The Weekly Independent Comics Page for Sept. 21, 2017!
On this week's action-packed weekly Independent comics page: The K Chronicles has an issue with the Emmys; This Modern World looks into a parallel Trump universe; Jen Sorenson examines white poverty; Apoca Clips shows Trumpy receiving visits from Harvey, Irma, Maria and others; and Red Meat goes through with an agreed-upon mercy killing.
Published in Comics
The Weekly Independent Comics Page for Sept. 7, 2017!
On this week's worried weekly Independent comics page: The K Chronicles looks at electronic voting machines; This Modern World ponders The Unprecedented Trump; Jen Sorenson rolls back some Obama-era protections; Apoca Clips gets to the truth about what's happening in North Korea; and Red Meat features Earl starting an exercise regimen.
Ask a Mexican: My Mexican Girlfriend Worries Too Much About Being Deported; How Can I Calm Her Down?
Dear Mexican: How can I get my new Mexican girlfriend to calm down about Trump and being deported?
We safely live in a sanctuary city. I have no intention of just marrying her unless something horrible happens, but I want to help her out. She is a kind, rational human being who simply has bought into the fear-mongering that Trump is instilling in her. While a triple-orgasm might make her feel temporary relief, how can I get her to realize that we are not in a place where she is going to get deported unless she blatantly breaks a serious law?
Good Gabacho Who Gives It Good
Dear Gabacho: Wow, you're a special kind of pendejo.
Sanctuary-city status doesn't mean shit to Trump or U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is threatening to cut federal funding to such cities. Sanctuary cities can't stop la migra from picking up people for no other reason than they're undocumented. And the Mexican knows of cases where people were deported for riding a bike on the sidewalk.
You aren't Mexican or undocumented, and you're obviously some deluded wimp whose gabachos privilege blinds him to his supposed love's serious concerns. Are you sure you didn't vote for Trump?
I seriously hope your novia breaks up with you and finds a real hombre who doesn't have his head up his culo.
Finally, triple orgasm? The only girl you get off happens whenever you download a clip from Pornhub.
Dear Mexican: Over the years, I have worked with, and gone to college with, Mexicans who were usually Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Latter-day Saints or other Christian religions. However, about 10 years ago, I was blessed to work with two Jewish Mexicans.
What is the history of Jewish Mexican culture?
Goyim but Great
Dear Gabacho: A very long story short: Jews accompanied Hernán Cortés in his conquest of Mexico—indeed, the man who built his ships was the judio Hernando Alonso. Alonso was also burned at the stake in 1528 for practicing Judaism, because Spanish Catholics were the ISIS of this day. Due to such terroristic ways, many Jews either hid their religion or moved to New Mexico, as far away from the Inquisition as possible.
Flash-forward 500 years, and Mexico City now has a significant Jewish community, and Mexican Jews have long been accepted in the country's upper circles, with one of the coolest ones being celebrity chef Pati Jinich.
But not all is kosher: As I wrote in one of my first columnas back in 2004, "For instance, when a Mexican thinks someone is a slob, we call the person a cochino marrano—a dirty Jew. And don't believe your Spanish teacher when she pulls out the Webster's and reads that marrano means 'pig'—Webster's doesn't know mierda about Spanish etymology. 'Marrano' does mean pig but was also the term used to ridicule Jews who hid their beliefs in order to survive the Spanish Inquisition." ¡Puro pinche parr!
Ask the Mexican at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; be his fan on Facebook; follow him on Twitter @gustavoarellano; or follow him on Instagram @gustavo_arellano!
Published in Ask a Mexican
The Weekly Independent Comics Page for Aug. 31, 2017!
On this week's weekly Independent comics page: This Modern World looks at the Trump cycle; Jen Sorenson examines increasing right-wing influences; The K Chronicles takes a trip to Germany; Apoca Clips covers a Trumpy speech from Texas; and Red Meat extends a hand.
