A PREVENTABLE INCIDENT

Three people are killed and two injured in 70ft scaffolding collapse at North Carolina construction site

Three people have died and another two were injured in a 'industrial accident' in Charlotte, North Carolina Monday morning

THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS JUST PREVENTABLE INCIDENTS

Sources at the scene said three construction workers were killed when the scaffolding they were on collapsed

The victims reportedly fell 70 feet to the ground with a wall falling on top of them
Another two were transported to a local hospital in the aftermath

NON UNION LABOR

By MELISSA KOENIG FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED 2 January 2023 

Three people have died and another two are injured in a horrific 'industrial accident' in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Charlotte Fire Department officials said the 'industrial accident' unfolded at around 9am on Monday at a construction site in the 700 block of E. Morehead Street.

Sources at the scene have said that three construction workers were killed when the scaffolding they were on collapsed, and they plummeted 70 feet to the ground with a wall falling on top of them.

Another two victims were transported to a local hospital in the aftermath. Paramedics say they did not suffer serious injuries.

The accident is now being investigated by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Charlotte Fire Department officials are pictured at the scene of a construction site where three people died and another two were injured Monday morning


Dozens of first responders, as well as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department vehicles were pictured at the scene

Construction workers who remained at the scene said they were doing 'as good as we can be'

Dozens of first responders, as well as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department vehicles were pictured at the scene, as the Fire Department said it was working to secure the area.

All of the work at the site has been suspended while the incident is being investigated, and construction workers who remained on the scene told WSOC TV they were doing 'as good as we can be.'

A family reunification site has been established nearby.

Code Name Blue Wren

Author Jim Popkin joins Morning Joe to discuss 'Code Name Blue Wren,' about Ana Montes, one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history.

Jan. 2, 2023

Interview: Slavoj Zizek: 'Denazification Should Begin At Home, In Russia'

January 02, 2023 
By Vazha Tavberidze

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek

After a career in academic philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s, Slavoj Zizek began to write widely in English, publishing what many consider to be his masterpiece work, The Sublime Object Of Ideology. Once referred to as a "celebrity philosopher" by Foreign Policy magazine, Zizek is known for his chaotic delivery, stream of consciousness speech, and controversial rhetoric. Although he has previously identified as a communist, he said he would vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Zizek is currently the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities at the University of London. He spoke to Vazha Tavberidze from RFE/RL's Georgian Service.

RFE/RL: Before we talk about Ukraine and the war, I would like to ask you about Russia itself. Is Russia still an empire? Or a remnant of one? Or a country that would like to be one?

Slavoj Zizek: It's a very interesting question. I think it would like to be one, but I think, as it were, the "origin of evil" is also the way the West reacted to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. [By the way], I am totally anti-Putin. What I mean is that, in the 1990s, in the era of [Russian President Boris] Yeltsin…the implicit silent pact between Russia and the West was that Russia is formally recognized as a superpower on the condition that it doesn't really act as one. Like, we treat you as a great power, but let's face it, you are not one, and Putin then broke this rule. I also think that the way the West influenced the Russian economy in the 1990s wasn't very constructive in [the midst of the] economic decay in the Yeltsin years. Economic decay, distrust in democracy, corruption -- [all] created the conditions for Putin. But to avoid any doubt, Putin is a global catastrophe. But we [the West] are not blameless there.

RFE/RL: Where do Russian imperial ambitions end? And what do they include? Is it the Soviet Union? Is it Russia from the time of Peter the Great? Where do we draw the line and the boundaries?

Zizek: As it is with all imperial powers, they probably themselves don't have a precise plan. They just try to push it on and on and on. In the case of Ukraine, they mentioned the Russian minority, but do you remember the short war in Georgia?

RFE/RL: I am Georgian, so I have to.

Zizek: Russia took the southern part of Ossetia [in the war]. But Ossetians are not a Russian minority.… Some people claim that all this big imperial rhetoric and all this idea of a Russian third way, all these fantasies of [Kremlin-connected far-right ideologue Aleksandr] Dugin, are just rhetoric and, in reality, Russia just wants to grab some land in Ukraine. I unfortunately don't believe in this. As a kind of leftist Marxist, I think that rhetoric is never just words. Ideology is a terrible material force; don’t underestimate it…. Oh, they are just talking…[but] what they are talking about is horrible. You know that Putin in one of his speeches included not just the Baltic states, but even Finland and, with some hints, even Sweden….

In Russia, they are dangerously approaching a new version of Nazism.

What worries me also is the situation in [Bosnia-Herzegovina] and northern Kosovo. As I pointed out in some of my texts, some Serbian politicians already talk Putin's language, claiming that Kosovo should also be denazified. And now the ideology is approaching madness. Did you notice that now they don't only talk about denazification, but already about de-Satanization? Putin was proclaimed chief exorcist not only of Ukraine but basically the entire Western Europe. And here things get really worrying for me.

