Life Imitates Art – Story of the Week

This sordid tale of the US Justice Department suddenly dropping an indictment against Mexico’s former Defense Minister is shocking. Perhaps not.  This is what the War on Drugs which began in 1969 in the Nixon Administration has been all about.  Politics.

One only needs to watch the terrific Steven Soderbergh movie Traffic released in 2000 to get a spot on cinematic look at the failed War on Drugs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_(2000_film)

Excerpted from New York Times 11.18.2020

Emotions reached a peak in recent days, as Mexico City issued an unheard-of warning to its counterparts in Washington: If the United States did not rethink its pursuit of Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, Mexico would consider expelling American federal drug agents from the country, jeopardizing a decades-long partnership that has helped bring several top drug lords to justice, according to three people in the United States who are familiar with the case.

Mexican officials made the threat after weeks of anger at the surprise arrest of a former defense minister. Their gambit appears to have worked — the charges were dropped.

That threat appeared to work. On Wednesday, at the request of Attorney General William P. Barr himself, a federal judge in Brooklyn said she would formally dismiss the charges against Mr. Cienfuegos, a former army general.

From the moment U.S. federal agents arrested a former Mexican defense minister last month on drug trafficking charges, the highest levels of the Mexican government were outraged at being kept in the dark about the case, seeing it as an egregious breach of trust between allies.

The pandemic is spiraling out of control, the death toll is rising, the economy – at least for the 99 percent portion – is collapsing.

Does any of this matter to soon to be tossed out Trump, our version of King George III (read your history books)?

Not for a second. This lame duck loser Trump just continues to spin the The Big Lie that he won the election.

And his enabler, clueless Treasury boss and big time lackey Steve Mnuchin is making sure the incoming Administration will inherit a complete pandemic and health disaster.

Vanity Fair 11.20.2020

Ask Steve Mnuchin about the whole thing, though, and he swears nothing nefarious is going on. “We’re not trying to hinder anything,” he said on CNBC Friday.

Something you’re probably aware of by now, unless you live in a cave or exclusively get your news from @realDonaldTrump and his big boy sons, is that there’s a very contagious disease ravaging the globe that is not just killing more than a million people but jobs and businesses as well.

Jobs, for the lazy rich who are unaware, are how people buy stuff like food and pay for things like shelter. So losing them is bad; less bad if you live in a society where the government actually cares about people and doesn’t just say, “tough shit, them’s the breaks,” when you lose one, and more bad if you live in, for example, the United States of America.

The current Treasury secretary presumably knows this and, yet, he’s apparently hoping to make a bad situation even worse!

On Thursday, Steven Mnuchin said that he doesn’t plan to extend a number of key emergency lending programs beyond the end of the year, asking the Federal Reserve to return the money supporting them to the Treasury. While the programs expire at the end of 2020, investors had expected them to continue without interruption, given that COVID-19 is spiraling out of control and continues to pose major economic risks.

As The New York Times reports, “the pandemic-era programs…have provided an important backstop that has calmed critical markets since the coronavirus took hold in March,” and “removing them could leave significant corners of the financial world vulnerable to the type of volatility that cascaded through the system as virus fears mounted in the spring.”

And while any Joe Biden–appointed Treasury secretary would likely restart them immediately, Mnuchin’s move would significantly delay doing so. In a rare critical statement, the Federal Reserve said it “would prefer that the full suite of emergency facilities established during the coronavirus pandemic continue to serve their important role as a backstop for our still-strained and vulnerable economy,” which is Fed-speak for “Bitch, the fuck is wrong with you? The economy is hanging on by a thread here!”

Per the Times:

With coronavirus cases on the rise, the economy may sour again, making the programs more necessary. As recently as Tuesday, [Fed chair Jerome] Powell warned of the potential for economic scarring and said that the economic recovery had “a long way to go.”

Mnuchin, of course, is one of Donald Trump’s most devoted lackeys and Trump would obviously love nothing more than to choke the economy to death right before his successor takes over. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce denounced the move, with Neil Bradley, the group’s executive vice president, saying, “a surprise termination of the Federal Reserve’s emergency liquidity program, including the Main Street Lending Program, prematurely and unnecessarily ties the hands of the incoming administration and closes the door on important liquidity options for businesses at a time when they need them most.”

