"How Soleimani’s Assassination Violates International Law and Puts Peace Further Out of Reach"

Phyllis Bennis, of the Institute for Policy Studies, interviewed at The Real News:

It was indeed this notion that Trump claimed at his press conference that he acted to stop a war is completely a reversal of the reality. This act, this single act–the assassination of this particular individual, General Qasem Soleimani–was perhaps the most provocative, reckless move he could have made in relationship to Iran. This is somebody who was not just the top general for Iran’s–what’s known as the Quds Force, the Jerusalem force. That was mainly the Iranian military support for a number of militias in a variety of countries around the region, but he was also a very influential, very popular political leader.

In fact, in a recent poll a few months back conducted by the University of Maryland, inside Iran it turned out that he was, by a substantial margin, the most popular political leader in the country. So the notion that he could be assassinated without any consequence, that somehow this would make the United States safer, that this would make U.S. troops throughout the region safer, is a complete reversal of the reality. There is now an incredibly tense escalation process underway which could really lead to full-scale war there.

The political response has to come from the Congress to reclaim our constitution. The constitution is vague about all kinds of things, but it’s very clear about at least one thing, which is that only Congress has the right to declare war. This war that is threatening right now was not declared by Congress. There was no imminent threat. Despite these claims, we have seen no evidence that there was an imminent threat even being considered or talked about…

This assassination not only represents violation of international law, a violation of U.S. law and immoral assassination that is specifically prohibited by a U.S. executive order that goes back to the 1970s, but it also undermined the possibility of averting continuing escalating tensions between the longstanding competitors Iran and Saudi Arabia…

Phyllis Bennis says Congress must stop Trump from taking the U.S. to war without any justification or provocation. Director/Video Editor: Adam Coley Audio Engineer: Bababtunde Ogunfolaju Visual Producer: Andrew Corkery Chase Producer: Genevieve Montinar Subscribe to our page and support our work at https://therealnews.com/donate.

Source: https://therealnews.com/stories/soleimani-...

"Precinct closures harm voter turnout in Georgia, AJC analysis finds"

Mark Niesse and Nick Thieme reporting for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Until her old concrete-block precinct shut down, Maggie Coleman lived about a mile from a place to cast her ballot in rural Georgia.

Now, she has to drive nearly 10 miles, past cotton fields and fallow farms, to reach the only voting location left in Clay County — a small room inside a government benefits building. She said she would have voted in last year’s primary election if it wasn’t so inconvenient.

Any time you hear that some district is closing or moving polling stations, you should immediately question where and why those polling stations were chosen. This is what "voter suppression" looks like: making it slightly harder for people to get to the polls. It's a death by a thousand cuts. In the US, a lot of elections are won on slim margins, and changing polling stations can change who wins and loses.

The AJC mapped Georgia’s 7 million registered voters and compared how distance to their local precincts increased or decreased from 2012 to 2018. During that time, county election officials shut down 8% of Georgia’s polling places and relocated nearly 40% of the state’s precincts.

...

Precinct closures and longer distances likely prevented an estimated 54,000 to 85,000 voters from casting ballots on Election Day last year, according to the AJC’s findings.

And the impact was greater on black voters than white ones, the AJC found. Black voters were 20% more likely to miss elections because of long distances.Without those precinct relocations, overall Election Day turnout in last year’s midterm election likely would have been between 1.2% and 1.8% higher, the AJC estimated.

We should make voting as easy as possible. Election Day should be a fully-paid holiday (funded through progressive taxation, of course). Polling stations should be distributed to ensure ease of access for everyone. And election committees that decide the voting rules and polling locations should be as non-partisan and transparent as possible.

Source: https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-g...

"Trump got what he deserved"

Ryan Cooper in The Week, on Trump’s (warranted, though narrow) impeachment:

It also bears mentioning that Trump is unquestionably the most personally corrupt president in American history. No previous president has continued to operate a vast business empire while in office, much less spend millions of dollars of public money at his own properties, or collect payments from dozens of foreign countries through them. Both behaviors are flagrant violations of the Constitution. Trump's protestations that his Ukraine actions were based on a genuine interest in "corruption" — the first and only time in his entire life (recall also that in his previous career in real estate, he routinely worked with mobbed-up businesses), and just so happening to involve his top political rival — are utterly preposterous.

Nevertheless, the House investigation also found multiple corroborating pieces of evidence. U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor testified that "our relationship with Ukraine was being fundamentally undermined ... by the withholding of vital security assistance for domestic political reasons." U.S. Ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland (who was appointed after donating a $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee) testified that he had personally communicated the scheme to Zelensky: "I said that resumption of the U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks." Alexander Vindman, a Ukraine specialist for the National Security Council, confirmed that there was "no ambiguity" about what Sondland was asking for — namely, an investigation into the Bidens. Another witness, State Department diplomat David Holmes, testified he overheard a phone call between Sondland and Trump discussing the demands.

