ancianita
ancianita's JournalJamie Raskin's Powerful Opening Arguments
The whole world was watching, not just America.They and we know that to the very end, House Democrats fight for the millions who voted against the one traitor and his seditious henchmen who would overthrow the democratic franchise.
Jamie Raskin's Touching Recall Of His Daughter's Response To His Promise
This had to touch millions of Americans, who now know that the 44 trumpculters who voted to dismiss the House impeachment know and care nothing for the damage done, only their cult leader.
Lawrence O'Donnell's Last Word On the Senate Trial
Some but not all of this list is included in O'Donnell's preview.
1. No cell phones or digital devices allowed for Senators -- they leave them outside
2. Senators take a second oath when conducting an impeachment trial --
“I solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of (the president’s name), President of the United States, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: so help me God.” -- then each signs an oath memorializing register.
3. Tuesday trial starts with four hours of debate on whether the trial is constitutional.
The Senate will then vote on whether to dismiss the charge against Trump.
If that vote fails, as expected, the House managers will begin
4. No interruption or disruption during the trial proper -- when House prosecution and Trump defense speak -- on pain of jail, per the Sergeant-at-Arms.
5. Up to 16 hours for both prosecutors and the defense to make their arguments.
6. Starts Wednesday, with no more than eight hours of arguments per day.
7. Later, there will be time for senators to ask questions, and there could be additional procedural votes.
8. House prosecution arguments begin Wednesday and continue into Thursday.
9. Trump’s lawyers are likely to begin their arguments Friday and finish Saturday.
10. Final vote on Trump’s conviction won’t happen until next week.
But he has one surprise! 
If the Catholic Church Were a Country, It Would Be the Third Most Populous After China and India.
This is important to note because Pope Francis has noted it.
In 2015, he presented "Laudato Si," a 40,000 word encyclical on reckless consumerism, ecological degradation and global warming.
In it, he interprets the biblical story of God giving humans "dominion of ... the earth" as something like moral responsibility for the "harm we have inflicted...," calling for the replacement of fossil fuels "without delay," and that wealthy countries be accountable for their "ecological debt" by their exploitation of poorer countries.
Now, according to environmental economist Herman Daly, he has many enemies -- the Heartland Institute, Jeb Bush, James Inhofe, Rush Limbaugh, and libertarian commentator Greg Gutfeld who, on Fox, called Francis "the most dangerous person on the planet."
The Church is the world's largest non-government provider of health care, humanitarian aid and education.
The Church, furthermore, is probably the world's largest non-state landowner. The assets of the Holy See combine with those of parishes, dioceses, religious orders, include not just cathedrals, convents and art like Michelango's Pietá, but farms, forests and nearly two hundred million acres of land.
The two hundred million affected by climate disasters live in Central Africa, the Amazon Basin and Asia, where the Church has more leverage than government. So there is no way to address the climate crisis or biosphere loss without the Catholic Church engaging with its own lands and property.
This timely and brilliant piece is about how the Church, with no cartography department, had lost track of its vast land holdings, and how the brilliant Molly Burhans used its databases with ArcMap to produce a working 3-D world map of where the Church can work to make "Laudato Si" the 'seed pollinator' for world governments.
Biden knows and listens. Now if other leaders will listen to both him and Pope Francis.
From this week's New Yorker, Annals of Geography, "Promised Land" by David Owen
https://www.newyorker.com/auth/complete?code=MnG1b_MD8JF2GDH3jcfyfC8IyDMZ-VwvYc-KSmju9Yq&state=%7B%22redirectURL%22%3A%22%2Fmagazine%2F2021%2F02%2F08%2Fhow-a-young-activist-is-helping-pope-francis-battle-climate-change%22%7D
Happy 76th Birthday, Bob Marley! Your politics are our politics.
One Love
Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit.
But my hand was made strong
By the hand of the Almighty.
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly.
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom
'Cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs
Redemption songs
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
Have no fear for atomic energy,
'Cause none of them can stop the time
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand outside and look
Some say it's just a part of it
We've got to fulfill the book.
Won't you help to sing
These song of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs
Redemption songs
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our mind.
Wo! Have no fear for atomic energy,
'Cause none of them-a can-a stop-a-the time
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look?
Yes, some say it's just a part of it
We've got to fulfill the book.
Won't you help to sing
These song of freedom?
'Cause all I ever had:
Redemption songs
All I ever had
Redemption songs
These songs of freedom,
Songs of freedom.
The Hoppean Snake and the Violence of "Free Market" Libertarianism
Don't kill the messenger. If anyone could accurately reveal the intellectual reach of Austrian beliefs and intellectualized violence, it is this source. It's not as if this source hasn't been posted here before. At least give this a fair read. It sheds light on the historical likelihood of right wing libertarian funders of the planners of Jan 6. The kind of funders who prop Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. Funders' whose hiding is revealed in plain sight through their denial of death-dealing ideologies behind their "free market" economics. Here, Hoppe's denial echoes the denials we see from right wing culters, Trump, and their corporate funded trumpcult representatives in the House and Senate.
