Trump Would be America’s Hitler

 

-by Harvey Wasserman

As The Donald unleashes his inner Adolf,  there must be no illusions about what we face.

Through his COVID/drug-induced madness (like Hitler's addiction to crystal meth) Trump’s  White Supremacism incites his violent fascist cadres. It’s all a terrifying re-run of Adolf’s rise to power in 1933 Germany.

The terror is escalating at the voting centers, inside and out. The Brown Shirts have blocked voter access at Alexandria, Virginia. Inside they pitch ballots on whatever pretext they can find.

This is  the most critical juncture of the election-- where an election board decides whether to disallow mailed-in ballots.

Prepare to see them gather when the votes are counted.

Trump’s fascist rhetoric has sunk to a whole new level in demanding the arrest of his electoral opponent, Joe Biden. No other major party candidate has done that, not even Dick Nixon. Given AG Barr’s sycophantic contempt for the rule of law, take this threat at face value. Terrified of any strong woman of color, Trump has called VP candidate Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) a “monster.”

Yelling at right-wing militia groups to “liberate Michigan,” he’s got nothing to say about the armed fascist alleged plan kidnap duly-elected governor Gretchen Whitmer. Got that? Kidnap the Governor of a major state!!

At the Mexican border, stealth sterilizations mirror what Hitler did to Jewish, Roma, and eastern European women.

Many of these refugees have come here fleeing Latin American dictatorships installed and maintained by US forces.  Some are U.S. citizens. Their children are held in cages.

All face Trump's COVID. None will get anything resembling his multi-million-dollar medical care we pay for. Death and disease rates are state secrets.

Hidden from the public and media, those who’ve seen the camps compare them compare them to Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and other Nazi concentration camps.

Journalists, labor organizers, feminists, LGBTQ individuals, and progressive activists might remember that Hitler used such camps to “settle scores” once he consolidated power, a virtual inevitability with Barr by Trump’s side.

Like his racist, anti-semitic, Klan-lovting father, The Donald openly touts the “good genes” of his white followers. He attacks African-American, Mexican-American, and other citizens and immigrants of color as “murderers” and “rapists.”

Trump openly lauds Hitler's “racehorse theory,” arguing that human beings can be selectively bred like animals to produce a Master Race.

Here’s what Trump seig-heiled to a virtually all-white crowd in Bemidji, Minnesota, on September 18:

“You have good genes, you know that, right? ou have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it? Don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

Says Rabbi Mark Diamond, a senior lecturer on Jewish studies at Loyola Marymount University: “To hear these remarks said at a rally in an election campaign for the presidency is beyond reprehensible...

“This is at the heart of Nazi ideology. This has brought so much tragedy and destruction to the Jewish people and to others. It’s actually hard to believe in 2020 we have to revisit these very dangerous theories.”

Steve Silberman, a best-selling New York Times author, adds: “As a historian who has written about the Holocaust, I’ll say bluntly: This is indistinguishable from the Nazi rhetoric that led to Jews, disabled people, LGBTQ, Romani and others being exterminated. This is America 2020. This is where the GOP has taken us.”

At Trump’s core is contempt for what Hitler called “Jewish values”: compassion, empathy, remorse-- democracy itself. As reported by his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen, Trump thinks such beliefs (like science) are for “losers” and “suckers.”  “You’re brutal people, not nice people at all,” he once told a room full of Israel supporters, referring to how Jews allegedly do business.

Trump’s backers love his ties to Jews like Cohen; his mobster mentor Roy Cohn; his son-in-law and fellow real estate grifter, Jared Kushner; consigliere Stephen Miller; and mega-backer Sheldon Adelson. His daughter has converted to Judaism, they say. His grandchildren are technically Jewish.

They might remember that Hitler personally signed waivers saving at least 77 Jewish officers who were useful to him while serving in the Nazi Army. Then he exterminated many of their families.

 

Some still dismiss Trump as a mere Mussolini, calling him a “clown,” as did many American journalists when they first encountered Hitler.

They ignore his utter lack of care for the 220,000-plus Americans who’ve died from his denial of the deadly realities of the coronavirus.

Trump’s hard-core followers suffer no such delusions. They proudly flaunt their swastika flags and Nazi tattoos. They happily salute him as der Fuhrer and loudly hate both Jews and people of color.

These are the “fine people,” who killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. This is the “hero” 17-year-old who killed two peaceful demonstrators in Wisconsin (imagine if that kid had been black, how quickly the cops would’ve shot him to pieces, and what Trump would be saying about him now).

Now he’s urged his Proud Boy storm troopers to “stand back and stand by” in anticipation of a coming coup.

Approaching humankind’s most consequential election since 1933, Yale historian Timothy Snyder warns: “That the next atrocity will be different than the last one is not a reason to let it happen. It will be ours, and we have been warned.”

Our Election Protection campaign has become a terminal life/death struggle for our nation and our species.

It will take every ounce of our collective solidarity and strength to defeat Trump’s Hitlerian madness. Our survival demands we shed all illusions about what we face.

Never Again!!

-------------


Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the Grassroots Election Protection Coalition Monday zoom (www.grassrootsep.org). His California Solartopia broadcasts at KPFK/Pacifica 90.7 fm Los Angeles; Green Power & Wellness podcasts at prn.fm. His People’s Spiral of US History awaits Trump’s departure at www.solartopia.org.

Trump's Racism Caused Him To Push To Sell Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is 5,328 square miles with a population of 3.2 million (Americans). Greenland is melting but the area is 836,300 square miles with around 56,000 people, less than the 70,000 who live in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico's 7th largest city. Greenland's biggest town, Nuuk, has 18,000 people. There are 140 Americans station in Greenland at the Thule Air Base.

Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor is getting really famous. The video above is an interview he did with Hallie Jackson on MSNBC yesterday. It's worth watching the whole thing but at the 5:15 point he said "One time before we went down, [Trump] told us, not only did he want to purchase Greenland, he actually said he wanted to see if we could sell Puerto Rico, could we swap Puerto Rico for Greenland, because, in his words, Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor."

Taylor said Trump wasn't joking. He said that Trump "expressed deep animus towards the Puerto Rican people behind scenes. These are people who were recovering from the worst disaster of their lifetime. He is their president. He should be standing by them, not trying to sell them off to a foreign country."

Alan Grayson, who grew up in the Bronx, in an area that has more Puerto Ricans than anyplace else in the continental U.S. and then went on to represent the Orlando area, which has one of the continental U.S.' biggest Puerto Rican populations said he feel "the feeling is mutual. I’m sure that Puerto Ricans would love to trade Donald Trump for the Queen of England, Pope Francis, or even Muammar Qaddafi’s corpse. To say that Donald Trump is a racist is like saying that Serena Williams is a tennis player."

