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Their Numbers Growing, Latinos Gain Clout in the New Congress

WASHINGTON — A record 43 Latinos elected to Congress are set to take the oath of office in January, including the youngest woman ever elected, two Latinas from Texas, the first Latino to represent Ohio and a woman born in Ecuador.

A few are ascending to leadership roles, demonstrating the growing clout of the 57 million Latinos who live in the United States. New Mexico Rep. Ben Ray Lujan will move into the fourth-highest position in Democratic leadership, becoming the highest-ranking Latino in the history of the House. In the Senate, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto will become the first Latina ever in charge of the Democratic Party’s campaign arm for Senate races.

Francisco Pedraza, a political scientist at University of California, Riverside, attributed the largest Latino representation ever to a larger turnout propelled by rhetoric from President Donald Trump about immigrants, but he said much more needs to be done to bring out the Latino vote. Latinos are the nation’s largest minority and constitute 18 percent of the total population, yet their political impact is diluted due to their low electoral turnout.

“Just being annoyed is not enough,” Pedraza said.

One of the power centers for Latinos in Congress is the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, where Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas is set to serve as chairman. Castro said the caucus will pursue a long list of priorities next year, including comprehensive immigration reform, reconstruction in parts of Puerto Rico affected by Hurricane Maria, raising minimum wages, lowering the cost of health care and dealing with climate change.

Ten of the Latinos coming to Congress are incoming freshmen. As such, they will be relegated to the lower rungs of committees, yet faced with the challenge of keeping their promises to voters back home. The task will be made even tougher by divided government, with Democrats set to control the House but Republicans holding power in the Senate and White House.

Among the newcomers is California Democratic Rep. Gil Cisneros, a former naval officer and 2010 Mega Millions lottery winner whose great-grandmother was born in Los Angeles when it was still part of Mexico. He expressed optimism that Congress can come up with the first immigration reform in 30 years to define the status of 11 million immigrants, mostly from Latin America, who are living in the country illegally.

Rep. Mike Levin, another newly elected California Democrat, also thinks there are some on the Republican side of the aisle who want to see “common-sense” immigration reform.

“We have to get past the toxic anti-immigrant rhetoric, and we have to work together to try to create an immigration system that is humane and that keeps our border secure. We can do both and we must,” said Levin, an environmental lawyer whose maternal grandparents migrated as children from Mexico to Los Angeles.

Yet the politics of immigration have grown more polarized, with Trump making his call for a border wall with Mexico one of his signature issues and his administration pursuing polices aimed at limiting entry to the United States.

House Republicans made a stab at passing an immigration bill in the summer, but the effort ended in failure. Two of the leading Republican advocates for action on immigration—Reps. Carlos Curbelo of Florida and Jeff Denham of California—lost their re-election races.

Newly elected Democratic Rep. Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico said lawmakers have to try to find bipartisan consensus on immigration.

“I was elected with a real clear interest in problem solving and working past party lines in working to identify opportunities to get things done,” said Torres Small, a Georgetown University-trained lawyer.

She, Cisneros and Levin were among five Latino Democratic first-time candidates who defeated Republican incumbents in November.

Other members of the largest Hispanic class ever include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 29-year-old Puerto Rican New Yorker who is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and Veronica Escobar and Silvia Garcia, who will the first Latinas to represent Texas in the House, while Debbie Mucarsel-Powell will be the first native of Ecuador.

Among the 43 members are 35 Democrats and eight Republicans. The only newly elected Latino on the Republican side is Anthony Gonzalez, who was an Ohio State University football star and became a businessman.

He agrees with his Democratic counterparts that a first step in the immigration debate should be a permanent legislative solution for the young immigrants who were brought into the country illegally as children, but he is pessimistic about the prospect of reaching bipartisan agreement.

Gonzalez—whose grandmother left Cuba in 1960—said he will take seriously the responsibility of being the first Latino from Ohio ever elected to Congress, though the Hispanic electorate in his district is just 2 percent.

He acknowledged that being the only winner out of eight first-time Republican Latino candidates in eight states could be a sign of the challenge the GOP faces on engaging conservative Latinos, given the harsh rhetoric from Trump has kept about that group since his campaign.

According to AP VoteCast, The Associated Press’ nationwide survey of the electorate in the November midterms, 67 percent of Hispanic voters said they disapprove of how Trump is handling the presidency, while about one-third approve.

“One thing that I want to do is take a conservative message to communities where we typically have not had success and at least sit down, understand people,” Gonzales said. “The Republican Party has to look more like America. It just does.”

Trump Picks Mick Mulvaney as Next Chief of Staff

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Friday picked budget director Mick Mulvaney to be his acting chief of staff, ending a chaotic search in which several top contenders took themselves out of contention for the job.

“Mick has done an outstanding job while in the Administration,” Trump tweeted. “I look forward to working with him in this new capacity as we continue to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Trump added that his current chief of staff, John Kelly, “will be staying until the end of the year. He is a GREAT PATRIOT and I want to personally thank him for his service!”

One senior White House official said there was no time limit on the appointment and that Mulvaney would fill the role of chief of staff indefinitely, regardless of the “acting” title.

Key to his selection: Mulvaney and the president get along and Trump has appreciated how the budget director briefs him, according to the official. Additionally, Trump prized the former congressman’s knowledge of Capitol Hill and political instincts as the White House prepares for both a Democratic-controlled House and the president’s upcoming re-election campaign.

Unlike with Kelly’s appointment, Mulvaney received the news before the president tweeted his announcement. Trump and Mulvaney met face to face Friday afternoon and spoke by phone in the evening, according to a second White House official. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the personnel matter on the record.

Mulvaney, who will be Trump’s third chief of staff, will now take on his third job in the administration. He is head of the Office of Management and Budget, and for a time had simultaneously led the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Russell Vought, Mulvaney’s deputy, is to take over at OMB.

The first senior official disputed reports that Mulvaney wasn’t interested in the chief of staff job and said the president didn’t need to change Mulvaney’s mind, though the budget director had previously signaled disinterest. A person close to him had told reporters that Mulvaney had made clear in recent months that he would be more interested in taking over at the Treasury or Commerce Department.

