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COMMENTARY: Jan. 6 Select Committee Hearings? Watch It Like You’d Watch a Warriors Game

And if you still don’t think it matters, just think on Jan. 6 Committee Chair Bennie Thompson’s opening statement last Thursday. A respected representative from Mississippi, Thompson put it on the line at the start: “I am from a part of the country where people justified the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021.”

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Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. He does a talk show on www.amok.com
Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. See him on www.amok.com

By Emil Guillermo

The NBA Finals/Game 5 was on primetime TV on Monday, and I have to confess, I was relieved it didn’t conflict with the Jan. 6 hearings on the “Big Lie.”

Because I would have had to make a choice. Democracy or basketball.

But the gods arranged for the story of our imperiled democracy to be on in the morning. And that gave primetime to the Dubs, who dutifully put the Celtics away. Can they win Game 6 in Boston on Thursday, or will a Game 7 be forced on Sunday?

I think they can.

Now what about our democracy? Why don’t we care about the Jan. 6 hearings enough to make it must-see TV?

The hearings require your absolute attention, as they lay out how the twice-impeached former president, No. 45, created the “Big Lie” about the 2020 election being rigged or stolen.

That would be quite enough, but small lies snowball into mega-lies and create the frenzy that led to the insurrection by MAGA followers to riot on the Capitol on Jan. 6. 2021.

This is nothing less than hearings on the future of our democracy. Everyone should be watching.

Twenty million people tuned in to the Thursday prime-time preview last week, which is about five times the number that tuned into Trump’s “Apprentice” in prime time.

But there are 300 million in this country impacted by the “Big Lie.”

Everyone needs to see the former attorney general Bill Barr call Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen, “Bull—-.”

Let that be emblazoned in our collective heads.

Here’s the man who was Trump’s chief enabler during his administration. And he is saying in no uncertain terms there was no election fraud.

And then there’s Trump’s own daughter, Ivanka, who said she believes in Barr.

This is Trump’s inner circle telling the truth under oath. They know how the rule of law works. But Trump still held on to the idea that the election was rigged and stolen. From day one, Trump continued to push the lie and even fund-raise a quarter of a billion dollars from the public.

And as Barr’s testimony continues to remind us, it was all based on Trump’s embrace of “bull—-.”

If you don’t care because the system is rigged against people of color, I have news for you. You not caring assures that the system will be as indifferent to us as it ever has been.

I urge you to watch in real time if you can. Or to watch on C-SPAN later.

And if you still don’t think it matters, just think on Jan. 6 Committee Chair Bennie Thompson’s opening statement last Thursday. A respected representative from Mississippi, Thompson put it on the line at the start:

“I am from a part of the country where people justified the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021.”

Thompson and his colleagues are under oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The sad thing the hearings reveal is that sometimes the enemy may include an outgoing president and his cronies (Rudy Giuliani, the former NYC mayor chief among them), hellbent on ignoring the will of the people.

If you still are lukewarm, maybe you’re one of those rare birds, a BIPOC diehard Republican. Clarence Thomas is one. Michelle Steel, an Asian American member of Congress representing Orange County is another. Many continue to run for office and somehow are fine with the “Big Lie.” They must be rooted out.

Just remember how Thompson hears anyone who defends Trump. They have the same tone as those who would defend and justify racism, slavery, and the Klan.

I tell my Asian American readers to think of our mothers and fathers and their early experiences when they arrived in America. They didn’t come from China, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, India, etc., because of the Big Lie.

They came to escape the lies in their ancestral homes and came to America because the truth and the rule of law means something.

The hearings show us how low a president was willing to go to diminish that something into nothing in our democracy.

And the real fear is that without a savvy, informed electorate, it could all easily happen again.

That’s why we must pay attention.

Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. See him on www.amok.com

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Ben Jealous

COMMENTARY: Make Banks Make Good on Their Pledge to End Fossil Fuel Financing

ConocoPhillips needs more than the disastrous approval it won from the Biden administration last week to proceed with its Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope. It needs $8 to $10 billion to build 199 wells, hundreds of miles of road and pipelines, a processing plant, and an airstrip on 499 acres that are vital to caribou, migratory birds and indigenous people.

