Mexico: National brigade searches for thousands of disappeared persons – DW (English)

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Around 3 a.m. on September 18, 2010, Noemi Martinez Martagon discovered that her son, Luis Alberto Calleja, was gone. He had been out with his wife and two other couples in Poza Rica, Veracruz, a small city close to Mexico's gulf coast. On the Avenue 20 de Noviembre, a thoroughfare busy with bars, clubs and restaurants, federal police took him away, along with the two other men. That night, Martinez Martagon left her house to look for her son in hospitals, police stations and prisons.

Nearly a decade later, Martinez Martagon continues to search for her son, one of the thousands of reported missing victims in the state of Veracruz. This past month, nearly 300 other Mexicans joined families like Martinez Martagon's in Poza Rica as part of the Fifth National Search Brigade for Disappeared Persons.

The group, organized by the Mexico City-based Red de Enlaces Nacionales (Network of National Links), brought together participants from 74 collectives of relatives of disappeared persons across 21 Mexican states. In addition to hopes of finding their loved ones, they came together from February 7 to 22 to break the silence around forced disappearance in Mexico.

Read more:Mexico: 'Journalism is the only source of truth'

Luz Elba Hernandez was among those holding a photo of a disappeared son in a march through Poza Rica, Veracruz

More than 61,000 missing

The searchers make up but a tiny fraction of Mexico's indirect victims of forced disappearance. As of early January 2020, the Mexican government puts the number of disappeared people at 61,637.

Juan Carlos Trujillo, a brother of four disappearance victims and one of the founders of the Red de Enlaces Nacionales, describes Mexico's crisis as a lottery. "Twelve tickets a day are chosen," he said, referring to an estimate that puts the average number of forced disappearances in Mexico at a dozen a day. "The tickets are free. As Mexicans, we all have them."

Activists suspect the real number could be dozens of times the official count. Many disappearances go unreported, whether due to social stigma or the fear of retaliation by authorities or organized crime.

Disappearances began to increase after former President Felipe Calderon declared a war on drugs in 2006. Many disappearances, like that of Luis Alberto Calleja, have been tied directly to Mexican security forces. Police forces, particularly in the state of Veracruz, were notorious for working hand-in-hand with the Zetas drug cartel.

In the face of historic government collusion and negligence around disappearance, family members of disappearance victims have taken up shovels and picks to search for their loved ones. Amid a rising wave of violence 2019 was one of the most violent years in the country's history this year's search brigade brought together the largest contingent yet.

Read more:Mexico: When drug violence 'turns into terrorism'

Photos of the disappeared are last reminders of their loved ones

Government pledge

Earlier this year, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who campaigned in 2018 on a platform of anti-corruption and ending the drug war, publicly promised unlimited government resources to aid in the search for disappeared people. But collectives of disappearance victims have said the federal government has failed to back up its pledge with action. According to coordinators, last year's brigade received significantly more support from government institutions. The National Registry for Victims (RENAVI) had previously covered the full costs for all family members' transportation to the brigade. This year, many participantsreceived partial or no coverageof their travel costs, resulting in nearly a third of registrants being unable to attend.

Juan Carlos Trujillo describes the mission of the search brigade as far more than simply excavating potential burial sites. "These people are taking 15 days out of their life to reconstruct a country," Trujillo said at a press conference to this year's search. "They are taking two weeks to bring a message of peace to Mexico."

This year, that message of peace took many different forms. Some brigade members spent each day searching fields, hills and creeks for human remains, following anonymous tips from residents of the region. Others visited prisons, rehab centers and local coroners' offices to seek out any information about their family members. Still others gave talks and led workshops on forced disappearance in churches, schools and government institutions, including municipal authorities and police forces.

Read more:Against the current: Femicide in Mexico on the rise and growing more brutal

Victims are 'erased'

At the outset of the brigade, Mario Vergara and Miguel Angel Trujillo, who are both searching for their brothers and have specialized in uncovering clandestine graves throughout Mexico, warned the rest of the group that they didn't expect to find many bodies in Veracruz.

Brigade member Mario Vergara (far left) joined state forensic experts to examine bone fragments

In Veracruz, unlike in other sites where the two men have conducted searches, the bodies of the disappeared are rarely found. A practice of destroying the bodies with acid, erasing all traces of DNA, has been common for about a decade. The brigade found evidence of sites where criminal groups had systematically burned bodies in acid or ovens. In other regions, finding the sites of former extermination camps known in the region as "kitchens" would be a step toward finding some sort of identifiable human remains, however small, but here the climate and the chemicals used have devoured many of the traces.

"These aren't graves like we're used to," said Vergara, referring to the clandestine graves common in his home state of Guerrero. "Here we aren't going to find people. There are people who were erased. Our question is, how are we going to make the government accept that there were disappearances?"

During the search, the brigade uncovered 12 sites where bodies may have been burned with acid. Members also found dozens of possible burned human bone fragments on a property that state and federal authorities had previously examined four times. The site, known as La Gallera, gave an indication of the chilling brutality that some disappearance victims may have experienced, as well as the negligence with which the state has historically treated disappearance investigations.

Among the brigade's discoveries at the La Gallera property was a huge oven and piles of ash that may hold human remains

On the final day of the brigade's activities, despite a persistent cold rain falling over the city, family members marched through Poza Rica with photos of their disappeared loved ones. They installed a plaque of remembrance, and in the city's Civic Square Noe Amezcua, one of the members of the coordinating team, read out a bulletin presenting their findings.

"We call for the implementation of a holistic search policy in the region," he said. "The state of emergency that this region is experiencing can only be overcome hand-in-hand with the families."

Read more:Mexico's children and youths face monstrous violence

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Mexico: National brigade searches for thousands of disappeared persons - DW (English)

Elizabeth Warren Might Have the Best Marijuana Legalization Plan Yet. – Weedmaps News

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) unveiled a plan for federal marijuana reform on Sunday, calling for legalization as well as a series of policies aimed at righting the wrongs of the drug war and promoting involvement in the legal industry by communities harmed by prohibition.

In the Just and Equitable Cannabis Industry plan, which Warren's campaign shared with Marijuana Moment ahead of a town hall event in Colorado, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate slams the racist 'War on Drugs' policy perpetuated during the Nixon administration and the mass incarceration that has followed.

She also introduces noteworthy ideas, such as using her executive authority to begin the federal legalization process within 100 days of taking office, respecting the sovereignty of other nations to legalize marijuana, protecting immigrants who participate in the legal industry, empowering veterans to access medical cannabis and ensuring that corporations aren't able to monopolize the market.

Further, the Warren plan promotes unionization in the marijuana industry, protecting Indian tribes' authority to enact their own reform programs and lifting a current ban so that Washington, D.C. can use its local monies to implement legal marijuana sales

Even as the federal government has held fast to its outdated marijuana policy, states have led the charge in adopting thoughtful, evidenced-based marijuana policy, the six-page document says. And what have we learned in the eight years since the first states legalized marijuana? Legalization works.

The senator details the progress of the legalization movement and the economic potential of the industry, and she argues that access to cannabis has been shown to play a role in mitigating the opioid epidemic. All that said, she notes that marijuana arrests have continued to increase nationally and they continue to be carried out on racially disproportionate basis and so comprehensive reform at the federal level is a goal she is pledging to pursue starting day one if elected president.

It's not justice when we lock up kids caught with an ounce of pot, while hedge fund managers make millions off of the legal sale of marijuana. My administration will put an end to that broken system.

Legalizing marijuana is about more than just allowing recreational use, or the potential medicinal benefit, or the money that can be made from this new market, the Warren plan says. It's about undoing a century of racist policy that disproportionately targeted Black and Latinx communities. It's about rebuilding the communities that have suffered the most harm. And it's about ensuring that everyone has access to the opportunities that the new cannabis market provides.

Warren's proposal is two-pronged. The first objective is to address the disproportionate enforcement of our drug laws. Here's how she plans to accomplish that:

Warren's second broad objective as described in the plan is to prioritize opportunities in the cannabis industry for communities of color and others who were harmed by the failed policies of the past. That will involve:

For four decades, we've subscribed to a 'War on Drugs' theory of crime, which has criminalized addiction, ripped apart families and failed to curb drug use, the plan states. Legalizing marijuana and erasing past convictions won't fully end the War on Drugs or address its painful legacy, but it's a needed step in the right direction.

As we move to harness the economic potential of a legalized cannabis industry, we must ensure that the communities that were harmed by the War on Drugs disproportionately communities of color are fully included in the opportunity and prosperity that legalization will create. I support investing federal and state revenue from the cannabis industry into communities that have been disproportionately impacted by enforcement of our existing marijuana laws.

Legalizing marijuana gives us an opportunity to repair some of the damage caused by our current criminal justice system, to invest in the communities that have suffered the most harm, and to ensure that everyone can participate in the growing cannabis industry. We have an opportunity now to get this right, and I'll fight to make that happen.

Warren also calls out former House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) in her proposal, stating that the country cannot allow affluent and predominantly white hedge-funders and capital investors to hoard the profits from the same behavior that led to the incarceration of generations of Black and Latino youth.

Boehner, who declared that he was 'unalterably opposed' to legalization while in Congress, now profits handsomely as a lobbyist for legalization even as others continue to live with the consequences of a prohibition he defended, she points out, referencing the former speaker's role as a board member at the cannabis firm Acreage Holdings.

While Warren's plan repeatedly cites the need to broadly address the harms of the broader drug war, her proposals are exclusively focused on cannabis policy changes. While she and Sanders have been strong champions of marijuana reform, drug policy advocates have emphasized the need to expand reform to other illicit substances, as former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) have by proposing decriminalization and legalization of all illegal drugs, respectively.

In terms of her marijuana reform agenda, however, experts who spoke to Marijuana Moment recently have indicated that Warren's 100-day plan would probably be legally and practically more realistic that Sanders's most recent proposal to use an executive order to legalize marijuana in all 50 states on day one of his presidency.

While Sanders initially proposed something similar to Warren appointing key officials within his administration who would pursue legalization during his first 100 days in office he shifted gears last month and pledged to deschedule cannabis on his first day in the White House.

Last year, Warren laid out a criminal justice reform plan that called for marijuana reform, as well as the legalization of safe injection sites where individuals could use illicit substances under medical supervision a move also backed by Sanders.

Warren and Sanders might have differing approaches to marijuana legalization, but what's clear is they stand in stark contrast to former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and former Vice President Joe Biden, both of whom are the only contenders in the Democratic race who remain opposed to ending cannabis prohibition.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

This article has been republished from Marijuana Moment under a content-sharing agreement. Read the original article here.

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Elizabeth Warren Might Have the Best Marijuana Legalization Plan Yet. - Weedmaps News

Saturday Journal: If we do the same old things, we’ll get the same old results – The Courier

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Morrisons, the fourth-largest supermarket chain in the country, earned 17.6 billion in revenue in 2018.

That same year more than 9 billion was spent on illegal drugs in the UK.

According to Dame Carol Blacks report on drugs published this week, the total cost to society by drug misuse in terms of health, crime and other problems is 20 billion.

The drug trade is, in fact, an industry and the collateral cost the thousands of lives lost each year up and down the United Kingdom is simply the price of doing business.

So, for two days this week, the great and the good met in Glasgow to discuss how best to tackle the drugs problem.

Both events the first organised by the Scottish Government, the second by the UK Government started from different places. Both were wrong.

Tuesdays event, at least, recognised that the drug epidemic cannot be curtailed by law enforcement and that, at best, all we can do is try to minimise the harm caused by drugs.

The first couple of hours were given over to various people from Glasgow arguing for the UK Government to give them the power to create a safe injecting room.

There are, we were told, around 500 hardcore drug users in Glasgow city centre, where such a facility would be based and where, in recent years, an outbreak of HIV has occurred due to users sharing their works.

Businesses and residents alike believe the safe consumption room would save lives and help stop the proliferation of drug paraphernalia littering their streets.

They are plausible, convincing arguments. But wrong.

The Scottish Government should not be calling for power to open a safe consumption room, it should be calling for drug laws to be completely devolved.

Because on Wednesday, the UK Government not only ruled out a safe consumption room, policing minister Kit Malthouse made clear UK drugs policy will remain on the same, doomed track it has been on for decades.

