North America

Watching the Shadows

Podcast: Tulsi Gabbard, paradoxical hippie fascist

Is Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard a pseudo-peacenik fraud who supports US military adventures as long as they target Islamist terrorists but not the bloody dictators she is enamored of? Actually, yes. In Episode 38 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg traces Gabbard’s trajectory, from a youthful devotee of a Hare Krishna schism to her current embrace of the Hindu fascism of Narendra Modi and political love affair with the genocidal Bashar Assad. Based on Weinberg’s profile of Gabbard on Freedom Leaf website. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon. (Image via Freedom Leaf)

North America

Kentucky: unpaid miners block rail line

For over a week now, some 100 laid-off miners and their families have occupied a railroad track in Kentucky’s Harlan County, blocking a train loaded with coal that the workers dug out of the earth but never got paid for. The miners want their jobs back, if possible—but first of all, they want their wages for the work they already did. Blackjewel LLC abruptly shut down all its mines and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Partway through a shift, workers were told the bad news and sent home. The miners never got their last paycheck. And their second-to-last paycheck, already deposited, disappeared from their bank accounts. The miners also never received any paper notice of their layoff, which proved a bureaucratic obstacle when they filed for unemployment. Another major Kentucky coal producer, Cambrian Coal LLC, also plans to sell off its assets in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy case that could impact hundreds of coal miners in Eastern Kentucky. (Photo: Megan Roark-Halcomb via Labor Notes)

North America

Judge rules Trump asylum ban illegal

A judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against the Trump administration’s ban on asylum requests for people who illegally cross the border. The administration issued the rule in late 2018, prohibiting migrants from applying for asylum except at legal ports of entry. The plaintiffs sought summary judgment to have this rule declared illegal under the Immigration & Nationality Act. Judge Randolph Moss agreed, writing: “[A]liens have a statutory right to seek asylum regardless of whether they enter the United States at a designated port of entry, and defendants may not extinguish that statutory right by regulation or proclamation.” (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

North America

SCOTUS overturns injunction on border wall funds

The Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision that blocked President Trump from using $2.5 billion from military accounts to build a portion of his pledged border wall. The order lifts an injunction from a federal judge in a case brought by the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition challenging Trump’s February declaration of a national emergency to access more than $8 billion to build the wall. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month declined to lift that injunction. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority found that the administration had “made a sufficient showing at this stage” that the challengers do not have standing to block the diversion of the funds. (Photo via Jurist)

Iran

Federal judge allows travel ban lawsuit to proceed

Judge Victoria Roberts of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan ruled that a lawsuit by the Arab American Civil Rights League against the Trump administration’s third iteration of his “travel ban,” which restricts travel from seven countries, can move forward. The administration sought to have the lawsuit dismissed based on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Hawaii, in which the court held that the Immigration and Nationality Act grants the president broad discretion to decide “whether and when to suspend entry, whose entry to suspend, for how long, and on what conditions.” Roberts held in the present case that “although the Proclamation is facially neutral, its impact falls predominantly on Muslims.” (Photo: Wikimedia Commons via Jurist)

North America

Judge blocks indefinite detention of asylum seekers

A US district court judge ruled that the Department of Homeland Security cannot hold migrants seeking asylum indefinitely as was ordered by Attorney General William Barr. Judge Marsha Pechman in Seattle held that the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act cited by Barr violates the US Constitution. Pechman stated that the plaintiffs in the case have established that asylum seekers have “a constitutionally protected interest in their liberty” and a “right to due process, which includes a hearing.” (Photo of Homeland Security’s Otay Mesa Detention Center from BBC World Service via Flickr)

North America

Judge blocks emergency funding for Trump’s wall

A federal judge blocked construction of Donald Trump’s border wall, ruling that Trump cannot use a “national emergency” to take money from government agencies for the barrier. Judge Haywood Gilliam of the US District Court for Northern California ruled that the diversion of the money likely oversteps a president’s statutory authority. The injunction specifically limits wall construction projects in El Paso, Tex., and Yuma, Ariz. (Photo via Jurist)

North America

Podcast: the Mueller Report and impending fascism

In Episode 30 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg decries the unseemly gloating from the (totally predictable) Glen Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and their ilk over the Mueller Report’s supposed (not actual) exoneration of Donald Trump. The report actually backs up the 2016 findings of the intelligence community that there was Russian meddling in the eleciton. There have been over 100 indictments issued by Mueller’s team, including for lying to Congress about meetings between Trump representatives and Russians. Meanwhile, the results of several other invesitgations and legal cases against Trump and his team remain pending. Yet paradoxical pro-Trump “leftists” ignore all this and echo the intepretation of the Mueller Report put forth by Attorney General William Barr—who was appointed by Trump precisely to protect his ass. Repudiating this Red-Brown pseudo-left jive that abets Trump’s lies, Weinberg joins with the ACLU and Robert Reich in calling for the complete and unredacted release of the Mueller Report. And hopefully using its contents to build a mass militant movement such as was seen in South Korea in 2016, to demand the impeachment of the president—or even nullification of the tainted election that brought him to power. Listen on SoundCloud , and support our podcast via Patreon.

North America

Podcast: Ilhan Omar, anti-Semitism and propaganda

In Episode 29 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg advances a progressive and anti-Zionist critique of Rep Ilhan Omar's controversial comments, which have posed the problem of US support for Israel in terms of "allegiance to a foreign country"—the nationalist and xenophobic language of our enemies. As a Somali-American woman in a hijab, Omar is ultimately legitimizing reactionary forces that threaten her with the use of such nationalist rhetoric. As the massacres of Christchurch and Pittsburgh all too clearly demonstrate, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are fundamentally unified concerns—and the way Jews and Muslims have been pitted against each other by the propaganda system is part of the pathology. Contrary to the canard of "dual loyalty," Weinberg declares himself a "zero-loyalist," repudiating both Zionism and America-first nationalism, calling for an anti-Zionism based on solidarity with the Palestinians, not "allegiance" to the imperial state. Listen on SoundCloud , and support our podcast via Patreon. (Photo: Wikipedia)

North America

Legal challenge to Trump emergency declaration

A 16-state coalition filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, requesting the court to issue a judicial determination that Trump’s national emergency declaration over the southern border wall is unconstitutional. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced the lawsuit, stating: “Unlawful southern border entries are at their lowest point in 20 years, immigrants are less likely than native-born citizens to commit crimes, and illegal drugs are more likely to come through official ports of entry. There is no credible evidence to suggest that a border wall would decrease crime rates.” (Photo via Jurist)

North America

Trump declares state of emergency for border wall

President Donald Trump announced a state of emergency to obtain $8 billion for a border wall between the US and Mexico. A significant amount of the funds are expected to be from the Department of Defense budget, but Trump was not clear regarding funding or spending plans. Legal challenges are expected to be filed soon regarding the reach of national emergency powers under a 1975 law that has been invoked 58 times. (Photo via Jurist)

North America

ICE condemned for force-feeding detainees

Human Rights Watch condemned US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for force-feeding detained migrants. Detained men at the agency's El Paso Processing Center have been participating in a hunger strike since early January. ICE officials said that 11 men are striking, but AP reports the number may be closer to 30. In mid-January a federal judge authorized ICE to force-feed six of the protesters. The detained men have been protesting "rampant verbal abuse and threats of deportation from guards" and long detentions while awaiting a hearing. Most of the hunger strikers are from India or Cuba. (Photo: Hetsumani/Pixabay)