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solarbirdThese are all short today. I've been swamped doing other things, and honestly, that's better for my health, but this is necessary. Here's what I've managed to wedge in.
----- 1 -----
Kathryn Tewson
twitter.com/KathrynTewson
14 June 2020
https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1272412945469718529
They are masked, and marching silently, to help limit the potential to spread coronavirus. This is chilling and powerful.
[QUOTED TWEET]
MC HAMMER
twitter.com/MCHammer
June 12, 2020
https://twitter.com/MCHammer/status/1271612196091359237
#blmSeattle in the rain .. thousands !!!
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK]
----- 2 -----
Exclusive: Trump aims to sidestep another arms pact to sell more U.S. drones
Mike Stone
12 June 2020
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-arms-trump-exclusive-idUSKBN23J1HS
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration plans to reinterpret a Cold War-era arms agreement between 34 nations with the goal of allowing U.S. defense contractors to sell more American-made drones to a wide array of nations, three defense industry executives and a U.S. official told Reuters.
The policy change, which has not been previously reported, could open up sales of armed U.S. drones to less stable governments such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates that in the past have been forbidden from buying them under the 33-year-old Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), said the U.S. official, a former U.S. official and one of the executives. It could also undermine longstanding MTCR compliance from countries such as Russia, said the U.S. official, who has direct knowledge of the policy shift.
Reinterpreting the MTCR is part of a broader Trump administration effort to sell more weapons overseas. It has overhauled here a broad range of arms export regulations and removed the U.S. from international arms treaties including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty.
Sidestepping the accord would allow U.S. defense contractors General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc and Northrop Grumman Corp to break into new markets currently dominated by less sophisticated offerings from China and Israel, which do not participate in the MTCR.
----- 3 -----
It's not so hard to imagine a life without police
Like many white Americans, I grew up unencumbered by the punitive presence of law enforcement. Black Americans deserve this, too.
by Mason Bryan
June 15, 2020
https://crosscut.com/2020/06/its-not-so-hard-imagine-life-without-police
The American uprising against police has forced the once politically unthinkable question: What would society be like if we abolished, or profoundly diminished, the police presence in communities?
Scholars, writers and activists have long considered this possibility. Many, including Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis and Alex S. Vitale, have developed sophisticated theories about a life without both police and prisons, two institutions joined in a symbiotic relationship. But never in mainstream political debate has such a radical diminishment of police emerged as an achievable reality. Never, it seems, until now, in the final year of Donald Trump’s chaotic first term, when cities across the country are actively considering significant cuts to police department budgets and, in the case of Minneapolis, already working on dismantling its municipal police force.
Surely I am not alone in having felt disoriented by the force and velocity of this shift in the discourse around policing. A life without police? What about the murderers and rapists and other violent criminals? Forget possible, is a world without police even desirable?
Until very recently, most white Americans shared a conception of police as brave and responsive, a benevolent government agency called to violence only when absolutely necessary. Many Black Americans, on the other hand, have never shared such a conception. The recent killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have certainly helped to dissolve the illusion that police treat Black Americans with the same respect and professionalism with which they treat white Americans. (One of the men charged in the killing of Arbery was a former police detective.) The fact that so many Black parents feel they must impart to their children, in a kind of rite of passage, practical advice for dealing with or avoiding encounters with cops suggests a deep and agonizing distrust. That white people in general have long chosen to ignore this reality helps explain why the call for police abolition feels so disorienting.
These fresh realizations are also a result, I think, of how police have responded to the nation’s anti-racist uprising. All over the country, police have perpetrated acts of violence against peaceful demonstrators and journalists that have been tweeted, livestreamed and reported in a public procession of horrors. Police allegedly maced a child in Seattle. Two New York Police Department SUVs surged into demonstrators in Brooklyn. Protesters and journalists in Long Beach, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere have been shot in the face with rubber bullets. In Buffalo, police pushed a 75-year-old man to the ground, causing his head to collide with concrete; a widely shared video showed blood pouring from his ear as officers heeded orders to continue marching, despite having badly injured a civilian.
----- 4 -----
Jared Yates Sexton
twitter.com/JYSexton
June 11, 2020
https://twitter.com/jysexton/status/1271098397483847680?s=21
[THREAD]
All right.
