IMPORTANT READS

STANDING FOR SOMETHING--It was almost midnight when I found myself glued to the live video of scores of Democratic congressmembers then about twelve hours into their historic sit-in. They were occupying the House chamber, jerry-rigging a social media-based broadcast when the Republican leadership shut-down the C-Span cameras, rising one after another to speak with passion, reminding the nation that business as usual is no longer okay. They are proud of themselves and each other, as they should be. They are grateful to civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis who has been leading them in speaking truth to power.   By late morning Thursday they were continuing to occupy the House.  Despite the Republican leadership announcing that the House is not in session, they are insisting that there be no congressional recess without voting on the proposed bills, and they are demanding that the public, filling the galleries, be allowed to stay.

They are reminding the world that since 1968 more Americans have been killed in gun violence than in all the wars in US history. They are demanding a vote on gun safety laws. It’s a moving, empowering thing to see.  It’s rare, powerful, and should be applauded.

"It’s a moving, empowering thing to see... And yet. There’s a huge problem."

And yet. There’s a huge problem. The two proposals the Democrats are demanding a vote on are very problematic.  One bill proposes only a small, completely insufficient expansion of background checks.  The second would not only be ineffective in preventing gun violence, but would cause a dangerous increase in racial profiling and Islamophobia.  That second bill is the basis for the slogan “no fly, no buy” – which refers to making sure that no one on law enforcement’s so-called “no-fly” lists is ever allowed to buy a weapon. 

If we were talking about actually preventing real terrorists from buying weapons, that would be a no-brainer.  But the “no-fly” lists are not lists of terrorists; they are lists of people –  American citizens, green-card holders, visitors, citizens of other countries – who end up on the FBI’s or other law enforcement agencies’ lists for reasons we and they never know. Maybe they share a name with someone once suspected of knowing someone whose second cousin once skyped with someone thought to be a would-be terrorist. Maybe their college roommate ended up trying to go to Syria. For some few of them, maybe they really do have dangerous intentions. But there are thousands of people on these lists. Most of them can’t even find out why they’re not allowed to fly, let alone succeed at challenging the prohibition.  We should not forget that President Nelson Mandela remained on the US “terrorist” watch-list until 2008. What the American Civil Liberties Union calls our “error-prone and unfair watch-listing system” doesn’t produce a list of terrorists at all. 

If it was up to me, I’d prohibit anyone – anyone, on or off those lists – from buying or possessing these lethal weapons.  But it’s not up to me.  And unfortunately the “no fly, no buy” rule being proposed in the newly militant House tonight is not going to prevent gun violence either.  What it is going to do, unfortunately, is further legitimize these watch lists, now as the basis for a politically more popular version of gun control.  But as the ACLU noted, “Our nation’s watch-listing system is error-prone and unreliable because it uses vague and overbroad criteria and secret evidence to place individuals on blacklists without a meaningful process to correct government error and clear their names.” 

And we know that those “vague and overbroad criteria” end up being applied disproportionately to Muslims, Arabs, South Asians and others wrongly assumed to be linked to terrorism.  It is terribly sad that some of our most principled, consistent members of Congress – members of the Black Caucus, the conscience of the Congress, and the Progressive Caucus, whose members work against racism, against racial profiling, against Islamophobia and hatred, against war and beyond – are among those accepting and urging even greater reliance on this “error-prone and unreliable” system in the name of preventing gun violence.

The Democratic leadership is refusing to allow their now-insurgent party to officially endorse the most sensible (however insufficient) versions of gun control laws:  outlawing assault weapons, removing the prohibition on federal research on the public health consequences of gun violence, and universal background checks.  Those things, lethally opposed by the NRA, would not stop the epidemic of gun violence in this country but unlike the no-fly lists they would certainly help.  Some in the sit-in rejected those restrictions. At 12:35 in the morning, Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, one of those who had set up the live-streaming of the debate after the Republican leadership turned off the cameras, rose to call for all three of those goals.

The congressional sit-in is bringing moral power and renewed urgency to the cause of gun control. Watching the Democrats shout down Republican leaders desperately trying to reclaim control of the House might challenge the partisan bickering that has paralyzed Congress for years. It may mark the beginning of a turn towards the re-legitimation of Congress, long demonized as the least effective, least useful, least popular institution around. That renewed legitimacy, though, would be far more likely achieved if these members of Congress, as they consolidate their new moral credibility, would finally reject the current iteration of “no fly” lists as the basis for gun control – or indeed, as a valid method of counter-terrorism.

The Congressional sit-in protesters should be congratulated for standing up for their principles. And they should be pressured to make sure their plans to act on those principles don’t undermine other principles of civil rights and equality.

(Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.  Her most recent book is Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror.  This perspective was posted first at Common Dreams) 

-cw

POLITICS--As the summer and fall of this election cycle get ever closer, it will be very easy to let ourselves choose sides and be divided--but if we're smart, and if we're truly liberal (open-minded) and if we're truly conservative (common sense) this need not happen.  Furthermore, we MUST NOT let this happen. 

There's a lot of commonality between the many infuriated, disenfranchised and frustrated groups in our nation.  We're in shock and horror about the Orlando shooting, and we're in shock and horror over the incident a toddler being drowned by an alligator, and we're in shock and horror over how the Stanford rapist got such a lenient sentence. 

In other words, if we hate liberals/Democrats, or if we hate conservatives/Republicans, more than we love this nation, then that's a choice.  Some of you may make that choice, but it's still YOUR choice...and one that need not be adhered to. 

And if there is any take-home message from the GOP and Democratic primaries, if you're not angry and fed up about how our leaders have run our nation, then arguably you're one of the "privileged and protected" or you're just not paying attention to how ALL empowered sides have sold the majority of this nation (particularly the rule-abiding middle-class) out. 

So while the majority of Americans polled did not approve of Donald J. Trump's response to the Orlando shooting, the majority of Americans weren't supportive of Hillary R. Clinton's response, either.   

But Clinton's lead over Trump has slipped since Orlando...because virtually all Americans do NOT want these types of shootings to be "the new normal", and they are divided over how to address these shootings. 

But we appear to be united in that most of us do not like either Trump or Clinton.  We are concerned if immigrants (particularly Muslims) are assimilating into American/Western culture, but we refuse to lower ourselves to racist rhetoric. 

We're also concerned about BOTH Bush's AND Obama's screwups that have turned Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria into dangerous and empowered cesspools and terrorist violence.  Clinton's past actions as Secretary of State are part of this problem, but is Trump likely to be any better? 

And has President Obama allowed these types of shootings to be "the new normal"?  

But THIS is the big divide:  while liberals/progressives have focused on gun control over the role of Islamism as the major cause/problem that led to Orlando (and, before that, San Bernardino), it's the other way around for conservatives/pragmatists. 

Yet what if BOTH sides are correct? 

That's right...BOTH.  It would have been best to have better screened the Orlando shooter before allowing him purchase to certain weapons, and SOMETHING has to be done to best screen potential purchasers of weapons not available when the Second Amendment of the Constitution was written.

Yet there are a few caveats here--because very few believe that law-abiding Americans should be denied access to self-protection.  That said, very few of those advocating modified gun control really know what the heck they're talking about when it comes to the guns they want restricted. 

Yet while the NRA opposes some of the gun control restrictions of the Left, they also quickly opposed Trump's statements of the benefits of the rights and ease of a "conceal/carry" permit to any customer going into a nightclub, where alcohol is being consumed. 

Even in the Old West, there were bars, dance halls, and other public venues where guns and other weapons were to be checked in for purposes of public safety. 

And inasmuch as some of us may hate the gun-control advocates or the NRA, their more moderate proposals (better screening, gun show controls, more armed security guards at schools and nightclubs) are probably to be ignored at our collective peril. 

And inasmuch as we don't want to devolve into racism, SOME common sense profiling of potential gun purchasers is in order to prevent more tragedies such as Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, and Orlando...so let's not kid ourselves: 

The "gun nuts" will need to be more carefully screened, but there will probably be a lot of potential Muslim gun buyers who will be screened, as well. 

Because while President Obama might be trying to make the Orlando tragedy into a "gun control thing" it would be better received if he also pleaded for American Muslims to "step up". 

After all, it's not unrealistic to be terrified of BOTH crazies that were responsible for the Sandy Hook, Gaby Gifford and Aurora, Colorado shootings (all Democrats, by the way, and unrelated to Sarah Palin) AS WELL AS Islamist extremists (who apparently had friends, neighbors, and families who could have, and SHOULD HAVE, turned them in before the tragedies occurred). 

The truth will set us all free--because we will ALL need to step up and do the right thing to prevent future tragedies from occurring.  Attorney General Lynch's censoring certain parts of the Orlando shooter's phone calls to remove references to his Islamist extremism won't help anyone, and won't prevent any future tragedies. 

So if you, the reader, just HATE Republican and conservatives more than you love this nation, or if you just HATE Democrats and liberals more than you love this nation, then that is your choice.

But it's a choice that you need not make.  Listen to all sides, and don't dismiss them as being devoid of excellent and moderate and smart compromises. 

Let's let these tragedies unite us, not divide us--we owe it to the memories of the slain and maimed to do the right thing in their name, and in the name of future American generations.

(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.)

-cw

EDITOR’S PICK--In the days following the horrific attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando – one of the worst mass shootings in modern U.S. history, which claimed the lives of 49 people (50 counting the shooter) and left over 50 wounded – evidence began to mount that the gunman likely possessed multiple motives. This evidence is not surprising in light of what research has revealed about the origins of violence, which includes the knowledge that most people who commit violent acts are driven by a complex, multifaceted and intertwined set of factors. The underlying root causes of violence, then, cannot be reduced to one or two sources. To invoke a cliché, the world is not black and white. The nature of violence is no exception, and our individual and collective understanding of it must not be either if we are to effectively address and prevent all forms of it. 

It is becoming increasingly clear that one of the shooter’s perceived justifications for perpetrating the murderous rampage may have been intense psychological and emotional pain over his sexual orientation – a catastrophic blend of deep shame, humiliation and bitterness over his possible queerness. 

Besides his apparent queer inclinations, there were several noteworthy details about the shooter’s life that were omitted during many discussions about motives: his history of domestic violence, both as a victimizer and a witness to it in childhood; his employment with G4S, one of the largest private security firms in the world, for which he rendered services that included the imprisonment and mistreatment of juvenile offenders; and, his fascination with the NYPD, which he apparently idolized as a would-be police officer. 

In addition, based on testimony from eye witnesses and acquaintances, racism could also have influenced his choice of target. What is more, we know from reports that both the ideologies behind and atrocities of the so-called U.S-led “war on terror” and terror groups operating across the world could have contributed to the gunman’s unspeakable act. 

All these factors, plus additional ones that may surface in the days and weeks ahead, may have played a role in the shooter’s toxic thinking and derangement, and ultimately led to the massacre which unfolded that awful night. 

For these reasons, as well as others, the attack in Orlando cannot be explained away by the tired and parochial refrain, “they hate us because of our freedoms,” regardless of the lengths to which some might go to convince people of its validity. 