Did you notice during the last visit of [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskiy to Washington, but already before, a strong resistance from the extreme right, some Trump supporters, and so on…. This deep solidarity of the Western new populist right with Putin. We should never forget -- although I am against any racist Eurocentrism -- that Europe is something unique today. And I'm saying this as a leftist, my God! A vision of a corporation of states in a global emergency situation based on basic social democratic values, even if there are conservatives in power, global health care, solidarity, free education, and so on. That's why, did you notice how Europe annoys everybody today? From Latin American leftists to the American right, to Russians, to third-world fake anti-colonizers and so on….

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Mr. Zelenskiy Goes To Washington. So What Did He Get From It?

Now I will try to be as open as possible understanding the Russian view. Yes, there are some neofascist tendencies in Europe here and there. I know the situation in Ukraine very well and [neo-Nazism], it's marginal and so on. But I will draw a distinction here between fascism and Nazism. Fascism is horrible. But remember, regimes like [Italian dictator Benito] Mussolini till 1938, [Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira] Salazar, and [Spanish dictator Francisco] Franco. They were not this explosive, expensive fascism. They just tried to maintain order in their own land, while Nazism was something different. Hitler needed that war, constant tension and so on. So, I agree with the goal of denazification, but I think it should begin at home, in Russia. In Russia, they are dangerously approaching a new version of Nazism.

RFE/RL: Speaking of ideology, let me ask you this. When we talk about the imperial mindset, is it just Putin? Or is empire something ingrained in the Russian subconscious?

Zizek: It's a very interesting question. Many friends of Russia and admirers of Russian culture like to say, "Oh, this is just the present elite, Putin and so on. One shouldn't confuse this with Russian culture." I think it's always [been] more complex. One strand, one direction of Russian culture has this imperial ambition built in. For example -- and I know what I'm saying here because I think his danger is vastly underestimated but he's overestimated as a writer – [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky. Dostoevsky was, as far as I know, the first who formulated this idea of Russia as the eternal victim of Europe. Russia saved Europe from Napoleon first and so on. Well, if we may engage in some crazy retroactive speculation, I think that if Napoleon were to win, with a miracle, and control Europe, maybe it would have been a much better Europe, incidentally…. OK, [it would be] absolutism, but more enlightened absolutism, based, nonetheless, on the values of the French Revolution, freedoms and so on.

I think there is no ethnic cleansing and violence without poetry.

So, we have this idea, which was the ultimate idea of the fascist third way. This idea [where] the Far East, Asia is totalitarian, the West is individualist, and Russia, Russian Orthodoxy, is the right way in the middle…. Only a united Eurasia can save us. I think that Eurasia is the Russian term for neofascism and it can even be empirically proven. The father of all of this is, as we all know but is not emphasized enough, Ivan Ilyn, a Russian political philosopher thrown out by Lenin. Already then, in the 1920s, [when Ilyn] emigrated to Italy, then to Germany, he was sympathetic to fascism. But, very interestingly, he claimed that Western Europeans, they are already too marked by Western dynamics: industrial, individualist, even Nazism, fascism. [He thought that] only Russian Orthodoxy, with its unity of secular and spiritual power, can provide the original Russian fascism. I think that line is returning today….

RFE/RL: Russian exceptionalism?

Zizek: Yeah. But exceptionalism…in the sense that we are the exception that can provide the right balance between individualism and collectivism. This is an old fascist idea. Almost every power tries to present itself as somewhere in the middle. [According to] the idea of fascism, "we have communist totalitarianism, no private property, no freedom, and then we have Western liberalism [with] too much individualism. [But] we are in the middle, [we] fascists, [we] are the only real balanced power." I take these things very seriously….

What [is happening] today in the United States with Trumpian neoconservatives is that they are now also moving into this revolutionary phase. It will remain, I hope, a cultural civil war. But did you notice that recently Trump said in an interview that to return to true trust, democracy, [the cancellation of the] Biden election and so on, we are allowed even to violate the constitution, [to] delegitimize the entire system.

So, I think that the nightmare that I see, is a silent pact between Western alt-right neoconservatives, aggressive populists from France to England to Germany, [and] the United States and Russia. They have, they say, a vision of new sovereign state multiculturalism…. You remember when the Taliban won in Afghanistan (as the United States completed its troop withdrawal in 2021), the Taliban and China immediately made a pact, which brutally made sense: "we leave you alone to do whatever you want, terrorizing women, and so on. You leave us alone to do what we want with our own Muslims, Uyghurs, and so on." This is the new world vision, and they even call it the new decentralization, multiculturalism, which means you can cut women's clitorises, be against LGBT, whatever you want. You do it there. We do it here, whatever we want. This is the new vision of sovereign neofascist states and the whole world is at least on one level moving in this direction….

Flanked by military personnel, Russian President Vladimir Putin makes his annual New Year address to the nation at the headquarters of the Southern Military District in Rostov-on-Don on December 31.

