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Category: Op-Ed

  • Biden’s EPA Nominee Must Act on Forests to Be an Environmental Justice Champion

    Michael Regan speaks during his nomination hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to be Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., on February 3, 2021.

    The confirmation process for President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the current secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality (NC DEQ) Michael Regan, has begun. While many environmental groups have enthusiastically supported his appointment, his leadership on environmental justice in his home state has produced mixed results.

    Regan has headed the NC DEQ since 2017. On the bright side, Regan played a lead role in the development of the state’s Clean Energy Plan pursuant to Gov. Roy Cooper’s executive order on climate change. This work led to the state rejecting biomass energy as a false solution to climate change.

    The plan states, “Currently, the wood pellet industry does not contribute to NC’s energy generation portfolio and does not advance NC’s clean energy economy. The wood pellets harvested from NC increase the state’s carbon output during logging, processing and transportation and are burned for fuel elsewhere, mostly Europe.”

    Regan also created the Environmental Justice and Equity Board. In Regan’s own words, “[T]ogether we will protect our natural resources, our economic interests, and our communities so that ALL North Carolinians will have clean air and clean water for today, tomorrow and future generations to come.”

    Unfortunately, these statements were not backed by sufficient agency action. Despite the strong local community and statewide opposition, as well as his own message relating to the Environmental Justice and Equity Board, wood pellet biomass facilities that were proposed during his tenure were fully permitted or allowed to expand production. These decisions have created irreversible climate, forest and human health impacts, all of which disproportionately affect low-income rural communities of color.

    If he truly cared about frontline (or as he calls them, fence line) communities, he would have addressed the wood pellet industry and logging in North Carolina. Had Regan’s actions as the top environmental regulator in North Carolina matched his words, there would have been a more favorable outcome for the communities and forests of the state, where my organization, Dogwood Alliance, is based. Time and time again, he deferred taking bold action, noting the lack of power he had as a state regulator to effectively address these issues. Now, on the cusp of becoming the head of the EPA, that all changes.

    There are four pathways that Regan should aggressively follow in order to achieve a positive environmental impact for all communities:

    1. Regulate biogenic carbon emissions and reject biomass as a path to reducing carbon emissions.
    2. Direct states to comply with their responsibility under the Civil Rights Act and consider the disproportionate impacts that issuing permits for wood pellet/biomass facilities would have on communities designated for environmental justice (defined as those communities that are most impacted by environmental harms and risks with a disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards and increased vulnerability to these hazards).
    3. Improve the EPA’s annual greenhouse gas reporting by disclosing forest carbon emissions from forestry in accordance with the latest science and methodology.
    4. Strengthen Clean Water Act regulations, which contain massive loopholes for industrial forestry.

    Under Regan’s leadership, the wood pellet industry has rapidly expanded in North Carolina, and the state is now the largest exporter of wood pellets in the world. Nearly 80,000 acres of forest had to be cut down in 2017 to meet the needs of pellet processing plants in North Carolina, according to an estimate by Dogwood Alliance. The forest products industry, including wood pellet production, is the third-largest carbon emitter in North Carolina, barely behind electricity and transportation. And every single wood pellet facility built in the state was sited in environmental justice-designated communities, increasing air pollution risks to local residents.

    The U.S. is the world’s largest wood producing and consuming nation, with rural low-income communities of color in the Black Belt region of the coastal plain of the U.S. South disproportionately bearing the negative impacts of this. The rate of forest cover loss from “forest management” (aka industrial logging) in this region was estimated to be “four times as high as that of South American rainforests” between 2012 and 2013, according to a paper by the United Nations Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals. This same region consistently exhibits high poverty, unemployment and other indicators of socioeconomic distress.

    Unregulated “forest management” via large-scale clear-cutting and the conversion of natural forests into plantations have left forests and surrounding communities in a degraded state. According to a paper submitted to the World Forestry Congress, as of 2003, 67 percent of the nation’s industrial tree plantations can be found in the South, with the highest concentrations in the coastal plain and Black Belt region. The loss of tens of millions of acres of natural forest cover to “replanted” or “regenerated” plantations planted with seedlings that have been genetically manipulated to grow faster for commercial extraction has been well-documented.

    Over decades, the loss of natural forests to pine plantations has brought some of the South’s most diverse ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Plantations are essentially dead zones in terms of carbon sinks and biodiversity, releasing carbon for up to 13 years after harvest. The establishment of plantations has degraded the natural ability of forests to filter water, purify and cool the air and provide natural flood control. In the coastal plain Black Belt region, approximately 28 percent (or more than 1 in every 4 acres) of “forests” are industrial tree plantations, compared to 8 percent nationally.

    These same communities are in high-risk flood zones, having suffered disproportionate impacts from the recent extreme flooding linked to climate change. Only approximately 10 percent of the forestland in the region is in public ownership, compared to 33 percent nationwide. Of the 90 percent in private ownership, less than 1 percent is owned by people of color. The lack of public ownership combined with the extent of industrial forestry disproportionately restricts access to outdoor recreation and its associated community and economic development benefits.

    So now, as Secretary Regan undergoes the confirmation process, we must remind him that actions speak louder than words. If he is confirmed, let’s hope he will take action and stand up to industrial polluters who continue destroying our forests and polluting our communities.

    This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Raskin Was Right When He Said Trump’s Actions Were Worse Than Yelling “Fire!”

    President Trump dances after speaking during a rally at Richard B. Russell Airport in Rome, Georgia, on November 1, 2020.

    After many long years of coddling and actively supporting Donald Trump, after defending or ignoring his crimes and rank indecencies, Senate Republicans were finally made to take their medicine on Wednesday, and it was a bitter pill indeed. None can say if any minds were changed, as there was no proving vote. As the day-long and meticulously documented description of the January 6 Capitol attack ground on, however, there were Republican heads down on desks, gestures of conciliation, and a generalized grimacing pain none could escape until the day was gaveled to a close.

    The evidence offered by House manager after House manager was devastating, mostly because it was made to be personal. The chamber they all sat in was the crime scene, and those assembled had been both witness and victim to the Trump-led sacking of the nation’s seat of democracy. Footage of Senators Mitt Romney and Chuck Schumer scrambling to escape the ravening mob made it bipartisan in the most elemental way: January 6 was scant inches from potentially becoming a bloodbath, and everyone in the building yesterday knew it in their bones once the presentations were finished.

    It was relentless, excruciating and infuriating. Point by point, connections were made between Trump’s incitement and the mob’s response. This was done to the granular level: At one juncture, footage was shown of rioters reading Trump’s incendiary post-rally tweets through a bullhorn, further inciting the rioter’s fury.

    Unlike the last impeachment, when the managers were committee chairs with deep seniority, these proceedings are being run by the Democratic Party’s young, hypertalented House varsity. Standing out was Del. Stacey Plaskett, the non-voting congress member from the Virgin Islands territory. No one in Congress has less power than a delegate from a territory, and yet there she was going John Henry on Trump and his mob. She and her colleagues were magnificent, and I could not help but wonder what could have happened 13 months ago if Democrats had staffed up their impeachment managers then the way they have now.

    Rep. Jamie Raskin, to my mind, made the most cogent argument connecting Trump’s actions to the riot; to knock the point home, he took the old “yelling fire in a crowded theater” metaphor and gave it a whole new set of legs:

    This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts “Fire!” in a crowded theater. It’s more like a case where the town fire chief who’s paid to put out fires sends a mob not to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater but to actually set the theater on fire, and who then when the fire alarms go off and the calls start flooding into the fire department asking for help, does nothing but sit back, encourage the mob to continue its rampage and watch the fire spread on TV with glee and delight.

    It was a vital point to make. Perhaps more than anything else, the fact that for so long that day Trump did nothing to stop the rampage he initiated was the most damning aspect of yesterday’s testimony. This truth was pounded home with grinding efficiency; here was Trump lumbering through the White House, riding the adrenaline high of an instigator, followed by pathetic pilot fish — aides, cabinet members, family, friends — all begging him to put an end to the violence… and for hours, he refused.

    Did any of yesterday make a difference? Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, one of Trump’s chief enablers during the post-election interregnum, sat up in the gallery with his feet on the rail and did paperwork throughout much of the proceedings. Sen. Mike Lee, who muddied the conclusion of yesterday’s proceedings with a petulant objection, went on Fox News to argue that Trump should be let off the hook for his actions on January 6. “Look, everyone makes mistakes, everyone is entitled to a mulligan once in a while,” said Lee. For the record, a “mulligan” is a golf term for a do-over, a free second shot after you put your first ball into the water or the woods. No, thank you.

    It is a long way to 17 Republicans voting to convict, especially given how many of them are directly complicit in the acts that led to January 6, but yesterday did Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s caucus no favors. They are leaning on a badly flawed argument that the whole impeachment process is moot because Trump is out of office. It is thin gruel, and those Republicans are waiting for Trump’s defenders to give them some sort of cover for an acquittal vote. That cover was glaringly absent on Tuesday, and desperately needed after Wednesday. Raskin and the House managers buried them and will be swinging for the fences again today.

    “We are watching an entire political party on trial, just one month after the failed putsch at the Capitol,” writes Walter Shapiro for The New Republic. “Beyond Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and their ilk, how can retiring Republicans with reasonable reputations like Ohio’s Rob Portman and North Carolina’s Richard Burr live with themselves as they ignore the evidence of Trump’s determined efforts to overturn a free election?”

    The grimy geometry of politics combined with simple nose-counting arithmetic place a Trump conviction at the far end of possible outcomes. Yet even in the face of that grim and cowardly truth, a sense is building that the House managers are slowly but surely brooming the entire Republican Party into a very tight corner. I have been critical of the foreshortened time frame of these proceedings — Republicans know how to make an issue like, say, Benghazi into a battering ram for months if not years — but it cannot be denied that the presentation to date has been both mesmerizing and ruinous in equal measure.

    Trump will probably be acquitted. The Republican Party looks guilty as hell. Day Three is underway. I wouldn’t trade places with those GOP senators for all the whiskey in Ireland.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s Legal Defense Is Embarrassingly Bad, But the GOP Is Still Backing Him

    Donald Trump

    Comedian Chris Rock once ribbed Michael Jackson for arriving at a court appearance “looking like Cap’n Crunch.”

    “Who’s your lawyer?” the comedian exclaimed. “Franken Berry?” His joke referred to the Frankenstein-inspired mascot of the classic pink monster cereal that arrived on supermarket shelves in 1971.