Mr Malthouse said he maintains an open mind but believes focusing on disrupting the organised crime networks that push drugs into our communities will, with improvement treatment, save lives.

There is no evidence to suggest enforcement, the war on drugs, is winnable, if it ever was.

Drugs have been in our communities for decades.

Everyone is familiar with the Trainspotting-generation, the so-called older generation of heroin users whose decades of addiction is now costing them their lives. Yet more than half of Scotlands 1,187 drug-related deaths in 2018 were people under the age of 44.

Thats to say, people who were not yet 16 when the 1980s ended. It is a growing problem, not a historical one.

We need to be honest rather than falling back on tough guy talk about cracking down on dealers.

Drugs are a 9 billion industry and those who make money through it from the Afghan and Pakistani farmers with their poppy crops to the Liverpudlian gangs sending couriers to Dundee will find a way to keep making profit.

Drugs can be harmful, we know that. The cost to society from crime as people steal to pay for their habits is huge, the violence that is carried out by drug gangs is horrific.

The harm users inflict on themselves Tuesdays summit heard of maggot-infested wounds being relatively common is terrifying but the stigma of criminality stops many people seeking help until it is too late.

To solve the drug problem we need to stop worrying about the drugs and let capitalism carry the load.

If we want to protect people, lets protect them from the pushers and the squalor that comes with addiction rather than the substances themselves, at least initially.

Lets decriminalise drugs like heroin and wipe out the black market that way, then funnel those users to help they need to get clean.

Because two days of talking wont help, and neither is expecting the same old strategies to produce different results.

Life after death

The generosity of Dundonians knows no bounds. It emerged this week a disproportionately high number of people donate their bodies to Dundee University for medical science.

The university has been gifted 465 cadavers since 2014. Only Glasgow home of an anatomy museum that can genuinely be called Scotlands ickiest museum received more.

I, however, will not be donating my body to medical science, having already offered it to be stuffed and put on permanent display in the McManus once I pop my clogs. I could even be dressed in amusing costumes when the occasion demands it, like a Dundonian Manneken Pis.

For some reason, the museum has not responded to any of my calls.

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Saturday Journal: If we do the same old things, we'll get the same old results - The Courier

‘Narcos: Mexico’s New Finale Pulled Off A Confrontation That Stands Among The Greats – UPROXX

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Narcos: Mexico, despite being as intense and violent as its predecessor (and high on its own supply), is becoming masterful at setting up quietly resonant closing moments while not taking the cliffhanger route. And I can appreciate that. In the streaming era, when entire seasons drop at once, cliffhangers are almost cruel when an audience must wait over a year to find out what happened. Lets get real, too: Narcos franchise fans tend to binge hard and fast. Cliffhangers are not needed here to stoke ongoing interest. Closing a season with understated moments is also practical because the War on Drugs wont ever end. It could be exhausting to keep watching finales like the ones from the Escobar years (him refusing to surrender and later going down on a rooftop) that dont work well with recent history. If that pattern continued, wed eventually see El Chapo pop into a tunnel and wave goodbye for a year. It would be beyond parody. I do hope the show sticks with reflective resolutions that suggest whats to come.

Before we dig in here, heres another reason why Narcos beats every other TV franchise when it comes to promo images. This image up there ^^^ of Scoot McNairys mustache? Netflix used that image for months to tease this season, and it illustrated a long-awaited confrontation. When the moment arrived, the showdown didnt go as planned. There wasnt a payoff for the characters, but for the audience? Hell, yeah. It was great to see two lions (mentally) circle each other while conceding that theyve both lost the battle.

Granted, Narcos: Mexicos second season did lead up to its final minutes with a mayhem-filled scene of revenge full of climactic adrenaline. This was both obligatory and necessary, to illuminate the truth of what was soon to be stated by Flix Gallardo. In particular, the shoe literally dropped on the remnants of Gallardos cartel leadership when Clavel gets beaten to death in a shopping mall while a spitting Chapo witnesses.

The franchise has held a lot of moments like these, obviously. Theyre bread and butter and gruesome and all that, but theyre almost operatic in their execution. Theyre also sometimes (disturbingly) funny, as with the bloodbath last season where Don Neto kept wearing his headphones. Yet theres a ton of value in quietly forecasting the fights to come. Moments of conversation allow the corrupted soul of the franchise to flourish. In this universe a very real one, although dramatized by Netflix justice cant win. There wont ever be a happy ending in this saga. To that inevitability, last years finale made a fantastic set-up: Scoots character, who narrated all along, finally comes into view as dogged DEA agent Walt Breslin. The assumption was that wed get to see Scoot kick some ass this season. And he did kick some ass. One and done is how the fledgling DEA wanted to do this thing, but its not quite that simple.

Part of that has to do with that unending reality of the War on Drugs. Also, as we learn by midseason, Walt a composite character based upon an amalgamation of multiple DEA agents wields a dual purpose. Hes damaged, and even more than seeking revenge for Kiki Camerenas death, Walt struggles with immense guilt over not being able to save his brother from ODing. All season, he hunted Flix Gallardo, who screwed himself over in his eternal quest for power. He betrayed too many people and proved that hes not so indispensable in guiding Mexicos drug empire. The final scene of the season shows Flix in jail after Walt felt compelled to visit. Walt finally stares down what hes been chasing, and he expects to find closure. He wants to see some remorse materialize in Flixs face when he holds that photo of Kiki up to the glass.

Not that Flix showed his cards. He showed everyone elses cards and taunted the hell out of Walt, who we saw alternately exude bravado and squirm with discomfort. I love that the show fictionalized this conversation between a real-life drug lord and a made-up character. They took it in one hell of a different direction than what we usually see in the hero-vs-villain dichotomy. And I love that theyre toying with the were not so different, you and I clich without actually saying it. They dont need to say it, since about 800 recent movies and TV shows have articulated that line. But the sentiment is here.

Dont get me wrong, man. I also giggle every time some villain offers up, Were not so different, you and I. Admit it, you get a little giddy when you hear it happen, too. But its rewarding to see such dynamics bypass the standard entry point and dive deeper. Its more personal. Not so black-and-white. That a series did this in the middle of a run is gutsy without a renewal announcement in hand, but Narcos has earned that confidence. Five seasons in, and this franchise has many more stories left to tell.

This is where I can quickly draw attention to a few standout comparisons to this Walt-Flix conversation, including the Heat diner scene. Showrunner Eric Newman told Collider that he drew inspiration from how Heat brought the cop-criminal dichotomy face-to-face. The diner scene between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro is one that people watched on repeat (lets forget that Righteous Kill failed to replicate the effect). Incredibly, it was the first scene that Pacino and De Niro had ever filmed together, and their connection felt organic. The scene made it clear that their characters respected each other despite knowing that, eventually, shots would be fired.

Theres some very reluctant respect on display in the Narcos: Mexico conversation, not on the same level as Heat, but it resonates in a similar way. Two driven, devoted, and brilliant sides of the same coin are butting heads and know theres no compromise to be found. Also, more than a little bit, Im reminded of the final Justified scene here. That one revolved around a very different dynamic and personal history between Raylan and Boyd and their coal-digging unity, but theres still the same magnetic draw here. Raylan felt it necessary to deliver a message to Boyd in person, and we needed to see this Harlan reunion happen, even if these two would never be on the same side of the law.

Again, the dynamic of Walt and Flix is quite different than these other two examples, especially when it comes to Raylan and Boyd, who had some love for each other, even if Raylan would never admit it. Its a conversation thats still regarded fondly, and the Walt-Flix meeting deserves to be remembered for decades to come. The season needed to feature a face-to-face meeting between the pair and the show executed it at the right time. Im glad the moment wasnt squandered during Flixs arrest, for the visitation scene isolates the duo and gives their dueling personalities the appropriate spotlight.

In only a few short minutes, we saw the culmination of what these two men had discovered about themselves. Walt visibly realized that his tireless and obsessive pursuit hadnt yielded the hard-hitting results that he wanted regarding the drug trade. Despite his displays of smugness, he couldnt maintain the facade when Flix began to prophesize the horrors to come. Flix, of course, admitted that his greed caused his downfall. Hes also largely spot-on with his predictions, and we see the new cartel heads boozily meet and call a truce. And Flix lays it all out there to Walt. He predicts who will be running his plazas, which are becoming their own cartels. Tijuana, Juarez, the Gulf, and Sinaloa all get divvied up with Chapo Guzmn positioned for a future Sinaloa takeover. They all agree to respect each other and prosper, but Felix knows thats not going to be how things work out.

Its an interesting thing, the War on Drugs. The winners of wars are the ones customarily entitled to tell the tales as they see fit, but no one wins here. Walt expected to walk into that visitation booth and make Flix feel like utter garbage while thrusting that photo of Kiki in his face. Hes wanted to do this for years. Thats what kept him going on the surface. He also expected to feel less restless after reminding Flix that he got sold out for a trade deal, but Flix knew that Walt held no cards. Theres nothing that Walt can do for him, so Flix isnt going to give him anything tangible. Yet in a way, and even though Flix is presenting the appearance that hes giving nothing to Walt, hes having the most honest onscreen conversation that hes had with anyone.

Flix takes Walt to terrifying places during this relatively short conversation. He digs into the strengths of the various cartels, and outlines their strengths and weaknesses, and their various strategies while striving for dominance. He even gleefully suggests that Walt take out the Juarez head, but more importantly, Flix knew how to get under Walts skin. And to a lesser degree, vice versa. The two of them picked at each other, and neither one of them won the confrontation, much like the War on Drugs. They smirk at each other, almost in the same way that De Niro and Pacino did in Heat only without knowing that their beef wont be resolved with one heist. Instead, this war will rage on indefinitely, and Flix calls it when he tells Walt that youre going to miss me.

Yes, Walt is gonna miss Flix. I mean, the guy motivated years of his existence. The tigers now in the cage, and where does that leave Walt? Ultimately, hes behind a desk now, and all of the other animals are on the loose. Its difficult to envision Netflix continuing this series without putting Walt back into action in some capacity. Obviously, the third season will focus on the unleashed circus of animals that Flix references. Chapo Guzmn should make a lot more progress with his tunneling endeavors, and Amado Carrillo Fuentes is likely going to be a major focus. Walt will be back in some way, but will we see Flix again? Maybe not, and thats only one more reason why this quiet confrontation will resonate for many years to come.

Narcos: Mexicos second season is currently streaming on Netflix.

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'Narcos: Mexico's New Finale Pulled Off A Confrontation That Stands Among The Greats - UPROXX

Tucker Carlson: Everyone in the 2020 Democratic field has been diminished. Their ideas are absurd – Fox News

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Tuesday night's Democratic forum on CBS wasn't the final primary debate of this season, but it's likely the last one that will matter. Between now and the next debate, a total of 21 states -- and that includes the biggest ones, California and Texas -- will hold their primaries. By then, it will almost certainly be over.

So you think the candidates would use the time to talk about things that voters cared deeply about. And for a brief moment, one of them actually did that. In his first answer, Bernie Sanders brought up wages. He said they ought to rise faster, which is true.

TRUMP CAMPAIGN ANNOUNCES 'COMMUNITY CENTERS' INITIATIVE TO ATTRACT BLACK VOTERS

Now, how could wages possibly go up with the open borders Sanders is demanding? That's an unanswerable question. But at least he mentioned it and that's exactly why he is the front-runner. When you talk about things people care about, they respond.

Michael Bloomberg is not the front-runner; he'd like to be. When given his chance to speak, Bloomberg went right to the issue he believes voters care about most -- the fact that Bernie Sanders is a secret Russian agent.

Mike Bloomberg: Vladimir Putinthinks that Donald Trump should be president of the United States and that's why Russia is helping you get elected so you'll lose to him.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.: Oh, Mr. Bloomberg --

So that's what Bloomberg's consultants told him to say. The lesson here is obvious: Go into political consulting -- even dumb people get rich.

At least one audience in America was powerfully moved by Bloomberg's attack -- the other candidates. At the very mention of Vladimir Putin, the stage erupted. Suddenly the debate sounded like a radical book club from the 1970s, old people yelling about the Cold War. "Russia! Russia! Russia!"

Pete Buttigieg, who is 38 but seems at least a century older, jumped in with his theory. What Trump and his paymaster Vladimir Putin actually wants, explained the tiny robot from South Bend, is political chaos. Buttigieg seemed totally convinced that no one had ever said that before.