Now, I will say something to provoke our listeners. Maybe even you. I think there is no ethnic cleansing and violence without poetry. I don't dismiss all poetry. But a certain poetry was always ready to justify a nationalist, racist, totalitarian regime. Let's look at [American poet] Ezra Pound, a great modernist. [He] was in Italy working for fascism during World War II. T.S. Eliot was also on the edge, not to mention my own country, Yugoslavia. It is deeply significant that Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was a poet. But wait a minute, I'm not dismissing poetry. Poetry can be an authentic voice, but nonetheless, we should take now from today's experience with Russia a deeper look into the past and analyze the root of it all.

You know where I see one of the ideological roots?... Already in the late 1970s, [the KGB] clearly saw something: that Russia is losing [a] serious ideological war. That was the explosion of Western popular culture, rock music, and so on. So how to counter it?.... I remember they consciously began to build links with the Orthodox Church and Russian conservatives, which were, of course, till that point, oppressed. Because they knew that the only thing [that] could really oppose the…individualist, hedonist West was traditional Russian culture. This link, it's not just Putin and the patriarch, who is now the boss of the Russian Orthodox Church. This link has a deeper meaning. There is a pact between the darkest forces of the ex-KGB and a certain strand, again, in Russian Orthodox tradition.

RFE/RL: With all the points you have made, professor, I think the central point, the gist of the question, still remains unanswered. Because what I asked was, is it an ideology that is imposed by the Kremlin leadership? Or is it an ideology that is embraced by the nation? Because that leads us then to another question of collective guilt and the question of whose war is it that is now happening in Ukraine? Is it Russia's war or Putin's war?

Zizek: Maybe I'm even too optimistic here. I would like to find, maybe…a middle way. First, don't underestimate, even among ordinary Russians, this idea that we were a great power, with the Soviet [Union] and all that. This is a popular trend. But I nonetheless think that…Russia is deeply divided. The majority is neutral, but neutral in a cynical way. It will happen in the same [way] as with Milosevic in Serbia. He lost power, not because of his terrible politics of ethnic cleansing, but because he lost the war. If Putin will succeed, this will make him genuinely more popular. If not, then of course, he will be proclaimed a dictator who misused Russia and so on.

So, I am not ready…to blame Russian people as such, to brand them totalitarian, fascist and so on. They are somewhere in between, as most people are, but their tradition, the Orthodox Church, is, I claim, dangerous.

There are tremendous achievements of Russian culture. For example, if you ask me, the three greatest writers of the 20th century, I think they are [Irish novelist and playwright] Samuel Beckett, not [Irish writer James] Joyce -- he's pretentious, Finnegans Wake? Who wants to read that? -- [German-speaking Bohemian novelist] Franz Kafka, and [Soviet writer] Andrei Platonov. [Platonov was] a faithful communist -- he was fighting for the Red Army. But in his[novel], The Foundation Pit, they dig a big hole for a new socialist building, [and] all that remains is a hole. It's so fascinating [that] even before Stalinism, he saw the nihilistic dimension of the Bolshevik project.

So, as every culture, Russian culture is deeply divided. The struggle is going on, which is where I don't agree with my Ukrainian friends when they say let's boycott Russian culture as such, and so on and so on. Aren't we leaving them to Putin, by allowing him to present himself as the inheritor of Russian culture?…. So, Russia is in deep conflict with itself. That would be my answer…. We simply cannot say [whether] they are terrorizing the majority or [if it] has some roots also in the broad mass of people.

RFE/RL: You did say that the relationship of the Russian people with Putin will depend on whether he wins this war or not. And there's another particular interesting quote of yours. You swipe against those who advocate that the West should not support Ukraine, and they should put more pressure to negotiate -- their reasoning is that Ukraine simply cannot win a war against Russia. And then to my surprise, when you write about this, you do agree with that assessment. You say: "true, but I see this exactly as the greatness of the Ukrainian resistance. They risked the impossible, defying pragmatic calculations, and the least we owe them is full support." Now if you don't think Ukraine can win this, then how far does this assistance and support go?

Zizek: No, I wasn't precise enough there. [Ukraine] cannot win without very strong Western help. That's what I meant. My pessimistic assessment. Do you remember the beginning of the war? Although we nominally supported Ukraine, secretly, so many people from the left and the right admitted to me that the bad surprise was that Ukraine defended itself. They wanted the war to be over quickly. Because then, yeah, we will condemn Russia. After a couple of years of playing this boycott game, we will accept a new reality and so on and so on.

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I think that at the deepest subconscious level, this was the bad surprise for us -- not the attack, but the Ukrainian will to resist…. Instead of being afraid of this -- my God, will they push Russia too far? -- shouldn't we, especially the leftists, be glad of this? This is one of the few examples [of] authentic popular resistance -- they did the impossible, every leftist should be glad. And I don't get my leftist friends who nonetheless perceive Russia as some kind of successor of the Soviet Union.

RFE/RL: That was exactly the question I was going to ask you next. What's the root of this fascination with Russia, or let's call it obsession, of the leftists in the West, including very prominent thinkers like Noam Chomsky or Jeffrey Sachs. What's the root of this fascination with Russia, even Putin's Russia?

Zizek: I read a recent statement by Sahra Wagenknecht, the German leftist [parliamentary deputy] of Die Linke (The Left party), and she quite openly says: Why should we lose energy, money, and so on, putting ourselves in danger, fighting for some war far away…endangering our welfare, the welfare, as she puts it, of our working people?

