Mexican feminists torn over prospect of first woman president

"If there isn't a woman who makes the patriarchal system tremble, nothing's going to change,"

Mexico City (AFP) – Mexico appears almost certain to elect its first woman president on June 2 -- a prospect that divides opinion among women's rights activists in a country with a long history of macho culture.


Issued on: 22/05/2024 -

Feminist activist and street artist Flor de Fuego performs on a street in Mexico City 

© CARL DE SOUZA / AFP

Front-runner Claudia Sheinbaum of the ruling party and her main opposition rival Xochitl Galvez have both invoked cracking the glass ceiling in their bids to lead the Latin American nation.

According to an average of polls compiled by the firm Oraculus, Sheinbaum is leading the presidential race with 56 percent of voter support, while Galvez follows with 34 percent.

The only man running, Jorge Alvarez Maynez of the Citizens' Movement party, has just 10 percent.

While Mexican women enjoy growing success in politics and business, life remains bleak for many in a country where around 10 women are murdered every day.

Last year, 852 killings were classified as femicides -- murders of women because of their gender.

'Important changes'

"It's time for women to be recognized," declared Elena Poniatowska, a renowned Mexican journalist and author known for her fervent left-wing views.

French-born Poniatowska, 91, has long supported outgoing leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and is confident that Sheinbaum will win.

Mexican author Elena Poniatowska speaks at her home during an interview with AFP in Mexico City 

© CARL DE SOUZA / AFP

Having a woman in the presidential palace would be a "logical consequence of a country that has been advancing," she told AFP in an interview at her home in Mexico City.

"There are going to be very important changes," said Poniatowska, the winner of the 2013 Cervantes Prize -- considered the most prestigious award in Spanish-language literature.

She expects the next government to do more on cultural issues and policies that benefit children -- and therefore women.

'Low expectations'

In contrast, Sara Lovera, who manages the feminist website SemMexico, said she has "low expectations" for a Sheinbaum presidency.

The former Mexico City mayor often praises Lopez Obrador, who has criticized women's rights activists as "pseudo-feminists."

While abortion was decriminalized and legalized, critics note that it was done by the Supreme Court and not by Lopez Obrador's government.

"We're not going to see any change. We're going to continue losing. Some people think that we have lost 30 years in gender politics," said Lovera.

But "I think we could talk to Xochitl Galvez, even though she doesn't understand anything" about the feminist struggle, the 74-year-old added.

Fashionable trend?

Activist and street performance artist Flor de Fuego (Fire Flower) earns a living as a fire dancer, performing for stopped traffic at intersections in Mexico City.

'I don't think things will change much,' activist and street performance artist Flor de Fuego said about the prospect of Mexico's first woman president 

© CARL DE SOUZA / AFP

The 53-year-old, who prefers not to reveal her real name, is a regular at women's rights marches, which she lights up with flames shooting out of her mouth.

"Women are in fashion so (political parties) took advantage of it," she said sarcastically after running between cars with the tray she uses to collect coins from motorists.

That was how she paid for her son to earn a biology degree.

"The truth is that I don't think things will change much" whichever candidate wins, Flor de Fuego said.

When Sheinbaum was Mexico City mayor, "we feminists were quite repressed in our marches," the activist added.

"Who knows how the feminist community will fare" if Sheinbaum becomes president, she said.

- 'Burn everything' -

Economics and law student Alondra, who prefers not to give her full name, is a member of the Black Bloc, a radical feminist movement.

Things are likely to "remain the same" with no end to violence against women, she said before posting flyers with the image of an alleged perpetrator of femicide.

Mexican activist Alondra covers her face during an interview with AFP in Mexico City 

© SILVANA FLORES / AFP

Alondra participated in the occupation of the National Human Rights Commission building in 2020-2022 -- a protest led by the mother of Maria de Jesus Jaimes Zamudio.

The petroleum engineering student was thrown from the fifth floor of a building in Mexico City in 2016.

The Black Bloc has been accused of vandalizing monuments and businesses.

Its members say such action is needed to send a message to politicians who have failed to protect women.

"If there isn't a woman who makes the patriarchal system tremble, nothing's going to change," said Alondra, who has been injured several times in scuffles with security forces.

"If we have to burn everything, then we have to burn everything."

© 2024 AFP

POST-FORDISM

Turkey bets on Togg to give its car industry electric edge

Gemlik (Turkey) (AFP) – On the shores of the Sea of Marmara, a grey and turquoise factory built at breakneck speed is churning out electric cars by the hundreds.

Issued on: 22/05/2024 - 

A Togg electric car rolling off the assembly line in Gemlik near Bursa in western Turkey 

© Yasin AKGUL / AFP

Turkey is hoping its first major electric carmaker will put the country in the driving seat of the automotive industry.

Inside the plant, robot arms weld the passenger compartment of its first SUV, the T10X, which launched last year. After painting, the parts are then sent for assembly, before finally passing through a luminescent tunnel to be scrutinised by workers for imperfections.

The batteries, made in partnership with Chinese manufacturer Farasis Energy, are assembled in a next-door building.

It takes an hour for the plant to produce 20 vehicles.

"Last year, we produced 20,000 vehicles without any loss. Tesla produced only 2,000 in their first year," a production manager told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The manager also praised the plant's "highly educated" workers, 40 percent of whom are women.

In half a century, the Marmara region around Istanbul has become one of the leading centres of the world's automobile industry.

Major carmakers including Fiat and Renault opened plants there at the beginning of the 1970s, with others like Ford, Toyota and Hyundai following, taking advantage of Turkey's position at the crossroads between Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Car horn in outer space

"They initially invested to supply the local market, which for a long time was protected by tariffs," independent consultant Levent Taylan told AFP.

The Togg logo at its Gemlik plant in Turkey © Yasin AKGUL / AFP

But after the European Union-Turkey Customs Union agreement came into force in 1995, opening the European market to cars made in Turkey, exports revved up.

"Today the Turkish automobile industry exports around 70 percent of its production to Western Europe," Taylan said.