    Cap’n Crunch and Franken Berry. This is how I’m feeling after watching Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team defenestrate what remained of their reputations on the first day of his Senate trial. Yesterday’s twin-bill performance by Bruce Castor and David Schoen will linger in the annals of publicly distributed gibberish until the last star winks out of the sky.

    The presentations by Castor and Schoen would have been bad enough in a vacuum, but they were rendered all the more ludicrous in the bright light of the presentation put forth by the House impeachment managers. Opening with a harrowing 13-minute video that set Trump’s words on January 6 beside the violent actions of his followers, Representatives Jamie Raskin, David Cicilline and Joe Neguse walked the chamber through a cogent, often riveting civics lesson on why they were all there.

    Each manager shined in turn, but it was Raskin’s closing remarks that lent the proceedings the emotional gravitas they deserved. After having buried his son only the day before, Raskin brought his daughter and son-in-law to the Capitol on January 6 so they could witness the Electoral College certification. All was most conventional, Raskin explained, until he heard the “haunting” sound of a furious mob attempting to batter down the chamber doors.

    “Senators, this cannot be our future. This cannot be the future of America,” Raskin tearfully implored the room. “We cannot have presidents inciting and mobilizing mob violence against our government and our institutions because they refuse to accept the will of the people under the Constitution of the United States.”

    Castor, for his part, rose in response to Raskin and ran headlong into his own belt sander. By the time he was finished, he had committed the mortal sin of admitting Trump had lost the election: “The object of the Constitution has been achieved. He was removed by the voters.” He even suggested the proper course of action instead of impeachment was to see the former president arrested: “If people go and commit lawless acts as a result of their beliefs and they cross the line, they should be locked up.”

    The word “meandering” does not do Castor’s presentation justice; he was the summer fly that can’t find its way out the open window, and so does lazy eights in the air until it dies of exhaustion.

    Schoen’s version of events hewed closely to the grievance mainline that most Trump defenders cling to in the absence of cogent argument. His main points can be summed up (and rebutted) as such:

    How dare the House managers attempt to overthrow the will of millions of voters? (It’s called constitutionally mandated oversight, that whole checks and balances thing.)

    Democrats don’t care about unity, they just want to destroy the country. (Says the guy defending the guy who turned a mob loose on Congress to try and keep his gig.)

    “This trial will tear this country apart, perhaps like we have only seen once before in our history,” Schoen bullyragged. (Suggesting the trial is the problem, and not the crime spree that required it.)

    “Castor started out trying to schmooze the senators and then went woolgathering all over the lot,” writes Esquire blogger Charles P. Pierce. “If there was a theme to Castor’s presentation, it was pitched at a frequency that I couldn’t hear. Schoen at least was able to get from A to B to C without breaking his leg chasing butterflies.”

    All in all, Schoen’s bit was a grand return to the phenomenon of the Audience of One: The only person Schoen was performing for was not in the building but was down in Florida seething at the TV. Trump’s team, by all reports, really let the boss down yesterday.

    “Mr. Trump, who often leaves the television on in the background even when he is holding meetings, was furious, people familiar with his reaction said,” reports The New York Times. “On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the angriest, Mr. Trump ‘was an eight,’ one person familiar with his reaction said.”

    The odds of Trump’s conviction at the conclusion of this trial remain fantastically long, but cracks have begun to appear. Castor and Schoen were so bad that GOP Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana went sideways and voted with five other Republicans to proceed with the trial. “They did everything they could but to talk about the question at hand,” said Cassidy. “And when they talked about it, they kind of glided over it, almost as if they were embarrassed of their arguments.”

    Can’t imagine why they’d feel that way.

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is playing coy about what his final vote will be, though he did vote against continuing the trial yesterday. “Additionally,” reports Talking Points Memo, “McConnell has reportedly given his Republicans Senate colleagues the green light to vote with their conscience and convict Trump if they so choose.”

    The House managers bagged one new Republican vote yesterday thanks to the strength of their presentation and the staggering weakness of Trump’s defense. They need 11 more to reach the threshold of conviction, and McConnell just let his dogs off the leash. Today’s presentation will reportedly include dramatic security video footage of the Capitol attack the public has never seen before. We may see more new names added to the “Yes” votes soon enough.

    Still, it remains farfetched to hope that enough Republican Senators will cross the line to conviction. The shabby presentations by Castor and Schoen underscore this; they believe they have already won, so why bother putting effort into the defense? It was deliberately insulting, a taunt: Look how I can spew nonsense and still win was yesterday’s message from Trump’s team, and they’re right. For the moment, anyway, these low men still hold the high ground.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Impeachment Won’t Stop Threat Trump’s Allies Pose to Global Reproductive Rights

    amy barrett

    As Donald Trump faces his second impeachment trial this week, women in Poland are being called in increasing numbers to police stations — accused of accessing medical abortions online, in a country with one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws. These prosecutions, an ocean apart, are not unrelated. Until recently, the chief counsel of an ultra-conservative group that argued for further restricting Polish abortion laws was one of the former US president’s personal lawyers.

    That group, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), is one of several Trump-linked US organisations that have spent millions of dollars around the world pushing ‘traditional family’ policies. Its chief counsel is Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s lawyers during his first impeachment challenge. The group’s European office provided legal arguments in support of banning abortion in Poland in cases of severe foetal anomalies — and it has opposed marriage equality including in Italy.

    The results of these campaigns have been severe for many women and LGBT people across the continent. “Terrible consequences” of Poland’s increased abortion restrictions will include “the broken hearts of mothers who are forced to continue such pregnancies and watch their children die”, one woman in Warsaw, told openDemocracy last year. She had ended her own pregnancy, shortly before the ban came in, after receiving a diagnosis of a usually fatal foetal anomaly.

    Another woman, in Rome, meanwhile told us that during the first COVID-19 lockdown last year she was not legally allowed to see her son for weeks. She and her former partner had conceived their child via IVF in Spain six years earlier, but because they were a same-sex couple “I am not his parent under the law”, she explained. “How can I explain this to a six-year-old child? For him, I am his mother.”

    In addition to the ACLJ’s European office, another U.S. group has intervened in legal cases opposing same-sex marriage and civil unions. This is the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), whose connections to the Trump administration included the president’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. She spoke at several of the group’s annual training courses for Christian right law students.

    In the U.S., Barrett is a key example of how Trump’s legacy achieved an institutional expression that will outlast him — whether or not he loses his impeachment trial. Internationally, groups that had close ties to his administration, such as ADF, will also continue to threaten rights and equality, regardless of this trial’s outcome.

    Last year, openDemocracy revealed that U.S. Christian conservative groups, many of them linked to the Trump administration, had spent at least $280m around the world since 2008. This spending pre-dated Trump’s time in office — and it will outlast it. Their troops of lawyers, lobbyists, campaign strategists and political operatives are playing long games with global ambitions. Their threat to democracy is not over — and they may focus their efforts globally even more than before.

    While they may now have to play defence in the U.S. against the Biden administration, which has for example already repealed the anti-abortion ‘Global Gag Rule’, internationally they still have many well-positioned allies. In Latin America, ADF also provided legal arguments to conservatives in Paraguay, who successfully campaigned for a ban on mentions of ‘gender’ in schools.

    In Europe, Serbia appears to be another hotspot for such activism — the World Congress of Families (WCF) network, founded by U.S. and Russian ultra-conservatives, says it has just opened an office in Belgrade. In Africa, a key WCF partner, Family Watch International, has trained senior politicians and diplomats on how to oppose the introduction of comprehensive sexuality education.

    Such Trump allies threaten rights globally — and his U.S. impeachment trial won’t change that. Internationally, we need action from our own governments and institutions to defend and promote the universality of human rights — including the right to health, to form families, and access information — regardless of gender, sex, race, or other characteristics. The alternative looks nothing like justice.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump Incited Real Harm on January 6. His Impeachment Trial Must Reflect This.

    Donald Trump walks by supporters

    Donald Trump has been impeached (again) for his incitement of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. In his Senate trial, his lawyers will likely argue that his speech to the mob that day was just a regular political speech that maybe contained a little “hyperbole.” Don’t fall for it.

    In the closing days of the 2020 election campaign, we were part of a team of pro bono lawyers who sued Trump for unlawful voter intimidation. As Election Day approached, we — and our lead client, Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, a national nonprofit organization that works to increase civic participation in the Latino community — became increasingly concerned by Trump’s violent rhetoric. He repeatedly called for an armed presence at polling stations to prevent “fraud,” and encouraged supporters — what his campaign called the “Trump Army” — to show up at the polls for nebulous purposes. Trump even told the white supremacist Proud Boys gang to “stand by.”

    We sued Trump and two administration officials in federal court in Washington, D.C., charging them with unlawful voter intimidation under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. We noted that Trump had “publicly encouraged vigilante violence,” and that he had “encouraged armed vigilantes to believe that their intervention is necessary and invited by the president and his administration.” We also cited Trump’s repeated public refusals to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost the election. We sought a court order that would, among other things, prohibit Trump from encouraging his supporters to interfere with voting or ballot counting, or from tweeting disinformation about the legality of mail-in voting.

    One of the Trump legal team’s main arguments — which ultimately persuaded the judge — is painful to read now. Our lawsuit cited a Trump campaign email inviting supporters to join “the Trump Army” and serve as “the President’s first line of defense when it comes to fighting off the Liberal MOB.” But Trump’s lawyers dismissed this, even in the context of all his other rhetoric, as mere “political hyperbole.” They argued that, “[t]he President’s description of election monitors as an ‘Army for Trump,’ and his directive to supporters to ‘[w]atch those ballots’ and ‘[w]atch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do’ … are calls for supporters to exercise statutory rights to serve as election monitors or otherwise be vigilant regarding potential voting abuses.” They argued that Trump’s rhetoric wasn’t voter intimidation, but merely “political ‘statements’ that Plaintiffs dislike.” Ultimately, they insisted, the risk of third-party violence was “far too speculative and conjectural.”

    The case was assigned to Senior Judge Richard Leon, a longtime fixture in Republican legal circles appointed to the bench by George W. Bush. After a brief telephonic argument, Judge Leon — who sounded annoyed at having to consider the case — opined that the threatened harm was “way too speculative” and ruled against us.

