12/31/2020

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, December 31, 2020

 

Photo from my backyard, San Francisco, December 23, 2012. —Bonnie Weinstein

Good Riddance 2020!
Bring on a Socialist New Year!

Here's to the beginning a new year of united struggle against bigotry, war, environmental destruction, economic inequality, injustice and capitalist oppression. 

"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!" The Communist Manifesto (1848), by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels


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Carmen Trotta and Martha Hennessy, two of the Kings Bay Plowshares disarmament activists, self-reported to federal prisons yesterday to begin their sentences.

Carmen was driven by a group of community members and friends from St. Joseph House Catholic Worker in NYC to the prison in Otisville, NY, about a two hour drive. Before leaving he received a blessing from many friends with a laying on hands. The group also stopped for a farewell meal in Middletown near the prison.

Carmen was given a 14 month sentence and has already served 7 weeks. He is expected to be quarantined for two weeks and then put into the prison camp population. The prison has stopped all visiting which may be a sign that the virus rate is growing.


Carmen in middle before reporting


Martha was brought from her home in Vermont to Danbury, CT by her husband, Steven Melanson to begin her ten month sentence. Two of her codefendants, Mark Colville and Liz McAlister along with Liz's daughter Frida Berrigan and Bill Marsten met them in the parking lot. Mark reports, "I was conscious of Martha's courage and faith, her faithfulness to the Gospel and compassion for all of creation which has made it possible for our community of love and justice to extend beyond that prison.


Martha goes in with a message that we need now, more than ever, to abolish nuclear weapons and war. She's laying down her life for that good news. We celebrated her there with homemade soup and chocolate. Frida's children made beautiful signs saying 'FEAR NOT' and 'We love you, Martha!'

I remember one particular moment when Liz stepped forward and reminded all that many great spirits had passed through those prison gates, including her beloved, Phil Berrigan. God rest his soul and many other resisters. Martha is carrying on that tradition and we were able to celebrate her as a community. It was a beautiful day, with snow descending as we drove up and intensifying as we drove back. 

On the way, we passed through the little town of Sandy Hook. Dec. 14th, was the 8th anniversary of that terrible school shooting of all those children and educators. We are conscious of the connection between nuclear weapons and the kinds of violence that plague our communities and neighborhoods everywhere in this country. Martha's going forward very much was a witness to this connection between the ultimate violence of omnicidal nuclear weapons and the violence that plagues our neighborhoods."


Fr. Steve Kelly is now being transported from jail in Georgia where he has been held since the action in April, 2018 to federal court in Tacoma, WA to appear for a probation violation. Steve had been convicted of trespass in an earlier action at the Kitsap-Bangor Trident nuclear submarine base. Taking into account his good time credit, Steve has served beyond the 33 month sentence given by Judge Wood. It is expected that his extra time will be credited to any sentence from the Tacoma court. So far Steve has stayed COVID-free and healthy. He gave away all his belongings just after his October 15th sentencing expecting to be moved soon but it didn't happen quickly. The transport to the West Coast could take days or weeks through various intermediate stages and holding prisons. Check the website for updates.


Carmen Trotta #22561-021
FCI Otisville
Federal Correctional Institution
Satellite Camp
PO Box 1000
Otisville, NY 10963


Martha Hennessy #22560-021
FCI Danbury
Route 37
Danbury, CT 06811

You can send letters to them on white paper with blue or black ink but no drawings. We are checking what else they may receive. See the website for updates.

Clare Grady and Patrick O'Neill will report to prison in the New Year. Mark Colville has a delay for sentencing until February 19.


To access the defendants' powerful sentencing statements go to https://kingsbayplowshares7.org/sentencing-statements/ which is under the "Legal" tab in the menu. Biographical information can be found under the "About" tab.

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 symbolically and nonviolently disarmed Trident submarine nuclear weapons on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who devoted his life to addressing what he called the “triple evils of militarism, racism, and materialism.”  Carrying hammers and baby bottles of their own blood, the seven attempted to convert weapons of mass destruction. They hoped to call attention to the ways in which nuclear weapons kill every day, by their mere existence and maintenance.

                                             




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LISA MONTGOMERY:   

"The Most Broken of the Broken



Please sign the petition to stop her execution:

https://sign.moveon.org/petitions/tell-president-trump-to-stop-the-execution-of-lisa-montgomery

URGENT:  PLEASE WRITE TO LISA!

Dear lovers of peace & justice,

President Trump is planning to execute still more federal prisoners on death row.
Will it be by firing squad, poison gas or electrocution, three very cruel means of execution that Trump has recently reinstated?

Lisa Montgomery is one of the planned executions, a victim herself of lifelong cruelty and violence.

Say Her Name!  Know Her Story:

a poignant dedication to Lisa, who sustained a lifetime of cruelty from mother, father, friends, strangers, via physical and sexual abuse, repeated rape by father and husband and gang rape and sex trafficking by her mother, and ultimately, neglect and abuse by law enforcement and the state.  She is “profoundly mentally ill” as a result.

Please write on a plane piece of paper.  NO CARDS, POSTCARDS, DRAWINGS OR ANY OTHER MATERIAL ALLOWED.  Only words allowed!  (The cruelty continues.) 
A simple message can do wonders!  
Lisa loves Christmas….so your words may want to reflect on that.
Suggestion:  Choose a special stamp….to add color and vibrancy!

Mail to:

Lisa Montgomery, #11072-031
Federal Medical Center-Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127

Let’s all be thinking and praying and hoping for long life and justice for Lisa.

