Archives For author
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Jim Hightower: The Real Purpose of Project 2025

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2024 //
14

Jim Hightower is a Texas Democrat who spent some time in state government, back in the days when Democrats had a shot at winning statewide offices in Texas. He warns here about the real purpose of Project 2025: to turn our country into a white Christian nation. The Founders never said that. In fact, the only things they said in the Constiturion was that there should be no religious test for office. And the First Amendment barred any establishment of any religion and guaranteed freedom of religion. So what these extremists are doing is a blatant violation of the Constitution.

Hightower writes:

We’ve seen a ton of social media posts and emails in the last week or so about Project 2025, and although we’re still working on a fuller analysis to give you the lowdown on what it means to you, as well as tools to fight it, we felt it was urgent to get some solid info into Lowdowner’s hands as soon as we could. Y’all are quite the army of activists (we see the results when you take action!) and we know that if we offer up the goods, you can take them and run with them.

Here’s our brief primer on what this mess is, what’s at stake, and what you can start to do.

What is it?

If you don’t know what Project 2025 is, or would like a brief summary to use to alert others about it, here you go:

It’s a painstakingly detailed, 922-page step-by-step plan to impose an American dictatorship of moneyed authoritarians and Christian nationalists, removing your and my democratic rights. Yes, this is an actual coup.

It sounds insane, yet there it is—a document written and being loudly promoted by a power-mad cluster of Trump bosses, Putin-esque despots, Reagan-loving economists and Ayn Rand-ian academics, moneyed corporate donors, and general far-right quacks and media blowhards. It’s innocuously coded “Project 2025” because the intent is to launch their full assault on the democratic fabric and structure of our national government next January, on Day 1 of another Trump presidency.

This scheme has been devised by The Heritage Foundation, a DC think tank set up in 1973 to promote the elitist economic and cultural doctrines of its über-rich founding funders, Joseph Coors (yes, that Coors) and Richard Mellon Scaife (yes, that Mellon). In recent years, Heritage has gone from merely being right-wing zealots to off-the-charts Trumpists… and now they’re going deep into the distant extremist cosmos. Thus, the head cosmonaut, Kevin Roberts, has megalomaniacally exulted that Project 2025 is “the second American revolution.” Unfortunately, it’s a dangerous devolution, with little tin-hat Kevin acting out what he pretends is a heroic coup.

This would be silly and inconsequential, except the Trump Party has become alarmingly treacherous. Ominously referencing the January 6th violent assault on democratic rule, Kevin said that his coup “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Of course, “the left”—i.e., sane democracy fighters like you and me—do not acquiesce to tyrannical wannabes.

But his ace is that The Donald, despite his denials, has hailed Heritage’s authoritarian agenda as his own and has cheered its plan to fire thousands of public employees on Day 1, replacing them with a lockstep army of enforcers that Heritage and others say they’ve already recruited to seize and Trump-ize every federal agency. This, combined with Trump’s own pledge to use the US military to enforce his political will, is where Project 2025’s subversive coup gets real. 

Here are just a few of the steps we’ve learned so far that Heritage autocrats intend to implement: 

  • Nearly eliminating abortion access altogether at the national level.
  • Cutting Social Security benefits.
  • Giving ever-more tax breaks to corporations and gabillionaires. 
  • Selling off national parklands, wetlands, wildlife sanctuaries and other public properties
  • Eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR, PBS).
  • Imposing a “biblically-based” definition of marriage and families.
  • Eliminating the Department of Education.
  • Preventing LGBTQ+ couples from adopting children.
  • Eliminating the food stamp program (SNAP) and the free school lunch program.
  • Putting the Department of Justice and other independent agencies under the direct political control of the President.
  • Eliminating organic food promotion, conservation programs, and most climate policies of the Agriculture Department

For more in depth reading, check out this series from the Center for American Progress.

Why is this different from previous right-wing agendas?

One, they were piecemeal proposals, like Bush the Second’s failed attack on Social Security, or they were just sloganeering war whoops, like Grover Norquist’s empty call to make government small enough to drown it in a bathtub. 

Two, Project 2025 is a comprehensive, all-in-one blueprint for a radical plutocratic and theocratic takeover of our government, surreptitiously advanced by many of the same anti-democracy corporate supremacists and billionaires who’ve already seized control of the judicial branch.

Three, the Republican Party is perfectly willing to submit to and grovel at the feet of moneyed extremists, media demagoguery, and political thuggery—even in support of stupid, poisonous policies the American people overwhelmingly reject.

Four: Donald.

What can I do?

Right now, the most important thing you can do is to tell your friends and family about this terrifying agenda. Right-wingers are currently attacking the media reporting on this, calling progressives and even moderates who oppose the coup “Chicken Little”-types, trying to minimize this elitist assault on America itself. We cannot let them.

The most important people to share it with are not your super conservative relatives that drive you nuts, but rather people who may be feeling ambiguous about voting for a Democrat (whoever that is ends up being) for President. You’re not going to change the people who’ve already gone over to the crazies, but you have a chance at inspiring more undecided voters to at least vote against an explicitly un-American, Christian Nationalist, fascist ideology.

