7/3/21 Two Female Athletes of Color are Barred from the Olympics; Another is Castigated for Dissing the Flag

Two women -- one who tested positive for marijuana and one who was banned for skipping a drug test shortly after an abortion -- have been barred from competing at the Tokyo Olympic games next month. A third, hammer thrower Gwendolyn Berry, caught plenty of flak for showing her distaste for the national anthem.

Sha'Carri Richardson won a decisive victory in the 100-meter dash, blazing down the track with red hair flying and in false eyelashes, during the Olympic trials in Oregon. She admitted to smoking marijuana and was given a one-month ban. She was disqualified for the 100-meter run, her signature event, for Tokyo. There's hope she'll run in a relay.

The kicker is that private marijuana use is legal in Oregon, but it's banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the US Anti-Doping Agency because it "poses a health risk to athletes, has the potential to enhance performance and violates the spirit of sport."

The hurdler Brianna McNeal was already banned from her sport for five years after failing to show up for a drug test in 2020. She said that she was in bed, recovering from an abortion that she had two days earlier, and did not hear anti-doping officials arrive at her home in California. Discrepancies in documentation to prove she had an abortion led to her ban.

She had appealed her suspension to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which upheld the ban, backdated to August 2020. That means there'll be no Tokyo Olympics -- and no Paris Olympics in 2024.

On Instagram, McNeal posted that she had sat through hearings for her case “and listened to white European men tell me how my experience doesn’t match with their perspective.” To be frank, it doesn't match ours either.

But McNeal will always have Rio, where she won the Olympic gold medal for the 100-meter hurdles.

Finally, there's the case of hammer thrower Gwendolyn Berry. She planned on using her participation at the Olympics to shine a light on injustices in America.

She happened to be on the podium at the Olympic track and field trials when the U.S. Anthem was played. "I feel like it was a setup, and they did it on purpose," Berry said, according to ESPN. "I was pissed, to be honest.''

Berry turned away from the flag and placed a T-shirt over her head. It had the words "Activist Athlete" printed on it.

Now, we all know athletes who are opinionated, and we all know some who are hotheaded. Still, her actions drew the ire of, among others, a red-blooded, one-eyed Republican congressman from Texas, Dan Crenshaw. A former SEAL, Crenshaw lost most of his eyesight when he was wounded in Afghanistan. “She should be removed from the team," Crenshaw said on Fox & Friends.

Berry responded, "Ya'all are obsessed with me," and, "I never said I hated the country." Berry did find support in the White House.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather see all three of these ladies kicking butt in Tokyo than having their butts kicked at home.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/02/sport/shacarri-richardson-positive-test-olympics-spt-intl/index.html?fbclid=IwAR08_L9rmtFZqxcErDMR6tSgjKLpAQSnd6T21XBNL93PsBmEOlGP37hvLDY

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/more-sports/hurdler-brianna-mcneal-loses-appeal-of-five-year-ban-will-miss-tokyo-olympics/ar-AALHAYu?fbclid=IwAR39Er_CqcwgRWbRE5RaI84MwLoaiUVzFMKedQad6MSUwlOcQFwVIFHmxsI

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/560440-us-olympian-turns-away-from-flag-i-feel-like-it-was-a-setup?fbclid=IwAR38G2EI8z9ncE41CULH_SBfAPz599pO1CkjLjz6WI_rIGE7GiEwoCretxM

7/4/21 Reps from 130 Nations Say Yes to a Global Tax Rate!

The long tax holiday that U.S. corporations enjoy when they move overseas just may come to an end. That's the latest news from the G20 summit, which hit a high point on Thursday with all of the 20 -- including China and France -- giving thumbs up to the deal. Their finance members are supposed to approve the agreement on July 9.

"Today is an historic day for economic diplomacy," U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement. "Today’s agreement by 130 countries representing more than 90 percent of global GDP is a clear sign: the race to the bottom is one step closer to coming to an end."

Not every country is on board. Ireland, for instance pockets a good bit of cash by being a tax haven; it has concerns about "national sovereignty" and suchlike. Other holdouts include Estonia, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru, Sri Lanka, and Barbados.

The massive, negotiation-intense agreement itself still has a ways to go. At first, the agreement was aimed at tech companies, but it now includes the top 100 corporations, those with global annual revenues of $20 billion. The tax will apply to the companies' profit margin above 10 percent.

While that opens the window for some accounting sleights of hand, there is also an exception for Amazon, which has some divisions that reach the 10 percent threshold even though the company as a whole does not. There are possible exemptions for companies in finance and manufacturing, as well as other details.

