Issues You May Know, 24 January 2025.
A list of things you might want to know about - or write your reps about.
When it’s Family, it’s nepotism.
NBC News - Secretive Christian group at heart of D.C. politics ready for its close-up in Netflix docuseries "The Family" puts the spotlight on the enigmatic Fellowship Foundation, the Christian group behind the National Prayer Breakfast. Aug. 9, 2019 By Ethan Sacks While the annual event is purportedly hosted by members of Congress, it is actually organized and run by an evangelical Christian organization called The Fellowship Foundation, or "The Family," as it is referred to internally by its members. The series, which debuts on Netflix on Friday, takes a look at the group that operates with its own higher purpose — quietly building its influence on global politics "in the name of Jesus." "The Fellowship isn't about faith and it spreads very little. It's about power," said Jeff Sharlet, whose books, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," and "C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy," inspired the Netflix series. "Internally, it is spoken of primarily as a 'recruiting device' with which to draw 'key men' into smaller prayer cells to 'meet Jesus man to man,'” according to Sharlet. "Practically, the Prayer Breakfast has functioned from the very beginning as an unregistered lobbying festival."
The new prayer breakfast same as the old breakfast.
National Prayer Breakfast Backed by Dark Money, anti-LGBTQ+ Group "New" Capitol Hill breakfast is funded by the same theocratic group behind the original Jonathan Larsen Jan 04, 2025 The Old Breakfast Is Still Served. The NPB Foundation could have chosen to hold the “new” breakfast any day of the year, but chose instead to stage it at the same time it used to be held, the first Thursday of every February. That’s also when The Fellowship has continued to hold what used to be the original breakfast (now confusingly titled “The NPB Gathering,” to help maintain the connection) at the Washington Hilton, just downhill from The Capitol. The two events are tied together by title, time, and the links between the groups behind them. All of this helps The Foundation because their international allies often need the same kind of “official” trip status Walberg cited — but in their case it’s to justify charging their taxpayers for the trips. And, sure enough, some international officials — entirely predictably — have conflated the two events, purposely or not. It’s an easy mistake to make, given how confusing the two groups have made things; a convenient mistake to justify billing taxpayers, inconvenient when it comes to light.
My letter to reps:
The National Prayer Breakfast has a distinct appearance of impropriety. It seems disingenuous to wrap political lobbying in an aura of religiosity. Making it a more “intimate” meeting with the President and Congress only accentuates the potential for corruption or at least enforcing one type of religion over others, indeed, one sect of culty wealthy libertarian Christianity over all others. It’s not really a good look for the politicians who get involved.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Freedom From Religion Foundation - January 25, 2023 FFRF calls National Prayer Breakfast changes ‘subterfuge’ The National Prayer Breakfast Foundation has no business summoning the president or Congress to a religious event requiring a show of obeisance and partaking in private religious rituals.” Yesterday, former U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor announced that the National Prayer Breakfast will become a “more intimate gathering between the Congress, the president, and those in his administration.” Pryor said the 70-year-old event will no longer be hosted by the controversial group he described as “the International Foundation,” but which is commonly known as The Family or The Fellowship. The Fellowship was exposed as an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful, using “free-market fundamentalism” and “imperial ambition,” in the book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, by journalist Jeff Sharlet, first published in 2009, which was turned into a 2019 Netflix documentary. In recent years, the Christian Right group has been dogged by reporting on its ties to despots, anti-LGBTQ policies and other scandals.
NDAs are a persistent problem, used often to cover up wrongdoing.