So here, her idea is basically: Let Ukraine perish so that we don't have to pay higher prices for electricity or whatever. And this is pure egotism. Beneath there is still deep distrust of -- more than the United States – NATO. The dogma of the left is, whoever you are, no matter how brutal the dictatorship, if NATO is against you, there must be ultimately something not totally bad in you. NATO is the automatic opponent. And I find all this reasoning so stupid….

This is exactly the abstract pacifism that German propaganda was playing on in Europe just before World War II -- they [called] it…anti-imperialism. French, English, American imperialism tries to dominate Europe, we will provide Europe [with] autonomy, we will save Europe and so on and so on. And the paradox is that Chomsky, who proclaims himself politically an anarchist, ended up not supporting Russia. The popular term today is "understanding Russia."

And what de facto happens is…while still helping Ukraine hopefully, we are putting pressure on Ukraine, [saying] don't provoke Russia too much. What I find so sad here is that the pacifists are not even ready to admit one thing – now, the pacificists say, the front is more or less stabilized, let's push for peace negotiations, give Russia part of Ukraine. But are these pacifists aware that we arrived at this stage of relative stabilization of the front precisely because of the immense Western help in Ukraine?.... That's the paradox that they are not ready to accept, that the Western intervention [has] opened up the chance for peace. Without Western intervention helping Ukraine, [the country] would probably be occupied and then you can probably go on, to Moldova, the Baltic states, pressure on Finland and so on and so on

.

Vazha Tavberidze is a staff writer with RFE/RL's Georgian Service. As a journalist and political analyst, he has covered issues of international security, post-Soviet conflicts, and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations. His writing has been published in various Georgian and international media outlets, including The Times, The Spectator, The Daily Beast, and IWPR.

 

Virgin Islands Attorney General Loses Her Job Days After Suing JPMorgan Chase in Connection with the Jeffrey Epstein Probe

ADAM KLASFELDJan 2nd, 2023, 

Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George lost her job after suing JPMorgan Chase in connection with her Jeffrey Epstein investigation. (Photos via VI DOJ / US DOJ)

The Virgin Islands top prosecutor who reached a more than $105 million settlement with Jeffrey Epstein’s estate has lost her job days after suing JPMorgan Chase in connection with her probe.

The federal lawsuit, filed in New York, accused the bank of having “facilitated, sustained, and concealed” Epstein’s human trafficking network.

On Dec. 27, then-Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George filed a blistering and heavily redacted 30-page lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase.

“JP Morgan turned a blind eye to evidence of human trafficking over more than a decade because of Epstein’s own financial footprint, and because of the deals and clients that Epstein brought and promised to bring to the bank,” the lawsuit alleged. “These decisions were advocated and approved at the senior levels of JP Morgan, including by the former chief executive of its asset management division and investment bank, whose inappropriate relationship with Epstein should have been evident to the bank. Indeed, it was only after Epstein’s death that JP Morgan belatedly complied with federal banking regulations regarding Epstein’s accounts.”

Epstein victims, who sued anonymously in a pair of class action complaints, previously had accused JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank  of “complicity” in the sex trafficking scheme. Though Epstein died in jail before his trial, his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Days after the AG’s filing of the lawsuit — on New Year’s Eve — George was removed from her post. Local news outlets in the Virgin Islands reported that the attorney general had not informed the territory’s Gov. Albert Bryan about her impending enforcement action.

George’s office did not immediately respond to Law&Crime’s email requesting comment on Monday, a federally observed holiday

The development was first reported by The Virgin Islands Consortium, citing anonymous sources. Bryan subsequently confirmed George’s termination — without providing an explanation for it — in a statement sent to multiple news outlet.

“I relieved Denise George of her duties as attorney general this weekend,” Bryan wrote in a statement sent to Law&Crime. “I thank her for her service to the people of the territory during the past four years as attorney general and wish her the best in her future endeavors.”

The governor’s spokesman declined to elaborate, telling Law&Crime: “I am not at liberty to discuss details on personnel matters.”

Bryan reportedly appointed Assistant Attorney General Carol Thomas-Jacobs to serve as acting attorney general. Thomas-Jacobs, who also did not immediately respond to Law&Crime’s press inquiry, also worked on the Epstein investigation, court documents show.

George had led the office when Thomas-Jacobs signed her name to a complaint suing Epstein’s estate under the territory’s Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (CICO) enforcement action, the local equivalent of a racketeering lawsuit. That action accused the estate’s executors Darren K. Indyke and Richard D. Kahn of acting as Epstein’s “indispensable captains.”

Both denied those allegations and did not concede wrongdoing under the recent settlement, which called upon the estate to keep providing documents for the attorney general’s “ongoing investigation.”

The case that George filed against JPMorgan Chase before her departure has been marked as related to the proposed class action lawsuits filed in the same court against JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, currently pending before Senior U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff. Those now-consolidated cases have been scheduled for trial in the Southern District of New York in the summer of 2023.

