Friday, February 25, 2022

Planet of the Psychopaths: Warmongering & Corruption Threaten the Future of Humanity

 Vlad the Terrorist Unleashes Hell on the World



In the decades-long unfolding of Vladimir Putin's insane war on the world, America, like Ukraine, has been used as a test lab, for destabilization, disinformation, election subversion, extremist manipulation & corruption on a scale that now threatens to end our culture & our democracy with violence, terror & criminal conspiracy, surrounding Trump org, a side-project of Putin's oligarch gang.

What is mystifying to younger generations is how the "world order" of the UN, NATO, EU, have acquiesced to criminal terror, murder, poisoning, torture, imprisonment of political opponents, for decades allowing Putin & other corrupt warlords to destabilize the world. We've all been warped by a world system which allows psychopaths like Putin & Trump to seize power & smother the possibilities for humane, progressive & peaceful outcomes. Did humanity not learn anything from the century of world wars of the 20th century, with the genocide, slaughter, repression of millions?

This tyrannical psychopathology has become epidemic, intentionally spread like a virus to threaten many countries & billions of humans, from China & Myanmar to Russia, Belarus, Syria, Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, like an Orwellian, totalitarian blueprint for enslaving all of us, keeping us all in a state of panic & confusion, or behind barbed wire. Given Putin's latest psychopathic threat, to use nuclear weapons, let us not forget, even for an hour, that we are all living on a gigantic frankenstein monster made of cruise missiles, submarines, stealth jets & planet-scorching atomic bombs.

Is it coincidental that as these psychopath cults turn up their rage & paranoid threats, humanity is faced with unprecedented climate catastrophes, battered, baked, inundated, forced to flee from extreme weather, requiring us to rally together as a world & radically change our fuels & industries? One can argue that underlying the extremes of politics & environment lies a bed of corruption, connected directly to petroleum production & weapons of war. Obsolete & toxic industries need a reason to continue, or a smokescreen (like war) to hide behind.

Is it possible we are witnessing the dying desperation of these 20th century modes & mobsters of corruption & tyranny? Or are we going to continue to be victims of their violence, madness & theft of possibilities? Will we wait until we no longer have any possibilities left but become refugees, prisoners, hostages struggling just to survive? At what point will the institutions of world order & justice step in to hold these psychopaths & their enablers accountable? We can see in Ukraine how humanitarian intentions, prayers & appeals for sensibility mean nothing to the psychopaths, who actually revel in the cruelty & suffering they cause. 

Humanity has reached a winnowing point in our evolution. We are planetary. We know within minutes what has happened on the other side of the planet. We all pretty much know who the psychopaths, criminals, warlords, manipulators are, with detailed documentation available right here on the internet. The "social media" companies know this too. 

What is the bottleneck we are being squeezed into? Like the sages of ages & saviors have warned: money (is the root of all evil). Everything on the planet, in the bloodshot eyes of industry, including you & I, has been reduced to a monetary value. In this respect, we are all slaves to a brutal & exploitative economic system which favors control by any means necessary, be it corrupt, homicidal, or completely inhumane (as war is). If an alien occupation of overlords imposed this system on us, we would all rebel, but we have been groomed from birth to acquiesce to the numbers & values of the $y$tem & accept its abuse.

As the great prophet sang, not so long ago: 

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery

None but ourselves can free our minds




‘It’s not rational’: Putin’s bizarre speech reveals the real Vladimir

Putin references neo-Nazis & drug addicts in bizarre speech to Russian security council 

Andrew Roth in Moscow

Looking dead-eyed into the camera on Friday, Vladimir Putin gave one of the most bizarre speeches of his 22 years as Russia’s leader, a directive that managed to sound alarming even in a week when he has ordered tanks into Ukraine and missile strikes on Kyiv.

“Once again I speak to the Ukrainian soldiers,” he said, addressing his enemy. “Do not allow neo-Nazis and Banderites to use your children, your wives and the elderly as a human shield. Take power into your own hands. It seems that it will be easier for us to come to an agreement than with this gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.”

The speech seemed to be ripped from an alternate reality – or from the second world war, where Putin appears to be spending more of his time as he launches the kind of broad military offensive not seen in Europe for nearly 70 years.

All this week, Putin’s megalomaniacal tendencies have been on display like never before. He has summoned his aides for a surreal national security council that resembled a television reality show and launched tirades about Lenin and decisions made nearly 100 years ago.

He has also, for the first time, spoken about his maximalist goals in this war: regime change in Kyiv, toppling the government of Volodymyr Zelensky and replacing it with a more pliant leadership. Putin’s call for a coup in Kyiv indicates that if Russia wins this war, Zelensky will almost certainly not remain in power. How he achieves that is anyone’s guess.

A number of analysts predicted this as Russia deployed more than 60% of its ground forces to Ukraine’s borders and demanded concessions that could never be granted.

