Independent News

This post was originally published on this site

Happy New Year to everyone except Mitch McConnell.

This post was originally published on this site

Over the Christmas holiday, I decided to try my hand at the podcasting game. Thanks to a microphone delivered by Santa and the ease with which all the little tools can be acquired these days, I sat down for a day and got something that sounds like … an amateur who sat down for a day. Still, I enjoyed the process and it gave me a chance to talk about something that has obsessed me for more than half a century: the books of former radio host Frank Edwards.

I won’t got into it at length because that’s a big part of what the podcast covers, but Edwards was something of a unique character, a more recent version of Charles Fort crossed with a bit of Ambrose Bierce and a dash of Walter Cronkite. For decades Edwards was a straight newsman, first on local radio programs and then on Mutual Broadcasting System. But he got into something that was … let’s just say strange. I stumbled across the books he made by compiling his radio broadcasts in the back row of a little public library in my hometown when I was about 10. I read them all. I bought them all. I read them apart. Then I bought them again. Something about Edwards’ style—strange tales told with a journalist’s directness—just floored me. It still does. If you’ve got 15 minutes, give: “Strangest of All: The disappearance of Oliver Larch” a listen.

I realize that many of you are, like me, fans of much more polished podcasts on subjects like history (hardcore, of course) or junkies for true crime. And I know this little “production” doesn’t stand up very well next to the polished products available in an exploding podcast market.

But think of this as a first draft. If there’s any interest, I’ve already worked up a second episode. And started a third. I’m going to let you guys decide whether those episodes ever see “air” time.

This post was originally published on this site

The Washington Post is reporting that there are going to be some changes to the Secret Service’s presidential security detail in the Joe Biden administration. This is not unusual in itself, but the Post says the changes come “amid concerns from Biden allies that some current members were politically aligned with President Trump.”

This is an unpleasant story in every direction. It may be unfairly maligning professionals in a deadly dangerous job. It may not be unfair, and there may truly be issues within the agency that justify what nervous Biden allies fear.

It has been difficult to interpret the behavior of Trump’s own Secret Service detail these last few years. Some members have been quick to bend to Trump’s insistence that those around him not wear masks during the pandemic. There has been no apparent pushback even as Trump has repeatedly infected members of his own security teams forced to attend plainly unsafe rallies and photo ops. You can brush much of this aside as enforced neutrality even in the face of danger, but then again: Despite the seemingly absolute necessity of the agency remaining politically neutral, a member of the service tapped by Trump for a top White House political position—a remarkable situation to begin with—is now being allowed to return to the Secret Service despite taking the most partisan possible of career shifts. That agent, Trump White House deputy chief of staff Anthony Ornato, will not be returning to help guard Biden. But he will be returning to a posh position at the agency’s training center, reports the Post.

There’s no word on whether the new curriculum will include how to organize events that expose your ex-colleagues to a deadly disease because the president got bored with safety measures, but it seems like it would come up. You can just return from that to a top job within the agency? Really? Huh.

In any event, Biden’s security detail is going to feature some of the same faces that once guarded Biden as vice president, said to be ones Biden “knows well.” But it will also by necessity feature some of the same faces that have guarded Trump, and … boy, it’s hard to know how to feel about that.

On one hand, these are people who have undoubtably watched Trump do or attempt crimes and have done nothing about it, so they take their jobs as neutral, invisible protectors quite seriously. Biden could feel confident that he could do anything, including appointing the family dog ambassador to Italy in exchange for a dog biscuit-based bribe, and his security detail would never let the arrangement leak. Right?

On the other hand, I think it is fair to inherently distrust anyone who has worked around Trump for that long, in quarters that close, but never shoved him into a sack and driven him into the mountains for a while so that the rest of us could get a moment’s peace. It is the Melania Rule: If you can stand even being near the man, you may be pretty messed up yourself.