Let's talk about how the Confederacy survived the Civil War, was absorbed into our culture, laws, and politics, and remains an everpresent threat we must destroy.
I didn't know any of this until I started researching American Rule.
[NEXT]
First things first, the Confederacy is hardly dealt with in our history or curricula. There's a reason the Civil War is reduced to a history of battles and military maneuvers.
To look any deeper would mean an actual reckoning with white supremacy and power in America.
[NEXT]
The truth is that the Confederacy considered itself the true ancestor of America and that the North had betrayed America's founding and purpose as a white supremacist state.
It wasn't a different country. It was America interpreted as a white supremacist nation.
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
----- 5 -----
Jamie Ford
twitter.com/JamieFord
14 June 2020
https://twitter.com/JamieFord/status/1272273637173637120
[THREAD]
Defund the police? Here's an example that you're benefiting from right now. 1/9
[EMBEDDED IMAGE of early an EMT team, the Freedom House Ambulance Services]
[NEXT]
Until the 70s, ambulance services were generally run by local police and fire departments. There was no law requiring medical training beyond basic first-aid and in many cases the assignment of ambulance duty was used as a form of punishment. 2/9
[NEXT]
As you can imagine, throwing people with medical emergencies into the back of a paddy wagon produced less than spectacular health outcomes. Now imagine how much worse it became when disgruntled white police officers were demoted to ambulance duty in black neighborhoods. 3/9
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
----- 6 -----
WANaziWatch
wanaziwatch
1 February 2020
https://twitter.com/WANaziWatch/status/1223829371565133824
[EDITOR: YES THIS IS OLD - put here for archiving/findability]
A group of 4 Seattle Proud Boys came out to support trans hate group Wolf tonight.
[EMBEDDED IMAGES: KNOWN PROUD BOYS AT PROTEST]
----- 7 -----
Abolish Oil
From Green New Deal to Green Reconstruction
Reinhold Martin
June 2020
https://placesjournal.org/article/abolish-oil/
[EDITOR: I haven't even read all this yet, it just starts interestingly]
The object of nervous condescension from neoliberals and red-baiting derision from authoritarians, the Green New Deal has prompted an extraordinary spate of activist organizing and planning among progressives, social democrats, and democratic socialists in the United States. Meanwhile the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn acute attention to enduring social injustice, of which the barbaric police killing of George Floyd is the latest instance to highlight deep-rooted connections between structural racism, state violence, and disinvestment. Across the country, decades of environmental racism have left black and brown communities overexposed to the multifarious threats of climate change, as the climate clock ticks on. Recall that among the triggers of the stock market turmoil at the pandemic’s outset was an oil price war. Attempts have been made to use the crisis to rescue the troubled US oil and gas industry, while relief legislation has remained mostly indifferent to proposals for “green” stimulus spending. 1 Fundamentally, however, nothing less than full-scale reconstruction — rather than restoration — can redress the massive social and economic inequities that the double-sided crisis has revealed while also reversing course on climate change.
Drawing on longstanding political traditions, I suggest that, to be truly transformative, a Green New Deal must take an abolitionist stance regarding “oil” and what we might call the Carbon Empire — a regime under which countless lives have been sacrificed to war, racialized colonial violence, and paramilitary conflict, and countless others are now threatened by climate change. In the expanded sense in which I use the word, “oil” names a system of production that begins upstream from the landscapes, cities, towns, buildings, and products that occupy the attention of most climate-change-mitigation strategies. Where these strategies typically deemphasize collective action in favor of technocratic or consumerist “solutions,” oil abolition implies social transformation — systemic change that turns away from the devil’s bargain between “green” austerity and corporate profit, and toward collective freedom. To reverse the dispossession by which the Carbon Empire governs, we must therefore enlarge the historical frame to include not only the expansive reforms of the New Deal, but also the unfinished project of Reconstruction. Oil abolition is, in short, a program of decarbonization as democratization.
Green New Deal and New Deal
Abolition of the oil-and-gas system goes unmentioned in the principal formulation of the Green New Deal, U.S. House Resolution (HR) 109, no doubt because its authors recognize that system’s ruling power. Nevertheless, evocation of New Deal reforms in the resolution testifies to a radical realism, where renewed historical consciousness is a precondition for the deeper and more sweeping change outlined by GND advocates.