Categories Citizenship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Republicans, Trump

Forbes: It’s Easy to Crack Your Passwords

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2024 //
5

Davey Winder, senior contributor to Forbes, writes about how to keep your passwords safe.

With just a few dollars, a little time, and a smart brute-force guessing algorithm, most passwords can be cracked in much less time than you might imagine. According to a new analysis from the experts at Kaspersky, 59% of 193 million actual passwords were cracked in less than 60 minutes, and 45% were cracked in less than 60 seconds.

The basis of a brute-force attack is where the perpetrator iterates all possible combinations in order to find a match for the password in question. However, Antonov explained, “smart guessing algorithms are trained on a passwords data-set to calculate the frequency of various character combinations and make selections first from the most common combinations and down to the rarest ones.”

Brute Force And Smart-Guessing Combine To Quickly Crack Passwords

Although very popular due to the point-and-fire simplicity of a brute-force attack, it remains suboptimal as far as password-cracking algorithms are concerned. When you consider that the vast majority of passwords in daily use contain similar characteristics involving the combination of dates, names, dictionary words and keyboard sequences, adding these to the guessing-game mix speeds things up considerably.

The Kaspersky study revealed that when it comes to the percentage of passwords crackable in any timeframe using each method, while 10% of the password list analyzed was broken in under a minute by brute force, that increased to 45% when smart-guessing was added to the algorithm. Allowing for between a minute and an hour, the difference was 20% compared to 59%.

The Smart-Guessing Algorithm Advantage Explained

Because humans are creatures of habit, we make for very poor password creators. The truth is that the passwords we choose for ourselves are rarely, if ever, truly random. We rely upon all the things that smart-guessing algorithms are designed to detect: common names and phrases, important dates both personal and historical, and patterns, lots of patterns. To give you an idea of how predictable we are, one YouTube channel took a sample of more than 200,000 people and asked them to choose a ‘random’ number between 1 and 100. Most people gravitated towards the same relatively small set: 7, 37, 42, 69, 73, and 77. Even when trying to be random with character strings, we fail as most people will favor the center of the keyboard for their selection, according to Kaspersky.

“Smart algorithms make short work of most passwords that contain dictionary sequences,” Antonov said, “and they even catch character substitutions.” In other words, using p@ssw0rd instead of password won’t slow the algorithm down that much at all.

How To Strengthen Your Accounts Against Smart-Guessing Algorithm Attack

Kaspersky recommends the following password usage strategy:

Generate strong and truly random passwords using a password manager.

Don’t reuse passwords across sites and services or hacking one basket will enable access to many more eggs.

If you don’t, or won’t, use a password manager, then use mnemonic passphrases rather than dictionary words and numeric combinations.

Don’t save passwords in web browsers.

Use a password manager protected by a strong master password.

Use two-factor authentication for all accounts that support it.

Categories Fraud, Safety, Technology, Computers

The Atlantic: What Happens When Streets are Closed to Cars and Open for Play?

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2024 //
5

The Atlantic contains a lovely article by contributing writer Stephanie H. Murray about a growing movement to close streets to cars so that children can play without adult direction.

She begins:

In the summer of 2009, Amy Rose and Alice Ferguson, two mothers living on Greville Road in Bristol, a midsize city in southwest England, found themselves in a strange predicament: They saw entirely too much of their kids. “We were going, like, Why are they here?” Rose told me. “Why aren’t they outside?” The friends decided to run an experiment. They applied to shut their quarter-mile road to traffic for two hours after school on a June afternoon—not for a party or an event but just to let the children who lived there play. Intentionally, they didn’t prepare games or activities, Rose told me, as it would have defeated the purpose of the inquiry: “With time, space, and permission, what happens?”

The results were breathtaking. The dozens of kids who showed up had no problem finding things to do. One little girl cycled up and down the street “3,000 times,” Rose recalled. “She was totally blissed out.” Suddenly, the modern approach to children’s play, in which parents shuttle their kids to playgrounds or other structured activities, seemed both needlessly extravagant and wholly insufficient. Kids didn’t need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less reliant on their time-strapped parents to get outside.

The experiment also produced some unexpected results. As children poured into the street, some ran into classmates, only just then realizing that they were neighbors. Soon it became clear to everyone present that far more children were living on Greville Road than anyone had known. That session, and the many more it prompted, also became the means by which adult residents got to know one another, which led to another revelation for Ferguson and Rose: In numerous ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for adults.

The dominance of cars has turned children’s play into work for parents, who are left coordinating and supervising their children’s time and ferrying kids to playgrounds and play dates. But it has also deprived adults of something more profound. Over the years, as Rose and Ferguson have expanded their experiment to other parts of the United Kingdom, neighborhoods across the country have discovered that allowing kids to play out in the open has helped residents reclaim something they didn’t know they were missing: the ability to connect with the people living closest to them.

