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Category: Money, Class, and Poverty,
Ocasio-Cortez won’t support the House Democratic campaign arm or any of her colleagues that rely on its assistance
“Sometimes the question comes: ‘Do you want to be in a majority or do you want to be in the minority?’ ” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) told Fox News. “And do you want to be part of a team?”
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who is facing a primary challenge from a progressive Democrat backed by Ocasio-Cortez, expressed frustration over what he described as efforts to “purify” the Democratic Caucus by ousting members who aren’t part of the party’s progressive wing.
“To have people try to purify the caucus because they don’t agree with them — 100 percent, I certainly don’t agree with that,” he told Fox News. “Hopefully, we will start to get away from this circular firing squad.”
Ocasio-Cortez defends decision not to pay dues to House Democratic campaign arm | TheHill
She either does want not progress or does not understand how it happens. Either way, she comes off a selfish little twit here.
And, not for nothing, she opens her own flank.
Graham, Paul rift deepens over Trump’s war powers
Paul and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) emerged from Wednesday’s classified briefing deeply critical of what they characterized as a warning from senior administration officials against debating Trump’s war authority
…Lee called the presentation “the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue.”
Paul added that he found the briefing “less than satisfying” and that it was “absurd” and “insane” to use the 2002 Iraq war authorization as the basis for an air strike against an Iranian general.
“I see no way in the world you could logically argue that an authorization to have war with Saddam Hussein has anything to with having war with people currently in Iraq,” Paul told reporters.
Graham, Paul rift deepens over Trump’s war powers | TheHill
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Fifth Pentagon official announces resignation in seven days
Ambassador Tina Kaidanow, a longtime State Department official who began working in her Pentagon role in September 2018, resigned on Dec. 16, the Pentagon confirmed. Defense News first reported her departure.
…“The department will not provide anything further on this personnel matter,” the spokesman added.
…Kaidanow’s resignation follows four other announced departures within a week.
…Top Asia policy official Randall Schriver would leave after two years on the job,
…[The] top official in charge of personnel and readiness Jimmy Stewart had resigned after taking the role in October 2018
…Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency leader Steven Walker
…Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Kari Bingen
…[Kaidanow] worked with top weapons buyer Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency to boost weapon sales with partner and ally countries.
Fifth Pentagon official announces resignation in seven days | TheHill
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Should Judges Have to Weigh the Price Tag of Sending Someone to Prison?
irginia jurors in 2017 requested 132 years of prison for a man who stole car tires. The jurors may have been unaware that taxpayers could pay more than $25,000 a year to keep someone incarcerated—so by proposing their sentence, they were also suggesting that society fork over $3 million. For tires.
…Americans pay tens of billions of dollars a year for state prisons, despite declining crime rates. But historically, prosecutors and judges haven’t had to think about these hefty costs.
…Tallying the price of sentences seemed sensible to him, especially because he knew prison wasn’t just expensive, but also likely to increase a person’s chances of committing more crimes later.
Should Judges Have to Weigh the Price Tag of Sending Someone to Prison? – Mother Jones
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This One Little Forgotten Statistic Might Hold Clues To Why Trump Won The 2016 Presidential Election
In the past 20 years, deaths from suicides, alcohol poisoning, and drugs have skyrocketed, achieving numbers not seen since the 1930’s. What is interesting is that there is one demographic that has seen a rapid rise in these types of deaths: single white men.
The shares of all income earned and wealth owned by the white working class fell even faster than their population share.”
…While all the other groups are getting richer, the white working class (and particularly males) are getting poorer.
This type of downward trend can have great negative effects on the mindset of people. If you are feeling that your life is not improving, but actually getting worse, and that you will never be able to achieve the lifestyle that your parents (or even you) had in the past, your psyche can go into feelings of depression and despair. This then makes you much more prone to seeking radical solutions to your perceived problems.
…The deaths are mostly among less educated white males, which is the same demographic that overwhelmingly supported Trump in the 2016 election.
If you further look at the statistics, there is a strong correlation between counties with high rates of deaths of despair among less educated white males, and votes for Trump. You can see that many of these men tried to solve their problems by doing extreme things: either drowning themselves in drugs and alcohol, committing suicide, or voting for Donald Trump.