Toby Blomé & Susan Witka
SF Bay Area CODEPINK,
Women for Peace & Justice

UPDATE: DEC. 25, 2020

Judge delays execution of only woman on US death row

Michael Balsamo, December 25, 2020

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2020/12/25/federal-execution-delayed-lisa-montgomery-death-row/4044701001/

 

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Urgent Demand For Mumia's Release
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM 8335
 
There is a serious outbreak of COVID 19 in Mahanoy Correctional Facility, where Mumia and 2,400 other men live.  As of now 20 guards have tested positive 4 COVID 19, and the prison is frantically testing those housed in the prison.  Obviously, this a a huge cause for concern.  Despite the prison being on lockdown, meaning no one leaves there cell except for showers and emergencies.  Food is brought to the cells. 

 

Needless, to say, Mumia quite worried as he should be.  He is 66, years old, has liver damage and prison personnel are the ones bringing in the virus. 

 

Please call Governor Tom Wolf to demand Mumia and other aging elders with underlying vulnerable health concerns be considered for compassionate release.  Clearly, there is no such thing as social distancing in prison.  The only way to stop this virus from spreading and killing those in its' path is to send our elders home
who pose no threat to our community. 

 

Governor Tom Wolf -1(717) 787-2500  Fax 1 (717) 772-8284
Office of the Governor
508 Main Capitol Building
HarrisburgPA  17120    
 
After calling the governor, send an online communication about our concerns.   https://www.governor.pa.gov/contact/#PhoneNumber
 
Let us know what there response was, Thank you.  Mobilization4Mumia@gmail.com
 
ONA MOVE
 


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https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/

Resources for Resisting Federal Repression

Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests. 

The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page. 

Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.

Emergency Hotlines

If you are contacted by federal law enforcement you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities. 

State and Local Hotlines

If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for: 

National Hotline

If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:

Know Your Rights Materials

The NLG maintains a library of basic Know-Your-Rights guides. 

WEBINAR: Federal Repression of Activists & Their Lawyers: Legal & Ethical Strategies to Defend Our Movements: presented by NLG-NYC and NLG National Office

We also recommend the following resources: 

Center for Constitutional Rights

Civil Liberties Defense Center

Grand Jury Resistance Project

Katya Komisaruk

Movement for Black Lives Legal Resources

Tilted Scales Collective


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Articles

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1) 40 Years a Prisoner Unearths a Little-Told History of Police Violence in Philadelphia

Cassie da Costa - December 24, 2020

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/12/40-years-a-prisoner-a-little-told-history-of-police-violence-in-philadelphia



 















Mike Africa Jr. met his parents in prison. In fact, he was born in a cell. For most of his life, he did all he could to get his mother, Debbie Africa, and father, Mike Africa Sr., released. A new documentary, 40 Years a Prisoner, available on HBO now, follows his journey fighting his parents’ incarceration—and rigorously examines the sordid history of law enforcement practices like the ones that landed them there in the first place.

 

Like Africa Jr., director Tommy Oliver grew up in Philadelphia, hearing rumblings about MOVE—the back-to-the-land Black anarchist group Africa Jr.’s parents were core members of. (While the name is capitalized, it’s not an acronym.) It wasn’t until Oliver began doing his own research on MOVE that a much bigger story began to reveal itself. “I watched everything I could. And then I went to the Temple [University] Urban Archives, and I went through dozens of boxes of content,” Oliver told Vanity Fair. “There was still so much that I knew wasn’t there. So I had a friend make an intro to MOVE”—first to a woman named Ramona, then to Africa Jr. He informed Oliver about the MOVE Nine, the incarcerated members of the group, which was founded in 1972 by John Africa. (All members take on the last name Africa.) Two had died in prison, while the other seven were still alive at the time, including his parents.

 

From the moment of its inception, MOVE had been a target of controversy, curiosity, confusion, and aggression. The film recounts a 1976 encounter between the group and Philadelphia police. Law enforcement attacked MOVE members just outside of their commune residence, claiming there was a disturbance. A female member of the group, Janine Africa, was holding her baby when she was shoved to the ground by an officer; the baby died. The tragedy would foreshadow the ultimate standoff between MOVE and Philadelphia police on August 8, 1978, and the resulting incarceration of the MOVE Nine.

 

A detailed, panoptic investigation into the lead-up to that fateful day, 40 Years a Prisoner lays bare the distortions of Philadelphia law enforcement as led by Mayor Frank Rizzo. Oliver weaves together extensive archival footage and new interviews with police, journalists, and MOVE members. The result is not only a historical excavation of anti-Blackness in one of America’s Blackest cities, but an unforgettable look into how propaganda becomes the foundation of American life.

 

“The truth is independent of what one believes. It just is,” Oliver told me in an interview. How, then, did he go about depicting that truth for inevitably biased audiences? The answer lies in Police Commissioner Joseph O’Neill. “When we see Commissioner O’Neill at City Hall during the press conference on August 8,” Oliver said, “[O’Neill] is flanked on either side by the D.A., Ed Rendell, and Mayor Rizzo.” In the footage, O’Neill claims that MOVE member Delbert Africa came out of MOVE headquarters armed “with a clip in one hand and a knife in the other.”

 

“And he’s talking to the media. He’s talking to the news. He’s talking to everybody,” Oliver explained. “And that is the information that’s going to be disseminated, that’s going to be shared and played and replayed.” After showing that clip, Oliver shows another from that day: “Delbert, hands open, no shirt on, nothing in either hand. And you see the very clear difference between what is being told versus what actually happened.”

 

The media often takes the police’s word for unvarnished truth. But serious research reveals what many at the time already knew: MOVE, while politically militant, was not an armed organization. (They had rifles, but during an earlier raid, police themselves found that they were nonfunctional.) A police officer died on August 8, though there is no evidence, besides police testimony, of what led to his death. “There is no video, no photos. And guess what happens? You take exactly what’s given,” Oliver said. “On top of that, [regarding] evidence, the house is literally razed by the city hours after. And so that’s how I deal with it. The idea of sort of showing very clearly, literally in black and white—because that footage is in black and white—the difference between what actually happened versus what [the police] say.”