I think anyone who knows anything about Trump from his pre-White House days, knows he's always been a bigot with an animus towards Puerto Ricans, especially working class Puerto Ricans. The first time the young Trump made it into the legitimate newspapers was as the result of the federal government suing him and his father for illegally discriminating against Puerto Rican families in a building development they used federal funds to develop. That's around the time Woody Guthrie, one other tenants in Brooklyn rode this song about Trump, Sr.





Progressive Jared West is the official Democratic candidate running to replace Trumpist Sam Killebrew in the Winter Haven-Haines City-Davenport area of Polk County (HD-41). He wasn't happy about hearing what Trump said about Puerto Ricans. "It is absolutely deplorable Trump said that," he told me this morning, "but are we really surprised? Puerto Rico has been through a lot lately, and he’s done nothing but mock them and ignore them. Puerto Rican people are Americans, and my district has one of the highest concentrations of Puerto Rican’s in Florida. Many of them came over after the natural disasters. Today, when I’m elected, and forever, I stand with all people and especially Puerto Ricans to denounce this awful hate filled rhetoric. We will see you in November Donald Trump, and you will be answering for these comments."

Bob Lynch is the Democratic Party candidate for the Miami-Dade state House seat held by GOP wig wig Daniel Perez, a knee-jerk Trumpist, with no interest in working families other than during election season. Lynch has a very different perspective. This morning he told me that "It is unclear why Miles seems surprised as to the extent of Trump’s depravity and lack of humanity. He willingly went to work for a man that announced his presidency by declaring our Latino neighbors to be rapists, thugs, and killers. We have people that are still living without electricity and running water in Puerto Rico because of the agency Miles continued to work for, despite his shamelessly self-serving newfound conscience. Trump, Kitstjen Nielsen, and Miles Taylor are all personally responsible for thousands of needless deaths in Puerto Rico as well as thousands of Latino families destroyed after being separated by ICE. Miles should have resigned and immediately gone to Congress the day it was proposed to keep children in cages. Congress should also haul him, Nielsen, and everyone else who committed crimes against humanity at Trump’s behest in for non-stop hearings between now and November. A redemption tour because he sees grifters like the Lincoln Project getting rich is not something the media should be feeding into. Donald Trump doesn’t consider Puerto Rican’s to be Americans nor does he believe other Latinos should be given basic human rights. Miles Taylor could have done something to stop it and chose to do nothing. November is way too late for his victims."

Here's the version of the same Woody Guthrie song, the one I've been listening to for the last few years-- and performed by Ryan Harvey, Ani DeFranco and Tom Morello:

Maybe It Really Is Time For the South To Rise Again-- But Without The Built-In Racism This Time

On Friday the House voted, 232-180 to admit Washington, DC-- which has more people than Wyoming and Vermont-- as a state. Every Republican-- ironically, the party of unadulterated and unashamed racism-- voted no, as did the most Republican of the House Dems, Minnesota Blue Dog Collin Peterson. There were 8 other Democrats who wanted top vote NO-- and in fact did vote with the GOP on their motion to recommit, but who felt their best strategy was to have it both ways, voting with the GOP on the motion and with the Democrats on the bill:

• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)
• Angie Craig (New Dem-MN)
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)
• Jared Golden (careerist-ME)
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)
• Conor Lamb (careerist-PA)
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Xochitl Torres Small (Blue Dog-NM)

McConnell already declared it DOA as far as the Senate is concerned, somehow deciding statehood for Washington is-- wait for it-- "socialist." So his virulent and disgusting racism had nothing to do with it at all. And if McConnell were to be hit by a car tonight and whisked off to his place in Satan's bed, Trump has already said he would veto it, although didn't mention he's the most racist president to ever occupy the White House. The District, by the way, is 49% African-American so, the thinking goes among racists like McConnell and Trump and, generally all the Republicans in Congress... why give them a House seat and two Senate seats?

So I asked myself why is there still so much racism in our country. Why is it still a thing? Inequality politically and economically are bad enough but what about in our hearts? Why?

Stuart Stevens, a Mississippi Republican had something to say about that yesterday at The Bulwark-- at least for part of the problem: My Confederate Past. Before we get to Stevens' reflections, a little news (beyond Faith Hill's call for Mississippi to get a new Confederate-free state flag): there's plan to do just that and that started today, a flag that was adopted in 1894 at the height of the white backlash to Reconstruction.

As of Friday at noon, the plan-- which several sources reiterated was “extremely fluid”-- is for the House of Representatives to begin the legislative process to remove or replace the flag on Saturday morning.

A resolution will be filed that would suspend the rules so that legislators could take up a bill to address the flag. This resolution is expected to be the most difficult part of the process because it requires approval of a two-thirds majority in each chamber (82 of 122 House members, 35 of 52 Senate members). And the resolution must be passed by both chambers before either chamber could actually begin the process of debating the actual bill. [It did pass the House today-- 85 to 35-- and Gov. Reeves announced he will sign the final bill into law if it passes the state Senate too.] UPDATE: Last in the day, the Senate passed it too!

If the two-thirds threshold to suspend the rules is met, a simple majority would be required to pass the actual bill (62 of 122 House members, 27 of 52 Senate members).

Sources close to House leadership say they have-- for now-- the two-thirds majority votes to suspend rules, but they stress the margin is very thin.

On the Senate side, reports are that the leadership is “close”-- within one or two votes-- to having a two-thirds vote to suspend rules. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said the plan is for the House to move first.

...Many Republican lawmakers have for years opposed changing the flag, particularly without a popular vote on the issue. Some who want the Legislature to change it fear a backlash from constituents.

And  Republican Gov. Tate Reeves-- the de facto head of the state GOP-- opposes the Legislature changing the flag.

But that sentiment appears to be changing among some lawmakers.

Rep. Karl Oliver, R-Winona, in a 2017 social media post said that those who support the removal of Confederate monuments should be “lynched.” In recent weeks, he declined to comment on the flag issue.

But on Thursday, Oliver issued a statement that said: “I am choosing to attempt to unite our state and ask each of you to join me in supporting a flag that creates unity-- now is the time.” Oliver’s statement said the flag issue is growing “more divisive by the day” and “History will record the position I chose.”

A growing list of businesses, cities, counties and other groups have either stopped flying the flag or asked leaders to change it. Religious leaders have spoken out, saying changing the flag is a “moral issue.”  The NCAA, SEC, and Conference USA this month took action to ban post-season play in the state until the flag is changed.

"It’s difficult to explain to a non-Southerner," wrote Stevens, "the role the Confederate flag has played in our lives. I suspect that’s more so for a Mississippian than for someone from any other state as Mississippi is the most Southern of the states. Put it this way: If you have connections to the University of Mississippi-- the most Southern school in the most Southern state-- then your connection to the Confederate flag is what the shamrock is to Notre Dame. I was born in the 1950s to parents who met at Ole Miss. The role Ole Miss football played in my life was basically what the Catholic Church is to the Jesuits. It was both a belief system and the organizing principle of life. Saturdays in the fall were the Holy Days when the Faithful would gather and reinforce our devotion through the shared communion of ritual."

