Day-Old Congress Most Hated Ever

January 6, 2015

By Andy Borowitz

Credit Photograph by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – In a troubling sign for the 114th Congress, a new poll released on Tuesday indicates that the day-old legislative body is the most hated in the nation’s history. 

According to the poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, only eight per cent of those surveyed approved of the job Congress is doing, a scathing indictment of the legislators’ first day on the job.

The 114th Congress started the day on a slightly more positive note, garnering a ten-per-cent approval rating, but after the House of Representatives reëlected John Boehner (R.-Ohio) to a new term as Speaker, the number sank to eight.

On the Senate side, Joni Ernst (R.-Iowa), newly elected to the most despised Congress in American history, said that the low approval number was no cause for concern.

“If you ask somebody to pick a number between one and ten, eight is a pretty high number,” she said. “So it’s all good.”


After Senator Ernst made her comment, Congress’s approval rating plummeted to four per cent.

All Forms of Life Are Sacred

Just because animals are cognitively different from us, why is it people's belief that they have lesser moral value? Using them is the ultimate problem—it does not matter how well we treat them.

Published: January 6, 2015 | Authors: Chris Hedges | Truthdig | Op-Ed

nationofchange.org

The battle for the rights of animals is not only about animals. It is about us. Once we de-sanctify animals we de-sanctify all life. And once life is de-sanctified the industrial machines of death, and the drone-like bureaucrats, sadists and profiteers who operate them, carry out human carnage as easily as animal carnage. There is a direct link between our industrial slaughterhouses for animals and our industrial weapons used on the battlefields in the Middle East.

During wars in rural societies, where the butchering of animals is intimately familiar, butchering techniques are often used on enemies. The mutilation of bodies was routine in the wars I covered in Central America, the Middle East and the Balkans.

Throats were slit. Heads were cut off. Eyes gouged out. Hands severed. Genitals stuffed into victims’ mouths. Body parts such as ears and fingers were collected as souvenirs. Balkan villages, which hung slaughtered pigs by their feet from tree branches to drain the carcasses of blood and so the hair could be shaved off, on some days dangled human corpses along the roadsides. Cattle prods were a favored torture implement in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

Killing in our mechanized slaughterhouses is overseen by a tiny group of technicians. Industrial farms are factories. Machines kill the animals. And in modern warfare machines kill our enemies. Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Somalis, Yemenis are condemned, like livestock, from a distance. Hired killers push buttons. Slaughter, at home and at war, is automated. The individual is largely obsolete. The mechanization of murder is terrifying. It creates the illusion that killing is antiseptic. This illusion is sustained by state-imposed censorship that prevents us from seeing the reality of war and the reality of animal slaughterhouses. Killing has gone underground. And this has made vast enterprises of killing palatable.

I witnessed the dismembering and evisceration of human bodies during the siege of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It was impossible not to make the link with animals. For several years after the war I would walk out of a restaurant if I saw blood pooling around a piece of rare meat on a plate. All blood is red. Hunks of meat from cattle look like hunks of human flesh. The high-pitched wail of a pig being butchered sounds like the wail of a wounded person on a battlefield.

I recently met Gary Francione, perhaps the most controversial figure in the modern animal rights movement, for lunch at the vegetarian deli of the Whole Earth Center in Princeton, N.J. With me was my wife, Eunice Wong, who was the driving force in our family’s decision last year to become vegans.

Francione is l’enfant terrible of the animal rights movement. He is a law professor and philosopher who founded, along with his partner Anna E. Charlton, the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic at Rutgers School of Law. He and Charlton have five rescue dogs, all of them vegans. In his 1996 iconoclastic book “Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement” he criticized animal rights activists for refusing to challenge the idea of animals as property. Many animal rights activists call for more humane treatment of animals—leading to the conscience-soothing labels “ethically raised,” “free-range” and “cage free”—before they are slaughtered, but Francione calls this form of animal activism “tidying up the concentration camps.” He maintains that promotion of what he calls “happy exploitation” deludes consumers into believing they can exploit animals in a “compassionate” way. We have no moral right, he says, to use animals as human resources.

