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"Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss'd to me

I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door."

Hundreds of Oregon Corporations Escape the Minimum Tax

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Half of the US Is Broke

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The myth of the Christian country

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“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

FDR, 2nd Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 1937

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Middle East friendship chart

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Corporations enriching shareholders

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Facts not fiction on universal gun background checks

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"Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere"

Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The GOP - Not One of US.

Wall Street, our new criminal class...       

   Business in the USA is sitting on $2 trillion dollars refusing to invest their own funds in expanding and hiring workers.  

   When one adds to this the reserves that banks, equity firms and hedge funds have - the picture is clear - "capitalism in the USA is on strike." 

   The engine of our economy - the spirit of entrepreneurship is not in evidence today.  So much for business being dynamic and risk taking. 

   They hire K- Street lobbyists and their ilk at the state level because they are averse to risk taking - pleading for tax breaks, tax credits and endless loopholes. 

   The "business of business" in America today is not about job creation, it's about wealth hoarding and redistribution from the middle class to the top 1%. 

   So for those who claim government doesn't create jobs, my response is that business doesn't either until given "corporate welfare" by government.  The fact is that the private and public sector are highly integrated, something the anti-tax, anti-government Tea Party types don't understand. 

   Job creation requires public/private partnerships but the benefits of such collaboration should go to the 99% not just the 1%.  

 

RAD'S

WEBSITE PICKS: 


 

  • A Middle East View      

Rami G. Khouri

  • RealClearPolitics:

Realclearpolitics

  • Jim Hightower:   

Jimhightower.com

  • Robert Reich:

Robert Reich

  • Thomas Friedman: 

Friedman Column

  • Nicholas Kristof: 

Kristof Column

Oregon's Motto: 

She flies with her own wings! 


Hard Times in Oregon: 

Hardtimes

The Oregon story - the rich get richer, the poor and middle class lose ground.  Check this front page Oregonian article out. 

Oregon wage gap widens

Homelessness in Oregon - a call to action

Chuck Currie The crisis of homelessness


  

      Oregon's coming 34th out of 41 states in the Obama "Race to the Top" illustrates the failure of leadership from Governor Kitzhaber and his predecessors as they have built an educational bridge to nowhere called high stakes testing.

   Instead of being in a race to the top we seem to be dumpster diving to the bottom despite doing education reform since 1991.  Insanity is termed doing the same thing over and over again.  When can we put a fork in this stupidity? 

   To confuse matters more the Oregonian's editorial board has pontificated that this was a lost opportunity to get federal funding for innovation.  How firing principals and teachers equals innovation is a mystery to me.   

   The way to reform schools is to reduce class sizes, to encourage teacher collaboration and to support their continued education.  High stakes testing and performance based assessment of teachers are NOT the answer!    

   If you want students to succeed you first have to resolve the issues they confront before they come to school.  Children who face poverty, hunger, homelessness, health care issues and family instability require wrap around services for them and their families, 24/7.   

   Every child needs a safe home of their own and parents who know how to be good parents.   

There is only one way to address this impending crisis.  Schools must have a stable source of funding. Until that happens - we will limp from crisis to crisis.   

 

 

    

    Why does the richest nation in the world have the moral blight of homeless people?

Invisible People

http://www.npr.org


 Homelessness

    Connecting the dots between homelessness & hunger in Oregon and Washington County: 

Homelessness:  

•    The faces of the homeless are families with children, single men and women, vets, and many who are impaired. It is estimated that in Washington County up to 56% of homelessness occurs to families.

Hunger:

•    Hunger is highest among single mother households (10%) and poor families (15%) as well as renters, unemployed workers and minority households. 

     In Washington County, Oregon's "economic engine," the divide between the affluent and the working poor continues.  We have a 19,000 unit gap in affordable low income rental housing.  County political and business leaders are indifferent to this crisis...   