“We have also put in place a carve-out system which was a very important request from emerging countries to take into account the real, physical presence of companies on their territory and to distinguish them from tax havens where there are only empty shells," said French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire.

All of these details are supposed to be negotiated by October. In that way, the old joke about the light at the end of the tunnel cannot be far from participants' minds: The course of true consensus never did run smooth.

Meanwhile, the United States has proposed new rules that will make it next to impossible for American corporations to dodge taxes by moving abroad. That will doubtless be top of the news later in the year.

Could this even some playing fields? Will that help workers? Will it possibly make corporations less crooked?

https://www.politico.eu/article/oecd-global-tax-deal-reached-g20/?utm_source=dailybrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DailyBrief2021Jul2&utm_term=DailyNewsBrief&fbclid=IwAR38G2EI8z9ncE41CULH_SBfAPz599pO1CkjLjz6WI_rIGE7GiEwoCretxM

7/2/21 Conservative SCOTUS Justices Okay Arizona's New Voting Laws, Angering Liberals

In an ideological split of 6 to 3, the Supreme Court today granted the blazing-red, conservative state of Arizona the okay it sought to build inconvenience into the voting process for people of color. Maybe Arizona isn't actually admitting its goal in making the state's voting laws more restrictive today than they were in 2020, but that is the effect.

The ACLU writes, "The case itself challenged two voting barriers under Arizona law – limitations on ballot collection and out-of-precinct voting – and whether those provisions violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by denying or abridging the right to vote in a manner that was racially discriminatory." Arizona's new law disqualifies ballots that are completed in the wrong precinct, and it forbids people from collecting absentee ballots from voters and turning them in on the voters' behalf.

As Justice Alito put it in his opinion for the majority, "Equal openness [i.e. the ability to vote] remains the touchstone," adding that "Mere inconvenience cannot be enough to demonstrate a violation of [Section 2]." Does it matter if the inconvenience falls on people of color? Not to these justices.

“Every voting rule imposes a burden of some sort. Voting takes time and, for almost everyone, some travel, even if only to a nearby mailbox," Alito wrote.

The three liberal judges joined the dissenting opinion by Justice Kagan. “What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten—in order to weaken—a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” Kagan wrote.

And President Biden? In a statement, he wrote that he was "deeply disappointed" in the Supreme Court's decision. "After all we have been through to deliver the promise of this Nation to all Americans, we should be fully enforcing voting rights laws, not weakening them."

We don't know how we can add to that, except to say that it's a travesty of a ruling that fails to serve democracy.

___

What do you think -- or feel -- about this decision?

Is this worse than the 2013 Shelby decision? (Shelby knocked down the requirement that, in states with a history of discriminatory voting practices, proposed changes in voting law had to be vetted before they were made into law.)

Do you think that Biden should add more justices to the Supreme Court? He has said he doesn't intend to, but -- should he?

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-upholds-arizona-restrictions-major-voting-rights/story?id=78182724&fbclid=IwAR23WTiLjDcATXSpBj4EGnkvrYeC6Gwr5daL-iFmpP9Z9TntM7Sgefa68SQ

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/01/supreme-court-arizona-voting-rights-decision-497518?fbclid=IwAR1pzfrE22cglTY1blbyUv_4mfePNjhKSBfZse00EhVRBZ6xlz7TiVqNqOw

7/3/21 An Exxon Lobbyist Spills the Beans -- to Greenpeace!

Did it ever cross your mind that Exxon might be telling a fib or two when it claims it's deeply concerned about climate change? Well, it's true.

Last week, Greenpeace UK's investigative arm published a story about remarks by the lobbyist, Keith McCoy, Exxon's Senior Director of Federal Relations, that were recorded in May during a Zoom call made to one or more reporters who were posing as recruitment consultants.

McCoy said that to scale back President Joe Biden's infrastructure package, ExxonMobil cast doubt on the scientific consensus about the climate crisis and targeted centrist lawmakers like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—"I talk to his office every week," the lobbyist claimed.

McCoy also says, "Did we join some of these 'shadow groups' to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true. But there's nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments; we were looking out for our shareholders."

McCoy was in California during the call. California is an all-party state, meaning that it was illegal to record the call without obtaining McCoy's consent in advance. We're guessing that the Greenpeace investigators were relying on British law to protect them from legal problems.

A savvy company usually ignores such publicity, which then dies of lack of reach. But Exxon's CEO responded to the story in the Houston Chronicle. Houston is Exxon's home town, after all.