    Were we wrong? Election Day itself was mostly peaceful. But the court order that we sought would also have prohibited Trump from urging supporters to interfere with ballot counting. And Trump-inspired mobs attempted to physically interfere with ballot counting in places such as Philadelphia and Detroit. Meanwhile, as we had predicted, Trump spent two full months tweeting and imploring officials to throw out validly cast mail-in votes.

    Ultimately, we were right about the threat of violence, but wrong about the timing. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric did lead to violent attacks on our democracy — not on November 3, 2020, but rather on January 6, 2021.

    It’s now clear that the “Trump Army” doesn’t understand his words as mere “political hyperbole” innocently inviting supporters to “exercise statutory rights to serve as election monitors.” When Trump told supporters to march to the Capitol to “show strength” and “fight like hell” because “you’ll never take back our country with weakness,” they understood perfectly well.

    Yet in the Senate impeachment trial, Trump’s defenders will surely cite his perfunctory disclaimer about marching “peacefully.” And they’ll most likely claim, incorrectly, that a 1969 Supreme Court case gives the president of the United States the unqualified right to incite a violent assault that left five dead and very nearly led to a massacre.

    Unless the Senate convicts and disqualifies Trump from running for office in the future, he may well run again in 2024. Recent polling of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents shows that — while many have turned away in disgust — he still leads the Republican primary field by miles. His hardcore supporters have tasted blood, and he’s likely to incite even more violence if allowed the chance. After January 6, no one can call that “speculative.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • I’m on Hunger Strike in Guantánamo. I Dream of Cooking for My Family.

    Illustration of Ahmed Rabbani cooking with Guantanamo fencing behind, in past

    There are very few freedoms at Guantánamo Bay prison, where I have been held without charge or trial — referred to as Guantánamo ISN 1461 — for over 16 years. The right to starve myself is one of them, but even then, they force-feed me, to spare themselves the embarrassment of my death.

    Back in Pakistan, before I was kidnapped and tortured and flown halfway around the world in chains, I loved cooking. There is nothing more satisfying than preparing a hot meal for your family and sharing it with them. Here, I am allowed to cook for my fellow prisoners, but only in a microwave, and the guards could take even that away at any time. I never eat the food myself. I have been on hunger strike for seven years in protest at my indefinite detention. When everything else has been taken from you, this small measure of self-determination means a lot.

    Ahmed Rabbani, pictured pre-detention
    This photograph shows Ahmed Rabbani in Karachi, Pakistan, before he was sold to the U.S. for a bounty in 2002. (Courtesy of Reprieve)

    I was abducted from my home on September 10, 2002, and sold to the U.S. for a bounty, with the false story that I was a terrorist called Hassan Ghul. As a result of that, I was taken to the Dark Prison in Kabul, and tortured for 540 days. I refused to say I was Hassan Ghul because I wasn’t. Eventually the U.S. captured Ghul, and because he was deemed “cooperative,” they let him go. He went back to his old ways, and was killed by a drone in 2012.

    I was rendered to Guantánamo in September 2004. I tried to obey the prison’s foolish rules for a long time before I gave up. I began hunger striking in earnest in 2013 when my patience finally ran out. Twice a day, they strap me into their torture chair and force a 110-centimeter tube up my nose.

    My lawyers have now created a website where, as I approach 3,000 days on strike, you can follow my gradual disappearance. I was 170 pounds when they first seized me, and I am now down to 80 pounds. This means that 53 percent of me has “escaped” from this prison. It can’t go on forever of course, and I hope that I don’t get shipped home in a coffin — but I have to do something to peacefully protest.

    This would be hard enough for anyone, but for a man like me who loves to cook and eat, it is even worse. Can you begin to imagine the torture when I make meals for my brethren here, but do not eat myself?

    All I have to sustain me are dreams. When I get out of here, I dream of opening a restaurant where I will cook only the most original food from our society, food that has existed for centuries. I will give you one example which perhaps you would like to try.

    I call it a “Rabbani” as it is my own take on an ancient tradition: I am ethnically Rohingya, but I am a Pakistani citizen and lived for many years in Saudi Arabia. The name of a similar dish among Arabs is “harisa” or “hareesa” and it is very spicy. My wife used to make it the Pakistani way: it is called “haleem” and has lentils with less spice. My innovation was to blend the cultures, using the spice of Arabia and the lentil flavor of Pakistan.

    Take whole wheat and soak it all night, with half as much weight in lentils. The next morning boil the wheat and lentils together in water for at least one hour, adding some spices — whole spices, not powder — plenty of cinnamon, cardamom and cloves.

    Meanwhile, fry some onion — cut very thin — in oil to begin with, but I generally add butter or organic ghee as they soften. Then add pepper and ginger.

    Now the meat. Lamb was my favorite, with a bit of fat. It should have been boiled beforehand until tender.

    Then mix everything for many minutes. It must be done by hand with a spoon, over the fire — never use a machine for this. Adding a little milk will lighten the color.

    Here at Guantánamo, I don’t have the ingredients for a Rabbani, so when I cook for the other men, I must make do with lentils. Last night I soaked some so that they would be ready after my call with my lawyer. One day, when I go back to my wife and family in Karachi, I hope to be able to make the dish properly once again.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Disqualifying Trump From Office Is the Least He Deserves — But It Won’t Happen

    Donald Trump in silhouette pointing with backdrop of Capitol seige

    The second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump is officially underway, and aside from the unique historic nature of the event itself, the whole thing feels like a sail with no wind in it. To call this “pathetic” is to be kind. Some 45 GOP senators have signaled their intent to cleave to a laughably incorrect legal theory that argues Trump can’t be tried now that he’s out of office. Without 17 of them voting to convict, acquittal is a certainty.

    Jeff Tiedrich of the political forum Smirking Chimp sums up the absurdity with Twitter-appropriate brevity: “so for four years we couldn’t prosecute Trump because he was president and now we have to let him get away with it because he’s no longer president? holy f—–g shit, this is some industrial-strength bullshit and I’m not having any of it.”

    Preach, brother.

    That rotten eggs reek is no surprise; nor is the sullen loyalty fest taking place within the Republican Party any shock to the observant. They like to call these things “trials,” but in truth it is purely a political event, and politics is about counting noses. For whatever reason, 45 GOP senators have chosen to wade deeper into the ashes of Trumpism, holding up their bowls like Oliver Twist asking for more.

    A decision has been made within the Republican overmind to stick with Trump even after losing the House, Senate, White House and 465,000 American lives under his administration, and they are toeing the line like the dutiful lemmings they are.

    Behold, then, the only thing less surprising than scurrilous Republicans: Pushover Democrats. To be sure, the fact that 45 GOP Senators have indicated they will acquit Trump is disheartening, but that does not mean you run down the colors and say, “OK, well, then I guess none of this ever really happened, sorry to have bothered you, we’ll make this quick.”

    Which is basically what the Democratic congressional leadership has agreed to. After four short days of testimony regarding the sacking of the Capitol by Trump supporters and the murder of a Capitol Police officer, senators could vote to hear more evidence.

    “But that appeared exceedingly unlikely Monday,” reports The Washington Post, “with Democrats wanting to move quickly to pass President Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief proposal and Republicans seeking to get past the internally divisive debate over Trump as soon as possible. Several Senate aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, said they expect an acquittal vote as soon as next Monday, which is Presidents’ Day.”

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is said to be pleased with the arrangement. Nothing more need be said.

    For all the talk of trials combined with the cowardice of speedy resolutions, it behooves us to remember the article of impeachment we’re talking about:

    President Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021, followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Those prior efforts included a phone call on January 2, 2021, during which President Trump urged the secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn the Georgia Presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so.

    In all this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government. He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government. He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

    Wherefore, Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law. Donald John Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.

    It’s the least the man deserves, and he still won’t get it, and that’s how that goes. There is no good reason whatsoever, given the profound gravity of the offenses as stated, to rush this thing. “You fight the fight because the fight is worth fighting,” I wrote yesterday. “You act out of hope in more than just the outcome, because the effort yields its own rewards. You shout down hypocrisy for the sake of the truth, period.”

    There is always the possibility that the House impeachment managers use their foreshortened time to put on such a dramatic and moving case that the full body will have no choice but to vote in favor of hearing more evidence. Trump may erupt and demand to testify after watching himself take a beating on television for four days — note well those GOP senators are not defending him, but are instead attacking the process, a fact he is sure not to miss.

    Here is history, again, and worth watching if you can. Let’s see what happens next.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Immigrants Shouldn’t Have to Sacrifice Themselves to COVID for Basic Rights

    Migrants and associates install tents as part of a protest on Republique square in Paris on November 23, 2020, one week after migrants were evacuated from a makeshift camp in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis without being relocated.

    During the election campaign that led him to the White House, Joe Biden promised swift reversal of Donald Trump’s draconian anti-immigrant policies. On his first day in office, President Biden signed executive orders to halt construction of the border wall, reverse the Muslim ban and safeguard DACA, a temporary programme that protects some migrants who came to the U.S. as children.

    Only a week into his term, the bold plans for reform began to falter. Biden’s 100-day deportation moratorium was barred by a judge. The plan to reunite separated migrant families is delayed. And Biden’s most ambitious proposal, amnesty for most of the 11 million undocumented, is already in doubt. Meanwhile, in the midst of a raging pandemic, Democrats are calling for more targeted relief for undocumented immigrants who act as essential workers.

    A Progressive Vision?

    The precedent for immigration relief for workers on the frontlines of COVID-19 came from the other side of the Atlantic a month earlier. In late December 2020, the French government announced that it was fast-tracking citizenship applications for immigrants working as essential workers during the pandemic, in order to reward them for their special service to French citizens. The naturalisation applications of these immigrants already on the path to citizenship would be expedited, but they would still go through the required steps, including proving their integration into French society.

    France’s new citizenship exception would seem to offer a progressive vision for the new Biden administration. The spectacle of white nationalists storming the U.S. Capitol on 6 January, with their belligerent messaging of racism, misogyny and xenophobia, redoubled the calls by liberals to undo or reverse Trump’s immigration policies. Many continued to advocate specifically for immigrant essential workers.

    Tweet advocating citizenship for essential workers

    However, it would be wrong to follow this vision of immigration policy. To address the entrenched racism exposed and exacerbated — but not created — by the Trump administration, different tactics are required. The demands for the Biden administration should reach much further than reforms that entrench the system itself, whether a path to citizenship for the most deserving essential workers or protecting DACA, which is just a temporary programme with no path to citizenship.

    France’s fast-tracked naturalisation process undoubtedly improves the lives of a few immigrants, providing them with security and benefits that they would not otherwise have. Notably, these are not undocumented immigrants but those already on the path to citizenship. Yet, it is a mistake to uncritically celebrate the French government and its pandemic-era generosity.

    While a few hundred, or even, eventually, thousand immigrants may become French citizens in recognition of their “commitment to the nation”, this policy makes no change to the country’s harsh immigration system. By recognising essential migrant workers, the French state is primarily making a statement about how it values the lives of citizens who require care. U.S. observers are pointing to France as an example of inclusive immigration policies when France, like the U.S., is actually waging a racist war against immigrants.

    As with the exceptional humanitarian measures the French state has instituted in the past, which simultaneously justify criminalising and deporting a majority of immigrants, these policies draw attention away from the precarious conditions in which the majority of immigrants live — which include an increasing number of informal camps in the heart of Paris.

    The French immigration system is increasingly draconian, under pressure from the extreme rightwing populist National Rally party, formerly known as the National Front, and the turn to the right in Europe more generally. President Macron imposed a new law in 2018 that cut the timeframe to legally apply for asylum — with the goal of deporting people more quickly — and doubled the amount of time that immigrants could be kept in detention. In 2018, France detained more migrants than any other EU country.

    No Pathway to Legalization

    Like the U.S., France is home to legions of undocumented immigrants who work in exploitative conditions that now expose them to COVID-19, and who have no pathways to legalisation, before or after French government’s new policy. Furthermore, there is the long-standing fear in France that acknowledging race and racism or even the existence of different ethnic communities in its society would lead to an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ acceptance of divided communities. But this unacknowledged racism, often expressed as Islamophobia, has been called out by French immigrant rights groups and anti-racist collectives, who say the country’s colonial history is expressed in exclusionary immigration policies, among other practices.

    If the U.S. government adopted the policy of fast-tracked naturalisation for essential workers, as some are calling for, it would similarly serve to draw attention away from the difficult and often violent conditions under which so many immigrants live, covering up the fact that both American and French societies primarily value immigrant lives when they are sacrificed. The trend in the U.S. throughout the last two decades of Democrat and Republican administrations has been increased surveillance and criminalisation of immigrants, expansion of immigrant detention and deportation, and extreme militarisation of the U.S.-Mexico border.

    Rewarding essential workers with citizenship entrenches the idea that most immigrants should not be granted legal status and that the state’s job is to keep its borders closed, protecting limited resources — this is so even as both France and the U.S. are fully reliant on immigrant labour.

    Rather than putting in place a standard policy of inclusion, the state decides which few immigrants have proved themselves most deserving of inclusion, gathering accolades for its generosity. Speeding up citizenship for immigrant essential workers in the US — similarly to members of the U.S. military, at least in theory — would serve the same purpose. These policies are designed to build pride in the nation’s benevolence and care, even as they work behind the scenes to legitimise the mass exclusion, detention or exploitation of migrants, based on racist ideas of belonging. They make citizens feel better about the woeful ways in which their governments treat immigrants, giving them a moral pass.

    Premising citizenship on exceptional deservingness is a common way of talking about who deserves to become a citizen. Before this pandemic, France gave citizenship to a Malian immigrant who risked his life to scale a building and save a child. But rewarding heroes has also meant implicitly consenting to criminalising everyone who is not a hero.

    During the pandemic, the stories of immigrant deservingness in the U.S. shifted from exceptional youth to essential workers — farm labourers, cleaners, medical personnel — who were amply demonstrating their utility to the nation. Some called on the U.S. government to give these undocumented essential workers protection from deportation or even a path to citizenship. This would undoubtedly improve the lot of these immigrants, yet once again lifts up the few, while maintaining a system that criminalises most. Such calls draw attention away from the failures of the government to provide state payments that allow people to stay at home during a pandemic or make their workplaces safer.

    The linkage between citizenship and productivity in a capitalist workplace, usually as an exploited worker, has uncomfortable implications. Firstly, it leaves out all those who work outside the narrow definitions of productivity, such as in unpaid care work, and those who are young, elderly, disabled, and otherwise outside the capitalist market. Secondly, immigrants are positioned as deserving of the protections of citizenship by the dint of their labour for others.

    After the past year of uprisings against white supremacy in both France and the U.S., it is easy to connect this way of valuing immigrants to the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Indeed, immigrants are being valued for their ability to take the fall, to get sick so “we” do not. To pay this impossible debt — the debt of life, and generations of life, valued as lesser — the state is recognising these immigrants now: quid pro quo. It says: now, we owe you nothing — all histories can be forgotten. We must resist judging the worth of human life and dignity in this way.

    Protecting Ill-Gained Riches of Empire

    What if, in fact, France and the U.S. truly followed the principles upon which their nations were formed — liberty, equality, fraternity; and to be the land of the free? What if they valued everyone’s life equally? Tendayi Achiume, legal scholar and UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, argues that citizenship for all immigrants from the “Third World” to the “First” would simply enact an entitlement to political equality that recognises the interconnections created by past and ongoing forms of imperialism. In other words, French or U.S. citizenship for immigrants — all immigrants — is a form of decolonisation or even debt repayment for past and ongoing imperial projects. Militarised borders, in contrast, are attempts to protect the ill-gained riches of empire.

    There should be an immediate amnesty and path to citizenship for all immigrants in the U.S., whether or not they are deemed essential. While Biden’s plan to provide a pathway to all 11 million undocumented immigrants is a start, why should it be delayed for eight years? More urgently, the U.S. border must be demilitarised, through the dismantling of ICE and Border Patrol, as these groups create the need to label some people as “illegal”, enabling violence against them, and will continue to do so, regardless of a one-time pathway to citizenship. These demands tie in with the Black Lives Matter movement’s abolitionist demands to undo the carceral system, and replace it with one that treats all people with care and respect.

    With a week left in his presidency, Trump visited the border wall in the Rio Grande Valley, to shore up his legacy of hate. A true break with racist policy would knock down the wall and all its supporting ramparts, including the idea of deservingness.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democratic Party Leaders Are Rushing Through Impeachment in Lieu of a Real Trial

    Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer talk to eachother, probably about how best to disappoint us all

    Here we go again, in more ways than one. Prepare to have your time wasted again, but this time, it appears to be the Democrats who are prepared to hit the chicken switch.

    The first impeachment of Donald Trump was an empty, rushed and preordained affair. House Democrats had just captured the majority, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew a large swath of her caucus would erupt into discordant rebellion if the strident calls to impeach a rogue, renegade president were not heeded… and so they were, full in the knowledge that the effort was doomed in the Republican-controlled Senate. The trial after the impeachment came off like a junior high school theater club doing a read-through of Our Town, and it ended with Trump’s acquittal to the absolute surprise of nobody.

    Flash forward 13 months to the afternoon of January 6, when the U.S. Capitol building looked as if it was under assault by a swarming army of red ants. Hours before, Trump had whipped his people into a frenzy and aimed them deliberately at the seat of Congress, where his final defeat at the hands of President Joe Biden was being certified.

    The mob came closer to toppling a branch of the federal government than anyone knew that day, but as the details seeped out along with the video imagery, it became clear that many in that raid had come for blood. Stunned members of Congress told harrowing tales of near misses and close calls, everyone knew this had been Trump’s people doing his specific bidding, and the roar for a second impeachment became a thunder upon the land.

    Trump was impeached again in about as much time as it takes to boil an egg, legislatively speaking, and 10 House Republicans joined the majority. Among them was Liz Cheney, the House Republican conference chair and a senior leader of the party. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did not vote to impeach but said that Trump was “responsible” for the perilous events of January 6. These two defections from the code of absolute loyalty have left Trump seething down in Florida ever since.

    The basis for the charges in the first impeachment trial were profound in scope and import, but by any reasonable metric, the charges this second time are more serious by orders of magnitude. “Incitement to Insurrection” is what they would have charged Confederate President Jefferson Davis with, had they ever brought him to trial: A sitting president incited a mob to violent action in the hope of overturning a fairly held election so he could remain in power. Five people died, including a Capitol Police officer who was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher by a Trump supporter.

    A little more than a month has passed since that chaotic, lethal day. In that time, it appears the old ways of doing things on the Democratic side of the aisle have reasserted themselves. Instead of a trial showing all the available damning evidence of what took place that day and who is responsible, Democratic congressional leadership — with the blessing of President Biden — appears poised to allow another impeachment rush job just to get it over with, because the Republicans are unhappy. From Politico:

    Democrats who’ve struggled for years to hold DONALD TRUMP accountable are at a crossroads again: Do they go all out to convict Trump by calling a parade of witnesses to testify to his misdeeds? Or do they concede it’s a lost cause, finish the trial ASAP — and get on with President JOE BIDEN’S agenda? Several of the House impeachment managers wanted firsthand testimony to help prove their case that Trump incited the Jan. 6 riot, our sources tell us. But Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER, Speaker NANCY PELOSI and Biden administration officials have been eager for the process to move quickly, we’re told.

    It’s been a source of frustration for some Democrats privately. Trump, these people have noticed, is already on the rebound politically, at least among Republicans. The GOP base has rallied to his defense, and many Republican lawmakers who witnessed the terror of the Capitol invasion are back in Trump’s corner. Schumer and other Senate Democrats argue, however, that they don’t necessarily need witnesses since Trump’s crimes were in plain sight and documented in videos and tweets. Privately, senior Democrats also note that 45 Senate Republicans have already decided they think the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer president, so why bother dragging this out?

    It has reached the point where you can set your watch to these Democratic waffles slithering off the griddle just when things get hot. “Why bother dragging this out?” That such a question is even being contemplated speaks volumes about how and why this nation has gotten so far down in the ditch.

    You fight the fight because the fight is worth fighting. You act out of hope in more than just the outcome, because the effort yields its own rewards. You shout down hypocrisy for the sake of the truth, period. If 45 GOP senators have incorrectly decided to hang their hat on a flawed constitutional defense, bring witnesses like influential Republican lawyer Charles J. Cooper to shoot down the argument. Better yet: Let Trump shoot it down himself.

    “I am here to tell you, dude does not agree that he is a former president, and he is not allowing anyone to describe him that way,” explained MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last week. “If that’s the trap door they’re going to use to try to get him out of a Senate impeachment conviction, he’s going to fight it. He insists he cannot be called a former president. He must be called the 45th president. He’s still using the presidential seal. There’s no sign that he concedes that there’s now a 46th president, and so he’s an ex. I mean, how many ticks are we away from him claiming that he is still in office, that he still has the powers of the presidency? That he’s rightfully still president?”

    That alone would be worth the price of admission. Make those 45 Republicans who cannot imagine a world without Trump calling the shots sit through days of video and personal testimony describing a world with Trump calling the shots. Rub their noses in it like bad puppies, rub the nation’s nose in it, and if they still won’t act in the best interests of the nation, carve their names in stone and wait for 2022.

    But no. The Ents running the Democratic Party — Schumer, Pelosi and Biden — have opted once again for the bended knee in the flabby name of expediency. The impeachment trial will be a sham, and when it is done, all those congresspeople will head home through the war zone barricades that now drape the nation’s capital. You’d think they might notice all that and act on it; you’d think they’d remember that they were in the building and targets for violence a month ago, but that is not how we do things. I can’t remember the last time it was.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • With Trump’s Second Impeachment Set to Begin, How Will It Differ From the First?

    donald and melania trump

    The era of Donald Trump is not over, unfortunately. Yes, he has retreated to his compound in Southern Florida and has been uncharacteristically out of the public eye since he left office on January 20th. But his presence still hovers over the Republican Party like an evil genie pulling the party leadership’s strings and keeping the rank and file under his spell despite the fact that he’s been banned from social media and is refusing to appear on TV or talk radio.

    This week, Trump will be very much at the center of our political world once more when his second impeachment trial begins.

    As exhausting as it may seem to have Trump on the stage again, it is vitally necessary. The man tried to overturn the election and illegally install himself in the White House for four more years. While it’s still unlikely the impeachment managers from the House of Representatives will be able to get 17 Republicans senators to put their country before their party, the record will be kept for posterity and hopefully the country will figure out a way to close the holes in our system that Trump exposed during his four years in office. The impeachment managers had better get to work doing that because just as it is highly unlikely they will be able to convict Trump of his abuse of power it’s equally unlikely that they will be able to disqualify him from running again (although that is disputed). God forbid, it is possible that we could have President Trump again on January 20th, 2025.

    There has been a lot of back and forth on the issue of whether or not it’s constitutional to even hold an impeachment trial of a president who is no longer in office. The brief Trump’s lawyers submitted suggests that they will be leaning hard on the idea that it’s unconstitutional as their defense, which is understandable since the GOP senators signaled that was the ticket out when 45 of them voted for a resolution saying that it was.

    Interestingly, there has been pushback on this from some highly respected conservative legal scholars from the Federalist Society, notably former federal judge Michael McConnell and Charles J. Cooper, who is as stalwart a right-winger as exists in the Republican legal world. Cooper has worked closely with Ted Cruz of Texas and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as well as provided counsel for every conservative legal crusade from anti-abortion cases to gun rights. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Cooper points out that the idea a president cannot be impeached after leaving office makes no sense considering the provision that allows the Senate to bar him or her from holding office again. He says, “it defies logic to suggest that the Senate is prohibited from trying and convicting former officeholders.”

    There was a time when an opinion from Charles Cooper would hold great sway with Republican senators. But they have mostly been immune to reason when it comes to Trump for years now and that hasn’t changed since he left office. Still, if there are any conservatives looking for some back-up to argue the point, he’s given it to them.

    The House managers will be presenting a case that says, “you all know what you saw, here’s a reminder.” They will air video clips showing that for weeks Trump riled up his voters with the Big Lie about the election and then called them to Washington, promising it would be “wild,” and then incited them to storm the Capitol to stop the counting of the electoral votes. He told them he was going up there with them but went back to the White House instead. Did he suspect there was going to be violence? It’s a question worth asking. Back at the White House he watched the insurrection on television and did nothing for hours until he reluctantly issued this video:

    And then, with the Capitol building still engulfed in tear gas and smoke, windows shattered, people wounded and the country in shock, he tweeted this which resulted in Twitter finally locking his account:

    “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!

    That is basically the case right there. In a courtroom with an unbiased jury, it would be a slam dunk.

    But this won’t be a normal courtroom and it’s anything but an unbiased jury. It’s nearly the same jury that ignored Trump’s embrace of illegal electoral behavior going all the way back to 2016 when he was warned that the Russian government was interfering in the election and his reaction was to invite them to hack Hillary Clinton’s email and spend the next four years denying the interference had ever happened. When asked in the presidential debate that year if he would accept the results of the election, he refused to say. Days later he told his rally crowd that he would accept it — but only if he won.

    Fast forward two years and Trump is caught trying to extort the Ukrainian president to sabotage Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in exchange for military aid, a gross abuse of power for which he was impeached and acquitted by the Republicans in the Senate. Many of those senators argued that since it was only a year from the election they should let the people decide.

    And then came the Big Lie that the election of 2020 was stolen and the incitement to insurrection on January 6th. Many of those same senators who suggested the people should decide joined Trump in his post-election fantasy, refusing to admit that it was over, objecting to the results on the most specious of grounds.

    From almost the moment Trump entered politics, he’s been telegraphing that he had no intention of following the rules or laws that govern our democracy, especially those pertaining to elections. Once he learned how the Electoral College makes it possible to win despite losing he clearly thought he could game the system to his advantage and might well have succeeded if it had been just a little bit closer in some states. At some point, he became convinced that he could overturn the election if he intimidated Mike Pence and the Congress with a violent mob. And all the way along, a majority of Republicans have collaborated with him, in the process normalizing this democratic dysfunction.

    Republicans have shown us in living color that they will not forthrightly stand up against an assault on our democracy by one of their own. A handful voted to impeach in the House and it’s possible another handful will vote guilty in the Senate, but the number who stood by Trump, openly and boldly, to object to the election results despite massive evidence that the election was fairly decided is chilling. They now seem determined to let Trump off the hook once again. At this point, you have to wonder if it isn’t because at least some of them think he was on to something.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Return to “Normal” Under Biden Is Not Good Enough. We Must Demand More.

    President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris meet with House Democratic leaders, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and committee chairs to discuss the coronavirus relief legislation in the Oval Office at the White House February 5, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    A return to “normality.” A collective sigh of relief. From Washington, D.C. to living rooms across the world, the inauguration of President Joe Biden signalled a return to “normal.” Back to the old ways of doing politics. The slew of executive actions Biden signed on his first day undid (thankfully) many of the draconian dictates of the Trump administration. For many, January 20, 2021, was like waking up after a four-year nightmare. And of course, the damage of those years — whether in packing courts with right-wing judges or emboldening white supremacists — will be felt for generations. The Trump administration, of course, should not be considered as an aberration, except stylistically, to U.S. empire and the smooth functioning of global capitalism. But perhaps the domestic divide-and-conquer tactics of Stephen Bannon and his craven ilk marked an inward racial war that is usually reserved for overseas.

    But as the unbearably hollow celebrations of the Biden victory subside, we are left with this return to “normal.” What exactly is normal? And why have so many of us been so desperate to embrace it? The answer, of course, is full of contradiction and paradox. Most obviously, the “normal” that most Americans experienced was itself a stultifying order. Why the hurry to embrace a system as depressing and degrading as capitalism? Whether this system is branded with MAGA baseball caps or “I’m with Joe” t-shirts is largely irrelevant. Not unimportant, of course, but it is vital to peer behind the façade to see capital’s unyielding machinery.

    From the moment we are born, this “normality” of capitalism is forced upon us. Everywhere, everything, and everyone is conditioned to swallow “normality.” Low-paid, meaningless jobs, insecurity of livelihood and health care, mountains of debt, and an environment that is pillaged and polluted. All in the name of a normal order. There’s nothing natural about living in such a system of oppression. But nonetheless, this depression and depravity is compensated with a million shiny things and social media “likes.” Consumption temporarily provides the distraction and masks the pain, even as it contributes to the mounting crises tearing through neoliberal societies.

    So perhaps we’ve struck a Faustian bargain with capital’s pervasive normal. We will accept the low-paid bullshit jobs; we will accept the lack of security of housing, health and livelihood; and we will accept a planet on fire — so long as we are able to buy “stuff.” But is this really the reason why we accept normal? Or does the constant manufacture and reinforcement of normal also preclude our imagining and desiring more liberatory alternatives?

    Normal is ideology. Normal patterns how we think, perceive and act. The term ideology is usually associated with Cold War propaganda posters. But ideology is more than mental propaganda or psychological hypnosis. Ideology is made concrete. It materialises itself in the cities we work in (or don’t), in the houses we buy (or don’t), and in the planet we survive upon (or don’t). It’s little wonder then, that normal is so hard to escape. We eat, sleep and breathe normal. But in so doing, we inhale a system that deadens our imaginations, deadens our senses and deadens the planet.

    Without normal, who are we? What should we do for work? This is the most urgent of existential questions: how to go beyond our dystopian normal. Presently, we define ourselves in and through normal: Who we are is our miserable jobs. As Marxist scholar Andy Merrifield writes, “work is revered in our culture, yet at the same time workers are becoming superfluous; you hate your job and your boss, hate the servility of what you do, and how you do it, the pettiness of the tasks involved, yet want to keep your job at all costs. You see no other way of defining yourself other than through work.” And, as the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted, this truncated measure of self-definition has forced millions to make ghastly life and death choices.

    We are therefore led back to the central discontent of normal: the lack of alternatives. How can we possibly desire a different world when we don’t know what it looks like? Our current mainstream society offers absolutely no alternatives to capitalism. It tinkers with the edges, reshuffles identity politics as and when needed, and occasionally cuts a check to “hardworking families.” The lack of alternatives is not an accident. Any threat to capitalism’s order is violently suppressed, both in imagination and on the streets. Our intellectual commons have been violently emptied, and even the mild radicality of academia — which has sometimes nourished our collective unconscious with dreams of difference — has largely fallen in line with the astonishing success of normal.

    The masses have not been duped or tricked into desiring their own repression. They are taught to desire their repression from the day they are born. The wonderful world of normal is forced into our minds, our bodies, our jobs, our neighborhoods, our oceans. But its victory is not in any way assured. Normal can be (and routinely is) challenged. Yet we must strike at the heart of normal’s foundations if we want a truly transformative agenda, since these foundations are rarely discussed “in the open” of mainstream politics. We consider land (or, more precisely, the commons), livelihood and liberty as the three central pillars that must be addressed if we are to create a more dignified world.

    Presently, all three pillars are dominated by the violent injustices of capitalism. Our land — as part of a wider shared commons — has been constantly enclosed, privatized, chopped up and sold off. This creates a principle — or even primary — disconnect in capitalism, since billions are denied a place of their own. Astronomical rent, unfathomable mortgages, feudal land arrangements, a planet of slums and widespread homelessness, all follow from the strange belief that the land beneath our feet is a commodity.

    Second, our livelihoods are similarly privatized, chopped up and sold off. We must sell our labor to survive. And that is only for those “lucky” enough to have a job. What awaits many are underpaid jobs that are all too often supplemented by credit cards to make ends meet. What awaits many more is somehow surviving and making do in the brutal interstices of the global capitalist gulag.

    Finally, injustices in land and livelihood create injustices to our liberty. Saddled by debt, working (or not) a 9 to 5 job, barely able to make rent, we are unable to exercise our most basic human freedoms of creativity and spontaneity. In fact, such freedoms are scarcely even considered. Instead, liberty is narrowed, for the relatively privileged among the masses, to choices made almost exclusively in the arena of consumption: what to buy. For those less fortunate billions, there are few choices of any kind.

    The “normal” constraints placed upon land, livelihood and liberty must be challenged. First, the many existing starting points should be highlighted and used to light up our dormant imaginations. Second, we must seek a new politics of commoning, cooperatives, and — at the very least — large-scale investments in public housing to lift people out of debt and from the yoke of landlords. In so doing, we wish to forefront environmental justice as central to a new kind of socialist geography. Third, we must challenge the assumption that we must work for somebody else — and that the sole horizon of our work is to obtain a subsistence wage, no matter how soul- or planet-killing that work might be. Redefining work as a form of cooperation and mutual reciprocity within a local community (rather than a global market) is vital. Finally, we must redefine liberty as a power to create, to freely assemble across borders and to change the world with our own hands.

    A return to normal is a return to injustice. We must dream differently.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The New Environmentalism Must Demand Systemic Change

    A climate strike on the Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C., September 20, 2019.

    Fifty years ago, my young daughter and I were on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the first Earth Day. A group of us were then launching the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Since then, the NRDC and other U.S. environmental groups have racked up more victories and accomplishments than one can count.

    But here’s the deeply troubling rub: As our environmental organizations have grown stronger, more sophisticated and more global in reach, the environment has continued to slide downhill. And not just slightly downhill.

    Climate change is coming at us very hard. Worldwide, we are losing biodiversity, forests, fisheries and agricultural soils at frightening rates. Fresh water shortages multiply. Toxics accumulate in ecosystems, and in us. Here in the U.S., half of the freshwater bodies still do not meet the “fishable and swimmable” goal set for 1983 in the 1972 Clean Water Act. And about half of Americans live with unhealthy levels of air pollutants at least part of each year. Between 1982 and 2012, we lost an area roughly the size of Oklahoma to urban and industrial sprawl, much of it spreading into prime agricultural land. Thirty percent of U.S. plant species and 18 percent of animal species are now threatened with extinction.

    An annual country-by-country environmental performance review by Yale and Columbia universities for the World Economic Forum (reflecting results, not level of effort) ranks the U.S. in 2020 as 24th overall. No other advanced economy looks worse. We ranked 25th in environmental health, 23rd in drinking water, 67th in biodiversity protection, 62nd in wetland loss, 122nd in fisheries management and 15th on climate change. We are at the bottom among advanced countries in our ecological footprint per capita, too.

    So, something is terribly wrong. And it’s something that more of the same cannot fix. We’ve now had decades of more of the same, but find ourselves awash in the very planetary conditions we set out 50 years ago to prevent. Hard-working environmentalists truly believed during that momentous stretch that the current system could be made to work, and we were wrong.

    What we overlooked for decades is how deeply the most important environmental problems and the climate emergency are rooted in our current political economy’s defining features. Baked in are:

    • an unquestioning society-wide commitment to endless economic growth, routinely measured by the misleading gauge of GDP (gross domestic product);
    • powerful corporate interests determined to generate profit and to grow, while avoiding the large social and environmental costs of doing so;
    • markets that ignore these external costs unless corrected by governments, which won’t as long as they are themselves obeisant to corporate interests and the growth imperative;
    • rampant consumerism spurred endlessly by sophisticated advertising;
    • social injustice and economic insecurity vast and deep enough to delay action and fuel false claims that safeguards would cost jobs and ruin the economy;
    • excessively materialistic, individualistic and anthropocentric cultural values;
    • economic activity now so huge in scale that its impacts alter the planet’s fundamental biophysical operations.

    This complex is the citadel of power we are up against. It is what has been destroying the environment and climate, and, with history as our guide, it will continue to do so unless we change the system — the fundamental task of a new environmentalism.

    The starting point is again asking the basic question: What is an environmental issue? Climate change and water pollution, of course. But what if the right answer is that environmental issues include the things that determine environmental outcomes? Then, surely, creeping plutocracy and corporatocracy — the ascendancy of money power and corporate power over people power — are environmental issues. And so are chartering and empowering artificial persons to do almost anything in the name of profit and growth; the fetish of GDP growth as the ultimate public good and the main aim of government; runaway consumerism; and vast social insecurity, with half of U.S. families scrambling from paycheck to paycheck.

    The new environmentalism should debunk consumerism and commercialism, reject “growthmania” and profit-centered economics, redefine what it is that society should be striving to grow, challenge corporate dominance as well as today’s main corporation form and its goals, broaden control and the ownership of productive assets, and push against the anthropocentric values that currently dominate U.S. culture.

    New environmentalists must also join with social progressives and others to address the crisis of low incomes and economic insecurity now unraveling the U.S.’s social fabric. We should make common cause with those seeking to make politics respond to the common good and strengthen democracy. We need to reverse the vicious concentration of political access and influence to wealthy constituencies and large businesses.

    New environmentalists need to champion public financing of elections, new anti-corruption ethical restrictions on legislatures, the right to vote, tougher regulation of lobbying and the revolving door, nonpartisan congressional redistricting, and other political reform. We must join in campaigns like National Popular Vote to work around the Electoral College and Move to Amend to forge a new Constitution that recognizes that corporations are not people and money is not speech.

    Above all, the new environmental politics must be broadly inclusive, embracing the concerns of workers and working families, people of color, frontline communities, family farmers, religious organizations, the women’s movement, and other communities with complementary interests and a shared fate.

    In a nutshell, the new environmentalism should be seeking to build a new system that routinely produces good results for people and the planet, rather than making those results almost impossible to achieve.

    The Biden administration is making many good climate moves in its early days, including reversing some of the damaging policies of the Trump era. The danger is that its well-intentioned, positive steps forward will, like previous environmental efforts, still not give us enough velocity to escape the gravitational pull of status quo politics and popular fear of change.

    To give us that needed velocity, system change can best be approached through a series of interacting, mutually reinforcing transitions. Eight such transformations — some aborning, some farther off, and all difficult but none impossible — would alter the current system’s key motivational structures.

    • The market transition. The market becomes a secondary force in economic life, ceding dominance to cooperation and planning. Tight regulations keep prices honest and wages fair.
    • The corporate transition. Profit becomes a minor motivation for businesses. Producing social and environmental well-being comes first. Economic democracy is the goal and takes many forms: worker ownership, co-ops, community and public ownership, credit unions, public-private and for-profit, not-for-profit hybrids.
    • The growth transition. GDP — think “grossly distorted picture” — is recognized as a poor guide, ignored in favor of measuring progress toward democratically determined priorities and well-being.
    • Transition in investment and finance. Investment for high financial returns is largely replaced by investment for high social and environmental returns. Public and community banking predominates over private. Main Street trumps Wall Street.
    • The social transition. Powerful social justice measures — a job guarantee, tax fairness, fully adequate minimum wage and unemployment compensation, strong unions, good child care — ensure fundamental fairness and genuine equal opportunity, defeating social deprivation and gross economic inequality.
    • The lifestyle and culture transition. Vain attempts to satisfy non-material needs with material possessions give way to new lifestyles based on the recognition that other people are our main source of happiness. Nature is seen as a communion of subjects in which we are integral.
    • The communities transition. Runaway enterprise and throwaway communities are replaced by vital local communities that prize vigorous democracy and human solidarity. Joy in diversity supplants racial and religious discrimination and intolerance.
    • The democracy transition. Creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy are rolled back as political reforms bring true popular sovereignty and empowerment of marginalized groups.

    These essential transitions provide the truest escape from the currently failing system. And they are neither far-fetched nor necessarily far off. We already know enough about the policy and other changes needed to propel us in these directions. Innovative models along many of the lines sketched here are already proliferating: sustainable communities, solidarity economy initiatives, new regional and organic food systems, locally owned and managed renewable energy, community development and finance institutions, sharing and barter networks, local currencies, campaigns to “take back your time” and “move your money” (out of Wall Street) have all been taking hold around the country.

    We are also seeing the spread of innovative business models that prioritize community and environment over profit and growth — whether social and public enterprises, for-benefit business, worker-owned and other cooperatives, local credit unions or public banking. Consider, too, the interlinked campaigns for fair wages, worker rights, Earth-friendly and community-oriented lifestyles, racial justice and pro-family policies.

    Fifty years after that first Earth Day, we are running out of time and excuses. With examples aplenty of how things can and must be different, we must all be new environmentalists now.

    This article is excerpted from an essay in The New Systems Reader: Alternatives to a Failed Economy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Have Democrats Finally Realized That Power Is Only Real If You Use It?

    President Biden hosts a meeting alongside Vice President Kamala Harris with Senate Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (R) and Senator Patrick Leahy (L), in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., February 3, 2021.

    A funny thing happened this week. President Biden and the Democratic Party realized they have actual power. Wait, there’s more: They don’t appear to be afraid of using it. Wait, it gets even better: They don’t seem to care if Republicans say mean things about them — they’re gonna do their thing and look out below. After decades of watching Democrats cower before the slashing rhetoric of Republicans, it is an amazing thing to see.

    In this instance, “their thing” is to seek the passage via reconciliation of another deeply needed COVID relief bill. Republicans coughed up a proposal that was about a third of the size of the current $1.9 trillion package. Mr. Biden thanked them politely, agreed to consider measures to keep relief money from going to people who really don’t need it, and then showed them the door.

    “Reconciliation” is a process by which the 60-vote threshold — made necessary by the inevitable GOP misuse of the filibuster — is set aside. The House has already voted to do this on a straight party-line vote, and the Senate will take the measure up shortly. If reconciliation passes, which it should, Biden and his congressional Democratic allies will need 51 votes to pass the relief package.

    “With the budget resolutions in place,” reports The Washington Post, “Democrats would be able to get to work in earnest on writing Biden’s proposed relief bill into law — and ultimately pass it without any Republican votes if necessary, though they continued to insist that is not their preference.”

    Passing a hugely expensive bill this way is a significantly muscular move; it signals that all the talk about “unity” and bipartisanship can take a number, we’re getting this damn thing done.

    “Inside the White House, there is a belief that so much of Biden’s agenda is tied to the success of the Covid relief package — the most vital of which is containing the spread of coronavirus — that inaction would cripple the presidency and delay would endanger it,” reports Politico. “They also view the bill as critical to resolving some of the thornier issues they’ve confronted in their short time in office, including school reopenings, which would be accelerated with a massive resource infusion if the relief bill were to pass. And so, on Wednesday, Biden got more directly involved in the process than he had been at any time prior.”

    Lurking beneath all the inside-baseball political talk is the simple fact that the people have been screaming for help for a long, long time. The prone inaction of the former administration combined with the rigid NO SOUP FOR YOU Republican ideology in the Senate has made this a bleak, hungry and terrifying season for millions, because dealing with a lurking virus isn’t unsettling enough: Being a real American, according to the GOP, must also mean worrying about food and getting thrown out of your apartment.

    Mr. Biden’s stimulus package is wildly popular, so of course most Republicans are dead set against it. As punishment for seeking passage of the bill via reconciliation, the GOP is teeing up what is known as “vote-a-rama.” Because they cannot thwart the bill with the filibuster, they will launch a blizzard of amendments to it that will slow down — but not stop — the process. As of this writing, some 400 amendments have been readied. It is going to be a long night.

    I said “most Republicans,” and there’s the rub. One thing the Biden administration must be permanently aware of is Joe Manchin, the center-right Democratic senator from West Virginia. Manchin has already made a menace of himself regarding the elimination of the filibuster, and seemed to be positioning himself to be a log in the road of the relief package.

    At which point a deeply unexpected twist came along in the plot. West Virginia’s very awful Republican Governor Jim Justice said on Monday, “We need to quit counting the egg-sucking legs on the cows and count the cows and just move.” Loosely translated, this means, “Get out of the way, Joe Manchin, and let this bill pass.” Sen. Manchin got the message, and has since signaled his support for the relief package. Beat that with a stick.

    The Republican Party remains an active menace. It took 15 days after Biden’s inauguration for Chuck Schumer to wrestle committee control from the clammy grasp of Mitch McConnell. The GOP is in open civil war between a faction represented by the daughter of a notorious war criminal and a faction that is happy to promulgate the belief that pedophile cannibal lizard people are running the Democratic Party. Looming over it all is Donald Trump, who is gone but remains present like a Taco Bell fart in a crowded elevator.

    Yet here are Mr. Biden and his congressional allies with actual power in their hands, and more to the point, the actual will to use it. No worries about “You said unity!” fretting on Fox News, no “yeah but” or “what about”… just the will to get it done. In this, right now, they seem very much like, well, Republicans, who have no problem whatsoever getting what they came for.

    I am cautiously daring to hope that Democrats are starting to realize that power exists only if you use it. The GOP uses power to start wars, cut taxes, pollute the land and loot the Treasury. The Democrats are preparing to use their power to help pull the country out of the tailspin of COVID. At long last, they appear to have remembered how to flex.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • I Was Shackled to My Bed After Giving Birth. Then They Took My Baby Away.

    A prisoner looks at a photo of a baby while imagining touching their face

    I’m R87914. Even though I’m no longer in prison, that number, just like my social security number and name, will never change. I’m also a proud mom and a new one at that. There were no balloons or cards, no flowers or family allowed in the delivery room at the time of my daughter Aniela’s birth.

    The prison where I was incarcerated wouldn’t allow mothers-to-be to go into labor naturally. Too inconvenient. Each birth was scheduled ahead of time. Mothers were not told until the morning of their scheduled labor day that they were being taken to the hospital and induced. Families of the women were not told until after the baby was born; a three-minute phone call was allowed after the birth, per discretion of the officer.

    During my 36 hours of labor, an officer would sit on the couch, and watch me, and make occasional small talk and sometimes even pretend like they cared. Their shift, just like any other person’s, would end and eager to go home, they would leave, a new officer would walk in.

    Pregnant women in Illinois and a few other states are not allowed to be shackled, only handcuffed. I can’t imagine having to waddle in shackles eight or nine months pregnant. But so many of the guards in Illinois complain about not being able to use the shackles during pregnancy.

    After birth, women can be shackled — regardless of any pain from stitches one may have, or the women with C-sections. Once the baby is born, all restraints are once again an option, per discretion of the officer.

    So, there I was. Still in tears, both from being happy and also in pain, with my first born in my arms, an officer still on the couch and my feet shackled to the hospital bed, all the time knowing that in less than 48 hours my daughter would be taken from my arms and I would be driven back to the prison, handcuffed and shackled the entire ride.

    I cried the whole drive back to the prison after I was pulled away from my daughter. I closed my eyes and just tried to keep seeing her face.

    Although I could not breastfeed my daughter, I was the first person in my prison to be able to pump milk while incarcerated. Before that, the Illinois Department of Corrections said that any kind of breastfeeding or pumping by inmates was out the question. They said a breast pump was a safety risk. But after a struggle, activists finally got the Department of Corrections to allow breast pumps in Logan Prison. Until I started last year, using a breast pump in an Illinois prison without the baby being at the facility had never been done.

    Still there was no funding for a breast pump. Further efforts led to the donation of three breast pumps, along with the other supplies needed to save and freeze milk.

    So, when I got back to prison, there were two of us women who had just given birth the day before. I chose to use a breast pump and send home milk. She decided against it when we found out that if we used the breast pump, we would be restricted to staying only in the health care unit of the prison until further notice. (In some ways, that was kind of living in a prison inside of a prison.)

    Keeley Schenwar with her baby.
    Keeley Schenwar with her baby.

    For the next month and a half, I stayed in the health care unit and pumped every two to three hours — that is, of course, after we were done mixing up pieces to the different pumps and finally got one of them set up correctly. I had a picture of my daughter that had been taken at the hospital, and I looked at it while I pumped. I labeled bags of breast milk with the time and date, and every two weeks my family would have to drive four hours to the prison and pick them up, which ended up not really being possible. Milk would be wasted if it was brought out before visitors were allowed to leave. All visitors need to be escorted in and out of the prison at set times, and no coolers can be brought in to help preserve the milk, so some of the milk was spoiled. On top of this, for most women, it is not possible for their families to come and pick up breast milk.

    I was taken out of the health care unit after a month and a half. The breast pump stayed in the health care unit. I was allowed to go there every three hours during the day, but I was not allowed to go at night. That meant I couldn’t pump at night. A month after that happened, I stopped being able to produce milk, not long before I went home to my baby. That felt like a lot of pumping for no reason. In the end, I was not able to breastfeed my daughter when I came home.

    Here’s another thing that’s important to mention: After I was taken out of health care, one day they called me back in. Another woman was about to start using the breast pump. They called me in to find out how to put the second breast pump together. It wasn’t because I knew a lot about setting up a breast pump — it was because they knew so little. There was no one at the prison who could really support people in using the pump.

    So, it’s a good thing that breast pumps are now allowed at the prison, but it’s not enough. If they even had one person in the prison who knew what they were doing, and knew what was going on, it would make a difference. It wouldn’t need to be someone’s full-time job. More people just need to know what’s going on. When I told the male guards, “I need to use the breast pump,” they laughed at me and had no idea what I was talking about. Also, prisons need reliable pumps that are not old, donated pumps with scattered pieces, and mothers need to have access to the pump at all times.

    But also, when it comes down to it, my question is why we need to be thinking about breast pumps in prison in the first place. Why are all these moms sitting in prison when their babies are on the outside missing them?

    If new mothers are incarcerated, they need to have access to breast pumps. But really, no breast pump can replace being with your baby. No one should ever have to be handcuffed, shackled and pulled away from their newborn child.

    Note: This essay was written in 2014.

    Truthout has launched the Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize, which will be awarded to a formerly incarcerated writer. More information is here.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The House Impeachment Memo Is Tragedy. The Trump Defense Is Farce.

    A popped trump balloon lies deflated on the wet asphalt

    The 77 pages of the latest Memorandum of Impeachment levied against Donald Trump by the House of Representatives reads like a tragic novel. “This trial arises from President Donald J. Trump’s incitement of insurrection against the Republic he swore to protect,” reads the opening line of the introduction. The 14-page response from Trump’s legal team, by contrast, reads like pure farce: They misspelled the name of the United States (instead writing “Unites States”) before their counterargument even begins.

    I was in the civil litigation business for a long time a long time ago, and I probably worked as many as 20 courtroom trials over those years. Here is an axiomatic fact: Had I been responsible for such a cataclysmic typo in the opening header of an official court document, or anywhere in the document for that matter, I would have been fired with enough white-hot heat to turn my bones to glass. Legal communities tend to be tight-knit and gossipy; calamitous gaffes like this are recalled, re-masticated and mercilessly mocked for decades.

    Tragedy and farce: That is the binary state of these two competing documents. The first, from the House impeachment managers, lays out in searing detail what the world watched happen on January 6. The second, from Trump’s ragtag band of defenders, lays out the same defense the former president has used to bat down critics for years: I didn’t do it, there would be nothing wrong if I did do it, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

    On Wednesday, some 370 Capitol staffers spoke with one voice on the need to convict Trump for his actions on January 6. “As congressional employees,” they wrote in a deeply evocative letter, “we don’t have a vote on whether to convict Donald J. Trump for his role in inciting the violent attack at the Capitol, but our senators do. And for our sake, and the sake of the country, we ask that they vote to convict the former president and bar him from ever holding office again.”

    The House impeachment memo is clear and bold in its assignation of blame, stating:

    President Trump’s responsibility for the events of January 6 is unmistakable. After losing the 2020 election, President Trump refused to accept the will of the American people. He spent months asserting, without evidence, that he won in a ‘landslide’ and that the election was ‘stolen.’ He amplified these lies at every turn, seeking to convince supporters that they were victims of a massive electoral conspiracy that threatened the Nation’s continued existence. But every single court to consider the President’s attacks on the outcome of the election rejected them. And state and federal officials from both parties refused President Trump’s increasingly desperate demands that they break the law to keep him in power. With his options running out, President Trump announced a ‘Save America Rally’ on January 6. He promised it would be ‘wild.’

    Trump’s legal team, in response to this nutshell encapsulation of his manifest culpability, argues the former president was merely exercising his First Amendment rights to point out “suspect” election results, writing:

    It is admitted that after the November election, the 45th President exercised his First Amendment right under the Constitution to express his belief that the election results were suspect, since with very few exceptions, under the convenient guise of Covid-19 pandemic ‘safeguards’ states election laws and procedures were changed by local politicians or judges without the necessary approvals from state legislatures. Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.

    Let us not forget Trump’s claims from that fateful podium on January 6:

    “We won this election, and we won it by a landslide.”

    “rigged”

    “By the way, does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes? Does anybody believe that? He had 80 million computer votes. It’s a disgrace.”

    And all of these were followed by, “So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol.”

    Exhortations to violence and mob action are not protected by the First Amendment. In the vernacular of first-year law school students, your right to free speech stops at the other guy’s nose; throw a verbal punch, and you have gone beyond the wide freedoms afforded by that amendment. On that day, Trump threw several punches, and enough of them landed to topple the Capitol Building for a time. He drew the mob, aimed them and fired them. It is as simple as that.

    Thus is the I didn’t do it, but it would be OK if I did portion of the defense left in twisted little pieces. The remainder of Trump’s defense leans heavily on an argument that There’s nothing you can do about it, the farcical notion that an elected official cannot be impeached and convicted once they have left office.

    First and foremost, Trump was impeached while still in office; the trial is nothing more than the conclusion of the process. Second, if absence from office were a viable firewall from legal consequences, elected officials could loot the till two weeks before their terms are up and get away scot free, having left no time to prepare and execute a proper impeachment process. This is, therefore, not a tenable legal stance from any perspective.

    Trump’s defense memo is perfect nonsense, all in all a mayhem document written in spelling-error haste in order to obey the forms of the process. Trump and his people know full well that despite use of the word “trial,” what is set to happen in the Senate is a political event and not a legal one. Evidence matters less than knowing the impeachment managers lack the votes to convict. Why bother putting effort into a defense document when the real defense is happening behind closed doors in a festival of threats and arm-twisting?

    The impeachment memo concludes:

    President Trump endangered our Republic and inflicted deep and lasting wounds on our Nation. His conduct resulted in more than five deaths and many more injuries. The Capitol was defiled. The line of succession was imperiled. America’s global reputation was damaged. For the first time in history, the transfer of presidential power was interrupted. And the threat of violence remains with us: as President Biden was inaugurated and even now, the Capitol more closely resembles an armed camp than the seat of American democracy.

    The documents have been filed, the arguments and counterarguments made. The trial begins next week amid the cacophony of a civil war within the Republican Party. How the power struggle between Trump’s devotees and the establishment GOP goes this week looks to play a huge role in how this trial will ultimately play out. The House managers made the case. It is up to 17 Senate Republicans to make it count.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Illinois May Be First State to Eliminate Money Bail, But the Fight Isn’t Over

    Prison courtyard with open door

    On January 13, the Illinois legislature passed the Pretrial Fairness Act (as part of HB 3653 SFA2). Once signed, this bill will make the state the first to completely eradicate the use of money bail.

    Once fully implemented in 2023, the Pretrial Fairness Act will make Illinois’s pretrial system a national model. In addition to ending money bail, a variety of other provisions will improve the fairness of the state’s pretrial system and ensure that the vast majority of people are released before trial. The bill creates a limited detention eligibility net and mandates pretrial release in the majority of cases; reforms the way people are treated when they miss court dates; ensures sentencing credit for time spent and movement permissions for people on electronic monitoring; regulates the use of risk assessment tools, such as Cook County’s Public Safety Assessment; and ensures transparency and accountability through mandatory data collection and publication. Together, these changes move the state’s orientation toward a real presumption of pretrial freedom and an understanding that public safety comes from investment and resources rather than incarceration.

    The passage of this historic legislation was made possible by long-term community organizing, but catalyzed by last summer’s uprisings in response to the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. While lifting up the cries to defund police and refund communities, movement leaders demanded a new vision of community safety that relies not on militarized policing and violent punishment, but instead on resources like living wage jobs and fully funded schools and social services. The Illinois Legislative Black Caucus understood the protests as a mandate to bring sweeping changes to the state’s criminal legal system.

    Over the past 40 years, courts have jailed increasing numbers of people — disproportionately Black — who are awaiting trial and presumed innocent, simply because they cannot afford to pay money bail. This pretrial incarceration often lasts for months or even years, making it much harder for accused people to fight their cases, increasing pressure to accept plea deals, and leading to longer sentences. Pretrial jailing can lead to the loss of jobs, homes and even custody of children. By destabilizing people’s lives, pretrial detention makes us all less safe.

    Since 2016, the Coalition to End Money Bond and the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice (of which our organizations have served as anchors) have been organizing to bring an end to money bail. The Coalition’s 14 member organizations brought together a range of complementary capacities, including policy advocacy from organizations like Chicago Appleseed and the Illinois Justice Project; Black-led racial justice organizing by Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation (SOUL); and broad-based community and electoral organizing by The People’s Lobby (TPL). The newly formed Chicago Community Bond Fund (CCBF) brought a laser-like focus on this issue. This enabled the coalition to engage in a mix of “inside game” and “outside game” strategies. Our impact litigation and policy work complemented the grassroots work building power to move elected decisionmakers.

    We used a variety of strategies in our organizing, ranging from courtwatching, data analysis and report writing, and direct actions, such as the one in which TPL and SOUL occupied the George N. Leighton Criminal Court Building for five hours in an act of civil disobedience. Media and art were also essential tools in our campaign. CCBF led this effort, working with volunteers, videographers and graphic designers to produce compelling, original educational materials like videos, animations and infographics. Our policy experts wrote legislation that became the Pretrial Fairness Act and talked to dozens of legislators about how courts could achieve their goals while respecting the presumption of innocence and freeing the vast majority of people before trial.

    Uplifting the voices of people directly impacted by money bail and pretrial incarceration was a core element of Coalition activities. CCBF paid bail regularly for people and supported them in processing and analyzing their experiences. Many of them went on to share their stories with media, decisionmakers and community leaders. In Illinois, personal testimonies from members of CCBF, SOUL, TPL and others were key to changing the public conversation about wealth-based incarceration. Advocates can state hard facts until they are blue in the face, but personal stories from people impacted by pretrial incarceration move legislators, media and others without personal experiences in a completely different way. Over the past five years, the Coalition made money bail a widely understood and unpopular policy failure — and a litmus test for candidates and officials claiming to support racial justice.

    At several key points, The People’s Lobby and other groups used electoral organizing to move the campaign forward. In 2016, reform candidate Kim Foxx defeated incumbent Anita Alvarez in an election for Cook County state’s attorney with a platform that included bail reform and a broader repudiation of “tough-on-crime” policies. Robert Peters, TPL’s political director and former Coalition organizer, was appointed and then elected to the Illinois Senate, where he became a leading champion for bail reform. These elections showed widespread public support for ending money bail, changed the political calculus for other elected officials and added important new voices to decisionmaking bodies.

    Passing state legislation required uniting a diverse and statewide base of support. In 2019, the Coalition recruited dozens of additional organizations to form the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice (INPJ), of which our organizations have served as anchors. Together, we then engaged thousands of people to take action in Chicago, its suburbs, and throughout the rest of the state. To build this broad base, we centered Black leadership because Black people are by far the most impacted by money bail. At the same time, we also pushed people in other communities to recognize that we all have a stake in ending white supremacy and the criminal policies that perpetuate it.

    By early 2020, the Coalition had secured Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s support in ending money bail, but the COVID-19 pandemic quickly brought the 2020 legislative session to a halt. The Black Lives Matter uprisings that began in May agitated and inspired a broader array of legislators to make criminal legal reform a priority. Soon, the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus, led by Sen. Elgie Sims and Rep. Justin Slaughter, began working on a package of reforms to policing and incarceration. Senator Peters and Representative Slaughter, the sponsors of the Pretrial Fairness Act, advocated for the Black Caucus to include ending money bail in this package.

    Meanwhile, we built relationships with key organizations working to end domestic and sexual violence and negotiated their support for the Pretrial Fairness Act. Faith leaders organized through The People’s Lobby, Community Renewal Society, SOUL, A Just Harvest, Trinity United Church of Christ, United Congregations of Metro East, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism of Illinois and Believers Bail Out also played an important role in lifting up the voices of members impacted by bail, moving a number of legislators outside Chicago, and securing media coverage at key moments. Ultimately, INPJ members organized thousands of people to call and email their legislators in late 2020 and early 2021.

    Immediately upon its passage on January 13, Governor Pritzker congratulated the sponsors and the Coalition, and is expected to sign the bill.

    Our organizing has not always gotten everything right. Our actions were often too centered in Chicago, and we need to increase our power-building efforts in the suburbs and across the state. There were times when very specialized discussions of legal policy questions took over our coalition meetings, and the grassroots organizers and leaders did not always feel empowered to fully participate. The process of our movement building, however, elevated and centered the voices of directly impacted people, built a powerful and united statewide network, laid the groundwork for significant divestment from jails — starting with a $26 million reduction in the budget of the Cook County Sheriff in 2021 — and won the farthest-reaching overhaul of pretrial systems in the country.

    Our push to end money bail is not over. Police, prosecutors and their allies have shown that they are going to fight these reforms and attempt to stoke the kind of backlash that has rolled back efforts in places as diverse as New York, Atlanta, Alaska and California. The Pretrial Fairness Act will ramp up over a two-year period, so we’re going to need to keep up the fight and push hard to make sure the state follows through on the ambitious goals set by the bill’s passage.

    Illinois organizers have sent a resounding message to the rest of the country that we must bring an end to the criminalization of poverty and the targeting of Black communities. The passage of the Pretrial Fairness Act signals a new era in how we must continue to reimagine safety and justice in our communities: by providing people with resources instead of caging them for ransom. In Illinois, we have shown that when movements open new windows of possibility, community organizing can push through transformational changes.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.