BeckyDem
BeckyDem's JournalACLU @ACLU If you're voting to:
https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1305857150737154048Pass it on.
Biden/Harris 2020
@RepBarbaraLee: 19 years of endless war and trillions of dollars later, we are not any safer.
https://twitter.com/RepBarbaraLee/status/1305632501642268672Oregon Police Beg Public to Stop Calling In False Reports Blaming Antifa for Wildfires
Robert Mackey
September 10 2020, 10:30 p.m.
False claims that antifascists are starting forest fires have been spread by supporters of President Donald Trump.
Robert Mackey
September 10 2020, 10:30 p.m.
FOUR POLICE DEPARTMENTS in parts of Oregon ravaged by wildfires — propelled by high winds across parched land during hot, dry weather in a changing climate — are pleading with the public to stop calling 911 to pass on unfounded rumors that antifascist political activists have intentionally set the blazes.
The false claims have been spread on social networks by supporters of President Donald Trump, who has spent months pretending that antifascists in the Pacific Northwest dedicated to confronting white supremacists are members of an imaginary army of domestic terrorists called Antifa.
Primed by that fear-mongering, the president’s supporters have fallen hard for internet rumors and hoaxes falsely claiming that antifascist arsonists have been caught in the act.
“Rumors spread just like wildfire and now our 9-1-1 dispatchers and professional staff are being overrun with requests for information and inquiries on an UNTRUE rumor that 6 Antifa members have been arrested for setting fires,” the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Roseburg, Oregon wrote on Facebook on Thursday. “THIS IS NOT TRUE! Unfortunately, people are spreading this rumor and it is causing problems.”
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/10/oregon-police-beg-public-stop-calling-false-reports-blaming-antifa-wildfires/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter
THE MYTH OF THE "BAD" IMMIGRANT
SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
Immigrant communities are often asked to “get right with the law,” but is the law right in the first place? That’s what our guest Alina Das asks in her new book No Justice in the Shadows. She taps her experience as the daughter of immigrants and as an immigration attorney to ask whether immigrants who violate the law should be detained or deported.
Too often, she argues, our immigration system is used as a tool of discrimination and oppression, rather than as a tool of justice, and the consequences are dire. Our current immigration system is breaking up families, forcing people to face persecution – even death – in their home countries, and it’s all based on a false premise of ensuring public safety and national security.
Das is a professor of clinical law and supervising attorney at NYU School of Law. She is also the Co-Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic.
We’ve got some exciting news here at At Liberty. Starting on September 15th, we’re launching a special 2020 voting series called At the Polls. This will be in addition to our normal At Liberty episodes. Each week, we’re answering a new question about voting rights in the lead up to the presidential election. If you have a question you’d like us to answer, call us and leave a message at 212-549-2558. Or, email podcast@aclu.org. We so look forward to hearing from you. And until next time, stay strong.
https://www.aclu.org/podcast/myth-bad-immigrant-ep-118?initms_aff=nat&initms_chan=soc&utm_medium=soc&initms=200910_podcast_podcast_tw&utm_source=tw&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_content=200910_immigration_podcast&ms_aff=nat&ms_chan=soc&ms=200910_podcast_podcast_tw
Robert Reich: I refuse to tolerate a system that lets billionaires add $792,000,000,000
https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1303403482368675846Pass it on, Biden/Harris 2020
Charles M. Blow: Discussing my @nytopinion column on why voters should focus on policy & character
https://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow/status/1303378407263277058
History gives us reason for hope that inequality can be beaten
No one cedes power because of a great powerpoint.
Ben Phillips
6 September 2020
2020 isn’t just the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s also the year when protest has gone viral. Covid-19 has both supercharged our inequalities and shone a sharper light on them, exposing the reality that the status quo cannot hold. It has opened up a moment of opportunity, and young people are showing how we can seize that moment by building up a movement.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that young people were being lectured to ‘stop being so disengaged’ and ‘start getting involved.’ Now they get told ‘no, not like that.’ Discussions in newspapers and news studios, whether about Black Lives Matter, essential workers striking over poor safety and low pay, or young climate justice campaigners, involve ‘friendly advice’ to activists to ‘tone it down’ and ‘be less demanding’ - to be less in the way. Such complaints often include references to history: ‘why can’t they be more like the protestors of yesteryear - you know, the uncontroversial ones?’