His position puts him at odds with nearly every animal rights group, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), as well as most of the major writers about animal rights. Theorists on animal rights such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Peter Singer believe animal rights revolve primarily around how we use animals, not whether we should use them. Francione attacks this position in his 2008 book “Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation.” His iron condemnation of all forms of violence, including by animal rights activists, has enraged militants. Like most other important moral voices, Francione stands almost completely alone.

“These are fundamental issues of justice,” he said of animal rights during our lunch. “These are fundamental issues that require that we take nonviolence seriously. You cannot speak about nonviolence and stick violence into your mouth three times a day. How many of us have grown up with a dog, a cat, a parakeet or a rabbit? Did we love those beings? Did we love them in a different way from the way we ‘loved’ our car or our stereo? Why is that love different? It is different because that is the love of an other, whether that is a human person or a nonhuman person. It is love for an other who matters morally. Did we cry when that being died? It is moral schizophrenia to treat some animals as members of our family and then roast and stick forks into other animals, which have been abused and tortured and that are no different from our nonhuman family members.”

“This is not, however, an issue about whether animals are tortured,” he went on. “The big issue now is factory farming. Do I think factory farming is bad? Well, yes, but so what? Family farms are bad as well. There is a lot of violence that happens on family farms. Consider two slaveholders—one who beats his slaves 25 times a week and the other who beats his slaves once a week. Is Slaveholder Two better? The answer is yes, but it does not address the morality of slavery.”

“It is impossible to participate multiple times a day in victimizing the vulnerable and supporting the suffering and death of sentient others for trivial reasons and not have it make a profound impact,” he said. “It means we accept the injustice of violence. It means injustice is not taken seriously. Injustice fails to motivate us. Violence works when we ‘otherize’ groups of beings and put them on the ‘thing’ side of the line between persons and ‘things.’ The paradigmatic example of this is what we do to nonhuman animals. If we stop otherizing nonhumans it becomes impossible to otherize humans.”

Francione rejects the idea that ovo-lacto vegetarianism and family farms are incremental improvements. The egg and dairy industries, he points out, are vast systems of reproductive enslavement of female animals. Laying chickens and dairy cows are abused as grievously as animals raised for meat, and usually for many more years. Once these animals are “spent” and unable to produce eggs or milk at a profitable rate, they too are slaughtered. And because it is only the females that produce milk and eggs, the dairy and egg industries early year kill approximately 250 million newborn male chicks—often ground up alive for “raw protein” used in pet food and fertilizer—and approximately 2 million male calves, used for veal.

We are told from childhood that cows “give” milk, as though needing to be milked is a cow’s natural state. “Like other female mammals, including human women, female cattle produce milk as a complex hormonal response to pregnancy and birth,” Sherry F. Colb, a former colleague of Francione’s at Rutgers, writes in “Mind If I Order the Cheeseburger?” “Dairy farmers,” Colb continues, “regularly and forcibly place each dairy cow into what is sometimes called a ‘rape rack,’ a device on which animals are restrained while they are inseminated. … If left to her own devices, the mother cow would nurse her baby for nine to 12 months. And as dairy farmers accordingly acknowledge, cows suffer tremendously when farmers take their calves away from them shortly after birth. Cows bellow, sometimes for days on end, and behave in ways that plainly exhibit desperation and misery, including a lack of interest in eating and a tendency to pace around the area where they last saw their calves. … A dairy farmer cannot make a living from this work unless he subjects a cow to pregnancy, removes her calf from her side, and then slaughters the mother cow once her milk production diminishes. These are each unavoidable aspects of dairy farming.”

“All animal agriculture involves violence, suffering and death, including the most humanely produced dairy and eggs,” Francione told us. “The male chicks are ground up alive or pounded or gassed to death. If you are a feminist and you consume dairy you are confused. One of the worst things in the world is the sound of cows when their babies are taken from them. In a conventional dairy the calves are taken away the same day or the next day. In an organic dairy, which is a supposedly higher-level animal welfare ‘happy place,’ they are taken away two or three days later. The mothers cry for days. The fact that we will take a cow with a natural life span of 30 years, impregnate her six times and take away her baby six times and kill her after she has had mastitis for five years is dreadful. This is the commodification of the reproductive processes of a female other, the commodification of a mother and her baby. The reproductive process and the relationship of a mother and her child become a product. I don’t understand how someone can say, ‘I am a feminist, but I drink milk.’ ”

