Chris Hedges's Blog, page 639

San Francisco Outlaws the Sale of Fur

SAN FRANCISCO—San Francisco supervisors voted unanimously to ban the sale of fur, further burnishing the city’s animal-loving credentials as it becomes the largest U.S. city to approve the prohibition.

Animal welfare advocates around the world cheered news of Tuesday’s vote, applauding the city for its compassion and hoping that the legislation will catch on.

The ban takes effect Jan. 1 and applies to apparel and accessories featuring real fur, including coats, key chains and gloves. An amendment added Tuesday allows furriers and other retailers to sell current inventory until January 1, 2020.

Wayne Hsiung, co-founder of animal rights network Direct Action Everywhere, said in a statement that “this historic act will usher in a new wave of animal rights legislation across the globe.”

Retailers in San Francisco, however, balked at what they called another social mandate at the cost of their ability to make a living.

“It should be a citywide public vote, it shouldn’t be decided by the Board of Supervisors,” said Skip Pas, chief executive officer of West Coast Leather, which sells fur-trimmed items but deals largely in leather.

San Francisco, named for the patron saint of animals, has a reputation for a strong social conscience, often at a cost to businesses.

Its board banned the sale of menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco, which voters will consider in June. In 2016, San Francisco approved what was then a groundbreaking paid parental leave law, requiring private employers to offer six weeks of fully paid leave.

Katy Tang, the supervisor behind the fur ban legislation, has successfully pushed to prohibit performances by exotic animals and to forbid the sale of non-rescue cats and dogs from pet stores.

Mayor Mark Farrell said he plans to sign the legislation.

About 50 clothing and accessory retailers downtown will be affected by the legislation, said Jim Lazarus, senior vice president of public policy at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Reselling vintage and used fur by outlets not usually in the business of trading fur, such as secondhand stores, pawn shops and nonprofits, will still be allowed.

The chamber estimates San Francisco fur sales account for at least $40 million a year. The city’s Office of Economic Analysis estimated fur sales at $11 million in 2012, based on census figures.

The city says even if sales numbers are much higher than its estimate a prohibition is unlikely to significantly harm the overall local economy.

The Fur Information Council of America and the International Fur Federation wrote to supervisors before the vote, seeking to partner with the city to launch a rigorous certification program that it said would ensure animal and environmental health.

The organizations did not have immediate comment on Tuesday’s vote.

The prohibition will hit retailers large and small, although smaller businesses will probably have a harder time adjusting. Luxury department stores Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue both feature fur salons. Representatives for the stores did not respond to requests for comment.

Benjamin Lin, 72, owns B.B. Hawk in the South of Market neighborhood. His showroom features chinchilla, sable, fox, and Blackglama mink.

He is considering keeping his current location but selling fur at a smaller place nearby, outside San Francisco.

“I cannot fight it,” he said of the ban. “I will not win. I do not have the energy and the money.”

San Francisco joins two other California cities, West Hollywood and Berkeley, in saying no to fur.

Former French President Sarkozy Arrested in Campaign Finance Case

PARIS—Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was taken into custody Tuesday in connection with allegations that he received millions of euros in illegal campaign financing from the regime of late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

A judicial source with direct knowledge of the case told The Associated Press that Sarkozy was being held at the Nanterre police station, northwest of Paris. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Sarkozy, 63, has vehemently and repeatedly denied wrongdoing in the case, which involves funding for his winning 2007 presidential campaign.

A lawyer for the former president did not respond to a message from the AP seeking comment.

The investigation underway since 2013 gained traction when French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told the online investigative site Mediapart in 2016 that he delivered suitcases from Libya containing 5 million euros ($6.2 million) in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff, Claude Gueant.

Investigators are examining claims that Gadhafi’s regime secretly gave Sarkozy 50 million euros overall for the 2007 French campaign. The sum would be more than double the legal campaign funding limit at the time, 21 million euros. In addition, the alleged payments would violate French rules against foreign financing and declaring the source of campaign funds.

A former top aide of Sarkozy’s, former minister Brice Hortefeux, was questioned Tuesday but not detained.

Hortefeux said on Twitter that the precisions he gave to investigators “should help put an end to a series of mistakes and lies.”

Sarkozy, who was president from 2007-12, had a complex relationship with Gadhafi. Soon after becoming winning the French presidency, Sarkozy invited the Libyan leader for a state visit and welcomed him to France with high honors.

But Sarkozy then put France in the forefront of NATO-led airstrikes against Gadhafi’s troops that helped rebel fighters topple Gadhafi’s regime in 2011.

