BE AFRAID, VERY AFRAID

'Cast of dangerous clowns': Columnist claims Cabinet picks reflect 'allure of Trumpism'

Kathleen Culliton
November 19, 2024 9

RAW STORY

People dressed as clowns attend the Zombie Walk, October 20, 2024. REUTERS/Pablo Sanhueza

The kind of man Stephen King would depict luring unsuspecting children into sewers is the kind President-elect Donald Trump would pick for the secretary of education, a political columnist argued Tuesday.

Salon writer Amanda Marcotte on Tuesday made the case that Trump is actively seeking out men accused of sexually assaulting women for top positions in his administration or, as she calls it, his "cast of dangerous clowns."

"It's not just that Trump doesn't care about sexual assault," wrote Marcotte. "He appears to see it as a bonus if one of his nominees or allies has faced such allegations."

Three men Trump has tapped for Cabinet have faced sexual assault accusations, reports show.

The congressional Ethics committee investigated whether former Rep. Matt Gaetz sexually assaulted an underage girl, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been accused of sexually assaulting his children's babysitter and Fox News personality Pete Hegseth has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a hotel room, reports show.

The three men have publicly denied the accusations.

Marcotte argued Tuesday that the denials — and the accusations — don't matter to Trump or his voters.

"He expects his base voters to see these ... like they see him, as an aspirational figure," Marcotte wrote. "And not because they believe they're innocent men done wrong, either. The ability to commit crimes — even sex crimes — and get away with it is part of the allure of Trumpism."

Marcotte argued Trumpism came as response to the #MeToo movement that sought to hold men such as film mogul Harvey Weinstein — the convicted rapist Trump recently complained had been "schlonged" — accountable for attacking women.

"Defending a man's 'right' to have sex with underage girls would be making good on a campaign promise," she wrote. "It's tempting to hope this will anger the public and result in consequences for Trump, but frankly, that's unlikely."

'Apparently not a joke': Critics stunned as WWE co-founder reportedly expected for Cabinet as Education Secretary
Matthew Chapman
November 19, 2024 8:01PM ET

Donald Trump is reportedly expected to appoint Linda McMahon, the former co-founder of WWE and the chief of the Small Business Administration in his previous presidency, to head up the Department of Education.

The appointment, which swiftly followed Trump's announcement of TV personality and former Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, prompted an instant reaction from commenters on social media.

"Linda McMahon being tipped for Trump’s education secretary," wrote Telegraph editor Gareth Davies on X, attaching a clip of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's famous "Stunner" finishing move. "Another senior US politician who has been Stunnered."

"Cause nothing says educating our children like being an ex-professional wrestling performer and running the @WWE, which has allegedly failed to protect employees from workplace harassment and sexual misconduct," wrote Kendra Barkoff Lamy, a former spokesperson to President Joe Biden while he served as vice president.

In addition to the reaction on X, others commented on the site's growing competitor, Bluesky.

"And, in further 'apparently not a joke' news, Linda McMahon of the WWE for Secretary of Education. LULZ PWNED as a theory of governance, I guess," wrote McGill University professor and Niskanen Center fellow Jacob T. Levy.

"Sort of like Oz at CMS, it’s not clear to me that McMahon would have an agenda of her own, but that might not be a problem for an administration that wants to shrink and eliminate much of DOE," wrote Yahoo Finance's Jordan Weissmann.

"I wonder if Linda McMahon will allow Jim Jordan and @timgill924.bsky.social [to] settle education policy disagreements in the ring?" wrote Michigan State University professor Brendan Cantwell.

'Betsy DeVos 2.0': Trump education pick raises alarms

Jake Johnson
Common Dreams

November 20, 2024

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced late Tuesday that he intends to nominate Linda McMahon, the billionaire former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, to lead the Department of Education, a key agency that Republicans—including Trump and the authors of Project 2025—have said they want to abolish.

McMahon served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump's first White House term and later chaired both America First Action—a pro-Trump super PAC—and the America First Policy Institute, a far-right think tank that has expressed support for cutting federal education funding and expanding school privatization.

Trump touted McMahon's work to expand school "choice"—a euphemism for taxpayer-funded private school vouchers—and said she would continue those efforts on a national scale as head of the Education Department.

"We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort," Trump said in a statement posted to his social media platform, Truth Social. (McMahon is listed as an independent director of Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs Truth Social.)

The National Education Association (NEA), a union that represents millions of teachers across the U.S., said in response to the president-elect's announcement that McMahon is "grossly unqualified" to lead the Education Department, noting that she has "lied about having a degree in education," presided over an organization "with a history of shady labor practices," and "pushed for an extreme agenda that would harm students, defund public schools, and privatize public schools through voucher schemes."

"During his first term, Donald Trump appointed Betsy DeVos to undermine and ultimately privatize public schools through vouchers," NEA president Becky Pringle said in a statement. "Now, he and Linda McMahon are back at it with their extreme Project 2025 proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, steal resources for our most vulnerable students, increase class sizes, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle-class families, take away special education services for disabled students, and put student civil rights protections at risk."

"The Department of Education plays such a critical role in the success of each and every student in this country," Pringle continued. "The Senate must stand up for our students and reject Donald Trump's unqualified nominee, Linda McMahon. Our students and our nation deserve so much better than Betsy DeVos 2.0."

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, took a more diplomatic approach, saying in a statement that "we look forward to learning more about" McMahon and that, if she's confirmed, "we will reach out to her as we did with Betsy DeVos at the beginning of her tenure."

"While we expect that we will disagree with Linda McMahon on many issues, our devotion to kids requires us to work together on policies that can improve the lives of students, their families, their educators, and their communities," Weingarten added.

McMahon is one of several billionaires Trump has selected for major posts in his incoming administration, which is teeming with conflicts of interest. During Trump's first term, McMahon and her husband, Vince McMahon, made at least $100 million from dividends, investment interest, and stock and bond sales.

The Guardian noted Tuesday that "in October, [Linda] McMahon was named in a new lawsuit involving WWE."

"The suit alleges that she and other leaders of the company allowed the sexual abuse of young boys at the hands of a ringside announcer, former WWE ring crew chief Melvin Phillips Jr," the newspaper reported. "The complaint specifically alleges that the McMahons knew about the abuse and failed to stop it."

'Declaration of war on expertise': Experts explain danger of Trump 'MAGA zealot' nominees

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump is interviewed by Fox and Friends co-host Pete Hegseth at the White House in Washington, U.S. April 6, 2017. 

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

David Badash

November 20, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump has surprised and even alarmed many across the country, and “puzzled” and “baffled” some within his own party, with his Cabinet and other top White House nominations. Critics on the left have denounced his picks for their apparent lack of experience or qualifications for the roles they are expected to take on, noting some hold controversial or even false positions in the fields they may soon direct policy on. Meanwhile, experts in the fields of government, fascism, and democracy, are raising serious concerns about the potential “danger” some nominees represent, drawing comparisons to the “professional propagandists” often found in authoritarian regimes.

Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an NYU professor of history and a recognized expert on fascism and authoritarianism, on Wednesday pointed to this report on one of Trump’s most-recent nominations, Linda McMahon:





McMahon was Trump’s former administrator of the Small Business Administration, and is a former CEO of WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), a major GOP donor, and has recently been the chair of a pro-Trump Super PAC, the board chair of a pro-Trump think tank, and the co-chair of Trump’s second transition team.

“Trump’s cabinet picks are a declaration of war on expertise and facts (that’s why there are several Fox hosts in the mix). The con artists, fraudsters, and professional propagandists that populate authoritarian governments see facts and laws as impediments to their goals,” Dr. Ben-Ghiat wrote.

READ MORE: JD Vance Accidentally Reveals FBI Director Wray Is Likely Being Replaced

Trump, announcing McMahon’s nomination, claimed, “Linda will use her decades of Leadership experience, and deep understanding of both Education and Business, to empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World.”