These were not football games but celebrations of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Only this time our 11 soldiers on the field of battle more often than not emerged victorious. At halftime the band marched in Confederate battle gray uniforms while Colonel Reb led the cheerleaders in unfolding what was billed as the world’s largest Confederate flag. (Even as a 10-year-old I remember wondering, “How big was the second-largest flag?”) Cheerleaders threw bundles of Confederate flags into the stands. We stood and swayed together singing Dixie, always ending in the stadium-shaking cry, “The South Shall Rise Again.”

It was at halftime in the 1962 Ole Miss-Kentucky game at Jackson’s Memorial Stadium-- walking distance from my home-- that Governor Ross Barnett gave his famous speech calling for states’ rights. We beat Kentucky that afternoon and the next day in Oxford there began the last pitched battle of the Civil War. It took 30,000 troops to force the University of Mississippi to accept a single black student.

Today you’re more likely to get a student riot if a top-ranked black athlete committed to Ole Miss and then switched at the last minute to Alabama.

...Mississippi has the highest percentage of African Americans of any state in the country. I ask myself now why did it take so long for me to realize what it might be like for nearly 40 percent of my state to go to school and work under a flag that represented a cause dedicated to the right to own their ancestors? Why is it that I had written books about traveling through China, Africa, and Europe, fascinated by every cultural quirk I came across, before I looked up at my own state flag and thought about the dehumanizing brutality it represented?

I don’t have any good answers, most likely because there are none. I was given every opportunity in this life, an open door to the world, a chance at the best education in the United States and England, a family that supported my odd passions that I was lucky enough to turn into professions. I had passport stamps from 61 countries with different flags before I began to think about my own state’s flag. It wasn’t that I was actively for the flag . . . but that indifference was just as toxic as active support.

Today many white Mississippians of my generation-- and even more of the younger generation-- are eager to change. Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We can’t undo what we didn’t do.

But my regret is mixed with a hope. Hope that perhaps we can take steps-- small and inadequate as they might be-- to face the truth of our Confederate past. And in doing so change the future.

It will never be enough. But I hope today we can take one more step out of the shadows of a bloody past into the brighter sun of a better day.

This morning, the NY Times released a poll by Siena that showed how out of touch Trump-- who reflexively and unceasingly stokes The Lost Cause and American divisiveness over race-- is on sentiments about race seem to be heading. 59% of voters, including 52% of white voters, believe the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis was "part of a broader pattern of excessive police violence toward African Americans. Black Lives Matter is seen as favorably as the police as an institution is (44% for BLM, 43% for the police). "The numbers add to the mounting evidence that recent protests have significantly shifted public opinion on race, creating potential political allies for a movement that was, within the past decade, dismissed as fringe and divisive. It also highlights how President Trump is increasingly out of touch with a country he is seeking to lead for a second term: While he has shown little sympathy for the protesters and their fight for racial justice, and has continued to use racist language that many have denounced, voters feel favorably toward the protests and their cause."

The Police Weren't Created to 'Protect and Serve.' They Were Created to 'Maintain Order.' A Brief Look at the History of Police in America

One version of the "thin blue line" flag, a symbol used in a variety of ways by American police departments, their most fervent supporters, and other right-wing fellow travelers. The thin blue line represents the wall of protection that separates the orderly "us" from the disorderly, uncivilized "them".

by Thomas Neuburger

"[In the 1800s] the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class."
—Sam Mitrani here

It's a commonplace to say the primary job of police is to "protect and serve," but that's not their goal in the way it's commonly understood — not in the deed, the practice of what they daily do, and not true in the original intention, in why police departments were created in the first place. "Protect and serve" as we understand it is just the cover story.

To understand the true purpose of police, we have to ask, "What's being protected?" and "Who's being served?" 

Urban police forces in America were created for one purpose — to "maintain order" after a waves of immigrants swept into northern U.S. cities, both from abroad and later from the South, immigrants who threatened to disturb that "order." The threat wasn't primarily from crime as we understand it, from violence inflicted by the working poor on the poor or middle class. The threat came from unions, from strikes, and from the suffering, the misery and the anger caused by the rise of rapacious capitalism.

What's being protected? The social order that feeds the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. Who's being served? Owners, their property, and the sources of their wealth, the orderly and uninterrupted running of their factories. The goal of police departments, as originally constituted, was to keep the workers in line, in their jobs, and off the streets.

Looking Behind Us

The following comes from an essay published at the blog of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, an academic group for teachers of labor studies, by Sam Mitrani, Associate Professor of History at the College of DuPage and author of The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894.

According to Mitrani, "The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class."

Keep in mind that there were no police departments anywhere in Europe or the U.S. prior to the 19th century — in fact, "anywhere in the world" according to Mitrani. In the U.S., the North had constables, many part-time, and elected sheriffs, while the South had slave patrols. But nascent capitalism soon created a large working class, and a mass of European immigrants, "yearning to be free," ended up working in capitalism's northern factories and living in its cities.

"[A]s Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods." [emphasis added]

America of the early and mid 1800s was still a world without organized police departments. What the Pinkertons were to strikes, these "thousands of armed men" were to the unruly working poor in those cities.

Imagine this situation from two angles. First, from the standpoint of the workers, picture the oppression these armed men must have represented, lawless themselves yet tasked with imposing "order" and violence on the poor and miserable, who were frequently and understandably both angry and drunk. (Pre-Depression drunkenness, under this interpretation, is not just a social phenomenon, but a political one as well.)

Second, consider this situation from the standpoint of the wealthy who hired these men. Given the rapid growth of capitalism during this period, "maintaining order" was a costly undertaking, and likely to become costlier. Pinkertons, for example, were hired at private expense, as were the "thousands of armed men" Mitrani mentions above.

The solution was to offload this burden onto municipal budgets. Thus, between 1840 and 1880, every major northern city in America had created a substantial police force, tasked with a single job, the one originally performed by the armed men paid by the business elites — to keep the workers in line, to "maintain order" as factory owners and the moneyed class understood it.

"Class conflict roiled late nineteenth century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late nineteenth century echoes down to today – except that today, poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers."

That "thin blue line protecting civilization" is the same blue line we're witnessing today. Yes, big-city police are culturally racist as a group; but they're not just racist. They dislike all the "unwashed." A recent study that reviewed "all the data available on police shootings for the year 2017, and analyze[d] it based on geography, income, and poverty levels, as well as race" revealed the following remarkable pattern:

"Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder: in rural areas outside the South, predominately white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities, disproportionately black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men are killed by police at nearly identical rates."

As they have always been, the police departments in the U.S. are a violent force for maintaining an order that separates and protects society's predator class from its victims — a racist order to be sure, but a class-based order as well.