This post was originally published on this site

Daily Kos Elections’ project to calculate the results of the 2020 presidential election for all 435 congressional districts makes its next stop in Georgia, which Democrats not only won for the first time since 1992 but which of course is also hosting two crucial runoffs that will determine control of the Senate. Because of this special situation, we’re bringing you results for the presidential race and both Senate races as they played out on Nov. 3.

We have our usual county-by-county breakdowns for president and for the regular Senate race between Republican Sen. David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff. But because the special Senate election featured 20 candidates on the ballot, we’ve sliced the data in a couple of different ways. Our first spreadsheet features the vote shares for the three main candidates: Democrat Raphael Warnock, Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, and Republican Rep. Doug Collins, who collectively won 79% of the vote in the first round. We’ve also compiled a second spreadsheet that consolidates the total vote for Democrats, Republicans, and third-party candidates.

Joe Biden’s astonishing win was powered by an ongoing surge in the Atlanta suburbs, where large numbers of voters have been demonstrating their distaste for Donald Trump ever since the 2016 elections.

Despite a deliberate GOP gerrymander, both the 6th and 7th Districts saw some of the biggest swings in the country four years ago, a trend that continued this year as Biden flipped both seats. The 6th, which supported Mitt Romney 61-37 in 2012, went for Trump just 48-47 last time and Biden 55-44 in November. Freshman Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath easily won a rematch with the woman she ousted in the midterms, Republican Karen Handel, winning 55-45.

As for the 7th, it had been the most diverse district still held by a Republican, and it’s undergone a similar transformation: After going 60-38 for Romney, Trump won it by a much narrower 51-45 spread in 2016, and Biden carried it 52-46. It also gave Democrats their lone House pickup that wasn’t aided by redistricting, as Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux beat back Republican Rich McCormick 51-49 to pick up the seat left open by retiring GOP Rep. Rob Woodall, who nearly lost to Bourdeaux in 2018.

Perhaps most interesting of all, Biden’s third-best improvement came even further out in Atlanta’s northwestern suburbs, deep into Republican turf in the 11th District. This seat, held by Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk, narrowed from 67-31 Romney to 60-35 Trump, then made a similar jump again this year, voting for Trump 57-42. That’s still a long ways from competitive (Loudermilk won reelection 60-40), but the pattern should worry the GOP.

In fact, Biden improved on Clinton’s performance in all 14 of Georgia’s congressional districts on every metric: his margin against Trump, his own vote share, and his raw vote totals (though Trump’s vote totals also increased across the board). Democrats, however, may not get to enjoy the fruits of the Peach State’s metamorphosis for much longer since Republicans will exert total control over the next round of redistricting and are certain to impose another heavily gerrymandered map on voters.

The Senate results, meanwhile, help shed some light on the areas that the runoff campaigns might target. Both races followed the same pattern as the presidential contest: The majority Black 5th District in the heart of Atlanta yielded the best results for Democrats, while the rural 9th in the state’s northeast corner—which is represented by Collins—gave Republicans their best numbers. And in most cases, Democratic Senate candidates ran just one to two points behind Biden.

There were, however, some gaps, the most notable of which came, perhaps surprisingly, in the 6th. Ossoff’s 51-46 win there was about six points back of Biden’s 11-point margin despite the fact that Ossoff rather famously lost a close special election in 2017 in the district. The same thing played out in the special election, where Democrats combined for 52% of the vote and Republicans 46. It’s possible that a sizable chunk of traditionally Republican voters here were receptive to Biden’s appeal as the answer to Trump, but still retained their loyalties further down the ballot.

Unsurprisingly, Collins’ best district was his own, the 9th, where he beat Loeffler 45-28, making it the only district he carried. Loeffler won the other seven Trump districts and made her top showing in the rural 14th in the northwestern part of the state, which was won by pro-QAnon Republican Marjorie Greene. Warnock prevailed in the six Biden districts, as did Ossoff.

We also have a detailed map of the presidential results for you to explore, and if you haven’t done so yet, you’ll want to bookmark our complete data set for all 50 states, which we’re updating continuously.

