Friendlyfire (early adopters version)

Podcast — MeWe Founder Mark Weinstein — Web 3.0 & How To Save Social Media From The Technocrats

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 16:08:30 +0000

Mark is currently working on a book that deals with combatting this threat and we delve into many of the problems and possible solutions that arise.

New Research Finds CIA Used Black Americans as Drugs Experiment Guinea Pigs

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 14:15:55 +0000

A new study exposes a hitherto wholly unknown dimension of MKULTRA; Black Americans were disproportionately targeted by the CIA.

Cops Shut Down 8-Year-old Girl’s Lemonade Stand to Protect Society from Unlicensed Lemonade

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 13:15:07 +0000

Police were dispatched to an Ohio city, not for a robbery or murder, but for an 8=year-old girl selling lemonade without a permit,

The Three I’s of a Police State Education: Indoctrination, Intimidation & Intolerance

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 14:15:18 +0000

Roped into the government’s profit-driven campaign to keep the nation “safe” from drugs, disease, and weapons, the schools have transformed themselves into quasi-prisons

From Social Media to Napping, The List of Reasons Healthy People Die of Heart Attacks Seems to Be Growing

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 13:15:27 +0000

In the post COVID-19 aftermath, it seems like an article comes out every week detailing the new ways in which young people can have a heart attack.

More Than a Half-dozen Officers Stood and Watched for 8 Minutes as a Teen Hung Himself

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 14:15:09 +0000

For 7 minutes and 51 seconds, 7 correction officers, a captain and two paramedics walked by or watched on from a guard station as he hung himself.

PA State Councilor Defends ‘Minor Attracted Persons’, Says Calling Them ‘Pedophiles’ is ‘Hurtful Insult’

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 13:15:16 +0000

The idea being forwarded is that people who want to have sexual relations with children are suffering from a “disorder,” and should not be subject to moral evaluation.

“Beyond Chilling” — Homeland Security Seeks to Share Biometric Databanks With Foreign Countries

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 14:45:20 +0000

“The ramifications of a government — any government — having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.”

Cop Formerly Charged Over Murder of Freddie Gray Now in Charge of Investigating The Same Department

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 14:15:38 +0000

Sgt. White was promoted to captain in the Performance Standards Section in Baltimore City’s police force.

As Congress Members Increase Their Wealth by Billions, IRS Training to Raid Suburban Homes

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 13:23:42 +0000

As IRS agents train to raid suburban homes, Congress members are increasing their wealth at 5 times the rate of the market and non one is looking.

Recently Released Emails Provide More Evidence Of Big Tech-Government Collusion

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 14:45:55 +0000

Emails released as part of several open records requests and lawsuits provide a behind-the-scenes look at the level of collaboration between the U.S. government and Big Tech

IRS Deletes Job Listing After Calling for Special Agents to Be Able to Kill Americans to Do Their Jobs

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 14:15:11 +0000

The IRS is asking new hires if they would be willing to kill Americans in order to more effectively do their jobs.

Huge Masked Cop Attacks Woman, Slams Her to the Ground for Being in a Park at Night

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 13:15:24 +0000

For being in a park at night a couple was extorted and when the woman questioned her ticket, she was attacked and kidnapped.

Head Of The Lancet’s COVID-19 Investigation Is “Convinced” It Came Out Of A Lab

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 14:15:47 +0000

Charges that a real investigation is being blocked...

“Mommy Help”: Cops Pin Down Teen for 6 Minutes in Front of His Parents Until He Stops Breathing and Dies

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 13:50:41 +0000

Anton Black pleaded "Mommy, help" as officers pressed his face, chest and stomach to the ground for six minutes.

Young Activist Found Hanging From Tree Near City Hall, Cops Claim It Was Suicide

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:30:25 +0000

Many people believe it was a hate crime.

Atlanta Police Shoot and Kill Rayshard Brooks as Protests Continue Worldwide

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 02:26:00 +0000

"This is not the first time a black man has been killed for sleeping."

International Criminal Court Denounces ‘Unprecedented Attacks’ by US

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:34:38 +0000

"An unacceptable attempt to interfere with the rule of law."

Young Girl Killed as Saudi Bulldozers Demolish Family Home in Asir

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 16:44:09 +0000

She was killed while she slept in her home.

Humanity is Escaping From the Abusive Relationship With the Police State

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 07:16:35 +0000

Things are only going to keep getting stranger from here.

Cops TV Series Cancelled After 33 Seasons Amid Anti-Police Protests

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 07:04:33 +0000

The recent shift in the global consciousness will undoubtedly push networks to reconsider airing shows that glorify the police.

Journalist Derrick Broze Arrested for Simply Covering a George Floyd Protest in Houston

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 06:10:23 +0000

Derrick Broze was arrested and jailed for 16 hours last week.

Trump Imposes Sanctions Against ICC Officials Investigating US War Crimes

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 02:30:36 +0000

"The Trump administration's contempt for the global rule of law is plain."

National Guard Soldier Watched Her Own Brother Get Teargassed While Deployed

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 23:05:56 +0000

Many National Guard soldiers say they felt uncomfortable with the role they were asked to perform.

Flights Logs Suggest Bolivia Coup May Have Been Planned in Brazil

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 21:31:39 +0000

Bolivian President Evo Morales was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup in November.

The psychological condition that best explains Donald Trump's twisted worldview

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 16:40:00 +0000

Think of our president as a hoarder. But instead of objects, he collects victories and vendettas.

Trump’s ghostwriter put these words in the president’s mouth: "Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game."

I believe it about the money, though not about playing the game being his real excitement. If that were true, Trump wouldn’t be such a sore loser. He wouldn’t have said, on the last days of the campaign, that if he loses, “this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime, by a factor of 100.” He wouldn’t have said of John McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” And he wouldn’t have said, “That makes me smart,” when Hillary Clinton accused him of not paying taxes for 18 years.

Trump’s sole value is being an impressive winner of the game. A neutral psychological assessment of his motivations wouldn't rule out the possibility that he ran for president because he was frustrated to see other people winning more than he was. He saw dictators around the world who had amassed more billions and had more power than he did. He realized that if he really wanted to win, he might do the same.

The evidence is overwhelming; Trump is a pathological climber. The self-declared "ratings machine" suffers from "impressive compulsive disorder,” a condition that is like hoarding, not of stuff but of impressive power.

You know that burning, sinking feeling you get when you're around someone who's more impressive than you? That's Trump's sole driver. There's nothing in him to upstage it, no greater good to temper it. Read between the lines, his worldview goes something like this:

Life is nothing but a dog-eat-dog game. The only value is being top dog. Winning is its own reward and the only reward. The power you gain by winning isn’t for anything else. Winners play the game undistracted by other values. All other supposed values are just means to that end. Duping others into thinking you care about other values, like welfare or making America great again, is how you play to win. Losers lose because they’re distracted by other values. To win, you need to use other people’s values against them. Other values are the loser’s handicap. You can get them to help you win by convincing them that you care about what they care about.

To winners, values are free lip-service bargaining chips. They’re free because lip service costs nothing; they’re bargaining chips in that losers value them. You can get people to help you win the game if you give lip service to those other values – just enough to keep them supporting you in the competition. That’s how the game is played and if you don’t know that, you’re naïve. I know it. That’s what makes me smart.

To understand why Trump is a hypocrite and a liar, willing to say or do anything to climb, one has to pay attention to what’s missing in him. He lacks conscience. That may seem a moral accusation, but I mean it merely as a psychological diagnosis based on the evidence. Unconstrained by any other value, he’ll say and do anything to win. He is a gloataholic, addicted to gloating as impressive because no other value upstages that goal for him. We could call him a narcissist or sociopath, but it’s more than that. Not all narcissists and sociopaths need to keep gaining and hoarding power the way he does. He is Yertle the Turtle on steroids.

Source: Labeled for reuse, Pinterest.

All of us are hypocritical liars to some degree or other. We are willing to compromise here and there when there’s something to gain for it. Often what’s gained is personal and immediate, but often it’s a greater good of some sort, for example, saying what we know isn’t true as a way of encouraging others or ignoring our imperfections to make a stronger case against a greater evil.

Politicians have to be hypocritical and lie, in part because they have to appeal to a general public that is hypocritical and lying to themselves about how they (unlike other people) just want straight talk. Pandering is part of the politician’s job description. Downplaying one’s own flaws to draw contrasts with opponent’s flaws is part of the job description too. No politician can survive without doing these things. Great leaders do it. Lincoln did. What makes them great is that they do it both skillfully yet measuredly and always to serve a higher purpose. As Lincoln did.

Trump is a skillful hypocrite and liar, but not a measured one. He has no sense of proportion. His hypocrisy and lying know no bounds. He has no higher purpose in mind, nothing to constrain his quest for ever more power.

We tolerate more hypocrisy and lying when we think it’s serving a higher purpose. That’s why many were willing to hold their noses and vote for Trump even though they knew he was a hypocrite and a liar. They saw him as campaigning for the greater good. Some saw his character flaws as a cost outweighed by the greater good he would do. Others saw it not as a cost but a benefit because the only way to get the greater good done in our paralyzed system would be to deploy the unrelenting confidence Trump showed. Either way, the greater good justified it and made him worthy of their votes.

Two months in, there are no signs of the greater good. He still gives it lip service, but that costs him nothing. Increasingly it’s evident that Trump got away with justifying his unbounded hypocrisy and lying as serving a greater good that he never cared about. We have elected a rebel without a cause.

In a way, Trump is highly evolved. Evolution has always been about maximizing the organism’s gain. It is a merciless competition among creatures indifferent to each other’s welfare except to the extent that it helps them. Trump is the perfect animal. Not the perfect human, though. Humans have the foresight to be able to address the tragedy of the commons: If everyone is just out to win for winning’s sake, game over and everyone loses. That shouldn’t make us aspire to be selfless, but at least interested in keeping the game going by not winning so completely that we eliminate it altogether.

In a way, parasites recognize the risk of ending the game, though of course not consciously. They rarely kill enough hosts that the game is over for them. Work to win, but don’t blow up the game board winning depends upon.

Trump isn’t the only pathological climber. What was once the Republican Party is now infested with them.

Because greater goods don’t matter to pathological climbers they can exploit any popular cause. There have been plenty of leftist pathological climbers, and religious ones too, people who will pay lip service to any cause if it helps them gain and hoard impressive power.

Business is the career path of choice for many pathological climbers since money is the most tangible metric of impressive power, as Trump’s ghostwriter said, the way to keep score. Even those who enter business with a greater good in their hearts often end up just giving it lip service as a way to survive in business, since in intense power struggles, having other values ties one’s hands. Likewise, people enter law to fight the good fight and end up corporate lawyers just out to win. If they’re going to rise in power, they’re going to have to shed the weighty baggage of other values.

Both law and business are cultures prone to saturation with pathological climbers. The more there are, the more there will be, since competing with them is difficult when your hands are tied with other values. The traditionally pro-business Republican Party is the party likeliest to experience a surge in pathological climbing as it is today.

Social conservatism was a strange bedfellow, especially to libertarianism. How can you be for small government and yet want to impose social morality topdown? Cold War anti-communism and libertarianism slept well together since communism is the opposite of libertarianism. Still, one could hardly call the Soviet Union communist. It was communist in name only, much as Trump’s campaign was really about making America great again. More accurately, the Soviet Union was game-killing crony plutocracy, as is Russia today.

And as the U.S. could be soon, if we don’t get better at identifying what kills the game. It's not communism, which as a theory is very much a distracting value; and it's not political correctness, globalization or regulation, which are game levelers. Rather what kills the game pathological climbing, impressive compulsive disorder, the source of runaway inequality and a return to animal impulse unfettered by humanitarian values.

References

Bueno, M. B., & Smith, A. (2011). The dictator's handbook: Why bad behavior is almost always good politics. New York: PublicAffairs.

Bernstein, J.M., Hegel on Wall Street, New York Times. October 3, 2010

Frank, R. H. (2011). The Darwin economy: Liberty, competition, and the common good. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

The 8-Hour sleep myth: How I learned that everything I knew about sleep was wrong

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 16:30:00 +0000

We've been told over and over that the 8-hour sleep is ideal, but our bodies have been telling us something else.