Francione excoriates organic family farms that raise free-range chickens and grass-fed cattle. “The idea that loving something is consistent with killing it is not dissimilar from the man who says ‘I love my wife but I beat her a lot,’ ” he said. “I am not interested in discussions about the cruelty of factory farming. It does not matter. It is not a question of whether you go into the woods, buy a small farm and the animals come into the house at night so you can all play cards. The entire institution of animal exploitation is wrong. Our moral thinking about animals is terribly confused.”

When asked how he thought this happened, he answered: “Where we have gone wrong is our belief that because animals are cognitively different from us they have lesser moral value. They are not as cognitively sophisticated as we are—they don’t write symphonies or do calculus—so we can eat, wear and use them, as long as we do so ‘humanely.’ Most animal rights activists argue that ‘using them is not the problem, the problem is how we treat them.’ My view is that using them is the problem. It does not matter how well we treat them. Obviously, it is worse to impose more suffering than less suffering, but that does not mean it is all right to use them in a ‘humane’ way. If someone sneaks into your room while you are sleeping and blows your brains out and you do not feel a thing, you are still harmed. You may not have suffered. But you have been harmed.”

“The idea that … animals [are] of lesser moral value is dangerous,” he added. “It creates hierarchies that can also be used within human communities. Once you are sentient, or are subjectively aware, you have one moral right—the right not to be used as a resource. It does not mean you get treated equally for all purposes, but it does mean you are not treated as a slave or as a commodity. A slave is excluded from the moral community. A slave has no inherent value. A slave has only external value. A slave is a thing. This is what we have done to animals. Animals are property. Animal welfare laws cannot work because they are based on balancing the interests of humans and nonhumans. As long as animals are chattel property the animal owners win. As long as animals are chattel property the standard of animal welfare will always be tied to what we need to exploit them because we will generally protect animal interests only to the extent that we get an economic benefit from doing so.

Animal welfare reform, for this reason, has usually worked to make animal exploitation more economically efficient. The reason why you have the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958, which requires that large animals be stunned before they are shackled and hoisted, is because if you have a 2,000-pound animal hanging upside down the cow hits workers. Workers are injured. You have carcass damage. If you look at the arguments put forward for chicken producers to switch to controlled atmosphere killing, essentially gassing, from the electrical stunning method, still widely used, those arguments—made by groups such as PETA and HSUS—are based on economic efficiency. Animal advocates are [in effect] arguing that if you gas the chickens it cuts down on carcass damage. This does not move animals out of the property paradigm. It further enmeshes them in it. It is only about efficient exploitation.”

“All of the large animal charities, such as PETA and HSUS, are businesses,” he said. “They want to maximize their donor base so they try and let everyone stay in their comfort zone. They don’t take the position that veganism is the only rationally and morally acceptable response to the recognition that animals have moral significance.

They promote reform and not abolition. Unfortunately, we live in a postmodern, poststructuralist society. No one is supposed to be a moral realist. And yet we all have certain intuitions that we accept as true. We know, for example, that suffering is bad. Nobody says suffering is good, except for perhaps a masochist, but even then the masochist only embraces suffering when he or she gets pleasure from it. You can derive an enormous amount of what you need morally in the world from the simple idea that suffering is morally bad. You can’t justify doing to someone else what you would not want done to you. This is a moral truth. We all say it’s wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering. We all agree that necessity cannot mean just pleasure. But the only justification we have for eating any animal foods is palate pleasure. We don’t need animal foods for optimal health, and animal agriculture is an ecological disaster. We criticize people like Michael Vick for inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals, but we’re all Michael Vick. Our exploitation of animals is no more necessary.”

“I worry that we have raised a generation that has not been taught to think morally,” Francione said. “Yes, my generation often thought about morality superficially. I do not want to romanticize the past. But events such as the Vietnam War forced us to ask what were we doing as a nation. We feared getting drafted, of course, but the war helped us see. It forced us to think about moral issues. But morality today has been reduced to a matter of mere opinion. This is dangerously wrong. The morality of unjustified and unjustifiable exploitation is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of moral fact.”