McMahon’s only brush with the field of education came about 15 years ago, when she served on the Connecticut State Board of Education. She resigned after 15 months. At the time, her appointment was controversial, with one lawmaker lamenting, “her depth of knowledge regarding education is lacking.”




McMahon is far from the only controversial nominee.

On Tuesday, the vice chair of the powerful House Rules Committee Jim McGovern (D-MA) blasted Trump’s nominees as “beyond insane.”

“Someone who is credibly accused of having sex with an underage girl. Someone who sucks up to foreign dictators and has attracted major concern that they can’t be trusted to protect America’s secrets from our adversaries. Someone who paid hush money to cover up a sexual assault accusation, you know, to lead our military, he’s picked because Donald Trump likes him on Fox News? Someone who says that tap water turns kids gay? I mean, this is the dream team? This is the dream team? Really?”

He appeared to be referring to Attorney General presumptive nominee Matt Gaetz, Director of National Intelligence presumptive nominee Tulsi Gabbard, Defense Secretary presumptive nominee Pete Hegseth, and HHS Secretary presumptive nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State posted video calling Trump’s nominees “a trainwreck.”

“Gaetz, Gabbard, RFK – none of them have the experience or qualifications for the positions they’re seeking, in addition to the fact they’re all dangerous MAGA zealots,” the organization declared. They posted a video clip (below) from MSNBC with a chyron that noted opposition from the right to Trump’s Attorney General nominee, Matt Gaetz.

MSNBC’s justice and legal affairs analyst Anthony Coley told viewers that Gaetz, the recently resigned U.S. Congressman, “has no national security experience—not anything meaningful—little anti-trust experience, and he certainly has no experience with criminal law, except for being the target of a federal criminal investigation looking into inappropriate sexual contact, allegedly, with a minor.”

Trump has also just appointed his former acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, a strong Trump loyalist, to be the U.S. Ambassador to NATO.

“Whitaker has little evident foreign policy or national security experience, making him an unknown to many in U.S. security circles,” The Associated Press reports. “Previous ambassadors to NATO have generally had years of diplomatic, political or military experience.”

“Before serving Trump,” Mother Jones notes, “he helped a company hawk bizarre products like a ‘masculine toilet’ to help ‘well-endowed men’ avoid unwanted contact with water.”

But The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a former U.S. Naval War College professor and an expert on Russia and nuclear weapons, served up this warning: “This is just hilarious, but the danger here is that it makes him Senate-confirmed and available for other stuff later.”

In other words, assuming Whitaker is confirmed, Trump could nominate him to another, even more critical role, declaring he’s qualified because he’s already been Senate-confirmed.

Last week, Nichols declared that Trump’s “nominations for intelligence, defense, and justice were revenge on people he thinks are his enemies. This is just endangering millions of innocent people.”

On Monday on MSNBC, Nichols went much further, delivered a scathing analysis of Trump’s nominees, calling them “an all-fronts assault on American democracy,” in another warning.

Trump, he said, is “trying to break the institutions of American government and American society, and what you’ve been seeing for the past few weeks is an all-fronts assault on American democracy, especially with these nominations.”

“I think the most dangerous of these nominations is actually [Pete] Hegseth,” Nichols explained. “And I’m kind of startled that we’re not sitting here talking more about taking a morning Fox [News] host and sticking him in the nuclear chain of command, to lead the largest—one of the largest—bureaucracies in the United States, in the world, including the person that’s supposed to look after the most powerful fighting force on the planet.”

And he concluded, “it’s also important to recognize that we could be in the first phases of a major constitutional crisis, even before Trump is sworn in.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

Dr. Oz nomination seen as potential boon for Medicare privatization

Donald Trump looks on as Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz speaks at a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 5, 2022. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
Donald Trump looks on as Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz speaks at a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 5, 2022. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo

Eloise Goldsmith, 

Common Dreams

November 21, 2024

Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose unsuccessful 2022 Pennsylvania Senate bid included pitching voters on a plan to expand the privatized Medicare Advantage program, is now in a position to potentially actualize that plan.

President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Oz, also known by his TV personality name Dr. Oz, is his pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

"Dr. Oz—a massive investor in Pharma—told the voters of Pennsylvania his plans to privatize Medicare… and they rejected him. Now Trump is giving him the authority to see his industry-approved plan carried through," wrote the progressive-leaning outlet The Lever, which covered Oz's support for Medicare Advantage back in 2022.

Through Medicare Advantage, which has been promoted by Trump and other congressional Republicans, seniors can opt out of traditional government-run Medicare health plans and instead choose plans administered by private insurers, such as UnitedHealthcare and Cigna.

According to The Lever's 2022 reporting, Oz pushed Medicare Advantage plans on his show The Dr. Oz Show and co-wrote a 2020 column for Forbes with a former healthcare executive in which they argued that a "Medicare Advantage For All" plan can "save" our healthcare system. In the column, Oz and his co-author articulated a plan to expand Medicare Advantage by imposing a 20% payroll tax.

Oz "is not a good pick for a very powerful position in charge of a trillion dollars of healthcare spending," wrote Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project on X, in reference to The Lever's investigation.

The Lever also reported that Oz's plan to expand private plans under Medicare Advantage could "boost companies in which he invests." For example, Oz and his wife owned up to $550,000 worth of stock in UnitedHealth Group, at the time of reporting. UnitedHealthcare and Humana account for nearly half, or 47%, of Medicare Advantage enrollees nationwide, according to the health policy organization KFF.

Additionally, a 2022 investigation by The New York Timesfound that major health insurers have exploited Medicare Advantage to boost their profits by billions of dollars.

Project 2025, a list of right-wing policy proposals led by the Heritage Foundation that Trump has tried to distance himself from, calls for making Medicare Advantage the default option for Medicare beneficiaries, which, if enacted, "would be a multibillion-dollar annual giveaway to corporations at the expense of Medicare enrollees and taxpayers," according to the liberal research and advocacy organization the Center for American Progress.

Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, offered a related critique of Oz: Americans "need someone who will crack down on insurers who want to deny care to the sick, providers who skimp on quality healthcare, corporations that want to privatize Medicare, and Big Pharma profiteers and ideologues who want to slash Medicaid and refuse care to low-income people. What they do not need is a healthcare huckster, which unfortunately Dr. Mehmet Oz appears to have become, having spent much of his recent career hawking products of dubious medical value."

In addition to the potential boon for private insurers, some researchers, news outlets, and members of Congress have also raised concerns about the quality of care administered under Medicare Advantage.

A 2022 government report found that "[Medicare Advantage Organizations] sometimes delayed or denied Medicare Advantage beneficiaries' access to services, even though the requests met Medicare coverage rules" and also "denied payments to providers for some services that met both Medicare coverage rules and [Medicare Advantage Organization] billing rules."

In October, a group of three Democratic lawmakers wrote to the current CMS administrator about increasingly widespread abuses and care denials by for-profit Medicare Advantage insurers.

"We are concerned that in many instances MA plans are failing to deliver, compromising timely access to care, and undermining the ability of seniors and Americans with disabilities to purchase the coverage that’s right for them," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), and Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter.

"We continue to hear alarming reports from seniors and their families, beneficiary advocates, and healthcare providers that MA plans are falling short, and finding a good plan is too difficult," they wrote.


In particular, they pointed to Medicare Advantage plans' growing reliance on prior authorization, a complex, barrier-ridden process whereby doctors must demonstrate a proposed treatment is medically necessary before the insurer will cover it.

"Overuse of prior authorization is not only harmful to patients, it hinders healthcare providers' ability to offer best-in-class service," they added.

Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, warned in a social media post Tuesday that "Dr. Oz wants to fully privatize Medicare."

"That's why Donald Trump put him in charge of Medicare," the group added. "We will fight to stop this charlatan from getting anywhere near our Medicare system."

Trump nomination of crypto banker Howard Lutnick another 'win for the billionaire class'

Howard Lutnick, Chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, gestures as he speaks during a rally for Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden, in New York, U.S., October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo

Julia Conley

Common Dreams

November 20, 2024

Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen feigned surprise on Wednesday over President-elect Donald Trump's nomination of Wall Street CEO Howard Lutnick to lead the U.S. Department of Commerce.

