How far will the GOP go to steal the 2022 election?
The corrupt Republican Party, a wholly-owned division of corporate and billionaire America, has dropped all pretense of having any governing ideas that will help or improve America.
Instead, they’ve gone all-outrage, all-the-time and believe that getting white people all cranked up about America’s racial history will provide a veneer of “issues” while they work hard in the background to rig and then steal elections.
This is not new for the GOP.
Back in the 1960s they were hysterical about young people smoking pot and “open homosexuality.” And they were doing everything they could to block people of color from voting through programs like William Rehnquist’s Operation Eagle Eye that involved standing outside polling places and “challenging” people of color, thus forcing them to go home and get ID before they could vote…on the accurate assumption that most wouldn’t return. (This was before ID laws; you only needed ID to register to vote, and the biometric of your signature was how you verified identity on voting day.)
In the 1970s they were freaking out about Black people protesting police violence: every single “riot” through the late 60s and early 70s was triggered by an incident of police violence against unarmed Black people. Nixon fed his “Southern Strategy” in 1972 with poisonous rhetoric about “burning cities.”
Throughout the Reagan 1980s Republicans worked hard to destroy labor unions, cut taxes on the rich while raising taxes on working-class people, and freaked out even more about Black people (see George HW Bush’s infamous 1988 “Willie Horton” ads). And abortion; with Reagan’s 1980 election, the GOP went from pro-choice to pro-forced-pregnancy.
The 90s saw the GOP hysterical — positively hysterical — that President Clinton might have had sex with a consenting adult in the White House and lied about it. They were also working as hard as they could to ship factory jobs overseas (with, stupidly, help from Clinton) because de-industrializing America would destroy our labor unions, who generally supported Democrats. And, of course, they were getting “tough on crime” with stop-and-frisk and “three strikes” to make life miserable for Black people…who then could no longer vote because they’d been busted for a crime.
In 2001, Osama bin Laden gave the GOP a huge gift with 9/11, and the Bush administration and Congress reacted exactly as bin Laden had publicly predicted: wasting trillions of dollars, starting unnecessary wars, and dialing back on the civil liberties that have historically been at the core of American values. And, of course, when President Obama was elected in 2008 they went nuts again about Black people.
The second decade of the 21st-century saw the GOP fully embrace open and naked fascism with the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who then doubled down on his party’s racism with attacks on Muslim Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and, of course, Black people, both in America and in what he called “shithole countries.”
But where they’re going now to suppress the vote of non-white people is so over the top that even Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon didn’t dare try it.
In Arizona they’re in open violation of federal law, “inspecting” actual ballots and voting machines and even hauling some of them off to a “cabin in the woods in Montana” for “more careful examination.” You can safely expect that any day now they’ll tell us that Trump “actually won” Arizona, and then the race will be on to “inspect“ ballots in other swing states.
Down in Florida Republicans have been putting up “ghost” candidates and it appears they successfully used them to win two or three legislative state elections. This scam involves finding some random person who has the same last name as the Democratic candidate and getting that person on the ballot to confuse voters and split the vote against the actual Democrat.
Meanwhile, 14 states have now passed laws (with another 30+ pending) to make it harder for young people, older people, Black/non-white people and low-income folks to register, to keep their names on the voter rolls, and to vote. In many of those states they’ve gone so far as to give openly partisan Republican officials the power to decide which votes will be counted and which votes will be discarded based on their own personal “suspicion.”
Their newest strategy for the 2022 election is to freak out and piss off white people by falsely claiming that progressives, Democrats and Black people want to “teach white kids that they’re racist” and “should be ashamed of being white.” Republicans call this “Critical Race Theory” although it’s not; this “definition” of CRT is entirely manufactured by the GOP, and their faux outrage is pure politics.
The GOP has been running scam after scam for 70 years now; Dwight Eisenhower was the last legitimately elected Republican president, as I document here. They’re going to try to pull it off again in 2024, but the prize in 2022 is the House and Senate — and state legislatures and governorships.
In several states, like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, even though the majority of people statewide vote for Democrats, Republicans still control both the state Houses’ and Senates’ as well as a majority of those states’ congressional delegations to DC because of “surgically precise” mostly race-based GOP gerrymandering.
The right-wing billionaires don’t much care about race, but gleefully have their think tanks and media outlets like Fox use lies about CRT and other racial issues (“Replacement Theory”) to get people out to vote for Republicans who will then give the billionaires more tax cuts and deregulation.
Which brings us back to the question that opens this rant. “How far will the GOP go to steal the 2022 election?”
All you have to do is look at what they did on January 6, and how seriously they’re now paddling to pin the blame on antifa or the FBI or anybody other than themselves, to know the answer. But it also goes even beyond what the FBI calls open “terrorism.”
Now the Texas GOP is trying to recruit an army of 10,000 “poll watchers” to show up at polling places in minority and student neighborhoods during the 2022 election; prison tats, baseball bats and bullhorns are optional but no doubt welcome. What’s happening in Texas is being replicated in other states across the nation.
Election workers and volunteers all across the country, but particularly in swing states, are getting death threats and quitting in droves, to be replaced by GOP and Qanon operatives. One in six election workers has received a threat and one in three is thinking of leaving their job. This is all at the same time 14 GOP states have increased the power of these election workers to turn away voters or simply refuse to count their votes.
And now the NY Times is reporting that in Georgia and other states, GOP officials are actually firing and removing Black elections officials in largely-Black areas and replacing them with white Republicans. Georgia Republicans are “disappearing” Black election workers.
Meanwhile, Republican politicians and billionaire-owned right-wing media are doubling down on their lie that Critical Race Theory is “a way to make white people feel bad.” This is just the 2021 version of the “political correctness” (PC) Limbaugh and the right used to complain about in the 1990s when it became unacceptable to use the N-word and other racial slurs in white circles. They’re openly bragging these lies about CRT will mobilize white voters to show up for the GOP.
Legal or not, moral or not, consistent with American values or not, honestly or blatantly dishonest, they’ll do whatever it takes to seize and hold power.
The For The People Act will clean up a lot of this, but not the GOP’s resetting how election systems work in the states so GOP officials can simply throw out votes from precincts or areas they simply “believe” (but cannot demonstrate or prove) have “fraud” (also known as “Black voters”). That’s going to require additional federal legislation.
The next few weeks are critical and we all must contact our members of Congress and raise hell. The Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121. Americans who care about the fate and future of our republic damn well better get active now.
Since the start of the pandemic, Connecticut’s fourteen billionaires have seized $12.6 billion in additional wealth — while hundreds of thousands of working people across the state, especially working people of color, are suffering.
As the converging crises over the last year and a half have underscored, Connecticut has become a microcosm of the extreme racial and economic disparities in the United States. It consistently ranks as the wealthiest state here in the world’s wealthiest country. But it also ranks among the most unequal.
On a mission to end this injustice and create a more equitable state, nearly 50 labor, community, and faith organizations have formed a statewide coalition named Recovery For All. The coalition aims to unite progressive forces and reshape how Connecticut approaches the state budget: rather than perpetuate failed austerity policies that exacerbated inequalities over the last few decades, the state must actively eliminate inequalities by making dramatic investments in working-class communities and working-class communities of color in particular.
Ensuring the resources our communities need to flourish is impossible without a strong, fair, and reliable revenue stream. Recovery For All is leading a campaign for reforms that would boost revenue by taxing the wealthy and corporations, provide relief to poor and working-class residents, and fully fund vital programs and services. Similar efforts abound in states throughout the country; in nearby New York and New Jersey, allied coalitions recently won major victories.
Although Democrats maintain a state government trifecta in Connecticut, this year they have sparred with one another over progressive tax reform. Governor Ned Lamont routinely emphasizes his commitment to equity — but refuses to support tax increases on the wealthy. Challenging the governor to back up his rhetoric with action, Recovery For All has echoed an incisive catchphrase coined by State Senator Gary Winfield: “Equity Requires Revenue.” In other words, if Connecticut is serious about addressing systemic inequities, then elected officials have to repair the regressive tax structure which currently reflects and entrenches them.
Over the last six months, Recovery For All joined together with a bloc of several dozen champions inside the state legislature to make the push. At a public hearing before the Finance, Revenue, and Bonding Committee, 300 coalition members showed up to testify, sharing hours of stories illustrating why we must invest in our communities through progressive tax reform. As a result, the committee passed a package that would generate nearly $1.5 billion in new revenue by increasing taxes on the wealthy.
Outside the capitol, Recovery For All has demonstrated our key source of power: mass action in the streets. The coalition organized rallies, marches, car caravans, prayer vigils, and other mobilizations.
On May Day, for example, hundreds of people from many different organizations staged a die-in before the Governor’s Mansion to dramatize the staggering level of unmet need statewide. Coalition members worked together on actions to spotlight specific areas of investment: health care workers and community activists demanding expanded mental health services in black and brown neighborhoods; immigrant residents and labor department employees demanding expanded protections for low-wage workers; faculty, staff, and students demanding expanded public colleges and universities, etc. Our actions thus offered opportunities to forge relationships and build solidarity across organizations.
Some coalition affiliates amplified our vision of robust public investment by taking workplace action, like the members of SEIU 1199 New England. Thousands of long term care workers, mainly black and brown women, threatened to go on strike after sacrificing their lives to protect the most vulnerable patients during the pandemic while earning poverty wages. They averted the strike at the last minute after private employers and the state agreed to historic raises and benefit improvements as well as new measures to advance racial justice. This inspiring labor struggle highlighted why Connecticut must adopt a fair tax structure to end chronic underfunding of essential services such as nursing homes and group homes.
Although Governor Lamont is using the influx of federal funding as an excuse to oppose any tax reforms in this year’s legislative session, the stage is set for a continuing battle for the next two years and beyond.
State Senator John Fonfara, chairman of the Finance, Revenue, and Bonding Committee, delivered trenchant remarks from the floor on the last day of session.
“The status quo, the status quo budget, leaves us with status quo results,” he said. “Our policies are a knee on the neck of the Black community and other underserved communities of our state. We can do better. And we must do better.”
Recovery For All has successfully transformed the terms of debate over the state budget by making progressive tax reform the central question of the year. Now the coalition is primed to escalate the fight — all part of a long-term strategy to alter the balance of power in Connecticut and build a truly equitable society.
Lies are a denomination of power. The bigger the lie, the more power it represents. Right now in this country, we are being treated daily to the Big Lie that Donald Trump was the true winner of the presidential election of 2020, and the only reason he’s not in the White House right now is because the election was stolen from him.
You may have noticed that the people pushing the Big Lie today are very good at it. This is because many of them have been pushing an even bigger Big Lie for most of their lives: the lie of the Lost Cause, that the Civil War wasn’t really fought over the disgraceful secession of the Southern states and slavery, it was instead a noble cause fought for the “honor” of the South, and that slavery itself wasn’t bad or immoral, because enslaved people were happy workers living much better lives than they would have lived where they came from in Africa.
The Lost Cause was — or still is, because it lives today across a broad swath of America — the foundational ethos of racism and was used to perpetuate the racial crimes of the Jim Crow era, when Black Americans in the South were stripped of the right to vote and segregated from whites and subjected to the pernicious political and social discriminatory practices of white supremacy.
The Civil War was, of course, lost by the Confederacy, but you wouldn’t know it if you lived in the South through the disgraceful years of Jim Crow or even today in the states which comprised the Confederacy. One of the truths about wars is that they are often won or lost not in the big battles which become famous and end up celebrated — or lamented — in the history books, but in smaller out-of-the-way battles that get largely forgotten.
The battle of Franklin, Tennessee, was one such battle in the Civil War. Little celebrated in the history books or anywhere except Franklin itself, the battle was fought late in the war, on November 30, 1864, and was part of the campaign by the Army of Tennessee following the Confederate defeat by the Union Army of Lt. Gen. William T. Sherman in the battle of Atlanta. Commanded by Confederate General John Bell Hood, the Army of Tennessee, instead of pursuing Sherman after he left Atlanta and began his famous “March to the Sea,” turned westward and began a campaign to take Nashville from the Union forces which occupied this important manufacturing center of the South.
The battle of Franklin and the battle of Nashville, which followed quickly on its heels, were a disaster for the Confederacy. The Army of Tennessee began its campaign with 38,000 men in November of 1864. By January of 1865, the Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, who was in overall command of the Confederate armies in the West, would report to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, that his army was reduced in strength to 15,000, having lost more than 6,000 men on a single day in the battle of Franklin, and 2,500 more in the battle of Nashville. More than 2,000 losses were attributed to desertion in the ranks during both battles.
John Bell Hood was incompetent as a tactician and bloody awful as a combat commander. His campaign after the loss in Atlanta was “unfortunate” in the words of some sympathetic texts about the war. Confederate losses in the battle of Franklin were by some counts the largest in a single day in the war. Fourteen Confederate generals were either killed or wounded, along with 55 regimental commanders, decimating the leadership of the Confederate army in the west.
While living in Franklin a few years back, I visited part of the Franklin battlefield at Carnton Plantation with my son on a Cub Scout troop excursion. The house was transformed into a Confederate hospital during the battle of Franklin, and on the property is a cemetery containing 1,481 Confederate graves. The 48-acre site was the location of a plantation consisting of about 1,000 acres of land owned by Randal McGavock, who had been a state supreme court clerk and mayor of Nashville. The 1850 census showed 28 enslaved people working at the Carnton plantation. The plantation house and all the outbuildings, including a large sawmill, were built with slave labor. Records show that in 1859, McGavock’s son John, who had inherited the plantation upon his father’s death, “purchased a slave” for $2500 to run his sawmill. Currently owned by the Battle of Franklin Trust, you can visit the “historic” site seven days a week. An adult ticket costs $18, a child’s ticket $8. All of the land you walk on was worked by the people enslaved at Carnton plantation. Every structure you walk through on the tour was built by enslaved people. Throughout the time the plantation existed, there were more enslaved people on the property than there were white people who owned them.
During the tour of the house, I was stricken by the way the docent described the battle of Franklin. Facing a group of us from a few steps up on the house’s grand staircase, with a lavishly furnished entrance hall behind us, the docent went on at some length about what an “idiot” General Hood was, how he should never have been given command of a Confederate army, how his foolishness had led to so many sad deaths on the day of the battle. All of those now lying in the cemetery less than a hundred yards from the house were killed under Hood’s command, due to his malfeasance as a commanding general. The docent’s emphasis throughout his talk was on the tragedy of the deaths of so many good Southern boys. He didn’t mention once the “cause” they fought for. In fact, the the words “slave” or “slavery” didn’t pass his lips. It was as if the fact of slavery and the enslaved people owned by the McGavock family didn’t exist.
Outside we had passed reenactors in Confederate army costumes. Inside the house, listening to the docent describe the incompetent General Hood and the incredible losses suffered in the battle, we could hear the reenactors firing blanks, showing the tourists how the Confederate soldiers fired their rifles. Omitted from the reenactor’s demonstration was the fact that their rifles were fired in vain in a battle that cost the lives of several thousand Confederate soldiers attired just like them.
It was impossible to miss the implications of the whole scene at the plantation. The life of the distinguished McGavock family within the house was orderly, elegant, refined. The furnishings in the house were beautiful. The battle, as reenacted in a minor way outside and described by the docent inside, was tragic only in that the dastardly Hood had lost it. The Confederate soldiers had fought bravely, nobly for their cause, the Lost Cause that was on display all around us in the structures and land and furnishings. Unstated was the fact that the house itself was built by the enslaved and furnished and cleaned by them, the land was worked by the enslaved, indeed the life of the McGavock family had been made possible by slavery.
Carnton in its day was one of the grandest plantations in the whole Nashville area and had been voted “best farm” at the Williamson County Fair in 1860. For your $18 admission fee, you support the Franklin Battlefield Trust and visit this tribute to the nobility of a time and a way of life that is still celebrated in Tennessee and at similar sites of plantations and other battlefields across the South. Cherished for its “historical” value, the Carnton plantation is all the evidence you need that the Lost Cause was lost in name only.
The Lost Cause of Donald Trump’s defeat at the polls is being celebrated in much the same way every day across the land by his supporters who send money to his political action committee, who buy and wear MAGA gear, who wave huge TRUMP flags alongside Confederate flags at MAGA demonstrations, and of course who wore and waved all of their Trump gear when thousands of them assaulted the Capitol on January 6 in his name.
Some of them are even paying for memberships to his personal plantation at Mar-a-Lago, and to his golf clubs in Sterling, Virginia; Bedminster, New Jersey; and Briarcliff Manor, New York. It has recently been reported that Trump himself has been seen wandering through Mar-a-Lago and his golf clubs, stopping to visit gatherings of members at their weddings and birthdays — in effect acting as his own docent, delivering lengthy descriptions of the Battle of the 2020 Election, which while lost, was nonetheless fought valiantly, nobly by his supporters. The battle is still being fought today in places like Arizona by his own army laboring tirelessly in reenactments in their so-called “audit” as they shove ballots beneath black lights looking for shreds of bamboo fibers which would show their origin in China and give evidence of having been “stuffed” into ballot boxes on election day on behalf of the dastardly Joe Biden.
They’re going to keep this up. They’ve kept up the fiction of the Lost Cause of the South’s defeat in the Civil War for more than 150 years, so why shouldn’t they keep pushing the Lost Cause of Donald Trump’s defeat in the election of 2020? The South has been enslaved by the lies they have told about the Civil War. Look at John Bell Hood! They even managed to get a United States Army base named after the man who lost more Confederate soldiers on a single day than anyone during the entire war! Why give up now? Next thing you know, they’ll be pushing to erect monuments to General Michael “Let’s have a coup!” Flynn! If they can celebrate the criminally incompetent Hood, why not the criminally pardoned Flynn? Why not rename the FBI building after Rudy “Hunter Biden! Burisma!” Giuliani? Or re-name the building housing the Department of Justice after William “What Mueller report?” Barr? Or erect a grand statue of Mitch “I forgot where I was on January 6” McConnell? Or name a federal courthouse after Sidney “I lost every election lawsuit I filed” Powell?
Just watch what they’re going to do with the assault on the Capitol, which is perfect for the Lost Cause of Donald Trump. It’s like their very own Battle of Franklin. They failed to stop the certification of the Electoral College ballots. Joe Biden was named president. They lost the battle of the Capitol, 400 have been indicted, and they accomplished exactly nothing. All they need now is a new Lost Cause battle flag. Or maybe they’ll just adopt the old one, the Confederate battle flag, because that’s what the followers of the new Lost Cause have become: Donald Trump’s Confederacy of Dunces.
“All slaves are free,” Union troops shouted. On June 19, 1865, they read Order No. 3, written by Gen. Gordon Granger to the enslaved people in Galveston, Texas. Cheering crowds followed the soldiers. In the war’s aftermath, ex-Confederates attacked Blacks for celebrating freedom, but joy was stronger than fear. The holiday of Juneteenth began.
One hundred and fifty-six years later, Juneteenth — which has for decades been celebrated through family gatherings and grassroots political organizing — has now been designated by the U.S. Senate as the 11th federal holiday, in addition to being observed as a state holiday by 47 states.
Not all have wholeheartedly greeted this change: Some Black activists and intellectuals have argued that the federal recognition of the holiday paves the way for its cooptation by corporations and liberals who want to look progressive without actually confronting the realities of racial violence in the U.S., past and present.
Yet the increased recognition of the holiday, alongside the Tulsa Massacre remembrance, the pulling down of Confederate statues, the 1619 Project and other recent public acknowledgments of this country’s history of white supremacy, is also a cause for celebration because it reflects the growing power of the left within the “culture wars.” In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and others, the U.S. is on the precipice of a generational tipping point where the myths upholding racist systems are crumbling.
There is a delicate tension between remaining wary of mainstream symbolic efforts like holiday recognitions, which are often pursued in place of actual policy change, while also acknowledging that winning battles within the culture war may lead to political victories. It is in that sense that the widespread recognition of Juneteenth is both a welcome change and an opportunity.
What’s Past Is Prologue
Days ago, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Black people draped the Walnut Street Bridge with Pan-African flags to start Juneteenth. Over the past year, Oregon, Washington and New York have made it a holiday with time off for state workers. In Galveston, Texas, its birthplace, the day was declared an official anniversary with a ceremonial reading of Order No. 3.
The drive to recognize Juneteenth in 2021 comes after last year’s protests, the largest civil rights demonstrations in U.S. history, with 15 million to 26 million people calling for an end to racism. The rising tide of protest filled cities like New York, London and Chicago, as well as smaller counties, with organizers calling to defund police and defend Black lives. Activists pulled down Confederate statutes, and in doing so they challenged the white supremacy that is the U.S.’s cultural foundation.
June 19 is not just a holiday but a political barometer. It is an early form of Black resistance to the U.S.’s self-serving mythology as the “home of the free, and land of the brave.” To survive racism, African Americans developed a hardened practical view of the hypocrisy at the heart of the nation. In 1852, Frederick Douglass orated his What to the Slave is the 4th of July?, where he said, “your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity.” He voiced a Black view of America as a prison, contrasted with the European colonial image of a promised land. President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 but it took three more years of war to bring an official end to slavery (that institution continued in other forms, from convict leasing to today’s prison-industrial complex). After Granger’s troops marched into Galveston, Texas, Black citizens made it a point to precede the empty celebration of July 4 with the deeper one of Juneteenth.
