They have failed to step into the current political climate and counter far-right protests, and get workers the income, housing and other social support they need.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene told Steve Bannon that the country is too soft to violently protest against vaccine mandates.
Supporting the Canadian truck drivers causing havoc against vaccines excites Republican lunatics like Bannon and Greene, and they’re getting their hopes up for a violent uprising.
With her Southern twang, Greene says, “Well I think America’s soft, If I have to be honest.”
When are you ever honest, Marge?
I thought America was the greatest and toughest nation on God’s green grass!
She continued, “We’ve never truly suffered at the hands of government abuse and overreach.”
Greene is obviously confused, because that has been the basis for Republican outrage since the 1980s.
Oh, wait, she forgot to mention “Communists” in her rant. Is she slipping?
“By tyrannical government. Communism,” Marge said adding the topping to her conspiracy cake.
“Americans don’t know what to do, they’re frozen in fear,” Greene said.
Over 200 million Americans have been vaccinated, and none of them seem to be trembling in their boots or frozen in fear as a result. Only the anti-vaxxer muppets that Greene supports suffer from this fear.
Then Greene got to the real point she wanted to make.
Former Federal Reserve insider Thomas Hoenig thinks the U.S. faces a painful reckoning because of high inflation.
The current Republican Party is unsustainable: the public is both exhausted & increasingly sickened by Republicans who appear to be devoid of any principles whatsoever.
A U.S. senator has warned about China’s central bank digital currency. “Analysts have raised the eCNY’s potential to subvert U.S. sanctions, facilitate illicit money flows, enhance China’s surveillance capabilities, and provide Beijing with ‘first mover’ advantages,” the senator informed Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
U.S. Senator Warns About the Threat From China’s Central Bank Digital Currency
U.S. Senator Pat Toomey sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Secretary of State Tony Blinken last week raising concerns about China’s central bank digital currency, the digital yuan.
“I write to request your engagement on a momentous development in Beijing this week: the rollout of the world’s first major central bank digital currency (CBDC) to a foreign audience,” he told Yellen and Blinken.
“While the United States is still evaluating the concept of a digital dollar, China is using the Beijing Winter Olympics as an international test for the digital yuan (eCNY), which has been piloted domestically since 2019,” the lawmaker from Pennsylvania described, elaborating:
Analysts have raised the eCNY’s potential to subvert U.S. sanctions, facilitate illicit money flows, enhance China’s surveillance capabilities, and provide Beijing with ‘first mover’ advantages, such as setting standards in cross-border digital payments.
The senator noted that “Beijing has also launched the first state-backed global distributed ledger infrastructure, the Blockchain-based Services Network (BSN).”
Furthermore, Senator Toomey commented on China’s cryptocurrency crackdown, stating: “China’s crackdown presents an opportunity for the United States to be the forerunner of crypto innovation, grounded in individual freedom, and other American and democratic principles.”
The senator continued:
Given the prospective threat to U.S. economic and national security interests, I request that the Treasury and State Departments closely examine Beijing’s CBDC rollout during the Olympic Games.
Senator Toomey also requested information on nine areas to be provided to his office by March 7.
They include how the digital yuan was distributed, strategies employed to advance eCNY adoption by Chinese and non-Chinese persons, eCNY adoption rate by foreigners, total issuance of the eCNY after the Olympic Games, lessons for the U.S. government, and possible challenges to U.S. interests.
In January, China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), revealed that the digital yuan now has more than 261 million users, and transactions worth almost $14 billion have been made using the central bank digital currency. Last week, China designated 15 national pilot zones and 164 entities for blockchain projects.
Do you agree with Senator Toomey? Let us know in the comments section below.
After losing the election, Trump and his allies pressured officials in key states to reverse the popular outcome. The effort failed, and now—state by state—Trump is getting even.
A new report estimates that $21 trillion of that wealth will pass internally within America’s already dynastically wealthy families between now and 2045.
“A large across-the-board increase in interest rates is a cure worse than the disease,” says economist Joseph Stiglitz. “That might dampen inflation if it is taken far enough, but it will also ruin people’s lives.”
This story was originally published by The 19th.
A new report shows that 31 states and the District of Columbia have laws allowing permanent forced sterilizations. Little discussed and largely unmonitored, the issue grabbed national attention last summer when the pop star Britney Spears testified that she was forced to use birth control by her father. While Spears was not subject to surgical sterilization, her testimony started a conversation about reproductive rights and conservatorship.
According to the report from the National Women’s Law Center, 17 states allow the permanent, surgical sterilization of children with disabilities. The report is written in plain language, designed to be understood by at least some of the people impacted most by these laws.
The majority of people in the United States impacted by forced surgical sterilization — permanent procedures such as hysterectomies and tubal ligation — in the United States are under guardianship. Guardianship, called conservatorship in some states, is a legal arrangement designed to account for an individual’s incapacity to make legal and health decisions. The guardian, usually a family member or professional, acts as a proxy decision-maker for the person under guardianship. In many states, people under guardianship cannot refuse medical treatment or vote.
Historically, people of color were among the most impacted by forced sterilization laws, which around the turn of the 20th century were being used in eugenics movements. Even after eugenics fell into disrepute after World War II, eugenic thinking has persisted in American law. During the 1970s, the forced sterilization of Black women was so common in the American South that it was sometimes referred to as a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
While many think of forced sterilization as a relic of the past, some of the laws are quite recent: The two most recent state laws regarding forced sterilization were passed in 2019. An appendix in the report lays out the specific laws in every U.S. state and territory.
“These are very current laws,” said Ma’ayan Anafi, senior counsel for health equity and justice at the National Women’s Law Center and author of the report. “There’s still this narrative that disabled people, especially disabled people of color, are a burden on their families and to the public, that their having children is a threat to society,” they told The 19th.
