“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
The night was a flash point of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ history
New Year’s Eve in downtown San Francisco, Dec. 31, 1964.Barney Peterson/SF Chronicle via Getty Images
By Timothy Karoff, Culture ReporterJan 13, 2025 (SFGate.com)
A building on Polk Street has a problem. California Hall, which sits on the corner of Turk and Polk streets, blends in with the other boxybrick buildings that crowd the neighborhood. It looks ornate and vaguely historic, but so do most old Tenderloin buildings. It was built in the 1910s as a meeting hall for Polk Street’s German community; in the 1960s it served as a concert venue (the Grateful Dead played there in 1969); now, it’s part of the campus of Academy of Art University.
California Hall’s issue, according to local historians and activists, is that it’s missing a plaque.
The building was the site of a forgotten flash point of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ history — a moment when a group of Protestant ministers struck up an unlikely but rock-solid alliance with San Francisco’s gay and lesbian communities. On New Year’s Eve, 1964, a dance and drag ball at the Hall ended with a police raid and arrests, which spun into a legal battle involving the ACLU. Before the Stonewall riot galvanized the gay liberation movement in 1969, and before the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in 1966, the California Hall raid shone a light on police harassment of LGBTQ+ communities. In a 2023 article on the raid, the Guardian declared it “San Francisco’s Stonewall.”
Police arrested the lawyers who attempted to bar them from entering the ball.Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
“It was one of the earliest instances of a police raid against the queer community,” Shawn Sprockett, who gives walking tours on San Francisco’s queer history, told SFGATE. Sprockett’s tour of the Tenderloin and Polk Gulch includes a stop at California Hall. Rarely, if ever, do participants know of the event’s pivotal role in the city’s LGBTQ+ history.
Before the Castro became San Francisco’s official unofficial gay capital, Polk Gulch and the Tenderloin were hot spots for the city’s LGBTQ+ subcultures. In the ’60s, gay bars lined the streets, and on weekends locals would gather to drink and dance. It was a time when discrimination was rampant, and the Polk/Tenderloin area was subject to frequent police harassment. Plainclothes officers attempted to entrap gay men at bars, or barge in and arrest couples dancing together. One Tenderloin bar hung up a sign advertising this discrimination as part of its weekly programming: “The Chuckkers famous for its unusual entertainment now presents police harassment! Every Fri & Sat.”
In that same period, Bay Area church leaders had a problem of their own. Protestant churches struggled to make inroads among young San Franciscans, and several churches sent ministers to the city to figure out why. Methodist Rev. Ted McIlvenna was one of them. He left his parish in Hayward and began doing outreach with Glide Church. There, he gained acquaintances in the city’s gay and lesbian communities, and even went barhopping through the Tenderloin to better understand the scene.
Rev. Ted McIlvenna is seen at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality on Thursday, Feb. 14, 2013, in San Francisco.Lea Suzuki/SF Chronicle via Getty Images
“We got to be known in all the gay bars,” McIlvenna recalled in “Lewd and Lascivious,” a documentary about the California Hall raid. “They called me the gay priest of Fairyland for a while, which I got a kick out of.”
In 1964 McIlvenna, along with lesbian activists Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin and several other ministers, formalized their friendship by launching the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, a group dedicated to facilitating understanding between the church and San Francisco’s gay and lesbian populations. Shortly after CRH was established, it did what any new group of friends would do: It planned to throw a party. The Mardi Gras-themed New Year’s Eve dance would be held in a beautiful old building with around 600 guests, serving as a fundraiser for the new group. Ministers could mingle with drag queens; clergy and their wives could dance next to pairs of lesbians and gay men.
There was only one snag: They needed a permit from the police department. CRH ministers marched to the police station to argue their case, but negotiations began poorly.
When attendees arrived at the ball, police photographers were stationed by the entrance.Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
As McIlvenna recalled in the documentary: “The first thing they [the police] said to me when I walked into that meeting, the man said, ‘Do you believe that masturbation is a sin against God?’ And I said, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding.’”
“At some point, one of them pounded on the desk … and said, ‘If you’re not going to uphold God’s law, we will,’” Phyllis Lyon, CRH member and co-founder of the lesbian activist group Daughters of Bilitis, recalled in the documentary.
In spite of the shaky start, CRH finally received its permit. (The group would have to meet with the police two more times.) Better yet, the police promised not to interfere with the ball. They did not honor this promise.
When the big night arrived, participants noticed a police van parked across the street and police cars stationed at the corners of the block. Police photographers by the Hall’s entrance snapped photos of attendees as they walked in, some of whom were in full drag.
“Imagine you’re in drag, you’re not out to your co-workers,” Sprockett said. “Now your photo’s getting taken by the police. You don’t know where that’s gonna end up. So it was definitely like an intimidation tactic to scare people from going inside.”
The intimidation didn’t stop participants from dancing.Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
The intimidation didn’t stop celebrants from dancing. In “Lewd and Lascivious,” Jon Borset recalls meeting another man named Konrad Osterreich, from Los Angeles, and hitting it off: “We spent some time together, drinking and getting to know one another and dancing.” At its peak, around 600 attendees had gathered in the hall, making it one of the largest gatherings of LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco’s history up to that point.
Two lawyers, Herbert Donaldson and Evander Smith, were stationed at the entrance of the hall. When police came to the door asking to inspect the building’s entrances they acquiesced. When the officers asked to enter the ball, they refused them.
“Evander and I looked at each other and I remember saying, ‘God damn it, no. If you’re going to come in, you’re going to come in with a search warrant,’ Donaldson said in the documentary. “And then, all of a sudden, it seemed like the entryway filled up with police.”
The police entered the hall, some plainclothes and some uniformed. One man in street clothes interrupted Borset and Osterreich while they were dancing, and asked them to follow him outside. When they stepped out onto the sidewalk, he arrested them.
In court, an SFPD inspector claimed that he showed up at the ball with 15 officers and two police photographers “just to inspect the premises.”Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
As police raided the hall, attendees raced to leave. One minister walked drag queens to their limo, holding up his coat to block the views of police photographers. Another, Rev. Chuck Lewis, ran to his apartment in North Beach to retrieve his camera, then back to Polk Street to take flash photos of the police raiding the ball. To keep the photos from being confiscated, CRH member Joanne Chadwick stuffed them in her bra.
For John Brett of the San Francisco Night Ministry, this was an especially illuminating gesture. “Just as much as people attending the dance wouldn’t want their pictures to be published given the oppression … of the time, the police didn’t want their pictures taken either,” he told SFGATE. “Because then it would make their future raids and activities against the queer community and other communities more difficult.”
When the dust had settled, police had made six arrests: Conrad Osterreich, also reported as Konrad, and Jon Borset, who were arrested for dancing together; Nancy May, who took tickets; and attorneys Herbert Donaldson, Evander Smith and Elliott Leighton.
Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Methodist Church at press conference, Feb. 13, 1974.Dave Randolph/SF Chronicle via Getty Images
In the following days, the raid turned into a PR disaster for the San Francisco Police Department. None of the seven ministers at the event, among them Rev. Cecil Williams, was arrested, and the next day, they called a press conference in protest of what they described as “bad faith” on the part of SFPD.
SFPD’s legal efforts floundered as well. A lawyer from the ACLU represented Smith and Donaldson, who were tried for interfering with police. In the courtroom, Inspector Rudy Nieto of SFPD’s Sex Detail claimed that he showed up at the ball with 15 officers and two police photographers “just to inspect the premises,” prompting ministers and their wives who were present to break out into laughter. The next day, the judge presiding over the case asked the jury to rule not guilty: “It’s useless to waste everybody’s time following this to the finale.”
Later that year, Donaldson, Smith, Leighton and May filed a suit against the city of San Francisco and 20 members of the police department, including the chief, for $1,050,000 in damages for the violation of their civil rights.
Gay activists, drag queens and ministers and their wives intermingled at the ball.Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
At the time, the raid made a splash. Although the fallout exposed police harassment, its legacy faded in the intervening years. In San Francisco’s historical memory, the California Hall raid underwent the reverse maneuver of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. That incident, once nearly forgotten, now has reemerged as a canonical event in San Francisco’s trans history. The Tenderloin Museum even produces an interactive play inspired by the event. And, of course, there’s a plaque designating the building that once hosted the cafeteria.
All of which takes us back to California Hall’s problem. It’s missing a plaque.
Although the building doesn’t yet bear any historical distinction, locals are commemorating the raid on their own. On Jan. 1, 2025, Brett, Sprockett, and several others gathered outside the hall to mark the raid’s 60th anniversary. A small group stood together, reading stories from that night before holding a moment of silence.
Phyllis Lyons and Del Martin, founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, outside their home in Noe Valley in San Francisco, March 3, 1989.Eric Luse/SF Chronicle via Getty Images
They plan to return next year on New Year’s Day, Brett said, and again every year from then on. He expects the next commemoration to be grander, with a parade of drag queens marching down Turk Street. In the meantime, they’ll keep lobbying for a plaque.
“The clergy members and their wives stood up and gave validation to the queer community as allies … so that the queer community could stand as pride in spaces where they were previously unwelcomed. It was a type of capacity building that everyone benefited from,” Brett said. “And we can take inspiration by keeping these stories alive.”
Each of the five books discussed in this essay deals with what Jeanna Smialek calls the “modern era” of American central banking, wherein the Federal Reserve became the country’s preeminent macroeconomic policy institution, charged by law with working to maintain “maximum employment but also slow and stable inflation” as Smialek puts it. More precisely, in the language of the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act: “full employment… balanced growth… and reasonable price stability.”
