It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
What is often forgotten about Martin Luther King was that he was the voice the working class in America, black and white. Which is what the conservatives in the United States will never forgive him for.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act just days after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King — and President Donald Trump’s Housing secretary wants to undo that legacy.
The 1968 law hasn’t been able to undo the harm from government-sanctioned housing segregation, which still feeds today’s wealth and racial inequality, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to remove a protection for black owners who pay unfairly high property taxes, reported the New York Times.
The Trump administration, under HUD secretary Ben Carson, would make that process so difficult that most homeowners could not even make their claims.
“Before the city would be required to provide a rationale for its failure to keep assessments current,” wrote author Richard Rothstein, “the complainants would have to imagine every conceivable justification that the city might assert, and prove that each was not legitimate, without knowing what actual defense the city might claim or what standard of legitimacy HUD would impose.”
If the city came up with an excuse the homeowner hadn’t refuted, HUD could dismiss the complaint.
“A process that requires complainants to refute defenses that haven’t yet been offered is one that is designed to block civil rights, not protect them,” wrote Rothstein, author of “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”
Carson has opposed remedies to racial segregation as “social engineering,” and the HUD he oversees has been openly hostile to the Fair Housing Act.
The administration now wants to undo one change implemented by President Barack Obama that required cities and towns to propose solutions to the segregation their residents faced, but Carson’s HUD removes that requirement.
“This second newly proposed HUD rule effectively relieves jurisdictions from an obligation to desegregate and virtually reduces the Fair Housing Act to a tool that can be used only to combat racially explicit discrimination,” Rothstein wrote.
White nationalist speaker heckled for denying Holocaust at Virginia gun march: ‘You are literally a neo-Nazi’
A white nationalist speaker who has been affiliated with neo-Nazi rhetoric was caught on video denying the Holocaust at a pro-Second Amendment march in Richmond, Virginia.
The remarks were made by former Proud Boy Jovanni Valle, who goes by the name Jovi Val. Video clips of Valle’s speech were shared on Twitter by writer Robert Evans.
“You wear a swastika and walk down the street,” a man can be heard telling Valle. “You took it off and now you are like, oh no. You are denying the existence of the Holocaust.”
“Why should I answer your questions when you haven’t answered any of mine?” Valle asks. “Why is it you say 6 million [died in the Holocaust], when 30 million die, when 70 million die, you don’t care.” “You’re trying to hide the fact that you are literally a neo-Nazi!” someone shouts at Valle.
A right-wing protester is later seen complaining to Valle that supporting Adolf Hitler is a “liberal” position.
Watch some of the clips below.
Jovi Val here, denying the Holocaust. So we have a Nazi loudly expressing himself here. pic.twitter.com/Q9GFEec0QH
— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) January 20, 2020
— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) January 20, 2020
An interesting moment here, as a right wing demonstrator is incensed at Jovi and his friends expressing support for Hitler. He calls Jovi a "liberal". One of Jovi's people desperately tries to convince the man that Jovi is on the right. pic.twitter.com/VUQjQLuG0U
— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) January 20, 2020
— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) January 20, 2020 Conservatives rage after Westworld actor Jeffrey Wright compares armed protest to Klan rally
January 20, 2020 By Travis Gettys Actor Jeffrey Wright kicked a hornet’s nest of conservative fury by comparing an armed protest in Virginia to a Ku Klux Klan rally.
The star of HBO’s Westworld three James Bond films mocked the Richmond gun rally in a tweet linking to a Washington Post article on the armed demonstration, and noted the event was scheduled on Martin Luther King Day.
“The organizers aren’t at all bothered that a gun circle jerk in Richmond, VA on #MLKDay has a Klan-rally smell to it?” Wright tweeted. “Wonder why.”
