Wednesday, November 29, 2017

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2017

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Addicted to War:

And this does not include "…spending $1.25 trillion dollars to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and $566 billion to build the Navy a 308-ship fleet…"
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/18/funding-for-war-vs-natural-disasters/

Dear Comrades, attached is some new art, where Xinachtli really outdid himself some.

Kaepernick sports new T-shirt:

Love this guy!

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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

B) ARTICLES IN FULL

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A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

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Ready to ramp up the fight to end Urban Shield for good? The Stop Urban Shield Coalition has been plugging away to advance the powerful work of this campaign. Be sure to save the date for a Community Teach-In in San Francisco on Demember 13th, and come out this Thursday for a rally on the steps of SF City Hall.

Check out our video of our September mobilization and community fair

Thursday, November 30th in San Francisco
Community Rally and Press Conference + SF Board of Supervisors Committee Hearing

San Francisco will be deciding on whether or not to sign onto another agreement that would lock it into four more years of accepting federal funds to allow Urban Shield to take place. The Stop Urban Shield Coalition will be holding a press conference on the steps of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors an hour before the meeting to demand that decision makers reject this agreement. Come out and tell the San Francisco Board of Supervisors NO to Urban Shield. Please also sign our SF petition here.

When: Thursday, November 30th
9am - Press Conference and Rally
10am - SF Budget and Finance Meeting
Where: SF City Hall Steps
Facebook page

Wednesday, December 13th - Save the Date!
Community Teach-In about Urban Shield

Interested in learning about what Urban Shield is, the work of the coalition, and how to get involved? On Wednesday, December 13, SURJ San Francisco will be hosting a public Community Meeting on Policing and Urban Shield. There will be time to hear about what organizing against Urban Shield has looked like, next steps, and how you can support us in achieving a people's victory over Urban Shield. We encourage organizations and community members in SF to attend this gathering so that we can all be well informed and best positioned to organize and win.

When: Wednesday, December 13th, 7-9pm
Where: ACLU Northern California Office
39 Drumm St, San Francisco, CA 94111
Facebook page

Copyright © 2017 Stop Urban Shield Coalition, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you signed a petition to help stop Urban Shield.

Our mailing address is:

Stop Urban Shield Coalition

www.stopurbanshield.org
Alameda County, CA 94606

Add us to your address book

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Standing Rock raised the stakes for the global environmental and indigenous rights movements. Now, another victory. A North Dakota judge has ruled that my legal team is entitled to substantially more evidence from the North Dakota State Prosecutor's office than has been forthcoming in other water protector cases. We will be able to take sworn testimony and demand documents from Energy Transfer Partners and their private, militarized security firm, TigerSwan.

The timing on this ruling is important for all environmental protectors. 84 members of Congress—nearly all Republicans—recently sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions encouraging him to invoke the domestic terrorism statute to prosecute fossil fuel protesters. These attacks on our fundamental constitutional rights, spearheaded by Donald Trump and parroted by congressional shills of Big Oil, should deeply concern all citizens who value our right to speak freely and demonstrate.

Our team has produced a new video that explains how I was singled out and targeted—and the justification for our bold legal strategy to expose the illegal and immoral wedding of the fossil fuel industry, law enforcement, and militarized private security forces. You'll see why I took action on behalf of my people, millions of others downstream, and Unci Maka—Grandmother Earth. Please watch it, and share it widely.

Don't lose sight of what Standing Rock means. My tribe—one of the poorest communities in the nation—won't stop leading the struggles to protect the earth and freedom of expression. Continue to stand with me, my courageous fellow defendant HolyElk Lafferty, and hundreds of others being represented by our ally organization, the Water Protector Legal Collective. Our fight is your fight—and it is nothing less than the movement to protect freedom and the earth for future generations.

Wopila—I thank you.

Chase Iron Eyes
Lakota People's Law Project Lead Counsel

P.S. Help us reach 60,000 petition signatures. Please share our video with your network and together we will pressure North Dakota's legal authorities to do the right thing and #DropDAPLCharges. In the coming weeks, we will hand-deliver petitions to the state's attorney. More than 45,000 have already signed. Help us free the water protectors!

Lakota People's Law Project
547 South 7th Street #149
Bismarck, ND 58504-5859
United States

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1) F.C.C. Plans Net Neutrality Repeal in a Victory for Telecoms
By CECILIA KANG NOV. 21, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/technology/fcc-net-neutrality.html?hp&action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=
top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Ajit Pai, the Federal Communications Commission chairman. Eric Thayer for The New York Times

The Federal Communications Commission released a plan on Tuesday to dismantle landmark regulations that ensure equal access to the internet, clearing the way for internet service companies to charge users more to see certain content and to curb access to some websites.

The proposal, made by the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, is a sweeping repeal of rules put in place by the Obama administration. The rules prohibit high-speed internet service providers, or I.S.P.s, from stopping or slowing down the delivery of websites. They also prevent the companies from charging customers extra fees for high-quality streaming and other services.

The announcement set off a fight over free speech and the control of the internet, pitting telecom titans like AT&T and Verizon against internet giants like Google and Amazon. The internet companies warned that rolling back the rules could make the telecom companies powerful gatekeepers to information and entertainment. The telecom companies say that the existing rules prevent them from offering customers a wider selection of services at higher and lower price points.

"Under my proposal, the federal government will stop micromanaging the internet," Mr. Pai said in a statement. "Instead, the F.C.C. would simply require internet service providers to be transparent about their practices so that consumers can buy the service plan that's best for them."

Mr. Pai, a Republican who has pursued an aggressive deregulation agenda, was widely expected to have his plan approved during a meeting on Dec. 14. The two other Republicans on the commission generally vote with Mr. Pai, giving them a majority over the two Democrats.

Telecom and internet companies are expected to lobby hard in Washington — and directly to the public — as they did when the current rules were adopted.

Some internet companies were expected to put up a fight to prevent the proposal from taking hold. The Internet Association, an industry group, joined a legal effort in 2015 to protect the existing rules. The agency has already received 20 million public comments, many of them in opposition of changing the rules, since Mr. Pai announced the broad outlines of his thinking early this year.

The big companies that provide internet access to phones and computers have fought for years against broadband regulations. Under the new plan, broadband providers will be able to block access, slow down or speed up service for its business partners in some cases — as long as they notify customers.

"This action will return broadband in the U.S. to a regulatory regime that emphasizes private investment and innovation over lumbering government intervention," said Joan Marsh, a vice president at AT&T.

Big online companies like Google and Facebook say the repeal proposal would allow telecom companies to play favorites by charging customers for accessing some sites or by slowing speeds to others. The existing rules were written to prevent such arrangements, adopting a policy often called net neutrality.

"We are disappointed that the proposal announced today by the F.C.C. fails to maintain the strong net neutrality protections that will ensure the internet remains open for everyone," Erin Egan, a vice president at Facebook, said in a statement. "We will work with all stakeholders committed to this principle."

Small online companies believe the proposal would hurt innovation, because telecom companies could force them to pay more for the faster connections. Only the largest companies, they say, would be able to afford the expense of making sure their sites received preferred treatment. Companies like Etsy and Pinterest, for example, credit their start to the promise of free and open access on the internet.

And consumers, the online companies say, may see their costs go up if, for example, they want high-quality access to popular websites like Netflix, a company that depends on fast connections for its streaming videos. Netflix said on Tuesday that it opposed Mr. Pai's proposal.

The action "represents the end of net neutrality as we know it and defies the will of millions of Americans," said Michael Beckerman, chief executive of the Internet Association, a lobbying group that represents Google, Facebook, Amazon and other tech companies.

Mr. Pai said the current rules had been adopted to stop only theoretical harm. He said the rules limit consumer choice because telecom companies cannot offer different tiers of service, for example. As a result, he said, internet service companies cannot experiment with new business models that could help them compete with online businesses like Netflix, Google and Facebook.

"It's depressed investment in building and expanding broadband networks and deterred innovation," Mr. Pai said Tuesday.

Comcast, one of the country's biggest broadband companies, said it would not slow websites that contain legally permitted material.

"We do not and will not block, throttle, or discriminate against lawful content — and we will be transparent with our customers about these policies," the company said.

In a call with reporters, F.C.C. officials said the blocking and slowing of some content could be seen as anticompetitive. Those practices, they said, would be policed by the Federal Trade Commission or the Justice Department.

The plan to repeal the existing rules, passed in 2015, would reverse a hallmark decision by the agency to consider broadband a public utility, as essential as phones and electricity. The earlier decision created the legal foundation for the current rules and underscored the importance of high-speed internet service. It was put in place by Tom Wheeler, an F.C.C. chairman under President Obama.

Mr. Pai, who was appointed chairman by President Trump in January, has eliminated numerous regulations during his first year.

The agency has stripped down rules governing television broadcasters, newspapers and telecom companies that were meant to protect the public interest. On Tuesday, in addition to the net neutrality rollback, Mr. Pai announced a plan to eliminate a rule limiting any corporation from controlling broadcasts that can reach more than 39 percent of American homes.

The fight over net neutrality could end up being one of his biggest and most fraught decisions. For more than a decade, the agency has struggled with how to regulate internet service, leading to extended legal battles. The rules adopted under Mr. Wheeler were upheld in 2016 by a federal appeals court in Washington.

The proposal released on Tuesday will probably make its way to court as well. And companies like Google and Facebook are expected to push the public to speak out against the plan. They coordinated a huge online protest against the possible changes in July.

Some of the lobbying could take place in Congress, even though it may change little because Republicans control both houses. Nevertheless, Democrats have vowed to try to reconstruct the strict rules adopted by the F.C.C. in 2015.

The next three weeks promise to hold intense lobbying from both sides, but that might not be the end of it. The regulation of internet providers has already swung once on a change in the Oval Office.

"As good as the F.C.C.'s action is for I.S.P.s, it only assures nonregulation of broadband through 2020," said Paul Gallant, an analyst at the research firm Cowen.

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2) Colin Kaepernick and the Legacy of the Negro National Anthem
By BRENT STAPLES NOV. 21, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/opinion/kaepernick-negro-national-anthem.html?action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=
opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

The lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key embraced the pop cultural tastes of his day when he wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner" to commemorate an American victory over the British at Baltimore during the War of 1812. He gave his composition broad appeal with a melody derived from a popular British music club anthem that celebrated the virtues of love and wine.

Satirists pounced, lampooning the song with lyrics that depicted a man who staggers home drunk and sleeps well past "the dawn's early light" — that light through which Key had seen an American flag still flying above the fort that had repulsed the British invasion.

Abolitionists during Key's lifetime viewed "The Star-Spangled Banner" as they viewed the nation as a whole — through the lens of the injustice perpetuated by slavery. They argued that Key should have described America as the "land of the free and home of the oppressed."

