved in categorizing terrorist groups and couldn’t respond to the request.)  While the Trump administration completely ignored the site for most of his early tenure, after relaunching the platform in early 2018, the administration has responded to a select few petitions, including the one calling for Antifa to be designated as a terrorist group.  View tells Mother Jones that White House petitions are attractive to Q-Anon conspiracy theorists because they fit perfectly into the “slacktivism” the group thinks will bring political change. “This is a sort of an extension of their general political philosophy, which is if they get enough people together they can have an effect on the internet that can bring about real change,” he says. “It’s the same sort of impulse as to why they encourage a particular hashtag.”  The White House did not respond to questions about its use of the platform, whether it was aware of its role in spreading conspiracy theories, or if it plans to respond to a petition with nearly 200,000 signatures demanding George Soros—the liberal philanthropist of Jewish heritage who is a frequent target of online conspiracists—be declared a terrorist.  To Q-Anon believers, there’s another allure to the petition website: the platform’s very existence is taken as proof that purported liberal fears that Trump “is a dictator” are bunk.    Perhaps inevitably, some online conspiracists have launched conspiracies about the site itself. One YouTuber suggested that the government had tampered with a Pizzagate-related petition, reasoning the number of signatures was “much lower” compared to online interest in the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, DC pizzeria.  While conspiracies like those about the Getty might seem bizarre and easily dismissed to many people, they can egg on real-life violence. In 2016, DC police arrested a man who fired a semi-automatic rifle inside of Comet Ping Pong; a subsequent arson attempt took place in January. Last year, Soros was mailed a pipe-bomb by an extremist who was radicalized online.


nationalreview--2019-04-17--Is This Bank Chasing Away Conservatives

Is This Bank Chasing Away Conservatives?

I have been a Chase Bank customer for years. Who knows how much longer it’ll be? Will the company’s thought police come for me next? How about you? If you are a non-leftist who does business with the financial giant owned by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., you need to ask questions and get answers.  On Tuesday, investigative journalist James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas team released a disturbing new video on the runaround that Chase officials gave Texas conservative entrepreneur Enrique Tarrio about his canceled account. Big business may very well be enabling America’s very own version of the Chinese social-credit system in which political dissent is flagged, shunned, punished, and eradicated.  Tarrio is a young, peaceful, Afro-Cuban freethinker and chairman of the Proud Boys organization. In February 2019, the Texas Trump supporter received a letter from Chase Bank informing him that “after careful consideration,” the financial institution could “no longer support” his banking account. The notice followed a hit piece against minorities who support the president by The Daily Beast, a reliable echo chamber for the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center smear machine.  Tarrio was subsequently kicked off Chase’s payment processor, which he used to sell patriotic and pro-Trump T-shirts. Next, he was deplatformed from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Airbnb, FirstData, Square, Stripe, and PayPal before losing his bank accounts. When I asked on Twitter in February why we can’t have just one financial institution that doesn’t cave to social-justice warriors, the official Chase Twitter account tweeted me back:  “Hi Michelle, this article is inaccurate. We did not close his personal account. We do not close accounts based on political affiliation.”  I pointed out that Chase’s letter clearly stated that the company had closed his account. “So if not for political reasons,” I asked, “why, ‘after careful consideration,’ did you close his account?” The social-media manager of Chase’s corporate Twitter account, previously so eager to spill the tea, replied: “For privacy reasons, we can’t say more.”  Thanks to Project Veritas, we now know more. Undercover audio and video exposed how:  Others who received Chase shutdown notices so far in 2019: conservative Rebel Media contributor Martina Markota, anti-sharia and pro-borders investigative journalist Laura Loomer, and U.S. Army combat vet and vocal Trump supporter Joe Biggs. Were Markota’s, Loomer’s, and Biggs’s removals “clerical” errors or unfounded, or were they based on an ideological litmus test disguised as a “moral character” assessment?  How exactly is J.P. Morgan Chase’s $500,000 donation last year to the SPLC left-wing operatives being put to use?  Why did the company embrace a known defamation racket whose stated mission is to “destroy” its political enemies on the right?  What comment does Chase have now that SPLC’s top leaders have been purged amid internal accusations of intolerance and discrimination within the walls of the notorious Poverty Palace?  Does Chase keep tabs on high-profile conservative customers’ political speech on social-media platforms?  Is Chase operating from the same playbook as Paypal, which is booting off conservatives in consultation with the SPLC? One of its most recent victims: Luke Rohlfing, a young reporter for BigLeaguePolitics.com, who had exposed how the payment processor was allowing Open Borders Inc. heavyweight Pueblo Sin Fronteras to raise money for illegal-immigrant caravans conspiring to break our immigration laws — even though Paypal’s own terms of service state clearly that users may not engage in any activities that “violate any law, statute, ordinance, or regulation.”  Tarrio warns of the speech-squelching pattern emerging across Silicon Valley and on Wall Street: “First we get silenced on social media, then Paypal, then I get debanked. It’s a very dangerous trend.”  He is not alone. Former Toronto mayoral candidate and social-media commentator Faith Goldy told me: “To date I’ve been banned from: PayPal, Patreon, GoFundMe, Airbnb, Facebook, and Instagram. I’ve committed no crime! My only fault is loving my country and quoting government statistics to a camera from my kitchen table. The nature of big-tech censorship is imperialistic, and these Silicon Valley nerds won’t stop until every freethinker is snuffed or scared into submission.”  As for Chase Bank, I sent all my questions to chief communications officer Patricia Wexler, who challenged the authenticity of one of the employees recorded by Veritas (O’Keefe showed proof of the Chase New York media relations number dialed and had audio of the employee identifying himself as a Chase rep) and ignored the substance of the report.  Evasion and denial are surefire ways to lose business. Is it Chase Bank or Chase Away Bank? Inquiring customers would like to know.