Naming your own holiday to commemorate your freedom is creating a culture to resist being erased. In a collective effort, we in the Black community have fought to honor this history. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed said in an NPR interview about her book On Juneteenth, “There are stories about people celebrating what they called the Jubilee or Emancipation Day before it … became Juneteenth, and they were whipped. They were whipped for doing it. They were punished for doing it.” Eventually, it became a day for large, boisterous family gatherings in Texas with fireworks and grills. When those Texas families migrated, they took the holiday with them and it spread.
Black people have not only had to fight racist whites to celebrate Juneteenth — we’ve also had to fight the racism in ourselves. The holiday hit a low point of observation in part because of the desire to integrate. In the 2010 book, The Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture, author Gladys L. Knight wrote, “Upwardly mobile blacks … were ashamed of their slave past and aspired to assimilate into mainstream culture.” The further upward in class they climbed, the more they saw themselves through the “white gaze.” The clearest formulization of this identity crisis was made by scholar W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, where he wrote, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” The white-washing of one’s self that led to a nadir of the holiday’s celebration was diagnosed by Langston Hughes in his 1926 essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain where he decried this “urge within the race toward whiteness.”
Juneteenth has, in some ways, functioned as a barometer of the Black imagination. During conservative years, it decreased in intensity. During the Civil Rights and Black Power Era, the holiday was a mirror reflecting back across time to measure how real freedom was in America. After last year’s protests, it symbolizes an era in which the colonial myths of the United States are beginning to be upended, and a reckoning has begun.
Yet fighting this reckoning are the many schools that don’t teach about Juneteenth or any major Black holidays, and that downplay the violence of slavery. Above them are Republicans who try to ban Ethnic Studies or Critical Race Theory from colleges. They want to sweep the blood of U.S. history under the flag.
How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
“How does it feel to be a problem?” wrote Du Bois about how he was approached as a Black man. Now the question can be reversed, and asked to white conservatives. For many of us, the rise of Juneteenth comes alongside a deep shift in the nation’s image. Many more Americans have come to realize that we don’t live in a “City on a Hill” or a “Land of Opportunity.” The vital work of grassroots activists has stripped some of the nostalgic glow for the United States’s brutal past, and that in itself is a partial victory in the culture war.
A culture war is a struggle over the identity of a nation by groups with a passionate, vested interest in seeing themselves at the center. Since Christopher Columbus and other colonizers initiated a brutal genocide on this continent, Europeans have colonized not only the land but how it is imagined. Whether it is the idea of Manifest Destiny or the American Dream, they put themselves at the center as heroic founders and the multitudes of people of color, workers, women, sexual and religious minorities, and disabled people at the margins, attempting to render us invisible outside of stereotypes and caricatures.
The battles to retake culture have often taken the form of protests during capitalist crises that changed popular sentiment — and also the academy. The Progressive Era led to historian Charles Beard’s 1913 book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States that highlighted how the rich sabotaged democracy. During the Great Migration and the Great Depression, Du Bois published in 1935 his classic Black Reconstruction to disprove the Dunning School version of Reconstruction as a corrupt failure. The 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power movements forced colleges to create Black Studies departments. In 1980, in the midst of depression and oil shock, Howard Zinn published The People’s History of the United States, which replaced the “Great Man” version of history with the reality of the many buried under the “City on a Hill.”
Rising with racial diversity, rising with each protest, rising with each victory is a more accurate vision of the United States. First and foremost, we must acknowledge the vision put forth by grassroots organizers: a vision of life beyond white supremacy, and, relatedly, beyond police, prisons, borders and colonialism. Thanks to ongoing pressure from movements, we are also seeing more mainstream efforts like The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which although fairly criticized has repositioned race as central to the U.S.’s founding in school curriculums. In pop culture, we see it in films from Django to 12 Years a Slave, the new Watchmen series with its racial commentary to the TV series Pose about transgender youth of color in New York, to the success of Jordan Peele’s Black cast horror suspense films. We see it in the panic around so-called “cancel culture,” in which people like white libertarian Joe Rogan say they fear “woke culture” will lead to “straight white men not being allowed to talk.” One response to this panic was actor LeVar Burton, famous for Roots, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Reading Rainbow, saying to Meghan McCain on The View, “I think we have a consequence culture, and that consequences are finally encompassing everybody in this society, whereas they haven’t been ever in this country.”
Again and again, one simple fact stands out. Progressives are winning culture wars because their narrative gives people the right to be visible. The victories are seen in Pride Month, changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and yes, Juneteenth.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” The racial, class and gender tension that rip at the nation’s fabric can only be mended when the violence done under the guise of patriotism and white supremacy is no longer hidden by nostalgic myths.
The millions of protesters, mainly Millennials and members of Gen Z, who powered last year’s uprisings are dismantling the ideology that destroyed lives. It is now possible to imagine the end of the drug war, mass incarceration and austerity politics. Policy makers’ long-time resistance to even liberal reforms — not to mention democratic socialism — has long been bound up with racist fearmongering. For a whole generation of American youth, that racial appeal falls flat. For them, Black Lives Matter. On Juneteenth, we celebrate Black freedom, knowing it’s not fully realized but that we are drawing closer and closer. So close, you can hear the people cheering.
The words “I can’t breathe” were not only uttered by Eric Garner and George Floyd as they were murdered by police. They were also uttered by over 70 others who died in law enforcement custody over the past decade after saying those same three words, according to the The New York Times.
Policing in the United States is a force of racist violence that is entangled at the core of the capitalist system. As Robin D.G. Kelley pointed out on Intercepted With Jeremy Scahill, capitalism and racism are not distinct from one another: “If you think of capitalism as racial capitalism, then the outcome is you cannot eliminate capitalism, overthrow it, without the complete destruction of white supremacy, of the racial regime under which it’s built.”
Police in the United States act with impunity in targeted neighborhoods, public schools, college campuses, hospitals, and almost every other public sphere. Not only do the police view protesters, Black and Indigenous people, and undocumented immigrants as antagonists to be controlled, they are also armed with military-grade weapons. This police militarization is a process that dates at least as far back as President Lyndon Johnson when he initiated the 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which supplied local police forces with weapons used in the Vietnam War. The public is now regarded as dangerous and suspect; moreover, as the police are given more military technologies and weapons of war, a culture of punishment, resentment and racism intensifies as Black people, in particular, are viewed as a threat to law and order. Unfortunately, employing militarized responses to routine police practices has become normalized. One consequence is that the federal government has continued to arm the police through the Defense Logistics Agency’s 1033 Program, which allows the Defense Department to transfer military equipment free of charge to local enforcement agencies.
The scope of the 1033 Program is alarming given that “Since its inception, more than 11,500 domestic law enforcement agencies have taken part in the 1033 Program, receiving more than $7.4 billion in military equipment,” according to CNBC. There is also the federally run 1122 Program which allows the police to purchase military equipment at the same discounted rate as the federal government. In addition, there is the Homeland Security Grant Program, which provides funds for local police departments to buy military-grade armaments and weapons. The military-grade weapons provided through these federal programs include armored vehicles, assault rifles, flashbang grenade launchers, bomb-detonating robots, and night vision items. Arming the police with more powerful weapons reinforced a culture that taught police officers to learn, think and act as soldiers engaged in a war. Moreover, as Ryan Welch and Jack Mewhirter write in The Washington Post, the more militarized and armed the police are, the greater the increase in civilian deaths. As they point out:
Even controlling for other possible factors in police violence (such as household income, overall and black population, violent-crime levels and drug use), more-militarized law enforcement agencies were associated with more civilians killed each year by police. When a county goes from receiving no military equipment to $2,539,767 worth (the largest figure that went to one agency in our data), more than twice as many civilians are likely to die in that county the following year.
There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against Black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.
Police brutality cannot be separated from the lethal nature of white supremacy, and in its recent incarnations became “the war on crime.” Under President Nixon and every American president after him, the war on crime continued to expand and intensify into a war on Black communities. The call for “law and order” repeatedly served as a smokescreen for racist and militarized police practices that equated Black behavior with criminality and authorized the use of force against them.
As the reach of the culture of punishment expanded, its targets included protesters, immigrants, and those individuals and groups marginalized by class, religion, ethnicity and color as the other — an enemy. This is the organizing principle of a war mentality adopted by the police throughout the United States in which the behavior of Black people and other marginalized communities is criminalized. It comes as no surprise that as one study reports, “Police kill, on average, 2.8 men per day…. Police homicide risk is higher than suggested by official data. Black and Latino men are at higher risk for death than are White men, and these disparities vary markedly across place.”
A militarized culture breeds violence. It wastes money on the security industries and policing, and drains money from the socially necessary programs that could actually prevent violence. Violence is both shocking and part of everyday life, especially for those who are poor, Black, Indigenous, trans, disabled and/or otherwise disenfranchised. In the last few decades, Francesca Mari writes, “the US has had the highest homicide rate of any high-income country, and according to preliminary data released in March by the FBI, it rose by 25 percent in 2020, when an estimated 20,000 people were murdered — more than fifty-six a day.”
Police brutality became code for a more violent expression of racism that emerged with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. This was especially obvious under the Trump administration as the racist adoption of both white supremacy and a wave of police brutality against Black people and undocumented immigrants was presented to the American public as a badge of honor and an act of civic pride.
As the power of the police expanded, along with their unions, social programs were defunded. These included job programs, food stamp programs, health centers, healthcare programs and early childhood education. In many states, more money was spent on prisons than on colleges and universities, as documented by Ruth Gilmore in her book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Targeted cities inhabited mostly by poor Black and brown people were now under siege as the war on poverty morphed into the war on crime. Instead of “fighting black youth poverty,” the new crop of white supremacist politicians fought what Elizabeth Hinton called “fighting black youth crime” in her book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.
As Jim Crow re-emerged in more punitive forms, immigration was criminalized, the war on youth of color intensified, and the culture of punishment began to shape a range of institutions. This was particularly evident as mass incarceration became a defining organizing institution of the narrow racially inspired policies of criminalization in the U.S. and, by default, the prison its most notorious welfare agency. The U.S. has been in the midst of an imprisonment binge since the1960s. As Angela Y. Davis writes in Abolition Democracy:
But even more important, imprisonment is the punitive solution to a whole range of social problems that are not being addressed by those social institutions that might help people lead better, more satisfying lives. This is the logic of what has been called the imprisonment binge: Instead of building housing, throw the homeless in prison. Instead of developing the educational system, throw the illiterate in prison. Throw people in prison who lose jobs as the result of de-industrialization, globalization of capital, and the dismantling of the welfare state. Get rid of all of them. Remove these dispensable populations from society. According to this logic the prison becomes a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent.
The numbers speak for themselves. Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad makes this clear in his new preface to The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. He writes:
By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision…. The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries.
Michelle Brown has argued persuasively in her book The Culture of Punishment that the rise of police violence, especially against people of color, indicates that increases in the scale of punishment cannot be abstracted from a parallel rise in both power and apparatuses of punishment — extending from the law enforcement, military services, private security forces, immigration detention centers, to intelligence networks and surveillance apparatuses.
Moreover, the culture of punishment increasingly defines both subjects and social problems through the registers of punishment, pain and violence. How else to explain the actions of the South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who in 2021 signed legislation giving people on death row the grotesque choice between a firing squad and electrocution. Frank Knaack, the executive director of South Carolina’s ACLU, stated that capital punishment and the new law “evolved from lynchings and racial terror, and it has failed to separate its modern capital punishment system from this racist history.”
Policing cannot be understood outside of the history of criminogenic culture and a racist punishing state marked by both staggering inequities in wealth, income and power, as well as a collective mindset in which those considered non-white are considered less than human, undeserving of human rights, and viewed as disposable. The journalist Robert C. Koehler rightly argues that underlying both the larger culture and the culture of policing is a deeply ingrained white supremacy marked by a system of growing inequalities in which economic rights do not match political and individual rights. Koehler writes:
it is racism that is the trigger that disproportionately escalates police encounters with people of color. However, even more sadly, it is systemic racism that normalizes it, or legitimates it, making it largely acceptable to white American eyes and consciences. For it is not only the police who have this problem, but our entire society.
As neoliberalism failed to deliver on its promises of upward social and economic mobility, it shifted attention for its broken social experiment to attacks on immigrants, Blacks, and other populations deemed unworthy, inferior and a threat to white people. In doing so, gangster capitalism has become armed, spiraling into a form of authoritarianism that has merged the savagery of market despotism with the rancid ideology of white supremacy. Cornel West is right in arguing that neoliberal capitalism with its emphasis on materialism, racism and cruelty “allows for endemic inequality and a culture of greed and consumerism that [has trampled] on the rights and dignity of poor people and minorities decade after decade.”
Sociologist Alex Vitale rightly insists that calls for change regarding policing should not be about producing “better” police through technocratic reforms such as the increased use of body cameras and bias training, but rather with a “larger structure of economic life in America.” In the age of neoliberal austerity, the defunding of the welfare state has given way to a range of social problems — extending from the criminalization of homeless people and the relentless erasure of human rights to the mass proliferation of surveillance and the placing of police in the schools — all of which have contributed to the expansion of police power as a way to control people removed from meaningful involvement in the broader global economy. Turning over every social problem for the police to fix is more than an impossible task; it is a failed, if not diversionary, political decision.
Police violence can be understood as a form of systemic terror instituted intentionally by different levels of government against populations at home in order to realize economic gains and achieve political benefits through practices that range from assassination, extortion, incarceration, violence, and intimidation or coercion of a civilian population. Some of the more notorious racist expressions of such terror include the assassination of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton by the Chicago Police Department on December 4, 1969; the MOVE bombing by the Philadelphia Police Department in 1985; the existence of COINTELPRO (an illegal counterintelligence program designed to harass anti-war and Black resistance fighters in the 60s and 70s); the use of extortion by the local police and courts practiced on the largely poor Black residents of Ferguson; and the more publicized killings of Ma’Khia Bryant, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by the police — to name just a few instances of acute state violence.
The American nightmare that has descended upon the United States points to a crisis of power, agency, community, education and hope. The effects of neoliberalism’s death-dealing-machinery are everywhere, and police abuse is only one thread of this criminogenic social formation.
Rather than fade into the past or disappear beneath the propaganda techniques of right- wing disimagination machines, widespread poverty, racially segregated schools, rampant homelessness, ecological destruction, large-scale rootlessness, fearmongering, social atomization, voter suppression, and the politics of disposability are alive and well. It is now unabashedly reproduced and defended by a Republican Party that has become the overt symbol of white supremacy, economic ruthlessness and manufactured ignorance.
Widespread corruption is now matched by a climate of fear and a willingness on the part of Trump’s political allies to inflict violence on undesirable members of the public along with anyone voicing criticism or dissent. The scaffold of resistance now faces a malignant fascist politics growing across the globe. Fascist politics, especially in the United States, has been on steroids, especially true both during Trump’s reign in office and after his defeat, with the rule of the Republican Party in Congress and among a majority of state legislatures. If the systemic violence and lawlessness that denies Black communities a claim to human rights, citizenship and dignity are to be challenged, it is crucial to understand how neoliberal fascism becomes a machinery of dread, tearing the social fabric, while cancelling the future. As a regime of ideology, neoliberal fascism wages a political and pedagogical war against the conditions that make thinking, agency, the search for truth and informed judgment possible.
The heart of American violence does not reside merely in the culture and practice of policing in the U.S., or for that matter, in its prison-industrial complex. Its center of gravity is more comprehensive and is part of a broader crisis that extends from the threat of nuclear war and ecological devastation to the rise of authoritarian states and the human suffering caused by the staggering concentrations of wealth in the hands of a global financial elite. The roots of these multilayered and intersecting crises lie elsewhere in a new political and social formation that constitutes a racialized criminal economy that has embraced greed, violence, disposability, denial and racial cleansing as governing principles of the entire social order. This is the rule of neoliberal fascism on steroids. It is also an extermination machine rooted in a vapid nihilism that fuels the celebration of materialism and social atomization with a belief in unshakable loyalty, purification through violence and a cult of heroism.
It is crucial to understand how the threads of racial violence in its broader historical context, comprehensive connections and multidimensional layers shape capitalism in its totality to produce what David Theo Goldberg calls a machinery of proliferating dread. It’s no wonder that the same activists who are working to defund the police are also part of a collective movement to bring an end to neoliberal capitalism. Mariame Kaba writes:
People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.
The challenge that Kaba and other abolitionists are posing does not advocate for liberal reforms. Their call is to advance a radical restructuring of society. Central to their call for social change is that such a task be understood as both political and educational. This necessitates the development of political and pedagogical struggles that take seriously the need to rethink the attack on the public imagination and attack on critical agency, identity and everyday life. Also at stake is the need to identify and reclaim those institutions, such as schools, that are necessary to produce and connect an educated public to the struggle for a substantive and radical democracy. The current crisis cannot be faced through limited calls for police reforms. It demands a more comprehensive view not only of oppression and the forces through which it is produced, legitimated and normalized, but also of political struggle itself.
The evolution — or devolution, if you will — of the right’s January 6 narrative continues apace, but is steering toward strange waters. When it happened, it was deemed an appalling attack against the very fabric of democracy … but Donald Trump didn’t like that, because the attackers were his people, and so the story began to change. It was antifa! Black Lives Matter protesters! No, that didn’t stick. Wait, they were peaceful tourists! See how they stay within the ropes as they carry their Confederate battle flags and lengths of pipe! Ten minutes with the footage from the front stairs and hallways batted that one down.
“There was a nationwide dragnet to find [the Capitol attackers]. Many of them are still in solitary confinement tonight,” intonedFox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night. “But strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6 have not been charged. Look at the documents; the government calls those people unindicted co-conspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that in potentially every single case they were FBI operatives. Really? In the Capitol on January 6?”
Thus, by way of Carlson’s fake-clever loaded questions technique does the newest poisoned information pill splash down into the national bloodstream. The FBI did it, why not? This answer, unlike the others, is sure to please Trump, who despises the FBI and all within it. Blame it on them? What a hoot! Why didn’t I think of that?
It’s important to note that the FBI is certainly not blameless in the broader sense, having caused ongoing and brutal harm to many marginalized communities. However, there is absolutely no evidence that it had anything to do with the Capitol attack.
The FBI-did-it theory is the brainchild of Darren Beattie, whom you may recall was a Trump speechwriter for about 213 seconds before his deep ties to white supremacists were revealed. After being relieved of his position, Trump put Beattie “on a commission tasked with preserving sites related to the Holocaust,” according to the Independent UK. Beattie’s FBI argument, published earlier this week on his far right website Revolver News, has since been picked up and spread via social media by Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.
Some fine company Tucker is keeping these days.
“Even if we set aside these reasons to disbelieve Carlson’s theory and the fact that the government isn’t supposed to cite government agents as unindicted co-conspirators, it’s still a massive leap to assume that these people were government agents,” counter-argues Aaron Blake for The Washington Post. “Carlson initially raises this as a supposedly likely possibility, but then essentially treats it as fact. Is it possible it’s right? Virtually anything is possible. There’s just no genuine reason to believe it, despite Carlson’s presentation.”
A day later, D.C. police officer Michael Fanone arrived at the Capitol to speak with the 21 Republican House members who voted “no” on giving the officers who defended the Capitol the Congressional Gold Medal. When Fanone met one of them — Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia — Clyde pointedly refused to shake Fanone’s hand. Clyde, you may recall, was the Congress member who recently said the riot looked like “a normal tourist visit.”
If you believe this rash of dangerous conspiracy theories is going to wind down of its own volition soon, I invite you to think again. Carlson is merely a mouthpiece for the Republican-dominating Trump faction, which believes it is in total control of the party because it is. Floating this “FBI did it” theory is perfect Trump: Bleat some aggravated nonsense to scramble the minds of your foes, deny you actually said anything because you couched it as a question and let the battery acid of your malevolent intentions do its corrosive work on the body politic.
These are the people who very nearly turned the Department of Justice into Trump’s own personal hand puppet.
“[Trump and his allies] wanted the Justice Department to explore false claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines had been manipulated to alter votes in one county in Michigan,” reports the Post. “They asked officials about the U.S. government filing a Supreme Court challenge to the results in six states that Joe Biden won. The president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, even shared with acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen a link to a YouTube video that described an outlandish plot in which the election had been stolen from Trump through the use of military satellites controlled in Italy.”
Trump loyalists want us to believe the election was stolen by Italian satellites, the Capitol was sacked by FBI agents dressed in their finest MAGA gear, and all of it is controlled by a cabal of cannibal pedophiles who run Hollywood and the Democratic Party. These theories are bizarre, wild and baseless, to be sure, but they are also dangerous, grounded in white supremacy and a deep disdain for democracy.
I would like to believe this is all going to be healthy for the republic in the long run, the lancing of a boil left to swell with pus and rot for too long … but the sheer number of people who will buy into all this is staggering. Maybe they don’t believe it, but they say they do, and they vote for the ones peddling these fictions.
Soon enough, and to the great thrill of Trump, the arc of this argument will leave Republicans with little alternative but to openly embrace the Capitol attackers as brothers and patriots. It really doesn’t matter if they believe it or not. On a long enough timeline, the platform of “owning the libs” becomes potentially lethal for all involved, and for the country itself.
There’s only one person in this photograph/video of last week’s G7 meeting who represents a country where an illness can destroy an entire family, leaving them bankrupt and homeless, with the repercussions of that sudden fall into poverty echoing down through generations.
Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the “developed world” that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens. That’s it. We’re the only one left.
The United States spends more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.
Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.
Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll, whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10%.
We are literally the only “developed” country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf. The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.
And it’s not like we haven’t tried. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all proposed and made an effort to bring a national healthcare system to the United States. Here’s one example really worth watching (it’s 2 minutes and gets better as it goes along):
They all failed, and when I did a deep dive into the topic last year for my newest book The Hidden History of American Healthcare I found two major barriers to our removing that tick from our backs.
The early opposition, more than 100 years ago, to a national healthcare system came from southern white congressmen (they were all men) and senators who didn’t want even the possibility that Black people could benefit, health-wise, from white people’s tax dollars. (This thinking apparently still motivates many white Southern politicians.)
The leader of that healthcare-opposition movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a German immigrant named Frederick Hoffman. Hoffman was a senior executive for the Prudential Insurance Company, and wrote several books about the racial inferiority of Black people, a topic he traveled the country lecturing about.
His most well-known book was titled Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. It became a major best-seller across America when it was first published for the American Economic Association by the Macmillan Company in 1896, the same year the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision legally turned the entire US into an apartheid state.
Hoffman taught that Black people, in the absence of slavery, were so physically and intellectually inferior to whites that if they were simply deprived of healthcare the entire race would die out in a few generations. Denying healthcare to Black people, he said, would solve the “race problem” in America.
Southern politicians quoted Hoffman at length, he was invited to speak before Congress and was hailed as a pioneer in the field of “scientific racism.” Race Traits was one of the most influential books of its era.
By the 1920s, the insurance company he was a vice president of was moving from life insurance into the health insurance field, which brought an added incentive to lobby hard against any sort of a national healthcare plan.
Which brings us to the second reason America has no national healthcare system: profits.
And that’s just one of multiple giant insurance companies feeding at the trough of your healthcare needs.
Much of that money, and the pay for the multiple senior executives at that and other insurance companies who make over $1 million a year, came from saying “No!” to people who file claims for payment of their healthcare costs.
Companies offering such “primary” health insurance simply don’t exist (or are tiny) in almost every other “developed” country in the world. Mostly, where they do exist, they serve wealthier people looking for “extras” beyond the national system, like luxury hospital suites or air ambulances when overseas. (Switzerland is the outlier with exclusively private insurance, but it’s subsidized, mandatory, and non-profit.)
If Americans don’t know this, they intuit it.
In the 2020 election there were quite a few issues on statewide ballots around the country. Only three of them outpolled Joe Biden’s win, and expanding Medicaid to cover everybody was at the top of that list. (The other two were raising the minimum wage and legalizing pot.)
The last successful effort to provide government funded, single-payer healthcare insurance was when Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid (both single-payer systems) in the 1960s. It was a hell of an effort, but the health insurance industry was then a tiny fraction of its current size.
In 1978, when conservatives on the Supreme Court legalized corporations owning politicians with their Buckley v Belotti decision (written by Justice Louis Powell of “Powell Memo” fame), they made the entire process of replacing a profitable industry with government-funded programs like single-payer vastly more difficult, regardless of how much good they may do for the citizens of the nation.
The Court then doubled-down on that decision in 2010, when the all-conservative vote on Citizens United cemented the power of billionaires and giant corporations to own politicians and even write and influence legislation and the legislative process.
Medicare For All, like Canada has, would save American families thousands every year immediately and do away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen only because somebody in the family got sick. But it would kill the billions every week in profits of the half-dozen corporate giants that dominate the health insurance industry.
The Covid crisis — which is producing an explosion in healthcare debt for American families (but not for those in any other “developed” nation) — is starting to create considerable pressure for change, but Americans still must overcome the political corruption the Supreme Court wrote into our system with Citizens United.
Prosecutors’ offices deal in punishment, not healing, prevention or justice. When candidates running for prosecutor claim to be on the side of survivors of violence, we always need to take a closer look — and recognize the violence inherent in the office itself.
In May, Manhattandistrict attorney (DA) candidate Alvin Bragg published an op-ed with advocate Marissa Hoechstetter in which they assert that it’s time to “center survivors and fight the public health crisis that is sexual violence” by expanding the prosecutor’s office to include a specific sex crimes unit. Not long after,carceral feministsGloria Steinem and Sonia Ossorio announced support for the wealthy Wall Street candidate for Manhattan DA, Tali Farhadian Weinstein. They similarly claim that the expansion of the punishment system will improve the lives of women. The reality is that these carceral feminists, Manhattan DA candidates and the overwhelming majority of DAs across the country, are pushing forward a decades-old agenda of expanding a system that is inherently violent and counter to what most survivors say they need.
One year after the murder of Oluwatoyin Salau, a Black teen activist who was failed by a system unable to provide her safe housing and was, therefore, left more vulnerable to violence, the DA candidates are advocating for devouring the already austere New York City budget to build out the criminalization infrastructure.
As Black survivors of gender-based violence ourselves, and as organizers who work to end the criminalization of survival, our vision for a world without gender-based violence requires a world without policing, prisons and prosecution. Carceral feminists — or those who believe punitive practices such as policing and incarceration can solve gender-based violence — continue to claim they speak for all survivors. Yet many of us are screaming from the rooftops that we deserve so much more than the few carceral crumbs governments toss our way.
While carceral feminists may take up much of the public spotlight, radical feminists have long made connections betweeninterpersonal and state violence, showing how law enforcement has perpetratedgender-based violence throughout history and outlining the ways thatcarceral systems have failed many survivors. While it may be true that some survivors feel that the criminal legal system is useful to them, studies have found that around 70 percent to75 percent of sexual violence survivors do not report the violence to the police. Of those who do report to police, crude estimates show that 2.3 percent result in a conviction.
As the experience of Chanel Miller — a sexual assault survivor whose victim impact statement went viral in 2016 — revealed to millions, the court process is frequently retraumatizing and victim-blaming for gender violence survivors, even if a conviction occurs. Survivors are often crushed as the carceral machinery churns along to cage its next victim. Unlike restorative or transformative justice approaches, this legal system does not foster survivor-centered healing and accountability. The things that are precious to so many survivors — the abusive person taking responsibility for the violence they caused, apologizing and outlining how they will stop their violence, and making agreed-upon amends — are not byproducts of this system. The byproduct is more violence. Studies have shown that when the state targets communities with criminalization and incarceration, these communities actually experience increased rates of interpersonal violence rather than less. In short, incarceration does not prevent violence, it fuels it. The Manhattan DA has had over two centuries to become a victim-centered office — ultimately carceral feminists need to reckon with the fact that this is not possible in a system that only cares about punishment and not what survivors actually say they need.
As arecent survey of violence survivors has shown, overall survivors of violence prefer investments in schools, jobs and mental health treatment over more investments in prisons and jails. These realities would not surprise most anti-violence advocates. Since the Violence Against Women Act was first introduced, survivor advocates, particularly those that center the most historically marginalized groups, have stated over and over what communities ask for most while experiencing abuse:somewhere safe to live and somewhere nurturing to heal. Nevertheless, these cries go largely ignored by most bureaucrats and lawmakers. As a result of refusals to invest in actualaffordable housing and sufficient emergency cash assistance, our city’s shelters burst at the seams, as domestic violence has become thenumber one driver of the New York City homeless shelter population. Upon fleeing violence, many survivors and their families then experience the stress of severe poverty and housing insecurity.
Any real commitment to survivors must involve divesting from law enforcement responses to violence — which most survivors do not benefit from and which many marginalized survivors experience as violent — and redistributing resources to life-affirming and non-carceral supports.
Prosecutors Must Drop Charges Against Survivors
Not only do prosecutors usually fail to provide any respite for survivors of gender-based violence, they also often directly target them with criminalization and incarceration. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has a long history of prosecuting survivors of gender-based violence. In 2007, seven women were arrested for defending themselves after being sexually harassed in the West Village, andfour of them were later sentenced to up to 11 years in prison. Today, that same office isprosecuting Tracy McCarter, a survivor of domestic violence, for the death of her abusive partner. The DA’s office currently housesa Domestic Violence Unit similar to the proposed sex crimes unit that Bragg andHoechstetter propose, and yet it continues to prosecute people for defending their lives.
Steinem and Ossorio are promoting Farhadian Weinstein’s plans for a Bureau of Gender-Based Violence as if a departmental expansion and name change can transform the system’s relationship to survivors. Prosecutors cannot claim to care about survivors while simultaneously criminalizing their survival.
Prosecutors often serve as a criminalized survivor’snext abuser through aggressive character assassinations, monitoring their movement and phone calls, and creating an environment of punishment and fear. New York City jails and prisons are also frequent sites of sexual violence. Criminalization, prosecution and incarceration inherently spread violence; they don’t solve it.
Any discussion about reforming criminal legal systems on behalf of survivors without mention of how these very systems are abusing survivors themselves is incomplete at best, and extremely harmful at worst. This is particularly true forBlack, Latinx, Indigenous, queer and trans survivors who are rarely seen as “real” victims by courts if they fight back, but are also killed at the highest rates when they do not fight back. The city’s next DA must decline to prosecute and drop the charges against all survivors of gender violence — including Tracy McCarter — once elected. Otherwise, their “commitments” to survivors are nothing more than campaign talking points while survivors continue to be penalized by prosecutors in New York City.
Prioritize Survivor Needs, Not the Expansion of the District Attorney’s Office
Survivors shouldn’t have to engage with violent carceral systems to receive the support they need. While gender-based violence is supposedly considered apublic health issue, local and state government officials and prosecutors continue to push for a law enforcement response.
The District Attorney’s office is a law enforcement body, and we know that in ravaged government budgets, when a budget line is added in one place, it means another is lost. Instead of adding more survivor-oriented social workers and medical personnel to the law enforcement budget, we should be building up these resources in other departments. Supports should not be an extension of policing.
Moreover, if these resources are housed in police precincts and district attorney’s offices, they are likely to be used as carrots to pressure survivors into working with cops and prosecutors. As just one example, New York State requires that survivors quickly report a crime to law enforcement to be eligible for Victim Compensation, financial assistance to cover medical bills, counseling or other costs related to their survivorship. This policy coerces survivors into engaging with police to receive emergency economic support. Funding for the prosecutor’s office should be redirected to the resources that survivors have been consistently asking for, such as housing, flexible funds, and other resources that are essential for supporting survivor healing and self-determination. If we funded these needs proactively, we would be investing in the prevention of violence rather than only responding after the fact — and peddling public dollars into institutions that often cause further harm.
Defund the District Attorney’s Office to Radically Invest in Safety
Prosecution cannot address the root causes of violence. The criminal legal system itself is built on anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, and other oppressive forces that sustain a culture of violence. Unable to recognize their fundamental role in continuing these systems of oppression, any solutions that prosecutors offer outside of shrinking their own power will continue to fall short. For example, something as simple yet consequential as the framing of the issue has implications for who is recognized as a survivor and can access public resources. During this campaign, DA candidates — as well as Steinem and Ossorio — wrongly use a “violence against women” frame to describe gendered violence, which is often used to exclude transgender women and erases many other survivors across the gender spectrum. These instances reinforce what other feminists have long been telling us about the delusions of trusting the criminal legal system to support survivors, when these systems have targeted the communities that many survivors come from.
Conversations about the consequences of relying on criminal legal responses to violence have been happening for decades, from theFeminist Alliance Against Rape newsletters in the 1970s to theMoment of Truth Statement signed by anti-violence organizations across the country in 2020. Prosecutor candidates like Bragg and Farhadian Weinstein are proposing to interrupt gender-based violence with more violence (such as the sexual violence of incarceration). A truly transformative step would be one that shrinks prosecutor power. If prosecutors really want to help gender-based violence survivors, they should cut their budgets and return their funds to the city for community and survivor-led participatory budgeting.
Prosecutors’ offices are using their outsized power and resources to harm so many of us, particularly Black, queer, and other historically marginalized communities. It is time to defund and abolish them all, and give us what we need to live.
If the infrastructure bill survives the current battles and is passed through the crucible of reconciliation, thank Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders first. President Biden and the conservative wing of the Democratic Party have burned weeks trying to strike a deal with Republicans on infrastructure, only to have those efforts thwarted at every turn. On Monday, Sanders indicated that time had run out.
“I wouldn’t vote for it,” said Sanders on Monday, of a far-smaller infrastructure plan put forth by 10 Republican and Democratic senators last week. “The bottom line is there are needs facing this country. Now is the time to address those needs and it has to be paid for in a progressive way given the fact that we have massive income, wealth inequality in America.”
Many within the progressive caucus in the House and Senate have been vocal for weeks in their opposition to the half-a-loaf “compromise” bill being peddled by Joe Manchin and his Republican friends, intended to be an alternative to President Biden’s massive and historic $2.2 trillion proposal. Yet it was Sanders who came out first with a definitive “nope” that redirected the conversation away from the doom of “negotiation” and toward the reconciliation process, which has always been the only way this thing gets done.
Sanders was followed the next day by two Democratic senators — Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon — who joined Sanders in opposition. “I agree that we have many opportunities to put together a progressive tax package in order to pay for the infrastructure climate bill,” said Markey at a press conference. “All working ingredients are there. Obviously, there were tax cuts that were given back in the Trump early years. There are other areas where we can look at that will provide the revenue stream that will pay for this program.”
Merkley concurred. “If we’re looking at a deal on infrastructure going to the floor that does not have the energy investments in it and [for] which there has not been a deal worked out on reconciliation to have those energy investments, then absolutely not, I will not support the package,” he said. When asked about the bill by a reporter earlier in the day, Merkley replied, “When the ship sails on infrastructure, energy investments cannot be left on the docks. If there’s no climate, there’s no deal.”
For Sanders, Markey and Merkley, the breaking point came when negotiations between Manchin and his GOP friends peeled many of the most vital climate-oriented elements from the bill. This was done to appease Republicans who are demanding that “no new money” be spent. That is weasel-speak for “We want to keep the massive 2017 tax cuts intact,” and would ensure that new taxes are not levied against the hyper-wealthy and corporations.
Progressives in the House are firmly on the side of Sanders, Markey and Merkley. Congressional Progressive Caucus leader Rep. Pramila Jayapal said on Tuesday, “The reality is that the American people — Democrats, independents and Republicans — want us to go big, they want us to go bold, and they want us to get it done now because there’s real urgency.”
All this fire is not aimed solely at Republicans, who are only acting the way their paymasters expect them to act. This chorus of “no” is also directed at the Biden White House after weeks of frustration. Mitch McConnell and his caucus will eat hot mud before granting Biden another legislative victory. Everyone is waiting for the likes of Biden and Manchin to figure that out.
Just yesterday, McConnell made the astonishing announcement that, for all intents and purposes, a Republican Senate will never allow a Democratic Supreme Court nominee to come to a vote. How anyone sees McConnell as a fair dealer after proclamations like that is an ongoing mystery, but the congressional dam has broken, and patience is at an end.
It is becoming ever clearer that negotiations have failed, because that is what they were supposed to do, and reconciliation is now the only way to pass meaningful infrastructure legislation. In progressives’ corner is an obscure parliamentary procedure called Rule 304, which allows Democrats to avoid the filibuster on budget-oriented bills, so long as they frame them as “amendments” to an existing bill. In this case, the existing bill is the American Rescue Plan. As I explained in early April:
President Biden and Schumer got the first one across the goal line — the American Rescue Plan — and going forward, so long as they affect the budget somehow and stay within parliamentary lines, vast new pieces of legislation can be passed simply by labeling them as “amendments” to the bill that’s already done.
Take Biden’s pending massive multitrillion-dollar proposal for infrastructure reform and repair, called Build Back Better (BBB). Before the advent of Rule 304, and after the passage of the American Rescue Plan, getting infrastructure through this Senate was going to be like rolling blood up a sandy hill in the rain pretty much forever.
It’s not just Build Back Better we’re talking about here. The parliamentarian has strongly suggested Democrats could move as many as six pieces of legislation under Rule 304 before the end of this Congress. What six policy initiatives are most dear to you?
The wheels are already in motion. “Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer says he will convene a meeting with all 11 Democratic members of the Senate Budget Committee on Wednesday to begin the process for passing a budget resolution, paving the way for Democrats to pass a major infrastructure bill on a party-line vote,” reportsThe Hill. “Schumer said he hopes to pass the budget resolution for fiscal 2022 in July.”
The president, to his credit, appears to have received the message, sort of, maybe. According to top Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti, the White House is seeking another week to 10 days of negotiations with Republicans before abandoning hope and going it alone. “They’re giving it a week or 10 days more and that’s about it,” said House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. John Yarmuth. “And then we move along with reconciliation — for everything.”
The August recess will soon come rushing, and afterward, it will be nothing but midterm preparations for Congress. After wasting weeks on the dry socket of Republican cooperation, however, the ship appears to finally be steering the only course it really ever had to begin with. Hurry up and wait is the rule of the day.
The 25 richest Americans pay little to no taxes thanks to leveraging loopholes in the tax code, according to a report from ProPublica released last week. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg are able to pay so little because of policy decisions that result from the lobbying pressure of large corporations like the ones these billionaires run. The problems include the lack of a U.S. wealth tax and the fact that labor is taxed at a higher rate than investment. But to add insult to injury, as the ultra-wealthy take advantage of the fact that capital gains on investments are taxed at a far lower rate than incomes, they are building portfolios of investments that further increase their political power and more deeply entrench inequality.
The wealthy have many options to further increase their wealth, including investing in hedge funds — private investment funds which charge high fees but hold out the promise of returns better than the overall stock market. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act created new rules of the road for hedge funds, including new transparency into what they own. Once a quarter, they must report certain positions on a form called the 13F. But family funds — in which only the wealth of a single family is invested — lack this same level of transparency, as they were carved out of the Dodd-Frank Act. Many of the billionaires ProPublica found are paying little to no taxes are also growing their wealth through family investment offices.
Family funds have been in the news this year following the spectacular blow up of Archegos Capital. Archegos, created in 2013 by former hedge fund manager Bill Hwang one year after he settled charges of insider trading with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), made a series of increasingly risky bets that the price of about a dozen stocks would keep rising. He used money borrowed from some of the biggest banks to amplify these bets. When the bets went south and he couldn’t pay the banks what he owed, it led to an estimated $10 billion in losses across the banks, with Credit Suisse taking the biggest hit: $5.5 billion. The lack of public reporting on Archegos’s positions contributed to the fact that none of the banks knew until it was too late that they were all on the same side of the same bad trade.
Archegos wreaked havoc at the largest banks with a fund worth an estimated $20 billion. Amazon founder and Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos runs a family fund that’s even larger: Bezos Expeditions was estimated to be worth a staggering $107 billion in 2020. Bezos Expeditions is described by CrunchBase as a family investment office that manages Bezos’s venture capital investments. It was through Bezos Expeditions that Bezos purchased the Washington Post and created the private space travel firm Blue Origin. But Bezos Expeditions has a host of other investments in companies further entrenching the gig economy. Bezos Expeditions’s website discloses some of its other “select investments,” which include home sharing app Airbnb, which has been accused of skirting state hoteling laws and of displacing long-term residents; and ride-sharing app Uber, which has fought laws to classify its drivers as employees. Bezos Expeditions has also invested in Nextdoor, which in some cities has become a sort of crowd-sourced private surveillance network. As Pam Martens and Russ Martens noted for Wall Street on Parade, Bezos Expeditions has never filed a single 13F form with the SEC; this means the general public has no transparency into which stocks or options he holds. But Bezos is still able to take advantage of losses on his investments, and by disclosing those losses to the IRS, he paid no taxes in 2011, despite having a personal net worth of $18 billion.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates also has a family investment office, Cascade Investments LLC, that has allowed him to amass the largest private ownership of farmland in the U.S. Gates and Melinda French Gates together own 269,000 acres of farmland through companies that all link back to Cascade Investments. Gates may have attempted to add even more secrecy to these purchases by using a series of limited liability shell companies. An NBC News investigation found that Cascade Investments bought farmland using at least 22 limited liability shell companies across the United States. John S. Quarterman, a Georgia farmer and landowner, told NBC News that he discovered by searching property records that companies buying multiple tracts of land in Georgia were all a “shell of a shell of a shell company investing for Bill Gates.” This raises questions about concentration of power over farmland, from the same man who made his fortune through inadequate antitrust enforcement, leading to Microsoft’s concentration of power in the PC business.
Michael Bloomberg also has a family investment office called Willett Advisors. CaproAsia estimated in 2020 that Willett Advisors is worth $25 billion, which would make it the seventh largest family office in the world. Wall Street on Paradenoted that the last Form 13F the firm filed dates back to 2014, when the fund had a mere $273,000 in assets.
Elon Musk appears to have used his family investment office, Excession LLC, to buy up some $100 million in property in California around his mansion. Limited-liability companies with ties to Musk purchased six houses across two streets in the wealthy Bel-Air neighborhood of Los Angeles; at least one of those LLCs shares a P.O. Box with Excession LLC, Musk’s family office, the Wall Street Journalreported.
While reporting has given us some insights into what these family funds are doing, regulations don’t require the sorts of disclosures that hedge funds must make — allowing family offices’ investments to largely remain in the shadows, providing yet another benefit to the billionaires of the nation.
