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Bernie Drop Out Now
Dear Bernie: Drop Out
In the times of Covid-19, and in the face of Joe Biden’s overwhelming lead, you’re still running for the Democratic nomination and pushing for 30 more primaries to be held. You keep running, despite the vanishingly small chance that you could overtake Biden’s lead, and the even smaller chance that your revolutionary platform would find enough support in the House AND the Senate to be enacted if you were elected President.
No, Bernie. No. Just drop out of the primaries. Do it for the health of the people of this nation, and do it for the health of the nation. We are facing two existential threats: the corona virus, and Donald Trump as president. It’s time to wash our hands, marshal our forces, and vanquish both so we can heal this Republic.
Joe Biden is well on his way to becoming the presumptive nominee and, for better or worse, there is nothing you can say or do to change that that you haven’t already said or done.
Feel proud that you fought for minimum wage increases, feel proud that you have spotlighted this nation’s wretched history to stomp on the most vulnerable while putting millionaires and billionaires on pedestals and rewarding them with tax breaks. I share your disgust, and I am as furious as you are about the lethal injustices that keep people in sickness and protect pharma companies, and the systemic misogyny and racism that kills us silently every day.
Angry Dude #1: We are on the same page. But it’s time to go.
Stop asking people who don’t have much to fork over a few dollars every month to fuel your righteous but withering campaign.
We heard you, Bernie – free college, Medicare for All, raise the minimum wage, the billionaires rig the system. Got it, and gracias. Thanks for pushing forward admirable ideas that, thanks to you – and the foundation built by others, including Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton – are finally taking center stage. Your work promoting those concepts will help, finally, to make these United States a more perfect union.
But now is the time to be a different kind of leader. One who knows when his message outshines him, and knows he must step aside so that others can carry it forward.
Thank your supporters, your bros, both the good guys and the blowhards, and get back to the Senate. Continue to rail against the wrongs, continue to point to solutions, learn to build coalitions in the Senate so that your proposed legislation makes it to a floor vote at least.
Look, Elizabeth Warren did more in 2011 building the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that protects 340 million people in the United States, than most of the Democratic candidates. And she had to drop out.
There were too many people on that Democratic debate stage for too long. The egos of no-chance candidates like Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer robbed women of great achievements–Warren, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar–of air time. The mass media “celebrities” who “moderated” these debates favored some candidates over others. The proof is in how many minutes each candidate got to answer questions and respond to attacks. The way the debates were structured was appalling, infuriating, and only served to play into the hand of the toxic, vicious man in the White House.
But you, Bernie, you belonged on the stage. And many of us, though we don’t support you, do agree that your ideas should be part of the Democratic platform. Well done. Now, please, let’s not continue putting people’s health in danger by requiring more primaries, when Biden’s lead is already virtually insurmountable.
And even more important: Let’s not put this entire nation’s health in any more danger than it already is. The prescription is Donald Trump’s removal from the Oval Office, and the way to get to the cure is to accept the fact that Biden will win the nomination so we can turn our attention to attacking Trump, not fighting among ourselves.
Otherwise, you risk being known as the self-centered socialist who puts your own ambitions and beliefs ahead of the well-being of the entire United States.
Latinos in Popular Films Almost Nonexistent
It is no surprise that you rarely see Latinos in Hollywood movies. Hollywood has that door still tightly shut, save for stereotypical depictions and, every once in a while, an original character in an original story.
The 2019 study “Latinos in Film: Erasure on Screen and Behind the Camera Across 1,200 Popular Movies,” by the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), and Wise Entertainment, examines the decades-long void and fills it with interpretation and recommendations.
Read more here
Kill the story about the dead: Puerto Rico Governor
Like father, like son.
Ricardo Rosselló is the son of Puerto Rico’s former Gov. Pedro Rosselló, whose administration resulted in the imprisonment of 40 top level advisors and cabinet members in the 1990s for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars.