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If you want to e-mail me "comments" use my Yahoo back up e-mail address russdondero@yahoo.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RAD Lines

See my FACEBOOK @ Russ

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Trump & The Mob

http-//www.politico.com#13C5A6C


Trump's role models are Vladmir Putin and Benito Mussolini.  He has contempt for our checks and balances system.  He wants to "rule" not govern like a strong man, a despot.  He will shredd the Constitution anytime he feels the urge to do so and like all despots he only listens to his inner circle.  And he is paranoid and narcissistic. 

     

Hundreds of Oregon Corporations Escape the Minimum Tax

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Half of the US Is Broke

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The myth of the Christian country

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Housing Needs in Oregon 

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"There are men who believe that democracy... is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate [and that] tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future..." 

FDR, 3rd Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 1940

  • "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild


  • Miguel de Cervantes, from The Duke - "I accuse you of being an idealist, a bad poet and an honest man."  Cervantes' response - "Guilty as charged, I have never had the courage to believe in nothing."   from Man of La Mancha  


Professor Kingfield, from the Paper Chase

   "I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you." 

- George Bernard Shaw

 

BLOGS:

From the Left Wing:

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman - The New York Times

Democracy Now
democracynow.org

The Daily Kos

dailykos.com

Blue Oregon

blueoregon.com

 

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." 

- Emilie Buchwald 

 


    "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." 

- Justice John Paul Stevens, Bush v. Gore, 2001

    The state of our union - check out the map, it's a reality check for those who can't figure out why people are so ticked off... 

americanobserver

 



"Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war"

- John Adams

"Loyalty to country always.  Loyalty to government when it deserves it."  

- Mark Twain  

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  

- George Santayana 

"The love of one's country is a natural thing.  But why should love stop at the border?" 

- Pablo Casals

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." 

- William Butler Yeats  

 

"You see things; and you say, 'Why?' 

But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"  

- George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah" (1921) 

"...the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society...  The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government..."  

- James Madison, Federalist Papers #11 

"Why … should we have government? Why not each individual take to himself the whole fruit of his labor, without having any of it taxed away?”   

The legitimate object of government, is to do for the people whatever they need to have done, but which they can not do, at all, or can not do, so well, for themselves – in their separate and individual capacities … There are many such things … roads, bridges and the like; providing for the helpless young and afflicted; common schools … the criminal and civil [justice] departments."    

- Abraham Lincoln 

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society  

- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 

"Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates, but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole..." 

- Edmund Burke  

“It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again, and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.  These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions.”  

- Jonathan Swift 

A RAD rhetorical question - Were Madison & Marx "Marxists"?  

 

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments."   

- James Madison

 

FYI:  

Squareapace has closed the "comments" section on my blog as a way around this contact me via my Yahoo e-mail address posted on the left sidebar...   

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 


 

 

  

 


  

 

Monday
Feb172020

DEMS: DON'T BURN DOWN THE PARTY...  

EDITOR'S NOTE:  I ran across and interview of Bernie Saunders by former labor secretary Robert Reich done in 2018.  Bernie made some good points - espcially that the Democats must run a 50 state campaign - they ought not to cede any states to the GOP.  I've been saying this for over a year in my blog posts and on my FB page. If one expands the base to those who undervote - working class folks and minorities- then winning in currently red states might happen and at the least will cost the GOP time and money to protect its base.  And with Mike Bloomberg's money to fuel such an effort, whether or not he's the candidate - this is in the realm of the possible.  

But Dems must not engage in their all too favorite blood sport - fighting with each other.  That's why I think EJ Dionne's op ed which I read in today's Oregonian makes a lot of sense - especially Liz Warren's grace in defeat in New Hamphsire.  The two wings of the party - the Clinton wing and the Bernie wing and everyone in between must unite to beat Trump.  I worry that the Clinton and Bernie wings are too prone towards relliving the past of 2018.  We can't afford the luxury of such revenge politics.  No mater who the nominee is - All Dems must unite and vote for the nominee - and that includes Bernie if he wins...   