Looking Ahead

We've seen the violence of the police as visited on society's urban poor (and anyone else, poor or not, who happens to be the same race and color as the poor too often are), and we've witnessed the violent reactions of police to mass protests challenging the racism of that violence.

But we've also seen the violence of police during the mainly white-led Occupy movement (one instance here; note that while the officer involved was fired, he was also compensated $38,000 for “suffering he experienced after the incident”).

So what could we expect from police if there were, say, a national, angry, multiracial rent strike with demonstrations? Or a student debt strike? None of these possibilities are off the table, given the economic damage — most of it still unrealized — caused by the current Covid crisis.

Will police "protect and serve" the protesters, victims of the latest massive transfer of wealth to the already massively wealthy? Or will they, with violence, "maintain order" by maintaining elite control of the current predatory system?

If Mitrani is right, the latter is almost certain. 
 

Anti-Semitism And The Far Right

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and education organization and on Friday Daniel Greenberg rote up one of their surveys about what single word people associate with Señor Trumpanzee. "More than six in ten (62%) responded with a negative term, while one in four (26%) provided a positive word and 12% were neutral. Looking among Americans who are negative to Trump, they can be categorized into four separate groups. One-third (33%) criticized Trump’s intellect, maturity, and preparedness for the office of the presidency. A similar amount (28%) were especially harsh toward Trump by describing him as bigoted, corrupt, criminal, and dictatorial. Nearly one in four (23%) spoke negatively about Trump’s personality and conduct with others), while less than one in five (15%) critiqued his ego.

Another PRRI survey showed that nearly half the country--48%-- believe the Republican Party "has been taken over by racists... Democrats overwhelmingly view the Republican Party as being controlled by racists (80%), a view shared by 48% of independents and only five percent of Republicans." Just sayin'. Now let's keep that in the backs of our minds and skill over to a report from last week by Joel Swanson for the Jewish Daily Forward-- The Right Owns Anti-Semitism in America. He wrote that "A survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee last October found that fully 84% of American Jews think anti-Semitism in the United States has increased in the past five years, while 42% believe that the status of Jews in the US is less secure than it was just a year ago. And now we have the concrete numbers to back up our fears: The Anti-Defamation League just released its annual audit of anti-Semitic incidents for the year 2019, and the numbers are as grim as you would imagine... In 2019, the ADL recorded 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, a 12% increase from just a year earlier in 2018, and the highest number on record since the ADL began collecting annual data on American anti-Semitism in 1979. Instances of harassment were up by six percent, vandalism was up by 19%, and anti-Semitic assaults rose by a terrifying 56% since 2018. There’s no denying it: The numbers are bad. But in addition to the horror at these numbers, there’s also a political lesson here for the American Jewish community, if we are open enough to learn it. The majority of anti-Semitic incidents in 2019 seem to have been random attacks motivated by personal hatred, not linked to any identifiable political ideology. But the ADL also recorded 270 anti-Semitic incidents inspired by extremist ideology. And out of these identified extremist incidents, one side of the political spectrum was a lot more culpable than the other."

[O]f the three deadliest anti-Semitic attacks committed in 2019, in Poway, Calif., Jersey City, N.J., and Monsey, N.Y., the ADL found that one attack, the Poway attack, was motivated by far-right white nationalism.

...Whatever our community leadership may say, American Jews simply do not hold both sides of the political spectrum equally to blame for rising anti-Semitism. Polling last year found that more than three-quarters of American Jews consider the extreme political right to pose a “very serious” or “moderately serious” threat to the safety of American Jews today, compared to only one-third who believe that about the extreme left.

And when we have a US president who says that neo-Nazis who chant “Jews will not replace us” include some “very fine people” among them, and who shares the very same conspiracy theories about George Soros funding migration to the US from Central America that are cited by synagogue shooters, it’s no wonder that more than half of American Jews place substantial responsibility on the Republican Party for rising anti-Semitism in the US today. (By comparison, fewer than one in five American Jews consider the Democratic Party to be equally culpable for anti-Semitism.)

Despite these findings, the ADL has gone to great lengths to conceal the political implications of its new anti-Semitism audit. In the past, the ADL has called on Congress to avoid the “politicization of anti-Semitism” and the ADL’s press release about its new audit seemed to deliberately avoid using the words “left” or “right,” instead referring only to “extremism.” You have to spend more time digging into the ADL’s findings to learn what the ideological source of most of this non-specified “extremism” actually was.

So, if the ADL’s findings about the main source of anti-Semitism in the US are as clear as they are, and if most American Jews ourselves know that at some level, then why are our community institutions so insistent that “American Jews affiliated with both parties view the far right, the hard left and extremism in the name of Islam as anti-Semitic threats,” in the words of Avi Mayer of the American Jewish Committee?

Why not call out the most significant ideological source of anti-Semitism in the United States for what it is? Why is the ADL’s messaging downplaying what its own findings uncovered?

Some of it no doubt has to do with the disproportionate influence of right-wing Jews in the Jewish institutional community in the US, who have enough power to delay the nomination of the former leader of immigrant aid-organization HIAS to chair the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, despite the fact that HIAS is much closer to the median American Jewish opinion on immigration than its critics are.

And some of it no doubt has to do with a desire to maintain good relations with the Netanyahu government, whose growing ties with the international far-right led Netanyahu to publicly contradict a report by his own government researchers finding that the far-right posed the greatest threat to Jews in Europe. (This finding was recently confirmed by a German anti-Semitism monitor.)

But I suspect the Jewish institutional community’s refusal to call out the ideological source of most American anti-Semitism is not entirely about the influence of right-wing Jews, or about Israel. I suspect some of it has to do with a deeper sense that the work of the American Jewish establishment ought to be above the fray of politics, to operate in the sphere of what historian of American Judaism Lila Corwin Berman terms “depoliticized politics.” In Berman’s words, instead of identifying themselves as partisan, American Jewish organizations “characterized their work as reflecting consensus and nonpartisan communal interests.”

And now this studied insistence on remaining above partisan politics has left us in the odd position where the ADL is refusing to be forthright about its own findings in its public messaging about the 2019 anti-Semitism audit, for fear of being accused of partisanship. The ADL is burying the lede on its own story.

So yes, we should continue to call out anti-Semitism wherever we see it, right and left. But these are scary times to be an American Jew, and refusing to be honest about the biggest source of the threats we face will not make us safer.

Anti-Semitism is not somehow above partisan politics. It is political, and it’s long past time for us to say so.

Who Gets The Shitty End Of The Stick? Always?