The son, the current governor of Puerto Rico, is now facing calls to resign from a cross-section of Puerto Ricans after unforgivable scandals that reflect his supreme incompetence and lack of morality and regard for human rights.
- Hurricane María in September 2017 revealed his ineptitude. Post hurricane revealed his evil, when he denied multiple times that thousands had died because the electrical system was broken, which meant that hospitals and clinics could not treat patients for ongoing chronic health issues nor emergencies. This denial, from the son of a corrupt governor who was also a pediatric surgeon, is almost unspeakable cruelty. No tiene nombre.
Uninformed people say the hurricane destroyed Puerto Rico. Informed people know history, and so know that decades of neglect and corruption – starting with Rosselló senior’s violations of the Puerto Rico Constitution in borrowing more from Wall Street than we could possibly repay — yes, we actually have a constitutional section about not borrowing more than we can repay — law , upending the public health care system, planting the poisonous seeds to destroy public education as a bridge to college or other vocations – left the island lethally vulnerable to hurricanes and stupidity. In a recent chat on Telegram, the son asked his communications team to bury the stories about the number of people who have been assassinated.
To this day, not all the dead from the hurricane have been buried because many have remained unidentified and their bodies are in refrigerators truck containers.
Fortunately, the junior’s bros were inept at sweeping under the rug the story of the thousands who died. - Last week, top level Cabinet members were arrested for misappropriation of funds. Specifically, giving their friends and themselves lucrative government contracts.
- This week, Rosselló Jr. and like-minded advisors and members of his Cabinet and contracted friends revealed their wretched souls to the world when through more than 800 pages of a Telegram app chat room they used words like “whore” and homophobic remarks to characterize those they do not like, not on Facebook not in the real world. The complete chat is available here
These band of brothers, as junior calls his pals to whom he gave important positions that require, at minimum, maturity, are misogynistic, homophobic, corrupt, schemers of lies and personal attacks against leaders of their own pro-statehood party and others. They are what ails Puerto Rico more than broken water pipes and downed electrical lines.
These boys are empty vessels with holes in their moral pockets that can only be filled with taxpayer money – that is, taxpayers in Puerto Rico and here in the United States.
Junior has never even looked at a Help Wanted ad in his life. He comes from a wealthy family that hands over jobs to the next generation whether they show capacity to do the job of not. Junior’s brother Jay made partner in two months at a Virginia law firm, just days after the firm received contracts from Puerto Rico with federal taxpayer money.
The sons are as morally corrupt as the father. They believe they are entitled to take whatever they want from whomever they want. And what they and their friends take is money from the poor people in Puerto Rico, who need public health care, public schools, public transportation and all the rest to get to a place where they can have better economic opportunities. But the Rosselló family also destroys the very government entities that were founded to help the poor and sick, even as they promise they are fixing problems within those systems.
The Rosselló mafia stole money from the AIDS Institute in the 1990s – money that was to help people with AIDS. They stole money from public education – money that was to buy books, launch innovative programs, fix schools. If there’s a major government agency that they did not steal from, please let me know. They stole money from you and me, from taxpayers and the poor alike.
The scope of their corruption and greed is unconscionable.
Puerto Rico, my Puerto Rico, is a gorgeous place with hard-working people who have been fooled over and over again. We are ever hopeful, ever forgiving. I hope that this time, though, we collectively agree: ¡Basta ya!
The boy’s club is a den for sentiments of misogyny and homophobia. It is a centuries-old problem and worldwide. But here, I am talking about my Puerto Rico. Growing, we would advised by well-meaning family and friends simply turn away from human rights violations. “Just don’t pay attention to them,’ they told us, as they themselves had been told by their own elders. Don’t pay attention to your oppressor? How does that lead to liberation from oppression. #MeToo #BastaYa #DerechosHumanos
Fortunately, we are wiser finally.