OPINION - EJ Dionne

Diversity: the Democrats’ strength and challenge 

When Sen. Amy Klobuchar broke through in the New Hampshire primary, relegating Sen. Elizabeth Warren to single digits and fourth place, the Massachusetts Democrat could not have been more gracious toward her party rival from Minnesota.

“I … want to congratulate my friend and colleague, Amy Klobuchar,” Warren declared, “for showing just how wrong the pundits can be when they count a woman out.”

It was part of an eloquent call for party unity in which Warren warned Democrats not to engage in “a long bitter rehash of the same old divides in our party,” and spoke with concern about a willingness “to burn down the rest of the party in order to be the last man standing.”

A speech that Democrats needed to hear got almost no coverage. So given what gets play (and Warren’s longstanding skepticism of financial institutions), it’s unsurprising that Warren directed some sharp criticism toward former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Thursday. Warren excoriated Bloomberg for once saying that anti-redlining laws prohibiting discrimination against minority neighborhoods had helped cause the great financial crash of 2008.

“Anyone who thinks that,” she said, “should not be the leader of our party.”

So much for unity, you might say. Nonetheless, the party should not forget Warren’s earlier insistence that in the face of President Trump’s abuses of power, “we cannot afford to fall into factions, we can’t afford to squander our collective power.”

But it is Warren’s call to sisterhood that deserves more notice, partly as it relates to another underdiscussed divide in the party. One of the most striking findings of a New Hampshire exit poll suggested that women candidates actually do face electability concerns from voters that male candidates do not.

The Edison Media poll asked voters: “If the Democratic nominee is a woman, do you think that it would make it easier to beat Trump, harder to beat Trump” or make “No difference.”

The poll found that only 9% thought that being a woman would make it easier to beat Trump. Nearly four times as many — 34% — thought being a woman would make it harder, and 55% said it would make no difference.

This gender issue appears to have affected outcomes in New Hampshire, particularly in the battle for second place between former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who won the slot, and Klobuchar, who ran third.

The small group that saw a benefit to nominating a woman overwhelmingly favored Klobuchar over Buttigieg, 37% to 17%, and she also ran ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, in this group. It gave the primary victor just 22%. Warren trailed badly with only 6%. To the extent there was a pro-woman faction it appears that Klobuchar, not Warren, was its beneficiary.

But in the much larger share that saw a woman as having electoral liabilities, Buttigieg bested Klobuchar 23% to 16%, with Sanders winning 30%.

The race was a virtual tie among those who said gender made no difference: 25% for Sanders and 23% each for Buttigieg and Klobuchar.

There are limits on using exit polls to measure causality — whether a given answer accounts for why people voted as they did, or whether voters offer an answer that conforms to the choice they made for other reasons. But it’s hard to deny that gender mattered to the New Hampshire outcome, and it will be part of the larger challenge Democrats face this year in avoiding the incapacitating factionalism that Warren counseled against.

Face it, Democrats: You are the diverse party and Republicans are the homogeneous party. Democrats include moderates and the left; Republicans are almost uniformly conservative. Among their elected officials Democrats are the party of racial and gender diversity; Republicans aren’t. In the House, 37.9% of Democratic members are women, and 36.6% are African-American or Latino. The numbers for the GOP: 6.6% women, 3.6% black or Latino.

Diversity is a source of pride for Democrats. But that pride must be matched by patience among the party’s ideological factions and its many different social groups, and by an embrace of the equal dignity of all members. The most important philosophical battles and group conflicts will be fought out among Democrats because Republicans, by the very nature of who they are, stand detached from these struggles.

Fighting exclusion while building electorally-necessary solidarity isn’t easy. But for Democrats, there is no other option.

@EJDionne; © 2020, Washington Post Writers Group

 

Tuesday
Jan282020

TRUMP'S WORST NIGHTMARE...  

Bolton was in the last Tom McCall Forum in 2007 vis a vis Lee Hamilton...  