Only one of the five is by a participant in the forging of the Fed’s modern era, and that is a brief treatment in a personal memoir by Jane D’Arista. D’Arista describes the long campaign for central bank accountability – “Patman’s chess game,” his staff called it – waged by Rep. Wright Patman (D-TX), chair of the House Banking and Currency Committee, and his successor from 1975 to 1980, Rep. Henry Reuss (D-WI). Reuss capitalized on reformist sentiment following the 1974 Watergate election to advance House Concurrent Resolution 133, requiring quarterly appearances by the Chair of the Federal Reserve Board – Arthur Burns at the time – before the Banking Committees of the House and Senate, and specifying (more-or-less) precise questions for that testimony to address. It was from the practice of these hearings, refined over several years, that the statutory language of section 108 of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, dealing with monetary policy, emerged.
In their important 2017 book, Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel give the best account I’ve seen of the history of congressional oversight of the Federal Reserve. They make the indisputable point that under the Constitution, Congress carries the ultimate burden of specifying monetary policy and thus authority over the central bank. This legal reality stems from the fact that the Federal Reserve is a creation (and a “creature”) of Congress, a statutory body as the executive and judiciary are not. The design of the Federal Reserve, with its twelve regional banks spread across the country according to the developmental patterns of the Railroad Age, was a congressional confection. It was intended, as Robert Hockett shows in his massive inquiry into original purposes, as a bulwark of decentralized industrial and commercial finance for economic development and common prosperity. Thus the Federal Reserve has been “under Congress” from the beginning, and Congress has shaped and reshaped the Federal Reserve periodically since 1913. The Fed depends on Congress in a way that (say) the European Central Bank does not depend on the European Parliament.
But this reality elides a parallel reality, which is that the Federal Reserve’s leadership has only sometimes acknowledged the constitutional and legal position. Before 1975 Burns and his predecessors largely disdained Congress (and enjoyed important congressional support in so doing). After the early 1980s, the Fed’s leadership under Alan Greenspan turned “congressional oversight” to their advantage, making the regular hearings into a stage set for monetary dicta. As Leah Downey relates, in the 2000s, under Ben Bernanke, the Fed set out to rewrite the congressional mandate by elastic use of language, to suit the macro-theoretic fashions of that moment. Congressional oversight requires overseers with confidence and competence, and these are historically exceptional. Hence the Patman-Reuss era takes on a special significance, all the more so in view of the fact that the institutional framework they put in place has now endured for fifty years.
Before H.Con.Res. 133 the Federal Reserve had few fixed duties to Congress. It fell only loosely under the Employment Act of 1945, and had been freed of direct obligation to support the price of Treasury bonds by the “Accord” of 1951, which had (as Binder and Spindel report) the strong back-channel backing of the Senate’s then-leading (and perhaps only) economist, Senator Paul Douglas (D-IL), chair of the Joint Economic Committee and a man whose name still haunts students via the infamous “Cobb-Douglas production function.” Practically the only bearing of Congress on Fed operations was through the appointment power, restricted to the Senate and applying only to the seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board, not to the twelve Presidents of the regional Fed banks. Once confirmed, Fed officers needed have little further contact with Congress unless they wanted new legislation (or to oppose some congressional initiative), and apart from that, the House had no leverage to speak of.[1] For this reason, Patman had resolutely pursued his goals of making the Fed subject to audit and placing it under the budget, but without success.[2] H.Con. Res.133, and its inauguration of regular hearings to evaluate specified macro- and monetary objectives, was therefore a substantial step in the right direction.
Monetary Policy and Economic Theory from 1945 to 1975
Although accounts of this period tend to emphasize the institutional and political developments, along with intermittent struggles over power and policy, crucial context can only come from a review of intellectual and theoretical perspectives as they evolved at that time. By 1975, the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt had been over for thirty-five years, and the mobilization that had produced victory in World War II for thirty. Veterans of that period were still in senior roles on Capitol Hill, and a few policy warriors of the 1940s, notably Leon Keyserling and Bertram Gross, were still active in the corridors. These people tended to see government and economy as an integrated whole, with an expansive role for public purpose specified by legislation and executed by public administration. They saw business and labor (ideally, not always in practice) as partners in a common national project, and finance – the big bankers – as competitors with democratic institutions for power. By 1975 their worldview was a fading force, overtaken in academic circles by postwar economic theory. It would enjoy a last hurrah with the drafting of H.R. 50, the Hawkins-Reuss bill, spur and predecessor of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act.
Postwar academic economics in America had been dominated by a school variously described as neo-Keynesian, the neoclassical synthesis, or simply, the New Economics. Based mainly at MIT but with tentacles throughout the leading departments, and a lock on the textbook market, this school advanced what Reuss called a “needle-valve” view of economic management, centered on fiscal and monetary measures, operating on a market system according to certain statistical relationships which were supposed to have structural significance. Of these, the two most important were Okun’s Law, relating the growth rate of GDP to the rate of unemployment, and the Phillips Curve, relating unemployment to inflation. Other regulatory interventions – antitrust, labor, and environmental standards – were admitted, but considered secondary. The key to the setup lay in the assumption that the key “laws” could bear the weight of policy interventions, with unmolested markets adjusting to deliver predictable, efficient (and presumably, desired) outcomes. The economy could therefore be modeled as a system of (linear) equations on the newly developed computers of the time. This transformed the “macro-economists” in government into the pilots of a vast aeronautical machine, tasked with keeping it aloft, steady, and above all from stalling, diving, or crashing. The problem with this contraption, by the mid-1970s, was that it was clearly not airworthy. The question therefore was what would come next.
In the face of the recession of 1970, the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971, the first oil shock of 1973, and the deep recession of 1974, the leading academic challenge to the neo-Keynesians came from Milton Friedman and his Chicago acolytes, who sought to fix the jury-rigged structures of the neo-Keynesians by the simple device of (almost) abolishing them altogether. The problem was not the aircraft, its control system, its maintenance or its fuel. The problem was pilot error. The solution was not better pilots but to get rid of pilots – rules over discretion. Set an autopilot – a monetary control rule – Friedman argued, and the machine would fly level and indefinitely on its own. The implicit underlying metaphor was no longer a plane (which requires fuel and maintenance) but, say, a Zeppelin or perhaps a simple helium balloon. Other rules – balanced budgets, deregulation, Free Trade – might be concocted for other policy areas, but for central banking, monetary control was it. Friedman had stipulated an annual money growth rate between two and six percent, to allow for growth and minor inflation. His leading supporter in the Senate, William Proxmire (D-WI) had tasked the Federal Reserve with reporting by letter twice a year (if I recall correctly) on whether money growth (M1 for aficionados) had fallen within that range. It rarely did.[3]
House Concurrent Resolution 133 and the Hearings on the Conduct of Monetary Policy
My own direct engagement with these issues began with a message taped to the door of my rooms at Peas Hill Hostel, graduate housing overlooking the market square and belonging to Kings College Cambridge, on a cold evening in late January or early February, 1975. It instructed me to call Congressman Reuss collect by close of business Washington time. There was a pay phone in the basement. I had worked for Reuss the previous summer, on a subcommittee dealing with international economics of the Joint Economic Committee, leaving for Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship after botching a proposed amendment to the Export-Import Bank bill that would have stalled preferential financing for sales of the then-new Boeing 747, a monopoly product that (it seemed to me, aged 22) should have been bankable on commercial terms. Boeing and its many subcontractors were not amused and Reuss, having prevailed in markup, was obliged the next day to withdraw his amendment. I remember the guard at the Rayburn House Office Building, seeing my face as I walked to the committee chambers, saying, “It can’t be that bad.” I did not expect to hear from Reuss, who had just been elected to succeed Patman as Chair, but I returned the call, congratulated him, and was astonished to hear him invite me to be “chief economist” for the Banking Committee. I agreed a few days later to return in June but with no special title. “Staff economist” would do.
My colleagues on arrival that June included the Patman holdovers – among them D’Arista – a lawyer from the McGovern campaign, Bill Dixon, who later advised Gary Hart, a former associate research director at the Fed, Jim Pierce, his lawyer wife Mary Ann Graves, and an energetic, dogmatic, hard-core Chicago monetarist, Bob Weintraub, soon joined by another equally hard-core, Bob Auerbach. Both were Friedman students, both remained my friends for life – in Weintraub’s case until his early death in the 1980s, in Auerbach’s through a migration that led to an office next to mine at the LBJ School until his retirement in 2016 and death (at 88) early the next year. As a Cambridge (UK) Keynesian, however greenhorn, I was the odd person out in the trio. It was a curious menage, but good-humored and tremendous fun. The staff director, Paul Nelson, would call us to go see the Chairman: “Better hurry, Bob Auerbach is already talking!”
Our common ground, from the left-Keynesian that I was, to the mainstream Pierce and the two Friedman disciples, lay in a determination to crack the secrecy and obfuscation that shrouded Federal Reserve policy in mystery – a mystery, we suspected, intended to obscure the influence of the White House (notoriously, Nixon’s over Burns in 1972) and that of the major banks. Neither was likely to serve the public interest, which was for Congress – that is to say, ourselves – to define. We did not agree on how precisely to define it, but so much the better, that meant that we could ally across multiple perspectives and unite Members with strongly varying views. Transparency and clarity of objectives (and associated forecasts) could be common goals. The quarterly hearings specified under H.Con.Res. 133 created a venue for the pursuit of “government in the sunshine.” Monetary control objectives provided a format that could be specified in law without leaving the impression that Congress sought to dictate interest rate policy on a day-to-day basis.