“(The) comments are entirely inconsistent with our commitment to the environment, transparency and what our employees and management team have worked toward since I became CEO four years ago,” Darren Woods said on Friday.

He continued, “Exxon Mobil’s position is clear: We want to be part of the solution while responsibly providing affordable energy required to power the economy. We have the experience, capabilities, capacity and commitment to help meet this critical need.”

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Exxon-CEO-reiterates-climate-policy-after-16289867.php?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=HC_AfternoonReport&utm_term=news&utm_content=headlines&sid=5dc30632fc942d1f403e32c0&fbclid=IwAR14ARow3MUEBbMVvDGLG2IsIV0npLMsZn6tXA312vES-q-EXThxm7Geyi0

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/bombshell-lobbyist-video-reveals-exxon-s-secret-campaign-to-water-down-u-s-climate-legislation/ar-AALGX3q?fbclid=IwAR23WTiLjDcATXSpBj4EGnkvrYeC6Gwr5daL-iFmpP9Z9TntM7Sgefa68SQ

7/3/21 Florida Man: Surfside's Former Chief Inspector Has a Shaky Foundation

The guy who was only recently the top building official in Surfside City is now under a microscope. Three years ago, he told the owners of the collapsed condo building that it seemed to be “in very good shape.” It was in November of the 2018, the same year a building consultant raised the alarm about its structural integrity. The following year, the entire Surfside building inspection department was put under administrative review.

Ross Prieto has a master's in construction construction management, and in about 25 years he has worked professionally for at least six different municipalities in South Florida. In his previous position in Miami Beach, he was known for absenteeism, but he had a warm-but-expert manner that made people happy to work with him. Besides fairly frequent changes of employment, however, Prieto also pursued developments on his own, and filed for bankruptcy in 2002 and 2012.

The reddest flag of all was Prieto's role in overseeing the demolition of a dog track in Miami Shores in 1997. The building collapsed during demolition, killing two people. Prieto said he had visited the building four times in his role as assistant director of building and zoning. The Miami Herald quoted him as saying that said his job was to make sure that the work was done according to schedule, not, the Herald paraphrased, whether workers were using proper procedures. An unlicensed subcontractor was held responsible and paid a fine of $90,000.

Prieto's remark is telling. As it happens, building inspectors do not have fiduciary responsibilities, the way architects, lawyers, and accountants do. "Many residents and laymen naturally assume that a municipality or building inspector that issues a certificate of occupancy should be held liable if they make a mistake or negligently issue the certificate," writes one law firm, commenting in its blog on a case in New Jersey. "However, most people are surprised to learn that, as a matter of law, a municipality is not liable in tort for negligently granting a certificate of occupancy."

While that blog is about a case long ago (ten years) and far away (New Jersey), current Florida building inspectors are merely responsible for making sure a building is up to code, a responsibility with most of its weight on the construction end.

I know little to nothing about these matters, so correct me if I'm wrong. It seems to me, though, that Prieto bears no meaningful responsibility for the disaster. He just has to live with his own conscience.

https://news.yahoo.com/inspector-deemed-florida-tower-good-120851901.html For the legal info:

https://www.constructionlitigationlawblog.com/.../can...

https://www.lawserver.com/.../florida_statutes_468-604

7/2/21 Liz Cheney Joins Pelosi's House Select Committee Investigating Jan. 6

When only two (2) (count 'em!) House Republicans are prepared to back an investigation into an insurrection attempt ...

When more than two dozen House Republicans literally flee Washington, DC to avoid voting on the bill to authorize an investigation ...

When Kevin McCarthy, Minority Leader, threatens to strip committee assignments from any Republicans who join the Select Committee ...

it starts to look less like partisan chess than like a fight between Good and Evil.

That's why we're happy to see Liz Cheney show that she has a spine and a mind of her own. When Nancy Pelosi phoned to ask her to join the Select Committee, Cheney said Yes. She's already been punished once by being removed from the House Republican leadership. She's ready to face up to her bullies on principle. Good for her!

The only other Republican rep to vote for the Select Committee was Adam Kinziger (R-Ill.), who, asked about McCarthy's threat, said "Who gives a s**t?"

Kinzinger added, “I do think the threat of removing committees is ironic, because you won't go after the space lasers and white supremacist people but those who tell the truth." He was alluding to statements by the reality-flouting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

Pelosi’s choice to lead the committee is Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). He'd worked on the plan for a bipartisan commission to investigate January 6.