Sunday
Jan262020

HEALING OREGON'S URBAN/RURAL DIVIDE

 

EDITOR'S NOTE: Oregon like many states faces a serious urban/rural divide.  Those who live in the Portlana metro area are more progressive while those who live outside the I-5 corridor are more conservative. Modeling bills to reflec regionsl differences offers a chance to close that divide.  Or so it is hoped.

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“We put the minimum wage proposal on the table and took a look at how we could do something similar with (carbon fees on gas and diesel).”

At a time when much of the nation is divided geographically on hot-button issues such as environmental policy and reproductive rights, Oregon policymakers’ willingness to pass different laws for different communities could be seen as deepening rural-urban divisions within the state. There’s also a risk that the approach could water down policies to the point that they are meaningless or make them unwieldy to carry out, one local political scientist said. At least one lawmaker worries about the unintended consequences of ceasing to legislate for one Oregon.

Tessa Provins, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in state and local politics, said that tailoring regulations to apply differently around the state could reflect a basic theory of political researchers: that policymakers “either advocate for, or fight against, policies they think will represent the interests of their constituents.” So it makes sense, she said, that representatives from urban areas with ample mass transit want a greenhouse gas charge on fuel, while rural lawmakers whose constituents might drive long distances in trucks and SUVs would be skeptical of such a plan. Giving lawmakers the option for regional policy making “is very powerful in being able to take into account the unique characteristics of a particular place,” Provins said.

Supporters of the approach say it better reflects the needs of a geographically large and economically diverse state, where local conditions vary greatly. And Oregon fits that bill, stretching over a larger area than all but eight other states. At least one other state, New York, also has a minimum wage law with different rates based on geography.

In Oregon, other examples of regionbased legislation include a law passed last year that regulates diesel engine emissions only in the state’s three most populous counties. A 2017 law allows self-service fuel pumping in rural Oregon, and a 2015 law raised speed limits on several rural highways and a section of interstate through rural eastern Oregon.

Some supporters of cap-and-trade hope that phasing in one portion of their proposed regulations will show they listened — and responded — to the concerns of Republicans and rural constituents.
Rep. Karin Power, a Milwaukie Democrat who works as a lawyer for The Freshwater Trust, has played a central role in developing cap-and-trade proposals for both sessions. She said that as supporters listened to feedback on the plans, one theme that emerged was “the pretty significant difference in how much people drive in different parts of the state … In parts of southern Oregon and eastern Oregon, your doctor’s appointment might be two hours away.” A phased approach would also give rural areas a chance to watch regulations roll out first in urban areas, Power said.

But some opponents aren’t satisfied, saying it only makes the plan more complicated and does not address their fundamental problems with it.

“It’s a way for them to say, ‘We went out on the road, we listened. We’re still going to hit you with regulation, it’s just a little less,’” said Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis, R-Albany, a key opponent of the cap-and-trade bill and owner of Boshart Trucking. “It hides bad legislation … It makes it just a little bit easier to swallow.”

Oregon’s minimum wage law isn’t particularly inspiring to Boshart Davis, either. Her family also farms, and she said the minimum wage is too high given that teenagers hired during summers are learning on the job.
Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose, represents a rural coastal district and is one of three Democrats in the upper chamber who opposed the 2019 climate bill. She was also unimpressed by the new proposal to phase in gas and diesel fees differently around the state.

“I think this legislative approach is fraught with problems,” she said. “If it’s good for one Oregonian, it ought to be good for all Oregonians.” Johnson said she is concerned about “the implementation of this regionalism and unintended consequences.”

RAD:  Johnson has always been the contrarian or more bluntly a pain in the ass.     

Phillip J. Cooper, professor of local government at Portland State University’s Mark Hatfield School of Government, agreed there is a danger of creating “a Swiss cheese policy” with so many exceptions that it is difficult to administer. However, Cooper said, “one-size-fits-all policies don’t work very well in states that are as diverse as most states are.”