The day before our first hearing, Pierce, Graves, Weintraub and I briefed the Democratic Members.[4] Our strategy was simple: to ask Chairman Burns, respectfully until he answered, to release the Board’s internal economic forecasts for growth, employment and unemployment, and inflation, consistent with the money growth projections he was already obliged to supply. Burns resisted until early afternoon, as Members took turns asking the question. Finally in response to one of the junior Members – it may have been Jim Blanchard (D-MI), a freshman and later Governor of Michigan – he relented to the extent of giving his “personal forecast.” At that point we asked whether his personal forecast was consistent with that of the staff and Board – and we had him. At future hearings, the question could be phrased as a request for “a personal view, consistent with the forecasts of the staff and Board” – or words to that effect. Soon enough the forecasts themselves were made public.
Binder and Spindel give an accurate account of the Fed’s early efforts to empty the money growth targets of any meaning – actually they never had much meaning – by rolling deviations into the base for projections made the next quarter. In this way the projections could be kept stable, whatever happened. We were not fooled, although it took some time to come up with the formula ultimately written into Sec. 108 of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. This specified semi-annual hearings, with the mid-year projections serving in part as a review of the accuracy of the forecasts made and targets set at the beginning of the year. Ultimately, the money-growth contraption fell by the wayside, as the financial system evolved (with, among other things, interest paid on checking deposits), and monetarism itself went out of fashion. What endured were the drift toward transparency in monetary policy, the use of the congressional hearings as the central forum for conveying policy intentions, and ultimately the direct statement of interest rate policy. Over time, Federal Reserve chairs became accustomed to dialogue with Congress, and the quality of these officials indisputably improved.
The Drafting of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act
What did not endure, but rather came and went over time, was the “dual mandate” – the statutory commitment of the central bank to “full employment” and “reasonable price stability.” The drafting committee that produced the language included Keyserling and Gross, and met periodically in the spring of 1976 in the offices of Augustus F. Hawkins (D-CA), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and a Member whose career dated back to Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty In California (EPIC) campaign of 1928. I was by far the youngest participant, representing Reuss, and the only one with significant interest in monetary policy. The New Deal/Truman era figures were planners. They envisioned an apparatus to guarantee employment, in the public sector if necessary, by setting and meeting social and industrial goals, through the federal budget. If there were credentialed macroeconomists in the group, they were early post-war neo-Keynesians for whom multiplier effects and budget deficits were the primary tools. Interest rates hardly mattered to them and monetary control, not at all. I had a relatively free hand on the substance of Section 108, which merely specifies the timing and format of reporting to the Banking Committees. To the senior draftsmen, this was a minor provision; otherwise, it’s unimaginable that a 24-year-old could have played the role that happened to fall to me.
When Hawkins-Reuss went over to the Senate, and Senator Hubert Humphrey signed on, his staff (largely at the Joint Economic Committee, which he then chaired) reworked the language, downgrading the planning provisions in favor of macro-econometric forecasting and goals in the neo-Keynesian style. It was at this point, I believe, that definitions of “interim targets” – “full employment” as four percent unemployment and “price stability” as three percent inflation – came to the fore. This approach in turn made Humphrey-Hawkins acceptable to the Brookings Institution economists then dominant at the Carter White House. The planners took what they could get and called it a victory. I wrote a critical essay, “Why We Have No Full Employment Policy,” my first publication, for Working Papers for a New Society, and did not attend the celebration dinner after the bill was signed. Most of Humphrey-Hawkins was a dead letter from the first day. And yet, the hearings on the Conduct of Monetary Policy went on. I would staff them for Reuss until he left the Banking Committee chair to take over the Joint Economic Committee at the start of 1981, taking me with him.[5]
Volcker and Congress in the 1980s Recessions
As an effective mandate for monetary policy, full employment was worse than still-born. The Humphrey-Hawkins Act preceded by about a year the appointment – by President Carter – of Paul A. Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve. Volcker soon embarked on a crusade to restore the international dollar, crush America’s industrial unions, and in the process drive down the inflation rate, whatever the cost. A brief recession in 1980, amplified by credit controls, cost Carter the election. A much deeper one followed in 1981-82, as short-term interest rates were driven above twenty percent and unemployment, in October 1982, above ten percent for the first time since before World War II. As Binder and Spindel relate, Volcker spun a smokescreen of “monetary targeting” to cover what was an extreme high interest rate and high dollar policy, setting the stage for four decades of US financial hegemony alongside industrial decline. Through it all, the Humphrey-Hawkins hearings endured.[6] Volcker, unlike Burns and far more efficiently than his short-tenured, well-meaning predecessor, G. William Miller, was patient and largely forthcoming in dialogue with Congress. He instructed Federal Reserve staff to prepare detailed responses to written queries from Capitol Hill, which I would draft for Chairman Reuss about six weeks before each hearing.[7] Constructive discourse and destructive policy went hand-in-hand.
As the slump deepened in 1982, Reuss and I sought ways to pressure Volcker and his colleagues to reverse course and bring interest rates back down. A new law was out of the question. But since the Federal Reserve was a “creature of Congress,” in principle it could be bound for the duration of the legislative session, legally if not necessarily enforceably, by a Concurrent Resolution (in the manner of H.Con.Res. 133). For this purpose, language on monetary policy could be placed in the budget resolution. But what should the language say? Binder and Spindel note that the two chambers introduced differing language and quote a congressional staffer as describing the effort as “a disaster.” But this misunderstands the situation, at least from my point of view.
The problem we faced was that any budget language on interest rates would face overwhelming criticism, even ridicule, from economists, the press, the White House and the Federal Reserve. The solution was to draft two resolutions. One, introduced in the House by Majority Leader Jim Wright (D-TX), called for lower long-term interest rates. The other, floated by Democratic Leader Robert Byrd (D-WV) in the Senate, called for lower real interest rates, somewhat vaguely defined. Possibly it was the other way around. From my perch at the JEC I had access to staff on both sides,[8] and I drafted both versions. Thus, when one was attacked the other could be waved around, leaving open the possibility that something might end up in the final resolution, once the two chambers got to conference. Sometime that summer, the legislative liaison for the Fed, Don Winn, made a trip to the Hill to ask what, in my view, might make that danger go away. I opined that if interest rates were to start declining the buzz would subside. Soon enough, they did. Cause and effect remains obscure in such matters, but our purpose was to worry the Fed staff and Board. In this, we succeeded.
From early 1983 inflation fell while GDP growth recovered, along with non-industrial employment, although overall unemployment remained high by all previous standards. These developments engendered two further responses within the economics profession. First, monetarism largely disappeared. With inflation down, money demand and money holdings soared, and the statistical relationship between money growth and inflation, the bedrock of Friedman’s argument, broke down. Bob Auerbach, the “honest monetarist,” changed his views and went off to do other things, eventually as an academic in California, returning later to investigate employment discrimination and other abuses at the Fed for Banking Committee Chair Henry B. Gonzalez in the Greenspan era. He would come to the LBJ School toward the end of the 1990s, aged about 70, to write and teach about the Federal Reserve for the rest of his life.
The second response was a kind of apologetics for high unemployment, the so-called natural rate doctrine or “Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment” (NAIRU) theory of the labor market. Originated by Friedman and E.S. Phelps in the late 1960s, this doctrine asserted an amazing fragility of the capitalist system – that any effort by government to reduce the unemployment rate would necessarily lead to not only to higher inflation, but to accelerating inflation, hyperinflation, and socio-economic collapse. There was, needless to say, never a shred of evidence that this was true. Prices and wages in advanced industrial economies are notoriously sticky, and hyperinflations are very rare. But you could prove the NAIRU’s existence with an assumption (about expectations) and a bit of algebra, starting with the traditional Phillips Curve relationship beloved of neo-Keynesians. The notion mesmerized economists, from center-left to extreme right, well into the 1990s, even as unemployment fell while inflation did not return.
The NAIRU concept gave license to the Fed to ignore the dual mandate, or more precisely to claim that “full employment” was any unemployment rate at which price stability prevailed. Thus monetary policy could and should focus on prices alone. As for Congress? Well, a Fed officer explained to Downey, Congress just got the economics wrong. It was a perfect triumph of dogma over law, dressed up as a triumph of science over superstition. And it had the added virtue that as inflation subsided, the Fed could claim credit for having mastered inflation expectations. And how, pray, did they do that? Why, by “forward guidance,” conveyed to Congress and declared to the public in the Humphrey-Hawkins hearings!
In this way Alan Greenspan converted a forum for the demonstration of congressional power into a cave of the Delphic Oracle – Greenspan himself – speaking in riddles and circumlocutions. Greenspan was a political celebrity and sometime consultant[10] with a PhD awarded by New York University for some previously-published articles, and then removed from their library and unseen – until after Bob Auerbach caught the whiff of academic scandal and wrote about it in a book. But he was affable and pragmatic, and he allowed unemployment to drift far below the estimated NAIRU, until by the late 1990s only fools and economists could still advance the construct with a straight face.[11]
Bernanke, Yellen, and the Return of the Dual Mandate
With the age of Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, the fully credentialed academic economist finally arrived at the helm of the Federal Reserve. And curiously enough, after a certain time, the dual mandate finally came into its own.