At this point, the moderators at CBS just gave up. The chaos Putin is hoping for descended on the debate stage. Sanders decided it was a perfect opportunity to indulge his real passion, which is attacking America, a country he clearly hates.

Here he is explaining that the American criminal justice system is actually more repressive than communist China's.

Sanders: We have a criminal justice system today that is not only broken, it is racist. It got more people in jail than any other country on Earth, including China. One of the reasons for that is a horrific war on drugs.

Oh, the war on drugs. Bernie Sanders talks about that in every speech he gives. A declining country with a sad underemployed middle class obviously needs to smoke a ton more weed. That's Bernie's solution to the malaise --fire up a bowl, numb out, maybe you won't notice.

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So where's all this weed going to come from? Well, Bernie has got a plan for that, too. Black people are going to sell it to you. No kidding.

Sanders: And I'll tell you what else we're going to do. We're going to provide help to the African-American, Latino and Native-American community to start businesses to sell legal marijuana rather than let a few corporations control the legalized marijuana market.

That's a real clip, by the way. So first, they fill black neighborhoods with abortion clinics. Now, their front-runner is encouraging more black kids to sell drugs. But somehow this is the party that loves black America. It doesn't sound like it.

But whatever. Joe Biden soon changed the subject by making very loud noises. Biden has lost his ability to speak clearly, and that's got to be frustrating for anyone. In Biden's case, it's led to a series of rage eruptions.

Joe Biden, former vice president: You talk about -- whether we're talking about with Bernie. Bernie, in fact, hasn't passed much of anything. The fact of the matter is --

Tom Steyer, billionaire hedge fund manager and activist: I get to answer that.

Biden: Look, the fact is --

Steyer: You're out of time.

Biden: I'm not out of time. You spoke overtime, and I am going to talk. Here's the deal. Here is the deal. The fact of the matter is, look at what's happening here. Look at what's happening here --

At the very mention of Vladimir Putin, the stage erupted. Suddenly the debate sounded like a radical book club from the 1970s, old people yelling about the Cold War. "Russia! Russia! Russia!"

The crowd roared, because screaming always elicits roars from crowds. Our animal brains at work. But for those who are trying to follow what Biden was actually saying -- deaf people, for example, reading it at home on closed caption -- it was a profoundly confusing moment.

By the end, Biden's train of thought didn't simply get lost. It hopped the tracks and became a fiery derailment plunging off the bridge into the gorge below.

Biden: I would make it clear ... I'd make it clear to China. We are going to continue to move closer to make sure that we can,in fact, prevent China -- prevent North Korea -- from launching missiles to take them down. And if we don't -- why am I stopping? No one else stops.

"Why am I stopping," he asked.Well, because disjointed sentence fragments are counterproductive in a presidential campaign.

The good news is, at least Biden still knows a verbal cul de sac when he hits one. A few months from now, he'll be reciting Allen Ginsberg poems to strangers at bus stops. He's going fast.

Elizabeth Warren was there, too. Warren is not going to be president. That's a good thing. She's awful, maybe the most unpleasant human being ever to run for president in this country. You'd be in Paraguay by the end of the first Elizabeth Warren administration just to stop the noise.

Warren seems to know this. She can tell that she is doomed. If nothing else, she's not stupid. And she's decided to spend her remaining time destroying Michael Bloomberg.

And really that's a nice way to go out if you think about it. It's a service to the country. But, unfortunately on Tuesday night, it didn't work. Instead, Warren just humiliated herself.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.: I was visibly pregnant. The principal wished me luck and gave my job to someone else. Pregnancy discrimination?You bet.

But I was 21 years old. I didn't have a union to protect me. I didn't have any federal law on my side. So I packed up my stuff, and I went home.

At least I didn't have a boss who said to me kill it that way that Mayor Bloomberg is said to have said to one of his pregnant employees.

Bloomberg: I never said that. Oh, come on!

Whoa, whoa, wait a second! We have news emerging. Did you notice here Elizabeth Warren say there are circumstances in which encouraging abortion might be wrong? Oh, don't tell Planned Parenthood -- she'll lose her funding.

Meanwhile, Warren's story about her own pregnancy could have been the most depressing moment of the night. The story is a lie. Everyone knows it is. It has been conclusively debunked by her on tape.

But Warren keeps telling the story anyway, with exactly the same inflections and pauses and hand gestures. Keep in mind, this is a person who was once a tenured Harvard law professor. She wrote a genuinely good book at one point. People respected her.

Now? Well, now, Warren's up there degrading herself with some transparent whopperdesigned to show you how oppressed she is.

By her time is over. Warren will be Hillary Clinton pacing her backyard with a bottle of wine and sending bitter tweets about Trump at midnight. No normal person will have lunch with her after this. It's pathetic and sad.

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But it's not just her -- it's universal this year. Everyone in the Democratic field has been greatly diminished by this, and it's not because they're all bad people. Not all of them are bad people. It's because their ideas are absurd.

Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on Feb. 26, 2020.

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Tucker Carlson: Everyone in the 2020 Democratic field has been diminished. Their ideas are absurd - Fox News

Bankruptcy Definition

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What Is Bankruptcy?

Bankruptcy is the legal proceeding involving a person or business that is unable to repay outstanding debts.The bankruptcy process begins with a petition filed by the debtor, which is most common, or on behalf of creditors, which is less common. All of the debtor's assets are measured and evaluated, and the assets may be used to repay a portion of outstanding debt.

Bankruptcy offers an individual or business a chance to start fresh by forgiving debts that simply cannot be paid while offering creditors a chance to obtain some measure of repayment based on the individual's or business's assets available for liquidation. In theory, the ability to file for bankruptcy can benefit an overall economy by giving persons and businesses a second chance to gain access to consumer credit and by providing creditors with a measure of debt repayment. Upon the successful completion of bankruptcy proceedings, the debtor is relieved of the debt obligations incurred prior to filing for bankruptcy.

All bankruptcy cases in the United States are handled through federal courts. Any decisions over federal bankruptcy cases are made by a bankruptcy judge, including whether a debtor is eligible to file or whether he should be discharged of his debts. Administration over bankruptcy cases is often handled by a trustee, an officer appointed by the United States Trustee Program of the Department of Justice, to represent the debtor's estate in the proceeding. There is usually very little direct contact between the debtor and the judge unless there is some objection made in the case by a creditor.

Bankruptcy filings in the United States fall under one of several chapters of the Bankruptcy Code: Chapter 7, which involves liquidation of assets; Chapter 11, which deals with company or individual reorganizations, and Chapter 13, which is debt repayment with lowered debt covenants or specific payment plans. Bankruptcy filing specifications vary among states, leading to higher or lower filing fees depending on how easily a person or company can complete the process.

Individuals or businesses with few or no assets file Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The chapter allows individuals to dispose of their unsecured debts, such as credit cards and medical bills. Individuals with nonexempt assets, such as family heirlooms (collections with high valuations, such as coin or stamp collections),second homes, cash, stocks, or bonds, must liquidate the property to repay some or all of their unsecured debts. So, a person filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy is basically selling off his or her assets to clear debt.Consumers who have no valuable assets and only exempt property, such as household goods, clothing, tools for their trades, and a personal vehicle up to a certain value, repay no part of their unsecured debt.

Businesses often file Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the goal of which is to reorganize and once again become profitable. Filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows a company to create plans for profitability, cut costs, and find new ways to increase revenue. Preferred stockholders may still receive payments, though common stockholders will not.

For example, a housekeeping business filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy might increase its rates slightly and offer more services to become profitable. Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows a business to continue conducting its business activities without interruption while working on a debt repayment plan under the court's supervision. In rare cases, individuals can file Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Individuals who make too much money to qualify for Chapter 7 bankruptcy may file under Chapter 13, also known as a wage earner's plan. The chapter allows individuals and businesses with consistent income to create workable debt repayment plans. The repayment plans are commonly in installments over the course of a three- to five-year period. In exchange for repaying their creditors, the courts allow these debtors to keep all of their property including nonexempt property.

Financially distressed municipalities, including cities, towns, villages, counties, and school districts, may file for bankruptcy under Chapter 9. Under Chapter 9, there is no liquidation of assets to repay the municipality's debts. Chapter 12 bankruptcy provides relief to "family farmers" or "family fishermen" with regular annual income. Both Chapters 9 and 12 make use of an extended debt repayment plan. Chapter 15 was added in 2005 to deal with cross-border cases which involve debtors, assets, creditors and other parties who may be in more than one country. This type of petition is usually filed in the debtor's home country.

When a debtor receives a discharge order, he is no longer legally required to pay any of the debts on that order. So, any creditor listed on that discharge cannot legally undertake any type of collection activity (making phone calls, sending letters)against the debtor once the discharge order is enforced. Therefore, the discharge absolves the debtor of any personal liability for the debts specified in the order.

But not all debts qualify to be discharged. Some of these include tax claims, anything that was not listed by the debtor, child support or alimony payments, personal injury debts, debts to the government, etc. In addition, any secured creditor can still enforce a lien against property owned by the debtor, provided that lien is still valid.

Debtors do not necessarily have the right to a discharge. When a petition for bankruptcy has been filed in court, creditors receive a notice and can object if they choose to do so. If they do, they will need to file a complaint in the court before the deadline. This leads to the filing of an adversary proceeding to recover monies owed orenforce a lien.

The discharge fromChapter 7 is usually granted about four months after the debtor files to petition for bankruptcy. For any other type of bankruptcy, the discharge can occur when it becomes practical.

Declaring bankruptcy can help relieve you of your legal obligation to pay your debts and save your home, business, or ability to function financially, depending on what kind of bankruptcy petition you file. But it also can lower your credit rating, making it more difficult to get a loan, mortgage, low-rate credit card, or buy a home, apartment, or business in the future.

If you're trying to figure out if you should file, your credit is probably already damaged. A Chapter 7 filing will stay on your credit report for ten years, while a Chapter 13 will remain there for seven. Any creditors you solicit for debt (a loan, credit card, line of credit, or mortgage) will see the discharge on your report, which will prevent you from getting any credit.

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Bankruptcy Definition

Fish fry and bankruptcy: Buffalo’s first Friday of Lent – WKBW-TV

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TONAWANDA, N.Y. (WKBW) Fridays during Lent means fish fry for many across Western New York. Joseph Kroczynski has been in charge at Saint Amelia's School fish fry in Tonawanda for more than 15 years.

"We love doing it to see the joy of people coming in. It's like a club, an annual club," Krocynski said. The Catholic school holds a fish fry every Friday during Lent. Seven volunteers man the kitchen cooking up 250 orders. All of the proceeds go back towards the school.

"The price is right. The people are nice. The community is good. I'm a community guy, so I sort of stay in my community and do the best I can," Jerry Niedziela said. He was one of the first for fish fry as a steady stream of people came in throughout the evening.

"It's supporting the church and it's supporting the school and you meet your friends and you don't have to cook," Carol Reingold said. She's been a member of St. Amelia's for 45 years.

But the first Friday of the Lent season in Buffalo was also marked with the announcement of the Diocese declaring bankruptcy. Weather is always a topic of conversation, according to Kroczynski, but adds the news about the Diocese also came up at the dinner table.

"I don't think it effects your faith. That's a financial part. It's not that your faith had anything to do with the finances of the whole situation," Kroczynski said.

Reingold adding, "I believe in my church and there's good and bad in everybody and I guess we can't really pick our people."

"I don't know where the money is going to come from. They're not going to take care of the people as much as they promised, so I have a lot of compassion for everyone in that regard," Niedziela said.

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Fish fry and bankruptcy: Buffalo's first Friday of Lent - WKBW-TV

Modells begs landlords to help it stave off bankruptcy – The Real Deal

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Modells CEO Mitch Modell and a Modells store in Brooklyn (Credit: Getty Images,Wikipedia)

Modells Sporting Goods is renegotiating leases in a last-ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy.

The 130-year-old retailer, which has more than 150 locations across 10 states, sent letters to 19 landlords pleading with them to dig deeper so the retailer can avoid filing for bankruptcy March 1, the New York Post reported.

So far pledges of help have come from owners of buildings where five stores have launched liquidation sales. More than 2,900 jobs depend on the retailer avoiding bankruptcy.

