Category: Ethics in Government

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Publishing, Sexuality and Gender No Comments Tagged with , , , , ,

I am asking myself two questions in the wake of Tuesday’s election results.

1. Why did so many people stay home? Why, despite a bazillion new registrations, despite enormous enthusiasm at every public appearance, despite a roster of endorsements the like of which I’ve never seen before did 13 million fewer people vote for Harris then did for Biden 4 years ago?

2. And why did 72 million people vote for a convicted felon who tells thousands of demonstrable lies, who based his entire campaign on hatred, othering, retribution, and the promise of fascism, and who was increasingly incoherent, physically exhausted, and obviously mentally unstable as the campaign went on?

I have a ton of respect for journalists. I trained to be one. But under the rubric of “journalistic objectivity” and pressure from owners who are more interested in ratings than reality, they had a lot of constraints covering this election. And thus I think at least part of the answer lies in a third question: why did the mainstream media consistently have a double standard of coverage: refusing to hold Trump accountable as they were doing first with Biden and then with Harris?

First, they went after Biden, even before his disastrous debate with Trump. “Isn’t he too old?” “What about inflation?” I even remember a shockingly biased Washington Post newsletter with a graph comparing Biden’s age at the end of a second term to Trump’s age at the beginning of one. So suddenly the three and a half year age gap looked like seven and a half years. Wtf?

And then after the debate, enormous pressure for Biden to step down. I do think he had become compromised and stepping down was the right decision. It was pretty clear within a couple of weeks that the debate was not a one-off (as it had first appeared) but a pattern that was emerging more frequently. He wasn’t up to the job for another 4 years and to his credit, and unlike his opponent, he stepped away to make room for a younger generation.

But then came the attacks on his replacement. “Why won’t she meet with us?” “How come they aren’t going to run the primaries again?” “Why doesn’t she release policy statements?” “Does she have the gravitas to be president?”

That would have been fine if they were asking the same questions of Trump. Not only were they not pressuring him to go into details on policy, but they accepted his softball interviews in front of Trump-supporting audiences venues like Fox News as an adequate substitute for actual journalistic interviews.

More worrisome was the normalization of Trump as a legitimate candidate. Where were they when it was time to question Trump’s gravitas—or his competence? As Harris herself noted, he is “an unserious man” in a position to do serious damage. The cadre of media that was so quick to jump on every little stammer of Biden’s not only tried to paper over Trump’s increasingly incoherent and delusional speeches, even on several occasions translating the nonsense into what he might have said if he had been talking in comprehensible English. They also papered over the genuine threats to democracy in the vague policy outlines he did provide and the much more detailed proposals from the project 2025 blueprint. His lack of gravitas showed again as he lackadaisically attempted to disavow in the face of evidence that his fingerprints and those of people close to him were all over it. And Vance? Vance has so little gravitas after just two years in the Senate that he whined the one time in his debate that he was fact-checked—after making up completely false and very damaging lies about immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets, as he himself admitted later.

There wasn’t even much hand wringing when Trump skipped out on future debates after Harris wiped the floor with him in their sole formal pairing. And then he skipped out on promised interviews with real media, who acquiesced.

And there was surprisingly little examination of his character until just a few weeks before the election. Where was the focus on his 34 criminal convictions, his liability in civil court for raping and defaming, the other 60 or so criminal felony counts that didn’t get to go to trial and now probably never will, the literally tens of thousands of lies he told before, during, and since his term in office, his authoritarian tendencies, his blatant narcissism and personal cruelty, and his totally transactional view of the world in which everything has to be a way for him to make money, gain status or power, and/or build his personal brand or else he is not interested. That this sociopath was treated as a normal candidate will be a shame on the media for decades to come.

And then there is Fox! I used to be a free speech absolutist. But free speech absolutism only works when there is a common core of decency that everyone respects, some minimum standards for reporting. The filth that was spewed by their commentators, the disgusting and completely false advertisements they were airing, and the way they shielded their audience from any negative news about Trump should disqualify them from any legitimate role as press. This of course is not new and has been going on since it was founded—but it has now reached extremes and probably has a lot to do with why certain sectors of the population voted for Trump against their own interests.

I happened to be at a restaurant one night that was airing a baseball playoff on Fox. They showed one Trump commercial accusing Harris of immigration positions she has never taken and policies that did not exist. I happen to know a thing or two about immigration issues. It has been the focus of my activism since spring 2019. This ad was so blatantly false that it made me wonder why it is even legal to air it. After all, a candidate who is attacked has no way to respond. Those messages go out into the ether unchallenged, whether or not they’re based in fact. Only when the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated in the Reagan era did Fox become even possible. And maybe it’s time for real-time fact checking to be standard operating procedure for any political debate.