I’ve always been at odds with sleep. Starting around adolescence, morning became a special form of hell. Long school commutes meant rising in 6am darkness, then huddling miserably near the bathroom heating vent as I struggled to wrest myself from near-paralysis. The sight of eggs turned my not-yet-wakened stomach, so I scuttled off without breakfast. In fourth grade, my mother noticed that instead of playing outside after school with the other kids, I lay zonked in front of the TV, dozing until dinner. “Lethargy of unknown cause,” pronounced the doctor.

High school trigonometry commenced at 7:50am. I flunked, stupefied with sleepiness. Only when college allowed me to schedule courses in the afternoon did the joy of learning return. My decision to opt for grad school was partly traceable to a horror of returning to the treadmill of too little sleep and exhaustion, which a 9-to-5 job would surely bring.

In my late 20s, I began to wake up often for a couple of hours in the middle of the night – a phenomenon linked to female hormonal shifts. I’ve met these vigils with dread, obsessed with lost sleep and the next day’s dysfunction. Beside my bed I stashed an arsenal of weapons against insomnia: lavender sachets, sleep CDs, and even a stuffed sheep that makes muffled ocean noises. I collected drugstore remedies -- valerian, melatonin, Nytol -- which caused me "rebound insomnia" the moment I stop taking them.

The Sleep Fairy continued to elude me.

Recently I confessed my problem to the doctor, ashamed to fail at something so simple that babies and rodents can do it on a dime. When I asked for Ambien, she cut me a glance that made me feel like a heroin addict and lectured me on the dangers of “controlled substances.” Her offering of “sleep hygiene” bromides like reserving my bedroom solely for sleep was useless to a studio apartment-dweller.

Conventional medical wisdom dropped me at a dead end. Why did I need to use a bedroom for nothing but sleeping when no other mammal had such a requirement? When for most of history, humans didn’t either? Our ancestors crashed with beasties large and small roaming about, bodies tossing and snoring nearby, and temperatures fluctuating wildly. And yet they slept. How on earth did they do it?

A lot differently than we do, it turns out.

The 8-Hour Sleep Myth

Pursuing the truth about sleep means winding your way through a labyrinth of science, consumerism and myth. Researchers have had barely a clue about what constitutes “normal” sleep. Is it how many hours you sleep? A certain amount of time in a particular phase? The pharmaceutical industry recommends drug-induced oblivion, which, it turns out, doesn’t even work. The average time spent sleeping increases by only a few minutes with the use of prescription sleep aids. And -- surprise! -- doctors have just linked sleeping pills to cancer. We have memory foam mattresses, sleep clinics, hotel pillow concierges, and countless others strategies to put us to bed. And yet we complain about sleep more than ever.

The blame for modern sleep disorders is usually laid at the doorstep of Thomas Edison, whose electric light bulb turned the night from a time of rest to one of potentially endless activity and work. Proponents of the rising industrial culture further pushed the emphasis of work over rest, and the sense of sleep as lazy indulgence.

But there’s something else, which I learned recently while engaged in a bout of insomnia-driven Googling. A Feb. 12, 2012 article on the BBC Web site, “The Myth of the 8-Hour Sleep,” has permanently altered the way I think about sleep. It proclaimed something that the body had always intuited, even as the mind floundered helplessly.

Turns out that psychiatrist Thomas Wehr ran an experiment back in the ‘90s in which people were thrust into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. When their sleep regulated, a strange pattern emerged. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before drifting off again into a second four-hour sleep.

Historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech would not have been surprised by this pattern. In 2001, he published a groundbreaking paper based on 16 years of research, which revealed something quite amazing: humans did not evolve to sleep through the night in one solid chunk. Until very recently, they slept in two stages. Shazam.

In his book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, Ekrich presents over 500 references to these two distinct sleep periods, known as the “first sleep” and the “second sleep,” culled from diaries, court records, medical manuals, anthropological studies, and literature, including The Odyssey. Like an astrolabe pointing to some forgotten star, these accounts referenced a first sleep that began two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

This waking period, known in some cultures as the “watch," was filled with everything from bringing in the animals to prayer. Some folks visited neighbors. Others smoked a pipe or analyzed their dreams. Often they lounged in bed to read, chat with bedfellows, or have much more refreshing sex than we modern humans have at bedtime. A 16th-century doctor’s manual prescribed sex after the first sleep as the most enjoyable variety.

But these two sleeps and their magical interim were swept away so completely that by the 20th century, they were all but forgotten.

Historian Craig Koslofsky delves into the causes of this massive shift in human behavior in his new book, Evening's Empire. He points out that before the 17th century, you’d have to be a fool to go wandering around at night, where ne’er-do-wells and cutthroats lurked on pitch-black streets. Only the wealthy had candles, and even they had little need or desire to venture from home at night. Street lighting and other trends gradually changed this, and eventually nighttime became fashionable and hanging out in bed a mark of indolence. The industrial revolution put the exclamation point on this sentence of wakefulness. By the 19th century, health pundits argued in favor of a single, uninterrupted sleep.

We have been told over and over that the eight-hour sleep is ideal. But in many cases, our bodies have been telling us something else. Since our collective memory has been erased, anxiety about nighttime wakefulness has kept us up even longer, and our eight-hour sleep mandate may have made us more prone to stress. The long period of relaxation we used to get after a hard day’s work may have been better for our peace of mind than all the yoga in Manhattan.

After learning this, I went in search of lost sleep.

Past Life Regression

“Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work and helps
make something of the world.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

What intrigued me most about the sleep research was a feeling of connection to ancient humans and to a realm beyond clock-driven, electrified industrial life, whose endless demands are more punishing than ever. Much as Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams pulls the viewer into the lives of ancient cave dwellers in southern France who painted the walls with marvelous images, reading about how our ancestors filled their nights with dream reflection, lovemaking and 10-to-12 hour stretches of down-time produced a strange sense of intimacy and wonder.

I’m a writer and editor who works from home, without children, so I’ve had the luxury, for the last couple of weeks, of completely relinquishing myself to a new (or quite old) way of sleeping. I’ve been working at a cognitive shift – looking upon early evening sleepiness as a gift, and plopping into bed if I feel like it. I try to view the wakeful period, if it should come, as a magical, blessed time when my email box stops flooding and the screeching horns outside my New York window subside.

Instead of heading to bed with anxiety, I’ve tried to dive in like a voluptuary, pushing away my guilt about the list of things I could be doing and letting myself become beautifully suspended between worlds. I’ve started dimming the lights a couple of hours after dusk and looking at the nighttime not as a time to pursue endless work, but to daydream, drift, putter about, and enter an almost meditative state.

The books I’ve been reading in the evening hours have been specially chosen as a link to dreamy ruminations of our ancestor’s “watch” period. Volumes like Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body or Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors provide the kind of reflective, incantatory experience the nighttime seems made for. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams would be another excellent choice, and I know from experience that reading it before bedtime triggers the most vivid mental journeys.

In sleep, we slip back to a more primitive state. We go on a psychic archaeological dig. This is part of the reason that Freud proclaimed dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious and lifted his metaphors from the researchers who were sifting through the layers of ancient history on Egyptian digs, uncovering relics and forgotten memories. Ghosts flutter about us when we lie down to rest. Our waking identities dissolve, and we become creatures whose rhythms derive from the moon and the seas much more than the clock and the computer.

As we learn more, we may realize that giving sleep and rest the center stage in our lives may be as fundamental to our well-being as the way we eat and the medicines that cure us. And if we come to treasure this time of splendid relaxation, we may have much more to offer in the daytime hours.

Lynn Parramore is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.

Stumped by the stock market slump? Start by picturing a used car dealership

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 16:28:00 +0000

Trading stocks can be a lot like buying a used car.

Stocks have been slumping on a variety of concerns, from President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war with China to worries about an economic slowdown and rising interest rates.

Given the many factors driving shares up or down on any day or week, it’s hard to make sense of what’s happening on Wall Street.

Based on my many years of experience teaching and writing about financial markets and frauds, I believe the best way to understand what’s happening on Wall Street – and puncture its mystique – is to imagine it as a used car dealership.

Stock markets 101

Stock exchanges are places where people trade ownership in corporations by buying and selling shares.

Partial ownership of a company comes with benefits, such as a cut of future profits and rising stock prices. But there are risks and costs as well. Share price can fall, reducing the value of one’s wealth; even worse, businesses can go under, reducing the value of ownership to zero.

About half the population owns at least some stocks, mostly in their 401(k)s. But, except for the richest 10 percent of Americans, stock holdings are usually on the smaller side.

The New York Stock Exchange, one of several in the U.S., is the largest securities exchange in the world. At a current market value of almost US$23 trillion, it’s worth more than the GDP of the U.S. and the world’s other big economies.

Stock exchanges play an important economic role by helping companies finance new investments. When a large company wants to expand, it goes to an exchange like the NYSE and offers investors a stake in its business through what is known as an initial public offering. That’s exactly what ride-hailing services Lyft and Uber plan to do at some point in 2019.

Selling used cars

However, this is not what stock trading is mainly about. Virtually all the $80 trillion or so in daily trading on the NYSE and other exchanges around the world involves someone who already owns shares of a company selling them to somebody else. In other words, it is very much like a used car dealership.

Used car dealers buy old automobiles and resell them. Similarly, stock markets are places where someone sells their ownership in a company to a dealer, who then finds someone else to buy it. That is it. Ownership of a company changes hands, with the exchange serving as the middleman.

These exchanges have benefits. They enable us sell things quickly. When I want to get rid of my car, it is more convenient to have a used car dealer serve as an intermediary than for me to sell it myself. Because it is easy to sell my car every few years, I may purchase a new one more frequently, which increases consumer spending and strengthens the economy.

Selling lemons

But there are also negatives to stock markets.

As used car buyers know, it is easy to end up with a lemon. Most people don’t know the specifics of a particular used car. Its past and even its present condition is often a total mystery.

Be wary of buying a lemon. Joshua Resnick/Shutterstock.com

And car dealers have incentives to hide flaws in what they’re selling – and thus deceive potential buyers. Revealing flaws in the car will likely lose them sales and commissions.

Similarly, investors typically don’t know much about a particular company. Such knowledge requires doing a lot of homework about the company – its past history, its senior executives and its future plans – as well as knowing how to read financial statements. This is much harder than homework on a specific car that you are thinking about buying.

And just as car dealers can make a lemon look good for a test drive, companies can cook their books or drive up their stock price to make themselves look good.

Furthermore, the stock market can help turn companies into lemons. Wall Street’s focus on short-term stock price gains means that it cares more about what will generate a quick buck rather than what will support long-term growth and profitability. Consequently, companies end up focusing more on doing whatever drives up the value of its shares at the expense of producing quality products efficiently, worker training and customer satisfaction.

This is why we keep seeing business scandals such as car companies like Volkswagen installing deceptive exhaust systems and financial firms such as Wells Fargo that charge customers for accounts that they did not ask for.

The history of financial markets is also a history of fraud, from the South Sea Bubble of the early 18th century to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme in the 2000s.

In the old days, there used to be a lot more paper on the floor of the NYSE. AP Photo Making sense of the slump

So what does this all mean for the current market slump?

One important lesson is that Wall Street is not the economy. If stocks go up or down, this doesn’t mean that the economy has necessarily improved or worsened. It only means that “pieces of paper” being bought and sold have changed in value. Some people get richer, others poorer.

However, sharp stock market declines can have a real world impact, such as when a “bubble” collapses. That’s what happened in 2008 and what happened in October 1929, when a stock market crash caused by a bursting bubble led to an 80 percent drop in stock prices. That market swoon helped spawn the Great Depression, which saw an average of 15 percent unemployment for an entire decade, soup lines throughout the country and a 30 percent decline in economic activity and average incomes.

In other words, when bubbles burst, the economic damage can be substantial. People become poorer and spend less. Corporate profits plummet, causing stocks to fall even further. People become skeptical of the stock market and won’t lend money to firms that want to expand their operations. A downward spiral can quickly deepen and become self-reinforcing.

The bottom line: While you shouldn’t panic about Wall Street’s current woes, there are still reasons to pay attention to the economy and stock market. And, most important of all, if you’re an investor, do your homework and steer clear of lemons.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 5, 2017.

Steven Pressman, Professor of Economics, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This could stop congress from forcing shutdowns

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 16:20:00 +0000

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has the right idea

US Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Saturday called for congressional salaries to be put on hold during the next government shutdown.