The organizers aren’t at all bothered that a gun circle jerk in Richmond, VA on #MLKDay has a Klan-rally smell to it? Wonder why. https://t.co/1kq9pu1is1
Jeffrey Wright – Pathetic human being. — Patriot Trainer (@AmericasValues) January 20, 2020
Actor Jeffrey Wright sees a pro-2nd Amendment gathering and immediately labels it a Klan rally. Sensationalistic Hollywood gobshite, but the scenario makes for a cheap C-list movie. Haven't we seen that one before?? I'll just call Wright, 'Re-Run' from now onwards. — Thomas Lane (@ThomasL16765780) January 20, 2020
Yeah, and Jeffrey Wright has a Commie smell to him! https://t.co/kevMenPc5v — Samuel Sayer -"Are we not men?!" H.G. Wells (@SamuelTheSayer) January 20, 2020
HOW STUPID DO YOU FEEL NOW? Actor Jeffrey Wright: Virginia Gun Rights Gathering Has a 'Klan Rally Smell to It' https://t.co/tECl7YoPIz
And Jeffrey Wright's Asinine comment has a 'Really Stupid Smell' to it. I wonder who wrote that comment for him? Maybe it was 'Slow Joe' Biden or the Idiot Governor of Virginia. https://t.co/nMog91EQWl — Lakewood Bob (@lakewoodbob) January 20, 2020
Jeffrey Wright is just showing his own personal Blancophobic Racism. Hes a bigot, hes the face of prejudiced hate. — NC Zero (@NC_Zero) January 20, 2020
Please enlightened one Jeffrey Wright, tell us what a Klan Rally smells like without showing your utter ignorance. — Jeff McCutcheon (@jgmccut) January 20, 2020
Jeffrey Wright has a BullSh*t smell to him! — I Party w/ Jesus (@ERBALIZT) January 20, 202
WHAT A BUNCH OF SNOWFLAKES
Trump’s election was white America’s vicious backlash to black success: journalist Image via / Fox News. Written by Howard Bryant / Salon January 20, 2020
Once, appearing on ESPN to discuss the controversy of Colin Kaepernick not voting, I suggested that instead of his abstinence disqualifying his say on the American situation, perhaps he had gone “full dissident” and recognized the accepted framework of sociopolitical involvement—the ride-alongs with cops, the listening to candidates owned by money, the insistence that deliberate, institutional racism is just a misunderstanding still unsorted—and found them useless. I further argued that if he saw an unredeemed, corrupt system as the problem, there was no reason for him to trust in it and even less reason to expect him to participate in it.
Full dissidence may or may not have applied to Kaepernick, but it certainly felt personal. The thoughts were neither new nor revelatory, certainly not to me or any black person who reaches a certain age, a certain rage or breaking point, but they were nevertheless true: Donald Trump’s installation as president was a proud and unhidden repudiation of the nation’s first black president, and no matter how many attempts at misdirection toward economic anxiety or some other, greater complex phenomenon, some element of taking back proprietorship of the country had appealed to an overwhelming number of white people who voted for him. With Trump’s lies and distortions normalized by an overmatched, often complicit free press, the writer Michiko Kakutani referred to his presence as “the death of truth.” Dozens of books followed along similar themes regarding the decline of standards and accountability, but underneath so much of the apparent discontent, from Charleston to Charlottesville, is an anti-blackness, a reminder of to whom the country belongs. This was a reclaiming.
I do not say this hyperbolically, but Trump’s election felt like a repudiation of a half century of black assimilation and aspiration to integration, of lifetimes of relationships, and of strategies and choices to better navigate the maze of white America. It didn’t feel personal. It was personal. Something was dying, though at first I could scarcely pinpoint what, since I did not possess previously any great belief in this country’s commitment to black equality, either on a state or personal level. In other words, I was already down following the election but I did not have far to fall.
But whatever lack of faith I may have possessed in the colorblind, Utopian future, millions of black families did believe in it, and they risked their children to the aspirational pathways, whether rooted in the Christian ethics of kindness and compassion or in the possibilities of education. Central to that belief was the strategy of moving their families away into hostile white communities of Milwaukee and Long Island, placing their children into hostile school systems in Boston or Denver, for the purpose of better. Acceptance. Citizenship. This was the endgame to the faith, and the twin acts of the triumph of the Obama presidency, the Trump corrective, and the proud amorality that followed killed it.
Black success, those who choose to listen know, has always led to white retribution, whether that success was something as revolutionary as Barack Obama addressing the crowd at Grant Park that night in 2008 or the unremarkable victory of an average black person scoring a decent job. What died was the belief that a day without white retribution was ever possible, replaced by the more immediate sentiment that it no longer mattered.
None of this, it should be noted, was theoretical. Some of my longtime white friends had already revealed themselves and decades-long friendships turned to dust. Skirmishes began as bee stings: the female friend I had known since seventh grade who told me in October 2008 that Sarah Palin was smarter and more qualified to be president than Obama; the thirty-year friend who before Trump’s inauguration told me how “disappointed” he was in the civil rights icon John Lewis for calling out Trump’s weakly coded racism. There were the progressive friends who, wounded and horrified by the election’s outcome,had threatened to move to Canada, then in the next sentence dreaded the upcoming Thanksgiving dinner where they would have to listen to relatives revel in Trump’s victory. It was as if all they had lost was a Super Bowl bet, but the decision to no longer sit at the table was rarely a consideration. These were no longer exchanges to be survived but telegrams urging a goodbye that needed to be listened to. Instead of anxiety, these departures were welcome, ballast being dropped.
Trump’s election ended relationships and friendships, with family and romantic, and the referendum was not on him but on the dozens of millions people who voted for him, people whose lives, whether directly or indirectly would become part of mine. That the racism Trump promoted and condoned was occurring simultaneously with the ongoing demand that black people embrace postracialism as America’s new reality represented an even greater insult for those sprinklings of black families living in predominately white communities.