The professional football player Colin Kaepernick appealed to that same sense of injustice last year when he knelt during "The Star-Spangled Banner" to protest police violence against African-Americans. By doing so, he tapped into a feeling of alienation from the anthem in the black community that dates back to the days of racial terrorism and lynching in the South.

Congress declared "The Star-Spangled Banner" the national anthem in 1931. Well before then, however, black communities across the Jim Crow South were instead embracing the soaring, aspirational lyrics of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" — otherwise known as the Negro National Anthem — which was sung in churches, at civic events and even in schools, where substituting the song for "The Star-Spangled Banner" was a quiet act of rebellion against the racist status quo.

By the late 1960s, many of us who had grown up black in an era when African-Americans were locked into Northern ghettos and murdered in the South for seeking the right to vote registered our grievances by refusing to stand for the anthem at sporting events.

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" became what the Princeton University scholar Imani Perry describes as a tale "of endurance, lament and supplication" that acknowledges the cruelties of racism while also pointing toward transcendence: "Lift every voice and sing/Till earth and heaven ring/Ring with the harmonies of Liberty/Let our rejoicing rise/High as the listening skies." As Ms. Perry writes in "May We Forever Stand" — her forthcoming history of the song — it spread rapidly through black America in the early 1900s, reflecting a growing sense that the promise of full citizenship in the nation's canonical texts simply did not apply to African-Americans.

The provenance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is itself deeply suspect. Key, who owned human beings, penned his celebration of freedom during a war in which the British had promised that very thing to enslaved African-Americans who agreed to fight on their side. The third stanza of the song — which ceased to be sung once warm relations were re-established with England — can be read as a reflection of Key's anger at Britain's overtures to the people he himself owned.

The passage reads in part: "No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave/And The Star-Spangled Banner in triumph doth wave/O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." Contemporary thinkers disagree on whether the word "slave" was used as a generic insult that could be applied to people of any race or as a direct reference to African-Americans who joined the British side in the War of 1812. But imagine yourself an enslaved person serving refreshments to your masters and their guests as they all retire to the piano room to sing Key's song as he had written it. There can be little doubt about what the passage referring to a "slave" would mean to you.

The histories of the white and black anthems are strikingly different. James Weldon Johnson and his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" in 1900 to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birthday at a time when the government seemed to have abandoned altogether the promise of Reconstruction. Four years earlier, the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, had validated the doctrine of "separate but equal." As the historian Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary writes in "To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism," the door had been opened for racists and nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan to appoint themselves custodians of what it meant to be an American.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" began as an ordinary song that competed with other songs for space in the American imagination. It was not until the early 20th century that it acquired the stature of a sacred writ and became, in effect, a loyalty test and an excuse for people who called themselves patriots to harass and beat people who dissented from the song's message.

The truth is that the maxims about freedom implied in the song describe a condition the country has yet to achieve. People who confront that reality by kneeling prayerfully on the football field are often more determinedly patriotic than those who reflexively stand.

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3) Why Won't Israel Let Me Mourn My Father?
By RAED JARRAR NOV. 23, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/why-wont-israel-let-me-mourn-my-father.html?action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=
opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

My father, Azzam Jarrar, died last month. He was a proud Palestinian, a refugee, a civil engineer, a farmer and an entrepreneur. He was also my friend and mentor. He taught me the multiplication tables on our way to school in Saudi Arabia. He taught me how to question authority when we lived in Iraq. He helped me finish my master's degree when I lived in Jordan. Above all, though, he was the gateway to my Palestinian roots and identity.

My dad fled his home with his family in 1967, when Israeli soldiers invaded and occupied the West Bank. He went first to Jordan and then to Iraq, where I was born. I was the first Jarrar to be born east of the Jordan River since our family was established on Palestinian land centuries ago.

I didn't have the chance to visit my relatives on the West Bank until 2015, when I traveled there for a short work trip while working for a Quaker nongovernmental organization. Being in the diaspora meant that I wasn't given the opportunity to connect with the land and people. My only connection to my family history was through old stories and a few blurry pictures that my father took with him when he left as a teenager.

That's why, after my father died in Jordan in October, it was so important for me to visit my extended family in the city of Jenin, to mourn his death with them. Unfortunately, I was prevented from doing so by the Israeli government.

I had visited Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip two more times since that first trip in 2015. Like most Palestinian-Americans, I was questioned at the border about my family and personal life for hours before being admitted.

My latest visit was different. This time, Israeli officials were mostly interested in my work, even though I made it clear that my partner, Alli McCracken, and I were traveling in our personal capacity to mourn my father and visit my family.

I'm the Middle East and North Africa advocacy director for the human rights organization Amnesty International U.S.A. In that capacity, I have played a leading role in a new campaign that seemed to get the Israeli border guards' attention, a campaign calling on governments to ban goods from Israeli settlements.

The officials who questioned me asked why Amnesty has a problem with Israel. I kept trying to steer the conversation back to my dad's memorial service, but they insisted on discussing the organization's work. Alli, who also works for Amnesty International, was questioned for a long time, too. They took her phone and went through her text messages.

After hours of back and forth, I was informed that I was being denied entry for reasons of "public order" and — believe it or not — "the prevention of illegal immigration." I called the American Consulate General in Jerusalem and was told that there was nothing the officials there could do to help.

Based on the questions I was asked, I had no doubt that this denial of entry was retaliation for my work. Amnesty International believesIsrael's settlement enterprise amounts to a war crime. Under international law, governments have an obligation not to recognize or assist "illegal situations." That's why Amnesty is calling on governments across the world, including the United States, to uphold that law and not allow Israeli businesses to profit from an illegal occupation.

Israel seems to have denied me entry under legislation passed in Marchthat bans entry to Israel for noncitizens who knowingly issue "a public call for boycotting Israel." This law pertains not only to the boycott of goods produced in Israel proper but also to goods produced in settlements. Although Amnesty International calls for a government ban on importing those goods — not a consumer boycott — the Israeli government seems to treat it the same way.

Could my teenage dad fleeing his hometown half a century ago have imagined this happening to his son? I wanted to visit his old school and my grandparents' old house. I wanted to touch the olive trees he climbed as little boy, and eat hareeseh, my favorite Palestinian dessert made of semolina and coconut, from the shop in central Jenin. Does it even exist anymore?

I wasn't just upset about missing my dad's memorial service. Before I left the United States, I told my 4-year-old son that I was going on a trip because his grandpa had died. He cried a lot. Then he asked me if we could plant his grandfather back in earth like a plant and wait until he grows back. I told him we couldn't. He said he would just use his imagination. I tried to use my imagination while I was being sent back from the border crossing — I tried to imagine my family's land that I couldn't plant my father back into.

When I returned home, my son asked me about the trip, and I had to tell him that I wasn't able to go. He looked confused. I couldn't explain the details — my work, Israel's settlements and the occupation, its unjust laws that stifle civil society. I know I'll have to tell him about all that someday.

It won't be an easy story to tell, not only because of the Israeli government's actions but also because of the United States government's lack of action. Although I've tried to follow up, my own government has not stepped in to protect my right to equal treatment, and yet continues to help sustain illegal settlements by allowing the flood of Israeli goods into American markets.

Israel must respect my right, and the rights of others, to engage in peaceful human rights work without fear of reprisal. Whether or not the Israeli government agrees with my work — and, of course, I know it doesn't — I still should have been able to take part in those most human of activities: mourning my father and celebrating his life.

Raed Jarrar (@raedjarrar) is the advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International U.S.A.

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4) Papua New Guinea's Police Storm Manus Island Refugee Camp
By DAMIEN CAVE and ADAM BAIDAWI NOV. 22, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/world/australia/papua-new-guinea-manus-island-detainees.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=rank&module=
package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

In a photograph released by an Australian activist group, an asylum seeker appeared to have collapsed as Papua New Guinea police officers stormed a detention center on Manus Island on Thursday. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

SYDNEY, Australia — The authorities in Papua New Guinea confronted asylum seekers on Thursday inside a controversial detention center on Manus Island, ordering hundreds of detainees to leave and destroying their belongings in an attempt to end a standoff at the camp that has drawn international scrutiny to Australia's offshore detention policy.

By early afternoon, dozens of the asylum seekers had been removed from the camp and placed on three minibuses, said refugee advocates who were at the scene.

"They drove past with their heads out the windows, and they cried, 'Help us,'" said Tim Costello, chief advocate for World Vision Australia, a charity. "They looked sullen and disturbed and defeated."

Abdul Aziz Muhamat, a Sudanese asylum seeker in the camp, said the men taken away had been targeted because they were separated from a larger group and were easier to remove. "The problem was, those men split up from the rest of us," he said.

The Papua New Guinea authorities' aggressive move, which Australia's immigration minister confirmed was taking place, represented an escalation of the conflict over the Manus center. It comes three weeks after Australia officially closed the camp on Oct. 31, cutting off electricity, food and water as hundreds of the detainees, all of whom are men, refused to leave.

Since 2013, Australia has paid neighboring Papua New Guinea to shelter migrants who were intercepted at sea while trying to reach Australia. The country's policy, which the government says is meant to deter human trafficking, is that no such migrant will ever be allowed to settle in Australia.

Security forces stormed the camp around 7 a.m. Wednesday and began tearing through the men's shelters and makeshift water tanks, before announcing on a loudspeaker that the men had to leave for alternative facilities on the island, detainees said.

"They've destroyed everything: our belongings, our shelters, our rooms and beds," said Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish asylum seeker and journalist in the center. "They said, 'You must leave this prison camp.' "

Mr. Boochani said the authorities were confiscating mobile phones after a number of refugees photographed and filmed the episode, making it available to international news media outlets.

"At this moment that I'm talking with you, I'm in the toilet," said Mr. Boochani, who has regularly posted Twitter messages and written articles from the camp. "If I go outside, they'll take my phone. It's possible that if I go out, they'll arrest me. I'm only worried that I won't be able to write and tweet."

The asylum seekers' defiance was partly an act of protest, but it was also motivated by complaints that alternative facilities were not ready. Many of the men have also said they feared they would be attacked or intimidated by local residents who have resisted Australia's attempt to move them closer to the island's largest city, Lorengau.

On Thursday, Australia's immigration minister, Peter Dutton, accused the detainees of ruining the detention center and wasting Australian taxpayers' money.

"I think it's outrageous that people are still there," he told 2GB radio. "They've trashed the facility, they're living in squalor."

He compared the situation to building a new house for tenants who then refuse to move in. "The Australian taxpayers have paid about $10 million for a new facility and we want people to move," he said.

Detainee advocates have questioned Mr. Dutton's assessment, pointing to photographic evidence that the alternate facilities are not ready.

"I find it very hard to believe anything that the immigration minister is saying at this stage — that's based on the fact that I was at the camp on Manus Island last week," said Jana Favero, director of advocacy at the Asylum Seeker Resource Center. "The only thing that's making these men live in these conditions is the destruction that's been brought on them by authorities. I can understand why they're staying: because they're going to be moved from one prison to another."