In the Mediapart interview, Takieddine said he was given 5 million euros in Tripoli by Gadhafi’s intelligence chief in late 2006 and 2007 and that he gave the money to Sarkozy and Gueant in suitcases on three occasions. He said the cash transfers took place in the French Interior Ministry, while Sarkozy was interior minister.

Takieddine for years has been embroiled in his own problems with French justice. They center mainly on allegations he provided illegal funds to the campaign of conservative politician Edouard Balladur for his 1995 presidential election campaign — via commissions from the sale of French submarines to Pakistan.

Takieddine made his claims when Sarkozy was campaigning to be the presidential candidate of the right-wing The Republicans party. Sarkozy lost in the first round.

According to Le Monde newspaper, investigators have provided magistrates with a report detailing how cash circulated within Sarkozy’s campaign team.

In January, a French businessman suspected of playing a role in the financing scheme, Alexandre Djouhri, was arrested in London on a French warrant “for offenses of fraud and money laundering.” Le Monde said French investigators also possess several documents seized at his home in Switzerland.

Sarkozy has faced other legal troubles. In February 2017, he was ordered to stand trial after being handed preliminary charges for suspected illegal overspending on his failed 2012 re-election campaign. Sarkozy has appealed the decision.

Trump’s New Lawyer Has History of Peddling Conspiracy Theories

The newest member of the Trump legal team is a former U.S. attorney who has spread conspiracy theories about the FBI and the Justice Department. Joseph E. diGenova, who joined the team Monday, is slated to start work later this week but has been speaking out against former FBI Director James Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller for months, calling Comey a “dirty cop” and arguing that Mueller’s Russia probe has questionable origins.

The New York Times reports:

Mr. diGenova, a former United States attorney, is not expected to take a lead role. But he will serve as an outspoken player for the president as Mr. Trump has increased his attacks on the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Trump broke over the weekend from the longstanding advice of some of his lawyers that he refrain from directly criticizing Mr. Mueller, a sign of his growing unease with the investigation. …

Mr. diGenova has endorsed the notion that a secretive group of F.B.I. agents concocted the Russia investigation as a way to keep Mr. Trump from becoming president. “There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime,” he said on Fox News in January. He added, “Make no mistake about it: A group of F.B.I. and D.O.J. people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.”

Little evidence has emerged to support that theory.

DiGenova has also made reference to text messages between two FBI officials that were revealed last month. Fox News reported that lawyer Lisa Page told her lover, agent Peter Strzok, in a September 2016 text message that then-President Obama wanted “to know everything we’re doing.” Many conservatives believed the messages were evidence of widespread anti-Trump bias in federal law enforcement, but The Wall Street Journal clarified that the texts were actually about Obama wanting to learn more about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, not about the Clinton investigation.

Nevertheless, diGenova insisted that the texts indicated an attack on Trump. “Everything we have seen from these texts, and from all the facts developing, shows that the FBI and senior DOJ officials conspired to violate the law, and deny Donald Trump his civil rights,” he said.

A source familiar with Trump’s legal strategy told Politico that the hiring of diGenova is a bad sign for Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer who has long argued that cooperating with Mueller’s probe is the most likely way to bring about a quick resolution. Cobb issued a statement Sunday saying that the president’s comments against Mueller should not be interpreted as a sign that the special counsel’s job is in jeopardy.

“I don’t think he’s long for this team,” the source said of Cobb. “It’s clear the president wants to be more aggressive.”

Politico continues:

Indeed, about 12 hours after Cobb’s remark that the president “is not considering or discussing the firing” of Mueller, Trump took to Twitter with a Monday morning post suggesting the special counsel faced ethical challenges that merited closer examination.

“A total WITCH HUNT with massive conflicts of interest!” Trump wrote, echoing complaints he made in private last June to White House counsel Don McGahn in an order to fire Mueller. …

Cobb’s fate has been up in the air for months. Some Trump boosters were arguing late last year that Cobb should be fired because he’d set up unrealistic expectations about when the Russia investigation will end.

DiGenova himself served as a special counsel in the 1990s, looking into fraud, government waste and abuse charges in various cases. He once investigated the George H.W. Bush administration to see if it had improperly searched for information about rival Bill Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign.

However, diGenova has been vocal about his thoughts on special counsels, saying they brought too much “target attention” to investigations and argued that their role ought to be narrowed.

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica CEOs on the Hot Seat

LONDON—A British parliamentary committee on Tuesday summoned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to answer questions as authorities stepped up efforts to determine if the personal data of social-media users has been used improperly to influence elections.

The request comes amid allegations that a data-mining firm based in the U.K. used information from more than 50 million Facebook accounts to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. The company, Cambridge Analytica, has denied wrongdoing.

