Points for the resistance

Women go on strike

On 8 March 2017, women in at least 50 countries around the world went on strike from jobs, shopping, and housework and took to the streets in a vast showing of solidarity. In a Guardian op-ed, a group of leftist feminists including Angela Davis and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor called for the International Women’s Strike. They then acted in coalition with the Women’s March follow-up “A Day Without a Woman” to, as Frances Fox Piven once put it, “throw sand in the gears of everything”.

This was a day celebrating “feminism for the 99%” that prioritizes the needs of trans, queer, non-white and otherwise marginalized women, as well as labor rights, anti-imperialism, and broad social programs like universal healthcare, childcare, and education. Speakers at rallies decried not only the right-populist authoritarianism of Donald Trump, but the neoliberal feminism of Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg. It introduced untold numbers of women to the militant, grassroots resistance tactics that might just be our salvation.

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Thanks, Obama

When Donald Trump baselessly accused Barack Obama of wiretapping his campaign during the election, our 44th president was too classy to tweet back. But he did reportedly roll his eyes and let an anonymous source who relayed the info to NBC know that he believes Trump’s claims “undermine the integrity of the office of the president”, but not his own integrity, because “he didn’t do it”.

The source told NBC that Obama “is much more concerned by President Trump kicking people off their health insurance, not staffing the government, not being prepared for a crisis, rolling back regulations so that corporations can pollute the air and water and letting mentally unstable people buy guns with no problems whatsoever,” concluding: “He cares about all those things much more than what President Trump tweets at the TV each morning.” That’s got to hurt an egomaniac like Trump, even coming from the man he called a “bad (or sick) guy”.

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Size matters

Since the day after his inauguration, our ratings-obsessed ruler has been claiming he drew the largest inauguration crowd of any president ever, and any evidence to the contrary – and there’s a lot of it – is a distortion by the liberal media. He even went so far as to demand the National Park Service release additional photos, which he believed would show the crowd’s true magnitude.

On Monday, they did just that, in response to numerous Foia requests, but unfortunately for Trump, the newly released photos just proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that his audience was much smaller than Obama’s. They also showed he’s not afraid to lie about even the most obvious of things, which should do little to quell bipartisan fears that he’s delusional or otherwise unwell.

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Points for Trump

Trumpcare roll-out

After months of promising to make healthcare great again, the Republican party rolled out its Obamacare replacement, the American Health Care Act, by falsely implying the cost of healthcare was comparable to the cost of an iPhone.

While it keeps in place a few popular ACA provisions, it screws over the elderly, the chronically ill, and pretty much anyone who’s not rich, especially those who gained coverage in the Medicaid expansion. The AARP, the AMA, and numerous other associations wasted no time in condemning it as a major step down from Obamacare that will literally kill people, but that probably only made Trump and friends happier. It’s not yet a done deal, but if you happen to be dating someone with fancy health insurance, now might be a good time to pop the question.

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Travel ban 2.0

Following successful legal challenges to his first immigration ban – or as he called it on the campaign trail, “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” – the Donald signed a fresh executive order designed to achieve the same result while being more convincingly constitutional. It does this by leaving those who already have visas and green cards alone and focusing solely on new applicants. It also removes Iraq from the list of affected countries, underlining the arbitrariness of those included, and removes tests that could favor Christian refugees over Muslims.



While the first ban was rolled out in a flurry of chaos, this one promises “smoother” implementation, risking a few more weeks of letting “radical Islamic terrorism” into the country in hopes of quelling any dissent. Protesters have yet to shut the airports down, which means, at least for now, the White House plan is working.

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RIP Earth

In a meeting with corporate fat cats in his first week as president, Trump promised to reduce regulations by 75%, “maybe more”. Now he’s making good on that promise with plans to roll back Obama’s regulations governing greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles and power plants.

In a three-pronged gift to the oil, coal, and automobile industries, Trump plans to dismantle the EPA’s Clean Power Plan as much as possible with the help of EPA head/climate change denier Scott Pruitt, loosen federal standards for fuel efficiency and tailpipe emissions, and bar states from enforcing stricter emissions standards than the federal government. Oh boy!

Even if this were going to boost the economy and not just further enrich these industries’ CEOs, it will be hard to have a functioning society when both coasts are underwater and we have to put on space suits to go outside. Then again, considering who those coast-dwellers tend to vote for, maybe that’s just what Trump wants.

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