That such reconsiderations were occurring nationwide, I had no doubt. I also had no doubt that the relationships it did not end made me more skeptical of the people involved, for both he and his election signified to me a stark and nonnegotiable collision of belief systems. For fleeting moments I even felt envious of those whites who could afford the luxury of being “apolitical”—of the world just not mattering that much—until I focused on the potential explanations: only whiteness and fealty to it could be strong enough to bond people of such disparate values, or those people really did not possess any values at all.
I, and the black people around me who were equally weary of this dance, did not have that luxury, and even if the number of friends who voted for Trump could be counted on one hand (at least the ones who volunteered their candidate honestly), they were not the only people who constituted my life, for they were connected by friendship, blood, and marriage to some of the sixty-two million other people who did vote for him. It was finally clear: what had died was negotiation.
By electing Trump they showed us who they were, just as the violent reaction in the 1970s by whites to black children desegregating Boston schools reminded my aunts and uncles exactly what white people had thought of them. “How much,” my uncle would tell me, “they hated us.” For the black families who lived in the white world, had bought the house and integrated the white community and its schools, had bought into the dream, the questions now stood even taller and more imposing. How many more Thanksgiving dinners could one be expected to sit through with one’s white friends under the realization that not nearly enough questions had ever been asked of them? How, then, could one assess the people who have stayed by your side, the ones expected to attend your funeral? The ones with whom you have shared your holidays and your home and your bed and who, at any moment, could and would retreat—because, for white people, race is and always will be just a topic to either be addressed or ignored. Was it possible to trust the complicated relationships with white women, whose attitudes regarding interracial relationships seemed to be rooted in the attitude “If you’re OK with me, everything’s OK,” yet who could always return to the comfort of whiteness when life with you got too tough?
What was being said in these relationships, in effect, was that white people wanted the benefit of loving someone black without confronting the conditions that make life difficult for black people. When white people would say to me, “I don’t care if you’re black,” they were not being generous. They were not being progressive. They literally meant what they said. They did not care, and even if they did not mean it cruelly, they meant to say the historical, overwhelming conspiracy on the part of their country—by government, the judiciary, the financial and educational institutions, and by law enforcement—to ensure a black underclass was not enough (or was too much) for them. They might be sympathetic. They might not, but it was life, and however terrible they may have felt individually, they would do nothing more about it.
Doing nothing more about it did not only mean a willful misunderstanding of the black journey but an abandonment of the white people who were willing to risk their lives because they knew exactly the depth of the conspiracy and its inevitable destructiveness. The Andrew Goodmans and Michael Schwerners, William Lewis Moores and James Reebs, Viola Liuzzos, Bruce Klunders, and Heather Heyers on a national level and the few committed, important people of our anonymous lives were equally betrayed by this daily cynicism as much as any black person.
These friends and lovers, especially the lovers, sought to absolve themselves of guilt for their systemic advantages by loving the black person in their life—without risking anything to keep that person safe. They wanted to save themselves by appearing to save me, and as any black man who has dated a white woman knows, white women believe they can have both—all the preferential treatments and patriarchy of whiteness while believing in their inherent innocence. They could expose their black friends or lovers to their family’s casual racism at Thanksgiving with no intention of risking their comfort, for the minority is always expected to willingly absorb humiliation as part of the privilege of the invite—but by doing this, the very people who pledged love for you with their words were sending another message by their lack of deed: they were always willing to sacrifice you.
The people of Colombia are cracking up the walls of war and authoritarianism Niek van Son https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ Written by Justin Podur / Independent Media Institute January 18, 2020
The protests that started with the national strike called by Colombia’s central union on November 21 to protest pension reforms and the broken promises of the peace accords have persisted for two months and grown into a protest against the whole establishment. And the protests have continued into the new year and show no signs of stopping.
The end of the decade has seemed to bring an unstoppable march of the right wing in Latin America as elsewhere. The 2016 coup in Brazil that ended with fascist Jair Bolsonaro in power, the 2019 coup in Bolivia, the continuously rolling coup in Venezuela, all showcased the ruthlessness of the U.S. in disposing of left-wing governments in the region. Right-wing victories at the ballot box occurred in Chile in 2017 and in Colombia in 2018, where the electorate rejected the left-wing Gustavo Petro and embraced Iván Duque, a protege of the infamous former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez. But with the new wave of protests, the unstoppable right-wing juggernaut is facing many challenges.
In Chile, three months of protests, still going, are demanding the resignation of President Sebastián Piñera and the reversal of a range of neoliberal policies. Even in the face of the police and army using live fire against protesters, they have not let up.