Yet, almost immediately after news of the nightclub tragedy broke, various political leaders and members of the corporate media, among others, began engaging in selective hate and bigotry against Muslims. They did not ask questions. They did not want answers. They conveniently ignored or discounted credible information regarding the gunman’s background and automatically defaulted in their dogmatic thinking to blaming so-called “radical” Islam. 

Those who spew hate, especially in the wake of a national tragedy, only reveal their bigotry, cowardice and bad character, and, whether they intend to or not, incite further hostility against vulnerable minority groups. Practitioners of such reactionary thinking tend to use the red herring of immigration and foreign “terrorism” to advance their own xenophobic and jingoistic agendas. This careless and irresponsible behavior only fuels Islamophobia and hate crimes against Muslims. 

Demagoguery and fear-mongering about terrorism and the “Other” is extremely lucrative for the multi-trillion dollar war industry. The tragic incident in Orlando could prove to be another opportunity for war profiteers to grow even richer. Islamophobia and racism sells war. A national conversation about homophobia, domestic violence, the security-surveillance state and prison-industrial complex does not. 

We will never stop mass shootings if we continue to fault Islam. Sadly, however, the religion will probably continue to be targeted and exploited by small-minded people to communicate and spread anti-Muslim, ultra-nationalist propaganda. Horrendous violence is sometimes committed in the name of Islam, as it is in the name of other religions. However, this in no way makes religion culpable for it, yet Islam is deliberately and repeatedly scapegoated. 

It is utter nonsense to attribute mass shootings to Islam, particularly when an honest analysis of these incidents provides some concrete albeit complicated answers regarding the pathologies of violence. If it were about blaming or banning a particular demographic to eliminate mass shootings, the statistical data show that religion should not be a candidate. 

The Albany Times Union’s Chris Churchill articulates this point well in a recent column: “…if you look at the long list of recent mass shootings, you can't help but realize that it is entirely dishonest to call this a Muslim or immigrant problem…It would be far more accurate to call it an angry and isolated young man problem. In fact, if the goal is ending mass shootings, it would make much more sense to ban all men under the age of 35 than it would to bar Muslims.” 

Not only is the problem of mass shootings far from being rooted in religion, the policy of sound gun control offers some solid evidence about preventive approaches: In his latest column, Nicholas Kristof, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, calls attention to the fact that, “Over the last two decades, Canada has had eight mass shootings. Just so far this month, the United States has already had 20…. Canada’s population is 3.2 percent Muslim, while the United States is about 1 percent Muslim — yet Canada doesn’t have massacres like the one we just experienced at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., or the one in December in San Bernardino, Calif. So perhaps the problem isn’t so much Muslims out of control but guns out of control.” To insist, therefore, that Islam is the problem would be to expose either profound ignorance or explicit and virulent racism regarding the religion. 

The good news is that there is a significant number of antiwar and peace and justice groups working diligently to identify and eliminate the multiple and interconnected forms of violence that could have influenced the mass shooting at Pulse. The #VetsVsHate movement is one example of this work.  

#VetsVsHate was inspired by efforts including the Veterans Challenge Islamophobia campaign, an national initiative of Veterans For Peace launched earlier this year in collaboration with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). The campaign seeks to confront and stop the verbal and physical targeting of Muslims. Along with on-the-ground nonviolent protest/civil disobedience actions against the vitriol being directed at Muslims, social media has been a vehicle through which veterans and allies have expressed their defense of and solidarity with the Muslim community. 

As an organization dedicated to abolishing war as well as ending violence in all its forms in order to help build a more just and peaceful future, VFP believed it had a responsibility to release a statement on the mass shooting in Orlando. The statement reads, in part: “Tragedies like this often lead people to look for someone or something to blame. Veterans For Peace rejects attempts to perpetuate hatred against the LGBTQ and Muslim communities. We ask all to resist this temptation. We call on all people to challenge the forces of division and hatred, and to stand against all forms of hate; and at this time particularly against homophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry. Let us instead recommit ourselves to working toward a world without hatred and prejudice.” 

IVAW also released a statement about the attack on Pulse which touches on many of the same points that were conveyed in the VFP statement. 

Veterans have a unique perspective on the various ways in which enmity and violence develops and destroys lives, as many of them were thrust into situations where it was inescapable and on full display. Veterans can speak with authority on how and why demonization and persecution of the “Other” can and does produce violence. Frequently, they are eager to share their insights with anyone willing to listen and learn. The aftermath of the Pulse massacre has proven to be one such time when veterans are speaking out. 

Below are the voices of four veterans who offer their perspectives on the Pulse nightclub attack and the hate rhetoric and blame game that followed: 

“Anytime a shooting or bombing occurs around the world, the collective hearts of 1.7 billion Muslims is shattered and the anxious prayer "please don't let them claim to be Islamic" is uttered. This is because all Muslims know that the tenets of Islam proclaim that the unjust taking of one life is equivalent of killing all of humanity in the sight of God, particularly during this time of Ramadan -- when it is forbidden to even engage in an argument with another person much less commit a mass shooting. This is precisely how every single Muslim in the world knows that the Orlando shooter was a fraud, whose only belief system was violence and hatred. But, true to form, in the aftermath of this tragedy, the world is witnessing the charity and goodness of Muslims, who are donating blood (even though they are fasting from food and water), bringing sustenance to those in need, or, like me, standing shoulder to shoulder with the LGBTQ+ community through tears in solemn vigils of remembrance for the beautiful souls we lost. We know that our bonds of kinship as minority communities cannot and will not be torn asunder by violence because our bonds are made of love and unity and they are everlasting.” –Nate Terani (Navy veteran, VFP member, and Phoenix-based VCI field organizer) 

“Hijab. Allah. These are terms we think of when we come upon the word “Muslim.” People also think “terrorist,” which is a destructive way of thinking. Both the events of 9/11 and the Orlando massacre caused tremendous suffering for many. But we must not forget these tragedies hurt the Muslim community as well. When 9/11 occurred, I like many Americans said we needed to go over there and do something about it. However, I didn’t understand Islam. I ended up meeting a man wanting to explain the beliefs of Islam to people who didn’t know, to strike down the belief that all Muslims are evil. Since that time, I’ve never looked back and even in the Marine Corps (while I never deployed) I stood up for our brothers and sisters, some of whom were Muslim. Two quotes come to mind for me: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” (Santayana) and “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” (Gandhi). Knowledge is power and if we do not understand Islam we need to educate ourselves in order to dispel Islamophobia.” –Renee Whitfield (Marine Corps veteran, #VetsVsHate supporter) 

“As a Latinx. A Muslim. A Veteran. A serious conversation is necessary to discuss the ways Toxic Masculinity, Militarism, Homophobia, and Islamophobia contributed to the shooting in Orlando, as well as helping shape the narrative told by US media outlets and posturing of U.S. politicians. We live in a society that is homophobic, heterosexist, and is discriminatory towards marginalized people. In communities across the U.S., both children and adults are learning to perpetuate oppressive behavior towards the LGBT+ community. Homophobia like Islamophobia can be fear-driven, but it is also contempt-driven.” –Ramon Mejia (Marine Corps veteran, IVAW member, Texas-based VCI field organizer) 

“A long time ago, I made it a point not to watch the news, listen to the radio or read a newspaper regularly. It felt like ingesting poison. Existing in our society – at times – feels the same way to me; an onslaught of verbal insults or the stare of the unspoken judgement. It has been a long journey of realising my existence is not an embarrassment, the colour of my skin is not some mistake, who I love is not “a sin and I am going to hell” or that my last name does not warrant that I be singled out and labelled. When I step outside my home, I must emotionally and spiritually prepare myself to deal with “the world”. I know I will encounter individuals who believe what mainstream mass media has been feeding them: ready-made summaries consisting of lies and fear and pre-packaged judgements of hate. When I am directly (or indirectly) confronted with someone who unleashes their poison upon me, I must work times over to not mirror their behavior, lest I prove true to that person what the media machine has fed them. I believe we are all truly connected. Admittedly, I struggle with this belief when I encounter another’s fear and hate. Whether in that moment or thereafter, there is a deep realisaton that their anger and hate is a symptom of the insecurity and dis-empowerment syphoning upon the spirit of the many in our country. My responsibility, is to ensure my journey and activism remain genuine and fluid, rooted in from a spiritual connection.” –Monique Salhab (Air Force and Army veteran, VFP board member) 

If more people in the U.S., especially our lawmakers, truly listened to and took voices like the ones shared above seriously, we might be able to make meaningful strides in curbing the sort of violence that took so many innocent lives and devastated so many families last week in Orlando. Hate rhetoric and anti-Muslim sentiments will fail to bring us closer to stopping violence. It will, however, continue to breed hostility and erode the Constitution. This is unacceptable and must be countered by individual and collective efforts to grow diversity, inclusivity and equality and secure civil and human rights for all people, both at home and abroad.

(Brian Trautman is an Army veteran and currently sits on the national board of directors of Veterans For Peace (VFP). He teaches peace studies and economics at Berkshire Community College in western Massachusetts and resides near Albany, NY.)

-cw

PERSPECTIVE--Sunday, I woke up to the news “that someone had shot up a gay club in Orlando and there were many injured and killed.” I then went about my morning getting ready to go to a gay family picnic celebration. There would be a jumping castle and lots of games and fun stations set-up for kids to play. The news hadn’t sunk in yet, and I didn’t look for details.

There was some talk at the event and a couple folks said they were glad this celebration was taking place at a (and this is my description) “gated” park and that reservations were required to attend.

I like to think the reservations were so those organizing the event would know how many to plan for … but now I wonder. Here in New Orleans we still have closed family Facebook groups and operate by rules some of y’all might think are from the days in which social tolerance was much lower.

My initial thought regarding the shooting at Pulse in Orlando was that this was a hate crime planned for Pride. The social psychologist in me guessed some perceived threat had likely led to this event and, indeed, the detail about Omar Mateen’s fury over seeing two men kissing was reported early. It was only after I had returned home that I started to learn the details and that the death toll was rising.

There are so many angles and lessons to learn from this event, but I felt compelled to share my opinions on the symbolic importance of the gay bar to myself and the gay community, spurred by these two tweets from Jeramey Kraatz: 

Growing up a sexual minority means you were most likely raised by the majority script. This means you likely weren’t taught the skills or coping mechanisms to deal with your sexuality and most definitely homophobia. You live in fear that those you love the most may not understand. Moreover, you go from one day being what you thought of as “typical” and having unrecognized privileges to coming out. In the next moments, many of those privileges are wiped away and you have to re-frame expectations for yourself and what you can do and what is possible … just because of a few words you said out loud.

For many non-heterosexual people, gay bars help us find our way. They are often the most accessible safe spaces available. So much so that they have academically been compared to churches for the LGBT community, complete with rituals, a sense of community, and a routine. Religious scholar Marie Cartier wrote a history of life at gay bars before the Stonewall riots. “The only place that you could be a known homosexual — even though you could get arrested there and it was not safe,” she wrote, “was a gay bar.” Even today, just knowing that they are there is powerful. 

I have gone years not really celebrating Pride, but during a week like this you realize why it is there and why we do it and why it is important.