Modern folks tend to think that streets serve largely mobile purposes—getting cars from one place to another in swift, orderly fashion. But “prior to the automobile, streets had a ton of stationary functions,” Marcel Moran, a faculty fellow at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, told me. Streets were where people sold wares and socialized. And particularly after the United States and Europe began to industrialize, streets were the primary location for the rising number of urban-dwelling children to play, according to Jon Winder, a historian and the author of Designed for Play: Children’s Playgrounds and the Politics of Urban Space, 1840–2010. This remained the case in the U.K. and the U.S. even after playgrounds became widespread in the early 20th century. Only when cars hit the streets in larger numbers did things begin to change. Society, Winder told me, began prioritizing “the movement and storage of motor vehicles over children and their playful behavior…”

Rose and Ferguson’s project on Greville Road is of course not the first or only effort to reclaim the streets for children. In the U.K., play streets emerged roughly a century ago as a sort of compromise in the process of booting kids off the street. But after peaking in the 1960s, they largely dwindled out, to be revived only in the late 2000s. New York has had a play-streets program since 1914, and Philadelphia for more than half a century—and recently, the idea has been taken up in other U.S. cities. Chicago launched a play-streets program in 2012, followed by Los Angeles in 2015; an initiative in Portland, Oregon, hosted its first events in 2023.

In the U.K., Rose, Ferguson, and their friend Ingrid Skeels expanded their experiment in 2011 by founding Playing Out, an organization that has helped residents on more than 1,000 streets in dozens of cities across the country set up their own play sessions. These typically last for two hours and occur weekly, biweekly, or monthly.

Open the link to read the rest of the article. It’s an inspiring idea that is great for children and parents alike. Plus, it introduces neighbors to each other.

Categories Childhood, Creativity, Freedom, Parents, Play

Simone Biles: “I Love My ‘Black Job’”

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
8

Simone Biles posted a tweet mocking Trump’s claim that immigrants are taking away “Black jobs.” This story was published by the New York Daily News.

Gymnast Simone Biles dinged former President Trump on Friday by tweeting “I love my Black job” after her latest Olympic gold medal win.

Taking a victory lap after her winning performance at the Paris Games, Biles trolled Trump for his controversial claims that undocumented immigrants are taking so-called “Black jobs” from Americans.

The world champion was amplifying a post by singer/songwriter Ricky Davila that praised Biles as the greatest of all time.

“Iconic photo of the GOAT mastering her black job and collecting gold medals,” Davila tweeted.

Biles won the all-around gold medal on Thursday, her second of the Paris Games. It raised her career haul to nine gold medals, and she could add even more honors with three more finals looming in coming days.

The wins amount to a remarkable comeback after Biles withdrew from the last Olympics to focus on her mental health.

Her tweet amounts to a rebuke of Trump who has refused to back down from controversial remarks about “Black jobs” at his recent debate with President Biden.

Trump doubled down on the comment Wednesday during a forum with reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists in which he also falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently “became Black.”

“A Black job is anybody that has a job,” Trump said at the NABJ event, drawing derisive groans from the crowd.

The spat with Trump isn’t the first tangle between Biles and his right-wing supporters.

Biles’ 2021 decision to withdraw from competition sparked an unusual backlash from Trump’s MAGA allies who suggested she should suck it up and compete regardless of her health concerns.

One of them was Trump’s vice presidential running mate JD Vance, who denounced Americans for supporting Biles’ difficult decision at the time.

“I think it reflects pretty poorly on our … society that we try to praise people, not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments,” said Vance, who was launching an ultimately successful run for U.S. Senate.

Democrats seized on the remarks this week to take shots at Vance, who has stumbled badly in his debut on the national stage with comments deriding Americans who don’t have children.

“The audacity of JD Vance to go after the GOAT @Simone_Biles as if he isn’t the most unpopular V.P. pick in decades,” tweeted Aida Ross, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee.

Categories Elections, Humor, Trump

Anand Girihadaras: Yes, Kamala Is Both

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
7

Donald Trump is incredulous that Kamala Harris is both Indian and black. He ridiculed before an audience of black journalists for “turning black,” presumably to advance her career. The claim is false and bigoted. It says more about Trump than it does about Kamala. JD Vance endorsed Trump’s insulting statement, saying that Kamala is a “chameleon.” This is rich coming from a man who is married to an Indian woman and whose children are biracial.

Anand Girihadaras, a brilliant journalist, wrote about the dilemmas of biracial people on his blog, The Ink:

Today Donald Trump sought to question Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity, much as he rose to political prominence doubting Barack Obama’s origins.

He mused that she had always cast herself as Indian, until one day, suddenly, magically, she turned Black. Well, this is false, first of all. And dumb. Harris went to Howard University, an historically Black college, and has identified as both Indian and Black all her life. She had the unusual childhood situation of being raised by an Indian mother who, having divorced Harris’s Black father, nevertheless invested great effort and intention in exposing Harris and her sister, Maya, to the Black community and Black tradition and thought, as Harris writes in her memoir, The Truths We Hold.