Ecuador is another peculiar case, in which Lenín Moreno ran as a candidate who would continue left-wing policies, but who promptly reversed course upon reaching power in 2017, including revoking the asylum of Julian Assange, who is now in a UK prison. Reopening drilling in the Amazon, opening a new U.S. airbase in the Galapagos, getting rid of taxes on the wealthy, and doing a new package of International Monetary Fund austerity measures was enough to spark a sustained protest. Moreno’s government was forced to negotiate with the protesters and has withdrawn some of the austerity measures.
In Haiti, protests have gone on for over a year. Sparked in July 2018 by a sharp increase in fuel prices (the same spark as for the Ecuador protests), they have expanded to call for the president’s resignation. In Haiti, as the protests have dragged on, some of the country’s elite families have joined the call for the president’s resignation, which will make it even more difficult to find a constitutional exit from the crisis.
In Colombia, after winning the runoff in 2018, President Duque may have felt that he had a mandate to enact right-wing policies, which in Colombia have usually included new war measures in addition to the usual austerity. But combining pension cuts with betraying the peace process was simply stealing too much from the future: Young people joined the November 21 protests in huge numbers (the lowest estimates are 250,000).
The sustained nature of the protests is striking. Rather than one-offs, the protests have been committed to staying on until change is won. We may hear more this year from post-coup Brazil and Bolivia as well.
At the heart of Colombia’s protest is the issue of war and peace. To say Colombians are war-weary is an understatement. The war there that began (depending on how you date it) in 1948 or 1964 has provided the pretext for an unending assault on people’s rights and dignities by the state. Afro-Colombians were displaced from their lands under cover of the war. Indigenous people were dispossessed. Unions were smeared as guerrilla fronts and their leaders assassinated. Peasants and their lands were fumigated with chemical warfare. Narcotraffickers set themselves up inside the military and intelligence organizations, creating the continent’s most extensive paramilitary apparatus. Politicians signed pacts with these paramilitary death squads. The war gave the establishment an excuse for the most depraved acts, notably the “false positives” in which the military murdered completely innocent people and dressed their corpses up as guerrillas to inflate their kill statistics. Even though the guerrillas, with their kidnapping and too-frequent accidental killings of innocents, were never popular with the majority, Colombians have backed peace processes when given the chance. And Colombians didn’t look kindly at the major betrayals of peace processes in the past, like the one in the 1980s, when ex-guerrillas entering politics were assassinated by the thousand. From 2016, when the new peace accords were affirmed, until mid-2019, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) tallied 138 of their ex-guerrillas murdered; more than 700 other activists were killed in the same period, including more than 100 Indigenous people since Duque came to power in 2018.
At the end of August, a group of FARC members led by their former chief negotiator, Iván Márquez, announced that they were returning to the jungle and to the fight. They argued that the assassination of their members and the refusal of the government to comply with the other aspects of the accords demonstrated that there was no will for peace on the side of the government. Those FARCs who announced they were giving up on the accords were treated as having gone rogue: The government labeled them as criminal groups. Aerial bombardment (a war measure not normally the first recourse in dealing with “criminals”) quickly followed. When a bombing (also in August) by the Colombian air force of one of these rogue groups in Caquetá killed eight children and Duque labeled it “strategic, meticulous, impeccable, and rigorous,” he was greeted with much-deserved public revulsion. Duque was shaping up to deliver the same kind of war as always, only now under the flag of peace, its victims labeled criminals instead of guerrillas.
Eternal war does benefit some: those in the arms and security business especially, and those who want to commit crimes under the cover of war. But despite the many benefits of eternal war for the elite, normalcy also exerts a powerful draw. When Duque’s mentor Álvaro Uribe Vélez was elected president in 2002 and 2006, it was with the promise of normalcy—of peace—through decisive victory over the guerrillas. Instead, he delivered narco-paramilitarism, false positives, and, very nearly, regional wars with Ecuador and Venezuela.
One of Uribe’s early acts was to negotiate a peace agreement with the paramilitaries. Since the paramilitaries were state-backed, organized, and armed, this was a farcical negotiation of the government with itself. But when some of the paramilitary commanders began to speak publicly about their relationships with the state and multinational corporations, they found themselves deported to the U.S. At the time, the scandal was given a name—“para-política.” But to some of the investigators, it was better-termed “para-Uribismo.” Paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso—who had the temerity to talk about the Chiquita banana corporation and who is apparently going to return to Colombia sometime soon—is just the best-known name. Many others have found that being a paramilitary leads to a considerably shortened lifespan. Uribe, mayor of Medellín and governor of Antioquia during the heyday of the cartels, is named in numerous official documents as being close to both the narcotraffickers and the paramilitaries. The evidence keeps coming, as courts, now trying Uribe’s brother, keep getting closer to the man himself.