The Green New Deal points in its very name to a “usable past” for today’s climate politics. HR 109 centers on a call for the United States “to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers” by 2050. 3 This implies policies on a scale well beyond even that of the New Deal, a heterogeneous suite of legislation and executive actions put in place under the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, principally from 1933 to 1936, during the Great Depression. The New Deal’s second phase (1935-1936) was especially ambitious. In an environment of heightened labor activism, which increased pressure on the Roosevelt administration and on Congress to enact progressive legislation, this period saw passage of the National Labor Relations Act, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Social Security Act, all designed to regulate capital and redistribute material and social goods. Today, these and other New Deal programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, are rightly cited by Green New Dealers as evidence of government’s ability to address societal crisis.
Yet I want to consider a different set of New Deal initiatives, linked more directly to energy: The National Industrial Recovery Act and the Tennessee Valley Authority, both dating from 1933. The NIRA regulated industrial competition (including the petroleum industry), protected labor unions, and established the Public Works Administration; the TVA created thousands of construction jobs and provided publicly subsidized electricity to thousands of households. At the same time, the TVA in particular depended upon a racially coded regionalism that, when reconnected to the postwar oil economy, naturalized white, suburban homeownership as a racial “wage,” or primordial entitlement. That is, New Deal regionalism defined what qualified as “American,” while oil nourished a middle-class, property-based “Dream.”
----- 8 -----
Trump administration blocks tribes from protecting their waters
By Jim Murphy, opinion contributor — 06/15/20
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/502745-trump-administration-blocks-tribes-from-protecting-their-waters
In the midst of a pandemic and unrest that are exposing the public health and racial injustices in our society, the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on long-standing, bipartisan bedrock public health and environmental safeguards marches on.
The latest move involves a new rule that ties the hands of states and tribes wishing to protect their waters from projects like pipelines, dams and coal terminals that go through the federal permitting or licensing process.
This rule was spurred by industry ill will over states blocking a few major fossil fuel infrastructure projects, such as New York state’s denial of gas pipeline projects over water quality concerns and the Millennium Bulk Coal terminal in Washington that threatened salmon habitat. It is no surprise that the administration has no problem limiting states’ rights if it would benefit the oil and gas industry. This rule elevates industry interests above state and tribal rights to safeguard their waters and the health of their people.
The new rule specifically weakens Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, which gives states and tribes the authority to review and potentially block or place conditions on federally permitted projects that could harm water quality from impacts like oil spills, nutrient pollution that can contaminate drinking water, loss of adequate flow for wildlife or habitat destruction or disturbance.
The new rule undermines states and tribes authorities to protect their waters in the several key ways.
----- 9 -----
Federal Executions Set To Resume After Nearly 2-Decade Hiatus
June 15, 2020
Matthew S. Schwartz
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/877748845/federal-executions-set-to-resume-after-nearly-two-decade-hiatus
After nearly two decades, the federal government will once again begin executing criminals, the Justice Department announced Monday. Four inmates convicted of murdering children are set to be put to death by lethal injection.
"The four murderers whose executions are scheduled today have received full and fair proceedings under our Constitution and laws," said Attorney General William Barr in a statement. "We owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system."
The crimes were grisly. Daniel Lewis Lee murdered a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl. He's been on death row since 1999; his execution is scheduled for July 13. Wesley Ira Purkey, who raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl, will be put to death on July 15. Dustin Lee Honken, who shot and killed five people, will be executed July 17. Keith Dwayne Nelson, who kidnapped, raped and strangled a 10-year-old girl to death with a wire, will be executed Aug. 28.
Federal executions have been exceedingly rare in recent decades. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, only three have taken place since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988. All of those executions were carried out during the George W. Bush administration. One of those was Timothy McVeigh, sentenced to death for bombing the Oklahoma City federal building.
In 2014, President Barack Obama ordered a review of how the death penalty is applied in the U.S. after a bungled state execution in Oklahoma in which medical officials had difficulty inserting the IV. It ultimately took more than an hour for the prisoner to die.
Last July, the Trump administration announced that the review was complete, and executions could resume. After a series of legal challenges that delayed the executions, a federal appeals court gave Barr the go-ahead in April.