It was unclear why Mulvaney’s appointment was announced as temporary — but that decision was made by the president, the first official said. The source added that Kelly was happy with the choice of Mulvaney and plans to stay on through the end of the year to assist with the transition.

A former Tea Party congressman, Mulvaney was among a faction on the hard right that pushed GOP leaders into a 2013 government shutdown confrontation by insisting on lacing a must-pass spending bill with provisions designed to cripple President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.

The appointment of the affable, fast-talking South Carolinian came just hours after another candidate for the post, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, took himself out of contention for the job. Christie cited family reasons in a statement saying that he was asking Trump to remove him from consideration. He had met with Trump on Thursday to discuss the job, according to a person familiar with the meeting who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The president’s hunt for a new chief reverted to square one last weekend when Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, took himself out of the running and decided that he would instead leave the White House.

Ayers, who had cited family concerns as a reason why he didn’t accept the post, tweeted Friday: “The right father of triplets got the job…Congratulations @MickMulvaneyOMB!” Both men are, coincidentally, fathers of triplets.

Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, served for six months before leaving in July 2017. Trump tweeted his choice of Kelly to replace him before informing the retired four-star Marine general.

For some months, Kelly had success streamlining the decision-making process in the West Wing and curtailing access to the undisciplined president. But Trump grew weary of the restrictions and Kelly’s influence waned as the two men frequently clashed.

As the search dragged on after Ayers bowed out, the void had been filled with Trump’s specialty: drama.

British journalist Piers Morgan suggested he would be a good fit in an op-ed for “The Daily Mail,” while former major league slugger Jose Canseco tweeted his interest to Trump. Speculation has swirled around an array of Trump associates, prompting some to distance themselves from the job.

When former House Speaker Newt Gingrich visited the White House this week, he insisted it was merely to see the Christmas decorations.

The wild process was hardly a novelty for the Trump administration, which has struggled with high staff turnover and attracting top talent, but it underscored the tumult of Trump’s Washington. In past administrations, chief of staff was a sought-after job, typically awarded after a careful process. Now, many view the job as a risky proposition, given Trump’s propensity for disorder and his resistance to being managed.

Author Chris Whipple, an expert on chiefs of staff, had called the search process “sad to watch.”

“In his first two years, Trump devalued the position by failing to empower anyone to perform the job, and now he’s turned the search for a replacement into a reality show,” said Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers,” a book on the subject. “The only thing more broken and dysfunctional than the White House itself seems to be the search for the new White House chief of staff.”

Ivanka’s Involvement in Trump’s Inauguration May Be Her Undoing

Find “Trump, Inc.” wherever you get your podcasts.

When it came out this year that President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee raised and spent unprecedented amounts, people wondered where all that money went.

It turns out one beneficiary was Trump himself.

The inauguration paid the Trump Organization for rooms, meals and event space at the company’s Washington hotel, according to interviews as well as internal emails and receipts reviewed by WNYC and ProPublica.

During the planning, Ivanka Trump, the president-elect’s eldest daughter and a senior executive with the Trump Organization, was involved in negotiating the price the hotel charged the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee for venue rentals. A top inaugural planner emailed Ivanka and others at the company to “express my concern” that the hotel was overcharging for its event spaces, worrying of what would happen “when this is audited.”

If the Trump hotel charged more than the going rate for the venues, it could violate tax law. The inaugural committee’s payments to the Trump Organization and Ivanka Trump’s role have not been previously reported or disclosed in public filings.

“The fact that the inaugural committee did business with the Trump Organization raises huge ethical questions about the potential for undue enrichment,” said Marcus Owens, the former head of the division of the Internal Revenue Service that oversees nonprofits.

Inaugural workers had other misgivings. Rick Gates, then the deputy to the chairman of the inaugural, asked some vendors to take payments directly from donors, rather than through the committee, according to two people with direct knowledge. The vendors felt the request was unusual and concerning, according to these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they signed confidentiality agreements. It is not clear whether any vendors took him up on his request.

The revelations about the inauguration’s finances show how Trump blurred the lines between his political and business lives, as the real estate mogul ascended to the presidency.

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that federal prosecutors in New York have opened a criminal investigation into whether the inaugural committee misspent money and whether donors gave in return for political favors, citing people familiar with the matter. In addition, The New York Times reported that prosecutors are examining whether foreigners illegally funnelled money to the inauguration.

Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Ivanka Trump’s ethics lawyer, said: “When contacted by someone working on the inauguration, Ms. Trump passed the inquiry on to a hotel official and said only that any resulting discussions should be at a ‘fair market rate.’ Ms. Trump was not involved in any additional discussions.”

Mirijanian did not provide evidence that Ivanka Trump sought a fair market rate.

A spokeswoman for the inaugural committee said it “is not aware of any pending investigations and has not been contacted by any prosecutors. We simply have no evidence the investigation exists.” The White House and a lawyer for Gates did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Manhattan federal prosecutors’ office declined to comment. The Trump Organization did not comment.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with the president or the first lady,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Thursday night, when asked about the story in the Journal.

President-elect Trump was repeatedly briefed on inaugural planning and specific events, according to one committee worker with direct knowledge. WNYC and ProPublica have seen presentations that were shown to the president-elect, complete with renderings and floor plans.

Trump’s 2017 inauguration committee, which was chaired by his friend the businessman Tom Barrack, raised nearly $107 million from donors including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and AT&T. The January 2017 festivities cost almost twice President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, previously the most expensive. The nonprofit that planned Trump’s inauguration booked many spaces in the Trump International Hotel, located in the Old Post Office building near the White House, including a ballroom, hotel rooms and work spaces, as well as paying for meals there, according to several people who worked on the inauguration.

How the inaugural committee managed to spend all the money it raised remains a mystery, nearly two years after the event. While groups that support political candidates or issues must publicly detail their spending, an inaugural committee is required to list only its top five contractors. That leaves about $40 million unaccounted for.

Greg Jenkins, who led George W. Bush’s second inauguration, was perplexed by the Trump team’s mammoth fundraising haul. “They had a third of the staff and a quarter of the events and they raise at least twice as much as we did,” Jenkins told WNYC and ProPublica this year. “So there’s the obvious question: Where did it go? I don’t know.”

As planning for the inauguration was underway in December 2016, Ivanka Trump was still an executive vice president at the Trump Organization. But she was reportedly preparing to move to Washington and take on a greater public role. She now serves as an adviser to the president.

