Politics

To friends of democracy around the world: we need your help.

This was always the endgame, I just didn't expect to be around for it.

Hmm ... majority of Americans worried about higher prices and looming recession. I guess that's at least something that unifies the country.

Preemption measures against municipal governments have also targeted movements to raise the minimum wage, improve public health, and enact sanctuary policies to protect immigrants. Indeed, state preemption efforts have become so numerous and expansive that movement organizers and others have described the tactic of state governments preempting in response to local government action as “abusive state preemption,” or “aggressive preemption/post-emption.” Such descriptions, while not inaccurate, risk obscuring the fact that state preemption of local municipalities has long been utilized by right-wing and neoliberal legislators to control, oppress, and subjugate local communities fighting to enact racial and economic justice policies. Put simply, the rampant wielding of state preemption power during times of political radicalization is a feature, not a bug, of the American system, and one with which local officials must learn to contend.

The Missouri House passed legislation Thursday to repeal the paid sick leave that voters approved in November.

One concrete step being advocated by many mainline Black denominations is the boycott of Target during Lent, from March 5 through April 17. “We’re asking people to divest from Target because they have turned their back on our community,” the Rev. Jamal Bryant said in an interview with CNN. Bryant, who is leading the boycott, is the pastor at an Atlanta-area megachurch.

Tiffany Lee, the county clerk and top elections official in southwestern Colorado’s La Plata County, wasn’t sold at first on the state’s new law requiring every jail to create an in-person polling place for incarcerated voters. Lee, who was elected as a Republican but is now unaffiliated, said she and the local sheriff didn’t appreciate a new mandate and felt it was too one-size-fits-all to work for a diverse state.

This week, voters in Greenland go to the polls for elections to their regional parliament. The autonomous territory, still formally part of Denmark, has been increasingly in the news in recent months thanks to Donald Trump.

By terminating State Department Inspector General Cardell Richardson and DOD Inspector General Robert Storch, followed weeks later by Paul Martin after he released a report showing the impact of cuts on USAID, Trump has fired the main people responsible for oversight of aid to Ukraine.

When state and local governments act as “market participants,” paying for a particular project or service (instead of acting as a “regulator” setting the rules for everyone), they can require higher labor standards from the recipients of that public funding. In other words, the government has a greater say over working conditions on a project when the government is paying for that project – and employers are more likely to play by the rules if they know their public funding depends on how they treat their workers.

We are rapidly approaching what might be called a democratic point of no return. If anti-democratic forces succeed in dismantling constitutional safeguards now, if they gain the power to deploy AI systems without meaningful oversight, they won't need to maintain power through traditional repression. The systems they're building could make effective opposition technically impossible, not through violence but through precise behavioral and social control that eliminates the possibility of organized resistance before it can form.

The late monarch suspected her art curator Anthony Blunt of treachery a decade before he confessed to MI5, but did not sack him.

Long read: British rule in Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s enabled Zionist colonisation at the expense of Palestinians.

https://archive.ph/Yo32G

There has been a constant onslaught of terror from our new autocratic administration, which can make us feel powerless. But there is nothing futile about resistance. Here’s why.

Courtesy of electionlawblog

Good man.

Not to be confused with a “perfect storm” or the perhaps less scientific “clusterfuck”, “polycrisis” – a term coined by the authors Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern – refers to the idea that not only are we facing one disaster after another, but those messes are all linked, making things even worse. Or, as Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor and public intellectual who has championed the term, put it: “In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”

archive link

Typically, I don't post more than once in one community per day. However, this is important and ties into my previous post.

He told us, but 77 million didn't listen.

The resistance is growing. We’ve seen it in the last several weeks in the anger aimed at members of Congress during their recess, in the ongoing Tesla protests, and in a membership surge at resistance organizations.

The first 53 days proceed apace.

I remember a time when Presidents were impeached for withholding congressionally approved funds...

The winter of 2016-17 was a mean one. North Dakota state legislators proposed laws making it illegal to wear a face mask; another law was proposed that gave drivers a pass if they hit or even killed someone who was blocking traffic on a public road. They didn’t want us to use the phrase “water protector,” instead the intention is to use the term “protestor,” which has a very different meaning.

Last weekend, a swarm of pickets converged on Tesla showrooms in dozens of cities across the U.S. I joined one on Saturday in San Francisco, and then a larger one on Monday. Since then, many more pickets have sprung up, with more being planned. It’s all under the loosely organized banner of “#TeslaTakedown.” And since there are no leaders or spokespeople, I can only say what drew me to join: the desire to declare, as my protest sign read, that “Musk is a Nazi.”

If you do not want to be completely disgusted, embarrassed and angry then don't watch the video of the Oval Office discussion.

There's not a whole hell of a lot that's new here, but it's important to remember that if you're not recognizing the country we've known, colonialist and imperialist as it's been over the years, you're not alone.

This has horrific implications for the continuance of a tolerant, multireligious society. It would be one thing if the push toward christofacsism actually *followed* Jesus' teachings, but that's not the kind of Christianity these people wish to espouse.

The resistance is growing.

I would say "waffles," instead of "shifts." They said "Gulf of America" and people made fun of them for it, so now they're refusing to take a stand either way. Which is only going to annoy both sides instead of one.

Leopards, faces and all that.

The Forest Service firings — on the heels of deadly blazes that ripped through Los Angeles last month — are part of a wave of federal worker layoffs, as President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting measures reverberate nationwide.

For those who came in late, this is not perhaps the killing blow ... I don't think they have another quarter-million news aficionados still subscribed after the endorsement fiasco, but this is idiotic for the brand.