"Oh look, another billionaire has made his way into Trump's Cabinet," said the group, noting Lutnick is also a promoter of cryptocurrency and a Trump megadonor. "The conflicts of interest are almost too many to count."

Among the conflicts are Lutnick's involvement in the crypto industry and federal and state cases against Cantor Fitzgerald.

In addition to running the Wall Street firm, Lutnick is a banker for the "stablecoin" company Tether; purchasers receive a Tether token for $1, with the proceeds invested in reserves and Treasury bonds managed by Lutnick's Cantor Fitzgerald.

As Public Citizen noted, New York Attorney General Letitia James found in 2021 that Tether and another crypto firm "recklessly and unlawfully covered up massive financial losses to keep their scheme going and protect their bottom lines."

The company is also reportedly under federal investigation over alleged criminal violations of anti-money laundering rules and sanctions.

Public Citizen also said that while co-chairing Trump's transition team, Lutnick "may also have helped arrange a meeting between Trump and Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong," who "helped steer a record amount of political spending from the crypto industry into the 2024 election."

Crypto firms poured over $119 million into directly influencing the 2024 federal elections, Public Citizen found in August, making the industry's spending second only to that of fossil fuel companies.

As Politico reported in October, even other members of Trump's inner circle have accused Lutnick of using his transition team co-chair position to take meetings on Capitol Hill and "talk about matters impacting his investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald—including high-stakes regulatory matters involving its cryptocurrency business."

Lutnick's nomination, said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, serves as a reminder that "Trump serves the oligarchy, not the people."

"Debris from crypto's political spending tsunami will jam up more halls in Washington than ever before if Lutnick is confirmed as secretary of commerce," said Bartlett Naylor, a financial policy advocate for Public Citizen. "The president-elect, who once correctly called bitcoin a scam, now surrounds himself with even more crypto enablers. Cryptocurrency won't return good jobs to the heartland or reduce food prices; it will only thin the wallets of those vulnerable to a now government-legitimized con."

Government watchdog Accountable.US pointed to more than $19 million in political donations Lutnick has made since 2009, nearly all of which went to GOP candidates and political action committees. He contributed $6 million to Trump's super PAC, Make America Great Again, Inc., in 2024 alone.


"Howard Lutnick's questionable qualifications to lead the Department of Commerce begin and end with his loyalty to the president-elect," said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk.

Tether isn't the only Lutnick-linked company that's been investigated for wrongdoing. The Securities and Exchange Commission fined Cantor Fitzgerald $1.4 million in 2023, saying the company repeatedly failed "to identify and report customers who qualified as large traders." The company also agreed to pay $16 million in fines to the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2022 for using unauthorized communication channels.

Should Lutnick be confirmed as commerce secretary, Accountable.US said a "major regulatory conflict" could arise due to a dispute between the BGC Group, a spin-off brokerage of Cantor Fitzegerald, and futures and commodities exchange CME Group, over a competing trading platform BGC Group is launching.

"Lutnick's company's violations resulting in financial regulator fines and millions in right-wing political donations shows that political devotion takes precedence over actual experience to do the job in Trump's Cabinet," said Carrk.

Trump campaigned as a champion of working people as he railed against high grocery prices. As The New Republicreported on Tuesday, Lutnick has showered Trump's plan for across-the-board tariffs with effusive praise—even as leading economists warn the plan to impose tariffs on foreign imports will pass higher costs onto consumers, not foreign countries.

"In September, Lutnick told CNBC that 'tariffs are an amazing tool for the president to use—we need to protect the American worker,'" wrote Edith Olmsted. "Lutnick also gushed about tariffs at Trump's fascistic rally in Madison Square Garden last month, claiming that America was better off 100 years ago, when it had 'no income tax and all we had was tariffs.' His high praise for tariffs came even as he admitted Americans would face higher prices as a direct result."

Lutnick's nomination, said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), "is a win for the billionaire class at the expense of working people.


"The across-the-board tariff plan," she said, "is a distraction from the MAGA scam to extend tax giveaways for giant corporations and billionaires like Howard Lutnick."

Trump's Cabinet of horrors exposes his totalitarian drift

John Stoehr
November 19, 2024 

Former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard attends a campaign rally of Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump in Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S. October 22, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Donald Trump nominated an alleged rapist and sex trafficker to be attorney general. He picked a Russian asset to be director of national intelligence. He chose a religious fanatic and Kremlin stooge to be secretary of defense. And for secretary of health and human resources, he selected an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who once had a literal brain worm, and who habitually takes (“legal”) steroids to maintain, at the age of 70, the appearance of a physique of a man half his age.

There are the obvious things to say about this motley crew. Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr are , respectively, not qualified to lead the agencies they have been chosen to lead. None has managed anything larger than an office. None has the expertise required. Gaetz has never worked in law enforcement, Gabbard in intelligence, Hegseth in military leadership or Kennedy in public health. Their only qualification is their loyalty to the man who picked them, and how they look to him when they are on television.

Right now, the discussion seems to be concentrated on the Senate Republicans, who will have majority control of that chamber in January. They will be responsible ultimately for vetting Trump’s cabinet picks. The question is whether they will find the courage to restrain the President-elect or roll over, either by approving them or by letting Trump have what he wants through recess appointments.

Among liberals, the discussion seems to be limited to the absurdities each of these people brings to governance as well as the dangers they pose. “Yes, shake your head at the seeming absurdity of these picks,” wrote MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “But don’t stop there. These choices aren’t just controversial; they require us to stay vigilant about how each potential new Cabinet member could negatively affect our lives.”

But I think we’re missing the bigger picture. These nominations signal the totalitarian drift that’s coming to Washington and the country. Yes, that’s right. No, I’m not exaggerating. It’s time to start using that word.

Totalitarianism seeks dominion over the individual to the point where individuality is erased. That’s what happened to the Republican Party. Individuals have looked the same, talked the same, acted the same and thought the same for a long time. (The men sometimes literally dress the same as Donald Trump, with a blue suit and a long red tie.) After the election, however, Republican behavior has finally been totalized.

As one GOP congressman said, Trump “is the leader of our party. … His goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word. If Donald Trump says jump three feet high and scratch your head, we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads.”

The objective is forcing the rest of America to conform the way the Republican Party has conformed. This can be seen in the anger expressed by some MAGAs. It wasn’t enough to win. Losers must now shut up and get in line, too. As a Trump attorney said recently: “You’ve got to own when you lose and say: this is America. We have to stand behind President Trump.” Senate Republicans are likely to approve his picks, no matter how bad, because the losers must be taught a lesson.

Totalitarianism also seeks to dominate the individual’s mind by going to war against facts, reason, science and any useful meaning of the word “proof.” In normal times, pre-Trump, we could expect the Senate to have a spirited debate over a President-elect's cabinet nominations, beginning with whether they’re qualified. Such debate is going to be impossible now, because “being qualified” is a meaningless term.

It is a stone-cold fact that Kennedy’s views on vaccines are not only insane, but in direct opposition to the moral principles of public health. But that fact won’t be accepted as fact. It will be taken as evidence of Trump’s enemies trying to sabotage his presidency. And there’s no way to break through this "conspiracist mindset," as Lindsay Beyerstein calls it. It is impervious, she said. “When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that’s what conspirators to kill our children would say.”

Because there’s no empirical anchor to conspiratorial thinking, totalitarians can make reality into whatever they want. Up is down, left is right – or in the words of the totalitarian regime in George Orwell’s 1984: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Therefore, the Republicans are likely to see nothing wrong with his picks. His nominee for the law is anti-law. His nominee for national intelligence is anti-intelligence. His nominee for national defense is anti-defense. His nominee for science is anti-science. But there’s no dissonance in the world of conspiratorial thinking. Up is the new down, and the only measure of morality is whether it pleases the dear leader.