On this week's multi-sided weekly Independent comics page: Red Meat prepares for a church luncheon; Apoca Clips bemoans the appearance of a new memorial; The K Chronicles gets clarification from Trump; This Modern World examines the Trump Crisis of the Week; and Jen Sorenson finally sees the (torch) light.
Democracy in Crisis: White Supremacy, Monuments, Power—and What It All Means
Donald Trump's Aug. 15 press conference, during which he defended the racists in Charlottesville and attacked those there to protest them, was one of the worst performances of his presidency.
It came a day after the Durham, N.C., statue to commemorate Confederate soldiers came down thanks to activists who took it into their own hands.
"So this week it's Robert E. Lee," Trump said. "I notice that Stonewall Jackson's coming down. I wonder: Is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself—where does it stop?"
Early the next morning, cranes and crews of workers began removing all four of the Confederate monuments in Baltimore. Here we were, a small crowd, at 4 a.m., black and white, crustpunk and square, reporter and activist, watching the statue of Confederate generals Lee and Jackson being hoisted through the air in the surreal pre-dawn light and taken away. It felt like a moment of catharsis—a rapid response to the racist rally and white radical terrorist attack in Charlottesville, as the city hauled away one of its four monuments to the Confederacy. Two others had already come down, and the last one would be carted away at dawn.
The mayor, Catherine Pugh, an African-American woman, is being widely praised for the order, which came after a local activist group planned an event called "Do It Like Durham," referring to a group of activists that pulled down a statue dedicated to Confederate soldiers in that city.
Sarah Willets, with INDY Week in North Carolina, reported on the scene in Durham. Before the statue came down, Takiyah Thompson, one of the activists responsible for the event, told her: "This land has never been ours for my people. … This land has never been ours for Native Americans. This land has never been ours for queer people. This land has only been ours for rich ruling white elites, period."
The Durham rally seemed to be winding down. However, after someone walked up with a ladder, things went quickly from there. Thompson climbed the ladder and wrapped a rope around the statue.
"It's important to not just talk about, for instance, the Confederate monument being taken down as vandalism in that moment," said Bree Newsome, who made news when she broke the law to climb the pole and take down the Confederate flag on South Carolina's capitol grounds back in 2015, to Willets. "Yes, literally it's vandalism, but if you understand the historical context and the history of that monument being erected, then you understand morally why it's necessary for the monument to come down."
After Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans in Mother Emanuel church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, we should have removed the statues that are coming down now—if not well before that.
"It's going to be very exciting ... as we really confront the power structure that has existed here for a very long time in ways that are full frontal," said Muhiyidin d'Baha, who later became famous when he leaped across a protest line and grabbed a rebel flag from a racist hand, to me the day after the Mother Emanuel shooting. At the time, he was standing at the foot of a statue of John C. Calhoun, a former vice president and staunch defender of slavery. "In ways that say, 'This statue does not need to be here anymore.'"
After the shooting at Mother Emanuel, the city rallied around its white mayor, who said the right words. However, the Calhoun monument did not come down. Activists rallied again this week for its removal. It is necessary. But Charleston, like America, is so steeped in white supremacy that we white people should not be able to feel good about the removal of a statue.
Less than 24 hours after the Durham monument takedown, Takiyah Thompson was arrested as she left a press conference after the sheriff said, "No one is getting away with what happened." So far, eight people have been charged—the same number of white supremacists who have been charged after Charlottesville.
I am still haunted by what I saw in Charlottesville. I took a video as police were clearing out the park where the racist rally was planned, and I got footage of a man beating a white anti-fascist in the head with a long stick; a still from that video is above. Later, he was filmed and photographed beating a black man, Deandre Harris.
He looks, hauntingly, like me—a little heftier, with a slightly longer beard. How can I see him and feel good about symbolic acts? I have the physical quality he values most. I could have ended up like him. I grew up in Columbia, where Newsome took down the rebel battle flag. I was taught, not so much at home, but in the world around me, to honor people like Robert E. Lee. And I was taught not to notice my own whiteness. Now, I can't not notice it.