This post was originally published on this site

Moscow Mitch McConnell once again refused to allow $2,000 survival checks to struggling families in a rare New Year’s Day session of the Senate. To be precise, he had his minions Sen. John Thune and Sen. John Cornyn do the dirty work this time, first blocking Sen. Chuck Schumer’s effort to bring up the House bill, then Sen. Bernie Sanders’ request to bring both the House bill and the ridiculous McConnell poison bill addressing Trump conspiracy theories. Trump’s bluster over the $2,000 survival checks clearly didn’t extend to actually doing anything to make it happen, so he lost.

He also lost when the Senate forged ahead to override his veto of the National Defense Authorization Act. A note on this: Sanders had said he would not allow the Senate to move forward on this vote without also voting on survival checks. That was Sanders doing his level best, with the support of Democratic leadership, to pressure Republicans into bucking McConnell. Republicans clearly weren’t going to do that, and the defense bill has too much heft for even the whole of the Democratic conference to reject. Sanders had to have known that the most that was going to come out of this was shining a bright light for the whole nation—but particularly Georgia—to see that Mitch McConnell is why they are suffering. That’s worked to a large extent.

So, back to procedure, McConnell got the vote, 80-12 to invoke cloture to move to the veto override, and then did just that, apparently because Senate Democrats agreed to not force the Senate to wait 30 hours under cloture for the bill to “ripen,” and all hang around until Sunday to take the final vote. They overrode Trump’s veto, 81-13. Happy New Year, asshole.

The $2,000 survival checks are dead, killed by McConnell. The only way they are revived is with the election of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia on Tuesday and a new Democratic majority in the Senate. Until then, here’s Sanders’ argument to Republicans on how hypocritical it is for them to oppose helping Americans.

This post was originally published on this site

The San Diego sheriff’s department has announced that it’ll no longer post the release information of immigrants in its custody, a policy that immigrant rights advocates say undermined state law and in fact aided Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) mass deportation agenda.

“The practice of posting a daily list of individuals who were being released from custody served the same function as notifying ICE of release dates and facilitated unofficials transfers—both transfers and notifications to ICE are prohibited under the California Values Act,” San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium said. “Removing this information is a huge win, and will keep all San Diegans safer.”

KPBS reports that San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore, who implemented the policy in 2017, made the decision to end it after “discussions with my staff, law enforcement partners, and advocacy groups,” and “reached the conclusion the concerns related to this report significantly outweigh the value of it.” 

In its statement, San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium said the postings enabled ICE “to detain individuals in the jail parking lot the minute they were released from sheriff custody.”

But, they cautioned, “[t]he struggle to stop local law enforcement from collaborating with ICE and Border Patrol is far from over, as the San Diego Sheriff’s Department continues to transfer individuals to ICE and work with them on joint task forces, which means county resources continue to be utilized to separate families and deport community members.

“These practices don’t simply harm undocumented people,” the organization continued, “but also wreak havok on their loved ones and their communities, regardless of their immigration statuses.”

But the win on the release date policy shows that community pressure to protect immigrant families works.

“For now this is a big win for our communities, because we’re making things harder for them,” San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium chair Lilian Serrano told KPBS. ”Sometimes we might not be able to fully stop their actions, but we can definitely make things harder for them, and in that way mitigates the impact in our communities and reduces the amount of people affected by it.”

This post was originally published on this site

A new ProPublica report takes a deeper dive into the Trump administration’s rush to execute death row prisoners in Trump’s last months, and now last weeks, in office.

The whole piece is good and worth a read, but a few points stand out. Officials in the Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons have been itching to resume executions since 2011, but it was Jeff Sessions who began pressing from the top to “move forward” on getting it done. The Bureau of Prisons “planned to have the executions carried out by two private contractors,” whose identities are kept secret and who are paid in cash. There was a lot of wrangling to obtain drugs to carry out the executions and new paid “expert” opinions on why they could use them, and if you are a death penalty opponent then certainly everything about this will look skeevy because it pretty much is.

But there is a great deal of support in law enforcement for executions, so it’s not surprising that the efforts to resume federal executions had some diligent supporters inside federal ranks.