Trump Launches Blatant SCAM COIN 3 Days Before His Inauguration! | Bulwark Takes - The Bulwark Jan 18, 2025 JVL: “Paramount or Viacom I forget who the parent company is with CBS is considering settling the 60 Minutes lawsuit and so I don't know if you saw this but one of the ridiculous (not legal advice) lawsuits that Trump filed, there was the one against the pollster Ann Selzer from the Demoines register, one was against 60 Minutes for airing an edited version of the Kamala Harris interview and that this was election interference - it's the dumbest ___ thing anybody's ever heard okay and uh.” Tim Miller: “Yeah 60 Minutes edits every interview that they do, it’s the style of the 60 Minutes magazine interview.” JVL: “This what all television does right so but here's the thing you and I - and I'm going to give Trump credit for playing four-dimensional chess - you and I looked at that and said this is so stupid look at this he's going to get pantsed or we said this is so sinister look he's trying to chill things and intimidate the media but that's not what's going on. What's going on is that the CBS parent company has a perspective merger that is going to come before the Trump administration and so by having Trump the person, not the office of president, file a civil lawsuit against them, that gives them the opportunity to settle that lawsuit and to settle it with very strict non-disclosure terms to it, and who can say maybe that winds up helping their case for merger approval. Do you see, do you see what I'm saying here?” Tim Miller: “yeah we’re a banana republic is what you’re saying.” JVL: “Yes yes this is a ban but this is true innovation using civil litigation not for the purposes of intimidating or extorting people but like cooperatively with the plaintiff and the defendant working cooperatively to use that to transfer funds legally, totally legally, and to then lock that fund transfer behind an NDA so that nobody can ever see what happens, in order to then auction off core government services that's again I – slow clap, right this is I am like Ron Burgundy I'm not even mad - you ate the whole wheel of cheese - I'm impressed.” (emphasis added)
My letter to reps.
Non Disclosure Agreements are too often to cover up wrongdoing, or even hide crimes. NDAs need to be curtailed. This is especially true for NDAs as the result of lawsuit settlements where the true nature of the deal may put others at risk, or constitute corruption, or present the appearance of impropriety for government officials and elected representatives.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
I think we’d all be happier with a more transparent society that isn’t about backroom deals by wheeler-dealer powerful tycoons and corporations.
I didn’t know Stepford Christian Katie Britt and so-called Democrat John Fetterman are close friends.
I didn’t actually know that Katie Britt visited John Fetterman when he was vulnerable hospitalized for clinical depression, nor had I known they’re in a group chat together where he’s getting messaging from her on the regular. I wonder if the group chat is on Telegram.
I found this out from PayDay Report, which I highly recommend for interesting labor related news I rarely see anywhere else.
Fetterman Abandons Pledge to Protect Dreamers - AFL-CIO Releases Deportation Defense Guide - Shakir Outlines Bold DNC Plan Mike Elk Jan 22, 2025 Given that his wife had arrived here as a child of an undocumented mother, Fetterman always promised to never vote for a bill that would hurt the so-called “Dreamers,” immigrant youth, who arrived undocumented as minors and were backed by DACA. However, not only did Fetterman vote for the bill, but he co-sponsored it with Republican Alabama Senator Kate Britt, a close friend of his, who visited him while he was hospitalized last year.
Air out the particle board furniture.
ProPublica - Formaldehyde Causes More Cancer Than Any Other Toxic Air Pollutant. Little Is Being Done to Curb the Risk. by Sharon Lerner and Al Shaw Dec. 3, 5 a.m. EST They have interviewed more than 50 experts and pored through thousands of pages of scientific studies and EPA records. They’ve also reviewed the actions of the previous Trump administration and what’s been disclosed about the next. The conclusion: The public health risks from formaldehyde are greater and more prevalent than widely understood — and any hope of fully addressing them may well be doomed, at least for the foreseeable future.
Letter to reps:
The government needs to regulate formaldehyde, including in furniture, as it’s a health hazard.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Trump admin executive order lets tech tycoon villains do secret unsafe AI programs.
NextGov FCW Trump axes Biden’s AI executive order January 20, 2025 08:08 PM ET By Natalie Alms It is not yet clear how and when Trump will replace Biden’s policies for the technology, but former Biden officials have worried about a lack of guidance for agencies. “The OMB memo was laying out those guardrails,” Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination and Redesign at Brown University and former official in Biden’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, previously told Nextgov/FCW. “If it is taken down, we will have no protections at all.”