After I left Charlottesville on that fateful weekend, I felt disgusted by my own skin. Whenever I saw another white person, I cringed, wondering which side they were on. I knew people thought the same thing about me.
Six days after the Charlottesville horrors, it was announced that Steve Bannon was leaving the Trump White House. Much like I feel about the monuments coming down, I'm glad he's out—but it's only a small part of something so much larger. White supremacy is a white problem. Even if its more awful displays disgust us, we still benefit from it.
There were plenty of white anti-racists fighting the racists in Charlottesville, and they largely kept them out of Boston a week later. But until we fight a lot harder, we don't get to feel good when a monument comes down.
It is not only Bannon or Trump who has a white supremacy problem. It is us.
Democracy in Crisis is a joint project of alternative newspapers around the country, including the Coachella Valley Independent. Baynard Woods is editor at large at the Baltimore City Paper. Send tips to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Twitter @demoincrisis. Podcast every Thursday at www.democracyincrisis.com.
Published in National/International
On this week's off-script weekly Independent comics page: Jen Sorenson looks at Trump's words on protesters; This Modern World assesses threats to the nation; The K Chronicles shares a true coming-of-age story; Apoca Clips listens in on a conversation between O.J. and Trumpy; and Red Meat accepts a delivery.
Democracy in Crisis: Charlottesville and the Shattering of America
Two middle-aged men, one black and one white, were walking up a street in downtown Charlottesville, Va., yelling at each other. It was a moment of relative normalcy in a day otherwise defined by mayhem.
Both men use the phrase "born and bred" to define their relationship to the smallish Southern college town, nestled in the hills in the politically contested state of Virginia.
The white man, Ed Knight, was wearing a Confederate flag bandana around his head.
"You, with that stupid Confederate flag, talking about history," the black man, George Steppe, said. "You don't know nothing about no history. Only thing you know is hate."
"This is our history, and it should not be destroyed," Knight said about the statue of Robert E. Lee in the park—which the Charlottesville City Council has voted to remove—where an alt-right Unite the Right rally had been scheduled.
Knight supported the rally that brought hundreds of armed racists and fascists to his home city on Saturday, Aug. 12. It also brought hundreds of anti-fascists—some of them armed with sticks and shields as well—pledging to defend the city from right-wing terror. Now, after hours of bloody battle during which they remained largely passive, riot police were breaking things up, pushing Steppe back, inching forward behind their shields. Knight walked alongside with a sign: "Make C-Ville Great Again."
The chaos started the night before, as the Nazis and other racists gathered for the 21st-century version of a Klan rally—a Klanclave of khaki and tiki torches. At one point, a group of white supremacists surrounded a group of counter-protesters, throwing punches and torches.
Within minutes of arriving in town on Saturday morning, we saw the first of many fights. White supremacists had helmets—some German, World War II-era—as well as white polos, sticks, an assortment of flags and homemade shields marked with the insignia of the racist group Vanguard America. They chanted at a smaller crowd of counter-protesters.
"You can't run; you can't hide; you get helicopter rides," they said, a reference to far-right governments in Argentina and Chile in the '70s and '80s that threw leftists from helicopters to "disappear" them.
The racists began to march forward, and the anti-racists tried to block them. After a swirl of violence and swinging sticks, three of the counter-protesters were left with bloody faces—the racists seemed to target women's faces with their sticks—and the racists, who also took some heavy blows, ran away as the cops rolled in and began setting up a barricade.
Over the next several hours, this same pattern continued to play out: Another fight broke out every few minutes as a new faction of the right marched in its crazed armor toward the park.
The park was filled with every variety of racist you can imagine, from the Nazi biker to the fashy computer programmer. They were almost exclusively white and male. The anti-fascist activists who packed the streets were predominantly white as well, but there were far more women and people of color opposing the Nazis. The two opposing armies seemed to be of roughly equal size. The fights were swift, chaotic and brutal.
