Category: Bigotry

Peace & Justice History 11/13:

November 13, 1933
The first recorded “sit-down” strike in the U.S. was staged by workers at the Hormel Packing Company in Austin, Minnesota. When the Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW) went on strike, the company tried to bring in scab (strike-breaking) workers.

“ Four hundred men, many of them armed with clubs, sticks and rocks, crashed through the plant entrance, shattering the glass doors and sweeping the guards before them. The strikers quickly ran throughout the plant to chase out non-union workers. One . . . group crashed through the doors of a conference room where Jay Hormel and five company executives were meeting and declared “We’re taking possession. So move out!” (Larry Engelmann, “We Were the Poor — The Hormel Strike of 1933,” Labor History, Fall, 1974.)

The tactic worked: within four days Hormel agreed to submit wage demands to binding arbitration. The success of this strike reinvigorated the labor movement, which had been in decline throughout the 1920s.
November 13, 1956
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional in public transportation. The case, Browder v. Gayle, was brought by four women, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, who had refused to surrender their bus seats to whites in Montgomery (months before Rosa Parks had done so), and had been arrested for violating Alabama law which required segregation on public buses.They challenged the law and the Court agreed, finding the law under which they were arrested in violation of the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Aurelia Browder

A roadside monument was dedicated in 2004 to the four plantiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case.
Colvin, a 15-year-old student at Booker T. Washington High School, boarded a bus in 1955 and refused to give up her seat to a white man. She was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus, as she screamed that her constitutional rights were being violated. 
More on Browder v. Gayle 
November 13, 1960

Over 1000 Quakers (members of the Society of Friends) surrounded the Pentagon for a silent vigil to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the first Quaker Peace Testimony issued to King Charles II in 1660.
From the original Peace Testimony: “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever.
And this is our testimony to the whole world….”
The complete text of the 1660 Declaration
November 13, 1974

Karen Silkwood, a technician and union activist (Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers’ Union) at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron plutonium fuels production plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, was killed in a one-car crash.
Read more about her story  
November 13, 1982
Maya Ying Lin
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. Carved into black granite are the 58,260 names of those Americans who died in Vietnam. The designer, Maya Ying Lin of Athens, Ohio, a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale University, was the winner of the competition that drew 1,421 design entries: “. . . this memorial is for those who have died, and for us to remember them.” Eventually, the Memorial included three elements, the Wall of names, the Three Servicemen Statue and Flagpole, and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial.

The Wall of Names, the Three Servicemen Statue and Flagpole, and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial

Read more about the memorial

Stunning photo gallery of the Memorial including interactive panoramic images

Interview with Maya Lin and filmmaker Freida Lee Mock, who made the Academy-Award-winning documentary, “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision” (My apologies about Charlie Rose; it’s PeaceButton’s link, and it’s good info, Rose notwithstanding. -A)

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november13

FACT FOCUS: Claims that more than 300,000 migrant children are missing lack context

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-misinformation-migrant-children-missing-7ab0cea2fd2238346197429e952baa8b

I am so tired of this stupid lie.  The right  / republicans keep using it because the children they stole from parents at the border back during tRump’s term have never been found and returned to their parents.   That is what this asshole false claim is about.  Here are the facts.   Hugs

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By  MELISSA GOLDIN
Updated 6:29 PM EST, October 2, 2024
 

Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have recently claimed that hundreds of thousands of migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border unaccompanied are missing, then criticized the border policies of the Biden administration and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, repeated the claim during Tuesday night’s debate.

“We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” he said as he met Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in what is likely the last debate of the 2024 presidential campaign.

But immigration experts say the claims regarding missing migrant children lack significant context.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

CLAIM: The Biden administration has lost more than 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children.

THE FACTS: This claim misrepresents information in an August report published by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, which faulted Immigration and Customs Enforcement for failing to consistently “monitor the location and status of unaccompanied migrant children” once they are released from federal government custody.