Since Trump, who is of German and Scottish heritage, cannot seem to hold in his head the notion of people with more than one heritage, we’re offering this primer. It’s an essay from our archives, from 2020, on Vice President Harris’s layers of identity, viewed through the lens of caste — of the divisions and hierarchies that have haunted both the Black and Indian sides of her lineage.

The many layers of Kamala Harris’ identity

Kamala Harris is the first woman of color on a major-party presidential ticket. She is, in fact, you might say, a woman of two colors: Black, owing to her Jamaican father; and brown, owing to her Indian mother. And each of those lineages comes with its own histories and complications and inheritances related to caste.

Harris almost certainly wouldn’t exist if her maternal grandfather had not been an improbably progressive upper-caste Indian, a defier of caste. A Brahmin civil servant in newly independent India, P.V. Gopalan might have been expected, as The Los Angeles Times notes, to hew to the convention that “destined Brahmin offspring for arranged marriages and comfortable careers in academia, government service or the priesthood — if they were men. Women were not expected to work at all.” Instead, all four of his children traveled untraditional roads. His son married a Mexican woman. A daughter became a doctor and never married. Another daughter became an information scientist and didn’t have children. And Shyamala, the senator’s late mother, pulled off a caste-defiance hat trick of Things a Well-Born Indian Woman is Not Supposed To Do: leaving the country alone as a 19-year-old woman; pursuing a master’s degree as said woman; and not only failing to marry an Indian man but marrying a Black man — a brave act given anti-Black racism among Indians.

So Harris descends from privilege in the Indian system of caste, but only came to be born because of the rejection of the rules of that privilege. And her father’s background implicates other systems of — and questions about — caste. Donald Harris was Black and Jamaican. He and Shyamala met during their work for the civil rights movement. So it was the battle against the American caste regime that brought them together. Yet because of her father’s foreign provenance, Harris has long been met with (rather unfair) questions about the authenticity of her Blackness. “What does it mean to call Kamala Harris ‘black’ in an American context?” the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams has tweeted. “People keep saying, ‘Well, she looks black.’ Always good to keep in mind that ‘race’ has never strictly been about how someone looks. My blue eyed children would qualify for reparations and Harris would not.” His ground for this latter claim is that Harris cannot trace an ancestor back to American slavery. (There have also been unsubstantiated suggestions that Harris’ ancestors include an enslaver — suggestions that are intended to cast her bona fides as a survivor of the American caste system into doubt, suggestions that seem utterly unfamiliar with hemispheric history.) But whether or not Kamala Harris’ future critics would recognize her and her sister as Black, their mother had no doubt. As Harris writes in her memoir, Shyamala “understood very well she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident black women.”

At that, Shyamala couldn’t be accused of failing. And as Harris grew into a trailblazing public official and a political superstar, the ghost of caste hovered. At every step of her career, she defied America’s racial caste system and other hierarchies, accumulating a pile of firsts: first woman elected district attorney of San Francisco; first woman, first African-American, and first person of South Asian origin elected as attorney general of California; first United States senator of South Asian descent (and only the second African-American woman). But, like Barack Obama’s ascent to power, Harris’ successes also illustrated the limitations of singular defiers of caste regimes. As the writer Casey Gerald has said of his own transcendence of caste, rising to great heights from a hard-up African-American community in Dallas, “The American dream relies on stories like mine…to distract from the American reality: There is a conveyor belt that sends most young people, especially from neighborhoods like mine, from nothing to nowhere, while the chosen few are randomly picked off and celebrated.”

There is also the issue of what is expected of those from disfavored castes in exchange for the chance to defy caste systems. A lot of us would have wanted an angrier Barack Obama when it came to the abuses that led to the 2008 financial crisis, but, given how many white Americans react to Black anger, that man would probably have remained a professor in Chicago. Those of disfavored castes permitted to rise within caste systems must often navigate an extra expectation to prove that they will not rock the caste boat. Which is hardly to excuse Senator Harris’ controversial record as a prosecutor — a record that, for certain progressives, puts her beyond the pale. She did what prosecutors do — put people in jail — and she did it within the caste regime that is, in Michelle Alexander’s phrase, “the new Jim Crow.”For many of Harris’ critics, it is especially disheartening that a pioneering woman of color — of those two colors — rose to power through, among other things, jailing Black and brown people. It is a reminder that representation matters, and that structure matters as well, and advances in representation can bring about advances in structure or can crowd them out and stave them off. It is progressive to diversify the rooms where it happens, but diversifying those rooms doesn’t necessarily, on its own, make them progressive.

Please open the link to read the article in full.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Hypocrisy, Racism, Trump

Trump Doubles Down on his Racist Remarks about Kamala

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
14

After telling the National Association of Black Journalists that Kamala Harris “turned black” and that she used to portray herself as Indian, Trump was roundly criticized for raising the issue of her race. Kamala is the daughter of an India-born scientist and a Jamaica-born father who is an economist. She has never denied her biracial heritage.

Yet Trump released a photo of Kamala with her mother’s family, who are Indian, hoping to prove that she only recently “turned black.” This is ridiculous. Kamala went to a black university and joined a black sorority.