nationalreview--2019-04-19--Beyonces iHomecomingi Fakes Black Militancy

Beyoncé’s <i>Homecoming</i> Fakes Black Militancy

Julia Hart’s Fast Color gives a clearer — and life-affirming — depiction of contemporary black experience.  Look at Beyoncé on the cover of her new album, Homecoming: Her manicured fingers with rings on the left hand are holding on to her Afrocentric kufi. To keep it from being blown away by the winds of fashion? Or does she simply have a headache? Beyoncé’s latest career move helped me make sense of the movie Fast Color, in which a biracial woman from the Midwest, Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), works through her drug addiction and psychological ordeal and is drawn home to assess her complicated feelings and mysterious, natural gifts.  A government scientist searching to dissect Ruth claims that “this woman can affect the energy of the earth.” Ruth’s superhero characteristics belong to metaphysical sci-fi: She sees colors in the atmosphere and can “rearrange” the sky, turning clouds into aurora borealis–style rainbows. These metaphors for power are comparable to the cultural effect Beyoncé stirs just by releasing new music — and her command of our cultural institutions when she confoundingly gestures toward politics in a Super Bowl tribute to Black Panther militancy or in her Lemonade album’s pandering to the idea of black female agency.  At first, it’s difficult to grasp exactly what writer-director Julia Hart is after in Fast Color’s story of a young, single mother who abandoned her child and wandered through the indifferent world, only to come back and confront her unspecified trauma. Ruth suffers disabling fits that make the space around her quake. (“She can cause tectonic plates to shift that never moved before.”) Hart’s conceit deals with recent female disorientation — some agony or dissatisfaction like what led several young black women to concoct the #MeToo and #BlackGirlMagic movements.  Ruth (whose biblical namesake stood for abiding loyalty and devotion) returns to her drought-stricken birthplace and accepts familial obligation to her steadfast mother Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) and her pre-teen daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney). Each female represents an evolution of black American experience: dark-skinned Bo, light-skinned Ruth, and frizzy-hair beige-fleshed Lila. Their shared special gifts are ominous and perplexing, but as the link between generations, Ruth is key to their self-esteem and survival.  Fast Color’s narrative of a parched world in spiritual crisis works like the extraterrestrial plot of Will Smith’s widely misunderstood After Earth. But when Ruth finds “Germfree Adolescents” on the jukebox in a Midwestern bar, the film’s weirdness finally takes emotional shape — it wells up just like the song’s opening synthesized strains. By bringing lead singer Poly Styrene’s eccentric musical and political wit into Ruth’s already mysterious saga, Hart interprets the millennial black girl’s plight in her own, fresh way — as universal.  In Fast Color, contemporary black experience — now confused by Jordan Peele–Steve McQueen political exploitation — finds clarity through British punk’s more genuine sense of alarm. Hart doesn’t need Peele’s banal cultural connection to N.W.A. when, instead, the band X-Ray Spex cheekily articulates female punk rebellion that is not merely predicated on racial dissent.  