(Lisa Wade is an associate professor of sociology at Occidental College, currently on leave and living in New Orleans. Her newest book, American Hookup, is about the emergence and character of the culture of sex that now dominates college campuses all across the country. This piece was posted first at Pacific Standard Magazine.)

SECURITY WATCH--When I learned that Omar Mateen, the Islamic terrorist who killed 49 Americans at a gay bar in Orlando, Florida and wounded 53 others was a security officer working for a company called G4S I decided to do some research on this company. What I have found is not only disturbing, but downright terrifying. Now, understand that I am not someone who readily subscribes to conspiracy theories, but I am a trained military intelligence officer and I know how to analyze information and draw conclusions based on that information. 

I have found that G4S is a British security firm operating in over 100 countries with over 600,000 employees. It has a checkered past to say the least. It had to pay millions of dollars to the British Government for its failure to provide security to the 2012 Olympics in London. This failure caused the British government to deploy thousands of troops to provide adequate security. There have also been other scandals involving the company. 

G4S acquired a U.S. Security firm named Wackenhut Corp., also with a questionable history, and made it a subsidiary company named G4S Security Solutions USA Inc. This is the company that actually employed Mateen in 2007. The U.S. affiliate initially claimed to know nothing about any FBI questioning of Mateen. However, it finally admitted that it was aware of the first FBI investigation of Mateen, but not the second. 

G4S also claims to know nothing about the terrorist threats Mateen made that had been reported by one of his fellow employees. FOX News interviewed this former employee, Daniel Gilroy, who confirmed these allegations. G4S then refused Fox News’ requests for a response. However, the firm relieved him of duties as a security guard at a Florida courthouse because people complained about Mateen’s negative comments about women and his Jews and his expressions of admiration for the radical Muslim that killed 13 American soldiers and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas. 

So this where it gets scary: G4S has contracts with numerous federal agencies including the State Department, Departments of Interior, Labor, Justice, Energy as well as the IRS, DEA, Homeland Security. It has also been hired by the U.S. Army, Air Force, and NASA. As a result, G4S has worked on projects at Guantanamo Bay, and provides security services for over 50 American embassies around the world, 90 percent of the nuclear facilities in the United States, as well as numerous prisons and juvenile detention facilities around the country. 

In the case of the contract with DHS, the G4S has a rather unique job. It is to provide secure transport for people who have entered the United States illegally and are OTMs, (from countries other than Mexico) to sanctuary cities in the United States. In other words, people who have already violated U.S. laws by entering our country illegally and who are from Central American countries or from the Middle East and could be gang members, drug dealers, or even terrorists are being provided with a free pass into our cities with no questions asked.

This means that G4S is an active participant in the Obama administration and DHS efforts to violate U.S. immigration laws, the U.S. Constitution, and a federal court order. This is placing Americans around the country in danger of being subjected to criminal activity, and more possible terrorism like what just occurred in Orlando. 

When it comes to providing security for U.S. embassies, G4S had an epic failure in 2011 at the embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan when their underpaid local security guards hired went on strike. They were immediately replaced by new local guards who were not subjected to any background checks. The embassy was severally at risk until the company finally agreed to increase the pay of the strikers.

Now we have an employee of G4S that has committed a major atrocity against Americans by killing and injuring almost 100 innocent people, yet he continued to be employed by this company despite the fact that there had been two FBI investigations of him, a complaint by a fellow employee that he made statements indicating he was a dangerous individual, and there was documentation of his involvement with an American jihadist who ultimately became a suicide bomber in Syria. 

If G4S allowed an obvious security risk like Omar Mateen to continue as an employee it makes you wonder how many others like him are out there guarding prisons, nuclear sites, embassies, and other sensitive government facilities. Why are federal agencies continuing to employ this company and pay it millions of tax dollars, seemingly oblivious to the problem?

This also raises another, more insidious question. Are the actions of G4S just the failure of a private company employed by our government -- or is it the result of political correctness run amok? Was Mateen allowed to continue working for the company and have a license to carry firearms because G4S was prohibited by our government from firing him because he was a Muslim, despite the clear danger he represented?   

Instead of launching an all-out assault on law-abiding American gun owners, Obama and Congress should be investigating why someone like the Orlando shooter was granted a security clearance by G4S that ultimately allowed him to go forward with his radical Islamic terrorist agenda.

Unfortunately, it will not happen. Just today I have learned that a radical female Muslim has recently been granted U.S. citizenship. Her name is Laila Alawa, a Syrian who was appointed last year to the Homeland Security Department’s subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism. 

She has an active Twitter account and I have read some of her posts. She clearly seems to believe that the free speech of anyone opposing radical Islam should be severely restricted; that the real danger to the security of the United States is the “white race.” In addition, she praises the terrorist attacks on 9/11 as a good thing. She is clearly a racist, radical jihadist, and a supporter of radical Islamic terrorism – yet she is now an employee of our very own Federal government. 

See her posts in the article that appeared on ClashDaily.)  

Why isn’t Laila Alawa being investigated by Congress?

(Michael Connelly is a US Army veteran, a retired attorney, published author, freelance writer, and instructor of Constitutional law. He is an occasional contributor to CityWatch. Reach him at: [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRUTHDIG-California’s economy has recently surpassed France’s to become the sixth-largest in the world. The populous state grew 4.1 percent in the last year and had a gross state product of $2.46 trillion. The state also outpaced the rest of the U.S. in job growth. 

Although there are numerous reasons for the Golden State’s economic growth, The Washington Post points to a 2012 increase in taxes on millionaires. The newspaper contrasts the economic development of California to that of Kansas, which reduced taxes on income and sales the same year. 

The Post reports:

In 2012, voters in California approved a measure to raise taxes on millionaires, bringing their top state income tax rate to 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. Conservative economists predicted calamity, or at least a big slowdown in growth. Also that year, the governor of Kansas signed a series of changes to the state’s tax code, including reducing income and sales tax rates. Conservative economists predicted a boom.  

California’s economy grew by 4.1 percent in 2015, according to new numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, tying it with Oregon for the fastest state growth of the year. That was up from 3.1 percent growth for the Golden State in 2014, which was near the top of the national pack. 

The Kansas economy, on the other hand, grew 0.2 percent in 2015. That’s down from 1.2 percent in 2014, and below neighboring states such as Nebraska (2.1 percent) and Missouri (1.2 percent). Kansas ended the year with two consecutive quarters of negative growth—a shrinking economy. By a common definition of the term, the state entered 2016 in recession. 

Other effects of the Kansas tax cuts, which were meant to spur entrepreneurship, are well-documented.

While state officials anticipated that the reductions would create a shortfall in the state budget, tax revenues have been consistently below even those expectations. Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service have signaled that they could reduce Kansas’s credit rating, indicating there is a chance the state cannot pay its bills. 

The shortfalls have forced Gov. Sam Brownback (R) and lawmakers to make additional adjustments. The state canceled the initial reduction in sales taxes, then increased them again, while delaying additional scheduled reductions in the income tax. 

On the whole, Brownback’s policies modestly increased taxes for the poor and working class, who pay more in sales taxes than income taxes, while reducing taxes drastically for the rich.

The poorest 20 percent of households—those making less than $23,000 a year—are paying about $200 more, on average, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington. For the middle class, the changes have been a wash, with less-affluent households paying somewhat more and more-affluent households giving up a little less. 

Meanwhile, the wealthiest 1 percent of households, those making at least $493,000 a year, are saving an average of $25,000. 

Read more here. 

(Donald Kaufman is an L.A.-based producer, composer and mix engineer. He is also the songwriter and frontman of the band Visceral Design. He writes for TruthDig where this was originally posted.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams. 

GELFAND’S WORLD--Bernie Sanders wants the Democratic Party to reform.  I don't think he goes far enough. Think of the following as a wish list. 

The party should show respect for intellectual freedom. Here's one story. I was once the president of a Democratic club in the LA area. We had a new congressman who represented the district. In conversation, he told me he'd like to meet with my club. I said, "Sure, why not." It turns out that there is a "why not" among Democratic Party activists. This congressman was a Republican. 

So even though congressman Steve Horn had a lot of clout that could affect our residents -- congressional offices get involved in everything from helping you find job training to helping you get a new passport in a timely manner -- apparently Democrats aren't supposed to be allowed to get within speaking distance of an actual Republican. I guess I have too much of an academic background for this type of thinking, because it never would have occurred to me that residents of Lakewood shouldn't be allowed to meet and talk with their own elected representatives. 

We went ahead with the public forum, but not without difficulty. There was Hell to pay, to put it mildly. One local Democratic club passed a resolution asking the L.A. County Democratic Party to take away our club's charter. A local activist explained to me that allowing Democrats to hear from a Republican might convince them to vote for the other side. (This didn't show a lot of faith in the power of Democratic values, I must say. And what about the idea that conversation with Republicans such as Horn might bring a little political movement on their part?) 

Here is another example of a constricted intellectual philosophy that ran over into a deranged moral philosophy: Everyone was supposed to support all Democrats, even those who were out and out crooks like Paul Carpenter. Another: Democratic organizations have endorsed judicial candidates who are demonstrably inferior to other candidates, just because the opponent is registered as a Republican. 

This policy strikes me as the sort of attitude that pushes a lot of people away. Intellectual freedom should be one element in Democratic Party philosophy. If we expect honorable Republicans to repudiate the candidacy of Donald Trump, then we have a right to expect the Democratic Party to support integrity within its own ranks. 

There are legitimate reasons that lots of liberal people choose to register as independents. They support the Democratic Party's principles and vote for non-criminal Democrats in elections, but refuse to give up their sense of political autonomy. They should be embraced by the party. Perhaps Bernie Sanders is just being opportunistic when he calls for the primary system to be universally opened to independent voters, but there are people who have legitimate reasons of their own. Opening primary elections to independent voters isn't a deep philosophical question. People who don't state a party preference are a significant fraction of the electorate, and they have a right to participate in the selection of the president. 

Bernie's idea of getting rid of superdelegates makes some sense. Reserving one vote out of each five at the convention for unelected delegates is ridiculous. Even using the term superdelegates to describe these voters makes little sense. The party should rid itself of the problem by taking away superdelegates' votes or requiring them to vote in accord with their states' primary election totals, turning them in effect into pledged delegates. 

By the way, it makes sense to allow elected members of congress and state governors to attend the convention. That's the idea behind the superdelegate system. They just shouldn't be given convention votes automatically. 

One reform Sanders seems to have failed to think about is the order the states go in the primary system. As I've written previously, New Hampshire and Iowa were not awarded primacy in the system through any virtue of their own, and certainly not as a result of a decision by the rest of the country. They just took it. And they enforce their power by rejecting candidates who don't kiss up to them. This is why we don't hear much about water rights out west, or big city issues for the first year or two of the presidential election cycle. The candidates are too busy promising Iowans that they really do believe in ethanol subsidies and promising New Hampshire voters that they get to have first pick in the primaries forever. 

There are a lot of possibilities for reforming the primary system, ranging from a lottery system to a simple reversal of the current order for the next couple of elections. Let California go first and Iowa go last. This is a reform suggestion I'd like to hear coming from Bernie Sanders. Let him show that he is as honest and independent as his supporters think he is. 