The two sides launched bottles and tear-gas canisters back and forth as state troopers stood and watched, slack-jawed. At one point, as a few bottles whizzed by him in quick succession, a trooper perked up enough to pull out his phone and record some of the mayhem.
When the police declared the assembly illegal before it even began and told everyone to leave, it forced these groups together. Right-wing militia types wielding assault rifles and wearing "Make America Great Again" patches on paramilitary uniforms roamed through the crowd. Guys with pistols seemed to keep their hands on them, ready to draw at any moment. It felt like something horrible would happen.
Then, as the various groups became separated, it seemed like the rumble was largely over.
"I'm glad no serious gunshots rang out. I was threatened with a gun, though. Police wasn't around when a guy pulled up his gun up on me," Steppe said, around 12:30 p.m.
Steppe and Knight both seemed to think that it was the end of the day. The racists, who had not been able to hold their rally, were trying to regroup at another park a little farther from downtown. Eventually, as a state of emergency was declared, most of them decided to leave. Some of them even suggested hiding in the woods.
Antifa—an anti-fascist group—burned right-wing flags in a park and then marched through the city; two groups converged on Water Street around 1:35 p.m. It felt triumphant. They had driven the racists out of town—at least those who were from out of town.
The feeling would not last. About five minutes later, it sounded like a bomb exploded as a muscle car—which police say was driven by alt-right member James Alex Fields—sped down the street and plowed through the march and into other cars. Fields then threw the weaponized car into reverse, fleeing from the scene of terror.
Bodies were strewn through the road. Street medics, marked by red tape, delivered first aid while waiting on ambulances to arrive. Activists held Antifa banners to block camera views of the injured.
The other alt-righters were nowhere to be found.
The same day, Trump meandered through a speech in New Jersey in which he condemned violence on "many sides." He did not use the words "white supremacy" or "terrorism." He did not say the name of Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed in the terror attack. He did not offer support to the 19 others who were hospitalized or prayers for those who were still in critical condition.
Fields, who was photographed earlier in the day with the same Vanguard America shield we saw when we first arrived in town, was later arrested and charged with murder.
I won't to pretend to know what this all means for our country. The racism is not new. The argument Steppe and Knight were having in their hometown could have happened any time within the last 50 years. But the way the battle over white supremacy was being waged around them was new. Charlottesville was not ready for it. None of us are.
When that gray car slammed into those people, it shattered a part of America, or at least the illusion of it. I don't know what that means yet, because it shattered something in me, too.
Additional reporting by Brandon Soderberg. Democracy in Crisis is a joint project of alternative newspapers around the country, including the Coachella Valley Independent. Baynard Woods is editor at large at the Baltimore City Paper. Send tips to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Twitter @demoincrisis. Podcast every Thursday at www.democracyincrisis.com. Below: Counter-protesters just moments before police say James Alex Fields drove his car through the crowd.
Anticipating a Break: California Already May Be Temporarily 'Paying' for Trump's Hypothetical Tax Cuts
Tax reform may not be much more than a glimmer in the eye of Republicans in Washington D.C., but their promise of lower rates and closed loopholes appears to be already affecting state and local finances.
Exhibit 1 comes in the form of a disappointing haul for California tax collectors this summer: In June, the most recent month for which figures were available, the state took in $361 million less than lawmakers planned for in the state budget.
While there are plenty of reasons for revenues to miss their projected mark—an unexpected economic cold snap, perhaps, or a forecasting model miss—the fiscal sleuths at the Legislative Analyst's Office suggest that something else could be afoot. They wrote in a recent report that "high-income taxpayers may be deferring income and/or tax payments to late 2017 or even 2018 in anticipation of a federal tax cut."
It's a phenomenon that may be sweeping the nation: States such as New York and Massachusetts, both of which levy state income taxes, report lackluster receipts.
The evidence for California is incomplete, but compelling.
For one, state sales taxes actually came in higher than expected. So did withholding receipts—the money that gets taken out of your paycheck. That rules out the possibility that the state economy has taken an unexpected dip.
