"...seven months before the riot, Washington insiders held a secret war game called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) that literally rehearsed a “January 6 breakdown.”

BTT

And they publicly promoted their coup plans through the Washington Post, as discussed here during the election by Rosa Brooks ( -> Michele Flournoy -> WestExec Advisors, Pine Island Capital -> Anthony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, et al.):

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/03/trump-stay-in-office/

https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3880588/posts

What’s the worst that could happen?
The election will likely spark violence — and a constitutional crisis

Bendik Kaltenborn for The Washington Post
By Rosa Brooks
September 3, 2020

Rosa Brooks @brooks_rosa is a law professor at Georgetown University and co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project.

We wanted to know: What’s the worst thing that could happen to our country during the presidential election? President Trump has broken countless norms and ignored countless laws during his time in office, and while my colleagues and I at the Transition Integrity Project didn’t want to lie awake at night contemplating the ways the American experiment could fail, we realized that identifying the most serious risks to our democracy might be the best way to avert a November disaster. So we built a series of war games, sought out some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around, and asked them to imagine what they’d do in a range of election and transition scenarios.

A landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.

Picture this:

On the morning of Election Day, false stories appear online claiming that Biden has been hospitalized with a life-threatening heart attack and the election has been delayed. Every mainstream news organization reports that the rumors are unfounded, but many Biden supporters, confused by the bogus claims, stay home.

Still, by late that night, most major networks have called the election for Biden: The former vice president has won key states and has a slender lead in the national popular vote, and polling experts predict that his lead will grow substantially as Western states count an unusually high number of mail-in ballots. The electoral college looks secure for Biden, too.

But Trump refuses to concede, alleging on Twitter that “MILLIONS of illegal ALIENS and DEAD PEOPLE” have voted in large numbers and that the uncounted ballots are all “FAKE VOTES!!!” Social media fills with posts from Trump supporters alleging that the election has been “stolen” in a “Deep State coup,” and Trump-friendly pundits on Fox News and OAN echo the message.

Soon, Attorney General William P. Barr opens an investigation into unsubstantiated allegations of massive vote-by-mail fraud and ties between Democratic officials and antifa. In Michigan and Wisconsin, where Biden has won the official vote and Democratic governors have certified slates of pro-Biden electors, the Trump campaign persuades Republican-controlled legislatures to send rival pro-Trump slates to Congress for the electoral college vote.

The next week is chaotic: A list of Michigan and Wisconsin electors for Biden circulates on right-wing social media, including photos, home addresses and false claims that scores of them are in the pay of billionaire George Soros or have been linked to child sex-trafficking rings.

Massive pro-Biden street protests begin, demanding that Trump concede. The president tweets that “REAL PATRIOTS MUST SHOW THESE ANTIFA TERRORISTS THAT CITIZENS WHO LOVE THE 2ND AMENDMENT WILL NEVER LET THEM STEAL THIS ELECTION!!!” Around the nation, violent clashes erupt. Several people are injured and killed in multiple incidents, though reports conflict about their identities and who started the violence.

Meanwhile, Trump declares that “UNLESS THIS CARNAGE ENDS NOW,” he will invoke the Insurrection Act and send “Our INCREDIBLY POWERFUL MILITARY and their OMINOUS WEAPONS” into the streets to “Teach these ANTI-AMERICAN TERRORISTS A LESSON.” At the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff convene a hurried meeting to discuss the crisis.

And it’s not even Thanksgiving yet.

. . .For obvious reasons, we couldn’t ask Trump or Biden — or their campaign aides — to play themselves in these exercises, so we did the next best thing: We recruited participants with similar backgrounds. On the GOP side, our “players” included former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, conservative commentator Bill Kristol and former Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson. On the Democratic side, participants included John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and a top White House adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; Donna Brazile, the campaign chair for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential run; and Jennifer Granholm, former governor of Michigan. Other participants included political strategists, journalists, polling experts, tech and social media experts, and former career officials from the intelligence community, the Justice Department, the military and the Department of Homeland Security.

In each scenario, Team Trump — the players assigned to simulate the Trump campaign and its elected and appointed allies — was ruthless and unconstrained right out of the gate, and Team Biden struggled to get out of reaction mode. In one exercise, for instance, Team Trump’s repeated allegations of fraudulent mail-in ballots led National Guard troop to destroy thousands of ballots in Democratic-leaning ZIP codes, to applause on social media from Trump supporters. Over and over, Team Biden urged calm, national unity and a fair vote count, while Team Trump issued barely disguised calls for violence and intimidation against ballot-counting officials and Biden electors. . .

. . .Meanwhile, military and law enforcement leaders can prepare for the possibility that politicians will seek to manipulate or misuse their coercive powers. Partisans, including Trump, may try to deploy law enforcement, National Guard troops and, potentially, active-duty military personnel to “restore order” in a manner that primarily benefits one party, or involve troops and law enforcement in efforts to interrupt the ballot-counting process. The federal response to this summer’s protests in D.C.’s Lafayette Square and Portland, Ore., suggests that this is not purely speculative. To avoid becoming unwitting pawns in a partisan battle, military and law enforcement leaders can issue clear advance statements about what they will and won’t do. They can train troops and police officers on de-escalation techniques and on the vital need to remain nonpartisan and respectful of civil liberties.

The media also has an important role. Responsible outlets can help educate the public about the possibility — indeed, the likelihood — that there won’t be a clear winner on election night because an accurate count may take weeks, given the large number of mail-in ballots expected in this unprecedented mid-pandemic election. Journalists can also help people understand that voter fraud is extraordinarily rare, and, in particular, that there’s nothing nefarious about voting by mail. Social media platforms can commit to protecting the democratic process, by rapidly removing or correcting false statements spread by foreign or domestic disinformation campaigns and by ensuring that their platforms aren’t used to incite or plan violence.

Finally, ordinary citizens can help, too — perhaps most of all. As the jurist Learned Hand said in 1944, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it . . . while it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.” This is as true now as it was then: When people unite to demand democracy and the rule of law, even repressive regimes can be stopped in their tracks. Mass mobilization is no guarantee that our democracy will survive — but if things go as badly as our exercises suggest they might, a sustained, nonviolent protest movement may be America’s best and final hope. . .

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https://keywiki.org/Rosa_Brooks

Rosa Brooks
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Rosa Brooks
Template:TOCnestleft Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks was a senior advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy.

In 1970 Rosa Brooks was born to prominent socialist activists Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich[1]. She was named after Rosa Parks and Rosa Luxemburg, the German revolutionary, as well as a great-grandmother[2].