Here's another big idea that will be hard to accomplish, but belongs as a central element of any future Democratic Party that is worth its salt. Make unionization a top priority, not only for the trades but for part time workers and for the tens of millions of white collar workers. Make it a long term Democratic Party priority to make it easy for workers to create unions, and make it a serious crime to interfere with this process. Perhaps the state of California could potentiate the process of creating white collar associations and protecting workers who choose to participate. The rest of the country could follow. 

Bernie Sanders wants reform and restructuring of the Democratic National Committee. It's actually a useful goal, even if most voters don't have the least idea what the DNC does. Most party activists have never been near a DNC meeting. The DNC organizes the national convention. Since the convention has ultimate power over accepting or rejecting delegates, the DNC has a lot to say about what happens in primary elections. Anybody remember the credentials fight over the Michigan delegation in 2008?  There are lots of other DNC powers such as raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Most of all, the DNC members are superdelegates. This doesn't make a lot of sense. At least the congressmen and senators who are superdelegates had to win elections and might therefore be said to represent the reality of the party at some level. As far as the DNC is concerned, not so much. The DNC has a lot of power, and there ought to be checks and balances. 

Finally, the biggest idea of all. The Democratic Party ought to wean itself away from the big corporate money that funds campaigns. The idea isn't as farfetched as it sounds, because the Democrats used to accept union money and spurn management money. The Democrats held control over the congress for most of half a century under this system. But somewhere along the line, they figured that since they had control of the congress and business lobbyists had to come to them anyway, they might as well start taking the money. 

When the system broke down under Newt Gingrich, the Democrats were left trying to represent Democratic Party values but having become beholden to big money contributors. The current situation for the Democrats is sort of Catch 22, since they want to take back control of congress, and this takes money. 

One possible solution is to bring back the idea of public financing of elections. Los Angeles is partway there, as are other places. If it weren't for a particularly annoying Supreme Court decision from a few years ago, we might be moving down that road. A more honest Supreme Court may be more accepting of public financing. 

Another approach that may build by itself is the movement into internet mediated political contributions. I get email requests for money several times a week from DailyKos and several party organizations. When politicians in strongly Democratic districts win congressional seats by relying on cleaner money, we will be making progress. This is something that goes to the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. It's a long overdue reform.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw

JUDGING THE JUDGES-Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky has been blocked by prosecutors from hearing an upcoming sex crimes case. The judge has been taking heat for sentencing former Stanford student Brock Turner to six months in jail for three felony counts of sexual assault. The removal from the case is “a rare and carefully considered step,” according to a statement made by prosecutors. The district attorney had removed the judge after he had dismissed a non-sex crimes case prior to the jury’s deliberation. 

District Attorney Jeff Rosen said, “We are disappointed and puzzled at Judge Persky’s unusual decision to unilaterally dismiss a case before the jury could even deliberate. After this and the recent turn of events, we lack confidence that Judge Persky can fairly participate in this upcoming hearing in which a male nurse (allegedly) sexually assaulted an anesthetized female patient. In the future, we will evaluate each case on its own merits and decide if we should use our legal right to ask for another judge in order to protect public safety and pursue justice.” 

Per California court procedure, prosecutors and defense attorneys may file a motion in order to remove a judge from a case for reassignment. Prosecutors in the new case brought a motion to remove the judge after several jurors refused to serve in his courtroom following the outcome of the Turner case. One of the jurors in the Turner case had written a letter to the judge, stating that he was “absolutely shocked and appalled” at the sentence. 

Judge Persky’s sentencing in the case has led to efforts to recall the judge with several political groups promising to raise money for the campaign to recall the judge. To date, almost a million people have signed online petitions, calling upon the California Commission for Judicial Performance to remove Persky, who was appointed by Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 and faces reelection in November.

Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Turner to a six-year prison term for three felony counts of assault with the intent to commit rape of an unconscious person, sexual penetration of an unconscious person, and sexual penetration of an intoxicated person, which carry a maximum sentence of 14 years. However, the judge seemed to have sentenced Turner according to the recommendations of Turner’s chief probation officer Monica Lessettre who recommended the six months sentence in county jail, along with three years of proba tion and sex offender treatment. 

Recalls of judges are rare in California and there is support in Santa Clara County for the judge from those who say the sentencing is within his rights, as legal experts say the sentence falls within the law but is lighter than for most similar cases. 

Recalling judges may be a slippery slope, compelling judges to rule to accommodate the greater public. However, as prosecutors may continue to motion for the judge’s dismissal from cases, his role will be diminished. To date, no one has submitted paperwork to challenge Persky in November or for a recall.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a successful Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.)Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

FIRST PERSON-The weekend of June 12 sent me on a rollercoaster of emotions I never thought possible. The previous Friday, I was an invited participant in the first-ever White House Summit for African American LGBTQ Youth. I felt amazingly supported, empowered, and valued — by my school, by my family and friends, by President Obama, and by my LGBTQ community. 

I was inspired. 

On Saturday, I marched in the Pride Parade in our nation’s capital. I sang and danced with neighbors from every race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity. We celebrated ourselves, each other, our allies, and our bright futures. 

We were so beautiful and full of promise. I was so proud to be an Afro-Latina-Anglo transgender teen.

Then came Sunday. 

I woke up to find that a hatred-filled assassin in Orlando had brutally murdered 49 members of our young, innocent, beautiful, and beloved community, and injured over 50 more. 

They say the murderer was a U.S.-born Islamic terrorist. But Omar Mateen’s hatred for my community echoes the headlines I see about right-wing fundamentalists of other faiths who call for discrimination against people like me — and for the erasure of my rights as a human being. 

His hatred echoes the oppression, arrests, and killings of my black and Latino brothers and sisters on the streets, in schools, and in our prisons. It reflects the cruelty of those who want to keep Muslims and Latinos away from our country — by force — and who still want to keep LGBTQ people from marrying each other. 

They’ll even deny us the right to pee in peace, if that’s what it takes to dehumanize and humiliate us.

I’m not trying to be partisan. But it’s hard not to notice that President Obama held a summit to tell us how valued we are, while Donald Trump and many conservative lawmakers want to erase us. 

Many Republicans invoked fears of international terrorism, but most said nothing about the members of our LGBTQ communities, who were the very targets and victims. They vow more Islamophobia, but make no mention of the ease with which the killers get and use assault weapons. 

I’m only 15 years old, but I know what it’s like to have deep love and support, and I’ve witnessed and been the object of deep hatred and ignorance. I feel angry and heartbroken by this massacre. 

A culture of fear and bigotry is again taking hold of this country. But my generation demands our equality and our human rights. We want to lead, and to determine our own future. We want you not just to love us, but to support us and to listen to us. 

So if you don’t understand who we are and what we need, ask us. 

To start, you can fight back against laws aimed at hurting us or erasing us, like those bigoted and ridiculous bathroom bills. Punish politicians who block sensible gun control. Stop supporting lawmakers who want to exploit and exclude immigrants. Stop the people who are expelling and suspending and arresting and incarcerating us. 

They’re killing us. Help us stop them. 

We’re stronger than you think. We’re Generation Z, and we come of age in 2018. Our future is majority black and brown, and more openly queer than any before us. 

We know that many of you are allies. We need you, and you need us. Together we can stop the rollercoaster of fear and terror and start the climb to the mountaintop of love and liberation.

(Grace Dolan-Sandrino is a transgender teen activist. An earlier version of this piece appeared at Common Dreams. Distributed by OtherWords.org)  Photo: Ted Eytan / Flickr. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

WHAT YOU SEE, NOT WHAT YOU GET--Who does the biggest lobbying force in the United States represent? Not its members. 

That's according to a new investigation (pdf) by a group of U.S. senators, which found that on the issues of tobacco use and climate change, there's a profound disparity between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's positions and those of the companies it supposedly speaks for.

The investigation, which comes on the heels of leaked polling results showing how the group attempts to suppress the "empathy" of its members on pro-worker positions, is based on research and correspondence with 108 private sector members of the Chamber's Board of Directors. 

Led by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), it was triggered by a series of 2015 New York Times articles exposing how the group was working to thwart global anti-smoking efforts and fight President Barack Obama's plan to limit power plant emissions of greenhouse gases. 

The findings, the report states, "[call] into question the Chamber's allegedly transparent decision-making process, and [suggest] that the Chamber does not accurately represent the positions of its member companies." As noted in the report:

• Approximately half of the companies on the Chamber’s Board of Directors have adopted anti-tobacco and pro-climate positions that contrast sharply with the Chamber's activities.
• Not a single Board member explicitly supported the Chamber's lobbying efforts.
• Despite the Chamber's description of the Board as its "principal governing and policy-making body," not one Chamber Board member explicitly indicated that they were fully aware of and able to provide their input and views to the Chamber regarding its actions on tobacco and climate.

In fact, "We found a corporate America far more concerned about public health and the environment than the Chamber's efforts would suggest. We identified dozens of companies investing heavily to get their employees to stop smoking because they realize a healthy workforce is a productive one.  We identified companies from all corners of the economy working to reduce their carbon footprints and affirmatively supporting the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan and its international efforts at the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris," the senators write in their cover letter to Chamber Board members accompanying the report.

Yet these members "undermine their own efforts by affiliating with an organization that actively and aggressively undermines efforts to reduce tobacco use and tries to prevent action to address climate change," the letter continues. "By lending tacit support to an organization that has spearheaded a decades-long effort against policies to address both problems, member companies become de facto promoters of tobacco and adversaries of climate action."

The letter goes on to urge the members to reflect upon "the effects in Congress of your continued affiliation with the Chamber on these issues."

Expounding on the influence the Chamber wields, Dan Dudis, director of Public Citizen's U.S. Chamber Watch Program, writes in an op-ed at The Hill this week:

While the Chamber is well known in Washington as a big-spending mouthpiece for Big Business, even seasoned observers of the D.C. political scene might be surprised at just how far and wide the Chamber has spread its tentacles.

Dudis also writes that it has a "central role [...] in corrupting our political system through more than $1 billion in lobbying and more than $100 million in election spending."

And that speaks to the campaign spending issues that followed the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling.  As Gretchen Goldman, lead analyst in the Center for Science and Democracy at Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote last year:

If its own board members aren't standing with the Chamber on climate change, who is? Who is supporting the Chamber's anti-science position on climate and other issues? And who is funding its work to undercut efforts to promote clean energy and reduce our emissions? We need greater transparency in our political system to hold accountable those blocking efforts to address climate change.

(Andrea Germanos writes for Common Dreams  … where this piece was first posted.)

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW-Stanford University is known for many accolades. Until Brock Turner put the Palo Alto University on the media radar, Stanford was primarily known as a breeding ground for Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and as one of the nation’s most competitive universities. Now, Stanford ranks high on a list that isn’t quite as impressive. 

Using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s campus safety and security website, a San Diego law firm assembled a ranking of the crime rate at four-year colleges in California and Stanford came out on top. According to criminal defense attorney George Gedulin, Stanford’s rate of crime is more than double the closest California university. 

The attorney’s office notes, “While the vast majority of schools comply with the law that requires them to report crimes on campus, some schools have underreported campus crimes…Other schools have made honest mistakes in their reporting. Schools that are honest and accurate with their reporting may have higher numbers than other institutions that are not.” 