The US government went into a partial shutdown at midnight on Friday after President Trump refused to sign a spending bill that did not include $5 billion for his wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He had long claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall.

“It’s completely unacceptable that members of Congress can force a government shutdown on partisan lines & then have Congressional salaries exempt from that decision,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter.

“Have some integrity,” she added, calling for salaries to be furloughed for the next shutdown.

Members of the House and the Senate are paid $174,000 a year. According to Roll Call, 153 House members and 50 senators are millionaires.

More than 420,000 federal workers who are considered “essential” will continue working — but without pay, according to CBS News. Those employees may eventually receive back pay. However, an additional 380,000 workers will be furloughed and may miss a paycheck depending on how long the shutdown lasts.

Ocasio-Cortez, who will join Congress in early January as the new representative for New York’s 14th District, has been a vocal critic of the demand for $5 billion for a border wall. When the House passed a short-term spending bill with $5.7 billion for border security, Ocasio-Cortez challenged the GOP trope that the federal government simply doesn’t have the money to implement bold progressive policies such as Medicare for All or a Green New Deal.

“And just like that, GOP discovers $5.7 billion for a wall,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “But notice how no one’s asking the GOP how they’re paying for it.”

On Friday, she outlined another way the $5.7 billion could be spent instead of Trump’s proposed wall. “For the wall’s $5.7 billion, every child in America could have access to Universal Pre-K. Yet when we propose the SAME $, we’re told Universal Edu is a ‘fantasy’ & asked ‘how are you going to pay for it.’ Education is an investment in society that yields returns,” she tweeted. “Walls are waste.”

'Shame on this President': Trump cuts off funds for 'vital services and protections' for women who face abuse

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 16:14:00 +0000

"This shutdown is directly impacting the safety and lives of women and families across the country."

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) was among those condemning the government shutdown's impacts on the safety of women and families, as funding for the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) expired at midnight on Friday as the shutdown went into effect.

Along with nearly 400,000 federal employees who face a furlough thanks to President Donald Trump's decision to shut down the federal government, programs that support women who have survived violence may now face funding shortages due to the turmoil on Capitol Hill. Congress's failure to negotiate a spending bill over the weekend left programs that rely on the law without federal funding until at least Thursday, when lawmakers reconvene.

"Because of the Trump Shutdown, millions of survivors who rely on programs funded by the Violence Against Women Act will not have the resources they need to stay safe right before the holidays," Lee tweeted over the weekend as it became clear that the government would not reopen Monday. "Shame on this President."

Due to the lapse in funding for the landmark legislation which was passed in 1994, funding requests for a wide array of programs supporting women will be delayed. VAWA helps to fund rape education and prevention programs, strengthens public housing protections for survivors of domestic abuse, enables native tribes to prosecute non-native offenders who abuse and assault women, and provides funding for numerous other programs.

A number of lawmakers expressed anger over the funding lapse brought on by the president's refusal to sign the spending bill that was passed by the Senate late last week, as it did not include $5 billion for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border aimed at keeping asylum seekers out of the country. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who refused to budge on her opposition to the wall funding, called the expiration in VAWA funding "nothing short of an abdication of our responsibilities to women in our country."

The Trump administration's xenophobic anti-immigrant agenda has previously affected domestic violence victims when former Attorney General Jeff Sessionsannounced in June that survivors of abuse would no longer be granted asylum. A federal court last week struck down that rule, calling the administration's move "arbitrary, capricious, and in violation of the immigration laws." On social media, some wrote that the president's lack of concern for VAWA funding was hardly surprising considering his own admitted history of abuse toward women.

‘Trump is doomed': Conservative blasts president and bluntly states his 'presidency will end poorly'

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 16:10:00 +0000

Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg observed that the President's poor character—as evidenced by the government shut down and his reaction to it—might doom his administration.

As the government shut down over the holidays, the President appeared to barricade himself in the White House and tweet about his dire fate.

"I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security," he wrote. "At some point the Democrats not wanting to make a deal will cost our Country more money than the Border Wall we are all talking about. Crazy!"

I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security. At some point the Democrats not wanting to make a deal will cost our Country more money than the Border Wall we are all talking about. Crazy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018

Writing in the Los Angeles Times Tuesday, conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg observed that the President's poor character—as evidenced by the government shut down and his reaction to it—might doom his administration.

"As we celebrate Christmastime amid an unnecessary and indefinite government shutdown and the worst December for the stock market since 1931, I’m reminded once again of my longstanding prediction: The Trump presidency will end poorly because character is destiny," Goldberg writes.

He lists the qualities associated with good character, which seem to be largely missing in the Trump administration: "decency, politeness, self-restraint, commitment, honesty, cooperativeness and the ability to think of others’ well-being."

Conservatives might balk. "Weirdly, it’s gotten to the point that when I say President Trump is not a man of good character, I feel like I should preface it with a trigger warning for many of my fellow conservatives," he writes.

Goldberg points to an array of ways that fellow conservatives have defended the president's character, from minimizing his Twitter presence to citing his authenticity and apparent love for his children.

But Goldberg concludes that those are irrelevant tests of his character and lists the more pertinent qualities.

"But his refusal to listen to advisors; his inability to bite his tongue; his demonization and belittling of senators who vote for his agenda; his rants against the 1st Amendment; his praise for dictators and insults for allies; his need to create new controversies to eclipse old ones; and his inexhaustible capacity to lie and fabricate history,' he writes. "All this springs from his nature.'

A very 1960s Christmas

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 16:06:00 +0000

Fifty years ago, Christmas in New York came with dead bodies, fringes, patchouli and Jimi Hendrix

Christmas in 1968 was the first I would spend apart from my family. I was a cadet at West Point, and my parents and sisters lived in Hawaii, and I couldn’t afford to fly there for the holidays, so I called a woman I had been seeing in the city and asked if I could stay with her. To my great relief, she said yes.

She was a nurse who worked nights and lived on a bombed-out block of East 2nd Street, between Avenues A and B, as I recall. I took the bus to Port Authority, grabbed the shuttle to Grand Central and took the Lex to Bleecker Street and walked east. It was around freezing, and a stiff wind was blowing. The further east I walked, the more deserted the streets were. Her block faced husks of deserted buildings and empty lots with Houston Street just beyond. It felt like a landscape out of some kind of post-apocalypse movie — boarded-up doors and blown-out windows, a few cars up on cinder blocks with missing wheels and tires, empty lots piled with derelict mattresses and broken furniture and plain old garbage. Even in the bitter cold, the street stank.

But not as much as the entryway of her building. I smelled it the minute I pushed open the door: that sickly, sweet, somehow thick odor of death. It mixed with the smells of frying grease and garlic and peppers and onions and got stronger as I went up the stairs. I turned onto the third floor and knew there was a body behind one of the doors. Her place was on the fourth floor, and when she opened the door, I asked her, don’t you smell that? I know, she said. The Puerto Ricans are always cooking stuff in this building.

I threw open a window to flush the smell out of the apartment and looked up the number for the Fifth Precinct and called them. A couple of beat cops showed up an hour or so later, and after them came a truck from the morgue. They hauled out the body of an old man who had died alone in his apartment a few days previously. After they left, I went downstairs and propped open the front doors, and over the next day or so, the smell of death was gradually overtaken by the odors of fried food and cheap wine that had been spilled by winos trying to escape the cold. It was four days until Christmas.

She was a few years older than me, and we didn’t have a relationship as much as an arrangement. In the afternoons, we would lie around on her narrow bed in the front room watching a black and white TV until she had to put on her uniform for work, then we would venture out into the cold and dark New York winter and meet up again when she came back sometime after midnight. I’d usually pick up something from one of the bodegas on First or Second Avenue, and we’d eat a late dinner in her kitchen and drink some wine and go back to bed.

The temperature dropped into the 20s on the day before Christmas, and with the wind blowing through the cracks around the old tenement windows, the radiators in her place struggled to keep up. We huddled under a pile of blankets and quilts until she had to go to work. She had a later shift that night, so it was 9:00 by the time we bundled up and hit the street. I walked her over to the bus she took up First Avenue to Bellevue Hospital. I had read in the Voice that there would be a Christmas eve poetry reading at St. Marks in the Bowery, so I headed up Second Avenue.

Inside the church, it was a real old-fashioned beatnik scene. The place was crowded with long-haired East Village characters wearing long woolen overcoats and their old ladies in raccoon coats they’d picked up in the second hand shops on St. Marks Place. Someone was passing out cups of red wine at the door, and everyone was in a festive mood.

Up on the altar at the front of the room were several real beatniks: Hubert Huncke, known as “Huncke the junkie,” who was famous for his ability to scrounge up the scratch to feed his habit while staying out of jail; Gregory Corso, a diminutive pinch-faced guy with a cloud of curly hair and a mischievous smile; Ed Sanders, famous as an “investigative poet” and one of the Fugs, who ran the Peace Eye Bookstore, where he published “Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.”

I took a seat on one of the pews several rows back from the front. They began playing a tape Allen Ginsberg had sent from somewhere upstate for the occasion, reading his poetry in his distinctive cadences, cheerful no matter the subject matter. Ginsberg’s chant was filling the church when I smelled a woosh of patchouli oil to my right. I turned just as Jimi Hendrix slid in and sat down next to me. He was wearing a black hat with a wide brim and a fancy hat-band and a furry fringed vest and feather boas and a big silver belt that rode low on the hips of his bellbottoms. With him was an entourage of gorgeous young women chattering excitedly. Jimi sshhhed them.

We sat there for the next hour listening as East Village poets cried out in political protest and in celebration of sex and pot and Buddhism and the vegetarian lifestyle. Gregory Corso read a poem that managed to be angry and funny at once, and Ron Padgett read, and from Warhol’s factory Gerard Malanga read, and then there was an intermission. Hendrix and his crew stood up and left, and I thought they were gone for good, but they came back and sat where they had been before, and Jimi shhhhed his entourage again when Ed Sanders took the mic and read a bawdy poem about a motel room. Then Ed read a poem he had published in the Voice earlier that year when one of the Voice’s best writers, Don McNeill, had died unexpectedly. It was a sad, beautiful poem that captured something about that year, 1968, in its celebration of the death of a man who had covered the descent of hippiedom from pot and rock and roll and be ins into speed and smack and murders on Avenue B.

Ed finished reading, and everyone sat silently for a moment, and then it was over. Hendrix stood, and in a rush of boas and fringe and patchouli, he was gone. He had sat there listening to poetry for at least two hours, and he never said a word. After that night, I never listened to his music the same way again because I heard in his lyrics the rhythms of that night, his beat allusions to “happiness staggering down the street footprints dressed in red,” while “the wind whispers Mary.” I mean, how could you not hear his debt to the Beats amongst his brilliant guitar licks?

Hendrix was a poet who went out on a frigid New York Christmas eve to listen to poetry. He would be dead in London a year and a half later, but on that night in 1968, at the end of a year of protests and turmoil and war and assassinations, he was happy.

Merry Christmas and happy birthday to a Jewish immigrant

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 15:58:00 +0000

Dear white evangelicals: Christmas celebrates the birth of a Jewish child whose family then fled persecution

Nativity scenes are a ubiquitous sight in front of churches at Christmas time, but a Massachusetts church recently drew attention due to its unusual display. In its nativity scene, baby Jesus lies inside of a cage, separated from his mother and father. Earlier this year, churches in Indiana and California erected similar nativity scenes, eliciting reactions of both support and condemnation.

These provocative scenes provide clear reminders of something Christians often forget: Christmas celebrates the birth of an immigrant child. Jesus’ parents were from Nazareth, but fearing for the life of their child, they fled to Egypt. As Christmas 2018 approaches, the U.S. is tear gassing children at the U.S.-Mexico border, whose parents seek the same security that Mary and Joseph sought for their child. Children will spend Christmas in cells at the border, separated from their families.

As I show in my book "One Family Under God," many Christians are outraged by this separation of immigrant families. They believe Jesus’ command to welcome the stranger requires treating immigrants and their families with dignity. Data from PRRI shows these Christians are not alone in their views. Most Americans oppose the policy that separates immigrant children from their parents (71 percent), seeing it as antithetical to American values.