Around the middle of the month, with Inauguration Day scarcely a month away, Ivanka Trump was asked to help resolve a dispute between inaugural planners and her family’s Washington hotel, according to emails.

The problem: Organizers thought the hotel was charging too much money.

Emails show that Ivanka Trump connected Gates with Mickael Damelincourt, managing director of the hotel. Damelincourt responded with a new rate of $175,000 per day for use of the Presidential Ballroom and meeting rooms, offering a $700,000 charge for four days of use.

It is not clear what the earlier price was, but Damelincourt’s revised rate did not satisfy one of the lead organizers of the inauguration, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff.

In an email to Ivanka Trump and Gates, Wolkoff, who had previously managed the Metropolitan Museum’s annual gala and fashion shows at Lincoln Center, expressed discomfort with the price.

“I wanted to follow up on our conversation and express my concern,” Wolkoff wrote in the December email.

“These events are in PE’s [the president-elect’s] honor at his hotel and one of them is for family and close friends. Please take into consideration that when this is audited it will become public knowledge,” she wrote, noting that other locations would be provided to the inaugural committee for free.

“I understand that compared to the original pricing this is great but we should look at the whole context,” Wolkoff wrote, suggesting a day rate of $85,000, less than half of the Trump hotel’s offer.

A former Trump hotel staffer confirmed that the inaugural committee paid for inaugural week events at the hotel. It’s not clear what price the committee ultimately paid. Previous media coverage has focused on spending by outside groups at the Trump hotel but it was not known that the official inaugural committee itself spent significant sums there.

Wolkoff also raised concerns about spending in a conversation with then-Trump attorney Michael Cohen, according to the story in the Journal. Federal prosecutors have a recording of that conversation, according to the Journal. The Times story suggests that conversation took place well after the inauguration.

Wolkoff, who is a friend of first lady Melania Trump, did not respond to a request for comment. Wolkoff’s firm, WIS Media Partners, was the inauguration’s highest-paid contactor, according to the committee’s tax filing. Wolkoff was scrutinized in media accounts this year because the firm received nearly $26 million. Most of that of the money was passed on to subcontractors, according to a person familiar with the spending. It is possible that payments to the Trump hotel were included in that sum.

If the Trump hotel charged the inaugural committee above-market rates, it could violate tax rules, according to Owens, the nonprofit tax expert who is now a partner at the law firm Loeb & Loeb.

If a person with “substantial influence” over a nonprofit group charges the group above-market rates in a transaction with their outside business, the IRS can impose steep fines. In this case, Donald Trump could qualify as a person with such influence. Should the tax agency find that a violation occurred, the Trump Organization would have to refund any overcharge and the inaugural committee would be hit with a 25 percent tax on the money, Owens said.

Owens added that IRS audits of nonprofits are increasingly rare. Since the inaugural committee was incorporated in Virginia, the state attorney general there could also have standing to investigate its operations.

A spokeswoman for the inaugural committee said its finances “were fully audited internally and independently and are fully accounted. … These were funds raised from private individuals and were then spent in accordance with the law and the expectations of the donors.”

The inaugural committee spent money at the Trump International in Washington in other ways as well. Many workers came from California and New York and stayed at the hotel, eating their meals there and holding meetings. Receipts reviewed by WNYC and ProPublica show they typically paid about $350 a night. According to an inaugural worker, 15 to 20 inaugural workers stayed at the hotel most nights for roughly a month in the run-up to the inauguration, at a total cost of what could be more than $200,000.

The professional resumes of top Trump hotel staffers indicate they worked closely with the presidential inaugural committee. The hotel’s director of food and beverage says on his LinkedIn profile that he was “working with PIC [Presidential Inaugural Committee] during the 2017 Inauguration” and a “related series of very special events.”

The day before Trump’s swearing in, the inaugural committee hosted a Leadership Luncheon in the hotel’s Presidential Ballroom, featuring his cabinet nominees and major donors. “This is a gorgeous room,” the president-elect told the crowd. “A total genius must have built this place.” And the night of the inauguration itself, Trump’s family and close allies such as Sean Hannity celebrated into the early morning at an exclusive after-party in the Trump hotel’s grand lobby. Thousands of red, white and blue balloons were released from the rafters.

Some vendors for the inauguration became concerned when Gates, a top inaugural committee official, asked them to take payments outside of the normal committee invoicing process, according to two people with knowledge of what happened. He proposed that they be paid for their work directly from a would-be donor rather than by the committee. Gates told the vendors that the inaugural committee had received pledges of more money than was initially targeted, and, therefore, he wished to reduce the publicly reported sum raised.

Gates did not respond to a request for comment. Last February, he pleaded guilty to unrelated charges of lying to the FBI and conspiracy, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry.

Over the summer, Gates was cross examined about his work for the inauguration in the trial of his former boss, Paul Manafort. Gates conceded that he might have charged personal expenses to the committee. “It’s possible,” he said.

In a separate episode this year, a U.S. lobbyist pleaded guilty to helping a Ukrainian businessman and member of Parliament buy tickets to the inauguration, in violation of rules barring the committee from taking foreign money. The inaugural committee was not accused of wrongdoing in that case.

Facebook Exposed Users’ Private Photos

Millions of Facebook users’ private photos may have been exposed due to a bug, the social network announced Friday. For 12 days in September, as many as 6.8 million people’s private photos were accessible to third-party apps.

A bug in Facebook’s photo software authorized as many as 1,500 apps to access photos that users had not shared on their timelines, such as photos posted to Facebook Stories and photos that users uploaded to Facebook and then decided not to post. The social network said it would contact people affected by the bug.

“We have fixed the issue but, because of this bug, some third-party apps may have had access to a broader set of photos than usual,” wrote Tomer Bar, an engineering director at Facebook. Generally, apps have access to the photos people have shared on their timelines. Bar added: “We’re sorry this happened.”

TechCrunch’s Josh Constine reported that Facebook learned about the bug Sept. 25. The apps had access from Sept. 13 to Sept. 25. Constine wrote:

That it keeps photos you partially uploaded but never posted in the first place is creepy, but the fact that these could be exposed to third-party developers is truly unacceptable. And it seems Facebook is so tired of its failings that it couldn’t put forward even a seemingly heartfelt apology is telling.