But Putin’s unhinged appearances and apparent drive to war have raised questions of whether he remains a rational leader.

“Despite Crimea and everything else, Putin had always seemed an extremely pragmatic leader to me,” said Tatyana Stanovaya, the founder of R.Politik. “But now when he’s gone in this war against Ukraine, the logic in the decision is all about emotions, it’s not rational.”

Those emotions are deeply rooted in history and the historical injustices suffered by Russia. Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, said he saw Putin as a man with “a historical map in his mind and a plan to use his military to achieve it”.

Central to that map is Ukraine, which he has described as an artificial state. “Modern Ukraine was wholly and fully created by Russia,” Putin said in a historical sleight-of-hand, “namely Bolshevik, communist Russia.”

To help picture it, state TV ran a map earlier this week showing Ukraine cut up to represent which parts were “presents” from various leaders, including Stalin, Lenin and Khrushchev. Some commentators said it represents the partition that Putin himself might be imagining if he gets his way.

While once the map may have been viewed as fantasies or media trolling, a western diplomat based in Ukraine on Friday pointed to his speeches and to that map as a serious sign that Putin was weighing up a dismantling of the country.

“He is not pretending anymore. For the first time I think he’s revealing who he really is,” the diplomat wrote.


Why Putin’s Reasons For Invading Ukraine Are ‘Total Fiction’ 


Time to stop appeasing Putin and confront Russia’s imperial ambitions

By Paul Grod

The collapse of the USSR was in many ways remarkable as it happened so quickly and took place largely without bloodshed. However, it has since become increasing obvious that Russia never really came to terms with its reduced status or the loss of empire.

Unfortunately, a new generation of Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans, and Belarusians currently find themselves forced to defend their freedoms as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to reassert his country’s old imperial influence. Meanwhile, nations in nearby Central Europe are also facing up to the return of a hostile Russia.

The epicenter of this new Cold War is Ukraine.

Since 2014, Russian aggression in Crimea and eastern Ukraine has taken the lives of more than 14,000 Ukrainians and forced millions to flee their homes. While the front lines in the east have remained largely static since 2015, Ukraine continues to suffer regular casualties. Meanwhile, around 7% of the country is under Russian occupation.

Ukraine’s December 1991 referendum was in many ways as significant an event as the initial declaration of independence which took place a little more than four months earlier. While the parliamentary declaration is marked every year on August 24 as Ukraine’s official Independence Day, the referendum paved the legal pathway towards the formal dissolution of the USSR.

The late 1991 referendum was also crucial in securing recognition of Ukrainian independence from the international community. Many of the first countries to recognize an independent Ukraine including Canada, Poland, and the United States would go on to become the country’s closest allies, standing shoulder to shoulder over the coming decades as Ukrainians struggled to achieve their aspirations for peace, personal freedoms, and human dignity.

In order to secure these goals, Ukrainians have sought to join the key institutions of the democratic world. Since early 2019, the country’s NATO and European Union membership aspirations have been enshrined in the Ukrainian Constitution.

Ukraine’s progress since 1991 has been anything but straightforward, but the country has emerged from years of domestic political turbulence as a vibrant and highly competitive democracy. This makes Ukraine a source of inspiration for the wider post-Soviet region. At the same time, Ukraine’s democratic progress means it is seen in Moscow as an existential threat to Russia’s own authoritarian model.

The current Russian military build-up along the Ukrainian border has attracted considerable international attention. As political leaders and analysts speculate over the likelihood of an invasion, it is vital to underline that Russia has already invaded Ukraine and is waging a war against Ukrainian statehood that is currently in its eighth year.

Putin has made it clear he does not accept Ukraine’s independence. His recent essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” and his frequent claims that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” reflect the Kremlin ruler’s denial of Ukraine’s very existence as a distinct and separate nation. This rhetoric directly echoes the language of the Czarist era and exposes the imperial ambitions driving Putin’s war against Ukraine.

The democratic world now has an opportunity to demonstrate to Russia that the rules-based international order will prevail by adopting a decisive response to the Kremlin campaign against Ukraine.

It is no secret that the only language Russia respects is the language of strength. Unfortunately, Western efforts to continue doing business with Russia since 2014 have served to encourage further bad behavior. In geopolitics as in the school playground, the only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them. 

There are a number of options available to the West that would send an unambiguous message to Moscow. Freezing the certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would be a strong signal. It is also important to upgrade military cooperation with Ukraine, including the provision of defensive weapons. 

Ideally, Western leaders would demonstrate their rejection of Russia’s imperial ambitions by moving forward with NATO membership action plans for Ukraine and Georgia. Allowing Moscow an unofficial veto on future NATO membership rewards the Kremlin and is the surest way to guarantee continued Russian policies of international aggression.