However, the firm’s board of directions announced Tuesday evening that it had suspended CEO Alexander Nix pending an independent investigation of his actions. Nix made comments to an undercover reporter for Britain’s Channel 4 News about various unsavory services Cambridge Analytica provided its clients.

“In the view of the board, Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation,” the board said in a statement.

Facebook also drew continued criticism for its alleged inaction to protect users’ privacy. Earlier Tuesday, the chairman of the U.K. parliamentary media committee, Damian Collins, said his group has repeatedly asked Facebook how it uses data and that Facebook officials “have been misleading to the committee.”

“It is now time to hear from a senior Facebook executive with the sufficient authority to give an accurate account of this catastrophic failure of process,” Collins wrote in a note addressed directly to Zuckerberg. “Given your commitment at the start of the New Year to ‘fixing’ Facebook, I hope that this representative will be you.”

Related Articles









Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower: How We Influenced U.S. Voters (Video)



by Eric Ortiz















Whistleblower: Trump Data Firm Raided 50 Million Facebook Profiles



by

Facebook sidestepped questions on whether Zuckerberg would appear, saying instead that it’s currently focused on conducting its own reviews.

The request to appear comes as Britain’s information commissioner said she was using all her legal powers to investigate the social-media giant and Cambridge Analytica.

Commissioner Elizabeth Denham is pursuing a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s servers. She has also asked Facebook to cease its own audit of Cambridge Analytica’s data use.

“Our advice to Facebook is to back away and let us go in and do our work,” she said.

Cambridge Analytica said it is committed to helping the U.K. investigation. However, Denham’s office said the firm failed to meet a deadline to produce the information requested.

Denham said the prime allegation against Cambridge Analytica is that it acquired personal data in an unauthorized way, adding that the data provisions act requires services like Facebook to have strong safeguards against misuse of data.

Chris Wylie, who once worked for Cambridge Analytica, was quoted as saying the company used the data to build psychological profiles so voters could be targeted with ads and stories.

The firm found itself in further allegations of wrongdoing. Britain’s Channel 4 used an undercover investigation to record Nix saying that the company could use unorthodox methods to wage successful political campaigns for clients.

He said the company could “send some girls” around to a rival candidate’s house, suggesting that girls from Ukraine are beautiful and effective in this role.

He also said the company could “offer a large amount of money” to a rival candidate and have the whole exchange recorded so it could be posted on the internet to show that the candidate was corrupt.

Nix says in a statement that he deeply regrets his role in the meeting and has apologized to staff.

“I am aware how this looks, but it is simply not the case,” he said. “I must emphatically state that Cambridge Analytica does not condone or engage in entrapment, bribes or so-called ‘honeytraps’, and nor does it use untrue material for any purposes.”

Nix told the BBC the Channel 4 sting was “intended to embarrass us”.

“We see this as a coordinated attack by the media that’s been going on for very, very many months in order to damage the company that had some involvement with the election of Donald Trump,” he said.

The data harvesting used by Cambridge Analytica has also triggered calls for further investigation from the European Union, as well as federal and state officials in the United States.

___

AP Technology Writer Anick Jesdanun in New York contributed to this story.

‘Apprentice’ Contestant’s Suit Against Trump Will Proceed

NEW YORK—Saying no one is above the law, a New York state judge refused to toss out a defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump by a former contestant on “The Apprentice.”

Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Schecter ruled Tuesday that Summer Zervos’ lawsuit can proceed. Lawyers for the president had asked that the lawsuit be tossed out or delayed until Trump is no longer president.

Schecter said the president has no immunity and is subject to the laws for “purely private acts.”

She cited as precedent a civil rights lawsuit against then President Bill Clinton that was ordered to proceed.

Zervos was among several women who accused Trump of unwanted sexual contact.

Her suit says Trump defamed her by calling her allegations “fabricated and made-up.”

Minneapolis Policeman Charged in Shooting of Australian Woman

MINNEAPOLIS—A Minneapolis police officer who shot and killed an unarmed Australian woman in July was booked into jail Tuesday on charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

Officer Mohamed Noor turned himself in Tuesday after a warrant was issued for his arrest. He shot Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a 40-year-old life coach, on July 15 minutes after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in the alley behind her home. Damond’s death drew international attention, cost the police chief her job and forced major revisions to the department’s policy on body cameras.

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman planned a Tuesday afternoon news conference to discuss the charges. The criminal complaint remained sealed by midday Tuesday, but according to the jail roster, Noor was booked on a third-degree murder charge for perpetrating an eminently dangerous act while showing a “depraved mind.” The second-degree manslaughter charge alleges he acted with “culpable negligence creating unreasonable risk.”