 

Now, after some 40 years, Africa Jr.’s parents are finally out of prison. Still, the fight is not over. Africa Jr. hopes to have their 50-plus-year parole terms commuted, and to see MOVE supporter Mumia Abu-Jamal released. As for the film about the events that have shaped his entire life, from the time he was in the womb? “My hope is that people will look at the film and do a little digging into some of these issues themselves,” Africa Jr. told me. “Today in the Philadelphia Daily News, the front page of the paper says, ‘Guilty until proven innocent.’ And that is because another man was exonerated from prison based on evidence, and witnesses that were intimidated.”


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2) Another Arrest, and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match

A New Jersey man was accused of shoplifting and trying to hit an officer with a car. He is the third known Black man to be wrongfully arrested based on face recognition.

By Kashmir Hill, Dec. 29, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/technology/facial-recognition-misidentify-jail.html

Nijeer Parks is the third person known to be arrested for a crime he did not commit based on a bad face recognition match.

Nijeer Parks is the third person known to be arrested for a crime he did not commit based on a bad face recognition match. Credit...Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times


In February 2019, Nijeer Parks was accused of shoplifting candy and trying to hit a police officer with a car at a Hampton Inn in Woodbridge, N.J. He had been identified by police using facial recognition software, even though he was 30 miles away at the time of the incident.

 

Mr. Parks spent 10 days in jail and paid around $5,000 to defend himself. In November 2019, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

 

Mr. Parks, 33, is now suing the police, the prosecutor and the city of Woodbridge for false arrest, false imprisonment and violation of his civil rights.

 

He is the third person known to be falsely arrested based on a bad facial recognition match. In all three cases, the people mistakenly identified by the technology have been Black men.

 

Facial recognition technology is known to have flaws. In 2019, a national study of over 100 facial recognition algorithms found that they did not work as well on Black and Asian faces. Two other Black men — Robert Williams and Michael Oliver, both of whom live in the Detroit, Mich., area — were also arrested for crimes they did not commit based on bad facial recognition matches. Like Mr. Parks, Mr. Oliver filed a lawsuit against the city over the wrongful arrest.

 

Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who believes that police should stop using face recognition technology, said the three cases demonstrate “how this technology disproportionately harms the Black community.”

 

“Multiple people have now come forward about being wrongfully arrested because of this flawed and privacy-invading surveillance technology,” said Mr. Wessler. He worries that there have been other arrests and even mistaken convictions that have not been uncovered.

 

Law enforcement often defends the use of facial recognition, despite its flaws, by saying that it is used only as a clue in a case and will not lead directly to an arrest. But Mr. Parks’s experience is another example of an arrest based almost solely on a suggested match by the technology.

 

The crime

 

On a Saturday in January 2019, two police officers showed up at a Hampton Inn in Woodbridge, N.J., after receiving a report about a man stealing snacks from the gift shop.

 

The alleged shoplifter — a Black man, nearly six feet tall, wearing a black jacket — was visiting a Hertz office in the hotel lobby, trying to get the rental agreement for a gray Dodge Challenger extended. The officers confronted him and he apologized, according to the police report. He said he would pay for the snacks and gave the officers a Tennessee driver’s license.

 

When the officers checked the license, they discovered it was fraudulent. According to a police report, one of the officers spotted a “big bag of suspected marijuana” in the man’s pocket. They tried to handcuff him. That’s when the man ran, losing a shoe on the way to his rental car, police said.

 

As he drove off, the man hit a parked police car and a column in front of the hotel, police said. One of the officers said he had to jump out of the way to avoid getting hit. The rental car was later found abandoned in a parking lot a mile away.

 

The match

 

A detective in the Woodbridge Police Department sent the photo from the fake driver’s license to state agencies that had access to face recognition technology, according to a police report.

 

The next day, state investigators said they had a facial recognition match: Nijeer Parks, who lived in Paterson, 30 miles away, and worked at a grocery store. The detective compared Mr. Parks’s New Jersey state I.D. to the fake Tennessee driver’s license and agreed it was the same person. After a Hertz employee confirmed that the Tennessee driver’s license photo was of the shoplifter, the police issued a warrant for Mr. Parks’s arrest.

 

“I don’t think he looks like me,” Mr. Parks said. “The only thing we have in common is the beard.”

 

Mr. Parks’s mistaken arrest was first reported by NJ Advance Media, which said that the facial recognition app Clearview AI was used in the case, based on a claim in Mr. Parks’s lawsuit. Mr. Parks’s lawyer, Daniel Sexton, said he had inferred that Clearview AI was used, given media reports about facial recognition in New Jersey, but now believes he was mistaken.

 

Clearview AI is a facial recognition tool that uses billions of photos scraped from the public web, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Clearview AI’s founder, Hoan Ton-That, said officers affiliated with the state agencies where information was analyzed in the case, known as fusion centers, involved in the case were not using his company’s app at that time.

 

According to the police report, the match in this case was to a license photo, which would reside in a government database, to which Clearview AI does not currently have access. The law enforcement involved in making the match — the New York State Intelligence Center, New Jersey’s Regional Operations Intelligence Center, and two state investigators — did not respond to inquiries about which facial recognition system was used.

 

In January, after a New York Times story about Clearview AI, New Jersey’s attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal, put a moratorium on Clearview’s use by police and announced an investigation into “this product or products like it.” A spokesman for the attorney general’s office said New Jersey’s Division of Criminal Justice is still evaluating the use of facial recognition products in the state, and that the development of a policy governing their use is ongoing.

 

‘I was afraid.’

 

After police arrested Mr. Parks, he was held for 10 days at the Middlesex County Corrections Center. New Jersey’s no-bail system uses an algorithm that evaluates the defendant’s risk rather than money to determine whether a defendant can be released before trial.