Her other six choices for the committee are Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who led Democrats in Trump's second impeachment; Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who led Democrats in Trump's first impeachment; Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who is a former impeachment manager; Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), who is on her leadership team, and two members with national security chops, Reps. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) and Elaine Luria (D-Va.).

Besides threatening Republicans who cooperate by joining the committee, McCarthy has threatened not to choose members for the five additional seats that he will choose in consultation with Pelosi.

However, a few of the Republicans who want to whitewash the events of the 6th are reportedly trying to get seats on the committee. For those would-be members, we suspect that Pelosi's consult with McCarthy could be as short as a single word.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/01/pelosi-taps-cheney-for-jan-6-select-committee-497533?fbclid=IwAR0GdmAs3pToeJiCbx3ouaPhzO-Icpq7IGrB0s-Gilchizh2DPvB0zk40T4

7/1/21 An Oath Keeper Agrees to Testify Against Fellow Insurrection Plotters

There are oaths, and oaths. Mark Grods, an Alabaman of 54, who helped organize the insurrection attempt on January 6, has agreed in a plea deal to testifying against his fellow plotters. That makes him the second witness of a kind the Justice Department particularly values -- a witness with first-hand knowledge of the conspiracy behind the events of that day.

Grods's testimony, which he gave before a grand jury on Wednesday, will shape an upcoming conspiracy case against more than a dozen Oath Keeper members.

According to the DOJ, "On Jan. 6, Grods rode with others in a pair of golf carts toward the Capitol, at times swerving around law enforcement vehicles, before parking and continuing toward the Capitol. While walking through the restricted area and toward the Capitol building, Grods moved with others together in a military 'stack' formation with hands on the shoulders of those in front of them to communicate and effectively move toward the Capitol." Grods carried a large stick. He traveled with other members to Washington, bringing guns that were stored in a Virginia Hotel. He also admitted using social media to recruit others to the conspiracy.

The agreement was struck on Monday, but was kept secret for Grods's safety until his plea deal became public yesterday. He could receive more than five years in prison and be fined up to $200,000.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/alabama-oath-keeper-pleads-guilty-conspiracy-charges-related-jan-6-capitol-breach?fbclid=IwAR0T0XN_ElrNRza-6IBdKqaJrz4vykmRZ6L6HBZf_6AaI7f69IjazgXgcK8

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-grods-oath-keeper-capitol-attack-trump_n_60dc7417e4b058eea49d79ad?fbclid=IwAR1hjMjF69kKgZRiWgZrofsUk_hvOKuhWutUrPon8zVQHDrweQgQTdPi4uo

7/1/21 House Select Committee Will Investigate January 6 Events -- Over Republican Objections

“I think for some on the other side, nothing that gets to the truth will ever be good enough, because they do not want the truth,” said Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern today as the House voted to create a Select Committee to investigate the insurrection attempt at the Capitol on January 6 of this year.

It's about as true as a statement can be. While 35 House Republicans had voted for a bipartisan commission last month, which was promptly shot down in the Senate, only two Republicans voted for the Select Committee. They were Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinziger (R-OH). Cheney was removed from the House Republican leadership after speaking out against Republicans who have helped tout "The Big Lie" that the election was stolen from Donald Trump by fraud, while Kinziger has recently made himself a nationally known figure for doing much the same thing.

"Since January 6th, the courage of my party’s leaders has faded. But the threat to our Republic has not," Cheney said. "[Trump's] attacks on our Constitution are accelerating. Our responsibility is to confront these threats, not appease and deflect."

Michael Fanone, a DC police officer who was severely beaten on January 6, watched the vote in the House gallery along with Nancy Pelosi and other police and family members. Last week, Fanone said he asked McCarthy not to put “the wrong people” on the panel. That is, no GOP member who has played down the violence, tried to equate the crowd with tourists, or otherwise attempted to whitewash the day's events.

At this point, however, the partisanship around the issue is so pronounced that some worry that Republicans won't even join the committee as members. More than a dozen Republican House members skipped the vote entirely, joining Donald Trump and Texas politicians at a dog-and-pony show on the Texas border. There, Texas governor Gregg Abbott was burnishing his Trumpist credentials by vowing to continue constructing Trump's border wall. That's why the vote was 220 - 190, a total of 310 instead of 435, the full number of voting members of the House.

The committee will have 13 members, eight of them to be chosen by Nancy Pelosi, and the rest to be chosen in consultation with Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader. Pelosi has floated choosing a Republican for one of her picks. That doesn't mean a Republican will accept the seat. While Cheney and Kinziger haven't ruled out serving on the committee, they haven't promised that they will, either.