Bernanke is perhaps adequately described as a conventional economic ideologue clobbered by the real world. He grew up and prospered as a mainstream macroeconomist of the 1970s era, touched by monetarism, rational expectations, New Keynesian economics (not to be confused with the earlier version, neo-Keynesianism), and the NAIRU. All of this led him in the 1990s to the doctrine of “inflation targeting” – the idea that the central bank should focus on inflation, allow unemployment to reach its own level (“equilibrium in the labor market”) and seek price stability through credible projection and occasional manipulation of the Open Market Committee’s unique policy tool, the overnight interest rate on bank reserves.[12] Since with the demise of monetarism there remained no plausible link between money and prices, Bernanke was, perhaps without realizing it, a pure child of the Humphrey-Hawkins process. His instrument was psychological projection, from the congressional hearing room to the markets and the country and world beyond. It was a role for which as a modest and soft-spoken intellectual he was perhaps uniquely unsuited. But the press, accustomed to Greenspan, helped him out as much as they could. And he benefited from the larger reality (briefly acknowledged in Greenspan’s own memoir) that the decline and fall of the Soviet Union had inaugurated an era of low commodity prices, while the rise of China as a supplier of labor-intensive consumer goods put a ceiling on many other prices. That, plus the crushing of the industrial unions (and their associated industries) under Volcker, ensured that there was no inflation to fight.
It was under Bernanke, and his glib reassurances of a “Great Moderation” that would forever merge with Irving Fisher’s 1928 “stocks have reached a permanently high plateau” in the annals of foolish remarks, that US financial markets were swept by a vast wave of financial fraud, leading to the collapse of interbank lending in August 2007 and of the economy itself the following year. At this point, the Federal Reserve began to assert what Smialek calls its “limitless” power to buy assets no one else happens to want, flooding the banking system with cash, and – from early 2009 onward – paying interest on the cash! Since there was little deflation (outside of the fall of capital asset prices, which are by definition not part of current inflation or deflation), “inflation targeting” could hardly have justified trillions in such purchases. But with unemployment surging, the dual mandate easily covered the case.
It’s not that the Federal Reserve would not have acted without the full employment mandate. The European Central Bank, bound by charter to price stability first and foremost, went ahead and emulated the Fed. But the ECB had to lie about what it was doing. The Federal Reserve could invoke the 1978 law. From that point forward, under Yellen and Jerome Powell, her successor and the present Chair, the dual mandate regained an official respectability – which among economists, it had never enjoyed.
Conclusions: The Situation Now and What Could be Done
The Federal Reserve today is the most transparent of central banks – the absolute opposite of the institution that existed in 1975. Whereas then it pretended to hide its interest rate decisions in clouds of obfuscation and outright secrecy, today it announces them and also provides advance warning of future plans. The result in the public arena is roughly similar. In those days, the media went about guessing what the Fed had done; now it tries to read the tea-leaves of published remarks, hoping to find meaning in minor changes of wording or punctuation. The big difference is that fifty years ago the actions of the Federal Reserve mattered. Today, so far as the aggregate measures of the American domestic economy go, they do not.[13]
The difficulty facing the Federal Reserve now is neither Congress nor mandate, but the evanescence of the theoretical constructs on which the macroeconomic role of the central bank was founded. Neo-Keynesianism and monetarism died long ago. Inflation targeting, forward guidance, and expectations management had no effect on price increases in 2021-2022. Most surprisingly to the economists, Jerome Powell’s interest rate hikes, launched in March 2022, had no perceptible effect on growth or employment, hence no plausible role in bringing the inflation rate down. Monetary policy has become an empty set of rituals. When interest rates rise, the press reflexively reports that inflation is being fought; when they fall, the Fed is supporting growth and the labor market. But the gears are disconnected from the engine; the supposed causes no longer bear on the supposed effects.
The biting reality is that resource costs and global supply chains drive price increases. When inflation from these sources hits, some consequences are inevitable; others can be managed by direct actions – sales from storage, guidelines, even controls. Handing such problems to the central bank achieves nothing. In the era of interest payments on bank reserves, raising rates is a direct subsidy to the very rich, as well as a deterrent to loans for risky, long-term commercial, residential, and technical investments – including in low-profit-margin sectors like clean energy. If Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency wants to save real money in the federal budget, getting Congress to order the Federal Reserve to fix the federal funds rate at zero would be the right way to start.
What then should the central bank do? Jeanna Smialek tells of its limitless power to rescue the financial sector from its speculations. The other side of the same coin would be effective regulation to prevent the build-up of toxic speculations in the first place. That’s the necessary second step.
And then what? Robert Hockett points us back to the original purpose and structure of the Federal Reserve System, which was to ensure decentralized development and common prosperity across the entire country, through a robust system of directed credit administered by the twelve regional banks. Such systems have been the backbone of successful industrial and development policy everywhere in the world, including post-war Europe, post-war Japan, and modern China. They were also key to the rise of the United States in the twentieth century, when the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, founded under Herbert Hoover and vastly expanded by Franklin Roosevelt, superseded much of the private banking system and operated directly from the regional Federal Reserve Banks.
Biden’s industrial policy showed the drawbacks of attempting to revive industrial capacity without control of the credit system. Local control of infrastructure projects has meant a diffuse pattern of expenditures on roads, bridges, power lines, and suburban sprawl. Tax subsidies for energy and semiconductors mean that at the end of the day, corporations make the technical decisions based on their profit calculations and not on public purpose. The government cannot reach goals if it cannot effectively specify them and monitor progress toward their achievement. It cannot do this when the control of finance capital rests exclusively with private banks, still less if those banks are international in their outlook. The government either has the required instruments at its disposal, or it does not. Hockett tells us that it was for this purpose that the regional Federal Reserve banks were first designed.
The hope that this purpose might be revived is remote. But the opportunity to pursue it could be picked up by either party. Trump’s team may soon discover the limits of their tariff program and ask what else they might do. Or the Democrats, should they get serious about winning elections, and choose to break with the banks and move beyond Bidenomics, and not backward to the neoliberal globalism of Clinton and Obama. When pigs fly.
James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin. His new book, with Jing Chen, is Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production, just published by the University of Chicago Press.
Notes
[1] The position of the twelve presidents on the Open Market Committee, where they vote on interest rates, is in flagrant violation of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, a matter taken up by Reuss in a lawsuit styled as Reuss v. Balles. Balles was President of the San Francisco Fed and the first in alphabetical order of the twelve presidents. The lawsuit was pursued by a staff lawyer, Grasty Crews II, assisted by Bob Auerbach, and went through several permutations, being taken up by Senator Don Riegle (D-MI) and then John Melcher (D-MT) before finally being denied certiorari by the Supreme Court. No one ever contested the merits of the case; the various decisions (all adverse) were a tangle of standing issues.
[2] According to one story that I cannot now confirm, he (or possibly it was Henry B. Gonzalez, a later Chair and ally on these matters) once got the Fed to declare that its offices were in fact (tax-exempt) federal government buildings by persuading the District of Columbia government to send a property tax bill.
[3] Practically my first act on becoming Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee in early 1981 was to agree to a request from Don Winn, legislative liaison for the Fed, to discontinue the letters. I did not report this to Proxmire and no one ever noticed.
[4] I cannot recall whether Bob Auerbach was yet on board.
[5] In the fall of 1976, I went off to obtain a PhD in economics at Yale, but I returned to the Banking Committee part-time in late 1977, and took responsibility for preparing the monetary policy hearings, a task I relished, leaving New Haven in 1979 for the University of Maryland where I taught 1979-1980, while still working on the Hill.
[6] At one point the law lapsed, but it was soon restored – at the urging of the Federal Reserve.
[7] A notable exchange concerned the 1980 effort by the Hunt brothers to corner the market in silver.
[8] I was connected to Byrd through staff on the Senate Democratic Caucus, notably Richard Medley, who I had hired for a House Banking Committee study in 1980 and later recommended to Byrd’s staff. Richard went on to co-found The International Economy magazine, to help George Soros break the British pound in 1992, and then to found Medley Global Advisers.
[9] Greenspan’s support for the markets and economy, in the face of various crises, was known as “Greenspan’s Put.”
[10] At the JEC in 1981, Republican staff requested that we subscribe to Greenspan’s newsletter, perhaps instead of one of the econometric consulting services (Chase Econometrics, Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, Data Resources, Inc.) to which we were subscribing. I had no objections on ideological grounds but rejected the proposal partly on grounds of expense, mainly after reading a few samples and deciding that they were junk.
[11] In 1997 I published an article titled “Time to Ditch the NAIRU” in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Twenty-one years later the same journal was still noodling over the same construct, with a much-more-timidly-titled essay, “Should We Reject the Natural Rate Hypothesis?” by Olivier Blanchard, former chair of economics at MIT and former chief economist at the IMF. Blanchard did not reference my essay in his, even though he had published a paper in the same 1997 issue of the JEP.
[13] To be sure, rising interest rates in the United States still have powerful effects on the housing market, as higher mortgage rates drive down prices and depress construction. And they cause trouble outside the US for countries whose debts are denominated in dollars. As Smialek says, the Federal Reserve is central banker to the entire world – but the rest of the world has no representation at the Federal Reserve, and only a few countries, China first among them, have insulated themselves from its power.
Billionaire Elon Musk (C), co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), carries his son on his shoulders before a meeting with members of Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on December 5, 2024.
(Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images)
“We can offer views that are untainted by the appearance of corruption or self-dealing.”
Public Citizen co-presidents Lisa Gilbert and Robert Weissman on Monday requested to serve on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency “as voices for the interests of consumers and the public who are the beneficiaries of federal regulatory and spending programs.”
Shortly after Trump’s November victory, the Republican announced that he asked billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead DOGE, a presidential advisory commission that he said would work “to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Since then, numerous watchdog groups, Democratic lawmakers, and others have sounded the alarm about DOGE and its leaders, blasting the commission as a thinly veiled attack on federal programs—including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security—connected to the GOP trifecta’s effort to pass more tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations.
“Public Citizen has concerns about DOGE’s structure and mission,” the group’s co-presidents wrote to Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon, co-chairs of Trump’s transition team. “In structure, an advisory committee led by individuals such as Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy who hold financial interests that will be directly affected by federal budgetary policies presents substantial conflict of interest concerns that threaten to undermine public confidence in the committee’s recommendations to the administration.”
“Mr. Trump and OMB should take steps to ensure that DOGE’s advice and recommendations take into consideration the viewpoints of the consumers and citizens who would be directly affected.”
Musk, the world’s richest person, has leadership roles at companies including Tesla, SpaceX, and X. He has often been at Trump’s side in the lead-up to next week’s inauguration. Ramaswamy, who ran for president in the latest cycle before ultimately backing Trump, has founded a pharmaceutical company and an investment firm.
Gilbert and Weissman wrote that DOGE’s mission to advise the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) “on how to ‘slash excess regulation’ and ‘cut wasteful expenditures’ puts at risk important consumer safeguards and public protections, because it focuses only on eliminating rules and spending without considering the other half of the picture: more efficiently regulating corporations to better protect consumers and the public from harmful corporate practices, and making sound and efficient public investments.”
“In light of the significant influence that DOGE is expected to have on the administration’s fiscal and regulatory policy,” they argued, “Mr. Trump and OMB should take steps to ensure that DOGE’s advice and recommendations take into consideration the viewpoints of the consumers and citizens who would be directly affected by the regulatory and spending proposals that DOGE will advance, not only the viewpoint of wealthy businesspeople.”
The pair made the case that their appointment to the commission “would not raise conflict of interest concerns.”
Before Gilbert joined Public Citizen, she was an advocate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and worked as a campaign director to pass legislation on social justice and environmental issues for various organizations. Weissman previously directed the corporate accountability group Essential Action, edited the magazine Multinational Monitor, and worked as a public interest attorney at the Center for Study of Responsive Law.
“Unlike Musk, neither Rob nor I, nor Public Citizen, has a financial interest in federal government contracts and spending. In bringing the consumer and public perspective to DOGE, we can offer views that are untainted by the appearance of corruption or self-dealing,” Gilbert said in a statement.
Weissman emphasized that “all signs suggest the nonrepresentative DOGE co-chairs aim to use ‘efficiency’ as a cover to drive a pro-corporate, anti-regulatory agenda, and an ideologically driven social service cuts program. This would constitute an anti-efficiency agenda.”
“On the other hand, Lisa and I are prepared to offer a range of evidence-based efficiency proposals—to slash drug prices, end privatized Medicare, reduce the wasteful Pentagon budget—that would save American taxpayers and consumers hundreds of billions of dollars every year,” he explained. “We also have recommendations for smart, efficient public investments—in human development and to address climate change—that will have a positive monetary return for the government and society.”
As the letter highlights, Public Citizen—which “has worked to hold the government and corporations accountable to the people, including by focusing on research and advocacy with respect to regulation of health, safety, consumer finance, and the environment” since its founding in 1971—has already offered DOGE some recommendations.
“Consistent with Public Citizen’s mission—and that of DOGE—Public Citizen on December 20, 2024, sent Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy a letter proposing two measures that would save the government and taxpayers billions of dollars, while improving health and access to medicines: authorizing generic competition to anti-obesity medications and implementing the Medicare drug price negotiation and inflation rebate programs to lower drug prices,” Gilbert and Weissman wrote.
They also noted that appointing them to DOGE “would be an important step towards compliance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which requires ‘the membership of the advisory committee to be fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed by the advisory committee.'”
In addition to outlining concerns about Musk and Ramaswamy, they detailed that “DOGE member Katie Miller’s background is in handling press relations for government officials. William McGinley worked as a lawyer for various Republican Party groups and big law firms. Other people reported in the media as connected with DOGE also appear to have corporate backgrounds. These individuals lack the consumer and public interest perspective needed if Mr. Trump expects DOGE to have any hope of complying with FACA.”
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This screengrab shows a new ad from Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-founded group pushing for an extension of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax cuts.
(Photo: Americans for Prosperity/YouTube Screengrab)
“Don’t be fooled: What this Koch-backed group is really only after is protecting tax cuts for wealthy people like me,” said the chair of the Patriotic Millionaires.
But in a 60-second ad that debuted over the weekend, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) characterizes the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as a boon to “hardworking Americans” and small businesses—and warns that allowing provisions of the law to expire at the end of this year as scheduled would be disastrous for the working class.
“This year, Congress is facing a countdown to a crisis that threatens family budgets nationwide,” Ross Connolly, AFP’s regional state director, said in a statement Monday. “We are proud to partner with the incoming Trump administration to protect prosperity and ensure that Congress acts.”
AFP is a 501(c)(4) organization that describes itself as a “grassroots” movement despite being launched by Charles Koch and his late brother, David—two of the most notorious right-wing billionaire in U.S. politics.
The group said its new 50-state campaign represents “the largest effort by a conservative organization” to support President-elect Donald Trump’s legislative agenda as he prepares to take office next week. The campaign, according to AFP, will include “over 1,000 meetings” at congressional offices, “in-district events” with activists and lawmakers, and “roundtables with job creators.”
The campaign aims to “reach millions of voters on the phone and at their doorsteps,” AFP said.
“The Trump tax giveaways passed in 2017 did not help working-class Americans. In fact, the top 1% of corporations received almost all of the benefits.”
AFP’s description of the impacts of the 2017 tax law flies in the face of resounding evidence showing that wealthy Americans—not ordinary workers—were the chief beneficiaries and are poised to reap most of the rewards once again if Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress extend the measure’s soon-to-expire provisions.
“Americans for Prosperity is spending $20 million on a new ad campaign that champions the 2017 Trump tax law as a win for working families,” Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, told Common Dreams. “But don’t be fooled: What this Koch-backed group is really only after is protecting tax cuts for wealthy people like me.”
“I’m in favor of tax relief for working people, but not yet another huge and unnecessary windfall for America’s rich,” Pearl added. “If Congress wants to help working families, they should make tax rates on labor income the same as tax rates on profits made by investors.”
AFP is one of a number of right-wing, corporate-tied organizations pushing for an extension of the Trump tax cuts, which Republicans are planning to fund by slashing Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and other key programs.
The progressive watchdog group Accountable.US noted in a recent analysis that one of the groups pushing for an extension of the 2017 law is Advancing American Freedom, an organization “run by corporate consultants, lobbyists, lawyers, and executives, including former Trump administration officials who were directly responsible for the TCJA.”
Accountable also observes that Club for Growth, a group funded by wealthy conservatives, “has pushed a deeper corporate tax cut plan as an ‘opening salvo’ in the current tax debate.”
“The billionaire funders of the group’s action arm have benefited enormously from the TCJA, saving hundreds of millions of dollars from a single obscure tax break for pass-through entities,” the watchdog added.
In response to AFP’s new nationwide campaign, Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk told Common Dreams that “a glitzy ad campaign from a far-right organization won’t change the fact that the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress are paying for giveaways to billionaires, wealthy tax cheats, and price-gouging corporations by cutting critical services for working families, like Medicaid and SNAP.”
“The Trump tax giveaways passed in 2017 did not help working-class Americans,” said Carrk. “In fact, the top 1% of corporations received almost all of the benefits.”
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Last weekend, activists dressed as contractors replaced the banner outside the National Archives, demanding Biden publish the E.R.A.
Dear President Joe Biden,
It’s been three months since I sent you my suggested list of Executive Actions that you could take in your last weeks in office. A “Bucket List” so-to-speak filled with legal declarations to make the lives of your fellow Americans just a little bit better.
I am happy you took some of my advice. Thank you.
And thank you for commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on death row to life without parole. Thank you for pardoning 39 people and commuting the sentences of 1,500 others whose imprisonment would have been much shorter under today’s laws. I saw the news that medical debt will no longer affect the credit scores of at least 15 million Americans and their families. Though none of these are as far as I would’ve hoped you’d go, yes, it’s something.
But it’s not enough.
You are still president.
And you have nothing to lose. Literally, nothing.
So buck up, Joe, put your Scranton shit-kickin’ boots on and let’s get some good done in this, your final week.
Please start here:
PUT THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT FOR WOMEN INTO THE CONSTITUTION!
This is ridiculous that we even have to ask! The required 38th state ratified it in 2020 (Thanks, Virginia!). It’s the law of the land! But it can’t be enforced until it’s published by the National Archives — an agency of the Executive Branch, the one you run for the next 7 days. WAKE UP! It’s the LAST STEP. Make this YOUR legacy. You can be the one who got it done. For the majority gender of this country.
If you don’t, well…
Its fate will be in the hands of America’s Feminist in Chief, Donald John Trump.
