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I Helped Coin the Term 'Identity Politics.' I'm Endorsing Bernie Sanders |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53275"><span class="small">Barbara Smith, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 10 February 2020 15:00 |
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Smith writes: "As a black lesbian feminist who has been out since the mid-1970s, I believe that, among all the candidates, Sanders' leadership offers us the best chance to eradicate the unique injustices that marginalized groups in America endure."
Sanders has devoted his life to social movements. He has shaped them and been shaped by them. He understands that change comes from the bottom, not the top. (photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)
I Helped Coin the Term 'Identity Politics.' I'm Endorsing Bernie Sanders
By Barbara Smith, Guardian UK
10 February 20
I support Sanders because I believe his campaign is currently the best hope for helping marginalized Americans
 n 1977 I co-authored the Combahee River Collective Statement – a document that emphasized the overlapping forms of economic and social oppression faced by black women. The Combahee Statement coined the term “identity politics”, and it was instrumental in pushing the international left and other political movements to understand inequality as a structural and intersectional phenomenon which affects oppressed groups differently.
Those ideas continue to reverberate today. I am often disheartened, however, to see support for identity politics and intersectionality reduced to buzzwords. I am supporting Bernie Sanders for president because I believe that his campaign and his understanding of politics complements the priorities that women of color defined decades ago.
I was born into Jim Crow in 1946. The country I grew up in, with few exceptions, was brutally committed to keeping people like me in their place. My family were among the courageous African Americans who participated in the first wave of the Great Migration after the first world war, which occurred during an even more perilous era than the later wave following the second world war. They ended up in Cleveland, Ohio; although we lived in a northern state, racism and segregation shaped every aspect of our daily lives. I became active in the civil rights movement as a teenager.
At the same time that I was growing up in Cleveland, Bernie Sanders, who was a few years older, was growing up in Brooklyn. He noticed some of the same paradoxes and injustices that I did and came to a similar conclusion: that he needed to get involved.
Long before he thought about running for any office, let alone for president, Sanders fought for racial justice. He and I worked in different local branches of the same organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (Core), which focused on de facto segregation in the north.
Because there is little understanding of the terrifying conditions of mid-20th century US apartheid, some people dismiss Sanders’ involvement in the civil rights struggle as insignificant or think that many white people at the time supported black liberation and human rights. Far from it. I support Sanders because unlike most people of his generation he decided as a young person to challenge Jim Crow. I wonder if other candidates can say the same.
Sanders has devoted most of his life to social movements. He has shaped them and been shaped by them. He understands that the most substantial and meaningful change comes from the bottom up, not the top down. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to name two examples, would not have happened without movement organizing. The Vietnam war ended because a mass movement finally forced the political establishment to end the carnage. Sanders and I were in that movement too.
Sanders has said that as president he will be “organizer-in-chief”. He is committed to fighting for regular working people, which is most of us, and he has the advantage of connection with an existing broad-based social movement. As president he can implement policies that give those who are most harmed by the current system full access to opportunity and a decent human life.
At least 140 million people in the United States live in poverty or do not have enough income to cover their family’s basic needs of food, housing and healthcare. Women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, children and elders are disproportionately part of this 140 million.
Some critics have questioned whether Sanders is concerned about the specific ways that people with varying intersecting identities experience oppression. As a black lesbian feminist who has been out since the mid-1970s, I believe that, among all the candidates, his leadership offers us the best chance to eradicate the unique injustices that marginalized groups in America endure.
In 2016 I served on the LGBTQ steering committee for the Sanders campaign. I am even more excited to support him now.
Look at the diversity and vitality of Sanders’ own supporters. His campaign is powered by a grassroots movement including thousands of women and people of color. His current surge in the polls is due in large part to support from voters of color, Spanish-speakers and immigrants. Multilingual caucus sites in Iowa supported Sanders by a huge margin. Four of the most dynamic women of color in Congress – representatives Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – have endorsed Bernie.
The stakes could not be higher. Before the 2016 election I dreaded a return to the Jim Crow era signaled by the slogan “Make America Great Again”, which obviously meant white. Tragically that is exactly what happened. Four more years is unthinkable. That is why I am working to elect President Bernie Sanders.