The office also reminds that crimes that are never reported to the institution aren’t included in the data and that the statistics provided by the U.S. Dept. of Education website represent alleged criminal offenses reported to campus security authorities and/or local law enforcement agencies, which does not necessarily reflect prosecutions or convictions. 

Limiting the ranking to a higher volume of crime may not be a fair evaluation, as larger schools typically have more overall crimes, the law office looked at crimes per capita or in this case, per 1,000 students, based on reported crimes from 2012-2014. 

Stanford University (Student Population, 16,963) had an effective crime rate of 7.94 per 1,000 student during the reported period. The next closest campuses are UC Berkeley (Student Population, 37,565) with an effective rate of 3.2 per 1,000 and UCLA (Student Population, 41,845) with an effective rate of 2.84 per 1,000. Most California universities had an effective rate between 1 and 2.5 per 1,000. 

Other Southern California schools and rankings include USC with an effective rate of 1.25 per 1,000; UC Santa Barbara (2.26 per 1,000); California State University Northridge (1.13 per 1,000); and California State University Los Angeles (1.08 per 1,000.) 

An effective crime rate does not need to set off alarms and fears, especially since the reporting rates of schools may impact rankings. While many schools have relatively low effective rates of crime, the reporting is still an eye-opener. As parents prepare for their kids to leave for (or return to) campus later this summer or fall, it’s important to remind students to be aware of their surroundings and to take safety precautions.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a successful Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.)Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NEW GEOGRAPHY--With Bernie Sanders now dispatched by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party machine, Donald Trump has emerged as the unlikely populist standard-bearer. Not since the patrician Julius Caesar rallied the Roman plebeians, or the aristocratic Franklin Roosevelt spoke for the “forgotten man,” has someone so detached from everyday struggles won over such a large part of the working and middle classes.

Crass, superficial and materialistic to a fault, Trump, sadly, shares little of the virtues of either Caesar or Roosevelt, more resembling another creepy billionaire, the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Yet, like his wealthy political counterparts, Trump has crafted a message, however crude, that has demolished the Republican corporate establishment and turned conservative intellectuals into virtual irrelevancies.

The great tragedy for Trump is that the basis for a grass-roots-led Republican victory lay within his grasp. He could have been, like Ronald Reagan in 1980, the instrument of populist revolt had he shown the same wit, self-control and positive eloquence. Instead, his crudity, his barely disguised racial stereotyping and his obsession with himself has taken from the GOP, at least for this election cycle, the possibility of reaping an enormous windfall from the widespread alienation of the populace from the political and economic ruling class.

Racially tinged issues, notably immigration, propelled Trump’s rise. This reflects the sad reality that race relations in this country have been headed in the wrong direction the past several years. His opposition to illegal immigration – including his absurd, shock-jock-style advocacy of a southern border wall – resonates with a large part of the Anglo population, some African Americans and even some Latinos, a group whose mass desertion from the party may now seal its demise.

If negotiated with grace and some sensitivity, illegal immigration could have proven a winning issue this fall, as it was in the spring. The killing of Kate Steinle in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant felon, who was protected by that city’s “sanctuary” status, followed by terrorist massacres in Paris and San Bernardino, all played into this theme. Recent revelations about higher-than-reported criminal recidivism among undocumented felons aid the Trump cause.

Although most Americans don’t favor Trump’s cruel talk of mass deportations, the vast majority, around 60 percent, favor tighter border controls as an immigration priority. Most are not likely to look favorably on “sanctuary cities” and the essentially open-borders approach that now dominates progressive thinking.

But rather than assault the political correctness of open borders and sanctuary cities, Trump’s approach to immigration policy has been both shortsighted and mean-spirited. That doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant or incomprehensible, or could not resurface again. There is a future in challenging a progressive mindset that regards the majority of the country as fighting, as Salon recently put it, “white America’s sad last stand.” There also is something ironic in that much of the anti-Trump fever comes from such increasingly white bastions as Portland, Seattle and San Francisco.

In fact, the increasingly strident progressive multicultural agenda could have bolstered the GOP, if that opposition was not championed by someone who at times seems a buffoonish lout.

The recent resurgence in crime could have been another gift to The Donald and the GOP. Crime has always been a racially charged issue, and it propelled the rise of both Richard Nixon and George Wallace, who, between them, won close to 60 percent of the presidential vote in 1968. In contrast, Barack Obama’s presidency was aided by what had been a decades-long reduction in crime that undermined this classic conservative campaign issue.

Now the drop in violent crime seems over. The homicide rate is ticking up, in cities as diverse as Chicago, Dallas, Jacksonville, Fla., Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Memphis, Tenn. The impact of the “Ferguson effect” on policing and the often violent, anti-police rhetoric of some Black Lives Matter activists is putting law enforcement on the defensive, with arguably disastrous results.

Another potential gift to Trump and the GOP – the left-wing violence aimed at Trump events, often spilling over to attacks on police – will likely be squandered. Some left-wing journalists, such as a since-suspended editor at Vox, actually have urged readers to riot against the Trumpites. Rising crime and scenes of public disorder, notably at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, proved critical to Nixon’s success, but Nixon, for all his faults, knew how to package his message so that moderates could embrace him. Not so with the GOP’s crass Captain Ahab.

The Democratic Party has evolved primarily into an organ of core cities, a shift that increasingly defines its politics. Although core cities are home to, at most, 20 percent of the population, they have become so overwhelmingly Democratic that they represent the party’s largest electoral base. This slant, however, could have provided Trump, himself a luxury urbanite, an opening to win over the suburbs. These unheralded areas remain the nation’s dominant geography and the likely “decider” of who wins in November.

Democrats, who once supported suburban aspirations, now often regard suburbia as a giant mistake, while consigning the countryside, except for vacation locales, as the regressive abodes of what President Obama labeled as “clingers.” Measures now being pushed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to transfer large numbers of poor people, including felons, into middle-class communities, could prove a political time bomb for Democrats. Trump, however, a longtime beneficiary of government largesse through expropriation of homes and businesses, is ill-suited to even comprehend the issue and grasp this opportunity to win over the vast majority of Americans who don’t live in core sites.

When Trump took on the Environmental Protection Agency and the Obama energy agenda while campaigning in North Dakota recently, he touched a potentially rich vein of support. As the Democrats have locked up most of the software, design, entertainment, media and financial oligarchy, they have become increasingly opposed to all fossil fuels – including natural gas – that drive much of the industrial economy.

The assault on coal has already cost the Democrats virtually all of Appalachia, and could also begin to weaken Democrats even among union members. Nationally, this can be seen in a growing rift between greens, and their oligarchic and public sector allies, and traditional construction and industrial unions, who are furious about the party’s close coordination with environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer’s For Our Future super PAC.

The conflicts here are based around those policies – for example, on energy and roads – that directly impact middle- and working-class voters on the periphery. Trump could have made hay by pointing out that green San Francisco elites and Hollywood stars enjoy lives of almost absurdly conspicuous consumption, while urging everyone else to cut back their carbon footprints.

The real-versus-ephemeral split could still work to Trump’s favor in areas, like Ohio and western Pennsylvania, where the energy revolution promised real economic gains. Voters in these regions, even if they don’t work in factories or oilfields, are aware of how critical these industries are for their economies. Trump’s alienation of large parts of this political base – which also includes many minorities – will limit his electoral harvest.

The idea of the loquacious and status-obsessed Trump leading the ignored “silent majority” provides something of a theater of the absurd. The country was ready for a real GOP populist to run against Hillary Clinton, who epitomizes the almost complete capture of the Republic by the oligarchs, their media messengers and the governmental apparat. Desperate to hold onto Obama’s base, she embraces policies that have failed to deliver improved incomes for the middle class and reinforced the deep pessimism felt across the country.

In the end, Trump has mastered the art of the political “deal,” but largely for the benefit of his opponents. Given the deep grass-roots disgust with the power structure, he could conceivably have won over many of the “Bernie Bro’s” this fall. But his resplendent awfulness likely will prevent him from transforming the GOP into the voice of nationalistic populism and expanding its electoral base. Ill-suited as a populist icon, Trump seems destined to leave the country even more in the hands of the oligarchy while leaving his own party, for the near future at least, lurching toward oblivion.

(Joel Kotkin is a R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism in Houston. His newest book is “The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.” This was first posted at newgeography.com.)

-cw

HIJACKING THE ELECTION PROCESS-Most of us ignore the electoral process except when we’re voting. We stand in line and punch the card, carefully sweeping off the chads before we put it in the box. And leave the polls believing in the validity of our vote. 

Then along comes year 2000 and we see a national election in which the guy who got the fewer votes wins. For Gore voters, it was like someone had stolen the new millennium. 

But hey, it only happened once, right? After Bush there was Obama, and that made things all right. The system worked again, didn’t it? Maybe Bush-Gore was just a millennial glitch. It couldn’t happen again. Right? 

If that’s the way you feel, you have to read Andrew Gumbel’s “Down for the Count,” an unstinting account of U.S. election knavery back to the Founding Fathers. Actually, while Gumbel’s Early American History 101 entertains with lurid details of skullduggery among the Founders and their successors, it’s the book’s weakest portion. The author, for instance, assails the Constitution itself as “blunting the revolutionary spirit that had informed the rising against the British” because it didn’t establish universal suffrage and abolish slavery. Of course the Constitution didn’t do that, there being no widespread support throughout the original states for either innovation. It took over 80 years of shifting opinion and struggle—including the Civil War—to include both as amendments. This is the Constitution’s true value—its ability to change for the better. 

Gumbel is far more convincing on his central theme—fair and honest voting practices in America have been at best an orphan stepchild of the American political process. The electoral foot soldiers tend to be unschooled volunteers and minor, underpaid officials, beholden to the elected. 

Accordingly, the occasional crooked election, particularly in big cities, has long been a part of our heritage. The higher state election officials are usually partisan, whether elected (like the states’ individual Secretaries of State) or appointed. They are potentially motivated to make sure the opposing party has as hard a time as possible getting votes. Whether by spoilage or loss of ballots, breakdown of machines, dubious vote counts, early closure of polls, the list goes on: the party in power often has the upper hand at election time. California’s partial solution has been non-partisan local elections. But there seems no way to do this statewide, let alone nationally. Nonetheless, offices do change hands, and nowadays truly egregious election abuse seems to remain the exception rather than the rule. 

The new century, however, has brought new threats to the precarious election process. The first is the United States Supreme Court’s 2010 “Citizens United” decision that effectively prohibits limits on campaign spending. While its effect was muted in the 2012 presidential race, it was overwhelming in state elections, as Gumbel demonstrates: as long as two-thirds of America’s wealthy remain conservative, they’re going to pay to help elect Republicans to legislatures, even in Democratic-aligned states like Michigan and West Virginia. And of course Republican legislatures gerrymander districts to elect Republican members of congress. Gumbel has all the details. 