The report noted that more than 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children had not, as of May 2024, received a notice to appear in court. Additionally, more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children got a notice to appear but then failed to show up for immigration court hearings. Those figures came from ICE and covered a period from October 2018 to September 2023. During that period there were a total of 448,820 unaccompanied children released by ICE to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.

But experts say it is a stretch to refer to roughly 300,000 children as “lost” or “missing.”

“This is not a ‘missing kids’ problem; it’s a ‘missing paperwork’ problem,” Jonathan Beier, associate director of research and evaluation for the Acacia Center for Justice’s Unaccompanied Children Program, wrote in an email.

Plus, President Joe Biden only entered the White House partway through this period. It includes approximately 15 months when Trump was president and does not specify how many children arrived in the U.S. under each president.

Experts say there are many reasons why the children might not have appeared for hearings or received a notice to appear in the first place. For example, they only get a notice to appear when removal proceedings against them have begun, and if ICE hasn’t started that removal process, they wouldn’t have gotten a notice in the first place.

A lack of communication between government agencies could mean a notice is sent to the wrong address if it has been updated with one agency and not another. A child’s guardian may be unable to take them to court, perhaps because they live on the other side of the state.

The report does not provide any explanations.

“All of these factors can explain some of the deficiencies and a conclusion that the children are missing could be very, very premature,” said Raul Pinto, deputy legal director for transparency at the American Immigration Council.

Carmen Hills, an ICE spokesperson, said the agency agreed with the inspector general’s recommendations to improve information sharing within ICE and externally with HHS, but disagreed with the suggestion that the children are missing.

“We are concerned that the report’s findings are misleading and may be misconstrued because they fail to acknowledge key facts,” she said.

Hills said ICE does not generally issue court notices to unaccompanied children “until after they have been placed with sponsors who have been vetted by HHS” so that they can get settled and seek legal help.

Representatives for HHS and Vance did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

An unaccompanied migrant child is defined by the U.S. government as someone who is under 18, lacks lawful immigration status and has no parent or guardian in the country to take custody of them. When they’re apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security, they’re transferred to the HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.

They are then placed “in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interests of the child,” according to the resettlement office. That can mean shelters, foster care or residential treatment centers, among other options. If possible, children are released to sponsors, often family members, who can care for them.

 

Removal proceedings may be initiated by ICE and the Department of Justice. Some children are able to stay in the U.S. legally if they qualify for asylum, special visas for victims of abuse, trafficking and other crimes, or other types of immigration relief. In those cases, removal proceedings may never start.

___

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.

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MELISSA GOLDIN
Goldin debunks, analyzes and tracks misinformation for The Associated Press. She is based in New York.

How Trump’s second term will be different

The Fight for Native American Voting Rights

Despite the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, Native American activists have had to repeatedly take their fight for voting rights to Congress.

The Fight for Native American Voting Rights

In June 1986, Judge Edward Rafeedie handed down a ruling. Indigenous voting rights were being suppressed in Montana’s Big Horn County, where “official acts of discrimination…have interfered with the rights of Indian citizens…to register and vote.” This was a victory for voting equality, but it wasn’t met with open arms. County Commissioner Ed Miller, for example, was dismayed, citing a longing for the “good old days.”

“The Voting Rights Act is a bad thing,” Miller claimed, according to the San Francisco Examiner. “[T]hings were fine around here. Now they (Indians) want to vote. What next?”

Maybe most weren’t as vocal about their opposition to equal rights as Miller was, but the Native American franchise was a hard-fought battle. As historian Matthew G. McCoy writes, “Only through consistent activism and legal action did Native Americans succeed in breaking down these egregious barriers to voting.”

It shouldn’t have been as difficult for Native Americans to vote as it was. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, in theory, settled the question of whether Indigenous people were citizens. They were. And they were entitled to vote. However, as historian Orlan J. Svingen explains, this law didn’t prevent discrimination.

“Just as passage of the 15th Amendment precipitated countless barriers for the freedmen, the Indian Citizenship Act also failed to elevate American Indian civil rights on an equal footing with non-Indians,” Svingen writes.