UK Civil servants threaten to coordinate strikes as union leader warns some workers are skipping meals

2 January 2023

Dave Penman said some junior civil servants were skipping meals due to the cost of living crisis. Picture: Getty/Alamy

By Henry Riley

Civil Servants have been skipping meals, and unable to heat their homes according to a union leader.

Dave Penman, the General Secretary of the FDA Union, which represents civil servants, has told LBC that civil servant graduates, some of whom are supporting government ministers, 'cant afford to eat, or heat'.

He added they were 'skipping meals' and 'not going out at night' because of the cost of living crisis.

The union, which is currently balloting some of its members, said that it was 'unprecedented' that 'some of the brightest and most able graduates in the country' were considering industrial action.

Mr Penman said his members were considering the action because of a 3% pay offer on top of a very low starting salary - adding that when the ballot closes on the 16th January 'we'll be considering what strike action our graduates will take', saying it was an 'embarrassment for the government'.

The Union also refused to rule out co-ordinated strike action, admitting 'of course we talk to other unions around their action, and whether co-ordination makes sense'.

Dave Penman went on to tell LBC that there were 'common themes with a lot of these disputes'. When pressed about whether this meant this meant the FDA would co-ordinate any future action, he said it 'may well be working with other unions... the responsibility for any co-ordinated action is with ministers, not the unions'.

The government said 'Unions should step back from this strike action so we can start 2023 by ending this damaging dispute.'

 

EU Parliament bids to lift immunity for two MEPs in corruption probe

2 January 2023, 16:24

Europe Corruption. Picture: PA

President Roberta Metsola asked all services and committees to give the procedure priority, with the aim of completing it by February 13.

The president of the European Parliament has launched an urgent procedure to waive the immunity of two MEPs following a request from Belgian judicial authorities investigating a major corruption scandal rocking EU politics.

The European Parliament said on Monday that President Roberta Metsola asked all services and committees to give the procedure priority, with the aim of completing it by February 13.

“From the very first moment the European Parliament has done everything in its power to assist in investigations and we will continue to make sure that there will be no impunity,” Ms Metsola said. “Those responsible will find this Parliament on the side of the law. Corruption cannot pay and we will do everything to fight it.”

The EU Parliament press service did not identify the two MEPs. According to two people familiar with the case who were not allowed to speak publicly because the investigation is ongoing, they are Italian Andrea Cozzolino and Belgian Marc Tarabella.

Lawyers for Eva Kaili speak to the media at a court in Brussels (Olivier Matthys/AP/PA)

Both men are members of the Parliament’s Socialists and Democrats group. Mr Tarabella, whose home was raided last month, has denied wrongdoing. The two were asked for comment.

A third member of Parliament, Eva Kaili, has already been charged in relation to the scandal, which allegedly involves Qatari and Moroccan officials suspected of influencing economic and political decisions with gifts and money.

Prosecutors accuse Kaili of corruption, membership in a criminal organisation and money laundering. A Greek socialist MEP, Kaili has been in custody since December 9. Her partner, Francesco Giorgi, an adviser at the European Parliament, is being held on the same charges.

Kaili was relieved of her duties of parliament vice-president after being charged. She would have normally enjoyed immunity from prosecution but was brought before a judge after Belgian police launched raids on premises across Brussels last month and large sums of cash were reportedly found at her home.

Kaili and Giorgi are suspected of working with Giorgi’s one-time boss, Pier Antonio Panzeri, a former EU politician. According to arrest warrants, Panzeri “is suspected of intervening politically with members working at the European Parliament for the benefit of Qatar and Morocco, against payment”.

The Parliament has halted work on files involving Qatar as it investigates what impact the cash-and-gifts-for-influence bribery scandal might have had. Qatar vehemently denies involvement and Morocco has yet to respond to allegations that its ambassador to Poland might have been involved.

Seals are pictured on Eva Kaili’s office door at the European Parliament in Strasbourg (Jean-Francois Badias/AP/PA)

Belgian prosecutors are also seeking the handover of Panzeri’s wife and daughter from Italy, where they were put under house arrest on similar charges.

A fourth suspect in Belgium — Niccolo Figa-Talamanca, secretary-general of the non-governmental organisation No Peace Without Justice — was also charged over the affair.

The scandal came to public attention after police launched more than 20 raids, mostly in Belgium but also in Italy. Hundreds of thousands of euros were found at a home and in a suitcase at a hotel in Brussels. Mobile phones and computer equipment and data were seized.

By Press Association

Stand Up and Fight': Sanders Delivers New Year's Message on 2023 Priorities


Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) delivers a New Year's Day message.
(Photo: BernieSanders.com/Screenshot)

"What we have in this country is really disgraceful" when it comes to healthcare, says the U.S. senator from Vermont.


JON QUEALLY
Jan 01, 2023

Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a New Year's Day message on Sunday as he gets ready to take over as chair of the powerful Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in the U.S. Senate when Congress comes back into session later this month.