Today’s tax code incentivizes the nation’s billionaires to plow as much of their money as possible into investments in these family funds, further amplifying their wealth and giving them larger influence over the political process. With these investments, they seed companies like Uber that fight against worker’s rights, or buy up farmland, making it harder for smaller farmers to compete.
To her credit, House Financial Services Committee chairwoman Maxine Waters has proposed draft legislation requiring family funds managing more than $750 million to provide disclosures about their investments. Although broader legislation — including a wealth tax — is sorely needed to address the inequalities that family funds create, Waters’s bill is a good start. Bringing more transparency into family offices could be an important first step for Congress to tackle this sprawling problem.
Great Britain had great plans for June 21. English citizens had been calling it “Freedom Day,” the day that nation’s COVID restrictions would be lifted after the pandemic’s long siege. A well-managed vaccine rollout has more than half the population fully inoculated, and everything appeared to be moving in the right direction.
Upon the emergence of the COVID-19 variant dubbed “Delta,” however, the U.K.’s plans have changed. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has delayed “Freedom Day” for another four weeks, with a potential for more if the variant is not better contained.
The Delta variant of COVID first emerged from the coronavirus wave that subsumed much of India earlier this spring. Reports strongly suggest that it is far more contagious than the original version of the virus, and is doing more damage to those who become infected. It took four weeks for Delta to become the dominant COVID strain in Great Britain, and at present it has spread to more than 60 countries worldwide.
The U.S. is one of them. At present, the Delta variant represents approximately 10 percent of all new infections here, and that rate is doubling every two weeks. “Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday that a coronavirus strain known as the Delta variant is likely to become the dominant source of new infections in the U.S.,” reportsCNN, “and could lead to new outbreaks in the fall, with unvaccinated Americans being most at risk.”
There were almost 13,000 new cases of COVID diagnosed yesterday, and 145 recorded deaths. While these numbers represent an astonishing decrease from the horrific toll the nation endured last winter, the number of new daily infections remains simply unacceptable in a country so flush with vaccines that medical experts fear whole batches will go bad for lack of use.
As of Monday, almost 44 percent of the U.S. population over 12 years old has received both doses of the vaccine, and 52.5 percent has received one. Children under 12 remain completely unvaccinated. In a nation of 328 million people, slightly more than 174 million have gotten at least one dose. This, for lack of a better phrase, is a dramatic chink in our COVID armor, especially in the face of an exceptionally virulent variant like Delta.
As with all things these days, the question of “why?” boils down to the deliberately deluded garbage politics of the right. A Washington Postanalysis shows COVID rates plummeting in states with high numbers of vaccinated people, and rising in states with fewer vaccinated people. This is simple math, really, but disquieting to confront in the face of the highly contagious Delta variant.
So where are the politics? Where they always are: in the states. “The top 22 states (including D.C.) with the highest adult vaccination rates all went to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election,” reportsNPR. “Some of the least vaccinated states are the most pro-Trump. Trump won 17 of the 18 states with the lowest adult vaccination rates.”
Adherence to nihilistic anti-science Trumpism is not the sole factor for the lower rates in these various states. Less than a quarter of Black people have received at least one shot as of last week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the lowest among the ethnic and racial groups listed. A large part of the problem is access: There have been a number of issues with the vaccine rollout, particularly impacting people who lack access to transportation or cannot take time off work to get a shot. Meanwhile, some vaccine hesitancy persists within Black communities; it is an understandable byproduct of generations of unspeakable abuses of that community by the medical field.
However, among the largely white Trump supporters who are refusing the vaccine, the hesitancy has a very different root. Many people across the country appear to be saying no to the vaccine because doing so will shore up their pro-Trump street cred. The conspiracy theories that have enveloped the effective distribution of this medicine to Trump supporters have morphed into their own sort of bent, all-encompassing multiverse, where all the “answers” are spelled with the letter “Q” and mask mandates are equated with the Holocaust.
It is not difficult to foresee what comes next. If COVID holds to its pattern of finding all the gaps in our defenses, and if Delta is as bad as they say, we can expect to witness the return of terrible infection numbers to the regions that continue to shun the vaccine. By all accounts, the vaccines remain highly effective in their ability to stave off the Delta variant, especially if those receiving two-dose vaccines make sure to get both shots.
The United States is reopening from shore to shore, and there is great gladness for it. Vaccinated people are being told with high confidence that they can return to a semblance of normal … but with less than half the country fully vaccinated, and with a stunning portion of that half clinging to their Trump-spawned delusions, I still fear that we are reopening too soon.
The rise of the Delta variant makes this concern all the more pressing. If Trump had a single care for the people who make him possible, he would embark on a vaccination campaign in all the states he carried in 2020, but he will not do this unless forced to. He will squat in his Bedminster lair plotting revenge, even as those he owes his power to die preventable deaths every day.
From the “Nothing New Under the Sun” files, I bring you a former president whose concern over leaks to the press eventually blew his entire administration straight to hell.
“President Nixon’s staffers formed the ‘White House Plumbers,’” explainsTime, “a secret unit tasked with digging up dirt on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. The Plumbers went on to commit crimes for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, including the Watergate burglaries. Although Nixon denied knowledge of the Plumbers activities, tapes subpoenaed during the Watergate investigation revealed years of political espionage and illegal surveillance. The ‘Smoking Gun’ tape revealed that Nixon was involved in the cover up. On August 8, 1974, Nixon became the only American president to resign the office.’”
Nothing so dramatic as that is in the offing today; Donald Trump — whose own surveillance program against journalists, Democratic politicians and their families, and even his own lawyer, is roiling Washington, D.C., once again — is already out of office. He has been quacking about getting “reinstated” as president from his funnel hole in New Jersey. Sure, put him back in, and then impeach him a third time. Maybe this one will stick.
The first reports of Trump’s administration running its own ham-fisted Plumbers operation landed late last week with a rolling boom. “As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members,” reportedThe New York Times. “One was a minor.”
The roll call of people affected is a perfect match to another Nixonian throwback, the enemies list. Atop Trump’s effective corollary to Nixon’s list was House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who was a regular target of Trump’s tirades. All told, Apple received subpoenas that covered 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses. A number of the people swept up in this metadata search were not in government, including the aforementioned minor.
Along with the subpoena came a nondisclosure order which barred Apple from informing its customers that the Justice Department was digging into their data. “The nondisclosure order was extended three times,” reportsCNN, “each time for a year, Apple said. When it was not extended for a fourth time, Apple said it informed the affected customers on May 5, 2021.”
Concurrently, the Trump administration also seized communications data from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post. This revelation landed more than a week ago, tangling the Biden administration up in the mess, because his Justice Department apparently continued this surveillance after Trump left office. The Biden White House has disavowed these activities, and the policy regarding leak investigations over at Justice has been changed.
The wildest revelation came this weekend, when it was revealed that one of Trump’s targets was his own White House counsel, Doug McGahn. “Apple told Mr. McGahn about the subpoena last month, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Mr. McGahn’s wife also received a similar notice from Apple,” reports the Times.
The time frame for this is easy enough to recall. Not long after Trump took office, his administration sprang more leaks than a badly wrapped diaper. Nobody in the administration’s lower echelons had the courage to resign in protest over the terrifying things they were seeing — “Anonymous,” your table is ready — but they were more than happy to spray that cheese into the wind for the news media to collect, and collect it they did.
There were weeks when one could not walk around the block without tripping over 10 heavily sourced news reports about White House shenanigans regarding the southern border, the ceaseless infighting within the administration that was usually inspired by Trump himself, and the administration’s dealings with Russia both before and after the election. The Russia questions, it appears, hit a tender spot with Trump, initially prompting the broad and surreptitious data harvest.
Fallout from these revelations is just beginning. House Democrats intend to hold hearings on the matter and will subpoena any witnesses who don’t come voluntarily. This includes former Attorney General William Barr, who was running Justice when all of this went down. Barr is trying to put as much daylight as he can between himself and these subpoenas, but that will be challenging.
In May of 2019, then-Sen. Kamala Harris asked Barr directly if “the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation into anyone?” Barr’s reply was a tap-dancing clinic, but if and when he appears at a hearing on this matter, he will not have many places to hide besides an invocation of his Fifth Amendment rights.
The House will not be the only entity involved in this investigation. “The Justice Department’s internal watchdog announced Friday that he would review how officials sought the data of reporters, lawmakers and others as part of an aggressive crackdown on leaks during the Trump administration,” reports the Post, “a day after it was revealed the department years ago had secretly obtained the data of two congressmen well known for their criticism of President Donald Trump.”
For their part, congressional Republicans are putting on their best “What, me worry?” faces as these revelations continue to roll in, and why not? Few of them have paid a price for loyalty to Trump, even now that he is out of office. As far as the public stance of the GOP goes, it’s all blue skies.
… but I do wonder. At present, the Republican Party has tasked itself to defeat several wildly popular pieces of Democratic legislation, bury the sacking of the Capitol by Trump supporters under a compost pile of “They were just tourists” excuses even as they block an investigation into the incident, and now this, a scandal straight out of central casting with an eerily familiar historical hook to boot. There are only so many running chainsaws a person can juggle before limbs start getting lopped off.
“The reason this latest issue is so important is that it appears to show the executive branch of the government wielding presidential power to target the legislative branch,” report’sCNN’s Stephen Collinson, “and the President’s personal political enemies. It would be hard to find a more clear and flagrant abuse of presidential power. This behavior would not only be a perversion of the DOJ’s critical role in ensuring the neutral and apolitical application of justice — a key requirement for a democratic society. It would also mirror the actions of autocrats across the world, many of whom Trump openly admired.”
The GOP’s worst enemy in this? Trump himself, of course. Does anyone think he will sit quietly while this investigation unfolds daily on the television he watches relentlessly? I would be not at all surprised if at some point he winds up pulling a Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men: Did you order the Code Red? YOU’RE GOD DAMNED RIGHT I DID!
One of these days — not today or tomorrow, but someday — I have to believe the GOP will be forced to wise up and toss this hot potato back into the pot. They are whistling past the political graveyard now because Trump’s base still has the back of the loyal, but there are not enough voters in that base to make a winning national coalition. As these treacherous stories about the former president continue to pile up, that loyalty may come only to be worth the price of a bus ticket home.
The presence of police officers at Pride is completely antithetical to its origins as an anti-police protest. Police officers should have absolutely no role in the modern-day queer and trans liberation movement and any parades, marches or events celebrating the lives of LGBTQ people. In fact, many of the first events resembling current-day Pride parades were born out of community responses to police violence in New York City, San Francisco and other cities across the country. At best, including police officers in Pride events is disrespectful toward LGBTQ people, living and passed, who have experienced police brutality. And at worst, police presence at Pride actively endangers the lives of LGBTQ people, especially Black and Indigenous LGBTQ people, who are here today.
The Violent History of Police Attacks on Pride
Police officers across the country have historically perpetrated horrible acts of physical, sexual and verbal violence against LGBTQ people. Community resistance to this police brutality, particularly by Black trans women and other LGBTQ people of color, birthed the modern-day queer and trans liberation movement. The June 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City and the Compton’s Cafeteria riot in August 1966 in San Francisco are two prominent examples of LGBTQ people, particularly Black trans women and other trans women of color, fighting back against homophobic, transphobic and racist attacks by police. While there had been many other public actions, demonstrations and protests by LGBTQ people throughout the 1960s, the events at Stonewall and Compton’s Cafeteria more directly served as the launching points for Pride marches and the queer and trans liberation movement in New York City, San Francisco and other U.S. cities.
Unfortunately, police brutality against the LGBTQ community has not stopped, and police officers continue to harass and endanger LGBTQ people, even at Pride and other community events. In 2017, more than a dozen police officers attacked LGBTQ activists of color who were peacefully protesting at a Pride event in Columbus, Ohio. Members of Black Queer Intersectionality Columbus (BQIC), a group of Black LGBTQ community organizers, planned to silently block the parade for seven minutes to “protest the recent acquittal of the police officer who killed Philando Castile” and to “raise awareness about the violence against and erasure of Black and brown queer and trans people.” Less than 45 seconds into their silent protest, police officers brutally attacked the protestors.
A similar incident occurred at San Francisco Pride in 2019, when a small group of protesters planned to delay Pride for 50 minutes to “commemorate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall” and “to honor and continue the legacy of our militant trans and queer ancestors, who fought, loved, and rioted to make room for our existence today.” The protesters handed out flyers with their demands, one of which called for no police participation in Pride. The police officers present responded violently, using excessive force against several protesters. They also broke the cane of a disabled trans protester and intentionally misgendered them multiple times.
Police officers’ attacks on LGBTQ people are rarely grounded in legitimate concerns of “public safety.” Instead, they are deeply rooted in homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism and other systems of oppression. As demonstrated by the incidents above, it’s clear that the police targeted the protesters for multiple reasons: their gender and sexuality, their race and their anti-police politics. LGBTQ people of color with anti-police and abolitionist politics, particularly Black LGBTQ people, are seen as “dangerous” to the state. Police officers treat them as such, and respond with physical violence, as well as homophobic, transphobic and racist verbal harassment. For LGBTQ people of color who survive these attacks, they are often left with trauma from both the individual police officers who harmed them and the ramifications of the prison-industrial complex more broadly.
Banning Police and Reclaiming Pride
Several cities across the country have banned police officers from participating in some capacity in Pride parades, marches, festivals and other events. The specific actions vary from city to city, but there is a clear nationwide movement to limit and eliminate police presence at Pride. While these decisions might be recent, the call to action to remove police officers from community spaces has been led by LGBTQ people of color for decades. And considering the origins of Pride, keeping police out of community spaces has been central to the queer and trans liberation movement from the start.
In 2018, police were banned in some capacity from several Pride parades around the country. In Minneapolis, Minnesota; Madison, Wisconsin; and Durham, North Carolina, police officers were banned from marching in Pride parades while in uniform. The organizers of Capital Pride in Washington, D.C. also banned uniformed police officers from marching in Pride in 2018, and reiterated the ban in 2021. As required by the D.C. city government, the police department will have “jurisdiction to close and clear the streets,” but any needed security will be hired through a private company.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, San Diego, California; Charlotte, North Carolina; Portland, Oregon; and Indianapolis, Indiana, all took actions in 2020 to reduce police presence at their future Pride events. The organizers of San Diego Pride released a four-part plan to limit police presence, which included removing parade contingents and festival booths for law enforcement agencies. Similar to San Diego, the organizers of Charlotte Pride in North Carolina also released a four-part plan to limit police presence and power in order to support Black LGBTQ people and other LGBTQ people of color. The plan demands that the city “make less visible the number of uniformed and armed law enforcement officers” they are required to have for security, and encourages the city “to redirect police funding into investments in community-based … initiatives that will uplift Black and Brown people, low-income people, and other marginalized communities.”
In Portland, Pride organizers had asked police officers to not march in uniform in 2017, but after witnessing “the ever-increasing use of violence against our citizens,” organizers have now banned uniformed and armed police officers from marching in the parade and participating in the festival beginning in 2021. And in Indianapolis, Indy Pride “will no longer contract with or utilize police departments for security … unless necessary for road closures.” Pride organizers in each of these cities demonstrate how a variety of tactics can be used to limit or eliminate police presence at Pride events. Beyond this, they also emphasize the need to invest resources to better the livelihoods of the most marginalized people in the LGBTQ community, and show that this liberatory work is indeed possible.
Unfortunately, some of the decisions to ban police officers from Pride were made as direct responses to incidents of police violence. In 2020, the organizers of San Francisco Pride banned uniformed police officers from marching in the parade after the above-mentioned police attacks on protesters at Pride in 2019. The board of San Francisco Pride also worked to have the charges dropped against the protesters. In New York City, the organizers of Pride decided to ban uniformed police officers from marching in the parade from 2021 until at least 2025. Community members in New York City had been demanding that police be removed from Pride for years, but the call to action wasn’t taken seriously by the organizers of Pride until an incident of police violence at the 2019 Queer Liberation March. As the nationwide movement to limit police presence at Pride continues, cities should choose to be more proactive in their approach to avoid further harm to LGBTQ people and communities, and commit to fully removing police officers in all capacities from these spaces.
Honoring the Origins of Pride
As cities continue to debate whether or how to limit or eliminate police presence at their Pride events later this month and in the years to come, we must continue to advocate for community-based solutions that center the most marginalized LGBTQ people. Continuing to organize for the removal of police officers from all LGBTQ spaces, as well as the ultimate abolition of the police and the prison-industrial complex, is one of the most important actions we can take to honor the history of the queer and trans liberation movement. Anti-police and abolitionist politics must be centered in all efforts to achieve queer and trans liberation, because the liberation of LGBTQ people is inherently intertwined with the destruction of all systems of oppression.
Resisting police presence at Pride brings us one step closer to achieving that liberation.
I am a first-generation American. My Jewish parents fled Germany as the horrors of the Holocaust were unfolding. They left behind family who perished in camps and were killed as they fled from their homes while being chased and shot at by Nazis.
My great-grandfather, grandfather and father had a thriving butcher business in Frankfurt. They lived in the apartment building next to the butcher shop. My father always said he barely realized he was Jewish until Hitler arrived. It was always Deutschland über alles.
My mother’s family were wheat traders in Wetzlar. After the rise of Hitler, my mother fled Germany first so that she could learn the language in her new country and make enough money to bring over her parents and brother. They came to the U.S. without much money and like many, had to build a life from the bottom up.
Once the war was over, Germany gave my father reparations for the loss of his business as well as for the crime of persecution. He received a monthly check until his death at the age of 91. Both of my parents were welcomed back by the German government and told they could get their passports and citizenship returned.
Those born to Holocaust survivors who can prove that their father was forced from his homeland between the years 1933-1945 have the right to become German citizens along with all of their children, grandchildren and all future progeny forever. Last year, my children, grandchildren and I became German citizens, and were given European passports.
As I think about my own family and its history, I wonder why the 750,000 Palestinians forced from their homes and land in 1948 when Israel was founded are not entitled to the same treatment my family received after WWII ended. But the war on Palestinians was never over. Instead, Israel continues to this day its policy of ethnic cleansing, as evidenced by the current expulsions in Sheikh Jarrah and other parts of East Jerusalem.
B’Tselem, a human rights organization in Israel, and Human Rights Watch have documented and denounced the continuing maltreatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government and the settler movement, including the confiscation of Palestinians’ lands and houses; the restrictions on movement; the limitations on rights of free speech and assembly; the denial of building permits; the denial of many basic civil rights and the terrorizing by Jewish settler extremists backed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Human Rights Watch has concluded that conduct toward the Palestinians amounts to persecution and apartheid, which are crimes against humanity under international law.
We recently witnessed the brutal bombing of Gaza, where 2 million Palestinians have been strangled by a 14-year blockade. Using the most sophisticated weaponry made in the United States, the IDF has targeted civilian population centers, hitting 18 hospitals and clinics, apartment buildings and killing scores of children and other innocent bystanders.
I ask myself: How is it possible that the victims of the Holocaust and their progeny can so brutally victimize another people on racial grounds? I ask myself why Palestinians don’t have the same rights to reparations and return afforded to my family after Germany accepted responsibility for their crimes. Shouldn’t Palestinians be entitled to reparations and the right of return? Shouldn’t they have the same rights to self-determination that Israel itself claims?
Palestinian refugees’ right to return to the homes from which they were displaced is well-established in international law. The first source of support is UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of December 1948, in which the UN General Assembly, “Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the governments or authorities responsible.”
It is somewhat ironic that thousands of Jews in Israel are getting reparations and passports from Germany because of expulsion, loss of property and persecution, yet Israel will not allow Palestinians to return to a land from which they were expelled.
I simply cannot reconcile these profound contradictions that obviously preclude any possibility for peace in the region.
I am deeply ashamed and angry that these acts are committed in the name of the Jewish people and that my government provides the money and arms to support these Israeli crimes.
The recent focus on the rising number of Central American asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border could have one positive result: it creates an opening that activists can use to promote a progressive foreign and domestic agenda.
The two parties are split over how to slow the current rise in migration. Republicans favor the sort of harsh measures that the Trump administration inflicted on migrants; centrist Democrats also support deterrence, but they propose moderating it slightly and spending a few billion dollars to address Central American migration’s root causes. Vice President Kamala Harris’s statements during her June 7-8 trip to Guatemala and Mexico were typical. “Do not come,” she warned potential migrants from Guatemala, while proposing U.S. aid for an anti-corruption task force and more training for the Guatemalan police.
These approaches have never worked.
Deterrence has regularly failed to stop recurring spikes in Central American migration. President Obama’s “kids in cages,” the Trump administration’s family separations, and the current use of Title 42 of the health code to exclude border crossers have all been equally unsuccessful. As for the Biden administration’s plan to help Central Americans with $1 billion in aid each year, this is basically an expansion of Obama-era policies that did nothing to change migration patterns, and may actually have made conditions worse in the countries.
Progressives don’t share the politicians’ obsession with reducing the number of Central American asylum seekers, but a progressive agenda would in fact do exactly that.
Creating “Bad Governance”
Mainstream analysts generally understand that most Central American asylum seekers don’t want to come to the United States, that they would be happy to stay home if they could. They’re being driven out of their own countries by forces beyond their control: corrupt and repressive governments, pervasive violence and major disruptions of regional climate.
What the analysts usually overlook is the role of U.S. policies in creating these conditions.