On Friday morning, Karine Jean-Pierre, author and chief public affairs office for MoveOn, tweeted the meme above about the Ahmaud Aubrey scandal. Rev. Jacqui Lewis, one of my colleagues from Vote Common Good wrote she's "sick of writing emails about dead Black people. This week, video footage surfaced of the February 23rd murder of Ahmaud Arbery. The video is horrific, but I put it here because SOMEONE who gets this letter needs to be stunned with the truth of the permanence of White supremacy in this nation. This heinous crime can only be described as a lynching-- two men (and maybe a third?) hunted Ahmaud as he was jogging, and killed him in cold blood."


 

What's even more sickening is that the police simply ignored this horrifying attack until the video was made public. I'm glad to see two men were charged last night, but it should not take more than two months to prosecute grotesque White supremacist violence. I am so tired and heartbroken living in a country where-- again and again-- Black lives are disregarded as if we do not matter. Why does a lynching need to be captured on film to be treated as a crime?

We need a revolution of values in this country, and we need it badly. And I am convinced that there is something happening at the heart of our incredible church that can teach this nation what it means to live as a beloved community. You all give me hope that, someday, Black lives will indeed be treated as if we matter. But until that moment comes, we must continue to cry out for justice until our voices grow hoarse.

Today is Ahmaud's 26th birthday; let's honor his life!!

Those who are more concerned... what do they call it?... Southern Heritage? would rather honor the murderers, Gregory and Travis McMichael. This is real-- from a Facebook group with 37,000 members.

Writing for the Black Agenda Report earlier in the week, Shaun Ossei-Owusu got into the idea of the politics of disposability in the midst of the pandemic. Remember, the African-American infection rate, death rate and unemployment rate are all higher.

When the dust settles, as in all U.S. disasters, there will be a tale to tell of who mattered and who was sacrificed.

“The people whose disposability is on widest display are those who work in immediate-risk industries: the financially precarious service workers, the health care workers tasked with ‘equity work.’”

In the final chapter, “The Space Traders,” of his 1992 book Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Persistence of Racism, Derrick Bell, Harvard Law School’s first tenured black professor, described a fictive world eerily similar to the one we know today. Local and federal governments ostensibly had no money. “Decades of conservative, laissez-faire capitalism had emptied the coffers of all but a few of the very rich,” the narrator says. Because of a host of poor choices, the country “was struggling to survive like any third-world nation,” and financial exigencies “curtailed all but the most necessary services.” The parallels are acute: “the environment was in shambles, as reflected by the fact that the sick and elderly had to wear special masks whenever they ventured out-of-doors.”





In the story, English-speaking extraterrestrial beings land on the shores of New Jersey and offer to solve everything: gold to bail out companies, chemicals to unpollute the environment. The country could have this deal for one sweet price: “all the African Americans who lived in the United States.” This was the central, controversial claim in Bell’s science fiction: that white people would sell black people to aliens for the right price. The story concludes with a successful trade. Twenty million black men, women, and children are stripped to just one undergarment, lined up, chained, and whisked away, like many of their ancestors’ centuries before.

In Bells book, ‘Decades of conservative, laissez-faire capitalism had emptied the coffers of all but a few of the very rich.’”

Bell’s story lays bare the politics of disposability. But unlike the cosmos of the Space Traders, the world of coronavirus is not simply black/white. It is white and non-white; poor and not poor; essential and non-essential; white collar and blue collar; Asian and not Asian; undocumented and citizen; able-bodied and sick; young and elderly; first-generation higher ed students and  their wealthier counterparts; the free and imprisoned; celebrities with access to instant testing and plebeians; red states and blue states; and countless other binaries. From these overlapping inequities we get a glimpse of who is disposable: the people who occupy the wrong category. The scholar and cultural critic Henry Giroux analyzes this politics in his book Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (2008). “It is a politics in which the unproductive (the poor, weak and racially marginalized) are considered useless and therefore expendable,” he writes-- and “in which entire populations are considered disposable, unnecessary burdens on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves.”

Tragically, demographic data about COVID-19 deaths are beginning to bear this vision out. On Monday Kaisher Health News reported  that “A Disproportionate Number Of African-Americans Are Dying, But The U.S. Has Been Silent On Race Data.” Seventy percent of those who have died from coronavirus in Chicago are black. Last week saw calls from a range of politicians, journalists, and scholars for more fine-grained data than has been made available thus far. But for many observers, who was being impacted was the first question on their mind. Beyond the latest numbers, we have other data points: history, what is visible from news and experience, and media accounts. These are imperfect, but they supply some information, and the implications are grim.

“A Disproportionate Number Of African-Americans Are Dying, But The U.S. Has Been Silent On Race Data.”

This is certainly not to say-- as some multiracial groups of conspiracy theorists allege-- that there is some sinister grandmaster plot afoot to harm vulnerable populations. In Bell’s allegory intent can often be a sideshow, if not an outright distraction. The truth is more banal: systemic social inequalities have made some groups more vulnerable than others, and the question of intent is irrelevant. As a criminal law professor, I teach my students that intent matters, but in some instances it does not. In this context, malfeasance, misguided policies, and indifference suffice. Moreover, while government is the easy and most identifiable culprit, popular complicity is at play here too, which makes this version of disposability different from Bell’s telling.

The people whose disposability is on widest display are those who work in immediate-risk industries. The financially precarious service workers out with the epidemiological wolves so the rest of society can buy groceries. The health care workers plastered on the news, who labor in a profession that tasks minority and women nurses, physician assistants, and technicians with what sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield calls “equity work” labor that makes health institutions more available to marginalized groups. The homeless population, which was already noticeable in U.S. cities, but is now more conspicuous because of their inability to shelter in place.

Then there are the undocumented agricultural workers in the west and southwest who can’t work on Zoom like their white-collar counterparts and have now become more precious in a country that has insisted on calling them illegal. There are Native Americans-- some of whom have been facing a long-standing water crisis-- who have uniquely high rates of diseases that make COVID-19 more lethal. There the Asian Americans who have been subject to hate crimes since this virus surfaced in the U.S. And there are the residents in poorly serviced public housing projects in places like Chicago, Baltimore, and my native South Bronx, where 2,000 public housing residents woke up to no water during an epidemic that requires vigilant hand washing.

“Systemic social inequalities have made some groups more vulnerable than others, and the question of intent is irrelevant.”

The recent history of other U.S. disasters is also telling. The Chicago  Heatwave of 1995 killed more than 700 people, mostly poor and elderly, and necessitated refrigerated trucks for dead corpses in ways that are similar to New York now. A decade later, Hurricane Katrina took the lives of more than 1,800 people in Louisiana, many of whom were poor and could not leave their homes as advised. Poor people in New York City face the same today: they do not have the benefit of escaping to second homes in Long Island and New England. And then there was Hurricane Maria, which was a little more than eighteen months ago. That disaster, which killed approximately 3,000 people in Puerto Rico, elicited similar criticisms of the federal government’s slow response and accusations that the death count was severely understated. Jason Cortés has described President Trump’s paper-towel-throwing spectacle during his visit to Puerto Rico as “the American commander-in-chief [choosing] to toss disposable paper to disposable people.”




