We’re going to be looking at the racial divide in America, focusing on
the lawlessness that white citizens are able to get away with, and the
gross injustices being suffered by people of color at the hands of
police officers.
The Top 5 Reasons MoveOn Members Voted to Endorse Bernie (with the Most Votes and Widest Margin in Our History)
By Ilya Sheyman,Executive Director, MoveOn.org Political Action
With a record-setting 78.6 percent of 340,665 votes cast by the MoveOn membership,
Senator Bernie Sanders has won MoveOn.org Political Action’s
endorsement for president with the largest total and widest margin in
MoveOn history.
MoveOn.org
only endorses candidates based on votes by our members. Our only
previous presidential endorsement during a Democratic primary was for
Barack Obama, in early 2008. In 2004, no Democratic candidate reached
the threshold for an endorsement.
Here
are 5 of the top reasons MoveOn members support Bernie and will
mobilize to get out the vote on his behalf in Iowa, New Hampshire, and
other crucial early states.
1.
Bernie’s lifelong commitment to standing up to corporate and 1%
interests to fight for an economy where everyone has a fair shot.
“His
refusal to accept the status quo of the wealthiest Americans using
their power to influence politicians matters to me. If we’re going to
push back against the rising oligarchy in our country, we need people
like Bernie Sanders representing us in government.”
– MoveOn member Matt R., Reston, VA
At
the core of Bernie’s campaign is a commitment to fixing an economic
system that has been rigged in favor of giant corporations and the
wealthiest few and that is making economic inequality worse.
Bernie’s
campaign is funded by more than a million ordinary Americans chipping
in whatever they can afford — not by billionaires or corporate
SuperPACs. In our endorsement vote exit poll, one of the words MoveOn
members most frequently used to describe him was “integrity.” He isn’t
beholden to lobbyists and corporate interests, and it shows in the
positions he’s taken, from fighting to break up too-big-to-fail Wall
Street banks, to tuition-free public higher education, to expanding
Social Security, to fighting for bold solutions on climate change and a
$15-hour minimum wage.
In
short, MoveOn members support Bernie Sanders because they believe they
can trust him to stand up to powerful interests and fight for what’s
right.
2. He’s standing up for justice for communities facing oppression.
“In
a nutshell, he exemplifies the ‘We the People’ style of democracy I
believe in. He has stood by and with the people, supporting women,
people of color, LGBTQ, seniors, and the poor against those who look to
subjugate these historically oppressed groups for profit.”
– MoveOn member Natalie R., Claremont, CA
Bernie
is fighting for racial justice by calling to demilitarize police,
invest in community policing, end the drug war and tackle the epidemic
of mass incarceration, and restore voting rights gutted by federal
courts. On immigration, Sanders proposes allowing undocumented
immigrants to purchase health care through the Affordable Care Act,
dismantling inhumane deportation programs and private detention centers,
and a path to citizenship for 11 million aspiring Americans. He’s
fighting for equal pay for women and to expand and protect reproductive
rights, and has pledged to only nominate Supreme Court justices who
support Roe v. Wade.
3. He’ll say no to permanent war.
“He
represents integrity. He was also right about Iraq and I prefer his
stance on foreign policy. I feel that he is concerned with getting our
country on track and not getting us in more wars.”
– MoveOn member Janekee C., Davenport, FL
Bernie
Sanders has been a strong, consistent voice for the principle that war
should always be a last resort. He had the foresight to vote against
authorizing the war in Iraq in 2002, was a strong supporter of the
nuclear deal to prevent war with Iran, and has been a voice of reason
against escalation in Syria and other conflicts around the world.
A
diplomacy-first foreign policy has long been one of MoveOn members’ top
priorities, and Bernie has consistently stood with us against costly,
needless, and unwise military escalation that puts our nation’s security
and values at risk.
4. Electability: This election will hinge on turnout, and Bernie is inspiring and mobilizing the communities it’ll take to win.
“I
have never been as excited about a candidate as I am about Bernie
Sanders. His liberal values match my own values more closely than any
other candidate. I respect Bernie Sander’s independence from corporate
influence. His focus on social justice and addressing the economic
inequality in this country make him the candidate for me.”
– MoveOn member Megan W., Poulsbo, WA
Bernie’s
campaign is inspiring millions of people to enter the political process
for the first time, including young people and other members of the
“rising American electorate” who the eventual Democratic nominee will
need to mobilize in order to win in November. He’s raised money from
more contributors than any candidate in history at this stage in the
primary process, and massive crowds have turned out to see him across
the country. Part of why MoveOn members are supporting Bernie is that
his agenda excites and inspires them, and they see it doing the same for
others.
Experts
agree that the general election will hinge on voter turnout. If the
Obama coalition can be inspired to vote, Democrats will retain the White
House. But if the electorate looks like it did in 2014, when
Republicans gained ground across the country and seized control of the
Senate, Democrats will be in trouble.
Not
only do some new polls this week show Bernie leading the Democratic
field in Iowa and New Hampshire, they also show him to be the Democratic
candidate who performs best against various hypothetical Republican
nominees.
MoveOn
members support Bernie because they know his message has broad support
and that he is well positioned to win the White House in a general
election.
5. Putting members in the driver’s seat is what MoveOn does, and a whopping 79 percent voted to endorse Bernie.
“I
voted for MoveOn.org to endorse Bernie Sanders for president because he
represents the progressive movement like this organization. His views
align perfectly with my own — wealth inequality, a living wage, job
creation, Wall Street reform, racial justice, women’s and LBGT rights,
college without debt, climate change, and peaceful solutions to prevent
war, such as his support for the Iran deal.”
– MoveOn member Terri D., Brookfield, WI
Finally,
MoveOn is endorsing Bernie for president because MoveOn is our members.
MoveOn only endorses candidates for office after formal membership
votes, and in this case, the outcome of our internal democratic process
was overwhelming: the vast majority of voting MoveOn members want the
organization to support Bernie, so that’s what we’re going to do. We’ve
pledged to run a 100% positive campaign. And then regardless of who wins
the nomination, MoveOn will support the eventual Democratic nominee in
the general election to keep a Republican out of the White House,
because the vast majority of members have made clear that it’s what they
want MoveOn to do.
More
than 340,000 MoveOn members participated in our endorsement process.
Sanders won with 267,750 votes, or 78.6 percent. “Fellow Democrat
Hillary Clinton garnered 49,811 votes (14.6 percent). Martin O’Malley
earned 2,949 votes (0.9 percent). There were also 20,155 MoveOn members,
or 5.9 percent, who voted against MoveOn making an endorsement now.
Bernie’s
vote total and percentage are MoveOn records — the best any
presidential candidate has performed in our 17-year history.
In
short, MoveOn members #FeelTheBern and are going to mobilize in a big
way to turn out the voters Bernie needs to win in Iowa, New Hampshire,
and other early primary states. Let’s demonstrate the impact of
progressive people power. Click here to join our MoveOn for Bernie campaign.
Republican
Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) delivered a Stepford wife like performance as
she unsuccessfully sold the Republican agenda of racism and tax cuts for
the wealthy in the GOP response to President Obama’s State Of The
Union.