Mr. Boochani said that the men were tired, and he demanded that the Australian government find a solution to the stalemate.

"We've been in this prison camp for more than four years," he said. "We are refugees, and we've been recognized as refugees by international law. Let us go to a third country. We don't want to go to Australia."

Of the 843 asylum seekers still on Manus, nearly 200 have not had their claims for refugee status approved or have been rejected, including many of the camp's leaders.

Just hours after Mr. Boochani said he feared arrest, asylum seekers on the island said he had been taken from the camp by the authorities. Mr. Boochani later said in a tweet that he had been released, and that the authorities had berated him over his reporting.

"I've just been released. They hancuffed me for more than two hours in a place behind the prison camp. The police commander yelled at me 'you are reporting against us.' They pushed me several times and broke my belongings. Will write more about it later."

9:49 PM - Nov 22, 2017

Mr. Boochani is a prominent figure at the camp. His writing has appeared regularly in the Australian news media and has won multiple awards, most recently from Amnesty International. "I have a feeling that was their strategy — to arrest a few key people," said Ms. Favero, the refugee advocate.

Damien Cave reported from Sydney, and Adam Baidawi from Melbourne, Australia.

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5) Thanksgiving for Native Americans: Four Voices on a Complicated Holiday
By JULIE TURKEWITZ NOV. 23, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/us/thanksgiving-for-native-americans-four-voices-on-a-complicated-holiday.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=
latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Sherman Alexie in Seattle. "You take the holiday and make it yours," he said of Thanksgiving. "That doesn't strip it of its original meaning or its context." Ian C. Bates for The New York Times

"Do Indians celebrate Thanksgiving?"

The Native American artist Sherman Alexie, who is Spokane-Coeur d'Alene, writes in his poem "Happy Holidays!" that he is asked that question a dozen times a year.

The implicit assumption is that indigenous people would never celebrate a holiday tied up with the arrival of white settlers and the myths of American foundation. The truth is more complicated.

Excerpted here are perspectives from four Native American writers.

Sherman Alexie: A Story of Survival

Q. Do you feel like you've been able to make Thanksgiving your own?

A. You take the holiday and make it yours. That doesn't strip it of its original meaning or its context. There's still the really sad holiday as well. It is a holiday that commemorates the beginning of the end for us, the death of a culture. I guess you could say Thanksgiving is also about survival, look how strong we are.

Q. How do you talk to your kids about the Thanksgiving story?

A. You just tell them the truth, the long historical nature of it. They're quite aware of what happened to us, the genocide and the way in which we survive and the way in which my wife and I have survived our individual Indian autobiographies.

I guess it's trash talking: "Look, you tried to kill us all, and you couldn't." We're still here, waving the turkey leg in the face of evil.

— Interview in Bitch Media

Winona LaDuke: Tired of Being Invisible

There is this magical made-up time between Columbus Day (or Indigenous People's Day for the enlightened) and Thanksgiving, where white Americans think about native people. That's sort of our window.

November is Native American Heritage Month. Before that, of course, is Halloween. Until about three years ago, one of the most popular Halloween costumes was Pocahontas. People know nothing about us, but they like to dress up like us or have us as a mascot.

We are invisible. Take it from me. I travel a lot, and often ask this question: Can you name 10 indigenous nations? Often, no one can name us. The most common nations named are Lakota, Cherokee, Navajo, Cheyenne and Blackfeet — mostly native people from western movies. This is the problem with history. If you make the victim disappear, there is no crime. And we just disappeared. When I travel, I get this feeling someone has seen a unicorn in the airport.

— Essay in Inforum

Jacqueline Keeler: A Hidden Heart

I see, in the First Thanksgiving story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism.

Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused.

Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving Day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle.

And the healing can begin.

— Essay from the Pacific News Service

Simon Moya-Smith: When We Commemorate

Native American Heritage Day falls on the one day each year when Americans ravenously indulge in material possessions — Black Friday. So is this an insult to Native Americans? Of course it is. How could it not be?

If Native American Heritage Day fell on Nov. 5, for example, then students would be in the classroom and teachers could offer lessons about the Native American today. But no. Instead, streams of bundled-up shoppers are standing in line to make their purchases, with the class the last thing on any kids' minds as they sit watching TV.

If we're going to choose a day for Native American Heritage Day when school is out, then how about Thanksgiving Day itself? Why not? That way we could learn about the real history of the holiday, and not the romanticized version we all hear about.

— Essay on CNN

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6) Telling the Truth About the Cost of War
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD NOV. 23, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/america-war-casualties-soldiers.html?action=
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A half-century ago, the Pentagon's misleading claims about civilian deaths in Vietnam eroded public trust and, ultimately, support for the war. The United States military today claims to have learned the hard lessons of that and subsequent wars. It's put in place an elaborate system intended to minimize civilian casualties, including an Obama-era requirement that forces have "near certainty" that no civilian will be harmed before launching an attack. Intelligence analysts select targets, "targeteers" study models to calculate the most precise angles to strike, teams of lawyers evaluate plans and the Pentagon later discloses the few civilians who still, inevitably and tragically, wind up getting killed.

It turns out this is all, at least partly, an illusion. The Pentagon is killing far more civilians than it acknowledges, according to a recent report in The New York Times and other findings. A system intended to ensure transparency and accountability appears, instead, to be enabling the Pentagon to fool itself as well as the rest of us about the true cost of its strikes. It is often feeding bad intelligence into its intricate targeting system in the first place and then failing to thoroughly investigate civilians deaths after an attack.

The American-led military coalition has claimed, for instance, that the ratio of civilian deaths to airstrikes in the operation against the Islamic State in Iraq is one for every 157 strikes. The New York Times Sunday Magazine's account found a ratio of one civilian death for every five airstrikes — more than 31 times the Pentagon's claim. The true number, wrote the authors, Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal, "is at such a distance from official claims that, in terms of civilian deaths, this may be the least transparent war in recent American history."

Ms. Khan's and Mr. Gopal's reporting provided the first systematic, ground-based sample of airstrikes in Iraq since the operation began in 2014. They visited the sites of nearly 150 airstrikes in northern Iraq after ISIS was expelled, and they interviewed hundreds of witnesses, survivors and others. They photographed bomb fragments and mapped the destruction with satellite imagery, and they took the data to experts at the United States base in Qatar.

The article's organizing narrative was the tragic story of Bassim Razzo, whose wife, daughter, nephew and brother were killed in 2015 in coalition airstrikes on their side-by-side homes in Mosul, the main ISIS stronghold in Iraq. Video and written records showed that the coalition misidentified the two compounds as an ISIS car-bomb factory or command center. Before the writers took up the case, coalition officials had not included the Razzo family in its accounting of civilian victims. When Mr. Razzo asked for compensation, the military eventually offered the insulting sum of $15,000.

The Costs of War project at Brown University estimates over 200,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan since 2001. Most experts attribute a majority of the civilian deaths to extremists.

Although international law obligates combatants to minimize harm to civilians, it is unrealistic to think that all civilian deaths can be prevented. Yet the reporting by Ms. Khan and Mr. Gopal suggests that America could be doing far more to protect civilians. They said they found a "consistent failure" by the American-led coalition to investigate claims carefully and to keep proper records. Some deaths occurred because civilians were close to ISIS targets. Many others, however, appear to have been recorded wrongly by "flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants." The article said the military seldom recognized its failures or made changes to prevent civilian deaths.

To some extent, the American people may be blind to this carnage, having been lulled by their military and political leaders into believing that advanced technology and precision strikes kill the bad guys while sparing the innocent. This seductive concept took hold with video of seemingly pinpoint strikes during the first Persian Gulf war and was reinforced since by widespread use of drone strikes by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump against faraway targets.

However precise the weapons, careful the planners and skilled the fighters, war inevitably includes mistakes that kill civilians. Leaders need to be honest that there is no such thing as antiseptic combat, while Americans need to understand the full cost and consequences of military actions undertaken in their names.

These are not idle concerns. The pace of attacks and civilian casualties seems to be rising, and with them the potential for alienating the very people America hopes to save. The anti-ISIS fight has quickened and moved into crowded cities, but the president has also given field commanders more authority to make battlefield decisions in an ill-defined hunt for terrorists.

Civilian deaths impose another penalty. They become a recruiting tool for terrorists and undermine counterterrorism operations. It's up to Congress to ensure true accountability and transparency, if the administration does not, by holding hearings and demanding answers.

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7) The Horses on Standing Rock Get a Checkup

Traveling veterinarians, their patients and tradition.

By VICTOR J. BLUE NOV. 23, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/sunday/the-horses-on-standing-rock-get-a-checkup.html?action=

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Kallen Harrison with his mare, Oreo. Behind them are volunteers from the Rural Veterinary Experience Teaching and Service program, which provides free and low-cost care to horses in areas with few veterinarians. Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

FORT YATES, N.D. — Arlene Grey Bear took Lucky and Rue and Kennedy to the rodeo grounds in Fort Yates, N.D., on the Standing Rock Reservation — Lucky and Rue, her ponies, for a checkup, Kennedy, her 16-year-old granddaughter, to help. And to learn.

Kennedy started riding a few years ago, Ms. Grey Bear said, and then her friends wanted to as well. So her grandmother made sure they had horses to ride. She said it keeps them out of trouble. They're not running around or doing things they shouldn't, she said, because "they're always on a horse."

From left: Eric Davis, Arlene Grey Bear and her granddaughter Kennedy at the clinic.Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Ms. Grey Bear is a Lakota teacher at an elementary school nearby, important work because, she said, if "a lot of our kids don't know our language, it gets lost." That concern about heritage, and what might get lost, extends to teaching the children about horses.

"In our culture horses are well respected," Ms. Grey Bear said. "We're supposed to take care of our horses the right way. We teach our kids: You take care of your horse first. Take their saddles off, brush them off, give them water, give them feed. Then you can take care of yourself. The horse's needs before yours."

But how do you take care of the horses if there isn't a vet nearby?

There are no full-time veterinarians on the Standing Rock Reservation, let alone specialists in equine health.

Enter Dr. Eric Davis, a veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, and the director of Rural Veterinary Experience Teaching and Service, a program that has since 2011 sent veterinary students to clinics at farms, rodeo grounds and homes to provide free or reduced-cost care for horses.

"We seek out places where other people don't go," Dr. Davis said. "I think that you have the opportunity to do the most good if you go to a place that has the least resources."

As Jamie Murphy, who keeps rescue ponies on her place in Porcupine, N.D., said, "We're kind of out here in the middle of nowhere."

The care the volunteer vets provide is essential: treating wounds, fixing teeth and trimming hooves — key to keeping the horses healthy on the Plains. Dr. Davis and his students also geld stallions, which can become uncontrollable without the procedure. For the students, Dr. Davis said, it is " 'hands on, get blood on your gloves' training."