As the Associated Press notes, “many progressive economists have argued that,” with the election of Biden, “a Democratic-led Treasury could support the Fed taking on more risk and making more loans to small and mid-sized businesses and cash-strapped cities under these programs. That would provide at least one avenue for the Biden administration to provide stimulus without going through Congress.” Stimulus that, for some reason, Mitch McConnell is in no hurry to get out to struggling Americans.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/steven-mnuchin-joe-biden-economy

11.19.2020

The following Letter to the Editor was published in the San Francisco Chronicle

Lee Heidhues – San Francisco

Regarding “Traffic puts Great Highway closure at risk” (Nov. 17): I applaud Heather Knight for reporting on the fight by cyclists and pedestrians to gain increased mobility.

The past seven months has seen the Great Highway, astride the Pacific Ocean, turn into a thoroughfare for cyclists, runners and pedestrians of all ages.

It is one of the best things that has happened to San Francisco in this cataclysmic 2020. I am shocked and disappointed that Supervisor Gordon Mar could think of reopening the Great Highway to cars, again. Particularly since he was the one who advocated for this move which sent a clear message to car owners.

They don’t rule the world. Let car owners engage in some new behaviors and stop complaining about having to go a bit out of their way.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/letterstoeditor/article/Letters-to-the-Editor-Keep-Great-Highway-free-of-15737632.php
Late unlamented Embarcadero Freeway.

When the Embarcadero Freeway in the eastern shore of San Francisco was irrevocably damaged in the October 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake it was torn down.

The Embarcadero – Then and now.

https://www.cnu.org/what-we-do/build-great-places/embarcadero-freeway

The blight on the beauty of San Francisco was built during the freeway craze of the 1950’s. It ran like a cancer along the waterfront.

When the demolition was proposed the uproar from certain constitutents, car owners and neighborhood groups, was fierce.

The fearsome howls that loss of the freeway would ruin businesses, impact neighborhoods and make the streets more congested was all bloviating rhetoric.

The Embarcadero Freeway was demolished. The San Francisco waterfront is now a beautfiul place. The neighborhoods are doing just fine. Car owners have adapted.

Similiar gloom and doom talk is now being heard from those who are inconvenienced by car owners and nearby neighbors who feel inconveniced. The car free Great Highway has been a marvelous improvement to San Francisco life and needs to be made permanent.

Contact management at the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Supervisor Gordon Mar whose district abuts the Great Highway. Let them know you want an environmentally clean Great Highway for cyclists, runners and pedestrians of all ages.

jeffrey.tumlin@sfmta.org Director of Transportation San Francisco MTA

kristen.holland@sfmta.org Acting Media Relations & Customer Communications Manager San Francisco MTA

gordon.mar@sfgov.org Gordon Mar – District 4 Supervisor

Americans sense of history is virtually non-existent. Most probably can’t even tell you where Germany is located. That makes sense in a nation which foisted Trump onto the world scene.

Citizens in the USA country don’t pay much attention to anything but what is going on any further than the drivel coming out of their television.

In Germany, which has been hit hard by the Pandemic the government is proposing a law imposing restrictions which many are comparing to the draconian laws Hitler’s rubber stamp Reichstag imposed in 1933.

The soon to be tossed out wannabe despot Trump probably longed for the opportunity to impose his fascist mentality on the American public. Fortunately he is being rebuffed.

The scary reality is that 72,000,000 Americans, many of whom live on a 24/7 diet of Fox junk News, went to the polls this year and supported this thug. It’s a sad commentary on the USA and leaves many people who treasure democracy feeling adrift and forlorn.

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 11.18.2020

Anti-lockdown protesters have compared the Infection Protection Law, proposed by Angela Merkel’s government, to the law that paved the way for Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship in 1933. But the two laws are hardly comparable.

“It is a very unusual day”, said Social Democrat MP Helge Lindh as he approached the German Bundestag by foot Wednesday morning. He was referring to crowds of protesters gathering outside the parliament building.

Their goal was to stop the new infection protection law, intended to make it easier for the government to swiftly introduce lockdown measures in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

Several hundred demonstrators defied bans to protest outside the parliament buildings and in the surrounding government district. Some protesters even tried to block access to the building, before the protests were dissolved by police.

“It must be possible to demonstrate and to criticize,” Lindh told DW by telephone. “But tolerance can not go so far to accept that the infection protection law is being equated with the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, with the Enabling Act of 1933.”

On March 23, 1933, Adolf Hitler placed before the parliament a “Law to Remedy the Distress of People and the Reich” — the law that came to be known as the “Enabling Act.”

Some protesters, as well as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), have repeatedly drawn this analogy. They claim the new law will give the government dictatorial powers, drawing a parallel to events in 1933. “This is blindness towards the lessons of history,” said Lindh. “And it is a complete trivialization of National Socialism.”