Honduras is a good example. U.S. prosecutors say its current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, has accepted more than a million dollars in bribes from drug cartels, including the notorious “El Chapo.” Hernández’s own brother is now serving a life sentence in the United States for narcotrafficking and associated crimes. Honduras has become, in effect, a “narco state.”
But the U.S. government has never brought charges against the Honduran president. On the contrary: Successive U.S. administrations enabled his rise to power and have helped him stay in office. The Obama White House gave de facto support to the 2009 coup that brought Hernández’s faction of Honduras’s National Party to power, while the Trump administration backed his unconstitutional and probably fraudulent reelection in 2017.
There’s nothing new in this. The United States has played kingmaker in Central America for more than a century, with methods ranging from the “gunboat diplomacy” of the early years to the coups, massacres and death squads of the 1980s, and the somewhat more subtle methods of control used now. “Bad governance” in Central America is largely the result of interventionist policies in the United States.
Fueling the Violence
Victims of violence become reluctant to involve the police; they may be linked to the perpetrators, and sometimes are the perpetrators themselves. This adds to the high level of violence in much of Central America — a level which is also largely the result of U.S. policies.
The U.S. government’s “war on drugs,” now 50 years old, has done little to stop narcotrafficking from Latin America. Instead, it has spread much of the trade, along with its associated violence, from the Andean countries to Mexico and Central America. Homicide rates rose in El Salvador and Honduras as the drug war extended into those countries. In 2012, Honduras had the world’s highest murder rate; El Salvador’s rate was even higher three years later.
But violence like this would be impossible without weapons. Lax U.S. gun laws make it relatively easy for straw buyers to purchase powerful firearms here and send them across the southwestern border. An estimated 200,000 U.S.-manufactured guns flow into Mexico each year in what author Ioan Grillo calls an “iron river.” Many end up in Central America; nearly half the firearms recovered by Honduran and Salvadoran police from 2014 to 2016 originated in the United States.
As if this wasn’t enough, Central Americans now also face the effects of climate change, projected to “displace up to 3.9 million people across Mexico and Central America by 2050,” according to a report published this April by a coalition of university-based human rights groups.
“As one of the world’s greatest emitters of greenhouse gases, the United States has disproportionately contributed to the world’s climate crisis,” the authors note.
This crisis is already driving migration from the region. It’s likely to have caused or exacerbated the two hurricanes that devastated the region last fall, and it’s a major factor in droughts and crop failures that have led to famine-like conditions in Guatemala. As of March, Guatemalans accounted for the largest number of unaccompanied children encountered by the U.S. Border Patrol.
Starting the Conversation
A progressive program would address all these push factors by rejecting U.S. interventionism, by ending the drug war, by properly regulating U.S. firearm sales, and by implementing the Green New Deal. People in both Central America and the United States would benefit — Central Americans by being free to stay home and people here by no longer having to pay for foreign interventions and no longer losing their loved ones to the domestic drug war, to the proliferation of weapons, and to the weather disasters created by climate change.
Many people are already working on these issues. Antiwar groups have protested U.S. interventions for decades; some, like CODEPINK, include a focus on Latin America. A broad range of organizations call for ending the drug war, while Congress continues to consider legislation that would slow gun smuggling by requiring universal background checks and restricting the sale of “ghost guns.” Fighting climate change is a major priority for progressive politicians as well as grassroots activists.
But the public is generally unaware of the connection between these issues and migration patterns.
This isn’t to say that progressives should view their program as primarily an answer to the supposed “border crisis.” After all, there’s no reason to fear migration: The United States has a smaller share of the foreign-born than many other wealthy nations, and undocumented immigrants — the subject of so much attention from the right wing — account for just 3 percent of the country’s inhabitants. But the occasional spikes in border crossings give progressives an opportunity to go on the offensive, to describe the ways that their program would improve the lives of working people both at home and abroad.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) provided an example when she was asked about immigration in March. “It’s not a border crisis,” Ocasio-Cortez told viewers in an Instagram Live session. “It’s an imperialism crisis. It’s a climate crisis. It’s a trade crisis.” The “solutions need to be rooted in foreign policy, because our interventionist history in foreign policy and history over decades of destabilizing regions drive people to migrate …. But people don’t want to have this conversation.”
Ocasio-Cortez raised the point again on June 7 in response to Vice President Harris’s remarks in Guatemala: “We can’t help set someone’s house on fire and then blame them for fleeing,” she wrote. Acknowledging the U.S.’s role in the past would “help us change US foreign policy, trade policy, climate policy, & carceral border policy to address causes of mass displacement & migration.”
Here we go again. Following in the footsteps of states like Georgia, Florida, and Arizona, North Carolina is moving full speed ahead on legislation deceptively entitled the “Election Integrity Act.” Like similarly titled bills in those other states, it is designed to make it harder to vote, particularly for voters of color. The measure, S.B. 326, was approved by the state senate’s Redistricting and Elections Committee on Wednesday. It’s now heading towards a vote by the full state senate and is expected to be considered by the house as early as next week.
It is part of a nationwide, GOP-led backlash to robust turnout by Black, brown, and Indigenous voters in 2020. Like similar bills, North Carolina’s targets voting by mail, which some 1 million North Carolinians relied on to cast their ballots in 2020. S.B. 326 would make this harder by reducing the time to request and return an absentee ballot. Had its provisions been in place last year, tens of thousands of applications and ballots would have been rejected.
North Carolina voters, especially voters of color, have long been targets of legislative voter suppression. I stood with them as counsel in a successful challenge to a massive voter suppression law that a federal appeals court concluded targeted African Americans with “almost surgical precision” in 2016. Voter advocates are not taking this latest assault sitting down either, packing the state senate hearing room to give testimony on S.B. 326.
Unfortunately, many were unable to testify, as the committee waited until 10 minutes before adjournment to bring up this bill. But several advocates were able to speak, including Desmera Gatewood of Democracy North Carolina, who called out the Jim Crow underpinnings of the bill’s “election integrity” frame.
“As a Black person, I’m probably the most qualified to speak to integrity of the ballot process,” she said, pointing to the unending stream of historic and recent barriers directed at voters of color in North Carolina, and calling on lawmakers to abide by the 15th Amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote not be abridged due to race.
But it’s clear that this is exactly what would happen, as S.B. 326 would constrict the mail voting process in North Carolina by reducing the time to request and return an absentee ballot in a way that disproportionately harms voters of color.
Under existing law in place for more than a decade, voters in North Carolina can request an absentee ballot until one week before Election Day. The bill would move that deadline from 7 days before Election Day to 14 days, or two weeks, before Election Day. Because interest increases closer to an election, many voters tend to request ballots in the week eliminated by this bill.
S.B. 326 bill also shortens the window to return a ballot by removing a safeguard allowing absentee ballots to count if they are postmarked by Election Day and received within 3 days after. This grace period — which has been in place since 2009 — means that voters aren’t punished for postal delays beyond their control. S.B. 326 would require all ballots to be received by the election authority by 5 p.m. on Election Day, regardless of when the voter mails it. Voters who complete and get their ballots in the mail by Election Day should have their ballots count just like other voters.
One recent poll found that a majority of North Carolina voters oppose this change. It is important to note that the existing grace period doesn’t hinder the vote count. Election results are not finalized in North Carolina on election night but during the statewide county canvass 10 days later. State election data shows that, excluding military and overseas voters, in 2020, 13,654 ballots were postmarked by Election Day and received within 3 days after. Those ballots would be rejected under this bill.
One recent study by Western Carolina University found that had the request and return restrictions in S.B. 326 been in place in 2020, 31,680 ballots in North Carolina would have been rejected. Had the proposed provisions been in place in 2016, almost 24,000 ballots would have been rejected. The study also found that the rejected ballots would have been disproportionately from African American voters, younger voters, and registered unaffiliated voters, who were all more likely to request ballots during the final week removed by S.B. 326 and more likely to have a ballot that postmarked by Election Day that was received after Election Day.
Worse, the bill contains no funding to educate voters about these changes — changes that are likely to cause confusion among voters accustomed to requesting ballots a week before Election Day and having until Election Day to get them back in the mail. Lawmakers previously saw fit to allocate over $2 million to educate voters about important voting changes.
Without any state funding at all, the burden will then fall to local election authorities, who — outrageously — would also be prohibited by S.B. 326’s provisions from receiving any private funds to help get the voters the information they need.
Wednesday’s committee vote takes this bill closer to approval. Instead of passing a misguided “Election Integrity Act,” North Carolina lawmakers should instead recognize the integrity of the voters they represent and reject this burdensome measure.
Do you remember the first year of the Trump administration? A daunting question; among Trump’s many grim accomplishments was the way he made time elastic. So much has happened since, so it’s a bit like asking if you remember the first year of the Boxer Rebellion.
The mind deals with trauma in part by deleting or obscuring traumatic memories — the oft-maligned “memory hole,” which may help us more than we appreciate — and there have been so many shocks to our mental and spiritual underpinnings that it becomes impossible to keep track. Your mileage may vary, but for me, trying to recall the eon that was 2017 to 2018 is akin to peering into deep space with a dollar store flashlight.
It’s all there, though, if I concentrate. The Muslim ban, the mocking of sexual assault survivors, the public embrace of white supremacists, the separation of children from their parents at the southern border, the disdain shown to Puerto Rico after it was flattened by a hurricane, the scorn for the rule of law, the constant inescapable media presence like a cultural migraine that won’t abate, the attacks on students who survived school shootings, a trillion-dollar tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy, the singling out of individuals and groups as “enemies of the people,” the vivid racism expressed toward nations described by Trump as “shithole countries,” the coddling of violence at the rallies, the brazen broad-daylight corruption, the daily drumbeat of malicious and petty acts whose only purpose was to “own the libs”… an abridged accounting, and that was just the first year.
Donald Trump is out of office and deplatformed from social media, so he is a bit like the Deepwater Horizon of former presidents. The blowout has been capped, but the enormous mass of poison he spewed will be in the Gulf of Mexico forever.
Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic, captured the essence of what we were all trying to figure out back then: “What the hell is all this? Why?” Serwer’s masterpiece October 2018 article, “The Cruelty Is the Point,” crystallized the raw truth of the moment better than anyone has before or since, as far as I’m concerned:
Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright.
The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
I’d wager most who read the article when it came out said, “Oh, OK, right” afterward, and moved into the following years with something of a framework to operate from, a baseline context that made it all ever so slightly more manageable. It certainly had this effect on me. Why did Trump do that? Because it was cruel. Box checked.
Of course, there was also the money.
The dazzling graft of the Inaugural Committee, the rampant nepotism, the self-dealing that led to millions of tax dollars arriving in Trump’s bank accounts because he and his entire entourage stayed at his hotels wherever they went, and the endless frenzy of doom-swaddled fundraising aimed at a deliberately provoked and near-frantic base, all served a simple purpose: He was looting the Treasury, and his own supporters, to hose money onto the bonfire of his massive debt.
The havoc Trump promoted and the two-fisted cash grab that defined his administration were entirely symbiotic, and he hasn’t stopped just because he moved to New Jersey. The fundraising pattern in particular is altogether clear by now: Make an extravagant and entirely impossible promise or prediction (“Stop the steal,” “overthrow the election,” “Trump will be inaugurated on March 4,” etc.) and fundraise off it, and when it fails to come to pass, fundraise off that, too.
Trump has made millions playing the martyr to his base since November, and recently deployed a new version of the old trick. Several reports had him speaking recently with deep confidence about being “reinstated” as president come August. It does not matter that no mechanism exists to make this happen, absent a national conflagration that would make January 6 look like an episode of Barney the Dinosaur. A large portion of his base believe it, because he said it.
Make the claim and fundraise off it. When it fails to come to pass, fundraise off that (“See? See?! The deep state did it to us again! Trump needs your help to defeat this evil! We’re all in this together!!!”). In the immortal words of hippie Homer Simpson, “Lather, rinse and repeat. Always repeat.”
The seamless success of this pattern has not been lost on the wobbling Jell-O mold of Republican officeholders whose political existence has been digested by the Trump phenomenon they helped create.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene may seem like some wild-eyed flake with an obnoxious face mask and too much time on her hands, but don’t be fooled: Every one of her bizarre proclamations about Jewish-controlled space lasers or “false flag” school shootings, all her seemingly erratic behavior, is not merely the byproduct of a racist QAnon devotee from Georgia.
I’m confident Greene believes at least some of the stuff she spews, but by fundraising relentlessly off of it, she cleared more than $3 million in three months. By comparison, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez banked less than $800,000 in the same time frame. Batshit sells in the right marketplace, and the GOP base is buying hand over fist, because they know she is a devoted pilot fish to Trump’s hammerhead shark.
Perhaps a more egregious example is another to-the-knife Trump supporter, Rep. Matt Gaetz. In the throes of allegations that he raped teenage girls, Gaetz proclaimed he would run for president in 2024 if Trump does not. This elicited a mighty “Huh?!” from many, but Gaetz knows exactly what he was about: He pulled down about $1.8 million over the same three months as Greene by fundraising on his own self-proclaimed martyrdom and devotion to Trump. When the fundraising reports for quarter two come in next month, we’ll see how handsomely Trump’s base rewarded him for trolling the ’24 presidential race.
Some days ago, the wife of Rep. Mo Brooks — also a champion of all things Trump — was served a subpoena for her husband as part of Rep. Eric Swalwell’s allegation that he helped foment the 1/6 Capitol breach. Brooks’s wife got it because Brooks himself has been hiding from Swalwell’s process servers for weeks. Yesterday, Brooks transitioned the event into a fundraising email to the base titled, “They Came After My Wife.”
Lather, rinse and repeat. Always repeat.
The mystery of why so many Republicans have stapled themselves to Trump, even as they fear his antics may cost them a recapture of the senate in 2022, isn’t a mystery at all. Sure, they fear getting on the wrong side of Trump’s base, but they have also learned that playing to that base is the equivalent of having a bottomless ATM in the office closet.
Trump has created a near-frictionless fascist fundraising juggernaut that relies entirely on the greed of the Republican politicians he has captured, and the evangelical credulity of his closest supporters. Feed the base and the base will feed you, and you get to keep your job, too. Step out of line and you’re not only a political fistful of Thanos infinity dust, but the plug on the ATM is pulled forever. Rep. Liz Cheney is the rare exception; most of the rest got the gilded memo in triplicate, and will play along until the music stops. If having their offices sacked by Trump supporters did not dissuade them from this course, I imagine nothing can.
Remember this whenever you see a Republican rolling in the slime of conspiracy theory and abject racism with more alacrity than has been the norm. The GOP has found a new platform, the only plank Trump left them: Cruelty pays. It will all end badly, but for the foreseeable future, the madness is the method. “It’s a hustle,” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said on Wednesday. Indeed, and a damned effective one. “Owning the libs” and fleecing the base is the new Republican gold rush. It will be a wonder if the nation survives it.
The time-eating puppet show playing out between President Biden and Senate Republicans over the infrastructure bill has concluded its first phase. Each side played their roles well, if you’re into that sort of thing. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the West Virginia lawmaker leading the Senate GOP group in the negotiations, continued to hand Biden bag after bag of unworkable GOP “ideas,” while Biden held tight to the mantle of Bipartisan-Guy-in-Chief, even as he swatted down Capito’s nonsense suggestions one by one.
As impossible as it may sound, the next phase of this process promises to be even more maddening. “The breakdown did not close off the possibility of a bipartisan compromise entirely,” reportsThe New York Times, “and the White House signaled that the president would continue seeking one. He shifted his focus to a bipartisan group of centrist senators who have been working separately on an alternative, calling three of them personally to cheer on their efforts and encourage them to work with top White House officials to hammer out a deal.”
This “bipartisan group” currently includes six senators, among them Republicans Mitt Romney and Rob Portman. On the Democratic side sits… wait for it… Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two of the people who are currently the reason why we can’t have nice things like roads, bridges and voting. Somehow, we are expected to believe these two — with the help of Mitt the Human Weathervane and Portman, a stalwart ally of Mitch McConnell’s obstructionism for the last decade — are capable, or even interested, in pulling this rabbit out of a hat.
(Bang head here.)
A growing number of Democrats, both within and outside of the progressive caucuses in the House and Senate, have had about a bellyful of this elongated mess. CNN White House reporters Manu Raja and Lauren Fox spoke to multiple Democratic senators after a closed-door lunch on Tuesday. After Sinema announced her confidence that a deal could be struck before departing the meeting, several senators threw buckets of cold water on the idea that Republicans were interested in doing anything other than running out the clock to the August recess. Confidence in Manchin and Sinema specifically was not high.
“There is no way Manchin and Sinema are going to cut a deal that represents the view of the caucus,” said one Democratic senator who was not named in the CNN report. “A group of four or five people don’t get to carry 50 Democratic votes on their back,” said a second, also unnamed senator. “I’ve been ready to move on from bipartisanship for major priorities for the Biden administration for a while now,” said Mazie Hirono, voicing the opinion of many in the room.
All of this unfolded against the backdrop of ongoing Republican obstruction against popular Democratic legislation. The Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill aimed at addressing the gender wage gap, was successfully filibustered to death by Republicans on Tuesday. Not one of them voted for the Act.
“I think that’s [bipartisanship] coming to a screeching halt this month because the majority leader is starting with the so-called Paycheck Fairness bill late this afternoon,” said McConnell yesterday, “which is essentially a giveaway to the plaintiffs lawyers in America, a series of totally partisan bills designed to get no Republican support.”
There it is, right there, in flaming letters ten stories tall. This has been McConnell’s playbook since 2009. He makes promising noises before undercutting Democratic legislation, and then grandstands about how it’s the other side’s fault. The minority leader is the political version of a funnel spider: He leads his prey to the edge of his lair, and then bursts out of his hole to inject his poison before dragging his victim down into the dark so his children can feed.
McConnell pulled this exact same number on Joe Manchin just the other day. Manchin, who is resisting the voting-reform For the People Act, has voiced support for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. This was Manchin going out on a limb for the sake of his beloved bipartisanship, but McConnell chopped him down and made him look like a fool.
Why? Because for as long as McConnell is minority leader, there will be no legislation passed that aids President Biden politically if he can possibly help it. This includes an infrastructure bill, the filibuster, either voting bill and whatever else may be on the White House menu. Dude may as well be holding a sign, yet Manchin and his cohort blunder on toward the funnel hole like a clutch of juicy beetles that have lost their way.
The infrastructure bill can be passed in the Senate via reconciliation without a single Republican vote, and that appears to be the only way it will happen. All 50 Democratic senators along with Vice President Kamala Harris will have to vote in favor, so lashing Manchin and his people to the mast is the paramount priority. So long as this dithering caucus of Mitt, Rob, Joe and Kyrsten — along with the president — belabor the fiction of possible bipartisanship, however, Manchin and company will threaten to break ranks when voting time comes.
In every meaningful sense, what we have here is a hostage crisis, with Manchin as the lead hostage-taker. All these pieces of vital legislation, and the people they would serve, are the hostages. In this, Biden is squarely complicit with his drawn-out quest for something that has a snowball’s chance in hell of happening while McConnell sits in the minority leader’s chair. Only a hard turn toward the reconciliation process and a reckoning with Manchin and his crew have any real chance of resolving the infrastructure impasse.
It will likely be days before we see any sort of resolution; Biden has winged his way to Europe for the next eight days to try and repair the appalling damage done by the previous administration. For the time being, expect a lot of talk and no action. Alas, puppet shows aren’t only for children anymore.
Policing and militarism are a two-headed monster that protects and upholds the foundation upon which racial capitalism was built — exploitation of the lives of poor Black and Brown people.
Although much attention has been placed on recent expansions of police militarization, these threads have long been intertwined. For Black Americans, police have always acted as an occupying force within our communities. But during the 1960s, a decade of unprecedented Black radical resistance, the lines between police and military and national defense became even more blurred.
On December 8, 1969, the SWAT unit of the Los Angeles Police Department raided the Black Panther Party’s headquarters in Los Angeles, California. Four days prior, the Chicago Police Department had violently raided the home of and assassinated Fred Hampton, the chairman and leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, based out of my hometown of Chicago. It is in the legacy and practice of militarism that SWAT teams were created — as a means to decentralize and suppress Black resistance.
As a Black femme abolitionist and organizer from the west side of Chicago, I fight in the spirit of Fred “Baba” Hampton, in a movement that is built upon the community-based power around which the Panthers mobilized to combat militarism, colonialism and occupation.
The attack on the Black Panther headquarters in 1969 was one of the first publicly known uses of newly emerging SWAT teams, but they quickly spread. Throughout the past two decades, SWAT units have become more heavily armed and funded and used all too regularly as a tactic of instant response in predominantly Black cities, particularly in response to uprisings. The 1033 Program, created as a part of the 1977 National Defense Authorization Act, allows the Department of Defense to supply local authorities with its military-grade equipment. War weaponry, such as assault rifles, riot gear, grenade launchers and military tanks, is awarded to police departments and used to perpetuate harm against Black and Indigenous people putting their lives on the line to oppose colonization, white supremacy and policing.
The facts are simple: When masses of Black people mobilize, gangs of police move in, and terrorize.
Since the start of the 1033 Program, around 10,000 law enforcement agencies have received around $7.4 billion worth of equipment.
This equipment funds the type of raids that killed Breonna Taylor, it funds teargas being used against Black people in Kenosha and Minneapolis, it funds the batons the Chicago Police Department uses to beat youth in the streets, it funds the water cannons used at Backwater Bridge at Standing Rock. It funds the murder of millions at the hands of policing, war, militarism, colonialism and imperialism. It is a never-ending cycle of violence.