Thirty years ago, an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians voted for independence. Tragically, they are now dying in defense of this independence in a war waged by a revisionist and resurgent Russia.

With the Russian military currently massed along the Ukrainian border, the Kremlin is threatening to launch a major escalation in its campaign to extinguish Ukrainian independence. Putin has already plunged the world into a new Cold War in his quest to subjugate Ukraine. He will continue to advance his imperial agenda until confronted decisively.

At stake are the values that will define international relations for decades to come. The West needs bold and visionary leadership to end this war on democracy and a rules-based international order. The alternative is a new age of empires where great powers are free to impose themselves on weaker neighbors. Putin wants to resurrect the Soviet Empire and reverse the verdict of 1991. We cannot allow him to succeed.

Paul Grod is President of the Ukrainian World Congress.


Masha Gessen: Vladimir Putin's eerie similarities to madman Hitler

Masha Gessen

Vladimir Putin has enjoyed a stunning variety of incarnations in the American imagination in his nearly 15 years as Russia’s leader. He started out as an economic reformer and a budding democrat. His graduation to dictator took years.

In that time, he dismantled Russia’s electoral system, took over its media, saw many of his opponents killed, jailed or forced into exile, created one of the most ruthlessly corrupt government systems in history, made peaceful protest punishable by jail time, waged a long and brutal war on his country’s territory and a short one against a neighboring country, Georgia, a piece of which Russia bit off in 2008.

But it was only after he invaded Ukraine last month that Americans’ image of him took another drastic turn. German Chancellor Angela Merkel ostensibly told President Obama that Putin was out of touch with reality. And then former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton compared him to Adolf Hitler.

So is Putin insane, is he Hitler, or is he both? He is none of those things. In fact, he may be unlike any politician the world has known.


Russian television parrots what Putin has been telling the Russian people for more than a decade: Russia is a country under siege, surrounded by enemies, perennially on the brink of catastrophe, from which only Putin can save it. In Ukraine, and everywhere, he is defending poor besieged Russians, not to mention the history and honor of the U.S.S.R.

Putin expressed this worldview long before he became president, and he has consistently acted on it since.

The day after Merkel’s statement became public, Putin held a news conference in which he denied that Russian troops were in Crimea and made so many other fanciful statements that the State Department issued a fact sheet exposing 10 of his most blatant lies.

Many analysts concluded that the bizarre news conference proved Putin had indeed lost his mind. They were wrong. Putin was acting the way he always has, like a playground bully. Bullies do not aspire to lead through rhetoric; they dominate by intimidation. When confronted, they either lash out or they obfuscate.




Putin said the troops occupying Crimea weren’t Russian, then promised to deploy the Russian military to protect civilians in Ukraine, then disowned deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. He was like a bully caught wearing a younger boy’s jacket — first claiming it was his own, then saying he got it from a friend, then that he wasn’t friends with that guy anyway. This is a tried-and-true intimidation strategy: Bald-faced lies render opponents helpless.

So if Putin is not insane, is he Hitler?

There are some eerie similarities: his obsession with imminent catastrophe, his total distrust of the rest of the world, his paranoid scapegoating of particular minorities, and his appetite for annexing new territories.

But knowing that Putin is similar to many 20th century dictators is not very useful or even interesting. He does, however, have one trait that sets him apart. History’s dictators have generally tried to claim that they were good people fighting the good fight. But Putin has no positive spin for his aggression — or his actions in general.

The political culture Putin has created in Russia is based on the assumption that the world is rotten to the core.

In his official autobiography, published in 2000, Putin told a joke in which President Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev compare notes: Both are embezzling, but Brezhnev embezzles twice as much, blatantly. This is the line Putin’s officials have taken in response to all accusations of graft over the last 14 years: Corruption is endemic to all governments; Russian corruption is just less hypocritical.

The same goes for Russia’s treatment of minorities and political protesters, as well as violations of international law: Putin and his officials are always quick to point out that Western countries are also imperfect on these issues.

A corollary is Putin’s conviction that his opponents act out of self-interest rather than on the basis of political conviction. When members of the punk rock group Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail, he said they got what they wanted.

This belief that everyone, without exception, acts solely out of base self-interest is what has led Putin to ratchet up the aggression, meanness and vulgarity of his public statements and political actions.

For American culture, which relies heavily on a belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity, this is an impossible world view to absorb. It is another world indeed. But that does not make it crazy.

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the author of the political biography “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.” 



Renewable Energy Solutions Can Save Our World from Kleptocracy & Corruption: How to defeat Putin & other Petrostate Tyrants
by Bill McKibben

‘Imagine a Europe that ran on solar power and windpower. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia, and it would be far less scared of Putin’s Russia.’ 

The pictures this morning of Russian tanks rolling across the Ukrainian countryside seemed both surreal – a flashback to a Europe that we’ve seen only in newsreels – and inevitable. It’s been clear for years that Vladimir Putin was both evil and driven and that eventually we might come to a moment like this.