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Duncing About Architecture: The Right-Wing Push for "Classical" Federal Buildings |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53274"><span class="small">Kate Wagner, The New Republic</span></a>
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Monday, 10 February 2020 15:00 |
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Excerpt: "The ignorance and racism behind the right-wing push for 'classical' federal buildings."
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Federal Plaza on Dearborn Street. (photo: Rich Hein/Sun-Times)
Duncing About Architecture: The Right-Wing Push for "Classical" Federal Buildings
By Kate Wagner, The New Republic
10 February 20
The ignorance and racism behind the right-wing push for “classical” federal buildings.
 n February 4, 2020, the Architectural Record reported that it had obtained a draft copy of a proposed executive order titled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” The order would, essentially, force a rewrite of the 1962 Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, which mandated that “an official [architectural] style must be avoided” for federal buildings and that new buildings should be exemplary of the time in which they are built. The proposition put forth by this new executive order—which is spearheaded by the National Civic Art Society, a conservative nonprofit—would essentially scrap the old guidelines in favor of a mandate that establishes a “classical style” inspired by Greek and Roman architecture as the default.
The American Institute of Architects—along with several other institutions, architecture critics, and publications—swiftly published vehement denunciations to this plan, on the grounds that it would stifle architecture and violate the free thought and artistic expression that are essential to a democracy. Comparisons have already been made to Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Everyone is very mad online, except for Ross Douthat, who loves the idea.
The abrupt aesthetic reversal heralded by this executive order has some obvious underpinnings, beginning with the fact that the reversion to a mandatory classical style reflects the architectural philosophies of white supremacists online, as well as the doings of a developer-president and a right-wing think tank making what is explicitly a political move. But this is also the inevitable result of an architectural faux-populism that has been sown in the conscience of American architecture since postmodernism.
The effort to stifle aesthetic expression in public architecture by instating a mandatory style is wrong for all the reasons the AIA and the Chicago Sun Times editorial board lay out in opposition. The proposal would allow Trump to create a “President’s Committee for the Re-Beautification of Federal Architecture,” which would enforce this design mandate, and this panel would exclude “artists, architects, engineers, art or architecture critics, members of the building industry or any other members of the public that are affiliated with any interest group or organization” involved in architecture. Speaking as an architecture critic, this is insane and borderline totalitarian. But as with all the insane and borderline-totalitarian things Trump does, it can be partially explained by the man himself.
Whether we like to admit it or not, Trump is an architectural president—in his professional life as a (failing) developer, he has had his grubby, tiny hands in myriad buildings across the country. Like all building-peddlers, Trump is subjected to the gaze of architecture critics, who have on occasion praised his work but have most often panned it. Though Trump has put up buildings ranging from nineteenth-century retrofits to late-modern skyscrapers, his personal style is a combination of 2000s bling and Louis XIV—nothing in his penthouse Trump Tower apartment is spared a metallic coating. His choice of modernism for the style of the Trump Towers in Chicago and New York can simply be explained away by the fact that modern, all-glass buildings are the hegemonic aesthetic signature of corporate capitalism: It is the style of big business.
Trump has found a kindred soul in the right-wing Federalist Society clod Justin Shubow, who is the president of the National Civic Art Society. NCAS is an unhinged conservative think tank founded by Catesby Leigh (who authored an infamous editorial on this topic in the conservative publication City Journal last year), hell-bent on forcing neoclassical architecture on the entire country. Trump already appointed Shubow to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts in 2018 (as well as both another NCAS member and an architect practicing in the classical style in 2019), and it’s no coincidence that the proposed Committee for the Re-Beautification of Federal Architecture bars architecture critics but allows at least one member of the Commission of Fine Arts.
Shubow is already infamous in D.C. architecture circles for his very public hatred of Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial, proposed in 2012 and wrapping up construction this year.* The Los Angeles Times’s Christopher Knight wrote extensively in 2012 about the nutjob-filled world in which Shubow and his organization reside. As for NCAS, the central tenet of its belief system is that modern architecture is a degenerate art form, bringing about the downfall of Western Society. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Hitler and his chief architect, Albert Speer, believed the same thing; and because crypto-fascist Twitter accounts have been spewing garbage about the inherent beauty and superiority of Western European cities and classical architecture for many years.