The goal is bigger than just providing care, though. Dr. Davis wants young people in Standing Rock to get involved and perhaps even see veterinary medicine as a career. "I would love it if I can help get students, reservation youth, more interested in doing things with horses," he said. But he added that doing that when "you are the old white guy on the reservation," can be difficult: "I don't know what to say or what to do or how to act. And I'd be faking it if I tried to, and I can't fake stuff." He hopes that will change next year, as the first Lakota recruit will join the program from the Cheyenne River Reservation.

He also wants his students, many of them from urban areas, to see what rural practice is like.

On a Friday evening after a day of work earlier this year, the students headed to a powwow at Porcupine, on the Standing Rock Reservation. They bought fry bread and tacos and sat in the stands, taking in the traditional Lakota dances. "We have very few students that come from a background of farming, where people have to work and struggle," Dr. Davis said.

One vet student asked a dancer for a photo of a "No DAPL" beaded outfit, a reference to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Another, also a musician, was mesmerized by the drumming.

"I can give students the chance to look," Dr. Davis said. "Whether they see or not is kind of up to them."

Victor J. Blue is a photographer based in Brooklyn.

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8) Does Race Matter in America's Most Diverse ZIP Codes?
By JOHN ELIGON NOV. 24, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/24/us/does-race-matter-in-americas-most-diverse-zip-codes.html?hp&action=
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Darryl Johnson, center, and his wife, Marissa Johnson, with their daughter Sienna at their restaurant in Vallejo, Calif. The city is one of the most racially balanced in the United States.Jim Wilson/The New York Times

VALLEJO, Calif. — Beyond the burgers and fries coming from the kitchen and the oldies blaring from the radio, the scene playing out daily at the Original Red Onion might appear unfamiliar to much of the country.

The restaurant's married owners — Marissa Johnson, a Filipino-American, and Darryl Johnson, an African-American — work alongside Jahira Fragozo, who is of Miskito and Yaqui Indian descent. Ms. Johnson bonds with a customer, Hillory Robinson, who is black, over the challenges of motivating their children in the winter. "They need something to do," Ms. Robinson says.

Ms. Johnson gushes a short time later when a regular, Dylan Habegger, who is white, decides to tackle the restaurant's new, spicy creation with a name that describes its effect. "Uh oh," Ms. Johnson tells him, "you're trying the Burner today."

The Original Red Onion sits in one of the country's most racially diverse ZIP codes: 94591, in Vallejo, Calif. About 30 miles north of Oakland, it is the rare place in the United States where black, white, Asian and Hispanic people not only coexist in nearly equal numbers, but actually connect.

At a time when race often still defines where people live and attend school, and the battles between alt-right and Antifa, nativist and immigrant, continue to rage, this Bay Area suburb of 120,000 can seem like a respite from the divided nation. Pick any two people out of this ZIP code, and there is a 76 percent chance they are a different race or ethnicity — and odds are they'll be comfortable talking to each other.

"The gift about being in close proximity is that you're desensitized to seeing a different culture and judging it right away," said Lena Yee-Ross, a 17-year-old high school senior whose mother is Chinese-American and father is black.

Lena Yee-Ross, center, with her classmates Arabella Compton, left, and Christian Bustos at Jesse Bethel High School in Vallejo. Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Living next to one another for generations, since a major naval yard drew large numbers to the town with the promise of jobs, has mitigated much of the tension found in more segregated communities. People of all stripes sing arm in arm during Thursday night karaoke at Gentleman Jim's bar, where on a recent evening a white man with a cowboy hat sat next to a Filipino man in a biker vest, and the songs ranged from Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" to the Fugees' "Killing Me Softly."

Students of different races study side by side at one local high school, and their shades of skin color span such a spectrum that it is difficult to tell what races or ethnicities they are when they congregate for lunch.

Still, Vallejo (pronounced va-LAY-oh) is no promised land.

Stubborn racial divisions remain. The typical black family has a household income that is three-fourths of the city's median. Nearly three out of every four members of the Police Department are white, and all of the City Council members are either Filipino or white.

Academic performance is improving in schools, but achievement gaps remain: Of the 11th graders at Jesse Bethel High School, which is in the 94591 ZIP code, 42 percent of black students and 51 percent of Hispanic ones tested proficient in English this year, compared with 63 percent of white students and 77 percent of Filipino ones.

Spencer Lane, a 17-year-old white senior at a high school where whites are in the minority, said classmates had told him that he looked as if he could shoot up a school. Ms. Yee-Ross said her mother once heard a news account of a robbery and insisted that the perpetrator had to be black. And the Johnsons have battled racial tension in their family and their business.

A white customer who had been a regular at the restaurant once asked the woman taking his order to make sure that a young black employee did not cook his food, Ms. Johnson said. When she heard commotion at the front of the restaurant, she said, she confronted the customer, who told her: "How can you have people like that working here? His pants are sagging."

The Johnsons met in Vallejo in 2003, introduced by mutual friends. He liked her toothy smile, she liked his respect, but each harbored racial stereotypes.

Mr. Johnson, 33, assumed that she would be a devoted homemaker who would cook and clean for him. Ms. Johnson, 31, said she was impressed that he did not wear baggy pants and that "he doesn't talk ghetto."

As diverse as Vallejo is, Ms. Johnson said she grew up hanging out mostly with Filipinos, a clustering that many local residents of different races said is natural. Immigrants from Mexico or the Philippines may want the company of people who can help them navigate a new country.

But within these groups, stereotypes can fester.

When Mr. Johnson's mother, Tanja Mayo-Pittman, found out he was dating Ms. Johnson, she thought of the time she worked at Home Depot. She was the only non-Filipino on her team, and felt ostracized in part because her co-workers spoke Tagalog and joked with one another, leaving her to wonder if they were teasing her.

"Until I met them, I couldn't imagine that they just had open arms toward my child," she said of her son's future in-laws.

But those fears and barriers have dropped. "I stopped feeling judged or left out," she said. "I stopped seeing them as Filipino. I started just seeing them as people."

Ms. Mayo-Pittman, 52, also had to contend with her own formative years in nearby Pinole, when, as a fair-skinned woman, she had trouble fitting in — not black enough for the black people, or white enough to be white.

"To be honest with you, I never wanted my kids to be light-complected because I didn't want them to have an identity crisis," she said.

The Johnsons have four daughters together, from age 3 to 11, each with tawny brown skin.

As the girls lounged on the carpet of Ms. Johnson's grandparents' ranch-style home one evening, after a dinner of lumpia and white rice, Ms. Johnson joked about some of the questions that had come from her husband's side of the family: Do you work at a nail salon? How do you speak such good English?

Ms. Johnson's father, Al Remorin, 51, grew up in nearby Richmond, where most of his friends were black. He moved to Vallejo in 1979, when he was 13. That's when he came to know a lot of other Filipinos. He was surprised, he said, to hear some of their racism. People asked him why he talked as if he were black.

Mr. Remorin quickly bonded with Mr. Johnson, often discussing sports. So Ms. Johnson said she was caught off guard by her father's reaction when she became pregnant.

"How can you?" Ms. Johnson said her father asked. As in: How could she think it was O.K. to have biracial children?

Mr. Remorin said he did not recall saying that. He never had an issue with his daughter having biracial children, he said. Back in his day, he rarely saw "half-Filipinos and half-blacks, or half-this and half-that," he said. "It's hard enough as it is being nonwhite, and you imagine when they're half-this and half-that."

Things are different today. In the Vallejo-Fairfield metropolitan area, 22 percent of marriages from 2011 to 2015 were interracial, more than double the national rate in the same period, according to a Pew Research survey.

Even in 2001, The New York Times was reporting that Vallejo was one of the most racially balanced cities in the country. Then, as now, racial and ethnic groups often stuck with their own.

Back then, there were also concerns about the racial makeup of the police, with no African-Americans above the rank of sergeant. Today, the longest-serving member in the history of the department is black and currently a lieutenant, but there are no other African-Americans above the rank of sergeant.

"There is not really the interaction in the way we would like," Liat Meitzenheimer, who is black and Japanese, said in 2001. "Kids in the neighborhoods play with each other, but by and large, people stay to themselves."

A decade and a half later, Ms. Meitzenheimer still lives in Vallejo and she says those divisions still exist.

"For somebody who has lived here for 32 years now, it really hasn't changed," she said in a recent interview. "There are people actively trying to find ways to bring people together so that we participate from different communities together on single issues, whether it be sports or some artistic endeavor."

Vallejo is even more racially balanced now, with the white population dropping and other racial and ethnic groups growing. Hispanic and white residents each make up about 25 percent of the population. A little more than 23 percent of the city is Asian and nearly 21 percent black.

The 94591 ZIP code — where the Johnsons live, own their business and send their children to school — is a sprawling swath of the city known as East Vallejo. Among ZIP codes with at least 50,000 residents, it is the third most diverse in the country, according to a Times analysis of census data.

Vallejo's diversity stems from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, which for nearly a century and a half attracted families with the promise of stable jobs. The yard closed in 1996, and with it went much of this town's fortunes; the city declared bankruptcy in 2008. It remains a largely working-class bedroom community, though some fear that the relatively affordable housing could lure more affluent Bay Area residents, displacing low-income residents.

Past restrictions that kept people of color confined to certain neighborhoods have largely fallen, but glaring disparities endure. Black households rank lowest in median income, at $42,000. Residents have complained of brutality by the police force against black and brown people, and the seven-member City Council currently does not have a black or Hispanic member.

"I think that's part of that racial divide, where Filipinos want to have Filipino leadership or African-Americans want to have an African-American leader or whites want to have a white leader, so they specifically target an individual for election," said Bob Sampayan, who was elected the city's first Filipino-American mayor last year.

But Mr. Sampayan and other local residents see promising signs of integration, like the diverse neighborhood watch patrols that sprang up after cuts to the Police Department and the diverse group involved in the city's participatory budgeting process.

The Vallejo Chamber of Commerce, once a mostly white organization, now has its first Latina chairwoman, and nearly half of its board members are people of color. Different ethnic chambers of commerce — Filipino, Hispanic and African-American — work more closely with the city chamber under a group called the Vallejo Business Alliance.

Then there are the day-to-day interactions that blur conventions of race and culture.

Christopher Morales, 17, said his black friends were not offended when he, a Mexican-American, used an anti-black slur because their relationships transcended race. It is an attitude, he conceded, that puts Vallejo in something of a diversity bubble.

"It doesn't really offend us," he said, "until someone from, like, an outside town comes over here."

Robert Gebeloff contributed reporting from New York. Susan Beachy contributed research from New York.