Laying out his priorities for the committee in 2023, Sanders put a familiar focus on the need for an improved and expanded Medicare system and lower drug costs as he lambasted the nation's "cruel and dysfunctional" for-profit system that leaves tens of millions of people uninsured or grossly underinsured.

"What we have in this country is really disgraceful" in terms of healthcare, Sanders says in the video address posted to YouTube and shared on social media.

Fixing the nation's healthcare system, he said, is "an issue, together, we are going to have to work on. We must have the courage to stand up to the greed and recklessness of the insurance companies and the drug companies" who continue to oppose progressive reforms, including the push for Medicare for All.

"We have to work to substantially lower the cost of prescription drugs," Sanders added, "and we have got to work to guarantee healthcare as a human right for all of our people, not a privilege."

Watch the full video:

Happy New Year. Here’s what’s on my mind for 2023.

On education, Sanders blasted that the richest nation on Earth—which somehow manages to provide "massive tax breaks to the billionaire class—still allows its heroic teachers to struggle in underfunded schools that disadvantages all children trying to learn. He also criticized a higher education system that has saddled an estimated 45 million college students and their families with outrageous levels of debt.

With labor the other key area of jurisdiction for the committee he will soon be leading, Sanders lamented in his address the existence of a "very rigged economy with unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality" that is hurting working families in favor of making life better the already rich and powerful.

"I'm thinking about a country today where at this moment workers all across this country—at Starbucks, Amazon, nurses at hospitals, workers at factories, young people at college campuses—they are organizing unions in order to receive better wages and working continues, because they know, at the end of the day, that unity—bringing people together for collective bargaining—is the only way that many workers are going to get the benefits, wages, and working conditions that they so desperately need."

With that context, Sanders said these workers in unions or those trying to organize a new union are being "vigorously" opposed by corporate bosses using "fierce and illegal anti-union action."

Countering those anti-union efforts by Starbucks, Amazon, and other major employers, he said, will be something he intends to do from his chair position.

Acknowledging political realities, however, Sanders said he knows very well that he will not have the power to simply pound his gavel of the new committee "and lo and behold all these important pieces of legislation get passed."

"It ain't gonna happen that way, that's for sure," said Sanders. While admitting that Republicans and certain "conservative Democrats" are not going to be supportive of his progressive agenda, Sanders said, "That doesn't mean we give up on these issues. We're going to take these issues to the people and continue the fight.

Despite partisan opposition on many things, Sanders said he has genuine hope that some progress can be made on things like reducing the cost of prescription drugs and childcare in the upcoming session.

In the end, Sanders called on listeners to join together in the battles to come in the new year "as we stand up and fight to make sure that working families in this country can live with the kind of dignity and security that they are entitled to."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


JON QUEALLY is managing editor of Common Dreams.

BOOK EXCERPT
"They got Daddy": Reckoning with my grandfather's kidnapping, racial terror and our family's trauma

My grandfather was brutalized for suing a white cop in Jim Crow Alabama. Here's what reporting the story taught me

By SHARON TUBBS
PUBLISHED JANUARY 2, 2023 

Israel Page and Margaret (Warren) Page, Sharon Tubbs's maternal grandparents, and the house in Uniontown, Alabama, where the Tubbs family traveled from Fort Wayne, Indiana, each summer to visit grandparents.

 (Photo illustration by Salon/Photos courtesy of author/Getty Images)

Adapted from the introduction of "They Got Daddy: One Family’s Reckoning with Racism and Faith" by Sharon Tubbs. Published by the University of Indiana Press, 2023. Used with permission.

Memories of my grandfather remain both vivid and vague, even now, after researching and writing about the most tumultuous season of his life. I see him in demented old age, sitting on a pine wood chair in my grandparents' rural Alabama home, his gaze distant, his suspenders securing a pair of baggy slacks. Yet, I cannot recall any words or sentiments exchanged between us. I see the disabled arm hanging at his side, something I'd wondered about but never asked anyone to explain.

Several years passed from when I wore a ponytail and patent leather Mary Janes at his funeral to the day my mother mentioned the kidnapping. We were watching the news, and one story featured an upcoming Ku Klux Klan rally in some part of Indiana. My childhood mind questioned whether the hate group still existed in the 1980s, but my mother verified that they most certainly did. As a matter of fact, she said, "They got Daddy," referring to my grandfather. Those words would guide me along a journey to learn much more about Israel Page, the grandfather whose character I saw more clearly after death than in my memories of his life. In the process, I would also learn about how racism affected me as a Black woman in America.
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My first career as a newspaper journalist prepared me for the task. Editors and experience trained me in interviewing and researching people and their pasts. I gathered details from my mother, her siblings, my grandmother, and my grandfather's contemporaries. Israel Page had worked as a church pastor, a sharecropper, and a well driller, they'd said. Research through courthouse records, libraries, online databases, and writings about racism yielded more results. I learned that the kidnapping ordeal began in 1954 with a car accident between my grandfather and a white sheriff's deputy. The accident left his right arm lame, which meant he could no longer drill wells, which led to his lawsuit against the deputy, which culminated in the 1959 kidnapping and beating by white supremacists.

