This video from the USA says about itself:
Trump Reneges On TPP Campaign Promise
30 March 2017
TYT Politics Producer Emma Vigeland reports on the Wall Street Journal story that shows that Trump is only seeking “modest” changes to NAFTA, and some of those changes include TPP provisions, breaking a major campaign promise.
The TPP May Be Dead, but Big Pharma‘s Still Getting Away With Murder: here.
GREEN GROUPS SLAMS TRUMP TRADE DEAL Trump’s deal to tweak the NAFTA trade agreement was panned by environmental groups, arguing it includes “corporate giveaways” for fossil fuel giants, excludes binding agreements on lead pollution and contains no mention of human-caused global warming. [HuffPost]
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Reblogged this on Die Erste Eslarner Zeitung – Aus und über Eslarn, sowie die bayerisch-tschechische Region!.
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Thu Mar 30, 2017 1:24 am (PDT) . Posted by:
“bigraccoon” redwoodsaurus
TRUMP LAWYERS ARGUE HE’S IMMUNE FROM CIVIL SUIT BECAUSE HE’S PRESIDENT
President Trump is trying to argue that, because he’s president, he is immune from a defamation lawsuit filed by a former “Apprentice" contestant who has accused him of sexual assault.
Summer Zervos says Trump repeatedly sexually assaulted her during a meeting in 2007, kissing her on the lips, pressing his body against hers and groping her breasts, all without her consent.
She was among a series of women who accused Trump of sexual assault during the 2016 campaign.
She’s now suing him for defamation, after Trump called her and other women accusers “liars” during the 2016 campaign. Trump’s lawyers are now arguing that Trump is immune from all civil lawsuits filed in state court until he leaves office.
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Thu Mar 30, 2017 2:39 pm (PDT) . Posted by:
“bigraccoon” redwoodsaurus
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/03/30/vp-pence-casts-awful-tie-breaking-vote-defund-critical-family-planning-program
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> VP Pence Casts ‘Awful’ Tie-Breaking Vote to Defund Critical Family Planning Program
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> Senate pushes forward with effort to allow states to slash funding for “lifeline” reproductive health clinics
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> To widespread outcry, a procedural vote on a GOP effort to slash funding for the Title X family planning program, which funds clinics that largely serve poor women and women of color, passed the Senate Thursday after Vice President Mike Pence was forced to cast a tie-breaking vote.
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> The measure repeals an Obama-era rule that blocks states from defunding healthcare providers for political reasons. The Republican-led effort appeared designed to target Planned Parenthood clinics, which receive funds under Title X.
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> “The Title X family planning program is a vital source of family planning and related preventive care for low-income, uninsured, and young people across the country,” wrote the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights in an open letter to Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
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> “Every year, more than four million individuals access life-saving care such as birth control, cancer screenings, and testing for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) including HIV at Title X-funded health centers,” the advocacy group observed . “Seventy-five percent of Planned Parenthood patients are at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level and half of their health centers are located in rural or underserved areas. People of color comprise forty percent of Planned Parenthood patients.”
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> “For decades, the Title X Family Planning Program has been a lifeline for women, helping them to have healthier families and lead healthier lives,” wrote the Center for American Progress’ (CAP)
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> The Title X amendment to the Public Health Service Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970, and “it is the only federal domestic program focused solely on providing people with critical reproductive health services related to family planning and contraception, including physical exams, prescriptions, laboratory exams, contraceptive supplies, and referrals when medically needed,” Gillette-Pierce and Taylor noted.
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> Democratic senators testified passionately against the attempt to cut Title X funding:
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> .@PattyMurray on Title X rollback vote: “Restricting women’s access to the full range of reproductive care is unacceptable.”
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> — Alice Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) 8:37 AM – 30 Mar 2017
> Sen. @maziehirono : A vote for this CRA is a vote to deprive millions of women important health care services. #TitleX #ProtectOurCare — Civil Rights (@civilrightsorg) 9:09 AM – 30 Mar 2017
> Republicans are continuing on their extreme, anti-women agenda, rushing to roll back a rule that protects family planning providers.
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> — Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) 8:26 AM – 30 Mar 2017
> In fact, the effort to dismantle Title X funding proved so unpopular that two female Republican senators—Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine—refused to vote for the measure to move forward with it.
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> As a result, the effort gridlocked, and virulently anti-choice Pence was forced to cast a tie-breaking vote . “Pence is the first vice president ever to break a tie to undermine women’s access to care,” tweeted Planned Parenthood.
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> The GOP didn’t have the votes to prevent millions of women from getting cancer screenings & birth control. So the @VP broke the tie. Awful. https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/847473617797599232 … — Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) 9:28 AM – 30 Mar 2017
> Sen. @PattyMurray on @VP ‘s tiebreak of the #TitleX rule: “This is wrong, this is dangerous, and we cannot let it stand.” #ProtectOurCare — Civil Rights (@civilrightsorg) 8:44 AM – 30 Mar 2017
> The roll-call for the vote can be found here .