We don’t have room in this article to explore WHY this biased coverage happened. But unconscious OR conscious othering (ageism, racism, sexism, bias against physical disabilities such as Biden’s stutter) just might have been a factor, don’tcha think?

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Environment, Ethics in Government, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Sexuality and Gender, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

As I was waking up this morning at 5:47 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, the New York Times was calling the election for Donald Trump. And when I checked a few minutes later, I literally burst into tears. I am not much of a crier but I feel upset, betrayed, a stranger in my own country.

It is going to be the worst presidency in the history of our country. This lying, thieving, predatory thug is going to do his worst to reverse all our hard-fought progress. Expect devastating attacks on:

  • The environment and the movement to reverse catastrophic climate change
  • The rights of immigrants, LGBTQ folks, people with disabilities, people of color, people who do not identify as Christian
  • Women’s reproductive freedom, and potentially even women’s place in modern society
  • Independent media featuring honest reporting
  • Low-income wage workers
  • Labor unions
  • And of course, democracy and personal freedom

But we can’t give up!

We have 2 months to organize a nationwide nonviolent resistance movement. We have four years to do what we can to clog up the evil work this man will try to do. We have been here before, in the 1850s, in the 1960s, and in the 1980s, to name three. We have resisted and we have survived. Never underestimate our collective power but never take it for granted either. Some of us may find ourselves organizing from  prison or exile. But we can still organize.
Study and train in non-violent resistance. Follow people like Stephen Zunes, Erica Chenoweth, George Lakey, the long list of people who organized Standing Rock, the shrinking list of people who were active in the many-headed nonviolent revolution that brought us the civil rights, get out of Vietnam, modern feminist, and environmental movements, and whose (figurative as well as literal) children and grandchildren have been active in stopping carnage in Palestine and elsewhere. That is our future, that is our hope, and that is our call to action. We do not give up and we are not going back! Even if our government is.
You may thing that nonviolent resistance doesn’t work. But you would be mistaken. Nonviolent struggles are slow but they do work. Historicallty, they’ve worked better than violent revolutions. On multiple occasions, they’ve brought down govenments.
One lesson I take away from this is it proves that yes, the perfect is the enemy of the good. I am totally shocked that 15 million fewer people voted for Kamala Harris then for Biden 4 years ago. It was about people staying home or voting third-party. That is the only way I can understand the huge drop between Biden’s 81 million 4 years ago and Harris’s 66 million. That’s where the election went.
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By Posted on Posted in Branding, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Politics, propaganda, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , ,

Joe Biden has been taking a lot of heat for his response to the blatant racism at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden debacle. The claim is that he called Trump’s supporters (plural) “garbage.”

But that isn’t what he actually said.

Here’s a piece of the transcript. He uses the possessive singular and follows it up with “his demonization of Latinos” (emphasis mine). Seeing them together, it is 100% clear: Both of these two uses confirm that he was directing his ire at that one particular supporter who spewing racism on the stage–and as I see it, that so-called comedian deserves the insult. Here is the quote, in context: “they’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

Meanwhile, Trump, in his arrogance, not only didn’t apologize, not only called this horrorshow a “lovefest” and said it was “an honor to be involved,” but then had the hubris to do one campaign event from the cab of a garbage truck, telling reporters “How do you like my garbage truck? This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden” and say at another, “We know it’s what they believe, because look how they’ve treated you. They’ve treated you like garbage.”

The only way I can interpret this is he’s is totally OK with calling Puerto Ricans “garbage.”

I have to wonder how any decent, moral person can support this man who goes against those values. He’s not only racist, he’s homophobic, he otherizes lots of groups from people with disabilities to both Muslims and Jews to military veterans. He has been convicted of 34 felonies so far, is a self-acknowledged sexual predator, has stiffed hundreds of small businesses that did work for him, was found in court to have not only committed “the equivalent of rape” but to have defamed one of the at least 69(!) women who have accused him of rape or sexual misconduct–and increasingly, he is advocating fascism. Increasingly, too, he is showing signs of rapid cognitive decline. He is also the only US President, as far as I know, to use the office he was elected to for massive business and personal financial gain. He has repeatedly betrayed the loyalty of those who stood by him, from his Attorney General, William Barr, to his Vice President, Mike Pence. He has been called unfit by dozens of people who worked for him.