But the same PRRI data shows that some Americans do support such policies (22 percent), including a sizeable minority of white evangelical Christians, 36 percent of whom support family separation at the border. For them, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” are the words of some soft-hearted fool, not the person whose birthday is celebrated at Christmas. Many white evangelical Christians seemingly believe safety and belonging are privileges rather than rights.

New research on what churchgoers hear from the pulpit may help explain why: despite a supposed end to the “culture wars,” religious leaders remain much more likely to talk about homosexuality and abortion than immigration during religious services. However, this varies by religious tradition and race, with at least four in ten Hispanic and black Americans hearing about immigration from the pulpit, compared with only 16 percent of white evangelical Protestants. If immigration isn’t portrayed as a religious issue in white evangelical churches, then it is little wonder that Jesus’ teachings about welcoming the immigrant — indeed, his position as an immigrant himself — are seen as irrelevant to their positions on immigration policy.

The main characters in the Christmas story weren’t just immigrants: they were also Jewish. The holy family had to flee because Herod, king of Judea, feared the power of the child the magi called “king of the Jews.” Today, fear and hatred of Jews remains alive and well: a recent CNN poll found high levels of anti-Semitism across Europe, where 20-25 percent of people believe Jews have “too much influence” on business, media, and politics. In the U.S., just in the last two months, Jewish students were harassed in schools, Jewish professors encountered swastikas spray-painted outside their offices, and Jewish worshippers were brutally murdered, in part due to their perceived support for refugees.

While some political commentators reacted to the Massachusetts “caged” nativity scene by saying “Christmas is under siege,” calls to stand against those who reject immigrants, Jews, and other marginalized people are not tangential to the Christmas story: they are at its very center.

After Jesus’ birth, the magi, three Persian foreigners, embarked on a long journey to bring gifts to Jesus, to honor the good in something they didn’t fully understand. Sometimes difference — racial, ethnic, cultural, national, religious — causes fear, and this fear too easily turns into hate. On their way to visit Jesus, the magi encountered Herod, who told them to come back and tell him where he could find Jesus so he could “worship him” (translation: kill him). They could have gone back to Herod after delivering their gifts to Jesus. They’d already shown their love and admiration: Why risk their own safety and well-being?

Instead, the magi showed us how to celebrate Christmas by welcoming difference, even if it required them to risk everything. In their most extravagant gift that first Christmas, the magi refused to cooperate with the government’s plan to harm Jesus, resisting the message that an immigrant Jew should be an object of fear rather than a person to honor and love. They defied Herod’s order. They took another road home.

White evangelical Christians need Jesus — not Donald Trump — if their movement is going to survive

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 15:41:00 +0000

Rampant hypocrisy is one reason why conservative white evangelicals continue to lose relevance and influence.

Amidst the chaos of relentless, mind-numbing corruption, lies, and malfeasance by Donald Trump and his administration, Adam Serwer’s brilliant essay reminds us of a common element: “The Cruelty Is the Point.” Serwer argues that Trump and his supporters thrive on cruelty against those “outsiders” who, in their eyes, “deserve it.”. This cruelty binds Trump and his supporters—especially conservative white evangelical Christians—into a community that celebrates Trump’s mockery of others and the punitive actions he takes against various people and groups. It also leads his supporters to ignore or rationalize Trump’s other unethical or illegal activities.

Some examples of Serwer’s contention include the Trump administration’s heartless “zero tolerance policy” of separating refugee children as young as four months-old from their asylum-seeking parents, the continuing detention of almost 15,000 migrant children, the illegal closing of ports of entry for asylum seekers, and radically limiting the number of people who can apply for asylum each day, including unaccompanied children. The most recent immigration atrocity was the death of Jakelin Caal Maquin, a seven-year old girl who fled Guatemala with her father and who died in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials. Her death was one of more than 260 deaths in 2018 alone. 50 of these deaths were “water-related,” a statistic made even more obscene by the fact that U.S. border patrol agents routinely pour out containers of water humanitarian groups leave for migrants crossing the desert in an attempt to punish and deter people from crossing the border illegally. And instead of remorse, an apology, and a change in policy, the Trump administration instead blamed the death of seven year-old Jakelin on her family, telling migrants and asylum seekers not to “put themselves or their children at risk attempting to enter illegally.” As always, the cruelty is the point.

Have we already forgotten how the raucous crowd cheered wildly as Trump mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at a rally in Southaven, Mississippi, in his noxious but ultimately successful effort to defend Brett Kavanaugh, who Senate Republicans permitted to allegedly lie his way into a lifetime appointment on the U.S. Supreme Court?

The media continues to cover the murder of Jamal Khashoggi—one of “The Guardians” recently named Time’s Person of the Year—and remind us that the Trump administration is complicit in his murder by ignoring, excusing, and even abetting it with Jared Kushner advising Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the assassination, on how to “weather this storm." Often missing from headlines, however, is that a Saudi-led coalition aided by the U.S. is largely responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Yemen’s civil war, where as many as 85,000 children may have died from starvation due to the conflict with more than 15 million people on the brink of starvation.

The list of the Trump administration’s various forms of cruelty is seemingly endless. Yet as the foundation of the Trump coalition begins to crack, conservative white evangelical Christians, those who most adamantly claim to follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, remain Trump’s strongest and most devoted supporters, supporters who often approve of and sometimes participate in Trump’s cruelty.

This particular form of evangelical Christianity is a far cry from the religion of Jesus, who proclaimed good news to the poor, release to the captives, and liberation of the oppressed. The same Jesus who declared that the two greatest commandments were to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself. The same Jesus who uttered the parable of the sheep and goats which says that one’s eternal salvation is dependent upon whether one gives food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, welcomes immigrants, clothes the naked, and visits those in prison. The same Jesus who commands his followers to have absolute honesty and integrity, which stands in stark contrast to a president who lies so blatantly and continuously that a new category of “bottomless Pinocchio” was created just for his constantly-repeated lies and who made at least 6,420 false or misleading claims in the first 649 days of his presidency. Jesus also repeatedly condemns the rich and powerful, declaring that it is difficult for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God unless they give extravagantly to the poor without expecting anything in return. In addition, Jesus urges his followers not to seek glory, honor, and power, but in his ethical system, the “first” or “greatest” must actually be the “last of all” and “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant.”

Yet I have found that explaining these teachings of Jesus has little or no effect on white evangelical Trump supporters. This hypocrisy is one reason why conservative white evangelical Christians justifiably continue to lose both their influence and their relevance, and why the percentage of evangelical Christians in the total population has declined from about 21% to about 15% in the past ten years.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration continues to believe that a government of white, heterosexual Christians, by white, heterosexual Christians, and for white, heterosexual Christians, shall not perish from the earth. Anyone who disagrees with that viewpoint or who belongs to population of a different race, color, creed, or sexual orientation must be seen as dangerous outsiders who threaten their hold on power and influence.

The great Christian theologian Howard Thurman diagnosed this problem in his 1949 classic work, “Jesus and the Disinherited.” The religion of Jesus, he said, emerged from those suffering persecution and oppression, but in subsequent centuries, became the religion of the elite and powerful whose use of power and violence destroyed the message of Jesus of Nazareth, the poor, powerless, first-century Jew who spoke to others who were poor, oppressed, disinherited and dispossessed. Thurman’s analysis of the corruption of modern Christianity in the U.S. was informed by the discrimination and segregation of the U.S. in the 1940s, a situation analogous to Trump’s racist vision of the U.S. becoming “great again.”

White Christians of all denominations need to take a long, hard look in the mirror of Jesus’s teachings about loving one’s neighbors, but a number of scholars have demonstrated that racism—specifically a reaction against school integration—is one of the founding principles of modern white conservative evangelicals, a movement Randall Balmer argues is “based in racism.” We should celebrate the eroding influence and loss of relevance of the current white evangelical leaders who support Trump and his policies, especially until they take more seriously the social implications of the ethics of the historical Jesus. Perhaps one day they will be forced to admit that their voice is only one of a diverse multitude of voices that deserve to be heard, voices that must include the people who Trump demeans, marginalizes, and demonizes.

The teachings of Jesus echoed the message of other Jewish prophets who came before him, such as Micah, who declared that human beings should do justice, love mercy, and live in humility.

Cruelty has been the point in 2018. My wish for 2019 is that justice, mercy, and humility will make a comeback.

Internet mocks Trump for ridiculous Christmas Eve boast that he is already building the wall

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 23:19:00 +0000

The president is completely self-destructing.

On Christmas Eve, with the government in the throes of a federal shutdown putting tens of thousands of workers in limbo, President Donald Trump boasted that he is already beginning work on the border wall:

I am in the Oval Office & just gave out a 115 mile long contract for another large section of the Wall in Texas. We are already building and renovating many miles of Wall, some complete. Democrats must end Shutdown and finish funding. Billions of Dollars, & lives, will be saved!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018

Leaving aside the fact that Trump, not Democrats, shut down the government (and boasted that he would take credit for it), the president is obviously lying. Congress would need to appropriate funds to hire a contractor to work on the construction of a wall, and the Republican-controlled Senate is not doing any such thing.

Social media quickly pounced on Trump's absurd boast:

That isn’t how federal contacting works. https://t.co/NhZFnIcfJN
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) December 24, 2018

1. It’s pathetic that Trump feels compelled to tell us he’s actually working (“I am in the Oval Office”)

2. Trump hasn’t gotten a cent for his wall, so he’s either lying about this “contract” or living in fantasy land https://t.co/Io9CbJ3AWo
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 24, 2018

The president cannot give a contract to anyone to do anything, which means Trump is sitting alone in the Oval Office, snorting Adderal, and tweeting out his drug-fueled fantasies. https://t.co/ENumIxb5Hp
— Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) December 24, 2018

And some other people mocked Trump's broken English reference to a "115 mile long contract":

Trump just broke the world record for 115 mile long contract, that's alot of paper.
— Clazzex (@CJLavEd) December 24, 2018

Trump just tweeted that he signed a 115 mile long “wall” contract which comes very close to matching the length of my last CVS receipt.
— Matt Dalton (@MattDaltonRules) December 24, 2018

Just a footnote in Trump's 115 mile long contract. pic.twitter.com/MeFDtBZUgW
— Radio Justice (@justiceputnam) December 24, 2018

Former NATO commander: Allies are wondering if Trump was 'blackmailed' to pull out of Syria

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 20:02:00 +0000

"There doesn’t seem to be any strategic rationale for the decision."

One of last week’s biggest political bombshells came when President Donald Trump announced that he was withdrawing all U.S. troops from Syria because the terrorist group ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria) had been “defeated” in that war-ravaged Middle Eastern country. Trump’s decision inspired a variety of reactions, from vehement criticism from Sen. Lindsey Graham and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to praise from Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. And Gen. Wesley Clark (a former NATO commander) has been among the critics, asserting on CNN that some U.S. allies in the Middle East are wondering if Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan coerced Trump in some fashion.

During a CNN appearance on December 24, Clark stressed that “there doesn’t seem to be any strategic rational for the decision. And if there is no strategic rational, then you have to ask, ‘Why was the decision made? I can tell you that people around the world are asking this. And some of our friends and our allies in the Middle East are asking, ‘Well, did Erdogan blackmail the president? Was there a payoff or something? Why would a guy make a decision like this?’”

Clark disagreed with Trump’s claim that ISIS has been defeated in Turkey, telling CNN, “We’re not quite finished with ISIS….What does this say about the foreign policy of the United States? That we’re not reliable? That we make strategic decisions based on no strategic logic?”

The former NATO commander went on to say, “What the United States had going for it is the reputation of reliability, consistency—that we were going to be there through thick and thin. The decision on the spur of the moment as the president made undercuts all of that…. This is a really dangerous time for the United States in foreign policy because of this.”

"There doesn’t seem to be any strategic rationale for the decision... then you have to ask, why was the decision made? Did Erdogan blackmail the president?" — Former NATO commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, on Trumps decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.pic.twitter.com/oWvZJe8hP3
— Kristian (@ursusmiratus) December 24, 2018

Noam Chomsky: Social media outlets have 'become major forces for undermining democracy'

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 19:49:00 +0000

"The Internet does allow us to….overcome the impact of the concentration of media—and in fact, can be done pretty effectively.”

One of the most ludicrous—and debunked—claims of the far right is that the mainstream media in the United States has an inherent liberal/progressive bias. But Noam Chomsky tore that claim apart in his 1988 book, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” (which he co-wrote with the late economist/media scholar Edward S. Herman). The real media bias, Chomsky stressed, was a corporate bias dictated by advertising and soundbites. And 30 years later, the 90-year-old Chomsky revisited his book during a recent interview with Al Jazeera English.

“The myth is that the media are independent, adversarial, courageous, struggling against power,” Chomsky told Al Jazeera, stressing what while the United States often has “very fine reporters, correspondents” who do “an honest, courageous job,” they “must operate within a framework that determines what to discuss, what not to discuss. What we try to demonstrate in the book is that if you simply look at the institutional structure of the media within a state capitalist society like ours, they are performing pretty much the way you would expect.”

Soundbites, Chomsky told Al Jazeera, are an effective propaganda tool because propagandists “can say anything they want in two minutes, but they can’t be exposed in two minutes.”

Much has changed technologically since the release of “Manufacturing Consent” 30 years ago, including the rise of the Internet. Chomsky told Al Jazeera that having so much of the mainstream media owned by giant corporations “cheapens and reduces the access to information.” But he quickly added, “There is a way to compensate for that. The Internet does allow us to….overcome the impact of the concentration of media—and in fact, can be done pretty effectively.”

Chomsky described social media outlets like Facebook as “double-edged,” noting, “Sometimes, they are used for constructive purposes. But they have also become major forces for undermining democracy.” Chomsky cited Brazil as an example, noting how effectively the far-right Jair Bolsonaro used social media to win Brazil’s presidential election this year.

In addition to interviewing Chomsky, Al Jazeera spoke to some contemporary journalists who were influenced by “Manufacturing Consent”—include Israeli journalist Amira Hass and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who recalled that the book “had a big influence on me as a young reporter. I had always thought that we lived in a completely free society where the reporting was outstanding and the free press model worked exactly the way it should. And when I read that book, I realized there were significant problems.”

Hass told Al Jazeera that Chomsky’s book “unveiled America of the myth of being such a splendid democracy.”

Al Jazeera concluded its interview with Chomsky by asking him where, in 2018, he usually gets his news. Chomsky responded that he consumes everything from the Washington Post to “the foreign press” to Democracy Now. And he praised the New York Times, saying that “with all of its flaws….it still has the broadest and most comprehensive coverage of, I think, any newspaper in the world.”

Mother of jailed NSA contractor rips Manafort, Flynn and Cohen: Those 'responsible for threatening our election continue to get off easy'

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 18:59:00 +0000

The 27-year-old Winner is serving a five-year federal prison sentence for releasing a National Security Agency (NSA) document.

Not since Richard Nixon in the 1970s has a U.S. president been surrounded by as many scandals as Donald J. Trump. And in a new article for the Intercept, Billie Winner-Davis—mother of imprisoned U.S. Air Force veteran Reality Leigh Winner—asserts that her daughter has been treated much more harshly than Michael Cohen, Rick Gates and other Trump associates who have admitted to serious federal crimes.

The 27-year-old Winner is serving a five-year federal prison sentence for releasing a National Security Agency (NSA) document detailing cyber attacks on U.S. election officials by Russian military intelligence. Winner-Davis stresses that although her daughter was “wrongly portrayed” as a “traitor and spy” and a “Taliban sympathizer” for “unlawful disclosure of national defense information,” her actual motivation was showing the American public the degree to which the United States’ election system had been under attack by a foreign power.

Winner-Davis writes, “It is maddening to watch my daughter in prison as the so-called justice system interacts in such drastically different ways with Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen.” And she goes on to discuss their cases, noting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has recommended no prison time for Flynn (who admitted to lying to the FBI about his communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in late 2016) and that Papadopoulos was sentenced to only two weeks of incarceration.

Winner-Davis explains, “Gates’ fate is not yet known, but we do know that he has not spent time languishing in a jail or prison after he was charged, unlike Reality, who is now on day 568 behind bars.”

Cohen, Winner-Davis points out, pled guilty to everything from tax evasion to lying to Congress and was sentenced to three years in prison compared to five years for her daughter. And she has a lot to say about Manafort, noting that initially, Trump’s former campaign manager “was allowed to remain out of jail on bond.”

“Manafort’s bond was revoked only when he was accused of tampering with witnesses,” Winner-Davis explains. “And even then, he seemed to be getting preferential treatment—until a judge transferred him to a ‘real’ jail. Manafort was convicted of eight crimes and then entered into a plea agreement in another case. That plea was later revoked, after he was accused of lying to prosecutors.”

Winner-Davis argues that even admitted Russian agent Maria Butina has been treated better than her daughter. Butina, she writes, “was not charged with and will not be convicted of espionage. Let that sink in. My daughter Reality, who blew the whistle on Russian efforts to attack our election, is the traitor, the one guilty of espionage—but not a Russian agent and those working with her.”

Winner-Davis concludes her article by emphasizing that when her daughter is treated more harshly than Trump associates like Cohen, Flynn and Gates, it “sends the clear message that if you are poor and powerless in this system, you will be abused. I am outraged. I hope you are too.”

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Bring the troops home, but also stop the bombing

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 18:12:00 +0000

In this “war on terror,” the U.S. and its allies have dropped a staggering 291,880 bombs and missiles on other countries.

As our nation debates the merits of President Trump’s call for withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, absent from the debate is the more pernicious aspect of U.S. military involvement overseas: its air wars. Trump’s announcement and General Mattis’ resignation should unleash a national discussion about U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts, but no evaluation can be meaningful without a clear understanding of the violence that U.S. air wars have unleashed on the rest of the world for the past 17 years.

By our calculations, in this “war on terror,” the U.S. and its allies have dropped a staggering 291,880 bombs and missiles on other countries—and that is just a minimum number of confirmed strikes.

As we contemplate that overwhelming number, let’s keep in mind that these strikes represent lives snuffed out, people maimed for life, families torn apart, homes and infrastructure demolished, taxpayer money squandered and resentment that only engenders more violence.

After the horrific crimes of September 11, 2001, Congress was quick to pass a sweeping Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). While three presidents have claimed that the 2001 AUMF legally justifies these endless wars as a response to the crimes of 9/11, no serious reading of the Authorization could interpret it that way. What it actually says is:

“That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

As former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz told NPR a week after 9/11, “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done... We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.”

And yet here we are, 17 years later, mired in wars in which we are bombing ever more “nations, organizations (and) persons” who had absolutely nothing to do with the crimes committed on September 11. We don’t have a single real or lasting success we can point to in 17 years of war in 7 countries and “counter-insurgency” operations in a dozen more. Every country the U.S. has attacked or invaded remains trapped in intractable violence and chaos.

Please look at this chart, and take a few moments to reflect on the mass destruction it represents:

**Numbers of Bombs & Missiles Dropped on Other Countries by the U.S. & Its Allies Since 2001**
	*Iraq (& Syria)**	Afghanistan	Other Countries**
2001	214	17,500
2002	252	6,500	1+ (Y)
2003	29,200
2004	285	86	1 (Pk)
2005	404	176	3 (Pk)
2006	310	2,644	7,002 (Le,Pk)
2007	1,708	5,198	9 (Pk,S)
2008	915	5,215	40 (Pk,S)
2009	119	4,163	5,557 (Pk,Pl,Y)
2010	18	5,100	130 (Pk,Y)
2011	2	5,411	7,789 (Li,Pk,S,Y)
2012		4,083	93 (Pk,S,Y)
2013		2,758	51 (Pk,S,Y)
2014	6,292*	2,365	5,048 (Pk,Pl,S,Y)
2015	28,696*	947	10,978 (Pk,S,Y)
2016	30,743*	1,337	13,625 (Li,Pk,S,Y)
2017	39,577*	4,361	15,179 (Li,Pk,S,Y)
2018	5,075*	5,982	8,738 (Pk,S,Y)

GRAND TOTAL	291,880
TOTAL	143,810*	73,826	74,244

**Other Countries: Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia, Yemen

These figures are an absolute minimum of confirmed strikes, based on U.S. Airpower Summaries for Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s count of confirmed drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; the Yemen Data Project’s count of Saudi-led airstrikes on Yemen; and other published statistics. Figures for 2018 are through October for Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan; through November for Yemen; and incomplete for other countries.

There are several categories of airstrikes that are not included on this chart, so the real total is certainly much higher. These are:

Helicopter strikes: Military Times published an article in February 2017 titled, “The U.S. military’s stats on deadly airstrikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported.” The largest pool of airstrikes not included in U.S. Airpower Summaries are strikes by attack helicopters. The U.S. Army told the authors its helicopters had conducted 456 otherwise unreported airstrikes in Afghanistan in 2016. The authors explained that the non-reporting of helicopter strikes runs throughout the post-9/11 wars, and they still did not know how many actual missiles were used in those 456 attacks in Afghanistan in 2016.
AC-130 gunships: The airstrike that destroyed the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in 2015 was not conducted with bombs or missiles, but by a Lockheed-Boeing AC-130 gunship. These machines of mass destruction, usually flown by U.S. Air Force special operations forces, are designed to circle a target on the ground, pouring howitzer shells and cannon fire into it, often until it is completely destroyed. The U.S. has used AC-130s in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Syria.
Strafing runs: U.S. airpower summaries for 2004-2007 include a note that their tally of “strikes with munitions dropped... does not include 20mm and 30mm cannon or rockets.” But the 30mm cannons on A-10 Warthogs and other ground attack planes are powerful weapons, originally designed to destroy Soviet tanks. They fire up to 65 shells per second and can blanket a large area with deadly and indiscriminate fire, but that does not count as a “weapons release” in U.S. airpower summaries.
Yemen: Journalist Iona Craig, who has reported from Yemen for many years and manages the Yemen Data Project (YDP), told us she doesn’t know what proportion of actual airstrikes its data represents, and that the number of bombs or missiles recorded in each “air raid” in the YDP’s data is only a minimum confirmed number. Whatever fraction of total air raids YDP’s data represents, the actual number of bombs dropped on Yemen is certainly higher than these figures. YDP just doesn’t know how much higher.
The U.S. and allies conducting “counter-insurgency” operations in West Africa and other regions.

The U.S. public soon lost its appetite for sending our own sons and daughters to fight and die in all these wars. So, like Nixon with Vietnam, our leaders reverted to bombing, bombing and more bombing, while small deployments of U.S. special operations forces and larger numbers of foreign proxies do most of the real fighting on the ground.

Our enemies call us cowards, especially when we use drones to kill by remote control, but more importantly, we are behaving like arrogant fools. Our country is acting as an aggressor and a bull in a china shop at a critical moment in history when neither we nor the rest of the world can afford such dangerous and destabilizing behavior from a hyper-militarized, aggressive imperial power.

After U.S.-led bombing, artillery and rocket fire destroyed two major cities in 2017, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, the U.S. and its allies conducted fewer airstrikes in 2018, but actually increased the number of strikes in Afghanistan.

We are heading into 2019 with new initiatives to reduce U.S. military involvement overseas. In Yemen, that initiative is the result of massive grassroots pressure on Congress, and is being done in opposition to Trump’s continued support for Saudi aggression in Yemen. In the case of Syria and Afghanistan, it is coming from Trump himself, with broad popular support but bipartisan opposition from Congress and D.C. elites.

Those who are part of the bipartisan war consensus should reflect on the growing public awareness of the murderous futility of U.S. overseas wars. A survey by the Committee for a Responsible Foreign Policy revealed “a national voter population that is largely skeptical of the practicality or benefits of military intervention overseas.” Donald Trump seems to realize this public disdain for endless war, but we shouldn’t let him get away with reducing U.S. troop presence but continuing—and in some cases escalating—the devastating air wars.

A good New Year’s resolution for the United States would be to put an end to the wars we have been engaged in for the past 17 years, and to make sure we do not allow the same military madness that got us into this mess to sucker us into new wars on North Korea, Iran, Venezuela or other countries. Yes, let’s bring the troops home, but let’s also stop the bombing. Sustained advocacy toward the Trump administration and the new Congress by peace-loving Americans will be critical if we are to fulfill this resolution.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

‘I am all alone (poor me) in the White House’: Trump goes off the rails in pre-Christmas tweetstorm

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 17:42:00 +0000

He did find time to praise Saudi Arabia, the country responsible for the assassination of a Washington Post journalist.

It's Christmas Eve. The markets are tanking after the Treasury Secretary posted a statement causing even greater panic. The partial shutdown of the federal government has entered its third day.

President Trump over the past 24 hours or so has posted 22 tweets, including some just minutes before midnight. He's attacked the Federal Reserve, Democrats, foreign allies, his own anti-ISIS coalition chief, the "FAKE NEWS," and his outgoing Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis.

He did find time to praise Saudi Arabia, the country responsible for the assassination of a Washington Post journalist.

Trump's own administration is in tatters. His Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Interior, UN Ambassador, and Chief of Staff are all exiting in the next week. He has only acting officials heading up the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency.

That's just for starters.

And yet, the President of the United States, unable to travel to Mar-a-Lago for a 16-day planned vacation, is stuck in the White House – only for optics – because he shut his own Republican-majority government down.

So he's tweeting.

His latest – no joke: "I am all alone (poor me) in the White House," as he attacks Democrats for the shutdown he proudly boasted he would not only cause, but take credit for.

I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security. At some point the Democrats not wanting to make a deal will cost our Country more money than the Border Wall we are all talking about. Crazy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018

Paul Krugman rips ‘clueless’ Mnuchin for panicking markets with tweet: 'Idiot'

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 17:12:00 +0000

“We should take seriously the possibility that we’re looking at an economic team as clueless as their boss."

On Monday, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman went on a tweet storm in reaction to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin ’s tweets about calling banks.

While on a beach in Cabo, Mnuchin called leading banks to reassure them about the plummeting U.S. economy.

Krugman said that the U.S. has an “economic team as clueless as their boss.”

“We should take seriously the possibility that we’re looking at an economic team as clueless as their boss — and that they’ll respond to real problems by firing off off-point tweets from various golf courses,” he tweeted.

This is amazing. It's as if Mnuchin was trying to create a panic over something nobody was worried about until this release 1/ https://t.co/YJsGnEyOQD
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 23, 2018

Alternatively, Mnuchin could just be an idiot 2/ pic.twitter.com/5nvS5yQzhD
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 23, 2018

Not just me 3/ pic.twitter.com/ITCoOOoALZ
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 23, 2018

You know, nobody seriously trying to think about the economic risks is envisioning a replay of 2008; the problems now are much less bank-centered, much more about trade and lack of monetary space. But *maybe Mnuchin doesn't know that* -- and maybe nobody in the admin does 4/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 23, 2018

We should take seriously the possibility that we're looking at an economic team as clueless as their boss -- and that they'll respond to real problems by firing off off-point tweets from various golf courses 5/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 23, 2018

Yemen: Will a deal between combatants stop the misery?

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 17:04:00 +0000

Slipping toward widespread famine, the Yemeni war has devastated the country’s health and livelihood.

On the verge of famine, the main warriors in Yemen agreed on steps to ameliorate their disastrous war, but few claim that aerial bombings by Saudi Arabia and ground attacks by the rival Houthis will eventually stop the slaughter.

In a town near Stockholm, Sweden, the combatants met for the first time for talks (December 6 to 13), led by Briton Martin Griffiths, the UN special envoy for Yemen. They promised a cease-fire on the Red Sea ports of Hodeidah, Salif and Ras Issa, prisoner exchanges and a promise to look into turbulence in the city of Taiz.

Griffiths told the UN Security Council that “our collective achievements this week were indeed a significant step forward. But what is in front of us is a daunting task. As ever the hard work starts now.”

The United Nations has started placing monitors, led by retired Dutch General Patrick Cammaert, around Hodeidah to keep watch on the cease-fire and allow ships to unload humanitarian supplies.

“The country is on the brink of famine, with over 60 percent of the population not knowing where their next meal will come from,” the leaders of the UN World Food Program, UNICEF and the World Health Organization said in a joint statement.

David Beasley, executive director the World Food Program and a former South Carolina governor, reported that at least 12 million people in a population of 28 million are “just one step away from famine.” Furthermore, about 70 percent of the population suffers from food shortages.

There has been a 50 percent decrease in shipments coming through the port of Hodeidah because of the fighting, preventing WFP from delivering enough wheat for 3.7 million people, he said.

Health care fares no better. Beasley said the chief doctor at the main hospital in Sana’a said he only had room for 20 children. “The rest? They go home to die.”

According to UN reports, the country has experienced the world’s worst cholera outbreak this century.

Who Is Fighting Whom?

In March 2015 Saudi Arabia launched a military campaign, mainly from the air, against the Houthis in the north, who now dominate most of the civilian population and the city of Sana’a. Some experts believe at least 10,000 people have died from the air strikes. While Saudi Arabia has no troops on the ground, its Emirati allies are accused of aiding jihadists like Al Qaeda.

They also are supposed to dominate Aden, the nominal capital, but no one is sure who is in charge, and the president of the internationally recognized Yemeni government has fled to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.

The Houthis are mainly made up of tribal groupings. They began to fight three decades ago to counter Saudi Arabia’s strain of Salafi Islam. They mastered their combat ability in the last few years but seem to have no long-term strategy to build a modern state. Their main slogan is: “God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curses on the Jews, Victory to Islam.” They are known to have recruited thousands of child soldiers and allow no public criticism. They have, however, battled Al Qaeda.

U.S. Positions

For the United States, the Houthis are tools of Iran, although they differ in doctrine. No doubt Iran has supplied some of its weapons. Nikki Haley, the ambassador to the UN, has presented evidence of Iranian support for the Houthis’ missile attacks on Saudi and Emirati targets. For Haley and other U.S. officials, “Iranian aggression [is] at the root of the crisis.” Few experts would agree.

Washington, followed by London and Paris, supplies Saudi Arabia with weapons and other military aid.

But since the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, leading members of Congress have asserted that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was complicit in the killing while President Donald Trump has distanced himself from the charge.

In December, the Senate voted to end military assistance for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. It also passed a separate resolution assigning the blame to Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the killing of Khashoggi. But it will not get past the White House.

The Trump administration’s support for Saudi Arabia was also evident in a December 21 UN Security Council resolution that authorized the UN monitors for an initial 30 days and asked Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to report weekly on the implementation of the resolution.

U.S. Challenges Britain

Britain, the drafter of the resolution, ran into American objections, backed by Kuwait, on the humanitarian crisis and the need for accountability for war crimes. Diplomatic sources attribute the U.S. position to Saudi influence. Washington also wanted Iran mentioned, which Russia refused.

After a night of talks, the British stripped some of the humanitarian language but kept in the resolution a call for all sides to “remove bureaucratic impediments to the flows of commercial and humanitarian supplies, including fuel….”

The Saudi-led coalition has at times stopped fuel supplies to the Houthis.

In an address to the Security Council, Karen Pierce, Britain’s UN ambassador, said: “It’s vital that the parties follow through on their commitments to pave the way for a formal relaunch of negotiations, and at the same time deliver real improvements on the ground that make a tangible difference to ordinary Yemenis.”

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

‘Trump ain’t gonna pay my rent’: Federal workers fume as government shutdown extends into Christmas

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 17:01:00 +0000

Republicans have painted themselves into a corner because many of them are backing Trump’s position, which will be a loser for them.

President Donald Trump’s decision to let the government shut down because Democrats refuse to fund his border wall has federal workers looking into January and beyond, fearing they won’t be able to pay their bills.

In interviews with the Daily Beast, both lawmakers and workers have grown weary with the constant budget battles that take their livelihoods hostage.

According to Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), the Republicans have painted themselves into a corner because many of them are backing Trump’s position, which will be a loser for them.

“It’s not going anywhere–it’s about positioning, and unfortunately for Trump and the Republicans, their position is lost,” he explained. “I think that it’s been pretty solid from our caucus that there’s no wall. Money for security, that’s smart, I don’t think people would be [opposed] to discussing that, but you keep doing the wall in exchange for X—that is a hostage-taking that I don’t think we should support.”

The collateral damage of that “hostage taking” would be the federal employees who are fearful the shut-down could extend into February — putting their financial well-being in peril.

“The hardest part will be rent. The second paycheck of the month is my ‘rent’ paycheck. Without it, next month will be tough,” a 24-year-old NASA contractor from California, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, told the Beast. “If I don’t get paid, my short-term savings will be virtually wiped out, and I’d have to dip into long-term savings to pay for February rent if Trump keeps it up.”

Isabel Chaloux, a 67-year-old janitor who works for the federal government in San Diego, looked only at the short term, saying she is “very worried that Trump is going to ruin” her holiday.

Another federal employee was blunter in her appraisal.

“I won’t have enough to pay my rent” lamented 57-year-old Bonita Williams who does janitorial work at the State Department.

“I can’t afford a shutdown,” she added. “Trump ain’t gonna pay my rent.”

You can read more here.

A room with a view: Why windows are so important to older people

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 16:47:00 +0000

Windows can be vital as a way to access the world, especially for those who spend a lot of time indoors.

Windows are something that many of us take for granted – they’re just part of the houses we live in or the buildings we work in. And yet for older people, windows can be vital as a way to access the world, especially for those who spend a lot of time indoors.

In 1981, Graham Rowles carried out some seminal work in the United States looking at the “surveillance zone”, the area immediately outside older people’s homes. He found that older people watched their neighbourhood in this zone from their window, and were able to participate in the community without having to literally be in it.

Building on Rowles’ work, I recently interviewed 42 older people in the UK on the importance of having a room with a view. Those I spoke to – all aged over 65, who go outside less than once a week – valued their window so much that many spent a while setting up their space to get a good outlook. The views were a place of high significance for the observers.

Previous research has suggested that older people prefer being able to see nature, and studies have found there is a link between nature and stress reduction too. But I found urban, and even what we might think of as banal or dull views – factories or telephone and TV masts – to be important too. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or at least significance of the view is.

Changing views

What was most important for my interviewees was change – both expected (seasons, for example) and non-expected (road works or even storms). One 78-year-old lady with a suburban view said, “I love the way the trees begin to move, the branches, when the wind gets up”. While an 84-year-old man who lived in an urban area said, “I like it when they’re digging. They’re always digging it up here. Mains, water, electricity, gas, telephone, all come here. I don’t mind it, so long as there’s no dust which is no good for my breathing”.

While Rowles’s study focused on the immediate area outside the house, I found my interviewees really loved a view that contained different levels. A juxtaposition between the immediate and the distant was preferred, for example between a built-up neighbourhood and hills in the distance, or a garden and distant motorways or factories.

What was fascinating was how much the views helped the people understand life better. What they saw backed up what they had heard on the television or radio. Even something we would regard as insignificant, like bad traffic or seeing a hands-free conversation on a mobile phone. A 75-year-old woman with an urban view said:

I saw a man talking to himself. Quite animated. I was alarmed but realised it must be a phone.

I also found that the interviewees did not just watch people, they created stories from what they saw, with characters and plots. One 80-year-old man who lives in an urban area explained:

I see the same people going to work every morning and coming home again in the evening. I wonder what they get up to. I call this one here Frank, he looks tough, look at his suit, bet he’s a mean business man, probably a manager of some kind.

Some of the observers talked to the people they saw through the window too. An 84-year-old woman told me that she sometimes commented on people’s appearance, saying they were “very smart”, or telling teenagers to tuck their shirts in and pull up their trousers. While another woman said that she asked people she regularly saw how their day had been, adding, “I wonder if anyone does ask them that when they get where they’re going. I hope so!”.

There is a downside however. Some of the people I spoke to worried that that they’d be labelled nosy and, as an 84-year-old man put it, “I don’t tell others about it. They’d think I’d lost it. Well it’s all a bit sad isn’t it”. But the benefits to these people are still clear.

Looking ahead, technology may help people access scenes that can’t be viewed from their window. There is some interesting work already being done in this area. The views don’t even have to be of what is immediately outside – one UK care home uses a filmed train journey to allow people to experience the passing views through a virtual window.

A window is so much more than just something to let in light and air for older people. Those I spoke to talked about how they can spend hours there and how it feels good for them to look out. It shouldn’t be something older people hide either. In fact, family members and carers should encourage them to look outside, and help set up unobstructed views where possible. Imagine a home set up around the view, rather than one set up around the TV.

FOIA requests find 95 newly undisclosed Trump appointees

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 16:34:00 +0000

Among the latest hires: a longtime DuPont manager who is now at an EPA position that is typically not a political appointment.

We have obtained a list of 95 new Trump administration appointees made over the past six months. Following a pattern we’ve detailed before, many of the hires previously worked on President Donald Trump’s campaign or at conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. In other cases, appointees seem to have little work experience at all.

We compiled the information from Freedom of Information Act requests and have added the appointees to our Trump Town app, which lets you search the disclosures of nearly 3,000 of them.

Here are a few of the recent appointments:

Lynn DeKleva, who worked for decades at chemical giant DuPont, was appointed to a job as an environmental engineer in the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical safety and pollution prevention office in October. Typically, environmental engineering positions are not political appointments. DeKleva did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comments. The EPA said in a statement that DeKleva “brings considerable product stewardship experience and knowledge with her to assist” the agency.
Ileana Garcia, a co-founder of the campaign’s Latinas for Trump, was appointed in October as deputy press secretary in the Department of Homeland Security.
Todd Thurman, a Heritage Foundation staffer who used to write for the Daily Signal and Breitbart, was appointed as the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s digital strategy specialist in September.
Antonin Scalia, the namesake grandson of the late Supreme Court justice, was appointed in September as a temporary assistant in the State Department. Scalia graduated from college last year. Scalia and the State Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comments.

Do you know something about one of the Trump administration staffers in Trump Town? Send us an email at trump@propublica.org or send a Signal message to 347-244-2134.

Here's why countries are banning this Chinese telecommunications firm

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 16:16:00 +0000

Huawei is “the world’s biggest supplier of telecoms gear” and has plans to “dominate the market” for the next generation.

The Chinese telecommunications company Huawei is under scrutiny around the globe over concerns that its close ties with the Chinese government present national security threats to the U.S., Europe and allied countries. Huawei, which denies all the allegations against it, is “the world’s biggest supplier of telecoms gear” and has plans to “dominate the market” for the next generation of wireless communications, called 5G. But its hopes are threatened by governments around the world, which are restricting the company’s prospects and even banning it from operating in some areas.

No Chinese company is fully independent of its government, which reserves the right to require companies to assist with intelligence gathering. Huawei is even more closely tied to the government than many Chinese firms: Its founder, Ren Zhengfei, is a former technologist in the People’s Liberation Army. As his company grew, so did international concerns about whether Huawei equipment could be used to spy on companies and governments around the world.

As far back as 2003, the company was accused of stealing intellectual property, including from U.S.-based network hardware maker Cisco. The companies settled out of court, but Huawei has been accused of stealingother firms’ intellectual property and violating international economic sanctions. Throughout 2018, a flurry of activity has signaled the level of concern in the international intelligence community, and pressure on the company – and other Chinese technology firms – has mounted.

Months of setbacks

In February, the heads of six U.S. intelligence agencies told a Senate committee they didn’t trust Huawei or its rival ZTE, which is also based in China, and would recommend Americans not use the company’ssmartphones or other equipment.

On July 17, the intelligence chiefs of the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand reportedly met in person, in part to make plans to publicize their concerns about allowing Huawei equipment to operate in their countries and governments.

Two days later, the United Kingdom’s government-run lab specifically set up to evalute Huawei hardware and software reported finding “shortcomings” in Huawei’s engineering processes that raised security risks. After a big push from the British government, Huawei agreed to spend US$2 billion to address those problems.

In mid-August, the U.S. Congress passed, and President Donald Trump signed, a law specifically prohibiting U.S. government agencies from purchasing or using telecommunications and surveillance products from Chinese companies like ZTE and Huawei – both of which are named in the law.

A week later, Australia announced a similar ban, barring firms “who are likely to be subject to extrajudicial directions from a foreign government” from supplying equipment for its nationwide 5G rollout. The announcement did not specifically name Huawei or ZTE, but Huawei criticized the decision as political and based in “ideological prejudices,” rather than actual security concerns.

In late November, New Zealand’s intelligence agency barred Huawei from participating in its 5G development, citing “significant national security risks.”

In Canada, where telecommunications companies use Huawei equipmentextensively, the government is still discussing a possible ban. But the country did arrest Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wangzhou, who is also the daughter of the company’s founder, as a result of a U.S. allegation that she violated international sanctions against Iran. China threatened Canada with “severe consequences” if Meng was not released immediately. She is now out on bail with extradition proceedings pending.

Days after Meng’s arrest, the private company that dominates U.K. telecommunications, BT Group, announced it was removing Huawei equipment from its existing mobile networks, and would not use Huawei technology in future mobile systems.

In early December, Japan also announced it was poised to ban Huawei and ZTE from its 5G networks.

In mid-December, French telecommunications company Orange, previously known as France Telecom, announced it would not use Huawei equipment in its 5G network.

And Germany’s Deutsche Telekom said it was reviewing security concerns about Huawei equipment.

On Dec. 17 Czech authorities warned their citizens against using Huawei equipment for security reasons.

Tensions over evidence

All these countries and companies are expressing concern that China’s government could exploit Huawei’s technology to spy on them, stealing corporate or government or military secrets.

Tensions between free commerce and national security are not new. Security skeptics, and those who favor free and open trade, will ask to see evidence supporting the claims that Huawei, ZTE or other foreign companies have spied, or might spy, on conversations and data transmissions. Security proponents will counter that the evidence must remain secret, to protect intelligence operations.

The situation with these Chinese companies is even more challenging, because the full extent of any relationship between Huawei and the Chinese government is masked. However, it’s extremely rare for the U.S. and allied governments to take the sorts of steps they have taken to restrict specific companies. Those moves suggest that – even without detailed public proof – there is solid evidence supporting the intelligence community’s worries.

The focus of many security agencies and countries on Huawei’s involvement in 5G systems raises the stakes, too: The next generation of wireless technology is expected to fuel even more connectivity in the “internet of things,” linking smart cars, smart homes and smart cities together. Billions of devices will be involved, all communicating with each other, forming what could become a surveillance web over much of the planet, and exponentially expanding the number of potential targets for spying. As governments seek to ensure 5G is secure and trusted around the world, Huawei may find its prospects limited by its links to the Chinese government.

How US demographics changed in 2018: 5 essential reads

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 16:04:00 +0000

Today, more than 80 percent of Americans live in an urban or suburban area.

The end of the year is a classic time for reflection. But, in today’s turbulent news cycle, it can be hard to keep track of what happened last week, let alone what was going on way back on Jan. 1.

For a look back at 2018, I’d like to slow down and draw attention to a few stories that looked at the big picture. How is the U.S. changing, on a grand and gradual scale? How are Americans different than they were last year, or last decade, or last century?

These patterns may not yet be fully understood, but they hint at what the U.S. could become.

1. Americans aren’t living as long

This was the third year in a row with falling U.S. life expectancy.

“The U.S. is not bumping up against natural limits to life expectancy,” writes David Bishai, who studies health economics at Johns Hopkins University. “The extra American funerals were for American sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, neighbors and coworkers dying in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. Their death certificates list mostly overdoses from opioids and other substances, cirrhosis, suicide and homicide.”

American lifespan

In 2015, U.S. life expectancy dipped for the first time in decades. The average American born in 2016 can expect to live an average of 78.6 years.

2. Americans aren’t having as many kids

It’s a baby bust: This year, the national fertility rate fell by 2 percent, to just 1.76 children per women. That’s the lowest the rate has been in 30 years.

Demographers offered a number of explanations for the drop, including birth control use and the high cost of having children.

Caroline Sten Hartnett at the University of South Carolina isn’t too worried, explaining that the drop brings the U.S. closer to its peers: “This gap between the U.S. and other developed countries baffled demographers through the 1990s and early 2000s.”

3. Americans are getting older

The declining birth rate and the rising death rate go hand in hand. Some counties are experiencing “natural decrease," a demographic phenomenon where the number of deaths actually outweigh the number of births.

Meanwhile, the country’s average age has shot up, from 28.1 years old in 1970 to 37.9 in 2016.

“This graying of America has left a distinctive geographical fingerprint,” says Peter Rogerson, a geographer at SUNY Buffalo. Americans over 70 are more highly concentrated in popular retirement states like Florida and Arizona, as well as the Midwest and the Appalachians.

Death and birth in the US

In 2013, over 30 percent of all U.S. counties experienced a phenomenon known as "natural decrease," due to the greater number of deaths than births.

4. Americans are struggling with new racial dynamics

In the 1990s, California plunged into political turmoil, thanks to sharp job losses and a wave of anti-immigration sentiment.

Manuel Pastor at the University of Southern California, Dornsife believes that this political environment was borne from a rising “racial generation gap” between white people over 65 and young people of color.

He sees California state history replaying on the national stage today. “Much like in California in the 1990s, we have seen a racialized ‘whitelash’ which in this case brought the election of Donald Trump, the racist violence in Charlottesville, and the revocation of DACA, the program designed to protect undocumented youth brought to this country at an early age.”

The racial generation gap

The rising racial generational gap in the U.S. parallels California's in the 1990s. The gap represents the percent of white seniors minus the percent of white youth.

5. Americans are moving to the suburbs

Over the last 50 years, Americans have gradually moved away from rural regions, drawn largely by urban economic opportunity. Today, more than 80 percent of Americans live in an urban or suburban area.

But millennials don’t seem to share previous generations’ enthusiasm for suburban life, writes Arizona State University’s Christopher Boone. “Will millennials follow older generations to the suburbs as they marry, have children, recover from the shocks of the Great Recession and find affordable housing? The jury is still out.”

Suburbanizing

As of 2010, fewer than 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas.

Two years of Republican government has been an incompetent circus — and even worse than we expected

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 15:42:00 +0000

So long, Republican Congress, and good riddance.

P oor Paul Ryan. The golden boy of the Ayn Rand crowd was once assumed to be a future president, or at least one of the great statesmen of the Republican Party. He was considered a rarity among Republican pols --- a policy wonk with the polish and personality of Ronald Reagan. (I know that sounds crazy, but people really did think that.)

When Barack Obama came into office he saw Ryan as a partner in reducing the federal deficit and the White House went out of its way to feature him prominently in various domestic policy "summits" that were held in the early months of that administration. Obama's opinion changed after he tried to negotiate with Ryan and his cohorts in the House Republican leadership, but it took years for the political media to see Ryan for what he really was: a callow ideologue without much character when the chips were down.

Paul Krugman had his number back in 2010:

Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his "Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”
But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

But oh, did they love those blue, blue eyes of his.

Ryan never wanted to be House speaker. He wanted to be president. But when John Boehner was finally forced out by the Freedom Caucus and his heir apparent, Kevin McCarthy, tanked his chances with loose talk about using the Benghazi hearings to hurt Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, Ryan was the only person all Republicans could agree on. He reluctantly signed on. And in doing that he ended up signing his political death warrant.

Ryan's performance as speaker showed him to be feckless, hypocritical and weak in just about every way. He couldn't control his crazies on the one hand and couldn't deal effectively with the crazy in the White House on the other. He ended up being a yes-man for an unfit president who didn't even understand how the three branches of government work. Krugman nailed it again this year upon word of Ryan's retirement. Commenting on the media's surprise, even now, that Ryan and his cohorts have blown the deficit up to unprecedented proportions and happily enabled Donald Trump, Krugman wrote:

[T]he principles they claimed to have never had anything to do with their actual goals. In particular, Republicans haven’t abandoned their concerns about budget deficits, because they never cared about deficits; they only faked concern as an excuse to cut social programs.
And if you ask why Ryan never took a stand against Trumpian corruption, why he never showed any concern about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, what ever made you think he would take such a stand? Again, if you look at Ryan’s actions, not the character he played to gullible audiences, he has never shown himself willing to sacrifice anything he wants — not one dime — on behalf of his professed principles. Why on earth would you expect him to stick his neck out to defend the rule of law?

Surprise. Paul Ryan is just another partisan hack. Still, I don't think even I expected him to be as terrible at the job as he has been. As he takes his farewell tour, which President Trump generously stepped all over with his silly government shutdown, it pays to recall just what a disaster he has been and the rubble he leaves in his wake.

First, let's recall that when Boehner saw the writing on the wall, he at least made a deal to keep the government open and raise the spending limit for two years as a parting gift to the American people. Granted, he wasn't negotiating with an insane president, but he did have the insane Freedom Caucus in the House, allied with the meddling Ted Cruz in the Senate at the time. He spent every last chit trying to calm things down on his way out the door. Ryan's just rolled along with all of Trump's lurching about on the budget and the wall and is leaving in the midst of total chaos.