…As many ancient philosophers have noted, people are social animals and need contact with other human beings to prosper. Unfortunately, in the modern world, these basic connections between people are being lost, as the social space becomes more and more impersonal, with growing loneliness being the result.
…People have a need to belong. They are tribal in nature, which is very easy to exploit in pitting people against each other and creating “us” versus “them” types of dichotomies.
…You don’t really have too many prospects of getting out of this situation, and things seem to be getting worse.
Then suddenly, you are confronted with people saying that you are privileged based on your race or sex. You look around, notice your squalid surroundings, reflect on your meager job prospects, and your non-existing love life, and say to yourself: “privilege my ass!”
However, you continue facing attacks on your identity. You start taking these attacks more and more personally, as they lower your self-esteem even more. You start feeling as if you are under attack.
…Today’s toxic climate creates the right conditions for normal people to fall through the alt-right rabbit hole.
…Woke culture and calling people out not only creates divisions, but doesn’t help the people it is supposed to help. Most people coming from minority background don’t care about political correctness. In fact, they want the same things that people from the deprived white male working-class want.
… Shame based political discourse as practiced by woke social justice warriors, not only doesn’t improve social justice for minorities, it just degenerates the political discourse and is incredibly counter-productive.
This One Little Forgotten Statistic Might Hold Clues To Why Trump Won The 2016 Presidential Election
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Genealogists outraged by Trump administration plans to hike fees for immigration records
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials declined to explain exactly how they arrived at the new fee amounts. But the agency has said it must increase fees across the board — including substantial hikes for green card and citizenship applications — to avoid a $1.26 billion annual budget shortfall. By law, USCIS must fund itself through fees.
…Some of the files are scheduled to transfer to the National Archives, where they can be accessed free by the public in person, but the vast majority of the information contained in the files is not available outside of the USCIS program, he said.
Venezia said he is puzzled by the jump in fees, especially given that the program nearly tripled fees in 2016, explaining at the time that the new fees would fully cover the program’s costs, he said.
“What could possibly have changed in three years to warrant such a huge increase?” he asked.
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University of Farmington: ICE arrests more at fake Michigan college
A total of about 250 students have now been arrested since January on immigration violations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of a sting operation by federal agents who enticed foreign-born students, mostly from India, to attend the school that marketed itself as offering graduate programs in technology and computer studies, according to ICE officials.
…The students had arrived legally in the U.S. on student visas, but since the University of Farmington was later revealed to be a creation of federal agents, they lost their immigration status after it was shut down in January. The school was staffed with undercover agents posing as university officials.
…Attorneys for the students arrested said that they were unfairly trapped by the U.S. government since the Department of Homeland Security had said on its website that the university was legitimate. An accreditation agency that was working with the U.S. on its sting operation also listed the university as legitimate.
,,,The U.S. “trapped the vulnerable people who just wanted to maintain (legal immigration) status,” Rahul Reddy, a Texas attorney who represented or advised some of the students arrested, told the Free Press this week. “They preyed upon on them.”
The fake university is believed to have collected millions of dollars from the unsuspecting students. An email from the university’s president, Ali Milani, told students that graduate programs’ tuition is $2,500 per quarter and that the average cost is $1,000 per month.
University of Farmington: ICE arrests more at fake Michigan college
Sanders’s Climate Ambitions Thrill Supporters. Experts Aren’t Impressed.
Bernie Sanders’s $16 trillion vision for arresting global warming would put the government in charge of the power sector and promise that, by 2030, the country’s electricity and transportation systems would run entirely on wind, solar, hydropower or geothermal energy.
…The federal government to build and generate renewable energy, and sell it to publicly owned distribution systems, with preferential prices for utilities that pledge to break themselves of fossil fuels.
….Mr. Sander’s plan envisions expanding the four existing federal agencies that market electric power …[and] create a fifth such agency that would spend $1.52 trillion on developing renewable energy and another $852 billion on technology like advanced batteries to store energy for days when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow.
…Congress would have to create and fund these new entities, a heavy lift even with a Congress in Democratic control.