He is not fit to be President. He is not fit to be trusted with any responsibility for others. Please share widely with anyone in your circle who is considering voting for this cowardly, criminal, immature bully.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Diversity, Environment, Ethics in Government, language, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Sexuality and Gender, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Democracy itself is at stake in this election. If you choose not to vote, or you cast a vote for a 3rd-party candidate, you may never have the right to vote again. You’ve probably heard about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—but have you looked at the details? Fasten your seatbelts—this one’s scary! Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, actually said it out loud: he’s attempting to conduct “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be…There are parts of the plan that we will not share with the Left: the executive orders, the rules and regulations.”

But what they did commit to paper is bad enough: an approximately 900-page blueprint for a fascist takeover of the US including an agency-by-agency roadmap for the first six months of a second Trump administration. Project 2025, written with input from somewhere between 85 and 100 senior Trump advisors and endorsed by J.D. Vance in his foreword to the main author’s book, will attack our freedom in many directions. Here are five of the awful things they are planning to do:

  1. Viciously attack immigrants with massive deportations and detentions that would be far, far worse than the criminal cruelty of Trump’s first administration (this link outlines all the immigration points I summarize below)
  2. Attack women’s reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and women’s equality—starting with banning abortion in all 50 states.
  3. Act as if the climate crisis doesn’t exist: wildly ramp up dirty energy sources like oil, coal and nuclear while destroying green energy programs. According to the Sierra Club, “Project 2025 is essentially a death sentence for federal climate and environmental protections.”
  4. Eliminate DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs—and further enable Trump’s long history of open and blatant racism, from the 1970s right up to his recent race-based attacks on Kamala Harris, to be just the outward face of seriously cruel policies..
  5. Eliminate the right to vote for millions of people, through obscenely difficult registration procedures, reduction of polling places in areas that vote Democratic, and even bringing armed thugs to polling places to discourage voters of color—and, from all appearances, try to maintain power indefinitely. Trump even publicly told a so-called Christian Nationalist audience (if you look at what Christ said, they’re not Christians), “You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

Because this article is a project of Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice, let’s look more closely at the horror of Project 2025’s immigration proposals. You can find equally horrifying parts attacking civil rights, social equity, women’s reproductive freedom, the environment, and even education itself. According to the Niskanen Center, a centrist think-tank, Project 2025 would demolish legal immigration and make the US less safe while inflicting significant damage to the US economy

Specific policies within Project 2025 are a fascist’s dream and a progressive’s nightmare. To list just some proposals, it would:

  •       Choke off many types of legal immigration (even for survivors of crimes)
  •       Cut off federally funded student loans from up to 10.7 million US students at schools that grant in-state tuition to DACA recipients and undocumented students
  •       Ban most immigration from 13 countries that refuse to receive deported nationals
  •       Repeal ALL Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations (putting about 700,000 long-term US residents at risk of deportation)
  •       Stop processing refugee immigration applications
  •       Eliminate work permits for many immigrants, denying them jobs and creating a burden on taxpayers
  •       Require immediate expulsion if Customs and Immigration Service denies an application, even for simple paperwork errors, and even for people with valid Green Cards
  •       Force state and local governments to provide driver’s license and other data to the feds—pretty much ending Sanctuary communities around the country
  •       Eliminate ALL privacy protection for those without documents, leading to risk of harassment by private vigilantes and deportation or incarceration by federal agencies
  •       Evict from public housing mixed-status families that include citizens or green card holders and people without documents

Immigration justice activists will also be badly hurt by non-immigration-related parts of both Project 2025 and Trump’s own hate-filled speeches such as how to handle dissent and dissenters.

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections…They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream…the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within…” 
—Donald Trump, speaking at a rally in Claremont, NH, November 11, 2023

Note that the “vermin” wording is one of several times Trump has plagiarized from Adolf Hitler. That’s not a coincidence.

If Trump gets back into the White House, many progressives might have to organize from inside the walls of prisons and detention centers. Proposals to stop dissent from those who lean Democrat and other supposed “enemies” include:

Another deeply worrisome batch of proposals would centralize government power in the White House and eliminate even the weak protections against corporate greed that now exist: Project 2025 aims to:

  •       Move control of the Federal Communications Commission (which regulates TV, radio, telephone, etc.) and other public protection agencies directly under the White House while eliminating the Departments of Education and Commerce entirely
  •       Permanently eliminate career managers and replace them with political appointees loyal to Trump

Coupled with the recent Supreme Court Trump v. United States decision giving presidents they like unlimited powers to quash dissent, including even assassinating their enemies, we need to take these threats—and all the other threats wrapped up in Project 2025 and in Trump’s own words—VERY seriously.