Until her appointment to the Obama administration, Professor Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks served on the Georgetown Law full-time faculty. Brooks, who wrote a weekly opinion column for the Los Angeles Times, holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law School.

Education
Rosa Brooks received her A.B. from Harvard in 1991 (history and literature), followed by a master’s degree from Oxford in 1993 (social anthropology) and a law degree from Yale in 1996.

Leftwing teen
In the mid ‘80s, teens Rosa and Benjamin Ehrenreich were active in Students Against Drunk Driving on Long Island. “They both consider themselves leftwing.”[3]

Career/activism
From 2001-2006, Brooks was an associate professor[4]at the University of Virginia School of Law. In 2000-2001, she was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a consultant to the Open Society Institute and to Human Rights Watch.

Rosa Brooks worked at the U.S. State Department until 1999, where she was senior advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

Before joining the State Department, Brooks was a lecturer at Yale Law School, where she also served as acting director of Yale’s Schell Center for International Human Rights Law and faculty supervisor of the Lowenstein Human Rights Law Clinic. Her current research focuses on human rights, terrorism and the law of war, and post-conflict rule of law issues.

Her government and NGO work has involved field research in Iraq, Indonesia, Israel, Palestine, Kosovo, China, Russia, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and Sierra Leone, among other places.

Kerry/Edwards campaign
In 2004 Brooks served as director or the Kerry-Edwards campaign’s task force on democracy, development & human rights.

Soros connection
On November 29, 2006 Open Society Institute held a roundtable discussion entitled “How Do Progressives Connect Ideas to Action?”

Individuals and organizations with similarly progressive goals often dilute their power by working alone or even working at cross-purposes. As Americans who are politically left of center move forward, questions of infrastructure, communication, and collaboration are particularly important.
Participants included several key leaders of the “progressive” movement[5];

Deepak Bhargava Center for Community Change
Robert Borosage Campaign for America’s Future.
Rosa Brooks Open Society Institute
Anna Burger Service Employees International Union
Eric Foner Columbia University, Department of History
Michel Gelobter Redefining Progress
Hendrik Hertzberg The New Yorker
Alan Jenkins Opportunity Agenda
Gara LaMarche Open Society Institute
Jal Mehta New Vision Institute for Policy and Progress
David Moss The Tobin Project
Iara Peng Young People For
Stephanie Robinson The Jamestown Project at Yale
Joel Rogers University of Wisconsin Law School
Andrea Batista Schlesinger Drum Major Institute for Public Policy
Katrina vanden Heuvel The Nation editor.
John Podesta Center for American Progress
Michael Waldman The Brennan Center for Justice
Matthew Yglesias The American Prospect
Service
Brooks has also served as a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of State, a consultant for Human Rights Watch, a fellow at the Carr Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a board member of Amnesty International USA, a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a lecturer at Yale Law School, a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on fragile States. She currently serves on the board of the National Security Network and on the Steering Committee of the White Oak Foreign Policy Leaders Project.

Writing
Rosa Brooks’ book, “Can Might Make Rights?” (Cambridge, 2006), was co-authored with David Wippman and Georgetown Law professor Jane Stromseth, the book looks at the difficult issue of restoring the rule of law in the wake of military interventions.

References
Template:Reflist

http://www.allbusiness.com/information/publishing-industries/698569-1.html
http://www.allbusiness.com/information/publishing-industries/698569-1.html
Democratic Left, March/April 1986, page 4
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/news/releases/august.24.2006.html
http://www.soros.org/resources/events/progressives_20061129

Thank you for this post.

Reading some of that made my blood boil.

Time to arrest and prosecute these traitors!

Bump!

TIME also boasted about the coup, naming and interviewing some of the conspirators:

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https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election

By Molly BallFebruary 4, 2021 5:40 AM EST

. . .There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program. . .

The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.” . .

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”. . .

Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster–and determined to protect it.

This was not his usual purview. For nearly a quarter-century, Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest union federation, has marshaled the latest tactics and data to help its favored candidates win elections. Unassuming and professorial, he isn’t the sort of hair-gelled “political strategist” who shows up on cable news. Among Democratic insiders, he’s known as the wizard behind some of the biggest advances in political technology in recent decades. A group of liberal strategists he brought together in the early 2000s led to the creation of the Analyst Institute, a secretive firm that applies scientific methods to political campaigns. He was also involved in the founding of Catalist, the flagship progressive data company. . .

It turned out Podhorzer wasn’t the only one thinking in these terms. He began to hear from others eager to join forces. The Fight Back Table, a coalition of “resistance” organizations, had begun scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense Coalition. Voting-rights and civil rights organizations were raising alarms. A group of former elected officials was researching emergency powers they feared Trump might exploit. Protect Democracy was assembling a bipartisan election-crisis task force. “It turned out that once you said it out loud, people agreed,” Podhorzer says, “and it started building momentum.”

He spent months pondering scenarios and talking to experts. It wasn’t hard to find liberals who saw Trump as a dangerous dictator, but Podhorzer was careful to steer clear of hysteria. What he wanted to know was not how American democracy was dying but how it might be kept alive. The chief difference between the U.S. and countries that lost their grip on democracy, he concluded, was that America’s decentralized election system couldn’t be rigged in one fell swoop. That presented an opportunity to shore it up. . .

Suddenly, the potential for a November meltdown was obvious. In his apartment in the D.C. suburbs, Podhorzer began working from his laptop at his kitchen table, holding back-to-back Zoom meetings for hours a day with his network of contacts across the progressive universe: the labor movement; the institutional left, like Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace; resistance groups like Indivisible and MoveOn; progressive data geeks and strategists, representatives of donors and foundations, state-level grassroots organizers, racial-justice activists and others. . .

The meetings became the galactic center for a constellation of operatives across the left who shared overlapping goals but didn’t usually work in concert. The group had no name, no leaders and no hierarchy, but it kept the disparate actors in sync. “Pod played a critical behind-the-scenes role in keeping different pieces of the movement infrastructure in communication and aligned,” says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. “You have the litigation space, the organizing space, the political people just focused on the W, and their strategies aren’t always aligned. He allowed this ecosystem to work together.”. . .

In March, activists appealed to Congress to steer COVID relief money to election administration. Led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, more than 150 organizations signed a letter to every member of Congress seeking $2 billion in election funding. It was somewhat successful: the CARES Act, passed later that month, contained $400 million in grants to state election administrators. But the next tranche of relief funding didn’t add to that number. It wasn’t going to be enough.

Private philanthropy stepped into the breach. An assortment of foundations contributed tens of millions in election-administration funding. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million. “It was a failure at the federal level that 2,500 local election officials were forced to apply for philanthropic grants to fill their needs,” says Amber McReynolds, a former Denver election official who heads the nonpartisan National Vote at Home Institute. . .