After the first round of “Uribismo,” it was time to try a peace process. The betrayal of that process, initiated in 2012, and the new president Duque’s promise of yet another decade of “Uribismo,” has been a motivating force of the recent protests.
Uribismo entangles endless war with austerity and inequality. In a recent Gallup poll, 52 percent of Colombians surveyed said the gap between rich and poor had increased in the past five years; 45 percent struggled to afford food in the previous 12 months; and 43 percent lacked money for shelter. The social forces that typically fight for social progress and equality—unions and left-wing political parties—have traditionally been demonized as proto-guerrillas. With the government declaring the war over—and with great fanfare—people want the freedom to make economic demands without being treated as civil war belligerents.
But when faced with the November 21 protests, the government went straight to the dirty war toolkit, murdering 18-year-old protester Dilan Cruz on November 25, imposing curfew, detaining more than 1,000 people, and creating “montajes,” the time-tested use of agents provocateurs to commit unpopular and illegal acts to provide a pretext for state repression. Government officials have also tried to claim that Venezuela and Russia (of course) were behind the protests.
Part of the dirty war toolkit is to negotiate, and the government has been doing so with the National Strike Committee. No doubt hoping that the protests will exhaust themselves and any agreements can be quietly dropped as numbers dwindle, the government is dangling the possibility of dropping some austerity demands. Meanwhile, the negotiators are being threatened by paramilitary groups, and another mass grave of those murdered as military “false positives” has been unearthed. Uribismo has wormed its way into every structure of the state: Real change will have to be deep. By not giving up easily, the protesters have shown the way. These protests could be a crack in the walls of fascism that seem to have sprung up everywhere in the past decade.
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and a writing fellow at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. He is the author of the novel Siegebreakers.
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Three Texas towns vote in favor of "sanctuary cities for the unborn," hoping to ban abortion
Big Spring, Colorado City and Rusk are the three latest towns to vote in favor of such ordinances, which are of contested legality and enforceability. BY EDGAR WALTERS JAN. 15, 2020 REPUBLISH
A billboard on Interstate 20 outside of Waskom displays an
anti-abortion message. Ben Fenton for The Texas Tribune
ANTI ABORTION CAMPAIGNS ALWAYS USE WHITE BABIES IN THEIR PROPAGANDA JUST ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING 'THEY WILL NOT REPLACE US'
Three Texas towns recently voted in favor of anti-abortion ordinances, extending the reach of a campaign to create “sanctuary cities for the unborn” across the state.
The city councils of Big Spring and Colorado City — with populations around 28,000 and 4,000, respectively — voted Tuesday for a version of the controversial ordinance, which started popping up in small towns in East Texas last year. The ordinance aims to outlaw abortion if the U.S. Supreme Court makes it possible to do so. It also grants family members of women who have abortions the ability to sue the provider for emotional distress.
Big Spring’s vote was tentative; a majority of City Council members will need to vote once more in favor of the ordinance for it to pass. Colorado City’s vote, which also banned the sale of emergency contraception such as Plan B, was final, making it the eighth local government with such an ordinance in effect, according to the anti-abortion group pushing them. The East Texas town of Rusk approved a similar ordinance last week.
The ordinances are of contested legality and enforceability. The American Civil Liberties Union has said it is investigating a possible lawsuit seeking to strike them down. Three towns — Mineral Wells, Omaha and Jacksboro — have voted down similar ordinances or walked them back under advice from city attorneys.
But that hasn’t discouraged Mark Lee Dickson, the traveling anti-abortion activist who hopes to galvanize a statewide movement and perhaps provoke a lawsuit that could change abortion law nationwide.
“We have every intention of targeting every part of the state,” said Dickson, who said he is traveling to Levelland this week in hopes of persuading the town west of Lubbock to adopt a similar ordinance. “Every city, no matter what size, is valuable.”
Abortion rights advocates say the local ordinances are dangerous and intentionally confusing because they may lead people to believe, falsely, that abortion is illegal.
"This extreme proposal is a tactic for abortion opponents to score political points and mislead Texans about their rights," said Kamyon Conner, executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, which helps low-income women afford abortion. "Access to reproductive care and abortion allows individuals and families to receive the support needed to thrive in our state."
The strategy of bringing the abortion fight to the local level has divided even the staunchest anti-abortion activists. Some groups, including the Texas Alliance for Life, have warned against taking an inflammatory approach that is unlikely to survive a legal contest and could set the anti-abortion movement back in court.
Most provisions of the ordinance would not take effect unless the U.S. Supreme Court issues a new opinion on the legality of abortion. Specifically, the high court would need to overrule its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, a case that originated in Texas and led to the legalization of abortion nationwide by nullifying state laws that banned the procedure.