But we have to get rid of these despicable people. They are relentless in their pursuit of power and self-congratulatory celebrations. A few years ago, the University of Massachusetts was set to give Rosselló senior an honorary degree – until public outcry pushed the UMass Chancellor to rescind the award. The award was the brainchild of a former UMass academic tool Jorge Haddock, who later was appointed by Rosselló junior to lead what was once the prestigious University of Puerto Rico. In the 1990s, under Rosselló senior, the beloved educational system was politicized at the highest levels, from its board of trustees to its deans.
Imagine if UMass’s chancellor were Education Secretary Betsy Vos. All the bright minds and astonishing researchers would suddenly find themselves at the mercy of a truly stupid leader. That would be intolerable.
In Puerto Rico, decades of corruption have worn down the electorate to such a degree that now people accept some forms of corruption, whereas before, even a whiff of it caused quick dismissals.
Rosselló junior himself has not put in an honest day’s work until he was elected governor in 2016, with the lowest amount of votes ever, 650,000. Not even losing gubernatorial candidates from the two major parties had ever received so few votes from an island where almost 2 million vote.
As the son of a lucky thief who has yet to be caught, junior had name recognition and connections to the party machine. Other than that, he was appointed to positions at two universities — Ana G. Méndez where his father deposited his papers from his two terms as governor, and the University of Puerto Rico and did not show up for work but was paid. After public outcry, his contract was finally canceled.
As a candidate, he was fortunate to have the gravitas of a respected former House speaker as a running mate, Jenniffer González, now in the US Congress as a non-voting delegate. She received more than 50,000 more votes than junior. She has also called his resignation this week.
As have religious leaders, party colleagues and a growing number of voters.
Maybe this time, the Rosselló mafia will finally be ousted for what they are, and end up in prison for corruption in which millions of dollars were stolen, and thousands of lives lost.
Hurricane Rossello Hit Puerto Rico Before Hurricane Maria
Hurricane Corruption joined forces with Hurricane María in Puerto Rico on Sept. 20. All the advance preparation that a category hurricane 5 requires was lacking in direct proportion to the extreme danger it ultimately unleashed.
It was as if an earthquake had struck the island by surprise, ripping walls from houses, tearing mountains at the seams, downing electricity in all 50+ hospitals hospitals, killing dozens of people by all types of horrific deaths — dragged into currents, drowned in one’s own home.
The government’s inept response was on the same level as the natural disaster.
But María wasn’t the only force to destroy Puerto Rico.
A man-made storm of corruption began in the 1990s, when US Attorney for Puerto Rico Guillermo Gil summarized the jaw-dropping theft of untold millions of public dollars by the Gov. Rosselló Administration this way: “Corruption has a name and it’s called the New Progressive Party.”
The debt was compounded because of illegal multi-billion loans and spending on poorly conceived and developed projects that resulted in the complete abandonment of the island’s infrastructure in order to pay back the loans with interest rates of 75 cents on the dollar. Gil sent many from the administration to prison, but the island’s health, education, public works and electrical grid was already in shambles.
There’s always irony in Greek tragedies. In Puerto Rico’s case, Rosselló was himself a doctor, a beloved pediatric surgeon whose charisma translated into attaining the governorship. But his hubris and magical thinking led him to create a new health care system – to be paid by the then President Clinton’s plan for universal health care. Instead, Clinton’s dream of providing health care to all was shut down by Republicans, but Puerto Rico was already spending the money it was counting on to receive from the U.S.
And so began what years later became a $74 billion debt and a U.S.-appointed seven-member control board.
At the beginning of the man-made disaster, Rosselló had to keep issuing bonds to borrow billions to cover the losses of his bankrupt health care system. The loans also financed the big public works projects, which delight the eyes of voters.
An urban train in metro San Juan cost almost a billion dollars, most of it from the U.S. taxpayers. Even before the hurricane it was losing $50 million a year and only one/third of its seat were occupied by commuters.