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Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January.
Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January.

By Ben Jealous

ConocoPhillips needs more than the disastrous approval it won from the Biden administration last week to proceed with its Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope. It needs $8 to $10 billion to build 199 wells, hundreds of miles of road and pipelines, a processing plant, and an airstrip on 499 acres that are vital to caribou, migratory birds and indigenous people.

While President Biden certainly could have stopped Willow, so can the financial institutions helping create it. Willow is just the most recent example of banks’ complicity in preserving fossil fuel extraction through a continuing flow of money to Big Oil and Gas — all despite pledging a year ago to pursue the net zero carbon emissions we need to save the planet.

That’s why I joined activists from Third Act Tuesday on a block in Washington to protest among the offices of banking giants Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, and Wells Fargo in our nation’s capital. Third Act is a group founded by environmentalist and author Bill McKibben to bring together Americans over 60 to campaign for a sustainable planet. While I’m still too young to join, I was part of demonstrations they organized at bank branches across the country.

We were there to call out these “dirty” banks’ practices and their unacceptable costs — both immediate and long-term. Right now, any money that goes to Willow and fossil fuel projects like it, is money that won’t be invested in a clean economy, particularly in fledgling companies that are finding sustainable ways to power the planet. It’s those jobs that Alaskans and their descendants really need.

Longer term, the banks’ lending will weaken the impact of an historic $370 billion investment our country will make in the next decade on green technology and alternatives to oil and gas. As those investments pay off, there will be less and less demand for oil coming from projects like Willow. But the supply will remain steady (for 30 years in Willow’s case). So, gas will be cheaper for the holdouts who continue to use it, making it even harder to push them to make the switch.

The situation got even more dire with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the shadow of doubt it unfairly cast on other regional banks. Banks of that size have been vital to the growth of the clean economy. For example, Silicon Valley reportedly financed 60% of community solar energy projects in which property owners jointly construct a solar facility to power their neighborhoods.

The consequence of the turmoil has been to concentrate even more power in the biggest banks. Bank of America, for example, took in close to $15 billion in new deposits in a matter of days after Silicon Valley was taken over by federal regulators.

That makes it even more imperative that we hold these banks to their pledges not to fund new fossil fuel projects (HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, is keeping that promise). Third Act has suggestions that most people can take to be part of that accountability — cut up credit cards issued by the banks and move deposits out of them, not into them. When more and more people do that, they will be strengthening the case of a small group of the banks’ investors who have begun introducing resolutions at shareholder meetings calling for an end to fossil fuel financing.

Throughout our country’s history, it’s been profitable to consider certain people and places as disposable. We know where continuing that unjust path will lead — to a planet that’s too polluted and too hot to be livable. We’ve passed the time when financial institutions can postpone an end to their investment in the climate’s demise. It’s time these dirty banks put their money somewhere else.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January

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Activism

Oakland Post: Week of March 15 – 21, 2023

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of March 15 – 21, 2023

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The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of March 15 - 21, 2023

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Arts and Culture

What Asian American Oscar Victories Mean for All of Us

After the Oscars, when Asian Americans were everywhere on the winners list, from actors, writers, directors, but also makeup artists, and not just in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” but also in movies like “The Whale,” I turn to the Oakland playwright Ishmael Reed who must be wondering will Asian Americans now go for the Whiteness Prize?

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Michelle Yeoh is the first Asian actress to win an Academy Award.
Michelle Yeoh is the first Asian actress to win an Academy Award.

By Emil Guillermo

After the Oscars, when Asian Americans were everywhere on the winners list, from actors, writers, directors, but also makeup artists, and not just in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” but also in movies like “The Whale,” I turn to the Oakland playwright Ishmael Reed who must be wondering will Asian Americans now go for the Whiteness Prize?

(I consider Asian American to be a generic term, indicating people of Asian descent either living or working not necessarily indicative of their citizenship status.)