Though there was anger and a number of court battles in earlier years, it may have been the start of World War II that acted as a catalyst for activism

A government study in 1936, for example, found that seven states were actively preventing Native Americans from voting. Much like the laws that prevented Black Americans from voting, these states enacted laws specifically targeting Native American voters, including mandating that all voter registrars be taxpayers (many Native Americans were exempt from certain local taxes, and this law depressed voter registrations on reservations) and literacy tests as a requirement for voting. One Cherokee voter was told by a judge that despite his master’s degree from the University of North Carolina, “You couldn’t read or write to my satisfaction if you stayed here all day.”

Though there was anger and a number of court battles in earlier years, it may have been the start of World War II that acted as a catalyst for activism, McCoy notes. Though Native American soldiers were being sent overseas to fight for freedom, that same freedom eluded them at home.  Navajo soldier Ralph Anderson sent a letter to tribal leaders in 1943 with this exact contradiction on his mind.

“We all know Congress granted the Indians citizenship in 1924,” he wrote, “but we still have no privileges to vote. We do not understand what kind of citizenship you would call that.”

In the following years, Native activists took their fight to Congress several times, meeting denials of their rights most times. But they were undeterred and began leading direct actions. In 1946, for example, Navajo citizens attempted to register to vote in Arizona and were denied, as were two people from the Yavapai tribe. The latter denial led to a court case, Harrison v. Laveen, that overturned a previous ruling that classified Native Americans living on reservations as being essentially wards of the state and ineligible for voting. A case in 1948 successfully took the fight to the federal government, arguing that the denial of voting rights was unconstitutional. And as Svingen writes, in the 1970s, “exemptions from certain taxes no longer limits [Native Americans’] right to vote, and election districts must be apportioned under the ‘one person one vote’ principle,” rules that officials in Big Horn County were simply ignoring.

There have been many subsequent fights for equality, and some experts argue that certain regulations, like voter ID, may still be playing a role in disenfranchising Native American voters. Legal scholar Sally Harrison writes that “one in five eligible Native American voters do not have a [government-issued] photo ID that meets the requirements for ID in strict-photo ID states [and] many states do not allow tribal photo IDs at the polls because a state or federal government did not issue them,” a contradiction that could lead to revisiting past injustices. As Harrison notes, “state and federal legislators should pay special attention to the Native American vote, making sure that it does not face the discrimination and exclusion it has in the past.”

Trump names Stephen Miller to be deputy chief of policy in new administration

https://apnews.com/article/trump-stephen-miller-policy-immigration-9cc6ad3118779b23bff88022ca5e2260

Please remember what Stephen Miller wants to do.  He is a white supremacy Nazi with Jewish heritage.  His own family immigrated here.   But I am sure they will be safe from the purge as was Melania and her parents.  Remember he was behind the separation of children from their parents who cross the border.  The parents were deported while the children were given to Christian adoption agencies to sell.   Many have never been found.   He was behind the lawsuits that wanted any and all DEI programs stopped in the collages and private business claim it displaced white men for every job given to a woman or brown / black person.  Remember he wants to end both birthright citizenship and deport people born to undocumented people even though they are US citizen.  Remember that during tRump’s first term many non-white people were deported even though they were citizens and had a hard fight getting back into the US.  It is back to carry your papers if you are not white and even then it is going to be hard for many.  Hugs.

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Stephen Miller speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Lititz, Pa., Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

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By  MICHELLE L. PRICE
Updated 12:05 PM EST, November 11, 2024
 

President-elect Donald Trump is naming longtime adviser Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner, to be the deputy chief of policy in his new administration.

Confirming the appointment, Vice President-elect JD Vance posted a message of congratulations on Monday to Miller on X and said, “This is another fantastic pick by the president.” The announcement was first reported by CNN.

Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving aides, dating back to his first campaign for the White House. He was a senior adviser in Trump’s first term and has been a central figure in many of his policy decisions, particularly on immigration, including Trump’s move to separate thousands of immigrant families as a deterrence program in 2018.

Miller has also helped craft many of Trump’s hard-line speeches, and was often the public face of those policies during Trump’s first term in office and during his campaigns.