One of the worst parts of facing today’s reality is our impotence in its face. Yes, America is imposing sanctions, and yes, that may eventually hamper Putin. But the Russian leader made his move knowing we could not actually fight him in Ukraine – and indeed knowing that his hinted willingness to use nuclear weapons will make it hard to fight him anywhere, though one supposes we will have no choice if he attacks a Nato member.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to dramatically reduce Putin’s power. One way, in particular: to get off oil and gas.

This is not a “war for oil and gas” in the sense that too many of America’s Middle East misadventures might plausibly be described. But it is a war underwritten by oil and gas, a war whose most crucial weapon may be oil and gas, a war we can’t fully engage because we remain dependent on oil and gas. If you want to stand with the brave people of Ukraine, you need to find a way to stand against oil and gas.

Russia has a pathetic economy – you can verify that for yourself by looking around your house and seeing how many of the things you use were made within its borders. Today, 60% of its exports are oil and gas; they supply the money that powers the country’s military machine.

And, alongside that military machine, control of oil and gas supplies is Russia’s main weapon. They have, time and again, threatened to turn off the flow of hydrocarbons to western Europe. When the Germans finally this week stopped the planned Nordstream 2 pipeline, Putin’s predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev , said, “Welcome to the new world where Europeans will soon have to pay 2,000 euros ($2,270) per thousand cubic meters!” His not very subtle notion: if the price of keeping houses warm doubles, Europe will have no choice but to fold.

Today, 60% of Russia’s exports are oil and gas. Control of oil and gas supplies is Russia’s main weapon
Finally, even the Biden administration – which has been playing its hand wisely in the lead up to the invasion – is constrained by oil and gas. As we impose sanctions, everyone’s looking for an out: the Italians want to exempt high-end luxury goods and the Belgians diamonds, but the US has made it clear that it doesn’t want to seriously interrupt the flow of Russian oil for fear of driving up gas prices and thus weakening American resolve.

As one “senior state department official” told the Wall Street Journal this week, “doing anything that affects … or halts energy transactions would have a great impact on the United States, American citizens and our allies. So our intention here is to impose the hardest sanctions we can while trying to safeguard the American public and the rest of the world from those measures,” the official said. It’s obviously not an idle fear: as of this morning Tucker Carlson was attacking Russia hawk Lindsey Graham for supporting a conflict that will bring “higher gas prices” while he has a “generous Congressional pension”. If you’re an apologist for fascism, high gas prices are your first go-to move.

So now is the moment to remind ourselves that, in the last decade, scientists and engineers have dropped the cost of solar and windpower by an order of magnitude, to the point where it is some of the cheapest power on Earth. The best reason to deploy it immediately is to ward off the existential crisis that is climate change, and the second best is to stop the killing of nine million people annually who die from breathing in the particulates that fossil fuel combustion produces. But the third best reason – and perhaps the most plausible for rousing our leaders to action – is that it dramatically reduces the power of autocrats, dictators, and thugs.

Imagine a Europe that ran on solar and wind power: whose cars ran on locally provided electricity, and whose homes were heated by electric air-source heat pumps. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia, and it would be far less scared of Putin’s Russia – it could impose every kind of sanction, and keep them in place until the country buckled. Imagine an America where the cost of gas was not a political tripwire, because if people had to have a pickup to make them feel sufficiently manly, that pickup would run on electricity that came from the sun and wind. It would take an evil-er genius than Vladimir Putin to figure out how to embargo the sun.

These are not novel technologies – they exist, are growing, and could be scaled up quickly. In the years after Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, America turned its industrial prowess to building tanks, bombers, and destroyers. In 1941, in Ypsilanti, the world’s largest industrial plant went up in six month’s time, and soon it was churning out a B-24 bomber every hour. A bomber is a complicated machine with more than a million parts; a wind turbine is, by contrast, relatively simple. In Michigan alone (“the arsenal of democracy”), a radiator company retooled to make 20m steel helmets and a rubber factory retooled to produce the liners for those helmets; the company that made the fabric for Ford’s seat cushions stopped doing that and started pushing out parachutes. Do we think that it’s beyond us to quickly produce the solar panels and the batteries required to end our dependence on fossil fuel?

Imagine a Europe that ran on solar and wind power. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia
It’s not easy – among other things, Russia has a good deal of some of the minerals that help in renewable energy production. (Nickel, for example.) But, here again, the example of the second world war is helpful – with the Axis in control of commodities like rubber, we quickly figured out how to mass produce substitutes.