Hand in hand with “Citizens” has been the Republican state-by-state drive to keep as many minority, elderly and youthful voters as possible from the polls by jacking up voter ID qualifications and making registering to vote far more difficult. Again, our Supreme Court came running to the rescue of unfair voter qualifications with its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The case was effectively Shelby County v. the Voting Rights Act, as it gutted the 1965 law, leading to a massive attack on minority voting rights from North Carolina to Texas to Arizona that is still being fought in the courts: Gumbel calls this assault “The new Jim Crow.” 

After his hefty 220-page brief against the U.S. electoral system, Gumbel’s four pages of suggested remedies seem a bit sketchy. Obviously, he’d like legislative or legal relief from the “Citizens” and “VRA” decisions. He also suggests weekend elections, abolition of the Electoral College and a national election agency that would have the power to right electoral wrongs. These are all good ideas, but to be effective, they would probably have to become constitutional amendments. 

That’s what the Constitution is for, Mr. Gumbel.

(Marc Haefele is a regular commentator on KPCC. He has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. In the 1970s, he was Clerk of the Board of Elections of Pahaquarry, New Jersey. This piece first appeared on Capital and Main.  Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

GUEST WORDS--The homophobic and transphobic carnage in Orlando was a ‘plane crash’, with the blood and corpses of LGBTQ people splattered across the headlines. However, LGBTQ people are dying of hate, isolation, exclusion, and violence daily, in ‘car crashes’ that do not catch the public eye. Gay children are being bullied to death in our schools, trans women beaten to death on our streets, and the public does not bat an eye. After the Pulse nightclub massacre, there will be the customary vigils, speeches, and rainbow processions, vows of solidarity, and then the predictable return to business as usual.

My heart is exploding with love and grief for those who have died and are dying, and it is also burning with anger at those who perpetrate, encourage, and enable these atrocities. I am left wondering, amid all the prayers and mourning, wherein lies the responsibility and who is to blame?

I blame Ted Cruz, Pat McCrory, and every single politician in America and around the world who has promoted fear and hatred against the LGBTQ community in attempt to garner more votes.

I blame all those legislators who have devoted countless time and resources to concocting homophobic and transphobic laws, while simultaneously thwarting legislative action aimed at protecting the LGBTQ community.

I blame every religious leader who has encouraged his faithful to be intolerant towards LGBTQ people and urged them to fight against our basic rights and dignities as human beings.

I blame every person who feels that their religion entitles them to be biased against LGBTQ people and to exclude us.

I blame every parent who has victimized and bullied transgender children in schools by attempting to deny transgender students their right to access facilities matching their authentic gender identity.

I blame everyone who has threatened transgender people with violence and murder simply for using facilities that match our authentic gender identity.

I blame all parents who have taught their children to be intolerant and unaccepting of LGBTQ people, and all those parents who have rejected and abused their own LGBTQ children.

I blame all those who seek to erase LGBTQ people because our existence makes them uncomfortable.

I blame all those who bully, intimidate, or harass LGBTQ people, and those adults who turn the other way when LGBTQ children are being mistreated.

I blame all those who think it is acceptable to mock and ridicule LGBTQ people, and those who dismiss attempts to end this bullying as ‘political correctness’.

I blame law enforcement in America and around the world that erases LGBTQ people and does not take action to protect us, and in fact is often the worst perpetrator of abuse and violence against us.

I blame every court, judge, and jury that has acquitted or given a token sentence to perpetrators of hate crimes against us, because of the ‘gay panic’ defense or simply because in their eyes our existence is worthy of violence.

I blame hate groups and terror groups like the American Family Association, the Ku Klux Klan, and ISIS.

I blame all those who have amicable dealings with regimes under which being LGBTQ is considered an offense punishable by death.

I blame all those who stand in silence as LGBTQ people are attacked, abused, murdered, and denied our human rights, because they do not think it is their problem or because they are embarrassed to speak up for us.

All of them have blood on their hands, not just in Orlando now, but everywhere every day. Scores of our people were murdered in cold blood in the worst mass shooting in our nation’s history, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. We are assaulted, raped, and murdered around the world with impunity. Our children are thrown out of their homes and disowned by their families simply for being themselves. Surely, our lives matter enough that those who are destroying us should be named and held accountable. Please spare us your speeches, your candles, and your prayers, and give us our right to breathe. And please do not drown out our right to love and exist authentically with hate.

(Mischa Haider is a trans researcher, mother, writer, and activist. This perspective was posted earlier at Huff Post.) 

EDITOR’S PICK--Reaction to the death of Muhammad Ali this weekend was reverential, and why not? As obituaries explained at great length, Ali was more than just a great boxer. He was a “civil rights activist,” a “champion of free speech,” a “humanitarian,” a “tireless human rights ambassador and philanthropist” known for “gentle generosity.” 

Reading this, one might imagine that Ali lived the kind of life that made everyone admire him. The truth is quite opposite. During the prime of his life, Ali was widely hated. Politicians and news commentators denounced him as a cowardly, anti-American traitor. The legislature of his home state, Kentucky, passed a resolution declaring that he had brought discredit to the state and to “thousands who gave their lives for this country.” Even other African-American athletes, including Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, criticized him. 

This is a wonderful lesson in the way we whitewash figures who harshly criticize America’s conduct in the world. While they live and speak, we abhor them. Years later, when they are conveniently gone, we forget the ferocity of their words and pretend they were part of America’s happy family. 

If Ali was a gentle giant beloved by all, he symbolizes our goodness and the unity of our society. Yet he was much more than that. Ali sacrificed years at the peak of his career because he hated what his country was doing to nonwhite people far away. As he was about to enter prison for refusing induction into the Army, he explained his motive: “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, some poor, hungry people in the mud, for big powerful America.” 

Ali believed it was wrong and even sinful for the United States to bomb faraway lands because their people or leaders do not behave as we wish. His message is every bit as urgent today as it was when he first began preaching it. Yet in the fawning coverage that has followed his death, Ali comes across as a friendly grandpa rather than a passionate critic of American foreign policy. 

His case is hardly unique. Not long before Ali died, much publicity was given to the death of another relentless advocate of peace, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan. Like Ali, Berrigan was jailed for actions that stemmed from his antimilitarist convictions. At one protest, he denounced “the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America, with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country’s crimes.” Obituaries did not ignore his activism — they could not, since it was the center of his life — but many portrayed him as an eccentric oddball and suggested that he would be remembered for his poetry and “wry wit.” 

Martin Luther King Jr. has suffered the same fate. Today he is an icon, universally revered, and even honored with a statue on the Washington Mall. Most of us have come to share his belief that African-Americans deserve civil rights. We congratulate ourselves for having heeded his antiracist message.

That was not, however, King’s only message. He detested what he called “smooth patriotism,” and was horrified by the American compulsion to bomb, invade, and occupy countries on other continents. “We increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support,” he said in one speech. “People read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs.” 

Statements like that led the director of the FBI to call King “the most dangerous man in America,” all but begging some misguided patriot to kill him. We forget this essential part of King’s message because it applies too directly to the foreign policy we follow today. 

Activists of earlier generations have suffered the same fate. Radicals from Thoreau to Paul Robeson to Malcolm X now appear on US postage stamps. Mark Twain is remembered as a folksy humorist partly because his vivid denunciations of American intervention are absent from most anthologies. 

Few today realize that Twain opposed sending “our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit’s work,” that he believed foreign wars had “debauched America’s honor,” or that he proposed a new American flag “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.” 

Americans who want our country to change the way it acts in the world often feel that we are blazing a new trail. We are not. The idea that the US harms itself and others, by considering itself “indispensable,” and by trying to “shape” the politics and culture of faraway countries, was not recently invented. It is as American as apple pie. Yet those who have preached this gospel are either forgotten or — even worse — portrayed after death as friendly folks who may have spoken an intemperate word or two but in their hearts loved everything America is and does. Muhammad Ali is the latest to suffer this indignity. We do him, and others who share his antiwar passion, a disservice when we forget crucial aspects of their political identities.

(Stephen Kinzer is a former New York Times reporter and the author of “Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” (2006) and “Reset Middle East: Old Friends and New Alliances: Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Iran” (2011). This piece originally appeared on CommonDreams.org.  Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW--Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky is in the hot seat for his light sentencing of former Stanford student Brock Turner (Photo above left). The now 20-year old Turner was found guilty of assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating an intoxicated woman with a foreign object, and sexually penetrating an unconscious woman with a foreign object; two formal rape charges under California law were dropped during preliminary hearings. The judge had the leeway to sentence Turner for up to 14 years but chose the six month sentence because the judge wrote, a longer sentence might “have a severe impact on him.” Judge Persky’s sentence and sentiments have riled the over 370,000 who have signed at least one online recall petition.

On January 17, 2015, two Swedish grad students, Carl-Frederik Arndt and Peter Jonsson, bicycling past the scene, witnessed Turner as he sexually assaulted the partially clothed woman behind a dumpster. When the two men realized the woman wasn’t moving, they stepped in. Turner tried to leave the scene but Arndt and Jonsson tackled him and held him down until the police arrived.

What has shaken me to the core has been the cavalier responses of both Turner and his father, who laments his son won’t be enjoying his favorite ribeye steaks or breaking his swimming records just because of “twenty minutes of action.” Turner himself has focused on the dangers of “intoxication and promiscuity.” In a letter in support of Turner, his friend blamed the conviction on “political correctness,” stealing a page from the Trump playbook.

Turner seems to express no remorse for his actions; he and his father are more concerned about how the sentence impacts his life going forward. I can understand in some part a parent’s instinct to protect their children but we also have an obligation to raise our children to be accountable and empathetic. Turner was 18 at the time of the rape and a drunken stupor is not an excuse to rape an unconscious victim behind a dumpster.

Rape is a pervasive problem on college campuses, despite an overall downturn in rape during the last 20 years. According to Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), “11.2 percent of all students experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation (among all graduate and undergraduate students.)” Among graduate and professional students, 8.8 percent of females and 2.2 percent of males experience rape or sexual assault. The statistics are even more grim among undergraduates, with 23.1 percent of females and 5.4 percent of males experiencing rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation.

Female students (18-24) are three times as likely as the general population of women to be victims of rape and sexual assault. 18 to 24 year old women who are not students are four times as likely to be victims of rape or sexual assault.

Blaming sexual assaults on “the influence of alcohol and the party culture” is unacceptable but endemic of our societal need to finger point instead of accepting accountability. For many, intoxication muddies the waters. We remind our daughters and students to watch out for each other, avoid being alone with men or accepting a drink; we even warn them not to put down their water bottles. While we want our daughters to be safe, we tend to blame victims who might not have heeded our advice.

As an incoming freshman at Vanderbilt University c. 1980s, we were taught at a dorm meeting how to carry our keys to fend off an attacker and how to use our elbows and knees to temporarily paralyze or knock the wind out of an assailant, who we assumed would lunge at us from the bushes. We called upon campus security to escort us after dark; we carried pepper spray. We never thought we’d be slipped a roofie at a party or that a fellow student might rape us if we had a few too many drinks.

We can advise kids not to binge drink and to avoid becoming so blitzed that you’re not in control but if they don’t regard that advice, that doesn’t leave a rapist free to assault an unconscious or drunk woman or man. If we forget to set the alarm, does that mean a thief should just be able to walk in and take what he wants?