Oregon’s regional minimum wage law grew out of an effort to understand the goal of such a mandate and different cost of living and other economic factors around the state, according to one of the central figures who helped develop it. Caitlin Baggott Davis is executive director of North Star Civic Foundation, which worked with the Northwest Health Foundation in 2015 to lead discussions around the state about raising the minimum wage. North Star Civic was formed that year by New Season Market co-founder Stan Amy, Rejuvenation Hardware founder Jim Kelly and New Villages Group Executive Vice President Christy Eugenis to explore whether philanthropic organizations could help generate productive conversations about some of Oregon’s most polarizing problems.

At the time, various advocacy groups and lawmakers favored competing minimum wage increases. Groups filed two ballot initiatives to raise wage guidelines if lawmakers failed to act: one would have upped the minimum to $13.50 an hour, the other to $15 an hour.

Baggott Davis said that in contrast to states with city-by-city minimum wages, Oregon’s pay law still ties the state together under “a coherent plan for all of Oregon to move forward together.”

Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, was involved in passing the minimum wage law, as well as the diesel emissions regulations centered around Portland. He’s also one of the Democrats most involved with the carbon cap-and-trade legislation.

“It’s really not dissimilar to what we’re dealing with here with the climate action program,” Dembrow said of creating a tiered minimum wage. “We heard a lot of need to see the minimum wage increased, and we received a lot of concern from rural parts of the state that it would be hard for them to implement it.”

After years of trying to pass a statewide ban on older diesel truck engines, a group of lawmakers including Dembrow and Power finally got the Portland-focused law across the finish line last year. “I wouldn’t say that the only problems are in the Portland metro area, but clearly the problem is most acute here,” Dembrow said. “So at the end of the day, it made sense to do it that way … That approach caused the bill to be passed in a bipartisan manner, and that was good.”

RAD:  Politics as the art of compromise.   

A bipartisan task force, which Boshart Davis is helping to lead, is looking at how to eventually take the diesel policy statewide.

Provins, the University of Pittsburgh political science professor, said a benefit of regional policymaking can be “that it allows for policy innovation.” There are downsides, too. “It can also spur policy advancement in some regions but not others, so there’s asymmetric policy advancement,” she said. “If we have some areas that are producing high emissions but not being included in policy, it could be impactful on a statewide basis.”

Power said some laws, such as workplace safeguards, must apply statewide. But “the geographic differences between all of our regions and the industries that have flourished there do merit some tailored legislation. It’s hard to do one size fits all — when we have such a large state — all the time.”

“It’s a way for them to say, ‘We went out on the road, we listened. We’re still going to hit you with regulation, it’s just a little less.’” - Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis, R-Albany,

Protests and a Republican walkout curtailed a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade bill last year. It’s being reintroduced in the 35-day session that begins in just over a week and the new bill would phase in carbon fees on gas and diesel on a geographic basis, giving Republican-dominated rural areas a multi-year or even permanent reprieve. 

Mark Graves, Oregonian

Thursday
Jan162020

THE IOC PUTS A MUZZLE ON OLYMPIANS...  

EIDTOR'S NOTE:  My successor at {acific is an expert on the Olympic games.  Here's his latest analysis.  

The Olympics are political. The IOC ban denies reality — and athletes their voice.

A new International Olympic Committee policy barring political expression at the Tokyo 2020 games benefits those in power.
Chancellor Adolf Hitler declares the Olympiad officially open on Aug. 7, 1936, in Berlin.Bettmann Archive
Jan. 16, 2020, 12:30 PM PST
By Jules Boykoff

Imposing neutrality by fiat requires a certain hubris. The International Olympic Committee demonstrated that it has that in abundant supply when it forbade activism by athletes at the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, prohibiting “gestures of a political nature, like a hand gesture or kneeling.” The policy, announced last week, added precision to a longstanding — and controversial — rule in the Olympic Charter stating, “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”

The IOC’s guidelines were not only a response to a global zeitgeist of athletes’ political expression, but also a firm rebuke to last summer’s outburst of activism.

