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Category: Political / Governments / Nations / Countries /
Peace & Justice History for 11/21:
| November 21, 1945 200,000 members of the United Auto Workers went on strike against General Motors, the first major strike following World War II. The UAW’s demand for a 30% wage increase was based on the increase in the cost of living during the war (28% according to the Department of Labor), the wartime freeze on wages, and the cut in the average workweek with the disappearance of overtime pay in manufacturing.   But the UAW also considered profits and prices a subject for negotiation, a position rejected by GM. The union did not merely say that labor was entitled to enough wages to live on. It also said that labor was entitled to share in the wealth produced by industry. “… Unless we get a more realistic distribution of America’s wealth, we won’t get enough to keep this machine going.”–Walter Reuther, UAW President More about the strike |
| November 21, 1973 President Richard Nixon’s attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, revealed the existence of an 18 1/2-minute gap in one of the subpoenaed White House tape recordings of Watergate conversations made by President Richard Nixon in the days after the Watergate break-in.The erasure was blamed on an accident by Nixon’s private secretary, Rose Mary Woods, but scientific analysis determined the erasures to be deliberate. White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig later attributed the gap to “sinister forces.”  Rose Mary Woods, demonstrating how she might have created the Watergate tape gap More about Rose Mary Woods |
| November 21, 1974 Both Houses of Congress voted to override President Gerald Ford’s veto of updates to the Freedom of Information Act. Originally passed in 1966, it required federal agencies to release information upon request to citizens and journalists.The amendments put an end to governmental resistance to compliance, including excessive fees, bureaucratic delays, and the need to sometimes resort to expensive litigation to force the government to share copies of documents. Ford advisors Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Dick Cheney, and government lawyer Antonin Scalia advised him to veto it.  Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, President Gerald Ford and Deputy Chief of Staff Richard Cheney April 28, 1975 What was the dispute? |
| November 21, 1975 The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, led by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), issued a report charging U.S. government officials were behind assassination plots against two foreign leaders – Fidel Castro (Cuba) and Patrice Lumumba (Congo), and were heavily involved in at least three other plots: Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Ngo Dinh Diem (Vietnam), Rene Schneider (Chile).  Senator Frank Church, left, chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, displays a poison dart gun as co-chairman Senator John Tower (R-TX) watches. The committee, a precursor to the Senate Intelligence Committee, was established to look into misuse of and abuse by intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI, some of which had been revealed by the Watergate investigations.      Fidel Castro / Patrice Lumumba / Rafael Trujillo / Ngo Dinh Diem / Rene Schneider Read more |
| November 21, 1981 More than 350,000 demonstrated in Amsterdam against U.S. nuclear-armed cruise missiles on European soil. |
| November 21, 1985 A full-scale summit conference, the first of five between the President Ronald Reagan of the U.S. and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union concluded. There was optimism over beginning a more productive and cooperative relationship between the two countries, each of which had thousands of nuclear warheads targeted at the other.The U.S. had proposed building a space-based anti-ballistic missile system, commonly known as “Star Wars,” which the Soviets had strongly opposed as an escalation of the nuclear arms race.In an unofficial meeting the previous evening, President Reagan had noted that he and Gorbachev were meeting for the first time at this level and had little practice. Nevertheless, having read the history of previous summit meetings, he had concluded that those earlier leaders had not accomplished very much. Therefore, he suggested that he and Gorbachev say, “To hell with the past, we’ll do it our way and get something done.” Gorbachev concurred.  Reagan and Gorbachev at their first summit |
| November 21, 1986 National Security Council member Oliver North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, began shredding documents that would have exposed their participation in a range of illegal activities regarding the sale of arms to Iran in an attempt to free hostages, and the diversion of the proceeds to an insurgent Nicaraguan group known as the contras.  Fawn Hall Oliver NorthMore on Fawn Hall |
| November 21, 1995 China officially charged well-known human rights activist and political dissident Wei Jingsheng with trying to “overthrow the government.” Wei had not been seen for a year and a half after disappearing into police custody after meeting with a U.S. assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs.“If the people allow the power holders, in the peoples’ name, to violate and ignore the rights of some of the people then, at the same time, they are giving the power holders the power to violate the rights of all the people.” “ Most people wait until others are standing to make their move, very few are willing to stand up first or to stand alone. That’s why my friends call me a fool! But I don’t have any regrets.” – Wei Jingsheng  Wei Jingsheng He had been imprisoned previously for his involvement with the Democracy Wall movement, including years in solitary confinement. He had also spoken out on behalf of the Tibetans. |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november21
Letters From An American
November 18, 2024 by Heather Cox Richardson Read on Substack
On Friday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo locked in a $6.6 billion deal with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for it to invest $65 billion in three state-of-the-art fabrication plants in Arizona. This will bring thousands of jobs to the state. The money comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, about which Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan on October 25: “That CHIPS deal is so bad.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he would work to repeal the law, although he backed off that statement when Republicans noted the jobs the law has brought to their states.
Also on Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule that would have made 4 million workers eligible for overtime pay. The rule raised the salary level below which an employer has to pay overtime from $35,568 to $43,888 this year and up to $58,656 in 2025. The decision by Texas judge Sean D. Jordan kills the measure nationally.
On Sunday, speaking from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, President Joe Biden said that it would not be possible to reverse America’s “clean energy revolution,” which has now provided jobs across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states. Biden noted that the U.S. would spend $11 billion on financing international responses to climate change in 2024, an increase of six times from when he began his term.
But President-elect Trump has called climate change a hoax and has vowed to claw back money from the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated to mitigate it, and to turn the U.S. back to fossil fuels. What Trump will have a harder time disrupting, according to Nicolás Rivero of the Washington Post, is the new efficiency standards the Biden administration put in place for appliances. He can, though, refuse to advance those standards.
Meanwhile Trump and his team are announcing a complete reworking of the American government. They claim a mandate, although as final vote tallies are coming in, it turns out that Trump did not win 50% of the vote, and CNN statistician Harry Enten notes that his margin comes in at 44th out of the 51 elections that have been held since 1824. He also had very short coattails—four Democrats won in states Trump carried—and the Republicans have the smallest House majority since there have been 50 states, despite the help their numbers have had from the extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina.
More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him. (Emphases mine- A.)
Although Trump ran on lowering the cost of consumer goods, Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have vowed to slash the U.S. government, apparently taking their cue from Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei, who was the first foreign leader to visit Trump after the election. Milei’s “shock therapy” to his country threw the nation into a deep recession, just as Musk says his plans will create “hardship” for Americans before enabling the country to rebuild with security.
Ramaswamy today posted on social media, “A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids.” He has suggested that cuts are easier than people think. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted that on a podcast in September, Ramaswamy said as an example: “If your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you’re out. If it ends in an even number, you’re in. There’s a 50 percent cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security number starts in an even number, you’re in, and if it starts with an odd number, you’re out. Boom. That’s a 75 percent reduction done.”
But, as Bump notes, this reveals Ramaswamy’s lack of understanding of how the government actually works. Social Security numbers aren’t random; the first digit refers to where the number was obtained. So this seemingly random system would target certain areas of the country.
Today, both Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein, and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post and Robert Tait of The Guardian reported that Trump’s economic advisors are talking with Republicans in Congress about cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly known as food stamps, and other welfare programs, in order to cover the enormous costs of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Medicaid is the nation’s health insurance for low-income Americans and long-term care. It covers more than 90 million Americans, one in five of us. Rural populations, which tend to vote Republican, use supplemental nutrition programs more than urban dwellers do.
The Washington Post reporters note that Republicans deny that they are trying to reduce benefits for the poor. They are, they say, trying to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending. “We know there’s tremendous waste,” said House Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX). “What we don’t seem to have in the hour of action, like when we have the trifecta and unified Republican leadership, is the political courage to do it for the love of country. [Trump] does.”
Those cuts will likely not sit well with the Republicans whose constituents think Trump promised there would be no cuts to the programs on which they depend.
Trump’s planned nominations of unqualified extremists have also run into trouble. Senate Republicans are so far refusing to abandon their constitutional powers in order to act as a rubber stamp to enable Trump’s worst instincts. Former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a Trump bomb thrower, was unqualified to be the nation’s attorney general in any case, but as more information comes out about his alleged participation in drug fueled orgies, including the news that a woman allegedly told the House Ethics Committee that she saw him engage in sex with a minor, those problems have gotten worse.
Legal analyst Marcy Wheeler notes that the lawyers representing the witnesses for the committee are pushing for the release of the ethics committee’s report at least in part out of concern that if he becomes attorney general, Gaetz will retaliate against them.
According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, fear of the MAGA Republican colleagues who are already trying to bully them into becoming Trump loyalists is infecting congress members, too. When asked if Gaetz was qualified for the attorney general post, Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID) answered: “Are you sh*tting me, that you just asked that question? No. But hell, you’ll print that and now I’m going to be investigated.”
The many fringe medical ideas of Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earned him the right-wing New York Post editorial board’s denigration as “nuts on a lot of fronts.” The board called his views “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines.” Kennedy is a well-known opponent of vaccines—he called Covid-19 vaccines a “crime against humanity”—and has called for the National Institutes of Health to “take a break” of about eight years from studying infectious diseases, insisting that they should focus on chronic diseases instead.
Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Peter Baker noted that Trump “has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation’s capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it.” Mischievous glee is one way to put it; another is that he is trying to destroy the foundations of the American government.
Baker notes that none of Trump’s selections would have been anything but laughable in the pre-Trump era when, for example, Democratic cabinet nominations were sunk for a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny, or for a donor-provided car. Nor would a president-elect in the past have presumed to tap three of his own defense lawyers for top positions in the Department of Justice, effectively guaranteeing that he will be protected from scrutiny.
A former deputy White House press secretary during Trump’s first term, Sarah Matthews, said Trump is “drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote.”
Today Trump confirmed that he intends to bypass normal legal constraints on his actions by declaring a national emergency on his first day in office in order to launch his mass deportation of undocumented migrants. While the Congressional Budget Office estimates this mass deportation will cost at least $88 billion a year, another cost that is rarely mentioned is that according to Bloomberg, undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Losing that income, too, will likely have to be made up with cuts from elsewhere.
Finally, today, CNBC’s economic analyst Carl Quintanilla noted today that average gasoline prices are expected to fall below $3.00 a gallon before the Thanksgiving holiday.
—
Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/biden-amazon-peru-g20-3cc827382d1e3c32865a14616ddfe467
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/15/trump-elon-musk-javier-milei-government-cuts.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/18/trump-medicaid-food-stamps-welfare
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/18/trumps-2024-mandate-isnt-robust-bidens-was-2020/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/18/gop-targets-medicaid-food-stamps/
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/11/15/congress/robert-f-kennedy-jr-new-york-post-00189800
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rfk-jr-vaccine-access-hhs/
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/presidential-emergency-powers-explained/
X:
ForecasterEnten/status/1858527168608829707
VivekGRamaswamy/status/1858559544202502250
gabrielsherman/status/1858150639513002043
Bluesky:
kevinmkruse.bsky.social/post/3lazmbaly4k2d
emptywheel.bsky.social/post/3lbavtjxuzk2y
My reading headlines and talking about the stories11 19 2024
This is a completely different video than the one I posted before. I am sorry that I posted that one. I hated the glitches in it. So I trashed it. I did it before I looked to see if It had comments. If you left comments please put them on this one. This one is longer and more in depth, but done with a higher resolution and done at 3 am this morning so I sound better and more coherent. There are no glitches of either video or audio that I could see / hear. I hope you will enjoy it. Today I am going to dump both computers starting at 12:30 pm. I have the laptop running if I need it. Hugs. Scottie
I read a bunch of headlines I have in open tabs and I talk about the stories they pertain to briefly. Nothing in depth, just generalized information in the public sphere of information. If there is a topic you wish me to cover in more detail please mention it in the comments. Hugs
Jon Stewart Urges Dems to Fight Like Republicans and Exploit Loopholes | The Daily Show
Jon Stewart covers the latest post-election news from Trump and Biden world, then unpacks Republicans’ strategy of aggressively exploiting loopholes, in contrast to the Democrats’ style of following rules and norms
Trump Acts Cordial With Biden While Gaetz, Gabbard, and Hegseth Score Nominations | The Daily Show
It is OK and great to stop the video at the 8:30 mark. After that it gets seriously stupid. But before that it has a lot to say that is true and said in a semi comedic way. Hugs
FBI: Text Messages Target LGBTQs For “Re-Education”
Via press release from the FBI:
The FBI is aware of the offensive and racist text messages sent to African American and Black communities around the country and is in contact with the Justice Department and other federal authorities on the matter.
The reports are not identical and vary in their specific language, but many say the recipient has been selected to pick cotton on a plantation.
The text message recipients have now expanded to high school students, as well as both the Hispanic and LGBTQIA+ communities.
Some recipients reported being told they were selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp. The messages have also been reported as being received via email communication.
Although we have not received reports of violent acts stemming from these offensive messages, we are evaluating all reported incidents and engaging with the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.
We are also sharing information with our law enforcement partners and community, academia, and faith leaders.
Read the full press release. Re-education = ex-gay torture.
Service Member Flagged Hegseth As “Insider Threat”
The Associated Press reports:
Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard veteran and Fox News host nominated by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Defense, was flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by a fellow service member due to a tattoo on his bicep that’s associated with white supremacist groups.
Hegseth, who has downplayed the role of military members and veterans in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and railed against the Pentagon’s subsequent efforts to address extremism in the ranks, has said he was pulled by his District of Columbia National Guard unit from guarding Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. He’s said he was unfairly identified as an extremist due to a cross tattoo on his chest.
This week, however, a fellow Guard member who was the unit’s security manager and on an anti-terrorism team at the time, shared with The Associated Press an email he sent to the unit’s leadership flagging a different tattoo reading “Deus Vult” that’s been used by white supremacists, concerned it was an indication of an “Insider Threat.”
Read the full article. Last month Hegseth sat for an interview with anti-LGBTQ Christian nationalist Kirk Cameron.
New Focus On Gabbard’s Ties To Anti-LGBTQ Cult
The Daily Beast reports:
In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to appoint ex-Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as his Director of National Intelligence, reports have resurfaced of her ties to a religious sect described as a “cult”—a connection that has the potential to throw her nomination, which requires Senate confirmation, into jeopardy. She reportedly met her husband, Abraham Williams, when he volunteered to shoot a video for her 2012 House campaign.
In addition to bonding over a love of surfing, The Daily Mail reported that the couple also was mutually connected to the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), a group with a history of antagonism toward LGBTQ people, women and Muslims. The group’s leader, Chris Butler, is heralded by members as a deity in his own right. The SIF, described as an alt-right branch of Hare Krishna, has reportedly developed thousands of followers.
Newsweek reports:
Former members who don’t speak so fondly of the Foundation and others close to Gabbard have said the group’s influence could be affecting her political motives, according to the report.
People have said the Science of Identity Foundation forbids people to speak publicly about the group, requires people to lie face down when Butler enters a room and even sometimes eat his nail clippings or “spoonfuls” of the sand he walked on, The New Yorker reported.
“I know what an abusive, misogynistic, homophobic, germophobic, narcissistic nightmare Chris Butler is. And I know what kind of relationship he has with Tulsi,” Lalita, a self-described cult survivor, wrote on Medium in 2017.
There’s more at both links.
Double-Dip Monday Poetry
Seeing things in Pictures
While Elon Musk is channeling Fonzi,
The withered husk of Trump
is a played out Ponzi.
His expression wry,
his head seems bare
as if worry at last has
Behold the stylite, who would eschew
the seed oil, the highly-processed,
the inferior fuel.
He is taking communion
in the body of Trump.
See this face now kissing
such poisonous rump.
Here’s Moses Mike, barely in the frame.
Happy to be here, a man without shame.
No weaker speaker would ever rest on such laurels,
Enabling, dissembling, religious, with no morals.
Dominionist, insurrectionist–
How in this mixture?
A key cog, not insignificant,
not the focus of the picture.
And poor Don. Jr. the first born second place
will wonder when he was erased,
But I think younger sibling Barron
is the heir to all this wayward carrion.
The pictures tell a tale most bizarre–
Is this how future folk will see who we are?
Scottie's Playtime 