Compounding the fiscal troubles was the greed of his friends and colleagues: dozens were convicted of stealing millions of dollars from the education, health, public works, housing and just about every government department. The education secretary alone was convicted for stealing $13 million, although there was suspicion he stole more.
Since those happy days when illegal money flowed from taxpayers into the pockets of Rosselló’s friends, successive governors have been forced to continue borrowing to cover immoral but legal interest rates of 75 cents on the dollar.
Puerto Rico was borrowing more and more billions to pay loans, not to maintain the grid, not to improve the health care system or return public education to its glory days with the added bonus of technological advances.
It was borrowing to keep afloat a sinking ship.
As Hurricane Irma barreled from the eastern Atlantic toward Puerto Rico, the island braced for total destruction. Instead, it survived almost intact.
There was collective relief in Puerto Rico, but a few days later, the frustration began to grow. Despite Irma barely blowing a kiss to the islands of Puerto Rico, its electrical grid failed.
Almost half the people of Puerto Rico still didn’t have power when Hurricane María rolled into Puerto Rico just two weeks later.
Now the son, Ricardo Rosselló, holds the reins of power, but lacks authority to lead. He won with the least number of votes in the island’s history. A few months later, even less people showed to the polls for yet another and ultimately disqualifying referendum asking what do Puerto Ricans want: statehood, current free associated state status or independence. Only 22 percent showed up at the polls.
Junior Rosselló appears to have the claws of his father but not the agility. Not everything the elder Rosselló did was terrible. But most of it was. Junior doesn’t appear to be a thief nor have thieves in his cabinet as his father did. But he craves attention even when there is nothing to say. He holds press conferences in an air conditioned hall in San Juan’s Convention Center, named for his father. In Puerto Rico, it’s known as the Corruption Center, for his father.
Throughout the island, people can’t hear him, but that doesn’t matter. Because whatever he is promising, it is not arriving; he’s a tree that fell in a forest and no one knows if it made a sound because no one was there.
People are hungry, sick, tired, scared, frustrated, angry, thirsty. The heat reaches 108 degrees on some days.
Hurricane María was always going to destroy much of Puerto Rico.
But bring it to its knees?
That’s the Rosselló family’s inaction.
Another Hurricane But Who Cares About Caribbean?
This morning I called family and friends in Puerto Rico, all of whom are to varying degrees frantic and worried about Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 hurricane with winds at 180 mph and gusts at never-behind seen 215 mph. The monster storm is just a day away from destroying people’s lives and properties in the Caribbean.
But as large as Irma looms on the radar, it’s as if the storm doesn’t exist in local media outlets. Millions of lives are in danger, and in Western Massachusetts alone there are hundreds of thousands of residents from the Caribbean islands, who visit home or who have people in the trajectory of Irma, but neither the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Masslive or the Boston Globe are paying attention.
What the men and women — mostly monolingual white men — who head news rooms consider important is the geography of borders only they can see. For them, Hurricane Irma is not a story unless it gets closer to Florida. This is an example of provisional “journalism” aka small minded editors.
The result is that many people who are tied to weather apps and in constant communication with their people in the Caribbean with updates, once more receive affirmation on how powerfully irrelevant local media is.
And how irrelevant we are to local media.
National media is covering Irma, if only as a threat to Florida, a second destructive storm to enter the United States days after Hurricane Harvey left its heartbreaking mark in Houston.
This is also another example of what institutional racism looks like. The powers that be have decided that there is no story to tell, even as millions in the Caribbean, including the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, a territory of the United States, handle the impending horror that is getting closer to them. They are thinking that they will lose everything, all their pictures, their books, their furniture, their homes, maybe even their lives.
Families in Western Massachusetts offer support, go over the to-do lists with them again and again, just to be sure that they are as safe as possible. It’s all happening outside the hearing range of local media. Even as it not surprising how tone deaf local media is, especially on issues and events in which people from multicultural communities are affected, it is no less frustrating, in 2017, to still be invisible.
A calamity named Irma is getting closer, and the local media is a million miles away.