If the House has to forge ahead with a committee of eleven Democrats and two Republican unicorns, its credibility will be as good as a target for conservative spinmeisters. You might think that someone in the GOP is working in the interests of the United States, but it's entirely possible that there are only two representatives in Congress who are not only Republicans, but patriots as well.  

https://wtop.com/congress/2021/06/house-poised-to-launch-new-probe-of-jan-6-insurrection/?fbclid=IwAR2cHGbAaVWPhow1iv9FggPA8IrXu5ofnbk0LRM6ZZsWDKKdzU7mT9ivQJk

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/560984-cheney-kinzinger-back-jan-6-select-committee?fbclid=IwAR0T0XN_ElrNRza-6IBdKqaJrz4vykmRZ6L6HBZf_6AaI7f69IjazgXgcK8

7/1/21 SCOTUS Hands Power to Condemn State and Private Land to a Pipeline Builder

Those of us who've been in a state of relative bliss since Biden cancelled the Dakota Access Pipeline -- that is, all of us -- got a rude awakening today thanks to a stunning decision by SCOTUS to allow a private pipeline builder to use eminent domain to condemn land on behalf of the state.

The PennEast Pipeline Company, which is building a natural gas line from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, is the beneficiary of SCOTUS's decision, which was 5 to 4 and written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts said, in the New York Times's wording, that the government was entitled to delegate its power of eminent domain to private parties even where state property is at issue.

Alito, Kavanaugh, and liberal justices Kagan and Breyer joined Roberts -- further evidence that a court with a conservative majority has produced strange bedfellows, who hop from bed to bed depending on the case. Equally surprising was the fact that Amy Coney Barrett's dissenting opinion was joined by Kagan, Gorsuch, and Thomas.

The ruling allows New Jersey to hand control of its eminent domain powers to a pipeline is also a ruling that will allow North and South Dakota to hand its powers of eminent domain to some of the most rapacious, ruthless private entities we ever want to see -- i.e., people who might produce a travesty like the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Let's hope that the opinion doesn't bring that one back to life, like the bloodsucking vampire it proved to be. Because it's going to be awfully hard to find a silver bullet.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/us/supreme-court-pipeline-new-jersey-land-seizure.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210630&instance_id=34188&nl=the-morning&regi_id=86904976&segment_id=62115&te=1&user_id=9eedf77d8afca88a98053cf5b3cb2c1b&fbclid=IwAR3xTtVz8tlnBcB4hySJYyOlZEThdOJvTe2NIidyajMagLLJQM44KYwAyc8

"I have Rape-colored Skin" by Caroline Randall Williams

Another Facebook post that is too perfect to be confined to a single platform. It's being shared freely, and it appears that Ms. Williams wants it to be shared. I'll take it down if I learn otherwise. 

By Caroline Randall Williams

June 26, 2020

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trumpand the Senate majority leader,Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

Caroline Randall Williams(@caroranwill) is the author of “Lucy Negro, Redux” and “Soul Food Love,” and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University.

A Day in the Life of Sue, by Kay Dee/Occupy Democrats

 A "sharable" post from Facebook that's too good for a single platform. 
"A day in the life of Sue the Trump supporter…

Sue gets up at 6 a.m. and fills her coffeepot with water to prepare her morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.

With her first swallow of coffee, she takes her daily medication. Her medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but $10 of her medications are paid for by her employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance - now Sue gets it too.

She prepares her morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Sue's bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In the shower, Sue reaches for her shampoo. Her bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for her right to know what she was putting on her body and how much it contained.

Sue dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air she breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

She walks to the subway station for her government-subsidized ride to work. It saves her considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Sue begins her work day. She has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Sue's employer pays these standards because Sue's employer doesn't want his employees to call the union.

If Sue is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, she'll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn't think she should lose her home because of her temporary misfortune.

It's noon and Sue needs to make a bank deposit so she can pay some bills. Sue's deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Sue's money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.

Sue has to pay her Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and her below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Sue and the government would be better off if she was educated and earned more money over her lifetime.

Sue is home from work. She plans to visit her father this evening at his farm home in the country. She gets in her car for the drive. Her car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards.

She arrives at her childhood home. Her generation was the third to live in the house financed by Farmers' Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans. The house didn't have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn't belong and demanded rural electrification.

She is happy to see her father, who is now retired. Her father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Sue wouldn't have to.

Sue gets back in her car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn't mention that Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Sue enjoys throughout her day. Sue agrees: "We don't need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I'm self-made and believe everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have."

- Kay Dee