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9) The Biggest Tax Scam in History
By Paul Krugman, November 27, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/opinion/senate-tax-bill-scam.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

A Senate Finance Committee meeting room. The group is working on tax legislation that could prove costly to the middle class and future generations. Eric Thayer for The New York Times

Donald Trump likes to declare that every good thing that happens while he’s in office — job growth, rising stock prices, whatever — is the biggest, greatest, best ever. Then the fact-checkers weigh in and quickly determine that the claim is false.

But what’s happening in the Senate right now really does deserve Trumpian superlatives. The bill Republican leaders are trying to ram through this week without hearings, without time for even a basic analysis of its likely economic impact, is the biggest tax scam in history. It’s such a big scam that it’s not even clear who’s being scammed — middle-class taxpayers, people who care about budget deficits, or both.

One thing is clear, however: One way or another, the bill would hurt most Americans. The only big winners would be the wealthy — especially those who mainly collect income from their assets rather than working for a living — plus tax lawyers and accountants who would have a field day exploiting the many loopholes the legislation creates.

The core of the bill is a huge redistribution of income from lower- and middle-income families to corporations and business owners. Corporate tax rates go down sharply, while ordinary families are nickel-and-dimed by a series of tax changes, no one of which is that big a deal in itself, but which add up to significant tax increases on almost two-thirds of middle-class taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the bill would partially repeal Obamacare, in a way that would sharply reduce aid to lower-income families and raise the cost of insurance for many in the middle class.

You might wonder how such a thing could possibly pass the Senate. But that’s where the scamming comes in.

While the underlying structure of the bill involves raising taxes on the middle class, the bill also includes a number of temporary tax breaks that would, at first, offset these tax increases. As a result, in the first few years most middle-class families would see modest tax cuts.

But the operative word here is “temporary.” All of these tax breaks either dwindle over time or are scheduled to expire at some point; by 2027 the bill is, as I said, a tax increase on the middle class used to pay for tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy.

Why would anyone write a bill full of provisions that evaporate over time? There’s no economic or policy logic behind it. Instead, it’s all about trying to have it both ways, making a safe space for political double talk.

Here’s how it works: If you point out that the bill hugely favors the wealthy at the expense of ordinary families, Republicans will point to the next few years, when the class-war nature of the plan is obscured by those temporary tax breaks — and claim that whatever the language of the law says, those tax breaks will actually be made permanent by later Congresses.

But if you point out that the bill is fiscally irresponsible, they’ll say that it “only” raises the deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade and doesn’t raise deficits at all after that — because, you see, those tax breaks will expire by 2027, so the tax hikes will raise a lot of revenue. By the way, the claim that middle-class taxes will rise is crucial to passing the bill: Only bills that don’t raise deficits after 10 years can bypass the filibuster and be enacted by a simple Senate majority.

The point, of course, is that these claims can’t both be true. Either this bill is a big tax hike on the middle class, or it’s a huge budget-buster. Which is it? Nobody really knows; probably even the people who wrote this monstrosity don’t know. But someone is being scammed, bigly.

Oh, and ignore claims that tax cuts for corporations would jump-start the economy and pay for themselves. Of the 42 ideologically diverse economists surveyed by the University of Chicago on the impact of Republican tax plans, only one agreed that they would lead to substantial economic growth, while none disagreed with the proposition that they would substantially increase U.S. debt.

So it’s a giant scam. And while the exact nature of the scam may be unclear, ordinary American families would end up being the victims either way.

For suppose those temporary tax breaks did end up becoming permanent, so that the budget deficit soared on a long-term basis. Then what? You know the answer: Republicans would suddenly revert to the pretense that they’re deficit hawks, and demand “entitlement reform” — that is, cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, programs that ordinary families depend on. In fact, they’re already talking about those cuts — they’ve started the switch even before getting the suckers to take the bait.

So will they manage to pull off this giant con job? The reason they’re rushing this to the Senate floor without a single hearing, without a full assessment from Congress’s own official scorekeepers, is their hope that they can pass the thing before people figure out what they’re up to.

And the question is whether there are enough Republican senators with principles, who believe that policies should not be sold with lies, to stop this bum’s rush.

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10) What Congressmen Are Hiding
By THE EDITORIAL BOARDNOV. 27, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/opinion/congressmen-sexual-harassment-taxpayers.html?action=
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As charges of sexual harassment and assault swept from Hollywood to Washington, Congress has faced questions about how it addresses such claims. The answer: terribly.

For two decades, taxpayers have been underwriting secret payments to people who accuse lawmakers of sexual misconduct under a 1995 law called, paradoxically, the Congressional Accountability Act. The legislation applied to Congress many laws on workplace safety, employment and civil rights from which it had been exempt. In the process, it established an account to pay settlements, which prevented lawmakers from being personally liable, and created an Office of Compliance that kept charges and payments secret.

After public pressure, the Office of Compliance released a tally of the settlements this month: Between 1997 and the present, the office has paid more than $17 million on more than 260 claims. In keeping with Congress’s maddening lack of transparency, the tally lumps harassment with discrimination and other claims, so the number of harassment claims isn’t clear. It also doesn’t name any of those accused.

On Sunday, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan stepped away from his post as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee as the House Ethics Committee investigates reports that Mr. Conyers, the longest-serving House member, in 2015 settled a wrongful dismissal complaint with a woman who said she was fired because she would not “succumb to [his] sexual advances.” (Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, faces a likely Senate Ethics Committee investigation after a woman said he forcibly kissed and groped her in 2006, before he was in politics.)

Congressional sexual misconduct is likely far more prevalent than the settlement figures suggest, because Congress lacks safeguards common in large institutions. Lawmakers get no mandatory training in appropriate behavior toward their staff. Employees, many young and female, say they get little to no guidance on where to report predatory behavior. Victims who do find their way to the Compliance Office are required to undergo counseling, mediation and a 30-day “cooling off period” before filing a formal complaint.

Early this month the Senate adopted a bipartisan resolution requiring its members and staff to participate in anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training; in coming days the House is expected to follow suit. But the heavier lift is overhauling how harassment complaints are handled. In the House, Representative Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, and Representative Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican, are leading a bipartisan push for legislation that prohibits nondisclosure agreements as a condition of initiating a complaint, makes mediation and counseling optional before a victim can file a complaint and requires lawmakers who settle discrimination cases to repay the Treasury. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, is championing similar legislation in the Senate. But lawmakers are divided on the question of whether to unmask lawmakers and settlements from before this year. Some legislators, including the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, have said that revealing details from those cases could jeopardize the anonymity of victims. If Congress is serious about change, it should pass legislation that grants victims, not legislators, the choice.

It’s sobering to recall that the 1995 law was passed three years after another congressional scandal, in which House members of both parties were censured and prosecuted for abusing accounts with the House bank, in some cases writing checks for tens of thousands of dollars they didn’t have. The same environment of entitlement, secrecy and lax rules led to the current situation. Both parties have controlled the House and Senate in the years since the Congressional Accountability Act was passed, and neither has pushed to better protect the thousands of staffers who do the bulk of the work on Capitol Hill. Righting this wrong would seem obvious for Democrats, who led the condemnation of President Trump for his videotaped boasts of sexual assault. So it was not encouraging to hear Ms. Pelosi on Sunday, delivering a weak, he-said she-said defense of Mr. Conyers.

Decades of hushed-up complaints show sexual misconduct is as terrible an open secret in Congress as in Hollywood. Legislators have a chance to correct their poor handling of a national problem. They should seize it.

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11) He Raised Drug Prices at Eli Lilly. Can He Lower Them for the U.S.?
By ROBERT PEARNOV. 26, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/us/politics/alex-azar-senate-confirmation-hearing-hhs.html?hp&action=
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Alex M. Azar II in 2006, when he was deputy health and human services secretary under President George W. Bush. He will begin confirmation hearings this week to head the department under President Trump. Evan Vucci/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Alex M. Azar II, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has expressed concern about the soaring cost of prescription drugs for many consumers. This week, Mr. Azar, a former pharmaceutical executive, is expected to face tough questions at a Senate confirmation hearing over why his own company raised prices.

Democratic senators say that, as a top manager at Eli Lilly and Company, he was responsible for steep increases on insulin and other drugs. How he would now tackle that problem as secretary, along with the future of the Affordable Care Act, promises to dominate the hearings.

Even Democrats who are unlikely to vote for Mr. Azar say that he will probably be confirmed, and that he would be more pragmatic and less ideological than the man he would succeed, Tom Price, who resigned in September under criticism for his use of private jets and military flights.

And Mr. Azar has struck a conciliatory tone as the public outcry over pharmaceutical prices has grown.

“Let’s start by saying, ‘We have a problem,’” he said at a pharmaceutical industry conference in May.

Mr. Azar, 50, would bring an unusual combination of experience in government and industry to the job of running a cabinet department that spends more than a trillion dollars a year providing health insurance to more than 130 million Americans.

His résumé is studded with conservative credentials. He was active in the Federalist Society and was a Supreme Court law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, whom he describes as “one of the 10 greatest figures in the history of Anglo-American law.” He spent two years working for Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton. He worked on the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 and provided legal support for vote recount efforts in Florida.

Mr. Azar, who describes himself as a policy wonk, joined the administration of President George W. Bush as general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services in 2001 and became deputy secretary four years later.

He helped devise the legal rationale for a complicated compromise on the emotional issue of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. And he helped carry out a 2003 law that added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, one of the most significant changes in the history of the program.

Work on Medicare was a formative experience for Mr. Azar, and he cites the drug benefit — delivered entirely by private companies under contract with the government — as a model. The cost to Medicare beneficiaries and to taxpayers has been substantially less than originally projected.

Mr. Azar (rhymes with “pay czar”) joined Lilly in 2007 and worked there for nearly 10 years before he left the Indianapolis-based company in January of this year.

Lilly’s portfolio includes Cialis, for men with erectile dysfunction; Forteo, for osteoporosis; and Zyprexa, for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. But its best sellers are insulin and other products for the treatment of diabetes.

Patients and members of Congress criticized increases in list prices for insulin while Mr. Azar was the president of Lilly USA, the company’s largest affiliate, which is responsible for more than 40 percent of its global revenue.

“The price of insulin has tripled in the last decade,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “If you want to bring down drug prices, you don’t put a former pharmaceutical company executive in charge of health care policy for our country.”

Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that he wants to lower drug prices, but Democrats say his words have not been matched by action.

The Senate health committee will investigate Mr. Azar’s record at a hearing on Wednesday. The panel includes liberal critics of the drug industry like Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

“We need an H.H.S. secretary who is willing to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and lower prescription drug prices, not one who has financially benefited from this greed,” Mr. Sanders said.

The Senate Finance Committee plans to hold a separate confirmation hearing soon.

In a letter to the health committee, the Type 1 Diabetes Defense Foundation, a nonprofit group, said that Mr. Azar had condoned Lilly’s “overpricing of insulin” and that some patients had suffered as a result. In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the past seven months, Lilly said it had received demands for information about the pricing of its insulin products from offices of the attorneys general in California, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico and Washington State.

