Tidbits – June 13 – Reader Comments: Billionaires Captured Trump; Criminalization of Solidarity; Slippery Slope to World War III?; Pride Month Event – Telling the Stories of Lincoln Brigade LGBTQ Volunteers; Cartoons; More…

Reader Comments: Billionaires Captured Trump; Criminalization of Solidarity; Slippery Slope to World War III?; One Nation Not Rolling Out Red Carpet for the Rich; Pride Month Event - Telling the stories of Lincoln Brigade LGBTQ Volunteers; more...

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Tidbits - Reader Comments, Announcements AND cartoons - June 13, 2024,Portside

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Re: The Billionaires Have Captured Donald Trump
 

Desperate to avoid prison—and needing cash to win reelection, so he can pardon himself—Trump is selling his administration’s domestic and foreign policy to the highest bidder. It’s hardly a conspiracy, too. As we speak, he is traveling from billionaire to billionaire, with hat in hand, making explicit promises to sell his presidency.

Trump has raked in campaign contributions in the wake of his conviction last week on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records—$60 million alone in the 24 hours after the jury delivered a guilty verdict...

Trump is going to wealthy donors and interest groups and offering to cede policymaking to them—in exchange for massive campaign contributions. Last month, The Washington Post reported that Trump gathered oil executives at Mar-a-Lago and made a pitch: For the low cost of $1 billion, he would, as president “reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted.”

Trump is advertising that he’s open for business, and he has never shown any interest in Palestinian rights; it’s fair to assume he would see supporting annexation of the West Bank as a small price to pay for millions in campaign contributions. Last month, moreover, Trump promised donors that he would set back the pro-Palestinian movement by “25 or 30 years.” One easy way to do that: Allow Israel to annex the West Bank.

Lynn Hamilton
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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Yes He Did  --  Cartoon by Clay Jones

 

Clay Jones
June 7, 2024
Colorado Times Recorder

 

Re: Migrating Workers Provide Wealth for the World
 

The treatment of migrants, who are crucial for poverty reduction and for building wealth in society, is outrageous. They are treated as criminals, abandoned by their own countries who would rather spend vulgar amounts of money to attract much less impactful investment through multinational corporations. Migrant remittances are greater by volume and more impactful for society than the “hot money” that goes in and out of countries and does not “trickle down” into society.

If the migrants of the world—all 281 million of them—lived in one country, then they would form the fourth largest country in the world after India (1.4 billion), China (1.4 billion), and the United States (339 million). Yet, migrants receive few social protections and little respect. In many cases, their wages are suppressed due to their lack of documentation, and their remittances are taxed heavily by international wire services (PayPal, Western Union, and MoneyGram) which charge high fees to both the sender and the recipient. As yet, there are only small political initiatives that stand with the migrants, but no platform that unites their numbers into a powerful political force.

Norm Littlejohn
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Re: The Criminalization of Solidarity: The Stop Cop City Prosecutions
 

Another heads-up warning and call to action.

As Portside summarizes: "Georgia’s sweeping, political application of conspiracy law echoes tactics that shattered the left a hundred years ago, when the government targeted socialist parties and militant unions with laws against criminal syndicalism, espionage, and sedition."

Kipp Dawson
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

New Name  --  Cartoon by Mike Luckovich

 

Mike Luckovich
June 11, 2024
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

Re: A Slippery Slope to World War III?
 

Mr Feffer's piece about how there are good arguments for sleepwalking into WWIII, and though it may be uncomfortable, it is the principled thing to do.  Oh goody.  Did you catch the bit about how the F-16s are going to change everything?  Do you recall when that was said about, oh, lets see... HIMARS, Patriots, western tanks, "NATO training", guided artillery shell systems, the Switchblade drone, ATACAMS, each a game changer.  Dumb game didn't get the message though... As to who is spreading what, lets see, Macron talking about not just sending trainers but sending troops, if the front collapses.  Because, of course, he's confident the front is not collapsing and is just engaging in macho-mouth?  All the stories of the Russians, badly beaten in electronic warfare a year ago, are now dominant in the field?  Likewise with drones, drone effectiveness, artillery domination?

There is so much bullshit being slung around, by both sides, that it is impossible to see more than the haziest outlines of what is happening.  But it is clear, both sides are losing.  The notion that either NATO or Russia can sustain an ongoing modern war, with its prodigious lethality, expenditure of munitions, cost of same.  It cannot be sustained, not by NATO, not by Russia, certainly not by Ukraine.