The institute’s work helped 37 states and D.C. bolster mail voting. But it wouldn’t be worth much if people didn’t take advantage. Part of the challenge was logistical: each state has different rules for when and how ballots should be requested and returned. The Voter Participation Center, which in a normal year would have supported local groups deploying canvassers door-to-door to get out the vote, instead conducted focus groups in April and May to find out what would get people to vote by mail. In August and September, it sent ballot applications to 15 million people in key states, 4.6 million of whom returned them. In mailings and digital ads, the group urged people not to wait for Election Day. “All the work we have done for 17 years was built for this moment of bringing democracy to people’s doorsteps,” says Tom Lopach, the center’s CEO.

The effort had to overcome heightened skepticism in some communities. Many Black voters preferred to exercise their franchise in person or didn’t trust the mail. National civil rights groups worked with local organizations to get the word out that this was the best way to ensure one’s vote was counted. In Philadelphia, for example, advocates distributed “voting safety kits” containing masks, hand sanitizer and informational brochures. “We had to get the message out that this is safe, reliable, and you can trust it,” says Hannah Fried of All Voting Is Local. . .

At the same time, Democratic lawyers battled a historic tide of pre-election litigation. The pandemic intensified the parties’ usual tangling in the courts. But the lawyers noticed something else as well. “The litigation brought by the Trump campaign, of a piece with the broader campaign to sow doubt about mail voting, was making novel claims and using theories no court has ever accepted,” says Wendy Weiser, a voting-rights expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. “They read more like lawsuits designed to send a message rather than achieve a legal outcome.”

In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote. About a quarter voted early in person. Only a quarter of voters cast their ballots the traditional way: in person on Election Day. . .

Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it. One component was tracking dangerous lies that might otherwise spread unnoticed. Researchers then provided information to campaigners or the media to track down the sources and expose them. . .

Quinn’s research gave ammunition to advocates pushing social media platforms to take a harder line. In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,” says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) “It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down.”. . .

Dick Gephardt, the Democratic former House leader turned high-powered lobbyist, spearheaded one coalition. “We wanted to get a really bipartisan group of former elected officials, Cabinet secretaries, military leaders and so on, aimed mainly at messaging to the public but also speaking to local officials–the secretaries of state, attorneys general, governors who would be in the eye of the storm–to let them know we wanted to help,” says Gephardt, who worked his contacts in the private sector to put $20 million behind the effort.

Wamp, the former GOP Congressman, worked through the nonpartisan reform group Issue One to rally Republicans to the effort. “We thought we should bring some bipartisan element of unity around what constitutes a free and fair election,” Wamp says. The 22 Democrats and 22 Republicans on the National Council on Election Integrity met on Zoom at least once a week. They ran ads in six states, made statements, wrote articles and alerted local officials to potential problems. “We had rabid Trump supporters who agreed to serve on the council based on the idea that this is honest,” Wamp says. This is going to be just as important, he told them, to convince the liberals when Trump wins. “Whichever way it cuts, we’re going to stick together.”. . .

The Voting Rights Lab and IntoAction created state-specific memes and graphics, spread by email, text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, urging that every vote be counted. Together, they were viewed more than 1 billion times. Protect Democracy’s election task force issued reports and held media briefings with high-profile experts across the political spectrum, resulting in widespread coverage of potential election issues and fact-checking of Trump’s false claims. The organization’s tracking polls found the message was being heard: the percentage of the public that didn’t expect to know the winner on election night gradually rose until by late October, it was over 70%. A majority also believed that a prolonged count wasn’t a sign of problems. “We knew exactly what Trump was going to do: he was going to try to use the fact that Democrats voted by mail and Republicans voted in person to make it look like he was ahead, claim victory, say the mail-in votes were fraudulent and try to get them thrown out,” says Protect Democracy’s Bassin. Setting public expectations ahead of time helped undercut those lies.

[Amber McReynolds, Zach Wamp and Maurice MitchellRachel Woolf for TIME; Erik Schelzig—AP/Shutterstock; Holly Pickett—The New York Times/Redux]

. . .The racial-justice uprising sparked by George Floyd’s killing in May was not primarily a political movement. The organizers who helped lead it wanted to harness its momentum for the election without allowing it to be co-opted by politicians. Many of those organizers were part of Podhorzer’s network, from the activists in battleground states who partnered with the Democracy Defense Coalition to organizations with leading roles in the Movement for Black Lives. . .

The best way to ensure people’s voices were heard, they decided, was to protect their ability to vote. “We started thinking about a program that would complement the traditional election-protection area but also didn’t rely on calling the police,” says Nelini Stamp, the Working Families Party’s national organizing director. They created a force of “election defenders” who, unlike traditional poll watchers, were trained in de-escalation techniques. During early voting and on Election Day, they surrounded lines of voters in urban areas with a “joy to the polls” effort that turned the act of casting a ballot into a street party. Black organizers also recruited thousands of poll workers to ensure polling places would stay open in their communities.

The summer uprising had shown that people power could have a massive impact. Activists began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election. “Americans plan widespread protests if Trump interferes with election,” Reuters reported in October, one of many such stories. More than 150 liberal groups, from the Women’s March to the Sierra Club to Color of Change, from Democrats.com to the Democratic Socialists of America, joined the “Protect the Results” coalition. The group’s now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets. . .

About a week before Election Day, Podhorzer received an unexpected message: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to talk.

The AFL-CIO and the Chamber have a long history of antagonism. Though neither organization is explicitly partisan, the influential business lobby has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns, just as the nation’s unions funnel hundreds of millions to Democrats. On one side is labor, on the other management, locked in an eternal struggle for power and resources.

But behind the scenes, the business community was engaged in its own anxious discussions about how the election and its aftermath might unfold. The summer’s racial-justice protests had sent a signal to business owners too: the potential for economy-disrupting civil disorder. “With tensions running high, there was a lot of concern about unrest around the election, or a breakdown in our normal way we handle contentious elections,” says Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer. These worries had led the Chamber to release a pre-election statement with the Business Roundtable, a Washington-based CEOs’ group, as well as associations of manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, calling for patience and confidence as votes were counted.

But Bradley wanted to send a broader, more bipartisan message. He reached out to Podhorzer, through an intermediary both men declined to name. Agreeing that their unlikely alliance would be powerful, they began to discuss a joint statement pledging their organizations’ shared commitment to a fair and peaceful election. They chose their words carefully and scheduled the statement’s release for maximum impact. As it was being finalized, Christian leaders signaled their interest in joining, further broadening its reach.