Still, however, what comes out more than anything is the real sense of urgency William Barr in particular brought to the effort. Sessions may have pressured for executions to resume, but Barr put his own rush and stamp on the efforts. In familiar Barr style, it wasn’t enough to resume federal executions: It had to be done with lies, rule-bending, and maximum dickishness.

Barr picked out which prisoners would be executed, chosen for the heinousness of their crimes. Barr fibbed in his public announcements about it, just as Barr has done in other announcements. Barr set the schedule for “back-to-back” executions, three in a week, or maybe didn’t, depending on which administration liars you believe over the others. Barr’s Justice Department killed one prisoner while his lawyers were appealing the case, resulting in the appeals court meekly declaring the appeal as “moot” in their response.

But a particular note might be made about Barr’s seemingly out-of-nowhere push to have the government be once again allowed to execute prisoners via firing squad, of all things. This bit of extravagant vulgarity was evidently not as random as it appeared; it was proposed just two weeks after lawyers for death row prisoners had “argued that overdosing on pentobarbital would be so excruciating that even death by firing squad would be less painful.”

Though Barr’s team defended their chosen drug with a response brushing off firing squads as “more primitive” and “regressive,” two weeks later Barr’s department proposed new regulations that would reintroduce firing squads.

ProPublica points to this as an admission by the Justice Department that their previous legal claims needed cleaning up. That is one interpretation. We have gleaned more than enough knowledge of Barr’s team and methods to suspect that this embrace of previously acknowledged “more primitive” and “regressive” means of executing prisoners might instead have simply been a purposeful thumb in the eye to death penalty opponents—an explicit confirmation, from Barr, that in fact his team intended to push forward on executions not just despite debates over the cruelty of their chosen drugs, but with whatever additional “primitive” cruelty might be required.

The cruelty, as has often been said of the newest brand of conservatism, is the point.

The Barr push to execute as many prisoners as can be executed before his team runs out of time will, as it turns out, outlast Barr himself. He has now resigned, but there are three more executions scheduled to be carried out before Joe Biden, a death penalty opponent, takes office. It is impossible not to see the record number of executions under Barr’s short tenure as anything other than the continued fetishization of killing, one of the few remaining obsessions in a conservative movement that has gone flaccid on whatever other principles it once had in favor of overt authoritarianism.

This post was originally published on this site

As we enter a new year, still facing disasters, death, and destruction wreaked upon us in the old one from both nature and the man-made crazy of Trump, his enablers, and his voters, it’s easy to want to forget the past and look hopefully toward a brighter future with the incoming Biden-Harris administration. They have a major task ahead of them cleaning out Augean stable-sized messes left behind by the Orange Occupant and his minions. With that said, I have my own “hope” to add to the towering pile of critical issues they face.   

I hope and pray that attention to Puerto Rico doesn’t get washed away in the flood of other important issues on their overflowing agenda.

This isn’t the first time I’ve expressed these wishes and made resolutions. The following story is from Sunday, Dec. 31, 2017, posted only a few months after hurricanes Irma and Maria slammed into Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands—2017 review and resolution for 2018 and beyond

In 2017 many U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico will be ringing in the new year of 2018 by candlelight. Not because it is romantic or spiritual—it is because they still have no power. Living sin luz (without light) is not some poetic reference—it is a nightly reality. A nightmare from which the dawn of the following day brings no surcease. Citizens in the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) are not nearly back to normal,  are facing a major loss of tourist revenue and a budget crisis.

I’m not in the habit of making New Year’s resolutions, however this year I’ll make an exception. I resolve to continue shouting, writing, tweeting, calling elected officials and doing anything in my power to keep the untenable, unacceptable, disgraceful state of affairs facing our sisters and brothers in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands in front of politicians and the general public who have allowed the unimaginable to become normal. Since when is it normal for a travesty like this to become simply a matter of ticking off the number of days that pile up, and moving on in our minds to something of greater urgency?