And indignant and determined statement of PRINCIPLES will not actually be of any significance if Mr. Putin, in a fit of panic, decides to go for his hole card, and pops a nuclear cap on NATO's ass.  And then, my dear friends, all the principled stands in the world will make not one whit of difference.  Fade to black.  Oh, by the way, in case you're curious, there's nothing on the other side, its all blackness and silence.  And there are no "lets reshoot that last scene, this story needs a happy ending to be marketable."  That will be all she wrote.

Jack Radey

 

You Have A Military Industrial Complex  --  Cartoon by Matt Wuerker

 

Matt Wuerker
July 29, 2015
Politico

 

Re: For the Rich, One Nation Isn’t Rolling Out the Red Carpet
 

Fascinating concept, sharing the wealth.

Susan Lowry
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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Wait, so they are literally fleeing the country over a 0.25% tax increase? That’s hilariously absurd.

Jenna Sanz-Agero
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Re: Elon Musk Wants $50 Billion or He’ll Walk
 

Other than money, what does he bring to the table? It's not as if he's the one designing everything. At what point do his personal shenanigans and reputation become more of a liability to the company?

Robert Laite
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Racist Asshole  --  Cartoon by Mike Stanfill

 

Mike Stanfill
June 10, 2024
Raging Pencils

 

Re: Roger Corman’s 1962 Film ‘The Intruder’ and the Crisis of National Values
 

I found it really powerful and extremely disturbing!  Not to mention very close to our world today 😕

Liz Redwing

 

Many White Americans Fail to Assimilate  --  Cartoon by Jen Sorensen

 

  

With all this talk of immigrants assimilating (or not assimilating) into “our culture,” it’s often implied that said culture is white and Christian. But if you consider that America is, in fact, a highly-diverse nation of immigrants — E pluribus unum, anyone? — the true outliers seem to be those who view the nation as a monolithic body resembling themselves. If anything, it is these folks who have not fully integrated, and who reject American values.

In the second panel, I originally drew “Sweet Home Alabama” blasting out of the pickup truck, but that particular lyric complicated the message I was trying to convey with the Confederate flag, since Alabama actually is a part of the United States thanks to the outcome of the Civil War. So I opted for some fitting lyrics from “Free Bird” instead

Jen Sorensen
February 12, 2019
jensorensen.com

 

ALBA Pride Month Event: Telling Our Stories  --  Online  --  June 25

 

Join Us!
Tuesday, June, 25 at 3 PM ET / 12 PM PT

​Online Event!

Register Here!  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/alba-pride-month-event-telling-our-stories-tickets-918895219337

Featuring Shannon O’Neill and Bettina Aptheker
O’Neill, Curator for the Tamiment-Wagner Collections at NYU Special Collections and ex-officio ALBA board member will re-acquaint us with the ALBA archives and highlight the importance of telling the stories of LGBTQ Volunteers and the challenges involved.

Aptheker will discuss her book Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s. Drawing on the ALBA collection, among other archives, the book recounts the struggles of the Party to come to grips with the many LGBTQ folks among its rank-and-file.

Please join us for this special presentation and discussion as part of Pride Month. 
All are welcome. This promises to be a lively and informative session—don’t miss it!

Pick up a copy of Aptheker's Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s here!
An audiobook copy can be found here!

Bettina Aptheker is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz where she taught for more than 40 years, and had over 17,000 students in the course of her career. An activist-scholar she co-led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964, and the National Student Mobilization Committee To End the War in Vietnam. She was a member of the Communist Party from 1962-1981. She has been part of the LGBT movement since the late 1970s, She has published several books including, Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s, The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis, Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness and the Meaning of Daily Experience, and a memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech & Became A Feminist Rebel that was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2006. She and her wife, Kate Miller, have been together since 1979. They live in Santa Cruz.

Shannon O'Neill is the Curator for the Tamiment-Wagner Collections at NYU Special Collections, a department within NYU Libraries, and the repository responsible for the ongoing care, preservation, and access to the Abraham Lincoln Archives Collection and collections of numerous Spanish Civil War veterans. She joined NYU in August of 2019. Prior to NYU, she worked at the Barnard College Archives and Special Collections as its Director, and the Los Angeles Public Library and Atlantic City Free Public Library. As of May 2024, she has completed a master’s in public history at NYU’s Archives and Public History program.