And to those who voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary to protest Biden’s way-too-enabling response to Netanyahu’s massive crime in Gaza, let’s not forget that Trump has not only called for detaining/deporting Pro-Palestinian students and their allies but has told Israel to “finish the problem,” encouraging the Israelis to continue on the path toward genocide.

Sitting out this election or voting 3rd-party is not an option if you want to protect democracy and prevent fascism. Without ranked-choice voting, any vote other than for the Democratic nominee is a vote for Trump and his brand of fascism.  Is Harris perfect? Certainly not. But elections in a two-party, winner-take-all election are not about getting the perfect candidate. They are about who we’d rather be organizing against or trying to impact!

Although on a number of key issues–especially immigration justice and the war in Gaza–Harris is far from where we want her to be, we activists across the country will have a much better chance to extract concessions from a Harris-Walz administration than from the fascist alternative. As Abraham Josephine Riesman wrote in Slate, progressives do influence the Biden administration: “They have, at times, responded to pressure from their left wing in Congress (the so-called Squad and others), as well as pressure from unions and advocacy campaigns…”

National partners in the immigration justice movement (led by those most directly impacted) confirm that progressive organizing campaigns have led to recent wins (e.g. TPS for Haitian asylum seekers, legal paths and freedom from deportation for undocumented spouses and children of US citizens).  Currently the ACLU and immigration justice groups are suing the Biden administration for their new anti-asylum executive orders.  Under a Biden-Harris or a Harris-Walz administration, these suits and advocacy efforts can move forward.  We don’t know what repressive steps would be taken if MAGA were to win.

As we continue to fight to save lives in Gaza and on the US/Mexico border, we must be assured of the best environment possible to continue to influence legislators and the administration, speak up and speak out, and push the news media to take stands in favor of peace and justice.   With Biden and Harris, we have been able to push for better policies and we have had some wins.  We need to elect Harris and Walz so that radicals will not be hunted down as they were during the McCarthy era and so we can build our movements to be as large and inclusive as possible.  This is a long-term fight, and electing Harris and Walz is just the first step.

In fact, we urge you to vote for Democrats for every contested office this time so that Harris and Walz can get things done without getting blocked by Congress, state legislatures, governors, and judges at every turn.  The choice this time is clearer than it’s ever been.

 

Lifelong activist Shel Horowitz wrote this on behalf of Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice, which unanimously endorses it and ran an abridged version in its newsletter. An author, international speaker, TEDx Talker, and expert in turning business into a force for social justice and environmental healing, his award-winning 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. Download excerpts from the book at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com Shel acknowledges Holly Bishop and D. Dina Friedman, whose significant edits made this piece stronger.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business Ethics, Democracy, Ethics in Government, language, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Ever look out your window at a drenching rainstorm after you just heard “chance of precipitation near zero?” Political polling is, if anything, even less exact than meteorology. I think (and HOPE) people are going to be very surprised to wake up on November 6 and see an enormous victory for Harris and Walz.

Why am I so optimistic? Here are 10 of the many reasons:

  1. Every time reproductive rights has been on the ballot since Rowe v. Wade, it not only generates big turnout, it has won and has brought out Democratic voters—even in places like Kansas. 10 states are voting on reproductive rights this year, including normally Red-voting Florida, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Missouri and swing state Arizona. Flipping those states Blue would make a Trump victory very difficult. A related factor: Many people correctly see Trump as an existential threat to our democracy, and those people are going to vote to protect us.
  2. Usual Red states that have elected Democrats in recent statewide elections (e.g., Governor, US Senator, Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge) include North Carolina, Georgia, Montana, and Kentucky. Not to mention several swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
  3. Even before Kamala Harris took over the top of the ticket, new voters were registering in huge numbers. Since Biden ended his candidacy, the surge has been far greater. And Harris’s ability to sew up the nomination and get endorsements not only from potential competitors but pretty much the entire Democratic Party establishment as well as a vast array of grassroots groups in 48 hours is nothing short of miraculous.
  4. The excitement and enthusiasm also manifests in private donations on a scale never seen before, massive rallies long after the July “honeymoon”, and influential celebrity endorsements like Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen—not to mention a gazillion interest-group caucuses fundraising and organizing under titles like Elders for Kamala (ranging from Bill McKibben to Jane Fonda), Labor for Harris, Disabled Voters for Harris, and so many others
  5. Harris has gained the support of vast constituencies who were insulted and belittled by Trump and Vance: women, labor, LGBT, people of color, military veterans, youth, environment and climate change activists, even sane Republicans from George Will to Liz Cheney and her former Vice President father.
  6. While activists to the left of Harris (including me) recognize that she is not our ideal candidate—she has a lot of growing to do on Middle East policy, immigration justice, and climate/energy, to name three among many—we also recognize that ranked-choice voting doesn’t exist, that on every issue she is orders of magnitude better than her opponent, and that we can pressure her from the left. Not only can we not meaningfully pressure Trump to change his incredibly bad policies (though we can file lawsuits that will undo at least a little of the harm), we will face serious repression. It’s hard to fight for justice from prison or exile.
  7. Project 2025, the blueprint for a fascist takeover of the US government, is scaring a lot of people into voting to protect democracy. And despite his denials, Trump’s fingerprints are all over Project 2025. What I don’t understand is why they actually published it before the election. I’m happy for their huge strategic mistake, but puzzled. Did they actually think this would help get Trump elected? Meanwhile, the electorate overwhelmingly favors much more liberal policies on issue after issue. Whether it’s reproductive rights, sensible gun laws, or even world trade—and that trade link is from the conservative Cato Institute—Trump, Vance, and the MAGA Republicans are wildly out of step with the public.
  8. Not only have Trump and Vance made no attempt to court independent voters or even moderate Republicans, they seem to be working hard to alienate them. They are only courting the MAGA base, and that won’t be enough to get them into office.
  9. Trump’s noticeable cognitive decline and both his and Vance’s consistent use of fantasy instead of fact are scaring people.
  10. As a country, we are tired of Trump’s constant lying, bullying, name-calling, criminal self-dealing, criminal fraud, actions that a courtroom considered the equivalent of rape, coup attempts, horrendous policies, coddling of dictators while bashing allies, and all the rest of Trump’s chaos. It is clear that he didn’t have the skills or the temperament to run the country during his term, and he’s even less suited to this very tough job now.

Harris will undoubtedly win the popular vote, probably by several million. But the Electoral College vote is the one that really counts, and that could be a lot closer. Thus, if you want to see a sane, compassionate president rather than a lying, bullying, incompetent 34-count convicted felon and failed businessman with numerous bankruptcies in the White House, please vote—and please volunteer and/or donate. Every vote will make a difference in getting those vote totals not just past victory, but with such a margin that no one will take seriously Trump’s inevitable claims of fraud. DO NOT leave this for someone else! Participate in the most important election in your lifetime, and maybe in the nation’s history.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Ethics in Government, language, Marketing Trends/News, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , ,

…They claim the Dems are undemocratic because Kamala didn’t become the presidential nominee through primaries? What hypocrites!

Here’s what to tell MAGA folks when they start kvetching that Biden got 14 million votes in the primaries while Kamala got none:

  1. 81 MILLION people (almost 6 times as many as Biden’s primary votes) voted for Kamala Harris when she ran for Vice President in 2020 (and that same 14 million who voted for Biden this year also voted for her again in the Democratic primaries)—and the entire electorate will get to vote on this very shortly.
  2. She has Biden’s (and both Obamas’ and both Clintons’) strong endorsement as well as pretty much every major non-MAGA politician from AOC and Bernie on the left to Liz Cheney, her father the former VP, and conservative columnist George Will along with a bunch of former Trump senior staffers on the right—precisely BECAUSE Trump presents an existential threat to democracy.
  3. She got endorsements from practically every delegate pledged to Biden once he withdrew.
  4. The whole idea of HAVING a VP is to have a mechanism in place if the president can’t continue. Listing them in reverse chronological order, LBJ, Harry Truman, Calvin Coolidge, Teddy Roosevelt,  Chester Arthur, Andrew Johnson, Millard Fillmore, and John Tyler all became president without ANYONE voting them into that office. They were sitting VPs when the president died. If people feel that Kamala’s nomination was unfairly undemocratic, they have the option not to vote for her on November 5.
  5. MAGA people are opening quite the can of worms by bringing up undemocratic attitudes. Because THEIR guy is super-vulnerable on this. Not only has Trump openly stated he wants to be a dictator but his speeches are jam-packed with attacks on minority groups, calls for retribution against his enemies, endorsements of other dictators including Orban, Xi, Putin, and Kim among others, not to mention endorsing the savage but fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter. Project 2025, which Trump falsely claims to know nothing about, is a roadmap for overthrowing democracy—created with help from more than 140 past and  present Trump employees and naming Trump numerous times. And that is just one of his tens of thousands of documented lies (30,573 just during his time as president, 162 in a single recent so-called press conference that did not take actual on-the-fly questions and did not subject him to being in the same room with his hand-picked panel). Agenda 47, which Trump does endorse and which the GOP has adopted as this year’s platform, sounds an awful lot like a simplified, less detailed Project 2025.
  6. And Trump not only has an extremely undemocratic record in his four years as president, a lot of the guardrails that kept him at least somewhat in check have been taken away—starting with the loony Supreme Court decision that found a president can not be held accountable for any action that was taken in his role as president.
  7. Finally, do we even need to mention that sore loser Trump is the ONLY US president who refused to hand over power peacefully at the end of his term, who incited a riot in a vain (and in-vain) attempt to incite a coup, who filed roughly 60 lawsuits to overturn the will of the people, many of which were tossed out by judges he had appointed? And, of course, he’s the only US president to be charged with 94 felonies and to be found guilty of 34 of them in the one trial that has taken place so far, not to mention held liable for $454 MM in the aftermath of just one of many suits against him for slanders and credible allegations of abusing women.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Branding, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, General Commentary, Innovation, language, Media Ethics, media-general, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,