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> A final vote on repealing the Obama-era rule could take place as early as Thursday afternoon, according to The Hill.
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> Meanwhile, people are outraged, and taking to the streets to protest the latest GOP attempt to severely limit access to women’s healthcare.
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> “Republicans have literally had to fly in a senator to vote and haul the Vice President—Mr. Defund-Planned-Parenthood-himself—to the Senate floor to cast a tie-breaking vote. All of this makes the GOP desperation and obsession with taking away reproductive health care crystal clear,” NARAL Pro-Choice America national communications director Kaylie Hanson Long charged in a statement.
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> Opponents of the measure are also tweeting under the hashtags #TitleX
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http://www.alternet.org/activism/raising-bar-political-engagement?akid=15372.2582026.EnBGoG&rd=1&src=newsletter1074734&t=3
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> What We Are Doing to Fight Trump May Not Be Enough
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> Shortly after the election of Donald Trump, I attended a conference of organizers from across the nation where I hoped to find collective answers to the question, how did we get here and what do we do now?
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> What I found instead, among thousands of the most supposedly committed people in our political process, was a civic engagement conference much like any other, a bland breakdown of polling by party, a discussion of new campaign technology and tired complaints about voter apathy.
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> Later that night, I found myself shaking the shoulders of a friend, yelling into the din of the bar, “Why isn’t anyone acting like this is a crisis!” The United States had just elected a pathological liar to its highest office, and the most practiced organizers in the nation were carrying on, business as usual.
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> I don’t know what exactly I expected. Revolutionaries poring over charts and writing manifestos? Frantic resource mapping and coordinated protest planning? This all would have been nice, but to be fair, it was only a few days out from the election, and most of these people were running on six months or more of very little sleep. Still, it was clear that the political professionals on the left were at a loss. Not having a plan, or a boss telling them to make a plan, they just did what they always do, networked for their next job and complained about campaign burnout and voter apathy.
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> How did we get here? This is exactly how.
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> The art of political engagement, like most everything once pure to me, has been industrialized. Despite claiming to attempt exactly the opposite, political professionals have made politics, even transgressive politics, into something that others don’t get access to, something we are uniquely trained to navigate, a language we alone can speak. And then we go home and complain on our social media accounts about the lazy public, all the people who didn’t show up or voted wrong. But we created this by owning the world of political strategy and treating everyone else like sheep. After all, it’s how we keep the political industrial complex alive and keep our jobs as professionals.
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> Being on campaigns too long will have you thinking of everyone in terms of their utilities as short-term volunteers, voters or donors—not agents of earnest democratic participation. Around elections, organizers helicopter into communities for short-term campaigns, failing to engage people in long-term strategic conversations about taking back their own power. In turn, we don’t expect much from people: a dollar here, a vote or signature there. That’s as much as we typically ask for, as long as we ask it en masse.
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> The primary lesson that I have taken away from most of my political mentors is that you have a tiny window in which to reach people— sometimes only a matter of seconds—and it’s your job to get a small commitment out of them in that window. While it may be true that attention spans are low in our media-saturated environments, this approach makes political engagement as inherently analogous to advertising and strips the very people we are trying to engage of their agency. It creates a paradigm wherein “we” (political organizers) are salesmen of our brand of politics and “they” (the public) exist on the other side of the glass, window-shopping customers. This paradigm assumes and assures a lack of commitment from the start. When the delineated path for engagement is short, people walk a short path.
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> This industrialization of our political process combined with a deep American individualist pressure to give in to the apathy of our “personal lives” (as if the personal is not political) has left us in a dire place. We are now in a position where we fear our neighbors will be carted off across a new border wall, where the former CEO of Exxon Mobil is now Secretary of State, and where the most fundamental social services are on the chopping block. It is clear that the professional political class is unequipped to bear the weight of the challenges facing us. The only conceivable way forward is to set people up with tools to wield their own power. This means we need to break from the political engagement framework that views the public as lazy consumers of a political brand. We need to build an engagement module that demands higher levels of strategic involvement from everyone.
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> Ask more of people? Why, it’s hard enough to get most people to show up to a rally!
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> My hypothesis is that many people actually want more asked of them than these often all-too-symbolic gestures. And there is a way to challenge people with the grace that allows them to feel okay when they can’t engage at the level we are asking, but we still have to be able to make the ask. It’s better people know there’s a community out there aimed at winning these fights, not simply “engaging” them just long enough to get some money or contact information. I believe that people who care about the injustices inherent in our current system need something to plug into that even begins to compete with the elaborate corporate entertainment traps that suck their money and leave them feeling empty.