It amended the constitution, giving sweeping legislative powers to the government: “Laws of the Reich may also be enacted by the government of the Reich…Laws enacted by the government of the Reich may deviate from the constitution…”

The law passed through both chambers of parliament and gave Hitler and his National Socialist party absolute power over the German state.

“Parliamentarism was dead after that,” Andreas Wirsching, director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, told DW. “It was the self-abolition of parliament. And most members of parliament realized this when they voted for the law.”

Almost 100 communist members of parliament had already been imprisoned, were in hiding, or had fled the country when the Reichstag convened to pass the “Enabling Act.” Nazi paramilitary storm troopers were positioned at the parliament’s entrance, putting pressure on the remaining members of parliament.

To compare today’s Infection Protection Law to the legislation pushed through back then is “purely demagogical,” Wirsching said. “The ‘Enabling Act’ had one goal: dictatorship. That’s why the analogy is nonsense.”

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-can-germanys-infection-protectionlaw-be-compared-to-the-nazis-enabling-act/a-55649748

Fortunately there remain a few level headed Republicans who have refused to drink the Trump kool-aid.

In Wayne County, Michigan President-elect Biden received approximately 72 percent of the votes. 412,000 to Trump’s 143,000. Republicans are upset. Trump got clobbered in a county with a predominantly black population. In the 2010 census the county’s black population was over 40 percent.

The effort to discredit the vote is nothing more than thinly veiled racism.

After two Republicans refused to certify the presidential vote in Wayne County a wellspring of outrage and protest erupted.  

The two Republicans had the good sense to realize they were flouting the will of the voters and, once again, bowing to the soon to be exiled, disgraced and former President.

These officials know there’s more to life than Trump.

Excerpted from Washington Post 11.17.2020

People have predicted that freed from any constraints anything is possible with Donald Trump. His advisors may have prevailed upon this despot to call off the dogs of war.

For Now.

There are still 65 days left until Trump disappears into ashbin of history.

Let’s hope he doesn’t take us with him.

Excerpted from New York Times 11.16.2020

The president was dissuaded from moving ahead with a strike by advisers who warned that it could escalate into a broader conflict in his last weeks in office.

WASHINGTON — President Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former U.S. officials said on Monday.

A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike. The advisers — including Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary; and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — warned that a strike against Iran’s facilities could easily escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

Any strike — whether by missile or cyber — would almost certainly be focused on Natanz, where the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Wednesday that Iran’s uranium stockpile was now 12 times larger than permitted under the nuclear accord that Mr. Trump abandoned in 2018. The agency also noted that Iran had not allowed it access to another suspected site where there was evidence of past nuclear activity.

Mr. Trump asked his top national security aides what options were available and how to respond, officials said.

After Mr. Pompeo and General Milley described the potential risks of military escalation, officials left the meeting believing a missile attack inside Iran was off the table, according to administration officials with knowledge of the meeting.

Mr. Trump might still be looking at ways to strike Iranian assets and allies, including militias in Iraq, officials said. A smaller group of national security aides had met late Wednesday to discuss Iran, the day before the meeting with the president.

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo should take the correct and humane step by releasing Chesa Boudin’s father from prison after nearly 40 years.

David Gilbert murdered no one. He was an accomplice to a murder. Now 76, it serves no useful purpose to continue his incarceration.

Andrew Cuomo will hear the outcry from law enforcement and the victims family.  The incumbent’s goal is re-election in 2022 which may preclude him taking a humanitarian action.

I hope I am wrong.

San Francisco Chronicle 11.16.2020

A coalition of faith leaders is urging New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to grant clemency to David Gilbert — the father of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin — who is serving a 75-year-to-life sentence for his participation in the fatal robbery of a Brink’s armored truck in 1981.

A young Chesa Boudin and his dad David Gilbert

The letter, signed by 45 inter-faith leaders and activists, asked Cuomo to show mercy to the 76-year-old Gilbert, both because of the COVID-19 pandemic and because they said Gilbert has taken responsibility for his role in the robbery. Among those who signed the letter are the Rev. Dr. Bernice King, daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ela Gandhi, the granddaugther of Mohandas Gandhi.

“However long these sentences are, they were not intended to be a death penalty,” the letter to Cuomo said. “We see daily that elders in prison, especially those with compromised immune systems and underlying heath concerns, are in grave danger and many have died. For us, like you and your father before you, opposition to the death penalty is a religious and moral principle.”

Gilbert, along with Chesa Boudin’s mother Kathy Boudin, were members of the radical leftist organization Weather Underground. On Oct. 20, 1981, they joined members of the Black Liberation Army in the botched robbery of a Brink’s armored truck in New York. Other members of the group shot and killed a Brink’s guard, Peter Paige, before killing two Nyack police officers, Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady. Chesa Boudin was 14 months old at the time.

