Youth Advocacy
Youth Advocacy
Year 4, Week 06 (248 total reports)
12.03.20245-18.03.2025
REVIEW and ANNOUNCEMENTS
Dr. Jerry Goebel
We’re in a long-term fight for democracy, and we need to find strategies to sustain our energy to continue resisting. Hopefully, this news review will provide you with insights into what is happening this week.
NEW FEATURE: Visual Stories!
This week I introduced two songs about American legends that stood for civil rights. RBG broke through glass ceilings as one of the major voices for civil rights (and especially women’s rights) in US history. Please pass her story to others through this original song and presentation: “The Notorious RBG.” The second song features Congressman John Lewis, whose famous words, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble,” are remembered in this visual story: “Good Trouble.”
Top Links of the Week
18.03.2024
The Political Fight of the Century
This article gives insightful glimpses into the reasons the current administration won the last election, the disillusionment of voters over the economy, and the inability of Democrats to capitalize on those feelings and offer a stirring response. It also gives a way forward if the Dems want to fight their way out of the basement and reasons why the current administration is failing the very people who put it into office. This truly is… the Political Fight of the Century and a deciding battle for global democracy.
17.03.2025
One Word of Truth Shall Outweigh the Whole World
This well-timed, reprinted op-ed piece by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is desperately needed at this time. Very few people understand oligarchies—and, in particular, Russian oligarchies—better than Solzhenitsyn. The Nobel Prize-winning laureate spent nearly a decade in the Russian gulag under Joseph Stalin. Peter Wehner, who reprinted this reflection, reminds us that the courage needed in Russia then is needed in the US today. Quoting Solzhenitsyn, he reminds us: “The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing. The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.” It is time to shake off any complacency or sense that this administration will ever seek to negotiate a halfway point with its opposition. Democrats like Chuck Schumer are wrong if they think they can deal with President 47, his oligarchic regime, Putin, and Musk. It is time for full-on resistance!
16.03.2025
The Kind of Thing Dictators Do
Remember the famous poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller?
First they came for the Communists,
And I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists,
And I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
And I did not speak out,
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
And I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me,
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.
This case of Mahmoud Khalil is exactly that kind of situation. As stated in this “The Atlantic” article by Graeme Wood, “Finding someone whose politics you don’t like and using some flimsy excuse to put him in handcuffs is the kind of thing dictators do.” Khalil is a Syrian Palestinian graduate student with U.S. permanent residency, and 47’s administration plans to eject him from the country for protesting at Columbia University. There’s been no case filed against him by 47’s administration. This is straight out of the books of Hitler, and it can’t be overlooked. It is a radical departure from the civil rights that are afforded by our Constitution for free speech. Since it seems apparent that Congress will not act to rein in President 47, it is up to courts and demonstrators. As the Notorious RGB once said, “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.”
15.03.2025
How Worried Should We Be About the Economy?
In this interview, Nobel Prize Winner and Professor, Paul Krugman, interviews someone he respects for balanced and non-reactive views on the economy; macroeconomist, Neil Dutta. To date, Dutta has been cautiously bullish about the economy slipping into a recession. Dutta is a real insider, deeply researching the halls of Congress and the inner workings of Wall Street financial corporations. Both Krugman and Dutta examine the housing market and remark that it has stayed south for an extended period of time. (A personal note here… Republicans—including this administration—have consistently sold off the national treasure of our forests to fund building.) Dutta cites layoffs at companies like Starbucks and Southwest Airlines, not to mention the drastic attempted cuts by Musk at DOGE, leading to jobs being cut “downstream” from the Federal government and then suggests the impact of Higher Education layoffs. To quote Krugman, “…consumers are unhappy, businesses are maybe fading out. Elon Musk is chopping up the government with a chainsaw…” The pair examine this administration for someone, “with the chops” to oversee all these economic levers and the best thing they can say about the only person they come up with, “Scott Beeson,” is, “at least he’s not an idiot…” That’s pretty telling to readers. The best thing these world-famous economists can say about the “main brain” behind Project 2025 (and soon to be released, Project 2026) is, “at least he’s not an idiot…? Just think, what does that imply about the rest of the administration tinkering with our economic future? Idiots? No doubt…
14.03.2025
EA-Times Radio VideoCast: "Trump Is Biggest Threat to US Constitution Since 1865" - EA WorldView
This article (podcast) is from Ireland, another country that used to be an ally of the US and now being shafted by President 47 and his rulers: Musk and Putin. Scott Lucas, the interviewer, explains why 47 is the biggest threat to the Constitution since Andrew Johnson’s presidency in 1865. 47 has said that Johnson is the president that he admires the most. Johnson, a Southern Democrat, took over from Lincoln when the President was assassinated. Like 47, Johnson was impeached (in 1868) for trying to usurp Congress. Eleven articles were filed against him. And like 47, he did not agree that African Americans were equal to Anglo-Americans. 47 has the record for being impeached (twice, in 2019 and 2021), yet the people of the United States voted him back into office anyway. Over 90 million people did not vote (which was more than those who voted for both 47 and Kamala Harris). 47 and his Radical Republican think tank did not disguise their intent to undermine the Constitution; in fact, at first, they bragged about it (until they began to see that it was costing them at the polls, whereupon they tried to hide their intentions). Now, thanks to the MAGA cult and those too apathetic to vote, the US faces a constitutional crisis. This is THE ISSUE, everything else 47 is doing is a distraction to keep people from understanding the true intent of this administration. If the US is going to save its democracy, it needs to wake up and resist at every level, personally and corporately, possible.
13.03.2025
U.S. Added to Global Human Rights Watchlist Over Declining Civil Liberties
Congratulations, Trump voters, your guy just added a new notch to his gun. The second-worst president (second only to himself during his first term) and the US economy’s leader in stock market declines, has now made a global list that includes other favorites like Serbia, Pakistan, and Sudan. The author of this Time Magazine article, Solcré Burga, points out, “the US was added Sunday to the CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist, a research tool that publicizes the status of freedoms and threats to civil liberties worldwide.” In the words of Mandeep Tiwana, Interim Co-Secretary General of CIVICUS, “The Trump Administration seems hellbent on dismantling the system of checks and balances which are the pillars of a democratic society.” The man who represents you, 47 voters (and stay-at-home ignoramuses), is fulfilling your inner fantasies of bullying and taking away the rights—and living standards—of the poorest of the poor in the world. This is what you wanted, this is what you now have.
12.03.2025
Why Psychopathic People Need So Much Power
The Canadian Beer Company, Molson Canadian, just released a brilliant marketing scheme, a “Presidential Pack” of beer. 1,461 beers, amounting to one a day for President 47’s term. Are they being optimistic or pessimistic? Do they really think that this administration is going to turn over power at the end of this term if 47 (or whomever holds the reins at that point) is still in power? That is certainly not their plan. President 47 is not only psychopathic, but he has surrounded himself with psychopaths and cult worshippers who are there solely to do his bidding (or the bidding of whomever paid him to win the election; let’s see… Putin? Musk? Project 2025? Just how many people does he owe his position to)? This article is timely—and important—for giving us insights into the nature of power and psychopathology.