A vast network of 530 automotive subcontractors has also sprung up, employing more than 230,000 people, according to Albert Saydam, President of the Turkish Association of Automotive Parts and Components Manufacturers (TAYSAD).

"Most cars around the world have a part which is produced in Turkey. For example, the horn of (the) first car in space, the Tesla Roadster, was supplied from one of our members," he told AFP.

In 2018, Tesla boss Elon Musk blasted a Roadster into space aboard a Falcon heavy rocket as a publicity stunt, with the car's sound system set to play David Bowie's hit "Space Oddity" on loop.

That same year Togg was founded as a joint venture between four Turkish companies and the country's chamber of commerce to steer its car industry towards the electric future.
Market booming

"The project represents a significant milestone in Turkey's automotive industry and symbolises the country's ambition to become a prominent player in the global electric vehicle market," Saydam said.

Workers on the assembly line at the Togg electric vehicle plant in western Turkey

 © Yasin AKGUL / AFP

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to make the carmaker a point of national pride, with the T10X model launched in March 2023 right before the country's presidential elections.

"We have not missed the boat on electric cars," he said again in mid-May.

Nevertheless, Togg says the government's support is limited to allowing it the free use of land for its seaside Gemlik factory and a commitment to purchase 500 vehicles a year.

Since its launch, the Togg T10X has taken nearly a third of electric car sales in Turkey, according to data from the Turkish Automotive Distributors Association (ODMD), with 19,583 vehicles sold in 2023.

And the market is booming. EV sales increased nine fold there last year, making the Turkish market bigger than Italy and Spain's.

Despite Togg's hopes that the T10X will hit the road in Germany by the end of the year and in France next year, Taylan believes the company still has a long way to go.

The car "is considered to be expensive and only about 25,000 models a year are being sold," he said.

To have a chance of being profitable, a car plant would have to make at least "200,000 vehicles a year", Taylan argued.

© 2024 AFP

Forever fad: Rubik says his cube 'reminds us why we have hands'
Agence France-Presse
May 20, 2024 

Success cubed: Hungarian inventor Erno Rubik, the man who created Rubik's Cube (ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP)

The naysayers said the maddening multicolored cube that Erno Rubik invented 50 years ago would not survive the 1980s.

Yet millennials and Generation Z are as nuts about Rubik's Cube as their parents were, much to the amusement of its 79-year-old creator, who talked to AFP in a rare interview.

In a digital world "we are slowly forgetting that we have hands", Rubik said.

But playing with the cube helps us tap back into something deeply primal about doing things with our hands, he said -- "our first tools", as he calls them.

"Speed cubing" and Rubik's Cube hacks are huge on social media, with youngsters regularly going viral while dancing, rapping and even playing the piano while solving the 3D puzzle.

Rubik said the "connection between the mind and hands" that the cube helps foster has been "a very important" factor in human development.

"I think probably the cube reminds us we have hands... You are not just thinking, you are doing something.

"It's a piece of art you are emotionally involved with," Rubik added.

The unassuming Hungarian architecture professor never thought the prototype he devised would conquer the world -- and set him up for life.


It's what hands are for: Inventor Erno Rubik gets to grip with his famous cube (ATTILA KISBENEDEK)

More than 500 million copies of the cult object have been sold -- not counting the myriad of counterfeits.

Rubik's Cube has remained one of the world's top-selling puzzle games, with more than 43 quintillion -- a quintillion being a billion trillion -- ways of solving it.

Even after "hundreds or thousands of years", you would still be finding ways to crack it, Rubik enthused.

Despite the omnipresence of screens, "new generations have developed the same strong relationship with the cube," Rubik told AFP at Budapest's Aquincum Institute of Technology, where he sometimes gives lectures.

It was in the spring of 1974 that he created the first working prototype of a movable cube made of small wooden blocks and held together by a unique mechanism.


A Rubik's Cube-shaped kite at a kite festival in Hsinchu, Taiwan (Sam Yeh)

The five decades since have been "unbelievable", he said, comparing his relationship with the cube to having a "wunderkind" in the family.

"You need to take a step back because of your 'child' and its fame.... (which) can be very tiring," he said.

In his book "Cubed", published in 2020, Rubik revealed that he had never intended to leave a mark on the world -- he was just driven by a love for building geometric models.

It took Rubik several prototypes and weeks of tinkering to figure out the ideal mechanism -- and a way to solve his puzzle -- before he could file a patent application in 1975.

The colourful "Magic Cube" first sold domestically in 1977 before hitting international shelves three years later.

Rubik recalled his first fairytale-like trip from communist Hungary to the West, on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Despite being publicity-shy, the inventor has amassed a collection of some 1,500 magazine covers featuring his cube over the years, which has become "a symbol of complexity" to illustrate anything from geopolitical problems to elections.

You either "like or hate it", he said, but you cannot ignore it.

Rubik's Cube legacy lives on strongly in pop culture, having been featured in numerous TV series and Hollywood blockbusters.


It has also remained the centrepiece of puzzle-solving competitions.


Pope Francis takes on the mystery of the cube

Handout

Masters of the cube frequently gather across the world, battling with their hands and feet -- sometimes while blindfolded, parachuting or doing headstands -- Rubik said.

The cube has a place in the permanent exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and it has also inspired artists, including renowned French street artist Invader.

An educational tool used everywhere from nursery schools to universities, the cube is also popular in retirement homes and helps people living with autism, including American speed-cubing star Max Park, who holds the world record of solving it in 3.13 seconds.

Rubik said the emotional rewards the cube has brought him have been even better than the "retirement money" it has earned him.

It feels nice to have done "something good for people", he said, adding that the cube has even made "marriages and much more..."

© Agence France-Presse

After 180 years, new clues are revealing just how general anesthesia works in the brain

The Conversation
May 20, 2024 

Anesthesia (Sergey Mironov/Shutterstock)

Over 350 million surgeries are performed globally each year. For most of us, it’s likely at some point in our lives we’ll have to undergo a procedure that needs general anesthesia.