The drift toward conformity and away from individualism isn’t limited to the GOP. Thanks to the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, totalizing groupthink has also been growing in the culture at large. The trick is that it comes disguised as subversive individualism.

During his interview with Trump, popular podcaster Joe Rogan said, “the rebels are Republicans now. They’re like, you want to be a rebel? You want to be punk rock? You want to, like, buck the system? You’re a conservative now. That's how crazy. And then the liberals are now pro-silencing criticism. They’re pro-censorship online. They’re talking about regulating free speech and regulating the First Amendment.”

If you are listening to liberals directly, you know there are no such efforts. But if you are listening to the right-wing media apparatus, or if you just feel the conspiratorial ambiance that it generates, it’s possible to cast yourself as a person who’s bucking the system, as if the party of billionaires is the party of the common people, as if people who look the same, talk the same, act the same and think the same are punk rock.

But the strongest evidence of totalitarian drift is the plain awfulness of Trump’s cabinet picks. They have not earned the right to be called on. They haven’t studied or mastered their disciplines. They haven’t built reputations among leaders, peers and professionals in their fields. They haven’t overcome adversity and hardship. They haven’t reached high and achieved. They certainly haven’t followed the road toward the American dream, which asks us to work hard and play by the rules.

And that’s the point. Totalitarians fear individual excellence, first because they can’t understand it, and second because excellence threatens their goal of totalizing conformity. They are not humble enough to admit that they are mediocre people but they are arrogant enough to believe they can force the rest of us down to their level.


With this cabinet, Trump can pick up where his second campaign left off, which is a movement toward “the consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity …” as Hannah Arendt once wrote.

“Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable,” she said. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty” (my italics).

If Trump Can Be Believed, His Return to the White House Could be a Good Thing…at least Internationally

A left view of the election from an expat in the UK

by Dave Lindorff / November 8th, 2024

TRUMP VOTER IN New Hampshire

Cambridge, UK — As the voting results started coming in here from Virginia at 4 am (GMT, which is five hours later than Eastern Time in the US), I went to bed, having seen enough to know that Kamala Harris’s  crash campaign for the White House was failing.

I knew what was coming.  I’d experienced it four times already. In 1968 I watched Richard Nixon, the notorious House version of Commie-hunter Sen. Joe McCarthy rouse what he dubbed  the “Silent Majority” of right-wing white bigots and pro-Vietnam War super-patriots and defeated Hubert Humphrey (an earlier VP who the Democratic party chose as their nominee when their incumbent president after, Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek re-election).

There was a sense of hopelessness on the left the morning after Nixon’a election.

It happened again in 1980, with the surprise win by Republican Ronald Reagan, who defeated incumbent Jimmy Carter.  That morning, I got up early and went down to Broadway from my 11th-floor apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Walking down the largely empty sidewalk like a zombie, I passed a few people headed the other way, their faces looking similarly shell-shell shocked, until a neighborhood friend, John Hess, a spritely, gray-bearded retiree N.Y. Times staffer, bounded up to me cheerfully. “Isn’t it great?” He said with a smile. “The Republicans also took the Senate!”

“What’s so great about that?” I asked, astonished that this radical leftist journalist would say such a thing.

“Because,” he explained, “If the Democrats control Congress, Reagan can’t blame all his disasters on them. Now he won’t have the ability to blame anyone but himself!”

Actually, in the event, Reagan managed to serve out two terms, and even accomplished some positive things including negotiating with House Majority Leader Democrat Tip O’Neill a rescue of the underfunded Social Security program and ending the Cold War and (at least temporarily) the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.

Then, of course, there was the Supreme Court which in 2000 stole the election for George W Bush by halting the vote counting in Florida, where it was clear that Democratic Vice President Al Gore, who had already won the popular vote, would also have won the state and its Electoral College total. Instead, the feckless top court gave the White House to Bush and Dick Cheney.

And finally there was the night Donald Trump stunned the pundits and himself by winning the White House and defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

So waking up Wednesday morning to see that Trump would be president for another nightmare four-term had for me a definite “Groundhog Da” feel to it — but without the guy-gets-girl happy ending to it).

Actually, this time Trump 2.0 is worse than those four earlier Republican wins. This time the Republican president will have solid control of both houses of Congress, with a Senate so overwhelmingly Republican that it will be able to pass almost any piece of legislation without Democrats blocking it, and will likely remain in Republican hands for Trump’s full term.  This time around, the Supreme Court too is solidly controlled 6-3 by hard-right justices, and Trump has made it clear that every cabinet office and every government agency will be run  by “loyal’ lackeys of his choosing, with even civil service employees either replaced or cowed into submission — including at such normally independent agencies as the Pentagon, CIA, Justice Department and EPA.  Even the late irrepressible John Hess would have  had a hard time finding a bright side to this Election Day outcome.

Nonetheless I’m going to give it a try.

First a reality check:  What we see in the 2024 election result is that a majority of Americans — men and women, rich and poor, white and people of color, educated and uneducated,  religious and atheist —  are either ready to gamble on a self-involved sociopathic, racist and misogynist criminal billionaire with anger issues or are too concerned with just getting by with their daily lives  to to worry about elections that never seem to change their lives for the better or that even make them harder. Analysis of the voting shows that a huge percentage of late voting younger people went for Trump. And a tidal wave of women voting for Harris didn’t materialize. More women voted than men, as usual, but plenty of them went for the pussy-grabbing rapist Trump. Trump also did better with Black men than he did in 2016 and 2024 and significantly improved his tally among Latinos (or as he calls them “Hispanics”). In the end Harris’s larger share of women voters was the same as Trump’s larger share of  men, making the predicted gender war a wash-out.

Here in the UK, where I am living for the next nine months, I can see what the results of such so-called populist voting trends can be. British voters in 1979 elected a hard-right Prime Minister named Margaret Thatcher and allowed her and her Conservative Party to set off a seismic shift of the country’s politics away from social democracy and a rather classical conservatism into a two-party Neo-liberal dystopia where both parties accepted the notion that capitalism, unfettered markets, and a coddled business elite managing things was the best option for society.

This  narrowed political playing field has led over the ensuing decades to a long period British economic doldrums, and to a turning away by Brits from the rest of Europe, as resentment and hostility towards outsiders, including eastern Europeans, and especially people from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean — all of them willing to work for less and to leave countries that had it even worse — availed themselves of the lack of borders across Europe  to flock to the UK. This latter phenomenon led to the narrow victory of a referendum that resulted inBritain’s removing itself from the European Union. Called Brexit, this abrupt anti-immigrant “secession” has wreaked havoc on the nation’s economy and living standards, as well as the operation of key services like the country’s once vaunted National Health System.

Just this past July, British voters, frustrated  with a country and government where “nothing works anymore,” turned out the Conservatives after 15 straight years of Tory rule and handed a landslide win to the Labour Party and its new Prime Minister Keir Starmer.  How that new government will fare in its effort to right the ship of state and its stagnating economy, given the incredible decades-long disinvestment and privatization it is hoping to reverse, remains to be seen.

I suspect the US, under a second Trump administration, this time emboldened by a political realignment at least as profound as was Thatcher’s 1979 win in the UK, will soon be similarly strip-mined and privatized.

The one bright spot, however, if President-re-elect Trump, a shameless liar, can be taken at his word, would be if he actually were to brings an end to the decade of US military aid political  brinksmanship in pushing Ukraine to break away from neighboring Russia’s sphere of influence and to join NATO, the US-led anti-Russian alliance created way back at the start of the Cold War of he 1950s. Trump says, quite logically, that US efforts to pull Ukraine into NATO, a mutual protection pact whose very existence is an existential threat to Russia, and the Ukraine government’s now ten-year old armed conflict with first its ethic Russian minority and then, when Russia responded by invading Ukraine, with Russia, a leading nuclear power,  has led to a war in which Ukraine’s military is largely underwritten by US arms and financial banking interests. It is a war that the US knows poses a high risk of provoking a devastating and potentially world-ending nuclear conflict between ther world’s two nuclear superpowers.