Given all of this, calls to defund police and end wars are bigger than just targeted demands; they are calls to invest in life, abundance and an abolitionist world in which we don’t depend on the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex or policing to sustain our communities.
This struggle is very personal to me. I am an abolitionist from a city that spends $4.8 million a day and about $2 billion a year on policing — and a city in which taxpayers spend about $38 million yearly to arm, aid in and fund apartheid, genocide and state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians.
Militarism is a strategy of using violence to keep people in positions of power in control and to maintain the racial, economic and other social hierarchies that uphold this power.
$4.8 million a day is the allowance police are given daily to uphold militarism in Chicago.
Divesting from education, mental health services, violence prevention that addresses the root causes, housing, and all other necessities of life keeps the racial, economic and social hierarchies in place that justify the supposed need for police.
This is why in this same city the yearly budget for mental health services is around $9.4 million — equal to less than two days of the police budget.
This is why the budget for substance abuse treatment is only 2.6 million — a half-day worth of police budget on any given day. And only $1.5 million is spent yearly in violence prevention — a proactive way to combat violence without the reactionary nature of police.
This is why in 2013, my elementary school and nearly 50 others — all of which were located on the predominantly Black South and West Sides of the city of Chicago — were closed down in one of the largest public school closures of United States history. The city claimed the closures were due to lack of funding, but four years later, the city proposed spending $95 million to build a police training academy in my neighborhood — where they previously closed schools that they supposedly could not afford to keep open.
It is why, as a 12-year-old in 2013, I went to community hearings begging then-mayor Rahm Emanuel to keep my elementary school open. It is why five years later, I joined #NoCopAcademy, a youth-led campaign against the city-proposed policy academy — and for a change in notion that community safety is directly tied to policing. And it is why, today, I am organizing around demands to defund police and to get the cops — who are being prioritized for funding above education — out of Chicago Public Schools.
It is why, as I joined other #NoCopAcademy organizers on the day of the vote over whether to build the police academy, I was beaten in the stairwells of city hall, while Mayor Lori Lightfoot awarded the Chicago Police Department with a new $95 million police school. The violence perpetrated against my being was accompanied by the violence of more resources being poured into state-sanctioned violence.
It is why my voice was ignored in 2013, and again in 2019 when the cop academy was approved. Now, as I scream Rekia Boyd’s name in the street, chant in her legacy and demand divestment from the institution which was responsible for her death, I am again ignored.
The 2022 fiscal budget under President Joe Biden requests $753 billion in national security funding. This is a 1.6 percent increase that includes $715 billion for the Department of Defense. In 2016, the military utilized about $610 billion. Just as national defense budgets continue to increase drastically year by year, local police department budgets continue to rise as wars are waged in poor Black communities via hyper-policing, surveillance and police torture.
Many of my closest comrades from the hood experience trauma from witnessing and experiencing police violence and torture. For nonwhite people — for people who live in hoods flooded by police and abandoned in every other way, and for those of us who watched our sisters and brothers be tortured and targeted by police on a daily basis — conversations about “defund,” “divest” and “abolish” are not new. They are demands, necessities, discussions we’ve been having in our communities for years, and even decades. And for Black Chicagoans, this is about our lives. This violence happens daily. We don’t need another video of Black trauma. We didn’t need to see George Floyd, or Rekia Boyd, or Adam Toledo, or Laquan McDonald or Breonna Taylor be murdered to know policing is violence. We didn’t need to see genocide, war and crisis unfold in Palestine, Yemen or Nigeria to know militarism is violence.
Police and the military operate under the same practices of militarism. Police move into external communities and occupy. Military forces move into external communities and occupy. The idea that Black and Brown communities need “law and order” and that these institutions implement it alongside safety is flawed. Safety for Black, Brown and Indigenous people doesn’t look like more police. It looks like access and abundance, because when you think about the safest place in the world and the places where you feel most safe, it is very likely that they are places with the most resources and the least police.
As campaigns to defund and divest from death and to fight for liberation continue, the struggle for an abolitionist world lives on through every chant at an action; every ancestor that shows us the way; every community relationship we build; and all the steps we take to become a global community connected in love, liberation and abundance.
As noted yesterday, West Virginia’s rock-in-the-road Sen. Joe Manchin is all but untouchable at the moment. Secure in his office until 2024, and with the threat of defection to the GOP ever present, he remains able to snarl vital legislation and filibuster reform/abolition without the building falling down on him.
Manchin’s next week or two won’t be the building falling, but he is about to hear from activists and religious leaders who have spent their lives at the ramparts fighting the long struggle for civil rights in the U.S. In a similar vein, the cork has popped on the progressive side of the House of Representatives, with patience for Manchin’s self-serving intransigence nearing a very loud end.
This morning, Manchin took a meeting with the heads of the National Urban League, the National Council of Negro Women, the NAACP, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The institutional memory of systemic racism within these groups is beyond profound, and the outcome of their conversation with Manchin regarding the civil rights laws he is blocking is of great interest.
“The goal of the meeting for us in the civil rights leadership is to establish and build the relationship,” Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, said on Monday night. “There was no particular item on the agenda, but we will have a conversation about our policy priorities and hopes to open up the dialogue so that we can, in fact, have the type of give-and-take opportunity to ensure that all Americans are supported.”
It appears Manchin emerged from this morning’s meeting unmoved by the arguments put before him. “Meeting between civil rights activists and Manchin over S1 didn’t change his mind,” reportsCNN’s Manu Raja. “‘I don’t think anybody changed positions on that,’ Manchin said, calling the conversation ‘constructive.’”
Progressive activists have long employed an “inside/out” strategy to exert political pressure: Meet with politicians inside their office, and let them hear the protesters on the streets outside that room. To that end, a few days after Manchin meets with those civil rights leaders, he will be the focus of a protest by the Rev. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign.
“Even if [Manchin] doesn’t change,” Barber toldThe Washington Post, “we have to bear witness to how his policies are hurting the democracy, are a form of political and legislative violence, and that he is standing more on the side of the corporate lobbyists rather than poor and low-wealth workers and people across this country.”
This will not be Manchin’s first encounter with Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign. After voicing his resistance to the $15 minimum wage back in February, Manchin met with Barber, who came away from the meeting deeply disappointed. “We’re not interested in compromise,” he told reporters at the time. “$15 is a compromise. What [Manchin] was suggesting would just further keep people in poverty.”
On Monday, Barber called Manchin’s stances on the voting bills and the filibuster “wrong, constitutionally inconsistent, historically inaccurate, morally indefensible, economically insane, and politically unacceptable.” It is an open question as to whether Barber’s planed June 15 march on Manchin will have any more effect than his February meeting did, but Barber is hardly alone in voicing his deep anger at the West Virginia Democrat. It’s getting awfully loud under the Capitol dome, and promises to get louder still.
“Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow,’” tweeted Rep. Mondaire Jones on Sunday, in reference to Manchin’s weekend op-ed.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused Manchin of supporting “voter suppression,” and progressive colleague Rep. Jamaal Bowman concurred. “Republicans have been ramming through voter suppression bills around the country along party lines,” Bowman said via Twitter. “Democrats can’t afford to condition protecting the right to vote on their cooperation.”
It’s also getting loud back in West Virginia. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), a muscular organization that is a power in that state, came out in favor of the voting legislation Manchin opposes. “It is wrong for these states to attack the basic rights of citizens to participate in our democracy,” said UMWA International President Cecil Roberts. “Congress should be doing everything possible to not just maintain, but expand voting access and create freer and fairer elections. If only one party is interested in doing that, then so be it.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has announced his intention to bring this legislation up for a vote during the week of June 24, no matter where Manchin may be on the matter. That’s two weeks from today, two weeks to see if a man who says “no” like a record on repeat can be made to see the light. It would probably be helpful if the president of the United States did some more lobbying of his own, too. I’m just sayin’.
Let me see if I have this straight: The very right to vote is being fed into a meat grinder in several of the GOP-controlled states Donald Trump lost, or almost lost, in 2020. For example, it is now illegal in Georgia to bring water and snacks to people forced to wait hours in line to vote, said lines existing thanks to several other new anti-voter rules that have also been enacted… but Congress can’t pass a voter protections bill.
There is an ongoing political crisis in this country over employment, one that has reached such a pitch that Republican governors are preparing to slash unemployment aid to force people back into low-paying and/or dangerous jobs… but Congress can’t pass an infrastructure bill and help folks get to work putting this crumbling country back together again.
Six months and one day ago, a raging army of Trump voters steamrolled law enforcement and sacked the U.S. Capitol building seeking to disrupt the certification of the November election. Several in the crowd were vocal about their desire to murder House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence. People died, scores were injured, and human feces got smeared on the walls. Afterward, many of the attackers claimed they had been given permission to act by Trump, who whipped them into a frenzy before turning them loose on the city… but Congress can’t look into the root causes of that mayhem, though it happened in their offices, hallways and voting chambers.
The Democratic Party holds majority control in the House and Senate by a cat’s slim whisker at present, but they hold it nonetheless. The reason these immediately pressing crises remain unresolved is because Republicans have use of the filibuster, which was never intended to be a bedrock rule of Senate procedure. In fact, the filibuster was born in 1805 when Aaron Burr re-wrote the rules of the Senate without any oversight and accidentally created it. Cloture did not come to exist until 1917, and the filibuster itself wasn’t actually used until 1837.
In short, the filibuster rules were not handed down by the God of Parliamentary Procedure and chiseled onto stone tablets. There is nothing intrinsic about the filibuster that lends it special or protected status. Quite the opposite, in fact; the main use of the procedure for decades was to stymie civil rights laws and protect Jim Crow in the South. Anything so filthy and wrong should be stuffed into a sack and buried on a moonless night.
Yet here we sit, watching like helpless puppies as Mitch McConnell and his disciplined GOP minority drop 60-vote roadblocks in front of virtually every piece of legislation proposed by the Biden administration and the majority. They’re not even against all of the stuff they’re thwarting; the point is not progress, but to hobble the administration so they can run on (and fundraise off) those failed endeavors in 2022. The Republican Party appears to have no agenda beyond whatever Trump is on about this week. They are seeking to run out the clock, period.
Why is this tolerated? Because Joe Manchin, Democratic senator, wants it this way. He is not alone in his devotion to the filibuster rule — Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Jon Tester of Montana and a smattering of other right-leaning Democrats share his profoundly misplaced zeal for it — but Manchin has placed himself foursquare in the middle of the debate, and he ain’t moving.
“I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” Manchin wrote in a goopy weekend op-ed for the Charleston Gazette-Mail. “For as long as I have the privilege of being your U.S. senator, I will fight to represent the people of West Virginia, to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love.”
For the record, Manchin also used this op-ed to announce his opposition to the proposed voting rights bill. His reason? Republicans don’t like it enough.
Manchin’s apparently bottomless desire to screw his own party is so monumental, in fact, that even the folks at Fox News felt compelled to call him out. “The question I have is whether or not you’re doing it exactly the wrong way,” pressedFox anchor Chris Wallace on Sunday. “If you were to keep the idea that maybe you would vote to kill the filibuster, wouldn’t that give Republicans an incentive to actually negotiate because old Joe Manchin is out there and who knows what he’s going to do? By taking it off the table, haven’t you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists?”
A sound argument, to which Manchin could only reply with some version of, “Barg barg barg barg brave Republicans barg barg barg good signs barg barg Republican friends barg barg give us time.” That’s the thing, Sunny Joe: There is no time. We are pinwheeling toward the massive August recess, and by the time Congress returns, all they will be thinking about is next year’s elections. This is where the rubber meets the road, right here and now, and possibly for the last time. That’s why they’re running out the clock.
For his part, Trump thinks Manchin is doing the Lord’s work, and went out of his way to say so. “It’s a very important thing,” the former president toldFox Business this morning. “He’s doing the right thing, and it’s a very important thing.” Of course, Trump was all over McConnell to do away with the filibuster back when Republicans held the majority, but consistency has not been a GOP strong suit for a while now. Besides, the rest of that interview involved Trump howling about “phony lockboxes” on Facebook that accounted for “96 percent Biden votes.” Maybe not so much for listening to that guy anymore, under any circumstances, please?
This situation has been a ticking time bomb since the returns came in last November and revealed the Democratic Senate majority to be exactly as tall as Vice President Kamala Harris. Progressives in the House are on the verge of a full-scale flip-out, but at present there seems to be no omnibus solution to the Manchin dilemma.
Someone might ask Chuck Schumer what business an obstructionist right-wing Democrat from a sparsely populated coal state has chairing the Energy Committee, but punish Manchin too severely and he could switch parties. He would pay no price for this — Trump won West Virginia by pretty much all the points, and the GOP would erect statues in honor of him — and McConnell would retain majority control, thus giving vital chairmanships back to luminaries like Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley. I believe we all had about a budget of that bad noise the last time around.
Does Joe Biden have enough Lyndon Johnson in him to get in there and lay about with a rhetorical 2×4 until Manchin sees the error of his ways? Because that seems to be the only way out of this impasse short of a meteor strike or an attack by Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster. Biden has nothing of substance to threaten Manchin with, and Manchin knows full well he is sitting on an ace-high straight. If the senior senator from West Virginia does not fold, this promises to be another futile, infuriating summer.
All too often, the issue of plastic pollution is reduced to plastic straw bans led by clipboard-carrying college students, VSCO girls, and bracelets made with a promise of saving turtles. It conjures images of a wad of plastic grocery bags or perhaps a garbage island floating in the middle of the ocean somewhere.
The problem is that plastic pollution isn’t just an issue of waste accumulation — plastics are also manufactured and often incinerated in communities where poor people and people of color are rarely consulted or alerted to the risks. Our communities are living this pollution every day and understand the connections between air, water, land, ocean, and human health in very personal and concrete ways.
The Clean Air Task Force estimates that 1.8 million Latinx people in the U.S. live within half a mile of an oil and gas facility, increasing odds of preterm birth and respiratory illness. The production of plastic feedstocks and the raw fossil fuels used to make most plastics affect communities’ immune, reproductive, developmental, and respiratory systems, starting right outside factory fence lines. It is no surprise that our communities have been hit the hardest by COVID-19, as our immune systems are already compromised. Plastic pollution violates our human right to breathe without fear.
Plastic also fuels the climate crisis and contributes to climate change at every step of its life cycle, from extraction to refinement, manufacture, transportation, disposal, and waste. If plastic production and use grow as currently planned, emissions from plastic production could reach 1.34 gigatons per year by 2030, equivalent to the emissions released by more than 295 new 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants. Ninety-nine percent of plastic is derived from fossil fuels, and the direct impact its production has in our communities is the real global crisis. Studies have shown how rampant the plastic crisis is, finding microplastics in deep sea animals, in fish, in our bodies, and even in rain.
We stand up for solutions that will protect our communities and families from toxins in our air, water, and soil and will continue to fight for these solutions because justice demands it. But we often have no idea what is being built in our communities until it’s too late because of relaxed notice requirements for plastics facilities. Even if we make it to the public meeting, the language barriers are clear. We have watched children translating technical information while their parents lean over to ask, “Que dijo?” Places like California that are reducing plastics through legislation on producer and consumer responsibility still have two incinerators operating in Latinx communities. Facilities in communities of color have almost twice the rate of toxic release incidents than those in predominantly white neighborhoods.
Fortunately, the level of public awareness and political will to address these issues is starting to shift toward action. At least a dozen states are now considering plastic producer responsibility laws, forcing plastic makers to plan for the full plastics lifecycle before they put one bottle, bag, or spoon to the mold. Some of those states are including language justice requirements for any new or increased production so that Spanish-speaking communities like ours can have a say. And people are waking up to simple alternatives to single-use plastics, and the cultural significance of reuse that Indigenous and Latinx communities were practicing long before it was a trend.
Many local solutions to the plastics problem are bubbling up to the national level. Recently, California Rep. Alan Lowenthal and Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley re-introduced the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act (BFFPPA) of 2021 (HR2238/S984) to tackle the crisis of plastic pollution from beginning to end.
The legislation builds on state laws that reduce one-time plastic use, forces large plastic producers to take responsibility for post-consumer plastic waste, requires a pause on new and expanded industrial facilities including plastic production, chemical recycling, and incineration facilities, and institutes a nationwide bottle bill. Dozens of states such as California, Washington, Oregon, and New York have legislation for producer responsibility moving through their legislatures. New Orleans unanimously passed a resolution that opposed the proposed Formosa Plastics megaplant in St. James Parish and further petrochemical buildout in Cancer Alley. There are over 20 states — including Vermont, Massachusetts, and Montana — that have active bottle bills.
The BFFPPA essentially turns off the tap on expanded industrial facilities until the EPA can update or create new environmental and health regulations. It also requires any new permits to undergo environmental justice reviews and to deliver them to local communities early in the process. The bill would ensure that publications are translated and that live interpretation is provided at hearings. We can ensure that our communities know what is happening locally through written and oral communication that they can understand, in their native languages.
States, the federal government, and consumers need to hold companies accountable by incentivizing them to innovate, demanding that they use less packaging, consider reusable or refillable options, and take the plastic lifecycle into account in purchasing. Initiatives that appear across the state and federal efforts include:
Incentivising shower gel manufacturers to offer refills or reusable options and to manage any waste they produce with a goal of recycling at least 65% by 2027.
Starting as early as 2023, requiring hotels and motels to have bulk stations for shampoo and conditioner instead of the mini shampoo, soap, and lotion containers.
Requiring restaurants and food vendors to only give out compostable utensils and plastic straws upon request.
The plastic industry lobby, backed by the fossil fuels industry, is already pushing back on these state and national efforts. We need to hold accountable those who profit the most from pollution and these bills across the nation and in Washington, D.C., are a great start. The truth is that plastic isn’t cheap. Its cost is externalized to those at the fence lines of extraction, production, and waste.
It’s time to address the plastic pollution crisis at the national level. Thousands of GreenLatinos and members of the global Break Free From Plastics movement are calling on Congress to break our society’s addiction to plastic. Our Latinx communities have long-standing practices that demonstrate to society ways to live without plastics. We must strive to end the harm that plastics are having on our health, our lives, our climate and our culture.
Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by national media.
Under the watchful eyes of gun towers above us, prisoners are ushered through the turnstile to enter the yard and then some of us are called over to receive a pat search. The guards are eager to use this method, which had only been reinstated a few hours earlier. No more social distancing; guards stood merely feet from each other while running their gloved hands down prisoners’ bodies. They refused to change gloves before groping their next victim.
“I couldn’t believe we were getting searched. How can this line up with CDC guidelines? I mean, [the Department of Corrections (DOC)] has continued to weaponize those guidelines against us when they wanna bully prisoners, and now when those guidelines don’t serve their interest, they throw them out the window,” said prisoner Robert Entel. “Honestly, it’s just another clear demonstration [that the] DOC doesn’t care about us in the least. To know these guards will touch me before my family, it’s annoying, especially since it was a guard that gave me COVID in December.”
The practice of searching prisoners and their cells in Monroe Correctional Complex (MCC) was suspended in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the risk of spreading the virus from prison guards to prisoners. However, even though many prisoners and guards have yet to be fully vaccinated (with a high rate of refusal among guards), the Washington Department of Corrections (WDOC) has decided to prioritize reinstating searches of prisoners and their living spaces, regardless of the risk to their health.
Prisoners were first informed of the return of these invasive practices through a memo released on April 27, 2021, by WDOC Assistant Secretary of Prisons Division Robert Herzog. The memo claimed that, “due to significant increases in the discovery of intoxicated individuals, alcohol (pruno), drugs and weapons … the [DOC] will resume routine searches effective immediately.”
Making the reinstatement of searches immediate, the WDOC was able to skirt feedback from legislators, prisoners and their loved ones, which had delayed the reinstatement they attempted back in November 2020. At that time, the WDOC claimed the reinstatement was due to an uptick in “dirty” urinalysis tests — suggesting the use of drugs in the prison was on the rise. The administration said searches must resume to protect the “safety and security” of the prison and those held within it. But what about the safety of the human lives of those who reside behind prison walls? Is our health and safety secondary to their false sense of “security?”
Additionally, for our “security,” all contact visits and the majority of community-sponsored programs have been canceled since March 2020. While WDOC has reinstated searches, it’s holding firm in “protecting” prisoners by continuing to forbid all contact visits with loved ones and the majority of educational and betterment programs. These are things that matter most to prisoners’ health and well-being, but they are off the table.
The first contact for prisoners won’t come from the warm embrace of our loved ones at visits, but from the cold gloved hands of our oppressors — prison guards.
Many of us struggle with the fact that our safety is taking a backseat — again — to this false sense of security, something that has continued to happen over and over during the pandemic. One prisoner, who doesn’t want to be named for fear of retaliation, said, “Why should my well-being be put at risk because prison guards chose to bring drugs and contraband into the prison? I am tired of having my life put in danger because of their poor choices.” Many prisoners share his concerns.
From the very start of the pandemic, the WDOC has continued to put prisoners’ safety on a back burner. Guards had to be mandated by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to wear masks, a mandate that guards and their unions fought every step of the way. Even worse, prisoners were not issued masks until dozens of complaints were filed and some of the incarcerated people had already tested positive for the virus. Social distancing was foregone while prisoners were doubled and tripled up in tiny cells, which is still happening today across the state. The reinstatement of searches is a clear display that our health and safety isn’t a top priority to the WDOC.