----- 10 -----
Staff at JK Rowling’s publishing house are refusing to work on her new children’s book over her relentless anti-trans tirade
Vic Parsons
16 June 2020
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/06/16/jk-rowling-publisher-hachette-trans-transgender-terf-wars-ickabog/
JK Rowling’s anti-trans views have reportedly prompted staff at publishing house Hachette to threaten to stop working on the production of her children’s book, The Ickabog.
Hachette is apparently facing an “internal war” after those who disagree with Rowling’s position on trans rights “staged a rebellion” during a meeting, the Daily Mail reports.
A source told the Mail: “Staff in the children’s department at Hachette announced they were no longer prepared to work on the book.
“They said they were opposed to her comments and wanted to show support for the trans lobby.”
Another source added: “It was a handful of staff, and they are entitled to their views.
----- 11 -----
Katy Montgomerie
twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie
16 June 2020
https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1272826517899350016
Here is my article addressing the claims in twitter.com/jk_rowling's piece on trans people
There was A LOT of falsehoods and general pieces of misinformation, so it is long
I'll also publish each section one at a time in the coming days so it's more digestible
[LINKS TO:
Addressing The Claims In JK Rowling’s Justification For Transphobia
Katy Montgomerie
Jun 16, 2020
https://medium.com/@completelykaty/addressing-the-claims-in-jk-rowlings-justification-for-transphobia-7b6f761e8f8f?sk=61f635ad34ff7674b28f07a842bcccc7
Recently JK Rowling, author of Harry Potter, tweeted some transphobic statements and dogwhistles on Twitter that I have addressed here. After a few days silence she wrote a lengthy post trying to justify her position on her website. Here I will address the main claims and explain why they are either false or at best half true.
As is the problem with all misinformation, it’s easier and quicker to spread than it is to refute. JKR’s original post was long and it contained so many falsehoods it is very tricky to address concisely, therefore this article is very long. Please do your own research and don’t blindly trust either me or JKR, however all my sources are linked throughout.
]
- They are masked, and marching silently, to help limit the potential to spread coronavirus. This is chilling and powerful.
- Exclusive: Trump aims to sidestep another arms pact to sell more U.S. drones
- It's not so hard to imagine a life without police
- Let's talk about how the Confederacy survived the Civil War
- How modern ambulances came from defunding the police
- A group of 4 Seattle Proud Boys came out to support trans hate group Wolf
- Abolish Oil
- Trump administration blocks tribes from protecting their waters
- Federal Executions Set To Resume After Nearly 2-Decade Hiatus
- Staff at JK Rowling’s publishing house are refusing to work on her new children’s book over her relentless anti-trans tirade
- Katy Montgomerie fact-checking response to J.K. Rowling's long anti-trans article
----- 1 -----
Kathryn Tewson
twitter.com/KathrynTewson
14 June 2020
https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1272412945469718529
They are masked, and marching silently, to help limit the potential to spread coronavirus. This is chilling and powerful.
[QUOTED TWEET]
MC HAMMER
twitter.com/MCHammer
June 12, 2020
https://twitter.com/MCHammer/status/1271612196091359237
#blmSeattle in the rain .. thousands !!!
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK]
----- 2 -----
Exclusive: Trump aims to sidestep another arms pact to sell more U.S. drones
Mike Stone
12 June 2020
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-arms-trump-exclusive-idUSKBN23J1HS
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration plans to reinterpret a Cold War-era arms agreement between 34 nations with the goal of allowing U.S. defense contractors to sell more American-made drones to a wide array of nations, three defense industry executives and a U.S. official told Reuters.
The policy change, which has not been previously reported, could open up sales of armed U.S. drones to less stable governments such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates that in the past have been forbidden from buying them under the 33-year-old Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), said the U.S. official, a former U.S. official and one of the executives. It could also undermine longstanding MTCR compliance from countries such as Russia, said the U.S. official, who has direct knowledge of the policy shift.
Reinterpreting the MTCR is part of a broader Trump administration effort to sell more weapons overseas. It has overhauled here a broad range of arms export regulations and removed the U.S. from international arms treaties including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty.
Sidestepping the accord would allow U.S. defense contractors General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc and Northrop Grumman Corp to break into new markets currently dominated by less sophisticated offerings from China and Israel, which do not participate in the MTCR.
