Supporting quotations from the post (because evidence): "The tech community is powerful. Large tech companies in particular have enormous power and are held in high regard. We need to hear from the CEOs clearly and unequivocally"
"At a minimum, companies should take a public stance."
After a period of 6-12 months outside the country, US Green Card holders lose their Green Cards.
In a time of grave concern for many green card holders, it's probably better to avoid this sort of inaccurate info. It's freakout time but let's stick to freaking out about true things.
http://lawandborder.com/risk-abandoning-green-card-abroad-6-...
Key things: 6 months absence can be a factor in challenging your status as a Lawful Permanent Resident. 12 months absence means your green card (the actual document) is no longer valid for re-entry but it doesn't automatically make you a non-LPR.
Customs and Border Patrol can deny you entry, as we've just seen, on the basis executive action, legally questionable or not. But they can't take away your LPR status - only an order from an immigration court judge can do that.
A lot of this is cold comfort to any LPR caught up in this and unable to re-enter right now - but there is a process and the status itself is not so trivial to take away. The call to help organizations who provide legal aid to such people (and refugees and other visa holders) seems like the right thing to me, it's probably the most immediate need.
If you are absent > 6 months you could end up with your green card status listed as 'abandoned', but even if you come back every 6 months that is no guarantee at all that it will not be listed abandoned.
The golden rule seems to be to be more than 6 months per year in the USA, preferably substantially more than 6 months to avoid ambiguity.
Banners don't matter. Net neutrality mattered in October, doesn't really matter now. Get your head straight.
"You like this service? Our founder came to the US in 19XX"
"You enjoy this website? Here's a list of 2nd generation immigrants on our executive board"
...might get people to realise how much of the US economy is driven by 1st & 2nd generation immigrants.
"See! Immigration is good. These immigrants and their kids are building services!"
"See! Immigrants are hiring other immigrants and their children to provide lower cost labor and networking out-of-country and locking us out of the market."
If you want to change, you need a slogan like
"American made, American owned, American labor." along with the (now disappearing) attitude that American is not an ethnicity, it is a lifestyle.
1) You don't have the right to counsel in immigration hearings. There are several organizations that provide free legal aid.
2) Immigrant communities are scared and need to know their rights, and have a trusted source of information. There are unfortunately a ton of scammers who prey on scared people.
3) These organizations are a helpful intermediary between vulnerable people and government agencies, police, etc.
Of course, too many of the mostly white male tech company founders and investors are hoping to benefit from things like reduced corporate taxes to care about discrimination that doesn't affect them.
See also elitism vs meritocracy.
(In other words, you get what you vote for.)
As much as I think that the majority Democrat States should suck it up about losing the election, I also think it's fully within their rights to secede if their populace wishes.
Many of us live in "sanctuary cities" with local governments that plan to stand up to Trump's immigration policies anyway.
Strong business support here could easily inspire action by Sacramento and our congress critters.
Action now will matter a lot more than after the feds broaden their target.
Trump's power comes from the idea that he'll improve the economy. After this week, it should be clear that he'll do no such thing & maybe quite the opposite. Trump is too incoherent & impulsive.
He blames economic problems on the Chinese & Mexicans. Meanwhile, he ignores the role robots & Amazon will have in job destruction.
Corporate leaders can simply tell him to get lost when he sends a stupid tweet. With this he'll quickly lose his support base.
It'll be tough though. He is promising corporate america a big tax break which will instantly boost valuations (already has), giving CEOs nice bonuses & stock paydays.
They know what he refuses to admit: that a non-vocal majority of this country strongly supports the President and will NOT support anyone who publicly smites him.
Attacking the President as a normal consumer goods CEO is a losing proposition.
Even if you don't care about doing the right thing, losing some business from a (shrinking) minority of Americans is probably worth the positive publicity overseas, economic stability, retaining visa-holding employees, etc.
Edit: s/election/voting/
The election includes the whole primary system and the electoral college. Here I specifically mean the vote.
That's plenty for the seeds of doubt, especially given how easy it is to vote in several states.
I'm particularly interested in what types of machines and other voting procedures were in use there. It looks like they're optical scan machines, so hopefully they have the paper ballots on hand to do a proper audit. That, along with the voter rolls, should be able to determine what the issues were. That's a strength of using the optical machines as opposed to the purely electronic ones.
You're right that Detroit is just one city. It's also a city that's deeply troubled on many levels, so I'm not sure if it's fair to consider it typical. That's by no means excusing what look to be issues there. Those should definitely be looked into, and exhaustively. You're claim above is that there were enough fraudulent votes that Trump would have over 50% of the popular vote if they were removed. Detroit alone isn't enough to do this.
More important is to look at who's got owning shares in those machines.....
In the perfect world, we'd have open source machines that all enter voites into a public blockchain/ledger and you'd get a private key you could verify your vote with. Optical sounds awesome. But good luck with that. The fraud just seems to swing back and forth from left to right every X years instead. It's madness.
My claim is just a bet right now. But it's one I'm willing to put money on IF they actually do a national investigation, which I'm not confident will happen.
If voting integrity is something you feel particularly strongly about (I certainly do), I encourage to look into the work that's already out there. The 2000 election spurred a lot of research. Some good starting points are:
Ronald L. Rivest MIT
Auditability and Verifiability of Elections
ACM-IEEE talk March 16, 2016
https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv16x.pdf
---
Ben Adida Google Tech Talks December 19, 2007
Theory and Practice of Cryptography: Verifying Electiosns with Cryptography
I think the list includes (but I could be wrong):
Apple
Amazon
Oracle
IBM
Uber
Yahoo
EMC
eBay
AT&T
Tesla
And, of course, ycombinator.
Don't limit yourself to Congressional races. Those are incredibly hard to win, especially for political outsiders. Run for parks commission, for library board, for school board, for town trusteeships, and for county offices. Run for water reclamation. You don't need to be a subject matter expert --- that's not expected of you. You just have to be willing to do a little extra work every month.
Any elected office gives you a greater voice in all of the rest of our politics. You use local offices to put pressure on your congresspeople and your state reps, and to build an organization to win more offices later.
This is what the Republicans have been doing since the 1980s, and as a result the GOP controls most US states.
Another fantastic place to start:
Get a couple of friends together, and just pick one of you to go out for something, and then work as a team to collect information and plan outreach.
Even if you fail, treat the whole thing as an information gathering exercise. Take notes and share them. The GOP is crazy good at picking up local elected office, and they've had lots of practice. This is how they got that practice. Anyone who thinks local office doesn't matter should figure out who their State Senator is and how many constituents they have, and then look at Congressional redistricting --- it's state leg. that created the system in which rural Republican votes count so much more than urban Democratic votes do.
Allow me to suggest that you read and internalize this essay, because it is one of the few accurate summaries of out political reality that I've encountered in the past year.
https://medium.com/deep-code/situational-assessment-2017-tru...
I am nt arguing that politics is over and there's nothing that can be done any more, in fact I'm going to a city budgeting meeting in a couple of hours to find out/debate what to do about the imminent disappearance of federal funding. But your points about basic civics are redundant, I seriously doubt there's anyone reading or posting here who doesn't already know that.
Put another way, it's real hard to bring someone to justice for arson when you're inside the burning building. It might happen later, but in the short term that does little to remediate the risk to your life and property.
I'm in Texas though. A very red state. I've been calling my representative and senators to voice my opinion on all this stuff, but it's hard to tell how effective it is. I either get someone on the phone who sounds like, "oh geez, another angry liberal" or I have someone who just sounds like they'll add my name to a tally or something and says "I'll pass it along" and it's hard to know if they will or if that will help. And then I call my state senator to oppose the bathroom bill going through the Texas senate and the person who I'm talking to on the phone gets borderline combative with me.
I found a group of local people who are trying to do this in a more organized way. I found this[1] the other day and it makes me feel hopeful that our efforts are helping somewhat. We just need to not lose steam. It's easy to get fatigued by this kind of stuff, and we're only a week in.
[1] http://www.sacurrent.com/the-daily/archives/2017/01/26/cruz-...
That is exactly what you are going for. They keep a tally on a lot of issues. Unless you are a big employer or influential player in your district, you are not going to get to speak to the Rep or even his/her senior staff.
Unions and some Orgs know that you have thousands of people call your Rep and voice an opinion. Call, fax, or send a letter. Show up to the district office and be nice, deliver your opinion, and hand them a letter.
The last 8 years were driven by the Tea Party doing exactly this. They show up to vote more and practice local politics like everyone should be doing.
So yes, if you are a Republican with a Republican representative then calling them to voice your displeasure about Donald Trump's behavior may be beneficial. Otherwise it probably won't do much unless there really is massive numbers.
A large number of Democrats have voted to confirm John Kelly, the anti-immigration former general who will now run DHS and enforce Trump's Muslim ban. Almost all of the Democrats supported Mattis for DOJ, because he appears to be the sanest member of the administration's team. A decent sized number even supported Pompeo, a Muslim-alarmist, for CIA.
Coming up soon is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III for Attorney General. Sessions is by many accounts an unreconstructed white supremacist. But Democrats will support him, because he's also a member of the Senate, and collegiality goes a very long way in the Senate.
Unless the Democratic coalition makes it clear to their representatives that we are holding them accountable for their votes to give consent for confirmation votes, and for their actual confirmation votes, the Democrats will act "strategically", holding back resistance until they're absolutely required to offer it. It doesn't help that the Republican party is almost uniformly conservative and extremely white, while the Democratic party is a coalition of interests that leans but is not firmly planted in liberal tradition.
Even if you're in a liberal state. You have to call. Social media doesn't count. It's very easy to do and if enough people do it, it does make a difference. It's like voting, except that your calls have more influence than your votes.
I cannot recommend highly enough the Indivisible Guide, which is the outcome of a bunch of legislative staffers attempting to reverse-engineer the Tea Party's process from the last 8 years and apply them to Democratic objectives:
https://www.indivisibleguide.com/
It's all actionable stuff.
For a practical example, if people of San Francisco jointly decide that they want Nancy Pelosi to do X, Y and Z (otherwise she will get primaried in 2018), she will have no option but to do that. This is exactly what the Tea Party did (with tremendous help from Koch brothers) in last eight years. They unseated the old leaders and took over the party.
What exactly do you want them to do (serious, not provocative question)? All three have spoken up (in varying volume) about the nastier executive orders / memoranda / proclamations, all three argued against several of the more controversial senate approved cabinet posts.
Nearly all the senate confirmable posts can't be filibustered under the current rules. I'd even call it surprising how many of them haven't yet made it out of the respective committees due to the republican majorities. All that's holding them back seems to be those arcane "collegiality" rules that the senate has, and the reticence of some republican MoC.
Except for filibusterable stuff, the democrats are largely powerless for the moment.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly happy with how Democratic "leadership" is working, but it's far from clear to me what should be done.
Do you have a link showing where, "they took over the party"? My understanding is that the Tea Party is a minority faction within the GOP.
Pay attention to the 2010 primary races that happened within GOP. There were also some high profile races where the Tea-party/Traditional-GOP split even caused Dems to win some seats (like Christine O'Donnell in Delaware)
After that cycle, mainstream republicans mostly co-opted the movement and the rift wasn't that evident in successive elections.
Either way calling Congress members is a feel-good thing that takes almost no effort. It's worthless in terms of getting political power and making changes.
Edit: misread 'local congress' vs 'US congress' but I think the point still stands.
> Remind them who they work for.
The lobbyists who pay for their luxuries today, and secure their employment tomorrow?
Trump signed this on Friday because the response against it will be slower. Sure, a public statement by Democrats won't stop this, but it won't hurt and what the hell else are they doing? I work on the weekends, and they can too when core American values are under assault.
And of course, giving or raising money for other organizations is a great thing to do as well.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/aclu-and-other-groups...
The low-level workers at these airports who are enforcing this bullshit ban. They need to grow some spines and start ignoring bad orders, no matter who they come from.
"I was just following orders" was never an acceptable excuse to do the wrong thing.
A VP or probably even a middle manager taking a similar stand likely has cash saved up/secondary income/investments/other options to withstand this sort of change with fewer catastrophic results.
Maybe they are strictly interpreting it in order to cause an outrage?
WELL, THIS IS STUPID: DHS Spox: Trump Muslim Ban Includes Green Card Holders. It’s fine to be more careful about admitting people from countries that are major terror exporters, but Green Card holders are permanent legal residents — they’re not “admitted,” they’re returning home. If there’s a problem with green card grants to people from those countries, it needs to be addressed systematically, not simply by stopping people at the border. This is a debacle, and I’d be very interested in knowing who actually drafted the order.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/255787/#respond
I think you'll be surprised at what people think on this issue who support the temporary ban.
they only care about their agenda. to make them care about what people think, disrupt their agenda.
For people who are not tech CEOs, financially supporting legal challenges is probably the highest value near-term approach, though the other stuff is important long term.
Consider starting here:
ACLU (state offices especially) Council on American-Islamic Relations (state offices especially) National Immigration Law Center
For example, CAIR-MA serves all of New England on less than a quarter million dollars a year.
Any state, but particularly red states. Consider CAIR-Oklahoma.
Because most everyone here already knows these things.
And because the implication that it would be a useful strategy to keep reiterating basic principles seems reductionist.
This whole thing is a complex phenomenon that even experts are still trying to figure out. How was the sentiment or 27% of voters underestimated so badly and for so long? Even if the sentiment is now understood why did it bring about a post truth era and why do so many people easily accept this? And on and on.
Something is different this time. We need to understand it fundamentally and learn new approaches to counter it while making sure the responses themselves don't make the situation worse.
We need to find more direct ways to peacefully withdraw our consent of and participation in the existence of the state.
That's all well and good if you're an anarchist, but not everyone who objects to Trump also objects to the existence of the state, per se.
Is the goal to DDOS these offices with phone calls in hopes these politicians will rile together and pass a law?
Seriously though, how do you know this?
For those who aren't in positions of such influence, yes, your list is the right way to go
I am not a lawyer, but it looks as though airports (but not airport security) fall under the city's jurisdiction. (For example San Jose makes decisions about Uber at SJC, and Mayor Daley infamously tore up an air strip in the middle of the night with no warning).
Hello. My name is X. I am a resident of Y. Please do everything within your power to push for the release of any middle eastern refugees being held without cause by the Federal government at [local airport], and to put an end to this moving forward.
8. Donate money to said party and to candidates in upcoming elections.
2016 former Republican Governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson
2012 former Republican Governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson
2008 former GOP House member and Clinton prosecutor Bobb Barr
On the evidence, the Libertarian Party is a flag of convenience for Republicans.
In local races it's fine to put up someone with no or little experience in government, as long as they are a respected member of the community. But you can't just put up "some dude" for president. So in practice this means we have to take defectors. But heaven knows there has been a lot of consternation in the LP over this. My guess is that the LP is getting tired enough of taking former Republicans that whoever they nominate in 2020 will be homegrown. (Maybe a former Democrat.)
But while the presidential race gets the most press, we've been working hard to get Libertarians elected at lower levels of government. It's just really, really hard to break past the two party mindset (and ballot access laws), and we haven't had a lot of success to date. The difficulties we have getting people elected to the lower levels of translate directly to us nominating former Republicans for president.
Please don't be uncivil in comments here, regardless of how wrong someone else's comment may be. This sort of personal abrasiveness is destructive and leads to worse.
7. Contribute money to organizations filing lawsuits against Trump's actions.
the democrats are a minority, and so they can't effect political change. the republicans are on board with trump, and so they won't effect political change.
that means that you have to effect political change by physically preventing the operation of the country to move forward until your demands are met.
you can't do this from your computer chair or your couch.
7. THINK
Think up better arguments, that might convince people. Examine your own opinions, to see whether they're actually right. Examine your opponents' opinions, to see whether they're right too. Maybe come up with new ways of thinking about the issue which are better than the way anyone's thinking about them at the moment. And then start talking.
People in politics should put less thought into HOW CAN I SPEAK LOUDER and more thought into how they can think of smarter things to say?
And that includes the president smearing every source of criticism as "FAKE NEWS!" He exactly represents those who voted for him: ignorant, fearful, angry, reactionary, conspiracy theorists, suspicious and vindictive. There is no possible way of having rational conversations whether smarter or louder. I don't see any point in examining these opinions, it's a colossal waste of time. I'm not responsible for their opinions, or changing them. I think a very decent chunk will have buyer's (voter's) remorse on their own without me having to say a thing about it, and the rest will just dig their heels in.
Ergo, Trump and Trump voters are a distraction. Focus on the effecting policies: non-violent demonstrations and associations, legal recourse, letting local and state reps know how you feel. There are mayors like Marty Walsh who historically have done more to stand up to overreaching state and federal bureaucracy than any U.S. Senator.
Conservative resentment against what they perceive as liberal intolerance has been going on since at least the early 2000s. The conservative blogosphere really took off around that time. There they either endured constant ridicule for their views or total ignoring from the established media which mostly runs liberal aside from Fox News. When they broke the story on Dan Rather and the faked National Guard memo on Bush, they were instantly derided for being nothing but people blogging in their pajamas. When they were proven true, the hostile indifference never let up. This has gone on for 15 years or so now. For them, this last election to them was the last straw. The coverage that went on during the 2016 elections was deeply shameful and outright scurrilous in some areas.
Keep in mind that during the 2000s and probably about until 2008 or so, the internet community sites were mostly dominated by liberal views. Reddit for instance looked vastly different compared to now. This allowed the formation of deep and entrenched echo chambers that allowed certain behaviors to foment and become acceptable. When conservatives began to join the internet en masse, they ran up against these entrenched social communities and quickly found that they were getting shut out. Rightly or wrongly, that kind of blanket treatment will cause resentment.
Vast swaths of people on the left have been dismissive of people on the right for ages. This is not a one sided issue, of course conservatives do the same. But that does not matter. We got here because everyone started talking past each other, insulting each other, and not doing the hard work of emphasizing irregardless of our agreement or not. Emotional labor matters and we've all dropped the ball hard. Conservatives are not monolithic and people always appreciate feeling listened to and that their concerns matter. You don't have to agree with someone to do this.
When we want to fix a relationship with our partners we don't concern ourselves with who was right or wrong. We concentrate on the relationship itself.
But there's been, provably more dismissiveness and ensuing divisiveness within the conservative movement, which is where "Republicans eat their own" came frome. The explicit targeting by far right conservatives to destroy moderate Republicans in elections is not something that is at all common in the Democratic party. It was refined to great success by the Tea Party movement.
Smug liberalism is not at all the same kind of nefarious strategy the far right has used. Smug liberalism is a naive position that if only conservatives had the facts, they'd become liberals/progressives/Democrats or at the very least revert back to being moderate Republicans. It isn't intended to piss people off, even though that has been the outcome.
The political landscape is sufficiently damaged now that there is likely a significant and intractable minority who believe in a different reality where liberals are out to get them; that corporations and billionaires are out to screw them by hiring "illegals" (except for Trump's hand selected billionaires, they're the good ones); and that import tariffs are paid by foreigners. Damaged by the likes of Newsmax, Infowars, and Breitbart (previously run by now Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the U.S. president) are all far right sites trafficking in varying degrees of mistruth. These are not policy disputes, these are disputes over facts.
I do not think there is any fixable relationship when two sides are disagreeing on world view: how the world works, how it should work. They are mutually incompatible right now, and the thing to be negotiating is the outcome of losing arguments, which hopefully remain non-violent. The language of name calling and violence is destabilizing whether it is a one on one relationship, or directed at countries. The president is openly combative with everyone who disagrees with him. It'll be deeply fascinating to see how things go when those disagreements happen with people he's hand selected - which is why I think it's important senators support pretty much all of his cabinet selections, at least all of them are completely sane.
On the plus side, many ill conceived or implemented policies last week were walked back. So it's not like the administration is completely intractable in the face of outcry.
1. Call
2. Participate 3. Share 4. Vote (https://www.usa.gov/register-to-vote)5. Volunteer
6. Stop reading and start doing one of the other things.