During the just concluded election campaign, Trump promised to bring an end to that bloody military conflict immediately before even waiting for his second inauguration in January.  He has also promised to end the one-sided slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, though without specifying how.

I am no fan of Trump, but I have to say should he successfully cut short those two bloody conflicts, or even ends the Ukraine war while at least not making things worse in Gaza, his new presidency would be off to a great start. He should follow that up by returning the US to the treaty relationship on nuclear weapons that his Republican predecessor Ronald  Reagan worked out with former Soviet and Russia leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which effectively, if all too briefly,  ended the two countries’ nuclear standoff and raised humanity’s hopes for an end to nuclear weapons altogether. Trump should also follow through with his prior effort to pull the US out of NATO, which long ago morphed into a cover for and participant in US global military actions around the world and simply serves as an excuse for ploughing over a trillion dollars a year into the coffers of the US arms industry.

Martin Luther King, a year to the day before the day in 1968 that he was assassinated (my birthday) he gave a speech at the Riverside Church in New York titled Beyond Vietnam:A Time to End the Silence.” In it he correctly identified the US, at that time conducting a bloody aggressive war in Indochina, as being “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”  It has remained so, Indeed its endless wars and “interventions,” have reportedly killed well over 6 million people, mostly civilians, around the world in the eight decades since WWII.

Trump knows this and has talked of pulling US forces back from the hundreds of places they are based in foreign lands (though that idea was at one point linked by him to the idea of using them against American dissidents here at home — NOT a Great idea!).

He should pull them back and decommission them.

Trump has said on a number of occasions that he does not want wars — that as a businessman, he wants the US to do business with other nations, on a level playing field.  That is a great sentiment, and it’s one that his base, those MAGA voters, some of whom I know and have had conversations with,. Trump should be held to that promise, and should downsize the US military to a size appropriate to a country that is not facing any threat of invasion and that stops meddling militarily in other countries and maintaining bases around the globe. That is a position a lot of Trump’s MAGA backers agree with.

For now though, all we have from President-elect Trump are promises like  “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” and unless acted upon these cannot be taken seriously. But that said, I have to say the words themselves are welcome, and it’w a promise that I’ve never heard the likes of coming from any other president-elect of either party.. (Okay, Richard Nixon claimed during his first presidential race that he had a “secret plan’ for ending the war in Vietnam, but that “plan” turned out to be to massively carpet-bomb North Vietnam using B-52s. expand the war  into Laos and Cambodia and to ship more US combat troops into the country. Once elected, he kept the war going until he resigned from office in disgrace.)

We on the left are facing an existential crisis with Trump’s election victory but also an opportunity

Supporting the Democrats and their chosen candidate Kamala Harris as a tactical move to preserve freedom to organize and to protest was clearly unsuccessful as her poorly performed campaign did worse than Hillary Clinton did against Trump eight years before. Indeed, she lost not just in the Electoral College tally but in the popular vote, which Clinton at least won.  The Democratic Party has been shown once again to be a pathetic joke as a political opponent. Sen. Bernie Sanders,  who won a resounding re-election to the Senate in Vermont, identified right before Harris’s concession speech on Thursday, the party’s problem:  It is owned by billionaires and moneyed consultants wedded to corporate interests, and is  dismissive or even hostile to the interests of the working class.

But the pathetic showing of third party candidates in this,  as in prior elections,  has shown that building a third party is also a fool’s errand in a country where the political system is structured to prevent them.

That leaves us with the option of building a large movement outside of political parties focussed around broad popular issues that would bring working-class people together common goals like peace and demilitarization, significantly raising the minimum wage, improving and protecting Social Security, making Medicare universal for all ages, passing the Equal Rights Amendment and protecting every women’s right to control her own body and health and seriously addressing the climate crisis.

Trump has made it clear that he wants unrestrained power, without the hindrances of a Constitution or a Congress composed of members who might think for themselves and perform their intended constitutional role as a check and balance on the Executive Branch. Trump’s history of lying, criminality, racism and misogyny and his willingness to appeal to American citizens’ basest instincts are well known. But we are stuck with him. He cannot be defeated in the courts because he has a bunch of sycophants packing the Supreme Court and in the lower level federal courts.  Impeachment cannot happen and is a waste of time and effort. The weakened Congressional Democrats can no longer even put on a impeachment committee hearing this time.

With a mass movement we can pressure Trump and his Congressional supporters to do what they promised. If they go back on those promises, we can work to peel away those people who just voted for him as a “change disrupter,” especially as they begin to discover he really doesn’t give a damn about them.

Meanwhile we need to do the hard work of organize]ing wide support for resisting Trump’s worst ideas — the ones that will harm the defenseless and that will grievously contribute to climate change. For example, we need to support a campaign to protect undocumented people living in the USA from brutal arrest, detention and forced deportation, especially in cases that break up families.  We clearly need to build a mass movement to protect programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.  A key here is that most of Trump’s own voting base depend on those programs and on the Affordable Care Act. Trump and his advisers know this. This is why Trump vowed during his campaign not to cut them. He needs to be held to that promise. And we need to call out every Trump effort to worsen climate change by the reversal of what climate saving measures have been introduced, and by trying to sack or silence those civil service employees responsible for measuring or ameliorating climate change.

Trump, by making this false promises he won’t keep in order to win the election has handed us what we need to organize this same people.Email

Dave Lindorff has written for the NY Times, Nation, FAIR, Salon, London Review of Books and Rolling Stone. Dave cofounded the LA Vanguard, ran the LA Daily News county bureau and was a BusinessWeek Asia correspondent. He currently writes a Substack: ThisCantBeHappening!. Read other articles by Dave.

Claudia Sheinbaum Stares Down Mexico’s Highest Court

Mexican judges have threatened to throw their own president in jail for implementing constitutional reforms that subject them to direct elections. The effort is destined to fail, but the confrontation could set the tone for lawfare campaigns across the region.

By Kurt Hackbarth

November 4, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Claudia Sheinbaum | Image credit: ASAMBLEA INFORMATIVA EN TORREÓN, COAHUILA

Since taking office on October 1 as Mexico’s first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum has had — to put it mildly — an eventful month.

She has made three trips to Acapulco to coordinate recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane John. She has overseen the passage of key constitutional amendments, including measures to restore the passenger train network (privatized and eliminated in the ’90s), return the energy sector to public control, and authorize the federal housing authority, INFONAVIT, to build much-needed social housing. She has launched new programs to lower the pension age for women, provide home-to-home health care for senior citizens, provide day care for the children of maquiladora and field workers, and ban the sale of junk food in schools. And she has faced her own gruesome welcome wagon of violence, including the beheading of the mayor of the city of Chilpancingo, Guerrero, a pair of car bombings in the state of Guanajuato, and the killing of six migrants in Chiapas after the military opened fire on the truck carrying them, an incident currently under investigation.

But among all of these, the affair really putting her young administration to the test was set off before she took office: the judicial reform amendment, ratified on September 15, which provides for the direct popular election of federal judges.
Judges Run Amok

The judicial reform will roll out in two stages: half of the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, will be chosen in a special election in June 2025, and the other half at the time of the midterm elections in 2027. Current justices will have the option of participating in the elections or retiring from their posts.

The Mexican public has repeatedly demonstrated its utter fatigue with justices living high on the hog while leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces of a dysfunctional, profoundly unjust, and highly partisan justice system. At the same time that they stuff the bureaucracy with family members (according to a report by the chief justice of the Supreme Court herself, Norma Piña, the nepotism rate in the judicial bureaucracy in 2022 was a staggering one in two), judges routinely protect high-profile elites while leaving some 87,000 prisoners languishing for years without trials or sentences.

It is to be recalled that Morena ran on the judicial reform during this year’s presidential campaign, asking the public for the qualified majority of two-thirds necessary to pass it and other reforms over the opposition’s objections. Voters obliged. And in a series of polls taken shortly before ratification, support for the direct election of judges ranged from 68 to 75 percent.