Ever since Biden withdrew, reporters have been kvetching that they have a hard time finding out Kamala Harris’s policy positions. This is a very dubious claim, considering she has a website, she gave a broad outline of several polices in a much-viewed speech at the Democratic Convention and regularly repeats those themes in many speeches around the country.

But I’m not here to chastise lazy journalists but to give them another great place to find her policy statements:

Kamala Harris gave a truly remarkable interview to three very tough questioners at the National Association of Black Journalists. It is so rare to see a forum of this type where the journos actually let the interviewee answer at length and with depth.

And Kamala was really impressive—not just because she gave smart and detailed answers, not just because she continues to make every appearance about uplifting everyday people—but because she takes a holistic view that has not been obvious to me in the sound-bite journalism that all-too-often passes for news. This interview makes it clear that she understands root causes, unintended consequences, and the interrelatedness of multiple issues (intersectionality, in other words).

In a campaign where one candidate makes a fetish of putting others down, vowing retribution against perceived enemies, lying his way through life, and never taking responsibility for his criminal actions or dangerous policies, where everything is only about how he personally will benefit, it’s refreshing to discover that his opponent is a deeply systemic thinker who has crafted action plans that will help ordinary people while she continues to undo the damage that Trump inflicted on this country. Biden has made good progress on undoing that damage, but we still have a long way to go. I am convinced that Harris will carry that water for us.

I was especially moved by her answers on Gaza, on the race-baiting of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community, and on making progress on the US’s massive problem of gun violence. But the whole thing is so worth watching that I posted it not just to my Facebook feed but also LinkedIn and several of my Facebook groups.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, language, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If you missed Part I with the first four takeaways, please click here. Meanwhile, on to the final two.

 

  1. The Media Needs to Put Trump Under the Same Microscope

So quick to microanalyze every gaffe and instance of slow reaction on the part of Biden, the media now has to look just as carefully at the other old white guy (only 3-1/2 years younger than Biden). Since the debate, prominent media have harped over and over again on Biden’s fitness for office while giving far less attention to Trump’s far worse fitness level. This is something we can change with pressure! Every time you hear about a verified Trump non-lucid moment, every time you discover another one of his authoritarian policy proposals—if you don’t see it covered in the mainstream media you read, write to them and ask why they aren’t covering this important story.

First, let’s look at Trump’s public persona. Then his record as President. And third, his really scary policy plans.

Trump as a Campaigner

  • For starters, Trump also mixes up names. If it’s fair to talk about Biden confusing one person for another, it’s also fair to point out Trump’s repeated instances.
  • Trump has so much difficulty staying awake that he fell asleep repeatedly during the trial that could put him in prison for years. And the man who frequently derided Biden as “Sleepy Joe” may have also fallen asleep during his own Republican National Convention. I watched the video. It sure looked to me that he was sleeping, and it wasn’t during the prayer (as some have claimed). It was actually while the woman speaking was heaping praises on him.
  • Trump’s speeches mix rambling incoherence, total falsehoods, and bloodthirsty claims that he will wreak vengeance and retribution on his numerous enemies. As recently as his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention a few days ago, he was still spewing the proven lie that the 2020 election was stolen—probably because he hates being the loser that he is—a lie that’s been debunked over and over even in the courtrooms of Trump-appointed judges. And even though it made him a laughingstock when he first said it, he returned during his convention speech to his admiration for the fictional villain Hannibal Lecter.
  • Speaking of lies…Trump is a pathological liar on a scale exponentially beyond any other politician I’ve ever heard of. Just during his four years in the Oval Office, Trump was caught in more than 30,000 lies—that’s an average of 21 untruths every day he was in office.

 

Trump’s Record in Office

 

What Trump Wants to Do if He Gets Elected

If you’ve heard accusations that Trump and the Republicans want to bring back fascism, this is what they’re talking about. Here’s a tiny fraction of the antidemocratic policies they’ve proposed:

Over and over, Trump has made it alarmingly clear. He wants to be “a dictator on Day 1.” He wants to roll back the clock on progress in dozens of areas: climate, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights (including reproductive freedom), rights of people of color, of labor, of protestors. He has called for massive deportations of up to 15 million immigrants and mass detention of activists. He has called for Israel to “finish the problem,” implying he’s in favor of Israel exterminating Gaza. And with significant help from more than 100 former Trump administration employees, the Heritage Foundation has released 887 pages of repressive legislative proposals in a document called Project 2025. Trump has tried to pretend he doesn’t know anything about it, because he knows it’s going to be hugely unpopular. He’s been plugging the “kinder, gentler” version adopted as a platform by the Republicans and written with his active involvement—but make no mistake, Project 2025 will be his blueprint if he gets into office again. In fact, Trump’s VP pick J.D. Vance wrote a gushing foreword to Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts’ new book. And let’s not forget Trump’s constant cries for revenge and retribution and his open desire to illegally use the military to quash domestic protests.

 

  1. The Democrats Actually Manage to Unite

It’s not a surprise that the sitting vice president of a successful administration is the front-runner. But the immediate unity around her candidacy is a delightful shock. Before Biden’s withdrawal on Sunday, July 21, most pundits I read expected a brutal, damaging struggle for the nomination. But somehow, the party often labeled a “circular firing squad” managed to pull it together and instantly rally around a single candidate. It took her only ONE DAY to gain pledges from 2668 delegates—way more than the 1976 that clinches the nomination. By Monday, July 22, she also already gained the endorsements of Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Victory Fund, and the Latino Victory Fund, eight major unions. Of 47 Democratic US Senators, 212 Democrats in the US House, and 23 Democratic Governors, 42, 186, and 23, respectively, have endorsed her, along with most state party chairs. Fundraising is also record-setting, with over 888,000 individual small donors collectively donating $81 million while megadonors threw in $150 million more, bringing the total to $231 million just one day into her campaign.

A July 1 story on NPR named seven potential Democratic presidential candidates: Harris, Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, and J.B. Pritzker. When NPR updated the story Monday, Newsome, Moore, Buttigieg and Shapiro had already endorsed Harris. Later yesterday, Whitmer and Pritzker joined the chorus.

The unexpected unity is a feather in the caps of both Biden and Harris, could motivate disaffected votes unexcited by Biden, and could help to provide a comfortable margin of victory in November—which is absolutely necessary considering Trump already tried to steal one election.

 

  1. What Does this Mean for the Democrats and the 2024 Election?

With all this, I think Biden stepping down can provide some big opportunities for the Democrats. They have a chance to re-engage the progressives they lost over Gaza, push for meaningful gun safety after Trump himself was almost killed by a sniper, push for the same kind of scrutiny of Trump that Biden suffered through, and leave the party in strong, capable, younger hands. Let’s show them we have their backs.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, language, Mindset, Politics, propaganda, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

It’s gratifying to see people who’ve directly experienced her as an active step-parent to commend Kamala Harris’ love and commitment to her step-kids. Her husband Doug Emhoff’s first wife Kerstin said, “For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” And Harris’s stepdaughter Ella Emhoff also spoke out: “They have good communication between the three of them. They are really a unit, like a three-person parenting squad. It’s really cool.”

They made their remarks in response to the revelation of Republican VP candidate J.D. Vance’s inane 2021 comment, as reported in Time Magazine:

The controversy stems from a 2021 Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson, while Vance was running for the Ohio senate seat he later won. “We’re effectively run in this country—via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs—by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance, who has a wife and three children, told Carlson. “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Politics, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One of my regular readers messaged me Sunday night to ask if I planned to blog about Biden’s withdrawal. I said yes, but only once I’d figured out which angle to focus on. There are quite a few.