And the court would need to reverse its 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which allowed states to enact abortion restrictions only if they do not place an “undue burden” on a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy.
But the ordinances, which do not make exceptions for rape or incest, immediately allow “any surviving relative of the aborted unborn child” to sue a person in civil court for performing an abortion within the towns where they were passed. In some towns, a person could also be sued for transporting a woman to an abortion clinic or helping pay for the procedure, though local officials have said that language is largely symbolic and would be difficult to enforce.
None of the “sanctuary cities for the unborn” is home to an abortion clinic, and the number of clinics in Texas has plummeted in recent years thanks to increasing restrictions on abortion rights imposed by the Texas Legislature.
Big Pharma spends a small fortune every year buying politicians to make sure we can’t import prescription drugs from Canada, but they’re more than happy to sell us contaminated medications from countries with weak manufacturing controls and exploitable labor that ensure high-profit margins.
A toxic compound that doesn’t belong anywhere near medicine known as NDMA was first discovered in some blood pressure medications in 2018, and the FDA issued an alert and wrote a complaint letter to the raw materials supplier to Big Pharma companies. It turns out the meds follow the very common pattern of being made in India with raw ingredients coming from China. And they are sold by big companies for obscenely high prices to U.S. consumers.
More recently, NDMA contamination provoked a nationwide recall of the popular anti-heartburn medication Zantac and all its generic versions.
And now the world’s most widely prescribed drug of all, which is used to treat and prevent Type 2 diabetes called metformin, is contaminated with NDMA.
NDMA (N-Nitrosodimethylamine) is, according to the World Health Organization, produced by “the degradation of dimethylhydrazine (a component of rocket fuel) as well as from several other industrial processes. It is also a contaminant of certain pesticides.”
And it’s one of the world’s most potent carcinogens, at least for humans and other mammals. Our livers produce an enzyme that converts it to methyldiazonium that then leads to O6-methylguanine, both of which alter a process at the cellular level called methylation that is a cancer turbocharger.
Because it’s such a potent biological agent, NDMA is also extremely poisonous; a Chinese medical student put a few drops in his roommate’s water and killed him. Ditto for a Canadian grad student, who injected it into a colleague’s apple pie.
It’s so poisonous that the FDA has set the “acceptable” amount for human daily intake at 96 nanograms, or 0.000096 of 1 milligram (a single grain of salt is about a milligram). In some of the generic brands of the blood pressure medication, just one tablet was found to have NDMA levels almost 20 times higher than the “acceptable” 96 nanograms, and nearly all were drugs that are taken daily.
Once it gets into groundwater, NDMA is wicked hard to get out, as citizens of numerous California cities found out in the late 1990s. Its “miscibility” (rapid solubility) with water is extreme, meaning that a few drops of it rapidly spreads through miles of underground aquifers or other water supplies in a matter of hours or days at most. Because of this, it’s nearly impossible to isolate the contamination once it happens, the only solution then being radical and expensive water treatment everywhere in the aquafer, principally using ultraviolet light.
Ever since 1987 when Congress and the Reagan administration cut a corrupt deal with Big Pharma to ban the retail import of pharmaceuticals into the U.S., Democrats have pushed to allow Americans to get their prescription drugs from other countries when they’re too expensive here (which is nearly always the case; we pay about twice as much for drugs as any other country in the world).
In 2000, Congress passed a law to allow imported retail drugs, but the Clinton administration, heavily funded by the health care industry, killed it administratively.
Nonetheless, progressive Democrats have pushed for years for the elimination of the ban. I first met Bernie Sanders when I lived in Montpelier, Vermont, around the turn of the century and he was organizing busloads of Vermont seniors to travel the two hours to Montreal to fill their prescriptions.
And now, in another popular policy position “borrowed” from progressive Democrats (who have also opposed neoliberal trade deals for decades), the Trump administration is talking about letting American consumers buy drugs from Canada or overseas.
The downside of this is that generic drugs sold in Canada are just as likely to be made in India and China, and thus just as contaminated, as drugs sold here. The upside is that because Canadian drugs will be cheaper, some of us can afford to buy the name-brand versions made in Germany, Switzerland or Ireland and sold in Canada, and not worry about getting cancer from NDMA in our generic drugs. (Yes, I mean this sarcastically.)
There was a time when virtually all drugs sold in the U.S. were manufactured here, including generics, or in Switzerland and Germany. Congress passed a special tax break for American drug manufacturers who’d move their factories to Puerto Rico, and for decades that was the hub of U.S. drug manufacturing. But in past decades neoliberalism has won out, and only a fraction of the pharma facilities in and around San Juan remain in operation.
Trump ran on the traditionally Democratic and progressive position of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., a project that progressive senators including Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders have worked on their entire modern political careers.