Not surprisingly, this enthusiasm is not shared by the judiciary itself. Its guerrilla war against the reform began during the legislative process, when judges attempted to halt congressional debate by means of injunction or, failing that, prevent it from being sent to state legislatures for their consideration. While the idea that the judiciary can intervene to stop a legislature from doing its job is risible on its face — equivalent to Congress dictating to the courts what cases they can and cannot hear — it is further compounded by the fact that Article 61 of Mexico’s law governing the use of said injunctions (the Ley de Amparo), passed by today’s aggrieved opposition when it was in power in 2013, makes abundantly clear that they cannot be used against constitutional amendments.

This did not stop the judiciary, however, from trying again. Once the amendment was officially a done deal, a judge and conservative activist from Veracruz with a series of disciplinary problems ordered it to be stripped from the books within twenty-four hours; if not, she would refer the case to prosecutors, who, she warned, could move to jail the president for up to nine years for contempt. Coolly, Sheinbaum pointed out in her morning press conference on October 24 that it was illegal for the judge to remove something that had already been added to the Official Federal Register and that, by so ordering, it was the judge who had effectively placed herself in contempt.

Then it was the Supreme Court’s turn to get in on the act. Throughout October, it decided to accept a series of petitions submitted by opposition legislators and political parties to stop the reform. That was error number one, as political parties in Mexico do not have the standing to seek injunctions on constitutional matters; as for the justices themselves, the conflict of interest of purporting to rule on a measure that directly affected them was blatantly obvious to all concerned. Undeterred by such niceties, the court’s conservative majority plowed ahead, and, on October 28, Justice Juan Luis Alcántara Carrancá — who hosted a now infamous dinner between Chief Justice Piña and opposition political leaders before the election — presented a draft of his ruling. In language eerily reminiscent of the Bush v. Gore decision of 2000, which infamously limited itself “to the present circumstances,” Alcantára’s text took great pains to present itself as “exceptional” (nine times) and “an exceptionality” (five times). While accepting the settled precedent that a constitutional amendment cannot be unconstitutional, it goes on to contend that the offending parts of the Constitution are not constitutional-level text at all but downgradable to simple “federal electoral law” and thus susceptible to being overturned. In a subsequent interview on Radio Fórmula, former Supreme Court justice José Ramón Cossío (whose Instituto Para el Fortalecimiento del Estado de Derecho NGO is backed by the US soft-interventionist arm USAID) breathlessly threatened that anyone who disobeyed the ruling, be it the president or every last legislator, could be declared “in rebellion,” thrown out of office, and put on trial.
Keeping Her Powder Dry

All of this sounds far more lurid than it actually is. Backed by an enormous popular mandate, Claudia Sheinbaum is not going anywhere, nor are MORENA legislators or anyone else — except for the judges who of their own volition decide not to participate in next year’s election. Indeed, the Federal Electoral Tribunal has already given the green light for said election, and planning is already underway. Eight of the Supreme Court justices — the same eight who are attempting to place themselves “exceptionally” above the Constitution — have already handed in their resignations as of next year in order to benefit from the generous retirement package provided by the reform.

There is, indeed, more than a whiff of desperation around this vulgar little coup, what in Spanish is called patadas de ahogado, the flailing of a drowning person. This is very likely the reason why, in the face of calls from the Morena base to impeach the offending judges (which its qualified majority permits), President Sheinbaum has preferred to adopt a wait-and-see attitude, making a consistent case against the plotting in her morning press conferences but keeping her powder dry lest it be needed ahead.

But the episode does raise a larger — and largely unresolved — question that has plagued left-leaning governments throughout Latin America: how to defang well-funded lawfare campaigns that clothe themselves in legalese to subvert popular democracy, and how to handle a judiciary that violates the law in the name of defending it, converting itself in the process into a renegade political actor.

The strategy of what Andrés Manuel López Obrador called the “Supreme Conservative Power” is clearly to put Sheinbaum’s administration in an early bind: either knuckle under and accept its wayward ruling or be seen as disobeying the highest court of the land, thus reinforcing the authoritarian image of Morena’s popular government carefully cultivated by the national and international press over the last six years.

With a vote on Alcántara’s proposal scheduled for as soon as this week, it will soon become clear to what extent the justices, on their way out the door, are willing to burn down the house. How Sheinbaum responds will set the tone not only for her administration but for a generation to come.

Kurt Hackbarth is a writer, playwright, freelance journalist, the cofounder of the independent media project “MexElects" and host of Soberanía: The Mexican Politics Podcast.

Prison Abolitionists Could Score Wins on Election Day, Despite Electoral Ambivalence

Prison abolition itself won’t be on the ballot, but organizers are pushing demands that could change the lives of thousands if adopted by referendum voters or victorious candidates.

By Mansa Musa

November 4, 2024

Source: Real News Network


Policing and prison abolition policy questions have been minimized in the lead-up to the 2024 November election, despite their significance in the last election cycle. Yet these ideas have finally pierced into mainstream debate, and committed prison abolitionists are tirelessly organizing to free incarcerated people, improve conditions within the prison system, and close or prevent the opening of new correctional facilities. Rattling the Bars looks back on the past year of discussions with abolitionists on the stakes and political lessons leading up to November’s presidential election.

Transcript

Mansa Musa: On Tuesday, this country will be holding elections for the presidency as well as other national, state, and local elections. Nationwide the cry is that the election for presidency is the most important election this nation will be having.

Rattling the Bars and The Real News have been focusing on the impact the elections will have on the prison-industrial complex. More importantly, how does the abolition movement look at the electoral system? What role does it play in the abolishment of the prison-industrial complex? You can hear the views of abolitionists from previously recorded interviews.

Back in May, we covered the Free Her March, where formerly incarcerated women were calling for clemency for 100 women:

Mansa Musa: Okay. We got the Bronx with us today. Why are you here today?

Star: Because we’re here to petition the President, and everybody else on his team, to grant clemency to Michelle West and all the other women who deserve it.

Speaker 8: He told us when we was here four years ago that he was going to free 100 women within 100 days of him being in office. And he has not done any of what he said he was going to do. So we’re here today asking for him to free our women, and free them now.

Star: We are tired of giving the Democrats what they want, and they don’t give us what we need.

Speaker 3: So what do we want?

Star: We want freedom for all women and girls. We want rehabilitation, and alternatives to incarceration.

Speaker 9: We want Michelle West Free!

Miquelle West: I’m Miquelle West, Michelle West’s daughter. My mom was incarcerated when I was ten years old for a drug conspiracy case. She’s serving two life sentences and 15 years.

Speaker 9: I represent the women that want to be free. Let our women be free. Let our women out of [inaudible].

Group: Cut it down!

Speaker 10: [Inaudible].

Group: Cut it down!

Speaker 10: [Inaudible]

Speaker 11: Stop criminalizing us for poverty, stop criminalizing us for how we cope from this trauma that has been put on us historically and continues into this present day. Free my sisters.

Speaker 12: The women get treated badly. The women get raped in jail. All kinds of things. I served federal time, and I know what it’s like to be in there. And I say free women today.

Andrea James: We told them to free those women, and they didn’t do it. They’re sending them to other prisons that, guess what, also are raping our sisters inside of the federal system. So we’ve got a lot of work to do, people.

Laura Whitehorn: The response is to move all the women at once, all of a sudden to just throw them out into places all over the country with no preparation, no bathroom facilities. They’re being, as one of them said, the men who raped them, should, and are, going to prison. And the women are being punished now because they’re saying that the BOP, which can’t control their own staff, has to close the prison because they can’t manage it. And they take the women.

I’ve been walking with different friends of mine who were in Dublin with me. It was not a low-security place at that point. And we’re all having flashbacks of what it was to be transferred in that way, where you’re treated like a sack of laundry, except that you’re chained up. You’re chained at the waist. You can’t use the bathroom for hours, you get no food. They sat on a bus for five hours in the parking lot of the prison.