In his letter to the court, Brock Turner references just how much he has lost because of the trial. He blames his actions on alcohol and peer pressure, claiming that college culture is what got him into this “mess.” Never once does he point to the fact that he chose to sexually assault an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. His only crime was being caught.

It’s too easy to blame other people instead of accepting you (or your son) committed rape. When Turner’s childhood friend blames political correctness for the sexual assault charges, she’s buying into the idea that we’re all too thin-skinned and easily offended. Anyone who cares about campus rape of an unconscious woman who cannot give consent is just too “PC.”

Brock Turner will serve his sentence. Hopefully, he will one day acknowledge that he raped an unconscious woman and it wasn’t a case of “promiscuity while under the influence.” Perhaps the victim will create meaning from the tragedy and teach others about her experience.

Turner’s rape of an unconscious woman is a cautionary tale on so many levels. Binge drinking at a frat party is not an admissible defense for rape. We need to be accountable for our actions and to model that accountability for young people. Whether it’s a presidential candidate, a man convicted of felony sexual assault, or his father, blaming someone or something else for his actions is unconditionally unacceptable. That goes double for the uninformed and the ignorant who excuse this kind of redirected blame pointing.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a successful Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.)

-cw

HUFF POST--In the early 1950s, Sen. Joe McCarthy was on a rampage. Beginning in February 1950, when he said he had a list of “hundreds” of Communists then working in the State Department, he led the Red Scare that destroyed thousands of lives and tore at the basic fabric of democracy. Four years later, in March 1954, legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow pushed back. 

Murrow’s counterattack was followed by Joseph Welch, a lawyer for the U.S. Army, which McCarthy had targeted. Welch’s takedown of McCarthy was a decisive blow, and the senator fell from his perch. 

Over the past week or so, today’s media seems to be having a bit of its own Murrow moment, directly confronting presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and his high-level supporters with charges of racism. Whether Trump meets the same fate as McCarthy remains to be seen, but the worm, at last, appears to be turning. (Watch the video above by HuffPost’s JM Rieger to get a sense of it.)

Strangely, or perhaps not, Trump’s connection to McCarthy is more than metaphorical. (Indeed, the head of the Edward R. Murrow Center said Murrow would skewer Trump were he around today.) Lawyer Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s hatchet man, went on to become a close adviser to none other than Trump himself. 

In the closing remarks to Murrow’s pivotal newscast, one can hear loud echoes today.

“This is no time for men who oppose Sen. McCarthy’s methods to keep silent,” Murrow said, breaking the sound barrier of objectivity. “There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. ... We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom wherever it continues to exist in the world. But we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right, ‘The fault dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ Good night, and good luck.”

(Ryan Grim is Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post  … where this piece was first posted.)

NOT ABOUT BERNIE, IT’S ABOUT JUSTICE--Oh brothers and sisters, what an odd time.  I hear great energy going into whether or not Bernie should now concede or how the next few weeks look if he stays in the race as he proclaimed he would late Tuesday night.  Will Bernie delegates or supporters disrupt the DNC convention?  That’s another point to consider for pundits and others.  Bernie or bust is one group’s battle cry, while others call for Party unity.  I think all of these issues are missing the point and the moment at hand.

Bernie repeated the theme during his speech that this campaign, this political revolution, is about changing this country and addressing the issues he has framed so well over the last year. To the extent that we can exert pressure on the Democratic Party or even on the American public to support those changes, staying in the fight is critical for Bernie. 

While the Washington Post and others say that Hillary’s wins yesterday mean that Bernie has less leverage to demand concessions, I do not believe that will be true unless we allow that to be true.  If we give up or give in, this political revolution has really been a cult of personality that will fade even as Bernie sits in the White House chatting with President Obama.  We have to intensify our resolve, not wallow in disappointment.

"It’s not Bernie or bust. His campaign has been about us – all of us.  It’s about justice through revolution."

During Bernie’s Tuesday, he repeatedly referenced achieving justice in the policy areas he has articulated during this campaign.  From climate justice, economic justice, healthcare justice and beyond, that is what Bernie’s campaign and this political revolution is about.  It’s not up to Bernie alone to decide the next steps – it is also up to those of us who support this political revolution as much today as we did yesterday and not nearly as much as we will tomorrow.

It’s not Bernie or bust. His campaign has been about us – all of us.  It’s about justice through revolution.  While Bernie adds the term “political” to his pitch, what we don’t talk about enough is the growing unrest among those with nothing to lose – people like me who have tried to work within and through the political system only to be excluded and discounted – even by the best of "friends."

I watched Hillary’s speech because I wondered how I would feel.  And I can honestly say I felt less equal than I ever have in my life.  I heard the soaring words about history and watched the video packed with heroic women, yet I was not moved.  It felt so staged and so well-timed for prime time viewing that it felt phony to me.  I did not see myself at all. 

It isn’t as though I fall into the "I hate Hillary" camp, because I do not.  I don’t agree with her policies, and I far prefer Bernie’s.  What I was feeling was that old familiar sense of exclusion – Hillary is a very wealthy woman who cares little about people like me.  Her commitment to build an inclusive society fell flat with me because I know how far on the outside people like me are now and always will be unless there are fundamental changes like those envisioned by Bernie.  And I am not foolish.  I know my value or lack thereof within our society is mostly determined by my economic status even within very progressive circles. 

Reality is that most of us are outsiders to any of the campaigns at the presidential level.  Most of us do not have the money or power to be heard, and that’s what has driven millions to Bernie’s campaign and to the huge rallies.  Bernie’s political revolution embraces all of us, and it is not over unless we throw in the towel.  No matter what happens leading up to or during the DNC convention in Philadelphia, the revolution has been ignited, it is growing and the will of the people will not be denied.

Right now, large progressive groups that support Bernie are jockeying for position coming out of this campaign.  Many groups want Bernie’s fundraising list, his database and his direct endorsement of their brand.  And to a large degree, those with access to make their case will be those who have had the most money to invest in Bernie’s campaign or the most fundraising capacity over the past several months.  Even for this Democratic Socialist candidate, money talks.  I like to think Bernie thinks about the broader movement and that he will not play the same money and power games that seem to be the bedrock of our political system, but there is almost no way he can avoid doing so.  Some groups have anointed themselves as the new revolutionary leaders while others have been completely left out.  It is difficult for justice to prevail when money is used as the measure of commitment to this sort of political revolution.

There is a good chance at the People’s Summit in Chicago next weekend we will find among the other thousands of political revolutionaries gathered together a common commitment to advancing this movement toward justice. But that chance will only become reality if enough voices and enough groups attend and participate fully. 

Can we actually achieve a more just America as one of the outcomes of this political revolution? Yes. I believe we can. No other candidate has spoken favorably about improved Medicare for all. For me, that is unacceptable. It would have helped my trust levels immensely if the DNC had accepted my former boss and labor leader, RoseAnn DeMoro as one of Bernie’s choices for the platform committee. DeMoro is a warrior for single-payer and workers’ rights, and if she wasn’t right for the platform committee, then I am gravely concerned about the course ahead. Shame on the DNC. 

And if no candidate other than Bernie and no Party steps up to address the injustice, the people are becoming angry enough and disillusioned enough to make actual revolution – difficult, dangerous, unpredictable and perhaps even violent revolution – more probable in our future. Before anyone accuses me of favoring that path, I am not alone in my view. John F. Kennedy once said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

It seems that the DNC expects that everyone will fall in line behind Hillary without having real assurances that the pain and struggle and injustice of our economic policy will be addressed forcefully. It is not enough for Hillary to give broad, calming "I feel your pain" statements like her husband used so frequently during his presidency.  We are not fooled by that.  

Injustice in the health care system makes me mad.  Really mad.  I may die before improved 'Medicare for All' becomes the law of the land, but I will be damned if I will give up trying to achieve what I know to be a more just system.  I need to hear how healthcare justice will be achieved – and I will fight on.  So far, Hillary has assured me we will "never, ever" have single-payer, and I cannot see how we achieve any real healthcare justice without 'Medicare for All.'  Others who are engaged with other issues feel that same intensity around their causes. 

While no candidate can solve all injustice, any candidate who dismisses the energy, the passion and the resolve that has formed around Bernie’s clear articulation of the major issues risks not only losing an election but also pushing the nation towards unimaginable strife and struggle.  It’s not Bernie or bust – it’s justice or bust.  The Party or candidate that embraces that fact and puts forward real plans to achieve a more just society holds the only real balm for the anger that threatens us all. 

(Donna Smith is the executive director of Progressive Democrats of America.  PDA's mission is to strengthen the voice of progressive ideas inside and outside the Democratic Party by using "inside/outside" and "grassroots fusion" models of working both in the Democratic Party as well as working with other progressive organizations both inside and outside the Party. This piece was posted most recently at Common Dreams.) 

-cw

URBAN PERSPECTIVE--The Greatest is gone. And when I heard that my mind instantly raced back to 1968. Muhammad Ali by then had become America's official and biggest pariah. His conversion to the Nation of Islam, his one-time friendship with Malcolm X, his outspoken black preachments, all capped by his refusal to be inducted and his outspoken stance against the Vietnam War, made him a marked man. A federal grand jury in Houston quickly indicted him, and an all-white jury convicted him. 

He was slapped with the maximum punishment of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. His passport was revoked. The FBI stepped up its effort to ruin him. In one of its many wiretaps on Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967, it noted that Ali had proposed to donate the proceeds from a boxing match to King's organization. But the match could not be held, since every state boxing commission in the country had, by then, revoked Ali's license. 

Still, the FBI was alert for any hint that Ali might try to dodge legal restrictions on him to earn money in the ring. J. Edgar Hoover, the notorious head of the FBI at the time, assigned agents to watch and record everything that Ali said whenever he appeared on Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show." FBI agents also distributed "anti-violent statements" to counter what the bureau called "the anti-Vietnam stand of Cassius Clay." The FBI's spy-and-intimidation operation against Ali was finally exposed in legal documents in his draft case in 1970. 

By then Ali had embarked on the speaking circuit talking to anti-war and student groups on various campuses. One of his stops was at California State University ... my alma mater. Ali arrived on campus followed by a small swarm of FBI agents. Wherever Ali went, FBI agents tracked his every move.  This didn’t matter to me. In fact, it added to his allure. 

I, and a small entourage of Black Student Union members, met him in the parking lot to serve as his “official” escorts to the auditorium. Ali was the paragon of cheer and graciousness, and was as always playful. He shook everyone’s hand and engaged in light hearted banter with the students. In his talk, he stuck to his stock themes, leading a chant, “No Vietcong ever called me a nigger,” punctuated by digs at the Johnson administration and his denunciation of racial oppression. During his speech, the FBI took notes and snapped pictures of those in the crowd. 

However, what really brought the house down, was his shout to the standing room only crowd that despite everything the government did to him, he still was the biggest, baddest and prettiest, and yes the greatest. As he departed to loud cheers and shouts of encouragement, I, and a few others, thrust our draft cards in front of him, and he eagerly signed mine and the others. To this day his signature on my draft card is one of my most precious and endearing keepsakes. 