 

A decade ago, Mr. Parks was arrested twice and incarcerated for selling drugs. He was released in 2016. The public safety assessment score he received, which would have taken his past convictions into account, was high enough that he was not released after his first hearing. His mother and fiancée hired a private attorney, who was able to get him out of jail and into a pretrial monitoring program.

 

His prior history with the criminal justice system is what made this incident so scary, he said, because this would have been his third felony, meaning he was at risk of a long sentence. When the prosecutor offered a plea deal, he almost took it even though he was innocent.

 

“I sat down with my family and discussed it,” Mr. Parks said. “I was afraid to go to trial. I knew I would get 10 years if I lost.”

 

Mr. Parks was able to get proof from Western Union that he had been sending money at a pharmacy in Haledon, N.J., more than 30 miles away, when the incident happened. At his last court hearing, he told the judge he was willing to go to trial to defend himself. But a few months later, his case was dismissed.

 

Robert Hubner, the chief of the Woodbridge Police Department, declined to comment on the case because of the pending lawsuit, but said his department had not been served the complaint. The Middlesex County prosecutor’s office also declined to comment.

 

Mr. Parks’s lawsuit over the wrongful arrest does not yet ask for damages.

 

“I was locked up for no reason,” Mr. Parks said. “I’ve seen it happen to other people. I’ve seen it on the news. I just never thought it would happen to me. It was a very scary ordeal.”

 

Jack Begg contributed research.


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3) FUTURE GAZING: What If Care Was the Organizing Principle of Our Society?

By JM Wong, December 23, 2020

https://southseattleemerald.com/2020/12/23/future-gazing-what-if-care-was-the-organizing-principle-of-our-society/

With a challenging year soon to be behind us, we asked community members to share their vision of what they hope becomes of our city post-pandemic.


What if care was the organizing principle of our society? Not profit, not white supremacist garbage masked as liberal paternalism in the form of “diversity” that would hire cops of color to continue to target Black and Brown folks on the street just living their lives.

 

What if care was my people who are here finding home as guests on Turtle Island, shredding up the myths of american empire force-fed to us through aid packages and free trade agreements, with jobs that colonize our psyches and rob us of our life forces? 

 

What if care was us acknowledging our presence on someone else’s ancestral lands? Lands that are marked by Indigenous peoples’ resistance, the Black radical tradition, and also by Chinatown histories of striking railroad, textile factory, and hand laundromat workers? 

 

What if this kind of care — not the citizenship test, not words from twisted tongues that we are forced to regurgitate — was how we are oriented to this country?

 

What if care was my dear homie F, and all the other homies locked up in cages, being able to go kick it with me and the squad at Lake Washington on a full moon night, setting intentions and sharing prayer? But not before we fish off of that one dock and share why we love the story of orca whale mom Tahlequah who carried her dead calf around for 17 days and what that teaches us about mammalian grief, which is as deep as the ocean waters and as resilient as the light that hits it everyday. We know now that Tahlequah has a new baby calf! What if care was more shared moments of freedom, not captivity? We don’t stop organizing till our families are alive and free.

 

What if care was my bestie, undocumented in status, being able to return to the homelands, to introduce their mother to the new baby, so it is not just the screens and distorted sounds of choppy Wi-Fi that will etch the visual and audio memory of their child’s ancestral bloodlines? What if this child could play with her grandmother so my bestie can rest sometimes, not replying at all to my insomnia texts because work has kept them up too late? Organize childcare for everyone and especially the single parents who hustle while they deal with the regular challenges of life and sometimes while still doing the work to heal for themselves and the futures they nourish. 

 

What if care is everyone living lives of exploration, of ease, of connection?

 

What if care is the organizing principle of our society? 

 

Care that is creative and tenacious, relentless and wholesome, abundant and kind. The kind of fierce love that helped us survive the pain, loss, and heartbreak of 2020. A world where this love is the uncompromising foundation of our society, is the hope that anchors me into the future. We got you, and each other, 2021!

 

JM Wong (they/them) is a queer child of the Chinese diaspora living on Duwamish lands (Seattle) via Malaysia/Singapore and many cities in between. They write about movements, desire, and longings across distances and bordered spaces. Of diaspora, of the logistical supply chain stretching over ocean waters, of connections transcending prison walls, of crossings over to the ancestral realms. What we each journey through matters, and the futures we imagine begin from now. They organize with COVID-19 Mutual Aid, Free Them All WA, and the FIGHT/APICAG family.


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4) Argentina Legalizes Abortion, a Milestone in a Conservative Region

The Senate vote on Wednesday was a major victory for Latin America’s growing feminist movement, and its ripple effects are likely to be widespread.

By Daniel Politi and Ernesto Londoño, Dec. 30, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/world/americas/argentina-legalizes-abortion.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Supporters of legalizing abortion celebrating outside Congress in Buenos Aires on Wednesday.

Supporters of legalizing abortion celebrating outside Congress in Buenos Aires on Wednesday. Credit...Sarah Pabst for The New York Times


BUENOS AIRES — Argentina on Wednesday became the largest nation in Latin America to legalize abortion, a landmark vote in a conservative region and a victory for a grass-roots movement that turned years of rallies into political power.

 

The high-stakes vote in the Senate gripped the nation into the early morning, and the measure’s approval — by a wider-than-expected tally of 38 to 29, with one abstention — came after 12 hours of often dramatic debate, exposing the tensions between the long-dominant Roman Catholic Church, whose influence is waning, and a growing feminist movement.

 

“I didn’t change my way of thinking about abortion,” said Lucila Crexell, a senator from the southern Neuquén Province who had kept her vote under wraps and abstained from a vote on the matter in 2018. “I changed my focus on how I think the issue should be approached. It isn’t about feminism or religion. Clandestine abortion is a silent figure that kills, harms and writes very sad stories.”