If convicted of third-degree murder, he could face a maximum of 25 years in prison, though the presumptive sentence is 12 ½ years. The second-degree manslaughter charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, but the presumptive sentence is four years.

The jail set bail at $500,000, according to jail records.

Noor has not spoken publicly about the case and declined to answer questions from investigators. His attorney, Thomas Plunkett, confirmed Noor turned himself in, but had no other immediate comment.

Damond’s father, John Ruszcyzk, and her fiance, Don Damond, issued a joint statement on behalf of both families, saying they applauded the decision to charge Noor “as one step toward justice for this iniquitous act.” They said they are pleased that the investigation appeared diligent and thorough, and they hope for a conviction.

“No charges can bring our Justine back. However, justice demands accountability for those responsible for recklessly killing the fellow citizens they are sworn to protect, and today’s actions reflect that,” the statement said.

An officer who was with Noor at the time of the shooting, Matthew Harrity, told investigators that he was startled by a loud noise right before Damond approached the driver’s side window of their police SUV. Harrity, who was driving, said Noor then fired his weapon from the passenger seat. Damond died of a gunshot wound to the abdomen.

The officers did not turn on their body cameras until after the shooting, and there was no squad camera video of the incident.

The lack of video was widely criticized, and Damond’s family members were among the many people who called for changes in procedure, including how often officers are required to turn on their cameras.

The shooting also prompted questions about the training of Noor, a two-year veteran and Somali-American whose arrival on the force had been celebrated by city leaders and Minnesota’s large Somali community. Noor, 32, had trained in business and economics and worked in property management before becoming an officer.

Then-Chief Janee Harteau defended Noor’s training and said he was suited to be on the street, even as she criticized the shooting itself. But Harteau — who was on vacation when the shooting happened and didn’t make her first public appearance until several days after the shooting — was forced out soon after by Mayor Betsy Hodges, who said she had lost confidence in the chief.

Harteau’s replacement, Medaria Arradondo, quickly announced a policy change requiring officers to turn on their body cameras in responding to any call or traffic stop. Recent reports show the department is not yet in full compliance.

Damond’s shooting was the third high-profile police shooting in Minnesota in recent years in which a prosecutor made a charging decision rather than relying on a grand jury, a process criticized for secrecy and for the rarity of officers being charged. But in this case, Freeman convened a grand jury to investigate, but maintained the decision to charge would be his.

The move came about a month after Freeman was captured on video at a holiday reception in December, complaining that investigators hadn’t brought him enough evidence to charge Noor. Freeman apologized just a few days later, saying he shouldn’t have discussed the case in detail in public. About a month later, dozens of officers received subpoenas to testify before the grand jury.

Noor has been on paid leave since the shooting.

___

Associated Press writers Doug Glass, Jeff Baenen and Steve Karnowski contributed to this report from Minneapolis.

Mississippi’s 15-Week Abortion Ban Blocked for Now

JACKSON, Miss.—A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked a new Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks’ gestation — the most restrictive abortion law in the United States.

The law took effect as soon as Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed it Monday. The state’s only abortion clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, quickly sued the state, arguing the law is unconstitutional because it bans abortion weeks before a fetus can survive outside the womb.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves heard arguments Tuesday before granting the clinic’s immediate request for a temporary restraining order that would block the law during the legal fight.

“The Supreme Court says every woman has a constitutional right to ‘personal privacy’ regarding her body,” Reeves wrote in a brief decision that quoted previous legal rulings on abortion. “That right protects her choice ‘to have an abortion before viability.’ States cannot ‘prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision’ to do so.”

Reeves said in court that the “ultimate question” is whether a state can ban abortion before viability. He asked: “Does the state have the right to trump the woman’s right to have control over her decisions, over her body?”

Reeves did not rule from the bench but granted the temporary restraining order about an hour later, noting that lawyers for the clinic said a woman who is at least 15 weeks pregnant was scheduled to have an abortion Tuesday afternoon.

One of those lawyers, Rob McDuff, said the woman’s next available appointment would be March 28 because physicians travel from out of state to work there. He said the clinic does not perform abortions after 16 weeks of pregnancy, and March 28 would put her beyond that.

The law and responding challenge set up a confrontation sought by abortion opponents, who are hoping federal courts will ultimately prohibit abortions before a fetus is viable. Current federal law does not.

Some legal experts have said a change in the law is unlikely unless the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court changes in a way that favors abortion opponents.