Even though it is one of the safest medical practices, we still don’t have a complete, thorough understanding of precisely how anaesthetic drugs work in the brain.

In fact, it has largely remained a mystery since general anesthesia was introduced into medicine over 180 years ago.

Our study published in The Journal of Neuroscience today provides new clues on the intricacies of the process. General anaesthetic drugs seem to only affect specific parts of the brain responsible for keeping us alert and awake.
Brain cells striking a balance

In a study using fruit flies, we found a potential way that allows anesthetic drugs to interact with specific types of neurons (brain cells), and it’s all to do with proteins. Your brain has around 86 billion neurons and not all of them are the same – it’s these differences that allow general anesthesia to be effective.

To be clear, we’re not completely in the dark on how anesthetic drugs affect us. We know why general anaesthetics are able to make us lose consciousness so quickly, thanks to a landmark discovery made in 1994.

But to better understand the fine details, we first have to look to the minute differences between the cells in our brains.

Broadly speaking, there are two main categories of neurons in the brain.

The first are what we call “excitatory” neurons, generally responsible for keeping us alert and awake. The second are “inhibitory” neurons – their job is to regulate and control the excitatory ones.

In our day-to-day lives, excitatory and inhibitory neurons are constantly working and balancing one another.

When we fall asleep, there are inhibitory neurons in the brain that “silence” the excitatory ones keeping us awake. This happens gradually over time, which is why you may feel progressively more tired through the day.

General anesthetics speed up this process by directly silencing these excitatory neurons without any action from the inhibitory ones. This is why your anesthetist will tell you that they’ll “put you to sleep” for the procedure: it’s essentially the same process.
A special kind of sleep

While we know why anesthetics put us to sleep, the question then becomes: “why do we stay asleep during surgery?”. If you went to bed tonight, fell asleep and somebody tried to do surgery on you, you’d wake up with quite a shock.

To date, there is no strong consensus in the field as to why general anesthesia causes people to remain unconscious during surgery.

Over the last couple of decades, researchers have proposed several potential explanations, but they all seem to point to one root cause. Neurons stop talking to each other when exposed to general anesthetics.

While the idea of “cells talking to each other” may sound a little strange, it’s a fundamental concept in neuroscience. Without this communication, our brains wouldn’t be able to function at all. And it allows the brain to know what’s happening throughout the body.


Colorized neurons in the brain of a fly. Adam Hines

What did we discover?

Our new study shows that general anesthetics appear to stop excitatory neurons from communicating, but not inhibitory ones. This concept isn’t new, but we found some compelling evidence as to why only excitatory neurons are affected.

For neurons to communicate, proteins have to get involved. One of the jobs these proteins have is to get neurons to release molecules called neurotransmitters. These chemical messengers are what gets signals across from one neuron to another: dopamine, adrenaline and serotonin are all neurotransmitters, for example.

We found that general anesthetics impair the ability of these proteins to release neurotransmitters, but only in excitatory neurons. To test this, we used Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies and super resolution microscopy to directly see what effects a general anesthetic was having on these proteins at a molecular scale.

Part of what makes excitatory and inhibitory neurons different from each other is that they express different types of the same protein. This is kind of like having two cars of the same make and model, but one is green and has a sports package, while the other is just standard and red. They both do the same thing, but one’s just a little bit different.

Neurotransmitter release is a complex process involving lots of different proteins. If one piece of the puzzle isn’t exactly right, then general anesthetics won’t be able to do their job.

As a next research step, we will need to figure out which piece of the puzzle is different, to understand why general anesthetics only stop excitatory communication.

Ultimately, our results hint that the drugs used in general anesthetics cause massive global inhibition in the brain. By silencing excitability in two ways, these drugs put us to sleep and keep it that way.

Adam D Hines, Research fellow, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In Darwin's footsteps: scientists recreate historic 1830s expedition

Agence France-Presse
May 21, 2024 

The Oosterschelde set out from Plymouth, England, in August 2023

 (Carlos Espinosa/AFP)

Like Charles Darwin did in 1831, a group of scientists and environmentalists last year set sail from the English port of Plymouth, headed for the Galapagos islands off the coast of Ecuador.

But what they found on their arrival last month differed vastly from what naturalist Darwin saw while visiting the archipelago in 1835, in a trip key to developing his world-changing theory on natural selection.

The Galapagos today is under protection, part of a marine reserve and classified a World Heritage Site. Yet the area faces more threats than ever, from pollution and illegal fishing to climate change.

There to observe the challenges, with a well-thumbed copy of her great-great-grandfather's "On the Origin of Species" in hand, was botanist Sarah Darwin.

"I think probably the main difference is that, you know, there are people working now to protect the islands," the 60-year-old told AFP, onboard the "Oosterschelde," a refurbished, three-mast schooner built more than 100 years ago.

The ship has been on a scientific and awareness-raising expedition since last August, stopping so far in the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Brazil and Chile among other locales.

- Darwin's 'heirs' -

In colonial times, the islands -- located in one of the world's most biodiverse regions -- served as a pit stop for pirates who caught and ate the giant turtles that call it home.

During World War II, the archipelago hosted a US military base.

"I think if (Darwin) were able to come back now and see the efforts that everybody is making, both locally and globally, to protect these extraordinary islands and that biodiversity -- I think he'd be really, really excited and impressed," the naturalist's descendant told AFP.

Sarah Darwin first visited the Galapagos in 1995, where she illustrated a guide to endemic plants. She then devoted herself to studying native tomatoes.

She also mentors young people as part of a project to create a group of 200 Darwin "heirs" to raise the alarm about environmental and climate threats to the planet.

Calling at several ports on the journey from Plymouth to the Galapagos, the Oosterschelde took on new groups of young scientists and activists at every stop, and dropped off others.

One of them, Indian-born Laya Pothunuri, who joined the mission from Singapore, told AFP the Galapagos "has a very important place in scientific terms."

