Thought Portal

In an examination of the genealogies of America’s political elite, Reuters found that at least 118 of the country's most influential leaders – presidents, lawmakers from the last sitting Congress, governors and Supreme Court justices – have a slaveholding ancestor.

In notifying political elites of their family ties to slaveholding, we identified which of their ancestors enslaved people, how many people that ancestor enslaved, and how many generations removed that ancestor is from them.

We also sought comment from each public official to understand how learning about their family connection to slavery might affect them personally, and whether that knowledge might inform their views on policy matters.

In some cases, Reuters discovered documents that included the names of those enslaved by ancestors of the elites. In those instances, the names of the enslaved are pictured, along with links to explore the full documents that contain those names.

That information and more can be seen by searching by name (below) or by clicking on a leader’s photograph. Lawmakers

The document states that its provisions will stand until “21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, king of England living as of the date of this declaration”.

“Royal clauses” of this kind are used to avoid rules in some places against contracts which last in perpetuity. The British royal family was chosen for the clauses because information about the family tree was readily available, but also because of the “better healthcare available to, and longer life expectancy of, a royal family member compared to a non-royal”, according to the law firm Birketts.

East Palestine

Congressman Bill Johnson takes $18k from Norfolk Southern Pack

creator of the video: https://linktr.ee/heyjohnrussell

The corporate return on this mountain of money has been significant. Over the last 40 years, corporate tax rates have plunged. Regulatory protections for consumers, workers and the environment have been defanged. Antitrust has become so ineffectual that many big corporations face little or no competition.

Corporations have fought off safety nets and public investments that are common in other advanced nations (most recently, Build Back Better). They’ve attacked labor laws, reducing the portion of private-sector workers belonging to a union from a third 40 years ago to just over 6% now.

They’ve collected hundreds of billions in federal subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees and sole-source contracts. Corporate welfare for big pharma, big oil, big tech, big ag, the largest military contractors and biggest banks now dwarfs the amount of welfare for people.

The profits of big corporations just reached a 70-year high, even during a pandemic. The ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to 320-to-1 now.

Meanwhile, most Americans are going nowhere. The typical worker’s wage is only a bit higher today than it was 40 years ago, when adjusted for inflation.

But the biggest casualty is public trust in democracy.

What the BBB debacle has created is another opportunity to demonstrate that reforms of the system are not possible and that the only two paths that exist are either more blatant fascism or socialist transformation and decolonization.

That choice continues to reside with the people, whether they know it or not.

The United States Postal Service is facing continued backlash over its proposed 10-year plan which will slow down mail delivery.

The Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the post office, recently criticized the proposal saying there’s no basis that the change in service standards will improve the financial situation of the USPS, and there’s no evidence it won’t hurt customer satisfaction.

For more on this, The Takeaway spoke to Philip F Rubio, author of Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service and professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University.

Only six members of the Senate Democratic Caucus mustered the courage to vote against McConnell’s maneuver — Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, Jeff Merkley, Ed Markey and Ron Wyden. Democratic senators in fact provided the majority of the votes for the measure that lets the defense bill proceed without a vote on the $2,000 checks. 

In the end, millions of Americans struggling to survive will likely be left with just a one-time $600 check, as 80 U.S. Senators rubber stamp a bloated defense bill to show they support the troops — and then tell the poor to eat a roll call vote.

At no point in his career has Biden proven willing to take the slightest political risk on behalf of workers. His appearances in union halls occur when he needs something from labor. On the other hand, when Biden went to vacation in the Hamptons during the 2011 Verizon strike, workers in the area sought him out “just to possibly get a show of support, a thumb’s-up, a head nod, anything” – to no avail. That same year in Wisconsin, labor leaders specifically asked Biden to come to rally their resistance to the brutal, ultimately successful attack by Scott Walker; Biden declined.

Nor does Biden have a public policy record favorable to the working class. In 1977-1978, during unions’ big push for labor law reform, he vacillated for months and sabotaged the proposal with public criticism. He voted for Nafta and supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He authored the punishing 2005 bankruptcy bill, a reward to creditors and punishment to debtors. Worse still, he has been one of the main legislative architects of mass incarceration, a regime that has devastated the heavily policed and punished American working class.

When Biden cracked a joke several weeks ago about his habit of touching women without consent, he was speaking to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. While the IBEW today takes a strong public stand for workplace equality, both the union and the industry have deep histories of ignoring sexual harassment and racial discrimination. According to a 2013 study, only one-quarter of women in the building trades believe they are equally respected on the job. This context makes Biden’s joking about the accusation of a Latina before that particular crowd seem altogether more insidious. Harassment, after all, is nothing if not a workplace issue. You’d only joke about it to a union crowd if you didn’t think women were really workers.