Dr. Sacheen Carr-Ellis, medical director of Jackson Women’s Health Organization, argues in the lawsuit that viability varies from pregnancy to pregnancy depending on the health of the mother and the fetus, but that “no fetus is viable after 15 weeks of pregnancy.”

Paul Barnes, a special assistant state attorney general, argued that the law serves Mississippi’s “interest in protecting maternal health and the state’s interest in protecting unborn life.” He said medical advances and legal decisions continue to define viability earlier. He said viability was considered to be around 28 weeks when the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide was handed down in 1973, and it was defined as being about 23 or 24 weeks in more recent court cases.

Reeves said in his order that the Mississippi law “places viability at 15 weeks — about two months earlier than where the medical consensus places it.”

McDuff said the law keeps women “from making their own decisions about whether to bear children.”

“There has been no case in which a law like this setting a ban at some point prior to viability has been upheld on the merits in the face of a constitutional challenge,” McDuff said.

The law’s only exceptions are if a fetus has health problems making it “incompatible with life” outside of the womb at full term, or if a pregnant woman’s life or a “major bodily function” is threatened by pregnancy. Pregnancies resulting from rape and incest aren’t exempted.

Mississippi previously tied with North Carolina for the nation’s strictest abortion limits, at 20 weeks. Both states count pregnancy as beginning on the first day of a woman’s previous menstrual period, meaning their restrictions kicked in about two weeks before those of states whose 20-week bans begin at conception.

The lawsuit opposing the 15-week ban argues that it violates other federal court rulings that have said a state can’t restrict abortion before a child can survive on its own outside the womb.

The suit says the clinic performed 78 abortions in 2017 when the fetus was identified as being 15 weeks or older. That’s out of about 2,500 abortions performed statewide, mostly at the clinic.

Carr-Ellis, in a sworn statement, said the law would strip her of her Mississippi medical license if she continued to provide abortions to women past the 15-week ban. She said women shouldn’t be forced to carry their pregnancies to term against their will or leave the state to obtain abortions.

___

Associated Press writer Jeff Amy contributed to this report.

‘Public Safety Is None of Your Business’

World peace is none of your business

You must not tamper with arrangements

Work hard and simply pay your taxes

Never asking what for

Oh, you poor little fool

Oh, you fool

World peace is none of your business

Police will stun you with their stun guns

Or they’ll disable you with tasers

That’s what government’s for

Oh, you poor little fool

Oh, you fool

World peace is none of your business

So would you kindly keep your nose out

The rich must profit and get richer

And the poor must stay poor

Oh, you poor little fool

Oh, you fool

Each time you vote you support the process.

Each time you vote you support the process.

So crooned British rocker Morrissey in a haunting song recorded four years ago. It’s a melancholy ode to the pathetic irrelevance of the commoner, the everyday citizen, the popular majority, in what historian Noam Chomsky calls “RECD, short for ‘really existing capitalist democracy,’ pronounced as ‘wrecked.’ ”

So what if we vote, all us “poor little fools”? Who cares? Our majority opinion doesn’t matter much when popular democracy has been blown to bits by concentrated wealth that is always concentrated power, and we’ve all been trained to restrict the expression of our purported popular sovereignty to candidate-centered, big money, big media, major party, electoral pageants once every two or four years.

“Money talks, and bullshit walks,” as my steelworker uncle, Chick Luhtala, used to say. My Finnish and socialist aunt, “Red Mary,” said the same.

Think that’s just some working-class complaint from the bad old days of industrial capitalism, industrial unions and socialist parties? Think again. As political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern University) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched book, “Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It”:

“[T]he best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups—especially business corporations—have had much more political clout. When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless. … The will of majorities is often thwarted by the affluent and the well-organized, who block popular policy proposals and enact special favors for themselves. … Majorities of Americans favor … programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes. Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies.”

We get to vote? Big deal! Mammon reigns in the United States, where, Page and Gilens write, “government policy … reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office.”

Thanks to this “oligarchy,” as the authors call it, the United States ranks at or near the bottom of the list of rich nations when it comes to key measures of social health: economic disparity, intergenerational social mobility, racial inequality, racial segregation, infant mortality, poverty, child poverty, life expectancy, violence, incarceration, depression, literacy/numeracy and environmental sustainability and resilience.

It’s a vicious circle. “When citizens are relatively equal [economically],” Page and Gilens note, “politics has tended to be fairly democratic. When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers.” As in previous eras, savage inequality and abject plutocracy are two sides of the same class-rule coin in the current New Gilded Age.