Since leaving the White House, Miller has served as the president of America First Legal, an organization of former Trump advisers fashioned as a conservative version of the American Civil Liberties Union, challenging the Biden administration, media companies, universities and others over issues such as freedom of speech and religion and national security.

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He was also a frequent presence during Trump’s campaign this year, traveling aboard his plane and often speaking ahead of Trump during the pre-shows at his rallies.

Miller drew large cheers at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden during the race’s final stretch, telling the crowd that, “your salvation is at hand,” after what he cast as “decades of abuse that has been heaped upon the good people of this nation — their jobs stolen looted and from them and shipped to Mexico, Asia and foreign countries. The lives of their loves ones ripped away from then by illegal aliens, criminal gangs and thugs who don’t belong in this country.”

“We stand here today at a crossroads,” he went on, casting the election as “a choice between betrayal and renewal, between self-destruction and salvation, between the failure of America or the triumph of America.”

 

Because it is not a Cabinet position, the appointment does not need Senate confirmation. ___ Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

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MICHELLE L. PRICE
Price is a national political reporter for The Associated Press. She is based in New York.
 

History Will Not Forget

As I mentioned I spend all day listening to podcasts on one device or the other. Here is some of what I hear

This short clip is great.  The point she makes is the same one I made about the Democratic Party sliding right to get dissatisfied republican voters.  Her point, we should have paid more attention to the people who left the Democratic Party than those who were never tRumpers or left the republican party due to tRump.  Again it is the party of the working person not the party of republican lite.  Hugs

While I find it easier to follow Sam’s reasoning on some issues, while he is out on funeral leave after his mother died, I am glad it is Emma explaining this.  Listen to what tRump was saying about women.  He wanted to see Harris in a ring getting beaten by Mike Tyson. He said he would protect women if they liked it or not.  So she says two themes, I say three.  She says fear stoking by bashing immigrants and misogyny.  I say it was them plus racism.  The first thing he said about her was she changed to being black for advantage, then started calling a black woman retarded. But if you remember the things he said about women in the 2016 election about Clinton and the grab them by the pussy tape.  Sad that so many of our fellow people have these feelings in 2024.   Hugs.

in this video both Matts are upset with the culture of democrats in office refusing to do what is needed instead patting each other on the back as infallible.  Trump attacked both democrats and republicans who did not follow the ideas he pushed.  Ideas that he felt people wanted, and it became true the more he said it.  Even when they failed to actually help the lower incomes and did increase greatly the incomes of the upper incomes / very wealthy.  They mention that again in 2023 the mean average income was lower than in 2019.  Lower incomes are still losing and have been since the 1980s.  While harder to listen too it is all about the conditions on the ground vs words used by democrat candidates.  Brandon talks about the influencers on podcasts / social media.  Matt Bender continues that conservation.  Hugs

This video is about Joe Biden and him staying in until the last minute.  How there was no primary and no time for Harris to introduce herself to the public.   How Biden did not promote her publicly until he dropped out.  How Biden kept her sidelines because her age made him look older by comparison.  How the democrats need to do more to run to their extremer base like the republicans do.   Hugs

In video Emma points out that the covid recovery plan of massive help for the lower incomes made the Biden administration very popular, but when that changed in 2022 for a more austerity program pushed by bipartisan republicans and Manchin / Sinema … or should I say by the republicans and Biden’s need for the feeling of bipartisanship.  Once people realized again they wouldn’t be getting the help promised them by the democrats they again felt the democrats left them behind.  The lower incomes feel betrayed by the democratic party and they feel used.   Paid attention to only every four years and promised table scraps so the democratic candidate can keep the corporate dollars flowing.   Hugs

My thoughts after the election 11 7 2024

I talk about why I think Harris lost the election. What people heard and understood. Mistakes made from hiring people who keep running old playbooks to who was listened to on the ground. This is one of many videos I hope to make on this subject.

Peace & Justice History for 11/9

November 9-10, 1938
Nazis looted and burned synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and homes, and beat and murdered Jewish men, women, and children across Germany and Austria.