Hart’s sociopolitical empathy, her use of these racial archetypes, is ambiguous (Mother Toussaint strikes a few too many noble poses). But her fascination with the depth of family relations comes across musically more than visually. Filmgoers familiar with analog music should recognize that Ruth’s passing cultural heritage on to her daughter is a genuine all-American cultural ritual. This recalls Jeff Nichols’ sci-fi, country-western, family-movie amalgam Midnight Special, but rather than using folk music, Hart reaches out through Ruth’s idiosyncratic record collection. She introduces Lila to Nina Simone’s Silk & Soul, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and X-Ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents album.  X-Ray Spex is a significant choice because the group produced the most hair-raising of all anti-consumerist — not anti-capitalist — pop records, an inspiration for Lesley Woods’s eroticized cultural critique in The Au Pairs. Poly Styrene (born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said to a biracial British family) broke past her day’s postracial clichés. Her background, subtly embodied by Mbatha-Raw’s Ruth, substantiates Hart’s story. This very American drama is also what academics call diasporic.  The song “Germfree Adolescence” is a dreamier-sounding record than most X-Ray Spex (“The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” might have caused audiences to jump out of their seats and dance). This tune, Ruth’s favorite, matches the contemplative quality of Simone’s eschatological “New World Coming” favored by Bo (“You gotta like Nina Simone. That’s a rule”). They are A and B sides expressing Hart’s sci-fi dystopia. Ruth’s playlist (Simone’s ethnic defiance, Hill’s hip-hop-era independence, and British punk) is more than just eclectic; it sketches a sensibility.  Sensibility is what’s missing from Beyoncé’s recent “political” act. That Homecoming portrait evokes Nina Simone’s Afro garb but without the commitment — and without Poly Styrene’s daring. Beyoncé’s affectation is based on a skewed sense of the cultural heritage that one feels in Fast Color — the self-conscious weight of Simone and Paul Robeson as commercially exploitable, “political” race totems. This heritage weighs on Beyoncé’s self-conscious art production like the moment when the heroine of David Lean’s Madeleine holds her head and complains of tension, “The pain makes me stupid.”  Beyoncé’s glamour pose shows an effortful, sullen sensuality, far different from Mbatha-Raw’s troubled innocence. I had described Mbatha-Raw’s American film debut in Larry Crowne as “a Jonathan Demme cupid — transcending politics,” which is also the way Hart casts her in Fast Color. This film’s good intentions and ultimate optimism show a white liberal attempt at empathy whereas Beyoncé fakes Afrocentric militancy as a sales tactic. On Homecoming, her rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing (the Black National Anthem)” is Vogue magazine Negritude. Fast Color’s invocation of X-Ray Spex comes out of the blue, yet it never traps ethnic experience in platitudes. The oddball storyline is a life-affirming alternative to the obtuse Get Out and Us. And after Democratic congressmen assaulted Candace Owens, a black female political dissenter who advocates black independent thinking, at a congressional hearing last week, Ruth’s fear-flight-fate scenario makes Fast Color seem more poli-sci than sci-fi.