It’s true that we could produce carbon free energy with nuclear power too, as long as we were willing to pay the heavy premium that technology requires – and right now Germany is probably regretting its decision to hastily shut down its reactors in the wake of the Fukushima accident. But if you think about the scenario now unfolding across Europe, you’re reminded of another of the advantages of renewable power, which is that it’s widely distributed. There are far fewer central nodes to attack with cruise missiles and artillery shells – targeting reactors is pretty easy, but driving your tank across Europe from one solar panel to the next so you can get out to smash it with a hammer is comical.

At the moment, big oil is using the fighting in Ukraine as an excuse to try to expand its footprint – reliable industry ally Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, went on Fox this week to argue that stopping the Keystone XL pipeline had empowered the Russian leader, for instance, and the American Petroleum Institute today called for more oil and gas development. But this is absurd – we may need, for the remaining weeks of this winter, to insure gas supplies for Europe, but by next winter we need to remove that lever. That means an all-out effort to decarbonize that continent, and then our own. It’s not impossible.

We have to do it anyway, if we’re to have any hope of slowing the climate change. And we can do it fast if we want: huge offshore windfarms in Europe have been built inside of 18 months without any wartime pressure.

We should be in agony today – people are dying because they want to live in a democracy, want to determine their own affairs. But that agony should, and can, produce real change. (And not just in Europe. Imagine not having to worry about what the king of Saudia Arabia thought, or the Koch brothers – access to fossil fuel riches so often produces retrograde thuggery.) Caring about the people of Ukraine means caring about an end to oil and gas.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College.




Meanwhile, In Russia:

Alexey Navalny turns out to be a great journalist/investigator Navalny video about ‘#Putin’s Palace’ will help sort out the oligarchs (some Trump org overlap) ♞♘ Companion excellent website: https://palace.navalny.com

#PutinsPalace 💀 ☠ #dɯnɹʇ



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Saturday, January 15, 2022

Will America Allow GOP Criminal Conspiracy to Steal Voting Rights & Install a Corrupt, Violent Authoritarian Tyranny? 🌊 ♨ ⛈

American Democracy under attack by Authoritarian Criminal Conspirators/GOP & Mad Mob Bo$$ 


President Obama's Appeal for Voting Rights Protection: We need to follow John Lewis' example & fight for our democracy

When I spoke at John Lewis’s memorial service two years ago, I emphasized a truth John knew better than just about anyone. Our democracy isn’t a given. It isn’t self-executing. We, as citizens, have to nurture and tend it. We have to work at it. And in that task, we have to vigilantly preserve and protect our most basic tool of self-government, which is the right to vote. 

At the time, various state legislators across the country had already passed a variety of laws designed to make voting harder. It was an attack on everything John Lewis fought for, and a challenge to our most fundamental democratic freedoms.

Since then, things have only gotten worse.

While the American people turned out to vote at the highest rate in over a century in the last presidential election, members of one of our two major political parties – spurred on by the then-sitting president – denied the results of that election and spun conspiracy theories that drove a violent mob to attack our Capitol. Although initially rejected by many Republicans, those claims continued to be amplified by conservative media outlets, and have since been embraced by a sizeable portion of Republican voters – not to mention GOP elected officials who do, or at least should, know better. Those Republican officials and conservative thought leaders who have courageously stood their ground and rejected such anti-democratic efforts have found themselves ostracized, threatened, and subjected to primary challenges.

Meanwhile, state legislators in 49 states have introduced more than 400 bills designed to suppress votes. Some of these bills we’ve seen before: legislation that would discourage voters – including racial minorities, low-income voters, and young people – from casting a ballot. Others aim to treat certain polling locations differently, creating one set of rules for voters living in cities and another set for people living in more conservative, rural areas.

We’re also seeing more aggressive attempts to gerrymander congressional districts. Gerrymandering, which essentially allows politicians to choose their voters instead of the other way around, isn’t new – and both parties have engaged in it. But what we’re seeing now are far more aggressive and precise efforts on the part of Republican state legislatures to tilt the playing field in their favor. In states that have approved new congressional maps, there are now 15 fewer competitive districts than there were before. Fewer competitive districts increases partisanship, since candidates who only have to appeal to primary voters have no incentive to compromise or move to the center.

Finally and perhaps most perniciously, we’ve seen state legislatures try to assert power over core election processes including the ability to certify election results. These partisan attempts at voter nullification are unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times, and they represent a profound threat to the basic democratic principle that all votes should be counted fairly and objectively.



The good news is that the majority of American voters are resistant to this slow unraveling of basic democratic institutions and electoral mechanisms. But their elected representatives have a sacred obligation to push back as well – and now is the time to do it. 

Right now, there are bills in front of the Senate that would protect the right to vote, end partisan gerrymandering, and restore crucial parts of the Voting Rights Act. The bill’s sponsors have diligently reached out to their Republican colleagues to obtain their support. Sadly, almost every Senate Republican who expressed concern about threats to our democracy in the immediate aftermath of the January 6th insurrection has since been cowed into silence or reversed their positions. When one of the bills in front of the Senate today was introduced in November, every Democrat supported it. And every Republican but one voted against moving it forward.