Thanks in part to Democratic timidity, we haven't heard sworn testimony from several key players in the Ukraine conspiracy, including Giuliani, Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, and Vice President Pence, because the president forbade them from testifying. Trump himself has also refused to testify. If all this Ukraine stuff was so aboveboard as they all claim, why won't Trump allow them to testify and clear everything up? The answer is obvious.

Trump should have been impeached on his first day in office for his gross violation of the anti-corruption Emoluments Clause in the Constitution, let alone since then for his: refusal to do the work necessary of the office; appointing people just as corrupt as he is who loot the government agencies they lead; etc.

Trump richly deserves impeachment, but he’s a symptom of the larger disease. It’s an indictment of both the Democratic and Republican parties that it’s taken this long to get here. Both put party over country, the Democrats only caving once they sensed there was enough grassroots pressure, and the Republicans fighting impeachment with every trick they can to defend one of the most corrupt politicians in our history.

The current political class needs to be replaced by people who will fight for the common good, not narrow elite interests. And that’s only going to happen when more of us step up, putting more time in to change this system. At the very least, that should be paying more attention to what our “representatives” are doing while in office, and getting ready to vote the bums out when better people step forward.

Profile of Jubilee Baptist church

Here’s one particularly interesting case of a church turning itself around, re-orienting around community support and raising political consciousness from an explicitly anti-capitalist angle. At least one of the co-pastors is on Twitter—John Thorton Jr (@johnthorntonjr)—and worth following.

Anne Helen Peterson in Buzzfeed News:

On Wednesday night at Jubilee Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a group sits around the same sort of rickety conference table you’d find in churches all over the town, the state, the country. In the cabinets behind them, there are old Baptist tracts and stacks of New Testaments with covers declaring GOOD NEWS AMERICA, GOD LOVES YOU. But no one’s reading Galatians tonight. They’re reading Karl Marx.

“Let’s go around and introduce ourselves,” says Joe Stapleton, the high school English teacher leading the class. “Names, pronouns, how you’re feeling.”

Everyone opens their handouts — a section of Marx’s Capital, with handy summaries and annotations. They work slowly through the idea of use value versus exchange value and commodity fetishism. It’s most people’s first time with the material, and it’s admittedly a slog. At one point, after a particularly theoretical passage, someone exclaimed, “What the hell did I just read?”

A year ago, the congregation, then called Ephesus Baptist, had dwindled from a solid membership of several hundred people in the ’90s down to just twelve regular attendees, the youngest of whom was in his fifties. The church had half a million in savings, but its demise seemed imminent. Then Georgas, the pastor at the time, had a wild idea: What if the church started over entirely and used the savings to help repay the debts of its members — and others in the community in need?

This September, Ephesus was reborn as Jubilee Baptist: a quasi-socialist, anti-burnout, anti-racist, LGBTQ-affirming church focused on debt forgiveness and worker solidarity. When I spent a week at Jubilee this October, it felt vital, and alive, in a way I have not experienced in over three decades of attending church. It doesn’t feel like a social justice club or particularly cool in any way. It just feels like a place where people genuinely care about other people — which, in the current landscape of American Christianity, can feel incredibly radical.

Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/anneh...

Book recommendation: "No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age" by Jane McAlevey

Power has slowly concentrated around the world since the end of World War II. We haven’t suffered inequality at this level since the late Robber Baron/Gilded Age era of rampant monopolization. The rights that communities and unions fought for and won (sometimes literally against the US military) a hundred years ago have been eroded by those at the top rigging every system against us. In “No Shortcuts”, Jane McAlevey, a longtime community and union organizer, lays out answers. She briefly covers early unionizing in the US and how the Red Scare broke it, compares the competing models of organizing being practiced now, then walks through a few recent cases—what worked, what didn’t. It's great stuff, and shows how powerful we, the masses, are: how ordinary folks a hundred years ago won labor protections; why labor fights have failed so often since mid-century; and how people are winning fights again by doing “whole-worker organizing”—building community among the workers in a workplace, and engaging every community those people are a part of, religious and otherwise. There’s power in numbers, and when the whole community supports a strike (like Chicago did for the teachers strike in 2012—bus drivers, parents, black churches, etc.), we win. It can be done. It is being done. And it’s the only way forward if we want a strong, lasting democracy that we all have a say in. A better world is possible when we come together. I highly recommend this book, as well as the plethora of talks McAlevey’s given which are on YouTube

Here’s the book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/no-shortcuts-9780190624712

And here’s one of her excellent talks (of which there are many):

Jane McAlevey at the 4th conference on union renewal "Learing from our Struggles" (Rest of the conference was held in German) Braunschweig, 16.2.2019 Further information: https://www.rosalux.de/dokumentation/id/40012/

Source: Here’s the book: ...