In September of 2018, one year after the devastation of Hurricane Maria, I tried again and wrote: “Make a promise to support Puerto Rico”

Where is the national outrage?

More than a year has passed since back-to-back Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, killing thousands of people—not on direct impact, but in the days and months of neglect from their government and their “president,” aka Donald Trump, that followed.  

The situation remains grave for the survivors. Contrary to much of the published mainstream media reportage, not everyone has power, more than 60,000 people are living under leaky tarps, schools have closed, there is a mental health crisis, and we are in the middle of hurricane season 2018. New storms form each week and people who live in the Caribbean live with the daily anxiety of weather watching.

On Dec. 29 of 2019 my plea was repeated.

My New Year’s promise to Puerto Rico. Mi promesa de Año Nuevo a Puerto Rico

You don’t have to be Puerto Rican to give a damn about what is happening, right before our eyes, to Puerto Rico.

I’m not Puerto Rican. Sure, I have skin in the game since my husband, some cousins, my godkids and their children, and many of my former comrades from the Young Lords Party are Boricuas.

In September of 2017, after Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands as well, along with family and friends I watched a nightmare unfolding. It soon became patently clear that the U.S. government, under the failed leadership of Donald Trump, was botching relief and recovery efforts, and few mainland mainstream reporters were bringing their A-game into the mess. I was struck by the fact that a majority of folks here seemed to know next to nothing about the island and its fractured history as a U.S. colony. The New York Times reported, “Nearly Half of Americans Don’t Know Puerto Ricans Are Fellow Citizens.”

I made a promesa to my santos that I would do what I could to amplify the skimpy mainstream media coverage of the recovery efforts on the island—as well as covering the Puerto Rican community here on the mainland.

Same story for the three-year anniversary of Maria.

The power grid on the island is by no means stable, and one simply has to check the online outage map to get a sense of the frequency of loss of service. What is very troubling is the sale of the state utility. Ed Morales, author, journalist, and professor, recently wrote this illuminating piece for The Nation. 

Privatizing Puerto Rico

On July 26, Ángel Figueroa Jaramillo, the head of UTIÉR (Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego), Puerto Rico’s electrical and irrigation workers’ union, tweeted from one of the island’s power generation stations. From Costa Sur Unit 5, near the southern coast, he posted a video of an open porthole that allowed people to peer into a massive boiler made of decaying metal and see streaking blue and orange flames, the stuff of electric power generation. “This is the plant that failed on January 7th, 2020,” he wrote—referring to the day a 6.4 earthquake hit southwestern Puerto Rico—“the one José Ortiz said would take a year to repair.” Ever since the quake, Ortiz, then the CEO of the government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), had been saying the agency did not have the capacity to get the damaged plant back up and running until then. (Ortiz stepped down from PREPA in August.) […]

Since 2016, when, in response to the island’s spiraling debt, the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) was signed into law, many of its major decisions have been in the hands of the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB), which many call simply “the Junta.” The FOMB is tasked with restructuring the territory’s $72 billion debt; its main tool, a brutal austerity regime. Hundreds of schools have closed, government workers’ pensions are threatened with cuts, municipalities are being defunded, and PREPA is slated to be fully privatized as part of the solution to its $9 billion debt.

The fate of PREPA, then, is deeply bound up in the fate of Puerto Rico. The territory is in an exceedingly fragile state after a succession of political and natural disasters in recent years: devastating hurricanes in 2017; a political scandal that led to massive street protests and the resignation of the governor, Ricardo Rosselló, and several of his colleagues last year; and the massive earthquake and a series of aftershocks this January that knocked out the Costa Sur power plant and caused widespread damage. Figueroa Jaramillo’s confrontational stance against the CEO of PREPA is therefore at the center of a conflict that reveals the ways multinational corporations, aided by the federal government, are using the precarious situation to extract profit through privatization. This privatization scheme, urged on by the unelected FOMB, is speeding up a dangerous deterioration of democracy on the island at a time when it can little stand yet another crisis.

This month is also the anniversary of those earthquakes in 2020, which started in December 2019 and have continued.

A reminder.