Drug companies have long said high prices are not a concern because they provide big discounts and rebates on many products. But in the last year, as public outcry has grown, Mr. Azar has acknowledged a problem.

“This is not something to put our head in the sand about,” he told the industry conference in May. “Patients are having to pay too much for drugs.” In particular, he said, “patients are paying out of pocket too much money.”

“What happened?” he asked. “Was there in the last three years a radical change in the pricing of drugs — either how launch prices occur or how drug price increases happen? No. In the last five to seven years, the pricing model really has not changed one bit.”

“So why did things erupt?” he asked. “They erupted because we have seen a complete and fundamental restructuring of health insurance in the United States over the last three to five years. More of us now have high-deductible plans. More of us now have high cost-sharing.”

As a result, he said, “when the patient goes into the pharmacy, they’re getting the sticker, they’re getting the list price.”

At a symposium at the Manhattan Institute last November, Mr. Azar said, “We’re on the cusp of a golden age of pharmaceutical breakthroughs.” But he added, “Our outdated system for paying for prescription drugs is threatening to squelch patient access to this recent and revolutionary burst of innovation by shifting a crushing burden directly onto individuals.”

Even as drug companies increase list prices, they have been giving larger discounts and rebates to health insurance companies and the middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers, who work for insurers and employers. But consumers who are uninsured or who have high-deductible health plans often must pay the full list price, or close to it.

“No patient was ever supposed to pay those list prices, but in recent years a growing number have been forced to do exactly that,” Mr. Azar said, adding, “That practice exposes patients to huge amounts of cost-sharing when they walk into the pharmacy.”

And that, he said, is bad for patients because they are much less likely to fill prescriptions if their out-of-pocket cost is more than $50 or $100.

He said the current, convoluted system of paying for drugs had perverse incentives.

“All players — wholesalers like McKesson and Cardinal, pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens, pharmacy benefit managers like Express Scripts and CVS Caremark, and drug companies — make more money when list prices increase,” Mr. Azar said, adding, “The unfortunate victims of these trends are patients.”

Mr. Azar echoes Mr. Trump’s criticism of the Affordable Care Act. He maintains that the expansion of Medicaid under the law has not been successful. He speaks favorably of proposals to give each state a lump sum of federal money in the form of a block grant to provide health care to low-income people.

And he said he wanted to “get H.H.S. out of the business of being the nation’s insurance commissioner.”

Asked on the Fox Business Network in May if the health law was dead, he said, “It’s certainly circling the drain.”

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12) Vera Shlakman, Professor Fired During Red Scare, Dies at 108
By SAM ROBERTSNOV. 27, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/obituaries/vera-shlakman-professor-fired-during-red-scare-dies-at-108.html?rref=
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Vera Shlakman speaking with New York City Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin, left, in April 1982 after she and others received restitution from the city for being fired from college teaching positions because they had refused to testify in the 1950s about whether they were members of the Communist Party. With her, from right, were fellow recipients Oscar Shaftel, Dudley Straus and Bernard F. Riess.Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

Vera Shlakman, an influential economics professor who was fired by Queens College after she refused to tell Senate investigators whether she had ever been a card-carrying Communist — a punishment that brought an apology three decades later — died on Nov. 5 at her home in Manhattan. She was 108.

Her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by her friend Ellen J. Holahan.

Dr. Shlakman was the last survivor among more than a dozen teachers at New York City’s public colleges who were ousted by the Board of Higher Education during the early stages of the Red Scare wrought by Senators Pat McCarra n and Joseph R. McCarthy.

A 42-year-old assistant professor when she was fired in 1952, Dr. Shlakman neither taught economics again nor wrote a sequel to her groundbreaking 1935 book on female factory workers.

Thirty years later, 10 of the fired professors, including Dr. Shlakman, were indemnified with pension settlements after receiving an apology from college officials.

“They were dismissed during and in the spirit of the shameful era of McCarthyism, during which the freedoms traditionally associated with academic institutions were quashed,” the trustees of the City University of New York declared in a resolution adopted unanimously in 1980. The trustees had succeeded the Board of Higher Education.

No one doubted Dr. Shlakman’s political leanings.

She had been named for the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich. Emma Goldman, the anarchist, was a regular guest in her family’s home. Dr. Shlakman was vice president of the college division of a Teachers Union local that was rebuked for being dominated by Communists.

But when she was summoned before a public hearing of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, led by Senator McCarran, a Nevada Democrat, Dr. Shlakman invoked her constitutional guarantees of free speech and privilege against self-incrimination when asked about her membership in the Communist Party.

“Do you believe that a member of the Communist Party can be a college teacher?” Robert J. Morris, the subcommittee counsel, asked Dr. Shlakman at the hearing, held on Sept. 24, 1952, at the United States Court House in Foley Square in Manhattan.

She replied, “I think that any teacher must be judged on the basis of his performance in the classrooms; that if a teacher follows professional standards in the classroom, and is a scholar, he is entitled to teach as any citizen.”

As an economist, Dr. Shlakman seemed to suggest that “communism” had become an overwrought term. She cited one example of what, by her reckoning, had once been branded radical but became an accepted staple of American life while leaving democratic institutions intact.

“When the United States Post Office began to carry packages,” she said, “this activity was viewed as a challenge to private enterprise’’ and “a kind of socialistic or communistic activity.”

Pressed about whether being a Communist would close a teacher’s mind to any deviation from the party line, she replied that similar speculations had been raised against devout Roman Catholics.

“We don’t condemn people now — at least I assume we don’t — on the basis of guilt by association,” she said.

As far as the committee and college administrators were concerned, though, by refusing to respond to the question about party membership, Dr. Shlakman became a “Fifth Amendment Communist.”

She was fired from her professorship 12 days after the hearing under two New York regulations. One, authorized by the State Legislature in 1949, barred the school system from employing anyone who belonged to what was deemed a subversive organization.

The other, a provision of the city charter enacted to thwart corruption, provided that a city employee’s refusal to testify about his or her official conduct, because doing so might be self-incriminating, was grounds for dismissal.

Both provisions would be declared unconstitutional in the late 1960s. But they were enforced in Dr. Shlakman’s case, and as she told her fellow professors after she testified, her firing had left the academic community with a choice.

“It must either grovel and accept the standards of orthodoxy prescribed by the McCarrans and the McCarthys, and those who have capitulated to them,” she wrote, “or it must resist.”

She recalled that educators had resisted earlier congressional inquiries into reading requirements for college courses. “Is the dismissal of teachers,” she asked, “easier to accept than the burning of books?”

But profiles in courage were few and far between during the McCarthy era.

The British economist Mark Blaug, a former student of Dr. Shlakman’s, wrote in an essay in 2000 that she had been “scrupulously impartial and leaned over backward not to indoctrinate her students” — which was why, he added, as a college tutor he had endorsed a student petition demanding her reinstatement.

Less than 24 hours later, he said, the Queens College president ordered him to resign or be dismissed.

“For a day or two, I contemplated a magnificent protest,” wrote Professor Blaug, who died in 2011, “a statement that would ring down the ages as a clarion bell to individual freedom, that would be read and cited for years to come by American high school students — and then I quietly sent in my letter of resignation.”

After leaving Queens, Dr. Shlakman was unemployed for a year.

She then worked as a secretary and a bookkeeper and taught intermittently. She was placed on an F.B.I. watch list because she was, as an F.B.I. file put it, “reportedly” a member of the Communist Party from 1944 to 1946 and had invoked the Fifth Amendment before the subcommittee, according to Marjorie Heins’s “Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge” (2013).

In 1960, Dr. Shlakman finally started teaching again at Adelphi University, a private institution on Long Island, in its School of Social Work. In 1966 she was hired by the Columbia University School of Social Work, where she taught full time until she retired as professor emerita in 1978.

Dr. Shlakman was born on July 15, 1909, in Montreal, to Louis Shlakman, a tailor and shirtwaist factory foreman, and the former Lena Hendler, both Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. (Her sister, Eleanora, was named for Karl Marx’s youngest daughter; her brother, Victor, for Victor Hugo.)

Dr. Shlakman never married and leaves no immediate survivors. In her last years, when she was homebound and blind, she was looked after by several friends, including Judith Podore Ward and her husband, Bernard Tuchman, and Ms. Holahan. They said they never asked, nor did Dr. Shlakman reveal, whether she had ever been a member of the Communist Party.

Dr. Shlakman earned a bachelor’s degree in 1930 from McGill University in Montreal, and went on to receive a master’s in economics there. She earned her doctorate in economics at Columbia.

Queens College hired her as an instructor in 1938, shortly after it was established. She taught courses there in labor, Social Security and the concentration of wealth.

Dr. Shlakman’s doctoral dissertation, an analysis of female factory workers in 19th-century Chicopee, Mass., was the basis for her book, “Economic History of a Factory Town” (1935).

Joshua B. Freeman, a distinguished professor of labor history at Queens College and the City University Graduate Center, said by email that her book had “extended the boundaries of American working-class history” and influenced a generation of historians.

Alice Kessler-Harris, a Columbia history professor emerita, wrote in the journal International Labor and Working-Class History in 2006, “Shlakman raised the question of how a transformation in the meaning of work for female workers could, and perhaps did, alter the workplace environment and the nature of family life.”

Professor Kessler-Harris said in an email that at a time when the field was dominated “by Jeffersonian myths about the harmonious interaction of labor and capital,” Dr. Shlakman’s study of Chicopee confirmed that capital and labor were at odds with each other in fundamental ways, and that labor protests were a check on the excesses of the marketplace.

Dr. Shlakman’s firing from Queens banished her to academic obscurity. Professor Kessler-Harris said that her copy of “Economic History,” borrowed from Columbia’s library in 1951, was not taken out again until 1966. (The book was, however, reissued in 1969.)

After City University offered its apology in 1980, Dr. Shlakman and another fired colleague, Oscar Shaftel, appealed to City Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin to resolve a dispute with the state over pensions or death benefits for former professors who had been dismissed during the Red Scare.

In April 1982, the city announced a $935,098 settlement with seven living former professors and the estates of three who had died. Dr. Shlakman received $114,599 — the equivalent of almost $300,000 in 2017 money.

“Do you feel you have gained your honor back with this?” Dr. Shaftel was asked at a ceremony where he was joined by Dr. Shlakman and two other former colleagues.

“I never lost my honor,” he replied.

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13) Being Deported From Home for the Holidays
By DAVID GONZALEZ NOV. 26, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/nyregion/being-deported-from-home-for-the-holidays.html?rref=
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stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=sectionfront

Liany Guerrero, center, with her twin daughters, Liany Villacis, left, and Maria Villacis, on the porch of their home in Queens. David Gonzalez/The New York Times

Liany and Maria Villacis grew up in a family that did everything together. Each summer, even when money was tight, their parents made sure to take a week’s vacation, no matter how modest. Last summer, when Liany, 22, was in a finance training program in Chicago, her parents and twin sister took their family vacation in the Windy City.