In Trump’s first administration he blocked the ERA from happening in 2020. He’s vowed to employ scores of people associated with Project 2025 whose plan for the future of American women includes banning medication abortion, denying federal funding to states who want to expand abortion access, and changing our federal Health and Human Services Department into the “Department of Life” that’s actively against abortion, spies on pregnant women, and allows any healthcare providers to deny service or care based on their personal beliefs — including doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers. (That’s right. If you call 9-1-1 because you are actively miscarrying your pregnancy, the Project 2025 plan would legally allow the ambulance driver to refuse to drive you to the hospital if they suspect that by doing so, you will receive an abortion.) Trump appointed a Supreme Court that stripped women of the right to control their own bodies and granted permission to Christian fundamentalist state legislatures to enforce draconian anti-abortion laws in their states leading to the deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman, Candi Miller and others.
Trump is conniving and cruel. Ivanka will convince him that the way to “fix” his legacy regarding women will be to be known in history as the President who placed the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States Constitution. Joe, you’ve had four years to do what will take less than 3 minutes. Pretend I’m your priest. And the penance I’m handing you in order to make up for your sins against Anita Hill is to right now put down this Substack and take those 3 minutes to permanently enshrine the rights of all women into our Constitution. You’re not going to do it, are you? How do I know this? Let’s just say, I know your gender all too well. What a sad state of affairs it is.
PARDON LEONARD PELTIER.
What is the debate??? Seriously. The fact that Leonard Peltier has been held in prison by the DOJ and his parole board for 49 years is unforgivable. As HuffPost reports:
“There was never evidence that Peltier committed a crime, and the government never did figure out who shot those agents. But federal officials needed someone to take the fall and all of Peltier’s co-defendants were acquitted on grounds of self-defense. So, they settled on Peltier. His trial was riddled with misconduct: The FBI threatened and coerced witnesses into lying. Federal prosecutors hid evidence that exonerated Peltier. A juror admitted on the second day of the trial that she had “prejudice against Indians,” but she was kept on anyway. The U.S. government’s case fell apart after these revelations, so it just revised its charges against Peltier to aiding and abetting whoever did kill the agents ― based entirely on the fact that he was one of dozens of people present when the shoot-out took place.”
Even James Reynolds, one of the lead prosecutors in his case, has publicly apologized, calling the prosecution and incarceration of Peltier “unjust” and has asked for his immediate release.
Right this grave injustice TODAY. Before lunch.
And as your parting gift to the American people…
MAKE “ILLEGALS” AMERICANS.
Trump is less than one week away from enacting his mass exodus of Brown people from this country. Joe, do what you can to eliminate his opportunity, and throw up a shield: Anyone here illegally is forgiven! We have 9 million jobs that need to be filled and not enough Americans to fill them. Let them work. They will pay the taxes the rich aren’t paying. Potholes will be filled! New school buses will be purchased! Libraries will remain open on the weekends! Angry white men will hate you for this. Good. Maybe they’ll leave.
Millions and millions of Americans feel helpless to do anything about this, to save our friends and neighbors from what is coming — but YOU are not helpless, Joe. You have the power to DO SOMETHING — and the Supreme Court gave you immunity that was meant for Trump! USE IT! Before you lose it.
And as your parting gift to the world…
PULL THE PLUG ON ARMS AND MONEY TO ISRAEL.
Because it is the MORAL and RIGHTEOUS thing to do. Stop letting Netanyahu drive the out-of-control Ford F-150 down Gaza Blvd. He is not now, nor has he ever been, leading a crusade against Hamas. He is, and has been, enacting a plan prophesied by his Likud party charter (“Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”) that he put into action over a year ago when he asked his top advisor to draft plans to “thin” the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip “to a minimum.” The latest independent estimate published by the British medical journal, The Lancet, puts the true death toll in Gaza at 70,000 people. And, Joe, three of your high ranking State Department officials are among the 19 in your administration who have resigned over your slaughter in Gaza and gone public with the evidence, appearing on 60 Minutes this past Sunday night to call attention to your and Bibi’s war crimes.
I don’t know what the people around you are telling you, but I want to make clear exactly what your real legacy is going to be when you leave office. Please watch this searing and unexpected clip from Chris Hayes:
Yes, Joe, disgraceful indeed. Disgusting. Deplorable. And it’s true that any action you take this week will be too little and too late — especially for the 70,000 Palestinian civilians who’ve already been killed, most of them women, children and the elderly. But do it anyway. Seek redemption and save lives. I can tell you personally, from the Pope himself, whom I haven’t spoken to in six years, that your soul has no choice but to do the only thing that only you on this entire planet can do: Pull the plug. Tear up the blank check. Beg for God’s mercy.
You sir, are done. Use your last days in office to tell Netanyahu that he, too, is done. If it helps to hear this from me, and if you still want to protect the Israeli people, you will immediately, without equivocation, end this madness once and for all.
I won’t take up any more of your time.
Just f***in’ do it, Joe. You’ve got nothing to lose.
From the Gaza genocide to the LA fires the connection is about greedy capitalists and war mongers putting profiteering first no matter the cost. Politicians in the US who slash fire department budgets and greenlight destructive developments are the same ones who have voted to fund genocide. Meanwhile corporate media must be held accountable for its complicity with these interests and crimes.
The Trump victory in the 2024 election represents the complete failure of the Democratic Party to stop the rise of the ultra-right in both parties. Trump’s agenda is the culmination of this, and his administration will move to make major gains for the billionaire class at the expense of the millions of everyday workers in the US and across the world. We can defeat the Trump program by building an independent movement that cannot be ignored. Join us!
PEACE CENTER ACTIVIST ALERTWeek of January 13th MANY OPPORTUNITIES FOR ACTIVIS
M!
Monday, January 13th – 22nd10th Annual Week of Actionto RECLAIM MLK’S LEGACY! SCHEDULE FOR THE WEEK IS HERE Wednesday, January 15th, 2024, 11 AM. 14th and Broadway, Oscar Grant Plaza, Oakland 10th Annual March to Reclaim MLK’s Radical Legacy SPEAKERS & PERFORMANCES: We are honored to welcome performances and an exciting roster of speakers, including Linda Sarsour of MPower Change, Fredrika Newton, the co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Foundation, Oakland Poet Laureate Ayodele Nzinga, Malkia Devich-Cyril of Media Justice, Nicole Lee of Urban Peace Movement, and more. FRIDAY, JANUARY 17th, 10 – 11:30 AMONLINE TRAINING SESSIONSTAND TOGETHER CONTRA COSTA SUNDAY, JANUARY 19th, 1 PMSAN FRANCISCO CIVIC CENTER PLAZA
January 19th, the day before Inauguration Day, the people will come together to demand a future that centers the needs of the people over the interests of the wealthy elite. With voices raised for workers’ rights, immigrant rights, and environmental justice, we will call for an end to the genocide in Gaza, the U.S. war machine, and the rule of billionaires. This is just one of over a hundred cities and towns across the country where people will come together for a nationwide mobilization opposing Trump’s ultra-right, billionaire agenda. ENDORSING ORGANIZATIONS ARE FOUND HERE MONDAY, JANUARY 20th PUBLIC WITNESS, 10:30 – 11:30 AMCORNER OF CIVIC & BROADWAY, WALNUT CREEK then FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 1 – 3 PM1965 COLFAX STREET, CONCORD CELEBRATING Rev. Dr. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. with a day of HEALING, REFLECTION AND JUSTICE WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22nd, 7 PMLANEY COLLEGE, ROOM D200900 FALLON ST., OAKLAND
BOOK TALK AND PANEL DISCUSSIONTHURSDAY, JANUARY 23rd, 10 AM. TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE AIR BASE PARKWAY & PARKER ROAD, FAIRFIELD RALLY AT MAIN GATE TO SHUT DOWN WEAPONS SHIPMENTS TO GAZA SATURDAY, JANUARY 25th, 7 – 9 PMBerkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists1945 Cedar St., Berkeley PEACE GATHERING – NETWORKING and FUNDRAISING EVENTwith 14 ACTIVIST GROUPS! Organized by Humanist Mutual Aid NetworkFRIDAY, JANUARY 31st – MONDAY, FEBRUARY 2ndWEEKEND OF ACTIONBOYCOTT CHEVRON Chevron is currently supplying energy and millions of dollars in revenue to apartheid Israel, as it perpetrates a livestreamed genocide, bombing and starving 2.3 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip. In parallel, Chevron is destroying our planet. We anticipate that Chevron’s next earnings call will be around the weekend of January 31st – and Chevron needs to hear from you! Since the launch of the BDS Movement’s global Boycott Chevron campaign, tens of thousands of consumers have taken the pledge to boycott Chevron gas stations, dozens of groups around the world have led pickets at Chevron, Caltex, and Texaco gas stations, and at least 3 cities have divested from Chevron. Meanwhile, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth admits that Chevron’s gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean have been targeted in the escalating regional war thanks to Israel’s continued genocidal violence. Investing in genocide is not just unethical and illegal; it is also bad for business! GET MORE INFORMATION HERE! Informative readings/videos/podcasts: DIALOGUE WORKS: Interview of Pepe Escobar: Eurasia Rises as NATO’s Delusions Deepen DAVE DECAMP: Lancet Study: Gaza Health Ministry Undercounted Death Toll By 41%“A new study published in the British medical journal The Lancet found that the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip has significantly undercounted the number of Palestinians killed by Israel’s genocidal war.The study reviewed the period between October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024, and found there were 64,260 “traumatic injury deaths” in that timeframe. At the end of June 2024, Gaza’s Health Ministry said there were 37,877 dead, an undercount of about 41%.” DEMOCRACY NOW: “Tinderbox”: How Fossil Fuel Companies & Electric Utilities Intensified L.A. Wildfires, Climate Chaos“We speak with Leah Stokes, a researcher on climate and energy policy, who says the scale of the Los Angeles wildfires is a result of burning fossil fuels and destabilizing the planet’s equilibrium. “The ultimate driver here is climate change,” says Stokes. She says that as people begin to consider rebuilding their communities, they should think about how to build more resilient homes or whether the risk is simply too great in some areas. “Are these places where people really want to be building back at that same density, with that same risk?” she asks. “We do have to be asking tough questions because of the climate crisis, because we have not stopped burning fossil fuels, about where it is safer and less safe to be building back.” From last week…. DEMOCRACY NOW: Jimmy Carter Dead at 100:CHRIS HEDGES: Don’t Deify Jimmy Carter CBC Radio interview of Peter Beinhart, editor-at-large, Jewish Currents magazine DIALOGUE WORKS: Interviews of Colonel Larry Wilkerson and Jeffrey Sachs – Israel is DIGGING its Own Grave. IT WAS A BUSY YEAR!Thanks to the regular support of our members, other donors and fundraising events, we’ve managed to initiate and/or assist in the organization of a good number of important events and impactful programming.PEACE CENTER EVENTS FROM 2024 THAT MADE A DIFFERENCE! Now, more than ever, we must coordinate our community efforts towards making the world a more peaceful and safer place to live.WOULD YOU CONSIDER MAKING ADONATION TO THE CENTER?WE THANK YOU!ADDITIONAL ONLINE SOURCES FOR ACTIONS and INFORMATION ON PALESTINE/GAZA ARE YOU A UC ALUMNI? – ACCESS DIVESTMENT LETTER HERE!