UMass Boston Creates Fake News
By NATALIA MUÑOZ
Monday, May 15, 2017
President Trump isn’t the only one who makes up stories. So did the University of Massachusetts Boston when Chancellor J. Keith Motley sent a memo extolling the virtues of speakers and honorees for this month’s commencement ceremonies.
Alongside Irina Bokova, director general of UNESCO, and other accomplished people, was Puerto Rico’s former Gov. Pedro Rosselló, whose administration in the 1990s was a bed of corruption. He was to receive the Chancellor’s Medal.
Dozens of Rosselló’s cabinet secretaries, program administrators and assistants were imprisoned for stealing millions of dollars from the AIDS Institute and the departments of education, public works, housing, transportation – everywhere. Thankfully, the U.S. Justice Department convicted many of his cohorts.
Rosselló triggered the $73 billion debt crisis that today convulses Puerto Rico. He took out jaw-dropping loans to pay for projects of his own that bankrupted Puerto Rico.
Having lost pensions, jobs and homes, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans have been leaving the island in search of jobs in the United States. In 2009, then-Gov. Luis Fortuño, laid o 20,000 public employees to try to balance the books.
Successive governors continued taking out loans to keep basic services running. But in
May 2016, then-Gov. Alejandro García Padilla mournfully announced that Puerto Rico’s debt was impossible to repay. The island has not been generating enough even to pay interest rates.
Last year, then-President Obama pushed for, and Congress approved, a scal control board to collect the debt.
Since Rosselló’s tragicomical last day in o ce in 2000 when he was videotaped giggling as he literally ran away from a television reporter, frantic governors agreed to ridiculous loan terms set by vulture investors. Goldman Sachs, for example, owns a part of a highway. If you want to use the less-tra cked extra lane, your vehicle doesn’t need at least two people in it, but you must pay an extra $1.75 or more.
The Puerto Rico Constitution (Article 6, Section 2) expressly prohibits paying out more than 15 percent of the money the government generates through taxes every year. But Rosselló disregarded the Constitution he promised to defend.
He can’t even respect elections. In 2013, after losing a third attempt to win the governor’s o ce, Rosselló strong-armed an elected senator out and took his post. His actions are as corrupt and crazy as they sound. Think Trump.
There aren’t enough doctors – waiting times take four to seven hours. Families are torn apart by migration. Schools lack basic resources (Rosselló’s education secretary was convicted of stealing $14 million).
Abandoned beloved homes disappear behind thickening green vines. Downtown plazas are deserted. Massacres are frequent. Rage is rampant. So is numbness, denial. To see one’s country crumble is too much to bear on some days.
Chancellor Motley wrote that Rosselló “…was heralded while governor for e ectively combating violent crime, restoring English as an o cial language, and reforming health care, education, the judiciary, and the tax system. He is also credited with paving the way for public employees to unionize, developing Puerto Rico’s New Economic Development Model.”
Yes, if that model is how to plunder millions and still be selected for a UMass award – for the second time. He already received one in 1995.
Motley added that Rosselló has been “widely recognized for his many contributions to human rights and well-being.” Who’s feeding UMass this info? Trump?
More than 1,400 Puerto Ricans in the UMass system corrected the chancellor, point by point, in a public letter that sets the record straight about this violator of human rights and the well-being of Puerto Ricans.
The writers remember how Rosselló unleashed violent SWAT teams on peaceful protesters, how he targeted the poor in his crime plan, which “dehumanized and criminalized racially and economically marginalized communities.”
Chancellor, we remember what you did not bother to learn.
Several phone calls and an email later, your public relations o ce nally admitted that UMass rescinded the award. But, chancellor, you have not answered the questions: Who nominated Rosselló? Why was he set to receive a second award?
And you have not apologized to the Puerto Rican community.
Natalia Muñoz, of Northampton, is the host of “Vaya con Muñoz” on radio station WHMP (1400 AM).
