RSN: PODCAST: Marc Ash | Interview With Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen

 

 

09 August 20

---

Pandemic Fundraising: Unique and Challenging

There is no playbook for fundraising in the grip of a deadly pandemic and its global economic impact. The COVD-19 virus is novel and solutions will need to be novel as well.

Making this work starts with people doing what they can. As always some will be able to do more, some perhaps a bit less but doing what you can is the key.

Please be safe out there we’re going to need our community.

Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611

 

09 August 20

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

ALMOST EVERYONE HERE CAN AFFORD TO CHIP-IN - There may be some people who come to Reader Supported News who literally cannot afford to donate anything at all, but in truth, not too many. We are not a “for-profit” organization. We are a for-the-people organization. We raise money to fund the services and keep the lights on. We do a damn good job. In peace and solidarity. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

---

PODCAST: Marc Ash | Interview With Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen

Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
Ash writes: "In this the second episode of The RSN Podcast, I am joined by RootsAction co-founders Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen. We discussed their article, 'New Progressive Campaign to Vote Trump Out in Swing States,' the direction of the progressive movement heading into the 2020 presidential election cycle, and what comes after. It was quite a good conversation."
READ MORE

A man speaks with a library worker after receiving an unemployment form in Miami Beach, Florida. (photo: Marco Bello/Reuters)

Trump's Stimulus Orders May Not Be Enforceable
Maggie Haberman, Emily Cochrane and Jim Tankersley, The New York Times
Excerpt: "President Trump took executive action on Saturday to circumvent Congress and try to extend an array of federal pandemic relief, resorting to a legally dubious set of edicts whose impact was unclear, as negotiations over an economic recovery package appeared on the brink of collapse."
READ MORE

Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: B&T)

Facebook Removes Troll Farm Posing as African-American Support for Donald Trump
Ben Collins and Kevin Collier
Excerpt: "Facebook removed hundreds of accounts on Thursday from a foreign troll farm posing as African-Americans in support of Donald Trump and QAnon supporters. It also removed hundreds of fake accounts linked to conservative media outlet The Epoch Times that pushed pro-Trump conspiracy theories about coronavirus and protests in the U.S."
READ MORE

Cori Bush. (photo: Courtesy of Cori Bush for Congress)

Cori Bush Has Proved Progressives Are Gaining Strength - and That Gives Me Hope
Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian UK
Mahdawi writes: "Cori Bush used to be homeless - now she's on her way to the House of Representatives."
READ MORE

A protester confronts police in Beirut. (photo: Al Jazeera)

Tear Gas and Clashes in Beirut Amid Fury Over Massive Explosion
Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times
Bulos writes: "Demonstrators stormed government buildings, lighting fires and fighting pitched street battles with security forces in the Lebanese capital on Saturday, even as the country's embattled prime minister called for early parliamentary elections."
READ MORE

Sunday Song: Sam Cooke | Chain Gang
Sam Cooke, YouTube
Excerpt: "That's the sound of the men working on the chain gang."
READ MORE

Photographs of the leak show thick, sticky oils coating the water and the ground. (photo: Oumme Sakina Auckburaully/CNN)

A Stricken Ship Is Leaking Tonnes of Fuel Into the 'Pristine Lagoons' of the Indian Ocean
Sara Spary and Amy Woodyatt, CNN
Excerpt: "Mauritius is facing a 'state of environmental emergency' after a wrecked ship began breaking up, spilling oil into the Indian Ocean."

The vessel ran aground at Pointe d'Esny on the east of the island nation in late July, according to local media reports and environmental campaigners. This is close to the Blue Bay Marine Park reserve and a number of popular tourist beaches. 

Damage to the boat has since caused it to leak out polluting waste into the surrounding area, and photographs circulating on social media appear to show thick, sticky oils coating the water and the ground.

On Friday, Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth declared a state of environmental emergency. Mauritius lies next to the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, and Jugnauth also appealed to French President Emmanuel Macron for help on Twitter. 

The Mauritian leader said "our country does not have the skills and expertise to refloat stranded ships."

On Saturday, Macron said that France was deploying teams and equipment from Reunion Island in response.

Happy Khambule, Greenpeace Africa senior climate and energy campaign manager, warned that the bulk carrier was leaking "tonnes of diesel and oil into the ocean," and threatening the area's wildlife. 

"Thousands of species around the pristine lagoons of Blue Bay, Pointe d'Esny and Mahebourg are at risk of drowning in a sea of pollution, with dire consequences for Mauritius' economy, food security and health," Khambule said in a Friday statement. 

A clean-up operation is underway.

The country's minister of the environment Kavy Ramano said on Friday: "We are in a situation of environmental crisis." 

Younous Omarjee, a member of the European Parliament from Reunion Island, told CNN that international cooperation was needed to deal with the "ecological disaster." 

"This is a serious environmental crisis and we are not yet aware of all the consequences it could have. It's also terrible for Mauritius, whose economy is based on tourism and has already been severely impacted by the pandemic," he told CNN. 