The statement was released on Election Day, under the names of Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, and the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals and the National African American Clergy Network. “It is imperative that election officials be given the space and time to count every vote in accordance with applicable laws,” it stated. “We call on the media, the candidates and the American people to exercise patience with the process and trust in our system, even if it requires more time than usual.” The groups added, “Although we may not always agree on desired outcomes up and down the ballot, we are united in our call for the American democratic process to proceed without violence, intimidation or any other tactic that makes us weaker as a nation.”. . .

Activists reoriented the Protect the Results protests toward a weekend of celebration. “Counter their disinfo with our confidence & get ready to celebrate,” read the messaging guidance Shenker-Osorio presented to the liberal alliance on Friday, Nov. 6. “Declare and fortify our win. Vibe: confident, forward-looking, unified–NOT passive, anxious.” The voters, not the candidates, would be the protagonists of the story.

The planned day of celebration happened to coincide with the election being called on Nov. 7. Activists dancing in the streets of Philadelphia blasted Beyoncé over an attempted Trump campaign press conference; the Trumpers’ next confab was scheduled for Four Seasons Total Landscaping outside the city center, which activists believe was not a coincidence. “The people of Philadelphia owned the streets of Philadelphia,” crows the Working Families Party’s Mitchell. “We made them look ridiculous by contrasting our joyous celebration of democracy with their clown show.”. . .

It was around 10 p.m. on election night in Detroit when a flurry of texts lit up the phone of Art Reyes III. A busload of Republican election observers had arrived at the TCF Center, where votes were being tallied. They were crowding the vote-counting tables, refusing to wear masks, heckling the mostly Black workers. Reyes, a Flint native who leads We the People Michigan, was expecting this. For months, conservative groups had been sowing suspicion about urban vote fraud. “The language was, ‘They’re going to steal the election; there will be fraud in Detroit,’ long before any vote was cast,” Reyes says.

He made his way to the arena and sent word to his network. Within 45 minutes, dozens of reinforcements had arrived. As they entered the arena to provide a counterweight to the GOP observers inside, Reyes took down their cell-phone numbers and added them to a massive text chain. Racial-justice activists from Detroit Will Breathe worked alongside suburban women from Fems for Dems and local elected officials. Reyes left at 3 a.m., handing the text chain over to a disability activist. . .

Election boards were one pressure point; another was GOP-controlled legislatures, who Trump believed could declare the election void and appoint their own electors. And so the President invited the GOP leaders of the Michigan legislature, House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate majority leader Mike Shirkey, to Washington on Nov. 20.

It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trump’s bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied. “I was concerned things were going to get weird,” says Jeff Timmer, a former Michigan GOP executive director turned anti-Trump activist. Norm Eisen describes it as “the scariest moment” of the entire election.

The democracy defenders launched a full-court press. Protect Democracy’s local contacts researched the lawmakers’ personal and political motives. Issue One ran television ads in Lansing. The Chamber’s Bradley kept close tabs on the process. Wamp, the former Republican Congressman, called his former colleague Mike Rogers, who wrote an op-ed for the Detroit newspapers urging officials to honor the will of the voters. Three former Michigan governors–Republicans John Engler and Rick Snyder and Democrat Jennifer Granholm–jointly called for Michigan’s electoral votes to be cast free of pressure from the White House. Engler, a former head of the Business Roundtable, made phone calls to influential donors and fellow GOP elder statesmen who could press the lawmakers privately. . .

The pro-democracy forces were up against a Trumpified Michigan GOP controlled by allies of Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair, and Betsy DeVos, the former Education Secretary and a member of a billionaire family of GOP donors. On a call with his team on Nov. 18, Bassin vented that his side’s pressure was no match for what Trump could offer. “Of course he’s going to try to offer them something,” Bassin recalls thinking. “Head of the Space Force! Ambassador to wherever! We can’t compete with that by offering carrots. We need a stick.”

If Trump were to offer something in exchange for a personal favor, that would likely constitute bribery, Bassin reasoned. He phoned Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed and would make the argument publicly. Primus said he thought the meeting itself was inappropriate, and got to work on an op-ed for Politico warning that the state attorney general–a Democrat–would have no choice but to investigate. When the piece posted on Nov. 19, the attorney general’s communications director tweeted it. Protect Democracy soon got word that the lawmakers planned to bring lawyers to the meeting with Trump the next day. . .

That left one last step: the state canvassing board, made up of two Democrats and two Republicans. One Republican, a Trumper employed by the DeVos family’s political nonprofit, was not expected to vote for certification. The other Republican on the board was a little-known lawyer named Aaron Van Langevelde. He sent no signals about what he planned to do, leaving everyone on edge.

When the meeting began, Reyes’s activists flooded the livestream and filled Twitter with their hashtag, #alleyesonmi. A board accustomed to attendance in the single digits suddenly faced an audience of thousands. In hours of testimony, the activists emphasized their message of respecting voters’ wishes and affirming democracy rather than scolding the officials. Van Langevelde quickly signaled he would follow precedent. The vote was 3-0 to certify; the other Republican abstained. . .

There was one last milestone on Podhorzer’s mind: Jan. 6. On the day Congress would meet to tally the electoral count, Trump summoned his supporters to D.C. for a rally. . .

It was his final attack on democracy, and once again, it failed. By standing down, the democracy campaigners outfoxed their foes. “We won by the skin of our teeth, honestly, and that’s an important point for folks to sit with,” says the Democracy Defense Coalition’s Peoples. “There’s an impulse for some to say voters decided and democracy won. But it’s a mistake to think that this election cycle was a show of strength for democracy. It shows how vulnerable democracy is.”

The members of the alliance to protect the election have gone their separate ways. The Democracy Defense Coalition has been disbanded, though the Fight Back Table lives on. Protect Democracy and the good-government advocates have turned their attention to pressing reforms in Congress. Left-wing activists are pressuring the newly empowered Democrats to remember the voters who put them there, while civil rights groups are on guard against further attacks on voting. Business leaders denounced the Jan. 6 attack, and some say they will no longer donate to lawmakers who refused to certify Biden’s victory. Podhorzer and his allies are still holding their Zoom strategy sessions, gauging voters’ views and developing new messages. And Trump is in Florida, facing his second impeachment, deprived of the Twitter and Facebook accounts he used to push the nation to its breaking point. . .

As I was reporting this article in November and December, I heard different claims about who should get the credit for thwarting Trump’s plot. Liberals argued the role of bottom-up people power shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly the contributions of people of color and local grassroots activists. Others stressed the heroism of GOP officials like Van Langevelde and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to Trump at considerable cost. The truth is that neither likely could have succeeded without the other. “It’s astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is,” says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP executive director. “It’s like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff–if you don’t look down, you don’t fall. Our democracy only survives if we all believe and don’t look down.”

Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.

–With reporting by LESLIE DICKSTEIN, MARIAH ESPADA and SIMMONE SHAH

Correction appended, Feb. 5: The original version of this story misstated the name of Norm Eisen’s organization. It is the Voter Protection Program, not the Voter Protection Project. The original version of this story also misstated Jeff Timmer’s former position with the Michigan Republican Party. He was the executive director, not the chairman.

I wonder when it was that the Venezuelans handed the co-founder of BLM $20 million. I just ordered “Stolen Elections” so maybe it’ll talk about that in the book.

I suspect we’re awfully close to connecting the whole “resistance movement” in both the RNC and DNC, as well as the cartel-bought judges, etc in the overall plot of the Venezuelans, Chinese, Cubans, Iranians, and Serbians to overthrow the US Constitution through election theft.

Thank you for posting this.

Yep. The dems/deep state bragged about stealing the 2020 election. Recall that the CNN legal analyst was caught pleasuring himself while on one of these wargaming zoom calls. I hope the DOJ’s investigation into 2020 blows the lid off of this coup.

It was allegedly 2012, according to an anonymous defector, and Danny Glover was reportedly present. Glover had previously taken a similar amount of money from Chavez in 2007, and we can confirm he was in Venezuela as an “election monitor” in October 2012.

* * *

https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/how-venezuela-supporting-radical-left-wing-groups-the-us

Oct 29, 2025 7 min read
COMMENTARY BY
Mike Gonzalez
@Gundisalvus
Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow

Mike is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

. . .Venezuela played more than a supportive role in this attempt. Last week, I spoke with a former senior Venezuelan official who was very close to the dead dictator Hugo Chavez and who has now defected. He told me he was in the room in late 2012 when Chavez gave Opal Tometi—who the following year helped to found BLM—suitcases stuffed with dollars.

“Chavez ordered his people to hand the suitcases to them, suitcases filled with dollars, at least $20 million,” the defector told me, adding that Tometi was accompanied by three other African American women and the actor Danny Glover, a huge supporter of the Marxist regimes in Venezuela and Cuba. “Chavez told them that the money was to project the Bolivarian revolutionary project on U.S. streets,” he said, using Chavez’s term for Venezuelan Marxism.

The defector, who is cooperating with and providing evidence to the U.S. government on other subjects, particularly the close connection between the Cartel de los Soles narco group and the Venezuelan state, spoke with great specificity. “I see them all very clearly. The meeting took place at the Miraflores presidential palace, in a huge suite called the Japanese suite, where private meetings are held.”

* * *
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/may/21/film.venezuela

Venezuela giving Danny Glover $18m to direct film on epic slave revolt
· Chávez hopes venture will aid anti-imperialist fight
· Actor wants to educate US on Toussaint Louverture

Rory Carroll in Caracas
Sun 20 May 2007 21.14 EDT

Venezuela is to give the American actor Danny Glover almost $18m (£9m) to make a film about a slave uprising in Haiti, with President Hugo Chávez hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world public opinion against imperialism and western oppression.

The Venezuelan congress said it would use the proceeds from a recent bond sale with Argentina to finance Glover’s biopic of Toussaint Louverture, an iconic figure in the Caribbean who led an 18th-century revolt in Haiti.

It will also give seed money for a film version of The General in His Labyrinth, Gabriel García Márquez’s novel about the last days of Simón Bolívar, who liberated much of South America from Spanish colonialism.

Glover, 60, who starred with Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon series, and more recently with Eddie Murphy in the film DreamGirls, is a civil rights activist and supporter of Mr Chávez’s radical leftwing policies.

A document from the congress’s finance commission said the culture ministry would be a partner with Glover and give $17.8m for “scripts, production costs, wardrobe, lighting, transport, makeup and the creation of the whole creative and administrative platform”.

The project could mark a breakthrough for Villa del Cine, a new government-funded studio outside the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, which is part of Mr Chávez’s effort to combat what he sees as American cultural hegemony.

Glover, who visited Caracas at the weekend, told the Guardian that he would direct the film, titled Toussaint. “It’s so advanced that you can taste it. We’ve scouted locations within 75km [45 miles] of Caracas. I can do everything I need to do with this film from here.” He said he had been in talks with the government, but was unaware that a decision had been made until journalists tipped him off about the congress’s announcement. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” he said.

He suggested that there was still some uncertainty over whether the venture would go ahead. “One of the major axioms in theatre is never talk about anything until the deal is signed. There’s a lot of deliberation that goes on before something actually happens.”

It appeared that the congress timed the announcement to coincide with a media conference in Caracas hosted by the television network Telesur, a Venezuela-funded regional answer to CNN. Glover is on the board. . .

The actor is chairman of the TransAfrica Forum, an advocacy group for African Americans and other members of Africa’s diaspora, and a vocal critic of the Bush administration. Along with the singer Harry Belafonte, Glover is the best known celebrity supporter of Mr Chávez, whom he considers “remarkable”. He is a regular visitor to Venezuela.

Venezuela’s congress, which consists entirely of Chávez supporters, also said it would give $1.8m to develop a screen treatment of The General in His Labyrinth, by a Venezuela-born director, Alberto Arvelo. Some rate Gabriel García Márquez’s account of the final days of Bolívar along with the Colombian writer’s better known novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.

To build consciousness of what Mr Chávez calls “21st-century socialism”, the government has funded nationwide screenings of Charlie Chaplin’s classic film Modern Times, about the exploitation of US factory workers during the depression.