She was there, she said, to improve the irrigation systems in the islands' coffee-growing regions.


"I plan to do it using recycled plastic, which also, again, is a big problem over here," she said, noting that plastic waste ends up being consumed by wildlife.

- Plastic peril -

In the Galapagos, the expedition members worked with researchers from the private Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), the Charles Darwin Foundation and the NGO Conservation International on both confronting invasive species and protecting endemic ones.


Last year, a study by the Charles Darwin Foundation found that giant turtles in the area were ingesting harmful materials due to human pollution.

Samples revealed that nearly 90 percent of the waste consumed was plastic, eight percent was fabric and the rest metal, paper, cardboard, construction materials and glass.

From Galapagos, the Oosterschelde set sail again on Sunday to continue its world tour, with stops expected in Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.

The last time oligarchs tried to take over America it led to civil war

Thom Hartmann
May 19, 2024 6:17AM ET

A man hiding money in his suit (Shutterstock.com)

The headline in this week’s Fortune reads:“Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is ‘on the brink’ and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war”

Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump‘s attempt to overthrow our government.

READ: How the Big Lie is meant to finish off America

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Americans for Tax Fairness reports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump — in an effort to maintain enough control of our political system that their taxes won’t go up. And that total is just what’s reported: it doesn’t count the billions in unknowable dark money that’s sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United.

Back in the day, the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned us:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

The number one movie in America last month was Civil War. Rightwing militias are on the march. More than half of Republicans say they are “expecting” a civil war.

How did we get here? And what does oligarchy have to do with civil war?

The clear result of five corrupt Republicans on the 1978 and 2010 Supreme Courts legalizing political bribery of politicians (and Supreme Court justices) by both corporations and the morbidly rich is that America is now well past the halfway mark of a fatal-to-democracy slide into oligarchy and the strongman autocracy typically associated with it. And the conflict that can follow that.

You can see the consequence in any contemporary survey. The majority of people want things — gun control, a strengthened social safety net, a cleaner and safer environment, quality, free education, higher taxes on the rich — that Congress refuses to do anything about because it is in thrall to great wealth.

As President Jimmy Carter told me eight years ago:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

For example, just last week, Donald Trump solicited a $1 billion bribe from a group of fossil fuel executives in exchange for undoing all of President Biden’s climate regulations.

In a testament to how today’s form of transactional oligarchy has become normalized in America, the only national news organization that reported this shocking story was MSNBC; every other news outlet thought it was entirely normal for an American politician to have their hand out in exchange for legislative or policy changes. As Media Matters reported this week:

“CNN, Fox News Channel; ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS’ Mornings, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press” all completely ignored the story.


What we are watching is the final stage of the 40-year neoliberal transition of our nation from a forward-looking and still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs.

Some years ago, Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore (before he was Trump’s advisor) was a guest on my radio/TV program. I asked him, “Which is more important, democracy or capitalism?“

Without hesitation, Moore answered, “Capitalism.” He went on to imply this was how the Founders wanted things. After all, as George Orwell said:


“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

That philosophy and a phony American history have held the Republican Party in its thrall for the past 40+ years and have brought America to this moment of great crisis and danger.

It has transformed America from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible. Which presents a true crisis for America, because oligarchy is almost always merely a transitional phase in the evolution to full-blown tyranny and/or fascism, and often civil war.


Oligarchies are inherently unstable forms of government because they transfer resources and power from working people to the oligarchs. Average people, seeing that they’re constantly falling behind and can’t do anything about it, first become cynical and disengage, and, when things get bad enough, they try to revolt.

That “revolution” can either lead to the oligarchy failing and the nation flipping back to democracy, as happened here in the 1860s and the 1930s, or it can flip into full-blown strong-man tyranny, as happened recently in Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, and nearly happened here on January 6th.

Oligarchies usually become police states, where any average person who dares seriously challenge the ruling oligarchs is squashed like a bug either legally or financially; the oligarchs themselves are immune from prosecution and get to keep their billions regardless of how many people’s lives are ruined or die because of their crimes.


Oligarchic governments almost always do a few predictable things, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy:

— They change monopoly laws and regulations so their rich buddies can take control of most of the nation’s businesses and media.

— They stack the courts and regulatory agencies with oligarch-friendly ideologues or outright corrupt toadies, while eliminating regulatory protections for average citizens.


— They cut taxes on the rich and drive wages low on working people while criminalizing and cracking down on dissent, particularly if it involves any sort of direct action or property damage.

— They distract voters from their own looting by demonizing minorities and encouraging racism, religious/gender conflict, and regionalism.

— They reinvent history to argue that the country was “always an oligarchy and that’s the way the nation’s founders wanted it. It’s what works best.”


— They actively suppress the vote among people inclined to oppose them (typically minorities and the young), or outright rig the vote to insure their own victory.

— And they transform their nations into police states, heavily criminalizing demonstrations, nonviolent resistance, or “direct action” while radicalizing and encouraging rightwing vigilante “militias” to put down the inevitable pro-democracy rebellions as people realize what’s happening.

To the end of cementing their own oligarchy here, the billionaires who own the GOP are now actively promoting the same sort of revisionist history the Confederacy did, claiming that the Founders were all rich guys who hated taxes, wanted rich men to rule America, and wrote the Constitution to make that happen. It was a story popular in the South leading up to the Civil War, now part of the “Lost Cause” mythology.

To that end, they’re purging our schools and colleges of books and history courses; professors and teachers who don’t toe their line that America was designed from its founding to be an oligarchy are being fired as you read these words. In this, they’re promoting — for their own benefit — a dangerous lie.

A lie that rationalizes oligarchy.

While there were some in America among the Founders and Framers who had amassed great land holdings and what was perceived then as a patrician lifestyle, Pulitzer Prize winning author Bernard Bailyn suggests in his brilliant 2003 book To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders that they couldn’t hold a candle, in terms of wealth, to the true aristocrats of England.