Gilbert and Kathy Boudin did not pull the trigger; both were unarmed getaway drivers. They were charged and convicted under New York’s felony murder law, which says that all participants in a felony that leads to a death can be charged with murder, even if they were not directly responsible for the killings. Kathy Boudin was paroled in 2003. Gilbert continues to serve his sentence at New York’s Shawangunk Correctional Facility.

In an interview with The Chronicle on Monday, Boudin said he was told there have been more than 100 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at Shawangunk.

“I haven’t seen my father since December of last year,” Boudin said. “It’s one of the longest times in my lifetime — if not the longest — I’ve gone without visiting him, and I wish I could go see him.”

Boudin said he has not spoken with Cuomo about the possibility of granting clemency to his father, and that his involvement in his father’s clemency campaign is “extremely limited.”

Cuomo’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday, nor did Brink’s or the mayor of Nyack, the town where the two slain police officers worked. Boudin said he would not presume to guess how the families of those who died would feel about the possibility of his father’s release. Boudin has had “limited contact” with some of the families, while his father has reached out to them through clergy.

“My father is serving a 75-year sentence for a case in which he was unarmed and he did not personally or directly hurt anyone,” Boudin said. “No other country in the world with a civilized legal system would allow somebody who’s unarmed to serve a 75-year sentence.”

David Gilbert, Chesa Boudin and Kathy Boudin

The letter said Gilbert has taken responsibility for his role in the robbery and mentored younger people incarcerated with him.

“We are confident that David Gilbert’s release presents no threat to public safety,” the letter said. “To the contrary, his release would help peacefully resolve an era of tragic conflict.”

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Faith-leaders-urge-clemency-for-David-Gilbert-15732089.php#photo-18752953

It boggles the mind that Supervisor Gordon Mar is driving the City to permit cars onto the Great Highway, again.

The picture display is proof positive that turning this former vehicle highway into a pedestrian, runner and cyclist thoroughfare is the best thing to happen to San Francisco in 2020.

The citizenry of all ages like it as evidenced by what I saw on this Sunday afternoon.

Write Gordon Mar and the front office at the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Authority and tell them to bury Supervisor Mar’s idea in the sand at Ocean Beach.

gordon.mar@sfgov.org

jeffrey.tumlin@sfmta.org    Director of Transportation San Francisco MTA

kristen.holland@sfmta.org    Acting Media Relations & Customer Communications Manager San Francisco MTA

Photos by Lee Heidhues – 11.15.2020

The assorted deplorable Proud Boys, QAnon, neo-fascists, Klan supporters and, oh yes several Republicans descended on Washington to howl at the wind one more time before their bloviating spin meister wannabe tinpot despot Trump sinks into the morass of American history.

The good news is that the Orange Monster will be resucistated shortly after crawling out of Washington to face the myriad criminal investigations he so richly deserves.

Daily Beast 11.14.2020

The takeaway from the day was pretty simple: There is no way to make these people believe that they’ve lost, because they don’t believe in democracy. There is no recount that will satisfy them. There is no version of America they want unless their voices, their lives, and their votes take priority.

Let’s just call what happened in Washington, D.C. today what it was: An anti-democracy protest by an assortment of white supremacists, violent fascists, and conspiracy nuts. They came to town to collectively demand the disenfranchisement of more than 78 million Americans, Joe Biden voters, and to reaffirm that “legal votes” can only be cast by white folks outside of miscegenated cities.

The attendee list was a who’s who of prominent white nationalist groups and QAnon supporters, including the Proud Boys, Groypers, and Pizzagate pushers. The media repeatedly refers to these groups as “far right” or “fringe,” but this was actually a pretty perfect representation of mainstream Republicanism. In fact, GOP politicians Louie Gohmert, Mike Kelly, and Marjorie Taylor Greene were there to co-sign this display of white entitlement, and egg the whole show on.

Had they been marching against anti-Black racism or police abuse, cops would probably have violently rioted against them. Instead, the crowd of overwhelmingly white anti-democratic whiners and agitators made their way from Freedom Plaza to the Supreme Court with nary a tear gas canister lobbed or billy club deployed.

The disparate groups of demonstrators called the protest by various names, including “Stop the Steal,” “March for Trump” and the “Million MAGA March”—the latter of which was cribbed from the 1995 “Million Man March,” because these people can’t go a day without stealing from Black folks. There were far less than a million people there, though the White House way overinflated the numbers on hand for Trump, just as they did four years ago at this administration’s inauguration.