It’s time to apply it to manufacturing pharmaceuticals or at least insist on global regulations that can protect everyone.
Presidential historian slams National Archives for ‘idiotic’ decision to blur Women’s March photos that were critical of ‘vengeful Trump’ Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story January 19, 2020
Appearing on CNN on Sunday morning, noted presidential historian Douglas Brinkley harshly criticized the decision by the National Archives to blur photos of posters that were critical of Donald Trump, saying it was a betrayal of their mission.
Speaking with host Martin Savidge, the normally staid Brinkley was blunt in his assessment of the decision — despite an apology from a spokesperson for the Archives — calling the very fact that it even happened “idiotic.”
“I could not believe the National Archives did such a thing,” Brinkley began. “It’s such a venerable institution and we all trust it. It’s the depository of our national heirlooms and leavings and here it is doctoring photos to make Donald Trump look good. I mean to the idea you take the women’s march of 2017 which was largely anti-Trump march and start changing signs like one sign said ‘God hates Trump,’ they just blurred out the word Trump so the protester sign says ‘God hates.’ That was replicated many times, it’s an idiotic idea to have altered that photograph. I am pleased a retraction has come our way.”
“Do you think this was mandated say by someone or do you think this was an agency that sort of self-censored?” the CNN host asked.
“I think it’s the agency or someone within the agency that self-censored,” Brinkley replied. “But we are in the age of Donald Trump, if you work in the government are you fearful of a vengeful Trump, it may be very well they want to please him.”
“At all costs, we can’t have a photograph on our display that says something negative about him,” he added sarcastically. “We have to remember this is a president we are dealing with on his inauguration lied about his crowd size and blew up the Interior Department because they weren’t showing a photo that he wanted. This idea of air-brushing anything negative about Donald Trump out of our current government institutions is starting to happen more and more. It’s all the reason why we have to say knock it off, ever louder.”
The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, issued ten years ago, is one of retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s most maligned rulings. Many condemn the opinion for treating corporations as people, money as speech, and elections as commodities to be sold to the highest bidder.
President Barack Obama lambasted Citizens United in a State of the Union address. During her 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton promised to nominate a Supreme Court justice who would overturn it.
Citizens United does not deserve such scorn.
As an election law scholar who has litigated campaign finance cases, including in the U.S. Supreme Court, I believe Citizens United is a straightforward application of free speech principles and, like Kennedy’s jurisprudence as a whole, reflects a balance of conservative and liberal legal conclusions.
The history
Citizens United was a non-profit corporation that received “a small portion of its funds” from for-profit corporations.
In 2008, while Hillary Clinton was seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, it released a documentary called Hillary: The Movie. The film featured numerous interviews with people who, the Supreme Court explained, were “quite critical” of her.
Citizens United wanted to pay a cable company $1.2 million to make the documentary available for free, on demand, to the company’s subscribers. It also wished to air paid advertisements for the movie.
Federal law, however, prohibited corporations from spending money to expressly advocate a federal candidate’s election or defeat. This restriction applied to Hillary: The Movie because Citizens United had accepted some corporate funding and the film amounted to express advocacy.
Citizens United sued, arguing these restrictions violated its First Amendment rights. The ruling
Kennedy’s opinion in Citizens United blended conservative concern for free speech with a more liberal focus on transparency.
The conservative majority held corporations have the right to create and distribute political advertisements and other election-related communications such as Hillary: The Movie.
All the justices except Clarence Thomas joined in the final part of the opinion, which held that the government may require speakers like Citizens United to publicly report such expenditures and include disclaimers on their election-related communications, revealing who paid for them.
Citizens United ended unnecessary restraints on political expression and gave voters access to a wider range of election-related information. It also afforded corporations a fair chance to present their perspective on elections that could have tremendous consequences for them.
Corporations are taxed and subject to government regulation. They play vital roles in providing the jobs, goods and services that drive our economy. It is only fair to allow corporations to voice their institutional views about candidates for public office — views that voters, of course, are free to completely disregard.
Money, speech and collective political action
Critics claim Citizens United allowed corporate America to buy elections.
The central question in the case, however, was whether corporations could spend money to engage in election-related speech. It remains illegal for corporations to contribute money to candidates, political parties or traditional political action committees (PACs).
Moreover, most of the principles Citizens United relied upon were established in cases decided decades earlier.
The 1976 landmark case Buckley v. Valeo set forth the constitutional principles governing modern campaign finance law. It reaffirmed that election-related speech lies at the heart of the First Amendment. And it recognized that, while money is not literally speech, it is essential to virtually every form of political speech.
Political signs require poster board and markers. Political flyers must be duplicated. Political advertisements cost money to broadcast or publish.