France's Minister of Ecological Transition Barbara Pompili announced Saturday that France is providing support to the Mauritian authorities to deal with the fuel leak.

READ MORE

---

Contribute to RSN

Update My Monthly Donation

RSN: FOCUS: 'Top Cop' Kamala Harris's Record of Policing the Police

 

 

09 August 20

---

RSN Helped Me Survive The Election Cycle

I sent a little contribution today above and beyond my monthly gift. Why? Because RSN helped me survive the election cycle feeling well-informed and not-alone.

Where else can we go for the analysis and voices we so need to hear? Who else brings us this kind of forum for learning and discussion? I learn from the articles AND the comments—can’t do without it!

Sasha RSN, Reader-Supporter

Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

---

If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611

 

09 August 20

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

PANDEMIC FUNDRAISING: UNIQUE AND CHALLENGING - There is no playbook for fundraising in the grip of a deadly pandemic and its global economic impact. The COVID-19 virus is novel and solutions will need to be novel as well. Making this work starts with people doing what they can. As always some will be able to do more, some perhaps a bit less but doing what you can is the key. Please be safe out there we’re going to need our community. Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

---

FOCUS: 'Top Cop' Kamala Harris's Record of Policing the Police

Danny Hakim, Stephanie Saul and Richard A. Oppel Jr., The New York Times
Excerpt: "During this summer of tear gas and turmoil, Kamala Harris has not been quiet."

On “The View,” the California senator spoke about “reimagining how we do public safety in America.”

On the Senate floor, she sparred with Rand Paul after the Kentucky Republican blocked a bill to make lynching a federal crime, and she is among the Democrats sponsoring policing legislation that would ban choke holds, racial profiling and no-knock warrants.

Indeed, an examination of that record shows how Ms. Harris was far more reticent in another time of ferment a half-decade ago.

Since becoming California’s attorney general in 2011, she had largely avoided intervening in cases involving killings by the police. Protesters in Oakland distributed fliers saying: “Tell California Attorney General Kamala Harris to prosecute killer cops! It’s her job!”

Then, amid the national outrage stoked by the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., came pleas for her to investigate a series of police shootings in San Francisco, where she had previously been district attorney. She did not step in. Except in extraordinary circumstances, she said, it was not her job.

Still, her approach was subtly shifting. During the inaugural address for her second term as attorney general, Ms. Harris said the nation’s police forces faced a “crisis of confidence.” And by the end of her tenure in 2016, she had proposed a modest expansion of her office’s powers to investigate police misconduct, begun reviews of two municipal police departments and backed a Justice Department investigation in San Francisco. 

Critics saw her taking baby steps when bold reform was needed — a microcosm of a career in which she developed a reputation for taking cautious, incremental action on criminal justice and, more often than not, yielding to the status quo.

Image

Ms. Harris being sworn in as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2004. She has said she became a prosecutor to change the system from the inside.Credit...George Nikitin/Associated Press

The daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father who met in Berkeley in the social protest movement of the 1960s, Ms. Harris has said she went into law enforcement to change the system from the inside. Yet as district attorney and then attorney general — and the first Black woman to hold those jobs — she found herself constantly negotiating a middle ground between two powerful forces: the police and the left in one of the most liberal states in America.

Ms. Harris declined to be interviewed for this article. But over the years, she has proudly labeled herself both a “top cop” and a “progressive prosecutor.”

In her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” she wrote that “if we take a show of hands of those who would like to see more police officers on the street, mine would shoot up,” adding that “virtually all law-abiding citizens feel safer when they see officers walking a beat.”

Earlier this summer, in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, she told The New York Times that “it is status-quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety. That’s wrong. It’s just wrong.”

All of which poses a question: Is Ms. Harris essentially a political pragmatist, or has she in fact changed? And is she the woman to lead a police-reform effort from the White House?

An Officer’s Death

Ms. Harris was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003, defeating her former boss, Terence Hallinan. He was seen as one of the nation’s most progressive district attorneys, unafraid to confront the police, once even indicting the city’s police chief, albeit briefly.

Mr. Hallinan also had a low conviction rate, and Ms. Harris viewed his office as dysfunctional. The police union endorsed her in a runoff.

But in April 2004, barely three months into the job, Ms. Harris found herself at odds with the police after a gang member gunned down an officer named Isaac Espinoza.

During her campaign, Ms. Harris had opposed the death penalty, in part, as being discriminatory toward people of color, and she did not seek it for Officer Espinoza’s killer. Rank-and-file officers were infuriated. Heather Fong, the new police chief, called it an affront to those who “risk their lives for the sake of the public’s safety.”

Then, at the funeral, Ms. Harris was blindsided when Senator Dianne Feinstein called for the death penalty.

The blowback “totally traumatized her,” said Peter Keane, a former member of the Police Commission, which oversees the city’s Police Department. Throughout her tenure, he said, Ms. Harris had “traditional prosecution, pro-police, instincts. She has always tried not to be a target of the police.”

In 2007, she stayed quiet as police unions opposed legislation granting public access to disciplinary hearings. Gloria Romero, the former State Senate majority leader, who authored the bill, said many San Franciscans publicly supported the move, but not Ms. Harris.