----- 3 -----
It's not so hard to imagine a life without police
Like many white Americans, I grew up unencumbered by the punitive presence of law enforcement. Black Americans deserve this, too.
by Mason Bryan
June 15, 2020
https://crosscut.com/2020/06/its-not-so-hard-imagine-life-without-police
The American uprising against police has forced the once politically unthinkable question: What would society be like if we abolished, or profoundly diminished, the police presence in communities?
Scholars, writers and activists have long considered this possibility. Many, including Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis and Alex S. Vitale, have developed sophisticated theories about a life without both police and prisons, two institutions joined in a symbiotic relationship. But never in mainstream political debate has such a radical diminishment of police emerged as an achievable reality. Never, it seems, until now, in the final year of Donald Trump’s chaotic first term, when cities across the country are actively considering significant cuts to police department budgets and, in the case of Minneapolis, already working on dismantling its municipal police force.
Surely I am not alone in having felt disoriented by the force and velocity of this shift in the discourse around policing. A life without police? What about the murderers and rapists and other violent criminals? Forget possible, is a world without police even desirable?
Until very recently, most white Americans shared a conception of police as brave and responsive, a benevolent government agency called to violence only when absolutely necessary. Many Black Americans, on the other hand, have never shared such a conception. The recent killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have certainly helped to dissolve the illusion that police treat Black Americans with the same respect and professionalism with which they treat white Americans. (One of the men charged in the killing of Arbery was a former police detective.) The fact that so many Black parents feel they must impart to their children, in a kind of rite of passage, practical advice for dealing with or avoiding encounters with cops suggests a deep and agonizing distrust. That white people in general have long chosen to ignore this reality helps explain why the call for police abolition feels so disorienting.
These fresh realizations are also a result, I think, of how police have responded to the nation’s anti-racist uprising. All over the country, police have perpetrated acts of violence against peaceful demonstrators and journalists that have been tweeted, livestreamed and reported in a public procession of horrors. Police allegedly maced a child in Seattle. Two New York Police Department SUVs surged into demonstrators in Brooklyn. Protesters and journalists in Long Beach, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere have been shot in the face with rubber bullets. In Buffalo, police pushed a 75-year-old man to the ground, causing his head to collide with concrete; a widely shared video showed blood pouring from his ear as officers heeded orders to continue marching, despite having badly injured a civilian.
----- 4 -----
Jared Yates Sexton
twitter.com/JYSexton
June 11, 2020
https://twitter.com/jysexton/status/1271098397483847680?s=21
[THREAD]
All right.
Let's talk about how the Confederacy survived the Civil War, was absorbed into our culture, laws, and politics, and remains an everpresent threat we must destroy.
I didn't know any of this until I started researching American Rule.
[NEXT]
First things first, the Confederacy is hardly dealt with in our history or curricula. There's a reason the Civil War is reduced to a history of battles and military maneuvers.
To look any deeper would mean an actual reckoning with white supremacy and power in America.
[NEXT]
The truth is that the Confederacy considered itself the true ancestor of America and that the North had betrayed America's founding and purpose as a white supremacist state.
It wasn't a different country. It was America interpreted as a white supremacist nation.
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
----- 5 -----
Jamie Ford
twitter.com/JamieFord
14 June 2020
https://twitter.com/JamieFord/status/1272273637173637120
[THREAD]
Defund the police? Here's an example that you're benefiting from right now. 1/9
[EMBEDDED IMAGE of early an EMT team, the Freedom House Ambulance Services]
[NEXT]
Until the 70s, ambulance services were generally run by local police and fire departments. There was no law requiring medical training beyond basic first-aid and in many cases the assignment of ambulance duty was used as a form of punishment. 2/9
[NEXT]
As you can imagine, throwing people with medical emergencies into the back of a paddy wagon produced less than spectacular health outcomes. Now imagine how much worse it became when disgruntled white police officers were demoted to ambulance duty in black neighborhoods. 3/9
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
----- 6 -----
WANaziWatch
wanaziwatch1 February 2020
https://twitter.com/WANaziWatch/status/1223829371565133824
[EDITOR: YES THIS IS OLD - put here for archiving/findability]
A group of 4 Seattle Proud Boys came out to support trans hate group Wolf tonight.