Their closeness was a result of circumstance as much as blood: The twins were born in Pasto, Colombia, where their mother, Liany Guerrero, hailed from a politically active family. But when they started receiving death threats from rebel groups — along with unsettling snapshots of the girls at play — they sought political asylum in 2001 in New York with their father, Juan Villacis, whose mother lived in the Woodhaven section of Queens.

They paid their taxes and stayed out of trouble. The twins prospered and did well in school and college. And every year, when the parents went to see the authorities at Immigration and Customs Enforcement to renew their stay of removal, they went as a family.

After this year’s meeting, they came home one short.

On Nov. 15, Juan was detained and sent to the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey to await deportation to his native Ecuador in the coming weeks. His wife was allowed to go home, but under supervision and with orders to return this week to prove she has purchased a one-way ticket back to Colombia for mid-January. Their lawyer, Jillian Hopman, was stunned by what she saw as a heartless bureaucracy going after low-hanging fruit rather than the “bad hombres” of legend.

“For a family that does everything together, this is heartbreaking,” Ms. Hopman said. “Juan’s mother’s health has seriously deteriorated, and he is the one who cares for her. His wife has all kinds of medical problems, including complex cysts in her breasts. ICE did not care about any of this. Juan could have won the Nobel Prize and taken a bullet for Mike Pence. All he has become is a statistic.”

Adding to the sting, immigration officers refused to let the twins or his wife give him a final hug goodbye, Ms. Hopman said.

“They told us they no longer provide that courtesy,” she said, “because they don’t like emotional scenes.”

Rachael Yong Yow, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, did not respond to questions submitted last week by email.

Liany Guerrero and Juan Villacis met in Quito, Ecuador, Juan’s hometown, where both were studying physical therapy. They have been married 29 years. In Pasto, Liany had served as a first lady of sorts when her older brother was mayor. The family had been politically active and had been targets of rebel groups. One relative had been kidnapped. It was an obvious — if difficult — decision to seek asylum in New York when the threats against the family stepped up in the late 1990s.

Maria said her family arrived with valid visas in 2001 and immediately sought political asylum. However, she said, their lawyer at the time stressed the family’s social class — rather than political affiliation — as the reason they were targeted by rebels. Although their application was denied, they obtained stays of removal every year. Ms. Hopman took their case in 2010.

The twins did not expect things to go awry this year: Their father’s mother, a United States citizen who is confined to bed and in poor health, has applied for him to become a legal resident, but there is nearly a five-year backlog of cases. Their mother’s health makes the situation critical, too, they thought.

Instead, their lawyer emerged with bad news.

Adding to the sting, immigration officers refused to let the twins or his wife give him a final hug goodbye, Ms. Hopman said.

“They told us they no longer provide that courtesy,” she said, “because they don’t like emotional scenes.”

Rachael Yong Yow, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, did not respond to questions submitted last week by email.

Instead, their lawyer emerged with bad news.

“My mom went completely pale and held onto her knees,” said Liany, who with her sister has protection for now under DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “She was just staring at the floor, saying there had to be a mistake.”

Friends of the family agree. Alberto Roig, a retired Manhattan prosecutor who also was assistant counsel to former Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of the New York Police Department, was dumbstruck by the prospect that the family he has known for years would be broken up.

“They’re not some schmoes,” he said. “The girls are incredible because the parents are incredible. They are contributing to our society. They follow the law. They’re legit. And what do we do, kick them out and slam the door? This is a tremendous injustice.”

Now is the time of year when Juan would have hauled out the Christmas decorations and strung up the lights around the porch of the family’s Dutch Colonial-style home just off the elevated train on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. Instead, it is dark. Inside, his electric drum kit and saxophone rest against a wall, silent. Just the sight of them moved his wife to tears the day she returned home without him.

“Our family life was broken abruptly,” she said. “It’s like half of my heart was cut out. We always made the effort to keep our family united. We did everything to educate our daughters. Juan is his mother’s only hope. We worked hard and paid taxes. What did we do wrong to deserve this?”

She has prided herself on never missing appointments and doing whatever the authorities asked. One request she has yet to fulfill is buying her ticket to Colombia.

“I know I have to get it,” she said. “But I have the hope that someone will notice our case and say no, this can’t happen. Hope is the last thing you lose.”

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14) Trump Once Said the ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape Was Real. Now He’s Not Sure.
By MAGGIE HABERMAN and JONATHAN MARTINNOV. 28, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/us/politics/trump-access-hollywood-tape.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=
Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Shortly after his victory last year, Donald J. Trump began revisiting one of his deepest public humiliations: the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape of him making vulgar comments about women.

Despite his public acknowledgment of the recording’s authenticity in the final days of the presidential campaign — and his hasty videotaped apology under pressure from his advisers — Mr. Trump as president-elect began raising the prospect with allies that it may not have been him on the tape after all.

Most of Mr. Trump’s aides ignored his changing story. But in January, shortly before his inauguration, Mr. Trump told a Republican senator that he wanted to investigate the recording that had him boasting about grabbing women’s genitals.

“We don’t think that was my voice,” Mr. Trump told the senator, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Since then, Mr. Trump has continued to suggest that the tape that nearly upended his campaign was not actually him, according to three people close to the president.

As the issue of sexual harassment has swept through the news media, politics and entertainment industries, Mr. Trump has persisted in denying allegations that he, too, made unwanted advances on multiple women in past years. In recent days, he has continued to seed doubt about his appearance on the “Access Hollywood” tape, stunning his advisers.

More generally, Mr. Trump’s views on the issue have changed depending upon the political party involved. He has praised women for coming forward after accusations were made against a Democrat, Senator Al Franken of Minnesota. But in the case of Roy S. Moore, a Republican candidate for Senate from Alabama, Mr. Trump has said he believes Mr. Moore’s denials that he behaved inappropriately with teenage girls, and he has effectively endorsed Mr. Moore’s candidacy.

Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the “Access Hollywood” tape are part of his lifelong habit of attempting to create and sell his own version of reality. Advisers say he continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact.

In recent months, they say, Mr. Trump has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He has also repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud, according to advisers and lawmakers.

One senator who listened as the president revived his doubts about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate chuckled on Tuesday as he recalled the conversation. The president, he said, has had a hard time letting go of his claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. The senator asked not to be named to discuss private conversations.

Mr. Trump’s journeys into the realm of manufactured facts have been frequent enough that his own staff has sought to nudge friendly lawmakers to ask questions of Mr. Trump in meetings that will steer him toward safer terrain.

To the president’s critics, his conspiracy-mongering goes to the heart of why he poses a threat to the country.

“It’s dangerous to democracy; you’ve got to have shared facts,” Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said in an interview on Tuesday. “And on so many of these, there’s empirical evidence that says no: You didn’t win the popular vote, there weren’t more people at your inauguration than ever, that was your voice on that tape, you admitted it before.”

Mr. Flake, who is not running for re-election, said in the interview that he was about to begin a series of speeches on the Senate floor outlining his concerns about Mr. Trump. The first, he said, will be dedicated to what Mr. Flake called the president’s disregard for the truth.

Many Republican lawmakers — not wanting to undermine the party’s fragile negotiations over a much-sought tax overhaul — declined to talk on the record about Mr. Trump’s pattern of plunging into what one senator called “his rabbit holes.” But the president’s success last year has also left some in his party in awe of his achievement and uneasy about angering his base of supporters.

“This guy got $2 billion of earned media in the primary, and he won an election that nobody thought he was going to win,” said Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, alluding to the monetary equivalent of what Mr. Trump garnered in news media coverage. “This is a guy who is doing things that are totally unprecedented.”

Mr. Perdue, who like the president is a former business executive, did not defend Mr. Trump’s untruths but said that other historical figures had their flaws, too.

“He’s nobody’s choir boy, but neither were people like Winston Churchill, for example,” said the senator. “This guy, I think, is a historic person of destiny at a time and place in America when we’ve got to make a right-hand turn here.” Asked if the truth still matters, Mr. Perdue said: “Oh, absolutely. Facts are what you base decisions on.”

But Mr. Trump seems to not want to fully accept those facts that are embarrassing or inconvenient.

In October 2016, when The Washington Post first emailed Mr. Trump’s aides about the dialogue from the “Access Hollywood” tape, Mr. Trump said the words described by the newspaper did not sound like things he would say, according to two people familiar with the discussions. However, when an aide played the audio after the newspaper posted it online, Mr. Trump, who had been preparing for his second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, did not deny it.

“It’s me,” he told people in the room as he listened. Yet after The New York Times published an article last weekend revealing that the president had questioned the authenticity of the recording, White House aides refused to answer questions about whether Mr. Trump still believes it was him on the tape.

The White House declined to comment for this article, pointing instead to comments that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, made on Monday.

“He’s made his position on that clear at that time, as have the American people in his support of him,” Ms. Sanders said at the White House daily news briefing. She did not offer any direct answers when pressed further about the matter.

Mr. Trump’s friends did not bother denying that the president was creating an alternative version of events. One Republican lawmaker, who asked not to be identified, said that Mr. Trump’s false statements had become familiar to people over time. The president continues to boast of winning districts that he did not in fact win, the lawmaker said, and of receiving 52 percent of the women’s vote, even though exit polls show that 42 percent of women supported him.

Mr. Trump has a long history of stretching facts, predating his presidency. He has claimed his signature building, Trump Tower in Manhattan, was several stories taller than it actually is. In his first book, “The Art of the Deal,” he conceded to employing what he called “truthful hyperbole.”

“I’m not a presidential historian, but I think many other presidents have written and shaped their own myths,” said Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media, who spent part of Thanksgiving weekend with Mr. Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

“Look at what happened with John Kennedy,” Mr. Ruddy added. “If you read Theodore White’s books on it, he was given a story line about Camelot. I don’t think President Trump has gone that far — he’s not describing this as Camelot.”

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15) Canada Offers $85 Million to Victims of Its ‘Gay Purge,’ as Trudeau Apologizes
By DAN LEVINNOV. 28, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/world/canada/canada-apology-gay-purge-compensation.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=
stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront

Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau making a formal apology to individuals harmed by the so-called “gay purge” in Canada. Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

The Canadian government will pay up to 110 million Canadian dollars, or $85 million, to compensate victims of the so-called “gay purge,” decades of government-authorized discrimination against gay Canadians.

The announcement on Tuesday followed a speech in the House of Commons in Ottawa by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who apologized to the victims. The government program, which lasted for more than 30 years and ended only in the 1990s, caused thousands to lose their jobs and sometimes face prosecution because of their sexual orientation. The policy affected Canadians in the military, the public service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The government also introduced legislation to expunge “unjust convictions” from the judicial records of people charged under laws that criminalized homosexuality.