We have finally reached the end of this two-year period of total Republican control of the government. It's important to look at what they did when they had it. They managed to pack the courts with unfit, inexperienced extremists in the mold of the man who nominated them. No matter how few people agree with their agenda or vote for them in the future, they will have a strong influence through the extremist right-wing judiciary they have installed in lifetime positions. That's one mission they actually accomplished. Of course, that had nothing to do with Paul Ryan.

They managed to get tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, their Holy Grail, enacted. That was just a generous gift to their big donors, no strings attached and no expectation that it would benefit average Americans. It hasn't.

They just passed a criminal justice reform package that was backed by the Koch brothers and other big-money libertarian types, one suspects just in time to help a spate of rich white guys heading off to jail. (Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed this through having lived through his father's incarceration for fraud. What a family.)

They couldn't get Obamacare repealed, although Trump's minions have been working overtime to sabotage it from within. They didn't get Trump's wall. The national debt has exploded and the president is on the verge of being impeached. That's quite a record.

But don't worry. This will work out just fine for them. It's just a more extreme version of what they always do. They wreck the economy and destroy all faith in government. Then when the Democrats win as a result of their malfeasance, they stand on the sidelines and wail about fiscal responsibility and demand that Democrats cut services for average people. Like clockwork, rich media celebrities will undoubtedly stroke their chins and sagely advise the people to "grow up" and "take their medicine" by giving up things like health care and retirement security.

Look for Paul Ryan to be batting those baby blues and wringing his hands on TV over debt and deficits any day now. It's a beautiful scam and it's been working for decades. If you didn't know better you'd almost think they planned it this way.

Former Pentagon official: It's 'very telling' Trump didn't know his own anti-ISIS strategist

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 15:29:00 +0000

When Trump finds himself embarrassed by someone, his go-to response is to claim he has never heard of them.

After President Donald Trump unexpected announced a strategy-free withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, Brett McGurk, a longtime national security official acting as the president's special envoy to the coalition against ISIS, resigned his post.

Trump, with characteristic bravado, took to Twitter on Saturday to declare good riddance, calling McGurk a "grandstander" and saying he does not even know who he is:

Brett McGurk, who I do not know, was appointed by President Obama in 2015. Was supposed to leave in February but he just resigned prior to leaving. Grandstander? The Fake News is making such a big deal about this nothing event!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2018

Assistant Secretary of Defense Derek Chollet told the Washington Post that that outburst speaks volumes:

"George W. Bush and Barack Obama knew and respected Brett and considered him one of their most important advisers," Chollet said. Trump has shown evidence of disengagement from policy and a disregard for expertise, he said, "and it's very telling that Donald Trump claims to have never heard of him."

McGurk was an architect of both the Iraq surge and the subsequent negotiation to withdraw troops from the nation, and he has been integral to the U.S. strategy to contain ISIS forces in the region. It seems supremely unlikely that Trump never met this man in all of his national security meetings — and if he did not, it has disturbing implications for how disengaged the president is from our defense policy.

This could explain, for instance, why Trump has confidently proclaimed ISIS is already defeated in Syria, while McGurk has warned that pushing ISIS out of all of their physical territory "will not be the end" of the terrorist group, and that fully eliminating them will take years.

Of course, there is another possibility: that Trump does know who McGurk is, but is lying to try to minimize the humiliation of his relationship with him in the public eye. This is a longtime technique of Trump, who has falsely claimed he does not know about KKK grand wizard David Duke, "Celebrity Apprentice" contestant Lil Jon, or his own acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker.

Either possibility, at the end of the day, is not a good look for the man tasked with the goal of commanding our armed forces and keeping our nation safe.

These 10 women of 2018 wouldn't be silenced

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 15:14:00 +0000

From Stacey Abrams to Stormy Daniels, these are the women who spoke out despite efforts to keep them quiet.

It's been 26 years since the so-called "Year of the Woman," when a record number of women were elected to Congress in 1992. Four senators and 24 representatives were sent to Capitol Hill, following contentious Supreme Court hearings for then-nominee Clarence Thomas, who was accused by Anita Hill of sexual harassment.

On several levels, the themes of 1992 have made repeat, and amplified, appearances this year. The #MeToo movement became fully realized with women reclaiming and reframing their stories, as President Donald Trump, himself accused many times of sexual predator behavior settled further into the White House. Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, also accused of sexual assault, to the Supreme Court, and while Kavanaugh would go on to attain a seat on the highest court in the land, serial sexual predator and former beloved comedian Bill Cosby was sent to prison for the drugging and rape of Andrea Constand, only one of dozens of women who have spoken out against Cosby with credible accusations of assault.

In perhaps a more direct indication of a "Year of the Woman" in politics, more than 100 women were voted to Congress in the midterms, representing diverse ethnicities, backgrounds, religions and ideologies. This culture of opposition — of speaking up and out, of organizing and mobilizing, while structural and cultural blockades continue to be dominant and suffocating — has been inextricably linked to the experiences and progress for women (and other minority groups) in this country.

So here's an year-in-review list, in no particular order, that seeks to acknowledge the women who demanded we hear them in 2018, despite the very real barriers that attempted to keep them quiet.

Stacey Abrams

Stacey Abrams' commitment to a more equitable world has never wavered. She ran an incredible, inspiring campaign in Georgia to become the first black woman governor in the country, and fought to the end, despite rampant voter suppression in which the architect, Brian Kemp, served as both her opponent and the race's referee. Abrams has said she will run again and in the meantime is working to systematically alter the widespread voter suppression in the state, so that democracy becomes less of a dream and more of a reality for those who are black and low-income in Georgia, and around the country.

Indya Moore

Actress/activist and trans woman of color Indya Moore, 23, is one of 2018's breakout stars. She plays a central role on Ryan Murphy's Golden Globe-nominated "Pose," and Moore's elevation in the world of entertainment has opened the door for her to speak much louder about social justice. In "Pose" and through her own social media presence, she's putting the plight of trans people of color center stage (an urgent message in these times), and speaking out against transphobia, racism, sexism and all forms of inequality and bigotry. As she told GQ: "Trans women, especially black queer and trans women, are always in the front lines whenever there is a threat against human identity or the human condition. Whatever it is. Whether or not we’re included—and we’re often included in it—we’re on the frontlines of every civil rights movement." But as Moore and others continue to underscore, any movement that cares about liberation is incomplete if the freedom and self-determination of trans people are not part of its vision.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

After long being ignored by the Democratic Party and national media, once Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the primary in New York's 14th congressional district, defeating incumbent Joe Crawley, she became hyper-visible and has been consistently antagonized since. But a familiarity with her platform explains why the conservative right and the DNC establishment alike are so fearful of Ocasio-Cortez's power. She's a socialist and woman of color, and a progressive politician who advocates for environmental justice, the abolishment of I.C.E., an end to private prisons, restricting Wall Street's greed, Medicare for all, gun control, solidarity with Puerto Rico, and much more. And yet because her politics are rooted in imagining a more equitable world, the incessant jabs about her clothes, her economic background, and even her intellect keep coming. But Ocasio-Cortez is no pushover, and while her political career is just beginning, her Twitter clap-backs are already legendary.

Michelle Wolf

Michelle Wolf has not let access nor employment quell her voice. For roasting the president, his administration, and the media — to their faces — brilliantly and brutally at the White House Correspondents Dinner in April, she received condemnation from both liberals and conservatives. But despite widespread admonishment, Wolf did not quiet down and went on to tell searing truths on her short-lived Netflix show, which was canceled after only ten episodes. While Wolf is in a privileged position not to have to worry about one job loss, it is admirable that no matter which space she enters, whether a fancy Washington dinner or late-night TV, she will always tell the truth no matter the personal costs. After Wolf's WHCD monologue, the WHCA announced that they were discontinuing the comedic tradition. Who could dare follow Wolf anyways?

The @whca are cowards. The media is complicit. And I couldn't be prouder. https://t.co/OOIFGuZ731
— Michelle Wolf (@michelleisawolf) November 19, 2018

Lucy McBath

Lucy McBath's 17-year-old son was shot and killed in 2012 by a white man who argued with the teenager about playing his music too loud. While grieving the loss of her child, she emerged as a vocal advocate against gun violence. In late 2017, McBath decided to move from activism to politics, announcing a bid for the Georgia statehouse. When 17 people were gunned down in Parkland, Florida in February, McBath felt her message was more urgent and aimed higher. So McBath, a black woman and first-time candidate who ran on a message of gun control in the deep south — in a state with some of the highest rates of gun ownership in the country — managed to defeat Republican incumbent Karen Handel in Georgia's 6th congressional district, which had been Republican since 1979. After her victory, McBath wrote on Twitter: "This win is just the beginning. . . We’ve sent a strong message to the entire country. Absolutely nothing - no politician & no special interest - is more powerful than a mother on a mission."

Aurora Perrineau

Actress Aurora Perrineau's #MeToo disclosure was hijacked by Lena Dunham, who came forward to defend Perrineau's alleged rapist, a writer on Dunham's HBO series "Girls" and to essentially call the young actress a liar on the basis of having "insider information." Dunham recently revealed that she in fact was the liar in this situation and had no such information, only a blind loyalty to the accused. Still, Dunham has been given an exhaustive amount of time and space to apologize, but little room has been given to Perrineau's voice. I wanted to include Perrineau on this list because Hollywood and media need to do better in this regard. Where are the Hollywood Reporter columns or luncheons for Perrineau? Where are the New York Magazine profiles? In an era when so many women are reclaiming their stories, how do we handle the women who have had a hand in silencing them going forward? My hope is that in 2019, Perrineau's story will stop being used as a clickbait topic for Dunham's press and we are finally ready to hear her story instead.

Naomi Walder

Eleven-year-old Naomi Walder (who's now 12) stunned the world with her eloquent, breath-taking speech at the March for Our Lives demonstration in Washington D.C. where young people protested gun violence. “I am here to acknowledge and represent the African American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the evening news,” Wadler, the event's youngest speaker, said. “For far too long, these names, these black girls and women, have been just numbers,” she continued, “I’m here to say ‘Never again’ for those girls, too.” This future president is continuing the fight, which she says is personal. "Not only am I fighting for other black girls, I’m fighting for myself as a black girl," she told Teen Vogue. Walder's insightful words and politics have helped hold the gun control movement attentive and accountable to the way gun violence disproportionately effects communities of color.

Viola Davis

Viola Davis has had an incredible year. While her award-winning acting chops have proven her talent at playing a wide range of characters, this year her own voice made an impact as well. Davis revealed that she regretted starring in "The Help," a film that has long been criticized for its white-savior complex, and Davis affirmed that regardless of the film's intentions, the voices of the black women domestics who were forced to leave their own babies every day to raise and clean up after white ones, were ultimately marginalized in a story where they were supposed to be central. Then in November Davis gave an impassioned, unfiltered speech while receiving the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award about the continued sidelining of black women in Hollywood. "I cannot lead with bullshit," Davis said. "Stop taming us."

Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal

While President Trump's version of events regarding hush payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, who both claim they had affairs with him in the past, in the days before the 2016 presidential election has changed constantly, Daniels and McDougal have stuck with their accounts of events. Right wing media either vilified or tried to silence both of these women, and jabs at their professions reeked of classism and misogyny. But these women refused to back down. My colleague Nicole Karlis has long heralded Daniels as a "feminist hero" and after Michael Cohen's and AMI's admissions of the roles they played in attempting to keep both of their stories away from the public eye, let's absolutely add McDougal to that categorization.

Christine Blasey Ford

The world watched as Christine Blasey Ford relived the most horrific moments of her life as she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the time when then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh allegedly attempted to rape her in high school, and how it had a lasting, debilitating effect on her life. Her testimony did not stop Kavanaugh's ascent, just as many women's stories — and our histories of violence — have proven to not carry more weight than an alleged predator's accomplishments. It's a reality that Ford likely knew, and nevertheless she decided to speak up. In her testimony, we saw strength and bravery, pain and resilience, and it provided hope for many others that no matter what happens, we will not stop telling our stories and demanding our voices be heard.

Friendlyfire (early adopters version)

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These 10 women of 2018 wouldn't be silenced