In one breath, Nikki Haley proclaimed herself the child of
immigrants. In the next breath, Haley said that the country must crack
down on immigration. Haley said, “We cannot continue to allow immigrants
to come here illegally. And in this age of terrorism, we must not let
in refugees whose intentions cannot be determined. We must fix our
broken immigration system. That means stopping illegal immigration. And
it means welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of their
race or religion. Just like we have for centuries.”
Haley brought back the same old Republican b.s. that if they
win back the White House, their tax cuts for the wealthy will help
working Americans, “If we held the White House, taxes would be lower for
working families, and we’d put the brakes on runaway spending and
debt…We would make international agreements that were celebrated in
Israel and protested in Iran, not the other way around. And rather than
just thanking our brave men and women in uniform, we would actually
strengthen our military, so both our friends and our enemies would know
that America seeks peace, but when we fight wars we win them.”
It was the same old trick that Republicans try to pull every four
years. The GOP never stops trying to dress up their racist, anti-woman,
pro-billionaire agenda with a new face. This time the Republican Party
trotted out an American-Indian woman to try to fool voters into
believing that they were not being sold the same old bill of goods.
Haley’s performance in the Republican response was professional. Her
delivery was solid. She fared better than Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio,
but Republicans still don’t get it. The problem is the messenger. The
problem remains the message.
Voters
aren’t going to buy tax cuts that benefit the wealthy and
discriminatory policies from anybody.
The Stepford governor failed just
like all of the other puppets failed before her.
Republicans can’t hide that it’s Donald Trump, not Nikki Haley who speaks for the real Republican Party.
Ted Cruz has been gaining
on Donald Trump in recent weeks, closing the gap between the two among
likely GOP voters. While the numbers show support for Cruz is building, there’s
apparently one conservative whose vote he doesn’t have, and is unlikely to
gain—PBS talking head and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
In his latest
op-ed, Brooks took Cruz to task for what he calls the candidate’s “pagan
brutalism,” which he says leaves the candidate empty of “compassion, gentleness
and mercy.” Brooks cites the case of Michael Wayne Haley, a Texas man who in
1997 was sent to jail for stealing a calculator. Due to prosecutor error, what
should have earned Haley two years maximum behind bars resulted in a prison
sentence of an astounding 16 years. When the mistake was discovered, then-Texas
solicitor general Ted Cruz actually fought to keep Haley imprisoned, going as
high as the U.S. Supreme Court. Haley was ultimately released after serving six
years, but in that anecdote, Brooks finds troubling indications about Cruz’s
personality.
Brooks notes a marked incongruity between Cruz’s appeals to evangelical
voters, with whom he’s gaining a foothold, and his so-called dedication to
Christian virtues. “[Cruz’s] speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and
vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them,” Brooks writes. “When he is speaking
in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is
jarring.”
He suggests the candidate is creating an “atmosphere of apocalyptic fear,”
making hyperbolic pronouncements that seem like doomsday forecasts. Brooks
quotes Cruz's statement that America is in danger of toppling off the “cliff
to oblivion.” He also points to a Cruz quote following a Democratic debate
about how “[w]e’re seeing our freedoms taken away every day, and last night was
an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously.”
Brooks believes this tone, thanks to its success with some Republican voters,
is being picked up by other candidates. "Ted Cruz is making headway.
There's...you begin to see little signs of liftoff,” Cruz said, according to Politico.
“Trump has sort of ceiling-ed out. Carson is collapsing. And Cruz is somehow
beginning to get some momentum from Iowa and elsewhere. And so people are either
mimicking him, which Rubio is doing a little by adopting some of the dark and
satanic tones that Cruz has."
Brooks suggests in his column that evangelical voters would do well to look
more closely at Cruz’s rhetoric before deciding to support him, since it runs
counter to much of what they believe. “Evangelicals and other conservatives have
had their best influence on American politics when they have proceeded in a
spirit of personalism,” Brooks writes, “when they have answered hostility with
service and emphasized the infinite dignity of each person. They have won
elections as happy and hopeful warriors. Ted Cruz’s brutal, fear-driven,
apocalypse-based approach is the antithesis of that.”
With just a month to go before New Hampshire votes, Gov. Chris
Christie's opponents have begun whacking him over his dismal performance
as governor.
Finally, someone noticed.
I don't think I'm the only Jersey guy who feels that the voters of
New Hampshire are a pretty clueless bunch if they embrace Christie
before checking with his home team.
They would find that a whopping 76 percent of New Jerseyans say that
Christie cares more about himself than the state; that 69 percent say
he'd make a poor president, and that 59 percent are so fed up they want
him to resign today.
Put it this way: If Christie wanted to leave the state for good, he'd
have no trouble finding volunteers to drive him to the airport.
During two trips to New Hampshire, and one to Iowa, I found that
nearly all their voters are judging Christie solely by his performance
on stage, where he excels.
Heads bob up and down as Christie claims that New Jersey's economy
is robust, that the Bridgegate scandal is over, that the state's
finances are rock solid, and so on. It's enough to make your head
explode.
But the attack ads could pry open the door to Christie's real
record. And it's been a torrent lately, with attacks coming directly or
indirectly from Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Marco Rubio.
Christie says the attacks are a good sign. "They're coming after me
because I'm doing well," he says. "Its good to be attacked. It means I'm
in the game."
Fair point. Why would they waste their money attacking a guy who has no prayer?
But that's not the end of it. Because if New Hampshire voters do take a hard look at Christie's record, he's in big trouble.
This is the time bomb that's been embedded in this campaign from the
start. Once a candidate gets traction, the scrutiny gears up. And for
Christie, that could cut deep.
I was impressed with Christie during his first few years, as were
most people in New Jersey. He signed a slew of bipartisan reforms that
helped contain public spending at a time when that was a top priority.
And he made solid progress on education, with tenure reform and the
robust growth of the best charter school chains in the state's poorest
cities.
Give him that. It's not for nothing that he won re-election in a landslide.
Then everything collapsed. And we learned that while he may have the talent to be a good president, he lacks the character.
The turning point came when the party establishment begged him to run for president in 2012. He turned them down, but he was left with a bad case of White House fever.
By now, he's lost his bearings, like the mythical Icarus who flew too close to the sun.
The Bridgegate scandal was an early sign. It was all about an
attempt to run up his margin of victory in New Jersey as a credential
for a presidential run.
But the fever has deepened since then. Christie was absent from the state 72 percent of the days during 2015, a truly shameless total. And still, he attacks Rubio for missing Senate votes. Has he lost his mind?
If you wonder why New Jersey's transit system is such a mess,
blame Christie's fever. He can't raise the gas tax because it would
kill his campaign, even when the state's Chamber of Commerce sees no
alternative to a tax hike of some kind. So he has proposed no solution
whatsoever.
The result: Our crowded trains break down much more often, tolls and
fares have skyrocketed, several crumbling bridges have been closed
down, and the state's economy faces the risk of a body blow if the
decrepit century-old railroad tunnel under the Hudson River fails. Keep
your fingers crossed.
Christie's gotten sloppy in his second term, like the cocky star quarterback who skips practice. He slurps up luxury gifts from kings and billionaires, and makes the phony claim that they are all personal friends.