This column appeared originally in The Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton MA)
Liberals: Don’t Blow It Again
President Donald Trump and his key advisers are incompetent, mean-spirited, elite tontos who fooled 63 million voters into believing that he cares about the working Joe.
Meanwhile, 66 million other voters have been organizing marches across the land in reaction to Trump on every human rights issue from women’s rights (“…are human rights once and for all.” Don’t forget Hillary Clinton said that) to immigration.
To the 1.2 million who voted for Jill Stein of the Green Party — who is admirable for her “Green New Deal” platform, but who hasn’t held elective once beyond the Lexington Town Meeting; to the 4.5 million who voted for clueless Gary “What is Aleppo?” Johnson of the Libertarian Party; and to the 90 million who did not vote: Here’s your chance to do better now.
While Trump and most of the Republican Party are implementing an agenda based on beliefs that people who are poor (read working class and middle class) don’t deserve doctors or medicine, and that all Muslims are terrorists, immigrants are job-robbers and that the Earth is not in imminent danger of becoming too hot for all living things, millions are protesting online and in the streets.
For those who thought hating Hillary was a fun way to spend the day, now find time to call your elected officials and support them when they take positions you agree with, and call them out when you disagree.
The way forward is not to agree on everything, as Sanders and some of his loud-
mouthed followers insist. It is not to give up on the Green Party’s ideals, or our most progressive dreams.
Instead, we can take our cacophony of ideas and push the Democratic Party to live by its platform and make this country greater.
And do put on your seatbelts because democracy is a bumpy ride.
When Massachusetts Senate President Stan Rosenberg, D-Amherst, gave himself a $45,000 raise earlier this year, he broke the Democratic platform contract which, among other things, deplores greed. But on other issues, including helping people who are impoverished by ill health or institutional barriers, he is outstanding.
When U.S. Reps. Jim McGovern, D-Worcester, who was a Hillary supporter, and Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, a Bernie supporter, joined forces recently at an event to motivate voters, they stayed true to the platform.
When Trump nominated a right-winger, Neil Gorsuch, to the U.S. Supreme Court, Democratic senators — pushed by their base — tried to block the appointment. They noted that there already was a well-qualified candidate, Merrick Garland, nominated by then- President Obama in March 2016, who Republicans refused to even consider. Encouraged by the base, Democratic senators became activists.
But U.S. Senate President Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, changed the rules. There wasn’t much to complain about, though, because Democrats had done the same thing when they were in the majority.
So with a simple majority vote, Gorsuch, who voted in favor of the company and against the “frozen trucker” in the now-famous case, became an associate justice on the Supreme Court.
Compare that to Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who once said, “I strive never to forget the real-world consequences of my decisions on individuals, businesses and government.”
In the face of the real-time, real-life dangerous consequences to Trump’s presidency, every month protests both nationwide and globally draw hundreds of thousands who reaffirm that most of us believe in the Constitution.
Immigrants come here fleeing war and climate change. They have a simple wish — to live in peace. But this cruel administration casts them aside.
Except for Native Americans, every single one of us has ancestors who came here either voluntarily or were enslaved. The bravest came here, and they are still coming, pinning their hopes on the United States.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, a Greek-American, chose Neil Diamond’s hopeful “America” for his campaign theme song in 1988. Diamond’s heritage is Polish and Russian.
Rihanna’s tribute to immigrants, “American Oxygen,” has been viewed nearly 72 million times on YouTube. The song sung by the Barbados-born superstar highlights both the best and worst of the U.S., and it resonates. “We are the new America,” she sings.
We are, as our ancestors were, among the bravest. From the light bulb to airplanes, from charting human DNA to building bionic limbs, from television to computers to social media, immigrants and their descendants have contributed so much to this country, and the world.
There’s so much we’re fighting for. As Sotomayor has said, the Constitution must have a heart and soul.