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> From liquor to diet schemes, entire industries are built around people’s unhappiness and unexamined feelings of anomie with capitalist society. This is a symptom with a clear and direct cure: meaningful, long-term, intellectually stimulating pathways of engagement.
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> After the election my peers and less politically active family members asked me over and over, “What can we do?” We (organizers) couldn’t churn out petitions and phone scripts fast enough. People fell over themselves when the Indivisible Guide came out, which finally mapped out a clear directive for engaging with the government. People are still making calls every day to their congresspeople as a result of this digital handbook, and I’m so glad.
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> But if you really read it, the Indivisible Guide says little more than what could be inferred from a small amount of personal initiative and a cursory attempt at lobbying. It’s not the content itself that’s rocket science. The genius in this text is that it went ahead and made the hard ask for people to take daily, self-guided action. And folks have gone above and beyond to answer that call.
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> But when phone lines ring out, fax machines jam and congresspeople start barricading their doors and hiding behind tinted glass, we’ll have to up our game. We will have to diversify our tactics.
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> This is where direct action comes in.
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> From the teach-ins and highway blockades of Black Lives Matter to the tear-jerking, year-long camp at Standing Rock, a reinvigorated resistance movement is already making waves across our nation. Direct action connotes a set of physical tactics that immediately disrupt the known political cycle of “vote, eat, go back to sleep.”
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> These tactics, including sit-ins, strikes, walkouts, barricades, flash mobs, banner hangs, public performances, meeting disruptions, culture jams, etc., inherently disregard the very terms of political participation that professionals are trained to funnel people toward and which ultimately serve to consolidate power in small circles at the top.
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> I should say now—in case any of the Indivisible chapter members have bothered to keep reading—that I have no sweeping or sentimental objections to institutional politics. I actually love phone banking. I love talking to strangers on opposite sides of the country, fumbling with their names at first and saving the conversation with a moment of unexpected honesty. I like talking policy with elected officials, learning their positions and watching them move around a conversation like nimble ballerina, avoiding PR grenades.
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> But in this moment in history, I’m willing to go several steps further than the traditional forms of engagement. I’m not saying stop calling. I’m saying don’t undersell yourself and think that’s all you can do. We leave a lot of power on the table by sticking to the scripts, and if there were ever a time to try it all, it would be now. We can’t afford not to.
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> Luckily, there’s a vast, exciting terrain out there for people who want to engage a little more creatively. Nobel Peace Prize nominee Gene Sharp is most often cited in this world for his list of 198 disruptive political tactics. There are many other well-developed resources for learning about direct action. But even these encyclopedias of best practices must be seen as only potential tools to commit to an ever-shifting set of political landscapes and fluid power structures. It’s truly up to us to go deeper to learn and teach each other their strategic application in our current contexts.
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> What I propose is that everyone who gives a damn get together with their friends and neighbors and begin playing with some of these tactics. Go ahead and plan an action that creatively undermines the threats of the current regime. Many people (especially people of color, immigrants and indigenous communities) are already doing this work, inventing new tactics and leading incredible resistance efforts to engage the most disaffected by the political process. I’m seeing new organizers wake up every day and rise with them, people showing up to protests for the first time and pouring into meetings.
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> But I’ve begun to notice, among organizers who embrace the power of disruption, the same lingering trend toward the low-bar engagement framework we picked up from the professional political class. Usually you’ll hear this sentiment wrapped up in a statement like: “We have to think about creating low barriers to participation so that we can ease as many people as possible into the movement.” Again with this idea that the numbers are everything, even if people aren’t doing very much.
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> While I have often submitted to the apparent pragmatism of this argument, I see two major problems with it: 1) it perpetuates a consumerist view of people’s political conviction; and 2) as I have discovered in practice, it is less effective than setting the bar high and asking people to rise to the occasion. The obsession with giving people shallow opportunities for engagement is draining our movements of leadership potential. Still, we host direct action trainings in short sessions on the weekends, leaving people with some basic know-your-rights tips and a nagging sense that they are about to do something risky. But rarely do we give people the space or honest encouragement to plan and run their own campaigns for creative disruption. Like the major parties and NGOs, we grow lists of people to bother with hyperbolic fundraising emails and one-time asks. Like always, we say tacitly with this approach: “Hang tight, the pros will handle it.” And this, we know, is a lie.
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> In almost every 101 direct action training someone will quote Gandhi or King but forget to mention that both of those leaders asked people to dedicate months and years of their lives to travel and strategize with them. These movements did not succeed because people just showed up once in a while to other people’s events as symbolic gestures of support. For this reason, I am proposing a more involved engagement plan encouraging autonomous action, action that goes beyond checking participatory boxes.