This is all the worse in a moment that invites broad and radical vision. More workers went on strike in 2018 than in any year since 1986. Over 90% of those who did worked in either healthcare or education – sectors that were not included in the mid-century “basic bargain”.

What’s remarkable is that Biden’s proletarian minstrel act has worked for this long. When he dropped out of the 1988 presidential race, it was after getting caught plagiarizing a monologue by the British Labour party leader, Neil Kinnock, on his coalminer roots. Biden’s spokesperson explained that, while Biden had no immediate relations who were coalminers, the “people that his ancestors grew up with in the Scranton region, and in general the people of that region were coalminers.” In fact, Biden did have an ancestor in the coal industry, Patrick F Blewitt, who died in 1911. But he wasn’t a miner – he was a boss.

since her initial announcement in December, Warren’s campaign has rolled out a series of detailed policy proposals in quick succession, outlining structural changes to major industries, government functions, and regulatory procedures that would facilitate more equitable representation in the federal government and overhaul the economy in favor of the working class. These policy proposals have made Warren the Democratic party’s new intellectual center of gravity, a formidable influence who is steadily pushing the presidential primary field to the left and forcing all of her primary challengers to define their political positions against hers.

Warren has become the Democratic party's new intellectual center of gravity

Warren herself is an anti-trust nerd, having come to the Senate from a career as an academic studying corporate and banking law. On the stump, she’s most detailed in the same areas where she is most passionate, like when she talks about about breaking up huge tech companies such as Amazon and Google, and implementing a 21st-century – version of the Glass-Steagall act that would separate commercial and investment banking (she has also called for prosecuting and jailing bank executives who break the law). But her policy agenda is broader than that, taking on pocketbook issues that have resonance with working families.

Warren outlined a huge overhaul of the childcare system that would revolutionize the quality, cost and curriculum of early childhood education, with subsidies for families and a living wage for caregivers. It’s a proposal that she talks about in the context of her own career when, as a young mother and fledgling legal mind, she almost had to give up a job as a law professor because childcare for her young son was too expensive.

Warren has also proposed a housing plan that would limit huge investors’ abilities to buy up homes, give incentives for localities to adopt renters’ protections, and build new public housing. Crucially, and uniquely, her housing plan would also provide home ownership grants to buyers in minority communities that have historically been “redlined”, a term for the racist federal housing policies that denied federally backed mortgages to black families. The provision, aimed to help black and brown families buy their first homes, is a crucial step toward amending the racial wealth gap, and it has helped sparked a broader conversation within the party about the need to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves – a concept that Warren has also endorsed.

Warren has been the first to propose all of these policies, and it is not difficult to see other candidates falling in line behind her, issuing belated and imitative policy proposals, or being forced to position themselves to her right. Warren has promised not to go negative against other Democrats, but her campaign’s intellectual project also serves a political purpose: when other candidates campaign, her strong policy positions force them to define themselves against her.

There’s still a long time before the first contests, and it’s possible that Warren will succumb to the flaws that her critics see in her campaign. In particular, she might not be able to raise enough money. She’s decided not to take any Pac money and not to fundraise with wealthy donors, a position that may be as much practical as it is principled: the super-rich are not likely to donate to Warren anyway, since she has such a detailed plan, called the Ultra Millionaire Tax, to redistribute their money. She may fall victim to the seemingly unshakable controversy over her old claims of Native American ancestry, and she seems doomed to be smeared and underestimated for her sex, called cold and unlikable for her intellect and then, as with other female candidates, derided as pandering when she tries to seem more relatable.

Political observers and organizers should take these victories as a lesson: voters found that strong leftwing message appealing – and weren’t scared off by candidates who proudly called themselves “socialists”.

Socialism is spreading throughout the US, as seen in the popularity of the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the huge bump in DSA membership, increasing more than seven times over to 60,000 in the past three years. But what sets Chicago apart from many other cities in America – and played a crucial role in last night’s socialist victories – is that the left wing of the city’s labor movement hasn’t been afraid to partner with democratic socialist candidates.

The Reagan administration hailed Duarte as a centrist reformer who would bring democracy to El Salvador. With Duarte in power, the US increasedmilitary aid to El Salvador, hitting a high of $197m in 1984.

But Washington turned a blind eye to the human rights abuses carried out by the military and allied death squads under Duarte’s watch.

At El Mozote, soldiers from the Atlacatl Battalion – an elite counterinsurgency unit trained, armed, and funded by the US – lined up, interrogated, tortured, and executed villagers. They started with the men before turning to the women and children, gang-raping women and girls.

Newspaper, court accounts of killings are much different

Details reported at the time in a local newspaper, in addition to court records from Wilson's case, both differ significantly in numerous regards from Wilson's account to The Republic.