He flip-flops on
meaty issues like gun control, Common Core, immigration, and Planned
Parenthood.
He seems paralyzed by the state's budget crisis, with the
credit rating dropping a record nine times.
In New Jersey, this act has worn thin. Polls show that even Republicans here don't like him, and that he'd be crushed in a primary vote in his own state.
One hopes that New Hampshire voters will soon become curious to find out why.
WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton's campaign spent much of this week waging a
dishonest attack on Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and his campaign's Wall
Street reform platform. The risky attempt to make inroads with
progressives on one of her weakest issues is damaging the credibility of
some of her top lieutenants.
Clinton's
attack on Sanders is as simple as it is untrue: Unlike Sanders, Clinton
has argued, she is willing to take on "shadow banking" -- a broad term
for various financial activities that aren't regulated as strictly as
conventional lending.
Sanders has in fact proposed
attacking shadow banking in two principal ways: by breaking up big
financial firms that engage in shadow banking, and by severing federal
financial support for shadow banking activities by reinstating
Glass-Steagall.
These would be substantive changes. A
lot of shadow banking takes place at firms with traditional banking
charters, like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Some of it takes
place at specialized hedge funds, or at major investment banks like
Goldman Sachs. Breaking them up would not eliminate the risk shadow
banking poses to the economy, but it would limit it. Risky shadow
banking activities cannot bring down institutions that are
too-big-to-fail if there are no too-big-to-fail institutions.
Yet the Clinton campaign has repeatedly said Sanders is wholly ignoring shadow banking, accusing Sanders of taking a "hands-off" approach to it that would not apply to firms like Lehman Brothers and AIG. This barrage has come from Clinton's press aides, campaign CFO Gary Gensler, and Clinton surrogate Barney Frank.
In a bizarre appearance
on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show, Frank claimed that splitting up Morgan
Stanley or Bank of America "is not going to do anything, literally not
anything to restrain shadow banking." He even said that since Lehman
Brothers was "very small" when it failed, Sanders' break-up-the-banks
plan would be unworkably broad and apply to too many firms.
It's hard to see these comments as anything but dishonest. Lehman Brothers was not "very small" when it failed. At $639 billion in assets,
it was the single-biggest bankruptcy filing in American history. Only
six U.S. banks are now larger than Lehman was, and the next-largest
institutions are almost half Lehman's size. AIG -- then the world's
largest insurer -- was even bigger.
Breaking up major institutions and
forcing banks that accept insured deposits out of the shadow banking
system are not the only conceivable tactics for mitigating risks posed
by shadow banking.
Clinton's plan includes some vague but sensible
proposals to take a harder look at the sector, require more
transparency, and impose new leverage limits on some players. Her
approach eschews a focus on the threat posed by large institutions in
favor of monitoring risks across the financial system (she has
repeatedly rejected calls to break up the biggest banks). The Clinton
team could easily make a case for her approach without saying strange
and false things about Sanders' plan.
And indeed, the Clinton camp's relentless references to Lehman and
AIG undercut her own regulatory approach. If bank size were truly
irrelevant to the shadow banking problem, then there would be no need to
consistently highlight two too-big-to-fail institutions, one of which
wreaked havoc on the economy by failing, and another of which was bailed
out to avoid further havoc.
Jaret Seiberg, a regulatory
specialist at Guggenheim Partners - and one of the most astute
finance-friendly observers of American politics - issued a note to
clients this week saying that key elements of Sanders' platform have
bipartisan appeal and political viability that will put pressure on
other candidates to present more aggressive anti-Wall Street messaging.
"This is not just about breaking up
the biggest banks," Seiberg wrote. "Sanders is calling for a system in
which financial firms are smaller, the government controls the interest
rates that banks charge, certain fees are capped, the Postal Service
becomes a viable competitor to banks and payday lenders [and] CEO's would
be criminally liable if employees defraud customers.
"Sanders appears to argue that he
could implement much of this agenda on his own even without the need for
legislation," Seiberg continued. "We caution against dismissing this
view. There is much that the White House, Treasury, or the financial
regulators could do by executive order …. Bashing Wall Street is a
populist message that appeals to conservatives and liberals. Sanders has
now laid out the most radical option on the table that other candidates
will be judged against."
So it's easy to see why Clinton would
want to steal some of Sanders' populist thunder. But focusing on Wall
Street could easily backfire on Clinton. Aside from giving opponents
more opportunities to highlight speaking fees she accepted from Goldman
Sachs and other banks, it risks demoralizing progressive
voters. Financial reform is a major issue with the Democratic Party
base. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has become one of the most popular
figures within the party, built on her almost single-minded focus on
Wall Street accountability. Too-big-to-fail and Glass-Steagall are major
causes among Warren's supporters, many of whom have flocked to Sanders,
but would be perfectly happy to vote for Clinton over a Republican in
November.
Unless Clinton needlessly alienates
them. Turning out an enthusiastic base has increasingly become essential
for both parties over the past decade. With Clinton up more than 15
percentage points in Iowa polls and ahead by even wider margins
nationally, it's hard to see the upside in her campaign's current
assault on Sanders.
Making things up in order to
criticize Sanders proposals that Democrats actually like only damages
Clinton's credibility with Democratic voters.
Let's go to the scoreboard to see who's winning the exciting game of "Presidential Election Media Coverage."
A non-partisan media monitoring firm that has been tracking the
nightly news broadcasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC reports that Trump is
tromp, tromp, tromping over the airtime of everyone else. From last
January thought November, these dominant flagship news shows devoted 234
minutes of prime-time coverage to the incessant chirping of the
Yellow-Crested Birdbrain, with no other contender getting even a fourth
of that.
Take Democrat Bernie Sanders, who's stunning the political
establishment with a fiery populist campaign that's drawing record
crowds. Indeed, Sanders' upstart campaign is getting higher poll ratings
in the Democratic contest than Trump is getting in GOP race. And – get
this – polls also show Bernie topping The Donald by 10 points if they
face each other in November's presidential showdown. So surely he's
getting a proportional level of media coverage by the networks on our
public airwaves, right?
Ha, just kidding! The ABC, CBS, NBC devotion of 234 minutes to
all-things-Trump was "balanced" by less than 10 minutes for Sanders.
Most egregious, was ABC, the Disney-owned network. ABC's "World New
Tonight" awarded 81 minutes of national showtime to Trump last year –
and for Bernie: 20 seconds.
How self-serving of the media moguls! The one candidate who is
effectively rallying large numbers of voters to oppose the rise of
corporate oligarchy – including in the media – has the plug pulled on
him. Of course, this only amplifies the truth of what Sanders is saying
about the villainy of corporate profiteers, and it fuels a greater
determination by his millions of grassroots supporters to end the reign
of greed in America. For information and action, go to www.BernieSanders.com
I recently wrote two pieces on white privilege and the occupation of
federal property in Oregon by a gun-toting terrorist insurrectionist
“militia” that is led by the sons of Cliven Bundy—the Nevada rancher
who, with the aid of an armed group of anti-government protesters, stood
down federal authorities in 2014 because he did not want to pay his back taxes and grazing fees.