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> Where to start? Start by sitting down with people who want to do something and actually map some targets (entry points for strategic disruption). Start thinking about who or what has the power to shift an outcome and start making a timeline for a campaign. Take one of the hundreds of tactics that might apply, and select several to try at prime moments.
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> We need to create an indivisible guide of direct action tactics. Let’s call it Indomitable . And instead of coming from a class of political professionals and focusing around one or two tactics, it needs to be written by regular people trying out many, many tactics from the ground up. It’s time for us to throw things against the wall, see what sticks and compare notes. It’s time for us to write our own story about how power relates to pressure. After all, there’s no reason that strategic thinking on how to intervene in axes of power should be left to government staffers, executive directors or campaign managers. If we want to take back (or take down) this inarguably corrupt administration, we have to be willing to put in the work ourselves—and, again, I think folks are ready.
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> Finally, to all of my fellow political organizers out there, remember all of those wild thoughts you’ve had during sleepless nights on campaigns? Remember those crazy ideas? Like, “What if we just tried this? Because door knocking for an out-of-touch party is clearly not going that well.” You’re not crazy. It’s time to pull those ideas out from under the bed. It’s time to host kitchen table skill shares and weeks-long strategy camps for implementing them, time to write those utopian blueprints about what our communities could look like if we really fought for each others’ needs.
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> It’s time to organize freely and wildly, like you never have before.
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Thanks to your efforts we helped defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Now we need your help again as the Trump administration seeks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
NAFTA and trade deals like it have been disastrous for workers and the environment. In the last several decades, American manufacturing has plummeted, and good paying jobs have been outsourced. Working families in our trading partners have similarly been displaced and disadvantaged by the same multi national corporations. We need fair trade that works for citizens and the environment!
This Tuesday, I will join other labor, environmental and trade activists as we rally in DC calling for fair renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Deal (NAFTA). Add your name to the petition we will deliver to the U.S. Trade Representative calling for a transparent process that benefits workers, not corporations.
Rather than defending our manufacturing jobs and raising living standards for working families, NAFTA made it easier for large multinational corporations to move jobs out, and avoid regulations that protect workers and the environment.
Our trade deals have favored Wall Street and the largest corporations for far too long. We need a radical reimagining of what our trade policies are set to accomplish, and that begins with NAFTA. Please sign our petition calling for a renegotiation that benefits American workers, not Wall Street and multinational corporations.
Trade deals can be good for our economy, our workers, and the workers in our trading partners. Together, we can fight to make NAFTA the trade deal it should be: one where workers are treated fairly, the environment is treated with respect, and corporations play by our rules, not their own.
Thank you for taking this bold stand for workers everywhere.
In Solidarity,
Larry Cohen
Board Chair
Our Revolution
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Last week, the United States Senate voted on and passed a trade deal — the USMCA, or better known as NAFTA 2.0 — that will not stop outsourcing and is a giveaway to the fossil fuel industry.
I voted no.
And I voted no because what we need is a trade policy in this country that stands up for workers, farmers, and addresses the global threat of climate change.
While not everyone running in the Democratic primary cast the same vote as I did, I was proud to be joined by my colleagues Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand. I strongly believe that we are on the right side of this issue.
That bill, NAFTA 2.0, is 250 pages long.
It has 37,500 words.
And it does not have a single damn mention of climate change.
Not one.
And I believe that when you have an existential threat to the future of America and to the future of our planet, it is wrong to approve a treaty that will make it easier for large oil companies to destroy our planet and only exacerbate the crisis of climate change.
Our job when thinking about trade is that we always have to keep in mind that if we do not get our act together in terms of climate change, we will be leaving an increasingly uninhabitable planet to our children and to our grandchildren.
Our job is to ensure that any trade agreement we pass must include major provisions on how we’re going to stop the fossil fuel industry from destroying this planet.
Frankly, the future of our planet is more important than the short-term profits of Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
I also voted no because we need a trade policy in this country that creates decent-paying jobs in America and ends the race to the bottom. Corporate America cannot continue to throw American workers out on the street while they outsource our jobs and enjoy record-breaking profits.
Because if you think for a second most major corporations won’t send a bunch of jobs overseas if it makes them a nickel, then you are sorely mistaken.
The reality is that over the last forty years, so-called free trade policies have been unrelentingly bad for American workers. Written by large multinational corporations, these rigged agreements have made it far easier for companies to shut down manufacturing planets in the U.S., throw workers out on the street, and move to Mexico, China and other countries where workers are paid a fraction of what they are in the U.S.
How could the proponents of these so-called free trade agreements have been so wrong in the past? Maybe, just maybe, they are either purposefully misleading us, or perhaps some of them are misled by corporate America.
But the truth is, I believe that the American people want a president who has the GUTS to stand up to these large and powerful corporations.
That is what we are going to do when we are in the White House.
Thank you for reading.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
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