On Palm Sunday, Surgeon General Jerome Adams gave an ominous warning. “This is going to be the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly,” he cautioned. “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment. Only, it’s not going to be localized, it’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.” But who exactly will be dispensed with? It certainly won’t be all of us. Collective pronouns-- the “we” and “our” and “us” of public discourse-- are dangerously comforting. They give the impression of equal susceptibility, while celebrities and other prominent figures gain access to testing and top-flight health care. COVID-19 is not discriminatory as a biological matter, but history and available accounts indicate that the epidemiological fallout will be weighty and uneven.

“Collective pronouns-- the ‘we’ and ‘our’ and ‘us’ of public discourse-- are dangerously comforting.”

During the debates about the Affordable Care Act, hysteria emerged around government-run “death panels”: committees of doctors who would ration care and decide who would receive treatment. This alarm ignored the long history of rationing and unequal access to health care-- the subject of Beatrix Hoffman’s book Rights and Rationing in the United States Since 1930 (2012)-- but it echoes legitimate dismay about bureaucrats making decisions about who lives and who dies. People with disabilities, racial minorities, undocumented immigrants, prisoners, and the poor did not figure prominently into the frenzy around death panels, but they have reason to be worried now. The uninsured, elderly, and an ever-growing portion of the middle class should be added to that list.

Social science data has already shown that African Americans are often denigrated, disregarded, and disbelieved by medical professionals when they claim they are in pain. Where will they fit in the treatment queues? Can we rest assured that American doctors will not take a cue from those in Italy, who deprioritized the lives of coronavirus patients who are chronically ill, disabled, or elderly? What about the Latinx folk who constitute a third of uninsured people in the country? Bioethical scenarios usually reserved for grad school seminars are likely to be actualized.

“Doctors in Italy deprioritized the lives of coronavirus patients who are chronically ill, disabled, or elderly.”

Rural whites have been relatively safe from the virus for now (but not its economic impact). Most live in the approximately 1,300 counties that have no confirmed cases and where social distancing is ordinary. But many of these counties are also medical deserts unequipped to handle this virus. If COVID-19 creeps into these locales, as it has in Albany, Georgia, will this group of people-- many of whom perceive themselves to be “strangers in their own land,” as the title of the sociologist Arlie Hochshild’s 2018 book put it-- be disregarded, too? And if the virus does not make its way to rural America, what does that say about the disposability of everyone else?

Bell’s “Space Traders” struck a nerve because it highlighted the vulnerability of an entire class of people. The difference now is that the people being sacrificed extends beyond African Americans, and responsibility can be tethered not only to government but to the private sector, the media, and the parts of the general public. The outcome of this story is uncertain. But when the dust settles, as in all U.S. disasters, there will be a tale to tell of who mattered and who was sacrificed.

South Carolina Voters Need To Ask Themselves If Mayo Pete Respects African Americans?

I had dinner with civil rights icon Fergie Reid last night and we were discussing how both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders had backed the 90for90 voter registration initiative but how Mayo Pete's team had refused. I noted that Mayo's racism was hardly something new or unknown. Oddly, after having tried to get him to embrace the initiative, he finally did-- just hours after our dinner and hours before South Carolina primary day! A creation of intelligence agency spooks, did the Mayo campaign have our table bugged? I doubt it but it does seem like an act of desperation or, at least, one that lacks a certain comprehension. His outsider imagine has been carefully constructed by spin-masters to obscure his deep establishment roots, such as the fact that his foreign policy adviser is a powerful Pentagon insider , Doug Wilson, who started mentoring him right out of college, the same man who encouraged once-peacenik Buttigieg to join the military, an important factor in his political climb. Russ Baker:

In a February 25 pre–South Carolina primary debate during which Sanders took fire from all five candidates, Buttigieg called attention to himself by the intensity of his attacks on the frontrunner.

At one point, an argument broke out between the two after Sanders took aim at US foreign policy for being responsible for overthrowing “governments all over the world in Chile, in Guatemala, in Iran,” and supporting pro-business dictatorships. Buttigieg responded that Sanders represents the “revolutionary politics of the 1960s”-- and hammers a recurring theme, that the Vermont senator is as divisive and dangerous as Trump.

Buttigieg was able to put his military service front and center at the debate. Responding to a question framing him as the only veteran on the stage, he brought up his first trip to the state, when he attended Fort Jackson for three weeks of special training before being deployed to Afghanistan in 2015. He recalled looking down at his uniform sleeve and feeling pride that “the flag on [his] shoulder represented a country known to keep its word.”

Since 400,000 vets live in South Carolina, and it has eight bases, representing Army, Navy, the Marines, and Airforce, military service carries special weight there.

How was the little-known mayor of a small American city (ranked 308th largest) transformed into a candidate deemed most qualified to handle some of the most complex decisions facing this country and the world, at a time perhaps more challenging than any in history?

The answer, research suggests, is that Buttigieg has benefited — like many politicians — from a career-long shaping, punctuated by repositionings and makeovers, until he had the right set of credentials and backers to make it to the top. But the particulars of the makeover are like no other.

The Buttigieg we think we know today came into focus over the course of about 16 years, as he was bundled into a package of appealing but vague impressions-- energetic, reformer, articulate, thoughtful, youthful, reasonable.

During his presidential campaign, his handlers have pivoted from difficult-to-prove and politically profitless assertions about his tenure in South Bend, IN, to equally vague but far more savvy branding as a healing national figure, a hardheaded realist, and seasoned man of the world: global businessman and traveler, and, not least, military veteran.

Perhaps paradoxically, he turns out to be backed by a mighty retinue from the very national security elite he says he hopes to “upend.”

Henry Davis, Jr., currently serving his third term on the South Bend City Council, and Jordan Giger, a school teacher and leader of the South Bend chapter of Black Lives Matter, are clearly not on Team Buttigieg. Yesterday the two had an OpEd published by one of South Carolina's biggest newspapers, The State: If black voters in SC support Pete Buttigieg, they will only re-elect President Trump. "Before South Carolina votes in Saturday’s Democratic Party primary," they wrote, "we feel a duty-- as black leaders who know former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg very well-- to issue a political warning to anyone who cares about defeating President Donald Trump in 2020." And did they ever!

Simply put, if Buttigieg becomes the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, his candidacy will be damaged by at least three ticking legal time bombs that are set to go off during the 2020 election-- all of which will serve to help Trump depress black voter turnout and win re-election.

Voters deserve to know that there is a pending special prosecutor investigation into the June 2019 death of Eric Logan, an unarmed black man shot by a white South Bend police officer while walking to his mother’s home from a family event. Buttigieg was still mayor when the shooting occurred, and he was forced to leave the presidential campaign trail to face the anger and anguish of our community. The Indiana attorney general’s office says that the special prosecutor’s report on Logan’s death will likely be released soon.