Natalia Muñoz is the host of “Vaya con Muñoz” on radio station WHMP (1400 AM)
This column appeared originally in The Daily Hampshire Gazette On April 18, 2017
Maddow’s Awkward Moment
For the most part, the national media can’t quite tell the truth about the liar in chief.
There are exceptions. On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell calls 45 a liar often. He repeats the lies because the job of a journalist is not to be a stenographer; it’s to put information in context.
Joy Reid has been on the truth from Day 1. Andrea Mitchell was also ready from the beginning. She is relentless, digging for truth. She asks the Secretary of Oil Interests a bunch of questions at photo opps even as he pretends to not hear.
MSNBC is on a roll: Mika Brzezinski questions the president’s sanity. Joe Scarborough, formerly the GOP candidate’s morning-senior-advisor-on-television, has run out of ways to show exasperation.
Then came Rachel Maddow, too smart and honorable for click-baiting. But recently she succumbed with a cringe-worthy countdown clock at the bottom of the screen leading up to a big reveal about the president’s tax returns. Finally, Maddow showed the world … two pages from his 2005 taxes.
Two pages? From one year? What does that tell us about the man in the White House besides that he is wealthy and paid taxes in 2005? What were the deductibles exactly? What did he own in 2005 that could give us context to what those numbers represented? Ten skyscrapers? Ten square miles of Manhattan? Ten hotels? Is there an editor in the house? Does anyone care about journalism over there?
The big reveal is that MSNBC, just when it was looking like the only national for profit news channel that was not selling liberalism to Fox’s conservatism plus the growing assortment of lying liars with popular websites and podcasts, but just selling plain, old journalism, we get a big nothing of a story presented as something.
In other words, fake news.
The for profit national media continues selling the kind of information that led to the Electoral College results of Nov. 8 that empowered bigots to criminalize Muslims and Latinos, deepen the mortal danger that blacks face every day, turn back the clock on gender equity, put the world on notice that the use of nuclear bomb is once again possible, just like it was in the 1950s, when America was great, according to Trump et al.
A lot of us can’t risk the effects of the click-baiting. Truth takes a back seat to ratings cash, and the rest of us pay. And the smug elitism of a certain type of liberal that boos and hisses whenever other liberals say things they don’t like to hear. Flashback to Bernie bros dumping on Hillary through social media.
Bernie Sanders spat allegations of corruption about Hillary Clinton because she gave a few speeches on Wall Street. Did Sanders ever prove his point? Show us exactly how those speeches compromised her as a senator or secretary of state? The gaga eyes the media made at him, so taken by his curmudgeonly ways, meant that questions weren’t asked, nor evidence required. They didn’t push him on why he voted for mass incarceration, nor why his Senate staff was all monolingual white. No, he got a free ride to impugn Hillary, whose staff has been diverse since her days as First Lady of Arkansas, and to glorify himself.
Every time someone says that Hillary focused too much on what was wrong with Trump, only a few know for a fact that most of what she said went un-reported. You just had to look on Youtube and other sites for the parts in her barnstorming stops where she spoke again and again about health care, opportunities, good paying jobs, the whole progressive enchilada we were so excited about.
Instead, stories on her email server and Bernie’s unsubstantiated attacks satiated people with an axe to grind against Hillary in particular, women in general. On social media, fake news rocketed above real news. Its audience of uninformed and raging voters, too many of whom had a hissy fit on Nov. 8 because Bernie wasn’t on the ticket (the privilege of white voters strikes again) found comfort in lies.
And still today, too few in the national media dig for true stories. But that is exactly we need.
Dig, dig, national media, like you’ve just connected with a fastball and can already tell you will make it home. Go big. We’re waiting for you, hands at the ready for the high five.
Natalia Muñoz is host of “Vaya con Muñoz” on WHMP Progressive Talk Radio.