Known as Kristallnacht, it was a night of organized violence against Jews marking the beginning of the Holocaust with the killing of 91 and the deportation of 30,000 to concentration camps. The German word translates to “the Night of Broken Glass,” so called because of the vast number of broken windows in Jewish shops, 5 million marks worth ($1,250,000).
Read more 
November 9, 1965
At the first draft-card burning [see November 6, 1965], a heckler shouted that they should burn themselves, not their draft cards. Three days later Roger LaPorte, a student of religion and a Catholic Worker volunteer, poured gasoline on himself and struck a match to it in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York. Police managed to douse the flames.

Roger LaPorte
On his way to the hospital he said, “I’m a Catholic Worker. I’m against war, all wars. I did this as a religious action.” He died 33 hours later. Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement and a speaker on the 15th, wrote that she believed that LaPorte knew it was wrong to take his own life. But she explained his desire to end the Vietnam War; in the previous few days, six massive air strikes had made it the deadliest week since the war began.
Read more 
November 9, 1984
U.S. peace activists sailed a shrimp boat into the Port of Corinto to confront U.S. warships threatening Nicaragua. The U.S. had mined the harbor in violation of international law, and had invaded Nicaragua through this port in 1896 and 1910.
November 9, 1989
For the first time since World War II, free travel between East and West Germany was allowed. The Berlin Wall, built to stop the exodus from the Communist-controlled East in 1961, was opened in response to nonviolent popular action.
   
November 9, 2002
Somewhere between 450,000 and a million Europeans in Florence, Italy, peacefully protested the threatened U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Florence, Italy 11.9.2002
The inaugural meeting of the European Social Forum had just concluded there.It was a regional part of the framework established at the World Social Forum which had met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, first in 2001.

Read more about this protest 
The Forum is a citizens’ movement exploring alternatives to globalization and the inhumane consequences of the changing world order. They focus on sustainable development, social and economic justice. Those who were part of the Forum come from a broad range of civil society, including: pacifists; environmentalists; those in nonprofit, volunteer and non-governmental organizations; representatives of religious and lay groups; those in the anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movements; and, for the first time in Florence (Firenze), significant involvement of the labor movement, notably the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), and trade unions or national confederations from nine European countries, including Russia.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november9

(Oops. I’m sorry about the title. Fixed it, though.)

One Of The Issues I Work On

is abolishing the death penalty at all levels. It’s really a thing I’ve been certain of since I was a child and learned that the death penalty everywhere had been ruled to be unconstitutional by the SCOTUS. Even as a child, I remember being relieved and thankful that had happened. It was back in a matter of years, and I was old enough then to know more about the general system, and also about activism, which at the time, my church supported, even. Below is part of an article about asking the current president to commute all federal capital cases to life in prison, or another appropriate sentence in prison. We started nagging the president about this around a year ago, because he’d said he was going to try to get rid of the death penalty. Now, as he told us today, there are 74 days in which bad things aren’t going to happen. This could be a thing to do to help feel better about things, as it’s as likely to actually happen as it wouldn’t be. Again, as with anytime I bring activism here, I will neither know nor is it my business whether/what a person does. I’m just putting it out here as a thing that can be done. Thanks for your time, and your consideration!

=======

https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-urged-prevent-trump-death-row-execution-spree-1981920

(Snippet) Abraham Bonowitz, the executive director of Death Penalty Action, told Newsweek that although many death penalty opponents have been critical of Biden on the issue, “the truth is that he did the most pragmatic thing immediately upon taking office.”

He said: “The President appointed an Attorney General who understood the Administration’s position and knew not to set any death warrants. Anything more would have hurt his relationships with Congress, but that’s all over now.”

Biden now has the chance “to take away one of the things Donald Trump loves, which is the power to execute people,” he added.

“If Biden commutes all of those death sentences, Donald Trump will never get to oversee another judicial execution. It would be a great legacy for Biden to live up to his own morals and save dozens of lives while leaving a stinging parting gift for Trump.”

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/biden-demolish-the-death-chamber