Engineers at Facebook discovered another security breach on Sept. 25 as well. As many as 50 million accounts, Facebook announced days later, were completely exposed to attackers.

“It is not uncommon for us to receive reports about high or critical bugs from researchers,” Facebook’s security engineering manager, Dan Gurfinkel, told Wired. “The September security incident involved a case of three different bugs interacting with one another. Among other lessons, it served as a reminder that it’s important to get as many eyes as we can to evaluate and test our code.”

“I’m glad we found this and fixed the vulnerability,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time, “But it definitely is an issue that this happened in the first place. I think this underscores the attacks that our community and our services face.”

People are losing trust. At BuzzFeed, Charlie Warzel wrote:

That’s two massive vulnerabilities in a matter of months—in the same year as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which also involved millions of Facebook users. Taken together, screw-ups are mind-boggling in scope, affecting tens of millions of people. They aren’t mere email address or password leaks—though emails were certainly leaked—these are breaches of highly personal information—location histories, search histories, photos. In some cases, the information was improperly shared with political consultants potentially to manipulate voter sentiment.

In April, Facebook said that the data firm Cambridge Analytica accessed the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users. In May, Facebook drew skepticism from privacy advocates when it announced an anti-revenge porn program that required users to submit the nude photos that they did not want disseminated. And in June, Facebook revealed a software bug in which 14 million users may have posted information publicly that they had intended only for smaller groups.

Taking French Lessons: The Power of the ‘Yellow Vests’

The people of France are currently engaged in a major political battle with their government. But those of us on the outside watching the “Yellow Vests” bring their nation to a standstill are also learning a valuable lesson: how to make politicians bend to your will through relentless activism. Within just a few weeks of widespread and continuous protests, French President Emmanuel Macron has given in to several demands, postponing a planned fuel tax hike and offering both tax cuts and a minimum-wage increase.

Macron even issued a mea culpa in a televised address to the French people—an act that American politicians might find humiliating. “The anger is deeper. I feel it is justified in many ways,” he told them. “It is 40 years of malaise that is resurfacing … no doubt over the past year and a half we have not provided answers.”

Through weeks of mass direct action, the French have shown their government who is boss, and elected officials have been forced to accept and acquiesce—at least to an extent. It is a dynamic we can only dream of here in the U.S.

President Donald Trump has his own view of what the French protests mean. Trump has exploited the demonstrations to denounce the Paris Climate Accord agreed upon three years prior, packing three separate lies into a single tweet. First, he wrongly attributed the protests to the pact itself, writing, “The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris. Protests and riots all over France.” In fact, the planned fuel tax increase was legislated well before the 2015 meeting in which the climate deal was signed. He added that “People do not want to pay large sums of money, much to third world countries (that are questionably run), in order to maybe protect the environment.” Those tax revenues would not benefit other nations at all. Trump ended his tweet with the most ridiculous of lies, saying that the protesters could be heard chanting, “We Want Trump!”—a statement not even worth dignifying with evidence to the contrary. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian shot back at Trump, asking him to mind his own country’s business.

Mainstream news analysis of the French protests has also proved misleading. A recent Washington Post article casts the Yellow Vest actions as “part of a global backlash against climate-change taxes,” as though middle- and working-class people are putting their own selfish needs above the global needs of the human species.

The actual meaning of the protests doesn’t come down to the false premise of people versus the climate, as both The Washington Post and Trump are attempting to claim. Amnesty International’s secretary-general, Kumi Naidoo, penned a counterpoint in an essay for Time magazine, arguing that “It would be a mistake for the environmental movement to respond by playing [Trump’s] game and arguing that the moral imperative to tackle climate change must automatically override any hardship people might face in the short-term due to transition measures.” Instead, Naidoo suggested, “The French government must establish climate protection policies that reduce inequality, rather than deepen it. This includes policies such as subsidies to enable people to switch to clean energy sources rather than punishing them for failing to do so.”

In pushing a fuel tax hike, the French government has foisted the responsibility for the problems caused by carbon emissions onto ordinary people instead of targeting transnational corporations like Google and Amazon, which should pay higher taxes to aid the transition to clean energy. Major tech companies are currently exploiting the patchwork of tax codes across Europe, and Amazon even negotiated a settlement with the French government earlier this year for an undisclosed amount in back taxes.

France could also reinstate a tax on the rich. Last year, Macron backed out of the so-called Solidarity Tax on Wealth (known by its French acronym ISF) and has thus far ruled out the idea of returning to the days of a direct tax on the wealthiest individuals.

However the French government tackles climate change, it must do so by also tackling inequality—an idea that needs to take root all over the world in order to ensure the survival of our planet. In fact, climate solutions are perfectly suited to job creation and reducing poverty among those most vulnerable to the impact of global warming. This idea has been echoed in the so-called Climate Justice movement for years. Civil-society groups have persistently demanded equity on a global scale, insisting that wealthy governments pay for poorer ones to adapt to climate-friendly economies. It is the same basic idea behind the “Green New Deal” that environmental activists in the U.S. are pushing congressional members to back.

Indeed, the Yellow Vest protesters in France have articulated similar ideas. A list of 40 demands released by members of the movement includes numerous government policies to reduce income inequality by using taxes on the rich to subsidize the basic needs of the general population. It also includes ideas like nationalizing sectors of the energy industry and developing a hydrogen-vehicle industry. So far, it appears as though many in the leaderless movement are rejecting Macron’s gestures and refusing to back down until he makes more meaningful concessions.

Despite the success that members of France’s inspiring movement have had in making their anger felt, our analysis of the Yellow Vests must remain clear-eyed. For all its progressive aspects, this is not a purely leftist revolt against neoliberal capitalist hegemony. There are also reports of fascist and far-right elements among the protesters that have been linked to instances of property damage. Additionally, the movement has called for the deportation of immigrants whose asylum applications have been rejected, as well as funding increases for the police and armed forces—not exactly progressive ideas.

It should be noted that the people of France and the Yellow Vest protesters have made huge personal sacrifices to make their voices heard. So far, four people have been killed, more than a thousand have been arrested and scores have been injured. But, just as happens in the U.S., the retaliatory violence by police against the protesters is even more disturbing, as several photos and videos from the clashes show.