[EMBEDDED IMAGES: KNOWN PROUD BOYS AT PROTEST]
----- 7 -----
Abolish Oil
From Green New Deal to Green Reconstruction
Reinhold Martin
June 2020
https://placesjournal.org/article/abolish-oil/
[EDITOR: I haven't even read all this yet, it just starts interestingly]
The object of nervous condescension from neoliberals and red-baiting derision from authoritarians, the Green New Deal has prompted an extraordinary spate of activist organizing and planning among progressives, social democrats, and democratic socialists in the United States. Meanwhile the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn acute attention to enduring social injustice, of which the barbaric police killing of George Floyd is the latest instance to highlight deep-rooted connections between structural racism, state violence, and disinvestment. Across the country, decades of environmental racism have left black and brown communities overexposed to the multifarious threats of climate change, as the climate clock ticks on. Recall that among the triggers of the stock market turmoil at the pandemic’s outset was an oil price war. Attempts have been made to use the crisis to rescue the troubled US oil and gas industry, while relief legislation has remained mostly indifferent to proposals for “green” stimulus spending. 1 Fundamentally, however, nothing less than full-scale reconstruction — rather than restoration — can redress the massive social and economic inequities that the double-sided crisis has revealed while also reversing course on climate change.
Drawing on longstanding political traditions, I suggest that, to be truly transformative, a Green New Deal must take an abolitionist stance regarding “oil” and what we might call the Carbon Empire — a regime under which countless lives have been sacrificed to war, racialized colonial violence, and paramilitary conflict, and countless others are now threatened by climate change. In the expanded sense in which I use the word, “oil” names a system of production that begins upstream from the landscapes, cities, towns, buildings, and products that occupy the attention of most climate-change-mitigation strategies. Where these strategies typically deemphasize collective action in favor of technocratic or consumerist “solutions,” oil abolition implies social transformation — systemic change that turns away from the devil’s bargain between “green” austerity and corporate profit, and toward collective freedom. To reverse the dispossession by which the Carbon Empire governs, we must therefore enlarge the historical frame to include not only the expansive reforms of the New Deal, but also the unfinished project of Reconstruction. Oil abolition is, in short, a program of decarbonization as democratization.
Green New Deal and New Deal
Abolition of the oil-and-gas system goes unmentioned in the principal formulation of the Green New Deal, U.S. House Resolution (HR) 109, no doubt because its authors recognize that system’s ruling power. Nevertheless, evocation of New Deal reforms in the resolution testifies to a radical realism, where renewed historical consciousness is a precondition for the deeper and more sweeping change outlined by GND advocates.
The Green New Deal points in its very name to a “usable past” for today’s climate politics. HR 109 centers on a call for the United States “to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers” by 2050. 3 This implies policies on a scale well beyond even that of the New Deal, a heterogeneous suite of legislation and executive actions put in place under the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, principally from 1933 to 1936, during the Great Depression. The New Deal’s second phase (1935-1936) was especially ambitious. In an environment of heightened labor activism, which increased pressure on the Roosevelt administration and on Congress to enact progressive legislation, this period saw passage of the National Labor Relations Act, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Social Security Act, all designed to regulate capital and redistribute material and social goods. Today, these and other New Deal programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, are rightly cited by Green New Dealers as evidence of government’s ability to address societal crisis.
Yet I want to consider a different set of New Deal initiatives, linked more directly to energy: The National Industrial Recovery Act and the Tennessee Valley Authority, both dating from 1933. The NIRA regulated industrial competition (including the petroleum industry), protected labor unions, and established the Public Works Administration; the TVA created thousands of construction jobs and provided publicly subsidized electricity to thousands of households. At the same time, the TVA in particular depended upon a racially coded regionalism that, when reconnected to the postwar oil economy, naturalized white, suburban homeownership as a racial “wage,” or primordial entitlement. That is, New Deal regionalism defined what qualified as “American,” while oil nourished a middle-class, property-based “Dream.”
----- 8 -----
Trump administration blocks tribes from protecting their waters
By Jim Murphy, opinion contributor — 06/15/20
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/502745-trump-administration-blocks-tribes-from-protecting-their-waters
In the midst of a pandemic and unrest that are exposing the public health and racial injustices in our society, the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on long-standing, bipartisan bedrock public health and environmental safeguards marches on.
The latest move involves a new rule that ties the hands of states and tribes wishing to protect their waters from projects like pipelines, dams and coal terminals that go through the federal permitting or licensing process.