“There is an intimate relationship between human rights and animal rights,” said Francione, who teaches a course on human rights and animal rights with Charlton at Rutgers University. “You cannot think about this in isolation. Sexism, racism and classism are about turning others into objects. How can we talk intelligently about nonviolence when we are putting the products of violence into our mouths? We are wearing the products of violence. This is about justice. It is about justice for nonhumans, for women, for Palestinians, for African-Americans and for prisoners. Pornography represents the commodification of women. When you use pornography there is no longer a person there. There is a body part that you fetishize. The person has become a thing. You are consuming that thing. This is not all that different from going to the store and buying chicken in a Styrofoam package. The chicken is not [seen as] an animal. It is a product in Styrofoam covered with cellophane. All commodification is connected, and it’s all wrong.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer in his short story “The Letter Writer” said that human beings were Nazis to animals and had created “an eternal Treblinka” for the animal world. He, as well as writers such as Marguerite Yourcenar and J.M. Coetzee, saw in animal slaughterhouses the preliminary models for torture centers, extermination camps, genocide and war. Kazuo Ishiguro explored the idea of sentient beings raised “humanely” as commodities in his dystopian novel “Never Let Me Go,” in which cloned children, “donors,” are nurtured in special boarding schools resembling the finest private schools, but die in young adulthood when their organs are harvested for “normals”—uncloned humans.

“I believe as long as man tortures and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well—and wars will be waged—for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale,” Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz wrote in his “Dachau Diaries” while he was held in that Nazi concentration camp.

“Even though the number of people who commit suicide is quite small, there are few people who have never thought about suicide at one time or another,” Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote. “The same is true about vegetarianism. We find very few people who have never thought that killing animals is actually murder, founded on the premise that might is right. … I will call it the eternal question: What gives man the right to kill an animal, often torture it, so that he can fill his belly with its flesh. We know now, as we have always known instinctively, that animals can suffer as much as human beings. Their emotions and their sensitivity are often stronger than those of a human being. Various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal—be it a dog, a bird or even a mouse—knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify cruelty. … [A]s long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers à la Hitler and concentration camps à la Stalin … all such deeds are done in the name of ‘social justice’. There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.”

Senate's 46 Dems got more votes than 56 Repubs

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell welcomes some of the new white bread GOP senators-elect, all bearing Mitt Romney smiles, in his office on Capitol Hill. (photo: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

Senate's 46 Democrats Got 20 Million More Votes Than Its 54 Republicans

By Dylan Matthews, Vox

04 January 14

 

n Tuesday, 33 US senators elected in November will be sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden — including 12 who are new to the chamber. The class includes 22 Republicans and 11 Democrats, a big reason why the GOP has a 54-46 majority in the Senate overall.

But here's a crazy fact: those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote, "the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes."

Here's what that looks like in chart form:

This doesn't mean that the Republican majority is illegitimate or anything like that. Indeed, after 2008 and 2012, the tables were turned: Democrats got more Senate seats than their vote share suggested they should. The problem isn't that the deck is stacked in favor of Republicans. The problem is that the deck is stacked in favor of small states, which receive equal representation in the Senate despite dramatic variance in population.

The Senate is a profoundly anti-democratic body and should be abolished.

Brown Grand Juror sues for right to speak out

St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch. (photo: Cristina Fletes-Boutte/Reuters)

By Joel Currier, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

05 January 15

readersupportednews.org

 

member of the grand jury that declined to file criminal charges against former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown sued St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch Monday for the right to speak publicly about the proceedings.

The suit says that the former juror, identified in court documents only as "Grand Juror Doe," wishes to speak out to challenge public misconceptions about the case and that speaking publicly could "contribute to the current public dialogue concerning race relations" that was sparked by the Aug. 9 fatal shooting of Brown. It hints that jurors were not unanimous in their decision not to charge Wilson. Doe also wants "to advocate for legislative change to the way grand juries are conducted in Missouri," the suit says.

The suit, filed in federal court in St. Louis, asks a judge to rule unconstitutional the Missouri law that would criminalize any of Doe's comments "about Doe's experiences as a state grand juror" and bar McCulloch from prosecuting Doe.