What works in France may not work elsewhere, of course. The French have their own form of government and a unique history of militant activism and revolution to draw from. They have far higher expectations of government and their leaders than we do. But by sticking to their guns for long enough and not caving in at the first sign of apparent victory, the protesters saw their power and seized it, making demands and digging in their heels. American actions can and should emulate the determined spirit of the Yellow Vests.

The French have taken on Macron—a charismatic, telegenic and purportedly liberal politician who has paid lip service to progressive values while attempting to grow the economy on the backs of ordinary people. We Americans have to contend with both Trump—an authoritarian narcissist and pathological liar with delusions of grandeur—and the Democratic Party, whose milquetoast leadership often takes greater pride in civility over progress.

There are already militant actions occurring piecemeal around the U.S. The youth-led movements demanding action on climate change are burgeoning in this country. On Monday, more than a thousand young people showed up at their congressional representatives’ offices in Washington, D.C., pushing for their elected officials to back a Green New Deal. More than 140 of the activists were arrested. But the action worked, as 13 additional members of Congress pledged their support for the bill. On the same day in Katowice, Poland, the site of the COP24 summit, youth activists interrupted a ludicrous pro-coal event organized by the Trump administration by laughing and jeering, exposing it for the sham it was.

If Americans take a single lesson from the French, it should be to adopt a position of extreme distrust toward the rich and powerful. In other words, we need to rediscover our class consciousness. They are few and have most of the money. We are many and must demand our fair share. The many can exercise people-power over the few. It’s the only power we have got.

Robert Reich: Privatization Can’t Solve Our Country’s Ills

Privatization. Privatization. Privatization. It’s all you hear from Republicans. But what does it actually mean?

Generations ago, America built an entire national highway system, along with the largest and best public colleges and universities in the world. Also public schools and national parks, majestic bridges, dams that generated electricity for entire regions, public libraries and public research.

But around 1980, the moneyed interests began pushing to privatize much of this, giving it over to for-profit corporations. Privatization, the argument went, would boost efficiency and reduce taxes.

The reality has been that privatization too often only boosts corporate bottom lines.

For example, consider Trump’s proposal for infrastructure. It depends on private developers, who would make money off of both tax subsidies and private tolls. So the public would get charged twice, without any guarantee that the resulting roads, bridges, or rapid transportation systems would be where they’re most needed.

It’s true that private for-profit corporations can do certain tasks very efficiently. And some privatization has worked. But the goal of corporations is to maximize profits for shareholders, not to serve the public interest.

The question should be: What’s best for the public? Here are five rules of thumb for when public services should not be privatized:

1. Don’t privatize when the purpose of the service is to bring us together – reinforcing our communities, helping us connect with one another across class and race, linking  up Americans who’d otherwise be isolated or marginalized. 

This is why we have a public postal service that serves everyone, even small rural communities where for-profit private carriers often won’t go. This is why we value public education and need to be very careful that charter schools and other forms of so-called school choice don’t end up dividing our children and our communities rather than pulling them together.

2. Don’t privatize when the service is less costly when paid for through tax revenues than through prices set by for-profit corporations. 

America’s hugely expensive for-profit health-insurance system, for example, is designed to sign up healthy people and avoid sick people, while running up huge tabs for advertising and marketing, and giving big rewards to shareholders and executives. Which is why the administrative costs of Medicare are a fraction of the costs of for-profit medical insurance – and why we need Medicare for all.

3. Don’t privatize when the people who are supposed to get the service have no power to complain when services are poor. 

This is why for-profit prison corporations have proven again and again to violate the constitutional rights of prisoners, and why for-profit detention centers for refugee children at the border pose such grave risks.

4. Don’t privatize when those who are getting the service have no way to know they’re receiving poor quality. 

The marketers of for-profit colleges, for example, have every incentive to exploit young people and their parents because the value of the degrees they’re offering can’t easily be known. Which is why non-profit colleges and universities have proven far more trustworthy.

5. Finally, don’t privatize where for-profit corporations face insufficient competition to keep prices under control. 

Giant for-profit defense contractors with power over how contracts are awarded generate notorious cost overruns because they’re accountable mainly to their shareholders, not to the public.

In other words, for-profit corporations can do some things very well. Including, especially, maximizing shareholder returns. But when the primary goal is to serve the public, rather than shareholders, we need to be careful not to sacrifice the public interest to private profits.

Strasbourg Market Attack Suspect Killed in Police Shootout

STRASBOURG, France — The man authorities believe killed three people during a rampage near a Christmas market in Strasbourg died Thursday in a shootout with police at the end of a two-day manhunt, French authorities said.

The Paris prosecutor’s office, which handles terror cases in France, formally identified the man killed in the eastern French city as 29-year-old Cherif Chekatt, a Strasbourg-born man with a long history of convictions for various crimes, including robberies. Chekatt also had been on a watch list of potential extremists.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner, speaking earlier from Strasbourg, said police had spotted a man matching the suspect’s description in the city’s Neudorf neighborhood.

“The moment they tried to arrest him, he turned around and opened fire. They replied,” killing the man, Castaner said.

Chekatt was suspected of killing three people and wounding 13 near Strasbourg’s Christmas market on Tuesday night. Castaner said earlier Thursday that three of the injured had been released from hospital and three others were still fighting for their lives.

“Our engagement against terrorism is total,” French President Emmanuel Macron, who was in Brussels for a European Union summit, said in a tweet thanking security forces.

Five people have been arrested in connection with the investigation, including Chekatt’s parents and two of his brothers. The Paris prosecutor’s office said the fifth, who was arrested Thursday, was a member of Chekatt’s “entourage” but not a family member.

Witnesses said the gunman shouted “God is great!” in Arabic and sprayed gunfire from a security zone near the Christmas market on Tuesday. Security forces wounded the man but he managed to escape in a taxi, which dropped him off in the Neudorf neighborhood.

More than 700 officers searched for Chekatt, government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux told CNews television.

Chekatt was well-known to police but as a common criminal, not a terrorist. He had his first conviction at 13, and had 26 more by the time he died at age 29. He served jail time in France, Germany and Switzerland.