Protecting our democracy wasn’t always a partisan issue. The Voting Rights Act was the result of Democratic and Republican efforts, and both President Reagan and President George W. Bush signed its renewal when they were in office. But even if Senate Republicans now refuse to stand up for our democracy, Democrats should be able to get the job done with a simple majority vote. There are already 50 Senators who support bills to safeguard elections. The only thing standing in the way is the filibuster – a Senate procedure that allows a minority of just 41 Senators to prevent legislation from being brought up for a vote. 

The filibuster has no basis in the Constitution. Historically, the parliamentary tactic was used sparingly – most notably by Southern Senators to block civil rights legislation and prop up Jim Crow. In recent years, the filibuster has become a routine way for the Senate minority to block important progress on issues supported by the majority of voters. But we can’t allow it to be used to block efforts to protect our democracy. 

That’s why I fully support President Joe Biden’s call to modify Senate rules as necessary to make sure pending voting rights legislation gets called for a vote. And every American who cares about the survival of our most cherished institutions should support the President’s call as well.

For generations, Americans of every political stripe have taken pride in our status as the world’s oldest continuous democracy. We have spilled precious blood and spent countless treasure in defense of democracy and freedom abroad. But as we learned during the Jim Crow era, our role as democracy’s defender isn’t credible when we violate the rights and freedoms of our own citizens. And at a time when democracy is under attack on every continent, we can’t hope to set an example for the world when one of our two major parties seems intent on chipping away at the foundation of our own democracy. 

No single piece of legislation can guarantee that we’ll make progress on every challenge we face as a nation. But legislation that ensures the right to vote and makes sure every vote is properly counted will give us a better chance of meeting those challenges. It’s how we can overcome the gridlock and cynicism that’s so prevalent right now. It’s how we can stop climate change, and reform our broken immigration system, and help ensure that our children enjoy an economy that works for everyone and not just the few.

Now is the time for all of us to follow John Lewis’s example. Now is the time for the U.S. Senate to do the right thing. America’s long-standing experiment in democracy is being sorely tested. Future generations are counting on us to meet that test.

https://www.obama.org/

KEY FEATURES OF THE FREEDOM TO VOTE ACT

For American democracy to work, our citizens must have equal opportunities to vote, and the public needs to trust that our elections are fair. But politicians have increasingly worked to make it harder for Americans who oppose them to vote, and trust in our democracy is dropping.

The Freedom to Vote Act makes it harder for politicians to choose who votes and creates national standards to ensure greater transparency and security in how votes are counted.

Specifically, the Freedom to Vote Act will

* Create nationwide voter ID standards

* Require 15 days of early voting and vote-by-mail options for all voters

* Ensure every ballot has a paper trail, and every voter can track their mail-in ballot

* Make Election Day a federal holiday

* Fund strong, state-run audits to protect democracy and election integrity

* Allow same-day voter registration for American citizens with proper identification

 The Freedom to Vote Act is our best shot at ensuring all American citizens have the opportunity to vote and that all votes are counted fairly. This is how we make sure America’s government stays beholden to the will of the people, not the politicians.

https://www.freedom-to-vote.com/




Voting Laws Roundup: Brennan Center

This year’s tidal wave of restrictive voting legislation will continue in 2022.

In 2021, the state legislative push to restrict access to voting was not only aggressive — it was also successful.

Between January 1 and December 7, at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting. More than 440 bills with provisions that restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states in the 2021 legislative sessions. These numbers are extraordinary: state legislatures enacted far more restrictive voting laws in 2021 than in any year since the Brennan Center began tracking voting legislation in 2011. More than a third of all restrictive voting laws enacted since then were passed this year. And in a new trend this year, legislators introduced bills to allow partisan actors to interfere with election processes or even reject election results entirely.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-december-2021



Filibuster Out of Control 

Although filibustering originally required the minority to stand up for their principles and actively engage in debate— without pause —if they wanted to delay the vote, over time Senators relaxed their interpretation of those unwritten rules to permit them to avoid a vote without verbally justifying their views.

​The filibuster has a mixed history, but the most famous and longest filibusters came during the Civil Rights era to prevent the end of Jim Crow.

​Since that time, it has gotten easier and easier to filibuster, to the point that it has gotten out of control. Though the filibuster was originally used to debate a bill, over time it became used to dispute judicial nominations too.

When the filibuster became a default tactic to essentially "pocket veto" bills and nominations, it was used rampantly. There were more filibusters during President Obama's time in office than in the 50s, 60s, and 70s combined. In the history of the Senate before 2009, just 68 judicial nominees ever required a vote to end the filibuster ("cloture"). In contrast, 79 nominees between 2009-2013 required cloture, (ultimately leading the Senate to change its rules so judges could no longer be filibustered.)