World BEYOND War hasa DIVESTMENT campaign! About the CampaignGrassroots-led war divestment campaigns are springing up all over the world, from students organizing to divest university endowments, to municipalities and states coming together to divest public pension funds. Divestment means organizing to remove public and private assets from weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and war profiteers.Public pension and retirement funds especially are often invested, directly and indirectly, in weapons companies. Teachers and other public servants whose interests lie with promoting human needs have their retirement security tied up with maintaining or enlarging the war industry. Every dollar currently invested in weapons and war is a dollar that could be better spent on job creation, education, housing, healthcare, food security, and so much more.War profiteering is largely normalized today. We’re working to stigmatize the war machine. World BEYOND War assists divestment campaigns led by our chapters, affiliates, other coalitions, and individuals around the world. FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN HERE NOW WHAT???? The Frontlines event on May 4th was very powerful and emotional. FRONTLINE EVENT WAS REPORTED ON LOCAL NEWS! We heard from several attendees that they felt compelled to act in a meaningful way. Sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming… where do we start? In terms of direct aid going to Gaza specifically, we recommend Baitulmaal, who have been able to get aid in.The other organization we recommend is HEAL Palestine which is focused on rebuilding and rehabilitating Gaza. Its founders are the same founders of PCRF. There is also Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) which evacuates children who are in need of medical treatment abroad and Medical Aid for Palestinians which offers medical services to Palestinians in Palestine and Palestinian refugees in neighboring countries. For a full list of resources, you can access the document we put together: tinyurl.com/FrontlinesResources One thing we are asked to do, again and again, from the people in Gaza is to raise awareness about their situation. Talk to your nearest and dearest about the ongoing genocide. Remember, we all have a role to play and collectively, our small actions add up. Don’t give up, keep raising awareness, keep boycotting, keep donating, keep advocating, KEEP CALLING YOUR LOCAL REPS! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. – From the Frontlines Organization Team MORE UPDATES COMING SOON! WATCH THIS SPACE!
When I moved to Great Britain to study, I found the politics very exciting. The parliamentary system was different, so that new elections immediately led to new governments. The press was excellent but political, so that one could read the newspapers and be informed both of the facts and the sentiments. And, when reporting government policy, journalists always had an opposition voice to quote: members of the “shadow cabinet.”
Like so much else in British public life, the institution of the shadow cabinet was unfamiliar to me, but I soon grew to appreciate and admire it. The “cabinet,” of course, was the assembly of government ministers, led in Britain by the prime minister. The party in opposition (the Labour Party when I arrived in Britain in 1991) appointed its own leading members to “shadow” each government minister, including the prime minister.
Shadow meant follow. The shadow ministers “shadowed” the actual ministers, in the sense of following their every move, criticizing policy and offering alternatives. Importantly, the shadow minister was always available to offer commentary to the press on his or her area of expertise. This greatly enriched public life. At any point a journalist, and thus the public, had access to an alternative point of view, one which was both pertinently expert and politically relevant. Shadow ministers did not always become real ministers after the next elections, but often they did.
Four years ago today, Donald Trump led an attempt to overthrow a democratic election and thereby undo our constitutional system. In two weeks, the same man will be inaugurated president of the United States, this time with a centibillionaire as the unelected de facto head of government and with anti-qualified anti-patriots as his cabinet nominees. What to do? People talk about resistance, and about opposition. What forms should these take? I have written elsewhere about what citizens can do. Leading politicians of the opposition party, the Democratic Party in the United States, have a special responsibility, and also special opportunities. One of these is to form a shadow cabinet. I want to join the voices of those advocating for this. (Here I am speaking for the idea on television a few weeks ago.)Subscribe
In Great Britain, the shadow cabinet represents “the loyal opposition.” The loyalty in question is to the state and to its head, the monarch. In the United States, a “loyal opposition” would be loyal to our Constitution — and, indeed, that could be the basis of its activity. We face the unusual situation of a government — a president and his cabinet — who seem indifferent to the rule of law itself. By beginning from the principle that we have a government of laws, not men, a shadow cabinet would reinforce the American way of politics. It would be a very good thing to have a constitutional lawyer or two on the shadow cabinet.
And a shadow cabinet would remind us of how much better things can be. The regular reactions of its members to Musk-Trump would flow from different sense of politics and policy. That is material that the press needs, and that we all need. As Trump and his cabinet undertake their unpredictable whorl of destructive policy, journalists and others will be at a loss as to what to say. The worse things get, the harder it is to think of an alternative. As time goes by, the chaos of Musk-Trump might seem like the only possible reality. That, of course, will be the goal of the new regime: to persuade us that government just means dysfunctionality, spectacle, and repression. At every moment, members of the shadow government can remind us what government could instead be doing, positively, for the people. They are there to remind us that a better America is always possible.
Under Musk-Trump, every attempt will be made to make oligarchy, rule by the wealthy few, seem normal. The deeds of billionaires will be justified by the very fact that they are billionaires. Their own rise to the top of American politics will be celebrated as the success of everyone. Musk’s basic idea is that we should all suffer and thank him for our suffering. A shadow cabinet will help here as well. Simply by virtue of not being oligarchic, shadow cabinet members remind us of the variety of Americans and the variety of their perspectives. Their proposals will show that we could act together on behalf of the interests of the people, broadly conceived. Oligarchy is incompatible with democracy, and a shadow cabinet will remind is of the difference.
Trump and Musk admire and emulate foreign dictators and fascists. Under Musk-Trump, we will be told daily that authoritarians are better than elected leaders, and that far-right parties should be in power everywhere. Trump admires Putin and Xi and Kim Jong-Un, but both China and Russia have deep problems, not to speak of North Korea. The far-right leaders Musk supports in around the world have disastrous programs. There is no reason for the United States to be following the lead of foreign failures and foreign fascists. A shadow cabinet will remind us of this. Members of a shadow cabinet, simply by doing their jobs, will help us to see that there is nothing inevitable about government by the very rich and the very wrong.
The essential point is that a far better America is possible: not just better than oligarchy or dictatorship, but better than we can presently imagine. Members of a shadow cabinet would also represent that better America in their own persons. Trump’s actual cabinet, even if some of his nominees are not confirmed, will be corrupt and incompetent on a truly historical scale. He had competent Republicans to choose from, and he neglected them. The Democrats have a huge amount of charismatic talent waiting in the wings. As members of a shadow cabinet, they would have a daily platform to show their stuff. They could also remind us what a cabinet is supposed to be: a form of service to the American people.
Having a shadow cabinet would help to establish a new, and better, rhythm to American politics. The shadow ministers would make politics a daily reality, but in a positive sense. As things stand, we obsess about elections, announce some kind of new era, and then wait to see what happens. This time around, waiting could be fatal. Even in the best of situations, this is not the best way to proceed. A shadow cabinet would change the way that politics in American works and feels. It would generate not just critique and warnings but new ideas and visions. It would mean that each coming election would be about improvement.
A shadow cabinet will also be of huge service to the press, as I noticed back in Britain. When the government does something outrageous, the government always gets to set the tone. It will be hard for journalists to be ready for every shocking moment. Without recourse to readily available political expertise, journalists will be reduced to writing that “critics say” or “critics counter.” But what if “the critics” had names and faces and expertise and ambitions and political responsibility? Members of a shadow cabinet would be there to comment on all the Trump outrages, not just with expressions of outrage or hasty warnings, but with specific knowledge and plausible alternatives.