A local police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the man who shot at police Thursday night had been armed with a pistol and a knife.

Strasbourg Mayor Roland Ries said police had acted on a tip from a woman.

Residents described hearing shots on the street where Chekatt faced off with police, prompting new jitters after two days marked by tension in and around Strasbourg, which lies on the border with Germany and is considered as symbol of European unity.

The SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity online, said the Islamic State group’s Amaq news agency was claiming the gunman as a “soldier” of the group, although IS claims of responsibility have often been considered opportunistic.

Chekatt’s motives remain vague. Authorities had put him on a watch list three years ago for suspected radicalism, but said they didn’t detect signs he was ready to act on it — a pattern in several past attacks in France.

France raised its three-stage threat index to the highest level after Tuesday’s attack and deployed 1,800 additional soldiers across the country to help patrol streets and secure crowded events.

Security forces, including the elite Raid squad, spent hours Thursday searching in the Neudorf neighborhood where Chekatt had grown up based on “supposition only” he might have been hiding in a building nearby, a French police official said.

Residents of the Neudorf neighborhood expressed relief after Chekatt was killed.

“Everybody’s quite happy that the killer has been finally shot. I think now, the city and life can keep going on in Strasbourg,” resident Pierre Plasse said.

One of the three who died in Tuesday’s attack was a Thai tourist, 45-year-old Anupong Suebsamarn, according to the Thai Foreign Ministry. An Italian journalist was in critical condition, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said. The Europhonica radio consortium said Antonio Megalizzi, 28, was in Strasbourg to follow the session of the European Parliament.

The leaders of the 28 European Union countries held a moment of silence for the victims at their summit Thursday.

Before Thursday’s shootout, hundreds of people gathered in Strasbourg’s renowned 500-year-old cathedral to mourn and seek comfort.

“Evil does not prevail,” Archbishop Luc Ravel said. “And the message of Christmas has not been contradicted but rather confirmed by Tuesday’s dramatic night: Evil and good are both there, but in the end the good will have last word.”

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Petrequin and Becatoros reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Jean-Francois Badias in Strasbourg, France, Sylvie Corbet, Deborah Gouffran, and Elaine Ganley in Paris, Colleen Barry in Milan, Italy, Raf Casert and Angela Charlton in Brussels, Belgium, contributed to this report.

In Plea Deal, Russian Admits Being a Secret Agent

WASHINGTON — A Russian gun-rights activist admitted Thursday that she was a secret agent for the Kremlin who tried to infiltrate conservative U.S. political groups as Donald Trump rose to power.

Maria Butina, 30, agreed to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge as part of a deal with federal prosecutors.

“Guilty,” Butina said in a slight accent when asked how she wanted to plead. Dressed in a green jail uniform with her red hair pulled into a long ponytail, Butina spoke softly and mostly kept her eyes on the judge.

The Butina case has provided a vivid glimpse into Russia’s influence operations in the United States at a time when the U.S. intelligence community has determined that Russia was trying to help elect Trump by releasing emails stolen from Democrats and conducting a social media campaign in an attempt to sow political discord.

The case also lays bare how Russia tried to exploit one of the most sensitive social issues in the U.S. — gun control — to gain access to the political sphere.

Prosecutors say Butina and her Russian patron, Alexander Torshin, used their contacts in the National Rifle Association to pursue back channels to American conservatives during the 2016 campaign, when Trump, a Republican, defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Court documents detail how Butina saw the Republican Party as prime for Russian influence and courted conservatives through networking and contacts with the NRA. She posed for photos with prominent Republicans, including former presidential candidates, and snagged a picture with Donald Trump Jr. at a 2016 NRA dinner.

As part of her deal, Butina pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent and she agreed to cooperate with investigators.

The case is separate from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Prosecutors say it is “very likely” Butina will be deported after her sentence is completed. The charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, though the defense noted Thursday that federal sentencing guidelines recommend no time to six months. She has been jailed since her arrest in July.

According to her plea agreement, Butina’s work was directed by Torshin, a former longtime member of the Russian parliament who until recently was an official in Russia’s central bank. He is now under sanction by the Treasury Department for his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Butina acknowledged she “sought to establish unofficial lines of communication with Americans having power and influence over U.S. politics,” according to the plea agreement. She admitted that her boyfriend, conservative political operative Paul Erickson, helped her as she tried to use his ties with the NRA to set up the back channels. Erickson, who is referred to as “U.S. Person 1” in court papers, has not been charged. His attorney said he is a good American who “has done nothing to harm our country and never would.”

In a 2015 proposal she crafted with Erickson’s help, Butina argued it was unlikely Russia would be able to exert influence using official channels and, as an alternative, suggested using back channel communications to build relationships with Republicans, according to court papers.

Pushing her travel to the U.S. and her work with the NRA as selling points, Butina argued that she had already “laid the groundwork for an unofficial channel of communication with the next U.S. administration.” She asked for $125,000 from an unnamed Russian billionaire to attend conferences in the U.S. and meet with people who she thought may have influence with the Republican Party and sent the proposal to Torshin. He responded by telling her the proposal would “be supported, at least in part,” according to court documents.

Torshin also asked Butina to help justify him attending a national NRA meeting in 2016 and Butina encouraged his attendance “partly because of the opportunity to meet political candidates,” according to her plea agreement. In addition to attending numerous NRA events, Butina organized “friendship dinners” in Washington with influential political figures.

In their filings, prosecutors have said federal agents found Butina had contact information for people suspected of working for Russia’s Federal Security Services, or FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB. Inside her home, they found notes referring to a potential job offer from the FSB, according to the documents.

A senior Russian lawmaker said he was convinced that Butina was pressured to confess.

“They broke her down,” Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the State Duma’s foreign affairs committee, told Russian news agencies. “Anyone would break down in circumstances like that.”

Butina’s time in prison has included solitary confinement.

Butina’s lawyer, Robert Driscoll, had previously decried the charges against her as “overblown” and said Butina was a student interested in American politics.

On Thursday, prosecutors also appeared to have backed off their assertion that Butina’s attendance at American University was little more than a cover to enter the U.S. In their filing, prosecutors said “all available evidence” indicated she had a genuine interest in a graduate school education.

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Associated Press writer Chad Day contributed to this report.