In the next two decades, the unthinkable happened. Ali was no longer America’s fallen and disgraced boxing champion, he was now officially rehabilitated, even exulted, as an American global ambassador of sport and even of political goodwill. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terror attack, a Hollywood group loosely known as Hollywood 9/11 that worked with the Bush administration to support the war on terrorism promoted happy images of American life to film audiences in Africa and the Middle East. And who did they choose to be their star pitchman, you guessed it, Ali. 

During the next decade, the honors continued to flow to him. Presidents, heads of state, and foreign dignitaries, all hailed him as an authentic American hero and icon. But Ali’s struggle with Parkinson’s Disease had clearly taken its toll. Yet the rare times he appeared in public, I noted that he still had that same ingratiating smile he greeted me with those years earlier. And he would snap out an occasional playful jab to swooning and adoring admirers.  

Despite everything, Ali was and would always be mine and the world’s “peoples champ” and yes, the greatest.

(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is President of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable and an occasional contributor to CityWatch. For more Hutchinson insight.) 

-cw

TRADE WINDS--You have to give them credit: many journalists are confessing that they really blew it in the first act of this presidential election season. But most of their mea culpas are off point, apologies for the wrong mistake.

The media is collectively beating itself up for a series of poor predictions—dismissing the Trump candidacy, calling for an early Clinton coronation, anticipating a contested GOP convention—instead of beating itself up for a deeper pathology: its compulsive haste to predict everything in the first place.

Serious people, and even professors of journalism, have long harrumphed about how polls and “the horse race” dominate election coverage, at the expense of eat-your-broccoli-type substantive reporting of candidate policy proposals. Nothing new there. What is new is the extent to which the media’s obsession with predicting electoral outcomes in advance has seeped into, and practically taken over, the candidates’ own discourse on the campaign trail. 

It’s as if sideline analysis has become the game itself. 

Trump is the caricature extreme of this trend, giving campaign speeches that consist largely of spinning poll numbers, critiquing the media coverage of the campaign (which the media can then critique, for Trump to then critique back, in a never-ending to-and-fro Wimbledon rally) [and throwing the occasional verbal Molotov cocktail a minority group’s way.] 

But Trump is not alone. To an extent that would have been unimaginable not long ago, all candidates this election cycle have spent a fair amount of time discussing polls (selectively, of course) as the ultimate qualification for the highest office in the land. Even when candidates may not have wanted to engage in such horse race spinning, they were often forced to do so by poll-centric questions from the media—“Why are you running given such low poll numbers?” 

This was the tenor of the campaign and its coverage even before the first votes were cast in Iowa. Such is the anti-democratic hubris of media elites: Why wait to let people make their choice on election day when we smart media folks can tell you the results in advance, and tell you why you and your neighbors voted the way you did? 

The media, political operatives, and news junkies in this age of perpetual chatter and connectivity via 24/7 cable and social media feel compelled to show they’re in the know not just by explaining what’s transpired—but by being able to forecast with certitude what comes next. And so the media and news consumers who want to seem in the know fetishize certain superstar pollsters and data geeks, and congratulate themselves on the amount of data available to make foolproof predictions. 

To an extent that would have been unimaginable not long ago, all candidates this election cycle have spent a fair amount of time discussing polls (selectively, of course) as the ultimate qualification for the highest office in the land. 

Again, it’s all anti-democratic, we-know-best hubris. The media’s reliance on ever more complex predictive models advance what psychologists call the illusion of control. If there’s anything we can’t seem to tolerate in the 21st century, it’s uncertainty. And also surprises, which is why we’re seeing the outpouring of earnest if overwrought mea culpas from the media. 

These apologies are more disturbing than the mistaken predictions. The apologizers in the media genuinely seem to think their inability to predict this primary season accurately was a blow to the republic—as opposed to their insistence on allowing their prediction addiction to drive, and distort, most election coverage. 

Society’s intolerance of uncertainty (the media are playing to its audience, after all) and our mania for perfecting forecasting expands well beyond political reporting and analysis. Meteorology, the science we first think of when we think of “forecasting,” is a pursuit where less uncertainty is a societal good. You want to warn people to take an umbrella along on their commute, or abandon the coastline if an epic hurricane is heading their way. Blown climate predictions do deserve mea culpas and post-mortems—and there’s no positive interest in waiting to see where the hurricane will land, and withholding judgment. 

The financial world, on the other hand, is an arena long ago perverted by data-driven forecasting. When you invest your savings in a publicly traded company these days, you’re not making a bet on how that company will perform objectively in the long run. You are betting on how its performance in a succession of quarterly short-terms will compare with the forecasts drawn up by Wall Street analysts. It’s not enough to await a company’s results; what matters is how those results conform, or don’t, to the earnings estimates (or “expectations”) imposed on it by outside data crunchers. For instance, in April, Wall Street threw a collective hissy fit when Apple “missed” expectations set by outside forecasters by reporting $50.56 billion instead of $51.97 billion in quarterly revenue. The company’s stock was whacked as a result, taken down 8 percent in a day. 

Having a lot of brainpower attempting to predict what lies around the corner for a company, an industry, or the economy as a whole is not an inherently bad thing. It’s desirable, even, up until the point when forecasting becomes so important that its failures need to be treated like a disaster. For companies trading on the stock market, the tyranny of managing a business to meet the quarterly earnings expectations of outside forecasters end up stifling innovation and risk-taking. It’s the financial equivalent of campaigning on your poll numbers instead of setting your own agenda. 

Perhaps the world of political analysis should look to the world of sports for a healthier model of how to blend forecasting with substantive analysis, without allowing the former to overwhelm the latter. Sports journalists and fans alike love making predictions, and devote a great deal of airtime and print (not to mention fantasy league energy) to picking scores and predicting individual performances. But, maybe because it’s still a game in the end, there is more allowance made for the notion that ironclad certitude is elusive, undesirable even. Studio broadcast analysts keep track of the accuracy of their predictions and good-naturedly compete and tease each other over them. But failed predictions don’t trigger weighty mea culpas about how media let society down. 

The longest shot ever recorded by oddsmakers happened in the world of soccer last month, when tiny, impoverished and perennially struggling FC Leicester won the English Premier League, despite 5,000-to-1 odds. The story was a feel-good global phenomenon. The political media-operative complex should take note. Smart analysis can help explain how Leicester pulled off its championship, without having predicted it in advance. Some uncertainty is inevitable in life, at least until the games are played, and the votes are cast. And that’s OK.

(Andrés Martinez writes the Trade Winds column for Zócalo Public Square, where he is editorial director. He is also professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University and a fellow at New America.) Photo: Gage Skidmore. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EDITOR’S PICK--Legal marijuana is a big deal and it’s only getting bigger. It’s already a billion dollar-plus industry in the medical marijuana and legal states, and with California and a handful of other states poised to go legal in November, it’s only going to get bigger. 

With growing legality comes growing acceptance. Marijuana is insinuating itself deep within popular culture, and more and more people are getting interested. Pot use is on the increase among adults, especially seniors. In fact, it seems to be gaining popularity with just about everybody—except kids.

Some folks have been pot people for decades. They’ve been smoking it, growing it, selling it, agitating for its legalization. They have an intimate understanding of the plant and the issues around it. Still, there are many, many more people who are not cannabis aficionados, but are becoming curious about marijuana or the pot business. 

Will marijuana ease my aches and pains? If I start smoking pot, won’t I get addicted? How do you grow the stuff? Can I make a million bucks growing weed? How do I start a pot business? 

Chris Conrad and Jeremy Daw are well-positioned to provide some answers.  Conrad has been around pot since forever—he’s a certified expert witness on marijuana cultivation, he curated the Amsterdam Hemp Museum back in the 1980s, he formed the Business Alliance for Cannabis Hemp in the 1980s, too, and he’s been politically active in California (and national) pot politics the whole time—and Daw is the up-and-coming publisher of The Leaf Online. 

With The Newbie’s Guide to Cannabis and the Industry, the pair of pot pros provides a compendium of marijuana-related information sure to be invaluable to interested novices and likely to hold some hidden treasures for even the most grizzled veteran of the weed wars. 

The guide begins with a quick but detailed look at cannabis botany before shifting gears from the natural sciences to the social ones with a thumbnail history of pot prohibition and the last half-century’s increasingly successful efforts to undo it. Conrad and Daw take up through political developments into this year, noting the spread of medical marijuana, with outright legalization now following in its footsteps. 

And they make one critically important point here (and repeatedly in the business sections of the book): Despite how swimmingly legalization may be going in Colorado and Washington and Alaska and Oregon, pot remains illegal under federal law. All it would take is a new administration hostile to marijuana in the White House and a new memo from the Justice Department to bring the entire edifice crashing to the ground. 

That’s certainly something for would be ganjapreneurs to ponder, but it should also behoove the rest of us to remember that the job of freeing the weed remains unfinished business. As long as federal marijuana prohibition remains on the books, the prospect of a reefer rollback remains. Admittedly, the prospect seems unlikely: We are pretty far down the path of acceptance in the early legalizing states, and any return to harsh federal enforcement could have the paradoxical result of criminalizing or at least paralyzing state-level taxation and regulation while leaving pot legal, untaxed, and unregulated at the state level—because while the federal government could try to block the states from acting to tax or regulate pot, it can’t force them to make it illegal again. It could attempt to enforce federal prohibition, but it doesn’t have enough DEA agents to effectively do that. Still, imagine what an Attorney General Christie or Cruz might try to do. 

Conrad and Daw also delve more deeply into the botany of marijuana, addressing questions that will face consumers—edibles or smokables? Indica or sativa? High THC or high CBD?—as well as drilling down into the precise roles played by cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids (oh, my!) in creating marijuana highs, tastes, smells, and colors. 

It’s worth taking a moment to note the high production values of The Newbie’s Guide. The book has an illustrated cover (not dust jacket) and is filled with hundreds of color photographs of the plant, its users, marijuana production and sales, and more. It’s also printed on glossy, high-quality paper stock. This thing isn’t going to turn yellow in a few years. 

Conrad and Daw devote a large chunk of the book to getting in the pot business or, more accurately, what people need to be thinking about if they’re thinking about getting into the pot business. They accurately lay out the obstacles—legal, political, financial—awaiting anyone hoping to navigate the nascent industry, and they explore the manifold opportunities within the industry. 

As they make clear, there’s more to the pot business than growing and selling weed (although they certainly devote ample material to covering those basics) and there are employment and business opportunities far beyond growing, trimming, or budtending. Marijuana is spinning off all sorts of ancillary businesses, from edibles and cannabis oil manufacture to advertising and public relations to paraphernalia production to business services and beyond. 

The Newbie’s Guide is a most excellent handbook for marijuana consumers and potential consumers. It should also be required reading for anyone who is thinking about making a career in the industry. There is money to be lost as well as money to be made, and Conrad and Daw could well help stop you from throwing good money down a rat hole. 

Perhaps as important, they demand that people wanting to get into the business do a thorough self-examination. Just why, exactly, do you want in? What is it you seek? Honest answers to those questions will help people make the right choices for themselves. If you’re seriously thinking about using marijuana or getting into the business, you should read this book.

(Phillip Smith writes for AlterNet. This piece was posted most recently at TruthDig.) 

-cw