Reforming the Filibuster throughout History

The first major change to the filibuster was introduced in 1917 to overcome the tactic being used to stall important votes around World War I.  The Senate created the cloture rule, allowing a vote of 67 Senators (later reduced to 60) to end debate and force a vote.

Over the past several decades, the Senate has changed its filibuster rules many times, passing more than 161 pieces of legislation from 1969 onward under exceptions to the established filibuster rules. 

The Nuclear Option

After more than a century of failed clotures and haggled exceptions, the last decade has pushed Senators to reevaluate their own rules. Because the filibuster has become such a common and easy tactic for the minority to block the will of the elected majority in the Senate, both parties have increasingly moved to reform and limit the filibuster.  

The most famous of the recent reforms was the so-called “nuclear option” that then-Republican Senate Majority Leader McConnell finally used in 2017 to override the Democrats’ filibuster to confirm Supreme Court justices by a simple majority vote — requiring only 51 votes to the previous 60.  

The term “nuclear option” was coined by former Republican Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott.  It was seen as an unthinkable step to do away with the filibuster completely for judges because each party knew that such a change would undermine the historic precedent of appointing judges that could draw consensus from both parties.

​After decades of different changes, carve-outs, and exceptions, the secret filibuster continues to undermine the will of the majority in America. Most recently, it threatens the John Lewis Freedom to Vote Act, which has broad majority support by the American public. 

This has many Americans wanting filibuster reform, not through the “nuclear option” which President Biden opposes, but by restoring it to the original talking filibuster that encourages debate, voting, and provides protections to the Republican minority.

https://www.filibusterreform.com/what-is-the-filibuster


VP Kamala Harris pushed hard for voting rights — then hit a brick wall

The VP’s work was more extensive than known. 

More than six months ago, Vice President Kamala Harris embraced a new mission: to lead the administration’s push for federal voting rights legislation.

It was a chance to make her mark on a hugely important issue. And it took on added importance as her tenure turned bumpy over the summer. She dove into it.

For months, she helped craft political coalitions with civil rights leaders, built outside pressure on Congress and engaged privately with lawmakers. She met with Black leaders, helped create a list of actions that federal agencies could take to promote voter engagement and, more recently, added a larger media profile, with a high clip of national interviews. She spoke at the anniversary event for the Jan. 6 insurrection alongside President Joe Biden and then accompanied him to Georgia for a speech this past week to make a last public plea to pass new protections for voting.

On Friday, her work — and that of the administration, as a whole — hit a brick wall, as two moderate Senate Democrats said they would not support weakening the rules of the chamber to pass the party’s two election reform priorities. It’s left Harris in a now familiar place: stymied and with an uncertain path forward.

Harris’ aides and advisers say she’s unbowed by the setback. They view her more aggressive posture and increasingly public persona as an implicit sign that she’s solidified her standing in the White House. Allies argue she's finally getting a chance to succeed after prior misuse.

“When you're vice president, you really can't get out front of the White House," said Bakari Sellers, a friend of the vice president’s and one of her most vocal supporters. "It's tough. But with the president actually being forceful in nature about and not fence-sitting about his position on the filibuster on this issue, it gives her the tools necessary to be successful and that's the only concern I've ever raised. You want to make sure that she's not being handicapped."

The expectation going forward is that Harris and the administration will keep pushing for legislative progress in addition to meeting with key stakeholders. A White House official said Harris’ team is formulating plans on what next steps look like and that both public and private engagements for Harris are being discussed.

When asked on Friday what the next step on voting rights would be, Harris told reporters, “Well, we keep fighting. We are committed to seeing this through however long it takes and whatever it takes." She noted that she had, just today, “extensive meetings and discussions about how we can see this through.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/15/harris-voting-rights-push-527186

MLK, Jr.’s Birthday, The Racist Filibuster and the Fight for Voting Rights

Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan/ Democracy Now!

U.S. democracy is in crisis, as Republican supporters of the January 6th Capitol insurrection restrict or even eliminate democracy’s core tenet of one person, one vote. Former President Donald Trump is driving democracy’s demise, spouting the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him through massive voter fraud. Countless audits, over 60 court cases and both Democratic and Republican state Secretaries of State confirmed President Joe Biden trounced Trump by over seven million votes.

Nevertheless, Republican shills up and down the party power structure, from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to operatives at the state and local level, have embraced Trump’s Big Lie, ramping up voter suppression, gerrymandering and the use of dark money to ensure they can grab power and hold it indefinitely, even as the GOP is shrinking as a share of the electorate.

Two bills are currently before the Senate to stop this slide into authoritarianism: the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Similar versions have already passed in the House. Senate Democrats must first overcome Republican filibusters, though. The filibuster has long been used to derail civil rights legislation in the Senate, and now is no different.