More than this — the members of the shadow cabinet should assert themselves in the media environment. They should not wait for journalists to ask them; they should set the tone of the debates themselves. They should have a mass format by which they can not only sound the warning bells but get across their own positions and advance their own policies — podcasts, for example. A few of them will likely become very popular — the Democrats have some fantastic communicators, including some (soon-to-be) former members of Biden’s cabinet, members of Congress, and governors. The American Right now dominates the internet, in part because of how social media is organized, in part thanks to the big podcasts, in part thanks to Musk’s explicit bias on Twitter. A shadow cabinet could help re-establish balance here, while offering a different tone: one of creative solutions and citizen solidarity.
To be sure, there are some open questions. If we had such an institution in America, should we call it a “shadow cabinet” or something else? I use the term that is familiar from British (and other parliamentary) usage. Perhaps though it sounds too much like “deep state”? Do you have any better ideas (please leave them in the comment section)? Who should be on the shadow cabinet, and in what capacity? Should there be a shadow president or should that be left aside? In Britain, the leader of the main opposition party would become the prime minister if his or her party wins, but here we do not have a leader of the party in the same sense. So who should decide who is in the shadow cabinet (whatever we decide to call it)?
I raise these questions not because the problems are insuperable — on the contrary, they could be addressed by a serious group of a few Democrats in a few days. Candidates to be chair of the DNC should be talking about how this could be done. I mention the relevant issues because I believe this institution of opposition is something that Americans need and deserve. Only a minority voted for Trump. Harris’s policies, not Trump’s, were more popular. No one voted for Musk, and he is now the leading figure in American politics.
We are facing a moment when much will change for the worse, not just in policy, but in the structure of politics itself. We need to be imagining a better America. Some of this work can be done by individuals with ideas and by activists with organizations. But an essential part of this labor must be done by leading politicians through institutions — old and new, borrowed and improved.
Great Britain, my home for a few years in the early 1990s, has passed through some rough periods since then, especially since the Brexit referendum of 2016, which led to a depressing departure from the European Union. That referendum was an event very much like the first election of Donald Trump: at the same moment, unexpected, internet-driven, supported by Russia. But Britain, of course, always had a shadow cabinet. There was always, at the darkest and dumbest of times, an alternative team. Over there, in the United Kingdom, that alternative team, much of what was once a shadow cabinet, is now in power. That system can work. We should try it.
From the poisoned rivers, barren wells, and clear-cut forests, to the hundreds of thousands of farmers who have committed suicide to escape punishing debt, to the hundreds of millions of people who live on less than two dollars a day, there are ghosts nearly everywhere you look in India. India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product.
Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism has subjugated billions of people to the highest and most intense forms of racism and exploitation.
Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer who is also an activist who focuses on issues related to social justice and economic inequality. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays.
For her work as an activist she received the Cultural Freedom Prize awarded by the Lannan Foundation in 2002.
If you and I haven’t met yet, my name is Josh Weil. I’m a public school teacher and proud Democrat running in the Special Election for Florida’s 6th Congressional District—the first major election of 2025.
Here’s the bottom line: I’m a proud teacher who has always encouraged my students to seek knowledge anywhere they can find it. Meanwhile, my MAGA Extremist opponent is a proponent of Florida’s DISASTROUS book bans. The difference couldn’t be more stark.
I’ve spent my career in classrooms, working with at-risk youth and fighting to give every student a chance to succeed, no matter their background. But now, I’m running for Congress to take that fight to Washington—because my opponent has built his career on taking opportunities away.
My opponent is a vocal supporter of book bans and other extreme MAGA policies designed to stifle free thought and limit opportunities for kids like the ones I’ve dedicated my life to teaching. This isn’t just a policy disagreement—it’s about the world we’re leaving for the next generation. I’m running because I believe our democracy is worth fighting for, and because our kids deserve a future free from MAGA censorship and fear.
This is going to be an uphill battle, but recent special elections have shown that Democrats can win when we work together.
The protest of the Healthcare Convention that’s listed on the IndyBay website says that it’s at the St. Francis Hotel (at 4:00 pm on January 13) — see: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2024/12/that30/18871799.php Health Care Conference J.P. Morgan https://www.jpmorgan.com › events-conferences › healt… The 43rd Annual Healthcare Conference will take place on January 13-16, 2025 in San Francisco, CA. This premier... Continue reading →
You are invited. Topic: How did Florida create a Medicare for All campaign? Yes, Florida. When: Tuesday, January 14, 2025, 5:00-6:30 p.m. PT (8:00-9:30 ET). How: Zoom, register here. Speaker: Stephan Ramdohr, chair Medicare for All Florida Learn how activists in Florida: put on an annual Medicare for All virtual town hall event... Continue reading →
The protest of the Healthcare Convention that’s listed on the IndyBay website says that it’s at the St. Francis Hotel (at 4:00 pm on January 13) — see: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2024/12/that30/18871799.php Health Care Conference J.P. Morgan https://www.jpmorgan.com › events-conferences › healt… The 43rd Annual Healthcare Conference will take place on January 13-16, 2025 in San Francisco, CA. This premier... Continue reading →
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2023 AT 2 AM – 4 AM PDT How to create trust in a group? Details Event by Extinction Rebellion Empathy Circles online EMPATHY CAFE Duration: 2 hr Public · Anyone on or off Facebook How to create trust in a group? This is the question that arose in our... Continue reading →
The protest of the Healthcare Convention that’s listed on the IndyBay website says that it’s at the St. Francis Hotel (at 4:00 pm on January 13) — see: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2024/12/that30/18871799.php Health Care Conference J.P. Morgan https://www.jpmorgan.com › events-conferences › healt… The 43rd Annual Healthcare Conference will take place on January 13-16, 2025 in San Francisco, CA. This premier... Continue reading →
Love Is Our Armor: A Music-Filled Fundraiser for the Anti Police-Terror Project Thursday, January 16, 2025 • 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM BAM House • 1540 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94612 PURCHASE YOUR TICKETS HERE TODAY! I will be hosting and we will convene at BAM House, a “Black culture driven... Continue reading →
Happy New Year, We kick off 2025 with a review and remembrance of the Border as the new Trump Administration is ready to take office. We plan to have a speaker to address this issue in our discussion afterwards. Please be advised that it will be screened virtually and... Continue reading →
We hope you found time over the holiday break to rest and recharge — ready to meet the challenges of 2025 and the critical fights ahead. We are preparing for the first mobilization of the year in Washington, DC and want to make sure that you have the information necessary to... Continue reading →
Intro Empathy Café: Find out how to listen to others and how it feels to speak without interruption or fear of interruption. Meet people from around the world. Mondays at 10 a.m. Pacific time. Zoom Room: https://zoom.us/j/9896109339 How-To: Basic Empathy Circle In a Circle of 3 to 5 Participants 1. The first... Continue reading →
THURSDAY, JANUARY 23rd, 10 AM. TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE AIR BASE PARKWAY & PARKER ROAD, FAIRFIELD
FRIDAY, JANUARY 31st – MONDAY, FEBRUARY 2ndWEEKEND OF ACTIONBOYCOTT CHEVRON
The protest of the Healthcare Convention that’s listed on the IndyBay website says that it’s at the St. Francis Hotel (at 4:00 pm on January 13) — see: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2024/12/that30/18871799.php Health Care Conference J.P. Morgan https://www.jpmorgan.com › events-conferences › healt… The 43rd Annual Healthcare Conference will take place on January 13-16, 2025 in San Francisco, CA. This premier... Continue reading5:00 pm M4A in Florida? @ Online via ZoomM4A in Florida? @ Online via ZoomJan 14 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
You are invited. Topic: How did Florida create a Medicare for All campaign? Yes, Florida. When: Tuesday, January 14, 2025, 5:00-6:30 p.m. PT (8:00-9:30 ET). How: Zoom, register here. Speaker: Stephan Ramdohr, chair Medicare for All Florida Learn how activists in Florida: put on an annual Medicare for All virtual town hall event... Continue reading7:00 pm Milk Club January PAC Meeting @ 1155 Mission Street and bit.ly/milkpacMilk Club January PAC Meeting @ 1155 Mission Street and bit.ly/milkpacJan 14 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pmJanuary PAC Meeting Tuesday, January 14 | 7:00 – 9:00pm This will be a hybrid meeting at 1155 Mission Street and bit.ly/milkpac.Jan15Wed4:00 pm J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference @ St. Francis HotelJ.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference @ St. Francis HotelJan 15 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2023 AT 2 AM – 4 AM PDT How to create trust in a group? Details Event by Extinction Rebellion Empathy Circles online EMPATHY CAFE Duration: 2 hr Public · Anyone on or off Facebook How to create trust in a group? This is the question that arose in our... Continue reading4:00 pm J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference @ St. Francis HotelJ.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference @ St. Francis HotelJan 16 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
We hope you found time over the holiday break to rest and recharge — ready to meet the challenges of 2025 and the critical fights ahead. We are preparing for the first mobilization of the year in Washington, DC and want to make sure that you have the information necessary to... Continue reading10:00 am Intro Empathy CaféIntro Empathy CaféJan 18 @ 10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Intro Empathy Café: Find out how to listen to others and how it feels to speak without interruption or fear of interruption. Meet people from around the world. Mondays at 10 a.m. Pacific time. Zoom Room: https://zoom.us/j/9896109339 How-To: Basic Empathy Circle In a Circle of 3 to 5 Participants 1. The first... Continue reading