With page after page of photographs and old paintings of the homes of the Founders and Framers, Bailyn shows that none of those who created this nation were rich by European standards. After an artful and thoughtful comparison of American and British estates, Bailyn concludes bluntly:

“There is no possible correspondence, no remote connection, between these provincial dwellings and the magnificent showplaces of the English nobility...”

Showing and describing to his readers the mansions of the families of power in 18th century Europe, Bailyn writes:

“There is nothing in the American World to compare with this.”

While the Founders and Framers had achieved a level of literacy, creativity, and a depth of thinking that rivaled that of any European states or eras, nonetheless, Bailyn notes:

“The Founders were provincials, alive to the values of a greater world, but not, they knew, of it – comfortable in a lesser world but aware of its limitations.”

As Kevin Phillips describes in his masterpiece book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich:

“George Washington, one of the richest Americans, was no more than a wealthy squire in British terms.”

Phillips documents that it wasn’t until the 1790’s — a generation after the War of Independence — that the first American accumulated a fortune that would be worth one million of today’s dollars. The Founders and Framers were, at best, what today would be called the upper-middle-class in terms of lifestyle, assets, and disposable income.

In 1958, one of America’s great professors of history, Forrest McDonald, published an extraordinary book debunking Charles Beard’s 1913 hypothesis that the Constitution was created exclusively of, by, and for rich white men. McDonald’s book, titled We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, bluntly states:

“Economic interpretation of the Constitution does not work.”

Over the course of more than 400 meticulously researched pages, McDonald goes back to original historical records and reveals who was promoting and who was opposing the new Constitution, and why. So far as I can tell, he is the first and only historian to do this type of original-source research, and his conclusions are startling.

McDonald notes that a quarter of all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had voted in their own state legislatures for laws that would have helped debtors and the poor and thus harmed the interests of the rich.

“These [debt relief laws] were the very kinds of laws which, according to Beard’s hypothesis, the delegates had convened to prevent,” says McDonald. He adds: “Another fourth of the delegates had important economic interests that were adversely affected, directly and immediately, by the Constitution they helped write.”

While Beard theorizes that the Framers were largely drawn from the class of wealthy bankers and businessmen, McDonald shows that wasn’t true at all:

“The most common and by far the most important property holdings of the delegates were not, as Beard has asserted, mercantile, manufacturing, and public security investments, but agricultural property.”

Most were farmers or plantation owners and, as noted earlier, owning a lot of land did not always make one rich in those days, particularly compared to the bankers and mercantilists of New York and Boston.

“Finally,” McDonald concludes, “it is abundantly evident that the delegates, once inside the convention, behaved as anything but a consolidated economic group.”

After dissecting the means and motivations of the Framers who wrote the Constitution, McDonald goes into an exhaustive and detailed state-by-state analysis of the constitutional ratifying conventions that finally brought the U.S. Constitution into law.

For example, in the state of Delaware, which voted for ratification:

“[A]lmost 77 percent of the delegates were farmers, more than two-thirds of them small farmers with incomes ranging from 75 cents to $5.00 a week. Slightly more than 23 percent of the delegates were professional men – doctors, judges, and lawyers. None of the delegates was a merchant, manufacturer, banker, or speculator in western lands.”

In other states, similar numbers showed up. Of the New Jersey delegates supporting ratification, 64.1 percent were small farmers. In Maryland, “the opponents of ratification included from three to six times as large a proportion of merchants, lawyers, and investors in shipping, confiscated estates, and manufacturing as did the [poorer] delegates who favored ratification.”

In South Carolina it was those in economic distress who carried the day: “No fewer than 82 percent of the debtors and borrowers of paper money in the convention voted for ratification.” In New Hampshire, “of the known farmers in the convention 68.7 percent favored ratification.”

But did farmers support the Constitution because they were slave owners or the wealthiest of the landowners, as Charles Beard had guessed back in 1913?

McDonald shows that this certainly wasn’t the case in northern states like New Hampshire or New Jersey, which were not slave states.

But what about Virginia and North Carolina, the two largest slave-holding states, asks McDonald rhetorically. Were their plantation owners favoring the Constitution because it protected their economic and slave-holding interests?

“The opposite is true,” writes McDonald. “In both states the wealthy planters – those with personality interests [enslaved people] as well as those without personality interests – were divided approximately equally on the issue of ratification. In North Carolina small farmers and debtors were likewise equally divided, and in Virginia the great mass of the small farmers and a large majority of the debtors favored ratification.”

After dissecting the results of the ratification votes state by state — the first author in history to do so, as far as I can determine — McDonald sums up:

“Beard’s thesis — that the line of cleavage as regards the Constitution was between substantial personality interests [wealth and slave ownership] on the one hand and small farming and debtor interests on the other — is entirely incompatible with the facts.”

Here we find the explanation for James Madison sealing his notes on the Constitutional Convention until every man who participated was dead (they were finally published more than 50 years later in 1840). He and many others at the convention were essentially betraying their own economic class in favor of democracy. Something today’s wealthy Americans apparently can’t imagine doing.

No matter how hard Republicans try to reinvent the Founders and Framers of this nation in the image of their libertarian billionaire patrons, and no matter how imperfect and even brutal their time was, the simple reality is that in 1770’s America this nation’s Founders undertook American history’s first truly great progressive experiment.

And they all put their lives on the line to do it: when they signed their names on the Declaration, a death warrant was issued against each one of them by the largest and most powerful empire in the world.

And then, four generations later, we backslid.

The only other time in American history when an entire region of America was converted from a democracy into an oligarchy was the 1830-1860 era in the South. It’s why Republicans are so fond of the Confederate flag and Civil War memorial monuments.

The invention of the Cotton Gin made a few hundred families of southern planters richer than Midas; they seized political control of the region and then destroyed democracy in those states. Even white men who dared stand up to them were imprisoned or lynched, ballot boxes were stuffed, and social mobility came to a standstill.

By the 1840s, the South had become a full-blown police state, much like Trump and his acolytes would like America to become in the near future.