Ammon Bundy speaking at a
forum hosted by the American Academy for Constitutional Education
(AAFCE) at the Burke Basic School in Mesa, Arizona.
Photo
Credit: By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America
(Ammon Bundy) [CC BY-SA 2.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Those two works—one that was quite short and posted on my Facebook page; the other a longer piece featured on
Salon—have been shared and commented upon hundreds of thousands of
times on social media and elsewhere. When an essay on race (especially
when it explores questions surrounding white privilege) goes “viral”
there is a predictable range of reactions.
Some readers have
responded with rage and anger because to discuss the connection between
white privilege, state violence, guns and right-wing politics is
verboten to them.
Other readers have been very positive and
supportive. As was seen online at “Black Twitter,” many people were
quick, and quite correct, to point out the hypocrisy regarding how the
United States government and its agents are apparently much more likely
to use violence against people of color (and especially Muslims in the
post 9/11 era) than they are white Americans. With that observation, a
powerful example was summoned: Tamir Rice, a black child playing with a
toy gun was summarily executed by the Cleveland police; white people can
brandish real guns and point them at the police and federal
authorities, yet somehow they manage to (for the most part) survive
unharmed.
There were other readers who are plugged into the
right-wing conspiracy theory/Fox News/Alex Jones echo chamber. Epistemic
closure visits ignorance and disinformation upon those who are
self-exiled within the right-wing media. These readers defended the
Oregon “militia” brigands with claims that the latter are “freedom
fighters” who are standing up against “tyranny”–as opposed to the plain
fact that they are insurrectionists protecting poachers.
Among the
many thousands of comments (and several emails that I have also
received), there were a few that offered a reasonable and insightful
intervention. Several folks are concerned that the white Oregon “Bundy
Brigands” insurrection is 1.) about “more than race,” and 2.) that
somehow a discussion of the color line and white privilege is a
distraction from “the bigger picture.”
To the second point, my
response is that to critically interrogate matters of race and the color
line is to better understand almost every aspect of American life and
culture. The color line cannot be decoupled from American society. To
run away from this fact is ironically to cede the centrality of race to
America’s history and present. In practice, ignorant and willful
“colorblindness” is a malignant and perverse type of “color
consciousness” that too often enables white supremacy in the post-civil
rights era.
To the first point, are the events in Oregon about
“more than race?” Absolutely! Bundy’s Brigands are a nexus for many
other important matters of public concern in American society.
The
Oregon insurrection is an example of how the right-wing media has
cultivated a culture of anger, aggrievement, anti-government conspiracy
theories, and victimology among its consumers. The idea that publicly
held land is a form of tyranny is absurd. However, the right-wing media
and the Republican Party are part of a political religion which holds
that the government is always the enemy, a baby to be drowned in the
bathtub, as opposed to a force for potential good. Sarah Palin’s death
panels, claims that the Affordable Care Act is akin to “slavery,” the
foolishness of a “War on Christmas,” and the dunder headed political
opportunism of the Benghazi witch hunts, are part of the same distorted
and conspiranoid right-wing political imagination that excreted the
Oregon militia standoff.
In all, there is something profoundly
wrong with America’s sense of civic virtue and righteousness when some
would hesitate to call Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Black Lives Matter
activists freedom fighters, but those same people enthusiastically
embrace using such language to describe right-wing militias and
anti-government activists who want to suck off the public teat while
avoiding paying any taxes or fees to do so.
The right-wing media
protects and nurtures the likes of Cliven Bundy, his sons, and the
broader militia movement by giving them attention and using honorifics,
i.e. the word “patriots,” to describe their treasonous behavior.
Bundy’s
Brigands are also white men with guns. White ammosexual identity is
nurtured and protected by the National Rifle Association, the Republican
Party, and the right-wing media. These gun-obsessed civic deviants are
described by the right-wing, and unfortunately also the so-called
liberal media, as being members of a “militia” when in reality they are
rabble who are engaging in armed insurrection against a democratically
elected government. The gun industry encourages the armed cowboy cosplay
of groups such as Bundy’s Brigands in Oregon by marketing assault
rifles and other weaponry with allusions to “freedom,” “democracy,” the
myth of the American frontier and the Revolutionary War.
Bundy’s
Brigands are also an example of how certain economic interests are
protected in America. If this group of terrorist insurrectionists had
staged their “standoff” at Wall Street for example, they would have been
beaten up, arrested, and disappeared by the police, private security
forces, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The rhetoric of
capitalism and the iconic and empty Americana images of the yeoman
farmer and cowboy are also operative in the “Oregon Standoff” as well.
If Bundy’s Brigands were liberals and progressives demanding a fairer
and more equal democracy, forming grange associations, or people’s
economic collectives and banks, the reaction by the United States
government and the corporate news media would be very, very, different.
As was seen with Occupy Wall Street, the surveillance and punishing
state would infiltrate and try to destroy the movement. The corporate
news media would legitimate this anti-democratic behavior by slurring
and defaming the activists and other social change workers who are
involved with it.
Moreover, the efforts by militias, as well as
those of individuals such as Cliven Bundy and his sons to privatize
public land, cannot be separated from how corporations and other
interests would like access to those areas. Neoliberalism considers the
very notion of “the commons” and “the public” to be anathema to an
organizing logic where all things are to be privatized, sold off to
corporations, in exclusive service to the plutocrats, and where the
working classes and poor are deemed useless eaters. Bundy’s Brigands and
other right-wing militia groups speak of “freedom” from “tyranny,” but
in reality they are unwittingly (or perhaps, in some cases,
intentionally) working to replace an ostensibly elected and free
American government with an unelected corporate dictatorship.
The
Oregon insurrection is a great opportunity to participate in the too oft
used “teachable moment.” History, as it always does, should inform our
analysis of current events. This leads us to a necessary empirical
question, one that can be answered, and likely has already been, by
social scientists and historians. How does the American State respond to
protest behavior by different racial groups? How are the events in
Oregon similar or different from how the Philadelphia police decided to firebomb the
headquarters of the African-American radical organization known as
MOVE during the mid-1980's? Are the events at Ruby Ridge and Waco
outliers for how the state uses violence against non-whites, exceptions
that prove the rule? What of the freedom struggle by First Nations
peoples in the American Indian Movement in the 1960's and 1970's?
Is
the United States government (and its agents) more likely to use
violent force against black and brown people as compared to whites?
While both my intuition and the evidence would seem to suggest “yes,”
this is not an “unknown unknown”–to borrow from Donald Rumsfeld–the
answer is something that can actually be determined.
Bundy’s
Brigands benefit from several types of privilege, with white privilege
being central among them. But, white privilege is only one dimension of a
bigger system of power relationships in the United States and West. We
ought to look broadly for answers while also being mindful of the
specific details and aspects of what is being studied. Bundy’s Brigands
are not a Rosetta Stone for American politics. They can however, help us
to better understand its dynamics.
Chauncey DeVega’s essays on race, politics and popular culture can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com/. He is a regular guest on Ring of Fire Radio and TV, and hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Follow him onTwitter.