It normally takes 60 of the 100 senators to defeat a filibuster, currently an insurmountable barrier in the face of Republican opposition. Democrats could use a targeted override of the filibuster, a “carve-out,” which would need the votes of all 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus along with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. But two conservative Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have indicated they likely won’t support the maneuver.

“Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace,” President Biden asked at a speech Wednesday in Atlanta, advocating for the temporary filibuster override needed to advance these voting rights bills. “Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Bull Connor was the brutal, white sumpremacist Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama during most of the civil rights era. Biden’s reference to Bull Connor echoed a Nation Magazine article written by Martin Luther King, Jr., in March, 1964, as activists were pushing passage of the Civil Rights Act:

“As had been foreseen, the bill survived intact in the House. It has now moved to the Senate, where a legislative confrontation reminiscent of Birmingham impends. Bull Connor became a weight too heavy for the conscience of Birmingham to bear. There are men in the Senate who now plan to perpetuate the injustices Bull Connor so ignobly defended. His weapons were the high-pressure hose, the club and the snarling dog; theirs is the filibuster. If America is as revolted by them as it was by Bull Connor, we shall emerge with a victory.”

The essay appeared four months after President Kennedy’s assassination and nine months before King received the Nobel Peace Prize.

“It is not too much to ask, 101 years after the Emancipation, that Senators who must meet the challenge of filibuster do so in the spirit of the heroes of Birmingham,” King continued in that piece, invoking the powerful memory of the four young African American girls killed in the racist bombing of The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15th, 1963, and two more youth killed in rioting that immediately followed. “There could be no more fitting tribute to the children of Birmingham than to have the Senate for the first time in history bury a civil rights filibuster. The dead children cannot be restored, but living children can be given a life. The assassins who still walk the streets will still be unpunished, but at least they will be defeated.”

That filibuster eventually failed, and the Civil Rights Act became law, followed by the monumental Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). The VRA revolutionized African American political participation in the U.S., especially in the Deep South. The rightwing never stopped attacking it. Two recent Supreme Court decisions, Shelby v. Holder in 2013 and Brnovich v. the DNC in 2021, gutted the VRA, unleashing a flood of gerrymandering and laws designed to reduce voter turnout, disenfranchising millions of voters from Democratic-leaning urban centers and other communities of color.

“Frederick Douglass told us a long time ago: ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand,’” Georgia-based activist Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said Thursday on the Democracy Now! news hour. As we mark what would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 93rd birthday, now is the time to demand that the U.S. Senate override the Jim Crow filibuster and pass meaningful voting rights legislation.

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/1/13/mlk_jrs_birthday_the_racist_filibuster

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS

Voting Rights are Human Rights!

Learn more about how to exercise your voting rights, resist voter intimidation efforts, and access disability-related accommodations and language assistance at the polls. For help at the polls, call the non-partisan Election Protection Hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/voting-rights/


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Saturday, August 14, 2021

Solutions to Climate Crisis must Be Radical to Prevent Our Extinction 🐝 🌋 Sad/mad Rad Plan Omega 🌎

 

Sad/mad Rad Plan Omega 🐝 🌋

1) turn off the fucking engine
2) tear up the pavement & plant meadows
3) plant forests & gardens everywhere
4) stop mass murder technology & toxic ideology
5) empower women & children, rescue their future

There's no delicate way to say "we're sorry to inform you you are living through the greatest mass extinction event in post-mesozoic history"🐬 shut off the fucking engine  anti-slumber-party     
 🐺 🐾 ♨ 🐝 ★ 💙 ✯  🌟 💚ꉣ꒒ꍏꈤꍟ꓄ ꍟꍏꋪ꓄ꃅ 💫 https://www.youtube.com/c/GalaxyGarden 🌋

Water in the Anthropocene from WelcomeAnthropocene on Vimeo.


₴₱₳₵Ɇ₴Ⱨł₱ Ɇ₳Ɽ₮Ⱨ ❣ ❉✬✿ ❣  https://vimeo.com/channels/639670

'Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.'
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

🌻 🐦 🌈 ♨ ♥ 🔮 ❤ 💜 💚 🌞  ⛈ 
2021 now we must choose: are you on the side of the past, or the side of the future? Because Jan 6 in DC the past declared war on the future. Reclaim the #truth from a prison of hate & lies & shameless denial. ("truthless"= #dɯnɹʇ) 💜
💙💜❤️🌟💙💚❤️
"Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you." — Ruth Bader Ginsburg  https://iwillvote.com

2021 Emerging Filmmakers Professional Development Programme
 If Not Us Then Who’s work with Indigenous & community filmmakers & builds on initial film training programmes carried out in Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Indonesia & Brazil, to provide onward capacity-building for trainees as they expand their production and establish themselves in the filmmaking industry.




'Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blossoming in our civilised vase on the table.' ~ D.H Lawrence


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