Those earthquakes that toppled buildings and weakened major structures and facilities on the island severely damaged the Arecibo Observatory, which is now gone. This was one of the few recent well-covered stories that briefly put Puerto Rico back into the headlines.

Another item that became mainland newsworthy has been the ongoing issue of status—mostly viewed from the perspective of how Puerto Rican voters here on the mainland have affected votes for or against Democrats and Republicans.

The Puerto Rican vote is now being looked at in Georgia.

The other main area where there is coverage of Puerto Rico, to the exclusion of almost all else, is the statehood issue. Thousands of people, many of whom are not Puerto Rican or who are mainland politicians and don’t live on the island, continue to “weigh in” with their thoughts and opinions about Puerto Rican status: statehood, independence, maintenance of the status quo, or other alternatives. The voices of those who resist colonialism or who don’t have mainland media clout get the least amount of attention.

An example is Roberto A. Fernández, who has written pieces excoriating both statehooders and those who embrace the current farce of “commonwealth.” His analysis is rooted in the history of the United States’ acquisition of Puerto Rico.

Dissecting Puerto Rico’s Commonwealth Status

In late 1898, the Treaty of Paris established the conditions under which Spain ceded to the United States its control over the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, while relinquishing sovereignty over Cuba. By then, American political actors and judges were conversant with hierarchical notions rooted on the idea of “race,” using it to explain and justify the domination of “whites” over the continent and its “non-white” inhabitants. 

In 1901, the first cases testing the validity of the colonial policy over the new possessions reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In providing legal benediction to colonial domination over peoples and places, the Court relied on notions of racial hierarchy. 

By then, the racialist discourse that the justices articulated had been in circulation for several decades. In essence, it said that there is an innate capacity for institution-building and self-governance, which is denied to all races but the Anglo-Saxon stock. Given that Puerto Ricans were an “alien race,” i.e., not Anglo-Saxon, they were to be governed for their own sake, and be given limited measures of self-government, from time to time and in small doses.

I see lots of uninformed tweets like the one below, which assumes that gaining two senators from a future Puerto Rican state would mean two Democrats in those seats.

This opinion doesn’t encompass the reality that Jennifer González, the recently reelected non-voting Rep for Puerto Rico, is a Republican.

One of the things that makes me crazy is that lots of people who chime in with opinions about Puerto Rico have zero clue who the players are on the island, they don’t know the names of the political parties, they aren’t aware of new developments, and they make assumptions that a party with the word “progressive” in its name makes it so. 

I haven’t spent time in Puerto Rico in years, and the Puerto Rican “left” I interacted with decades ago has changed. There is a new cast of characters and I have tried to do my homework, but it’s hard, and made more so by having to do much of my reading in Spanish. (I’m not fluent in anything but Spanglish.)

I did find a translated article recently that helped. 

Luis Fernando Coss, a professor at the School of Communication at the University of Puerto Rico, wrote: Puerto Rico 2021: A Shift in Perspective, A New Opposition

…it’s important to reflect on the significant progress of the Left in Puerto Rico in the 2020 election cycle. I propose an optimistic outlook based on the election results, not mere fantasy. I am one of those people who feels the progress has been undervalued. Perhaps this is because the results were somewhat unexpected for many. In any case, the big questions are: How do we view the new landscape on the Left? How will the opposition to the colonial and neoliberal regime adjust going forward?

I’m now referring specifically to those forces that place themselves in opposition to neoliberalism and colonialism in Puerto Rico—without losing sight of some important differences among them. In other words, I’m not talking about a single community, but rather a pluralized “community” belonging to a very diverse movement that could identify as leftist in the sense described above. To be clear, I assume that the votes for independence and socialist candidates, for the MVC [Citizens’ Victory Movement] and the PIP, and for independent candidate [José Antonio “Chaco”] Vargas Vigot are like-minded votes mostly oriented toward some kind of transformation of the country and social progress —whether via a gradual or decolonizing route— and not a mere “act of protest.”

What confuses things more is the issue of just who can speak for Puerto Rico.