These people are counting on me; some have been with me for 40 years, Mitch Modell, who is the retailers fourth-generation leader, wrote in a letter to landlords, according to the Post.

It is the latest effort by Modell to save his family business. Last May, The Real Deal reported that the retailer was trying smaller concept stores between 5,000 square feet and 8,000 square feet. The plan was to roll out in 10 locations across New York.

Earlier in 2019, Modells listed its 300,000-square-foot Bronx warehouse for $100 million. [NYP] David Jeans

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Modells begs landlords to help it stave off bankruptcy - The Real Deal

Supreme Court vacates tax refund awarded to bank in bankruptcy case – Accounting Today

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The Supreme Court vacated and remanded Tuesday an appeals court decision that found under federal common law, a tax refund due from a joint tax return generally belongs to the company responsible for the losses that form the basis of the refund, rejecting a nearly half-century-old precedent.

In Rodriguez v. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the case involved the issue of whether a parent corporation or its subsidiary owns a tax refund during bankruptcy proceedings.

Justice Neil Gorsuch (pictured with President Trump), in his opinion, explained the facts of the case: The trouble here started when the United Western Bank hit hard times, entered receivership, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took the reins. Not long after that, the banks parent, United Western Bancorp, Inc., faced its own problems and was forced into bankruptcy, led now by a trustee, Simon Rodriguez. When the Internal Revenue Service issued a $4 million tax refund, each of these newly assigned caretakers understandably sought to claim the money. Unable to resolve their differences, they took the matter to court.The bankruptcy court agreed with Rodriguez, the FDIC appealed the ruling, and the district court reversed. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court, ruling for the FDIC as receiver for the subsidiary bank rather than for Rodriguez as trustee for the corporate parent.

In reaching its decision, the Tenth Circuit applied federal common law under the Bob Richards rule, which provided that, in the absence of an agreement, a refund belongs to the group member responsible for the losses that led to it. In this case, there was an allocation agreement, but the Tenth Circuit applied a more expansive version of the rule, applying it even to situations where there is an agreement unless the agreement unambiguously specifies a different result. The Supreme Court held that the Bob Richards rule is not a legitimate exercise of federal common lawmaking, and vacated and remanded the decision. Whether this case might yield the same or a different result without Bob Richards is a matter the court of appeals may consider on remand, Gorsuch stated.

Some tax experts see the case as a significant reversal from previous rulings. I was surprised that the Supreme Court has thrown out the Bob Richards doctrine, since it has been used by most courts as a factor in cases over the last 47 years, said Lee Zimet, senior director with Alvarez & Marsal Taxand LLC. Only the courts in the Sixth Circuit have refused to apply federal common law. The elimination of the use of federal common law in deciding ownership of tax refund cases will make the case decisions less predictable. Without the application of Bob Richards, the cases will be decided solely based upon the nuances of state corporate law and the specific language of a tax sharing agreement.

In the Rodriguez case, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the application of state law to determine property rights in a bankruptcy case, even when the property in question is a federal tax refund, according to Annette Jarvis, a partner in the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney.

The Supreme Court overturned federal court-created federal common law that had existed in many Circuits for over 45 years and, in so doing, severely limited the ability of federal courts to create federal common law, she said. Restricting federal court common lawmaking to that which is necessary to protect uniquely federal interests, the Supreme Court found this narrow ability to create common law not to apply to the allocation of federal tax refunds even when the parent and subsidiary companies were both in federally created insolvency proceedings. In addition to setting an important precedent for the limited ability of federal courts to establish federal common law, the impact of this decision is to allow corporate affiliates to freely decide, in a tax allocation agreement, the beneficiary of a tax refund among a corporate group filing a consolidated tax return, even if the allocation does not align with the company which created the tax losses and even when one or more of the corporate affiliates is in a bankruptcy case or an FDIC receivership. When companies face insolvency, this contractual allocation can be critical to the return available to a particular affiliated companys creditors, and, in some cases, to lenders who may have taken an assignment of tax refunds."

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Supreme Court vacates tax refund awarded to bank in bankruptcy case - Accounting Today

CONFER: The Boy Scouts will survive bankruptcy – Niagara Gazette

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Last week, the Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy. This was not unexpected. Speculation about bankruptcy had been running rampant for over a year now.

It was done in direct response to New Yorks Child Victims Act and similar laws in other states which allow for a temporary lookback for victims of abuse whose claims previously would have been denied by the statute of limitations. Thousands of lawsuits have been filed against churches, schools, clubs and the BSA for transgressions alleged to have been done by leaders and mentors decades ago.

The CVA and its companions are good, as they allow anyone who was abused as a youth in any organization or by any individual to find closure or, in legalese, be made whole after surviving evil and holding dark secrets that are nearly impossible to overcome and/or share as a youth and an adult. Most times, it takes decades to open up about it and these lookbacks recognize that.

The path of bankruptcy isnt the BSA abandoning its responsibility to anyone who was hurt. Instead, it allows the BSA to reach settlements with these parties in an equitable fashion, otherwise potentially large awards in the first rounds of lawsuits would have decimated BSA finances and prevented monetary awards for those who brought lawsuits later in the cycle. The management of finances and settlements ensures that all who deserve something get something and the BSA can continue its mission.

Since early 2019 and especially now following the actual filing, Ive been asked about what bankruptcy and financial reorganization of the BSA means for Scouting; after all, I have long been a champion of Scouting in this column and in the community, having been a scout for eight years and a volunteer in the organization for the past 26.

First and foremost, take comfort in knowing local Scouting is financially sound and protected.

The Iroquois Trail Council (which serves eastern Niagara and the GLOW counties) is, like all councils, a corporation separate from the BSA and it maintains its own 501(c)3 status. Business decisions made on bankruptcy by the BSA will not impact the assets of the Iroquois Trail Council including our camps and donations made to local programs by families, donors and community partners like the United Way. The Council is not on the hook for assisting with the BSAs reorganization.

It is important to note that the Iroquois Trail Council is governed by local volunteers who provide strong oversight on budget development, fundraising, spending and investment. During the past decade, the council has routinely balanced its budget, been creative with its staffing model, made substantial capital improvements to Camp Dittmer and Camp Sam Wood, acquired a new centrally-located headquarters in Oakfield and ensured the future of local scouting through growth in its endowment fund. The Council is also debt-free and has no pending litigation.

Secondly, know that scouting is safe.

At first glance, driven by headlines on smartphones and hot takes on social media, some would wonder why theyd ever want to put their children in scouting for fear that they might be abused, thinking that the spate of lawsuits are recent in nature. They arent; 90% of those filed against the BSA date back 30 years plus. We cant let a few bad apples spoil the barrel, nor can we believe that protections arent afforded. A system is in place to keep out troubled souls and identify and eliminate adults and youths who may put others at risk. As long as Ive been in scouting, there has been detailed and effective youth protection training for all participants, double supervisory control and background checks.

Lastly, know that scouting is just as meaningful now as it was when the BSA was founded 110 years ago.

My Eagle Scout certificate is beside me in my office every day, a reminder of who I am and who I will be because of scouting. The organization and its principled lessons and experiences gave me a deeper understanding of service, leadership, teamwork and humanity and it has helped me greatly at home, work, and in the community. I and my fellow volunteers want to make sure more boys and girls are given such positive experiences in their lives in hopes of making them the very best citizens, spouses and parents they can be. God knows we need that in todays world.

Please know that all of us in scouting cannot and will not let financial restructuring by the national organization distract us from our goals. Scouting will continue to be a guiding light for many children for many decades more even amidst the occasional storm that might shake its very foundation.

Bob Confer is a Gasport resident and vice president of Confer Plastics Inc. in North Tonawanda. Email him at bobconfer@juno.com.

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CONFER: The Boy Scouts will survive bankruptcy - Niagara Gazette

Watkins Nurseries and related businesses to get bankruptcy financing from a prominent family member – Richmond.com

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Watkins Nurseries Inc., which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, has reached out to a prominent family member for interim financing

Former state Sen. John C. Watkins, whose son is both the Chesterfield County-based companys president and majority shareholder, has agreed to lend the nursery and two related businesses Virginias Resources Recycled LLC and Watkins-Amelia LLC up to $200,000, bankruptcy court documents show.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Keith L. Phillips approved the post-petition financing, also known as debtor-in-possession financing, on an interim basis during a hearing Monday morning. A final hearing on the matter is scheduled for March 10.

John Watkins, a Republican who represented Powhatan and Chesterfield counties in the state Senate and House of Delegates for 34 years, is listed in bankruptcy court documents as a shareholder of Watkins Nurseries and a member of Watkins-Amelia limited liability corporation. He was president of Watkins Nurseries from 1998 to 2008.

He also is chairman of the board of Community Bankers Trust Corp., the Henrico County-based holding company for Essex Bank, which has 24 bank locations, including 18 in Virginia.

His son, Robert S. Watkins, is the fifth generation of his family to run the nursery business. The son holds the largest membership interest in Watkins-Amelia, which owns 331.4 acres in Amelia County that serve as the primary production area for the nursery. Robert Watkins also filed for personal bankruptcy last week.

Under the terms of the financing, the principal amount of the loan from John Watkins is not to exceed $200,000 with an interest rate of 6.25% annually. No payments will be due for the first six months following the judges approval.

The parties have agreed to the terms thereof, which the debtors [Watkins Nurseries and related businesses] believe are normal and customary (if not more favorable to the debtors than current market terms) for financing of this nature, according to the motion seeking approval for the financing.

The debtors contacted various sources about their liquidity issues and refinancing alternatives. Unfortunately, said discussions had not been completed before the debtors had to file these bankruptcy cases. However, in the course of the discussions, it was clear that no entity was willing to provide a short-term bridge loan, the court documents say.

As such, the debtors have concluded that no such prospective lenders were willing to provide unsecured or secured financing to the debtors in these bankruptcy cases under terms that were more favorable than the terms provided herein.

Filing for bankruptcy last Wednesday night was necessary to stop a foreclosure auction that was scheduled to be held Thursday morning to sell a total of 342.3 acres in Chesterfield, Powhatan and Amelia counties to pay off bank loans from Sonabank.

In 1997, Robert Watkins consolidated various individual and corporate loans with what was then Eastern Virginia Bankshares. (Southern National Bancorp of Virginia Inc. merged with Eastern Virginia Bankshares in 2017, and Sonabank is the name used for banking operations.)

The financing was needed, court records show. Unfortunately, recent years have resulted in certain financial hiccups for the debtors as they sought to continue providing their high quality services and products while also experiencing attrition and attempting to accommodate certain family members as they moved on to other endeavors outside of the nursery operations.

The two loans, court records show, were secured by real properties of the businesses and other assets, including substantially all assets of the nursery and Virginias Resources Recycled, a commercial and residential land-clearing, grinding, grubbing and logging business.

But while the businesses tried to address their financial obligations, Sonabank began collection efforts by seizing funds in an account of one of the guarantors, according to the documents.

The debtors have continued efforts to work with Sona and its counsel (which recently was replaced), but all such efforts have been rebuffed, the court documents show. In fact, Sonas response was the publication of foreclosure/auction notices for the properties owned by various debtors with no prior notice to the debtors or guarantors of the scheduled foreclosures/auctions. In addition, Sona has begun efforts to take possession of equipment vital to the debtors operations.

The Watkins Nurseries business as well as Virginias Resources Recycled and Watkins-Amelia each listed assets and liabilities of $1 million to $10 million. The personal bankruptcy filing for Robert Watkins listed assets and liabilities of $100,000 to $500,000.

Watkins Nurseries was founded by J.B. Watkins as a small fruit tree farm in Powhatan County in 1876. It has grown to have more than 500 acres across central Virginia used in the production of field-grown, landscape-size plants, according to the companys website.

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Watkins Nurseries and related businesses to get bankruptcy financing from a prominent family member - Richmond.com

This week: Should clerics vote? Is bankruptcy a disgrace? And more. – Catholic Culture

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By Phil Lawler (bio - articles - email) | Feb 28, 2020

This weeks news was dominated by reports about the coronavirus. Even in Rome, when Pope Francis curtailed his schedule for a few days because of a slight indisposition, some overeager reporters questioned whether it was possible the Pontiff had somehow contracted the feared virus. Yes, its possible. But not at all probable. There was no report of an outbreak in Rome, and statements from Vatican officialswho were obviously being terse, to discourage speculationsuggested that in the Popes case the culprit was an ordinary winter flu.