Offended and worried by the democratic example of the Northern states, the Confederacy declared war on the United States itself with the goal of ending democracy in America altogether. Almost 700,000 people died defending our form of government.

And now, for a second time in American history, we’re confronted with a near-complete takeover of about half of our nation by America’s oligarchs.

And with it has come not just the threat of political violence, but the reality, from the death of Heather Heyer to the George Floyd protests to January 6th and the assault on Paul Pelosi.

All driven by oligarchs determined to pit us against each other so we won’t recognize how they’re robbing us blind.

Unless and until our tax laws are changed and the Supreme Court’s legalization of political bribery is reversed, we’ll continue this disintegrative slide into fascism and the danger of domestic armed conflict.

This fall we’ll have the opportunity to elect politicians who actively oppose oligarchy and fascism while embracing the true spirit of American egalitarianism.

President Biden is the first president in 80 years to consequentially raise taxes on both rich people and corporations. That political bravery has brought him powerful enemies: this fall’s election will be hard fought.

Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, and if you live in a Republican-controlled state double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org.

America’s future — and the integrity of our history — depend on it.

NOW READ: The Supreme Court's wealth-driven corruption crisis

THE NEW KNOW NOTHINGS

Republican calls for economic ‘shut down’ while accusing Biden of Marxist agenda

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
May 21, 2024

Victoria Spartz (Photo via AFP)

U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) is calling on Congress to "shut down" the U.S. economy over the southern border, while accusing President Joe Biden of Marxist policies and denouncing his border legislation that Donald Trump ordered killed months ago.

Congresswoman Spartz on Tuesday spoke to Fox News Business host Maria Bartiromo in a rambling interview on the Senate bipartisan border bill that Donald Trump ordered killed. Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is one again trying to pass it.

Rep. Spartz said, "we need to get them back, you know, to really put pressure to control the border. So I just don't see anything else left there because no one wants to shut down the economy, unfortunately. We should really for such a serious issue, but Republicans are not gonna do it. And, and you know, and we're not just going to let Democrats have messagings bill with lots of loopholes. There are way more loopholes in that bill than people even realized."

The economy is a top issue for 2024 presidential election voters.

READ MORE: ‘Not an Accident’: Trump’s ‘Unified Reich’ Video Alarms Historians and Fascism Experts

After calling to shut down the economy, which economists for months have shown is doing extremely well, she then falsely accused President Joe Biden of socialism and enacting "socialist policies by Karl Marx."

"I think we need to have a serious discussion what really Bidenomics is and how it resembles socialist policies by Karl Marx where it's not just, you know, Biden administration had failed policy in a lot of fronts with its supply chain, whether we're dealing with energy, but also they've been subsidizing corporations very close to the government in trying to control financial markets, in order in essence control the means of production and financial markets. That's what socialism really is."

The Biden administration fixed the supply chain crisis created during the Trump administration, improved the supply chain, and continues to massively invest in it.

"And now they are trying to use you know, the government power to pick losers and winners and you know, this, winners are going to be people who can pay, give campaign contribution to Biden's reelection campaign, and losers are going to be all of us. And this is a serious discussion we need to have because this level of spending and subsidy cannot continue, it's destructive and inflation is going to destroy the middle class and people low income."

Donald Trump recently asked top oil and gas executives to donate $1 billion to his campaign in exchange for lower taxes and a rollback of President Biden's climate and environmental protections

Watch the videos above or at this link.

Mar-a-Lago hires 136 new foreign workers as Trump seeks immigration crackdown

Travis Gettys
May 21, 2024 

Mar-a-Lago hired more than 100 foreign workers last year as Donald Trump promises to restrict immigration and round up undocumented migrants for deportation.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee's businesses have long relied on foreign workers, and last year Mar-a-Lago asked the Department of Labor for authorization to hire a total of 136 foreign workers for seasonal work, and all but one request was accepted, reported Newsweek.

The Labor Department showed requests for 53 waiters and waitresses, seven hotel desk clerks, 17 housekeeping cleaners, five first-line supervisors of food preparation and serving workers, 24 cooks and five bartenders.

These workers were requested on F-2B visas that apply to workers in nonagricultural positions and require employers to show there aren't enough American workers who are willing and able to do that temporary work, and they must also prove the workers won't adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similar U.S. employees.

The number of foreign workers increased at Trump-owned businesses last year, according to Forbes, which reported that the former president's businesses hired 170 foreign workers in 2023 and at least 1,670 temporary foreign workers since 2008.

The former president's administration limited some employment-based visas in June 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the H-2B visas enjoyed by Mar-a-Lago.

Trump's biggest campaign promise would cause 'economic disaster': analysis

Travis Gettys
May 21, 2024 

Donald Trump's promised crackdown on immigration could inflict mass misery and economic calamity, according to a new analysis.

The former president's radical plans for a potential second term in office include barring entry from select Muslim-majority nations, denying all asylum claims and rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants for deportation, and economic analyst Robert Shapiro warned in a new Washington Monthly column that these policies would set off an "economic disaster."

"By any measure, a policy that eliminated 4.5 percent of the current workforce, including large numbers of college and high school graduates, would set off serious economic tremors," Shapiro wrote.

"Using Okun’s Law on the relationship between rising unemployment and GDP, a 4.5 percent drop in employment is associated with depressing GDP growth by more than 9 percentage points. This estimate also includes the impact on other jobs. A recent study of much more modest programs to deport immigrants found clear evidence that they cost other American jobs. By one calculation, deporting 1 million immigrants would lead to 88,000 additional employment losses by other Americans, suggesting that Trump’s program could cost up to 968,000 Americans their jobs on top of the 7.1 million jobs held by immigrants up for deportation."

Contrary to popular misconception, only 4 percent of undocumented immigrants work in agriculture, while nearly a third of them work in the construction or hospitality industries and 14 percent of working unauthorized immigrants provide professional, scientific, technical or administrative services.