In a speech to victims and their supporters who had gathered in the gallery of the House of Commons, Mr. Trudeau apologized for “Canada’s role in the systemic oppression, criminalization, and violence” against sexual minorities.

“It is with shame and sorrow and deep regret for the things we have done that I stand here today and say: We were wrong,” he said.

He added, “It is my hope that in talking about these injustices, vowing to never repeat them, and acting to right these wrongs, we can begin to heal.”

In the 1950s, a special unit of the Mounties began a broad campaign aimed at removing gay and lesbian members of the military and other government institutions who were seen as vulnerable to blackmail by the Soviet Union. There are no known cases of gay public employees passing information with any foreign power.

To identify targets, the authorities conducted surveillance, made threats and even developed a so-called “fruit machine” built in order to detect homosexuality. At one point, 9,000 people were under investigation by the unit, according to some estimates.

Although Canada partially decriminalized homosexual acts in 1969, the program continued until 1992, ruining tens of thousands of lives, as gay people endured shame and punishments ranging from the loss of security clearance and jobs to imprisonment for “gross indecency and physical abuse.”

In some cases, lawyers for the plaintiffs said, some gay women were raped by men who told them it would correct their sexual orientation.

Some of the victims are believed to have committed suicide after their careers were destroyed.

Mr. Trudeau’s apology and his government’s historic settlement, which gay-rights advocates hailed as unprecedented anywhere in the world, are the latest steps in a review begun last year by his Liberal government to address the devastating impact of the discriminatory program.

“It’s something we can be extremely proud of in Canada,” said R. Douglas Elliott, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “At a time when America is going backward and trying to reintroduce discrimination, we are moving forward and facing this historic injustice, making reparations to the victims and an unshakable commitment that this discrimination will never be repeated.”

The settlement, which totals 145 million Canadian dollars, will allow surviving victims who faced government retaliation between 1962 and 1996 to claim compensation, Mr. Elliott said. They will also be eligible for financial compensation ranging up to 150,000 Canadian dollars for those who experienced severe psychological and physical harm.

Because many victims have died, 15 million Canadian dollars has been allocated for an array of reconciliatory and memorial measures in their honor. These will include the construction of a national monument in Ottawa and educational programs on the history of discrimination against gay and transgender people.

Simon Thwaites, 55, lost his house and livelihood after he was forced out of the Canadian military in 1989 because he was gay. He said his excitement over the settlement was tempered by the trauma he has endured for decades.

“It’s a great step, but you can’t take away the hurt and damage in one day,” Mr. Thwaites said.

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16) The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death.
By Farhad Manjoo, November 29, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/technology/internet-dying-repeal-net-neutrality.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

The internet is dying.

Sure, technically, the internet still works. Pull up Facebook on your phone and you will still see your second cousin’s baby pictures. But that isn’t really the internet. It’s not the open, anyone-can-build-it network of the 1990s and early 2000s, the product of technologies created over decades through government funding and academic research, the network that helped undo Microsoft’s stranglehold on the tech business and gave us upstarts like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix.

Nope, that freewheeling internet has been dying a slow death — and a vote next month by the Federal Communications Commission to undo net neutrality would be the final pillow in its face.

Net neutrality is intended to prevent companies that provide internet service from offering preferential treatment to certain content over their lines. The rules prevent, for instance, AT&T from charging a fee to companies that want to stream high-definition videos to people.

Because net neutrality shelters start-ups — which can’t easily pay for fast-line access — from internet giants that can pay, the rules are just about the last bulwark against the complete corporate takeover of much of online life. When the rules go, the internet will still work, but it will look like and feel like something else altogether — a network in which business development deals, rather than innovation, determine what you experience, a network that feels much more like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you Napster and Netflix.

If this sounds alarmist, consider that the state of digital competition is already pretty sorry. As I’ve argued regularly, much of the tech industry is at risk of getting swallowed by giants. Today’s internet is lousy with gatekeepers, tollbooths and monopolists.

The five most valuable American companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — control much of the online infrastructure, from app stores to operating systems to cloud storage to nearly all of the online ad business. A handful of broadband companies — AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon, many of which are also aiming to become content companies, because why not — provide virtually all the internet connections to American homes and smartphones.

Together these giants have carved the internet into a historically profitable system of fiefs. They have turned a network whose very promise was endless innovation into one stuck in mud, where every start-up is at the tender mercy of some of the largest corporations on the planet.

Many companies feel this shift. In a letter to Ajit Pai, the F.C.C. chairman, who drafted the net neutrality repeal order, more than 200 start-ups argued this week that the order “would put small and medium-sized businesses at a disadvantage and prevent innovative new ones from even getting off the ground.” This, they said, was “the opposite of the open market, with a few powerful cable and phone companies picking winners and losers instead of consumers.”

This was not the way the internet was supposed to go. At its deepest technical level, the internet was designed to avoid the central points of control that now command it. The technical scheme arose from an even deeper philosophy. The designers of the internet understood that communications networks gain new powers through their end nodes — that is, through the new devices and services that plug into the network, rather than the computers that manage traffic on the network. This is known as the “end-to-end” principle of network design, and it basically explains why the internet led to so many more innovations than the centralized networks that came before it, such as the old telephone network.

The internet’s singular power, in its early gold-rush days, was its flexibility. People could imagine a dazzling array of new uses for the network, and as quick as that, they could build and deploy them — a site that sold you books, a site that cataloged the world’s information, an application that let you “borrow” other people’s music, a social network that could connect you to anyone.

You didn’t need permission for any of this stuff; some of these innovations ruined traditional industries, some fundamentally altered society, and many were legally dubious. But the internet meant you could just put it up, and if it worked, the rest of the world would quickly adopt it.

But if flexibility was the early internet’s promise, it was soon imperiled. In 2003, Tim Wu, a law professor now at Columbia Law School (he’s also a contributor to The New York Times), saw signs of impending corporate control over the growing internet. Broadband companies that were investing great sums to roll out faster and faster internet service to Americans were becoming wary of running an anything-goes network.

Some of the new uses of the internet threatened their bottom line. People were using online services as an alternative to paying for cable TV or long-distance phone service. They were connecting devices like Wi-Fi routers, which allowed them to share their connections with multiple devices. At the time, there were persistent reports of broadband companies seeking to block or otherwise frustrate these new services; in a few years, some broadband providers would begin blocking new services outright.

To Mr. Wu, the broadband monopolies looked like a threat to the end-to-end idea that had powered the internet. In a legal journal, he outlined an idea for regulation to preserve the internet’s equal-opportunity design — and hence was born “net neutrality.”

Though it has been through a barrage of legal challenges and resurrections, some form of net neutrality has been the governing regime on the internet since 2005. The new F.C.C. order would undo the idea completely; companies would be allowed to block or demand payment for certain traffic as they liked, as long as they disclosed the arrangements.

At the moment, broadband companies are promising not to act unfairly, and they argue that undoing the rules would give them further incentive to invest in their broadband capacity, ultimately improving the internet.

Brian Hart, an F.C.C. spokesman, said broadband companies would still be covered by antitrust laws and other rules meant to prevent anticompetitive behavior. He noted that Mr. Pai’s proposals would simply return the network to an earlier, pre-network-neutrality regulatory era.

“The internet flourished under this framework before, and it will again,” he said.

Broadband companies are taking a similar line. When I pointed out to a Comcast spokeswoman that the company’s promises were only voluntary — that nothing will prevent Comcast from one day creating special tiers of internet service with bundled content, much like the way it now sells cable TV — she suggested I was jumping the gun.

After all, people have been predicting the end of the internet for years. In 2003, Michael Copps, a Democratically appointed commissioner on the F.C.C. who was alarmed by the central choke points then taking command of the internet, argued that “we could be witnessing the beginning of the end of the internet as we know it.”

It’s been a recurrent theme among worriers ever since. In 2014, the last time it looked like net neutrality would get gutted, Nilay Patel, editor of the Verge, declared the internet dead (he used another word for “dead”). And he did it again this year, anticipating Mr. Pai’s proposal.

But look, you might say: Despite the hand-wringing, the internet has kept on trucking. Start-ups are still getting funded and going public. Crazy new things still sometimes get invented and defy all expectations; Bitcoin, which is as Wild West as they come, just hit $10,000 on some exchanges.

Well, O.K. But a vibrant network doesn’t die all at once. It takes time and neglect; it grows weaker by the day, but imperceptibly, so that one day we are living in a digital world controlled by giants and we come to regard the whole thing as normal.

It’s not normal. It wasn’t always this way. The internet doesn’t have to be a corporate playground. That’s just the path we’ve chosen.

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4444 Geary Blvd., Suite 207, San Francisco, CA 94118

415.387.5700

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/mayday.html

Hours(call 415.387.5700 to be sure the library is open for the hours you are interested in. We close the library sometimes to go on errands or have close early) suggested)

7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Closed on all major holidays and May Day We can arrange, by request, to keep the library open longer during the day or open it on weekends. Just ask.

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Support: CONTRIBUTE Thank you for being a part of this struggle.Cuando luchamos ganamos! When we fight we win! Noelle Hanrahan, Director To give by check: PO Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141 Stock or legacy gifts: Noelle Hanrahan (415) 706 - 5222

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In order to effectively combat the existing opportunism, hidden agendas and to better provide ALL genuinely good willed social justice organizations and individuals who work inside of the New York and New Jersey metropolitan areas... with more concrete guidelines;

The following "10 Point Platform and Justice Wish List" was adopted on Saturday, May 13, 2017 during the "Motherhood: Standing Strong 4 Justice" pre-mothers day gathering which was held at Hostos Community College - Bronx, New York.......

"What We Want, What We Need"

May, 2017 - NY/NJ Parents 10 Point Justice Platform and Wish List

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Major Tillery – An Innocent Man Imprisoned Through Gross State Misconduct!

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Hours

(call 415.387.5700 to be sure the library is open for the hours you are interested in. We close the library sometimes to go on errands or have close early) suggested)

7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Closed on all major holidays and May Day

We can arrange, by request, to keep the library open longer during the day or open it on weekends. Just ask.

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Prison Radio UPDATE:

Please sign this petition:

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FREE OUR BROTHERS

Campaign to Stop Modern Day Slavery in Colorado, Demanding Equal Rights to the Under Represented

http://freeourbrothers.com

Petitioning Denver FBI & US Department of Justice

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Support:

CONTRIBUTE

Thank you for being a part of this struggle.

Cuando luchamos ganamos! When we fight we win!

Noelle Hanrahan, Director

To give by check:

PO Box 411074

San Francisco, CA

94141

Stock or legacy gifts:

Noelle Hanrahan

(415) 706 - 5222

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When they knock on your front door: Preparing for Repression