Limiting political spending, the Supreme Court explained, reduces “the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.” The government may not limit political expression, the court emphasized, just because it costs money. Rather, such “independent expenditures” remain pure political speech entitled to maximum constitutional protection.
In the decades after Buckley, the Supreme Court held that people retain this right to engage in pure election-related expression when they join together to achieve political goals collectively. Groups such as political action committees, political parties and certain non-profit corporations have the First Amendment right to spend money to fund election-related speech without government limits. Several liberal justices joined in many of these rulings.
Citizens United extended to for-profit corporations the same constitutional right to advocate for or against candidates that other types of private associations – as well as the corporations’ stockholders, directors, executives and employees – already possessed. A trickle, not a flood
Critics proclaimed that Citizens United would open the floodgates to a deluge of corporate political spending. They were wrong.
University of New Mexico Professor Wendy Hansen and her co-authors discovered that, in the 2012 election, “not a single Fortune 500+ company” made independent expenditures. And only nine Fortune 500 companies made contributions to SuperPACs, totaling less than $5 million.
Such results are unsurprising. Most major corporations do not want to alienate up to half their potential customers by spending millions of dollars publicly aligning themselves with a particular candidate or political party.
SuperPACs are political committees that only fund election-related speech and activities without input from candidates. Because SuperPACs cannot contribute to candidates or political parties, people may give unlimited amounts of money to them.
Citizens United didn’t create the principles that led to SuperPACs; Buckley did. SuperPACs simply let people join together to engage in the same political speech and spending they were already free, under Buckley, to perform on their own.
Kennedy’s opinion in Citizens United did not cause a corporate Armageddon for our political system. It was a victory for the fundamental First Amendment right of all Americans, individually or collectively through corporations, to engage in pure political speech about federal elections.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 24, 2018.
As Frederick Clarkson noted on RD earlier this week, every January 16 we celebrate Religious Freedom Day. On this day 234 years ago, the Virginia Assembly passed the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, setting in motion what, according to Clarkson, “may be the most revolutionary and liberatory idea in the history of civilization.”
America’s unique contribution to political science is the separation of state and church. We invented it and it’s the only guarantee for true religious liberty. The “wall of separation” that Thomas Jefferson famously wrote of—a metaphor that the Supreme Court first adopted nearly 150 years ago—is an American original. The idea was born in the Enlightenment, but it was first implemented in the American Experiment. This is not just an improvement on political science, but one of our country’s unique contributions to humanity.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gary Wills put it nicely in his 1990 book, Under God: Religion and American Politics. The separation of state and church:
“more than anything else, made the United States a new thing on earth… . Everything else in our Constitution—separation of powers, balanced government, bicameralism, federalism—had been anticipated both in theory and practice. . . . But we invented nothing, except disestablishment. No other government in history had launched itself without the help of officially recognized gods and their state-connected ministers.”
Until America, no other government in the history of humanity had sought to protect citizens’ right to think freely by divorcing religion and government.
We should be proud of that contribution to the world, but Christian nationalists are doing their best to destroy it. Many groups are actively protecting the wall: the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the ACLU, American Atheists, the Center For Inquiry, the American Humanist Association, and others. The wall of separation is crumbling, though not from neglect. It’s being attacked.
The Trump administration is rife with Christian nationalists attempting to rewrite the Constitution by revising American history and declare this a “Christian nation.” Betsy Devos, Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, and Mike Pompeo have been abusing their government power to promote their personal religion. But under the U.S. Constitution, the government “has no particle of spiritual jurisdiction,” as Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist Papers.
At the head of this Christian Nationalist beast is Donald Trump. Today, he’s issuing a guidance to put prayer back in public schools. He’s appointed not only the Christian nationalists above, but also megachurch preacher Paula White to a White House position for which she has no qualifications. Trump held his first 2020 campaign rally at a church run by “Apostle” Guillermo Maldonado who, like Paula White, preaches the prosperity gospel, a theology so controversial even many conservative Christian leaders denounce it as false. (Incidentally, Maldonado’s church, El Rey Jesus, likely violated IRS regulations as the Freedom From Religion Foundation and members of Congress pointed out.)
At that rally, less than two weeks before Religious Freedom Day, Trump was clear about his desire to unite state and church. He declared, “We will restore the role of faith and true foundation of American life and we will ensure that our country forever and always remains one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God.” In the Virginia Statute for
Religious Freedom, Jefferson skewered:
“the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others.”
He might have been writing about Trump.
Without the secular government our founders established, religious freedom, the foundational American value that we celebrate every January 16, cannot exist. There is no freedom of religion without a government that is free from religion. The United States realized the dream of genuine religious freedom because it embarked “upon a great and noble experiment . . . hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent—that of total separation of Church and State,” as President John Tyler put it.
(@ThomasL16765780) 
Marci Newman Kitcho 
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