Release the unredacted Epstein files

Dolores Huerta, Chicana activist and defender of farmworker rights, dies at 96

A life well spent

Jessica Kutz, Climate Reporter

This story was originally reported by Jessica Kutz of The 19th. Meet Jessica and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Dolores Huerta, who rose to national prominence as the co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association and was known for her advocacy for women farmworkers, died on October 28. She was 96. 

Long recognized for her lifelong dedication to farmworkers, Huerta’s fight against injustice — and the sacrifices she made in that fight –  reemerged in the wider public consciousness this year when she spoke of being sexually assaulted and raped by César Chávez, the farmworker movement’s most visible leader. Her revelation was just one more act of speaking out in a life dedicated to justice.

Huerta was born in New Mexico but spent most of her life in California’s Central Valley, an agricultural hub where a quarter of the country’s food is grown. 

After graduating college, she became an elementary school teacher. A majority of her students were the children of migrant farmworkers. She left teaching when she realized that she could better use her talents to help their parents fight issues like wage theft and poor working and living conditions. She is widely quoted as saying: “I couldn’t tolerate seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”

She left the school to work at the Community Service Organization, a Latino civil rights group.  In 1955 she helped start the Stockton chapter of the organization, which is where she met Chávez, a rising Chicano leader. The two went on to create the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). 

One of the first major actions she undertook was helping organize the Delano Grape Strike in 1965, a five-year strike that was started by Filipino workers who were fighting for higher wages. About a week into the strike, NFWA joined the movement with 1,200 Mexican laborers. The two groups representing the strikers eventually merged to become the United Farm Workers (UFW), a labor union. 

As part of the UFW’s work to fight for better working conditions and union contracts, Huerta went to New York to organize a national boycott against table grapes. There she met the feminist leader Gloria Steinem, who in 1968 flew out to California to march with the striking farmworkers. 

While Huerta was the lead negotiator for the grape worker contracts that resulted from the organizing, her contributions and leadership during the strikes and subsequent boycotts were often overshadowed by Chávez. It was Huerta who coined the ¡Sí Se Puede! chant, which means “yes, it can be done” and came to define the farmworker movement – but the phrase has been erroneously credited to him over the years. The phrase continues to be a rallying cry of activists across the country, and more recently has been used by politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former President Barack Obama.

Yep, vote like Trump is on the ballot. A review of the rape charges against Trump

 
A new accuser comes forward:

This accusation came from the House Judiciary Committee Democrats' 53-page report on numerous other rape charges against Trump:

But most significant of all, Trump has been ruled an "adjudicated rapist" by the judge who oversaw Jean Carroll's sexual assault lawsuit against Trump:

He says he's on the ballot. Ok, then...

Oh, all right

Future members of Trump's cabinet

We'll tell you his weak spot

Appropriate Canadian response

Breaking news

Trump Downplays Significance Of Trump Tower Found On Epstein Island - The Onion

Breaking news from The Onion

Home - The Onion

I shudder to think

Federal Judge Blocks Trump and RFK Effort to Get More Teens Pregnant

Judge tells Trump and Bobby Jr. to leave teenage girls alone

Julia Conley for Common Dreams

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, first authorized through bipartisan legislation in 2009, has been credited with helping to dramatically reduce the number of American teenagers who have experienced unwanted pregnancies in the past decade and a half, dropping by more than 65% over 16 years, according to one congressional report.

Despite the best efforts of Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a federal judge’s ruling on Wednesday sent the message that the push to reduce teen pregnancy in the US will continue, with the administration’s limits on the program’s federal grants paused.

Judge Christopher Cooper of the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction in the case of Hennepin County, Minnesota v. US Department of Health and Human Services, in which officials joined King County in Washington state, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in challenging HHS’s changes to the program’s grant policy. The plaintiffs were represented by Public Citizen and Democracy Forward.

The changes, said Cooper, were “likely arbitrary and capricious.”

And behind him is a communist

Like father like son

OK, so here's the evidence

Dems dealt with Platner - now the GOP needs to deal with their own rapist

Not in the Epstein files

Deal with Trump the way Dems dealt with Platner

Yes, they are

The Age of the Super A*sholes

Trump and Musk dominate our economy and our politics

Robert Reich

Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.

To describe both as selfish narcissists would be a wild understatement. Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.

Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.

Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books, and civilly liable for sexual abuse.

Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.

Both pride themselves on paying little or no taxes. Trump famously said that paying not paying federal income taxes "makes me smart." Musk paid zero taxes in 2018.

While the country suffers,
Trump posts images like this

Both are notoriously lacking in empathy; they view all relationships as transactions. Trump refuses to be a "consoler-in-chief" in national tragedies and openly withholds sympathy for families of political opponents who die. (When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, Trump asserted they were killed “due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”)

Musk has stated that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” — arguing that a society can only afford to practice broad empathy if it operates from a position of systemic strength.

Both regard themselves as omnipotent and invincible. Both lash out verbally or physically at anyone who crosses them, often getting into raging disputes and fights.

And this

To the extent they have any belief beyond their own omnipotence, it’s white male nationalism. “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk wrote his 240 million followers in a January post on X. In a February post, he declared that “there has been unrelenting hate and poisonous propaganda in the West against anyone White, straight or male over the past decade or more,” adding, “No more guilt trips. ENOUGH.”

Musk has suggested that race plays a detrimental role in hiring. He’s touted the role of white people in eliminating slavery. He’s accused public figures of racism against white and Asian people.

In recent months, Musk has increased his online posts about perceived threats to whiteness, or what he views as calls for a “genocide” against white people. Over the past seven months, he has posted 850 times about race, nearly daily and triple the rate for the previous two years.

Trump also has a well-documented history of white supremacist actions and rhetoric, including the 1973 lawsuit brought against Trump management for allegedly discriminating against Black renters; his full-page ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty for the five Black and Latino teenagers eventually exonerated in the Central Park jogger case; his leading role in the debunked, racially-charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; his 2016 accusation that Mexican immigrants were criminals and “rapists;” his 2017 “Muslim ban;” his “fine people on both sides” of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; his view of Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole” countries; his determination to erase Black history from America’s classrooms; and his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Both Musk and Trump have pushed the conspiracy theory that Democrats are seeking to import undocumented immigrants so they can take over the U.S. government forever.

Both have fomented white nationalism abroad. Trump was an enthusiastic ally of Viktor Orbán, who saw Western civilization threatened by Muslim immigration into Europe. Many people in Trump’s circle continue to support and encourage leaders of the European far-right.

Musk, too, encourages white nationalism abroad. During the recent anti-immigrant protests and riots in the United Kingdom—particularly in Belfast and London—Musk posted that “civil war is inevitable” and urged British protesters to “fight back or die” (prompting British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to condemn Musk’s comments as “dangerous.”) In response to the recent killing in Belfast, Musk blamed “murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town.” He shared an image of the stabbing suspect, who is Black, alongside the caption declaring “millions must go.” And he reposted messages claiming that Starmer “hates white people.”

Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate report that “Musk’s amplification” of anti-migrant narratives to his hundreds of millions of followers was “instrumental” in provoking the violence in Belfast: “No individual played a bigger role in spreading [hateful] content on X than Musk himself.”