Some Republicans thought his attack on Kamala was embarrassing but he’s still the party’s candidate, and they still support the convicted felon.

The New York Daily News reported:

Former President Trump on Thursday posted a photograph of Vice President Kamala Harris wearing an Indian sari as he continued to push false racially charged claims that the Democratic presidential candidate isn’t really Black.A day after accusing Harris of only recently claiming Black heritage, Trump leaned into the controversy by sharing the photo of Harris wearing traditional Indian attire alongside her mother and maternal relatives.

“Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago!  Trump wrote on his social media site. “Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated,”

The message came as Trump and his campaign showed no signs of backing away from the firestorm controversy he launched during a contentious 35-minute sparring match with reporters at the National Association of Black

Trump’s campaign posted a headline depicting Harris as the “first Indian-American senator” elected from California as he addressed a rally in Pennsylvania.J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, praised Trump for having the courage to respond honestly to tough questions and slammed Harris as a “chameleon.”

Harris’ father is a Black immigrant from Jamaica and she has always proudly claimed both Black and South Asian heritage. She attended Howard University, a historically Black college, and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority.

Like most mixed-race people, Harris says there is nothing to be ashamed of about having roots in more than one culture or continent.

Moderate Republicans Thursday distanced themselves from Trump’s gibe as pundits branded the statement as an unforced error that could fuel Democratic political momentum.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu joined Maryland Senate candidate Larry Hogan and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in trashing Trump for the divisive and untrue claim.

“The path to victory in November is not won through character attacks or personal insults,” Sununu tweeted Thursday.

Haha, expecting Trump to abandon character attacks and personal insults is far-fetched. What else would he talk about? Policy? But he never read the briefing books and knows nothing about policy.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Elections, Ethics, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Racism

Robert Hubbell: The Gifts That Joe Biden Has Given Us

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
19

As I watched the arrival of the three hostages last night, I saw Joe Biden do two quiet deeds, both revealing his character. After he had finished welcoming the hostages and their families, he ascended the steps of the airplane with no fanfare. The rightwing attack machine would no doubt create a video about Biden “wandering away” mindlessly, as they did at the G7 summit, when he walked away from the global leaders to talk to a parachutist (the attack video showed him wandering away and clipped off his conversation with the parachutist—presenting him as a deluded old man). Last night, he entered the hostages’ airplane to thank the flight crew and the security officials who had accompanied the hostages from the moment of their release in Turkey to Andrews Air Base in Maryland.

After he returned to the hostages and their families, he sought out Paul Whelan, who had spent almost six years in Russian captivity. Biden chatted for a minute, then took off his American flag pin and pinned it on Whelan’s jacket. The quiet gestures of a decent man. Could you imagine Trump being quiet and decent? I can’t.

Robert Hubbell writes about Joe Biden’s gifts to his country:

Over his half-century of public service, Joe Biden bestowed many gifts on America. True, like every politician with a fifty-year record, he has made his share of mistakes. But when it mattered most, Joe Biden stepped into the breach to defend democracy and provide hope to America when it flagged.

He stepped up to challenge Trump in 2020 because he believed he could save America from the horrors of a second Trump term. He was right. That was a gift.

Over the next four years, he restored decency, compassion, and fairness to the governance of a great nation. That was a gift.

He proposed and passed sweeping legislation that made historic investments in fighting climate change, protecting the environment, ending child poverty, rebuilding our infrastructure, and bringing chip manufacturing back to America’s shores. That was a gift.

He restored the broken relationships between America and its allies. He was able to do so because our allies recognized that he was a good and decent man whose word could be trusted. That was a gift.

Today, Joe Biden’s gift of renewed international alliances resulted in the freedom of three American citizens wrongfully detained by Russia. The exchange would not have happened except for the relationship of trust and goodwill between President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The German Chancellor agreed to release a Russian assassin held in a German prison. In agreeing to the deal, Chancellor Scholz told Biden, “For you, I will do this.” See WaPo, Inside the deal that led to a blockbuster prisoner swap between U.S., Russia. (This article is accessible to all.)

The complex deal involved 24 detainees and 7 countries—the most complicated prisoner swap between the US and Russia in history. President Biden continued to work his relationships with foreign leaders to close the deal until the very moment he announced his withdrawal from the presidential race. Joe Biden’s selfless efforts were a gift.

The complex deal could not have happened without Joe Biden and Kamala Harris or the cooperation of six US allies. Vice President Kamala Harris played an active role in the negotiations, including private meetings with the Slovenian Prime Minister and German Chancellor at the annual Munich security conference.

The complexity of the deal is beyond the comprehension or attention span of Donald Trump—who boasted that he could secure the release of US detainees from Russia without giving any concessions to Putin. After Joe Biden finished his press conference announcing the deal, a reporter shouted a question about Trump’s boast that “that he could have gotten the hostages out without giving anything in exchange.”

Biden stopped, returned to the lectern, and asked, “Why didn’t he do it when he was president?” See embedded video, here.