There is also a wide-ranging federal civil rights lawsuit into systematic racism in the South Bend Police Department while Buttigieg was the city’s mayor. Civil rights law gives plaintiffs broad discovery power to unearth the racist behavior that plagued our community during Buttigieg’s two terms leading South Bend-- and our former mayor may be among those subpoenaed to give a deposition.

That represents the second ticking legal time bomb hovering over Buttigieg’s campaign.

And here is the third one that voters deserve to know about: the South Bend City Council brought a pending lawsuit against Buttigieg to demand the release of secret tapes revealing racist and criminal acts, including white police officers plotting against the city’s first black police chief in an attempt to get him fired.

This controversy has drawn national coverage: the New York Times, for example, published an April 2019 bearing the headline “Pete Buttigieg Fired South Bend’s Black Police Chief. It Still Stings.”

During the 2020 election President Trump will try to suppress the black vote, possibly with help from the Russians. Now just imagine the field day they will have as these Buttigieg-related lawsuits, depositions, subpoenas, reports and other revelations become public throughout the 2020 campaign.

It could resemble the 2016 election furor over Hillary Clinton’s emails, only on steroids. And the furor over the Buttigieg material will be far more warranted, because the systemic racism Buttigieg appeared to tolerate is real.

Before they vote, South Carolinians deserve to know that Buttigieg’s problems with black voters will not go away anytime soon, and that these problems exist for good reason.

Thanks for listening to our voices.

Hard to understand how a completely fabricated empty suit like Mayo could be polling even 4th-- and at almost double what Elizabeth Warren is polling-- in South Carolina. The Real Clear Politics average for the state looks like this going into primary day today:

• Status Quo Joe- 39.7%
• Bernie- 24.3%
• Steyer- 11.7%
• Mayo Pete- 11.3%
• Elizabeth- 6.0%
• Klobuchar- 5.7%
• Tulsi- 2.3%

We'll see how accurate that turns out to be in a few hours but now consider this. Did Mayo Pete just expose South Carolina Blacks to whatever contagion prevented him from meeting Florida Whites? In South Carolina on Thursday afternoon, Buttigieg shook hands and greeted each of nine African American health care leaders. But in Florida Mayo canceled plans for two rich people-only fundraisers scheduled for Wednesday evening at private residences in Palm Beach and Wellington as well as two appearances scheduled for earlier Wednesday in Miami, citing an unspecified illness.

Of The 4 Conservative, Status Quo Democrats Who Want To Ride The Wave Of Trump Hatred Into The White House, Bloomberg Is The Worst By Far

Michael Bloomberg: American Oligarch by Nancy Ohanian

Before we begin today, just let me just say that Republican oligarch Michael Bloomberg is refusing to affirm reports that he plans to make Hillary his running mate. OK, so that's out of the way-- at least for a few days or  hours. This chart shows what each presidential candidate had spent on TV ads alone (through January 29) in the four early states and in the Super Tuesday states. Needless to say, Bloomberg spent far more-- obscenely more-- than all of them combined. Here's the breakout for Bloomberg only. Those are eye-popping numbers. He's also spending millions of dollars nationally and millions of dollars-- daily-- on social media, not reflected by these numbers.

So... I think by now just about everyone has probably seen the fake Obama endorsement ad, which Bloomberg hopes will persuade African-American voters that Obama has endorsed him. Obama, of course, has done no such thing. But Bloomberg, who has never respected African-Americans and has never seen them as anything but a punching bag and a manipulatable credulous cohort of voters he can buy with bribes and ads, is counting on making a splash in both Carolinas and among targeted black voters in Super Tuesday states where no one else is on the air, like Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma.

I hope African-Americas go back and read the OpEd Bloomberg wrote when he endorsed Obama's reelection bid in 2012, 5 days before the election. (Bloomberg refused to endorse Obama in 2008.) The OpEd makes it clear that Bloomberg doesn't especially like Obama but thinks he's better than Romney on the Climate Crisis. Here's a snippet, showing his clear disdain for the president, the one he's spending millions of dollars on ads with attempting to manipulate Obama admirers.

Bloomberg, a Republican oligarch who was violently opposed to Obamacare but is pretending to be an Obama-Democrat this year so he can run against Trump, is a scumbag unworthy of support from any Democrats for any number of reasons:

• He's a financial royalist and is as bad as Trump issues impacting the lives of the working class. Like Trump's tax plans, his own are relatively beneficial to-- himself and other billionaires, resisting paying their fair share of the tax burden.

• We may not like Biden's record of support for the Iraq War and for the military industrial complex but on that count Bloomberg is even worse, as he is on domestic spying, which he seems to revel in.

• And, also like Trump, Bloomberg is a sexist pig who sees women as playthings to be bought and sold. "Bloomberg’s sexism," wrote Laura Basett for GQ late last week, "like that of fellow New York City billionaire Donald Trump, has been prolific and well-documented, but for some reason, the stories about him don’t seem to have taken hold. He is still being embraced by the Democratic establishment as a viable option for its presidential nominee."

Bassett included some Trump-like examples of some of Bloomberg's publicly-known exploits. "Sekiko Sakai Garrison, a former sales representative at Bloomberg LP, alleged in a 1997 lawsuit (one of four separate lawsuits in a two-year period) that when then-CEO Mike Bloomberg found out she was pregnant, he told her, 'Kill it!' and 'Great! Number 16!'-- an apparent reference to the number of pregnant women or women on maternity leave at his company. She also alleged that when Bloomberg saw her engagement ring, he commented, 'What is the guy dumb and blind? What the hell is he marrying you for?' and that he once pointed to another female employee and told Garrison, 'If you looked like that, I’d do you in a second.' Bloomberg denied having said most of those things, but reportedly left Garrison a voicemail saying that if he did say them, he 'didn’t mean it.' Bloomberg once described his life as a single billionaire bachelor in New York City to a reporter as being a 'wet dream'. 'I like theater, dining and chasing women,' he said. On a radio show in 2003, he said that he would 'really want to have' Jennifer Lopez, which he later explained away as wanting to 'have dinner' with her. A top aide said Bloomberg frequently remarked 'nice tits' upon seeing attractive women. Employees of his in 1990 put together an entire booklet of his some of his more egregious comments, including, 'If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they'd go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale's,' and, of the computer terminal that made him a billionaire, 'It will do everything, including give you [oral sex]. I guess that puts a lot of you girls out of business.'" Not to mention the young men Bloomberg has hired for sex, something the mass media is reluctance to talk about despite how well-known his life in the closet is among New York-based media.