The April 2021 memo went on to claim, “[T]he Department is committed to minimizing the chances of COVID-19 transmission,” yet, WDOC disregards important CDC guidelines related to keeping people safe from transmission of the virus. Their false claim proved to be far from the truth. Prisoner Jaarso Abdi was exiting the prison yard and returning to his living unit when he was instructed by guards conducting pat searches to stand for search. He followed the directive but was surprised when he was asked to perform a task that would put his safety at high risk. “The guard told me to turn around, face him, pull down my mask, and say ‘aah.’ I was shocked … but what could I say? If I didn’t follow what he said, I would probably get taken to solitary confinement.”
Some prisoners have even said they plan to skip meals and the yard, in an effort to dodge getting pat- or strip-searched. One told me, “It’s not that I have anything to hide, I just wanna be safe. I already got the virus once because of their neglect; I don’t want it again. Last time I was forced to spend weeks in solitary, because they [guards] got me sick, now they want to put me at risk again. Meals and yard aren’t that important; I can live on Top Ramen if I have to.”
Prisoners are worried that reinstated searches will allow guards to spread COVID-19 throughout the prison — again. It would follow old, established patterns that when guards are able to wield a sword of punishment, especially one cloaked under the guise of “security,” they will surely abuse it. Knowing there is no way to stop the WDOC from searching prisoners and their spaces, the people I live with are bracing for the next large outbreak and the worst possible outcome — lying in solitary confinement on a thin pad fighting off a possibly life-ending virus.
“I feel like a rubber duck floating in a tank of sharks, no ability to protect myself,” one prisoner told me. “I’m just surviving at the mercy of those that struggle to recognize me as a human being.”
Recently, President Joe Biden signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act into law. Under the new law, the Department of Justice will expedite reviews of violence related to COVID-19 that had been reported to law enforcement and help agencies establish a way to report attacks online.
As the bill was headed to the Senate for a vote in April, over 85 Asian American and LGBTQ groups released a statement opposing the legislation, arguing that it fails to address the actual causes of anti-Asian violence and ignores the violence that comes at the hands of law enforcement. In a statement released jointly by the organizations, Jason Wu, co-chair of the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), an organization empowering queer and trans Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs), said the groups are “calling for a redistribution of wealth and resources into things like health care and housing … because we know that at the root of the violence that we see in our communities, is … inequality.”
One cannot deny that the current spike in anti-Asian violence can be attributed to Donald Trump’s hateful anti-Asian slander. Still, the scapegoating of Asian Americans in the U.S. long precedes the blatant racism of the Trump administration, as a Democratic Party-affiliated district attorney’s targeting of a Chinese American bank in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the Obama administration’s targeting of an Asian whistleblower demonstrate.
Scapegoating Abacus Bank
Only one bank was prosecuted by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office after the housing crash in 2008. Who was it? Lehman Brothers? Goldman Sachs? Bank of America? JPMorgan Chase? CitiGroup? No. It was Abacus Federal Savings Bank, a small family operated business started and run by the Chinese American Sung family primarily catering to Chinese Americans and the Chinese immigrant community since 1984.
I first learned of the sole prosecution in May 2017, when I was invited to a press screening of Steve James’s documentary, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, which followed the Sung family through the four-month-long trial that started in February 2015. The trial came to a close with the jury finding the bank not guilty on all 240 counts, but not without costing the Sung family over $10 million, straining their business for several years, and inflicting a severe emotional toll on the family, which they say they still feel today.
Prior to the trial, at the May 31, 2012, press conference publicizing the decision to indict Abacus on “large-scale mortgage fraud conspiracy,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. told the media, “Today, we are announcing the indictment of 19 individuals on charges including mortgage fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy, as well as the indictment of Abacus Federal Savings Bank…. If we have learned anything from the recent mortgage crisis, it’s that at some point, these schemes unravel and taxpayers can be left holding the bag.”
It’s unbelievable that instead of going after any of the banks that were the actual cause of the global financial crisis, the Manhattan district attorney chose to scapegoat Abacus. This is especially because in December 2009, the bank’s director, Vera Sung, learned during a scheduled mortgage closing led by employee Ken Yu, that he had asked borrowers for bribes. As a result, he was fired. The Sungs brought in a consultant to conduct an audit, during which it came to light that several other employees had also falsified mortgage application information and were also subsequently fired. With the information compiled from the audit, Abacus then contacted government regulators at the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Thrift Supervision as well as Fannie Mae to inform them of the situation.
This scenario deeply contrasts against the actual, intentional, systemic fraud carried out by the big banks such as JPMorgan Chase, which routinely committed securities fraud by regularly inflating the quality of the mortgages it sold to investors and got to avoid criminal charges by paying a $13 billion fine; or Wells Fargo, which misrepresented tens of thousands of mortgages by misstating income and providing incomplete documentation, and packaging loans into securities, which were then sold to investors who subsequently lost billions when the securities defaulted.
In the documentary, Vance says, “I think the characterizations that this was somehow a cultural bias on the office’s part: entirely misplaced and entirely wrong…. Our handling of the bank was consistent with how we would have handled the bank if we were investigating a bank that serviced the South American community or the Indian community. There was nothing different that we did or purposefully designed to treat this bank differently.”
It’s unfortunately still so typical: A powerful, well-paid white man of a certain pedigree seeming to not understand what systemic racism is (or perhaps just putting on a performative display of ignorance to try to avoid connecting his actions to racist behavior). His answer doesn’t even touch on the systemic aspect of the situation: What his decision insinuates in a larger context.
Moreover, contrary to Vance’s statement that there was “nothing different” or “purposefully designed” carried out, journalist Matt Taibbi, Abacus’s attorney and former prosecutor Kevin Puvalowski, attorney Sam Talkin (representing one of Abacus’s employees), and the Sung family’s youngest daughter, attorney Chanterelle Sung — who in a strange turn of events had actually been working in the district attorney’s office when the case was brought against her family’s bank — all give accounts that the chain-gang-style photo op of Abacus employees during their arraignment on May 31, 2012, was something none of them had ever seen before.
With the spike in anti-Asian violence over the past year, I finally came to accept that I’m simply not as safe as I used to be. I often work late into the night and regularly come home sometimes as late as 4 am. I live on a block of Manhattan I wouldn’t describe as dangerous, but in the current socio-political climate, is increasingly becoming a place where anything could happen. As I started researching possible self-defense weapons to start carrying with me, it wasn’t just former President Donald Trump’s racism that was on my mind but also the government’s scapegoating of Abacus Bank.
I’ve also thought about Stephen Kim, a Korean American expert on North Korea who had been working for the State Department in D.C. and was indicted in 2010 for sharing classified information with Fox News reporter James Rosen. In the spring of 2009, the State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs had introduced Kim and Rosen in order for them to work together so that Rosen could put out stories.
In fact, a government official told the FBI that the report Kim and Rosen had discussed that was the subject of Kim’s indictment was “a nothing burger.” Eventually, after depleting his life savings while defending himself, he was forced to enter into a plea deal in 2014 in which he pled guilty to a single felony count of disclosing national defense information to an unauthorized person and was sentenced to 13 months in prison and a year on supervised release. After his release in 2016, Kim says he was “homeless, penniless,” and decided to return to South Korea — 40 years after his parents first brought him to the U.S. for a better life.
Kim’s case contrasts starkly against what happened with David Petraeus. While he was CIA director under former President Barack Obama, Petraeus shared hundreds of classified documents as well as eight “Black Books” of notes containing classified information, such as “the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussion, quotes and deliberative discussion from high-level National Security Council meetings, and … discussions with the president of the United States of America,” with his extramarital lover, Paula Broadwell.
In 2015, the Justice Department allowed Petraeus to enter into a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, was fined $100,000 and sentenced to two years’ probation, avoiding jail time altogether. Of course, he was able to launch a lucrative post-government career as a partner in the private equity firm KKR and as a global speaker on national security issues. In former FBI Director James Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, Comey writes, “Petraeus was treated under a double standard based on class.… A poor person, an unknown person — say a young black Baptist minister from Richmond — would be charged with a felony and sent to jail.”
Anti-Asian Racism Is Systemic
The current increase in anti-Asian violence is simply a physical manifestation of a mentality that’s always existed, the systemic racism that is part of this country’s DNA and has thrived through the ages via exclusionary anti-Asian domestic policy. The recent spike in violence is only to be expected because it’s an extension of the government’s own pattern of scapegoating people of color under various administrations and regardless of party affiliation. Furthermore, systemic anti-Asian racism is built into U.S. imperialism, proof of which can be seen in the history of violent U.S. foreign policy with war defining much of the U.S.’s relationship to Asia throughout the 20th century.
Across the country, parents, students, teachers and activists have also recognized as a source of the ignorance and hatred the lack of Asian American history classes and blatant invisibility of Asian American experiences and contributions being taught in its classrooms. They are demanding such curricula to be instated, as well as calling for mental health services and other resources for AAPI students. Even in cities such as New York, in which Asian students represent 18 percent of the public school population, the lack of education has been identified, and in April, 2,500 parents banded together and sent an “Open Letter for Asian-American History Education in NYC Public Schools” to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter.
Proponents of anti-racism applaud the idea of incorporating critical race theory — which examines racism as systemic, rather than a product of simply individual wrongdoers, and how policies perpetuate institutional racism — into K-12 education even while there has been sharp criticism from conservatives.
President Biden’s reversal in January of a ban put in place in 2020 by Trump on federal funding for critical race theory-based diversity training is a step in the right direction. Within our control as citizens, we can put an end to our historically low turnout in local elections, and — especially amid current voter suppression tactics by conservatives — vote in electable judges and justices who align with our values and vote out those who do not. The prosecution of Abacus Bank and Stephen Kim are, of course, simply an extension of our problematic two-tiered justice system in which the wealthy and well-connected are able to buy constitutional protections while everyone else suffers harsh punishments.
Amid this spike of anti-Asian violence, it’s time to listen to the needs of the communities that are being targeted. For example, the 85+ Asian and LGBTQ organizations who oppose the law enforcement-based hate crime legislation just approved by the House demand shifting resources from law enforcement to communities, designating bias violence as a public health issue, and rejecting proposals addressing anti-Asian bias that are inherently anti-Black, anti-immigrant and harmful for marginalized communities.
The scapegoating of and violence toward us may never stop until our own government acknowledges in what ways it has helped catalyze the violence we’re currently experiencing — especially now while it can under this seemingly more logical, centrist administration. This is the time for the government to admit its steady history straight through today of governmental institutional bias. This is the time to start committing itself to truly equitable behavior from within.
I was asked to take my mask off for the first time yesterday. Well, that’s not quite accurate. Better to say I was invited to remove my mask when I popped into my local bodega (yes, we have bodegas in New Hampshire). The counterman was all smiles when he said it, maskless himself. The store was empty and I didn’t want to seem rude, so off it came… and it felt for all the world like I was standing there without pants.
I’ve been fully vaxxed for a while now, but I still wear a mask when I’m going to be around people. Part of it is habit at this point, part of it is an act of solidarity with those who have to wear them, and part of it is the fact that I haven’t had so much as a case of the sniffles since I started wearing one. Come winter and no matter the current COVID circumstances, a mask will continue to be part of my accessorizing for that reason alone, and I’ll bet you a buck I won’t be the only one. The tissue companies are going to take a hit.
God, the masks. Our symbol for the age. If I live another 50 years, I will still never escape a feeling of melancholic anger whenever I see one. Every one of them should have “It Did Not Have To Be This Way” stamped on the front. They represent death, injury, failure and fear to me, and one thing more: They are a reminder that a stunningly large portion of this country won’t do a damn thing to help anyone else if it involves being mildly inconvenienced, even if it makes the difference between life and death.
That’s the glass-half-empty-and-cracked perspective, which probably isn’t entirely fair. Millions and millions of people took mask-wearing to heart, to help themselves and their neighbors, and our stratospheric infection numbers have sharply declined. More than half the country over the age of 12 has gotten at least one shot, which is also serving to put a lid on new cases. Those cases are still emerging every day by the thousands, but the difference between now and last winter is both staggering and heartening.
After an unendurably protracted run of months stuffed to bursting with death and sorrow, we are finally heading in the right direction. The people, by and large, deserve credit for this, including the many who poured themselves into mutual aid efforts when the situation was most dire. The scientists who conjured these vaccines like pulling a dove from a top hat deserve a parade, as do the medical professionals who turned themselves into hamburger fighting this virus.
President Biden also deserves a slice of the credit for this turnaround. The man may be about as inspirational as a bag of oyster crackers, and there have been stumbles regarding communication, but the change since January is nothing short of an astonishment. Given the sack of mayhem Biden was handed when he got the keys to the joint, his administration’s ability to pull us out of the tailspin we were in will stand as one of the more impressive acts of leadership we’ve seen around here in a long time.
That being rightly said, I still believe the drive to fully reopen — and to forget — is happening too soon. The green grass and warm springtime breezes can’t alter the fact that, while things are improving here, the COVID situation around the world is worse than ever. If something is not done about it expediently, we are likely to face … what? Would it be a fifth wave, or are we still riding the first one? In any event, it behooves us to remember that the murderous Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 did a good deal of its killing in a third wave that came in 1919. The rest of the world is sick as hell right now, and in this regard, borders are meaningless.
On Wednesday, a report emerged claiming that a vicious new virus variant had emerged in Vietnam. This one was actually a hybrid of the U.K. and India variants. I was an English Lit major, and the idea that two variants could meet up and make a super-variant had never crossed my screen. Yet another terrifying COVID fact none of us can un-know.
Fortunately, the World Health Organization announced today that the virus rampaging through Vietnam “does not meet the global health body’s definition of a new variant, though it is still very transmissible and dangerous,” according to The Washington Post. While this is welcome news, it is also a stark reminder that the longer COVID is allowed to burn, new and deadly variants will continue to appear, and one of them might figure out how to pick the lock on our precious vaccines.
Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, India, South America and now parts of Africa are setting the bar very high for the number of new infections per day, and their health care infrastructure is beginning to wobble badly. Malaysia is heading into a mass lockdown that will last two weeks, and Peru currently has the highest COVID mortality rate per capita in the world.
“In Africa, concerns are growing over the possible arrival of a new wave powered by a more transmissible variant of the virus, with the health systems in many countries at risk of being quickly subsumed by a surge of infections,” reports the Post. “A recent study found that the continent has the world’s highest death rate of patients critically ill with covid-19, thanks to limited intensive care facilities and reserves of vital medical supplies like oxygen.”
The Biden administration is moving to help these international hotspots, but there is concern these actions are not nearly enough. Over the next two weeks, the administration will announce its plans to distribute 80 million vaccine doses around the world. That sounds like a nice beefy number, until you remember the global number of infections to date is more than twice that amount, and two weeks is a damn long time when your house is on fire.
The president has also signaled that he is in favor of waiving international patent protections for the vaccines, so countries can manufacture the shots themselves. This proposal, naturally, is facing strong pushback from the pharmaceutical industry and its battalion of lobbyists. “The battle mirrors the one during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1990s,” reportsNPR, “when drug companies warred with global health officials who sought to produce generic treatments. Drugmakers eventually retreated after former South African President Nelson Mandela accused the companies of using patents to profit from his country’s health crisis.”
In this window of time when we seem to have a handle on the pandemic here at home, nothing less than a massive, global Berlin Airlift-style rescue mission is warranted. If Biden dickers around the edges of this and COVID makes another run on our shores, all the goodwill the president has accumulated will fall to dust, and my guy at the bodega won’t be inviting me to remove my mask anymore.
It’s pretty nice out now, but as any Stark will tell you, winter is coming. It is time to stop talking about leadership. It is time to lead. The world needs our help, and we have the capacity to give it. Let’s roll.
I cannot write computer code, and I have no idea how to make a decent rue. The engine block on a standard-issue Honda may as well be a Rubik’s Cube to me. I don’t know how to serve drinks to 25 people simultaneously from behind the bar on a busy game day. I couldn’t begin to conduct an autopsy, or a symphony. In a million years I would not try to drive an 18-wheeler through a Colorado snowstorm, because I would die explosively for lack of experience. I do what I do, and am thrilled on the daily to be surrounded by people who know how to do all the things I cannot do.
These we call “experts,” and lately they’ve been getting treated like clay ducks at target practice. You have specialized knowledge? Ha! Clearly you are a mole for evil forces. Tell me to wear a mask during a pandemic? Communism. Argue for equal rights based on the law? Terrorism. Deliver an ocean of evidence that the ocean is coming because the climate is changing? Communist terrorist socialism, and why? Because feelings and opinions, and the tripe I heard on the radio yesterday. So there.
On June 1, the mechanics of democracy fired a warning flare that lit the sky. These experts on social entropy run the ideological gamut from Francis Fukuyama to Michael Latner. They are professors, deans, activists, scholars, experts. More than 100 of them have drafted and signed a “statement of concern” regarding what they view as the imminent collapse of democracy in the United States, and they pulled no punches in the process.
“Specifically,” begins the statement, “we have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures in response to unproven and intentionally destructive allegations of a stolen election. Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.”
Over the weekend, a bold walkout by Democratic state legislators in Texas thwarted a Republican attempt to pass a raft of the most draconian anti-voter laws in the country. Like as not, the Republican majority will find a way to jam these laws through, and it is precisely this behavior that motivated the publication of this statement.
Much of it boils down to broad Republican refusal to accept the legitimate outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and that refusal is due to Donald Trump’s ongoing insistence that he won. The furor he has inspired over the ’20 election is directly responsible for the lethal January 6 attack on the Capitol building in Washington D.C., which was nothing less than an attempted coup d’état. When that failed, more than a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures began churning out voting laws that would make George Wallace wince.
“Every citizen who is qualified must have an equal right to vote, unhindered by obstruction,” continues the Statement. “And when they lose elections, political parties and their candidates and supporters must be willing to accept defeat and acknowledge the legitimacy of the outcome. The refusal of prominent Republicans to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, and the anti-democratic laws adopted (or approaching adoption) in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Montana and Texas — and under serious consideration in other Republican-controlled states — violate these principles. More profoundly, these actions call into question whether the United States will remain a democracy. As scholars of democracy, we condemn these actions in the strongest possible terms as a betrayal of our precious democratic heritage.”
The phenomenon of shunning experts and expertise has been vividly on display within public conservative circles in recent years. Prideful ignorance is nothing new on the right, but as hard data on climate disruption, gender, racism, economics and lately COVID-19 has advanced, those seeking to protect their fortunes and feelings from facts have paid handsomely to inject doubt into areas where experts have put doubt to bed.
This has, in the intervening years, gone from being a clever way to disrupt debate and transformed into something akin to gospel among the adherents of Republican ideology. Knowing things is scary for those who crave near horizons and the absence of doubt, and if you have all the money in the world, you can shout down experts from million-megawatt microphones like Fox News all day long. We live today in the aftermath of that effort, and it already has a body count from the pandemic. We must not allow our democracy to suffer a similar fate.
“We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary — including suspending the filibuster — in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want,” concludes the democracy scholars’ statement. “Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.”
It seems appropriate that the 2020-2021 school year in Portland, Oregon, began amid toxic smoke from the catastrophic wildfires thatblanketedmany parts of the state for almost two weeks. The night before the first day of school, the smoke alarm in my bedroom went off. Looking back, I see it as a clarion call, a shrieking, beeping warning of all the threats, real and existential, we’d face in the year to come.
On that first day of what would be that fall’s online version of school, I was still reeling from the loss of one of my dear friends. As wildfires approached her remote Sonoma County, California, home, she chose to end her life. She’d spent the initial months of the pandemic isolated from friends and loved ones, her serene mountain retreat no longer offering solace. She left no note, only a tidied kitchen and, according to those who’d attended a virtual yoga class with her on the last day of her life, a peaceful smile. She was my friend and I loved her.
Marooned inside our house, all the windows and doors tightly sealed, I stared into the grid of black boxes on Zoom that now represented the students in my high-school visual arts classes. I wondered how I’d find the strength to carry us all through the year.
As I greeted them, the air inside my home was stale, smoky, and distinctly claustrophobic. It was becoming harder to breathe. I struggled to find words of uplift. What do you say when the world is burning up all around you?
Ad-Hoc Childcare
Unable to find solutions to the larger and more menacing threats outside my door, I shifted my focus to managing the chaos inside. My first and most pressing concern was what to do with my nine-year-old daughter during the school day. My husband, who works outside our home as a studio artist, was under contract for a job that would last much of the year, ensuring us needed income at a time when so many had none. However, it also left us in a new type of childcare bind.
Last spring, a few friends, also teachers, realized that it was going to be next to impossible tojuggleparenting and homeschooling, while simultaneously running our own classrooms. In the spirit of self-preservation and of maintaining a shred of sanity, we decided that three days a week we’d set the kids up, masked — and with blankets and heaters once it got cold — on our porches or in open garages. We decided that, at the very least, left largely to themselves they’d develop skills of resiliency and independence, and learn to navigate their fourth-grade year together.
We put our trust in our kids and gave up control. In truth, we had little choice. We all felt lucky andincredibly privilegedeven to have such an option. No matter how imperfect, at least it was a plan. Our kids were old enough to make our ad-hoc solution work and they seemed desperate enough to socialize in the midst of a pandemic that they were willing to tough out Portland’s cold and rainy fall and winter outdoors together.