Neoclassical architecture isn’t always a right-wing dogwhistle. Most architects are required to learn about it in their architectural history classes, and many architects train at architecture schools (most notably the University of Notre Dame) that specialize in traditional Western architectural language. These architects sometimes go on to work on new buildings, but many ply their trade in restorations, renovations, and additions to existing traditional buildings. There is beauty and nuance in classical architecture, and it is worth studying—if more people studied how a traditional building comes together, we would end up with a lot fewer McMansions.
The issue of establishing a national style for federal buildings, while also the domain of infamous dictators, has its place in American architectural history. It can be found in the Colonial and Federal-style buildings constructed during the very founding of the country, the Beaux Arts style’s domination of federal buildings in D.C. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the widespread uniformity of buildings built during the New Deal under the Works Progress Administration—though it is worth clarifying that these were not officially encoded in any kind of law or shoehorned through an executive order drafted by nincompoops.
While there have always been classical revivals in architecture, the most recent iteration of this was the postmodern movement, beginning in the late 1970s and ending, for the most part, around the 1990s. A substyle of postmodernism, called postmodern classicism, was practiced in the 1980s by architects such as Robert A.M. Stern, Leon Krier, and Michael Graves. These buildings used classical elements but distorted them in some way, such as by compiling ornaments in collage-like assemblages and contrasting classical motifs with the use of modern materials and cotton candy pastels. The establishment of movements like new urbanism, which demonized both modern architecture and American urban planning (whether sprawl or urban renewal), further concentrated the ideological zeal toward Old Stuff.
During the postmodern period, a faux-populist narrative emerged. Modernism was a failure: It destroyed the fabric of cities under the auspices of urban renewal, it forced an ascetic style onto the American people who, in their homes and places of commerce, were devoted to a sprawl that tended aesthetically toward the traditional, much to the chagrin of Architecture writ large. This was best articulated by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who wrote the influential book Learning From Las Vegas, in which the authors say that “Main Street is almost alright” and urge their fellow architects to pay more mind to “ugly and ordinary architecture.”
Learning From Las Vegas is a nuanced (and very funny) book, but its message was quickly flattened into “Modernism is a failure, and ordinary people hate modernism and like red barns and gables.” This populism, which is ultimately centered on what buildings people consume (McDonald’s restaurants and ticky-tacky suburban fare) rather than the flourishing and nuanced aesthetic tastes of millions of Americans, has reared its ugly head time and time again, across all kinds of ideologies—from the desks of Nathan J. Robinson, the publisher of the socialist magazine Current Affairs, to Marion Smith, the chairman of NCAS. Smith, who said in a text message to The New York Times responding to the proposed executive order: “For too long architectural elites and bureaucrats have derided the idea of beauty, blatantly ignored public opinions on style, and have quietly spent taxpayer money constructing ugly, expensive, and inefficient buildings.… This executive order gives voice to the 99 percent—the ordinary American people who do not like what our government has been building.”
The notion of the “architecture of the people”—the architecture that the people really want—fuels both ads for new suburban developments and the architectural ideologies of the Nazis. Claiming to speak for the aesthetic tastes of the Everyman is a trick tucked up the sleeve of both Don Draper and Albert Speer; it’s so cheap that it’s hard to ascribe any real morality to it. Most people aren’t really thinking about the architecture of McDonald’s when they go to the drive-through, and while people love taking pictures on the steps of the Capitol building, they also enjoy taking selfies in front of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Simply put, people love good buildings, modern and traditional. More to the point, architecture is imbued with all manner of personal meaning to the people who experience it, regardless of how good it is. After all, the houses most of us grow up in are not architectural masterpieces. However, only a specific kind of person looks at architecture and feels the need to talk about the Grecian ideal or the backbone of Western Society. That person is usually either a white supremacist, a stuck-up nitwit trapped in the 1980s, or, in the case of Trump himself, both.
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RSN: Why the Buttigieg Campaign Tried to Have Me Arrested for Handing Out Information About Medicare for All |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 10 February 2020 13:15 |
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Solomon writes: "You'd think that a presidential campaign backed by 40 billionaires and untold numbers of bundled rich people wouldn't worry about just one leaflet on Medicare for All."