"Doing the math, we find that a mass deportation program could depress national wage and salary income by $317.2 billion or 2.7 percent of labor income in 2023," Shapiro wrote. "This would be a much larger percentage loss than during the 1980, 1991, and 2002 recessions. It also would be more than half the 5 percent decline in 2009 at the height of the Great Recession. By these measures, too, a severe recession would likely accompany Trump’s draconian program."

Mass deportation could potentially revive inflation, which happened when companies had to replace large numbers of workers after COVID-19 crested, and businesses would either have to pay more in overtime and recruitment or accept lower productivity, which all leads to higher prices for consumers.

"Mass deportations would involve enormous costs for taxpayers," Shapiro wrote. "One study found that apprehending, detaining, transporting, processing, and finally deporting unauthorized immigrants in 2015 cost the government an average of $18,214 per deportee or $24,094 in current dollars. Using the latest DHS estimates, the taxpayer costs to deport 11 million people would come to $265 billion—without including their American children or the costs to build and maintain large detention camps. For perspective, $265 billion is equivalent to 11 percent of all projected income tax revenues in 2024 and 30 percent of the Pentagon’s 2024 budget."

"Now, Trump seems determined to set new records for deportations," he added, "regardless of the costs to taxpayers and the economy."

Trump set to attend Big Oil fundraiser following quid pro quo offer

Edward Carver, Common Dreams
May 21, 2024 

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump will reportedly attend a fundraising luncheon organized by leading oil and gas executives in Houston on Wednesday, following a controversial offer he made to the industry to roll back environmental regulations in return for $1 billion in campaign donations—with two companies associated with both events.

At his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, Trump told a group of roughly two dozen oil and gas executives that $1 billion would be a "deal" for them, given how much money they would make in reduced taxes and regulations if he is elected, TheWashington Post first reported.

Top executives at Continental Resources and Occidental Petroleum, two of the companies with representatives reportedly present when the offer was made, are among the organizers of Wednesday's luncheon, according to The New York Times. Harold Hamm, the executive chairman and founder of Continental Resources and one of the luncheon's organizers, has been a longtime supporter of Trump; he spoke at the 2016 Republican convention.

Trump's campaign has raised about $7.3 million from the oil and gas industry in the 2024 election cycle, most of it since January, while President Joe Biden has taken in just $186,000, according to OpenSecrets data reported by the Times. These figures don't include money given to super PACs.

The industry has grown less supportive of Biden since his administration paused liquefied natural gas (LNG) export permits to certain countries in January, a move that was hailed by environmental campaigners.

"This LNG pause is a huge deal for climate and environmental justice," Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), told the Times this week.

"Big Oil gave $6.4 million to Trump's 2024 campaign in just the first three months of 2024 alone," LCV said on social media Monday. "Make no mistake: Trump and his Big Oil friends are an existential threat to our communities, planet, and future."

The pause could affect the monumental profits of the oil and gas industry. Following the fracking boom of the last two decades, the U.S. has become the world's leading exporter of LNG. Qatar, the second-largest exporter, announced plans to increase production following the U.S. pause.

During the Trump presidency, LNG exports boomed and the tax cuts that he signed disproportionately benefited the industry. Trump presumably sought to capitalize on this history in making the quid pro quo offer, which Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) characterized as a case of "open corruption."

The quid pro quo offer was underreported by cable news, according to an analysis by Media Matters for America, but has been the subject of a congressional probe. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, sent letters to eight oil and gas firms reportedly present for the Mar-a-Lago offer and the American Petroleum Institute, a lobby group, requesting information about their financial arrangements with Trump. He expressed concern that they may have "accepted or facilitated Mr. Trump's explicit corrupt bargain."

The oil and gas industry stands to make $110 billion from tax breaks alone if Trump is elected, according to an analysis by Friends of the Earth Action released last week.

While Trump's quid pro quo offer was direct and nakedly transactional in a way that may be new, his party has long-standing oil industry ties.

"Maybe some of these Big Oil CEOs preferred a different candidate in the primary, but it was clear that they were always going to support the Republican nominee," LCV's Sittenfield said. "They are all about continuing to pad their already enormous profits at the expense of our climate."

Inside Donald Trump’s billion-dollar Big Oil heist
Sabrina Haake
May 19, 2024 

Then-President Donald Trump speaks to city officials and employees of Double Eagle Energy on the site of an active oil rig on July 29, 2020 in Midland, Texas. 

(Photo by Montinique Monroe/Getty Images


As soon as fossil-fuel financed Donald Trump was sworn into office, he got busy destroying the nation’s climate progress.

In June 2017, Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, shamefully walking away from a global commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — the only signatory country to do so.

Among Trump’s other early steps to halt climate progress: Scott Pruitt, his Environmental Protection Agency director, scrubbed climate science information off the agency’s website. Pruitt, who resigned under an unethical cloud of scandal the following year, “cleansed” (read: removed) federal data about fossil fuels and carbon emissions from web pages that had been educating the public since the late 1990s.

Going into the 2024 election, Trump is warring with climate science again. Even as global temperatures hover at a precarious tipping point endangering habitability, Trump has solicited a billion-dollar contribution from fossil fuel execs in exchange for letting the planet burn baby burn.

Trump’s lowly $1 billion price tag

At a shockingly under-reported event in April, the presumptive Republican nominee invited fossil fuel representatives to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago where he served up a foul tasting entrée of quid pro quo.

More than 20 oil executives from Chevron, ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum and other fossil fuel concerns attended.

Over a steak dinner, Trump offered attendees $110 billion in tax breaks and said he’d reverse Biden’s environmental protections. Trump also pledged to scrap President Joe Biden’s policies on electric vehicles and wind energy and other initiatives opposed by the fossil fuel industry, including legal barriers to drilling and the Biden administration’s rules designed to cut car pollution.

The catch: the oil barons must agree to donate a billion dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign.

Trump said it was a good “deal.” Ponying up $1 billion to get Trump re-elected would be advantageous for Big Oil, he promised, because the value of the tax and regulation cuts he’d give them in return would far exceed that amount, including new offshore drilling and speedier permits.