And so, until they resumed in-person learning in April 2021, our kids spent a majority of the school week together outside. When it was our day to host such a gathering, my husband set up the heaters, made sure the kids could log on, and left for work. For the rest of the school day, I would rush out to check on them between my classes, delivering food, warm tea, and more blankets if needed. I couldn’t, of course, monitor their classroom attendance or help them with their work, but at least I knew that they were together, and could rely on one another. I’d then retreat back to the little room that I’d converted from an art studio to an office/classroom in order to teach my own students.
Going It Alone
The energy, problem solving, and logistics involved in creating a “solution” to our individual childcare problems in the midst of a pandemic will undoubtedly be familiar to many parents. Thedisastrous spreadof Covid-19 forced families to repeatedly engineer solutions to seemingly impossible, ever-evolving problems. It stretched families, especially women, to our breaking points.
It’s no wonder, then, that the push to restore the only support most of us rely on for free, consistent, and dependable childcare and resources — the public school — remains one of the most urgent and divisive issues of this period. However,the toxic dialoguethat developed around in-person versus online learning created a false dichotomy and unnecessary rancor between parents and teachers. The idea that somehow there was a conflict between what teachers (like me, often parents, too) and non-teaching parents desired functionally obfuscated the true situation we all faced. Parents didn’t want their children to suffer and they needed the resources and childcare support schools provide.Teachers wanteda safe school environment for our students and us — and not one more person to die, ourselves included.
If nothing else, the pandemic served as a stark reminder of at least two things: that the nuclear family is not enough and that schools can’t be itssole safety net. The ethos of toxic individualism that permeates this society can’t sustain families in such crises (or even, often enough, out of them). It’s a shoddy stand-in for a more communal and federally subsidized version of such support.
Since March 2020, we’ve suffered as our children suffered because we’ve had to do so much without significant help. And yet teachers like me endured our jobs through those terrible months at enormous personal cost, even as we were repeatedly punished on the national stage for doing so. We were called selfish, accused of being lazy, and told totoughen upand shut up, even as the most unfortunate among uslost their lives. What’s been missing in this conversation is the obvious but often overlooked reality that many teachers are also parents. Almost half of all teachershave school-aged childrenat home and, let me just add, 76% of all public school teachers are women.
What Students Actually Learned This Year
By the time my aunt, who contracted Covid-19 in the spring of 2020, died of sudden and inexplicable heart failure in October, I was no longer able to pretend that my personal life was separate from my professional persona. Isolated from my larger family, I found myself grieving the loss of a beloved relative without the normal rituals or sort of support I would have had under other circumstances. On the morning of her death, I logged on as usual and taught each of my classes, digging deep to make it through the day. I then cooked, cleaned the house, answered emails, and negotiated my own sadness. There just wasn’t the space or time to stop and grieve.
Despite waking with a heavy heart morning after morning, I would still log on and try to connect with my students. I had to ask myself: if I was feeling this exhausted, worn-down, grief-stricken, and anxious, how were they feeling? I had the benefit of financial security, experience, and years of therapy, and I was still really struggling. My students were coping with the loss of their autonomy, routines, andsocial worlds. Some had lost family members to the virus, a few had even contracted it themselves. Others were taking care of younger siblings or working jobs as well to support desperate families. Some were simply depressed. It was a wonder that any of them showed up at all.
I decided I would have to shift my thinking about what learning should look like in that strange pandemic season. If my students owed me nothing and their time was a gift, then I would have to approach teaching with a kindness, openness, and willingness to listen unmatched in my 20 years in the profession. I showed up because I knew that, even if students were silent and didn’t turn their cameras on, most of them were actually there and were, in fact, taking in far more than they were being given credit for.
Extraordinary learning has taken place in this school year. It’s just not the learning we expected. All the hand-wringing and fears of students’ “falling behind,” not taking in specific material in the timelines we’ve adopted for them, reflect the setting of goalposts that are completely arbitrary. That way of thinking is rooted in viewing certain kinds of students as eternally deficient and their struggles as individual failings rather than indications of historicallyinequitable systemic designand deprivation, or extraordinary circumstances like those we faced together this year.
The skills and the knowledge we promote as most valuable are tied to workforce demands — not to what should count as actual life learning or growth. When you narrow achievement to what’s quantifiable, you miss so much. You fail to see just how infinitely resourceful and resilient kids can actually be. You ignore skills and learning that haven’t historically been considered valuable, because it can’t be quantified. We’ve become accustomed to looking for skills that can be neatly measured and distributed like any other commodity. We’ve adopted standardized benchmarks, standardized modes of assessment, standardized testing, and standardized curriculum, but the truth of the matter is that knowledge is rarely neat and tidy, or immediately measurable.
This year our children figured out how to navigate complex technologies and online platforms, and many did so, despiteconsiderable disadvantages. They had to learn how to self-regulate, how to deal with complex time management, often under genuinely difficult circumstances at home. Older students sometimes had to sort out not just how to manage their own schooling, but that of younger siblings. Some of my students demonstrated extraordinary emotional growth. Sometimes, they would even talk with me about how the pandemic had shifted their understanding of themselves and their relationships. They learned the beauty of slowing down and the preciousness of family and friends. They have a far clearer sense now of what’s most worth valuing in life as they step back into a world radically altered by Covid-19.
As it happens, much of their learning has taken place outside school walls, so they’ve developed a deeper understanding of the forces that shape and control their world. Students in Oregon watched climate crises unfold in the form of catastrophic wildfires in the fall and terrible ice storms in the winter. Together, we all hada real-time civics lessonin the fragility of our democracy. They watched — and a numberparticipated in— a civil-rights uprising. They experienced their families and their communities being torn apart by political divisions, conspiracy theorizing, and a deadly virus. They suffered as the holes in what passed for America’s social safety net were exposed.
And yet most of them continued to show up for school day after day, still trying. And it’s a goddamn miracle that they did!
One More Layer
When it was announced that we would be returning to our school buildings in late April, I realized I had finally hit my own personal wall. My daughter, who attends school in a different district from the one where I teach, was to be in-person at school for only 2 hours and online for the remainder of the day. I, on the other hand, would be required to be in my building full-time, four days a week (with Wednesdays still remote). I had no options for outside childcare and no extended family or friends who could help me cobble together a plan.
Logistically, my husband and I were at an impasse. Personally, I was a mess. I’d lost four more loved ones and our cat had been eaten by a coyote. My husband, struggling to remain sober without the support of his recovery community, relapsed. My daughter had become increasingly anxious and fearful. When I tried to problem-solve an answer to our childcare predicament, my mind simply shut down.
For the decade since my daughter was born, I’d been trying to manage a difficult balance of working, commuting, taking care of myself, and raising her. I considered myself fortunate to have healthcare covered and an option at work for maternity leave. After all, my own mother, a kindergarten teacher, had been forced to return to her classroom a mere six weeks after giving birth to me (and she already had two kids at home to care for). Many women in America areineligibleeven for unpaid Family Medical Leave. Upon returning to work after her birth and a three-month maternity leave, I had no sick days banked and had exhausted our savings. When I experienced a period of severe postpartum depression I pushed through it and never missed a day of work. I didn’t feel then as if I could rest or be vulnerable or simply put the needs of my baby, or even myself, first. It took me years to recover from the physical, emotional, and financial toll of having a baby. And then the pandemic struck.
As the discourse about schools, teachers, and teachers’ unions became morevitriolicand antagonism toward educators grew louder, I realized that I was experiencing yet another layer of trauma. It was as if the work I’d sacrificed so much for had not only beeninvisible, but I was actually being punished for it.
This time, I decided, I needed a different answer. I applied for a leave of absence and left school for the last two months of the semester in order totake careof my child and myself. I did so knowing how lucky, how privileged I was even to be able to make such a decision.
As We Emerge
It would be no exaggeration to say that I did not love my job this year, but I did it with diligence and fortitude because it was the way that I could still contribute. I developed an entirely new online curriculum and learned to teach by Zoom. I also showed up each and every day for my students, no matter what was happening to me personally. I did that because I witnessed the ways in which my daughter’s teacher showed up every morning for her and how much that simple interaction with another adult buoyed her, how much it kept her spirits high despite the mounting mental-health challenges she faced.
My situation is neither unique nor extraordinary. If anything, I’m lucky. Nevertheless, I feel irrevocably changed by the past year. Some days, I’m flattened by grief, wrung out and hopeless. Other days I find myself daydreaming of the transformative potential of this hardship, imagining a future that better serves all our children — one that acknowledges their shared humanity, the fragility of our existence, and the tenderness required of all of us to build something better together.
A vicious military coup d’état took place on February 1 of this year in the nation of Myanmar. Parliament was preparing to convene after a November election that saw Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy win 83 percent of the available seats. The military refused to accept the results of the election — and started killing. More than 600 people have been murdered in the violence, and thousands have been injured. “Many of those killed have been young protesters,” reportsThe New York Times, “their lives ended with a single gunshot to the head.”
Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, attended a QAnon-heavy event in Dallas, Texas, over the weekend. The main topic of the event, called “For God & Country Patriot Roundup,” was the ongoing gibberish belief that Trump won the election.
One attendee asked Flynn, “I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here?” The audience cheered the question loudly. When they quieted, Flynn replied, “No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No reason.” When confronted with his own words, Flynn scrambled to claim that he didn’t actually say what he actually said into a recording camera, calling it “a boldface fabrication based on twisted reporting.” The camera did not lie, however: A former military general and high-ranking official in a Republican administration appeared to endorse the military overthrow of the United States government before a rapturously cheering Republican crowd.
Flynn is no wild-eyed outrider. A vast majority of the Republican Party has become loudly and vigorously anti-democratic in the aftermath of the Trump administration and the election that ended it. Trump himself has been going around telling people he expects to be reinstated as president by August, while giving no explanation for how this might come about. As there is no democratic mechanism for reinstalling a defeated president, he can only be speaking of one thing: another coup d’état, but here, and at the highest level.
State-level Republican officeholders are not waiting for August, but are laboring to affect their own slow-rolling coup in the upcoming elections. In more than a dozen states, brutally repressive anti-voter laws are being put in place in an attempt to make it impossible for non-Republican voters to cast a ballot. Seemingly convinced after 2020 that it is no longer possible for Republicans to actually win national elections, and stoutly incapable of making changes needed to alter that fate because Trump still commands the party, Republicans in these states have chosen to attack the underpinnings of democracy itself.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in Texas, where the Republican-controlled legislature this weekend attempted to pass the most draconian anti-voter laws in the nation. The bill, known as SB 7, is a terrifying raft of undiluted anti-democratic racism that has no business becoming law:
The legislation would make it a felony for an election official to offer a voter an unsolicited absentee ballot application. It would further restrict which people qualify to vote absentee, even though Texas already has irrationally restrictive standards. It would eliminate safeguards meant to prevent election officials from mistakenly tossing absentee ballots based on dubious signature-matching issues. It would crimp Sunday voting in a way that would make it difficult for Black churches to run “Souls to the Polls” events. It would crack down on anyone transporting more than two non-relatives to a polling place. It would ban drive-through voting, temporary voting sites and 24-hour early voting. It would make it dangerously easy for state judges to overturn election results. And it would empower partisan poll watchers, encouraging them to hassle election officials and voters.
It is well worth noting that had SB 7 passed, it would have become law the same week as a new Texas law that is on the verge of going into effect which allows people to carry concealed weapons without a permit. This means these “poll watchers” could all be packing heat as they try to intimidate and harass Democratic voters. If you think that’s a coincidence, I invite you to think again, hard.
The GOP effort was temporarily stymied by Democrats, who walked out of the chamber en masse on Sunday night, preventing a final vote. The walkout represented a significant setback for Gov. Greg Abbott, who loudly supports the measures in the bill, but not a permanent one. Abbott has announced his intention to call a special session at some point in the future, where Republicans can again bring SB 7 to a vote. In retribution, Abbott has threatened to cut the funding for the legislature itself. “No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities,” he tweeted on Monday.
“This is a battle over which party gets to rule,” Paul Waldman writes for The Washington Post. “But more importantly, it’s about whether we have a democracy at all, whether all citizens are allowed to vote and the system respects their decisions. That hasn’t always been true in the past. And if some people get their way, it won’t be true in the future.”
As with so much else, this crisis bends all the way back to the filibuster. The U.S. House has resoundingly passed HB 1, which offers a wide range of voter protections that would all but obviate the anti-democratic shenanigans going on in Texas and elsewhere. Because of the filibuster, HB 1 is essentially doomed in the Senate. Until a law like HB 1 is on the books, very little can be done to thwart these staggering power grabs at the state level. If the issue is not confronted soon, there will be mayhem of the highest order come November 2022 and 2024.
“Congratulations to Democrats in Texas for protecting democracy and the right to vote,” tweeted Bernie Sanders . “We must pass S. 1, the For The People Act. The future of American democracy is at stake.” S. 1 is the still-untouched Senate version of HB. 1.
At a bare minimum, these actions and the mindset behind them must serve as a klaxon warning to President Biden and congressional Democrats: The Republicans are not coming to the table with clean hands. They do not want bipartisanship, and they do not want to cut deals. They will break this nation over their knees if they believe they will be deprived of the power they think they deserve as their (largely white) birthright. That Rubicon was crossed on January 6, and in case no one noticed, they haven’t stopped since.
“If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism,” wrote George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum in 2018. “They will reject democracy.”
When right-wingers like Frum display that level of prognostication, it’s time to slap the panic button good and hard. End the filibuster, pass HB 1 and understand: A lot of people make a habit out of downplaying the power of the vote, but if the vote has such little power, why are Republicans trying so hard to destroy it?
Mass public surveillance is becoming a threat in everyday life, with big tech corporations digitally tracking our every move. For incarcerated people, surveillance is even more intrusive.
This blatant constitutional violation has critical and disproportionate impacts. Three-quarters of people incarcerated in New York City jails are awaiting trial and many are held solely because they cannot afford bail. More than 90 percent are Black and Brown, thanks to discriminatory police and prosecution practices and the fact that the U.S.’s criminal legal system is constructed on a foundation of white supremacy.
Behind these illegal recordings looms a scandal-plagued surveillance-tech-company-turned-DOC-phone-service-provider: Securus Technologies. The city’s contract with Securus expired on March 31. Yet, despite this scandal and the many others plaguing the vendornationwide, the DOC quietly extended its relationship with Securus for another year.
The city’s decision to do so highlights the threat our ballooning surveillance apparatus poses to New Yorkers’ civil liberties and rights. A critical first step to ensure that neither our privacy nor our dignity are for sale would be to end the universal recording of jail calls.
As a public defender, I am intimately aware of the crushing isolation that comes with being charged with criminal wrongdoing and caged on a remote island. Cut off from support structures, separated from loved ones and subjected to intense situational stress, New Yorkers who are detained in city jails rely on phone calls to stay in contact with their spouses, children and other loved ones. The phone is the singular lifeline for solace, counsel and advice.
But phone calls — free of charge since 2019 thanks to local advocacy — come at a dehumanizing and devastating cost: the sacrifice of privacy, intimacy and dignity. Every call made to a spouse, parent or child is recorded. There are no exceptions: not for calls to ask your mother for advice on your case; not for calls to talk through your spouse’s medical test results; not for calls to receive news that a younger sibling has passed. Every call is recorded.
It is easy to imagine that jail calls have always been recorded and that this type of dehumanizing surveillance is essential to public safety. Neither is true.
For decades, when law enforcement suspected that someone was a jail security threat or planning a crime, they had to apply for an eavesdropping warrant with the requisite evidence. However flawed the eavesdropping warrant regime is, there at least were oversight mechanisms under this system. The warrant requirement for call recording in New York City jails was blanketly eliminated in 2008 — at a time when the city’s crime rates were low and declining — with a simple administrative rule change by the Board of Correction. Their primary justification? “Everyone else is doing it.”
This rule change opened the door for today’s universal recording practice, which solidifies the biased impact of surveillance: Those who cannot afford bail also cannot afford their right against self-incrimination.
Years later, in 2014, Securus doubled down on privacy invasion when it began “voice printing” everyone in DOC custody. Simply put, a voice print is a visual representation of an individual’s speech pattern. A biometric (like finger and faceprints), voice prints are used to attempt to identify participants in call recordings. Not only was Securus voice printing incarcerated people, but the company also began tagging and tracking the voice of anyone receiving a call from a New York City jail. Those voice prints along with the call recordings — to the tune of 30,000 per day — are saved to Securus’s databases. With data being today’s most lucrative commodity, Securus is creating a new product line out of the voices of my clients, their loved ones and myself.
New York City must terminate its contract with Securus. Sadly though, the problem is not limited to just one spy-tech vendor. Many of the same concerns are raised by the city’s relationship with other corporations like Vigilant Solutions, Dataminr, Palantir and Clearview AI. The recording of jail calls is one example of the city’s misguided investment in covert surveillance programs, which include the monitoring of New Yorkers’ movements, social media activity and other highly personal information.
These surveillance activities impact not only the specific targets of the surveillance, but also their families, friends and communities. New York must dismantle its biased mass surveillance project. Eliminating universal jail call recording is a good first step.
In his extraordinary early 20th-century memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, Adams, the scholar, political observer and descendant of two presidents, wrote of the inherent dysfunction and dishonesty of the U.S. Congress. He wrote of a Cabinet Secretary crying out, “You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!” Of the Senate, Adams observed that “Senators passed belief. The comic side of their egotism partly disguised its extravagance, but faction had gone so far under Andrew Johnson that at times the whole Senate seemed to catch hysterics of nervous bucking without apparent reason … they were more grotesque than ridicule could make them … But their egotism and factiousness were no laughing matter. They did permanent and terrible mischief.”
Were there consistency in the GOP’s arguments, that would be one thing. But there isn’t, and there hasn’t been this past decade. Put simply, the GOP cares deeply about the debt limit when Democrats are in the White House, and cares not a whit about that limit when the commander-in-chief is a Republican.
It used to be the case that politicians of both parties tacitly agreed not to play party politics with the national debt. After all, the U.S.’s cast-iron guarantee that it won’t default on its loan obligations is what allows the country to maintain such a privileged position in global marketplaces, borrowing at far lower rates of interest than can most other countries, and allowing it to fund everything from its bloated military budget to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and vital infrastructure without taxing Americans at a level that would actually fully underwrite all of these programs. As soon as uncertainty is injected into that calculus, the likelihood increases that credit agencies will downgrade the country’s credit-worthiness and borrowing costs will significantly rise.
Since the Tea Party-dominated Republican Party swept to power in the House in the midterm elections of 2010, however, it’s become a central political axiom that the GOP will use the debt ceiling as a bargaining tool when dealing with Democratic presidents and their political priorities.
The GOP is now pulling the same trick against Joe Biden as its members did several times during Barack Obama’s presidency. Over a period of months in 2011, the newly minted GOP majority in the House withheld support for raising the debt ceiling, leading to a series of stop-gap spending resolutions that kept the government just about afloat, but unable to make long-term fiscal plans. They actually did shut down the government for days and weeks on end in 2013, as they tried to force negotiations over defunding the Affordable Care Act in exchange for funding government, a form of political vandalism and blackmail that would have hit the poor and the vulnerable particularly hard. And then, from 2013 through to late 2015, the GOP continued to threaten shutdowns, agreeing only to last-minute debt ceiling increases, and creating ongoing instability as they tried to leverage their power to force spending cuts.
Only in November 2015, after four years of blackmail over the debt ceiling, did Congress agree to a nearly one-and-a-half-year suspension of the ceiling, allowing for the government to be able to borrow enough money to fund its spending obligations.
True, there was a lengthy and destructive government shutdown in 2018-2019, lasting 35 days. But that was triggered not by a reluctance to raise the debt ceiling, but by the GOP and Trump being unwilling to pass and sign a government spending bill that didn’t include $5 billion for Trump’s much-touted border wall. The GOP gambled that, if threatened with a government shutdown that would put on hold the government’s ability to fund vital services like food stamps, Democrats would cave and fund the wall. When that didn’t happen, and the Democrats didn’t fold in the face of this blackmail effort, eventually Trump and the GOP blinked and reopened the government.
Fast forward to 2021, however, and the GOP — in the face of Biden proposals to increase assistance to low-income families, to establish paid family leave, to expand nutritional and early education programs, and to invest in programs to tackle climate change — has re-discovered its selective outrage at the idea of the country spending beyond its means.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) wants dollar for dollar spending cuts for any increase in the debt ceiling. Sen. Ted Cruz(R-Texas), who was silent about the dangers of increasing the debt under Trump, now worries that Biden’s plans will “bankrupt” future generations.
In the GOP mindset, busting through the debt ceiling is A-OK so long as the money flows to the wealthy through tax cuts. But it’s catastrophic and illegitimate when the money borrowed is used to better the lives of the country’s poor, to build infrastructure and to tackle climate change.
In response to these political games, last week three Democratic senators — Michael Bennet (D-Colorado), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) — introduced legislation to do away with the debt ceiling entirely. If it passes, it would do an end-run around the GOP’s ability to hold the nation’s finances hostage every time they face a set of policy priorities that they don’t like.
Of course, this reform almost certainly won’t pass the Senate. But at least it will show the stakes and highlight the hypocrisy of the Republican Party.