The investigation of Wilson "had a stronger focus on the victim than in other grand jury cases," the suit claims. The presentation of evidence and "the State's counsel to the grand jury" "differed markedly and in significant ways. . . from the hundreds of matters presented to the grand jury earlier in its term." The suit also claims the legal guidelines presented to jurors in applying facts of the case were "muddled and untimely" compared to other cases.

The plaintiff claims McCulloch's characterization of the grand jury's view of the evidence was at odds with Doe's opinions of the case, that the public's understanding of the grand jurors' views is "not entirely accurate."

The suits says Doe wants to challenge the accuracy of public statements and opinions about the grand jury, "especially the implication that all grand jurors believed that there was no support for any charges." It says that the heavily-redacted grand jury documents that have been released, and the lack of context, "do not fully portray the proceedings before the grand jury."

State law says it is a misdemeanor for grand jurors to discuss their service. The plaintiff is being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Town and Country law firm of Sowers & Wolf.

“The rules of secrecy must yield because this is a highly unusual circumstance," Tony Rothert, legal director of the ACLU of Missouri, said in a prepared statement. "The First Amendment prevents the state from imposing a lifetime gag order in cases where the prosecuting attorney has purported to be transparent.”

Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the ACLU, said that as both the public and legislatures are currently debating police misconduct, racial profiling and other issues sparked by the Brown shooting, “We believe that the public and the legislature need to have this information and we're working to convince a judge. . . . ”

Mittman said that the information about the grand jury investigation had been entirely “one-sided” and “government-directed” to date.

“How this process worked. . . is solely being driven by the government,” he told the Post-Dispatch, adding, “as you know, the First Amendment doesn't allow that.”

The public is entitled to “complete information not controlled by the government.”

Asked Doe's gender, how Doe approached lawyers, whether Doe's opinions represent the opinion of other grand jurors and whether Doe's suit might prompt other jurors to come forward, Mittman offered essentially similar versions of the same statement: “This grand juror is being very respectful of the legal process and does not want to share information that it is not legally permissible to share.”

One reason the grand jury process is secret is to protect the target if an indictment is not returned, Mittman said. The court, he said, will look at reasons to break that secrecy: the interests of public policy and the ongoing debate about “are grand juries the best way to deal with police misconduct?”

Mittman did not want to speculate about how long the case will take to be resolved. “We certainly hope to work cooperatively with the attorneys for the county. It would be wonderful if there could be an expedited process.”

A McCulloch spokesman declined to comment, saying that McCulloch had not yet been served with the suit.

The grand jury Nov. 24 announced it would not indict Wilson for killing Brown.

Plastic bag industry out to stop CA ban

Plastic Bag Manufacturers Spend $3 Million Hoping to Repeal California Ban

California has become the first U.S. state to ban plastic bags, but bag manufacturers are fighting this bill in hopes they can overturn it. Fingers crossed they are unsuccessful.

Published: January 3, 2015 | Authors: Anastasia Pantsios | EcoWatch | News Report

nationofchange.org

This past September, California became the first state in the U.S. to ban single-use plastic bags when Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill sponsored by San Fernando Valley State Senator Alex Padilla, overcoming heavy lobbying and big spending from a handful of out-of-state bag manufacturers.

“This bill is a step in the right direction—it reduces the torrent of plastic polluting our beaches, parks and even the vast ocean itself,” said Brown in September. “We’re the first to ban these bags, and we won’t be the last.”

But the bag manufacturers are fighting to dial that number back to zero. Despite strong public support for the ban—more than 125 California cities and counties had already enacted their own bag bans prior the statewide legislation—bag manufacturers are working hard to overturn it. Their trade organization, the American Progressive Bag Alliance, has spent $3 million to collect signatures to place a repeal of the bill on the November 2016 ballot, saying that claims that the bags contribute to litter and pollution are overblown.

“You just take it back to the grocery store and stuff it into a container and it gets recycled,” Jon Barrier, a spokesman for the bag trade group told Reuters.
Californians Against Waste, the group that pushed for the ban, says they’re ready to defeat the initiative and pointed to polling that shows 60 percent of Californians support keeping the ban in place.