The IOC’s guidelines were not only a response to a global zeitgeist of athletes’ political expression, but also a firm rebuke to last summer’soutburst of activismat the Pan American Games, where U.S. hammer thrower Gwen Berry raised her fist and fencer Race Imboden took a knee to raise awareness of racial inequality. In 2016, U.S. soccer star Megan Rapinoe, who will likely participate in this summer’s Olympics,took a knee in solidarity with NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in his fight against racialized oppression and police brutality.

The new guidelines’ core idea is that “sport is neutral and must be separate from political, religious or any other type of interference.” While political neutrality may appear laudable on the surface, it ripples with hypocrisy when it is mandated by the IOC. Under this policy, athlete activists are suspended between the past and the future while being denied their right to exist in the present. That reinforces the politics of the -status quo, which benefits those in power.

The new policy also clangs clumsily against one of the most iconic moments in Olympic history, when American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith thrust their black-gloved fists into the Mexico City sky at the 1968 Summer Games, while Australian Peter Normanstood in solidarity wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights button. Olympic officials ejected Carlos and Smith from the Olympic Village, and all three men paid a steep price for their activism on the medal stand.

 

Tommie Smith, center, and John Carlos protest during the "The Star-Spangled Banner" winning medals at the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, on Oct. 16, 1968.AP

Yet today, they are celebrated as heroes who stood up for what was right. The Olympic Channel feted Carlos and Smith as “legends” for their epic dissent, calling it “one of the most iconic moments in the history of modern Olympic Games.” Last fall, Carlos and Smithwere inducted into the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame. Before that, they were honored by President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House. Yet the new policy is designed to suppress the next generation of courageous athletes who might follow their lead.

But the IOC’s duplicity has additional layers. Although the United Nations has granted the IOC permanent observer status, the new policy stands in sharp contrast to Article 19 of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The new IOC guidelines are the wordsmithed inverse of those freedoms.

The IOC’s selective ethics are also conspicuous when it comes to its relationship with China. In 2001, when Beijing was bidding on the 2008 Summer Olympics, Chinese bid committee officials vowed that bringing the Games to China would improve the country’s human rights situation. Jacques Rogge, then the president of the IOC,agreed: “It is clear that the staging of the Olympic Games will do a lot for the improvement of human rights and social relations in China.”

Despite the rosy predictions, the 2008 Olympics marked a pivot point for intensified state repression. “The reality is that the Chinese government’s hosting of the Games has been a catalyst for abuses,”asserted Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch. But that didn’t stop the IOC from selecting Beijing once again to host the Olympics, this time for the 2022 Winter Games. Today, as the repression of ethnic Uighurs intensifies in Xinjiang province, the IOC sits idly by.

Neutrality can be a form of bias in favor of power. In fact, the new IOC policy banning athletes’ activism enables the repression of dissent with a little wink to Beijing. It states, “Any protest or demonstration outside Olympic venues must obviously comply with local legislation wherever local law forbids such actions.” In short, the IOC provides a generous carve-out for its authoritarian hosts, an alibi for subjugation.

The IOC is not against politics; it is against a certain type of politics. Banning political protest is itself a blatant political act.

The bottom line is that the IOC is not against politics; it is against a certain type of politics. Banning political protest is itself a blatant political act. And forbidding political dissent at the Olympics often means reinforcing white supremacy, because most recent protests by Olympic athletes were carried out either to raise awareness of racism and its ramifications — as Berry, Imboden and Rapinoe did — or by athletes of color who used the Olympics to talk back to power in their home countries, such as Damien Hooper, the Aboriginal boxer from Australia who, after wearing a shirt featuring the Aboriginal flag at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, was chastised for bringing politics to the Games.

Despite the IOC’s inspiring language placing “sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind,” the new policy bends the Olympics toward injustice. 

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Tuesday
Jan072020

UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL...  