Democratic presidential candidate and former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks during a campaign event on January 31, 2020 in Clinton, Iowa. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Why the Buttigieg Campaign Tried to Have Me Arrested for Handing Out Information About Medicare for All
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
10 February 20
 ou’d think that a presidential campaign backed by 40 billionaires and untold numbers of bundled rich people wouldn’t worry about just one leaflet on Medicare for All.
But minutes after Pete Buttigieg finished speaking in an auditorium at Keene State College in New Hampshire on Saturday, a Pete for America official confronted me outside the building while I was handing out a flier with the headline “Medicare for All. Not Healthcare Profiteering for the Few.”
“You can’t pass that out,” the man told me. I did a double take, glancing at the small “Pete” metal badge on his lapel while being told that he spoke on behalf of the Buttigieg campaign.
We were standing on the campus of a public college. I said that I understood the First Amendment. When I continued to pass out the flier, the Buttigieg campaign official (who repeatedly refused to give his name) disappeared and then quickly returned with a campus policeman, who told me to stop distributing the leaflet. Two Keene city police soon arrived.
The Buttigieg official stood a few feet behind them as the police officers threatened me with arrest for trespassing. Ordered to get off the campus within minutes or be arrested, I was handed an official written order (“Criminal Trespass Notice”) not to set foot on “Keene State College entire campus” for a year.
So much for freedom of speech and open election discourse in public places.
Why would a representative of the mighty Buttigieg campaign resort to such a move? A big clue can be found in a deception that Buttigieg engaged in during the debate on Friday night.
Buttigieg’s dishonesty arose when Amy Klobuchar, a vehement foe of Medicare for All, attacked Bernie Sanders for allegedly seeking to “kick 149 million Americans off their current health insurance in four years.” Klobuchar was reciting a key insurance-industry distortion that neglects to mention how a single-payer system would provide more complete health coverage, at less cost — by eliminating wasteful bureaucracy and corporate profiteering.
But Klobuchar then pivoted to attack Buttigieg: “And Pete, while you have a different plan now, you sent out a tweet just a few years ago that said henceforth, forthwith, indubitably, affirmatively, you are for Medicare for All for the ages, and so I would like to point out that what leadership is about is taking a position, looking at things, and sticking with them.”
Buttigieg was far from candid in his response: “Just to be clear, the truth is that I have been consistent throughout in my position on delivering healthcare for every American.”
That answer directly contradicted an early 2018 tweet from Buttigieg: “Gosh! Okay… I, Pete Buttigieg, politician, do henceforth and forthwith declare, most affirmatively and indubitably, unto the ages, that I do favor Medicare for All, as I do favor any measure that would help get all Americans covered.”
No doubt if the flier I was handing out at Keene State College had praised Buttigieg, his campaign would not have called the police to have me ejected. But the Buttigieg for President staffer recognized that Buttigieg’s spin on healthcare was undermined by facts in the flier (produced and financed by RootsAction.org, which is completely independent of the official Sanders campaign).
“Buttigieg is claiming that Medicare for All would dump people off of health coverage and deprive them of ‘choice,’” our flier pointed out. “Those are insurance-industry talking points. He is deliberately confusing the current ‘choice’ of predatory for-profit insurance plans with the genuine full choice of healthcare providers that enhanced Medicare for everyone would offer.”
Apparently, for the Buttigieg campaign, such truthful words are dangerous.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Friday Night Massacre's Just the Beginning for Acquitted Trump |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53271"><span class="small">David Rothkopf, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Monday, 10 February 2020 11:53 |
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Excerpt: "Nine months before election day, our most corrupt, unfit, demented and malevolent president has been given more power than any other human being in our history."
Gordon Sondland. (photo: Getty Images)
Friday Night Massacre's Just the Beginning for Acquitted Trump
By David Rothkopf, The Daily Beast
10 February 20
Nine months before election day, our most corrupt, unfit, demented and malevolent president has been given more power than any other human being in our history.
n an administration founded on lies, telling the truth is the ultimate crime.