* * *
https://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/9/danny_glover_record_venezuela_turnout_hands

Danny Glover: Record Venezuela Turnout Hands Chávez Convincing Mandate to Continue Social Agenda
StoryOctober 09, 2012

This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today.
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Topics
Latin America
Venezuela
Guests
Danny Glover
American actor, film director and political activist. He has been in Venezuela as an electoral monitor. He joins us now from Caracas.
Links
Follow Danny Glover on Twitter: @MrDannyGlover
“The Americas Blog” by the Center for Economic and Policy Research
Vea/Lea en español

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has won his fourth presidential election in a race seen as his strongest challenge yet. With a historic turnout of 80 percent, Chávez took 54 percent of the vote, besting challenger Henrique Capriles’s 44.9 percent. We go to Caracas to speak with actor and activist Danny Glover, who traveled to Venezuela to monitor the election. Addressing the record turnout and the wide support for Chávez’s anti-poverty program, even among members of the opposition, Glover predicts that “we may find that certainly President Chávez and those [other Latin American leaders] who are re-elected will really create a new page in this history of this region.” [includes rush transcript]

. . .Media Options
This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today.
Donate
Topics
Latin America
Venezuela
Guests
Danny Glover
American actor, film director and political activist. He has been in Venezuela as an electoral monitor. He joins us now from Caracas.
Links
Follow Danny Glover on Twitter: @MrDannyGlover
“The Americas Blog” by the Center for Economic and Policy Research
Vea/Lea en español

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has won his fourth presidential election in a race seen as his strongest challenge yet. With a historic turnout of 80 percent, Chávez took 54 percent of the vote, besting challenger Henrique Capriles’s 44.9 percent. We go to Caracas to speak with actor and activist Danny Glover, who traveled to Venezuela to monitor the election. Addressing the record turnout and the wide support for Chávez’s anti-poverty program, even among members of the opposition, Glover predicts that “we may find that certainly President Chávez and those [other Latin American leaders] who are re-elected will really create a new page in this history of this region.” [includes rush transcript]

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We are on the road on a 100-city tour in Durango, Colorado. But first we turn to Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez has won his fourth presidential election, defeating challenger Henrique Capriles in a race widely seen as Chávez’s strongest challenge since his first victory in 1998. Chávez won 54 percent of the vote, with Capriles gaining just under 45 percent.

Tens of thousands celebrated in the streets of the capital Caracas after the results were announced. Chávez held a replica of the sword of independence hero Simón Bolívar during the victory celebration. At a rally outside the presidential palace, Chávez reached out to the political opposition and called for unity among Venezuelans.

PRESIDENT HUGO CHÁVEZ: [translated] To those who promote hate, to those who promote social poison, to those who are always trying to deny all the good things that happen in Venezuela, I invite them to dialogue, to debate and to work together for Venezuela, for the Bolivarian people, for the Bolivarian Venezuela. That’s why I start by sending these greetings to them and extending these two hands and heart to them in the name of all of us, because we are brothers in the fatherland of Bolívar.

AMY GOODMAN: Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, speaking after winning another six-year term in office. In his concession speech later Sunday night, Capriles urged Chávez to recognize the voices of those who voted against him.

HENRIQUE CAPRILES: [translated] I hope a political movement that has been in power for 14 years understands that almost half the country does not agree with it. I ask those who remain in power for respect, consideration and recognition of almost half the country.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the significance of Chávez’s victory, we go to Caracas to speak with Danny Glover, American actor, film director, political activist. He’s been in Venezuela as an electoral monitor.

Danny Glover, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you tell us what you have observed in this fourth election of President Chávez?

DANNY GLOVER: Well, thank you, first of all, for having me on the show, Amy.

I had the opportunity to witness something very extraordinary in this hemisphere, and certainly in Venezuela: an election that was very clean, an election that—where the people had—were greatly enthusiastic on both sides about the prospect of another six years. And I witnessed—I went from polling stations, several polling stations, and talked to people, and through an interpreter, about what they felt about the voting process itself.

And the voting process is very, very meticulous and at the same time very thorough, in that you began with your voting card, then a fingerprint, then you vote. And then all of that is vetted through another process, including a mark on your hand, your thumb, a purple mark on your hand. So I witnessed this, and with the incredible enthusiasm around the polls.

And it’s on Sunday now. It takes place on Sunday, when there’s not a great deal of traffic on the street, and people voted to this or that. And they don’t sell liquor on Sunday as a result of the voting process, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Danny Glover, why did you go down to Venezuela? And talk about where you have spent your time.

DANNY GLOVER: Well, the first thing that—the reason I came, I was invited by the electoral commission to come here and be an accompaniment or a monitor. But my relationship with Venezuela has been one in which—it’s been over the last eight years, and even further than that, at the World Conference on Racism in 2001. I’ve been meeting African descendants in the region and had great discussions with them about the changes that were happening in the region and promoting more democracy, and perhaps understanding their own involvement. So, through TransAfrica Forum, we began to form these relationships, develop these relationships, which culminated in me coming to Venezuela in 2004, meeting with the Venezuelan Afro-descendancy groups there, and also meeting with the president. The president—certainly President Chávez expressed his—certainly expressed that they had not included within the 1999 constitution—looked out for—took into consideration the aspirations of Afro-descendants and, since then, has promoted programs in which they’ve improved the lives of Afro-descendants.

Well, during the day, we certainly—the day of the election, Sunday, we spent time here in Caracas. Then Monday, we went to the community of Barlovento, which is in Miranda state, was in Capriles’s—where he’s the governor of, the opposition leader is the governor of. We spent time talking to people and really understanding the real narrative around what this election means to people, poor people, people who have been affected by the changes that had happened in the—during the time of this regime, people who have been affected by the changes that have happened over the last 13 years. We—to people who talked about increased healthcare access, also increased education, also the building of co-operatives around chocolate, first of all, and also around bananas. And all of them expressed a sense of pride, a sense of also relief that President Chávez had been re-elected. . .

* * *
https://en.panampost.com/panam-staff/2020/06/23/the-links-between-black-lives-matter-and-nicolas-maduro-revealed/

The Links Between Black Lives Matter and Nicolas Maduro Revealed
by PanAm Post Staff June 23, 2020

. . .In December 2015 Black Lives Matter sent a delegation, headed by the organization’s co-founder, Opal Tometi, to act as observers during the Venezuelan Parliamentary elections of that year. The Maduro regime did not allow accreditation for observers from the Organization of American States, the UN, or the EU. The only accredited observers where from regimes and organizations friendly to the “revolutionary cause.”

Later that same month Tometi penned an article where she espouses, word for word, the regime’s standard text for international propaganda. “In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world ,” wrote Tometi about one of the world’s most corrupt voting systems in history.

Earlier in 2015 Maduro was given an award at the “Afro-descendants Summit” held in Harlem. Maduro was invited at the behest of the Black Lives Matter leadership.

Scores of Venezuelans have been killed, not while resisting arrest, or while scuffling with the police in demonstrations, but by police snipers under orders to quell demonstrations by providing a few corpses. The best-known case is of former beauty queen, Genesis Carmona, killed by Maduro’s snipers in 2013, two years before Tometi publicly declared her deep admiration for Maduro and his regime.

Reading Tometi’s piece, while remembering the atrocities and inhuman conditions suffered by the Venezuelan people, superbly reported in The New York Times by Meredith Kohut, one realizes that it is not racism that the co-founder of BLM is fighting. This level of cynicism is always a sign of a fanatical adherence to an ideology.

