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Fighting PC issues the past few days but looks like I’m slowly winning that battle. I’ll move on to the site issues that people have been experiencing once I get everything else shored up.

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Scott Walker and Wisconsin GOP Claim Protests Overblown, But Just Read the Full Details of Their Plan to Dismantle Democracy

As Wisconsin Republicans and outgoing Gov. Scott Walker bend over backwards to downplay the scope of their plan to strip crucial authority from Democratic governor-elect Tony Evers, the details of the GOP’s batch of bills—which the state legislature is expected to vote on as early as Tuesday night—show that Wisconsinites are entirely justified in calling the plan an outrageous attack on democracy… and even a full-blown “coup.”

“People are outraged. I’m not sure where that’s coming from right now,” said Wisconsin’s Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, who apparently expects the public to believe that he has no idea why thousands of his angry constituents braved the freezing weather Monday night to protest the GOP plan.

Walker—who has vowed to sign the legislation if it reaches his desk—feigned similar confusion, telling reporters, “For all the talk about reining in power, it really doesn’t.”

Demonstrations against the Republican plan continued on Tuesday, as outraged Wisconsinites heckled Walker with boos and chants of “Respect our vote!” as he spoke at a tree-lighting ceremony inside the capitol building.

Below, courtesy of the local Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, is a bullet-point summary of the “extreme” attack on democracy that Wisconsin Republicans want you to believe is no big deal. If passed, the legislation would:

Bernie Sanders’ call for a ‘war against climate change’ sounds presidential

Sounding more and more like a presidential candidate every day, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) called for a “war against climate change” on Monday.

Sanders was speaking with the Intercept’s Naomi Klein prior to his town hall on climate change Monday evening, which featured Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), 350.org founder Bill McKibben, and CNN host Van Jones, among many others.

The Vermont senator was an unexpected grassroots superstar in the 2016 campaign for the Democratic nomination. While the 77-year-old has not officially made a decision to run in 2020, HuffingtonPost reported Monday that he “is laying the groundwork to launch a bigger presidential campaign than his first.”

Klein, author of the 2014 New York Times Bestseller, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, asked Sanders why he decided to do a televised town hall on climate change.

“We have found that on some of the most important issues facing this country and the world, corporate media generally speaking is not there,” he said. “So what we have done working with progressive media outlets… is come together to produce town meetings.”

He added, “What we are saying is you can get around corporate media, you can talk about real issues and you know what, the American people are prepared to deal with it.”

..

Sanders sounds very much like a man who understands that climate change is a winning political issue that can take take a candidate all the way to the White House in 2020.

Iceland’s Prime Minister Joins Bernie Sanders’ Progressive International

Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Iceland’s left-wing Prime Minister, announced on Facebook her support for a new international progressive movement, Stundin reports.

In the first of a series in The Gaurdian, Yanis Veroufakis echoed Bernie Sanders call for the founding of a ‘Progressive International’. Bernie Sanders was the surprisingly successful challenger to Hillary Clinton’s nomination and one of the most popular politicians in the United States. Yanis Veroufakis was Greece’s finance minister in 2015, who resigned after the Greek government agreed to further EU mandated austerity. He is running for the European Parliament in Germany for the new DiEM25 party.

Katrín is the leader of Iceland’s Left-Green Movement and believes there needs to be more cooperation between leftists parties worldwide to confront, climate change, income inequality, militarism, and the resurgent far-right around the world. The Left-Green Movement is a Democratic Socialist party, but is in a coalition with the conservative Independence Party and the centrist-agrarian and unfortunately named Progressive Party.

Income inequality is a major issue in the coming labour contract negotiations, with housing being of particular concern for Iceland’s working people.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Are Pushing a Bold New Plan to Tackle Climate Change

Last week, Donald Trump offered a perfect encapsulation of the political Twilight Zone that is his presidency when he dismissed his own administration’s dire report on climate change, claiming simply, “I don’t believe it.”

That report was perhaps the most alarming warning yet of the imminent havoc presented by our climate crisis, predicting stark falls in GDP and economic activity, massive species die offs, flooding, increases in extreme weather events, sea level rise that threatens the very existence of U.S. coastal cities and rising temperatures that could make Chicago’s climate rival that of Phoenix or Las Vegas.