This rule was spurred by industry ill will over states blocking a few major fossil fuel infrastructure projects, such as New York state’s denial of gas pipeline projects over water quality concerns and the Millennium Bulk Coal terminal in Washington that threatened salmon habitat. It is no surprise that the administration has no problem limiting states’ rights if it would benefit the oil and gas industry. This rule elevates industry interests above state and tribal rights to safeguard their waters and the health of their people.
The new rule specifically weakens Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, which gives states and tribes the authority to review and potentially block or place conditions on federally permitted projects that could harm water quality from impacts like oil spills, nutrient pollution that can contaminate drinking water, loss of adequate flow for wildlife or habitat destruction or disturbance.
The new rule undermines states and tribes authorities to protect their waters in the several key ways.
----- 9 -----
Federal Executions Set To Resume After Nearly 2-Decade Hiatus
June 15, 2020
Matthew S. Schwartz
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/877748845/federal-executions-set-to-resume-after-nearly-two-decade-hiatus
After nearly two decades, the federal government will once again begin executing criminals, the Justice Department announced Monday. Four inmates convicted of murdering children are set to be put to death by lethal injection.
"The four murderers whose executions are scheduled today have received full and fair proceedings under our Constitution and laws," said Attorney General William Barr in a statement. "We owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system."
The crimes were grisly. Daniel Lewis Lee murdered a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl. He's been on death row since 1999; his execution is scheduled for July 13. Wesley Ira Purkey, who raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl, will be put to death on July 15. Dustin Lee Honken, who shot and killed five people, will be executed July 17. Keith Dwayne Nelson, who kidnapped, raped and strangled a 10-year-old girl to death with a wire, will be executed Aug. 28.
Federal executions have been exceedingly rare in recent decades. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, only three have taken place since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988. All of those executions were carried out during the George W. Bush administration. One of those was Timothy McVeigh, sentenced to death for bombing the Oklahoma City federal building.
In 2014, President Barack Obama ordered a review of how the death penalty is applied in the U.S. after a bungled state execution in Oklahoma in which medical officials had difficulty inserting the IV. It ultimately took more than an hour for the prisoner to die.
Last July, the Trump administration announced that the review was complete, and executions could resume. After a series of legal challenges that delayed the executions, a federal appeals court gave Barr the go-ahead in April.
----- 10 -----
Staff at JK Rowling’s publishing house are refusing to work on her new children’s book over her relentless anti-trans tirade
Vic Parsons
16 June 2020
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/06/16/jk-rowling-publisher-hachette-trans-transgender-terf-wars-ickabog/
JK Rowling’s anti-trans views have reportedly prompted staff at publishing house Hachette to threaten to stop working on the production of her children’s book, The Ickabog.
Hachette is apparently facing an “internal war” after those who disagree with Rowling’s position on trans rights “staged a rebellion” during a meeting, the Daily Mail reports.
A source told the Mail: “Staff in the children’s department at Hachette announced they were no longer prepared to work on the book.
“They said they were opposed to her comments and wanted to show support for the trans lobby.”
Another source added: “It was a handful of staff, and they are entitled to their views.
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Katy Montgomerie
twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie
16 June 2020
https://twitter.com/KatyMontgomerie/status/1272826517899350016
Here is my article addressing the claims in twitter.com/jk_rowling's piece on trans people
There was A LOT of falsehoods and general pieces of misinformation, so it is long
I'll also publish each section one at a time in the coming days so it's more digestible
[LINKS TO:
Addressing The Claims In JK Rowling’s Justification For Transphobia
Katy Montgomerie
Jun 16, 2020
https://medium.com/@completelykaty/addressing-the-claims-in-jk-rowlings-justification-for-transphobia-7b6f761e8f8f?sk=61f635ad34ff7674b28f07a842bcccc7
Recently JK Rowling, author of Harry Potter, tweeted some transphobic statements and dogwhistles on Twitter that I have addressed here. After a few days silence she wrote a lengthy post trying to justify her position on her website. Here I will address the main claims and explain why they are either false or at best half true.
As is the problem with all misinformation, it’s easier and quicker to spread than it is to refute. JKR’s original post was long and it contained so many falsehoods it is very tricky to address concisely, therefore this article is very long. Please do your own research and don’t blindly trust either me or JKR, however all my sources are linked throughout.
]