In the case of Black Lives Matter, both its co-founders are fanatical Marxists, and they have publicly admitted as much. Patrice Cullors, Tometi’s colleague in the founding of Black Lives Matter, has publicly admitted to being “a trained Marxist” and “we are super-versed in ideological theory”. . .

* * *
https://keywiki.org/Opal_Tometi

Supporting Maduro
Opal Tometi, hugged Nicolas Maduro at the 2015 People of African Descent Leadership Summit in Harlem, New York, where several high-rank officials of the Venezuelan regime also participated. Maduro, currently banned from the United States, was in town for the annual United Nations General Assembly.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzo9.PNG
Tometi appears alongside Maduro on a Venezuelan government propaganda site’s news report from the event, raising a fist and embracing him. The photo appears to be taken in front of a giant photo of Maduro’s face.

Tometi spoke at the summit, standing in front of a Venezuelan flag for the speech and thanking Maduro’s government for the opportunity. Among her targets during the speech were the government of the Dominican Republic for deporting Haitians and “Western economic policies, land grabs, and neocolonial financial instruments like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund” for, she argued, creating the Mediterranean migrant crisis.

“I am aware that justice also has to do with racial aspects,” assured Tometi, according to Venezuelan state media. “What we are experiencing is the manifestation of anti-black racism and this is state violence. It must be called by its name. Police brutality, the murders of blacks, violence against the Afro-descendant community, all is proof of the violence of the State,” said the Black Lives Matter founder.

Tometi also quoted Joanne Chesimard, a radical Marxist convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper in 1973 who has lived for decades as a fugitive in Cuba, as urging, “you must fight until all black lives matter.” Tometi referred to Chesimard, who renamed herself “Assata Shakur,” as the summit’s “dear exiled sister.”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzeddos.PNG
In addition to meeting with and applauding Maduro at the New York summit, Tometi also served as an election observer in socialist Venezuela during the 2015 legislative elections. She praised the socialist dictatorship as “a place where there is intelligent political discourse” on Twitter during one of the bloodiest years of police brutality in the country.

Tometi also applauded Venezuela in an article that year stating, “in these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.”[5

And we do know Opal Tometi was an “election observer” in Venezuela in 2015 and brought Maduro to Harlem that year.

https://therealnews.com/maduro0929harlem

Black Activists Host Venezuelan President Maduro in Harlem
by TRNN
September 30, 2015

Kicking off the UN decade for African descendants, Maduro joins Black activists in building solidarity with over 200 million people who claim African descent in the Americas

Story Transcript
DAVID DOUGHERTY, TRNN: Leaders of African descendants convened in the historic black cultural center of Harlem, New York for the People of African Descent Leadership Summit. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro visiting New York for the United Nations General Assembly attended the summit, which coincides with the UN’s declaration of 2015-2024 as the official decade for people of African descent. Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi was one of the invited speakers. OPAL TOMETI: The lives of black people in the U.S. and across the globe are inextricably linked. And we cannot win without global solidarity. And so it’s with that I charge us, this black summit, all of us to fight until every single black life matters. DOUGHERTY: Organizers of the event called for the establishment of a system of reparations to be delivered to African descendants around the world, whose ancestors were victims of the international slave trade. SPEAKER: The Africans, Atlantic slave trade has been recognized by the United Nations as a crime against humanity. In fact, it is a holocaust of enormous proportions. It is a crime against all of humanity, you know, not just in the Western world. Not just in Africa. Not just in the Caribbean. But throughout the entire world. And so we hope that this will not just be a celebratory, symbolic recognition of the injustices of the past but serious efforts, hopefully, will be made over the course of this decade to pay back the debt. DOUGHERTY: Actor-activist and chair of the Trans-Africa Forum Danny Glover introduced President Maduro at the summit. DANNY GLOVER: He realizes the important of this particular moment at the UN, dedicates this next decade to Afro-descendants. And has proposed a conference, a congress next year to express the ideals and change the dynamics of Africa [inaud.] within this region. In this world. And within this, their respective countries. DOUGHERTY: President Maduro met with a group of labor leaders and elected officials in a closed meeting before addressing summit attendees, where he stressed the importance of strengthening international ties in the fight against racism and historical injustices committed against African descendants. [Video of President Nicolas Maduro’s address] DOUGHERTY: President Maduro addressed the United Nations General Assembly the following day, where he called for the establishment of a multipolar world as a foundation to establish peace in conflict areas like Syria. Reporting from New York with Sharmini Peries, David Dougherty, the Real News Network.

End

It couldn’t have worked without Judas Pence.

Hmm. So the money to Glover and to BLM was given right before Obama’s 2 elections. I remember the reason given for not checking into Obama’s ineligibility was fear of black riots. The 2008 election of Obama was the first American election the Venezuelans stole. Seems the threat of violence from the BLM-type folks was part of the strategy to get a communist President installed in the US.

I hope all these people end up in Gitmo.

Glover received an award from the Institute for Policy Studies (Cold War Soviet/East German/Cuban front) a couple weeks after his participation in the 2012 Venezuela election, mentioning he was advocating for five arrested Cuban intelligence officers (the Cuban Five) at the time.

* * *
https://ips-dc.org/danny_glovers_letelier-moffitt_award_speech/

October 17, 2012
Danny Glover’s Letelier-Moffitt Award Speech
When the Great Recession struck, City Life/Vida Urbana was there, confronting bank power with people power.
By Danny Glover

I’m so sorry I can’t be with you in person tonight. I would love to be there with my dear IPS friend Saul Landau, with whom I’ve been fighting hard for the freedom of the Cuban 5. I was honored when IPS asked me to present the LM HRA to another group of freedom fighters: City Life/Vida Urban. Here’s why.

City Life/Vida Urbana is a grassroots community organization, led by low-income and working class people fighting for social, economic, racial justice and gender equality. Their struggle is focused on the right to decent housing for all of us. They fight slumlords, neglect, segregation, environmental hazards, gentrification. This is a group at the front lines of the fight not just against foreclosure, but against the entire economic model that started with Reagan and that deregulated Wall Street

You name it, they fight it. And they win.

With the Recession, came a big spike in foreclosures and evictions, hitting communities of color and low-income communities the hardest.

City Life/Vida Urbana was there, confronting bank power with people power.

City Life/Vida Urbana was there with their Shield and Sword.

The Shield they bring is their Legal Defense support for families facing evictions and foreclosure.

The Sword they bring is Direct Action. Using People Power, CityLife brings people together to create human blockades to obstruct and prevent home repossessions and evictions. Man, talk about courage. And guess what, when people have used their “sword and shield” strategy, 95% of the time they’ve been successful.