By the way, questions about the Popes health will probably remain unanswered next week. After his scheduled public audience on Sunday, he is due to go into seclusion for a week, with the leaders of the Roman Curia, for the annual Lenten Retreat.

Otherwise it was a quiet week. But I was taken aback, I admit, by Archbishop Bernard Hebdas directive that priests and deacons in his St. Paul archdiocese should not vote in Minnesotas presidential primary. Why would a prelate discourage clerics from exercising their civic rightsand, some would say, their duties? Archbishop Hebda explained that voting could be seen as partisan political activity under new Minnesota rules for the primary, and canon law bars clerics from involvement in partisan causes.

The new rules in Minnesota are neither unusual nor extreme. They require primary voters to select the ballot of a particular political party; this is, after all, a primary, to determine the parties candidates. And records are kept of which voters chose which ballots. Pulling a ballot for one party does not necessarily mean that the voter endorses that partys platform or favors that partys candidate. The voter could, if he wished, write in a Republican candidates name on a Democratic party ballot, or vice versa. There is no public record of how the voter marked the ballotonly of which ballot he chose. So a clerics activity inside the voting booth would still be secret, and unlikely to embroil the Church in political disputes. But when a voter chooses not to vote in the primary, he forfeits any opportunity to influence the partysany partyschoices. So the archbishop is asking clerics not to make their voices heard in the political process. Again I wonder: why?

Maybe Im too cynical, but I wonder whether Archbishop Hebda knows that a solid majority of his priests would choose to vote in the Democratic primary. If so, its theoretically possible that some energetic researcher could search the voter rolls and determine which percentage of the local clergy chose to participate in the primary of a party whose leadership is firmly committed to legal abortion on demand, same-sex marriage, and gender ideology. We still wouldnt know how those priests voted. But the data would be interesting, wouldnt they?

This week also brought the news that the Diocese of Buffalo has filed for bankruptcy protection, the 22nd American diocese to take that step. (The neighboring Diocese of Ogdensburg will likely join the list soon.) I can still remember the time in 2002 when the finance council of the Boston archdiocese approved a move toward bankruptcy. At the time the decision was shocking. No American diocese had ever previously contemplated such a radical step, and as things happened the Boston archdiocese never took it. But now there are 22 on the list (23 if you include the Archdiocese of Agana in Guam, a US territory), and the list is sure to grow longer. Signs of unhappy times.

Before I sign off for the week, let me call attention to two noteworthy articles on other sites:

Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He has edited several Catholic magazines and written eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is the news director and lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.

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This week: Should clerics vote? Is bankruptcy a disgrace? And more. - Catholic Culture

Democratic Socialism in the Twenty-First Century – CounterPunch

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In the previous century I was a regular columnist for The Humanist magazine, and I was fortunate to work for an editor, Rick Szykowny, who was committed to publishing both class conscious and explicitly socialist writers. On March 1, 1994, The Humanist published my article titled The Good Fight: The Case for Socialism in the 21stCentury. The article is archived online at The Free Library. Heres an excerpt:

Rosa Luxemburg pointed out in the last piece she wrote before her death that certain socialist successes had been Pyrrhic victories, whereas there was much to be learned and gained from those historical defeats which constitute the pride and power of international socialism. There is not a single word or ideal that has not been dragged through the mud and blood of this centuryincluding democracy and humanism. Shall we invent a new language altogether to be able to go on with life and still pass on our stories? Is the burden and shame of the old words too great this late in the twentieth century? Broken-hearted silence and withdrawal have a certain minimum of integrity. But the century approaching will bring us still greater shame and burdens if we leave politics only to politicians, and if we abandon the great majority of our own species to another era of wars and hunger. We can choose to fight the good fight.

In my sixth decade, I have lived long enough to recall the eye-rolling tolerance of progressives who preferred their social icons on postage stamps, who voted by rote for pragmatic candidates, who wrote checks to the ACLU and the Sierra Club, and who nevertheless made their peace with bipartisan war and empire. The deep lesson they learned from the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall was that social democracy made visits to Europe interesting, but that a comfortable life at home simply ruled out taking personal and political risks that might derail careers and create bad blood round Thanksgiving tables.

Since my social circle includes many academics, the fevered fantasies on the far right regarding troops of tenured radicals seemed absurd. True enough, a fraction of professors in higher education are, in fact, committed socialists. For that matter, a fraction of the very rich have always understood too well the brute facts behind the expensively groomed figures in corporate culture. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was even moved to join this fraction of class traitors, in an era of militant labor strikes and factory occupations. Roosevelt notably stated at Madison Square Garden in a public speech in 1936:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peacebusiness and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for meand I welcome their hatred.

Among secular humanists, then and now, there has been an ongoing debate about the very meaning of humanism, and an unsurprising division of opinion about rational policies in public life. In fact, humanists of various kinds span the whole political spectrum. Some are true believers in the free market and even in the vainglorious egoism of Ayn Rand; others hope to reform capitalism with the kind of managerial plans recommended by Elizabeth Warren, who has stated I am a capitalist to my very bones; and some are committed, like Bernie Sanders, to democratic socialism, including the kind of social democratic policies the Sanders campaign honorably supports.

Though I send donations to the Sanders campaign, I reserve my votes for socialist candidates of the Green Party, because their Green New Deal is far better than the shoplifted product of the Democratic Party. If they make it on the ballot, I also sometimes vote for independent socialists opposed to both of the big corporate parties. I gladly give much credit to Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and others who have taken discussion of democracy and socialism to a much wider public. Too damn easy to snipe from sectarian bunkers at the new wave of young socialists who have joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and the much larger number of voters and citizens who are the solid base in the Sanders campaign.

What really matters most now is that a growing number of working people are in motion, and that a class-conscious popular movement is on a collision course with the anti-democratic old guard within the Democratic National Committee (DNC). If the next Democratic Convention is a brokered convention designed to stop the Sanders campaign by any means necessary, then the old guard may retreat into the gilded palace of the DNC and finally pull down the roof and pillars on their own heads.

A class-conscious fight for basic democracy must also include radical reforms in the existing electoral system, so that councils of workers and neighbors finally become the living foundation of a democratic republic. We can have real democracy in this country or we can have the two party system, but we cannot have both. The political independence of workers and of class-conscious allies certainly includes a political revolution, just as Sanders recommends. Though we can fully expect the ruling class to wage a political counterrevolution through campaigns of organized lying and through ongoing economic assaults on the great majority of working people.

A democratic republic will certainly require a political revolution in campaign financing and in electoral laws. Including the overturning of the Supreme Courts decision in Citizens United, and the abolition of the Electoral College. Equally certain is that a political revolution will be more easily eroded without an economic revolution gained through actual class struggles in workplaces, in neighborhoods, and in daily life.

For both moral and strategic reasons, non-violent resistance against the corporate state is by far the best way forward. Anyone inclined toward gunfights with the state is willfully ignorant of the fact that they are far outgunned by the state, but they have also mistaken class-conscious power with state violence. That kind of political romanticism has far more in common with a fundamentally amoral corporate state than with a democratic movement for socialism. Fortunately, the little Lenins of the left are a small minority, though at crucial junctures they may wield an influence beyond their actual numbers. To this day, there are sectarians who have not reckoned with the actual course of the Russian Revolution, that stormy coalition of workers, peasants and intellectuals who formed workers councils and popular assemblies.

Lenin even wrote one of the classic documents of the libertarian left in August and September of 1917, titled The State and Revolution. He was moody and cunning, however, and by 1920 he was writing Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. By 1921, Emma Goldman gave a speech at the grave of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, and indeed his funeral would be the last time anarchists were permitted to demonstrate in public. In the same year, Lenin and the Central Committee mobilized troops to crush the Kronstadt Rebellion. In the previous century, an earnest member of the Spartacist League informed me that this rebellion was simply a misadventure of degenerate elements and lumpenproles.

By the time Lenin wrote his Last Will and Testament in 1922, he did give a warning: Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Furthermore, Lenin added: Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General.

This reference to the Russian Revolution may be of interest to democratic socialists for both moral and strategic reasons. Some readers may be impatient with past revolutions, and certainly our first duty is to stand our ground in present circumstances. Even so, we are better oriented to reality if we can glance backward to gain perspective, the better to acknowledge both the losses and gains of the world socialist movement over the past hundred years. Moreover, gaining a sense of history is not simply an academic exercise. What began as a Russian Revolution did not consolidate a democratic republic, and ended in a Bolshevik coup detat.

Some have argued that a plural coalition of peasants, workers, social anarchists, social democrats, and socialist revolutionaries was fated to fail without successful revolutions in Europe, and only the centralizing drive of Lenin had any chance of holding the red fortress in Russia. The Bolshevik theorists of revolution considered themselves in possession of a scientific doctrine that justified their own course of action, exclusively in command of state power and of state violence.

The crucial distinction between power and violence is worth our attention, since the ruling class rules far more often through institutional power than through outright violence. Consider the police power of the state, and the most honest opponents of assassins in uniform will acknowledge that the institutional impunity of the police is established not only by bullets but also by class and racial disparities in legal penalties, including the barbarism of the death penalty. When we confront state terrorism within national borders, then class-consciousness also grows in opposition to an unaccountable military budget and to endless wars.

Sanders is not our best guide in getting a clear public account of the vast Pentagon budget, nor has he been the most consistent public witness against imperial wars. But he has changed incrementally, and for the better, even on these issues. He has been challenged to be more honest about the racist and colonial regime in Israel, and he has become more forthright in criticism of state Zionism.

Outrageously, MSNBCs Chuck Todd recently addressed his guest, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, and stated,Ruth, we have all been on the receiving end of the Bernie online brigade. Quoting a column by Jonathan Last in The Bulwark, Todd said, Heres what [Last] says, no other candidate has anything like this digital brown shirt brigade except for Donald Trump. The question is this, What if you cant win the presidency without an online mob? What if we live where having a bullying, aggro social media online army popping anyone who sticks their head up, is an ingredient for or a critical marker of success? Has Todd no sense of decency, has he no sense of shame? Members of Sanders family were murdered by the Nazis.

A New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, had previously opined that Trump and Sanders are ideological mirror images of each other, and the graphic that ran with his column showed the heads of both men facing off in profile and encircled with flames. Bruni got merely rich in the course of flattering the stratospherically wealthy career politicians of his chosen party. For the record, Bruni also wrote a meatloaf cookbook, where his taste and talent are better featured.

What do we think of law, order, democracy? The story may be apocryphal, but a reporter once asked Mohandas Gandhi, Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization? Gandhi replied, I think it would be a good idea. Likewise, we can agree that reason and persuasion are best in making the case for law, order and democracy. The contradiction we face is that the ruling class is very highly class conscious of its own privilege in extracting profit from the whole planet, including from the lives and bodies of working people. In their version of capitalist meritocracy, the great majority of the human species does not merit any great share of their consideration. The stark and growing class divisions in this country are not an accidents of ruling class power and public policies, but necessities of the accumulation of capital across global borders and of imperial wars.

We are many, they are few. Democracy from the ground up is both the moral and political strength of any socialist movement worth our brief time on earth. This does not mean socialists should resign ourselves only to personal acts of witness. The whole field of social relations becomes the ground of struggle. If we lose our moral bearings, we will also lose any sane orientation to socialist goals. But the ruling class also gets a vote in the use of brute force, and indeed they exercise that option far more often than the working class, as the whole history of class struggles has proven.

Raising the ground floor of social democracy in health care, housing and education is common ground between social democrats and democratic socialists. These are certainly radical reforms, and cannot be won and defended without popular resistance against the corporate state. Whatever happens in the presidential election, the movement for democratic socialism will cross party lines and go beyond the year 2020.No friction, no traction.

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Democratic Socialism in the Twenty-First Century - CounterPunch

Answers to life, death and everything in between – The Hindu

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Religious texts have long shone a torch on the path to enlightenment, happiness and gratitude, yet we walk the aisles of book stores in search of a compass that will help us navigate resentment, grief and modern love. Sensitivity trainer TT Srinath has been at this for a while now asking existential questions since he lost his father as a teen, struggled as an entrepreneur and trained thousands as a human interaction facilitator before finding his voice as a writer of four books and a column in MetroPlus. Over the past few years, his Conversations with Self that appears on our Health pages has engaged with the world, warmly without being preachy.

When we meet to discuss his latest book, Facing My Mirror What It Means To Live In This World, Srinath, from a well-established industrialist family, looks back on the tough years that shaped his life and thinking, with disarming humanism.

What I would now define as setbacks in life primarily because of circumstances that were beyond my control were actually instances when life was presenting me a fork in the road; asking me to make a choice. While I made those choices, I did not like the consequences. But choice also gives you the power to be responsive rather than reactive. When I came to appreciate that it led to who I have become, says Srinath. I realised that there is no point being futuristic, no point of worrying about the past. Every day is a gift.

While Srinath had enough material from his own journey to help others accept or avoid lifes minefields, the idea for the book originated in early 2018, when he was unwell and juggling a training workshop he has trained nearly 30,000 participants and worked with 120 organisations across the world. A member of the Indian Society for Applied Behavioural Science, Srinath holds a doctorate from Anna University, Chennai, in Organisational Behaviour. His first introduction to existentialism came from a Jesuit, Father John Prabhu, while pursuing a post-graduate degree in Human Resource Management at XLRI, Jamshedpur. He lent me Mans Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. The book could not have come to me at a better time I was still low from the death of my father, I was trying to find my place in my extended family. It helped me recognise that there are certain givens you are born and you will die. So between those two posts, how do you embrace life, embrace people. And accept the pain that comes with the choices you make. The only choices we have are can I learn to appreciate my uniqueness, celebrate it and, therefore, celebrate the other; can I take charge of my life and find my authenticity.

Frankl continues to remain an important part of Srinaths book that had a soft launch, anchored by historian Pradeep Chakravarthy, earlier this week. Industrialist Suresh Krishna received the first copy from N Ravi, director, Kasturi and Sons. While Krishna spoke on how the book defines the weighty concept of existentialism in simple language, Ravi spoke on how it was a reflection of the writer who has transformed many times over in the four decades Ive known him. It does not handout bailouts for a perfect life; instead it suggests how to find a path.

Nirmala Lakshman, director, The Hindu Group Publishing, who has also written the foreword for the book, said, This is a book that must be dipped into often, a much-needed manual that can show us who we really are.

The book begins at what we consider the end death, and demystifies a subject that many do not wish to dwell upon. It is also an outpouring that the path to happiness is to not be in pursuit of it at all.

Facing My Mirror, published by Shakthi Forms, will be launched on February 28 at Higginbothams, Anna Salai, at 6.30 pm. The author will be in conversation with Vinay Kamath, Senior Associate Editor, The Hindu Businessline, and author-playwright-poet Shreekumar Varma.

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Answers to life, death and everything in between - The Hindu

The Integrative Work of Spiritual Ecology | Gregory Eran Gronbacher – Patheos

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My last post introduced my readers to the concept of spiritual ecology and I drew out some connections to Judaism. In this post, I want to briefly discuss how spiritual ecology can relate to nearly any religious tradition or practice.

At the core of spiritual ecology are the overlapping and intertwined insights and convictions that the natural world has spiritual meaning, that humans are embedded in the natural world, and how we relate to animals, the ecosystem, agriculture, natural resources effects our own well being.

Spiritual ecology does not seek to take existing religious traditions and add nature-based concerns or elements, but rather, seeks to draw out the nature based elements already present and beneficial to the tradition overall. Therefore, spiritual ecology can dialog and interact with Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and even forms of Humanism. And spiritual ecology is relevant whether one is orthodox, liberal, traditional, or whatever.

Spiritual Ecology & Holidays

Think about religious holidays for a moment. Sukkot is replete with nature-based imagery, calls us outside into the sukkah, and coincides with the time of the harvest. Scholars tend to think the origins of the holiday are deeply rooted in earlier harvest traditions and celebrations. In our modern world alienated from nature, it is too easy to neglect or even miss altogether the ecological aspects of the holiday which rather than detract from its deeper, spiritual meanings, enhance them.

Consider the Christian holiday of Christmas. While no one knows the exact date of Jesus birth, and while there are historical reasons for the holiday taking place when it does (supplanting earlier Pagan celebrations), from a Christian perspective having the celebration coincide with the Winter Solstice the renewal of light makes much sense. The same can be said of Hanukkah.

Part of the underlying structure of these, and many other celebrations, is natures cycles and rhythms. The specific timing of the holidays and festivals may vary due to culture and geographical location, but the cycles of the sun and seasons, and the corresponding agricultural events are the basis and structure for many of our enduring holidays.

A common thread is the recognition that attuning to the natural rhythms of nature can reconnect us to our place in the ecosystem and be a powerful tool for personal and spiritual transformation and growth.The seasons provide opportunity for reflection, personal accounting, and marking off significant times and events in our life. We live each day with the symbolism and metaphor of the constant progression/changing of the seasons. And yes, such things have spiritual power and significance and are not foreign or contrary to any of the worlds major religious traditions.

Spiritual Ecology & Environmental Responsibility

Spiritual ecology as a religious impulsebegins to suggest practices and disciplines that we can take upon ourselves to increase awareness and reconnection to others, the natural world, and therefore ourselves.We engage such practices to elevate our lives and move us toward wholeness. No spiritual practice fulfills its meaning unless it make us a better, more whole and loving person.

As we increasingly realize the potential dangers of climate change, pollution, and how many aspects of our lifestyle choices damage the environment, we also realize our moral obligations to lessen the harm we do. This recognition is not a partisan political one, it is simply the understanding that to the degree to which we harm the planet is to the degree to which we harm ourselves. There may be debate over the exact causes, corrective measures, and the like, but one cannot responsibly ignore the issues of climate change, the destruction of ecosystems, and our all too often callous attitude toward the natural world.

The thinking of spiritual ecology is that environmental concern is existential concern, that there is a moral and spiritual aspect to these issues, and that our responses will be most effective when they recognize such. Obviously, science and technology are vital and pivotal to finding solutions that will help protect the environment. But human attitudes and values must change as well, and changing human values and attitudes is, in part, a religious task.

What are your thoughts? Have you encountered ideas, books, or people into spiritual ecology? Was it a good experience?

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The Integrative Work of Spiritual Ecology | Gregory Eran Gronbacher - Patheos

The Neoliberal Time Capsule of Ricki and the Flash – The Spool

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Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmakers own biography. For February, were celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coveragehere.

2015s Ricki and the Flash doesnt know whats about to happen. It doesnt know it would silence the successful string of Singing Streep films. It doesnt know its Jonathan Demmes final film. And it doesnt fully realize the changing conservative political tide that was about to crest over America the following year.

Ricki and the Flash is a rock n roll fable about Ricki, a prodigal mother (Meryl Streep) who returns to bourgeois Indiana from her life as a working-class musician to help estranged daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer) through her divorce and suicide attempt. Her return reignites hostilities with ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) and sons Josh and Adam (Sebastian Stan and Nick Westrate). But with a little classic rock, the atypical family learns to accept one another. Sorta.

Ricki Rendazzo (real name Linda Brummell) is complex and flawed, to use 2015s euphemisms. She is a rock n roll baby boomer whose ideology is in direct conflict with the music she sings. She makes disparaging racial remarks about Obama, thinks all Asian people look alike, has a Dont Tread On Me back tattoo, and thinks her son Adams homosexuality is a passing lifestyle choice. While Ricki seems to be composed entirely of cognitive dissonance, the film interrogates none of these flaws, which rings a little tragic in a post-Trump world.

Uncharacteristically, Demmes camera feels invisible. This film has a straight-forward, matter-of-fact style that works to humanize its grisly protagonist. However, true to form, Demme composes some crackerjack musical sequences. Even the surprising renditions of Lady Gagas Bad Romance and P!nks Get This Party Started are shot with earnest verve. Demme, till the very end, has a wonderful eye for music. He knows how to cut to compliment the rhythm and is still masterfully able to get us inside the songs.

Written by Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifers Body, Young Adult), this off-kilter rock dramedy has a lot of good things going for it. An incredible cast headlines the film; Kline and Streep, pairing now for the third time, bring their tender chemistry back full circle. Streep and real-life daughter Gummer have a wonderful working rapport that makes the snipes weve come to expect from Cody feel all that more delicious.

There are plenty of winners in the supporting cast, too. Rock icon and consistent charmer Rick Springfield is a delight as Greg, Rickis somewhat boyfriend and lead guitarist of The Flash. Multi-Tony-Award-Winner Audra McDonald plays Maureen, Petes all-too-patient second wife. Unlike the film, we will return to her.

2015s Ricki and the Flash doesnt know whats about to happen.

Ricki and The Flashs tone runs all over the place. While the film doesnt get bogged down with subplots or unnecessary twists, the awkwardness of the films halves makes for a jolting momentum. Gummer does the best she can, finding golden moments of humor in a character that has to take a backseat to her family drama.

The film turns into a sentimental melodrama, as the second half forgets Julies struggles entirely and focuses on Ricki patching things up with her sons. All this while Ricki and The Flash intermittently pad the film with rousing covers of classic rock songs. They end the wedding with Bruce Springsteens My Love Will Not Let You Down and Canned Heats Lets Work Together.

But can they ever really work together? Wont Rickis love let her family down because of her beliefs? Looking back on contemporary reviews at the time, 2015 was happy to tepidly tip-toe around Rickis bigotry. Streep, never one to take on politically radical roles, pulls back just enough to let us know this is one background the grande chameleon is unwilling to disappear into. (Why she thought The Iron Lady wasnt as fraught, I still have no idea.)

Many critics avoided the politics altogether. But some critics praised the rebellious mother for her strength in pursuit of her dreams, despite societal pressure. Some even thought she should have been more outspoken instead of letting her family walk all over her. Others saw the familys animosity stem not from bigotry, but being fundamentally decent people whose choices have put them at odds with one another.

There were a few critics who acknowledged the troublesome politics, but downplay their severity. Ricki is described as more of an experiment than a person we should take seriously. Others focused on how Demmes use of ritual and music dissolve[s] [the] boundaries that Rickis beliefs put up in the family. To some extent this is true. Ricki performing at her sons wedding seems to make amends. But this moment plasters over Rickis politics, it does not acknowledge, correct them, or show theyve changed.

This isnt too say 2015 overlooked Rickis problems altogether. Slate critic Dana Stevens rightfully finds Rickis attitudes mournfully unexplored, despite it being a logical conversation to have. In his New York Times review, Bob Vergara describes Cody and Demme as conflict-averse and is justifiably confused as to why liberal-minded Demme didnt interrogate further. But even these reviews do not think Rickis problems are remarkable enough to investigate fully. They are happy to leave the film with a patronizing and benign ok, boomer commentary and move on.

Watching Ricki and the Flash after 2016 makes us realize how dangerous Ricki is.

Essentially, the Hollywood of 2015 had an optimism that the following year would prove completely unfounded. Even though the increased public discourse on police brutality and the rage of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri had begun in earnest the year before, many still thought 2016 would maintain the era of liberal centrism ushered in under the Obama administration. Only Varietys Andrew Barker, in acknowledging the changing shift in classic rock demographics, seems to sense the lurking trembles of right-wing populism in the films subconscious.

Though the film believes liberal goodness will change hearts and minds, watching Ricki and the Flash after 2016 makes us realize how dangerous Ricki is. Demme and Cody see Ricki and her politics as a flash in the pan, the last gasp of a dying ideology. Only now do we see the flash is actually the flicker of an oncoming train entering a long dark tunnel.

This is a movie about a wandering generation that believes in fierce, unregulated independence (for some). Ricki set out following the promises of rock n roll only to find that failure was still possible. Yet she refuses to see any link between her poverty and the ideologies she espouses. Time has shown that Ricki doesnt have to wait long. Her lost generation was about to find itself to monstrous effect.

And this distance is no more palpable than when we watch how she itself interacts with McDonald. Take for instance, the first scene with Ricki at The Brummels palatial abode. They already hint at this new wife, but shes not at home because shes visiting her sick father in Seattle.

Ricki sarcastically comments on the marble foyer to which Pete replies sometimes I feel like Jefferson at Monticello. Which, you know, makes McDonald into Sally Hemmings. If you dont know that one of the most acclaimed black performers of our time is in this movie, you might forget to yikes when Maureen shows up an hour later.

When they are on screen together, the tension between Ricki and Maureen feels heightened amongst a new political climate. Far from a meek and mild second wife, McDonald turns Maureen into a strong and intelligent force. We hold our breath, waiting for racial hostilities to ignite. Weve seen how people like Ricki who come into power respond to black dissenting bodies. But it never comes.

Ricki and the Flash captures a particular moment in American history where our liberal elite thought their reign was far from over. They were too scared to address existing racial tension because we were post-racial. Everything was going to be fine. The film paints Ricki as a fossil, a relic from a fading time. Demmes trademark humanism encouraged sympathy for a woman left behind by the system.

But now, because people gloss over her bigotry, this sympathy has turned to fear and loathing. We know it is entirely possible that Ricki doesnt learn her lesson and that, one day, in the not so distant future, we would have to confront her ideologies on a much grander scale.Watching Ricki and The Flash now reveals how ephemeral film can be and how our relationship to what it preserves changes over time. Far from static, films change over the years because the reflection changes. As such, Demmes final work leaves us looking at a funhouse mirror in which we can see our social distortions. We owe it to his legacy to learn from it.

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The Neoliberal Time Capsule of Ricki and the Flash - The Spool

The tormentor of the Krakow ghetto: The secret life of Horst Pilarzik – DW (English)

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A sporty Mercedes with a handsome man at the wheel pulls up at the sidewalk. Nearby, a young man is waiting. The driver signals to him to get in, and they speed off. It's the late 1950s; the Mercedes races down the wide streets of a freshly reconstructed Frankfurt am Main. In the city center, the tall buildings herald a new dawn. Shoppers are busy indulging their lust for consumption in the crowded pedestrian zones. These are the years of the German economic miracle.

The driver of the car is Horst Burkhart, a hotel manager, aged about 40. The young passenger is his nephew, Jochen, who is probably suitably impressed. Horst is rich; he surrounds himself with attractive women, takes them out on yachting trips. Jochen and Horst get along well; they often meet in Frankfurt in the evening and go to a bar. Horst likes a drink.

Many years later, Jochen is reluctant to talk about these meetings. His daughter Christiane encourages him, but he pleads forgetfulness. "Oh, Chrissie, that was so long ago," he says. He seems, in his old age, to have completely repressed his memories of Horst. Whenever Christiane asks him if he knows that Horst sent hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews to Auschwitz, he always responds automatically: "Really? That's terrible," sounding surprised every time.

"The name Horst had been buzzing around me ever since I was a child. The way people talked about him was so strange. There was something not right there," recalls Christiane Falge, Jochen's daughter. Born in 1970, she was the one who decided to oppose her family and bring the story of Horst Burkhart to light. She herself never met him; he died five years before she was born.

"The whole family knew that Burkhart wasn't his real name. They played along with this game of hide-and-seek. We were always told that we must never reveal that his name was Horst Pilarzik; we weren't allowed to say that he was part of our family," she remembers.

Read more:Poland's forgotten victims of Nazism

Horst Pilarzik was a regular at well-heeled establishments and events in Frankfurt

The terror of the ghetto

After the deportations from the Krakow Ghetto in October 1942, the German occupying forces set up a labor camp on the site of two Jewish cemeteries in Krakow's Plaszow district. A young SS-Unterscharfhrer, Horst Pilarzik, was appointed camp commander. The junior officer had previously been a member of the elite SS unit "Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler." In Plaszow, he supervised a group of about 200 workers who left the ghetto each day to remove gravestones and build the camp barracks.

Mieczyslaw Pemper, a member of the Judenrat the Jewish council appointed by the Germans was a prisoner in the Plaszow camp. He remembers a man the whole ghetto feared. Pilarzik was said to have shot dead a group of Jews as they returned to the ghetto after work. According to Pemper's official report at the time, Pilarzik's justification for this was that he had only recently graduated from the SS training school and it was the first time in his life he had seen so many Jews. Testifying after the war about German criminals in Krakow, Pemper remarked that there was "nothing good to be said about Pilarzik."

Pilarzik was only in charge of the camp for a few weeks. At the beginning of 1943 he was replaced by SS-Oberscharfhrer Franz Josef Mller. He remained in Krakow, however, and on March 13 and 14, 1943 he took part in the liquidation of the ghetto. 2,000 people died, and 1,500 were sent to Auschwitz.

Read more:A German town and Josef Mengele, Auschwitz 'angel of death'

When the Nazis occupied Hungary in March 1944, the Jewish population lost their rights, were persecuted, deported and finally murdered. Sheindi Ehrenwald, 14 at the time, took notes about it all, including her deportation and life in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp which she wrote at the risk of her life. Almost her entire family was killed by the Nazis.

The photo above, probably taken about 1935, is from a happier time in the lives of the Ehrenwald family, who were merchants and part of the large Jewish community in the town of Galanta near the Austrian border. The man in the foreground is Sheindi's father Lipot (Leopold) Ehrenwald, who died in Auschwitz.

On arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the newcomers who were not immediately sent to their deaths were forced to work. Sheindi was transported to a German weapons factory in Lower Silesia.

Sheindi secretly transferred her handwritten notes to index cards thrown out by the arms factory. She managed to hide and save them for the 14 months before liberation. Today, her diary is a rare testimony to that time.

"Punishment at roll call" is the title of a watercolor by Zofia Rozensztrauch, painted in 1945, that shows the brutality of German guards in the concentration camp. The painting is also on display in the exhibition of Berlin's Deutsches Historisches Museum to mark the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp 75 years ago.

Author: Stefan Dege (db)

A coat from Plaszow

These days, Christiane Falge is a university professor. She remembers hearing about clothes Horst distributed to relatives in Gliwice during the war. "He brought children's clothes and shoes as gifts for my young father, who wore them. Good quality children's boots, good warm coats," she says. She suspects they belonged to prisoners in Plaszow or Auschwitz. How else would a Krakow SS man have got hold of such clothes at that time?

In mid-1943, Horst Pilarzik was made adjutant to the third camp commandant, SS-Hauptsturmfhrer Amon Gth. Shortly afterwards he was transferred to Riga, possibly because of his excessive alcohol consumption.

Pemper describes hearing the drunken Pilarzik shouting in a Krakow casino: "Can't you find a chair for a holder of the Knight's Cross?" He was given a chair, but when it turned out that Pilarzik had no such a medal, he was moved away from Krakow. Another story suggests he was found drunk and asleep in the street.

Read more:Guilt without atonement: When Nazi Germany occupied Lodz

Escaping reality

Within the family, it was known that Horst had problems with alcohol, was aggressive, and had a lot of affairs with women, says Christiane Falge. "His life after the war was a life on the run. He drank, he beat up women, moved frequently from town to town. He was clearly afraid that the truth about his past would eventually come to light," Falge says.

As Horst Burkhart, Pilarzik lived in Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt and the Ruhr district. Although he wasn't an educated man, he found well-paid work in hotels. He had a sports car; he sailed yachts and rode horses. Beautiful women found him attractive.

But his past always threatened to catch up with him. Christiane's mother remembers a visit from two men in the 1960s, looking for Pilarzik. Was it the police? Were they Israeli agents? He was wanted by institutions that hunted war criminals. His case was also taken up by the District Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Krakow without success. Then, in 1965, Pilarzik died unexpectedly.

Read more:Nazi victim files go online in German archive

Christiane Falge researched her family past

Exposing the perpetrators

Without Falge's determination, Pilarzik's post-war life would probably have remained a secret. In 2018, she contacted the Krakow Museum and told the story of her relative. She wants the world to know about his crimes. "It's important to expose the perpetrators, like the camp commanders, and remind people of their guilt," she says.

Falge admits that it took time for her to deal with the Nazi chapter of her family history. "I don't think it's good to hide these crimes," she says. "I'm doing what I can to expose this story and bring it to light, and I feel better for it. The bad feelings that my family kept silent about Horst the mass murderer don't weigh on me as heavily as they did."

Falge's research focuses on the issue of diversity. She is involved in initiatives to counter discrimination and racism. She says she wants to raise her children with values like tolerance and humanism, so that Nazi ideology and others like it never return.

"In our house, we have visitors from all over the world. It's normal for our children that not everyone is German, and not everyone speaks German. They know that diversity is enriching," she says. She thinks for a moment. "This is probably the positive thing that's come out of this story."

This article is part of the Guilt without atonement series by DW's Polish desk in cooperation with Interia and Wirtualna Polska.

As Hitler's Propaganda Minister, the virulently anti-Semitic Goebbels was responsible for making sure a single, iron-clad Nazi message reached every citizen of the Third Reich. He strangled freedom of the press, controlled all media, arts, and information, and pushed Hitler to declare "Total War." He and his wife committed suicide in 1945, after poisoning their six children.

The leader of the German National Socialist Workers' Party (Nazi) developed his anti-Semitic, anti-communist and racist ideology well before coming to power as Chancellor in 1933. He undermined political institutions to transform Germany into a totalitarian state. From 1939 to 1945, he led Germany in World War II while overseeing the Holocaust. He committed suicide in April 1945.

As leader of the Nazi paramilitary SS ("Schutzstaffel"), Himmler was one of the Nazi party members most directly responsible for the Holocaust. He also served as Chief of Police and Minister of the Interior, thereby controlling all of the Third Reich's security forces. He oversaw the construction and operations of all extermination camps, in which more than 6 million Jews were murdered.

Hess joined the Nazi party in 1920 and took part in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi attempt to gain power. While in prison, he helped Hitler write "Mein Kampf." Hess flew to Scotland in 1941 to attempt a peace negotiation, where he was arrested and held until the war's end. In 1946, he stood trial in Nuremberg and was sentenced to life in prison, where he died.

Alongside Himmler, Eichmann was one of the chief organizers of the Holocaust. As an SS Lieutenant colonel, he managed the mass deportations of Jews to Nazi extermination camps in Eastern Europe. After Germany's defeat, Eichmann fled to Austria and then to Argentina, where he was captured by the Israeli Mossad in 1960. Tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity, he was executed in 1962.

A participant in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Gring became the second-most powerful man in Germany once the Nazis took power. He founded the Gestapo, the Secret State Police, and served as Luftwaffe commander until just before the war's end, though he increasingly lost favor with Hitler. Gring was sentenced to death at Nuremberg but committed suicide the night before it was enacted.

Author: Cristina Burack

Every evening at 1830 UTC, DW's editors send out a selection of the day's hard news and quality feature journalism. Sign up to receive it directly here.

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The tormentor of the Krakow ghetto: The secret life of Horst Pilarzik - DW (English)

Inside the Cuban Hospitals That Castro (and Bernie) Doesn’t Want Tourists to See – PanAm Post

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I saw biological waste discarded in a regular trash can. The beds had no linen, and the only equipment around was the bag of IV fluids hanging above them. (File)

As Cuba has become an issue in the U.S. Presidential election, we have thought it useful to republish the PanAm Posts own research on Cubas healthcare system:

By the time I climbed the steps of the emergency room entrance in San Miguel, Havana, I could already tell that the supposed first-classhealth care provided in Cuba was a myth. Hospitals in the islands capital areliterally falling apart.

Friends told me to dress like a Cuban and not to speak while inside, since my Argentinean accent would give meaway the moment I said hello. A member of the opposition Cuban Patriotic Union (UNPACU) party came along to guide me in my journey to the core of communist-style medicine.

We entered the hospital at 10 p.m. on an ordinary Saturday night in September. Three out of the hospitals four stories were closed. Only the ER was operational.

We have been waiting for an ambulance for four hours, yelleda man wearing green scrubs, who seemed to be a doctor. I sat on one of the four plastic chairs in the waiting area. My friend kept stilland gestured to let me know I should remain silent and listen to the patients and theirrelatives.

Twenty minutes went by,and still no ambulance. The man in green scrubsremained at his mothers side on an improvised stretcher, trying not to lose hispatience. They looked like characters from the play Waiting for Godot.

The scarce equipment available gave the building the appearance of a makeshift medicalcamp, rather than a hospital in the nations capital.

I stood up and continued my tour.Two nurses stared at us but didnt say a word as we entered an intensive-care unit, where the facilitys air-conditioned area began.

My guide a taxi driver for tourists who dont get to see this part of town told me that all the doctors working the night shift are still inschool. Indeed, none of them appeared to be older than25.

The only working bathroom in the entire hospital had only one toilet. The door didnt close, so you had to go with people outside watching. Toilet paper was nowhere to be found, and the floor was far from clean.