Virtually every aspect of cybercrime has been made into a service or
plug-and-play product. That includes dating scams — among the oldest and
most common of online swindles. Recently, I had a chance to review a
package of dating scam emails, instructions, pictures, videos and love
letter templates that are sold to scammers in the underground, and was
struck by how commoditized this type of fraud has become.
The dating scam package is assembled for and marketed to
Russian-speaking hackers, with hundreds of email templates written in
English and a variety of European languages. Many of the sample emails
read a bit like Mad Libs or choose-your-own-adventure texts, featuring decision templates that include advice for ultimately tricking the mark into wiring money to the scammer.
The romance scam package is designed for fraudsters who prey on
lonely men via dating Web sites and small spam campaigns. The vendor of
the fraud package advertises a guaranteed response rate of at least 1.2
percent, and states that customers who average 30 scam letters per day
can expect to earn roughly $2,000 a week. The proprietor also claims
that his method is more than 20% effective within three replies and over
60% effective after eight.
One of hundreds of sample template files in the dating scam package.
The dating scam package advises customers to stick to a
tried-and-true approach. For instance, scammers are urged to include an
email from the mother of the girl in the first 10 emails between the
scammer and a target. The scammer often pretends to be a young woman in
an isolated or desolate region of Russia who is desperate for a new
life, and the email from the girl’s supposed mother is intended to add
legitimacy to the scheme.
Then there are dozens of pre-fabricated excuses for not talking on
the phone, an activity reserved for the final stretch of the scam when
the fraudster typically pretends to be stranded at the airport or
somewhere else en route to the target’s home town.
“Working with dozens of possible outcomes, they carefully lay out
every possible response, including dealing with broke guys who fell in
love online,” said Alex Holden, the security expert who
intercepted the romance scam package. “If the mark doesn’t have money,
the package contains advice for getting him credit, telling the customer
to restate his love and discuss credit options.”
A sample letter with multiple-choice options for creating unique love letter greetings.
Interestingly, although Russia is considered by many to be among the
most hostile countries toward homosexuals, the makers of this dating
scam package also include advice and templates for targeting gay men.
Also included in the dating scam tutorial is a list of email
addresses and pseudonyms favored by anti-scammer vigilantes who try to
waste the scammers’ time and otherwise prevent them from conning real
victims. In addition, the package bundles several photos and videos of
attractive Russian women, some of whom are holding up blank signs onto
which the scammer can later Photoshop whatever message he wants.
Holden said that an enterprising fraudster with the right programming
skills or the funds to hire a coder could easily automate the scam
using bots that are programmed to respond to emails from the targets
with content-specific replies.
CALL CENTERS TO CLOSE THE DEAL
The romance scam package urges customers to send at least a dozen
emails to establish a rapport and relationship before even
mentioning the subject of traveling to meet the target. It is in this
critical, final part of the scam that the fraudster is encouraged to
take advantage of criminal call centers that staff women who can be
hired to play the part of the damsel in distress.
The login page for a criminal call center.
“When you get down to the final stage, there has to be a crisis, some
compelling reason why the target should you send the money,” said
Holden, founder of Hold Security
[full disclosure: Yours Truly is an uncompensated adviser to Holden’s
company]. “Usually this is something like the girl is stranded at the
airport or needs money to get a travel visa. There has to be some kind
of distress situation for this person to be duped into wiring money,
which can be anywhere between $200 and $2,000 on average.”
Crooked call centers like the one pictured in the screen shot above
employ male and female con artists who speak a variety of languages.
When the call center employees are not being hired to close the deal on a
romance scam, very often they are used to assist in bank account
takeovers, redirecting packages with shipping companies, or handling
fraudulent new credit applications that require phone verification.
Another reason that call centers aren’t used earlier in romance
scams: Hiring one is expensive. The call center pictured above charges
$10 per call, payable only in Bitcoin.
“If you imagine the cost of doing by phone every part of the scam,
it’s rather high, so they do most of the scam via email,” Holden said.
“What we tend to see with these dating scams is the scammer will tell
the call center operator to be sure to mention special nicknames and to
remind him of specific things they talked about in their email
correspondence.”
An
ad for a criminal call center that specializes in online dating scams.
This one, run by a cybecrook who uses the nickname “Sparta,” says “Only
the best calls for you.”
Check back later this week for a more in-depth story about criminal call centers.
Ammon Bundy, son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, participates in the protest march in Burns, Oregon.
A so-called militia with ties to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy has seized
a remote federal building in a frigid southeast Oregon wildlife refuge
with no plans to leave.
Bundy’s son, Ammon Bundy, was among the self-described militiamen
occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters and visitor
center with eyes to take over the U.S. Bureau of Land Management fire
station near Frenchglen, the Oregonian reported.
“We’re planning on staying here for years, absolutely,” Ammon Bundy told The Oregonian. “This is not a decision we’ve made at the last minute.”
Bundy, who lives in Idaho, called upon fellow militia members to "come
prepared" and join protesters decrying federal overreach and rallying
behind two ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son, Steven,
re-sentenced in October to five years in prison for arson.
It’s unclear how many militia members are camped out at the Malheur
building, but Harney County Sheriff’s Office has asked residents to stay
clear of the federal land.
Bundy is already asking others to join him and a handful of others at
the refuge. At least four men were seen trudging through a snow-covered
road at the refuge entrance.
One of those men, shown sporting camouflage pants tucked into his boots, is holding a rifle.
Bundy addressed reporters from the refuge late Saturday as he and
others stood around a bonfire, their breaths visible in the single-digit
weather.
“We pose no threat to anybody,” said Bundy, when asked how he and
demonstrators would respond to law enforcement officials attempting to
them. “There’s no person that is physically harmed by what we’re doing.”
“If they come to bring physical harm to us, they will be doing it
because of a facility or a building. I don’t believe that warrants
killing people,” Bundy added.
It’s unknown how long Bundy had been plotting his standoff at the
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge before driving to Oregon to protest the
Hammonds looming prison sentence.
A judge ordered the Hammonds to report to a California prison Monday to
begin a sentence deemed fit for the 2012 conviction. The two men set
two fires in 2001 on 2006 on federal land leased by the Hammonds for
cattle grazing.
The first fire destroyed all evidence of alleged deer poaching on the
BLM property, claimed Dusty Hammond, whose grandfather, Dwight, and
uncle, Steven, ordered him to “light the whole countryside on fire.”
“Dwight told me to keep my mouth shut, that nobody need to know about
the fire, and they didn’t need to know anything about it,” Dusty said
during the trial.
Dwight and Steven Hammond claimed the blazes were sparked on their
neighboring property near Diamond as a precaution against future
wildfires and invasive plants, but the flames spread out of control to
federal lands. The two fires scorched a combined 140 acres.
Les Zaitz/The Oregonian via AP
Hundreds
of protesters poured into Burns, Ore., to rally for two ranchers
convicted of arson before splitting off and taking over a wildlife
refuge.
Bundy said he did not know the Hammonds personally until days before
Saturday’s rally, but he identified with their ordeal in the wake of his
father’s longtime saga against the federal government.
Bundy’s father, Cliven, led an anti-government standoff with federal
agents over unpaid grazing fines in Nevada. The rancher of his son’s
stunt at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge stunt through a phone
call, but he told the Oregon Public Broadcast he had nothing to do with
the take-over.