nationalreview--2019-12-05--Presidential Misconduct: Some Historical Perspective

If you think Trump’s behavior is the worst in American history, you might be insane.  This week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee trotted out a trio of dispassionate legal experts to explain why the impeachment of Donald Trump was justified. They were there to bring a veneer of gravitas and erudition to what’s been, until now, a highly partisan affair.  But however smart people such as Michael Gerhardt, distinguished professor of constitutional law at University of North Carolina, might be, they aren’t immune from peddling partisan absurdities. Once Gerhardt argued that Trump’s conduct was “worse than the misconduct of any prior president,” we no longer had any intellectual obligation to take him seriously on the topic.  Because while I’m certainly not a distinguished professor, I am very confident that history began before 2016. Which means that, even if I concede Gerhardt’s framing of Trump’s actions — bribery, extortion, etc. — I can rattle off at least a dozen instances of presidential misconduct that are both morally and constitutionally “worse” than Trump’s blundering attempt to launch a self-serving Ukrainian investigation into his rival’s shady son.  Let’s ignore for a moment that American presidents have owned their fellow human beings, and focus instead on the fact that in 1942, the president of the United States signed an executive order that allowed him to unilaterally intern around 120,000 Americans citizens of Japanese descent. Not only was the policy deliberately racist, it amounted to a full-bore attack on about half the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold. Such an attack was a specialty of FDR’s, despite the all the hagiographies written about his imperial presidency.  Woodrow Wilson — who regularly said things like, “a Negro’s place is in the corn field” — didn’t merely re-segregate the civil service, personally firing more than a dozen supervisors for the sin of being black; he first pushed for, and then oversaw the enactment of, the Sedition Act. Wilson threw dissenters and political adversaries into prison, instructed the postmaster to refuse delivery of literature he deemed unpatriotic, and a created an unconstitutional civilian police force that targeted Americans for political dissent.  So, all of what Wilson did was “worse.”  Sorry to say, but despite their great achievements, both John Adams and Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the latter without any congressional approval. Surely, deep down, even those who act as if Russian social-media ads can topple the republic believe that denying citizens their fundamental rights of due process is a more serious offense than President Trump’s rhetoric and actions?  We can go on and on. Andrew Jackson ignored courts and laws and used his power to ethnically cleanse lands that he also sometimes happened to have a financial interest in. Teddy Roosevelt threatened American citizens with military intervention and abused his power in one way or another every day of his presidency. A reckless John Kennedy probably shared a mistress with a leading Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, whom he met in the White House, setting himself up for blackmail or worse.  Nixon may have lost his job after obstructing an investigation into freelance GOP spying on his political opponents, but Lyndon Johnson skipped any pretense, and just asked the FBI and CIA to spy for him. CIA officials, illegally operating inside the United States, spied on the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and brought Johnson information he used to undermine his opponents at every turn. That’s “worse.”  Johnson also lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, escalating the Vietnam War, and then kept lying about the war until he left office. I won’t even bother to catalogue the instance of other presidents misleading the public — either though lies of commission or lies of omission — in their efforts to precipitate or extend military conflicts, costing thousands of American lives. All of this misconduct is in every conceivable way “worse” than Trump’s actions.  Bill Clinton couldn’t go a month without some shady and humiliating scandal.  Now, maybe, Gerhardt doesn’t view incidents that weren’t investigated, prosecuted, or contemporaneously illegal as “misconduct.” That would be unfortunate. But even if so, referring to Trump’s actions as “worse than the misconduct of any prior president” would be terminally ahistorical.  Another Democratic expert, Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, actually drew applause for a canned line about the Constitution’s prohibition on titles of nobility: “While the President can name his son Barron,” she said, “he can’t make him a baron.”  Karlan’s line might have induced only some eye-rolling from me, if I hadn’t known that she was also a Barack Obama donor.  Barack Obama. The same president who ignored Congress and created laws by fiat. The man who ignored laws when they were inconvenient, and then ignored courts that told him to stop doing it. The man who ignored congressional subpoenas after his administration put 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of at least one American. More than once, Obama spied on the press. He ordered law enforcement to back off a terrorist organization that was engaged in criminal behavior in the United States, so that he could make a deal with Iran and bolster his political agenda. More than any modern president, Obama was rebuked by the Supreme Court, often 9–0. To watch a supporter of the previous president — a president who abused his executive power in unprecedented ways — playacting as a Madisonian purist was intolerable.  Of course, to argue, “sure, he’s bad, but, hey, there were worse presidents than Donald Trump!” is a terrible defense. Indeed, it is no defense at all. Impeachment should be decided on the facts of the case, and nothing else besides. But this isn’t a case in favor of Trump; it’s a plea for people to resist the compulsion to say insane things because they dislike this president. There is plenty to criticize without embracing hyperbole or losing all sense of historical perspective.