 

As it unfolded, the Senate debate was closely followed by masses of both opponents and supporters of abortion rights, who camped out in the plaza around the neo-Classical Palace of Congress, chanting, cheering and praying as they tried to sway a handful of undecided senators to their respective camps.

 

Argentina’s president, Alberto Fernández, has promised to sign the bill into law, making it legal for women to end pregnancies for any reason up to 14 weeks. After that, there will be exceptions allowed for rape and the woman’s health.

 

The effects of the legalization vote are likely to ripple across Latin America, galvanizing reproductive-rights advocates elsewhere in the region and leaving them hopeful that other socially conservative nations could follow suit.

 

Uruguay, Cuba and Guyana are the only other countries in Latin America to allow abortion on request. Argentina, like a number of other countries in the region, had previously permitted abortion in cases of rape or if the pregnancy posed a risk to a woman’s health; other Latin American countries have stricter limits or total prohibitions.

 

“Legalizing abortion in Argentina is a gigantic victory that protects fundamental rights and will inspire change in Latin America,” said Tamara Taraciuk Broner, the Americas deputy director for Human Rights Watch. “It’s predictable, however, that this will also mobilize pro-life groups.”

 

Supporters of the legislation cheered and hugged as soon as the vote total was announced, confirming that what they had been fighting for had become reality.

 

“It’s one of those things that you anticipate for so long that when it finally happens you can’t believe it and don’t know what to do with yourself,” said María Blanco, 27. “I couldn’t stop crying.”

 

Argentina’s legalization of abortion was a striking rebuke of Pope Francis, who injected himself into the bitter political debate in his homeland on the eve of the vote, praising a women’s group from impoverished neighborhoods for its activism against abortion. It was also a setback for the country’s fast-growing evangelical Protestant churches, which had joined forces with the Catholic Church in opposing the change.

 

“I feel a profound sense of anguish that in this country that I love the right to life is not respected,” said Abigail Pereira, 27, who had been out in Buenos Aires protesting against legalization. “But I will keep on fighting.”

 

The vote was a major legislative victory for Mr. Fernández, Argentina’s center-left president, who has made women’s rights central to his administration’s agenda.

 

But primarily it was a win for Argentina’s grass-roots abortion-rights advocates, who have recently paved the way for other deep shifts in the country’s cultural and political landscape — including marriage equality, gender parity initiatives and transgender rights — and made Argentina a bellwether of changes that have gained broader traction in the region.

 

Argentina’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, approved the bill earlier this month, by a vote of 131 to 117. It also passed a similar measure two years ago, only to have it fail in the Senate, 38 to 31; the president at the time, Mauricio Macri, said he was personally against legalization but vowed not to veto the bill if it made it through Congress.

 

Mr. Fernández campaigned for the presidency on a platform that included abortion rights, gender equality, and gay and transgender rights, and he has followed through on those promises to a degree that has surprised even some of his supporters.

 

Supporters of the abortion measure, including Senator Norma Durango, said legalizing abortion would simply bring the practice out of the shadows. Researchers say hundreds of thousands of underground abortions are performed in Argentina every year.

 

Around 40,000 women were hospitalized for complications related to abortions in 2016, according to the latest available data from the Health Ministry, while at least 65 women died between 2016 and 2018 from complications, according to a report by Argentina’s Access to Safe Abortion Network.

 

“I sit here today representing all the women who have died having clandestine abortions,” said Ms. Durango, who was the first lawmaker to speak during the debate that began Tuesday. “Abortion is a reality, and it has been taking place since time immemorial.”

 

The effort to loosen Argentina’s abortion laws is decades old, but it got a boost from the feminist movement Ni Una Menos, which formed in 2015 to protest violence against women and has since been the driving force behind the abortion legalization campaign.

 

The symbol of that effort in Argentina — green handkerchiefs — has caught on in several Latin American countries, including Mexico, where women sporting them have poured into the streets demanding greater support for their rights.

 

“The green movement that started in Argentina has taken over the entire region,” said Paula Ávila-Guillen, executive director of the Women’s Equality Center. “Any activist from Mexico to Argentina is wearing the green handkerchief as a symbol for legalizing abortion.”

 

Just hours before the Senate took up the measure on Tuesday afternoon, Pope Francis, who as pontiff has sought to distance himself from political debates in Argentina, issued a message that appeared directed to the handful of senators who had not yet made their position clear.

 

“The Son of God was born an outcast, in order to tell us that every outcast is a child of God,” he wrote on Twitter. “He came into the world as each child comes into the world, weak and vulnerable, so that we can learn to accept our weaknesses with tender love.”

 

Catholic and evangelical leaders had called on supporters to observe a day of prayer and fasting on Monday to reflect on “the killing of so many innocent children.” Church leaders have been working throughout the year to galvanize the faithful, and large anti-abortion marches have taken place across the country.

 

On Tuesday, opponents of legal abortion, who tend to wear baby blue, displayed a large doll that looked like a fetus, which they sprayed with fake blood.

 

Mr. Fernández, a law professor who has long supported legalizing abortion, made it a campaign promise, and an early legislative priority once he took office at the end of 2019. The decision entailed political risks, as he took the reins of a troubled economy that has been in recession for two years and soon after ordered one of the strictest coronavirus lockdowns in the world.

 

But Mr. Fernández and his vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, came to see abortion as one of the few items on their agenda they could advance amid a torrent of challenges. Ms. Kirchner, who led Argentina as president from 2007 to 2015, opposed legalizing abortion during most of her political career.

 

Her position shifted in the lead-up to the vote in 2018, when tens of thousands of women demonstrated across Argentina in support of making access to abortion on request legal. Ms. Kirchner, who was then a senator, has said her daughter played a key role in changing her mind.

 

“Through our years of activism, we’ve managed to get people to change their positions,” said Celeste Mac Dougall, an abortion rights advocate. “Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is the most obvious example that opinions can change.”