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Read the plea agreement: http://apne.ws/qHA37wM

Is Harvard Profiting From California’s Drought?

Harvard University has the world’s largest endowment, valued at $39.2 billion in 2018, according to The New York Times. That asset allows the university to take some surprising turns in its investments, including, starting in 2012, buying up vineyards in the drought-stricken region of Paso Robles, Calif., and the increasingly valuable water rights that come with them.

As The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, Harvard, through its endowment management company, “was acquiring rights to vast sources of water in a region where the earth’s warming is making the resource an ever-more-valuable asset.”

California’s Central Valley has suffered from a drought since 2011. Farmers in the region have resorted to obtaining water from ancient aquifers, an increasingly scarce resource that is expensive to access. The Journal points out that water has always been scarce in California, but “[c]limate change is making the situation worse, scientists and state officials say.” The region’s groundwater basin, it says, “was once celebrated as one of the largest freshwater aquifers west of the Mississippi River, but the level in certain wells had fallen significantly.”

To some, it seems that in betting on grapes, the university was also betting against climate change. Either way, the Journal reports, “Harvard’s bet has proven prescient.”

It appeared that way even in 2015, when Reuters reported that Harvard had “quietly become one of the biggest grape growers in California’s drought-stricken Paso Robles wine region.” Reuters also noted that, according to documents it reviewed, “[Harvard Management Co.] got permits for seven 800-foot wells on Aug. 21, 2013, six days before a ban on new pumping from the hardest-hit part of the basin took effect.”

There was nothing illegal about the purchases, but they raised concerns among activists, Reuters reported. Susan Harvey, of North County Watch, an environmental advocacy group, wondered, “Is Harvard going to keep pumping groundwater, or cut back on returns to protect water quality and quantity?”

Three years later, the returns continue to be large. The Journal reports that the endowment “now values its vineyards at $305 million, up nearly threefold from in 2013, while its overall natural-resources investments have done poorly.”

The investment “has also earned backlash from some farmers and other locals who fear Harvard eventually will use up groundwater and unduly influence water-use regulations.”

Some locals are particularly worried about the secrecy behind the land deals and Harvard’s use of limited liability companies, also known as LLCs, to make the purchases. In a letter to Harvard Management Co., Cindy Steinbeck, a vineyard owner in the area, wrote that the use of subsidiaries “seems designed to obfuscate Harvard’s activities in the area.”

Harvard responded that the investments were “purely agricultural in nature.”

At least one member of Harvard’s board of overseers, Kat Taylor—an environmentalist and wife of billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer—has resigned over the vineyard purchases. Harvard’s California investments “may, in the short run, be about developing vineyard property,” she told the Journal. “In the long run, it was a claim on water.”

Read the entire Wall Street Journal article here.

 

Activist Zeros In on Canada’s Indigenous Women

Cherry Smiley, born in Kamloops, British Columbia, is an artist, feminist activist, survivor of male abuse and aspiring politician from an indigenous background. Her mother’s side of the family is Nlaka’pamux and her father’s is Diné. “My maternal grandmother is a huge influence on my life. She’s 96, hilarious, and says what she thinks,” Smiley says.

Smiley also is a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University in Montreal. Her research aims to help end male violence against women and girls in Canada, with a focus on indigenous women and girls. She is critical of Canada’s response to the number of indigenous women who have been murdered or gone missing in recent decades.

I first met Smiley in 2015. She told me a story about speaking on a panel about the sex trade in Vancouver, which a number of indigenous women had attended. This topic is painfully relevant to them.

Smiley told me, “The women in the audience were asking questions and they were great, but they were [furious], of course. The organizers were threatening to call the police on the aboriginal women in the room because we were too savage and out of control, and [they worried that] these ‘angry Indians’ [were] going to storm the panel.

“It’s very particular to aboriginal women, because [we are] painted as uncontrollable and violent as soon as we express strong views,” she said. “The only role we get to play in the prostitution debate is as the missing and murdered women, the victims.”

Smiley was referring to the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, a topic I investigated in 2005. I was writing about convicted serial killer Robert Pickton, a farmer who claims to have sexually violated and murdered 49 women. During my investigation, I interviewed a number of indigenous survivors, family members and others involved in exposing police failures to protect the women and prosecute the perpetrators. During research for my recent book on the sex trade, I returned to the issue of the missing and murdered indigenous women. It appears that in 13 years, little has changed. I was appalled to learn from women that sexual exploitation and police failures are still endemic to their communities.

Since the 1970s, an estimated 3,000 indigenous women have been murdered or are presumed missing across Canada.

To Smiley, the response is inadequate. “They just want us to … tell the awful stories of our lives, or they want us to get up there and play our drums and sing our songs and do our dances,” Smiley says. “But they don’t want to hear what we think.”

Recently, I spoke with Smiley again. Partly as a response to being ignored, infantilized and stereotyped, she is planning to run for office in Canada’s 2019 elections:

I think the bolder misogyny becomes, the more we need to look critically at what we’re doing and restrategize. As I was researching the process of running in a federal election, it became very clear that no current federal party in Canada centers [on] women and girls. It’s time for a new party anchored in well-established feminist politics.

This political party—Women’s Party for Feminist Action—will prioritize ending male violence towards women, and ending racism, patriarchy and capitalism. We will hold public forums on male violence against women and girls, gender and gender identity, prostitution, surrogacy and other issues that impact all women from rarely heard critical perspectives. We need more women’s transition houses and rape crisis centers and more transportation options for women, especially in Northern Canada and in rural, reserve and remote areas. We also need to be providing core funding, no strings attached, for independent women’s organizations. Food security is another issue, especially in the North, that we need to address.

Another issue I’m really passionate about is elders. Women generally live longer than men, and women are usually the ones doing the caregiving, so this is a women’s issue. We need to begin to value our elders. Everybody who is 85 and over should have access to all the home care they need. To start, we’re going to pay the caregivers a good wage that reflects the importance of this work. Caregiving, whether it’s for elders, children, those who are disabled or others, is still seen as “women’s work” and [as being] of little value, which is not true. Men need to step up and take on caring responsibilities as well.