…Economists said, his climate plan fails to consider his larger agenda, such as the new infrastructure projects in his economic plan that would create a burst of new emissions. High-speed rail, wind turbines and mass transit need steel and concrete, the production of which requires energy.
…[Oppenheimer] said he was disappointed that Mr. Sanders no longer supported a carbon tax, a position he embraced in 2016. Economists say a fee on the burning of fossil fuels is the most efficient way to drive down global warming, but Mr. Sanders says that would not work quickly enough.
…Other analysts criticized Mr. Sanders’s rejection of nuclear energy and technology to capture and store carbon emissions. His plan calls both of those “false solutions” to climate change and calls for a moratorium on the renewal of nuclear power plant licenses.
Yet nuclear power currently accounts for 20 percent of the nation’s energy mix and more than half of its carbon-free power. Allowing aging plants to close would likely mean that natural gas, a fossil fuel, would fill the void and emissions would rise.
…Mr. Sanders is not a newcomer to the climate issue; he has spent decades fighting, largely unsuccessfully, for ambitious legislation to increase clean energy, reduce carbon emissions, and end fossil fuel subsidies. He distinguished himself in the 2016 Democratic primaries by calling for a tax on carbon emissions and declaring global warming a national emergency.
…Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist, said Mr. Sanders was more focused on signaling his ambitions to the party’s liberal wing than sweating policy details.
“People who care about these issues want a warrior,” Mr. Payne said. “Whether or not the battle plans they draw up exactly check out is kind of beside the point.” [emphasis: Peanut Gallery]
Sanders’s Climate Ambitions Thrill Supporters. Experts Aren’t Impressed. – The New York Times
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Mississippi Blues Trail
North of Bentonia, the road enters the vast alluvial plain known as the Mississippi Delta. Two hundred miles long and 70 miles across at its widest point, reaching from Memphis to Vicksburg, the Delta was the original epicenter of the blues. The music emerged at the turn of the 20th century and was characterized by raw emotional intensity, the use of repetition, and bent or sliding notes on the guitar or the diddley bow, a one-stringed instrument played with a slide. Most scholars trace the blues back to the field hollers and spirituals sung by slaves, and perhaps further back to West Africa, where similar musical scales and techniques can still be heard.
The Delta was a feudal, apartheid cotton society. White landowners ruled over huge plantations, and black sharecroppers toiled in the fields. For early bluesmen like Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, playing music for money and whiskey was a way to escape hard labor, entertain a crowd, attract women and achieve a measure of freedom.
…Holmes County, an hour north of Bentonia, is the poorest county in Mississippi, with a median household income of $22,325 and 62 percent of children living in poverty. “Mechanized farming hurt this place more than anything,” says Sam Calahan, 67, a retired music promoter standing by a blues marker in the small, rough town of Tchula.
“One good-sized plantation used to employ hundreds of men,” he says. “Now it don’t take but five or six tractor drivers, and there’s nothing else. A lot of people here have been on welfare for two or three generations. The stores have closed.
…Hoover takes visitors to the grave and some civil rights locations and the dusty old preserved shack that serves as his museum. “I’m making more with my tours than my store now.”
He’d like to see more support for blues tourism from local business leaders and politicians. “I’m trying to get grants and raise money to do more. We should have a couple of blues clubs with live music, a bigger museum, a soul food restaurant. These tourists got money. They just need somewhere to spend it.”
…Clarksdale, a town of 17,000 in the northwest Delta, is the undisputed capital of Mississippi blues tourism. It has live music seven nights a week and more than a dozen festivals through the year.
…The old downtown is undergoing a major revitalization, with entrepreneurs, most of them white, opening restaurants, cafés, clubs, hotels, music stores and souvenir shops in previously run-down buildings. Many of the buildings have been left partially decrepit for a hard-bitten look.
Buster Moton, a firebrand city commissioner representing a low-income, predominantly black ward, welcomes the tourists, but says there are too many white people profiting from an African-American art form. “Blues tourism is not providing jobs for the people who really need jobs or solving any problems in my part of town,” he says. “And we’re seeing more and more white musicians playing in white-owned clubs.”
…“A lot of money has gone into buildings and tourism,” says Abel. “But these old guys like John and Duck Holmes and a few others are still playing for peanuts, when they can even get a gig. I’d like to see them honored more, because they’re the last guys playing the real thing.”