My letter to reps:
I don’t think tech tycoons ought to have complete opacity to run whatever AI stuff out there that they want to. There need to be some guardrails and maybe some sensible people looking at what the heck is going on with these people.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
I’ve had it with the tech tycoons, nobody voted for those assholes.
Trump administration puts workers on paid leave willy-nilly in effort to satisfy DEI obsessed fanbase.
Politically motivated witch hunt for Civil Rights related federal jobs is apparently resulting in forced paid leave for those suspected of being involved with ensuring equal rights in workplaces.
Government Executives - Trump administration to lay off all federal employees in DEI offices - The president has called on federal agencies to immediately cease all DEI-related activities. - January 22, 2025 12:06 PM ET Agencies on Wednesday will also notify relevant staff of their administrative leave status leave. According to a sample letter drafted by OPM, agencies will tell employees their programs "divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars and resulted in shameful discrimination.” They will be encouraged to report any efforts since the election to obscure DEI efforts with a threat that a failure to report such actions within 10 days could result in discipline. In preparation for the directive, OPM took steps on this week to reverse President Biden-era rules that limited the use of administrative leave. Those facing administrative leave will receive notification that they will still receive their full salary and benefits while in that status, they are not expected to work or come into the office and their email will be suspended. (...) Separately, OPM is also asking agencies to deliver lists of every employee hired recently and are therefore still in their probationary period. Those employees can be fired easily without normal civil service hurdles, opening the possibility that the Trump administration is going to dismiss them en masse.
The Trump administration is also planning on firing new federal workers “en masse” just because.
They can’t even make books right anymore, commerce is crap.
books are failing as physical objects acollieralso Jan 9, 2025 you can actually see how far he got into it before he realized that he's missing like 60 Pages this book he did pre-order it from Amazon I probably wouldn't do that if I were him we probably shouldn't shop it Amazon but the thing is is he pre-ordered it so he was obviously very excited to read it and he flew through these 600 pages in like two days and it just it's missing 60 Pages like the book was just printed incorrectly and I just find that really interesting how how does that happen this copy that's missing 60 pages is like noticeably smaller than this copy which is the full copy so like how did they not realize
The media landscape needs an overhaul.
Our news and reporting ecosystem needs to break up corporate monopolies, make media distribution algorithms more transparent, and more incentives for local news and independent journalists. But the market will never be the answer to fix it.
Did you know that the U.S. Postal service acted as a subsidized news delivery service in the 1800s America?
Parallax Views w/ J.G. Michael - Our Broken Media System in the Era of Trump & How It Could Be Fixed w/ Victor Pickard Jan 18 2024 “We designed our public media from the get go to be relatively economically and politically weak. Those are structural problems that can be fixed. That's not inevitable that that's how our public media needs to look like. And that's why in a lot of my work I float these more kind of ambitious even utopian plans for building out an entirely new public media system that I think ultimately is something we're going to have to do if we're going to have any sort of especially local journalism which the market will never support. There is no commercial future for a lot of the kinds of journalism that we actually need to have a healthy democratic society. So we're going to have to find some kind of public model to do that but again one that I I would argue must be radically democratized, devolved down to the local level so that you have local ownership and control.” – Victor Pickard
📍 Keep up the demand for vaccination.
Stay up to date with all your vaccinations, and start writing to elected representatives at all levels to tell them your interest in vaccines now and in the future.
My letter to reps:
I want vaccines. I want research on effective vaccines funded, I want covid vaccines, I want vaccines covered by all insurance, and I want free vaccination available to the uninsured. I want vaccines to be mandated in hospitals, nursing homes, schools, the military, and congregate settings, so that coverage works for stopping preventable disease outbreaks.