I saw biological waste discarded in a regular trash can. The beds had no linen, and the only equipment around was the bag of IV fluids hanging above them. All doctors offices had handwritten signs on the doors, and at least four patients waited outside each room. The average wait time for each was around three hours.

Orderlies were also nowhere to be seen. A young man had to push his mother on a stretcher until he reached the line of those waiting for anambulance.[adrotate group=8]I leftthe hospital after a couple hours. Once outside, puzzled by the large bags the people entering the hospital were carrying, I asked my friend to explain.

Well, theyhave to bring everything with them, because the hospital provides nothing. Pillows, sheets, medicine: everything, he said.

Cubas Public Health Ministry runs all hospitals in the country and is in charge of centrally dictating public-health policies. The socialized medical system, delivered at no charge to Cuban patients, is akeypropaganda tool of the Castro regime.

Since the triumph of the Revolution, making sure that Cubans have free health care has become a fundamental social cornerstone,Granma, the Communist Partys official media outlet, boasts in an article. This is in linewith thehumanism and social justice of our revolutionary process.

Socialists and progressives outside of Cuba have also been known to gush over the islands state-run health-care system.

In 2007, filmmaker Michael Moore released a documentary that featured US citizens who traveled to Cuba to get free medical treatment. Moore claimed they received services comparable to what ordinary Cuban citizens would have received.

The Cuban people have free universal health care. Theyve become known as having not only one of the best health-care systems, but as being one of the most generous countries in providing doctors and medical equipment to third-world countries, Mooresays inSicko.

Yilian Jimnez Expsito, general director of Cuban Medical Services, toldGranma in an interviewthat the secret lies in the medicaltraining under a socialist system, where doctors do not view the patientas merchandise or acustomer; where every citizen has aright to health care from birth to the grave,without discrimination.

However, Hilda Molina, a Cuban neurosurgeon who turned against Castro, explained in an interview with El Cato that the whole sector is under tight government control, which shuts downs private alternatives or independent organizations.

These arbitrary measures, aside frommany othernegative consequences, had a terrible impact, ethically: the sacreddoctor-patient relationship was replaced with animpersonal government-patient dynamic. When patientsare forced to seekcare from government-sanctioned doctors and facilities, they suffer distress, whether consciously or unconsciously, immersed in a deep sensation of insecurity, she said.

The regime has neither provided Cubans with equality nor fairness in health care. The ruling elite, theirrelatives and friends,get better service than the rest, Molina lamented.

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Inside the Cuban Hospitals That Castro (and Bernie) Doesn't Want Tourists to See - PanAm Post

In Karnataka teens cry of Pakistan zindabad, an echo of Tagores thoughts about patriotism – Scroll.in

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As I write these words, a young woman is sitting behind tall walls in a prison somewhere in Karnataka, shadowed with the stigma of two among the gravest crimes in Indias statute books. The first is of these is sedition,the second is of fostering hatred between communities. If found guilty and convicted of the first, she could be sentenced to spend her life in jail.

Just two words brought this misfortune upon her young shoulders. These were Pakistan zindabad. Literally Long Live Pakistan.

Nineteen-year-old Amulya Leona Noronha stirred a tumult during a protest against amendments to Indias citizenship law, organised by the Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-Issai Federation at Freedom Park in Bangalore on February 20. It was here that she shouted the slogan Pakistan zindabad which plunged her into mayhem, as several men tried to drag her away. But before the microphone was snatched from her, she also managed to shout Hindustan zindabad or Long Live India.

No one allowed her, then or later, to explain why she wished that Pakistan live long. Soon after she uttered these two words, she was arrested. Her father condemned her actions, declaring, What she said is wrong. She was joined by some Muslims and wasnt listening to me! Some men, said to be members of an extremist Hindutva organization, gathered that night outside her home and stoned it.

The chief minister of Karnataka also took notice of the young womans slogan. He claimed evidence that the young woman had Maoist links, and that her refrain wishing Pakistan well werepart of a conspiracy to disturb peace and harmony in the state. He also said that her father wanted to break her bones. Asaduddin Owaisi, chief of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, who was on the stage and among the men who tried to silence her, later condemned her roundly,pronouncing: We, in no way, support our enemy nation Pakistan. The magistrate before who she was presented, refused her bail, and instead sent her for 14 days into judicial custody.

The first crime that she is charged with sedition, under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code was used by colonial rulers against freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi and Lokmanya Tilak. It can punish with life in jail any person who by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards, the Government established by law in India.

Among those recently charged with under this colonial provision are the mother and teacher of primary school children in Bidar for a writing and performing a play critical of the recent amendments of the Citizenship Amendment Act. Amulya Noronha is also charged under Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code, for the alleged crime of creating hatred against communities.

I confess to being utterly confused by too many mysteries at play here. Maybe I am missing something, but how could a young person declaring publicly that she wishes Pakistan well be seen to incite hatred against any community in any way? Her message, after all, was not of hate against anyone. How indeed could the call Pakistan Zindabad be construed as an attempt to cause hatred, contempt or disaffection against the government of India to attract the grave charge of sedition?

Moreover, if Karnataka Chief Minister Yediyurappa was correct in his overnight discovery of her Maoist links, I cannot figure out why a Maoist would hail Pakistan? Her father was angry with her because she did not listen to him: but he should know that this is a crime that any young people would be guilty of. His other complaint was that she was joined by some Muslims. But the Muslims who joined her on the stage only tried to seize her mic and silence her voice as she wished Pakistan well.

These mysteries become even more perplexing when I find that Union ministers who openly incite crowds to shoot at protesters or dub people of certain identities termites are not charged with either creating hatred or of sedition.

In our collective haste to charge Amulya Noronha with sedition and hate outraged by what we feel is evidence of her regrettable wanting in love for her country we have chastened her with a spell behind prison walls. Would we have profited by listening first to what she wanted to say? In a Facebook post a week before her public sloganeering, Amulya Noronha had written, Whatever country may be long live for all the countries! She had added. Long live India! Long live Pakistan! Long live Bangladesh! Long live Sri Lanka! Long live Nepal! Long live Afghanistan! Long live China! Long live Bhutan!

Among those who would surely have approved of the universal humanism that Amulya Noronha seemed to be attempting to uphold although with such disastrous outcomes for herself is Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore was vigorously opposed to the idea of the nation and nationalism, rejecting these variously in his writings as artificially created, organised self-interest, least human and least spiritual, and even a cruel epidemic of evil that is sweeping over human world of the present age, eating into its moral vitality. He was convinced that a naturally-built human society is much more humane in essence than the so-called artificially created nationhood.

Ashis Nandy tells us that Tagore was a patriot but not a nationalist. Patriotism means love for ones countrya certain emotional attachment to place of ones birth, the place where you have grown up, place which frames your earliest memories. Nationalism is different. Nationalism is not a sentiment. It is an ideology. It is based on the idea of that nationBecause nation and nationalism presume that you homogenise the population. And give them a theory of love of the country which also specified enemies and friends, allies and detractors.

If we had paid heed to what Amulya Noronha was saying, perhaps it was the rejection of the idea that love for ones country requires you to hate specified enemies.

In Mahatma Gandhis worldview, as well, there was no place for enemies. In his last fast, two weeks before he was assassinated, one of his demands was to pay Pakistan its promised share of funds, without which it stood in danger of going bankrupt. Pakistan is not an enemy, he insisted. We maybe estranged, but we are still siblings.

I dont know when Amulya Noronha will be released from prison, and (if and) when she will be freed from the charges of sedition and hate. I dont know if a time will come when politicians, the police, courts and the denizens of social media will listen to her rather than judge her.

If judge her we must, then the most we can judge is that perhaps she was brash and a little unwise in the way she communicated her convictions. But then what is the point of being young if you cannot on occasion have the privilege to be unwise and brash, especially if you believe in something which you are convinced is very important, which you want the world to think about?

We are passing through a luminous moment in the journey of our republic when our young people are trying to teach us new ways to engage with our country and our world. They are telling us to shed hatred and bigotry. Can we just stop and listen?

I feel a catch in my heart to think of this young woman in prison for trying to tell us simply that loving your country does not require you to hate any other.

I dont know if and when she will ever read this article. But if she does, I offer her a small gift. This is my clumsy translation of an exceptional Punjabi poem by Manjeet Sumal which I recently discovered.

The title of the poem is Pakistan Zindabad, two words which our establishment has deemed to be both seditious and hateful.

What is the harm in saying Pakistan Zindabad?Why should I say Pakistan Murdabad Death to Pakistan?Zindabad means may you live, may you remain happy, may you thriveMay you prosper, may you enjoy peace, may you enjoy good fortune alwaysPakistan at one time was part of usOn that side is left behind our land, our cities, our peopleOur history, our shared culture, the memories of our ancestorsWhy should these not be Zindabad?Why should these not live long?Why should I wish for their destruction?They are our neighbours. Tell me who wishes for the death of ones neighbours?We can wish for the death of terrorism in PakistanWe can curse with Murdabad the political leaders, the system which supports and fosters terrorismBut we cannot wish death to the entire people, the country, the citizens of PakistanThey are not to blame in any wayTheir artistes, singers, cricketers, actors are not to blameWhy should we curse themwith Murdabad?If our neighbours prosper, we will prosperDo we want them to raise the slogan Hindustan Murdabad against us?Would we be happy if they say that the people of India should die, should be reduced to a land of corpses?We ourselves sometimes raise the slogans Punjab government Murdabad! Indian government Murdabad!Never Punjab Murdabad! India Murdabad!If we wish death, it is to the systemBut when it comes to Pakistan, why do we forget this?That its system should perish, not its people?If we seek their death, is this not evidence of the bankruptcy of our minds, our ignorance?Patriotism should not be a device to hijack our mindsThose who truly love their country love all the earthTheir love does not halt at any borderTheir love does not wish that people live on this side of the border and die on the other sideMay India live long!May Pakistan live long!May Bangladesh live long!May Sri Lanka live long!May China live long!May Canada, America, England, Dubai, Qatar, Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia, all live long!May people who live everywhere thrive, prosper, find happiness!|Both India and Pakistan have lived long! They are living long! They will continue to live long far into the future!Pakistan Zindabad!

So, Amulya Leona Naronha, a rousing call from me to you Pakistan zindabad!

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In Karnataka teens cry of Pakistan zindabad, an echo of Tagores thoughts about patriotism - Scroll.in

Kosovo government forms a task force for abolition of tax on Serbian goods – Serbina Monitor in English

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Kosovos Ministry of Economy has formed a team to identify trade barriers and recommend to the Government of Kosovo further steps regarding the tax on Serbian goods.

It will recommend either the abolition or withholding of the 100% tax on the import of Serbian goods, Gazeta Express reports.

It is exactly one week since this team, consisting of nine members from different institutions, started to work. This team was founded at the initiative of the Kosovo Minister of Economy Rozeta Hajdari.

Based on the document obtained by the Pristina T7 television, the team consists of representatives of the Ministry of Commerce from different departments of this ministry, who also participate in the Kosovo Customs, Food and Veterinary Agency.

Discover the most important foreign investments in Serbia in 2019: click here!

Company representatives are also included in this group. The PKK, the Manufacturers Club and the Business Chamber are three bodies that represent the voice of Kosovo businesses.

Still, the American Chamber of Commerce of Kosovo is left out of the group. The Chamber told the T7 TV station that their views would have to be heard.

Despite our differing views on the issue of fees, the US Chamber of Commerce believes in the importance of the diversity of opinions and ideas that should be discussed within those bodies. However, over the past week we have had a meeting with both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Economy, at which we have communicated what is already a public view of the US Chamber of Commerce on the importance of undisturbed trade between the Western Balkan countries and therefore the full economic integration of the whole region, said Arian Zeka of the American Chamber of Commerce in Kosovo.

Vetvendosje and the Democratic Alliance of Kosovo stipulated in a coalition government agreement that the tax on Serbian products would be replaced by a measure of reciprocity.

(Blic, 25.02.2020)

https://www.blic.rs/vesti/politika/gazeta-kosovska-vlada-formirala-radnu-grupu-za-razmatranje-ukidanja-taksi/rgryqxx

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Kosovo government forms a task force for abolition of tax on Serbian goods - Serbina Monitor in English