I originally planned to tell the story of Israel Page's five-year legal battle with that deputy, Benjamin Brantley "B. B." Lee. The tale had moved silently through the Page family, feeding into cultural trauma from one generation to the next. The more I dug, the more the story swelled and extended beyond the 1950s and into the 21st century. Israel Page v. Brantley Lee eventually became my framework to explore lingering systemic issues through the experiences of one family, our family. Today, I still wonder about lasting repercussions from that disturbing slice of his life.

Trauma's generational impact

Cultural trauma describes the lasting effects of racism on African Americans, or, more generally speaking, it occurs when members of a group endure something horrendous that scars their group consciousness and changes their identity. The concept applies, then, to Jewish people whose ancestors endured the Holocaust, Japanese Americans forced into internment camps, and of course African Americans in the aftermath of slavery, Jim Crow, and even 21st-century tragedies of police brutality. Racism and the cultural trauma it carries seeped from my grandfather to my mother, uncles and aunts, to me.

Author and experienced birth doula Jacquelyn Clemmons said cultural trauma can't simply be dismissed or forgotten. "When we consider that we are not only walking around with our own lived experiences and traumas but also those of our ancestors, we must slow down and take a hard, honest look at our past," Clemmons wrote in a 2020 article for Healthline. To truly heal, we must address the cultural trauma that has always been there, shaping our perspective from birth."

Israel Page v. Brantley Lee eventually became my framework to explore lingering systemic issues through the experiences of one family.

While writing the book, my own racial fears and triggers unveiled themselves. I began remembering certain incidents, such as the time a retail worker practically chased my sister and I out of a store, assuming we'd plotted to steal clothes. Then there were instances when I shrank inwardly. Like when my homemade bologna sandwich fared cheaply compared to my white friends' lunches during an elementary school field trip. When I froze as a young journalist while covering a story about a Klan march. When, as an adult, I feared stopping for fast food in a city once rumored to be a "sundown town" that forbade Blacks from being out past dark. In an instant, tears would fall as my body recalled the shame, embarrassment, or fear I felt during those moments. And I realized that I, like so many other African Americans — be they impoverished or wealthy, unknown or celebrity — fit within the rubric of the culturally traumatized.

Linking the past and present

My research became more than ingredients for a book when I considered the impact of cultural trauma and the stigma of black and brown skin in my life. This was a journey of reckoning, of relating and healing that linked my grandfather's experiences with my own. I saw how my fears and emotions mirrored situations my ancestors suffered. Not that I had been blind to these connections before, but I hadn't previously felt or processed them to the same degree. Civil rights legislation deleted the Whites Only signs, but total equity remained elusive.

In 2020, the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd occurred in a four-month span. Other fatal shootings followed into 2021, pitting some white police officers against unarmed African Americans. The era marked a shift, an uprising of sorts that yielded protests nationwide, sharp social media debates of free speech and so-called cancel culture. America revealed its heart as divided, its future headed backward toward a stark segregation of ideals. For many people of color nationwide, these tragedies equaled triggers, awakening the trauma inside of us, sparking emotional pleas for help and hope, eliciting passions that our white friends and allies could not fathom because their bloodline lacked the tainted plasma of discrimination.

We have always amounted to more than the ferocity of our racial battles.

Today, I work as a nonprofit leader serving under-resourced communities and underserved groups. My experience and research in the human services realm, coupled with my work for "They Got Daddy," revealed more links between past and present systemic racism. For instance, the eugenics movement sanctioned doctors who unwittingly sterilized Black women during the early 20th century. I recall mentioning a surgical procedure in 2017 to a friend who told me her family shunned major surgery of any kind because doctors stole the wombs of two Black relatives during the eugenics era. The horror echoed in 2020 when a whistleblower accused a doctor of performing hysterectomies on undocumented women detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without their knowledge. It came as no surprise to me or other nonprofit leaders, then, when African Americans initially ranked among the most resistant groups to take COVID-19 vaccines. Of course, we were. A deep mistrust of American medicine had baked into the culture due, in part, to records of the eugenics movement, the well-documented Tuskegee Experiment, and modern reports of implicit bias in hospitals, to name a few reasons.

We are more than our struggles

Still, so much more filled my research journey than oppression and fear. Equally ingrained in our story are the family reunions, the bonds formed through laughter and perseverance, the oral histories I'd heard for years without appreciating their warmth and cultural swagger. These were the memories that relatives retold at holiday gatherings, during dinner after a funeral service, while sitting on the front porch to catch a spring breeze. These proud snapshots convey the strength of the Black family, the overcoming spirit that refuses to let the pangs of the world steal our joy and zeal for living. We have always amounted to more than the ferocity of our racial battles.

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For many Black families, including ours, faith charted the course to overcome. It empowered us to survive the harshest of conditions from 17th-century fields, to the protest marches of the Sixties, to the shootings that preceded the Black Lives Matter movement. Throughout this project, I felt the complexity of emotions, including the pain that my relatives must have worked through and that people of color live with regardless of our generation or time. The defeat of discrimination. The frustration and belittling of injustice. But also, I felt the reasons why African Americans possess pride and distinction in who we are, nonetheless. The passion for our culture. The hope and confidence found through faith.