The new report “advances disability justice in several critical ways” said Jasmine Harris, a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School and expert on disability and reproductive justice. In particular, she praised the report’s use of plain language, or writing designed to be understood by a general audience, rather than restricting information to legal experts and academics.
The National Women’s Law Center used plain language to make the information in the report accessible to at least some with intellectual disabilities.
“When people talk about forced sterilization, and are often talking as if disabled people are not there and don’t have a right to be part of the conversation,” Anafi said.
Anafi noted that this is especially true for those with intellectual disabilities.
“There’s this idea that people with [intellectual disabilities] can’t understand sex and pregnancy, so someone has to make that decision for them. But the truth is, when we give disabled people the right tools and support, more people can engage in the public conversation and make their own decisions,” they told The 19th.
To produce a plain language report, the National Women’s Law Center partnered with the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network, a nonprofit run by and for women and nonbinary people on the spectrum. They also recruited national leaders with intellectual disabilities like Tia Nelis and Max Barrows to help review and ensure that the writing was understandable to people who aren’t policy experts.
“Lawyers can also understand plain language,” Lydia X. Z. Brown, director of policy, advocacy and external affairs at the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network, told The 19th.
Anafi and Brown both hope that the report will empower more advocates to understand the laws in their states — and, by extension, change them.
“Bringing attention to these laws in an accessible way is step one towards a policy change,” Anafi told The 19th. “Ultimately, we want policies that ensure that everyone has the tools and supports they need to make decisions about their own bodies,” they said.
Here’s what happened this week
The Washington Post published a bombshell story about a December 2020 memo laying out how Donald Trump could try to use the National Security Agency and the Department of Defense to search communications records in an attempt to prove that foreign powers had tried to help President Biden win the 2020 election. Copies of the memo were circulated among Trump allies and some Republican senators. Trump, in the end, didn’t follow the memo’s recommendations. The memo’s existence underscores both the extreme lengths Trump and his allies considered to overturn the election and how little the public knows today about those efforts.
What is clear is that there were multiple memos floating around Trump circles with all kinds of outlandish proposals to try and help the former president retain power. The New York Times published its own story on a different memo laying out how Trump would set up his own slate of electors to propel him to reelection. Fourteen “alternate electors” were subpoenaed by the January 6 select committee last week.
The committee is undoubtedly going to give the memos and circumstances around them a high level of scrutiny. Right now, the panel is examining Trump’s connections to plans to seize voting machines, the Times reported this past week. That part of the committee’s investigation is partially based on documents from the Trump White House. Documents like that are invaluable to the committee’s work (partially because they weren’t ripped up by Trump himself beyond any reconstruction). The National Archives is also planning on handing over more documents to the committee, this time related to former Vice President Mike Pence and January 6. It stands to reason that these papers could tell the committee—and eventually us—something about who lobbied Pence not to certify the electors.
The committee has also had some success in interviewing people of interest. Months after having been found in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the committee, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark met with the committee for multiple hours on Wednesday. Clark drafted a letter in December 2020, which he asked acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to sign, to officials in the state of Georgia suggesting that the state name a new slate of electors (Rosen refused). Clark did more than that, too, and the committee surely had many interesting questions for him. The leader of the hard-right Oath Keepers militia also talked with the January 6 committee for six hours. Stewart Rhodes, who is being held in a federal detention facility on sedition charges, is widely believed to have had a hand in orchestrating the violence at the Capitol (he pleaded not guilty to the charges).
No one should forget the deadly backdrop of the investigation or the ongoing dangers to investigators. On January 6, 2021, Kamala Harris was just a few yards away from a pipe bomb planted at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
And in Georgia, the Fulton County prosecutor investigating Trump for allegedly trying to influence Georgia election officials to change the course of the election has asked the FBI to conduct a risk assessment of the county courthouse in Atlanta. The request for assistance from the FBI comes after “alarming” rhetoric from Trump himself. At a recent rally in Texas, Trump said, “If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta, and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt.”
Here’s what may come next
The committee is inching closer to calling former Vice President Mike Pence as a witness. Representative Pete Aguilar, a member of the committee, said in an interview with CNN this week that they were “trying to be deliberate and thoughtful” in asking Pence to testify.
“We are making significant progress with or without that testimony,” he said. “We’re not rushing to any, any decisions here. We are being respectful of the office. We’re trying to get testimony from individuals who were around the former vice president.”
Aguilar also said that the committee was still going through the mound of documents it received from the National Archives. “Obviously, in any interview we want to do, we want to be prepared. And that means we have to process the documents and get prepared for that witness,” he said.
What they did this week
Instead of appearing before the committee, Rudy Giuliani faced scrutiny from a different panel. According to Deadline, Giuliani was unmasked as a costumed contestant for the upcoming season of The Masked Singer. Upon his reveal, two of the judges for the contest—Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke—walked off the stage in protest. Giuliani was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee last month; it’s unclear whether he will have appeared before them by the time his exit episode airs in March.
Meanwhile, instead of handing in their phone records after being subpoenaed, two so-called alternate electors sued the committee. Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward and her husband, Michael Ward, who had served on an illegitimate slate of electors falsely declaring that Trump won their states, argued in a court filing that the committee should be prevented from obtaining their phone records because they are both doctors.
Best quote of the week on January 6
“Lindsey Graham’s wrong. I mean, Lindsey’s a nice guy, but he’s a RINO,” Trump said in an interview with Newsmax, speaking about Senator Lindsey Graham, who had said on Sunday that he would not support pardoning those convicted of participating in the insurrection. Graham has been one of Trump’s staunchest allies in the Senate.