…“If we’re basing economic development on the blues, then we must be concerned about the individuals who gave us this music,” he says, speaking from his home in Jackson. “We owe them that.”
Mississippi Blues Trail | Al Jazeera America
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Waking the Giants: Progressive DAs
His office has ended bail payments for nonviolent offenders; reduced the supervision of parolees; decriminalized marijuana possession; opened a sentencing review board to evaluate past cases and sentences; pushed for safe-injection sites to lessen the rate of opioid overdose; and diverted low-level drug offenses, some gun violations, and some prostitution cases from criminal prosecution to addiction treatment or other social-service programs. Krasner’s office has also given priority to reforming the police force, reportedly compiling a list of officers with a history of abuses like violence, racial profiling, or civil-rights violations.
…Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Baltimore have gained national attention for the reforms their new DAs have enacted.
Krasner and other DAs are at work remaking a criminal-justice system focused on fairness, rehabilitation, and community. They are providing admirable examples of how to resist Trump’s politics of fear.
Waking the Giants | Commonweal Magazine
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Paper Genocide: The Erasure of Native People in Census Counts
Native people, in particular, are the most undercounted ethnic group in the census’ history. Native people were excluded from the first 70 years under the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly regarded “Indians not taxed,” or those living on reservations or unsettled territories, as not countable. In more recent years, the U.S. Census Bureau’s own data has shown significant undercounting. In the 1990 census, 12.2 percent of Native people on reservations were undercounted, according to the Census Bureau’s findings. A decade later, the census seemed to improve, with the bureau not reporting a statistically significant undercount. But then in 2010, it jumped back up to 4.9 percent.
This is particularly devastating for Indigenous people because of how census data has been used to help determine many aspects of tribal sovereignty, such as tribal recognition and enrollment.
…“American Indian and Alaska Natives” are designated by the Census Bureau as a hard-to-count population due to issues including non-traditional addresses, high rates of renters and houselessness, and difficulties accessing more rural lands.
…In theory, blood quantum measures the amount of “Indian blood” a Native person possesses, which is then captured on a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood issued by the BIA. Officials use the following federal government records to measure blood quantum: census rolls between 1885 and 1940, the 1900 special Indian census, the Dawes Rolls, Durant Rolls, and land conveyances involving Native people. During this period, sexual violence became a common form of genocide against Native people, which some elders have attributed to an effort to lower the blood quantum of future generations.
There are only three types of living beings in the United States that have to register their blood quantum with the U.S. government: dogs, horses, and Native people.
…With the passage in 1887 of the General Allotment (Dawes) Act, the United States government institutionalized the distinction between full- and mixed-blood Indians. To receive an allotment, Indians had to become enrolled members of their respective tribes. To enroll in a tribe, an individual needed to prove a certain degree (purity) of Indian blood.”
…My blood quantum is registered with the BIA as one-eighth. This has a direct impact on my ability, and that of future generations, to gain tribal citizenship and be entitled to our treaty rights.
The passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 created new issues for counting Indigenous people. As Jobe’s paper explains, “The Census Bureau was concerned that Mexican laborers might attempt to pass themselves as Indians in the states that share a border with Mexico. To get an accurate count of the Indian population, the bureau instructed enumerators to take special care to differentiate between the two groups in the states of California, Arizona, and New Mexico.” To this day, Indigenous people from what is now known as Mexico and Central and South America aren’t counted as Indigenous to those lands. They can identify on the census as American Indian or Alaskan Native, but are often counted as Hispanic or Latino.
…Under the 1902 directive, officials assigned women and children the surname of their husbands and fathers even though this was not the way many nations and clans traditionally assigned names.
…Take U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion in the 2009 Carcieri v. Salazar decision holding that if tribes weren’t “under federal jurisdiction” in 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act was passed, then they can’t hold land in trust. This affects tribes that were not federally recognized before 1934, often because the government used the existence of intermarriage and assimilation to deny their status as Indian nations. This history is now being used against them, particularly for tribes mixed with Black people.
Paper Genocide: The Erasure of Native People in Census Counts – Rewire.News
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Comments From The Peanut Gallery 