Within an hour of completing negotiations for the swap, Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race. Thirty-minutes later, he endorsed Kamala Harris for president. At a time when party leaders and podcast pundits were calling for “mini-primaries” and an “open convention,” Joe Biden had the wisdom and foresight to realize that Democrats needed unity and certainty.

Kamala Harris had earned Joe Biden’s endorsement, and he gave it promptly and enthusiastically. Forty-eight hours later, Kamala Harris was the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. That was Joe Biden’s final gift—a seamless transition that has allowed Democrats to overtake Trump in less than two weeks. Kamala Harris deserves great credit for that result, but so, too, does Joe Biden for his selfless actions, wisdom, and political foresight.

Categories Biden, Character, Elections

Biden Administration Negotiates Historic Prisoner Swap with Russia

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
15

Good news for the families of Americans wrongfully detained in Russia: their loved ones have been released in a multi-nation deal. The deal confirmed that the U.S. was trying to include Andrei Navalny in the swap but he was killed in a Russian prison camp before the deal could be finalized. Trump, as customary, claimed that he could have gotten the prisoners released in a day, undoubtedly by a phone call to his pal Putin. But Whelan’s family complained that Trump did nothing to get him out of Russian prisons.

MSNBC News reports:

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Marine veteran Paul Whelan are among the Americans released on Thursday in a prisoner swap between the U.S., Russia and other countries.

Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmashev, U.S. permanent resident Vladimir Kara-Murza and 12 German nationals held in Russia have also been released in exchange for eight Russian nationals who were being held in the U.S., Slovenia, Germany, Norway and Poland.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called the swap, one of the largest since the Cold War, “historic.” 

“It’s the culmination of many rounds of complex, painstaking negotiations over many, many months,” Sullivan said on a call with reporters Thursday morning.

Gershkovich, 32, was detained in March 2023 while he was on assignment in Moscow. He was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to 16 years in a maximum security prison last month. Both the U.S. government and Gershkovich’s employer, The Wall Street Journal, called his trial a “sham.”

Whelan, 54, had been serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian penal colony after being convicted of espionage in 2020. He was arrested in December 2018 while in Russia for a friend’s wedding. 

Both men and the U.S. government have vehemently denied allegations of espionage.

Negotiations in prisoner swaps between the U.S. and Russia have often been colored by political tensions. Sources told NBC News earlier this year that a deal to release Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as well as Whelan and Gershkovich, had been in the works before Navalny died in a penal colony in February. At the time, President Joe Biden blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for Navalny’s death.

In 2022, while criticizing the release of WNBA star Brittney Griner in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, former President Donald Trump said he had turned down a deal to secure Whelan’s release in exchange for Bout. Whelan’s family has said that Trump did little to move negotiations forward when he was president. 

Trump has also repeatedly claimed that he would free Gershkovich from Russian detention if he wins the November election, boasting that Putin would “do that for me, but not for anyone else.” His remarks were widely criticized, including for potentially scuttling the possibility of Gershkovich’s release prior to the U.S. election.

Categories Biden, Cruelty, International, Trump

Slate: Silicon Valley Loves J.D.Vance

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
12

Nitish Pahwa writes in Slate about Silicon Valley’s devotion to J.D. Vance, although women are not so happy in light of Vance’s misogyny.

Pahwa writes:

Who was happiest about Donald Trump’s Monday decision to pick Ohio Sen. and former ivory-tower Appalachia whisperer J.D. Vance as his vice presidential hopeful? It wasn’t rural America, swing-state independents, or women voters. It wasn’t the conservative intelligentsia or the Catholic hard-liners, despite Vance’s self-pronounced conversion. It certainly wasn’t the traditional Republican donors currently opening up their checkbooks for Trump, or even Vance’s own Senate colleagues.

In actuality, it was the Big Tech and venture capital ambassadors who were the happiest of all. Trump had been the target of a heated effort from Silicon Valley types of all strata (well, mostly billionaires) to get Vance to the VP slot. Or, as Axios reported Monday, “a secret lobbying campaign continued into yesterday morning, with Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and tech investor David Sacks all calling Trump to try to lock in Vance.”

Musk, of course, has struck up a close relationship with Trump in recent months, regularly chatting on the phone with the former president and helping to organize executives who desire to oust President Joe Biden over his pro-worker, pro-tax, and pro-regulation agenda. “Excellent decision by @realDonaldTrump,” Musk tweeted to the ex-president, who still hasn’t returned to posting on the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Longtime VC, podcast host, and political influencer Sacks gave a Monday night speech at the Republican National Convention that, like many of his other screeds, mostly made the case against Biden instead of one for Trump. He did, however, tweet his satisfaction with Vance, praising his military service and subsequent critiques of forever wars, calling him “an American patriot, with the courage to fight America’s wars but the wisdom to know when to avoid them.” (Sacks’ tweet also erroneously implied that Vance had enlisted “when the Twin Towers came down,” even though he couldn’t join and serve until a few years after 9/11.)