The very small number of congressional statehood supporters includes both Democrats and Republicans.

Rarely do any of the mainland “opinionators” and pundits know much, if anything, about the long and painful colonial history of Puerto Rico, nor can any of them name the leadership of the various political parties on the island, nor are they discussing current issues with the fiscal control board, the island’s energy grid, the medical infrastructure, the lack of a hospital on Vieques, the privatization of the Vieques/Culebra ferry, the impact of the Jones Act, food insecurity, FEMA failures, and femicide. I could continue with my list, but frankly it’s depressing and I’m sure several people will show up today in comments stating why Puerto Rico should become a state (or not) while COVID-19 continues to kill off more Puerto Ricans, there are still residents whose power goes out daily, and there are far too many folks with no roofs. 

The recent “vote” for statehood in Puerto Rico generated a lot of social media heat, which is ongoing. One of the more interesting analyses I’ve read so far was this op-ed from Efraín Vázquez-Vera, a full professor at the University of Puerto Rico and the former assistant secretary of state of Puerto Rico’s State Department. He points out:

…the turnout in this plebiscite was only 50% of registered voters, which means that the 52% who voted yes to statehood represent only 26% of all registered voters in Puerto Rico.

Within the yes and no votes, 38,000 ballots left the question blank. These non-voted ballots could be seen as an expression of people who did not wish to validate another scam plebiscite with their vote.

He concluded:

How long can the United States avoid its responsibility to tackle the issue of Puerto Rico’s future political status? The territorial status of Puerto Rico is unsustainable, being the main reason for the present Puerto Rican crisis. If one thing can be said to be certain is that Puerto Rico’s crisis will go from bad to worse during the next four years. A governor with two-thirds of the people against him with an opposing legislature means a paralyzed Puerto Rican government for the years to come, when action is most needed.

This panorama suggests that, sooner or later, the United States will be confronted with the results of another plebiscite, probably with a true majority of Puerto Ricans who favor statehood for the wrong reasons: because of their poverty, their hopelessness and their desperation.

If the 2020 Puerto Rican Status plebiscite was a victory for the Puerto Rican pro-statehood movement is still an open question, but certainly Puerto Rico and the United States lost.

There are people publishing important stories about Puerto Rico and pressing issues outside of the status-wrangling. However, their voices need amplification. Follow them and share what you can.

What I am trying to say today is what Erica González Martínez, the director of #Power4PuertoRico,  lays out in this tweet.

I try hard to be the type of ally outlined in green. I am only one voice—a small, non-Puerto Rican voice. However, I believe one voice can reach a few others, who in turn can educate someone else.

I get up every morning between 4 and 5 AM and make an attempt to gather news from or about the island. I post what I’ve found and shared both on Twitter and here on Daily Kos every morning at around 7:30 AM in the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup (APR) and related pundit stories written by ChitownKev. I post a similar roundup twice a week in Black Kos (which is currently on holiday hiatus until Jan. 8).

I follow not only mainstream media outlets and island papers that post in Spanish, but also key journalism groups on the island like the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI in Spanish).

I ask again for you the reader to find some time in your day, or week, or month, to educate yourself, just a little, about what is going on in our colony. (Yes, Puerto Rico is a U.S. colony.) Check out current news and information, but also try to learn a little history. Share some of these stories to your social networks.

Join me in making a resolution to pay more attention to Puerto Rico in 2021. 

You don’t have to be Puerto Rican to give a damn.

This post was originally published on this site

Even in an awful year, we’ve got to laugh and point out hypocrisy, right?
Here is a small selection of some of my favorite cartoons I created in 2020. I hope you enjoy them!

Now, if you’ve already given to a local charity or subscribed to your local newspaper (or progressive political publication, hint, hint), consider helping support my weekly animation by joining me on Patreon.

Any amount helps keep the cartoons coming!
Thanks SO much, and Happy New Year!

-Mark

P.S. And if you already help support my work, thank you so much. I couldn’t do it without you. (And thanks for spreading the word:-)