 

Melina Alegre, a 34-year-old retail worker, said it seemed particularly significant that the law that the women’s rights movement had been pushing for so long was approved right before the new year.

 

“2020 was a horrible year,” she said, “and here we are, ending it with a historic victory.”

 

Daniel Politi reported from Buenos Aires, and Ernesto Londoño from Rio de Janeiro.


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5) COVID-19, Prison and Another Pandemic Clare Grady Made Me Remember

By Susie Day, December 30, 2020

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/30/covid-19-prison-and-another-pandemic-clare-grady-made-me-remember/
Clare Grady

Clare Grady is going to prison. On February 10, this nice Irish Catholic lady of 62, who lives with her family in Ithaca, New York will enter Alderson Prison, West Virginia, to begin a one-year-and-one-day sentence. That’s because, on April 4, 2018, Clare and six cohorts, also white and Catholic, broke into the world’s largest nuclear submarine base at Kings Bay, Georgia and defaced government property to call attention to the increasing danger of nuclear war.

 

Because the group – Plowshares 7 – believes that nuclear weapons aren’t created in isolation from a system that also creates climate change, murders people like George Floyd, and brutally detains immigrants, the group read out a statement, repenting of the sin of white supremacy. They condemned “racism, militarism, and extreme materialism,” the triple evils of the U.S. profit imperative once called out by Martin Luther King.

 

Unsurprisingly, Clare and her comrades were arrested, charged with federal crimes, and convicted on all counts. By now, all but one have been sentenced to terms similar in length to Clare’s, which, compared to those served by most people convicted of felonies, seem almost tiny.

 

As a journalist, I recently interviewed Clare about her case. Since then, Clare and I have been emailing, Zooming, talking about people we know in common, her kids, the puppets she’s making for some peace project. She is becoming my friend. So what you’re reading isn’t anything like a balanced, unbiased hunk of journalism. I am an unprofessional.

 

See, over the past decades, I’ve come to know many people imprisoned for unlawful acts, protesting some or all of Dr. King’s “evil triplets.” I know that people in prison suffer physically, psychologically. Sometimes they die.

 

And now, the COVID-19 pandemic has invaded the crowded, unsanitary cages where people – “political” or not – are afforded little or no protection. Reportedly, COVID-19 infections are 5.5 times – and counting – higher in U.S. prisons than out. Seeing Clare Grady and her friends incarcerated would have been hard without COVID. It’s way harder now. They’re in their sixties, seventies; many battling underlying health concerns.

 

To try and help them, I’ve thought about reporting on the scourge of COVID-19 behind bars: the high infection rates inside; the vulnerability of elders; how hardly anyone gets out. But knowing Clare has helped me remember, from deep in the 20th century folds of my brain, something even worse than this pandemic. I remember what nuclear weapons can do.

 

In 1945, as everybody knows, the U.S. dropped atom bombs on two Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of people, poisoning the ecosystem, and beginning a global arms race that brought us weapons of increasing devastation, capable of obliterating planetary life many times over. Like billions, I grew up in a world where “mutually assured destruction” was the only way to “peace.”

 

Fortunately, there was pushback. Some people wrote books like E.P. Thompson’s Protest and Survive. Others actually protested. People around the world decried not just nuclear war but also nuclear power, after accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Plowshares, begun in 1980, was only one group among hundreds working to abolish nuclear power and weapons. People like Clare and her gang were there on June 12, 1982, when around a million antinuke protestors took over Midtown and Central Park in New York City.

 

For a minute, back in the last century, protesting nuclear war was cool. Women in particular played a huge part; in the 1980’s, women’s peace camps sprang up in places like Greenham Common in the UK and Seneca Falls, NY. I was part of a Midwestern lesbian community where, along with supporting battered women’s shelters and marching against police brutality, just about everybody worked somehow against nuclear weapons and power. We got pretty good at describing what a nuclear winter would be for those unlucky enough to survive an initial blast: blackened sky for years; burning asphalt; deaths from radiation… We ingested that nightmare.

 

But it turns out you can’t live more than a few years contemplating nuclear apocalypse and ragging on the military industrial complex if you want a “normal” life. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas needed help; then the HIV/AIDS crisis hit. So, forgetting that the arms industry never sleeps, most of us migrated to other causes. Like America, we made peace with our end-of-the-world nightmare through fun, post-apocalyptic and dystopian scenarios, from Godzilla to The Hunger Games.

 

Years ago, it was relatively simple to identify governments as the source of nuclear buildup. Then corporations began devouring every facet of production, handling, storage. As the nuclear industry threaded its way through the products and services of our lives, it became harder to see, dismantle, and to protest. Gradually, much of the antinuke movement shuttered.

 

Plowshares didn’t. Clare’s April 2018 protest was maybe the 80th Plowshares action. Yet, how could it possibly change today’s world, which holds around 14,000 nuclear bombs, most of which are vastly more destructive than those that hit Japan, and can be launched (by design or accident) instantly?

 

There’s also the fact that Trump has pissed on nuclear pacts like the Open Skies Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Iran Nuclear Deal. A few days after Joe Biden takes office, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia will expire. Will Biden move to extend it? Maybe. But let’s remember that he voted for the 2003 Iraq invasion, and seems, according to In These Times, to be stocking his administration with a “host of pro-war individuals.”

 

What Joe Biden will never admit is that the world doesn’t have to work this way. In fact, it was Clare, not Joe, who told me that there’s a new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons [TPNW] going into effect January 22. International law will soon make nuclear weapons illegal.

 

Of course, Joe doesn’t care; NATO and the U.S. oppose the treaty. Clare will go to prison and the mainstream press won’t peep. All TPNW offers is small hope for a big miracle. But still, it’s hope.

 

So COVID. It would be wonderful if Clare and her comrades never had to go to prison and possibly contract the virus. It would be wonderful if none of the 2.3 million, mostly Black or Brown, people in U.S. prisons didn’t have to be there in the first place, and live with the constant fear of dying inside.