It’s not just them. The burgeoning (and amply funded) corpus of anti-regulation, anti-“woke,” pro-crypto, and A.I.–enchanted “effective accelerationists” are fully taken in with Vance. On X, Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey celebrated the coming matchup of “Tech Bro vs Kamala Harris,” while Chamath Palihapitiya—a now-right-leaning VC who co-hosts the megapopular All-In podcast with Sacks—reveled in the potential for “a Bestie adjacent as the VP.” (Besties refers to the four All-In hosts, who recently interviewed Trump on their show.)

Why the obsession with Vance? By the time his star began to rise with the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he had pivoted from a career in law to a Silicon Valley gig at Mithril Capital, one of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firms. At that time, Thiel—who’d co-authored an anti-“multiculturalism” bookwith Sacks in the 1990s—was one of Trump’s few outspoken tech-world surrogates, a position that had earned him a speaking slot at the RNC that first nominated Trump for president.

The conservative Vance wasn’t fully aligned with his boss, though: He frequently criticized Trump even while attempting to explain the candidate’s appeal to rural Americans. He also disparaged Silicon Valley in an interview with Slate as “more of a bubble than D.C.” and New York, full of Richie Riches with “no real sense of how frustrated and how destitute a lot of people outside of Silicon Valley are.” In an early-2017 New York Times op-ed, he expressed some admiration for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama while also “hop[ing] for better policy from the new administration, a health reform package closer to my ideological preferences, and a new approach to foreign policy.” Just two months later, he wrote another Times piece about why the “optimism [that] blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country” had spurred him to move back to Ohio from California.

Although Vance may have left the Bay Area, he hadn’t left his position with Thiel’s company and remained a “friend and big fan” of him. He got more involved in the VC arena, joining Steve Case’s Revolution firm as a partner in managing a fund that aimed to support more startups based outside the coasts. As reporting from Business Insider has indicated, it is unclear how successful he really was at that mission.

It was clear that Vance’s return home was less about uplifting the “hillbillies” he had whitesplained to the liberal bubble with his memoir and more about seeking higher power. He teased a run for office as far back as late 2016, in a Washington Post interview about his moving plans, and floated the possibilityagain two years later, while joining a conservative influence group chaired by Federalist Society maven Leonard Leo. When that run for office flamed out, he dug deeper into the VC realm, starting a Cincinnati-based fund backed by Thiel and Marc Andreessen in 2020.

Categories Elections, Gender, Republicans, Trump

The Hartman Report: Please Don’t Lie to Students!

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
14

Greg Palast wrote a guest column for Thom Hartmann about the mendacity of “divisive concepts” laws, which require teachers to lie or suppress the truth, because the truth night make someone uncomfortable. Let’s all be happy by imbibing a steady diet of lies!

Palast writes here:

A Sunday special editorial by my good friend Greg Palast for The Hartmann Report.  Catch Palast this week on Thom.TV

Do you know about Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order 13950?  If you don’t, be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Just weeks before he was fired by America’s voters in 2020, President Trump issued this piece of nastiness which was quickly rescinded by just-inaugurated President Biden.

The Executive Order is a “DCL,” what the right-wing brilliantly calls a, “Divisive Concepts Law.”   These DCL’s terrorize teachers with the threat of losing their jobs if they dare teach the truth of America’s racial history:  That white people enslaved Africans, that the Klan enforced racial vote suppression with the hanging rope.  And God forbid, they teach that women were banned from the vote until the 20th Century.  The Executive Order bans teaching  any historical facts if, 

“….any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex….”

As a practical matter, it means teaching the truth of America’s racial stain will get you fired.   In 2021, Tennessee high school teacher Matt Hawn lost his job because a student accused him of teaching—cover your children’s ears—“Critical Race Theory.”  Hawn said he’d never heard of Critical Race Theory when he was canned.

(Critical Race Theory, taught in law schools, says many of America’s laws and their enforcement, contain a racial bias.  Well, D’oh!].

On Thursday, Vice-President Harris told the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston, epicenter of the anti-CRT hysteria,

“While you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history; including book bans! Book bans — in this year 2024!  Just think about it: we want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books.”  

It was a century ago, that Tennessee was the laughingstock of the nation for prosecuting a schoolteacher for telling his class about human evolution, a story recounted in the film, Inherit the Wind.   Now, a hundred years later, Trumpsters are again passing wind over Tennessee.

And he’s baaaaack!  Trump has put his fixation with censoring “divisive concepts” into the GOP platform.  Details are provided in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 master plan for the master race. 

Ill wind out of Georgia

This ill wind originated in Georgia when Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB1084, threatening the jobs of  teachers fot teaching ‘divisive concepts’ that could make a white child feel “discomfort.”

Who would feel “discomfort” about the uncensored history of Georgia? Well, maybe it’s Gov. Kemp himself.  Because it was the Kemp family, then known as the Habershams, that first brought Africans in chains to Georgia.