In the end, I embraced my grandfather by filling the voids left in my childhood memories. He was not the Martin Luther King Jr. I wrote about in a middle-school essay. He was no Medgar Evers or Thurgood Marshall. He was a Black man in suspenders who wanted to take care of his family and live his life in a small country town, a man who believed strongly in a God much bigger than us all. He was this guy living at a time when an unjust system threatened to use his skin color to steal his greatness and hope, in much the same way that injustice threatens us all. That same threat never stopped breathing through my grandfather's children. It still breathes in me today. Yet, learning the fullness of his story — our story — has allowed me to exhale.

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By SHARON TUBBS

Sharon Tubbs is an author, speaker, and nonprofit leader, currently living in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her latest book is "They Got Daddy: One Family's Reckoning with Racism and Faith."

MORE FROM SHARON TUBBS

NOT PATTY HEARST
Not the Camilla We Knew
One Woman’s Path from Small-town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army
2022 •
Author:
Rachael Hanel


Tags
Literature, Cultural Criticism, History, Minnesota and the Upper Midwest, Sociology, Creative Nonfiction, Social Movements, Women’s Studies

Behind every act of domestic terrorism there is someone’s child, an average American whose life took a radical turn for reasons that often remain mysterious. Camilla Hall is a case in point: a pastor’s daughter from small-town Minnesota who eventually joined the ranks of radicals like Sara Jane Olson (aka Kathleen Soliah) in the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974. How could a “good girl” like Camilla become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Rachael Hanel tells her story here, revealing both the deep humanity and the extraordinary circumstances of Camilla Hall’s life.

Camilla’s childhood in a tight-knit religious family was marred by loss and grief as, one after another, her three siblings died. Her path from her Minnesota home to her final, radical SLA family featured years as an artist and activist—in welfare offices, political campaigns, union organizing, culminating in a love affair that would be her introduction to the SLA. Through in-depth research and extensive interviews, Hanel pieces together Camilla’s bewildering transformation from a “gentle, zaftig, arty, otherworldy” young woman (as one observer remarked), working for social change within the system, into a gun-wielding criminal involved in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.

During this time of mounting unrest and violence, Camilla Hall’s story is of urgent interest for what it reveals about the forces of radicalization. But as Hanel ventures ever further into Camilla’s past, searching out the critical points where character and cause might intersect, her book becomes an intriguing, disturbing, and ultimately deeply moving journey into the dark side of America’s promise.

Cover alt text: Group photo, with Camilla in black and white divided by slashes from colorized parents on left and Patricia Soltysik on right.

$17.95 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1345-8
$17.95 ISBN 978-1-4529-6832-2
240 pages, 18 b&w plates, 5 3/8 x 8 1/4, December 2022

Not the Camilla We Knew — University of Minnesota Press (umn.edu)

Gen. Mark Milley said there were talks about court-martialing former military officers who wrote 'very critical' op-eds of Trump

Kelsey Vlamis
Jan 2, 2023

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Army Gen. Mark Milley looks on after getting a briefing from senior military leaders in the Cabinet Room at the White House on October 7, 2019. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Gen. Mark Milley said there were talks of retaliating against retired officers critical of Trump.

Several former military officers wrote up-eds criticizing Trump during his presidency.
Milley said he was concerned about politicization of the military in his testimony before the January 6 committee.

Gen. Mark Milley said there were discussions about retaliating against retired military officers who wrote critical op-eds about former President Donald Trump, according to testimony released by the January 6 committee.

Milley has served since 2019 as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military adviser to the president, after being nominated by Trump. His testimony, taken on November 17, 2021, was among a trove of documents released Sunday by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot.

Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria asked Milley if he had considered addressing Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump's national security adviser and later called for the US to have a coup like Myanmar after Trump left office.

Milley responded by saying he was concerned about the politicization of the military, and that the issue had come up during the Trump administration after op-eds written by retired military officers were "very critical of then President Trump."

"And there was actually discussions with me: Bring him back on Active Duty, court-martial him, you know, make him walk the plank sort of thing, right? I advised them not to do that, because that would further politicize, in my personal view," Milley said, adding he would also advise caution in addressing Flynn.

Milley did not specify which retired military officers were considered for court-martialing, but several wrote critical op-eds of Trump during his time in office. Some were published in 2020 in response to Trump's handling of civil unrest that occured after the murder of George Floyd, including his walk from the White House to St. John's Episcopal Church after law enforcement was used to disperse peaceful protesters.

Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen wrote a scathing commentary for Foreign Policy, saying the president "threatened to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens." Navy Adm. Mike Mullen said in The Atlantic he was "sickened" to see security personnel "forcibly and violently" removed protesters from Lafayette Square and that Trump had "laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest."

Milley, who also apologized for his role in Trump's photo op at the church, also testified that while he was worried about the "broader implications" of politicization of the military, taking action against retired officers who speak out shouldn't be done lightly.


A representative for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.