 

Basically: if you’ve been fighting those bad triplets, please don’t stop. But the whole point of that seemingly pointless Plowshares action is to wake us up to the fact that all life forms – regardless of politics – are desperately, deeply, drastically interdependent. “Intersectional,” in movement terms. And if some “right-wingers” deny COVID, most of us – left, right, center – perpetually deny the likelihood of nuclear disaster.

 

So let Clare Grady do her work. And if my friend goes to prison, if she gets sick there, then sicker … my heart will break. It may not recover. But here’s the thing.

 

It won’t break for nothing.



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6) Minneapolis Police Release Body Camera Video of Its First Killing Since George Floyd

The video shows a man raising something to his car window before a bang is heard. An officer ducks for cover and then fires several rounds at the man.

By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Published Dec. 31, 2020, Updated Jan. 1, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/us/george-floyd-minneapolis-police-body-cam.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage
A still image from the body camera footage released by the Minneapolis Police Department shows the chaotic scene before the driver of the white sedan is killed.
A still image from the body camera footage released by the Minneapolis Police Department shows the chaotic scene before the driver of the white sedan is killed. Credit...Minneapolis Police Department

The Minneapolis Police Department released body camera footage on Thursday that shed new light on a fatal police shooting the night before, the first killing by a city police officer since George Floyd’s death in the spring.

 

The 28-second video shows a chaotic scene in which several police cars are blocking a driver from leaving the parking lot of a gas station. As an officer walks toward the car and yells for the driver to put his hands up, the man appears to raise something to his window and a loud bang can be heard. The driver’s window shatters, someone curses and the officer ducks for cover.

 

About two seconds later, the officer fires a shot at the man, followed by four more. About a dozen shots can be heard in all, but it is not clear from the video who fired the others.

 

The Hennepin County medical examiner’s office identified the man late on Thursday as Dolal B. Idd, a 23-year-old Black man, and said he had died of multiple gunshot wounds. Mayor Jacob Frey had earlier said the man was Somali. Police did not immediately release information about the officer or officers who fired.

 

Chief Medaria Arradondo said at a news conference on Thursday afternoon that the officers had been conducting a “weapons investigation” when they stopped the car, and that a weapon was later found inside the sedan.

 

Chief Arradondo had vowed to quickly release the footage as a small group of protesters arrived at the scene in the hours after the shooting, saying he would not tolerate destructive demonstrations like the ones that took hold of the city for several nights after the police killed Mr. Floyd in May.

 

During that unrest, people burned down a police station and set restaurants and other businesses on fire, including a pawnshop where the charred remains of a man were later found inside. But after the shooting on Wednesday night, protesters left the scene after only a few hours as temperatures dropped to single digits.

 

Chief Arradondo said on Thursday that he believed the body camera footage showed the man firing first at the officers, and he indicated that he thought the officers had been right to fire at the man.

 

The incident began when the police tried to stop the vehicle in a parking lot of a gas station and carwash, about a mile from where Mr. Floyd was killed. The chief said the man was pronounced dead at the scene.

 

The video released on Thursday begins with an officer stepping out of a vehicle and walking toward the driver of a white sedan who appears to be trying to flee. As the sedan pulls several feet away from the officer, its wheels spinning in the snow, the officer keeps moving toward the car and yells for the occupants to put their hands up. The gunshots can be heard after the driver puts the car in reverse and then stops.

 

Chief Arradondo said a female passenger was in the man’s car and was not hurt.

 

The chief said he understood that the shooting would inevitably bring back painful memories for Minneapolis residents still working through the death of Mr. Floyd and the ensuing protests.

 

“A lot of us know that our communities have been dealing with so much this year,” he said, “with the pandemic, increase in violence, certainly many in our communities facing very hard times financially.”

 

Minneapolis is among many American cities that have struggled with rising violence since the coronavirus pandemic began. The Police Department recorded at least 81 homicides in 2020, the same number as in the previous two years combined, and data also show a spike in carjackings, assaults and robberies. The police killing was the second of the year, including Mr. Floyd’s death. Data from the city indicates that Minneapolis police shot at people 17 times from 2015 through 2019, killing someone in five circumstances.

 

Minneapolis was rocked by protests in the days and nights after May 25, when three police officers pinned Mr. Floyd to the pavement outside of a convenience store. Those officers, as well as a fourth at the scene, were fired the next day, but the demonstrations grew for several nights until prosecutors charged Derek Chauvin, who had pressed his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck, with second-degree manslaughter and third-degree murder. They soon added a more serious charge of second-degree murder and charged the three other officers at the scene with aiding and abetting Mr. Chauvin.

 

All of the former officers have pleaded not guilty. A trial is set for March, but prosecutors in the state attorney general’s office, which is prosecuting the case, filed a motion on Thursday asking a judge to delay the trial until June, and lawyers for some of the fired officers have made similar requests.

 

City officials sought to show after the shooting on Wednesday that they were taking a different approach after the calls for reform that followed Mr. Floyd’s death. Chief Arradondo said he wanted residents “to see for themselves” what had happened, and Mr. Frey said he was determined to be transparent about the shooting.

 

“Honesty and accountability are what will lead us forward,” he said.

 

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.


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7) Virginia Judge Won’t Try Black Man in Courtroom Lined With White Portraits

David Bernhard, a circuit court judge, wrote in his decision that the display of portraits of white judges “is based on a non-racial principle, yet yields a racial result.”

By Derrick Bryson Taylor, Jan. 1, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/us/virginia-judge-white-portraits.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage
Portraits of former judges in the halls of the Fairfax County courthouse in 2013. 
Portraits of former judges in the halls of the Fairfax County courthouse in 2013. Credit...Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post, via Getty Images

When a Black man appears in a Virginia courtroom this month to stand trial on charges of eluding the police, assaulting an officer and other crimes, he will face a scene that defendants in that room have not experienced in decades: The portraits of white judges will no longer line the walls.