And then at the end of five hours, they were taken back into the prison. They said, oh, we don’t know where to take you. So the way that they’re being treated and then their families… Some people have children and their families are in the Bay Area. So the children were able to visit their moms in the prison, and now the moms have been sent across the country.

Mansa Musa: All this is the remedy for their abusive behavior. The remedy for their abusive behavior becomes more abusive.

Mansa Musa: Hear Andrea James, founder and executive director of the National Council for incarcerated Women and Girls and Families for Justice as Healing:

Andrea James: We were incarcerated in the federal system. We were in prison with sisters who are never coming home unless their sentences are commuted. So it’s kind of different when you determine what space you’re going to work out of when you haven’t had the full experience of what we’re talking about here.

But if you were like us, if you were women that were incarcerated in the federal system, who were mothers, who were wives, who were aunties, and grandmothers, and sisters, and moms in particular, we have been separated from our children. But some of us had the opportunity to go to prison and come home. So we’re fighting for sisters that, unless we get clemency for them, they’ll never come home.

And we’ve got to really understand that. We’re talking about the liberation of our people, and we want to bring attention to the intentionality of incarceration of our people and the policies that led up to that.

Now, we started our work after, we started organizing in the federal prison for women in Danbury, Connecticut, in 2010, and brought the work-out with us starting in 2011. And then other sisters inside Justine Moore, Virginia Douglas, Big Shay, they started to come home. So it wasn’t rocket science for us, but in the federal prison, you would see this from all over the country, sometimes from different Black communities around the world. And so it wasn’t rocket science for us to stop this work.

But we started in the prison realizing not really totally clear about what clemency was as a tool. But after coming home in 2011, that became crystal clear to us. We met Amy Povah at CAN-DO Clemency. She taught us a lot about clemency as a tool.

And then of course, President Obama, who we got in front of and who centered women and brought us to the White House. But also we should not be going backwards from what President Obama did with clemency.

Mansa Musa: Okay, let’s pick up on right there because… Now, for the benefit of our audience, clemency is a federal mandate, and it’s top heavy in its bureaucracy. Honest you know —

Andrea James: It’s a tool, it’s a privilege bestowed upon. It’s not a mandate, it’s a tool. It’s bestowed upon the president of the United States to grant relief to people from their sentences. And that takes many forms. It could be freedom, immediate freedom, commuting your sentence, meaning it only stops the sentence that you are serving from within a carceral place, a prison.

We decided at some point you can only go so far with what’s happening in Congress right now, who’s controlling Congress, what they’re paying attention to. We fought so hard against the passage of the First Step Act, the way it was presented, because it’s been a big smoke screen.

And we knew when Congress passed First Step that it really wasn’t what we needed. It didn’t address the people who needed to get out. It called out the very people that needed the most relief, and so how could we ever support a bill like that? And we never crossed over in support of it, even though we fought valiantly to try and add retroactivity and other things to the first step.

And then it was put into the hands of the most vile regime, a think tank called the Heritage Foundation, also responsible now for Project 2025, to implement the First Step Act.

And it’s just, we are one of the few, I don’t know if any other organizations have done it, but our legal division, led by our senior council, Catherine Sevcenko, has followed the implementation of the First Step Act. And it’s been just a sham. It’s been a [inaudible], but the PR on it would make anybody think that everybody who’s come, like 30,000 people got released because of the First Step Act. That’s not true. But I digress.

So when we talk about the FIX [Clemency] Act, at some point, yes, we have to weigh in. We need legislators who are directly affected, like Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, to carry these bills forward for us and to at least put them into existence, knowing that we got a big struggle to get them to go anywhere because the members of Congress were satisfied with the First Step Act.

As abysmal as it is, they weren’t going to center criminal justice reform in any significant way following that for years, we knew that. That’s the path of how things go. We haven’t heard a peep about criminal justice reform other than Trump wanting to bring the death penalty back for drug dealers. We haven’t even heard. It’s not even on the current candidates’ platforms.

And so we had to shift our energy to, and it’s not really a shift, it’s just, what are we picking up now to be present and to make sure that the concept of liberation of our people isn’t left to hope somebody’s going to keep it at the forefront? That’s our job. Nobody’s coming to save us. If nobody gives a shit about our issue, if you’re going to do this work, you have to be consistent in finding ways of staying in the public eye, of showing up, of taking up space, of getting in the street.

And so that’s what we did with the 10th anniversary. We did this 10 years ago in 2014, and that’s how we got the attention, because of the work of Civil Rights lawyer Nkechi Taifa, who brought the National Council and the sisterhood to the attention of President Obama and Valerie Jarrett to say, yo, Prez, we see you. We see you equating. We see you connecting clemency to racial justice. That clemency is racial justice. We see you going into the federal prisons. How could it be that he was the first president of the United States to go to visit a federal prison? How could that be?

Mansa Musa: In August, The Real News’s editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez and I talked to David Schultz, a criminal reform and social justice advocate, about how poor and working-class voters navigate an electoral system that doesn’t serve them:

Maximillian Alvarez: So I wanted to ask, as two guys on the front lines of that struggle, what do you think the pundit class covering the elections in mainstream media should learn about the conversations that y’all are having and that folks in these communities are having about the election right now?

David Schultz: Okay, yeah. So I’ll start with that one. So I would say it’s important for individuals. I think being in Washington DC obviously puts us in a unique position because we’re obviously a very political city. I guess it’s different when I go to different areas, different cities. I was just traveling recently, I was in Chicago, and of course it was very political there because we’re getting ready to have the Democratic and national convention. But usually it’s not.

So that puts us in a unique perspective to see how politics really affect our everyday lives. I think you’re a hundred percent correct. I think that individuals that are from smaller, more rural areas really want to see and are more concerned with that direct impact. And so elections for them seem like this far away thing. It’s like they drop something in a box, and if they’re the person they like personality wise really, or who agrees with them on more things than the other, then that’s who they go for.

But they don’t really do their research on the candidates as well as they should to see, really, are they living up to what they’re saying? Are they voting this way even though they’re saying they might be voting this way?

And so I think that it’s important for the pundits, so to speak, to really listen to grassroots individuals because we are the ones that matter. We are the people that they say in the Constitution. We are the ones that make everything one. We’re the working class. So at the end of the day, our vote matters, and they want our vote. So I think it’s imperative that they listen to what our needs and specific asks are.

Mansa Musa: I think on the grassroots, when you’re dealing with a grassroots level, it’s imperative that we educate the people that’s affected because, like you say, people want jobs. People want quality education. People want a safe living environment. People want food quality, cheap food, as far as food prices being so high. People want rent control. They don’t want to be living in squalor and then paying astronomical fees to live there.

So it’s important that we educate… When you’re dealing with the grassroots, it’s important that you educate the population to understand that you have to find a candidate that’s going to represent your interest.

When the Black Panther Party bring Bobby Seale for mayor, they wasn’t running Bobby Seale for mayor to try to get Bobby Seale to be the mayor. They was educating people about how, like Dave said earlier, where the monies come from, how the monies are allocated, and how you can have a voice in monies being allocated to your neighborhood, to clean up your neighborhood, to have the trash collected. How monies could be allocated towards medical or universal healthcare for everyone.

So when I look at it from the grassroots level, I’m always in my mind… My mind is always in this area, educating the people about the electoral process, educating the people about, okay, if you get involved with this process, then make sure you have a candidate that’s going to represent your interest because the candidate is going to come and say what they think you want to hear. They’re going to put on all kinds of activities to motivate your interest.

But when it does settle and they leave, trash hasn’t been collected. It’s high unemployment rate in your neighborhood, housing, you live in squalor. You’re not safe, and your children being targeted because you’re not safe.

So when I look at it from the perspective, I look at it from a perspective that it is incoming from me and people that’s in that space to educate the people on the budget, educate the people on the electoral process, educate the people on how to go about vetting accounts.