“There could not have been a more profound wall of silence,” said Ms. Romero, a Bernie Sanders supporter who has been critical of the Democratic establishment. “It’s easy to call yourself progressive today, but I mean, come on, it’s easy to reinvent yourself.”

Police use of force had been a contentious issue in San Francisco long before Ms. Harris took office. From 2001 to 2004, The San Francisco Chronicle reported, there were more complaints about use of force in the city than in San Diego, Seattle, Oakland and San Jose combined. Ms. Harris pursued few on-duty cases of force-related misconduct, though that was not unusual at the time.

Most district attorneys prosecuted officers in “only the rare case,” said Louise Renne, who as San Francisco city attorney once employed Ms. Harris. She and other supporters of Ms. Harris said it was unfair to criticize her through the prism of today.

“At that time, Kamala was a very progressive D.A., and some of the criticisms now are a bit of revisionist history,” Ms. Renne said.

Timothy P. Silard, Ms. Harris’s former chief of policy and one of a number of current and former aides who spoke on her behalf, said Ms. Harris experienced hostility in the department from the beginning. He recalled commanders and homicide detectives who refused to speak to her or look her in the eye during meetings in which she demanded they solve more murders in poor neighborhoods. Instead, they addressed white men — her subordinates.

“Did she set out as a professional prosecutor to anger the cops?” he asked. “No. Why would she do that? But did she shy away from doing bold things and important things because it was something the police department or police union didn’t like? Never.”

Image

Ms. Harris, as district attorney, at the African American Cultural Center in San Francisco. She told her staff not to prosecute cases resulting from arrests based on racial profiling, former aides said.Credit...Susan Ragan for The New York Times

From 2002 to 2005, Black people made up less than eight percent of the city’s population but accounted for more than 40 percent of police arrests. Mr. Silard and Paul Henderson, who was Ms. Harris’s chief of administration and now directs a city agency that investigates complaints about the police, said Ms. Harris told her staff not to prosecute arrests based on racial profiling.

“We regularly received calls from officers saying: ‘We can’t believe that you’re discharging this case. This was a good case.’ Well, no, it wasn’t,” Mr. Henderson recalled.

Ms. Harris also created a “re-entry” program called “Back on Track” that aimed to keep young low-level offenders out of jail if they went to school and kept a job.

As police chief of East Palo Alto, Ronald Davis studied the program. “Re-entry was not a prevailing thought in law enforcement,” he said. “She said this is a unique opportunity to reduce recidivism.”

But some say she did not do enough.

“We never thought we had an ally in the district attorney,” said David Campos, who was a supervisor and police commissioner while Ms. Harris was district attorney and is now chairman of the San Francisco Democratic Party. “You have someone saying all the right things now, but when she had the opportunity to do something about police accountability, she was either not visible, or when she was, she was on the wrong side.” (Mr. Campos backed Mr. Sanders’s presidential bid.)

In 2010, Ms. Harris’s office was caught up in a scandal over a police crime-lab technician who had been skimming drugs and had a past conviction for domestic violence. A judge found that her office had failed to disclose the information to defense lawyers, as required. The judge also faulted her office for not having procedures for producing exculpatory information on police witnesses.

READ MORE

---

Contribute to RSN

Update My Monthly Donation

TERMINATING SOCIAL SECURITY & MEDICARE

 

Cape Cod Women for Change

tac
 

A well-written piece that details what is actually going on:

the lead:

Two weeks ago, William Evanina, director of the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center, published a somewhat vague warning about various forms of foreign interference in the upcoming election. On Friday, he followed up with a more direct and incriminating one, specifically warning that Russia is working to help reelect Donald Trump. Even more important is what this warning unmistakably implies: that Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are actively cooperating with Russia’s campaign.

what it means:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/russia-ukraine-trump-biden-intelligence-foreign-interference-election.html

NYMAG.COM

U.S. Intelligence Says Republicans Are Working With Russia to Reelect Trump

The collusion is happening in plain 

Women for Justice - Pacific Region

'On Monday, the platform committee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted 125-36 not to include Medicare for All in the party’s platform.

Faced with a pandemic that has revealed the catastrophic irrationalities of the United States’s profit-driven health care system, it’s sad, but not surprising, that the billionaire-bought Democratic Party establishment remains more loyal to HMOs than working people.

But among those who voted no on Medicare for All were also four prominent national union presidents: Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Lily Eskelsen Garcia of the National Education Association (NEA), Mary Kay Henry of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and Lonnie Stephenson of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW).

This is outrageous. Why did top representatives of organized labor help shoot down a measure that would dramatically improve the lives of millions of workers? Especially in the face of an unprecedented social crisis, we need unions to fight for the physical and economic health of all working-class people, organized and unorganized.'

#AFT #NEA #SEIU #IBEW #MedicareForALL

Women for Justice - Pacific Region

JACOBINMAG.COM

Why Did Labor Leaders Vote Against Medicare for All in the Middle of a Pandemic?