There’s a pretty rich irony in people who can’t properly count crowd numbers taking to the streets to demand that the nation accept their feelings about the vote count in various states. And yet the attention paid to a march of however many dozens of thousands of disgruntled and deluded supporters of a candidate who lost by more than 5 million votes is a perfect metaphor for the Trumpism movement. From the moment its leader descended an escalator to the cheers of actors paid $50 each to cheer him, they’ve managed to be the center of the national political conversation.

The white reactionary politics were on full, proud display. There were plenty of “All Lives Matter” chants, OK hand signs, and posters with slogans including, “Ban Homo Marriage” and “Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong.” Fox News caught sight of a sign that read, “’Coming for Blacks and Indians, Welcome to the New World Order,” which was clearly meant to be read as a threat. These aren’t people who are actually angry about election fraud. They’re people who believe that having Black and brown votes counted is unfair. White people have rights, damn it. That’s their only real message.

The GOP legislators smiling at all this and hyping these people up know that Trump lost. They know that the unfairness of this election can be found in their gerrymandered districts, our undemocratic electoral college, and Trump’s tampering with the USPS. They know that they are potentially stoking violence, delegitimizing the incoming Biden administration, fomenting white racist hate and undermining democracy. They’re just too invested in maintaining their own power to care.

Speaking of not caring, Trump, who teased an appearance at the rally on Friday, passed through the crowd in his motorcade. Here was a moment when the president, who has been gassing up his followers on conspiracies and racism since before he made it to the White House, could stop his car, step outside, and address his fawning adorers—who unlike the press he’s assiduously avoiding, won’t have any follow-up questions about the timeline for conceding his historic loss. Instead, he rolled right through them, in his mobile version of a castle, and headed to where he really wanted to be—the golf course. His supporters carried on their protest for Trump, unable to see themselves as the pawns that they are.

This was an exhibition protest of sorts. There will be more to come. And we should expect that it’s going to be, at the least, an annoying four years.

San Francisco Supervisor Catherine Stefani representing the toney Pacific Heights neighborhood tells DA Chesa Boudin to deal with it.

His office, overwhelmed in its case load, particularly in a year of increasing domestic abuse during the pandemic is getting short shrift. Supervisor Stefani, herself a one time Assistant District Attorney in a neighboring county, told the DA to “budget within his means to deliver public safety for all San Franciscans.” Stefani knows, absent adequate funding, it’s an impossible task.

If DA Boudin does not prosecute crime he will be pilloried for neglecting the citizenry. It takes money and personnel to do the job. Stefani knows this all too well.

Stefani’s comments are just typical San Francisco political posturing.

San Francisco Chronicle 11.13.2020

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin said his office is inadequately funded and unable to fully staff units that investigate homicides and domestic violence cases — a situation, he said, that has reached a “tipping point.”

In an Oct. 29 letter, Boudin told Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors that his office is understaffed and overwhelmed by their caseloads. In the General Felonies Unit, for example, Boudin said his staff is handling between 185 and 229 cases a year, far more than the national standard of 150.

Boudin said the lack of adequate staffing impedes his office’s “ability to provide constitutionally required services.”

The letter came shortly after the city closed a massive, $1.5 billion budget deficit largely caused by the pandemic, and a few weeks before City Hall learned they had another $116 million deficit to contend with. As many departments faced budget cuts this year, the District Attorney’s Office received a slight increase in its budget from $73.59 million to $73.72 million.

Despite the slight increase, Boudin said his office has still been strained amid the pandemic as “COVID-19 has impacted staffing capacity due to illness, family leave and court closures” that have caused delays in processing court cases. He added that the department’s staffing issues existed long before he took over in January.

Additionally, he said, the short-staffed Domestic Violence Unit has seen a 60% increase in demand for services related to children witnessing domestic violence during the pandemic. The issues have also been “aggravated” by the need to investigate alleged misconduct of a forensic laboratory analyst from the Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

Supervisor Catherine Stefani, the most fiscally conservative member of the board, said Boudin should “be budgeting within his means to deliver public safety for all San Franciscans.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, Breed placed a hiring freeze on vacant city positions in an attempt to stave off layoffs and service cuts. Any department that wanted to fill a vacancy had to convince the mayor and board that such a position was essential. The District Attorney’s Office was allowed to hire four of the eight positions they requested, but David Campos, Boudin’s chief of staff, said that was not enough.

“People have to understand that this is serious and we all have obligations and responsibilities,” he said. “But we need the resources.”

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-DA-Chesa-Boudin-says-department-is-15726636.php