Some political scientists have argued that regular elections that generate competition for citizens’ votes are all that is required for a nation to be considered a democracy. But “elections alone,” Page and Gilens note, “do not guarantee democracy.” Majority opinion is regularly trumped by a deadly complex of forces in the U.S. The list of interrelated and mutually reinforcing culprits they examine is extensive: the campaign financing, candidate-selection, lobbying and policy agenda-setting power of wealthy individuals, corporations and interest groups; the special primary election influence of extreme party activists; the disproportionately affluent, white and older composition of the voting electorate; the manipulation of voter turnout; the widespread dissemination of “distracting, confusing, misleading, and just plain false information”; unrepresentative political institutions (the Electoral College, the unelected Supreme Court, the overrepresentation in the Senate of the predominantly white rural population and “one-party rule in the House of Representatives”); constitutional and related partisan government gridlock; and the fragmentation of authority in government.

“You had your input,” our masters tell all us poor little fools. We got it the last time we had our chance to go into a voting booth for two minutes and choose from a narrow roster of “preapproved, money-vetted candidates.”

World peace is none of our business. Neither is corporate welfare, jobs, health insurance, pensions, the environment, tax policy, the drawing of voting districts, campaign finance, the distribution of wealth and income, the structure of work and the labor process, wages or labor rights.

And neither is the freedom of ordinary people—all us poor little fools and our poor little foolish children—to not be massacred by sociopaths armed to the teeth with military-style weapons in our streets, schools, workplaces, concert halls, churches, shopping malls, lecture halls, movie theaters and parks.

There was no great American democracy for Russia to supposedly subvert in 2016. Saying that Russia subverted our “democracy” is like me saying that Russian basketball players have undone my chance of being a starting point guard in the National Basketball Association.

I was reminded of Morrissey’s song and the Page and Gilens book—one of many fancy volumes (including one of my own, well to Page and Gilens’ left) showing that my working-class relatives had it right—by the aftermath of the latest gun massacre to disgrace the nation: the assault-weapon slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Despite the National Rifle Association, after this bloodbath, longstanding majority support for gun control spiked to 68 percent, its highest level in 25 years.

Even the orange-tinted authoritarian in the Oval Office seemed to notice. At a televised gun summit at the White House, NRA ally Donald Trump was briefly moved to sound like a leader of that sane supermajority.

And then it all went poof. Gun money talked, and lethal bullshit walked.

The rich, powerful and frankly proto-fascistic NRA went to work, calling Trump’s liberal gun moment “surreal” and denouncing gun control as part of the “European socialist” conspiracy to “destroy freedom.” The NRA’s chief personally reminded the president that he could ill afford to lose voters among a small but so far durable group of white “heartland” Americans (between 32 percent and 40 percent of the U.S. populace, depending on which poll you consult) that has backed him no matter how idiotic, dangerous and clueless he has shown himself to be.

It worked. NRA leaders triumphantly tweeted that “POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don’t want gun control.” Our armed madhouse will clearly march on; the clock is ticking until the next revolting massacre that everyone knows is coming.

Was El Presidente chastened, perhaps? Trump doesn’t like that feeling! He needed to feel strong and loved again. “Hey,” he thought, “didn’t I campaign as—what did Bannon call it?—an economic nationalist, telling all those forgotten white ‘heartland’ workers that I was going to make America great again by bringing back the manufacturing jobs we lost to evil China with the help of bad Wall Street?”

The political policy course was clear. “David Dennison” could move the news cycle off the loser gun issue (and the rising Stormy Daniels scandal and ever more threatening Mueller investigation) and reclaim action-hero manliness by slapping some ill-conceived, fake-protectionist tariffs on steel and aluminum! His staff went back into full-scramble mode, trying to keep up with the president’s latest impulse.

But the kids—those leading the remarkable movement for elementary public safety sparked by the latest attack on U.S. soil—won’t let the issue die. Last week, Trump shrugged as he said that “there’s not much political support” for increasing the minimum age for purchasing an assault weapon. (He also somehow managed to chide Congress for being scared of the NRA.)

Think about that. More than two-thirds of Americans back the very modest, elementary gun control measure of raising the minimum age for purchasing assault weapons from 18 to 21—but Trump says, “There’s not much political support” for such a measure.

Translation: there isn’t any potent, money-backed and electorally strategic political support for a measure (along with many other gun reforms) backed by a preponderant majority of the “poor little fools” who make up the citizenry in the open plutocracy that calls itself the homeland of global democracy. The policy change would be widely approved. But the money-drenched federal government, disciplined by the awesome lobbying and campaign-finance (and fire-) power of the NRA, is committed to keeping the nation a heavily armed, open-air asylum where there is a mass shooting-defined as four or more people shot in one incident, not including the shooter-every nine out of 10 days on average.