 

A judge late last month ordered the removal of the portraits ahead of Terrance Shipp Jr.’s Jan. 4 trial, ruling that the presence of the artwork, depicting judges who served in Fairfax County, could have suggested that the legal system is biased. The judge, David Bernhard of the Fairfax Circuit Court, wrote in his Dec. 20 opinion that the court was concerned the portraits might “serve as unintended but implicit symbols that suggest the courtroom may be a place historically administered by whites for whites,” and that others are thus of lesser standing. “The display of portraits of judges in courtrooms of the Fairfax Courthouse is based on a non-racial principle, yet yields a racial result,” he said.

 

The order was in response to a motion filed by Bryan Kennedy, a lawyer for Mr. Shipp. The idea, Mr. Kennedy said, came from both his client and a murder case in Louisa, Va., where a judge this year ordered a life-size portrait of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee removed from a circuit courtroom at the defendant’s request.

 

The decision underscores a year in which Virginia and the rest of the United States grappled with both implicit biases and overt images of white supremacy, leading to Confederate monuments and other symbols of racism being removed from public spaces.

 

It is not, however, the first time Judge Bernhard has made such a decision: The judge, who sought asylum to come to the United States from El Salvador in the 1970s, has not permitted portraits in his assigned courtroom since taking the bench in 2017. But because of the coronavirus pandemic, he and the other judges in the Fairfax County courthouse are working out of the building’s three largest courtrooms to allow for social distancing, and it is in one of those where Mr. Shipp will stand trial.

 

The paintings hanging in the Fairfax Circuit Court are similar to those found in courtrooms and other government offices around the country, and often show retired judges who have served in that county’s history and sometimes stretching as far back as the Confederacy.

 

Judges in Fairfax County have been weeding out other portraits for at least the past five years, Mr. Kennedy said. As new judges have taken the bench, they have removed portraits “of people that were clearly Confederates or slave owners,” he said, adding that the remaining portraits mostly represented judges from the modern era.

 

Of the 47 portraits left across the Fairfax Circuit Court, 45 show white judges, including a handful of white women. There are portraits of two of the only three Black judges to have served on the Fairfax Circuit Court bench: Judge Marcus D. Williams, the court’s first Black judge, who served from 1990 to his retirement in 2012, and Judge Gerald Bruce Lee, who served from 1992 and until 1998, when he became a Federal District Court judge. The third Black judge, Dontaè L. Bugg, was elected in 2019.

 

Among the portraits is one of Judge Harry L. Carrico of the Supreme Court of Virginia, who in 1966 wrote the court’s opinion in Loving v. Commonwealth, which upheld Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. The law was overturned a year later.

 

Judge Bernhard noted that the portraits provide no context about their subjects and appear only as a “sea of portraits of white judges” to most members of the public, including juries. “The prevalence of portraits of white judges,” he said, “while not emblematic of racism on the part of the presiding judges, certainly highlights that until the more recent historical past, African Americans were not extended an encouraging hand to stand as judicial candidates.”

 

While the exact courtroom of Mr. Shipp’s upcoming trial was not yet known, Judge Bernhard’s decision will affect whatever space he occupies. “It’s more about the appearance of fairness now, than the actual monuments,” Mr. Kennedy said.

 

A lawyer for the prosecution did not return a request for comment, but Judge Bernhard said in his opinion that the prosecution did not oppose him granting the motion.

 

The chairman of the Fairfax County GOP objected to the decision.

 

“Judge Bernhard seems to have embraced this reductive, racialist view of his fellow man,” the chairman, Steve Knotts, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “We’d all do well to remember that, whether we are Black or White, Christian or Jewish, immigrant or native-born, we are all equally human. As a culture, we must reject all divisive ideologies and, instead, unambiguously affirm our shared humanity.”

 

Deborah Archer, a professor of law at New York University, said she had not previously heard of a judge taking such actions and emphasized that the ruling would not, on its own, ensure a Black defendant was going to get a fair trial.

 

Professor Archer said Judge Bernhard’s ruling was part of a larger conversation about inclusion and the ways in which systems in America can perpetuate inequality and send messages about who belongs in a space and who doesn’t.

 

Sherry Soanes, a lawyer and a former law clerk in the Fairfax Circuit Court, called Judge Bernhard’s decision a “no-brainer,” adding that the move was a “step in the right direction.”

 

While Ms. Soanes said she hoped the decision would lead other judges to take action, she was also emphatic that it wasn’t “putting racism in the closet.”

 

“It’s a step to thinking about how is racism at play,” she said. “That is the question that I want judges across Virginia and across the country to ask themselves.”

 

Not everyone supports Judge Bernhard’s decision, said Vernida Chaney, a criminal defense lawyer who has appeared before Judge Bernhard in Fairfax Circuit Court. But progress in the way courts view race and implicit bias is being made across Virginia.

 

“This is not a museum, it is a place where we go to have justice rendered,” Ms. Chaney said.

 

Public statues and other commemorations have been the subject of much debate in recent years and became the target of renewed protests against racism and police violence across the United States after the killing of George Floyd in police custody in May.

 

Virginia, in particular, has been grappling with images of white supremacy this year.

 

A Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Va., near the site of a violent white supremacist rally in 2017, was removed in September after 111 years. In Richmond, near the state Capitol, one by one the Confederate statues along the city’s Monument Avenue were taken down. Another statue of Lee in Richmond has been ordered removed and has in the meantime become the site of an unlikely community space.

 

At the U.S. Capitol, Speaker Nancy Pelosi in June ordered portraits of four speakers who served the Confederacy to be removed, and last month a statue of Lee was also removed from the building and placed in storage in a museum in Richmond.


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