What do we do when we only have two branches of government?

One of the many problems that’s come to a head these last few years is the increasingly activist Judicial branch, in a system that was designed to be balanced through three active and competitive branches. Congress has ceded more and more power to the Executive branch for the better part of 50 years. And it’s barely functioned for the last 10 years, as the Republican Party no longer tries to compromise, even when the Democrats are willing to give them what they want up front. The Judiciary has always included partisan activists who’ve used flimsy readings of the law and legislators’ intent, in order to “legislate from the bench.” But now judicial activists legislate more often than Congress, and the Executive appoints those judges. So the Republican Party has been stacking the courts with every ideologue they can, following the standard authoritarian playbook, since Trump took office.

Ian Milhiser, in Vox:

…The first reason is the effective blockade Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell imposed on appellate court confirmations the moment Republicans took over the Senate. McConnell’s effort to block Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland is well-known. Less well-known are the many lower court nominees who received similar treatment. Under Trump, McConnell’s turned the Senate into a machine that churns out judicial confirmations and does little else — he’s ignored literally hundreds of bills passed by the House. Under Obama, by contrast, McConnell’s Senate was the place where judicial nominations went to die.

We’re in the midst of a rapid takeover of the highest appeals courts in the country, which have already been gutting basic rights and protections for the average American over the past several years:

Judges, by contrast, have become the most consequential policymakers in the nation. They have gutted America’s campaign finance law and dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act. They have allowed states to deny health coverage to millions of Americans. They’ve held that religion can be wielded as a sword to cut away the rights of others. They’ve drastically watered down the federal ban on sexual harassment. And that barely scratches the surface.

The judiciary is where policy is made in the United States. And that policy is likely to be made by Republican judges for the foreseeable future.

There are likely now five votes on the Supreme Court, for example, to effectively give the judiciary a veto power over all federal regulations. Similarly, the Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) signals that religious conservatives may now ask the judiciary for an exemption from any law — and courts are likely to become quite generous in passing out such exemptions in the coming years. Republicans spent most of 2017 trying and failing to repeal Obamacare — but that failure means little to a federal appeals court that is expected to strike down the Affordable Care Act any day now.

And that’s not all. In the coming months, the courts are poised to gut abortion rights, eviscerate gun control, and neuter landmark environmental laws. Federal judges have already stripped workers of their ability to assert many of their rights against their employers, and this process is likely to accelerate in the near future. Many of our voting rights lay in tatters, thanks to conservative judicial appointments, and this process is likely to accelerate as well.

We need to break the increasing stranglehold the rich have on every lever of power in this country. This country is turning into a corrupt oligarchy. We need to educate ourselves, and get involved, and as many of us as quickly as possible. A better world is possible when we work together.

Source: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/20...

Destroying 3+ generations for the top 1%

Behold the New Gilded Age, much like the last Gilded Age, as money chases money, eventually leaving the 99% behind.

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, describing one effect of 40 years of wealth being sucked away from the poor and middle class:

The percentage of millennials planning to "always rent" is up about 25% from last year, to 12.3%, based on Apartment List's annual survey; the factors behind this are primarily high house prices and high levels of indebtedness, driven primarily by student debt.

But if millennials think they're struggling now, wait until their parents -- who lost their defined benefits pension and were moved into market-based 401(k)s that are grossly inadequate to supporting them after they stop working -- retire. 

That means that a whole generation's prime child-rearing and working years will be compromised by crushing eldercare and debt burdens, leaving them largely childless (with fewer young workers coming up behind them to pay into the Social Security system when they retire) and with stunted working lives.

Not everyone will end up this way: the top decile and the one percent will enjoy the "privileges" of good jobs and families. 

If there was ever a moment for intergenerational solidarity, this is it. Neither boomers nor the generations after them have a future under neoliberalism and inequality.

Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/21/intergen...

We're not prepared for modern disinformation campaigns

The following is even relatively minor compared with the “deepfake” photos and videos that are coming. This is societal poison; we need laws to stop this stuff now.

Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing:

It's a preview of just how badly things could go in 2020: the Kentucky gubernatorial race was narrowly decided for the Democratic candidate Andy Beshear, but the monumentally unpopular Trumpist incumbent Matt Bevin will not concede, and instead, he is repeating the Trumpist lie that "voter fraud" caused him to lose his office.

Supercharging this lie are obvious fake Twitter accounts, like the now-suspended @Overlordkraken1 account, which posted hours after the polls closed with "just shredded a box of Republican mail-in ballots" and "Bye-Bye Bevin." Though the account only had 19 followers and though it was swiftly shuttered, a screenshot of the tweet was retweeted by a botnet army, and then far-right commentators started to cite it as evidence of electoral fraud…