“After spending more than $3.1 million, 98 percent of which was raised from out of state, it is clear that the plastic bag industry is more interested in their own profits than reducing an unnecessary source of pollution and waste that threaten California’s wildlife and pollutes our ocean, coast and our communities,” said Californians Against Waste executive director Mark Murray. “Californians overwhelmingly support the law, and the $30 million to $50 million it will cost the plastics industry to launch a full-fledged campaign in 2016 if the measure qualifies will be proven to be an act of political malpractice, particularly since nearly half the state will no longer have plastic bags by election day.”

“Virtually all of the plastic bags sold in California are produced by just three out-of-state corporations,” he said, adding, “This is not the first time that out-of-state polluters have attempted to repeal a California environmental law. In 2010, out-of-state oil companies, along with the Koch Brothers, spent more millions on Proposition 23, an initiative that would have suspended AB 32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act. Voters soundly rejected that effort by polluters, and we are confident that, given the opportunity, voters will reject a repeal of the plastic bag ban.”

The bag manufacturers group has submitted 800,000 signatures; 505,000 are needed to place an initiative on the ballot. The secretary of state’s office must now confirm that at least that number are valid before certifying the initiative. If it is certified, the ban would be delayed until after the election. In an odd twist of fate, the incoming secretary of state is Alex Padilla.

10 Good Liberal Things About 2014

US activist Medea Benjamin is arrested by women riot police during her participation in a march to Al Farook Junction in 2012. (photo: Hamad)

By Medea Benjamin, Commmon Dreams

31 December 14

readersupportednews.org

t’s been a year of fervent activism on police accountability, living wages, climate change, personal freedoms, immigrant rights, an open internet and diplomacy over war. The electoral beating the Democrats received has prompted both the Administration and some spineless congresspeople to realize that support for progressive issues could reinvigorate their base —a realization that has already led to Obama’s executive action on immigration and the opening to Cuba.

So here are some of the 2014 highlights. 

1. Uprising for police accountability. The movement for police accountability has swept the nation, spawning brilliant new leaders from communities most affected, giving a voice to the families who have lost loved ones and opening people’s eyes to the militarization of our police forces. It is an organic, grassroots movement destined to have a transformative impact on the struggle for racial equality. Keep an eye out in 2015 for CODEPINK’s campaign to demilitarize the police, Communities Organize to Demilitarize Enforcement. 

2. Historic opening with Cuba. President Obama’s announcement that the US would work to restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba for the first time in over 50 years was historic. It including a prisoner swap that led to the release of the final three members of the “Cuban 5”—a group unjustly imprisoned for trying to stop terrorist acts against Cuba. And it marks the end of Cuba policy being dominated by a small cabal of right-wing Cuban Americans. (CODEPINK is taking a delegation to Cuba for Valentines Day, learn more about it at codepink.org/cuba.) 

3. Progress in talks with Iran. Iran and the six world powers announced they would extend an interim nuclear deal seven more months, and gave themselves four more months to reach a political agreement for a comprehensive nuclear accord. Despite intense opposition from the Israel lobby group AIPAC, as well as Republican and Democratic hawks, the U.S. and Iran are closer than ever to securing a historic agreement. It is a rare and commendable example of the Obama administration engaging in Middle East diplomacy instead of militarism. 

4. Triumph of the fractivists. Out of a year of environmental progress ranging from the People’s Climate March to the US-China bilateral agreement on climate change, one of the most monumental victories has been in the anti-fracking movement. The New York State ban on fracking imposed by Governor Cuomo followed a long campaign waged by tireless grassroots activists. But that wasn’t the only victory. Voters in eight locales from Mendocino County, California to Athens, Ohio to Denton, Texas, won fracking bans on the ballot in the 2014 election. So did Canadian citizens in Quebec and New Brunswick. These victories have spawned a national conversation on fracking, with public support for the practice plummeting. 

5. New gains for legalizing marijuana. With the majority of the country now supporting legalization, and Colorado and Washington proving that it actually works, new gains were achieved at the ballot box in Oregon, Alaska and Washington D.C. World leaders like former UN head Kofi Annan and presidents from Latin America called for an end to the drug war and for legally regulating drugs. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder continued to speak out against racist mandatory minimum drug laws and mass incarceration, while President Obama made national news declaring that marijuana is not more harmful than alcohol. 