This piece is rooted in several historical events that established American economic neoliberalism. One is the little-known fact of James McGill Buchanan -- Nobel Prize winner from the University of Chicago's School of Economics, (which the U of C president bragged about as the most conservative in the world) -- who literally wrote the Chilean constitution under Pinochet. Its key democracy-killer was its requirement of a 2/3 vote of Chileans for ANY changes in their society, with absolutely no other vote or legislative remedies. It took Chileans ten years to throw off the yoke of this Austrian austerity scam that a general, his libertarian funders and their economist-apologists still offer America to this very day. Read about Buchanan, Charles Koch, and the neoliberal plan in Duke historian, Nancy McLean's Democracy In Chains -- The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. On to "the snake"...
In the background fly childlike depictions of helicopters from which stick figures are jettisoned to their death, crying “Aaaahhh” in a barely legible scrawl. In one of its many variants, the snake-as-Pinochet proclaims with a sardonic smirk, “I’m evil for throwing people out of helicopters? False. Commies aren’t people.” It’s unclear why Pinochet is depicted as a snake, though it may be inspired by the recalcitrant snake on the Gadsden flag that warns “Don’t Tread on Me.”
Far from being a joking homage to Pinochet — putschist, tyrant, torturer, mass murderer, puppet of the CIA, and hater of all things socialist, who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 — the fetishized totem of the Hoppean Snake has dire significance for U.S. paramilitaries. When Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, armed Trumpists, and the like wear T-shirts that offer “free helicopter rides,” they are referencing a program of extermination.
Following Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’état, which ended the short-lived and turbulent administration of Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende, an avowed Marxist, thousands of Allende’s supporters were killed, tens of thousands of perceived enemies of the putschist regime were tortured, and thousands of others were disappeared, often after being flown in a military helicopter and toppled from the sky. Sometimes this free helicopter ride included splitting open the guts of kidnapped victims while they were still alive so that their bodies wouldn’t float when dumped in the sea.
“The Hoppean Snake is utilizing Cold War-era anti-communist imagery of a once-hidden history of right-wing brutality and terror that utilized U.S. military hardware,” said Portland-based investigative photojournalist Jeff Schwilk, who has documented the iconography of the alt-right since 2016. “Pinochet specifically hearkens to the heyday of U.S.-backed death squads in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, from the Phoenix Program in Vietnam to Suharto in Indonesia to the Contras in Nicaragua.
It is a direct threat of the intention of deadly mass violence and future death squads targeting the left in the United States and anyone else deemed an enemy. It reveals the true nature of this ideology.”
On January 27, the Department of Homeland Security issued a terrorism advisory bulletin warning of the ongoing threat from far-right domestic extremists. The January 6 assault on the Capitol was said to be mere prologue, with “DVEs” — domestic violent extremists — now “emboldened … to target elected officials and government facilities.”
The Homeland Security bulletin further warned of threats “against critical infrastructure, including the electric, telecommunications and healthcare sectors.”
In the wake of Allende’s election in 1970, right-wing elements in Chile formed a paramilitary group called Patria y Libertad, or Fatherland and Liberty. Patria y Libertad was not too different in spirit from the militias now common on the right in the U.S., though it had foreign funding and training, courtesy of the CIA. The group engaged in arsons, assassinations, and disruptions of infrastructure — exactly what the Department of Homeland Security warns we should expect from violent domestic extremists today.
I FIRST CAME across the image of the Hoppean Snake while editing Schwilk’s 2020 book of essays and photography, “Unflattering Photos of Fascists: Authoritarianism in Trump’s America.” Schwilk’s intention was to find a modicum of humor in the costumed display and ostentation of the alt-right, and in the Hoppean Snake, there is something at first glance that’s comedic: the smiling crayon-colored reptile and the plunging stick figures, the deluded implication of a communist threat in U.S. politics (Who are these commies? I ask myself. The corporate capitalist dollar-drenched Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer?), all of it suggestive of ignorant, harmless folk propaganda.
But this imagery, and the history it evokes, is far from harmless.
The origin of the name, when Schwilk first related it, seemed to strain belief. Prior to his entrance into the limelight of the epic realm of far-right struggle, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a German-born immigrant to the United States, was a mostly forgotten libertarian economist who served out his days in the dungeons of academia at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Hoppe’s claim to fame in the small world of libertarian economics was as second-stringer and all-around gopher to his hero and intimate friend, Ludwig von Mises, who was considered, alongside Friedrich August von Hayek, one of the leading lights of the so-called Austrian school of economics.
The Austrian school posited that there was no such thing as society except as a concatenation of individual choices in the marketplace. The individual was all; society was a mere afterthought of the many atomized creatures in it, and any attempt to aggregate the interests of the clashing atoms — say, in the form of democratic decision-making via universal suffrage — was a form of oppressive statist intervention. Hoppe’s contribution to the Austrian school was his 2001 book, “Democracy: The God That Failed,” whose title basically was the message.