“That’s not exactly what I thought should happen, but I didn’t know
what to do,” Bundy said. “He told me that they were there for the long
run. I guess they figured they’re going to be there for whatever time it
takes—and I don’t know what that means.”
In a statement, Bundy initially pleaded with the Hammonds to seek
protective custody at the Harney County jail instead giving themselves
over to federal authorities to serve a tougher prison sentence.
"This is not a time to stand down, it is time to stand up and come to
Harney County," Ammon Bundy said in a separate video on Facebook.
Despite Bundy's claim he and other protesters are in it for the long
haul at the wildlife refuge, he told his wife he would only "be gone for
a couple days.”
Mike Blake/Reuters
Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy, is reportedly among the anti-government militia holed up in a rural wildlife refuge.
Bundy’s call-to-action garnered an apparent goodbye video from one of
his militia followers addressed to his wife and two daughters, ages 3
and 5. The video was recorded at some point before the holidays,
tearfully explaining why he wouldn’t be home during Christmas or New
Years.
“This is one of the tougher videos I’ve had to make,” said a man
identified as Jon Ritzheimer. “I love you, my beautiful wife. I know I
never said it enough but I’ve become so proud of the mother you’ve
become.”
“We the people need to take a stand,” said Ritzheimer, adding he expects 75 year old Dwight Hammond to die in prison.
“Dwight, do you want die in prison labeled as a terrorist by these
oppressors,” Ritzheimer asked. “Or do you want to die out here with us a
free man. I want to die a free man.”
Ammon Bundy and two of his brothers were among hundreds of protesters
in Burns rallying in support of the Hammonds outside the Harney County
courthouse before a splinter group drove to the remote refuge and broke
into its headquarters, about 245 miles southeast of Portland.
A FBI spokeswoman is aware of the militia take-over at the Malheur refuge, but would not comment further.
The refuge, which is closed until further notice because of the
occupation, encompasses nearly 190,000 acres of wetlands and desert
frequented by hunters and fishermen with a visitor center.
Developer shutterbug2000 demoed Windows 95 running on a 3DS, yesterday.
This is achieved by running a windows 95 image file from the DOS
Emulator DosBox, on the 3DS.
Windows 95 on the 3DS – compatible with N3DS only?
The
port takes a while to start for now and doesn’t do let you do much for
now. But once things are shaping up and a proper on-screen-keyboard is
added to the build, this could be used to run old windows 95 games.
Anybody who’s old enough to have used Windows 95 though will remember
that most games from this era actually ran on DOS itself rather than
Windows 95. It’s also likely that the layers of emulation involved here
could mean no game will ever be playable through this.
Nonetheless, this is great to see such boiling activity on the 3DS scene.
People
have mentioned that the Dosbox port used here does not run on the O3DS,
only on he N3DS. Some people have claimed this could be because of lack
of RAM on the O3DS: these claims are complete BS. Windows 95 used to
run on the PSP ( through dosbox again. update: the DOS emulator running on the PSP was actually Bochs, thanks to everyone who corrected me on this)
with its 24MB of Ram, and the minimum RAM requirements for Windows 95
is 4MB. The reason this does not run on O3DS has nothing to do with
available RAM, and people are already looking into fixing this.
Win 95 on 3DS – How it was achieved
Windows 95 booting on the 3DS
To achieve this magic, Shutterbug2000 ported the libretro dosbox core to the 3DS. Confused? To sum it up, the 3DS is running RetroArch
(a popular meta-emulator), itself running the DosBox module (a popular
DOS emulator) which then starts windows 95 (a popular GUI for DOS).
So,
in other words, Shutterbug2000 made Dosbox compatible with the 3DS by
tweaking the dosbox Retroarch module, and added a startup script to
automatically run windows 95.
The sources for shutterbug2000’s changes can be found here. The actual code changes (the diff) from the original libretro dosbox core can be found here.
Windows 95 for 3DS – Download
You can download the files to run Win 95 on the 3DS here.
Keep in mind that this is an early build, and more recent files might
be found in the days to come on the original thread. you’ll also need an
image of Windows 95, which is not provided in the release build for
copyright reasons.
Windows 95 on the 3DS – Screenshot by @RetroRampage37
Since the 3DS scene is on red alert because of the keynote from a
couple days ago, I decided to write a catch-all guide to installing
Menuhax and Ironhax through Browserhax in anticipation of the upcoming
exploits.
First and foremost:
STOP UPDATING. STAY ON 10.3, THIS IS THE LATEST EXPLOITABLE FIRMWARE. Don't update anymore.
If a system firmware update has been released, STOP READING THIS GUIDE.
You need to set the blocker DNS before proceeding. You can read about
this in the 'WHAT'S THIS ABOUT DNS?' section of this guide.
3. Proceed according to your System Version (Found on the top screen,
bottom right corner in System Settings). You will need this system
version to install Ironhax as well, so write it down if you need it.
You should now see the Homebrew Menu. If you don't, restart the console
and try again. Clearing the cookies and cache in your browser helps.
The next step is installing a new entrypoint, as Browserhax becomes
unavailable every time a new system update comes out, potentially even
leading to it being patched.
You have two entrypoints available for install from here: Menuhax and Ironhax.
You'll definitely want to get Menuhax, but Ironhax is also an option if you're a complete klutz(In your own opinion anyway, I don't mean to insult anybody)and are afraid of system updates or changing Home Menu themes.
MENUHAX:
1. Open the Menuhax_Manager app.
2. Hit 'Install'.
3. You're done.
OPTIONAL: Hit 'Setup a built-in Home Menu 'Basic' color theme' to use a different theme with Menuhax.
To activate: Hold L while starting up your 3DS to open the Homebrew Menu.
CAUTION: Don't change your
Home Menu theme after installing this, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Doing so
will uninstall Menuhax and render it unusable. There are ways to use
any themes if you REALLY want to do so, which I will further explain in
the future.
IRONHAX (REQUIRES AN NNID):
1. Open the eShop - Old Version Downloader app.
2. Download Ironfall Invasion
3. Restart and open the Homebrew Menu (Using either Menuhax or Browserhax)
4. Open the Ironhax Installer app.
5. Follow the onscreen instructions. Your Ironfall version will most
definitely be 1.0. System Version will be whatever you wrote down during
the first guide, and the save slot doesn't matter.
6. You're done.
To activate: Open Ironfall Invasion and open the save slot you installed the exploit to.
CAUTION: Don't update
Ironfall Invasion after installing this, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. The
game will update to an unexploitable version.
WHAT NOW?:
You wait for the CFW and other-such >9.2.0-20 kernel stuff to show up.
I'll update this guide when it DOES happen.
WHAT'S THIS ABOUT DNS?:
System Versions 9.9 and above force you to update to use the Browser, as
it checks with Nintendo's servers if the console is on the latest
firmware to prevent exploitation. The current System Firmware as of this
guide, 10.3, is exploitable as well as not needing the DNS. Things will
change at 10.4 and beyond.