But while President Trump glibly writes off the predictions of over 1,000 experts spanning 13 federal agencies, a newly ascendant progressive cohort in government is rallying support for a bold alternative: A Green New Deal.

That proposal, which calls for transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy through a colossal jobs creation program, has been championed by two of the most well-known insurgents in Congress, incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). The progressive stalwarts shared the stage together Monday night at a packed town hall event entitled “Solving Our Climate Crisis.”

The gathering follows previous national town hall events put on by Sanders’ camp in recent years which have focussed on Medicare for All, income inequality and foreign policy. These town halls have frequently drawn over a million viewers, rivaling—and sometimes eclipsing—the viewership of cable news stations.

But besides the topic area of discussion, early on Sanders made clear what made his event distinct from what would be seen on corporate media: “This event is not sponsored by Exxon Mobil, nor is it sponsored or paid for by the Koch brothers.”

‘We Are All Here Together’: Demanding Charter Network Use Vast Resources for Better Pay, First of Its Kind Teacher Strike in Chicago

Days after learning that their charter school network’s refusal to give cost-of-living raises comes amid a cash windfall for the organization, about 550 teachers and staff members from Chicago’s Acero Charter Schools went on strike Tuesday, forming picket lines and demanding fair wages and resources in the country’s first charter school walkout.

Classes were canceled for the network’s 15 schools after contract negotiations, led by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), stalled just after midnight. Acero’s teachers are demanding cost-of-living wages for paraprofessionals, reduced class sizes, and more special education teachers to support the network’s 7,500 students.

Teachers and supporters held signs reading “I’d rather be teaching but this is important” and “On strike for a fair contract” in both English and Spanish, in picket lines outside their schools.

On Friday, Acero released an audit of its finances showing that in the midst of its stingy treatment of its teachers, it currently has $24 million in unrestricted cash on hand—$10 million more than it had at the end of 2017—and brought in $89 million in revenue this past year.

“Yet they remain unwilling to provide a penny more in compensation to paraprofessionals, their lowest wage workers,” said Chris Geovanis, CTU’s communications director, in a statement. “Management has also refused to move on a host of other critical issues that would improve the quality of education for students and reduce staff turnover rates, which are currently averaging over 30 percent in a two-year cycle.”

The network spent $1 million less on staff and teacher salaries this year than it did in 2017, giving a small raise to educators which were found to be “paltry” and “laughable” according to the union, and giving no wage increases to paraprofessionals including teachers’ aides, IT workers, and other staff.

The Harsh and Unjust Punishment of Marc Lamont Hill

The attacks on the professor are a threat to academic freedom and the criticism of Israeli human-rights abuses.

These Utah Activists Are Determined to Stop Trump From Stealing Our Public Lands

A year ago today, Donald Trump traveled to Salt Lake City to sabotage one of America’s oldest environmental laws.

On December 4, 2017, after a concerted pressure campaign by energy companies and conservative political operatives based in the Beehive State, President Trump signed an order to radically shrink two prominent national monuments there—the 1.3 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument that President Obama established in 2016, as well as the 1.8 million-acre Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument that President Clinton established in 1996.

The decision was the largest rollback of protected land in American history and a gross affront to numerous Native American nations, which had advocated for years for the creation of Bears Ears. It was also a full-scale attack on the Antiquities Act of 1906, a foundational conservation law that allows the executive branch to protect America’s public lands by declaring them national monuments. At the time, The Salt Lake Tribune called the actions of Trump and his allies “downright sickening.” Environmentalists, scientists, Native Americans, and many others across the country were outraged as well—they still are.

Ever since Trump turned his guns on the Antiquities Act, his administration has faced intense hostility and active resistance from a growing coalition of conservationists, indigenous communities, and politicians across the American West. On the day Trump officially shrunk Bears Ears, five Native American tribes, including the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe, filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to overturn the action. Numerous conservation groups, including the Wilderness Society and the Natural Resources Defense Council, have also filed suit to restore both Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument to their original size. The cases are ongoing.

“Our voice was totally shut out,” says Attorney General Ethel Branch of the Navajo Nation, who is helping lead the fight to push back against Trump’s anti-monument actions. “We are more than half the population [in the affected region], and we told the Trump administration we wanted this monument to remain intact, and we were completely ignored.”

Congress Takes a Critical Step Toward Reasserting Its War-Powers Control

In 1973, as President Richard M. Nixon escalated an unauthorized bombing campaign in Cambodia, Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) asked, “Does the President assert—as kings of old—that as Commander in Chief he can order American forces anywhere for any purpose that suits him?” Later that year, Congress answered unequivocally that he could not, overriding a presidential veto to authorize the War Powers Act.

Forty-five years later, the Senate took an important step last week toward reclaiming the war powers that Congress has abandoned in recent decades, especially as US military adventurism in the Middle East grew in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In a surprising 63-to-37 vote, the Senate advanced a resolution introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would end US support for Saudi Arabia’s devastation of Yemen. As the first time a war-powers resolution has ever advanced in the Senate, the vote marked a dramatic move toward returning control over matters of war and peace to Congress. It is also a testament to the power of antiwar activism—in the halls of Congress and at the grass roots—to force a reckoning with the consequences of the United States’ endless and unauthorized wars.

George H.W. Bush, Icon of the WASP Establishment—and of Brutal US Repression in the Third World

George Herbert Walker Bush represented a ruling class in decay. His WASP awkwardness, his famous syntactical struggles—described in obituaries as an ah-shucks genuineness, a goofy, “irreducible niceness”—was symptomatic of an Establishment in crisis. Franklin Foer, writing in The Atlantic, notes the nostalgia of the encomiums. The public apparently yearns for a time when politics were less coarse, when the country’s clubby elites were well-bred, well-voweled (compare the pleasantly rolling i’s and o’s found in the Harrimans and Roosevelts with the guttural u of today’s ruling clan), and well-mannered, their grasping and groping kept out of the press, for the most part.

What Foer doesn’t mention, and what is perhaps the single most important through-line in Bush’s life, is the way the extension of the national-security state, and easy recourse to political violence in the world’s poorer, darker precincts, allowed Anglo-Saxon men like Bush to stem the decomposition and to sharpen their class and status consciousness.

Raised in the shadow of legends, of a father (Prescott Bush) and two grandfathers (Samuel Bush and George H. Walker) who helped steer the expansive, epic era of Episcopalian capitalism—when American industry and politics had become interlocked with militarism—George H.W. Bush came into his own during the glory days of covert action in the Third World. This period ran from, say, the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran through the Guatemala coup in 1954 and the Cuban Revolution in 1959 to the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and the Bay of Pigs in 1961, until the eve of escalation in Vietnam.

Criminal justice reform splits 2020 Democrats

Democrats who are mulling 2020 presidential bids are split over whether to support criminal justice reform and give President Trump one of his biggest bipartisan accomplishments.

The decision to support or oppose the bill is a significant policy decision for 2020 hopefuls. The issue has split groups on the left and is sure to come up in presidential primary debates next year.

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), the chief Democratic negotiator, has agreed to move the legislation to the right in recent days to mollify Republican critics, but that has divided fellow Democrats who are eyeing the White House.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a former prosecutor, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass..), a prominent voice on the left, are undecided about whether to support the legislation.

Harris said she is balancing the “ideal” against not letting “perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Warren said she has heard mixed feedback from advocates of sentencing reform who are divided over whether the legislation goes far enough.

“We’re still looking at the details. Overall, it’s not nearly as comprehensive as we need but it appears to be an important first step,” she said, adding, “I’ve heard from groups who are pleased that there has been some effort made and other groups that are sharply disappointed they can’t do more.”

Electoral fraud claims roil North Carolina House race

An ongoing investigation into election fraud allegations and other voting irregularities has roiled a U.S. House race in North Carolina, raising the prospects that a new election could be called.

State officials are investigating fraud claims surrounding absentee ballots in the state’s 9th District, which prompted the North Carolina State Board of Elections to vote in favor of holding an evidentiary hearing by Dec. 21.

The unusual claims center around groups of people who went around collecting absentee ballots from voters in violation of North Carolina law, which says only voters themselves can mail in ballots.

Republican pastor Mark Harris narrowly leads Democratic veteran and businessman Dan McCready by 905 votes. McCready, a top recruit for Democrats, didn’t call for a recount and conceded shortly after the Nov. 6 election.

Harris defeated Rep. Robert Pittenger (R) in the May primary for his reliably red seat, which borders South Carolina and includes the Charlotte suburbs.

But the growing uncertainty around the race led to the state Board of Elections to refuse certification of the 9th District results. That is raising the potential that either the state elections board or the U.S. House of Representatives itself could call for a new election, a rare and likely unprecedented step for a federal race in North Carolina.

Sanders Is Building a New Political Movement and Could Run Again

Building a movement means organizing something that goes on and on and on—and there is no “winning” in a finite sense. But to succeed it must have one crucial component: a cause.

Panama Papers investigation: four men criminally charged in US

Four men have been criminally charged in the US government’s investigation into the findings of the Panama Papers, the leaked files from the offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca.

Prosecutors in New York said the four men, including an attorney and an investment manager who worked for the company, have been charged with wire fraud, tax fraud, money laundering, and other crimes.

The prosecutors said Mossack Fonseca perpetrated a “decades-long criminal scheme,” which was first exposed in a series of articles since 2015 by the Guardian and dozens of media partners around the world.

Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement on Tuesday that the four went to “extraordinary lengths to circumvent US tax laws” in order to boost the wealth of their clients.

“Now, their international tax scheme is over, and these defendants face years in prison for their crimes,” said Berman.

Meanwhile their clients sip chardonnay on Broadway.

‘We’re sounding the alarm’: half of Canada’s chinook salmon endangered

Prospects for species look dire as federal science body finds that only one of the country’s 16 populations is believed to be stable

Pipeline wars: Front line in the fight against climate change

As new pipelines expand the flow of dirty fossil fuels globally, environmental activists are joining with social justice and indigenous rights movements to cut off climate change-inducing oil and gas at the source.

How Indigenous Youth Are Healing Together

Indigenous filmmakers from the Nu Media Program partnered with VICE Canada to document the importance of how an Indigenous sharing circle helps address the epidemic of racism, violence, and intolerance.

Why This Republican Mayor Spoke at Bernie Sanders’s Climate Town Hall

Georgetown, Texas, isn’t the biggest city in Texas, or the weirdest, or the bluest. It went solidly for Trump in 2016, and for Romney in 2012. But last year, the Austin exurb became one of the greenest places in the state: It was the first Texan city to convert to 100-percent renewable energy to power its grid, and the largest city in the U.S. so far.*

“We’re at a tipping point right now,” said Dale Ross, the city’s mayor and the unlikely environmentalist who spearheaded Georgetown’s transition. “Coal cannot compete with wind and solar on cost.”

Ross was the one city leader present on a panel of environmental activists, scientists, and legislators that gathered Monday in Washington, D.C., at a climate-change town hall hosted by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. The event was convened to discuss the findings of the harrowing National Climate Assessment and to lay out an inclusive, economically viable climate-change adaption plan. One proposal, pushed by Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is to pass a Green New Deal through Congress, which would hold the entire country to running on 100-percent renewables within 10 years of its passage. In the process, Ocasio-Cortez says, the country could create thousands of green new jobs.

In Georgetown, Ross has already applied some of the principles of that FDR-inspired eco-deal at the local level. Ross, a certified public accountant, moved to Georgetown in 2004 and became mayor in 2014. He has expanded the city’s park system, begun composting fruits in local schools, and installed nine charging stations for electric vehicles. This year, Georgetown won a Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge grant to create a virtual solar plant by renting out space for panels on the city’s businesses and homes.

The renewable conversion started as an economic question—last year, Ross told NPR he’s been driven by a “love of green: green rectangles and green energy”—but it’s not just about the dollar bills, even for him. “I think we have a duty and obligation to leave the world better than we found it,” he said at the town hall. “We can do that; you just have to have bold visionary leaders who we can elect—with y’all’s help.” The crowd roared.

Thank you @DeanObeidallah for giving me the opportunity to talk about my legislative priorities and and shed light on a serious issues that deserves national attention. https://t.co/eJ5SpY8YQg

— Deb Haaland (@Deb4CongressNM) December 4, 2018