What came in under expectations are the estimated payments, made four times per year, that high-earners pay on income from capital gains, businesses, interest payments and dividends. Corporate tax payments also came in below the forecast.
More importantly, says Justin Garosi, an economist at the Legislative Analyst's Office and one of the authors of last month's report, estimated payments are only up 3 percent since last June, despite the S&P 500 stock index booming over 15 percent over the same period. Corporate America and Wall Street have had a blowout year, so where are their tax payments?
"For wages and salaries, it is generally not possible to have your employer delay a paycheck, so it gets recorded in 2017 instead of 2016," said Garosi. But those who earn a living by, say, selling stocks, often have the luxury of picking their payday. These taxpayers also have the option to simply fork over whatever they paid last year as an estimate on current earnings and then make up the difference later, explains Garosi.
"The puzzle we were talking about is that stock prices are up big over last year, but estimated payments aren't," he said. "This suggests that a lot of people are paying what they paid last year, even though they expect to eventually have more liability in 2017 than in 2016."
One reason to do that: You expect to pay a lower tax rate next April.
It's still too early to say whether that's exactly what's going on. The state's high earners may be holding off on cashing out for a variety of reasons. More detailed information—about which types of taxes are being paid by which groups, and when—won't be available until at least 2018.
"Even if we did have complete data on capital gains income, we couldn't be certain how much the level of gains was affected by expectations of federal tax changes," said state Finance Department spokesperson H.D. Palmer.
But what's clear is that the stock market is soaring, and estimated payments are not, a trend that "would support the notion" that deferral is taking place, he said.
This wouldn't be the first time this year that the premonition of lower taxes has been blamed for throwing a wrench into California finances. When it comes to taxes, expectations can be just as important as reality.
In the weeks after the election, the market for California municipal bonds—which are tax-exempt and fund most local development projects—took a dip. Some investment experts saw this as a sign that—with possible tax cuts on the horizon— the appeal of low-return but tax-free investments had worn thin. Prices have since come back up, but may dive back down if Congress gets serious about tax reform.
Similarly, affordable-housing developers across the state began complaining earlier this year that they were having a harder time raising cash from investors. These projects often are supported by the state's Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, which allows banks and other big investors that put money into below-market housing projects to write off a portion of their tax bill.
But the election had a profound effect on the state housing market, said Matt Schwartz, president of the California Housing Partnership Corporation, a state-created nonprofit that provides financial and policy consulting on affordable-housing issues. He said in deals the corporation helped oversee or advise, within a few weeks of the election, prices dropped by more than 25 cents per dollar of credit. Investors indicated a diminished appetite for tax-saving investments.
Those prices have since come back up, but only slightly. He said offers are still 10 to 15 percent below the pre-election high.
"We know of at least $10 million (worth of projects) where local governments pretty much had a gun put to their head and were told that they had to step up, or hundreds of homes ready to start construction would just fall apart," he said. "Every one of those lost percentage points is huge in terms of how many fewer affordable rental homes will get produced."
But investors can only make the argument that tax reform is on the way for so long. Nearly seven months into the current term, Congress has been short on major legislative accomplishments—a fact highlighted by its failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Rewriting the tax code, or just cutting top rates, can't be done overnight.
As for the state's finances, the future may be bright. If, in fact, high earners have been holding back on the hope of a friendlier tax code, the good news for the state is that these taxpayers can't kick the can forever. "As high-income tax filers eventually take gains from investments and businesses and make delayed tax payments, these eventually would show up in state revenue collections," wrote the Legislative Analyst's Office.
No matter what happens in Washington D.C., the state of California could see a big payday next April.
Ben Christopher is a contributing writer at CALmatters.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
On this week's nuclear-war-fearing weekly Independent comics page: This Modern World reveals the backstory behind Trump's lies about phone calls; Jen Sorenson examines how the Trump administration is playing the Country Card; The K Chronicles features touching words from a child; Red Meat shows off Earl's motherly side; and ApocaClips looks at the interplay Peter Pence and Tink.