Gun control is none of our business. Freedom from gun violence in our communities is none of our business. The gun manufacturers and gun-sellers must profit and get richer. The populace must be mortally weaponized against itself, encouraged to crouch further into atomized self-defense units, carrying concealed and open means of mass homicide to justify the emergence of an ever more fascistic police state and keep the commoners too divided and scared to join hands for the common good.

The rich don’t care about the firearm savagery in the streets, schools and public squares. They don’t care about our danger and fear. They live in gated, heavily guarded, luxurious compounds, protected from the ricochets outside and below. The political system they sit atop and profit from isn’t about democracy. It’s about something very different: It’s about capitalism. If they thought widespread gun ownership among all us poor little fools was a threat to that system, they’d use the enormous political power that flows from their wealth to rein guns in. But they don’t.

Capitalism careens in the direction of fascism, which always leaves the masters of capital in control.

But notice the kids this time—the remarkable and inspiring new wave of Parkland-inspired youths who are hitting the streets, demanding basic humanist reform and elementary public decency and safety beyond the endless state-capitalist election cycles that are sold to us as “politics,” the only politics that matter: the candidate-centered, major-party electoral politics that always bring despair to all us poor little fools, who need to understand that world peace and so much more is none of our business.

The comfortable, retired, baby-boomer Democrat who sits near me over a computer in the coffee shop is planning her and her husband’s next globetrotting, planet-cooking vacation to some remote and, she says, “delicious” corner of the planet. How grand. She votes, and, in Iowa, caucuses. The voting takes two minutes. The caucusing takes two hours. She takes the time for this once every four years. She marched against the Vietnam War half a century ago.

The children inheriting the insanely armed and ecocidal nation she’s helped leave in her socially and generationally privileged wake are walking out of school for the sake of their own lives and those of others.

I don’t have all that much generational ground to stand on myself, but I do want to counsel the kids to beware of something. The Democratic Party election and candidate addicts and operatives always try to wrap themselves around any grass-roots social movements. The idea is to channel the elemental popular energy into the standard, “elite”-coordinated path of an endless get-out-the-vote operation on behalf of some shiny, new, fake-resistance, hope-and-change-promising Democratic contender.

These major party parasites are already dogging the gun sanity kids with voter registration cards and candidate websites and other electoral seductions that have long made the Democratic Party the “graveyard of social movements.” Their fake AstroTurf resistance must be resisted.

“If voting made any real difference,” the old anarchist saying goes, “they’d make it illegal.” That’s a bit strong for me. I don’t agree with Morrissey that you necessarily support the system every time you vote. It depends on how you approach the messy and absurdly mythologized business of voting and elections. You don’t have to treat the ballot box like a coffin for the common people. There’s nothing wrong, in my opinion, with taking the very brief time required to vote without illusion.

Still, it’s always good to keep the “cynical” anarchist maxim in mind. As historian Howard Zinn noted in an essay on and against the “election madness” he saw “engulfing the entire society including the left” the year of Barack Obama’s ascendancy:

“Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth. But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice. … Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”

We deserve and should demand an electoral and party system worthy of our passionate participation and attention. The one we have now is no such thing—not even close. “Our” rigged political order and the broader class and imperial power and oppression system of which it is a part tell us again and again that world peace, social justice and livable ecology, indeed prospects for a decent future, are none of our business; that the management of the common good is properly the purview of the wealthy few and their trusted professional classes—the business of big business and its well-trained servants. (This goes way back in U.S. history and has nothing to with “Russian interference.”)

We must tamper with those arrangements, to put it mildly.

Postscript: When I went to YouTube to listen to the Morrissey song lyrics I quoted at the top of this essay, I was forced to listen to two NRA commercials whose angry and imposing spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, practically threatened assassination to liberals and leftists in the public sphere. In the first commercial, Loesch told “every lying member of the media” that the NRA has “had enough.” Against an ominous guitar track, she came onscreen dressed in black, an hourglass at her side. “We have had enough of the lies, the sanctimony, the arrogance, the hatred, the pettiness, the fake news,” she said, concluding with a menacing promise:

“We are done with your agenda to undermine voters’ will and individual liberty in America. So to every lying member of the media, to every Hollywood phony, to the role model athletes who use their free speech to alter and undermine what our flag represents, to the politicians who would rather watch America burn than lose one ounce of their own personal power, to the late night posts that think their opinion is the only opinions that matter, to the Joy-Ann Reids, the Morning Joes, the Mikas, to those who stain honest reporting with partisanship, to those who bring bias and propaganda to CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times … your time is running out. The clock starts now.”