Like you say, candidates have listening sessions. So when a candidate have a listening session, then it’s coming from people like myself and Dave to get people to come down there and educate the electorate, ask questions about, OK. Because if you don’t do what we say you supposed to do, same way we elected you in, we can get the recall and get you out.

David Schultz: Can I just add one quick thing? Can I just say, from a grassroots level, to answer your other question is what the individuals are saying is the basic needs is what they’re struggling with when it comes to housing and especially affordable housing, it doesn’t matter if you’re a returning citizen, if you’re just a working-class individual, that basic need is a struggle that, basically, grassroots individuals are really looking to have fixed this election cycle, and the basic necessity of being able to keep food on their table and be able to feed their kids.

So I know it sounds basic, but that’s what I’ve been hearing a lot of in the community and what they are really focusing on this election cycle.

Mansa Musa: And we recently sat down with Jeronimo Aguilar and John Cannon to talk about Prop. 6 initiative to have removed from California State Constitution its version of the 13th Amendment legalizing slavery:

Mansa Musa: I want you to give us a history lesson on how the code that came to exist that’s legalized slavery in California. Because you made an interesting observation before, and we was talking about it again, how we got this perception of California as being the big Hollywood, Rolls Royce.

Jeronimo Aguilar: Yeah, thank you, Mansa. Yeah, no, you’re right, man. We got this idea of what California is. Not only the palm trees and the Rolls Royce, and it’s always sunny, but also that we’re soft on crime, and that criminals are out able to just do whatever they want out here, and there’s no law and order, and all that kind of stuff.

The reality is, the prison-industrial complex out here is as crooked and oppressive as it is in any state of the union. And so, when you talk about especially this exception clause, and specifically here in California, it’s the exception to involuntary servitude. But like we say, as you can see on my background there, one of our main messaging points is that involuntary servitude is slavery.

Mansa Musa: That’s right.

Jeronimo Aguilar: So, they try to lessen it or give it a fancy name, but the reality is the practice is the same thing, of subjugating human beings to work against their will.

So, when you talk about involuntary servitude in California, the history, like you mentioned, it goes all the way back to when California became a state. So, back in 1849. Remember, this territory here was territory of Mexico up until then. You had the expansionist, I wouldn’t even really call it a war, but an assault on Mexico in 1848, which ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

That treaty was not honored. Or like most of the treaties that the US [inaudible] with folks of Indigenous ancestry, them treaties were nothing but opportunities for the forked tongue, as they say, to get what they want.

And so, what happened is the land was taken, and Indigenous folks, Indigenous mixed with Spanish folks, became immigrants overnight. And with that said, what you started seeing was the first Constitution of California in 1849 has that exception clause that we see today. It says that involuntary servitude is prohibited except for punishment for a crime. It’s not that exact wording, but it’s the same exact practice.

And so, that set things up. That set the stage for 1850, you started seeing this. So, this is the year right after it became a state and the constitution was introduced. You see the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.

And again, the forked tongue. The way that they named the act, you would think, oh, they’re protecting Indians, when in fact, it was a vagrancy law that they used to criminalize Indigenous people, and subsequently enslave them under the exceptions to involuntary servitude.

And so, I want to add to that. Indigenous peoples were already being enslaved by the Spanish colonial powers. We’ll talk about the mission system. So, the Southwest and California, a lot of it was already built by the enslavement of Indigenous peoples.

When you talk about colonization, and once the Spanish came and that era of terror, and then Mexico getting its independence, and you’ve seen Mexico actually outlaw slavery for a period of time while that practice of servitude was brought back once the US took the land from Mexico.

And so, like I said, from 1849 on, up until now, you’ve seen the consistent criminalization of Indigenous, Brown folks, later, obviously, our African brothers and sisters that were enslaved and brought to this continent, and also that ended up migrating, trying to find free states, trying to find places where they can actually be free from the subjugation of slavery, only to find the same kind of practices happening over here in the Southwest.

And so, following that 1850 Act of Government and Protection of Indians, which actually turned what’s now the LA Federal Courthouse, was a vibrant slave auction. Based on that law, you saw acts like the Greaser Act, which passed in 1855. It’s another vagrancy law. If you look at the actual statute, the statute reads, “Dealing with the issue of those of Spanish and Indian blood.” And so really, you’re talking about folks like me. Chicanos, Mexicans, those that are of Spanish or Latino and Indigenous ancestry.

And I think the point, and the benefit for our audience, I think you well represented the case to how they codified laws —

Jeronimo Aguilar: That’s right.

Mansa Musa: …To make sure that this exception clause could be enacted under any and all circumstances.

John, so now we’re at a place where in terms of y’all organized around the abolishment of slavery, the legal form of slavery as we know it now. Talk about y’all Proposition 6, John.

John Cannon: So, Proposition 6 would actually be reversing Article 1, Section 6 of the California Constitution, which is basically just like the 13th Amendment of the United States.

So, Proposition 6, what it would do right now is give a person autonomy over their own body, give a person choice whether they want to work or not. Because as it is now, you have no choice whether to work or not. So, Proposition 6, it would prioritize rehabilitation over forced labor.

So, what that will look like is, right now as it stands, if you’re inside and you’re working, they assign you a job automatically. And whether you want to do college courses or rehabilitative courses or anything else, you’re not able to, because you’re assigned a job. You don’t get to pick the job. You don’t get to choose if you want a job. If you’re assigned the job, you have to do it.

So, if you did want to, say, take an anger management course, or seek anything to rehabilitate yourself, and that aligns at the same time as your job, you’ll have to go to that job or you’ll be punished for refusing to work.

Whether you have a death in the family, you have to go to work, or you’ll be punished for refusing. And all these cases happened to me while I was incarcerated, and you’re getting punished for refusing to work. You’re losing days off your sentence, you’re losing phone time, you’re losing all type of things if you refuse to work. So, Prop 6 would actually give a person their own choice over their own body, over their own rehabilitation.

Mansa Musa: how do y’all address, or how will y’all address… We know Proposition 6 coming to effect, but we also know that prison has become privatized on multiple levels. The privatization of prison is the food service is private, the commissary is private, the industry is private, the way the clothes is being made. Everybody has got involved in terms of putting themselves in a space where they become a private entity.

How will Proposition 6 address that? Because what’s going to ultimately happen, the slave master ain’t going to give up the slave freely. They’re going to create some type of narrative or create some kind of forceful situation where, oh, if you don’t work, you ain’t going to get no days, and you can come over here and work, and… You see where I’m going there with this?

Jeronimo Aguilar: Yep. Yep.

Mansa Musa: So, did y’all see that? Do y’all see it as a problem? Or have y’all looked at that and be prepared to address it?

Jeronimo Aguilar: No, no doubt, Mansa. I think that this is really the first step for us, because it’s going to be a long road. And those of us that have been incarcerated or have fought against the carceral system, you know that every time you do something, they’re going to figure out a way to retaliate, and to find a way to try to circumvent it, they’re going to try to find a way to basically make whatever you’re doing obsolete so they can continue their practice.

And so on our end, it was a really long and tedious process with the language, but we wanted to make sure was that we weren’t just passing something that was symbolic, that ended up just being, oh, okay. We’re removing some words out of the constitution, we all feel better about ourselves, and people that are incarcerated are going through the same conditions.

Mansa Musa: Yeah. Status quo. Go ahead.

Jeronimo Aguilar: Status quo. Exactly. So, the language in Proposition 6, and what was ACA 8 when we passed it in the legislature to get it on the ballot, actually says that any person that’s incarcerated cannot be punished for refusing a work assignment. Cannot be [crosstalk].

So what that does is, it’s not going to stop CDCR from definitely trying to circumvent things. But what it does is it gives folks a pretty strong legal stance. So, if they do continue to be forced to work and disciplined for refusing to work, they can go to court. And we feel, with the language that we now have in the constitution, which is supposed to be the highest letter of the law, they’re going to have a pretty strong legal stance to stand on when they get to court.