I’m in New York as an actor in “The Conductor,” the latest Reed production now off-Broadway (get your in-person or live-streamed tickets here: https://theaterforthenewcity.net/shows/the-conductor-2023/).

I play a brown-skinned Tucker Carlson-type on a faux Fox, and very conservative news network.

That’s how good an actor I am!

As an Asian American sometime-actor, I’m gratified to see Asian American creatives take their historic star turn at the Oscars. Asians have won the Academy Award for best supporting actor before, but never has there been a best actor/actress winner until the Malaysia-born, Hollywood-based Michelle Yeoh last weekend.

There’s something about being a “first.” A “never before.”

But what’s next?

And that’s where Reed’s play got me thinking.

In Reed’s “The Conductor,” Blacks start a new underground railroad to help Indian Americans — not American Indians, but those from the continent of India — escape a wave of xenophobia that is forcing them to flee to Canada.

The main character, columnist Warren Chipp is Reed’s alter ego. When a conservative Indian seeks refuge and asks Chipp why the liberal Chipp is being so nice to him, Chipp reveals his grasp of irony.

“Minorities make alliances with us (Blacks) until their admission to the white club is accepted. This happened to the Jews, the Japanese, the Irish, the Italians and now you guys (Asian Indians).”

It’s just one of the provocative asides in the play, but the historical examples are there.

Says Chipp/Reed: “These groups come running to us when the white man decides to sic mobs on them because of some geopolitical conflict or culture war. Begging us to hide them and save them. And then, when they get an ‘all-clear’ sign, they return to auditioning for whiteness again. Lining up and trampling over each other, asking white people to ‘choose me!’ Some of them even change their names to go Anglo.”

Reed says it’s the root of “Afro-Pessimism.”

What’s that?

It’s a term by Frank Wilderson, as Reed explains, that means Blacks can’t depend upon Blacks’ “junior allies.” Wilderson calls B.S. on intersectionality and says that Blacks “must go it alone.”

After rehearsals and the first four performances, the passages from the play haunt me.

Especially last Sunday. When the Asian Americans were preparing for their Oscar turn, I was off-Broadway living Reed’s play.

Is the Model Minority now back to auditioning for whiteness again?

I hope not. I get what Reed’s saying in his play. But I see the Oscar victory as a win for not just Asian Americans but all BIPOC communities in all their unique narratives.

AAPI stories have a kind of heat now. An independent film about a family with a laundromat dealing with the IRS and the multiverse where people have hotdogs as fingers puts us in a whole new ballgame.

We aren’t so weird after all. We’re of immigrant descent, sure. We’re different, yes. But we’re of the modern world and our stories deal in universal truths.

People flocked to “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which gave it some cache as an indie project that was making money. Not like “Top Gun” money, but enough to satisfy Hollywood accountants. Once it caught the attention of the Academy looking for diversity, the film was simply recognized for its off-beat ingenuity and its creative weirdness.

I was having lunch in New York’s Chinatown with a lawyer friend of mine, a Chinese American immigrant and also a triple Harvard (College, Law School, and MBA) graduate. My friend surprised me when he said he couldn’t understand the hype about “Everything, Everywhere…”

He called it unwatchable. He liked the movie “Tar.”

I told him maybe it was generational. Just goes to show you that not everyone, not even Asian Americans are on board with “Everything, Everywhere…”

But the huge victory on Sunday makes the film like a Golden Spike in Hollywood. The track is finally connected and open for AAPI creatives bound for glory.

“Everything, Everywhere…” has put everyone in the equation on notice. We have stories to tell that sell, and that people want to see.

Stories that win Oscars.

I see the phenomenon as a rising Asian American film lifts all boats. And with AAPI at just over 6% of the population, I don’t buy the “Afro-Pessimism” idea in his play.

We can’t go it alone. We don’t have the numbers. We need each other.

Like anything worthwhile, it’s going to have to be done together.

Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. See his vlog on www.amok.com And see “The Conductor” in person or live-streamed tickets here: https://theaterforthenewcity.net/shows/the-conductor-2023/

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