DON'T OPEN THE 3DS INTERNET BROWSER IF THIS IS THE CASE, YOU'LL RENDER
IT COMPLETELY UNUSABLE. FOLLOW THE STEPS BELOW BEFORE YOU EVEN TRY TO DO
SO.
To change your DNS settings to bypass this:
1. Open System Settings.
2. Go to Internet Settings > Connection Settings. Edit your main connection settings.
3. Set Auto-Obtain DNS to 'No' and enter 107.211.140.065 under the DNS: Both primary and secondary.
4. Do this for all your other connections, if any.
Remember: Don't update. Ever.
To the smart people:
If I've missed anything in this guide or there are any mistakes, let me know.
Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there.
In an interview with Yahoo Politics, an
adviser to the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders hinted that the data
breach that resulted in the campaign losing access to the DNC servers
may have been the result of a employee planted in the campaign by the
DNC.
Following the controversy that saw Sanders staffers blocked from
accessing some of their own voter data after it was revealed that
proprietary information belonging to the Clinton campaign was being
viewed, the Sanders campaign apologized and fired the “hacker,” national
data director, Josh Uretsky.
However, an unnamed adviser to the
Vermont independent’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential
nomination is suggesting that Uretsky maybe have been a plant by both
the DNC and the technology company that hosts the data.
“It’s
not as if we conjured this guy Josh from thin air. This is an
individual … who was recommended to us by the DNC and NGP VAN,” the
adviser said.
According
to the adviser, Uretsky provided references to the Sanders campaign
from the DNC’s National Data Director Andrew Brown, who works closely
with the shared voter file program.
“Andrew
Brown spoke to us and gave him a positive review, as did this guy Bryan
Whitaker,” the adviser said, identifying Whitaker as the COO of
technology group NGP VAN. Whitaker is no longer with the company, having
taken a similar position with another group.
Supporters
of Sanders have complained that the DNC favors Clinton — the
establishment favorite — noting that the Democratic debates have been
scheduled on weekend evenings when viewership would be down, limiting
exposure for the populist message of Sanders.
The campaign had called for a “a full investigation from top to bottom” of the data breach and how it was allowed to happen.
The weather has finally cooled a bit, and that can only mean one
thing: time for Ted Cruz to dump his ill-fitting suits and ties for his
even iller-fitting collection of flannel shirts and leather jackets. The
#Cruz Country Christmas Tour (in a private jet) is under way and headed
to a town near you.
Why does the Texas senator lumberjack around America when the
temperature drops? Is he trying to create synergy with the cover of his
latest book?
That’s possible, but the real reason Ted Cruz wears
flannel shirts and leather jackets in the winter is because he wants
nothing more than to be perceived as one of the guys. Not just because
it could win him the White House, but because he’s always been that kid
in school that had no friends. The one whose parents made him
insufferable by constantly telling him how much better he is than
everyone else.
Cruz’s father, Rafael, has been brainwashing his
son since he was about four years old to believe he’s “gifted above any
man he knows” and “destined by God for greatness”, the kinds of
delusions that were guaranteed to get him stuffed in a locker by junior
high.
Unfortunately, training to become Daddy’s little messiah
didn’t leave Cruz time to develop even the slightest sense of style, and
GQ has some stern fashion advice for him.
“In general, we’re not
exactly sure why presidential hopefuls think that oversized, awkward
leather jackets will make them seem more, ‘relatable to voters’,” the
website said on Tuesday.
First, the jacket just doesn’t
fit. If you’re looking for one, make sure the shoulder seams hit at your
actual shoulders and there’s not so much fabric pooling around your
elbows (a slimmer cut would fix that). Second, it’s also a bizarrely
vague style, neither a bomber nor a cafe-type racer. Cruz opted for a
nondescript zip-front jacket that we think calling basic might be too
complimentary.
Even that weird, animatronic twang Cruz
speaks with, despite having grown up in urban Houston attending private
schools, raised by his Canadian mom and Cuban-accented dad, is a sad
attempt to make you think he’s a regular working stiff. Nothing could be
further from the truth.
So he pretends to fit in with blue-collar
types, but he was also pretending when in the company of his supposed
milieu. Ever since Cruz came on the national, political stage in 2013,
his freshman roommate at Princeton has been tweeting college memories of
the junior senator, and not in a good way.
“I begged them for a
different room or roommate. Begged. They didn’t understand then. They do
now,” Craig Mazin tweeted about Cruz in 2013. Mazin is a professional
screenwriter and avowed anti-Cruzite. “I would rather have anybody else
be the president of the United States. Anyone,” he told The Daily Beast.
“I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”
Of course,
not everyone at Princeton hated Cruz. The other dorks on the debate team
thought he was a master debater and a “sort of stud” with girls on the
debate circuit. (Hoo boy.) Cruz’s debate style meant he didn’t respond
to arguments, but reframed them so he could control the conversation.
Erik Leitch, who lived in the same building as Cruz, saw that style
bleed over into his personal interactions. “The only point of Ted
talking to you was to convince you of the rightness of his views,”
Leitch said in the same Daily Beast piece.
So, Cruz was a weird
kid saddled with a messiah complex who didn’t fit in with the liberal,
Ivy League intellectuals in college. Surely he finally found his peer
group when he got to Washington, right?
Political strategist
Matthew Dowd, who worked with Cruz on the George W Bush campaign,
tweeted that “if truth serum was given to the staff of the 2000 Bush
campaign”, an enormous percentage of them “would vote for Trump over
Cruz”.
“I just don’t like the guy,” George W Bush himself said of
Cruz at a political fundraiser for his baby brother Jeb. Well, sure, but
he’s just saying that because of his brother, surely.
“The tenor
of what he said about the other candidates was really pretty pleasant,”
one donor at the party said of Bush. “Until he got to Cruz.”
And Bush is certainly not the only Republican willing to go on the record with his hatred for Cruz.
“The
list of GOP politicians and operatives willing to take open shots at
Cruz has grown long,” says the Washington Post, listing Senators John
McCain, Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn and John Thune, former
Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, former House speaker John Boehner and
former senator Tom Coburn, for starters.
It looks like a flannel
shirt and a leather jacket aren’t going to be enough to overhaul Ted
Cruz’s image. He’d need some idea of who he really is instead of who
he’s trying to be to win over voters.
Cindy Casares is a
columnist for the Texas Observer and the founding editor of Guanabee
Media, an English-language, pop culture blog network about Latinos
established in 2007. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, The
American Prospect and Cosmo Latina. Follower her on Twitter @La_Cindy.
An 1881 illustration by Thomas Nast, published
in Harper's. Nast created the image of Santa Claus that endures today.
Wikimedia Commons
During a week when so many Americans have experienced
some combination of joy, rage, and frustration in seeking the perfect holiday
gifts for their children, it seems appropriate to pause and ask: Where did the
practice of giving Christmas gifts to children come from?
There does not appear to be an easy answer. Gifts do not
primarily serve as rewards: Commentators on the political left
and right
have in recent years asked parents to abandon the “naughty and nice” paradigm
that suggests such presents are prizes for good behavior, and indeed historical
evidence suggests that proper conduct has not been a widespread prerequisite for
young Americans to receive Christmas gifts.
Nor do presents seem to have a clear connection to
Christian faith. Some American families have established a “three-gift”
Christmas in an effort to link the practice to the generosity
of the three wise men in the story of Jesus’s birth, but again no broad
historical precedent exists for this link. In fact, religious leaders have long
been more likely to decry the commercialization of Christmas as detracting from
the true spirit of the holiday than to celebrate the delivery of purchased goods
to middle-class or wealthy children. (Donating gifts to poor children is a
different matter, of course, but that practice became common in the United
States only after gift-giving at home became a well-established
ritual.)
Critics of the commercialization of Christmas tend to
attribute the growth of holiday gift-giving to corporate marketing efforts.
While such efforts did contribute to the magnitude of the ritual, the practice
of buying Christmas presents for children predates the spread of corporate
capitalism in the United States: It began during the first half of the 1800's,
particularly in New York City, and was part of a broader transformation of
Christmas from a time of public revelry into a home and child centered
holiday.
This reinvention was driven partly by commercial
interests, but more powerfully by the converging anxieties of social elites and
middle-class parents in rapidly urbanizing communities who sought to exert
control over the bewildering changes occurring in their cities. By establishing
a new type of midwinter celebration that integrated home, family, and shopping,
these Americans strengthened an emerging bond between Protestantism and consumer
capitalism.
In his book The Battle for
Christmas, the historian Stephen Nissenbaum presents the
19th-century reinvention of the holiday as a triumph of New York’s elites over
the city’s emerging working classes.
New York’s population grew nearly tenfold
between 1800 and 1850, and during that time elites became increasingly
frightened of traditional December rituals of “social inversion,” in which
poorer people could demand food and drink from the wealthy and celebrate in the
streets, abandoning established social constraints much like on Halloween night
or New Year’s Eve.
These rituals, which occurred any time between St. Nicholas
Day (a Catholic feast day observed in Europe on December 6th) and New Year’s
Day, had for centuries been a means of relieving European peasants’ (or American
slaves’) discontent during the traditional downtime of the agricultural cycle.
In a newly congested urban environment, though, aristocrats worried that such
celebrations might become vehicles for protest when employers refused to give
workers time off during the holidays or when a long winter of unemployment
loomed for seasonal laborers.
In response to these concerns, a group of wealthy men who
called themselves the Knickerbockers invented a new series of traditions for
this time of year that gradually moved Christmas celebrations out of the city’s
streets and into its homes. They presented these traditions as a reinvigoration
of Dutch customs practiced in New Amsterdam and New York during the colonial
period, although Nissenbaum and other scholars have established that these
supposed antecedents largely did not exist in North America.
Drawing from two
story collections by Washington Irving, their most well-known member, these New
Yorkers experimented with domestic festivities on St. Nicholas Day and New
Year’s Day until another member of the group, Clement Clark Moore, solidified
the tradition of celebrating on Christmas with his enormously popular poem “A
Visit from St. Nicholas” (better known as “The Night Before Christmas”) in
1822.
The St. Nicholas that Moore presented in his famous poem
was not a wholesale invention, but like the other traditions the Knickerbockers
borrowed and transformed, he was not a well-established part of New York’s
winter holiday rituals. Similarly, his delivery of presents to children aligned
with a newly emerging practice in 1820's New York, although the giving of
homemade gifts during the winter holidays appears to have begun by the late
1700's. Moore’s poem does not explain why children are receiving presents on
Christmas, although they clearly have the expectation of receiving special
treats (“visions of sugar plums danced in their heads”).
Understanding why giving gifts to children (and by
gradual extension, to adults) became part of this new Christmas tradition
requires an expansion of Nissenbaum’s story. The Battle for
Christmas focuses on the tensions between New York’s elites
and its working classes, but during this same period, a middle class began to
emerge in New York and other northern cities, and the reinvention of Christmas
served their purposes as well.
Like their wealthier contemporaries, middle-class
families worried about what rapid population growth and expanding market
capitalism would do to their children—particularly because an expansion of goods
and services on offer was reducing young people’s household responsibilities at
a time when alternative pathways to adulthood, such as public education, had yet
to emerge.
In response to the increasing uncertainty surrounding
this stage of life, urban families that aspired to prepare their children for
life in the middle and upper ranks of American society widely adopted new
strategies for child-rearing. As work and home became increasingly separated for
these families, parents kept children within the home (or at church or in
school) as long as possible in order to avoid what many of them perceived as the
corrupting influences of commerce on kids’ inchoate moral character. Elites’
efforts to domesticate Christmas aligned neatly with these parents’ interests,
for they encouraged young Americans to associate the joys of the holiday with
the morally and physically protective space of home.
Meanwhile, even if parents were concerned about
commercial influences outside the home, they were not bothered by the idea of
letting children’s commodities into it, in limited doses. In the 1820's, an
American toy industry began to emerge, and American publishers started producing
books and magazines for children. (The first three self-sustaining children’s
magazines in U.S. history debuted between 1823 and 1827.) Much of the initial
demand for these items reflected parents’ recognition of the instructional power
of consumer goods. As an 1824 review of the evangelical children’s magazine
The Youth’s Friend noted,
Let the Youth’s Magazine be called his own paper, and how
will the juvenile reader clasp it to his bosom in ecstacy [sic] as he takes it
from the Post-Office. And if instruction from any source will deeply affect his
heart, it will when communicated through the medium of this little
pamphlet.
If early 19th-century newspaper ads promoting bibles as
children’s Christmas gifts are any indication, parents during this era seem to
have retained a similar focus on delivering spiritual value to their children.
After the Civil War, the spread of consumer products in American cities made it
increasingly difficult to control children’s access to toys, books, and
magazines, so in order to keep young people at home, parents gradually
acquiesced to purchasing products intended to amuse as well as instruct their
offspring.
Postbellum Christmas traditions followed this broader
trend by becoming more child-focused, particularly through the reconstructed
image of St. Nicholas. Clement Clark Moore’s St. Nick was an elf who was jolly
but also a bit scary (as indicated by the narrator’s repeated reminder that he
had “nothing to dread”).
During the 1860's, the cartoonist Thomas Nast created a
new image of Santa Claus that replaced this ambiguous figure with a warm,
grandfatherly character who often appeared with his arms full of dolls, games,
and other secular toys. One of the earliest publications in which Nast’s Santa
figure appeared was the December 1868 issue of the magazine
Hearth and Home.
Christmas gift-giving, then, is the product of
overlapping interests between elites who wanted to move raucous celebrations out
of the streets and into homes, and families who simultaneously wanted to keep
their children safe at home and expose them, in limited amounts, to commercial
entertainment. Retailers certainly supported and benefited from this implicit
alliance, but not until the turn of the 20th century did they assume a proactive
role of marketing directly to children in the hopes that they might entice (or
annoy) their parents into spending more money on what was already a
well-established practice of Christmas
gift-giving.
In the nearly two centuries since New
Yorkers instigated the invention of today’s Christmas rituals, American families
have invested gift-giving and other widely practiced holiday traditions with
their own unique meanings. Identifying the origins of these rituals as
historical rather than eternal reinforces their power to do so.
Scott Olson via Getty Images
Les Zaitz/The Oregonian via AP 
Mike Blake/Reuters 