This column appeared in The Daily Hampshire Gazette on March 21, 2017
Sen. Stan Rosenberg’s $45,000 Unearned Pay Raise
State Sen. President Stan Rosenberg blurred the lines between himself and Wall Street’s greed when he sought a jaw-dropping $45,000 pay raise last month, from $97,547 to $142,547.
here others were organizing strategies and events to push back against the newly installed unhinged president of the United States, Rosenberg, a Democrat from Amherst, was cynically leading the way for a pay raise that is unearned, immoral and just plain ugly.
OMG, Bernie was right about the Democratic Party. It needs a revolution.
Rosenberg is the darling of the Western Massachusetts political class and donors, agency heads and school leaders. A recipient of an exaggerated number of certificates for just doing his job, he bets that in 2018, he will win again. Bottom line, he’s got nothing to lose and $45,000 to gain.
Republican Gov. Charlie Baker – who had vetoed the pay raise bill – and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito rejected the hefty increase. Top Democrats Attorney General Maura Healey, who is fighting President Trump’s questionable policies, and Treasurer Deb Goldberg also passed on their raises. There you go, Senator Rosenberg. That’s leadership.
You don’t dig into taxes supplied by hard-working people to lift you into wealth. For wealth, you go elsewhere. Write a best-selling book, invent something, go to Wall Street. Taking $18 million out of circulation so you can live high off the hog is disgraceful. Now your pension will be even higher. That’s all of us paying for your highbrowed lifestyle. Had you given yourself a cost-of-living increase only, you would still be a shining star. But you prefer to be rich.
You show rot. You know how many agencies throughout the state would benefit with even $25,000 from that $18 million pot to cover the raises? Do you know how much teachers would have appreciated being reimbursed for supplies? You didn’t even hold a hearing for the public to comment on specifics of the bill. A cowardly move.
Senator, with self-indulgence as your cheerleader rather than public service, you organized colleagues to override the governor’s veto and became one of Trump’s trumpeters.
In very little time, a lot has changed, and you, senator, are a shadow of yourself.
It seems that it was years ago that the Democratic Party was a fountain of transformational aspirations – “Let us close the springs of racial poison” (LBJ); “We choose to go to the moon” (JFK); “Only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (FDR); “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (Obama).
What’s your declaration, senator?
On Inauguration Day, many of us went to the Arlington National Cemetery to stand with the fallen who made this an already great country.
At the stroke of noon, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of fallen soldiers, a few known, like Medgar Evers and U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, we held a minute of silence for all. Knowing that the incoming president had built a movement on hate, mourning these men and women pressed our hearts more deeply. Had we not sworn to never forget their sacrifices?
From the cemetery, we watched the helicopter take the Obamas away. Then we saw Air Force One so quickly disappear behind the low-hanging clouds of that rainy day.
Obama certainly made his share of disastrous decisions. The difference is he didn’t make them from a place of bigotry, unlike the current president.
Deep into his Muslim-baiting and hating pledge during the campaign, broken-hearted parents appeared on national television to talk about their son, Capt. Khan, who with the wisdom of an elder, shielded his comrades from an exploding bomb with his body, saving their lives, ending his own at 28.
Khan’s father asked the man who never should have won the GOP primaries, “Have you even read the Constitution?”
The next day, Jan. 21, the Women’s March on Washington ignited a movement. We descended on D.C. like a murmuration of starlings, swiftly moving in sync. Despair, rage, humor and simple facts adorned thousands of homemade signs: “Yuge Mistake,” “Nasty Women,” “I’ve Seen Better Cabinets at Ikea,” “Women’s Rights are Human Rights Once and For All,” – that’s a Hillary quote – and “Super Callous Fascist Racist Extra Braggadocious.”
The day after the march, we went to the Holocaust Museum because being a witness means doing something, not pretending like danger is nonexistent.
We went because as the poet Gwendolyn Brooks said, “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”
Senator, where is your magnitude and bond?
Natalia Muñoz, of Northampton, is the host of “Vaya con Muñoz” on talk radio station WHMP (1400 AM).
This opinion column appeared originally in The Daily Hampshire Gazette on Feb. 13, 2017