Writing for The Guardian on Wednesday, Benjamin Dixon decided take on how Bloomberg has avoided any meaningful scrutiny in the campaign. He wrote that "Other candidates appear on debate stages to be questioned by the American people. Not Bloomberg. Thanks to his wealth, he can afford to sidestep this process entirely by spending millions on TV ads. Is that fair? Surely anyone who wants to be president of United States needs to be vetted. That’s why I decided to dig through reams of video and audio footage of the former mayor. What I discovered was deeply troubling." Dixon exposed the racist and now-notorious Aspen Institute tape. On it, Bloomberg says "Put those cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods … [the] unintended consequences is people say, 'Oh, my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.' Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is... Ninety-five per cent of your murders-- murderers and murder victims-- fit one MO. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops."

Not only is this data point inaccurate, but it also reflects a deeply disturbing, racist worldview that harms minority men and is based on fallacious logic and inaccurate data.

The unearthed clip provides a glimpse into his deeply held philosophies regarding young minority men as well as his governing principles. The clip demands that the mayor come forward and answer to the people he ostensibly wants to lead.

Unfortunately, far from using the footage to help hold Bloomberg to account, many in the media want to divert attention away from his wrongdoings. One CNN anchor, for example, tried to malign me and question my motives for disseminating the tapes. She wondered how I got the audio and why I was distributing it now. Let me answer her: I got the audio by doing the most basic research that should be expected of any journalist. As to why I released it now, because if not now, when?

I make no apologies for my vehement opposition to billionaire Michael Bloomberg purchasing his way into the 2020 election. In fact, I believe that every American citizen should be terrified by the idea that, in the midst of a Democratic primary where big ideas are being debated and ideologies are being scrutinized, one man can advance not by merit but by the millions of his own money spent on ads. The gall of it is unacceptable.

The Aspen audio clip reveals Bloomberg’s governing philosophy: use the force of the government not to correct the underlying causes of a problem such as violence but to persecute the people who are the victims of the violence:

“And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them. [Inaudible] and then they start, they say, [inaudible] ‘Oh, I don’t want to get caught.’ So they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.”

He believes that the power of the government should be wielded to control the masses instead of to promote general welfare. This is evident in other statements he has made in the past. Consider the video of Bloomberg as he explains the rationale behind the infamous soda tax:

“Some people say, well, taxes are regressive. But in this case, yes they are. That’s the good thing about them, because the problem is in people that don’t have a lot of money. And so higher taxes should have a bigger impact on their behavior and how they deal with themselves.

“So I listen to people saying, ‘Oh, we don’t want to tax the poor,’ Well, we want the poor to live longer so that they can get an education and enjoy life.”

This belief that the government should use punitive force to “correct” the ills of marginalized communities is deeply disturbing. Is this what we want in the White House? How can Americans know without the opportunity to ask?

These are precisely the types of worldviews and philosophies that must be interrogated by the American people. Instead, the mayor is circumventing our democratic process by leveraging his tremendous wealth.

Which is why, until Michael Bloomberg addresses his critics in a meaningful way, we are calling on all of those politicians and leaders who have endorsed him to rescind their endorsements. How can they endorse someone who has yet to answer for worldviews that, if he still holds them, would certainly disqualify him from being president?

Democracy is too fragile to endure the complete circumvention of our electoral process by a billionaire with enough wealth to take the easy route while other candidates do the actual work of convincing America they are the right choice.

On Friday, NYC Mayor, Bill de Blasio endorsed Bernie Sanders. De Blasio, who endorsed Hillary in 2016, had run for mayor as the not-Bloomberg candidate. Although the endorsement was all about Bernie as the candidate who can benefit the working class and take on Trump, the subtext was about the primary and Bloomberg, who de Blasio detests. "De Blasio is not mistaken to think that he is well situated to serve as a voice of reason amid Bloomberg’s excessively rosy presentation of his own tenure as mayor. Like a Cassandra from City Hall, de Blasio is warning Democrats to resist Bloomberg’s enticements... De Blasio’s open scorn for Bloomberg-- and his desire to scratch that itch, even six years into his mayoralty-- has proven a constant in his City Hall. During de Blasio’s frigid 2014 inauguration ceremony, Bloomberg sat in the audience grimacing as de Blasio and his hand-picked participants laced into the former mayor’s record, his 'plantation called New York,' and the 'Dickensian' justice system wrought by Bloomberg’s use of stop-and-frisk policing."

Jon Paul Lupo, who worked on de Blasio's presidential bid and now consults for his political action committee: "As his successor, Mayor de Blasio has a unique perspective on Mayor Bloomberg's legacy and you and many of your colleagues have asked his opinion, which he is happy to share. This is a fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party and he believes a true progressive Democrat is best positioned to win."





And, as David Graham noted yesterday for The Atlantic the primary really has boiled down to a race pitting the working class champion against the Republican oligarch for who will take on Trump, another Republican oligarch. "In dueling rallies in North Carolina’s Research Triangle late this week," wrote Graham, "the emerging front-runner Bernie Sanders and the emerging non-Sanders alternative Mike Bloomberg each made the case that they should be the nominee-- and that the other man should not. Neither named the other as the two candidates kicked off early voting in North Carolina, which is both a crucial Super Tuesday state and a likely swing state in November, but they left no doubt whom they were talking about.

In focusing their rhetoric on each other, Sanders and Bloomberg are both making a pragmatic calculation. Based on recent polling, many analysts see the race headed for collision between the socialist senator and the centrist ex-mayor. But the strategy of treating the race as already narrowed to two entails risks. As measured by delegates, Buttigieg still has a lead over Sanders. Even with lower poll numbers in some upcoming states, Buttigieg remains a threat. Sanders also still has to contend with Elizabeth Warren, who has reported $6 million in new fundraising since Iowa. Bloomberg has even more work to do consolidating his support. He still splits the non-Sanders moderate vote with Biden, who is down but not out; Buttigieg; and a surging Klobuchar. Bloomberg hasn’t yet proved that he can clear the lane.

The contrast between Bloomberg and Sanders was clear long before either candidate stepped onstage. Bloomberg spoke before a graying crowd that listened to piped-in U2 and Fatboy Slim. In Durham, Bowerbirds, a beloved local indie band, opened for a younger, more casual crowd. If blue hair abounded in Raleigh, the coifs in Durham were more likely to be pink, green, or purple. Bloomberg’s crowd was overwhelmingly white. The supporters who flocked to hear Sanders were more diverse, although the crowd still didn’t reflect the demographics of Democratic-primary voters in the state, a third of whom were black in 2016.

...After taking criticism in 2016 for failing to effectively reach minority voters, Sanders has adopted a new approach. In Durham, he was introduced by five women of color and one black man, all local activists, candidates, or elected officials, as well as Susan Sarandon. Sanders left it to one of them, his steadfast ally Nina Turner, to hit Bloomberg directly-- though again not by name-- over recent leaked recordings in which he defended New York City’s stop-and-frisk program and said that the end of redlining had caused the 2008 financial crash.

“He is a billionaire and he don’t give a fill-in-the-blank about working-class people,” Turner said.