Smiley told me of her own journey, coming from a childhood of violence to a place where she was finally able to question the role of women and girls in a patriarchal, colonialist world:

I was mostly raised by my mother and maternal grandparents. I grew up in an environment of poverty, male violence and drug addiction. Part of the way I dealt with my circumstances was escaping into my head. I completed high school, which I’m quite proud of. I went to university but had a really awful time, as I didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about what had happened or was happening to me, and I didn’t have a way to understand that it wasn’t my fault. My graduation was a really big deal for my family.

I took a feminist theory course at the University of British Columbia in my final year. [Radical feminist texts] gave me a way to think about what had happened, and radical feminism made it clear that none of what had happened was my fault. I don’t think any other theory does that. It sounds corny to say that radical feminism saved my life, but it did save my life. Without it, I don’t even want to know where I might have ended up.

From the minute I discovered radical feminism, things fell into place. I could look back and start to make sense of it. I spoke to my mother about what I was reading and learning. Eventually she was like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t turn [feminism] off now, you’ve ruined TV for me.” I said, “Mum, no, patriarchy ruined TV for you.” Once you have that consciousness, you can’t help but see sexism. I guess that’s one of the powers of patriarchy: It makes itself look natural and normal. Once you notice it, it’s really unsettling.

We’re not allowed to question tradition, but it is questionable. I was speaking to an elder recently, and she said that when women were menstruating, they were told they couldn’t cook or walk behind the elders. She disagreed with that, seeing it as another way to control women. We’re told that women are extremely powerful when they menstruate and that is why there are all these rules, but why do we have to do things this way? Why can’t we challenge an idea that restricts us? It’s really difficult, because you get accused of affirming negative stereotypes [about indigenous men], or [of] betraying the community by putting women first, or [of] being disrespectful by questioning tradition.

The ideas that men attach to us (that we’re “squaws,” for example), the rates and types of male violence that are perpetrated against us, the challenges we face when attempting to fight back and the ways we are able to engage with institutions—these all happen in particular ways for us because we are indigenous women.

I think the larger discussion has been too quick to throw around colonization as the answer to indigenous women’s oppression—we need to dig deeper and always name what we discover: patriarchy, capitalism, racism. We need to stop being afraid to offend by questioning all traditions that restrict women, whether indigenous or not, if we’re going to move closer to women’s liberation.

In Montreal, I heard several indigenous feminists say they had been told, mainly by indigenous men, that feminism is a “white plot” and that violence toward women in their communities only exists because “white men had imposed it.” Smiley and others spoke to me about challenging this myth, and discovering that feminism is vibrant among women of color and indigenous women:

Ten years ago, it was really difficult to find an indigenous woman who was also a feminist. At the time, I accepted that violence against indigenous women was a result of colonization. Then I began to see the ways indigenous men were using colonization as an excuse for their shitty behavior. I used to say that patriarchy was imposed on indigenous communities, but now I say that patriarchy was adopted by indigenous men because it works for them.

I began to question what colonization actually is. What if colonization is a result of patriarchy? There’s a really great book called “Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West,” by feminist historian Sarah Carter. It looks at how men used white women to justify their treatment of indigenous women. The writer talks about numerous documented occasions where indigenous women and white women were working together much earlier in history.

After graduation, I moved to Vancouver and got a job with Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter. I went for the interview and the door was opened by an indigenous woman and I was, like, “Whoa!” I was also introduced to the Aboriginal Woman’s Action Network, and was around women who weren’t afraid to talk about controversial issues or put women first. It’s through discussion and debate that we move forward.

There’s an understanding that [in regard to] the pressures on women who are living with poverty, drug addiction and violence, that maybe the indigenous crisis and shelter workers are dealing with a lot of the same things, too. It was important that we checked in with each other.

During my time investigating the murdered and missing women in Canada, I met a number of women who had decided to break away from mainstream, male-dominated indigenous groups because of the absence of discussion and acknowledgement of violence against women and girls, including prostitution. I met women such as Courtney, a young native Canadian woman, originally from the Squamish Nation. Courtney, like so many native girls in Canada, was prostituted in Vancouver, from childhood until she escaped a few years ago. She took me around the area, showing me the near-dead women being pimped on the streets. “Native women are treated particularly brutally by pimps and johns,” she told me. “Many women don’t survive the violence; most have been abused as children before being preyed on by pimps.”

Smiley is committed to exposing male violence toward women and girls, both within and outside of indigenous communities:

In Canada, there were 67 reported cases of women being killed by their (usually male) partners or former partners in 2014. That’s approximately one woman murdered every six days by a man they are or were in a relationship with. Women are routinely harassed by men in public spaces, we are bombarded with pressure as young girls to look and act a certain way to make ourselves appealing to men, and we are too often an afterthought when it comes to municipal, provincial and federal politics.

This is especially true for women of color, indigenous women, immigrant, refugee and non-status women, as well as women with disabilities, criminalized and jailed women, poor women, women in rural areas, reserves and in the North, mothers and single mothers, girls and young women, elderly women, caregivers, lesbian women, homeless women and girls, and so many more. While there are many differences between us, we should be, as Audre Lorde reminds us, celebrating our differences and recognizing our common oppression as females.

Many indigenous feminists I have met in Canada, New Zealand and Australia told me, like Smiley, that feminism “saved” them. One young woman I met in Vancouver said she had no idea that indigenous women could be feminists and had been told by men that feminism was “colonialist.” Smiley, however, is proud of her foresisters:

Indigenous women, such as Mary Two-Axe Early, Sandra Lovelace, Jeanette Corbiere Lavell, Yvonne Bedard, Sharon McIvor, Lyn Gehl and others, have fought for decades to end the sex discrimination within the Indian Act, fighting for their rights against the Canadian government and often against indigenous men’s organizations. Some positive changes have happened, but only as a result of indigenous women’s hard work in spite of the backlash they receive, from in and outside of indigenous communities. However, sex discrimination remains in the Indian Act today while the federal government “consults” on this issue with no stated end date.

There is much more work to do, and it’s important to celebrate the victories we achieve on the way, as well as learn from feminists who have come before. There is absolutely no reason why we can’t imagine something different, something better. Why can’t we imagine government as a form of responsible leadership? Why can’t we imagine a world free from patriarchy, racism and capitalism? Why can’t we imagine a world where women and girls live free from male violence? We need each other to create this vision, and we need each other to make this vision a reality.