For my new book, How to Fight Inequality I investigated the history of social justice organizing and found conclusive evidence that - contrary to the false distinctions made between ‘then’ and ‘now’ - today’s protestors stand absolutely in the tradition of those who have gone before them. The reactions they are facing are also uncannily similar, but history also shows that we have real reasons for hope based on action.
In 1966, for example, a Gallup Opinion poll showed that Martin Luther King was viewed unfavourably by 63 per cent of Americans, but by 2011 that figure had fallen to only four per cent. Often, people read the current consensus view back into history and assume that King was always a mainstream figure, learning the false lesson that change comes from people and movements who don’t offend anyone.
The true lesson of changemakers is that fighting inequality requires us to be disruptive. As King himself said, “frankly I have yet to engage in a direct action movement that was ‘well-timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly; this ‘wait!’ has almost always meant ‘never.’” Icons who today are sanitized as unchallenging terrified the powerful at the time because they refused to be deferential.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/history-gives-us-reason-hope-inequality-can-be-beaten/
The Fed Invested Public Money in Fossil Fuel Firms Driving Environmental Racism
In April, the price of oil fell so far so fast that oil futures contracts went negative. Oil prices have recovered somewhat, but not enough to ever return the industry to its prior state. Analysts predict the U.S. has reached peak oil production and will never again “return to the record 13 million barrels of oil per day reached in November 2019.” ExxonMobil, which has been a part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average market index for 92 years, was removed last week and replaced with the software firm Salesforce. But while financial analysts sound the alarm about this dying industry, the Federal Reserve has been buying up the debt of fossil fuel companies through a pandemic emergency program. We the public, together with the Fed, now own over $315 million in bonds of fossil fuel firms, including those with a track record of environmental racism.
Among the many Fed rescue programs is the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), which buys corporate debt of companies. The program is supporting fossil fuel corporations in notably disproportionate numbers: More than 10 percent of the Fed’s bond purchases are fossil fuel companies, even though fossil fuel firms only employ 2 percent of all workers employed by firms in the S&P 1500 stock market index.
These bonds are effectively a public investment because the Fed is leveraging $25 billion from the CARES Act as a down payment for the SMCCF’s bond purchases. Together with the Fed, the public now holds the corporate bonds of ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Phillips 66 and Noble Energy. And it seems likely the Fed will be holding these fossil fuel bonds until they mature — up to five years into the future for some of them — based on comments Fed Chair Jerome Powell made to Congress.
https://truthout.org/articles/the-fed-invested-public-money-in-fossil-fuel-firms-driving-environmental-racism/
Why did the US justice department let Purdue off the hook for the opioid crisis?
Prosecutors believed Purdue was implicated in mail and wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy. Yet the firm got a slap on the wrist
The opioid epidemic is not over. Even as Covid-19 rages, opioid-related deaths continue to devastate communities across our states. In New Hampshire, overdose deaths rose in April and May over last year’s levels. In the first four months of 2020, Rhode Island overdose deaths jumped 29% from the same period last year and 38% from the same period in 2018. Opioid addiction remains a persistent, lethal menace.
We just learned a big reason why the opioid crisis was allowed to get so bad. The Guardian recently unearthed new details in the origin story of the opioid crisis. In 2006, career prosecutors at the US Department of Justice drafted a memo summarizing alleged criminal behavior by the major opioid maker Purdue Pharma. The memo, the culmination of a four-year investigation of Purdue’s opioid marketing and other business practices, was based on a review of millions of internal documents. The memo concluded that Purdue and its executives participated in mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy in pushing opioids, and recommended indictment.
But we still don’t know the whole story, and we need to in order to avoid a repeat of the deceptive marketing practices and corporate greed that’s cost the United States hundreds of thousands of lives.
Action in 2006 could have made an enormous difference. Bringing felony charges could have brought real accountability to executives who ran the scheme. More importantly, it might have forced the company to end its deceptive marketing practices, which contributed to millions of people becoming addicted to opioids. It could have saved the lives of an untold number of Americans.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/us-justice-department-opioid-crisis-purdue?CMP=share_btn_tw
Public Citizen @Public_Citizen: Ivanka Trump's products were made exclusively overseas.
https://twitter.com/Public_Citizen/status/1302959842475364352BIDEN/HARRIS 2020
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