Forbes reported that during an Arizona campaign rally in 2020, Trump similarly suggested that he could offer ExxonMobil permits in exchange for a $25 million campaign contribution. Appalling and galling though it was, last month’s Mar-a-Lago Big Oil fete wasn’t the first time Trump’s open corruption jeopardized a livable planet.

Dr. Evil would have been proud.

Trump advances Big Oil’s disinformation campaign

Climate disinformation from the fossil fuel lobby is legion, and it has gone on for decades.

American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers has undertaken an extremely well-financed campaign against Biden’s EPA tailpipe rules, misleading consumers and voters by calling the rules a “ban” on “gas cars.” The lobby has purchased ads in battleground states to lie to voters about Biden’s efforts to increase the manufacture of EVs, claiming that increasing EV production and adopting the charging station infrastructure to support them will restrict consumer choice.

Their disinformation efforts are obscene because their profits are obscene.

Last year, ExxonMobil and Chevron reported their biggest annual profits in a decade. Three of the largest oil and gas producers reported combined profits of $85.6 billion in 2023. ExxonMobil reported $36 billion, while Chevron reported $21.4 billion. Shell’s reported profits were down from 2022 but still reflected the second-largest profits in a decade.


Then-President Donald Trump speaks to 5,000 contractors at the Shell Chemicals Petrochemical Complex on Aug. 13, 2019, in Monaca, Pa. President Donald Trump delivered a speech on the economy, and focused on manufacturing and energy sector jobs. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Under the Inflation Reduction Act, the oil industry also received hundreds of billions of dollars in new financial incentives to expand carbon-reducing technologies. Given that larger fossil fuel companies have already diversified into renewables, one would think they would lead the discussion on what an appropriate energy mix looks like, instead of falsely lambasting Democrats’ transition efforts.

The rub, it’s clear, is timing and greed. They want the U.S. to rely primarily on fossil fuels for several more decades, but by then, scientists warn, the transition will be too late.
Democrats investigate

Politico reported last week that oil executives are licking their chops, eagerly drafting industry-friendly executive orders Trump would sign as soon as he returns to office.

Democrats say not so fast.

After the Washington Post reported that Trump had offered to dismantle Biden’s environmental rules in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions, Democrats on the House oversight committee sent letters to nine oil executives asking about the Mar-a-Lago meeting.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) wrote in the committee’s letter that, “Media reports raise significant potential ethical, campaign finance, and legal issues that would flow from the effective sale of American energy and regulatory policy to commercial interests in return for large campaign contributions.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said that “Trump’s offer of a blatant quid pro quo to oil executives is practically an invitation to ask questions about Big Oil’s political corruption and manipulation.”

The Houston Chronicle says Democrats are pearl clutching. While it is true that Democrats promise donors they will try to protect abortion access, there’s a vast moral and legal chasm between vowing to protect a fundamental human right — healthcare — and vowing to destroy a fundamental human right — breathable air.

A tale of two countries

Whether or not voters understand it, the climate contrast between Biden and Trump couldn’t be more dramatic.

Biden refers to global warming as an “existential threat” and has engaged in over 300 actions aimed to cut greenhouse gas emissions, reduce air pollution, restrict toxic chemicals and preserve public lands and waters. Biden’s administration has taken more action to combat climate change than any other administration in U.S. history. The Inflation Reduction Act led to record investment in solar, wind and increased EV sales.

Although these policies will take years to deliver climate results, by one early assessment, they have already resulted in a 3 percent cut in energy emissions.


President Joe Biden points to a wind turbine size comparison chart during a meeting about the Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership in the Roosevelt Room of the White House June 23, 2022, in Washington, D,C. The White House is partnering with 11 East coast governors to launch a new Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership to boost the offshore wind industry. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Trump, amplifying Big Oil’s decades-long disinformation campaign in exchange for money, has called climate change a “hoax.” At his New Jersey rally last week, Trump vowed to stop offshore wind “on day one.”

He has claimed without evidence that wind energy causes cancer, and that he knows “windmills very much,” because he has “studied it better than anybody I know.” Demonstrating the principles of Darwinism, Trump eliminated more than 125 environmental rules and policies during his time in office and is now promising more destruction.

In November, we will elect the president we deserve. Whether Trump or Biden is elected, both men are elderly. That means they will be gone long before the worst environmental disasters arrive.

The choice is before us. One of these candidates promises his grandchildren will eat from a golden plate. The other promises there will be something on the plate.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake, is free.

Dan Patrick shouts down journalist at trial: 'Donald Trump is not the ruling class!'

THEY WOULDN'T HAVE HIM

HE IS THE GRIFTER CLASS

David Edwards
May 21, 2024 

Real America's Voice/screen grab

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) showed up at Donald Trump's hush money trial in New York on Tuesday and shouted down a journalist who suggested the former president was part of the "ruling class."

After the prosecution and defense rested their cases, a group of Trump surrogates, including elected officials, spoke outside the courthouse.

"When a friend is in trouble, friends have his back," Patrick said. "The way he has been treated, you would see in Russia, you would see in China, you would see in North Korea, you would see in every little tin pot dictatorship across the world."

"If the courts in New York come after any of you because of something you said, because you said something the ruling class didn't like, and that's what all these other countries are about," he continued. "They want to be sure that anyone that speaks up against the ruling class disappears."

"They want to take him off the main stage because they know he is their biggest danger to take on the ruling class."

"Isn't Donald Trump part of the ruling class?" one nearby journalist asked.

Patrick quickly fired back: 'Now, no, you know what? Donald Trump is not the ruling class. Donald Trump is for every New Yorker. He's for every Texan, every, every state."

"Donald Trump has put his whole life on the line, his whole life on the line for the American people," he added.

Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka lashed out at the journalist.

"Would a member of the ruling class be facing 730 years in prison?" he asked. "What a pathetic question, 730 years in prison, and he's a member of the elite. That's pathetic. You're not a journalist."

Watch the video below from Real America's Voice.