Maybe Kemp and family should feel a bit of discomfort.  I spoke with Janie Banse, who told me she is she is heartsick that her cousin, Gov. Kemp, won’t admit that their family’s wealth originated in the African slave trade.  Kemp’s ancestors held the largest auction of human beings in American history, still remembered by Black Georgians today as “Weeping Time,” when 436 men, women and their children were separated and sold.

Georgia’s HB 1084, passed in 2022, 

Prohibit[s] the use of curricula that addresses the topics of slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination, including topics relating to the enactment and enforcement of laws resulting in racial oppression, segregation, and discrimination in a professionally and academically appropriate manner and without espousing personal political beliefs;

And what if a teacher expresses a personal distaste for slavery?
Since Georgia was among the first to pass a “DCL,” and at least 16 states have followed.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, dubbed his DCL the “Stop WOKE Act.”

He banned the College Board’s AP African American Studies course and supported new Black history standards that include the requirement to teach, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

I can’t make this up.

Since 2021, at least 27 states have imposed or proposed bans or restrictions on teaching topics related to race and gender. Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona and Oklahoma all passed these Divisive Concepts laws.  What do these states have in common?  According to rankings by US News and World Report, they are all in the nation’s bottom third in educational achievement.  Apparently, they won’t teach uncensored history—but then, it’s not clear that they teach much history at all.

Killing Killers

Trump’s DLC brigade is not just putting a blindfold over students regarding slavery and Jim Crow.  Oklahoma’s Divisive Concepts Law has effectively silenced the true story of the state that was once known officially as, “Indian Territory.”

Jim Gray, former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, told me that teachers throughout the state have been yanking copies of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon off their classroom shelves.  Killers, on which the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio movie is based, tells the true story about how, in the 1920s, over 100 Oklahoma Osage were murdered for their oil rights.

The insidious brilliance of the Oklahoma law is that it has a fuzzy general prohibition on “divisive” concepts—with teachers facing loss of their teaching credentials and the entire school district losing funding.  Because teachers have to guess which books or films will get them fired, the result is mass self-censorship, with Killersculled from classrooms across the state.

A RAND corporation study found that a breathtaking two out of three K-12 teachers, “have decided on their own to limit instruction about political and social issues in the classroom.”  Can you blame them?

Any student or parent can put a legal gun to a school principal’s head.  But when the law says, “students,” as a practical matter, they don’t mean young kids on the Reservation.  Every year, on April 22, Oklahoma celebrates “Sooner Rush Day”, the day in 1889, when any white man could simply stand on a plot of land and seize the surrounding 160 acres of what was, by treaty, Indian Territory.  Indigenous kids have to re-enact the theft of their property whether they feel discomfort or not.

I have included this story of the Sooner Rush land grab in my documentary, Long Knife: the Osage Nation, Koch Oil and the new Killers of the Flower Moon.  And for that alone, says Chief Gray, the chance it will screen in an Oklahoma school, even a state university, is zilch.

But some states are not shy about creating Black Lists of books to ban.  Assigning anti-racist classics Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, could kill a teacher’s career.  PEN America counted 3,132 books banned in nine states in the 2022-23 school year.
 

Evicted from the Historical Society

Cui Bono? Who benefits from historical amnesia?  Kemp alone was not the only white boy to make his fortune from a slaver’s whip.  Historic amnesia is a profit center covering many historic misdeeds from Jim Crow to union busting to corporate corruption.

I found this out when I was physically ejected from the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah.  I was having a polite interview with the Society’s in-house historian, Dr. Stan Deaton, who was explaining that the Klan took over control of the South when, in 1876, Republicans lost both the popular vote and the Electoral vote—yet a pact between the Klan-backed Southern Democrats and northern Republicans used a sly maneuver to overturn the vote and install the GOP candidate as President.  It came down to one official, Dr. Deaton noted, then added, “We saw Mike Pence in that situation recently.”

The second the historian uttered the words, “Mike Pence,” the door flew open and the Society’s PR man halted the interview and expelled me from the building, saying, “We have to protect the new corporate donors on our board.”

I was curious.  Who were these “donors” needing protection from history?  I found their gala dinner on YouTube with their tuxedoed corporate money men:  Georgia Pacific (owned by Koch Industries), Home Depot (owned by right-wing union buster Ken Langone), and Southern Company, whom I investigated some years ago for racketeering and the inexplicable death of whistleblowers.  And the Chairman of the Historical Society?  Gov. Brian Kemp.

The Occupation

Just below Savannah, at the Kemp family’s old plantation, I spoke with caretaker and Councilman Griffin Lotson whose own great-grandmother was sold at Weeping Time by Kemp’s progenitors.

Lotson emphasizes the connection between this legally enforced historical amnesia and the fight for voting rights. He says,  “Suppressing history is suppressing the vote.” 

Back in Oklahoma, the current Principal Chief of the Osage, Geoffrey Standing Bear, explained that if Oklahoma were to admit that its “Sooner Rush” was simply theft from the indigenous owners of the land, then it would force open eyes to what he calls, the “military occupation [of Native land] that continues today.”

Napoleon famously said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Trump’s DCL crusade sees history as a set of truths silenced

.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, History, Lies
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »