THIS IS EXCELLENT! Please consider watching and sharing. Thank you. 🙏 Molly
"I disagree with Kamala's position on the war in Gaza.
How can I vote for her?" Here is my answer.
― Bernie Sanders
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Trump’s Dehumanizing Rhetoric Is Adopting Franco’s Language of Fascism and Violence
I deeply appreciate and respect the strong and vital voices of truth of Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Marshall Curry and, of course, Amy Goodman. Such chilling, illuminating, excellent, and deeply important interviews. ― Molly
Trump's Dehumanizing Rhetoric Is Adopting
Franco's Language of Fascism and Violence
We speak with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and authoritarianism, who argues that Trump’s use of the hallmarks of “fascism and violence,” including dehumanizing rhetoric, profane and crude discriminatory language and threats to the “enemy within,” echoes the rise of midcentury fascist rulers like Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler.
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/29/2024_election_fascism_authoritarianism
Trump's Night at the Garden: Racist Campaign Rally
Evokes Infamous 1939 Nazi Gathering In NYC
Sarah Van Gelder: A Note to My Fellow Progressives Hesitant to Vote for an Imperfect Kamala Harris
I've long deeply respected and appreciated the work, integrity, and commitment to truth and a higher good embodied in Sarah Van Gelder. Yes, we make the best choice we can and then we continue to fight for a most just, sustainable, caring, and peaceful nation and world. ― Molly
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Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally on October 28, 2024 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. |
Voting for Harris is not a vote for a savior who will make everything right—anyone who claims to be able to do that is a cult leader or a demagogue, not a serious political leader. We make the best choice in front of us—and then we continue the fight.
By Sarah Van Gelder
Before Barack Obama ran for president, I remember thinking there would never be a black president in my lifetime. And I remember feeling overwhelmed, even tearful, when I watched on television as the new First Family walked on the stage at Grant Park in Chicago. It wasn’t so much the sight of President Obama that got to me. It was seeing Michelle and the girls, and Barak’s aged mother-in-law who would be living in dignity and esteem in the White House.
I was born in the segregated south, and there black women were mainly consigned to domestic work. But back in 2008, a majority of Americans voted to elect a young black man with a foreign-sounding name, and then four years later re-elected him.
Now we have the question—in a time of heightened stress and deepened divides, and a time of post-pandemic malaise, social isolation, an affordability crisis, and a corrupted social media—can we take another step forward in our democracy and elect a black woman as president?
Watching the DNC renewed my hope. So many men stood up for one black woman brave enough to run for the highest office in the nation, but also for each woman and girl of all colors who face the terrible vulnerability of simply having a body that can both bring new life into the world and endanger her life with a pregnancy, voluntarily and otherwise, that can end her life. So many of these men said that they would use some of their political capital to make right for women what the Supreme Court made wrong.
Change takes bottom-up organizing, building a base, doing the hard work of governing locally and building up to national participation, not parachuting in during razor-thin elections.
But the dread has crept back in recently as I hear people say they don’t really know Kamala. Is the real question about whether she is like me and, perhaps even more to the point, would she like me? Would I still belong, as a white person, or as a man, if a black woman holds the highest office in the land?
Or would I be reminded that our nation has not always been kind or just to people who look like her? Might her presence force me to question where I stand given our nation’s legacy of exclusion and violence directed at women and people of color. Will I feel uncomfortable or even shame?
Since the pandemic, so much of our anxiety, political and otherwise, has centered on the question of belonging. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a public health crisis. Perhaps that contributes to the fear, especially In places with large immigrant populations, where some long-time residents wonder if they will still belong in their communities, or if they will feel excluded, not able to understand an unfamiliar language or new cultural norms.
So what do the two candidates offer the public in terms of belonging? Kamala Harris has promised to govern for everyone, and instead of giving priority to the rich, to especially focus on those who work hard to support their families. Those who see her in person or on the media often speak of her personal warmth.
Donald Trump’s track record shows he will govern not based on policies or the best interests of the country, but based on what benefits himself and favored members of his family and inner circle. Billionaires and right-wing ideologues are salivating at the money and power they can extract from Americans when given the green light by Trump. All they have to do is turn on the flattery.
Trump gives some people a sense of belonging—wearing those red hats, laughing at his jokes about who he is going to rough up, creating an out-group—all that seems to scratch the itch for many people who are angry and feeling excluded. But the truth is that he has nothing but contempt for people who aren’t wealthy, and for men and women who served in the military (who he calls suckers), especially if they had the misfortune of being wounded, captured, or to have died in the line of duty.
Yes, his thirst for power and flattery, his threats of violence against those who fail to follow his most unhinged directives, and his ugly rhetoric mark him has a fascist.
The truth is that we create belonging at the local level, not by vilifying our neighbors but by fostering relationships of mutual respect, supporting small business, civic groups, and other local institutions that keep us connected, and showing up for one another during times of need.
We need the political space to do this work, and we need leaders willing to be swayed by the things we the people (not the billionaires) are asking for.
Belonging is, of course, just one of the issues raised by Kamala’s candidacy. What about Gaza? This is the most painful question for me. I was hoping for a much more robust commitment to stopping the killing and starvation in Gaza, and preventing the war from spreading through the region.
But a vote for Trump will not help Palestinians. Recall that Trump was the one who moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, turning their back on hopes for peace with Palestinians. And he told Netanyahu, “Finish the problem” in reference to the sustained killing which some now are calling genocide.
Harris has at least said that the killing must stop. A vote for her is not a vote for everything I would like, but I believe it is a harm reduction strategy compared to the alternative.
And here is the bottom line for me. Voting for Harris is not a vote for a savior who will make everything right—anyone who claims to be able to do that is a cult leader or a demagogue, not a serious political leader.
Voting for Harris is a vote for someone who authentically cares about people, and is a smart and capable leader.
To get the deeper changes we need to make housing and child care affordable, to straighten out the mess in our health care system, to combat the climate crisis, to bring peace to the world—all of these and so many other changes will require work by “we the people.” Even if we have an ideal candidate, the future is largely up to us. When we fight, we win. Or more specifically, when we organize and mobilize, we can get real change.
A vote for Kamala is a vote for someone who will not direct the National Guard to shoot at demonstrators, as Trump has tried to do.
Third party candidates rightly point out ways both of the two parties fall short. But change takes bottom-up organizing, building a base, doing the hard work of governing locally and building up to national participation, not parachuting in during razor-thin elections.
A vote for Kamala is a vote for someone who will not direct the National Guard to shoot at demonstrators, as Trump has tried to do. Under her presidency, we can do our work as the people of this nation to build powerful social movements that empower people to make change.
We need the political space to do this work, and we need leaders willing to be swayed by the things we the people (not the billionaires) are asking for.
Under a Kamala presidency, ordinary people can be heard, even if we make powerful interests uncomfortable, and we can achieve real wins for ordinary people and for our future. And as imperfect as it is, democracy of and by the people has a chance at working.
Please go here for the original article: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/a-note-to-my-fellow-progressives-hesitant-to-vote-for-an-imperfect-kamala-harris
EXCELLENT ― A Special Monologue for the Republican in Your Life
Excellent! Truly worth watching and sharing!
― Molly
Jimmy Kimmel Live
Tonight’s monologue is for Republicans. If you have someone in your life who is either planning to vote for Trump or thinking about it, please send this to them. Ask a Republican you love and respect to watch this. The whole thing. As a personal favor to you. We are a week away from the election so make sure to get out and vote on Tuesday, November 5th.
23 Nobel Economists Say Harris Plan 'Vastly Superior' to 'Counterproductive' Trump Agenda
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U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris arrives at Philadelphia International Airport in Philadelphia on October 23, 2024.
"I do not know any economist who thinks Trump would be a good president, or who thinks he would be good for the economy," said one of the signatories.
By Julia Conley
Recipients of the prestigious Nobel Prize for economics said in a letter Thursday that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has outlined an economic agenda that would be "more sustainable and more equitable" than the policies proposed by Republican contender Donald Trump.
Spearheaded by 2001 Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, the letter was signed by 23 economists—more than half of the living U.S.-based recipients of the award.
The signatories, including Claudia Goldin, Simon Johnson, and Richard H. Thaler, wrote that what the two candidates have said, "combined with what they've done in the past, gives us a clear picture of alternative economic visions, policies, and practices."
Harris has been applauded since launching her campaign in July for unveiling numerous proposals aimed at easing economic burdens for working families. She has called for the first-ever federal ban on price gouging in food industries; an expansion of Medicare that would provide relief to 37 million people who currently provide unpaid eldercare to family members; an extension of Medicare's prescription drug price cap to all Americans; and an expansion of the child tax credit.
"Harris's economic agenda will improve our nation's health, investment, sustainability, resilience, employment opportunities, and fairness and be vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump," wrote the economists.
The signatories particularly took issue with Trump's plan to impose high tariffs on goods and "regressive tax cuts for corporations and individuals."
His proposals "will lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality," the economists wrote.
Trump's tariffs would raise consumer prices by $2,500 to $3,000 per year, according to EPI Action, the advocacy arm of the Economic Policy Institute.
"I do not know any economist who thinks Trump would be a good president, or who thinks he would be good for the economy," said Thaler on social media.
The former president has also said he would extend his 2017 tax cuts, the vast majority of which benefited wealthy corporations and individuals. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy said in analysis of his tax proposals earlier this month that the richest 4% of Americans would see significant tax cuts under a Trump administration, and all other groups would see a tax increase.
"Among the most important determinants of economic success are the rule of law and economic and political certainty, and Trump threatens all of these. By contrast, Harris has emphasized policies that strengthen the middle class, enhance competition, and promote entrepreneurship," wrote the economists. "On issue after issue, Harris's economic agenda will do far more than Donald Trump's to increase the economic strength and well-being of our nation and its people."
Please go here for the original article: https://www.commondreams.org/news/harris-economic
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Mary Oliver: Heavy
It is not easy to be human. It is especially difficult to keep our hearts open when there is deep personal, national, and global pain, loss, trauma, and suffering within our world and our own hearts. This is where our capacity to hold grief is so deeply important.
Knowing that we humans all fall somewhere on the continuum of open-heartedness, the strength of our connection with our hearts, our Self, our Sacred core truly matters. Because the inner is a reflection of the outer. And whether we are aware of this or not, the joy and the suffering of others is also ours. This interrelationship with all of life illuminates a larger picture beyond our own personal pain. We absorb and are impacted by what is happening within and beyond ourselves, both the joys and the sorrows.
And thus I am moved to share this beautiful poem on grief by Mary Oliver.
Today and everyday, may our internal and external systems of support grow and expand. May we experience the strength that is found in the gentleness and tenderness of our hearts. In the midst of darkness, may we also remember beauty and joy and compassion and love. We are all related, all family, all in this together. 💗 Molly
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| Photo by Molly |
Heavy
That timeI thought I could notgo any closer to griefwithout dying
I went closer,and I did not die.Surely Godhad his hand in this,
as well as friends.Still, I was bent,and my laughter,as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.Then said my friend Daniel,(brave even among lions),“It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it -books, bricks, grief -it’s all in the wayyou embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,put it down.”So I went practicing.Have you noticed?
Have you heardthe laughterthat comes, now and again,out of my startled mouth?
How I lingerto admire, admire, admirethe things of this worldthat are kind, and maybe
also troubled -roses in the wind,the sea geese on the steep waves,a loveto which there is no reply?”
―
Sunday, October 27, 2024
EXCELLENT ― Naomi Klein: Why We Need Arundhati Roy
Tears. This one touches my heart so deeply. My bookshelves have long been lined with the work of Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy. And also many other wise and courageous souls who are fiercely committed to embodying the vital voices of truth, integrity, justice, and tireless caring and advocacy for the well-being of others ― passionate and heroic voices that are so incredibly needed in these dark times on our beautiful hurting planet. Please consider reading and sharing this illuminating, profound, and powerful piece. Thank you. 🙏 Molly
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| Photo by Mariam Butt / NTB scanpi via Alamy |
Why We Need Arundhati Roy
It is vanishingly rare for a writer to both confront the ugliness of humanity and still search for its beauty. Roy is that rare writer.
By Naomi Klein
There are few activities I enjoy more than praising Arundhati Roy, who has been awarded the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize. Under normal circumstances, I would be more than happy to recall favourite characters in her gorgeous novels and some of her greatest one-liners.
And no, I’m not talking about the ones about “another world… breathing” that were the italicised email signatures of half the people you knew in the early 2000s. I’m not even referring to “the pandemic is a portal” – those words that pierced the early shock of Covid-19 and helped so many of us to grasp that this cataclysm was going to take us somewhere new and different, and that we had urgent choices to make about what we wanted to bring on that journey.
I’m talking about deeper cuts, lesser-known framings that also helped us get our bearings and keep our wits when history suddenly started moving in fast-forward. After 9/11, when George W Bush declared “you are either with us or with the terrorists”, Roy reminded us then that we did not have to choose between “a malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs” – that all the beauty on Earth existed between those two poles. Or when US fighter jets pummelled Afghanistan with bunker busters, and then followed up by airdropping packets of food aid, and Roy described the display as “brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam”. Or what she said about the way our phones have become extensions of bodies: “Imagine if your liver or your gallbladder didn’t have your best interest at heart.” Or her scathing take on middle class, professionalised environmentalism, which, she says, “asks the question: How can we change without changing?”
I could go on – I’m a collector, you see: an Arundhati-ologist.
Her novels create worlds nestled within worlds, and then worlds within those. The characters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) embody and inhabit the riotous, uncontrollable diversity that Roy has, for so long, defended against the dull, monocrop twins of global capitalism and ethno-nationalism. John Berger once observed that Roy’s “fiction and non-fiction… walk [her] around the world like [her] two legs”. Which means that if we want to understand the uniqueness of her stride, we must look at them together, as companions.
Roy has written dozens of essays and lectures, enough to fill more than 1,000 pages in her beautiful anthology My Seditious Heart (2019), as well as her recent follow-up Azadi (2020). What becomes clear in these pages is that, after The God of Small Things (1997), Roy became a kind of self-assigning war correspondent, seeking out the places and people experiencing maximum pain, maximum injustice, maximum state violence: Kashmir, the Maoist insurgency, the aftermath of the Gujarat Massacre, nuclear weapons test sites, and the movement to defend the Narmada valley from drowning.
But she is Arundhati Roy, so she did not write about these conflicts and issues like a war reporter. She wrote about them like a novelist. She brought her tremendous gifts as a writer – her bottomless capacity for imagination, her devastating eye for detail and for the perfect, unforgettable metaphor – to find poetry in protest chants, and gallows humour in guerrilla warfare. So many struggles for justice and survival were better understood, more deeply felt, because she chose to help us see them through her artist’s eyes.
There are some writers, though not enough of them, who are willing to confront the ugliest acts that humans are capable of unleashing on to other humans and the natural world. And there are also writers who search out beauty with great insistence, who fall recklessly in love with the world again and again.
But it is vanishingly rare for the same writer to do both of these things: confront the ugly and still search for beauty. Look squarely into the dead eyes of the mob bent on annihilation – and still hold on to a belief in the potential of masses of people to come together to change the world for the better.
Arundhati Roy is that rare writer. So, too, is the British-Egyptian Alaa Abd el-Fattah. I was not at all surprised when I learned that Roy had chosen Abd el-Fattah as this year’s PEN Writer of Courage. Though very different stylistically, their spirits are connected in an almost sibling-like way.
It was my honour to write the foreword to Abd el-Fattah’s mind-altering book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021). Having spent many weeks immersed in his writing, I would also be happy to devote these remarks to praising Alaa’s work – pulling out the insights and sentences that are now permanent parts of my mental architecture.
I could tell you about his warnings about nationalism, his devotion to participatory democracy, his bold experimentations with form and style. I could share some of the endlessly original ways he finds to express disdain for tyrants, liars and cowards (a trait he shares with Roy). I could write about how rare it is for revolutionaries to look honestly at their own movement’s failures and missteps, which Abd el-Fattah does with great rigour and care.
All of these qualities, along with his strategic mind and acute analysis of power, made him one of the most important figures in the 2011 pro-democracy revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that overthrew the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak. There is so much to say.
And yet as I sat down to write this appreciation, of both Roy and Abd el-Fattah, it felt impossible to simply focus on their words – their books, essays and turns of phrase. Nor did it seem appropriate to focus on their impact – the significance they hold to the millions of people fighting for justice, liberation and dignified lives inside and outside their home countries.
I kept getting stuck on a simple fact. That, though their circumstances differ greatly, both writers are in danger. In fact, when I was invited by PEN to speak at the awards ceremony held at the British Library on 10 October, the letter contained a caveat, one that should startle us: “Given the state of the world, and the targeting by governments of both Alaa and Arundhati, we’re aware that it’s possible that both will be able to join us in person, but also that neither will.”
Abd el-Fattah should have been there, having finished serving his latest, absurd, sentence 12 days previously. The British government should have used every bit of leverage that it has – and it has plenty – to make sure that he was there. It clearly did not. Abd el-Fattah has already lost more than a decade of his life to Egypt’s dungeons – an incarceration so prolonged, torturous and arbitrary that his mother, Laila Soueif, calls this latest extension “a kidnapping”.
Meanwhile, just as PEN’s decision to award the Pinter Prize to Arundhati Roy was announced, reports came that she could face charges under India’s draconian anti-terrorism laws, with very severe implications for her freedom. That news led to a media frenzy, which put her in further danger, the kind of thing that has brought angry mobs to her door before.
Roy attended the ceremony, thank goodness. But it’s a reminder that we cannot take any writer’s freedom or safety for granted, no matter how renowned or celebrated.
A huge part of what I cherish about both Roy and Abd el-Fattah is that, like the best public intellectuals, they help us understand our moment in history. This is hard: change is constant and mostly incremental; the big shifts tend to sneak up on us. So how do we know when we are in a new chapter, one that requires different things of us? We know, partly, because our writers tell us.
“The pandemic is a portal,” Roy said. We’re going somewhere new. Pay attention.
Abd el-Fattah, from jail, helped his comrades understand that the Tahrir revolutionary moment had passed, and new strategies were required. A defeat did not need to be the end of the story, but he knew that you can’t write a new chapter if you are stuck in the old one.
I point this out because I think that this year’s PEN awards – when it was entirely possibly that neither honourees would be free enough to attend the ceremony – are telling us something important. I think they are telling us that we have entered a new era. I think they are telling us to pay close attention.
Arundhati Roy and Alaa Abd el-Fattah are famous writers, so we know about their cases. But thousands of lesser-known activists, journalists, academics and lawyers are currently imprisoned in India’s jails on draconian or entirely trumped-up charges. And those are the ones who have not been assassinated in the streets after being declared enemies of the state. In Egypt, human rights group estimate that there are some 60,000 political prisoners behind bars. An unfathomable number, one that helps explain why building shiny new prisons is one of the current regime’s most successful enterprises.
In light of these facts, I want to underline something that can get lost in the apolitical discourse of human rights. Both Roy and Abd el-Fattah are movement writers – writers whose voices are inseparable from the international resistance to the steamroller of corporate globalism and militarism that surged at the turn of the millennium. The movement looked different in every country, but before social media existed, we were connected to each other and we understood that we were fighting different fronts of the same struggle. From Chiapas to Palestine, Narmada to Genoa, Tahrir to Occupy Wall Street. This was the other world that Arundhati could hear breathing on a quiet day, the worlds that were always there.
I point this out because the state repression and harassment that these two writers face cannot be pried apart from the repression of the movements they helped build and that built them. Nor can the repression of these movements be pried apart from the fascistic political forces that are filling the vacuum left behind, with hateful ideologies that feed on anger – a legitimate anger at elites, systematically redirected towards the most vulnerable people in our respective societies. Particularly at the migrants who have been displaced by the wars, climate disasters and policies of economic immiseration that our global movements tried very hard to stop.
As multinational corporations rearranged India in their image, Roy wrote that “ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India – the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India.”
It’s not just India, of course. That successful succession is our world now. And a world like that needs a lot of jails. It needs all kinds of weapons. It needs Iron Domes – not just in Israel, but everywhere. Writers with compulsions to tell the truth? Not so much. In fact, there is a special kind of pure, distilled hatred that fascists and tyrants reserve for the people who see them. Truly see them. Or rather, see through them. And not only see through them but represent a true alternative to them – a politics built on love, solidarity and an open-armed embrace of the magnificence of our differences.
Those at English PEN know that writing is always a dangerous business somewhere. But as PEN honours these two writers, who are both at escalating risk from countries where the jails and morgues are crowded with other truth-tellers, we must contend with the reality that we have entered a brazen new stage of state violence.
And nowhere more so than in Palestine. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, the total number of journalists killed in Gaza in the past year has reached 176, with 32 Palestinian journalists in prison. Just a few days ago, an Israeli strike murdered the 19-year-old Palestinian journalist Hassan Hamad in his home in the Jabalia camp in northern Gaza. His remains were reduced to a shoe box. His colleagues shared a WhatsApp message he had received. It said: “Listen, if you continue spreading lies about Israel, we’ll come for you next… This is your last warning.” On 9 October, Israel shot and killed the Al-Aqsa TV photojournalist Mohammed al-Tannani. On the same day, Al Jazeera’s Fadi Alwahdi was shot in the neck and has since fallen into a coma.
So if you don’t mind, I write this encomium not just for Arundhati Roy and Alaa Abd el-Fattah, but for Hassan Hamad and Mohammed Al-Tannani and Fadi Alwahdi and so many others who believed so fiercely in the power of witnessing that they risked everything to try to shake us into action.
None of this is safely over there. In North America, solidarity with Palestine is costing jobs and reputations. Students and professors calling for divestment have been brutalised on their own campuses. Climate activists in the UK are getting multi-year sentences for trying peacefully to raise the alarm about the kind of cataclysmic storm that hit Florida recently. And just a few weeks ago, anti-migrant pogroms broke out in the streets of Britain’s major cities.
We are all inside this dangerous new chapter, connected to one another. There is fear in that, but there is strength too. It means there are many new alliances to make, new solidarities to forge, new strategies to devise. And new courage to find. Because as Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s words remind us, we have not yet been defeated.
This is an edited version of a speech given by Naomi Klein as she presented Arundhati Roy with the PEN Pinter Prize on 10 October 2024. At the same event, Roy announced Alaa Abd el-Fattah as this year’s Writer of Courage
Please go here for the original article: https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-essay/2024/10/why-we-need-arundhati-roy
James Risen: Mainstream Media Was Afraid to Compare Trump to Hitler. Now the Press Has No Excuse.
Thank you to James Risen for this excellent article. This is indeed the most consequential election of my lifetime and, given the climate crisis in particular, likely of all times.
The extreme dangers of the one candidate are glaringly obvious. I am deeply horrified by the incredibly dangerous rise of fascism in our country and beyond.
I also acknowledge the deep concerns that millions have about the other candidate. There are many who won’t vote for her because of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and her stated support of Israel.
While I am horrified with the one obviously authoritarian and fascist candidate, I also cringe when I listen to the other speak of her support of Israel, of American exceptionalism, of being a capitalist, of supporting the military industrial complex, and how she has walked back her previous stands on fracking and healthcare for all.
I also witness how she must appear to be “strong” — and especially because she is a woman. And, given the power of the donor class, she must appear as a neoliberal capitalist to the moneyed backers who she is dependent upon to have any real chance in this election.
Tragically, I believe that Kamala Harris must say these things in order to get elected. And that, to me, highlights the hold over the wealthy and over millions of Americans of what bell hooks has referred to the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
In the larger picture, we must recognize, address, heal, and transform this poisonous system that has permeated our individual and collective hearts and minds and bodies and souls. It is the only way forward that I see of healing humanity and our Earth Mother and coming to recognize the Sacred within all of life.
That said, there is no doubt whatsoever that the candidate that Kamala Harris is running against must be defeated. He absolutely must be defeated. And then we must collectively act to push, and push hard, a President Harris and all those in positions of power to make long needed vital changes with regard to Israel and Gaza, to the climate crisis, to our predatory economic system, and to other issues such that together we are creating a new nation and a new world ― one which is grounded in the highest good for all.
Bless us all, no exceptions. ― Molly
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| Donald Trump gestures to the crowd as he concludes a campaign rally on Oct. 19, 2024, in Latrobe, Pa.Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images |
Statements by John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, have made it nearly impossible for the media to avoid Hitler comparisons.
By James Risen
For decades, reporters have been taught not to make Hitler analogies in stories about American politics. Adolf Hitler was so uniquely evil that any comparison of an American politician with the Nazi leader was considered unfair and out of bounds.
And then came Donald Trump.
Trump is the first modern American political figure to force journalists to reassess whether Hitler references meet their editorial standards.
In my columns and other articles for The Intercept, I have drawn attention to the increasingly obvious parallels between Hitler and Trump and between the Nazi movement and the MAGA cult. Yet most mainstream journalists have stubbornly stuck to the de facto ban on Hitler analogies and have refused to compare the two. That reluctance to point out the truth about Trump has been part of a larger pattern in the media of the so-called sane-washing of Trump, in which his demagoguery, wild conspiracy theories, and racist proposals are given credence and serious treatment by the political press corps.
But in explosive new statements, Trump’s own former White House chief of staff has made it virtually impossible for the press to justify a continued ban on Trump/Hitler references. John Kelly, a retired Marine general and Trump’s longest serving chief of staff, told the New York Times and The Atlantic in interviews published this week that when he was president, Trump made it clear that he admired Hitler and yearned for his authoritarian power.
Kelly said that Trump repeatedly said in private that Hitler “did some good things,” and that Trump said he wanted the kind of “German generals” who served under Hitler and committed unspeakable war crimes in World War II.
Kelly said he is convinced that Trump is a fascist.
In his interview with the New York Times, Kelly pointed out the definition of fascist, and said that it fits Trump: “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy … he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Meanwhile, Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump wanted American generals to act like Hitler’s Nazi generals. Kelly recalled asking Trump, “‘Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’”
It has been widely known for years that Kelly knew explosive details about Trump’s time in the White House, but he has largely remained silent until now. He says that he has finally decided to reveal what he knows about Trump because he was fearful of Trump’s recent statements that he wants to use the U.S. military against his political rivals and dissidents. Trump has called his political opponents the “enemy from within,” and Kelly said that those statements finally prompted him to go public.
It is important that Kelly has finally spoken out before the election. But he could have done this much earlier; it is a wonder that the January 6 insurrection didn’t prompt him.
Of course, January 6 also didn’t convince the mainstream press to begin to regularly compare Trump to Hitler, even though the similarities between the 2021 insurrection and Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 were there for all to see.
The irony is that if Trump was a political figure in another country, the American press would have long since labeled him an autocrat. The U.S. media is susceptible to domestic pressures and so frequently avoids obvious truths about American political figures and about the actions of the U.S. government. In fact, the refusal by the American press to say that Trump is a would-be dictator is similar to the way in which the U.S. press refused to say that the Central Intelligence Agency had tortured prisoners at its black-site prisons during the war on terror. Rather than say that the CIA engaged in torture, the press shamefully used euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation” and “harsh interrogation.” For many years, the use of the word “torture” to describe what the CIA did was forbidden at many news organizations. That rhetorical smoothing helped the CIA avoid accountability.
Today, the press needs to avoid repeating that failure and plainly draw comparisons between Trump and Hitler.
Now, finally, Kelly’s statements provide all the ammunition that the press needs. He has confirmed that Trump wants to be a dictator and that he represents an existential threat to American democracy. His warning comes like a fire bell in the night that the American press — and the American people — must heed.
Please go here for the original article: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/25/trump-hitler-john-kelly-medi/
Hurricane Don: The Nightmare Storm Scenario Under Four More Years of Trump
This is an excellent article. For countless reasons, Trump must be stopped. He must! And this is at the top of my list. The climate crisis, the genocide in Gaza, the brutality and racism directed at immigrants, the rise of authoritarianism and fascism ― all of this and so much more would be infinitely worse under another horrifying Trump presidency. May this nightmare be ended! And then may we work tirelessly together to push a Harris administration and all of those in positions of power to create the radical changes necessary to be acting in the best interests of We the People and the planet. ― Molly
President Donald Trump brandishes an altered graphic during an Oval Office briefing on the status of Hurricane Dorian in Washington, D.C. on September 4, 2019. (Photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Rolling back every shred of climate progress and propping up rich polluters is going to make matters much worse for Georgia, Florida, and every other state on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.
By Ben Goloff
It’s 2029. JD Vance has been president for six months following Donald Trump’s second term in office. You’re waking up in a storm shelter in Georgia. You cowered all night as Hurricane Don smashed its way across the state.
You open the door to utter devastation—buildings destroyed, whole communities washed away, hundreds of people dead or missing.
Despite its Category 5 strength, Hurricane Don hit the Atlantic coast with little warning. Several years earlier, following the Project 2025 blueprint, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was privatized. Hurricane hunter planes were scrapped because they were unprofitable. And satellite data was sold to the highest bidder.
Back here in the present day, just days before Election Day, we should be clear-eyed about the consequences of a second Trump term.
Without NOAA forecasts, countless people were caught unprepared. They chose not to evacuate and tried to protect their homes.
In the days and weeks that follow, you realize that the federal government is not coming to help.
In line with Project 2025, emergency response activities were transferred to state and local governments. Federal disaster preparation grants have been eliminated. And the National Flood Insurance Program was wound down, leaving only the rich and lucky few who have private insurance with the ability to rebuild.
This was the consequence of electing Donald Trump and the fruition of his Project 2025’s extreme anti-people, pro-polluter agenda.
But there was more. Following through on his campaign promise, Trump delivered an oil and gas development frenzy with more fracking, more pipelines, and a battle plan to “drill, drill, drill.”
And Trump made quick work following through on his promise to oil executives that he’d block or reverse any environmental law they wanted if they donated $1 billion to his campaign.
Between 2025 and 2028, President Trump appointed two more justices to the Supreme Court. With an 8-1 conservative hegemony, the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency had no authority at all to address greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the court rejected that climate change was even real.
As a result, all federal agencies were left unable to address any impact of climate change. Superstorms, extreme wildfires, category 5 hurricanes have become the new normal.
Back here in the present day, just days before Election Day, we should be clear-eyed about the consequences of a second Trump term.
We just saw Hurricane Milton intensify in the Gulf of Mexico at one of the fastest rates ever on record. It finally slammed into Florida as a powerful Category 3 storm, leaving at least 24 people dead, more than 3 million without power, spawning dozens of tornadoes and creating a once-in-a-thousand-year rain event.
Two weeks earlier, Hurricane Helene brought a 1,000-year rainfall event to North Carolina and Georgia. It was the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina, leaving at least 230 people dead across six states and carving a path of destruction as much as 500 miles from any coastline.
Milton’s rapid intensification and Helene’s immense rainfall surprised some observers but both storms exemplify the effects of global heating driven primarily by digging up and burning fossil fuels.
For decades, scientists have predicted the increasing strength of such storms as governments fail to stop fossil fuel expansion and the planet keeps getting hotter. Continuing to burn ever more oil, gas, and coal means warmer oceans and warmer air. Warmer oceans provide immense energy that intensifies storms. Warming air holds more moisture, bringing heavier rainfall.
Rolling back every shred of climate progress and propping up rich polluters is going to make matters much worse for Georgia, Florida, and every other state on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Storms of the century will increasingly become storms of every few years—same goes for heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and floods—with little relief or recovery in sight.
And Trump’s reckless plans to pull out of the Paris agreement again and throw sand in the gears of the international climate negotiations threatens world leaders’ long-overdue agreement last year to “transition away from fossil fuels.”
In a year of climate extremes, we’ve learned that nowhere is safe on a heating planet.
Hurricanes will keep happening, as they always have. But when you emerge after 2029’s Hurricane Don, do you want a government that acts on science to protect people and planet, making polluters pay for their destruction? Or one that sacrifices our lives and livelihoods to the highest bidder?
Please go here for the original article: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/superstorm-under-trump
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