Donald Trump unleashed a Friday night massacre at the end of the week the Senate acquitted him, one that reveals yet again not only who Trump is but how he intends to act thanks to the carte blanche to abuse his powers handed him by the Senate and his attorney general.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman was escorted from the White House, six months before his rotation to the NSC was supposed to end. He was punished for speaking the truth before the Congress, for doing his duty, for having character, for having courage, for believing in our system of laws. Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Vindman, a White House lawyer, was also fired, also escorted from the White House. His crime? Being the twin brother of Alexander.
Ambassador Gordon Sondland was also terminated on Friday, asked to return home from his post as America’s envoy to the EU. While Sondland was a slippery character, a Trump enabler and sometime defender, he too was fired for telling the truth. A week ago, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch resigned from the State Department after having been unceremoniously fired from her job as Ambassador to Ukraine. She had endured months of attacks before her firing and those continued afterward from Trump allies who could not forgive her for putting her country and her oath of office and the Constitution and the national interests of the United States first.
Their firings and forced departures from their jobs are, by any definition, retaliation against witnesses in the case against the president. That’s a crime. But of course, that crime will never be enforced because the U.S. government agency responsible for enforcing such laws, the Department of Justice, has been taken over by an attorney general who has perjured himself before Congress, violated his oath and placed the protection of the president ahead of the interests of the American people to whom he owes his highest duty. This week, just after the Senate’s “total acquittal,” Barr issued a memo saying that no further investigations into any presidential or vice-presidential candidate or his staff could be issued without his express approval.
Between Barr and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump has been given free rein to be his worst self. And Trump never disappoints those who expect the worst of him. In the past few days he used a prayer breakfast to attack his enemies and question their faith. He awarded a racist the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the middle of a rambling, vapid State of the Union that had more in common with a television game show than with anything the Capitol building had ever seen before him. He held a press event to celebrate the Senate vote that was by turns vituperative against his opponents and so deranged that you expected the men with the butterfly nets to burst into the East Room of the White House and escort Trump to a quiet place where there were no sharp objects.
As the week drew to a close, a chilling realization settled in on the nation. Our most corrupt, unfit, demented and malevolent president has been given more power than any other human being in our history. He has been told he is above the law, incapable of committing a crime. He has been told that Article II of the Constitution grants him unlimited powers. He has been told he does not have submit to the oversight of the Congress.
He is, in other words, free to be himself. And we all know who that is—except perhaps Senator Susan Collins and the other Senate suckers who expected that somehow our felon-in-chief had learned a lesson from this impeachment ordeal. Trump is a man who thinks the law is for little people, that the rich can buy their way out of any legal predicament. He thinks character and courage and duty, the traits displayed by Yovanovitch and the Vindmans, are for suckers.
But he is worse than that. Trump is a man who would pardon and celebrate a war criminal like former Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher while he condemned and fired real war heroes like the Vindmans. He celebrates and defends the criminals and low lifes in his orbit like Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Rudy Giuliani and he relentlessly attacks those who are actively serving the country like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and Senator Mitt Romney.
In Trumpworld, up is down, good is bad and doing his worst is the objective. He penalized New York State this week, cutting off Global Entry services to New York travelers, just to get back at political leaders there who dared stand up to him— much as he has done in California and Puerto Rico. He has sought, again in the past week, to reverse decades of progress in fighting the scourge of landmines by recommitting his administration to their use. The scars borne by our environment, our allies, and our Constitution are all evidence of this.
An election is just nine months away. It offers us what is now the only available solution to this dark period in our history, this utter failure of our system at the hands of powerful forces from home and abroad committed to bringing it down. But nine months is also enough time to give birth to many crimes. Indeed, we must wonder how much wrongdoing by the criminal gang that has seized our government will be devoted to stealing that election to come. In an erratic administration, a concerted focusing on cheating at the ballot box is one of the few consistent initiatives that has been a priority for them since the very beginning. And they have never been so empowered to abuse their power as a way to maintain that power. Punishing truth-tellers and witnesses is the technique mob enforcers use to escape the consequences for their crimes.
Now it is the stock in trade of the most powerful man in the world, a signature tactic of the most powerful president in American history and the most dangerous and corrupt public official the United States has ever known. Few weeks in our history have therefore been as ominous. And few have made it so clear what the people of the United States must do if they wish to preserve our republic.
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