Then Loesch turned the hourglass before the screen went black.

In the second commercial, Loesch targeted those who dare to protest in the streets:

“They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance. All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia and smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding—until the only option left is for police to do their jobs and stop the madness. … And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. I’m the National Rifle Association of America and I’m freedom’s safest place.”

That, my fellow poor little fools, is what American-style fascism sounds and looks like in 2018.

Student Dead, Two Hurt in Maryland High School Shooting

GREAT MILLS, Md.—A teenager wounded a girl and a boy inside his Maryland high school Tuesday before an armed school resource officer was able to intervene, and each of them fired one more round as the shooter was fatally wounded, a sheriff said.

St. Mary’s County Sheriff Tim Cameron said the student with the handgun was declared dead at a hospital, and the other two students were in critical condition. He said the officer was not harmed.

Cameron said authorities were still investigating whether the shooter was killed by the officer.

“When the shooting took place, our school resource officer, who was stationed inside the school, was alerted to the event and the shots being fired. He pursued the shooter and engaged the shooter, during which that engagement he fired a round at the shooter,” Cameron said.

“Simultaneously the shooter fired a round as well. So, in the hours to come, in the days to come, through a detailed investigation, we will be able to determine if our SRO’s round struck the shooter.”

This latest shooting comes as lawmakers nationwide are under pressure to take action against gun violence following the Valentine’s Day killings of 17 people at a Florida high school by a teenager with an assault weapon. Maryland’s Senate joined the House Monday night to ban bump stocks, which enable a semi-automatic rifle to mimic a fully automatic weapon.

Outside the school, a line of about 20 school buses formed on the street in front of the building. Ambulances, fire trucks and other emergency vehicles crowded the parking lot and the street. No students or parents could be seen outside at midmorning.

The St. Mary’s County Public Schools said the situation was “contained” after the shooting at Great Mills High School, which has about 1,600 students and is near the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, about 65 miles (104 kilometers) southeast of Washington.

Agents with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives joined deputies at the scene. The county sheriff said parents or guardians should stay away, urging them to go instead to Leonardtown High School to reunite with Great Mills students there.

Many students across the country are calling for effective gun controls, leading up to Saturday’s March For Our Lives rally in the nation’s capital against gun violence in schools. Threats against schools have proliferated as well, and Great Mills High has not been immune.

Just last month, the school’s principal, Jake Heibel, told parents in a letter posted on the local news site The Bay Net that two students were interviewed after they were overheard mentioning a school shooting, and they were found to pose no threat. Heibel said the school increased its security nevertheless after social media posts about a possible school shooting “circulated quite extensively.”

Also last month, St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s office said it arrested two teenage boys for “Threats of Mass Violence” and a 39-year-old man on related charges after the teens made threats about a potential school shooting at Leonardtown High School, a high school about 10 miles from Great Mills. Police said they obtained a search warrant that led to them finding semi-automatic rifles, handguns and other weapons, along with ammunition.

High Court Takes Up Challenge by Pregnancy Centers

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a free speech fight over California’s attempt to regulate anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.

The case being argued Tuesday involves a state law that requires the centers to provide clients information about the availability of contraception, abortion and pre-natal care, at little or no cost. Centers that are unlicensed also must post a sign that says so.

The centers say that they are being forced to deliver a message with which they disagree because their aim is to steer women away from abortion.

California and abortions rights group that backed the law say its goal is to provide accurate information about the range of options facing a pregnant woman.

The outcome also could affect laws in other states that seek to regulate doctors’ speech.

In Louisiana, Texas and Wisconsin, doctors must display a sonogram and describe the fetus to most pregnant women considering an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights. Similar laws have been blocked in Kentucky, North Carolina and Oklahoma.

Doctors’ speech has also been an issue in non-abortion cases. A federal appeals court struck down parts of a 2011 Florida law that sought to prohibit doctors from talking about gun safety with their patients. Under the law, doctors faced fines and the possible loss of their medical licenses for discussing guns with patients.

In another lawsuit over regulating crisis pregnancy centers, a federal appeals court in New York struck down parts of a New York City ordinance, although it upheld the requirement for unlicensed centers to say that they lack a license.

The abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice California was a prime sponsor of the California law. NARAL contends that the centers mislead women about their options and try to pressure them to forgo abortion. Estimates of the number of crisis pregnancy centers in the U.S. run from 2,500 to more than 4,000, compared with fewer than 1,500 abortion providers, women’s rights groups said in a Supreme Court filing.

California’s law was challenged by the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, an organization with ties to 1,500 pregnancy centers nationwide and 140 in California.