That the snake that is “Hoppean” begins to make a kind of conspiratorial sense when you consider the career of Mises’s intellectual brother, Hayek, who died in 1992. Hayek was a big fan of Pinochet, visiting Chile in 1975 to meet with the dictator to celebrate and advise on the dismantling of the country’s programs of social welfare, the massive privatization of public goods, and the deregulation of corporate interests. Along with Milton Friedman, Hayek was among the ambassadors of neoliberalism in fascist Chile described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine.
As historian Greg Grandin writes, “Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom, who would rule as a dictator only for a ‘transitional period,’ only so long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation.” The concern of the libertarians — Hayek, Friedman, and their ilk — was the liberty of business to make more money but not at all the humans who were being murdered and tortured to further the great project of corporate freedom.
What garnered Hoppe the far right’s honor of associating him with Pinochet’s homicidal regime, however, was not the introduction of neoliberalism in Chile but specifically his musings about the democratic god that failed. Hoppe contends that the “physical removal” of undesirable citizens will be required in a putative libertarian “compact.” “There can be no tolerance,” he writes, “toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.
Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They — the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism — will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.”
When I wrote Hoppe to ask, as I put it in an email, about his name “being associated with a meme that celebrates mass murder,” he replied, “Your question — and insinuation — indicates that you are completely ignorant regarding my person and intellectual work. Even by the low intellectual standards of most contemporary journalists and journalism, then, [it] strikes me as scandalous and impudent. As even a cursory study of my website would reveal, for more than 40 years I have been an intellectual champion of private property right, free markets, freedom of contract and association, and peace.”
When I pressed him about the tying of his ideas to the snake meme, he wrote back, “What do I know? There are lots of crazy people out there!” Perhaps he should communicate this to the extremists who have adopted him as an avatar for a doctrine of terror.
By Christopher Ketcham at https://theintercept.com/2021/02/04/pinochet-far-right-hoppean-snake/
Pretty bland looking, right? Same as many in uniform, bailbond skippers, nice folks from all kinds of places in the U.S., who still call us (the whole Democratic coalition) the enemy, at best. And they probably couldn't tell us why.
Lawrence O'Donnell -- Another Powerful Last Word
Michael Steele, Steny Hoyer, Alex Wagner, Cori Bush, Peter Welch -- whew! 
We Know W.E.B. DuBois's 'Double Consciousness. Whites' Dueling Double Consciousness Is Another Thing
Notes from How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi
1.
David Hume declared that all races are created unequal.
John Calhoun believed this. Thus he and his southern cohorts called slavery an ‘institution.’
Thomas Jefferson declared that all men are created equal, but never made the antiracist declaration that all racial groups are equals.
All he actually said was, “ it would be hazardous to affirm that, equally cultivated for a few generations,” the Negro “would not become” equal.
Humes’ declaration justifies segregationist ideas that a racial group is permanently inferior.
Jefferson’s declaration justifies assimilationist ideas that a racial group is temporarily inferior.
2.
In America, these two ideas have dueled within White consciousness, as revealed by our political and social history.
Since segregationists posit the incapability of a racial group to be civilized and developed, segregationist policies are geared toward segregating, enslaving, incarcerating, deporting, and killing, maligning and blaming the racialized body.
Since antiracists posit that racial groups are already civilized, antiracist policies are geared toward reducing racial inequities and creating equal opportunity for racialized bodies.
White people have generally advocated for both assimilationist and segregationist policies.
POC have generally advocated for both antiracist and assimilationist policies.
As W.E.B. DuBois said, the “history of the American Negro is the history of this strife”
— between the assimilationist and the antiracist,
— between mass civlizing and mass equalizing.
To DuBois, Kendi and POC, this dueling consciousness yielded strife between Black pride and yearning to be White. Kendi says that his own assimilationist ideas stopped him from noticing the racist policies rising high during Reagan’s drug war.
The dueling White consciousness has, from its relative position of power, shaped the struggle within Black consciousness. Black people have been encouraged by an undeniable White history of antiracist progress; they have also, as DuBois said, desired to remain Negro, discouraged by undeniable racist progress, from police violence to voter suppression to the 20th Cent. formation of racial hate groups like neonazis and the KKK.
3.
The historical double consciousness duels have produced
— the undeniable history of antiracist progress,
— the undeniable history of racist progress.
Before and after the Civil War, civil rights movement, and the first Black presidency, the White consciousness duels define the American body and at the same time, segregate the Black body and then instruct the Black body to assimilate.
The White body rejects the Black body attempts to assimilate into the American body — and history and consciousness duel anew.
Thus, the Black body in turn experiences the same duel.
To be an antiracist is to emancipate oneself from the dueling consciousness.
To be antiracist is to conquer the assimilationist consciousness and the segregationist consciousness. It means that White body no longer presents itself as the historical or present American body; and that the Black body no longer strives to be the American body,
knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power.
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: New England, The South, Midwest
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Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
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