Monday morning, at 5:25 a.m., I had the lightning-bolt insight that I didn’t have to pick just one angle. This is a complex issue with many parts, and I can explore as many of those parts as I want to! So after an unsuccessful attempt to get a bit more sleep, I first sat down at the keyboard at 5:45 a.m., on five hours of sleep, and finally finished the first draft at 9:05 p.m. Then my wife suggested I break it into two pieces. In the clear light of morning, I followed her advice 😉.

Here are the first four:

 

  1. It’s Not About His Age!

There’s nothing magic about passing 80 that makes you suddenly lose all your ability. Pablo Casals was still making beautiful music into his 90s. Pete Seeger was still writing great songs, though he couldn’t sing them very well anymore. Grandma Moses (who didn’t even start painting until her late 70s) and Picasso were still making art. My activist friend, Arky Markham, used her public 100th birthday party to raise funds for her charity, while three years later her friend and mine, Frances Crowe, used HER public 100th birthday party to organize a demonstration for social justice. Her vision was “100 people with 100 signs for 100 causes;” she got 300. Strom Thurmond still displayed his reactionary politics as a US Senator into his 90s and served beyond his hundredth birthday. Though his Wikipedia bio notes that he wasn’t very competent for his last decade, that still means he was an effective senator long past the age Biden would have been at the end of his second term.

 

  1. But Biden’s Decline is Real—And So Is Trump’s

And yet, aging is real. We all age differently. Biden has been increasingly erratic. I believe George Clooney’s statement that the Biden he saw at a June fundraiser was not the strong, competent leader of the State of the Union Address or his more recent speech to NATO but “was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.” In an op-ed published in The New York Times on July 17, Clooney writes the Biden he was with last month “was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010” or “even the Joe Biden of 2020.”

I was also deeply concerned that Biden himself told a meeting of governors that he doesn’t want to schedule events past 8 p.m. because he needs to get more sleep. Unfortunately for Biden, being president doesn’t get you a lot of sleep. You’re going to be woken up frequently to deal with crises, and your schedule will demand late-night meetings. At least the president doesn’t have to deal with senior night-driving issues and drive there, as some of us do.

Even though his withdrawal was reluctant and belated, Biden has been deservedly lauded for putting his country ahead of his own ambition—something his recent opponent has proven over and over again that he is incapable of doing. Although you wouldn’t know it from the media coverage since the debate, Trump’s mental acuity (never his strongest suit) has also plunged. His speeches have been incoherent for months. As far back as April, Newsweek highlighted a prominent psychologist’s analysis on the David Pakman show that Trump was “faltering.” But for some reason, this story didn’t make many waves in the rest of the media, or in the public consciousness. Trump’s use of violent rhetoric, including plagiarizing Hitler not just once but on numerous occasions, got slightly more attention, but the media didn’t focus on it the way they did on Biden’s debate failure. I’ll go into more detail in Angle #5, in Part II.

 

  1. Deceiving the Populace Did Nobody Any Favors

The campaign should have been open and honest that Biden was declining. And Biden himself should have declared truthfully that even with just one term, he had one of the greatest records of accomplishment of any president in history—getting more done in one term than many presidents accomplish in two, despite never having control over both houses of Congress—and  it was time for him to relax, step back, and let a younger person get a turn to be the knight in shining armor. The ~14 million who voted for Biden in the primary should have been made aware that these flaws were showing up often enough to be worrisome—and they should have been presented with other choices. Challengers should have been given room to ramp up ahead of the primaries so that those 14 million voters would have been involved in choosing his successor.

And Biden’s record really is remarkable. Beyond the obvious big deals like bringing the economy back from the brink, hastening the end of the pandemic through science-based policy, passing infrastructure and recovery acts with a lot of good green stuff, walking his talk on supporting people of color and LGBTQ folks, and being the most labor-friendly president ever, here are 30 accomplishments you may not have heard about that harnessed the administrative power of the federal government to make huge progress on issues ranging from keeping our records private to shifting farming and energy to far greener paths to building stronger relations between countries that are historic enemies (such as Japan and South Korea).

 

  1. Biden Gained Office While Hinting that He Would Only Serve One Term

Recognizing that his age was an issue even in 2020, Biden signaled that he wouldn’t be likely to run again in 2024. While he didn’t come out and promise not to run again, private messaging was leaked to the public back then that strongly implied he would not seek a second term.

Later this week, I’ll post Part II, with more angles to examine, including a big surprise about the Democratic Party. As soon as it goes live, I’ll post a link here. If you post a comment, I’ll tag you when it’s ready.

 

Lifelong activist, author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker Shel Horowitz helps businesses succeed by building in environmental healing and social justice. His award-winning 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. Find him at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com

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