6. Massive wins for gay marriage. In decision after decision, courts in 18 states struck down gay marriage bans. It is now legal for gay couples to marry in 35 of the 50 states. A year ago, only about a third of Americans lived in states that permitted same-sex marriage. Today, nearly 65 percent of Americans do, making 2014 perhaps the biggest turning point in the history of same-sex marriage in the United States. 

7. Raises for minimum wage workers. From ballot initiatives and grassroots organizing to major legislative efforts, campaigns to raise the minimum wage gained momentum across the country. Voters, cities and statehouses passed minimum wage increases. The states included Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, New Jersey and South Dakota; cities included San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Louisville and Portland,OR. And the calls for raises came from workers themselves: Black Friday saw the largest strikes ever against Walmart, with pickets and strikes at 1,600 stores in 49 states. And on December 5, fast-food workers went on strike in 190 cities. Congress might not be able to push through national legislation, but workers and local communities are not waiting! 

8. Reform of immigration policy. In November, President Obama signed an executive order stopping five million people from being deported and allowing many to work legally. While it does not offer a pathway to citizenship, it does provide relief for millions of immigrants. And it was only possible because of the sophisticated organizing and sacrifices made by so many activists in the immigrant community. 

9. Release of the torture report. For years, human rights advocates have been pushing for the release of the 6,000-page torture report compiled by the Senate Intelligence Committee--against vehement opposition from the CIA. The full report remains classified, and the 600-page executive summary was redacted by the CIA itself. The public deserves to see the entire report, but the fact that any of it was released is also a tribute to Senator Dianne Feinstein and her colleagues. It marks the beginning of our nation coming to grips with this sordid page of our history. The next chapter should include accountability--bringing to justice all those who authorized and participated in these shameful acts. 

10. Palestine solidarity becomes mainstream. 2014 was horrific for Palestinians, with the Israeli war against the Gaza killing nearly 2,200, mostly civilians. But the invasion spawned unprecedented international solidarity with Palestine and huge steps forward for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS won the support of Christian congregations including the Presbyterian Church USA and academic groups like the American Studies Association. Activists shut down ports in California to stop the unloading of Israeli ships; they forced SodaStream to close its settlement-based factory, and the online shopping site GILT dropped AHAVA cosmetics, made in an illegal Israeli settlement in Palestine. In Europe, the movement has been hugely successful with country after country voting to recognize Palestine as a state and the European court ruling to remove Hamas from its list of terrorist organizations. Keep an eye out in 2015 for CODEPINK’s new campaign, No Open House on Stolen Land, targeting RE/MAX real estate company for selling illegal Israeli settlement homes.

The 2014 low electoral turnout and the Democratic defeat revealed how unenthused the public is about national politics. But it also revealed the popularity of progressive ballot measures. And the campaign pushing Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to run for President is putting populist economic issues into the national limelight and already influencing the positions of likely presidential contender Hillary Clinton. With this framework and the new energy infused into social justice and environmental activism, the progressive movement is poised to make significant gains in 2015.

Out with 2014, in with 2015, and up with people

Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

01 January 15

readersupportednews.org

 

e’ve made progress this year — raising the minimum wage in dozens of states and cities, providing equal marriage rights in a majority of states, limiting carbon emissions. But there’s far more to do.

The economy looks like it’s improving but most Americans are still stuck in recession, and almost all the economic gains are still going to the top. The only way we can have an economy that works for the many, not the few, is to get big money out of politics — so the rules of the economic game aren’t biased in favor of big corporations, Wall Street, and the rich. And to get more people fighting for equal opportunity and shared prosperity.

But many Americans have become so cynical about politics they no longer even bother to vote. Turnout in the 2014 midterm elections was the lowest in decades. This is exactly what the moneyed interests want. If we give up on politics we give up on democracy, and they can take over all of it.

Never underestimate what we can, and will, accomplish together. Organizing. Mobilizing. Energizing. Making a ruckus.

Here’s to your and yours for a great 2015.