Here are two of their stories I found particularly moving:

Tenants Reggie Fuller and Louanna Hall were faithfully paying rent on their apartment when they heard rumors their landlord was in foreclosure. Now, after two years living in limbo as the only remaining tenants in the building, they’ve become leaders in the movement to support others facing displacement after foreclosure.
When Marshall Cooper couldn’t qualify for a traditional mortgage, the bank referred him to an alternative lender who offered him a loan with twice the interest rate. As the expense of caring for his aging parents made it harder and harder to meet his increasing mortgage payments, he fell behind. After two bankruptcies and a failed modification, the house went into foreclosure. Now Marshall, 75, is fighting eviction by the bank and doing everything he can to hold on to his home.
Now CityLife/Vida Urbana is taking their successful strategy beyond Boston to help keep more and more families in their homes. They provide community education, organize vigils, marches, meetings, empower affected people to become the very leaders of this growing movement.

And they expose the banks, the very financial systems which use predatory lending practices, high interest rates, unethical eviction and foreclosure practices to increase profits even as families are stripped of homes that under fair terms, they could afford to keep. They partner with alternative non-profit financial institutions such as Boston Community Capital to ensure real and affordable valuations of homes, so people can stay in them. They use the court system to “slow down” the eviction process till the financial situation can be made manageable. These folks work hard to keep roofs over people’s heads.

As A. Philip Randolph said, “Freedom is never given. It is won.” And, City Life/Vida Urbana is fighting, and winning.

For their courage in doing what so many say cannot be done, for standing up to corrupt institutions and speaking truth to power, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome to the stage City Life/Vida Urbana’s Executive Director Curdina Hill and Organizing Coordinator Steve Meacham, who will be accepting the Institute for Policy Studies’ 2012 Letelier-Moffit Human Rights Award on behalf of their organization and members.

Danny Glover — the actor, director, producer, and fearless activist — presented Curdina Hill and Steve Meacham of City Life/Vida Urbana with a 2012 Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award from the Institute for Policy Studies.

* * *
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Five

The Cuban Five, also known as the Miami Five,[1] are five Cuban intelligence officers (Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González) who were arrested in September 1998 and later convicted in Miami, Florida of conspiracy to commit espionage, conspiracy to commit murder, acting as an agent of a foreign government, and other illegal activities in the United States.[2] The Five were in the U.S. to observe and infiltrate the Cuban-American groups Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue.[3] They were part of La Red Avispa (lit. ‘The Wasp Network’) composed of at least 27 Cuban spies.[2]. . .

In May 2012, it was reported that the U.S. had declined an exchange of prisoners proposed by the Cuban government, that would have seen the Cuban Five returned to Cuba in exchange for USAID contractor Alan Gross, imprisoned in Cuba for illegally distributing communications equipment.[45] American officials did not consider Gross, whom they viewed as unjustly detained for a comparatively minor offense, equivalent to spies, one of whom had been convicted of murder.[46]

Fernando González was released on February 27, 2014.[47] He returned to Cuba and campaigned for the release of the remaining three. . .

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/saul-landau-told-truth-about-cuba/

Saul Landau told truth about Cuba
September 13, 2013 2:31 PM CDT By W. T. Whitney, Jr.

Saul Landau – reporter, author of 14 books, filmmaker (45 of them), poet, college professor, and determined foe of U.S. assaults on Cuba – died Sept. 9 in Alameda, Calif., at the age of 77.

Landau served as senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. At one time or another, he taught at California Polytechnic University in Pomona, the University of California-Santa Cruz, and American University in Washington. But his main vocation was that of agitator and political educator.

That bent emerged in Madison, Wis., where, as a student, Landau organized a “Joe Must Go” group aimed at the red-baiting Wisconsin senator, Joseph McCarthy. Later, Landau was a researcher for anti-imperialist sociologist C. Wright Mills and helped found Ramparts and Mother Jones magazines in San Francisco. He was a public television reporter there and also joined a mime troupe.

The breadth of Saul Landau’s interests shows in themes he pursued in books and especially films. Often in collaboration with others, he wrote about “The New Radicals” (1966), “National Security and U.S. Foreign Policy” (1988), guerrilla insurgencies in Central America (1993), George W. Bush’s “Preemptive Empire (2003), and U.S. culture (“Bush and the Botox World” – 2007).

Landau’s documentary films explored Syria (2004), Iraq (2002), the U.S.-Mexican border (1999), Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico (1966), Iraq (1999), Nicaragua (1983), Beirut, Lebanon (1982), Jamaican President Michael Manley in 1976 and 1980 – and much more. Landau’s highly regarded film “Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang” (1980) documented the cover-up of terrible health effects from U.S. atomic bomb testing in the 1950s.

Notably, Landau produced films covering the rise of Chilean President Salvador Allende, later overthrown in the U.S.-assisted military coup in 1973. Orlando Letelier, foreign minister in the Allende government, was one of thousands who ended up being tortured and incarcerated. Landau helped spearhead a worldwide campaign for his release. Yet Chilean agents killed Letelier in 1976 in Washington. Landau and co-author John Dinges’ book on the case, “Assassination on Embassy Row,” alleged FBI involvement. Declassified U.S. intelligence material subsequently released by Washington’s National Security Archives provided confirmation.

Ultimately, Saul Landau’s signal contribution may have been that he told the truth about Cuba and 50 years of U.S. siege. He made six Cuba-related films. The most remarkable were “Fidel,” a report of Landau’s week-long jeep trip across the island with the Cuban leader in 1968, and his 2012 film “Will Real Terrorist Please Stand Up.” There, Landau documented the falsehoods and violence marking the notorious anti-Cuban terror campaign emanating from the United States. He showed how the Cubans Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, René Gonzalez, and Fernando Gonzalez came to Florida to defend against the terror and why four of them remain in U.S. prisons after 15 years. Through that film and in other ways Saul Landau contributed mightily to the cause of the Cuban Five.

During the last three years of Saul Landau’s life, he and actor Danny Glover visited and became friends with prisoner Gerardo Hernandez, who is serving two life terms. Landau issued down-to-earth, intimate reports after each visit. They circulated widely.

A month before Landau’s expected death, Hernandez wrote him: “It is just a journey, Saul, the other is not true … How could it be true, with so many people who admire you and love you? A trip where? …You’ll be here whenever Danny visits me, and in Cuba when the Five are reunited.” In August, Saul Landau received Cuba’s Medal of Friendship, issued by the Cuban Council of State.

Photo: Saul Landau, right, with actor Danny Glover, left, visits Cuban Five prisoner Gerardo Hernandez.

I hope all these people end up in Gitmo.

If arrest were to happen, it's my wish that they ALL resist.