EDITOR'S NOTE:  EJ Dionne hits the nail on the head in this column.  To beat Trump the Dems must unite people not divide them.  As Michelle Obama said at the 2016 DNC "we go high, while they go low."  But this requires of GOTV that lives up to this rhetoric - which Hillary's campaign did not.  We can't make that mistake again.  We must contest every princinct in every state, urban,suburban or rural.  And we must have a candidate who is a unifier not a divider.  
Among the top 4 that means Biden, Mayor Pete and/or Globuchar. My money is on Biden - he has the band width among Black voters and white working class voters.  Warren and Sanders are too fimly set in their ideological silos. But if Biden wins the nomination - he should tap Warren as his VP choice.  This is the forumula that JFK used to beat Tricky Dick Nixon in '60 by chosing LBJ at his running mate which drover progressive crazy but got JFK enough Southern votes to win.
 
Biden reassures the mainstream Ds and independents while Warren will keep the millennials in the fold.  But this is all too early to tell the tale...   
OPINION - EJ Dionne 

Political enemies — or fellow citizens?

We often hear that both sides of politics benefit equally from polarization. This is plainly untrue. Say what you will about President Trump, but he knows there’s only one way he can prevail. He needs to keep the nation deeply divided — by race, immigration status and religion and by region, culture and ideology.
Trump’s rants seem — and often are — irrational, undisciplined and self-indulgent. But they are also shrewd and purposeful.

He accepts that he has permanently lost large parts of the country. But, given our Electoral College, he knows he doesn’t have to win a plurality of the popular vote. He needs only tiny margins in swing states, and these require overwhelming support from whites, Christians, older Americans and people in small cities and rural areas.
He needs them to believe that he’s their champion and that his enemies — liberals and “socialists,” big city folk and the “politically correct,” the secular and the culturally adventurous — truly hate them. If keeping that level of hostility high requires direct and indirect appeals to racism and xenophobia, he’s good with that.
If polarization helps Trump, then the opposite follows for progressives. They win only with coalitions that cross the lines of race, place and faith.
Democratic candidates need strong support and turnout from African Americans, Latinos and city-dwellers. But they cannot prevail in swing states without help from blue-collar and non-college whites.
Moreover, the left and center-left believe that public action is a positive good, that social solidarity is a realistic possibility, and that a society thrives when it shares benefits and burdens equitably. When we live in our bunkers of hatred, none of these dispositions has a chance.

It’s thus a big mistake for progressives to think that their own form of “base politics” is sufficient, and one politician who firmly grasps this is Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio. He has a lot to teach this year’s Democratic presidential candidates, and he gathered his thoughts in his delightful book “Desk 88.”
Brown tells the stories of eight progressive senators who used the desk on the Senate floor that is now his. They include Al Gore Sr., Robert F. Kennedy, George McGovern, and future Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.
But most revealing is Brown’s analysis of his 2018 reelection by 7 points in a state Trump carried by 8. Rather than crow about his success in urban areas and college towns, he focuses on where he failed: “We lost medium-sized industrial city after medium-sized industrial city, small town after small town, rural community after rural community. Pretty much all of them.”
“Rural and small town voters don’t think either party is going to do anything for them, but they vote Republican because they think Democrats will do something to them: take their guns or raise their taxes, or enact an environmental law that will put them out of work,” he writes.
Bear in mind that Brown is no bland centrist. He’s a down-the-line progressive who campaigns hard for African American votes and speaks of linking labor rights to civil rights. His ideology, however, does not block his capacity for empathy. “I will never be one,” he writes, “who says that people in rural or small-town America vote against their own interest; who am I to say what is their self-interest? But we as progressives have work to do.”

It’s work essential not only to winning elections but also to creating a more humane and cohesive country.
I particularly appreciated Brown’s chapter on Kennedy, a politician known, as his biographer Jack Newfield wrote, for his “almost literary ability to put himself inside other people.”

Brown quotes these stunning words from Kennedy’s speech to the City Club of Cleveland during his 1968 presidential campaign, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated: “When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens, but as enemies — to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.”

This is politics in the Age of Trump. We cannot let things go on this way.

ejdionne@washpost.com; @EJDionne © 2019, Washington Post Writers Group